The Hunt

Keegan was surprised at how fast he got from the cashier to the manicurist to the owner of the shop, who was also the barber, and finally to the man himself. He recognized the high-pitched, hoarse, voice immediately.

“Who you say this is again?”

“It’s Frankie Kee, Mr. Costello. You remember me?” “Yeah, I remember you. You still drivin’ that Rolls?”

“I switched to a twelve-cylinder Packard.”

“So you’re that Frankie Kee.”

“One and the same.”

“I heard you was outa the country.”

“I’m back.”

“You was where, Germany?”

Costello obviously kept in touch. He was a man who never forgot information, no matter how unimportant it might seem. It went into the old memory bank and stayed there.

“That’s right.”

“What were you doin’ over there?”

“Hating Hitler.”

Costello broke out laughing, then yelped. “Jesus, Tony, you almost cut my throat. . well I can’t help it, the guy made me laugh. . . you, Frankie Kee, you almost got my throat cut for me.”

“Sorry, I didn’t know you were getting a shave.”

“Okay, you’re back. What’s your problem?”

“Mr. C., my problem is I’m lookin’ for a guy and I’ve got almost nothing to go on.”

“This guy one of ours?”

“No. He’s a European. Nothing to do with the business.”

“So why you come to me?” There was a touch of irritation in his husky voice.

“Because I need a name. Somebody who can keep his mouth shut and can give me some pointers, like how to find somebody who doesn’t want to be found.”

“This is personal, am I right?”

“Very personal.”

“I heard you never packed a heater.”

“That’s true.”

“This ain’t any of my business, but this guy you’re lookin’ to hire, does he have to do anything else? I mean, if he turns this noogle up, do you want him to do anything else for you?”

“I want to turn him up, Mr. C. All I want to know is how to go about it.”

“Must be real personal,” Costello said with a chuckle.

“You hit it on the button.”

There was a pause, a long pause. Vaguely in the background he could hear the sound of a razor being drawn across a whiskered face, the sound of an emery board on fingernails and, way in the background, H. V. Kaltenborn was delivering his daily news broadcast on the radio. Finally Costello spoke again.

“It could cost you a bundle, the guy I got in mind.”

“The cost doesn’t figure in.”

“Jesus, you really do want this guy bad. You got a pencil handy?”

“Right.”

“Eddie Tangier. Gramercy 5-6608. It’s a candy store on the East Side. They’ll take a message. You can use my name.”

“Thanks. That’s one I owe you.”

“You’re okay, Frankie Kee, I’ll remember that. Maybe someday you hear from me.”

“Grazie. Addio.”

“Addio.”

At four o’clock a man entered the saloon. He stood in the doorway for a moment, a hazy shape, haloed by sharp sunlight from outside. He was short and square, a boxy little man who kept his hands in his overcoat pockets as he strolled slowly around the room, checking the booths. He went to the back, opened the men’s room door with one hand, leaned over and looked under the booth doors. He did the same with the ladies’ room, then went back to the front. A moment later a second man, a slender man nearly six feet tall dressed in black, entered followed by two others who stood on either side of the entrance like palace guards.

Keegan sat in his rear booth reading the afternoon paper. He watched the little drama at the door with casual interest, then turned back to the tabloid.

The tall man in black walked cautiously toward the booth. He did everything cautiously. 1-le walked cautiously, he looked around cautiously, he talked cautiously and he sat down as if he expected the seat to be cushioned with nails. He was a dapper man with a pencil mustache and he wore a vested suit under a black chesterfield coat. He walked down the length of the bar, stopped at its corner and stared across the room at Keegan before he finally approached the booth.

“Frankie Kee?”

“Yeah.”

“Okay.”

He sat across from Keegan, shook out his shoulders and stared at him for ten or fifteen seconds. Then he smiled.

“Eddie Tangier.” His voice was low and soft, almost a monotone.

“Thanks for coming.”

“This your joint?”

“It’s one of my enterprises.”

“One of my enterprises, I like that. That uptown talk tickles me to death. So . . . ?“

He held his hands out and wagged his fingers toward Keegan.

“I need some advice,” Keegan began.

“From me?”

“Yeah.”

“What kind of advice?”

“I’m looking for a guy.”

“Whoa, whoa, what do you think, you see any feathers on me? I am not a vocalist.”

“It’s not like that. This guy isn’t connected in any way.”

“So why would I know him?”

“You don’t. Hear me out a minute, okay. I talked to Mr. C., he told me you were the man. He told me you could find God if the price was right.”

“Costello said that.?” Tangier smiled, obviously flattered. He stretched his neck and sat up a little straighter in the booth. “Well . . . yeah, that’s true. Mr. C. says the truth.”

“Let me set up a hypothetical case for you.”

“Hypowhat?”

“A make-believe situation. I’m looking for a guy and I’ve got very little to go on. I want to pick your brains, maybe I can figure where to start.”

“This ain’t a job then, you looking for something for nothin’, huh?”

“I’ll pay whatever you think it’s worth.”

Tangier sat sideways in the booth and looked past his shoulder at Keegan. He drummed his fingers on the table.

“You really do got big ones, call me in off the range like that, I think it’s something important, you blow smoke up my ass.”

“I’ll pay you five grand now and five G’s bonus if I find the guy.”

“Jesus, that’s okay. I’ll have a glass of wine. Red. My throat’s dry.”

“Sure. Tiny, a bottle of the best red in the house for Mr. Tangier. Two glasses.”

“Yes sir, comin’ right up.”

“Okay, so you wanna ride with Eddie Tangier. Shoot, what’s the game?”

“You might look at it as if... as if it’s a patriotic thing.”

“Uh huh. Right. We gonna salute the flag here in a minute?”

“I’m looking for a guy. I don’t know his name, I don’t know what he looks like and I don’t know where he is except he’s in America someplace. Where do I start?”

“What is this, some kinda gag or somethin’? You’re lookin’ for a guy, you don’t know his name, don’t even know what he looks like. What’d this phantom do?”

“Nothing yet. I want to stop him before he does.”

“What’s he gonna do?”

“I have no idea.”

“Shit, you’re wacky. You got bees in your bonnet there, Frankie Kee. I shoulda known.”

“I’m dead serious, Eddie.”

“I didn’t say you weren’t. What I said, you’re nutty as a fuckin’ peanut farm is what I said.”

Tiny came with two glasses of red wine and put them on the table with the bottle.

“Yeah, thanks,” Tangier said. He poured an inch or so in the bottom of the glass, held it up, peered at it through the light, took a sip and nodded approvingly.

“Good dago red,” he said and filled both glasses.

“Just let me set it up for you, okay? Hear me out. You still think I’m around the bend, you and your boys have a steak on me, we forget all about it.”

“You’re one strange dude there, you know that? Anybody ever tell you that?”

“Almost everybody.”

Tangier chuckled.

“Okay, so you know it. So talk to me.” He waved his two men away from the door and pointed to a booth. They sat down. “Feed ‘em while we talk, they been on their feet most of the day.”

Keegan nodded to Tiny, then toward the two bodyguards.

“Okay,” Keegan said, “here it is. Let’s say you want to get lost. Disappear, start over someplace else. You need an identity, license, whatever. How would you go about that? What’s the procedure?”

“Somebody could still recognize you.”

“No. The Phantom’s from across the pond. A foreigner.”

“Hey, this ain’t some kinda spy stuff? Look, I’m not about to screw around with the feds.”

“Thing is, Eddie, he doesn’t have to worry about his face. What he needs is an identity. I mean, can you buy that kind of thing?”

Tangier leaned back and caressed his lower lip with the rim of the wineglass. He took a sip and put the glass back on the table.

“Look, whyn’t you take this to the G-boys? They got the moxie, got the people.”

“I tried that.”

“And?”

“It’s too vague. They don’t have the time or the people. They think I’m a crackpot. They’re just not interested, blah, blab, blah. ‘Take your pick.”

“So forget it.”

“I don’t want to forget it.”

“This a personal thing?”

“Very.”

“You gonna whack this guy when you find him?”

“Probably.”

“I heard you don’t even carry a piece.”

“I know how to use one.”

Tangier looked around the saloon for a moment, then, “Okay, tell me everything you do know about this turkey.”

“Then you forget it, okay?”

“Hey, I got the worst memory you ever met.”

Keegan sighed. He lit a cigarette and blew smoke toward the ceiling.

“The mark is highly trained. A very smart guy. He came here in ‘33, spent a year someplace. Then sometime in the spring or early summer of ‘34 he got in a mix-up with the feds. It wasn’t something he did personally, it was like he was maybe an innocent bystander, something like that. Anyway, he had to cool off, disappear, start all over. So now he’s got a new identity and I don’t know where the hell he is. That’s all I know.”

“No description at all?”

Keegan shook his head.

“That’s a bitch.”

“Tell me about it.”

Tangier finished his wine and poured himself another. He thought for several seconds.

“Once there’s this guy called Speed Cicorella, who’s a numbers boss up in the Bronx only he’s shaving off the top and the boys get wind of it and they put his feet to the fire and it’s like, y’know, cough up thirty big ones, Speedy, or it’s curtains, so Speed turns rabbit and Mr. C calls me in.

“Now this Speed is a very bright guy except when it comes to tearing a piece off don’t belong to him. I got to figure, scheduled for a box like that, he’s gonna get real lost. The easiest way to do this, you go to a town, not a big town, not a small town, an in-between town, like, uh, Trenton or Rochester, and you go to the cemetery and you look over the stones and you find where a baby cashed in right after it was hatched, a week or so old, and this mark died about the same time you was born. You know, Baby Smith, born on Tuesday, died on Thursday, we miss you, that kinda thing. The reason you don’t wanna pick a small town, probably everybody in the courthouse knows about Baby Smith. You pick a big town like New York, you get lost in paperwork. So anyways you pick a medium town and you find your mark and you go to the courthouse and you get a birth certificate. And you become Baby Smith only now you’re like thirty years old.”

“How about death certificates?”

“They don’t match ‘em up. You get born, your stuff is in one place, you die, it’s someplace else. They don’t match ‘em up ‘cause it’s too much trouble plus who cares, okay? What I’m sayin’, it ain’t a problem, matchin’ up birth papers and death papers. It don’t happen.”

“Okay.”

“So now you got a new ID. You get a driver’s license. You get a passport. You get a job. You’re Baby Smith, now age thirty. You can do it and do it and do it, man. You can set up three, four IDs, switch back and forth. What it is, you’re gone, okay?

“So now I got to find Speed who is thirty-seven and could be anyplace and be anybody so what do I do? I check out his pedigree and he’s from this little town in Jersey called Collingswood across the river from Philly. I figure, what the hell, we got to start someplace. The biggest little town near there is Camden. I do the cemeteries. I write down every dead kid I come across who would be thirty-five to forty if he’s still kickin’. I end up with thirty-two names outa maybe half a dozen cemeteries. So I pull some strings with some people I know in Trenton and I make a run on driver’s licenses. I’m lookin’ for a match-up to one of the names from the cemetery, somebody in his late thirties who just applied for a driver’s license. I draw bopkes.

“Then I start dealin’ with Speed himself. He likes big city action. He likes ladies. He likes to play the numbers and the ponies. And. . . a big hit, he’s got diabetes. He needs a fix every now and again.”

“Insulin.”

“That’s the ticket. I figure, maybe he went across the river, maybe he’s hangin’ out in Philly. So I do the same thing with driver’s licenses in Pennsylvania and whadda ya know, I get lucky. I come up with three guys, three addresses, and one of the addresses is a phony. Now I figure Speed is a guy name of George Bernhart with diabetes livin’ someplace in Philly. I do the hospitals. My story is, this guy Bernhart, I never met him before, he comes by my place with a friend and he leaves his fixins. I’m afraid he needs the stuff. There’s twelve hospitals in the Philly area. I get to number nine, bingo. again. Now I got a George Bernhart, age thirty-eight, a diabetes freak livin’ at such- and-such in Philly. I stake the place, sure enough, here comes old Speedy down the street packin’ groceries. I make a phone call. Ten days, the job’s old news, I’m back in Manhattan spend- in’ the felt. See what I mean?”

“I get your point. Sometimes it’s the little things that count.”

“Yeah, right. Some oddball piece of information you pick up is what dumps them. If you ever get on to this bird, find out everything you can about him. Everything. Plus I got lucky.”

“You make your own luck.”

“I suppose there’s somethin’ to that.”

“What happened to old Speedy?”

“I didn’t ask. See, it’s not my thing. I’m a tracker, I don’t do hits. I don’t even pack heat, that’s what muscle’s all about. Now I’m in industry. I done Lucky Lootch a favor once. Wasn’t for him I’d be sittin’ in the pen someplace. Or maybe dead.”

“What kind of favor?” Keegan asked.

“I’m sittin’ in the holding pen down at the Tombs waiting for my bondsman to show up. I’m maybe twenty at the time, a small-time booster, that’s all. Anyways I’m sittin’ there and a couple of city dicks walk by and I hear one f them mention the name of a gambling house uptown they’re about to knock over. It’s a place I know is one of Lucky’s. So I make a little noise about my bond man not being there and the desk man lets me out to make another call and I ring up a guy I know knows Lucky and I tell him what’s about to happen and to get the word upstairs real fast. When the cops got there, the place was dark. Not a soul on the premises. Next thing I know my charges are dismissed and Mr. Lootch offers me a spot. I had this knack for sniffing out people didn’t wanna be sniffed out and he kind of cut me loose on my own. I never missed yet.”

“Mr. C. was right.”

“Bet’cher ass. I think I’ll have that steak. Medium well, a potato maybe and a bottle a ketchup.”

“My steaks are all prime beef, you don’t need to douse them with ketchup.”

“I put ketchup on everything. I put ketchup on my Wheaties.”

“Tiny, a T-bone medium well and a potato for Mr. Tangier. Bring the ketchup bottle.”

“Got it,” Tiny answered.

“So where do I start?” asked Keegan.

“Me? I’d start with the screw-up. See, you’re lookin’ for something federal around the middle of ‘34, right. Something that happened and maybe the feds are lookin’ for somebody related to that thing, whatever that thing is.’,

“Like what?”

“Hell, I don’t know. Maybe hot cars, that’s federal. Kidnapping. Smuggling. Bank robbery. Maybe somebody movin’ ladies around, state to state . .

“He wouldn’t be involved in anything like that.”

“Good thinkin’, Frankie. Not if he’s a sleeper like you say, waitin’ for somethin’ to happen, his angle would be to become a needle in the haystack. So, what I’m sayin’, somethin’ happened that maybe he wasn’t directly involved in. Somethin’ would make this John Doe turn rabbit. What could that be, a guy who’s missin’ but the feds wanna talk to him? An eyeball to something maybe? He knew somebody somethin’ happened to maybe?”

“And he couldn’t afford the scrutiny. What I mean, they’d maybe turn up his cover.”

“Now you’re cookin’. Look, how many cases that happened during those three, four months were the feds involved in? Already you narrowed things down a lot.”

“Where would you go if you were this guy?”

“Get lost out in the sticks someplace. Out in the farmland, someplace out past Chicago. Just melt in.”

“How about the South?”

“People’re too nosy down there.”

“Would he know all this?”

“You’d know that better than me. Anyways, that’s the way you do it, pal, hit and miss. Play the logic. Put yourself in his place. What would he do next? See what I mean? I can’t take a hand in this, y’unnerstand, with the feds in on it and all.”

“Sure.”

“You got my nose up, though. I hope you make this bird.”

“I’m going to make him.”

“Uh huh. I think I believe you there, Frankie Kee. Just outa curiosity, how bad you really want this guy?”

“I want to make a spot on the Street out of the son of a bitch.”

Tangier chuckled in his icy undertone. “Well, look, you run up a blind alley, you got my number, gimme a ring.”

“Thanks, Eddie.”

“Sure. Where the hell’s my steak, they have to kill the cow?”

At three AM, the phone jarred him out of a deep sleep. He groped for the instrument in the dark, finally got his hand on it and answered sleepily.

“Yeah?”

“It’s Eddie again.”

“What time is it?”

“Who cares. Listen, I been thinking about this problem of yours. A couple more things occur to me. First, if he come from across the pond, he had to have a passport from wherever he come from. Could be somethin’ there. Two, he woulda gone for his new ID quick, he wouldn’t wander around with a passport lookin’ in cemeteries.”

“I get your point,” Keegan said sleepily.

“I figure he probably hit the East Coast because he would do this fast when he got here,” Tangier continued. “If I was guessing, I’d say he got the name somewhere in north Jersey or eastern Pennsylvania, outa the Manhattan area but close enough by. Then he’d want to put some distance between him and wherever he picked up his ID so my guess, you look out in the middle of the country someplace, leastways for starters. So now you’re lookin’ for a case happened during those three, four months somewheres out West. See what I mean, I know it ain’t much but it’s better’n goose eggs.”

“I appreciate your help, Eddie,” Keegan said.

“You wanna give this thing up, I’d say you got good reason. But I just got the impression there, talkin’ to ya, this was a big thing with you.”

“It is a big thing with me.”

“Then don’t crap it up. You can find this guy. But I think you’re gonna need some help from the G-boys, looking for what screwed this bucko up back in ‘34. If the guy disappeared it’s gotta be on the books somewheres.”

“Easier said than done.”

“Think about this. What would be the perfect way to disappear? So they’d stop lookin’ for ya?”

Keegan lay in bed staring at the shadowy ceiling for a few seconds then it struck him.

“Dead. Hell, he’d die.”

“The perfect cop-out, pal. If he faked his death it would stop right there. He’s out clean, comes back later and starts over. Pull all your strings, Frankie Kee. Nothin’ comes easy.”

“I hear you. Thanks, Eddie.”

“Keep in touch.”

Keegan lay in the dark for several minutes. Pull all your strings, Tangier said.

He only had one string left to pull.

But it was a good one.