The Head of the House Page 5

  But Reuben was logical. A logical person would have to advise him to quit. If you pay the bloodsucking momzers, there’s no profit in the business. If you don’t pay, you’re chancing more bullets. The sane conclusion, the only conclusion is to forget it, walk away. But Izzie’s flesh crawled at that conclusion. The game was his. He’d worked hard to find usable locations with amenable janitors. He’d bargained with them, paid them, “made friends” with the cops on the beat. He and Julie had scouted up players at every candy store for blocks around. He loved the game. He’d let his brains boil over before he’d quit.

  A week later the identical crap game, heatedly accompanied by the same incantatory prayers, tense rattlings and clicking rolls of the dice, seemed to be in full sway, surrounded by the same dusty baby carriages. But the players were largely a different group. The regulars, sensitive to loud noises and oozing blood, had had no wish to return. These elbow shakers were neighborhood youths, hired for the afternoon to act as if they were shooting craps; they were betting pennies provided by Izzie. Time wore on. The charade grew desultory. Two of the youngest kids stood up and announced they had to go home for supper. Izzie dispensed an additional quarter to all the participants; the two youngsters remained, and the game again grew animated.

  Finally there came the tapping at the sooty basement window. Rivke, still Izzie’s angel, stationed out in the alleyway, rocking a blanket-covered wooden doll in a baby carriage, was sending the long and anxiously awaited signal—but only two taps.

  Izzie, Harry Klauber, a lanky and blindly loyal Jewish lad who’d taken to following Iz at P.S. 165, and Danny Keohane darted to their prearranged positions, while Julie scooped up the bones and began shaking them and cooing to them with operatic intensity.

  There was a knock. Izzie had locked the door.

  Danny opened it and admitted Scapellatti and the burly, pockmarked associate. This week only two of them.

  The players had been coached to ignore intruders and to concentrate exclusively on the game. About half of them did. The others sneaked quick glances.

  Scapellatti stood waiting patiently, not even bothering to keep his hands in his pockets.

  Izzie’s forehead glistened with sweat. A drop ran down his brow and dripped into his eye.

  “Seven-out, shit!” Julie cursed at the dice, and added in Yiddish, “Slaughter him, Almighty God!”

  At that moment from behind the steamer trunks piled on either side of the door, two black iron crow bars accurately, swiftly, viciously crashed down on two stylishly creased hats. The hoodlums quietly crumpled in their tailored overcoats and high-gloss shoes to the grimy concrete floor.

  Julie whisked out the goggle-eyed make-believe gamblers and then Izzie, Harry and Dan set about undressing the unconscious torpedoes, removing their socks, underwear—everything.

  Reduced to naked hair and pale skin, the two goons looked almost lamblike. Each was then jackknifed into a wheelbarrow, covered for the trip with a dusty bedspread from the storeroom, and carted two blocks to a fenced-in vacant lot strewn with rusty tin cans and dog droppings, where they were dumped, left, and then spied upon from a nearby rooftop. Even Julie, who’d argued for cutting them with a few permanent scars, roared with delight, watching them bashfully crawl about on their hands and knees, feverishly snatching at weeds, shriveled newspapers, rotten boards, anything to cover their privates. Scapellatti ended up with a ragged couch cushion with protruding springs; and the other gorilla awkwardly pressed an old gasoline can against his crotch. Izzie had hoped a cop would arrest them, but they scampered gawkishly down the street, eyes lowered to avoid the bystanders’ wide-eyed stares, and disappeared around the corner.

  Izzie hid in the Bronx, sharing Reuben’s room, traveling downtown only as far as Herald Square for his Western Union job, skipping night school, and keeping Scapellatti’s gun strapped under his arm. He was sure that after a few days of fruitless searching, the thugs’ lust for revenge would cool, and then they’d begin to think twice about risking another such embarrassing debacle for a measly twenty-fiver.

  Friday evening, six days later, Izzie ducked from the trolley, which stopped directly in front of Bella’s, right into the candy store, where he had arranged to meet his brother and, if the coast seemed clear, maybe Julie too.

  Except for a square-chinned, well-groomed young man sitting on a stool at the counter and drinking an egg cream, the sloppy confectionary was deserted. Fat Bella in her dirty apron had been out front straightening the newsstand. Izzie slipped into the phone booth in the darkened rear. Odd the place should be so empty, and Morris late. The stranger, Izzie observed, wore a perfectly pressed gray suit which looked too expensive for the penny candy and faded Fourth of July crepe paper decor. Izzie’s fingers curled around the stock of the pistol as he watched the fellow drain his glass and then swivel his stool. Toward the phone booth?

  “You Izzie Hargett?” the soda drinker pleasantly called.

  “Who wants to know?”

  “Somebody it might do you some good to meet.”

  “Like who?”

  The dapper newcomer slid off the stool, and stepped over to the phone booth. “Sally Pirone. You want to come out now, and talk a little?”

  Sally Pirone. The syllables reverberated in Izzie’s head. But if Scapellatti’s boss wanted to kill him, wouldn’t he have done so by now? Still, Izzie kept a tight grasp on the gun as he sidled out of the booth.

  Pirone, to Izzie’s amazement, was there not to threaten but to offer Iz his friendship, and maybe a job, if Izzie was interested. Any unarmed kid who’d take on a pair of rods had balls. And the way Izzie had done it showed some talent too. And Pirone was always looking for talent, especially in a dead neighborhood like Izzie’s.

  Izzie was intrigued. Pirone had been smart enough to find out about this rendezvous, to discreetly clear the store, and Pirone spoke with finesse. What a powerful aura he had. And yet he was so young. Izzie’s age. And most exciting to Iz was the portent of money. Pirone exuded it, smelled of it almost. And this fellow, no doubt out of a slum too, had made it on his own—and fast. The idea set Iz’s blood to tingling. True, Pirone’s world had its dirty side, but Iz had lived in worse. The young Jew, though, was not one for hasty decisions.

  Despite Izzie’s thanks-but-no-thanks, the meeting ended amicably, and with a promise that the crap game would not again be bothered, which it wasn’t. But less than a year later, it was to Pirone Izzie turned as a last resort, when the Khargetnishes were about to be thrown out onto the slushy street, and it was Pirone who got him situated with Little Nathan Beckstein.

  In the summer of 1922, Iz had fallen in love—with automobiles. Ernie Blomberg, a neighbor in Iz’s tenement who worked as a runner for George White, the Broadway showman, had a bachelor uncle who managed a speakeasy and owned a Stutz bearcat roadster. One sunny summer Sunday Ernie invited his pal to motor out to Edgemere Beach in the Rockaways. From the moment Izzie saw the gleaming, jaunty yellow car, it was as if his blood were set on fire. That whole day he had eyes for nothing else. He plied its dapper, straw-hatted owner with questions. Steadily, relentlessly, he asked about every glassed-in needle on the dashboard, the gasoline consumption, the brakes, the upholstery, the paint used on the body. But Ernie’s hip-flask-swigging uncle knew little of the machine’s inner workings and was preoccupied with boasting to his wide-eyed nephew about certain young ladies with real class he expected they’d run into near a particular jetty.

  The next evening Izzie edged in through the broad door of a ramshackle white frame building on Avenue A. By the week’s end, Bjornestadt’s A-l Expert Engine & Brake Repairs had become Izzie’s hangout, and his every free moment was spent peering over the shoulders of three grunting Swedes and a Ukranian, handing them clamps, socket wrenches, welding equipment, and trying to extract explanations about every belt, bolt, and wire in sight. Within days his clothes were all hopelessly splotched with grease, but he needed only the quickest glance to tell a 3/8-inch from a 1/2
-inch drive tool. Within weeks he was assisting full time, lubricating chassis, patching tires, grinding break drums, and then at home sitting up at the kitchen table long after midnight poring through complex, fineprint manuals to penetrate the mysteries and magic of underslung worm-driven rear axles, chrome silicon valves, dual type intake manifolds. He took trolley rides uptown, and prowled through carpeted salon showrooms, carrying his diagram-filled books. Despite the intimidating stares of nattily dressed salesmen, he pushed ahead and poked under the hoods of sedate Packards, graceful Maxwells, sporty and superluxurious Pierce Arrows, breathtaking Cadillacs.

  The hulking Swede grease monkeys and the short Ukranian called him Ikey, and old Charlie Bjornestadt who owned the place was liberal enough to tag him simply “kid.” Until the day a Norwegian sea captain came in with an English Vauxhall that had rear end problems. Each of the men and then Charlie too finally threw up their hands at trying to fit the reassembled oddly shaped crankshaft back in place. Izzie quietly pointed out how two minor fittings had been reversed, proceeded swiftly to correct them, and thereafter acquired the nickname Brainsy, the assignment of all the more knotty diagnostic dilemmas, and a fantastically fat salary of twenty-two dollars a week.

  In January 1923, on an unseasonably warm day whose glowing sun hinted of April or May, Izzie’s family moved to a railroad flat that had a double living room, a kitchen, and three bedrooms: one for the sisters (now Marilyn and Rhea), one for Izzie and Morris, and a separate one for Khayim. Marilyn, who did most of the cooking, danced in front of the gas stove. No more sooty scuttle, hauling heavy bags of coal, filthy ashes. Morris reveled in the radiant sunlight: windows faced the street on three sides! Rhea, still bubbly as ever and soon to be sixteen, was entranced with the porcelain bathtub which would not have to double as a kitchen sink and washtub. Over and over she ran her fingertips over its satin smoothness.

  But restless Izzie was content only briefly. The big money lay in the assembly lines, rolling out automobiles by the thousands, like Henry Ford, which for Iz had to be a hopeless dream, especially at a time when huge companies like Maxwell were going bust. And suddenly little Bjornestadt’s A-l, owing him two week’s pay, also had its doors padlocked—a matter of an unpaid note on a hydraulic lift. Izzie, heartbroken, furious, scoured Manhattan for a new job without success, scrambled to garages as remote as Brownsville in Brooklyn and Highbridge in the Bronx. But no one needed a puny Yid mechanic. That same week the dairy restaurant where Morris worked as a baker’s assistant burned to the ground—most conveniently for the owner who was suffering from a heart condition and looking to retire. Khayim, recuperating from another back injury, hadn’t brought any money home since before Thanksgiving.

  Poppa finally no longer needed medicine. But food all five of them had to have—even if only the half-price semi-stale bread which Morris walked a mile to buy from a baker he knew. And the money for that was fast dwindling. The Uncle, who had been piqued at the family’s profligacy in moving to such elegant quarters, refused to lend his brother-in-law rent money. A stub-nosed, thickly padded Irishman rang the doorbell and served tight-lipped Marilyn with a notice of eviction. The streets below were coated with ice. It was more frigid in March than it had been in February. Where could they go? Iz remembered the man in sheepskin threatening them in Antipolye. Iz had tried harsh measures, and they’d worked. But what kind now?

  Iz, who for a year almost had had Pirone’s face and words etched in his mind, made the decision that started him along a road from which there would be no detour and no turning back, ever. The Italianer’s offer, Iz felt, was the best he could get—and the only one. And Pirone came through.

  A day before the brawny crew was scheduled to evict them, Iz began work, servicing trucks for a bootlegger, Little Nathan Beckstein.

  CHAPTER 2

  Vannie Higgins sucked hard on the Turkish cigarette, tasting the lusty bittersweetness of the smoke on his tongue. Then he dropped the fag and obliterated its cozy glow under his work-booted heel. This was the signal for his boys in the boarded-up abandoned diner across the road to douse their own smokes and drop to their perches.

  Higgins, sitting at a second story bedroom window of a small withered frame house whose two elderly inhabitants were tied with scarves and drapery pulls to the legs of a Victorian pump organ downstairs in the cluttered parlor, felt uneasy. Something about this job didn’t set right. He had a hankering to let this convoy just roll on by.

  Queer that they’d off-loaded in Sag Harbor where the village selectmen had to be oiled twice as high as in Montauk or Greenport. Queer how they’d brought contact boats all the way across the Sound from New London and Narragansett, instead of using the local clammers; that had to cost too. And especially queer how greased-lightning fast they’d filled up four big boxcar scows. When Ankles had come racing in with the word that they’d begun heading west out onto the highway at three A.M., after only having started loading at eleven, Vannie had known right then something had to be up. Now almost an hour had passed, though, and he still hadn’t been able to dope out—get a really clear bead on what the hell it was.

  And things had been going along so smooth. That last job two weeks back, like rolling off a log; and the prices—like the stuff was solid gold. Queer, though, how a couple of those drivers had disappeared. Vannie had an eerie feeling, as if right this second those guys, still bleeding maybe, were out in the woods nearby. …

  Minutes ago Ankles’s kid brother, who’d tailed the hooch from the minute it had left Sag Harbor, had phoned from Hampton Bays to report no change, still just the same two plain escort cars, a Ford touring and an Essex sedan, and carrying the same, usual couldn’t-hit-the-broad-side-of-a-barn, tommy-gun grifters.

  Vannie, at twenty-six his shaggy black hair and Douglas Fairbanks mustache flecked with gray, turned his thoughts to packets of fresh green banknotes. Fifty thousand more, and he’d have himself a million, one beautiful, unbelievable million in U.S. green. He’d stash it into a duffel bag, buy a first class, champagne-around-the-clock passage on the White Star S.S. Majestic, and ship out back to neat little France, where he’d picked up shrapnel souvenirs at Château-Thierry and Belleau Wood, but other nicer ones too. The food there that had tasted so fine, even the skinny chewy bread. And the wine and the different shape to the trees. And Jacqueline, a short-haired, laughing-eyed little thing, plopping down and screwing right in the middle of a sunny hayfield. Five days in a place called Tours, the five best days ever. She’d be gone now. Fat. Married. He’d find another one like her, though. He’d buy one of the cream-colored houses facing down on the sleepy Loire River, with a thick wall around it and a fancy curving wrought iron gate, and in the cellar a million bottles of sparkling wine.

  He fished out another cigarette and rolled it back and forth between his fingers. He thought about lighting it. If he did, that’d be the signal this job was off. Tempted, he began feeling around his pocket for a match. No, hell, it’d be friggin winter soon. Numb toes and fingers, ass-freezing time. And if he let this load pass, it might be weeks, a month even, before there’d be another—with only two escort cars.

  He picked up his cool, steel-smooth Thompson gun, edged off his chair and knelt alongside the window, resting the barrel on the sill and peering out into the gloom, watching for the first glimmer of headlights.

  Soon he saw the bobbing glow. First a soft mushy blob of brightness, and then paired tiny pinpoints of light, growing larger, brighter, stronger, closer and closer.

  The signal shot for his ragtag gang of seiners, cod liners, clammers, duck hunting guides and strawberry pickers to commence blasting had to come from him. He brushed his calloused forefinger gently against the springy trigger—waiting, waiting. A few seconds more, and the first escort car would come abreast of the diner’s parking lot. Then it would be time.

  Could he be seeing right? A truck first? No escort car? Where in hell was it? Could both cars be at the rear? Why? Why? But now he had no time. The headlights of
the oncoming van were at fifty feet, perfect range; his finger pulled the hard lever backward, triggering a thunderous flaming burst.

  He’d hit those headlights. He knew he had, and yet instead of their going dark, suddenly the whole truck glowed, all four trucks blazed with blinding lights, hundreds of them, transforming the early morning shadow world into a hellfire-like high noon, brilliantly illuminating the diner, the tree trunks barricading the road ahead, Vannie’s window, and at the same time obscuring the trucks themselves, as if they were hidden inside the glare of an unseeable sun.

  And the sounds! As though half of Suffolk County were exploding, going mad with noise. An armada of crackling, roaring sounds Vannie hadn’t heard since he’d crawled beneath Frog barbed wire, with the sky raining clods and deadly shell splinters.

  The bastards had trapped him with Lewis guns. That’s why the lightning-fast loading. They hadn’t loaded a damn thing. Vannie felt an aching heaviness press down on his chest. Now he’d never make it back to France. His luck had run out.

  Who would have thought to outfit whiskey trucks with tripod-mounted, six-hundred-fifty-rounds-per-minute, full-scale machine guns?

  Lying on the floor, he watched the bullet-hole graffiti scrawl across the walls, cracking, chewing, crumbling the wood and plaster into powdery, smokelike whiffs. This time some friggin New York wisenheimer really had been smart.

  Suddenly it stopped. Dead quiet. A long minute. Then a voice, distorted, barking through a megaphone, ordering everyone out with hands high or they’d be mowed down and chopped up like tuna fish salad.