The Kind One (6 page)

But Bud wasn’t convinced. He had the boys take him into the back room and work him over, but Tagnoli continued to insist he was just lucky. “I’m gonna cheat Bud Seitz for a buncha fucking nickels?” he said. “You think I’m crazy?” Then Bud turned him over to Nucky Williams. Nucky slipped on his brass knuckles, which was Nucky’s thing and how he got his name. He made Tagnoli’s face look like a ripe tomato splitting open but he still just kept screaming that he was lucky. Then Teddy Bump took some wire pliers and started working on his nose and nipples and nuts and toes, but that didn’t do the trick either.

So Bud was really exasperated now. He had the guys tie Tagnoli up and throw him in Bud’s car along with the slot machine. They drove to San Pedro and got in a boat and went out about halfway to Catalina. Then Bud had Tagnoli tied up to the slot machine, and he told him: “This is your last chance, Sal. Tell me how you was beating my machine.”

Tagnoli started yelling: “Bud, you gotta believe me, I’m just lucky! I been lucky ever since I was a little kid! I’m just one of them lucky guys!”

Bud just sighed and said: “Sal, you’re tied up to a slot machine and you’re about to be dropped in the fucking ocean. How lucky can you be?”

Then Sal started screaming his head off in Italian and they threw him over the side, and Max Schnitter laughed and said: “No wonder they call you the Kind One.”

We were at the Surf Club in Redondo Beach. We were in a private room where there were some card and dice tables and a row of slot machines. Sitting in a booth besides myself and Bud and Schnitter were Teddy Bump and Vic Lester, a pug-nosed little guy with Schnitter.

Schnitter was about sixty, and maybe an inch or two north of five feet tall. He was bald and had pointy ears that gave him a slightly inhuman look, like an evil elf. I’d heard he was from Germany, and he’d got a job on a ship as a cabin boy when he was twelve. Then he jumped ship in Panama and walked all the way to America and now he was one of the most powerful guys in Los Angeles.

Guys like him and Bud had made most of their money from bootlegging. Repeal had happened just six months ago, which had basically jerked the rug out from under them. Now they were scrambling around trying to get into new things.

“We put too many of our eggs into one single basket,” said Schnitter, who still had a slight German accent.

“That’s it exactly, Max,” said Bud. “You need a lot of different baskets, so in case you got some D.A. with a bug up his ass about this thing or that thing you won’t be totally fucked.”

“And the secret of success is simple,” Schnitter said. “You must give the people what they want. The government did not have the right to deny a hard-working citizen a drink on Saturday night. Neither should it have the right to tell a man he cannot wager a portion of his wages on the roll of a die; that he cannot enjoy the sexual favors of a beautiful young lady in exchange for a few of his hard-earned dollars; that he shouldn’t forget the burdens of existence for an hour or two by smoking opium or snuffing cocaine.”

Bud wiped his hands on a tissue. “Danny, you oughta be taking notes when this guy talks. He’s a fucking genius.”

Schnitter smiled at me. He had sharp eye teeth, like Dracula. He was holding a snifter of brandy in his palm. He sloshed it around gently.

Teddy Bump had a laugh like a dying hyena and he let it loose now. “What’s so funny?” said Bud.

“That dame over there. The fucking ash from her cigarette fell down the crack between her tits and she’s going nuts.”

The pug-nosed guy looked over and started laughing too; his laugh was a lot like Teddy’s.

I excused myself to go to the can. There was crushed ice in the pisser. It steamed and crackled and melted as I hosed it down. I had an image of a little boy peeing in the snow, the little boy seemed to be me and then he vanished.

I washed my hands, and looked at myself in a mirror over the sink.

“Danny Landon,” I said softly.

There was a guy standing next to me combing his hair.

“What’s that, mac?”

“Nothing.” I dried my hands and went out.

But I didn’t go back to the private room. I went in the bar.

It was crowded. A chubby Negro in a white suit was playing the piano and singing “Stardust”:

“You wander down the lane and far away,
Leaving me a song that will not die—
Love is now the stardust of yesterday…”

It was a sad kind of a song, but he was smiling as he sang, and seemed like the happiest guy in the room.

Tommy and Goodlooking Tommy were sitting at the bar arguing about something. They were both very drunk. “Shanghai Sally!” said Goodlooking Tommy, and Tommy said: “You’re full of shit!” Spit was flying out of their mouths they were getting so mad.

The bar was so full of smoke I wanted to call the fire department. I went outside to get some fresh air.

Dick Prettie was standing there, one hand in his pants pocket, the other holding a cigarette. “Who’s Shanghai Sally?” I said.

Dick laughed. “Them two dumbbells still going at it?”

“Yeah.”

“There’s this broad that works as a bouncer in this joint in Pedro.”

“A broad?”

“Yeah. She weighs about two fifty and she’s got tattoos of dragons and shit all over her arms. Goodlooking Tommy says her name’s Shanghai Sally. Tommy says her name’s Cairo Mary.”

“You know which one it is?”

“Sure. But I’m staying out of it. Both them Tommys is fucking nuts.”

The sea breeze was blowing in on us and it was cold and I shivered a little. Out in the distance in the dark I could see white lines of foam where the waves were coming in. “Let’s go walk on the beach,” I said.

“What for?”

“The hell of it.”

“I’ll get fucking sand in my shoes.”

“Ah, come on.”

So we left the lights and the smoke and the noise of the club behind us and went out on the beach. There was half a moon and plenty of stars. And miles out on the ocean I saw the lights of a ship. I wondered if it was a gambling ship, like the one I’d helped to heist and sink.

Dick stumbled and started cursing. “It’s happening already, I’m getting sand in my shoes! I can’t stand the way it feels in between my fucking toes!”

I wondered what Darla was doing. Seitz had banished her from his presence for a few days, because it was that time of the month for her and he couldn’t stand to be around her when that was going on.

“So how’s it going with Shitter?” said Dick.

“Okay, I guess.” I saw some seaweed washed up on the shore that looked like a tangled clump of snakes. “He called Bud ‘the Kind One.’”

“Yeah?”

“Seems like I remember somebody else calling him that once.”

“Sure, it’s a nickname. It’s kinda like a joke, see? ’Cause kind ain’t the first thing you’d think of calling Bud Seitz.”

“Who started calling him that?”

He stopped to light up a new Old Gold. He cupped the flame of the lighter against the wind. His gaunt face was lit up, and the angles were filled with shadow. “It was this Mexican girl. Emperatriz.

“She was his girl for a while. He met her in Tia Juana, at Agua Caliente. She was there with this rich Mexican asshole old enough to be her grandpa. Bud told her what horses to bet in a couple of races, and she cleaned up. Then she dumped grandpa and came back up here with us.

“She was a gorgeous broad, but she was also nice. She was nice to people that most people don’t give a shit about.

“There was this kid, Flumentino. He worked in the kitchen at the Peacock, sweeping up, taking out the garbage, that kinda shit. He had a long neck and big ears and he was always smiling at everybody. Everybody thought he was a dummy, but maybe that’s just ’cause he didn’t speak no English to speak of.

“Anyway, Emperatriz was nice to Flumentino, and maybe he got the wrong idea. One night, him and one of the cooks, they’d been nipping at a bottle all night, and I guess he musta got pretty plastered, ’cause when Emperatriz walked by he grabbed her by the ass. And Bud happened to walk in right at that moment and he seen it.

“Jesus Christ, Danny, what they did to that poor kid. They cleared the kitchen out and tied him up and put him up on this counter where the cooks do their chopping. When they got done with him, they had to put him in four different gunnysacks to get him outa the kitchen. And then I got stuck with the job of going out in the desert to bury the sacks.”

“What was Emperatriz doing during all this?”

“Begging. Pleading. Screaming. But it didn’t do no good. And after that she started calling Bud
el Benévolo.
The Kind One.”

“What ever happened to her?”

Dick took a drag on his cigarette—took his time blowing the smoke back out. “I don’t know. She just kinda disappeared. Went back to Mexico, I guess.”

We started walking again. The sand sucked at my shoes. The waves slid up the beach then slipped away.

“Was I there?” I said.

“Was you where?”

“In the kitchen. That night.”

Dick was quiet a minute. “I think you was outa town. On business.”

I wondered what business I was on. We heard some laughing and screaming—a happy kind of screaming—then we saw a guy and a girl playing around in the water. Dick said: “Shit. They’re naked.”

They looked young, maybe seventeen or eighteen. They were chasing each other around and grabbing each other and kissing and then they’d laugh when a wave hit them and by the light of the half of the moon I could make out the nipples on the girl and the hair down between her legs and my heart felt like it was about to bust I wanted so bad to be out there in the waves chasing around a girl, not her, not Darla even, but the girl I dreamed about sometimes, the girl with the dark hair and the olive skin.

“Looks like they’re having fun,” Dick said wistfully.

“Yeah.”

“You know the last time I screwed a broad that wasn’t a whore?”

“No.”

“Me neither. Probably when Babe Ruth was still a pitcher.”

We walked a little further, then Dick said: “Hey, lookit!”

We’d found their clothes on the sand. A “his” pile and a “her” pile.

“I know what,” said Dick. “Let’s bury ’em!”

“Their clothes? What for?”

“’Cause it’ll be funny as hell.”

I thought about it a minute. “Nah. Let’s just leave ’em alone.”

“Well, no way I ain’t gonna get a fucking souvenir.”

He rummaged through the “her” pile then pulled out her underpants. He held them up dangling in front of his eyes and grinned then stuffed them in his pocket.

We headed back up the beach. When we got close to the Surf Club we saw a couple of guys duking it out on the sand. We got a little closer and saw it was Tommy and Goodlooking Tommy.

It looked like Goodlooking Tommy was getting the worst of it. By the way, it wasn’t like Goodlooking Tommy was really that goodlooking. Nello Marlini was twice as goodlooking as Goodlooking Tommy, girls were telling him all the time he was a dead ringer for Rudolph Valentino. But it got confusing having two guys named Tommy around, so since one of them was goodlooking in comparison to the other, who was very ugly, he got hung with the name Goodlooking Tommy. The alternative would have been for Goodlooking Tommy just to be Tommy and for Tommy to be Ugly Tommy.

We ran toward them, as well as you can run in the sand, yelling at them to stop it.

But they ignored us. Goodlooking Tommy tried to kick Tommy in the balls but Tommy dodged it and grabbed hold of his leg and started twisting it till he fell down. Then Tommy jumped on his back and started pounding on his head with his fists and yelling: “SAY IT! SAY IT! SAY IT!” and Goodlooking Tommy said: “FUCK YOU!”

Tommy suddenly whipped out his revolver and put it to Goodlooking Tommy’s head and pulled back the hammer.

“Say ‘Cairo Mary,’ damn it, or I’m putting a bullet in your fucking head!”

Dick and I jumped on Tommy and dragged him off. His gun went off with a heartstopping pop and a bullet flew out over the ocean. Dick was beside himself.

“Jesus Christ, Tommy, are you crazy? Bud’s gonna cut all our fucking balls off!” Because Bud couldn’t stand for us to get out of control in public. Unless, of course, he’d given us the say-so.

“Dick,” said Tommy, “you know what her fucking name is. Tell him. Tell the prick.”

“I’m staying outa this.”

Goodlooking Tommy stood up, brushing sand off his suit. He shot his cuffs, straightened the knot in his tie. “Everybody but this shitstick knows her name is Shanghai Sally.”

“Shut up,” said Dick. “You guys are like a couple of fucking kids. I don’t wanna hear nothing more about it.”

We all started walking back toward the Surf Club. By the time we got there the Tommys were laughing and joking around about something. I’d noticed they had memories like dogs or cats, not usually seeming to go back more than a minute or two into the past.

I went back in the private room. Everybody was standing up and getting ready to go. “That musta been the longest piss in history,” said Bud when he saw me.

“Sorry, Bud. I went for a walk.”

Max Schnitter was smiling at me with a slightly puzzled expression, as though he couldn’t quite figure out what to make of me. “It was good to see you again, Danny,” he said, holding his hand out.

I shook his hand and said: “Good to see
you
again, Mr. Shitter.” Bud glared at me, but Schnitter didn’t act as if he’d noticed.

“So, Max,” said Bud, “lemme talk to Blinky about a couple of things and then I’ll call you.”

“I’ll be looking forward to it,” said Schnitter. He didn’t stick his hand out to Bud because he knew how he felt about shaking hands.

We all headed toward the door. Teddy Bump was walking in front of us with Vic, Schnitter’s guy. They were talking and swapping their hyena laughs with one another like they’d suddenly become best buddies.

A fat-assed woman wearing a fox stole that had the sad head and bushy tail of a fox hanging off it squealed as a clatter of quarters came out of a slot machine. A long-legged cigarette girl snarled at some drunk: “Hey, keep your stinking mitts offa me!” White dice tumbled across a green table as the shooter yelled: “Eighter from Decatur!”