Legs

JACK SAUCE

I met Jack in l925 when he and his brother Eddie were personally running booze down from Canada. Jack stopped at the Kenmore even then, and he and Eddie and some more of their crew were at the table next to me, talking about Al Jolson. From what he said, Jack was clearly a Jolson fan, and so was I, and I listened to him express amazement that anybody could be as good at anything as Jolson was, but that he was also the most conceited son of a bitch in shoe leather. I broke into the conversation and said something windy, like: "'He sings, whistles, dances, gives out the jokes and patter and it's all emotion, all a revelation of who he is. I don't care how much he's rehearsed, it's still rare because it's pure. He's so at home in himself he can't make a false gesture. Everything he does is more of that self that's made a million, ten, twenty million, whatever it is. People find this very special and they'll pay to see it. Even his trouble is important because it gives him diversity, pathos, and those qualities turn up in his voice. Everything he does funnels in and out of him through his talent. Sure he's conceited, but that's only a cover-up for his fear that he'll be exposed as the desolated, impoverished, scrawny, fearful hyena that he probably thinks is his true image, but that he can't admit to anybody without destroying his soul."

It all stunned Jack, who was a sucker for slick talk, and he bought me drinks for an hour. The next day he called to say he was sending me six quarts of Scotch and could I get him a pistol permit from Albany County? I liked the Scotch so I got him the permit.

I didn't have anything to do with him after that until l929 when I represented Joe Vignola in the Hotsy Totsy case. And a story, which I pieced together very painfully from Joe, Jack, and half a dozen others, goes with that. It begins the night Benny Shapiro knocked out Kid Murphy in eight rounds at the Garden in '29. Jack, a serious fan of Benny's, won two grand that night taking the short end of seven to five.

"Stop by the club later," Benny remembered Jack telling him in the dressing room after the light. "We'll have a little celebration."

"I got to meet a guy, Jack," Benny said.

"Bring her along."

"I'll try to make it, but I might be late."

"We'll wait," said Jack.

Herman Zuckman came hustling toward the bar as Jack walked into the Hotsy Totsy Club with Elaine Walsh, a singer and his special friend of the moment, on his arm. Fat Herman had been sole owner of the Hotsy until Jack Diamond decided to join him as a fifty-fifty partner. The club was on Broadway, near Fifty-fourth, top of the second-floor stairs, music by a six-piece jazz band, and tonight Joe Vignola, the singing waiter, doubling on violin.

All thirty tables in the bar area were full, despite Mayor Walker's nightlife curfew to keep decent people away from racketeers, bad beer, and worse liquor. Wood alcohol. Rubbing alcohol. The finest. Imported by Jack from the cellars of Newark and Brooklyn. Drink me. The bartenders were working hard, but there was too much work for the pair, Walter Rudolph, old rum-runner with a bad liver, and Lukas, a new man. Jack took off his coat, a Palm Beach, and his hat, a white sailor straw, and rolled up his sleeves to help the barmen. Elaine Walsh sat at the end of the bar and listened to the music. "I'm just a vagabond lover," Joe Vignola was singing. Joe Vignola, a merger of John Gilbert and Oliver Hardy, fiddled a chorus, then went back to delivering drinks.

Saul Baker, silent doorman, sat by the door with two pistols in his pockets, one on his hip, another inside his coat, and smiled at arriving customers. Just out of Sing Sing, a holdup man in need, pudgy Saul had found a survival point in the spiritual soup kitchen of Jack Diamond. Let no hungry thief pass my door. Don't try to tell Saul Baker Jack Diamond is a heartless man. Charlie Filetti sat at the end of the bar. Filetti, it would soon be disclosed, had recently banked twenty-five thousand dollars in one day, a fragment of profit from his partnership with Jack Diamond in the shakedown of bucket-shop proprietors, shady dealers in the stock market.

"Who won the fight, Jack?" Filetti asked.

"Benny. KO in eight. He ruined the bum."

"I lose three hundred."

"You bet against Benny?" Jack stopped working.

"You got more confidence in him than I got. A lot of people don't like him ducking Corrigan."

'"Ducking? Did you say ducking?"

"I'm saying what's being said. I like Benny good enough."

"Benny ducks nobody. "

"Okay, Jack, but I'm telling you what talk's around town. They say you can make Benny lose, but you can't make him win."

"It was on the level tonight. You think I'd back a mug who runs? You should've seen him take Murphy apart. Murphy's a lunk. Hits like half a pound of sausage. Benny ate him up."

"I like Benny," Filetti said. "Don't get me wrong. I just like what Murphy did in his last fight. Murphy looked good that night I saw him."

"You don't know, Charlie. You shouldn't bet on fights. You just don't know. Ain't that right, Walter? He don't know?"

"I don't follow the fights, Jack," Walter Rudolph said. "I got out of the habit in stir. Last fight I saw was in '23. Benny Leonard whippin' a guy I don't even remember. "

"How about you, pal?" Jack asked Lukas, the new bar-man. "You follow the fights? You know Benny Shapiro?"

"I see his name in the papers, that's all. To tell you the truth, Mr. Diamond, I watch baseball."

"Nobody knows," Jack said. He looked at Elaine. "But Elaine knows, don't you, baby? Tell them what you said tonight at the light."

"I don't want to say, Jack." She smiled.

"Go ahead."

"It makes me blush."

"Never mind that, just tell them what you said."

"All right. I said Benny fights as good as Jack Diamond makes love."

Everybody at the bar laughed, after Jack laughed.

"That means he's a cinch to be champ," Jack said.

The mood of the club was on the rise and midnight seemed only a beginning. But forty minutes behind the bar was enough for Jack. Jack, though he had tended bar in his time, was not required to do manual labor. He was a club owner. But it's a kick to do what you don't have to do, right? Jack put on his coat and sat alongside Elaine. He put his hand under her loose blond hair, held her neck, kissed her once as everyone looked in other directions. Nobody looked when Jack kissed his ladies in public.

"Jack is back," he said.

"I'm glad to see him," Elaine said.

Benny Shapiro walked through the door and Jack leaped off his chair and hugged him with one arm, walked him to a bar stool.

"I'm a little late," Benny said.

"Where's the girl?"

"No girl, Jack. I told you it was a man. I owed some insurance."

"Insurance? You win a fight, break a man's nose, and then go out and pay your insurance?"

"For my father. I already stalled the guy two weeks. He was waiting. Woulda canceled the old man out in the morning. I figure, pay the bill before I blow the dough."

"Why don't you tell somebody these things? Who is this prick insurance man?"

"It's okay, Jack, it's all over."

"Imagine a guy like this'?" Jack said to everybody.

"I told you I always liked Benny," Filetti said.

"Get us a table, Herman," Jack said. "Benny's here."

Herman Zuckman, counting money behind the bar, turned to Jack with an amazed look.

"I'm busy here, Jack."

"Just get us a table, Herman. "

"The tables are all full, Jack. You can see that. We already turned away three dozen people. Maybe more."

"Herman, here beside me is the next welterweight champion of the world who's come to see us, and all you're doing is standing there making the wrong kind of noise."

Herman put the money in a strongbox under the bar, then moved two couples away from a table. He gave them seats at the bar and bought them a bottle of champagne.

"You feeling all right?" Jack asked Benny when they all sat down. "No damage?"

"No damage, just a little headache."

"Too much worrying about insurance. Don't worry anymore about shit like that. "

"Maybe he's got a headache because he got hit in the head," Charlie Filetti said.

"He didn't get hit in the head," Jack said. "Murphy couldn't find Benny's head. Murphy couldn't find his own ass with a compass. But Benny found Murphy's head. And his nose."

"How does it feel to break a man's nose?" Elaine asked.

"That's a funny question," Benny said. "But to tell the truth you don't even know you're doing it. It's just another punch. Maybe it feels solid, maybe it don't."

"You don't feel the crunch, what the hell good is it?" Jack said.

Filetti laughed. "Jack likes to feel it happen when the noses break, right Jack?"

Jack mock-backhanded Filetti, who told him: "Don't get your nose out of joint, partner"-and he laughed some more. "I remember the night that big Texas oil bozo gave Jack lip. He's about six eight and Jack breaks a bottle across his face at the table, and then you couldn't stop laughing, Jack. The son of a bitch didn't know what hit him. Just sat there moppin' up his blood. Next day I go around to tell him what it costs to give lip to Jack and he says he wants to apologize. Gives me a grand to make Jack feel good. Remember that, Jack'?"

Jack grinned.

The Reagans, Billy and Tim, came into the club and everybody knew it. They were brawny boys from the Lower West Side, dockworkers as soon as they knew they were men, that God had put muscles in their backs to alert them to that fact. Behind his back people called Billy The Omadhaun, a name he'd earned at seventeen when in a drunken rage he threw repeated football blocks at the crumbling brick tenement he lived in. Apart from the bleeding scrapes and gouges all over his body, an examination disclosed he had also broken both shoulders. His brother Tim, a man of somewhat larger wit, discovered upon his return from the Army in 1919 that beer-loading was no more strenuous than ship-loading, and far more lucrative. Proprietorship of a small speakeasy followed, as Tim pursued a prevailing dictum that to establish a speakeasy what you needed was one room, one bottle of whiskey, and one customer.

"That's a noisy bunch," Elaine said when they came in.

"It's the Reagans," said Filetti. "Bad news."

"They're tough monkeys," Jack said, "but they're pretty good boys."

"The big one's got a fist like a watermelon," Benny said.

"That's Billy," Jack said. "He's tough as he is thick."

Jack waved to the Reagans, and Tim Reagan waved and said, "Hello, Jack, howsa boy?"

"How's the gin in this joint?" Billy asked Joe Vignola in a voice that carried around the room. Herman Zuckman looked up. Customers eyed the Reagans.

"The best English gin is all we serve," Vignola told him.

"Right off the boat for fancy drinkers like yourselves."

"Right out of Jack's dirty bathtub," Billy said.

"No homemade merchandise here," Vignola said. "Our customers get only the real stuff. "

"If he didn't make it then he stole it," Billy said. He looked over at Jack Diamond. "Ain't that so, Jack?"

"If you say so, Billy," Jack said.

"Hey, he can get in trouble with that kind of talk," Filetti said.

"Forget it," Jack said. "Who listens to a drunk donkey Irishman?"

"Three of the good gins," Billy told Vignola. "Right away."

"Comin' up," said Vignola, and he rolled his eyes, dropped the serving tray he carried under his arm, but caught it just before it hit the floor, then lofted it and caught it again, well over his head, and spun it on the index finger of his left hand: a juggler's routine. Others laughed. The Reagans did not.

"Get the goddamn gin and never mind the clown act," Billy Reagan said. "You hear me, you waiter baloney? Get the gin."

Jack immediately went to the Reagan table and stood over big-fisted Billy. He poked Billy's shoulder with one finger. "You got no patience. Make noise in your own joint, but have a little patience when you're in somebody else's."

"I keep telling him he's ignorant," Tim Reagan said. "Sit down, Jack, don't mind him. Have a drink. Meet Teddy Carson from Philly. We been tellin' him about you, how you come a long way from Philadelphia."

"How you makin' out, Jack?" Teddy Carson said, another big fist. He shook Jack's hand, cracking knuckles. "Some boys I know in Philly talk about you a lot. Duke Gleason, Wiggles Mason. Wiggles said he knew you as a kid."

"He knocked a tooth out on me. I never got even."

"That's what he told me."

"You tell him I said hello."

"He'll be glad to hear that."

"Pull up a chair. Jack," Tim said.

"I got a party over there."

"Bring 'em over. Make the party bigger."

Saul Baker left his post by the door when Jack went back to his own table. "That's a bunch of shitheads, Jack. You want 'em thrown out'?"

"It's all right, Saul." Pudgy little Saul Baker, chastising three elephants.

"I hate a big mouth. "

"Don't get excited."

Jack said he wanted to have a drink with the Reagans. "We'll all go over," he said to Filetti, Elaine, and Benny.

"What the hell for?" said Filetti,

"It'll keep 'em quiet. They're noisy, but I like them. And there's a guy from Philly knows friends of mine."

Jack signaled Herman to move the table as Joe Vignola finally brought drinks to the Reagans.

"You call this gin'?" Billy said to Vignola, holding up a glass of whiskey. "Are you tryna be a funny guy? Are you lookin' for a fight?"

"Gin's gone," Vignola said.

"I think you're lookin' for a fight," Billy said.

"No, I was looking for the gin," Vignola said, laughing, moving away.

"This is some dump you got here, Jack," Billy called out.

Herman and a waiter moved Jack's table next to the Reagans, but Jack did not sit down.

"Let me tell you something, Billy," Jack said, looking down at him. "I think your mouth is too big. I said it before. Do I make myself clear?"

"I told you to shut your goddamn trap," Tim told Billy, and when Billy nodded and drank his whiskey, Jack let everybody sit down and be introduced. Charlie Filetti sat in a quiet pout. Elaine had swallowed enough whiskey so that it made no difference where she sat, as long as it was next to Jack. Jack talked about Philadelphia to Teddy Carson, but then he saw nobody was talking to Benny.

"Listen," Jack said, "I want to raise a toast to Benny here, a man who just won a battle, man headed for the welterweight crown."

"Benny?" said Billy Reagan. "Benny who?"

"Benny Shapiro, you lug," Tim Reagan said. "Right here. The fighter. Jack just introduced you."

"Benny Shapiro," Billy said. He pondered it. "'That's a yid name." He pondered it further. "What I think is yids make lousy fighters. "

Everybody looked at Billy, then at Benny.

"The yid runs, is how I see it," Billy said. "Now take Benny there and the way he runs out on Corrigan. Wouldn't meet an Irishman."

"Are you gonna shut up, Billy?" Tim Reagan said.

"What do you call Murphy?" Benny said to Billy. "'Last time I saw him tonight he's got rosin all over his back. "

"I seen you box, yid. You stink."

"You dumb fucking donkey," Jack said. "Shut your stupid mouth. "

"You wanna shut my mouth, Jack? Where I come from, the middle name is fight. That's how you shut the mouth."

Billy pushed his chair away from the table, straddling it, ready to move. As he did, Jack tossed his drink at Billy and lunged at his face with the empty glass. But Billy only blinked and grabbed Jack's hand in flight, held it like a toy. Saul Baker snatched a gun from his coat at Jack's curse and looked for a clear shot at Billy. Then Tim Reagan grabbed Saul's arm and wrestled for the gun. Women shrieked and ran at the sight of pistols, and men turned over tables to hide. Herman Zuckman yelled for the band to play louder, and customers scrambled for cover to the insanely loud strains of the "Jazz Me Blues." Elaine Walsh backed into a checkroom, Benny Shapiro, Joe Vignola, and four others there ahead of her. The bartenders ducked below bar level as Billy knocked Jack backward over chairs.

"Yes, sir," Billy said, "the middle name is fight."

Tim Reagan twisted the pistol out of Saul Baker's grip as Teddy Carson fired the first shot. It hit Saul just above the right eye as he was reaching for his second pistol, on his hip.

The second shot was Charlie Filetti's. It grazed Billy's skull, knocking him down. Filetti fired again, hitting Carson, who fell and slithered behind a table.

Jack Diamond, rising slowly with his pistol in his hand, looked at the only standing enemy, Tim Reagan, who was holding Saul's pistol. Jack shot Tim in the stomach. As Tim fell, he shot a hole in the ceiling. Standing then, Jack fired into Tim's forehead. The head gave a sudden twist and Jack fired two more bullets into it. He fired his last two shots into Tim's groin, pulling the trigger three times on empty chambers. Then he stood looking down at Tim Reagan.

Billy opened his eyes to see his bleeding brother beside him on the Floor. Billy shook Tim's arm and grunted "Timbo," but his brother stayed limp. Jack cracked Billy on the head with the butt of his empty pistol and Billy went flat.

"Let's go, Jack, let's move," Charlie Filetti said.

Jack looked up and saw Elaine's terrified face peering at him from the checkroom. The bartenders' faces were as white as their aprons. All faces looked at Jack as Filetti grabbed his arm and pulled. Jack tossed his pistol onto BilIy's chest and it bounced off onto the floor.