Billy Phelan's Greatest Game

Six

Red Tom Fitzsimmons, the four-to-two man at Becker’s, a good fellow, stood behind his mustache and amidst his brawn in a fresh apron, arms folded, sleeves rolled, waiting for thirst to arise anew in his four customers. Martin Daugherty sat at the end of the bar underneath the frame of the first dollar Becker’s ever made, and at the edge of the huge photo of Becker’s thirtieth anniversary outing at Picard’s Grove on a sunny day in August of 1932, which adorned the back bar. The photographer had captured two hundred and two men in varying degrees of sobriety, in shirtsleeves, sitting, kneeling, standing in a grassy field, clutching their beer, billowy clouds behind and above them. Emil Becker ordered a wall-sized blowup made from the negative and then spent weeks identifying all present by full name, and writing an index, which he framed and hung beside the blowup, which covered the wall like wallpaper.

Emil Becker died in 1936 and his son, Gus, put a check mark alongside his name, and a gold star on his chest in the photo. Customers then wanted the same done for other faithful departed, and so the stars went up, one by one. There were nineteen gone out of two hundred in six years. Martin Daugherty was in the photo. So was Red Tom. So was Billy Phelan, and Daddy Big, and Harvey Hess. So was Bindy McCall and his son, Charlie. So was Scotty Streck. The star was already shining on Scotty’s chest and the check mark alongside his name.

Martin looked at Red Tom, and at his mustache: in the photo and the real thing. It was a mustache of long standing, brooded over, stroked, waxed, combed, pampered.

“That mustache of yours, Fitzsimmons,” said Martin, “is outlandish. Venturesome and ostentatious.”

“Is that so?”

“Unusually vulgar. Splendid too, of course, and elegant in a sardonic Irish way. But it surely must be unspeakable with tomato juice.”

“Give up and have a drink,” Red Tom said, pouring a new bourbon for Martin.

“It’s pontifical, it’s arrogant. It obviously reflects an intemperate attitude toward humankind. I’d say it was even intimidating when found on a bartender, a mustache like that.”

“Glad you like it.”

“Who said I liked it? Listen,” Martin said, now in complete possession of Red Tom’s attention, “what do you hear about Charlie McCall?”

Red Tom eyed the other customers, moved in close. “The night squad was here asking your kind of question, Bo Linder and Jimmy Bergan.”

“You tell them anything a fellow like myself should know?”

“Only that the word’s out that he’s gone.”

“Gone how?”

“Disappeared, that’s all.”

“What about Jimmy Hennessey?”

“Hennessey? What’s he got to do with it?”

“Maybe something.”

“I haven’t laid eyes on Hennessey in months.”

“Is he all right?”

“Last I heard, he was drying out. Fell down the church steps and landed in front of Father O’Connor, who says to him, Hennessey, you should stop drinking. Hennessey reaches his hand up to the priest and says, I’m waiting for help from the Holy Ghost. He’s in the neighborhood somewhere, says O’Connor. Ask him to pick you up. And he steps over Hennessey’s chest.”

“He must be dried out by now. The McCalls put his name on a go-between list.”

“A go-between list?”

“It’ll be in the morning paper. Our guess is they’re trying to find an intermediary to talk with the kidnappers about the ransom.”

Martin put the list on the bar and ran down the names: Joe Decker, a former soft-shoe artist who ran the Double Dot nightclub on Hudson Avenue; Andy Kilmartin, the Democratic leader of the Fifth Ward; Bill Shea, a Bindy McCall lieutenant who ran the Monte Carlo, the main gambling house in the city; Barney O’Hare, a champion bootlegger who served four terms as Patsy McCall’s man in the State Assembly and no longer had need of work; Arnold Carroll, who ran the Blue Elephant saloon; Marcus Gorman, the town’s best-known criminal lawyer, who defended Legs Diamond; Butch McHale, a retired welterweight and maybe the best fighter ever to come out of Albany, who ran the Satin Slipper, a speakeasy, after he quit the ring; Phil Lynch, who ran the candy store that was Bindy’s headquarters for numbers collections and payoffs downtown; Honey Curry, a hoodlum from Sheridan Avenue, who did four years for a grocery store stickup; Hennessey, an ex-alderman who was one of Patsy’s political bagmen until he developed the wet spot on his brain; Morrie Berman, the ex-pimp and gambler; and Billy Phelan.

“Kilmartin never comes in anymore,” Red Tom said. “O’Hare comes in for a nightcap after he gets laid. Gorman hasn’t been in here since old man Becker told him and Legs Diamond he didn’t want their business. Most of the others are in and out.”

“Lately?”

“All but Curry. No show for a long while.”

“Billy been in tonight yet?”

“He’s about due.”

“I know. I whipped him today with a parlay. I think I hurt him.”

“He knows how to get well. You say this list is in the paper?”

Martin told him how the coded list arrived at the Times-Union as a classified ad and was sported by a lady clerk as oddball enough to send up to Emory Jones for a funny feature story. The message was to CHISWICK, the names in scrambled numbers. Emory solved it instantly: A as 1, B as 2, the moron code. And when Martin next communicated, Emory had him check out everyone on the list. Max Rosen admitted the list was connected to the kidnapping but would say no more and didn’t have to. Martin spent an hour in the phone booth discovering that none of those listed was available. Not home. In Miami. Away for the month. Except for Hennessey and Curry, whose phones didn’t answer, and Billy and Morrie, whose recent movements Martin knew personally.

“Who’s Curry hang around with these days?”

“He’s cozy with Maloy, used to be. But he’s always with a dame.”

“And Maloy?”

“I heard he was hanging out with a bunch down in Jersey. Curry too.”

Billy Phelan came in then. Martin saw him touch Red Tom for what looked like a twenty before he even looked the place over. Then he sat down beside Martin.

“Luckiest man in North America,” Billy said.

“A connoisseur of horseflesh.”

“With a horseshoe up your ass.”

“Talent makes its own luck, Billy. Like somebody bowling two-ninety-nine.”

“Yeah. I got a partial payment for you.” Billy signaled Red Tom for a refill for Martin and a beer for himself, and put an envelope in front of Martin. He kept his hand on it.

“I need a bankroll for Nick’s game tonight. If I hold on to this and I win I pay you off entirely.”

“And if you lose, I lose this.”

“You don’t lose. Billy pays his debts.”

“I mean this month.”

“All right, Martin, you need the cash, take it. I’m not arguing. I just work a little longer.”

“Keep the roll and maybe we’ll both get our dues paid. But I have a question. What do you hear about Charlie McCall, apart from what we both know about last night?”

“Jesus, this is my big Charlie McCall day. Why the hell does everybody think I know what Charlie’s up to?”

“Who’s everybody?”

“Nobody.”

“Some significant people in town obviously think you might be able to help find him, one way or another.”

“Find him? He ain’t lost.”

“Haven’t you heard?”

“I heard he got snatched, but I just found out upstairs that’s not straight. Daddy Big got it right from Bindy. Charlie’s in New York. All I heard was a rumor.”

“Your rumor was right.”

“They took him, then? That’s it?”

“Correct.”

“Daddy Big and his goatshit.”

“What goatshit?”

“Just goatshit. What about significant people?”

“Your name’s in the paper that comes out tonight, one of twelve names, all in a code in a classified ad, which is obviously a message to the kidnappers about go-betweens. Nobody said anything to you about this?”

“Nobody till now.”

“You weren’t on the original list. The ad came in about two this afternoon and I just found out your name was added about half an hour ago.” Martin told the ad story again, and Billy knew all the names. He signaled for a beer.

“I got a message for you,” Red Tom said when he brought Billy’s beer. “Your friend Angie was in today. She’s at the Kenmore.”

“She say anything?”

“She said she needs her back scratched.”

“That’s not what she wants scratched.”

“Well, you’re the expert on that,” said Red Tom, and he went down the bar.

Billy told Martin, “I don’t belong on that list. That’s either connected people or hoodlums. I pay off the ward leader, nickel and dime, and I vote the ticket, that’s my connection. And I never handled a gun in my life.”

“You classify Berman as a hoodlum?”

“Maybe not, but he sure ain’t no altar boy.”

“You know him pretty well?”

“Years, but we’re not that close.”

“You know everybody on Broadway and everybody knows you. Maybe that’s why you’re on the list.”

“No, I figured it out. Daddy Big got me on it. If it come in half an hour ago, that’s all it could be. Something I said about a plan to snatch Bindy last year. You know that rumor.”

“No. What was it?”

“Fuck, a rumor. I’m the only one heard it? What is this? It was all over the goddamn street. Tom, you heard that rumor about Bindy last year?”

“What rumor?”

“Around August. Saratoga season. Somebody was gonna snatch him. You heard it.”

“I never heard that. Who was gonna do it?”

“How the fuck do I know who was gonna do it?”

“It’s your rumor.”

“I heard a goddamn rumor, that’s all. I paid no attention, nothing ever happened. Now, because I heard a rumor last August, I’m on the McCalls’ shit list?”

“This is no shit list,” Martin said.

When Red Tom went to serve another customer, Billy said, “They think I’m in on it.”

“I don’t think that’s true,” Martin said, “but it does make you a pretty famous fellow tonight in our little community. A pretty famous fellow.”

“Know where I first heard about Charlie? From my Uncle Chick, who don’t even know how to butter bread right. How the hell did he hear about it? He asks me what I know about Charlie and all I know is last night at the alleys and then you and all your Charlie horses. You knew it then, didn’t you?”

“Maybe.”

“Maybe, my fucking noodle.”

“Maybe, your fucking noodle then.”

“I’m standing with Charlie horses and you know the guy’s glommed.”

“And that explains why I won?”

“Sure it explains why you won, you prick.”

“I didn’t win anything yet,” and Martin pushed the envelope toward Billy.

“Right. Poker time. Money first, Charlie later.”

“Morrie Berman’ll be in that game, right?”

“That’s what he said last night.”

“Look, pay attention to what he says. Anything. It’s liable to be very important.”

“What do you know that I don’t?”

“That’s an intriguing question we can take up some other time, but now let me tell you very seriously that everything is important. Everything Morrie says. We’ll talk about it later when things aren’t quite so public.”

“What are you, a cop?”

“No, I’m a friend of Charlie McCall’s.”

“Yeah.”

“And so are you.”

“Yeah.”

And Billy drank up and stood up. He and Martin moved toward the door, which opened to the pull of Daddy Big as they reached it, Daddy in his change apron and eyeshade, questing sweet blotto at eventide. Billy grabbed his shirtfront.

“You turned me in, you son of a bitch.”

“What’s got you, you gone nuts?”

“You told Bindy what I said about the snatch rumor.”

“I asked about it. Bindy asked me where I heard it.”

“And you finked on me, you fat weasel. And I don’t know anything worth a goddamn pigeon fart.”

“Then you got nothing to worry about.”

“I worry about weasels. I never took you for a weasel.”

“I don’t like you either. Stay out of upstairs.”

“I play tomorrow and you don’t shut me out and don’t try.”

“I shut out people who need to be shut.”

“Go easy, old man. There’s three things you can’t do in this world and all three of ’em are fight.”

Daddy Big broke Billy’s hold on his shirt and simultaneously, with a looping left out of nowhere, knocked him against the front door, which opened streetward. Billy fell on his back on Becker’s sidewalk, his fedora rolling into the gutter. Martin picked him up and then went for the hat.

“Not your day for judging talent,” Martin said.

Billy put on his hat, blotted his lip. “He hits like he plays pool,” he said.

“So, that’s new. Something you learned,” said Martin, brushing the dust off Billy’s suit coat.

Martin walked with Billy up Broadway toward Clinton Avenue, thinking first he would go to Nick’s cellar and watch the poker game but not play against his own money. Yet the notion of spectating at a poker game on such an evil day seemed almost evil in itself. His mind turned to thoughts of death: closing Scotty Streck’s left eye, Charlie Boy maybe with a bullet in the head, dumped in the woods somewhere.

And passing the United Traction Company building at the corner of Columbia Street he saw Francis Phelan, again cocking his arm, just there, across the street, again ready to throw his smooth stone; and he remembered the bleeding and dying scab, his head laid open, face down on the floor of the trolley, one arm hanging over the top step. The scab had driven the trolley down Broadway from the North Albany barns, and when it reached Columbia Street a mob was waiting. Francis and two other young men heaved a kerosene-soaked sheet, twisted and knotted into a loose rope, over the overhead trolley wire and lit it with matches. The trolley could not pass the flaming obstacle and halted. The militiamen raised their rifles to the ready, fearful that the hostile crowd would assault the car, as it had the day before, and beat the driver unconscious. Militiamen on horseback pushed the mob back from the tracks, and one soldier hit Fiddler Quain with a rifle butt as Fiddler lit the sheet. But even as this was taking the full attention of the military, even before thoughts of reversing the trolley could be translated into action, other men threw a second twisted sheet over the trolley wire to the rear of the car and lit it, trapping the trolley and its strike-breaking passengers between two pillars of flame.

It was then that Francis uncocked his arm and that the smooth stone flew, and the scab fell and died. No way out. Death within the coordinates. And it was the shooting of the innocent onlookers which followed Francis’s act that hastened the end of the strike. Violence enough. Martin saw two of the onlookers fall, just as he could still see the stone fly. The first was spun by the bullet and reeled backward and slid down the front of the railroad station wall. The second grabbed his stomach as the scab had grabbed his head, and he crumpled where he stood. Fiddler Quain lay on the granite blocks of Broadway after his clubbing, but the mob swirled around that horseman who hit him, an invasion of ants, and Fiddler was lifted up and swept away to safety and hiding. Like Franny, he was known but never prosecuted. The hands that carried the violence put honest men back to work. Broadway, then and now, full of men capable of violent deeds to achieve their ends.

“Listen, Billy,” Martin said as they walked, “that business between you and Daddy Big, that’s not really why the McCalls put you on the list. There’s something else going on, and it’s about Morrie Berman.”

Billy stopped walking and faced Martin.

“What Morrie says could be important, since he knows people who could have taken Charlie.”

“So do I. Everybody does on Broadway.”

“Then what you or the others know is also important.”

“What I know is my business. What Berman knows is his business. What the hell is this, Martin?”

“Patsy McCall is making it his business, too.”

“How do you know that?”

“I talked to him this morning.”

“Did he ask you to snoop around Morrie Berman?”

“No. He asked me to ask you to do that.”

“Me? He wants me to be some kind of stoolie? What the hell’s the matter with you, Martin?”

“I’m not aware that anything’s the matter.”

“I’m not one of the McCalls’ political whores.”

“Nobody said you were. I told him you wouldn’t like the idea, but I also know you’ve been friendly with Charlie McCall all your life. Right now, he could be strapped to a bed someplace with a gun at his head. He could even be dead.”

Billy made no response. Martin looked at him and saw puzzlement. Martin shaped the picture of Charlie Boy again in his mind but saw not Charlie but Edward Daugherty, tied to a bed by four towels, spread-eagled, his genitals uncovered. Why such a vision now? Martin had never seen his father in such a condition, nor was he in such a state even now at the nursing home. The old man was healthy, docile, no need to tie him to the bed. Naked prisoner. Naked father. It was Ham who saw Noah, his father, naked and drunk on wine, and Noah cursed Ham, while Shem and Japheth covered their father’s nakedness and were blessed for it. Cursed for peering into the father’s soul through the pores. Blessed for covering the secrets of the father’s body with a blanket. Damn all who find me in my naked time.

Billy started to walk again toward Clinton Avenue. He spoke without looking at Martin, who kept pace with him. “Georgie the Syph knocked down an old woman and took four bucks out of her pocketbook. I came around the corner at James Street and saw him and I even knew the old woman, Marty Slyer the electrician’s mother. They lived on Pearl Street. Georgie saw me and ran up Maiden Lane and the old lady told the cops I saw him. But I wouldn’t rat even on a bum like Georgie. What I did the next time I saw him was kick him in the balls before he could say anything and take twenty off him and mail it to Mrs. Slyer. Georgie had to carry his balls around in a basket.”

“That’s a noble story, Billy, but it’s just another version of the code of silence. What the underworld reveres. It doesn’t have anything to do with morality or justice or honor or even friendship. It’s a simplistic perversion of all those things.”

“Whatever it is it don’t make me a stool pigeon.”

“All that’s wanted is information.”

“Maybe. Or maybe they want Morrie for something particular.”

“No, I don’t think so.”

“How the hell do you know what they want, Martin?”

“Suit yourself in this, Billy. I was asked to put the question to you and I did.”

“I don’t get it, a man like you running errands for the McCalls. I don’t figure you for that.”

“What else can I tell you after I say I’m fond of Charlie, and I don’t like kidnappers. I’m also part of that family.”

“Yeah. We’re all part of that family.”

“I’ll be around later to root for our money. Think about it.”

“What exactly did Patsy say?”

“He said to hang around Berman and listen. That’s all he said.”

“That’s all. Yeah.”

And Billy crossed Clinton toward the alley beside Nick’s haberdashery, where Nick, Footers O’Brien, and Morrie Berman were talking. Martin walked up the other side of the street, past the Pruyn Library, and crossed to The Grand Theater when he saw the Laughton film on the marquee. He looked back at the library corner and remembered the death of youth: his cousin’s suicide in the wagon. Sudden behavior and pervasive silence. But sometimes living men tell no tales either. Francis Phelan suddenly gone and still no word why. The Beachcomber. Martin hadn’t told Billy that his father was back in town. Duplicity and the code of silence. Who was honored by this? What higher morality was Martin preserving by keeping Billy ignorant of a fact so potentially significant to him? We are all in a conspiracy against the next man. Duplicity And Billy Phelan saw through you, Martin: errand boy for the McCalls. Duplicity at every turn. Melissa back in town to remind you of how deep it goes. Oh yes, Martin Daugherty, you are one duplicitous son of a bitch.

In the drugstore next to The Grand, Martin phoned Patsy McCall.

“Do you have any news, Patsy?”

“No news.”

“I made that contact we talked about, and it went just about the way I thought it would. He didn’t like the idea. I don’t think you can look for much information there.”

“What the hell’s the matter with him?”

“He’s just got a feeling about that kind of thing. Some people do.”

“That’s all he’s got a feeling for?”

“It gets sticky, Patsy. He’s a good fellow, and he might well come up with something. He didn’t say no entirely. But I thought you ought to know his reaction and maybe put somebody else on it if you think it’s important.”

“I’ll take care of it,” Patsy said curtly and hung up.

Martin called the Times-Union and got Emory. Yes, the lid was still on the Charlie story. “Everybody went along,” Emory said, “including Dunsbach. I seared his ass all right. He wouldn’t touch the story now with rubber gloves.”

“Heroic, Em. I knew you could do it.”

“Have you smoked out any kidnappers yet?”

“You know I don’t smoke, Em. What happened with the A.L.P.?”

“I don’t give a damn about that piss-ant stuff when I’ve got a story like this. Here. Talk to Viglucci.”

Viglucci, the city editor, explained that some twelve hundred new voters had enrolled in the A.L.P, twice as many as necessary for Patsy McCall to control the young party. No, the desk hadn’t reached Jake Berman, the phone constantly busy at the A.L.P. office. Martin volunteered to go there personally, being only two blocks away. Fine.

Jake Berman had been barely a specter all day for Martin, whose sympathy was all with the McCalls because of Charlie. But now Jake could surely use a little consolation. Martin had known Jake for years and liked him, a decent man, a lawyer for the poor, knew him when he was a city judge, appointed by McCall fiat as a sop to the Albany Jews. But that didn’t last, for Jake refused to throw out a case against a gouging landlord, an untouchable who was a heavy contributor to the Democratic Party. Jake quit the bench and the party, and went back to practicing law.

In 1935, when the A.L.P. was founded to gain another line for Roosevelt’s second run, Jake spearheaded the party locally and opened headquarters in his father’s old tailor shop on Sheridan Avenue, just off North Pearl Street. Old Socialists and laboring men, who wanted nothing to do with the Democrats but liked F.D.R.’s New Deal, made the new party their own, and by 1936 the Albany branch had one hundred and eighty-four members. Patsy McCall tolerated it because it was a stepchild of the Democratic Party, even though he had no use for Roosevelt, the snob son of a bitch. The Catholic Church grew restless with the new party, however, as its ranks fattened with anti-Franco radicals and socialist intellectuals who spat on God. What’s more, it promised the kind of growth that one day could be a power balance in local elections, and so Patsy decided it was time to pull the plug.

The word went out to the aldermen and ward leaders of the city’s nineteen wards that some sixty voters in each ward should change their enrollment from Democrat to American Labor. As enrolled members, they would then be entitled to vote at A.L.P. meetings, and would vote as Patsy told them to. Jake Berman’s few hundred regulars would be dwarfed by the influx, and Jake’s chairmanship negated. In time, all in good time, Patsy’s majority, of which Chickie Phelan was now one, would elect a new party chairman.

The garmentless tailor’s dummy that had been in Berman’s tailor shop for as long as Martin could remember was still visible behind the Lehman-for-Governor posters taped to the old store window. The shop had stood empty for several years after the death of old Ben Berman, a socialist since the turn of the century and a leader in the New York City garment industry’s labor struggle until strikebreakers fractured his skull. He came to Albany to put his life and his head back together and eventually opened this shop, just off Pearl Street at the edge of an old Irish slum, Sheridan Hollow, where Lackey Quinlan once advertised in the paper to rent a house with running water, and curious applicants found he had built his shack over a narrow spot in the old Canal Street creek. This was the running water, and in it Lackey kept his goose and his gander.

Ben Berman worked as a tailor in the neighborhood, though his clients came from all parts of the city, until he lost most of his eyesight and could no longer sew. He died soon after that, and then his son Jacob rented the shop to another tailor, who ran it for several years. But the new man was inferior to Ben Berman with the needle, and the trade fell away. It remained for the A.L.P. to reopen the shop, and now it looked as if its days were again numbered.

Martin pushed open the door, remembering when Ben Berman made suits and coats for his own father, those days when the Daughertys lived under the money tree. Martin could vividly recall Edward Daugherty standing in this room trying on a tan, speckled suit with knickers and a belt in the back, mottled buttons, and a brown, nonmatching vest. Martin mused again on how he had inherited none of his father’s foppery, never owned a tailor-made suit or coat, lived off the rack, satisfied with ready-made. A woman Martin did not know was coming down the inside stairs as he entered. She looked about forty, a matron in style. She was weeping and her hat looked crooked to Martin.

“Jake upstairs?”

She nodded, sniffled, wiped an eye. Martin yearned to console her with gentle fondling.

“Can I help you?” he asked her.

She laughed once and shook her head, then went out. Martin climbed the old stairs and found Jake Berman leaning back in a swivel chair, hands behind head, feet propped up on an open rolltop desk. Jake had a thick gray mustache and wore his hair long, like a serious musician. The elbow was out of his gray sweater, and he was tieless. The desk dominated the room, two rooms really, with the adjoining wall knocked out. Folding chairs cluttered both rooms, and at a long table two men younger than Jake sat tallying numbers on pink pads. The phone on Jake’s desk was off the hook.

“Why don’t you answer your phone?” Martin asked.

“I’m too busy,” Jake said. He moved only his lips and eyes to say that. “What can I do for you?”

“I heard the results.”

“You did. And did they surprise you?”

“Quite a heavy enrollment. I was told twelve hundred plus. Is that accurate?”

“Your information is as good as mine. Better. You get yours from McCall headquarters.”

“I got mine from the city desk.”

“Same thing really, isn’t it, Martin?”

“I wouldn’t say so. The McCalls do have some support there.”

“Some?”

“I for one don’t see myself a total McCaller.”

“Yes, you write some risky things now and then, Martin. You’re quite an independent-minded man in your way But I didn’t see you or anybody else reporting about the plan to take us over. Didn’t anybody down on that reactionary rag know about it?”

“Did you?”

“I knew this morning,” said Jake. “I knew when I saw it happening. Fat old Irishmen who loathe us, drunken bums from the gutter, little German hausfraus enrolling with us. Up until then, the subversion was a well-kept secret.”

Jake’s face was battered, his eyes asymmetric, one lower than the other, his mustache trimmed too high on one side. In anger, his lower lip tightened to the left. His face was as off balance as his father’s battered and dusty samovar, which sat behind him on a table, a fractured sculpture with spigot, one handle, and one leg broken. Another fractured face for Martin in a matter of hours: Charlie when Scotty died; Patsy and Matt this morning; and now Jake, victim of the McCalls. Interlocking trouble. Binding ironies. Martin felt sympathy for them all, had a fondness for them all, gave allegiance to none. Yet, now he was being accused, for the second time in half an hour, of being in league with the McCall machine. And was he not? Oh, duplicitous man, are you not?

“I came for a statement, Jake. Do you have one?”

“Very brief. May the McCalls be boiled in dead men’s piss.”

A young man at the tabulating table, bald at twenty-five, threw down his pencil and stood up. “And you can tell the Irish in this town to go fuck a duck.”

“That’s two unprintable statements,” said Martin. “Shall we try for three?”

“Always a joke, Martin. Everything is comic to you.”

“Some things are comic, Jake. When a man tells me with high seriousness to go fuck a duck, even though I’m only half Irish, I’m amused somewhere.”

The young man, in shirtsleeves, and with Ben Franklin spectacles poised halfway down his nose, came to the desk, hovering over Martin. “It’s the religion, isn’t it?” he said. “Political Jews stand as an affront to the McCalls and their priests, priests no better than the fascist-dog Catholics who kiss the boots of Franco and Mussolini.”

Martin made a squiggle on his notepad.

“Quote it about the fascists,” said the young man.

“Do you think the McCalls are fascists, Jake?” Martin asked.

“I know a Jew who’s been with them almost since the beginning,” said Jake. “He works for a few pennies more than he started for in nineteen twenty-two, sixteen years of penurious loyalty and he never asked for a raise, or threatened to quit over money. ‘If I do,’ he once said to me, ‘you know what they’ll tell me? The same they told Levy, the accountant. Quit, then, you Jew fuck.’ He is a man in fear, a man without spirit.”

“People who don’t promote Jews, are they fascists, or are they anti-Semites?”

“The same thing. The fascists exist because of all those good people, like those sheep who enrolled with us today, all full of passive hate, waiting for the catalyst to activate it.”

“Your point is clear, Jake, but I still want a statement.”

“Print this. That I’m not dead, not even defeated, that I’ll take the party’s case to court, and that we’ll win. If ever the right to free elections was violated, then it was violated today in Albany with this farcical maneuver.”

“The McCalls own the courts, too,” said the young man. “Even the Federal court.”

“There are honest judges. We’ll find one,” Jake said.

“We won’t yield to mob rule,” the young man said.

“He’s right,” Jake said. “We will not. You know an Irish mob threw my grandfather out a third-story window in New York during the Civil War. They were protesting against their great enemy back then, the niggers, but they killed a pious old Jew. He tried to reason with them, with the mob. He thought they would listen to reason, for, after all, he was an intelligent man and had nothing to do with the war, or the niggers. He was merely living upstairs over the draft office. Nevertheless, they threw him down onto the street and let him lie there twitching, dying, for hours. They wouldn’t let anyone pick him up or even help him, and so he died, simply because he lived over the draft office. It was a moment of monstrous ethnic truth in American history, my friend, the persecuted Irish throwing a persecuted Jew out the window in protest against drafting Irishmen into the Union Army to help liberate the persecuted Negro.

“But the enormous irony hasn’t led to wisdom, only to self-preservation and the awareness of the truth of mobs. My father told me that story after another mob set fire to paper bags on our front porch, and, when my father came out to stomp out the flames, the bags broke and human excrement squirted everywhere. A brilliant stroke by the mob. They were waiting with their portable flaming cross to watch my father dance on the fire and the shit. Fire and shit, my friend, fire and shit. Needless to say, we moved soon thereafter.”

“The Klan’s an old friend of mine, too, Jake,” Martin said. “They burned a cross in front of my house and fired a shot through our front window because of what I wrote in support of Al Smith. You can’t blame the Klan on the Irish. Maybe the Irish were crazy, but they were also used as cannon fodder in the Civil War. I could match grandfathers with you. One of mine was killed at Antietam, fighting for the niggers.”

Jake held a letter opener in his hand like a knife. He poked the point of it lightly at the exposed desk top. Then his arm went rigid. “Goddamn it, Martin, this is a stinking, lousy existence. Goddamn its stink! Goddamn all of it!” And with sudden force he drove the point of the letter opener into the desk top. The point stuck but the blade broke and pierced the muscle of his thumb.

“Perfect,” he said, and held his hand in front of his face and watched it bleed. The young man ran to the bathroom for a towel. He wrapped the wound tightly as Jake slumped in his chair.

“Violence solves it all,” Jake said. “I no longer feel the need to say anything.”

“We’ll talk another night,” Martin said.

“I won’t be less bitter.”

“Maybe less bloody.”

“And unbowed.”

“There’s something else, Jake, and you ought to know. It’ll be in the paper tonight. Your son, Morrie, is named as a possible intermediary in a kidnapping.”

“Repeat that, Martin.”

“Bindy McCall’s son, Charlie, was kidnapped this morning and the ransom demand is a quarter of a million. The McCalls are publishing a list of names in a simple code, names of men they view as potential go-betweens for the kidnappers to pick from. Morrie is one of twelve.”

“God is just,” said Jake’s young aide. “The McCalls are now getting theirs back.”

“Stupid, stupid to say such a thing,” Jake snapped. “Know when to be angry.”

“I just saw Morrie,” Martin said, “getting ready to go into a card game.”

“Naturally,” said Jake.

“I may see him later. Do you have any message?”

“We no longer talk. I have three daughters, all gold, and I have Morris, a lead slug.”

Martin suddenly pictured Jake with a flowing beard, knife in hand on Mount Moriah, cutting out the heart of his son.

“I just had a vision of you holding that letter opener,” Martin said to Jake. “You look very much like an engraving of Abraham I’ve looked at for years in the family Bible. Your hair, your forehead.”

“Abraham with the blade.”

“And Isaac beneath it,” said Martin. He could not bring himself to mention the dissection of Isaac. “The likeness of you to that drawing of Abraham is amazing.”

As he said this Martin was withholding; for he now had a clear memory of the biblical engraving and it wasn’t like Jake at all. Abraham’s was a face of weakness, a face full of faith and anguish, but no bitterness, no defiance. And the knife did not touch Isaac. Abraham’s beard then disappeared in the vision. Where he gripped the sacrificial knife, part of a finger was missing. Isaac bore the face of a goat. The vision changed. The goat became a bawling infant, then a bleating lamb. Martin shut his eyes to stop the pictures. He looked at the samovar.

“Isaac,” Jake was saying. “God loves the Isaacs of the world. But he wouldn’t have bothered to ask Abraham to sacrifice a son as worthless as my Morris.”

“Now you even know what God asks,” Martin said.

“I withdraw the remark.”

With his gaze, Martin restored the samovar, new leg, new handle, new spigot. Steam came from it once again. He looked up to see the 1936 poster: Roosevelt, the Working Man’s President. Out of the spigot came the hot blood of centuries.