Legs

JACK, OUT Of DOORS

Jack lived the fugitive life after the Hotsy, the most hunted man in America, and eventually he wound up in the Catskills. I don't think I'd have ever seen him again if the 1925 meeting in the Kenmore had been our only encounter. But I know my involvement in the Hotsy case brought me back to his mind, even though we never met face to face during it. And when the heat was off in midsummer of 1930, when the Hotsy was merely history, Jack picked me out of whatever odd pigeonhole he'd put me in, called me up and asked me to Sunday dinner.

"I'm sorry," he said when he called, "but I haven't seen you since that night we talked in the Kenmore. That's been quite a while and I can't remember what you look like. I'll send a driver to pick you up, but how will he recognize you?"

"I look like St. Thomas Aquinas," I said, "and I wear a white Panama hat with a black band. Rather beat up, that hat. You couldn't miss it in a million."

"Come early," he said. "I got something I'd like to show you."

Joe (Speed) Fogarty picked me up at the Catskill railroad station, and when I saw him I said, "Eddie Diamond, right?"

"No," he said. "Eddie died in January. Fogarty's the name."

"'You look like his twin."

"So I'm told."

"You're Mr. Diamond's driver-or is he called Legs?"

"Nobody who knows him calls him anything but Jack. And I do what he asks me to do."

"Very loyal of you."

"That's the right word. Jack likes loyalty. He talks about it."

"What does he say?"

"He says, 'Pal, I'd like you to be loyal. Or else I'll break your fucking neck.' "

"The direct approach."

We got into Jack's custom, two-tone (green and gray) Cadillac sedan with whitewalls and bulletproof glass, armor panels, and the hidden pistol and rifle racks. The latter were features I didn't know existed until the following year when Jack had the occasion to open the pistol rack one fateful night. Now what I noticed were the black leather seats and the wooden dashboard with more gauges than any car seemed to need.

"How far is it to Jack's house?" I asked.

"We're not going to Jack's house. He's waiting for you over at the Biondo farm."

"That wouldn't be Jimmy Biondo, would it?"

"You know Jimmy'?"

"I met him once."

"Just once? Lucky you. The bum is a throwback. Belongs in a tree."

"I'd tend to sympathize with that view. I met him during the Hotsy Totsy business. We swapped views one day about a client of mine, Joe Vignola."

"Joe. Poor Joe"-and Fogarty gave a sad little chuckle.

"Some guys'd be unlucky even if they were born with rabbits' feet instead of thumbs."

"Then you knew Joe."

"I used to go to the Hotsy when I was in New York even before I knew Jack. It was quite a place before the big blowup. Plenty of action, plenty of gash. I met my wife there, Miss Miserable of 1929."

'"So you're married."

"Was. It broke up in four months. That dame would break up a high mass."

It was Sunday morning, not quite noon, when Fogarty left the station in Catskill and headed west toward East Durham, where Jimmy Biondo lived. My head was full of Catskill images, old Rip Van Winkle who probably would have been hustling applejack instead of sleeping it off if he'd been alive now, and those old Dutchmen with their magical ninepins that lulled you into oblivion and the headless horseman riding like a spook through Sleepy Hollow and throwing his head at the trembling Ichabod. The Catskills were magical for me because of their stories, as well as their beauty, and I was full of both, despite the little crater of acid in the pit of my stomach. After all, I was actually going to Sunday dinner with one of the most notorious men in America. Me. From Albany.

"You know, two and a half hours ago I was talking to a whole roomful of cops."

"Cops? I didn't know cops worked in Albany on Sunday."

"Communion breakfast. I was the speaker and I told them a few stories and then looked out over their scrubbed faces and their shiny buttons and explained that they were our most important weapon in saving the nation from the worst scourge in its history."

"What scourge?"

"Gangsterism."

Fogarty didn't laugh. It was one of his rare humor failures.

Fogarty was the only man I ever met through Jack who wasn't afraid to tell me what was really on his mind. There was an innocence about him that survived all the horror, all the fear, all the crooked action, and it survived because Jack allowed it to survive. Until he didn't allow it anymore. Fogarty told me he was eleven when he understood his own weak spot. It was his nose. When tapped on the nose in a fight, he bled, and the sight and feel of the blood made him vomit. While he vomited, the other guy punched him senseless. Fogarty avoided fistfights, but when they were unavoidable he packed his nose with the cotton he always carried. He usually lost his fights, but after he understood his nose, he never again bled to the vomit point.

He was thirty-five when I got to know him, pretty well recovered from a case of TB he'd picked up during his last year of college. He had a Fordham stringency that had gone sour on religion, but he still read books, liked O'Neill, and could talk a little Hamlet, because he'd played Laertes once in school. Jack used him as a driver but also trusted him with money and let him keep the books on beer distribution. But his main role was as Jack's sidekick. He looked like Eddie. And Eddie had died of TB.

Fogarty was working as a bartender for Charlie Northrup when he first met Jack. He talked flatteringly about Jack's history when they sat across from each other at Northrup's roadhouse bar. Jack was new in the mountains and he quizzed Fogarty on the scene. What about the sheriff and the judges? Were they womanizers? Gamblers? Queers? Drunks? Merely greedy? Who ran beer in the mountains besides Northrup and the Clemente brothers?

Fogarty gave Jack the answers, and Jack hired him away from Northrup and gave him the pearl-handled.32 Eddie Diamond once owned. Fogarty carried it without loading it, giving it the equivalent menace of a one-pound rock. "You boys don't know it, but I've got you all covered with a one-pound rock. "

"I don't want to get into any heavy stuff" is what he explained to Jack when he took the pistol.

And Jack told him: "I know you better than that, Speed. I don't ask my tailor to fix my teeth."

This arrangement suited Fogarty down to his socks. He could move among the big fellows, the tough fellows, without danger to himself. If he did not fight, he would not bleed.

Fogarty turned onto a winding narrow dirt road that climbed a few minor hills and then flattened out on a plateau surrounded by trees. Jimmy Biondo's place was an old white farmhouse with green shutters and green shingled roof. It sat at the end of the drive, and behind it stood a large unpainted barn as dilapidated as the house was elegant. Three moving shapes sat on the long front porch, rocking in green wicker rockers, their faces hidden from me by the newspapers they were all reading. The faces opened themselves to us when Fogarty stopped on the grass beside the house, and Jack, the first to stand, threw down the paper and bounded down the stairs to greet me. The woman, Alice, held the paper in her lap and looked at me with a smile. The second man was Jimmy Biondo, who owned the place but no longer used it, and rented it to Jack. He detached himself from Andy Gump to give me a look. "Welcome to God's country, Marcus," Jack said. He was in white ducks, brown and white wing tips, and a yellow silk sport shirt. A tan blazer hung on the back of his rocker.

"God's country?" I said. "Fogarty told me Jimmy Biondo owned this place."

Jack laughed and Jimmy actually smiled. A smile from Jimmy lit up the world like a three-watt bulb.

"Look at this guy," Jack said to his wife and Jimmy, "a lawyer with a sense of humor. Didn't I tell you he was beautiful?"

"I only let my mother call me beautiful," I said.

What can I say? Jack laughed again. He liked my lines. Maybe it was my delivery or my funny old hat. Fogarty recognized me from the hat as soon as he saw me. It was all discolored at the front from where I touched it, crown and brim; the brim was split on the side and the black band raveling a little. It happened to be my favorite hat. People don't understand that some men need tradition as much as others need innovation. I doffed the hat when Alice came down the steps and characteristically asked me after our handshake, "Are you hungry? Have you had breakfast?"

"Catholic eggs and Irish bacon. That's extra greasy. About three hours ago at a communion breakfast."

"We just came from church, too," Alice said.

Oh? But I didn't say oh. I just repeated the story about my speech on the scourge of gangsterism. Jack listened with straight face, and I thought, Oh Christ, another humor failure.

"I know what you mean," he said. "Some of my best friends have been taken by that scourge." Then he smiled, a very small smile, a smile you might call wry, or knowing, or ironic, or possibly ominous, which is how I looked at it and was why I laughed my courtroom laugh. That laugh, as they used to say in the Albany papers, is booming and infectious, and it had the effect of making Jack's line seem like the joke of the year. Jack responded by standing up and jiggling, a moving glob of electricity, a live wire snaking its way around the porch. I knew then that this man was alive in a way I was not. I saw the vital principle of his elbow, the cut of his smile, the twist of his pronged fingers. Whatever you looked at was in odd motion. He hit you, slapped you with his palm, punched you with a light fist, clapped you on the shoulder, ridding himself of electricity to avoid exploding. He was conveying it to you, generating himself into yourself whether you wanted to receive him or not. You felt something had descended upon him, tongues of fire maybe or his phlogiston itself, burning its way into your own spirit.

I liked it.

It was an improvement on pinochle.

I mounted the steps and shook hands with Biondo and told him how overjoyed I was to see him again. He gave me a nod and an individualized twitch of each nostril, which I considered high graciousness. I would describe Jimmy as a giant maggot, an abominable toad with twelve-ounce eyelids and an emancipated nose that had nothing to do with the rest of his face. He was a globular figure of uncertain substance. Maybe all hotdog meat, goat's ears and pig's noses inside that salmony, shantung sportshirt. You said killer as soon as you looked at him, but he was not a killer. He was more complex than that.

"How's your buddy Joe Vignola?" he asked me. And he grunted a laugh, which went like this:"Hug, hug,hug."

"Joe is recovering nicely," I said, an exaggeration. Joe was in awful shape. But I should give Jimmy Biondo satisfaction?

"Dumb," said Jimmy. "Dumb, dumb, dumb."

"He never hurt anybody," I said.

"Dumb," said Jimmy, shaking his head, drawing out the sound like a short siren. "Dumb waiter," he said, and he laughed like a sneeze.

"I felt so sorry for his family," Alice said.

"Feel sorry for your own family," Jack said. "The son of a bitch was a stool pigeon."

"I'll feel sorry for anybody I feel like feeling sorry for," Alice said in modified spitfire manner, a trait I somehow didn't expect from the wife of Jack Diamond. Did I think he'd marry a placid cow? No. I thought he'd dominate any woman he chose to live with. We know from the movies, don't we, that one well-placed grapefruit in the kisser and the women learn who's boss? Public Enemy, the Cagney movie with that famed grapefruit scene, was touted as the real story of Jack Diamond when it played Albany. The advertising linked it unmistakably to his current escapades: "You read about him on yesterday's front pages in this newspaper. Now see the story behind the headlines," etc. But like everything else that ever had anything to do with Jack in the movies, it never had anything to do with Jack.

Well, we got past Joe Vignola as a topic, and then after a few anxious grunts from Jimmy ("Guh, guh, guh,"), he got up and announced his departure. Fogarty would take him to Hudson, across the river, and he'd take a train to Manhattan. His and Jack's presence on this front porch was not explained to me, but I didn't pry. I didn't know until much later that they were partners of a kind. His departure improved the conversation, and Alice said she and Jack had been to mass over at Sacred Heart in Cairo where she, and once in a while he, went on Sunday, and that Jack had given money for the new church organ and that she brought up Texas Guinan one summer to raise money at a church lawn party and Jack was going to bring Al Jolson up and so on. Revelatory.

An old colored man came to the foot of the front steps and said to Jack, "The tahger's ready, Mist' Jack." Tahger? Tiger? Could he be keeping a tiger'? Was that what he wanted to show me'?

"Okay, Jess," Jack said. "And will you bring out two quarts of rye and two quarts of champagne and leave 'em here on the porch?"

Jesse nodded and moved off slowly, a man who looked far older than his years, actually a stoop-backed fifty, a Georgia cotton chopper most of his days and then a stable hand. Jack met him in '29 through a Georgia horse breeder who had brought him to Churchill Downs as a stable boy. Jack heard Jesse had made moonshine back home and hired him on the spot at a hundred a week, a pay raise of about eight hundred percent, to come north with his two teen-aged sons and no wife and be plumber for an applejack still Jack and Biondo owned jointly, and which, since that time, had functioned night and day in a desolated patch of woods a quarter of a mile from the patch of porch on which I was rocking.

So the old man went for the rye and champagne, and I mentally alerted my whistle to coming attractions. Then Alice looked at Jack and Jack looked at me and I looked at both of them, wondering what all the silent looking was for. And then Jack asked me a question: "Ever fire a machine gun. Marcus?" ·

We walked to the garage-cooler, which is what it turned out to be, as luxuriously appointed a tumbledown barn as you'd be likely to find anywhere in America, with a beer refrigeration unit; a storage room for wine and champagne, paneled in knotty pine; a large area where three trucks could comfortably park; and a total absence of hay, hornets, barnsmell, cowflop, or chickenshit.

"No." I had told Jack, in answer to his question, "I am a machine-gun virgin."

"Time you shot the wad," Jack said, and he went dancing down the stairs and around the corner toward the barn, obviously leading both me and Alice, before we were out of our chairs.

"He's a nut on machine guns," Alice said. "He's been waiting till you got here to try it out. You don't have to do it, you know, just because he suggests it."

I nodded my head yes, shook it no, shrugged, and, I suppose, looked generally baffled and stupid. Alice and I walked across the side lawn to the barn where Jack had already pried up a floorboard and was lifting out a Thompson submachine gun, plus half a dozen boxes of bullets.

"Brand-new yesterday from Philadelphia," he said. "I been anxious to test it." He dislodged the magazine, loaded it, replaced it with what, despite my amateurism in the matter, I would call know-how. "I heard about a guy could change one of these drums in four seconds," he said. "That's handy in a tight spot."

He stood up and pointed it at the far end of the barn where a target was tacked on a windowless wall. The target was a crudely drawn face with the name Dutch Schultz lettered beneath.

"I had a couple of hundred of these printed up a few years ago,” he said, "when Schultz and me weren't getting along. He looks just like that, the greedy prick. I drew it myself."

"You get along all right now with him?"

"Sure. We're pals again," Jack said and he let go with a long blast that nicked the Schultz forehead in two or three places.

"A little off," Jack observed, "but he'd have noticed."

"Let me try," Alice said. She took the gun from Jack, who parted with it reluctantly, then fired a long burst which roamed the wall without touching the target. With a second burst she hit the paper's edge, but not Schultz.

"I'm better with a rifle."

"You're better with a frying pan," Jack said. '"Let Marcus try it."

"It's really out of my line," I said.

"Go on," Jack said. "You may never get another chance, unless you come to work for me."

"I've got nothing against Mr. Schultz."

"He wouldn't mind. Lotsa people shoot at him."

Jack put the gun in my hands, and I held it like a watermelon. Ridiculous. I put my right hand on the pistol grip, grabbed the other handgrip with the left, and raised the stock into my armpit. Absurd. Uncomfortable.

"Up a little," Jack said. "Against the shoulder."

I touched the trigger, raised the gun. Why'? It was wobbly, cold. I pointed it at Schultz. Sunday morning. Body of Christ still undigested in some internal region, memory of prayer and holy bacon grease on my tongue. I touched the trigger seriously, pulled the gun tighter to my shoulder. Old feeling. Comfortable with a weapon against the pectoral. Like Army days, days in the woods as a kid. Put it down, fool.

'"For chrissake, Marcus, give it a blast," Jack said.

Really childish not to. Raising the flag of morality. Powerful Irish Catholic magic at work that prohibits shooting effigies on the side of a barn. Bless me Father for I have sinned. I shot at Mr. Schultz's picture. And did you hit it, son? No, Father I missed. For your penance say two rosaries and try again for the son of a bitch.

"Honest, Marcus," Alice said, "it won't bite."

Ladies' Auxiliary heard from. Altar Rosary Society Member attends machine-gun outing after mass, prods lawyer to take part. What a long distance between Marcus and Jack Diamond. Millenniums of psychology, civilization, experience, turpitude. Man also develops milquetoasts by natural selection. Would I defend him if some shooters walked through the barn door? What difference from defending him in court? And what of Jack's right to justice, freedom, life? Is the form of defense the only differentiating factor? What a morally confounded fellow Marcus is, perplexed by Mr. Thompson's invention. I pressed the trigger. Bullets exploded in my ears, my hands, my shoulders, my blood, my brain. The spew of death was a personal tremor that even jogged my scrotum.

"Close, off the right ear," Jack said. "Try again."

I let go with another burst, feeling confident. No pain. It's easy. I leveled the weapon, squeezed off another.,

"Got him. Eyeball high. No more Maggie's Drawers for Marcus. You want a job riding shotgun?"

Jack reached for the gun, but I held onto it, facing the ease with which I had become new. Do something new and you are new. How boring it is not to fire machine guns. I fired again and eliminated the Schultz mouth.

"Jesus, look at that," Jack said.

I gave him the gun and he looked at me. Me. Sandlot kid hits grand slam off thirty-game winner, first time at bat.

"How the hell did you do that?" Jack asked me.

"It's all a matter of the eyeball," I said. "I also shoot a pretty fair game of pool."

"I'm impressed," Jack said. He gave me another amazed look and put the weapon to his shoulder. But then he decided the shooting was over. What if he missed the target now? Bum of bums.

"Let's have lunch and toast your sharpshooting," he said.

"Oh nonsense," Alice said, "let's toast something important, like the beautiful day and the beautiful summer and having friends to dinner. Are you our friend, Marcus?"

I smiled at Alice to imply I was her friend, and Jack's, too. And I was then, yes I was. I was intuitively in sympathy with this man and woman who had just introduced me to the rattling, stammering splatter of violent death. Gee, ain't it swell?

We walked back to the porch where Fogarty was reading Krazy Kat.

"I heard the shooting," Fogarty said, "who won?"

"Marcus won," Alice said.

"I wiped out Mr. Schultz's mouth, if that's a win."

"Just what he deserves. The prick killed a kid cousin of mine last week in Jersey."

And so I had moral support for my little moral collapse-which sent a thrill through me, made me comfortable again on this glorious Sunday in the mountains.

We got into the car and left the Biondo place, Alice and I in the back seat, Jack up front with Fogarty. Alice previewed our Sunday dinner for me: roast beef and baked potatoes, and did I like my beef rare the way Jack liked it, and asparagus from their own garden, which Tamu, their Japanese gardener, had raised, and apple pie by their colored maid, Cordelia.

Alice bulged out of her pink summer cotton in various places, and my feeling was that she was ready instantly to let it all flop out whenever Jack gave the signal. All love, all ampleness. all ripeness, would fall upon the bed, or the ground, or on him, and be his for the romping. Appleness, leaves, blue sky, white sheets, erect, red nipples, full buttocks, superb moistness at the intersection, warm wet lips, hair flying, craziness of joy, pleasure, wonder, mountains climbable with a stride after such sex. I like her.

Oxie was asleep on the enclosed porch when we arrived, more formally known as Mendel (The Ox) Feinstein, one of the permanent cadre. Oxie was a bull-necked weightlifter with no back teeth, who'd done a four-year stretch for armed robbery of a shoe store. The judge specified he do the full four because, when he held up the lady shoe clerk, he also took the shoes she was wearing. Justice puts its foot down on Oxie.

He got up immediately when the key turned in the front door. We all watched as Alice stopped to coo at two canaries in a silver cage on the porch. When she went on to the kitchen, Fogarty sat down on the sofa with Oxie, who made a surreptitious gesture to Jack.

"Marion called about a half hour ago," he whispered. "Here'?"

Oxie nodded and Jack made facial note of a transgression by Marion.

"She wants you to see her this afternoon. Important, she said."

"Goddamn it," Jack said, and he went into the living room and up the stairs two at a time, leaving me on the porch with the boys. Fogarty solved my curiosity, whispering: "Marion's his friend. Those two canaries there-he calls one Alice, one Marion." Oxie thought that was the funniest thing he'd heard all week, and while he and Fogarty enjoyed the secret, I went into the living room, which was furnished to Alice's taste: overstuffed mohair chairs and sofa; walnut coffee table; matching end tables and table lamps, their shades wrapped in cellophane; double-thick Persian rug, probably worth a fortune if Jack hadn't lifted it. My guess was he'd bought it hot; for while he loved the splendid things of life, he had no inclination to pay for them. He did let Alice pick out the furniture, for the hot items he kept bringing home clashed with her plans, such as they were. She'd lined the walls with framed calendar art and holy pictures-a sepia print of the Madonna returning from Calvary and an incendiary, bleeding sacred heart with a cross blooming atop the bloody fire. One wall was hung with a magnificent blue silk tapestry. a souvenir from Jack's days as a silk thief. Three items caught my eye on a small bookshelf otherwise full of Zane Grey and James Oliver Curwood items: a copy of Rabelais, an encyclopedia of Freemasonry, and the Douay Bible sandwiched between them.

When he came down. I asked about the books. The Freemasonry? Yeah, he was a Mason. "Good for business," he said. "Every place you go in this country, the Protestant sons of bitches got the money locked up."

And Rabelais? Jack picked up the book, fondled it. "A lawyer gave it to me when I had my accident in l927." (He meant when he was shot three times by the Lepke mob when they ambushed and killed Little Augie Orgen.) "Terrific book. You ever read it? Some screwball that Rab-a-lee."

I said I knew the book but avoided mentioning the coincidence of Rabelais being here and also in the K. of C. library. where I made my decision to come here, and in the additional fact that a lawyer had given the book to Jack. I would let it all settle, let the headiness go out of it. Otherwise, it would sound like some kind of weird, fawning lie.

Alice heard us talking and came into the living room in her apron. "Those damn Masons," she said. "I can't get him away from that nonsense."' To rile her, Jack kept a picture of an all-seeing eye inside a triangle, a weird God-figure in the Masonic symbology, on the wall in the upstairs bathroom. Alice raised this issue, obviously a recurring one.

"It sees you, Alice," Jack told her, "even when you pee."

'"My God doesn't watch me when I pee," Alice said. "My God is a gentleman. "

"As I get it," Jack said, "your God is two gentlemen and a bird."

He opened the Rabelais to a page and began reading, walking to the kitchen doorway to serenade Alice with the flow. He read of Gargantua's arrival in Paris, his swiping of the Notre Dame Cathedral bells for his giant horse, and then his perching on the cathedral roof to rest while mobs of tiny Parisians stared up at him. And so he decided to give them wine.

" 'He undid his magnificent codpiece' "-Jack read with mock robustness; his voice was not robust but of a moderately high pitch, excitable, capable of tremolos-"and bringing out his john-thomas, pissed on them so fiercely that he drowned two hundred and sixty thousand, four hundred and eighteen persons, not counting the women and small children." "

"My God, John," Alice said, "do you have to read that?"

"Piss on 'em," Jack said. "I always felt that way." And holding the book and talking again to me, he said, "You know what my full name is? John Thomas Diamond." And he laughed even harder.

Jack threw the book on the sofa and went quickly out to the porch, then to the car, and came back with a bottle of champagne in each hand. He put both bottles on the coffee table, got four glasses from the china closet.

"Alice, Speed, you want champagne?" They both said no and he didn't ask Oxie. Why waste champagne on a fellow who'd rather drink feet juice? He poured our champagne, the real goods.

"Here's to a fruitful legal relationship," Jack said, rather elegantly, I patronizingly thought. I sipped and he gulped and poured himself another. That disappeared and another followed that, two and a half glasses in one minute.

"Thirsty," he explained, "and that's prime stuff." But he was getting outside his skin. He finished what was in his glass and then stared at me while I drank and told him my experiences with bad champagne. He interrupted me, perfectly, at a pause, with obvious intentions of letting me continue, and said: "I don't want to interrupt your story, but how about a walk? It's a great day and I want to show you a piece of land."

He led the way out the back door and along a stream that ran parallel to the highway, and at a narrow point we leaped across the stream and into the woods, all soft with pine needles, quiet and cool, a young forest with the old granddaddy trees felled long ago by loggers, and the new trees-pines, white birches, maples, ash-tall but small of girth, reaching up for sunlight. A cat named Pistol followed at Jack's heel like an obedience-trained dog. He was an outdoor cat and had picked us up as we left the back steps, where he'd been sitting, gnawing gently on a squirrel that wasn't quite dead and that still had the good sense to run away whenever Pistol relaxed his teeth. But that old squirrel never got far from the next pounce.

Jack walked rapidly, stepping over the carcasses of old trees, almost running, moving uphill, slipping but never falling, surefooted as the cat. He turned around to check me out and at each turn motioned to me with his right hand, backs of fingers upright toward me, bending them toward himself in a come-on gesture. He said nothing, but even today I can remember that gesture and the anxious look on his face. He was not mindful of anything else except me and his destination and whatever obstacle he and the cat might have to dodge or leap over: an old log, jutting rocks, half-exposed boulders, fallen limbs, entire dead trees, the residual corpses of the forest. Then I saw a clearing and Jack stopped at its edge to wait for me. He pointed across a meadow, a golden oval that rolled upward, a lone, dead apple tree in the center like the stem and root of a vast yellow mushroom turned upside down. Beyond the tree an old house stood on the meadow's crest and Jack said that was where we were going.

He walked with me now, calmed, it seemed, by the meadow or perhaps the sight of the house, all that speed from the forest faded now into a relaxed smile, which I noticed just about the time he asked me: "Why'd you come down here today. Marcus?"

'"I was invited. And I was curious. I'm still curious."

"I thought maybe I could talk you into going to work for me."

"As a lawyer or riding shotgun?"

"I was thinking maybe you'd set up a branch of your office in Catskill."

That was funny and I laughed. Without even telling me what he wanted of me, he was moving me into his backyard.

"That doesn't make much sense," I said."My practice is in Albany and so is my future. "

"What's in the future?"

"Politics. Maybe Congress, if the slot opens up. Not very complicated really. It's all done with machinery."

"Rothstein had two district attorneys on his payroll."

"Rothstein?"

"Arnold Rothstein. I used to work with him. And he had a platoon of judges. Why did you get me a pistol permit?"

"l don't really have a reason."

"You knew I was no altar boy. "

"It cost me nothing. I remember we had a good conversation at the Kenmore. Then you sent me the Scotch."

He clapped me on the shoulder. Electric gesture. "I think you're a thief in your heart, Marcus."

"No, stealing's not my line. But I admit to a corrupt nature. Prolligacy, sloth, licentiousness, gluttony, pride. Proud of it all. That's closer to my center."

"I'll give you five hundred a month."

"To do what?"

"Be available. Be around when I need a lawyer. Fix my traffic tickets. Get my boys out of jail when they get drunk or go wild."

"How many boys?"

"Five, six. Maybe two dozen sometimes."

"Is that all? Doesn't seem like a full-time job."

'"You do more, I pay you more."

"What more might I do?"

"Maybe you could move some money for me. I want to start some accounts in other banks up this way, and I don't want to be connected to them. "

"So you want a lawyer on the payroll."

"Rothstein had Bill Fallon. Paid him a weekly salary. You know who Fallon was?"

"Every lawyer in the U. S. knows who Fallon was."

"He defended me and Eddie when we got mixed up in a couple of scrapes. He wound up a drunk. You a drunk?"

"Not yet."

"Drunks are worthless. "

We were almost at the old house, a paintless structure with all its windows and doors boarded up and behind it a small barn, or maybe it was a stable, with its eyes gouged out and holes in its roof. The panorama from this point was incredible, a one-hundred-and-eighty-degree vision of natural grandeur. I could see why Jack liked the spot.

"I know the old man who owns this," he said. "He owns the whole field, but the son of a bitch won't sell. He owns half the mountainside. A stubborn old Dutchman, and he won't sell. I want you to work on him. I don't care what the price is."

"You want the house? The field? What?"

"I want all you can get, the whole hill and the forest. I want this yellow field. Everything between here and my place. Things are going good now and they can only get better. l want to build up here. A big place. A place to live good. I saw one in Westchester, a great place I liked. Roomy. A millionaire owned it. Used to work for Woodrow Wilson. Had a big fireplace. Look at this rock."

He picked up a purple stone lying at our feet.

"Plenty of this around," he said. "Have the fireplace made out of it. Maybe face part of the house with it. You ever see a house faced with purple rock?"

"Never."

"Me either. That's why I want it."

"You're settling in here in the Catskills then, permanently?"

"Right. I'm settling in. Plenty of work around here." He gave me a conspiratorial smile. "Lots of apple trees. Lots of thirsty people." He looked over at the house. "Van Wie is his name. He's about seventy now. He used to farm a little up here a few years ago." Jack walked over to the shed and looked inside. Grass was growing inside it, and hornets, birds, and spiders were living in the eaves. Birdshit and cobwebs were everywhere.

"Eddie and me did the old man a favor in here one day," Jack said, reminding me and himself, and, in his way, reminding me to remind the old man too that when Jack Diamond did you a favor, you didn't turn your back on him. He turned suddenly to me, not at all relaxed now, but with that anxious face I saw as he was moving through the forest.

"Are you with me?"

"I could use the money," I said. "I usually lose at pinochle."

I can recall now the quality of the light at that moment when I went to work for Jack. The sun was dappling his shoulders as he peered into the shadows of the empty stable with its random birdshit, with his faithful cat Pistol (Marion later had a poodle named Machine Gun), rubbing its sides against Jack's pants legs, his head against Jack's shoe, the sun also dappling the black and white of Pistol's tiger tom fur as it sent its electricity into Jack the way Jack sent his own vital current into others. I mentioned to Jack that he looked like a man remembering something a man doesn't want to remember and he said yes, that was a thousand percent, and he told me the two interlocking memories he was resisting.

One was of another summer day in 1927 when old man Van Wie came down the meadow past the apple tree, which was not dead then, and into the forest where Jack and Eddie Diamond were firing pistols at a target nailed to a dead, fallen tree, recreation therapy for Eddie, for whom the house, which would later be described as Jack's fortress, had been purchased: mountain retreat for tubercular brother.

The gunfire brought the old man, who might have guessed the occupation of his neighbors but not their identities; for Jack and Eddie were the Schaefer brothers back then, a pseudonym lifted from Jack's in-laws; and Jack was not yet as famous a face as he would be later in that same year when Lepke bullets would not quite kill him. The farmer did not speak until both Jack and Eddie had given him their full attention. He then said simply, "There is a mad cat. Will you shoot it before it bites on my cow? It already bit on my wife." Then the old man waited for a reply, staring past his flat nose and drooping mustache, which, like his hair, he had dyed black, giving him the comic look of a Keystone Kop; which was perhaps why Jack said to him, "Why don't you call the troopers? Or the sheriff. Have them do it."

"They'd be all week," said the old man. "Might be it's got the rabies."

"How'll we find him?" Jack asked.

"l chased him with the pitchfork and he ran in the barn. I locked him in. "

"Is the cow in there?"

"No. Cow's out in the field."

"Then he can't get at the cow. You got him trapped."

"He might get out. That's a right old barn."

Jack turned to Eddie, and they smiled at the prospect of making a mad cat hunt together, the way they had once hunted rats and woodchucks in the Philadelphia dumps. But Eddie could not walk all the way to the farmer's house, and so they went back and got Jack's car, and with old man Van Wie they drove to the barn which had not yet had its eyes gouged out or holes made in its roof. And with guns drawn and the farmer behind them with his pitchfork, they entered the barn.

"What's going to stop him from biting hell out of us?" Jack said.

"I expect you'll shoot him 'fore he gets a chance at that," the old man said.

Jack saw the cat first, yellowish orange and brown and curled up on some hay, and quiet. It looked at them and didn't move, but then it opened its mouth and hissed without sound.

"That don't look like a mad cat to me," Jack said.

"You didn't see it bite on my wife or leap on the lampshade and then try to run up the curtain. Maybe it's quiet 'cause I whacked it with the fork. Maybe I knocked it lame."

"It looks like Sugarpuss," Eddie said.

"I know," Jack said. "I'm not going to kill it."

The mad cat looked at the men, orange and silent and no longer disturbed by their intrusion or fearful of their menace.

"You shoot it if you want," Jack said.

"I don't want to shoot it," Eddie said.

"Look out," old man Van Wie said, pushing past the brothers and sticking his pitchfork through the cat, which squealed and wriggled and tried to leap off the fork. But it was impaled and the farmer held it out to the brothers, an offering.

"Now shoot it," the old man said.

Jack kept his arm at his side, pistol down, watching the cat squeal and squirm upside down on the fork. Eddie put three bullets in its head, and the old man, saying only "Obliged" and grabbing a shovel off a nail, carried the carcass out to the yard to bury what remained of madness. And Jack then was triggered into his second cat memory of eighteen years before, when he was twelve, when he said to Eddie that he wanted to furnish the warehouse and Eddie did not understand. The warehouse was enormous, longer than some city blocks, empty for as long as they had been, alive. It's was made of corrugated metal and wooden beams and had scores of windows that could be broken but not shattered. Jack discovered it, and with Eddie, they imagined its vast empty floor space full of automobiles and machinery and great crated mysteries. At one end an office looked down on the emptiness from second-story level. There was no staircase to it, but Jack found a way. He rigged a climbing rope, stolen from a livery stable, over a wooden crossbeam, the stairway's one remnant. He worked two hours to maneuver a loop upward that would secure the rope, then shinnied up. It was 1909 and his mother had been dead two months. His brother was eight and spent two days learning how to shinny up to the office. The brothers looked out the office windows at a fragment of Philadelphia's freight yards, at lines of empty boxcars, stacks of crossties, piles of telegraph poles covered with creosote. They watched trains arrive and then leave for places they knew only from the names painted on the cars-Baltimore and Ohio, New York Central, Susquehanna, Lackawanna, Erie, Delaware and Hudson, Boston and Albany-and they imagined themselves in these places, on these rivers. From the windows they saw a hobo open a freight-car door from inside, and they assumed he'd just awakened from a night's sleep. They saw him jump down and saw that a bull saw, too, and was chasing him. The hobo had only one shoe, the other foot wrapped in newspaper and tied with string. The bull outran him and beat him with a club, and when the hobo went down, he stayed down. The bull left him where he fell.

"The bastard," Jack said. "He'd do the same to us."

But the Diamond brothers always outran the bulls. Out scrambled them beneath the cars.

Jack brought a chair to the office and a jug of water with a cork in it, candles, matches, a slingshot with a supply of stones, half a dozen pulp novels of the wild West, a cushion, and, when he could steal it from his father's jug, some dago red. He kept the hobo's hat, which was worn through at the crown from being fingered and had spots of blood on the brim. Jack took it off the hobo after he and Eddie went down to help him and found he was dead. The hobo was a young man, which shocked the brothers. Jack hung the hat on a nail in the office and let no one wear it. The brothers were asleep in the office the day the orange cat came in. It had climbed one of the wooden pillars and found its way along a crossbeam. A dog was after it, barking at the foot of the pillar. Jack gave it water in the candle dish, petted it, and called it Sugarpuss. The dog kept barking and Jack fired stones at it with his slingshot. When it wouldn't leave, Jack shinnied down, clubbed it with a two-by-four, cut its throat, and threw it out by the crossties.

Sugarpuss remained the mascot of the brothers and the select group of friends they allowed up the rope. It lived in the warehouse, and all the gang brought it food. During the winter Jack found Sugarpuss outside, frozen in the ice, its head almost eaten off where another animal had gotten it. He insisted it be given a decent burial and immediately got another cat to replace it. But the second cat ran away, an early lesson in subtraction for Jack.

We came out of the woods onto the highway and walked back toward Jack's house. A car passed us, and a middle-aged man and woman waved and tooted at Jack, who explained they were neighbors and that he'd had an ambulance take their kid to Albany Hospital, some thirty miles away, about six months back when the local sawbones didn't know what ailed the boy. Jack footed the bill for examinations and a week's stay in the hospital, and the kid came out in good shape. An old woman down the road had a problem with her cow after her shed collapsed, and so Jack paid for a new shed. People in Acra and Catskill told these stories when the papers said Jack was a heartless killer.

Jack's Uncle Tim was working on the rosebushes when we reached the house. The lawn had been freshly cut, some grass raked into piles on the front walk. Tamu was watering the flower beds of large and small marigolds, dahlias, snapdragons, on the sunny side of the brown shingled house. The Bowers reached up toward a second-story window where, it was authoritatively reported in the press at a later date, Jack had his machine guns mounted. The fortress notion was comic but not entirely without foundation, for Jack did have floodlights on the house to illuminate all approaches, and the maple trees on the lawn were painted white to a point higher than a man, so anyone crossing in front of one was an instant target. Jack installed the lights back in l928 when he was feuding with Schultz and Rothstein, right after a trio of hirelings tried to kill Eddie in Denver. Eddie went to Denver because the Catskills hadn't solved his lung problems, and Denver must have helped, for when they shot at him he leaped out of his car and outran the killers. One killer, when he saw Eddie'd gotten away, grabbed a bull terrier pup in front of somebody's house and shot off one of its paws, an odd substitute for murder. But then I guess in any realm of life you solve your needs any way you can.

Jack and I stood on the lawn and watched the grooming of the landscape. Domestic felicity. Back to the soil. Country squirearch. It didn't conform to my preconceptions of Jack, but standing alongside him, I had to admit it didn't sit so badly on him either.

"Pretty good life you've got here," I told him. He wanted to hear that.

"Beats hell out of being at the bottom of the river," he said.

"A striking truth."

"But this is nothing, Marcus, nothing. Give me a year, maybe even six months, you'll see something really special."

"The house, you mean, the purple house?"

"The house, the grounds, this whole goddamn county."

He squinted at me then and I waited for clarification.

"It's a big place, Marcus, and they pack in the tourists all summer long. You know how many speakeasies in this one county? Two hundred and thirty. I don't even know how many hotels yet, but I'm finding out. And every goddamn one of them can handle beer. Will handle beer."

"Who's servicing them now?"

"What's the difference'?"

"I don't know what the difference is, except competition."

"We'll solve that," Jack said. "Come on, let's have some champagne."

Pistol, who had followed us out of the woods and along the road, pounced on a mole that made the mistake of coming out of his tunnel. The cat took him to the back steps and played with him alongside the carcass of the squirrel, who had died of wounds. Or perhaps Pistol had finished him off when he decided to take a walk with us. He let the mole run away a little, just as he'd let the squirrel, then he pounced.

'We were hardly inside the house when Alice called out to Jack, "Will you come here please?" She was on the front porch, with Oxie and Fogarty still on the sofa. They were not moving, not speaking, not looking at Alice or at Jack or at me either when we got there. They both stared out toward the road.

Alice opened the canary cage and said to Jack, "Which one do you call Marion'?"

Jack quickly turned to Fogarty and Oxie.

"Don't look at them, they didn't tell me," Alice said. "I just heard them talking. Is it the one with the black spot on its head?"

Jack didn't answer, didn't move. Alice grabbed the bird with the black spot and held it in her fist.

"You don't have to tell me-the black spot's for her black hair. Isn't it? Isn't it?"

When Jack said nothing, Alice wrung the bird's neck and threw it back in the cage. "That's how much I love you," she said and started past Jack, toward the living room, but he grabbed her and pulled her back. He reached for the second bird and squeezed it to death with one hand, then shoved the twitching, eyebleeding corpse down the crevice of Alice's breasts. "I love you too," he said.

That solved everything for the canaries.

We left the house immediately, with a "Come on, Marcus" the only words Jack said. Fogarty followed him wordlessly, like Pistol. "Haines Falls," Jack said in a flat hostile voice.

Fogarty leaned over the seat to tell Jack, "'We didn't know she was listening or we…"

"Shut your fucking mouth."

We drove a few miles in silence, and then Jack said in as tone that eliminated the canary episode from history, "I'm going to Europe. Ever been to Europe?"

"I was there with the AEF," I said. "But it was a Cook's Tour. I was in a headquarters company in Paris. Army law clerk."

"I was in Paris. I went AWOL to see it."

"Smart move."

"When they caught up with me, they sent me back to the States. But that was a long time ago. I mean lately. You been to Europe lately?"

"No, that was the one and only."

"Fantastic place, Europe. Fantastic. I'd go all the time if I could. I like Heidelberg. If you go to Heidelberg, you got to eat at the castle. I like London, too. A polite town. Got class. You want to go to Europe with me, Marcus?"

"Me go to Europe? When? For how long?"

"What the hell's the difference? Those are old lady questions. We go and we come back when we feel like it. I do a little business and we have ourselves some fun. Paris is big fun, I mean big fun."

"What about your business here? All those hotels. All those speakeasies."

"Yeah, well, somebody'll look after it. And it won't be all that long of a trip. Goddamn it, a man needs change. We get old fast. I'm an old son of a bitch, I feel old, I could die any time. I almost died twice already, really close. So goddamn stupid to die when there's so many other things to do. Jesus, I learned that a long time ago; I learned it in Paris from an old crone-old Algerian chambermaid with her fingers all turned into claws and her back crooked and every goddamn step she took full of needles. Pain. Pain she wanted to scream about but didn't. Tough old baby. I think she was a whore when she was young, and me and Buster Deegan from Cleveland, we went AWOL together to see Paris before they shot us in some muddy fucking trench, and we wind up talking every morning to this old dame who spoke a little English. She wore a terrycloth robe-maybe she didn't even own a dress-and a rag on her head and house slippers because her feet couldn't stand shoes. We double-tipped her every day and she smiled at us, and one day she says to me, 'M'sieur, do you have fun in Paris?' I said I was having a pretty good time. 'You must, M'sieur,' she said to me. 'It is necessary.' Then she give me a very serious look, like a teacher giving you the word, and she smiled. And I knew she was saying to me, yeah, man, I got pain now, but I had my day long, long ago, and I still remember that, I remember it all the time."

I'd been watching Jack have fun all day, first with his machine gun and then his champagne and his Rabelais and his dream of a purple mansion; but his fun was nervous, a frenetic motion game that seemed less like fun than like a release of energy that would explode his inner organs if he held it in.

We were climbing a mountain by this time, along a two-lane road that wound upward and seemed really about as wide as a footpath when it snaked along the edges of some very deep and sudden drops. I saw a creek at one point, visible at the bottom of a gorge. When you looked up. you saw mountains to the left, and you climbed and climbed and climbed and then made a hairpin turn and saw a waterfall cascading down the side of a great cliff.

"Get a look at that," Jack said, pointing. "Is that some sight?"

And at another sharp turn he told Fogarty to stop, and we both got out and looked back down the mountain to see how far and how, steeply we had climbed; and then he pointed upward where you could see more mountains beyond mountains. The stop was clearly a ritual for Jack, as was pointing out the waterfall. It was his mountain range somehow, and he had a proprietor's interest in it. We made a cigarette stop as we entered Haines Falls, a store where Jack knew they carried Rameses, his exotic, Pharaonic brand, and he dragged me to the souvenir counter and urged me to buy something.

"Buy your wife a balsam pillow or an Indian head scarf."

"My wife and I split up two years ago."

"Then you got no reason not to go to Europe. How about a cigarette box for yourself or a pinetree ashtray?"

I thought he was kidding, but he was insisting; a souvenir to seal our bargain, a trinket to affirm the working relationship. He fingered the dishes and glassware with their gaudy Catskill vistas, the thermometers framed in pine, toothbrush holders, inkstands, lampstands, photo albums, all with souvenir inscriptions burned into them, commemorating vacation time spent in this never-never land in the clouds. I finally agreed on a glass paperweight with an Indian chief in full war bonnet inside it, and Jack bought it. Forty-nine cents. The action was outrageously sentimental, the equivalent of his attitude toward that Algerian crone or the deceased brother, from whom, I would later come to know, Jack felt all his good luck had come. "All my troubles happened after Eddie died," Jack told me in the final summer of his life when he was learning how to die. Thus his replacement of the brother with Fogarty had a talismanic element to it. Talismanic paperweight, talismanic brother-substitute, talismanic memory of the Arthritic Witch of Fun. And here we were in old talismanic Haines Falls, the highest town in the Catskills, Jack said, and of course, of course, the proper place for him to stash the queenly consort of his fantasy life, the most beautiful girl I've ever known.

Jack said he once saw Charlie Northrup belly-bump a man with such force that the man did a back-flip over a table. Charlie was physical power, about six four and two forty. He had a wide, teeth-ridden smile and blond hair the color and straightness of straw, combed sideways like a well-groomed hick in a tintype. He was the first thing we saw when we entered Mike Brady's Top o' the Mountain House at Haines Falls. He was at the middle of the bar, standing in brogans with his ankles crossed, his sportshirt stained with sweat from armpit to armpit, drinking beer, talking with the bartender, and smiling. Charlie's smile went away when he met Jack eyeball to eyeball.

"Missed you the other night, Charlie," Jack said.

"Yeah. I think you're gonna keep missing me, Jack."

"That's a wrong attitude. "

"May be. But I'm stuck with it."

"Don't be stupid, Charlie. You're not stupid."

"That's right, Jack. I'm not stupid."

Jack's face had all the expression of an ice cube, Charlie's full of overheated juices. He was telling Jack now about something I had no clue to; but from their tone there were confidences between them. It turned out Charlie was responsible for Jack being in the Masons. They had been young thieves together on Manhattan's West Side in 1914, running with The Gophers, a gang Owney Madden led until he went to jail for murder. They both wound up in the Bronx about 1925, with Charlie gone semi-straight as a numbers writer and Jack a feared figure in the New York underworld because of his insane gang tactics and his association with the powerful Arnold Rothstein. Jack had also opened a place he called The Bronx Theatrical Club, whose main theatrical element was Jack's presence as a performing psychopath. I say performing because I don't think Jack was psychopathic in its extreme sense. He was aberrated, yes, eccentric, but his deeds were willful and logical, part of a career pattern, even those that seemed most spontaneous and most horrendous. He was rising in the world, a celebrated hijacker, and Charlie was a working stiff with money problems. Charlie married Jimmy Biondo's sister and they vacationed in the Catskills. When times got very rough in New York, Charlie and some two-bit Jersey thieves bought a defunct brewery in Kingston and went into shoestring bootlegging. In the years after, Charlie opened his roadhouse and also became the biggest beer distributor in Greene and Ulster counties. He was tough, with a reputation for muscle if you didn't pay promptly for your goods. But he was different from Jack. Just a bootlegger. Just a businessman.

"I'm having a little meeting tomorrow night," Jack told him, "for those who couldn't make it to the last one."

"I'm booked up."

"Unbook, Charlie. It's at the Aratoga. Eight o'clock. And I'm all business, Charlie. All business."

"I never knew you to be anything else, Jack."

"Charlie, old brother, don't have me send for you."

Jack left it there. turned his back on Charlie and walked down the bar and into the table area where only one table was occupied: by that beauty in a white linen suit and white pumps; and at the table with her a five-foot-five, one-eyed, waterheaded gnome. This was Murray (The Goose) Pucinski who'd worked for Jack for the past five years.

"Oh, God, Jack, oh, God where've you been?" was Kiki's greeting. She stood to hug him.

Jack squeezed her and gave her a quick kiss, then sat alongside her.

"She behaving herself, Goose?" Jack asked the waterhead.

Goose nodded.

"How could anybody misbehave up here?" Kiki said, looking me over. I was struck by the idea of misbehaving with her. That was the first logical thing to consider when you looked at Kiki. The second was the flawless quality of her face, even underneath all that professionally applied makeup; a dense rather than a delicate beauty, large, dark eyes, a mouth of soft, round promise, and an abundance of hair, not black as Alice had said, but auburn, a glorious Titian mop. Her expression, as we visually introduced ourselves, was one of anxious innocence. I use the phrase to describe a moral condition in fragments, anxious to be gone, but with a large segment still intact. The condition was visible in the eyes, which for all their sexual innuendo and expertise, for all their knowledge of how beauty rises in the world, were in awe, I suspect, of her rarefied situation: its prisonerlike quality, its dangers, its potential cruelties, and its exhilarating glimpses of evil. By eye contact alone, and this done in a few seconds, she conveyed to me precisely how uneasy she was with The Goose as her chaperon. A quick glance at him, then at me, then a lift of the eyebrows and twist of the pursed lips, was my clue that The Goose was a guardian of negative entertainment value.

"I wanna dance," she said to Jack. "Jackie, I'm dying to dance. Speed, play us something so we can dance."

"It's too early to dance," Jack said.

"No. it isn't"-and her entire body did a shimmy in anticipation. "Come on, Joey, come on, puh-leeeze."

"My fingers don't wake up till nine o'clock at night," Fogarty said. "Or after six beers."

"Aw, Joey."

Fogarty hadn't sat down yet. He looked at Jack who smiled and shrugged, and so Fogarty went to the piano on the elevated bandstand and, with what I'd call a semipro's know-how, snapped out a peppy version of "Twelfth Street Rag." Kiki was up with the first four bars, pulling Jack to his feet. Jack reluctantly took an armful of Kiki, then whisked her around in a very respectable foxtrot, dancing on the balls of his feet with sureness and lightness. Fogarty segued into the "Charleston" and then the "Black Bottom," and Kiki split from Jack and broke into bouncily professional arm maneuvers and kicks, showing a bit of garter.

Interested as I was in Kiki's star and garter performance, it was Jack who took my attention. Was Legs Diamond really about to perform in public? He stood still when Kiki broke away, watched her for a step or two, then assessed his audience, especially the bar where Charlie Northrup and the barkeep were giving Jack full eyeball.

"C'mon, Jackie," said Kiki, her breasts in fascinating upheaval. Jack looked at her and his feet began to move, left out. right kick, right back, left back, basic, guarded, small-dimensioned movements, and then "C'mon. dance," Kiki urged, and he gave up his consciousness of the crowd and then left out, right kick, right back, left back expanded, vitalized, and he was dancing, arms swinging, dancing, Jack Diamond, who seemed to do everything well, was dancing the Charleston and Black Bottom, dancing them perfectly, the way all America had always wanted to be able to dance them-energetically, controlled, as professionally graceful as his partner who had danced these dances for money in Broadway shows, who had danced them for Ziegfeld; and now she was dancing on the mountaintop with the king of the mountain, and they were king and queen of motion together, fluid with Fogarty's melody and beat.

And then above the music, above the pounding of Fogarty's foot, above the heavy breathing and shuffling of Jack and Kiki and above the concentration that we of the small audience were fixing on the performance, there came the laughter. You resisted acknowledging that it was laughter, for there was nothing funny going on in the room and so it must be something else, you said to yourself. But it grew in strength and strangeness, for once you did acknowledge that yes, that's laughter all right, and you said, somebody's laughing at them, and you remembered where you were and who you were with, you turned (and we all turned) and saw Charlie Northrup at the end of the Z bar. pounding the bar with the open palm of his right hand, laughing too hard. The bartender told him a joke, was my thought. but then Charlie lifted the palm and pointed to Jack and Kiki and spluttered to the barman and we all heard, because Fogarty had heard the laughing and stopped playing and so there was no music when Charlie said, "Dancin'… the big man's dancin'… dancin' the Charleston on Sunday afternoon… and then Jack stopped. And Kiki stopped six beats after the music had and said, "What happened?"

Jack led her to the table and said, "We're going to have a drink," and moved her arm and made sure she sat down before he walked to the bar and spoke to Charlie Northrup in such a low voice that we couldn't hear. Charlie had stopped laughing by then and had taken a mouthful of beer while he listened to whatever it was Jack said. Then he swallowed the beer, and with a mirthless smile he retorted to Jack. who did not wait for the retort but was already walking back toward us.

"I'm trembling, brother," Charlie called to him. "Trembling." He took another mouthful of beer, swished it around in his mouth, and spat it in a long arc after Jack. Not hitting him, or meaning to, but spitting as a child spits when he can think of no words as venomous as his saliva. Then he turned away from the direction of his spit, swallowed the last of his beer, and walked his great hulk out of the bar.

Holy Flying Christ, I said to myself when I understood Charlie's laughter and saw the arc of beer, for I understood much more than what we were all seeing. I was remembering what Jack's stylized terror could do to a man, remembering Joe Vignola, my client in the Hotsy Totsy case, a man visited not by Jack's vengeance but merely by the specter of it. I was remembering Joe on his cot in the Tombs, tracing with his eye a maze a prisoner before him had drawn on the wall, losing the way, tracing with his finger, but the finger too big, then finding a broom straw and tracing with that. And scratching his message above the maze with a spoon: Joe Vignola never hurt nobody, but they put him in jail anyway. Joe was dreaming of smuggling a gun in via his wife's brassiere, but he couldn't conceive of how to ask her to do such an embarrassing thing. And the district attorney was explaining almost daily to him, it's just routine, Joe, we hold 'em all the time in cases like this, an outrage, as you know, what happened, and we must have witnesses, must have them. Also a precautionary measure, as l'm sure you're aware, Joe, you're safer here. But I want to go home, Joe said, and the DA said, well, if you insist, but that's twenty thousand. Twenty thou? Twenty thou. I'm not guilty, you've got the wrong man. Oh no, said the DA, you're the right man. You're the one who saw Legs Diamond and his friends being naughty at the Hotsy Totsy. I'm not the only one, Joe said. Right, Joe, you are not the only one. We have other witnesses. We have the bartender. We have Billy Reagan, too, who is coming along nicely. An open-and-shut case, as they say.

Joe Vignola was in jail eight days when his wife got a phone call. Somebody, no name, told her: Look on such and such a page of the Daily News about what happened to Walter Rudolph. Walter Rudolph was the DA's corroborating witness, and two kids had found him lying off the Bordentown Turnpike near South Amboy, wearing his blue serge suit, his straw hat alongside him, eleven machine-gun slugs in him.

I was called into the case at this point. Vignola's lawyer was suddenly inaccessible to Vignola's wife, and an old show business friend of mine, Lew Miller, who produced Broadway shows and had patronized the Hotsy and gotten to know Joe Vignola well enough to go to bat for him, called me up and asked me to see what I could do for the poor bird.

Memory of my first interrogation of Joe: Why did you tell the cops what you saw? Why did you identify photos of Jack Diamond and Charlie Filetti for the grand jury?

Because I wanted people to know I had nothing to do with it. Because I didn't want them to put me in jail for withholding evidence. And a cop slapped me twice. But why, really, Joe? Did you want your name in the l papers, too?

No, because Billy Reagan had talked and would be the main witness and because the cops had at least twenty-five other witnesses who were in the club, and they told the same story I did, the DA said.

But, Joe, knowing what we know about Jack Diamond and people like him, how could you do it? Was it time to die?

Not at all. Basically, I don't approve of murder, or Jack Diamond or Charlie Filetti either. I was brought up a Catholic and I know the value of honesty. I know what a citizen has to do in cases like this. Don't I hear it in church and on the radio and in the papers about being a good citizen? We can't let these bums take over America. If I don't stand up and fight, how can I expect the next guy to stand up? How could I look myself in the mirror?

But why, Joe? Lay off the bullshit and tell me for chrissake, why?

Why? Because it takes big balls. Because Jack Diamond was always cracking wise about the guineas and nobody is going to say that Joe Vignola is a yellow-bellied guinea. Joe Vignola is an Italian-descent American with big balls.

Big balls, Joe? Was that really it'?

Right.

You dumb bastard.

I got in touch with the lawyer for Charlie Filetti, who they caught in Chicago and hit with murder one. They hadn't picked up Jack. I told the lawyer poor Joe was of no use to the prosecution because he would not be able to remember anything at the time, and that I wanted to be in touch with somebody in the Diamond gang who I could relay this message to at first hand so that Jack would also know what Joe was up to, which was not much. The lawyer put me on to Jimmy Biondo, who met me at the Silver Slipper on Forty-eighth Street one night. We talked briefly, as follows:

'You guarantee he's no pigeon?"

"I guarantee," I said.

"How?"

"Every way but in writing."

"The bum. The fuckin' bum."

"He's all right. He won't talk. Lay off the telephone threats. He's got three kids and a nice wife. He's a nice Italian boy like yourself. He doesn't want to hurt anybody. He's an altar boy."

"Funeral for altar boys." said eloquent Jimmy.

"I guarantee you. What do you want from me? I'm his lawyer. He can't fire me. He hasn't even paid me yet."

"Fuckin' "…said Jimmy.

"Easy does it. He won't talk."

"Fuck..

"I guarantee."

"You guarantee'?"

"I guarantee."

"You better fuckin' guarantee."

"I said I guarantee, and when I say I guarantee. I guarantee."

"Fuckin' well better..

"Right. Jimmy. You got my word. Joe won't talk."

"Fuck."

Joe told me Jack Diamond, disguised as a Boy Scout, came through the bars of his cell one night and stood alongside Joe's bunk as he slept. "It's time to have your ears pierced," Jack said to Joe, and he shoved the blade of his Scout knife into Joe's left ear. Joe's brain leaked out through the hole.

"Help me," Joe yelled. "My ear is leaking." From the next cell somebody yelled, "Shut up, you looney son of a bitch."

But Joe didn't feel he was looney. He told the Bellevue alienist how it was when they wanted to know why he hid food under the bedclothes.

"That was for Legs Diamond. If he wants a bite to eat and I got nothing, that's trouble."

"Did it occur to you that the food would rot and give off a stench?"

"Rotten. it doesn't really matter. It's the offer that counts."

"Why did you cover your head with the blanket?"

"I wanted to be alone."

"But you were alone."

"I didn't want visitors."

"The blanket kept them away?"

"No, I could see them through the blanket. But it was better than nothing."

"Why did you hide the spoon?"

"So my visitors would have something to eat with."

"Then why did you scratch at the concrete floor with it?"

"I wanted to dig a place to hide so the visitors couldn't find me."

"How did you tear up your fingers?"

"When they took my spoon away."

"You dug at the concrete with your fingers?"

"I knew it'd take a long time; the nails'd have to grow back before I could dig again."

"Who visited you?"

"Diamond came every night. Herman Zuckman came, cut up the middle and half a dozen iron bars inside him, and wire wrapped around his stomach to keep the bars from falling out. He dripped muck and seaweed all over. 'What did you do wrong, Herman?' I said to him.

" 'Jew people have a tough life,' " he said.

"And I told him, 'You think it's easy being Italian?' "

"Any other visitors?"

"Walter Rudolph came in to cheer me up and I saw daylight through his bullet holes."

The night the dead fish leaped out of Herman's tuxedo Joe finally won his straitjacket.

The judge ordered the acquittal of Filetti after four days of trial, saying that the state had utterly failed to prove its case. Jack, still a fugitive, was never mentioned during the trial. Of the fifteen witnesses who testified, not one claimed to have seen Filetti actually shoot anybody. Joe Vignola, who was described as the state's most important witness, said he was dozing in another room when the shooting broke out and he saw nothing. His speech was incoherent most of the time.

Billy Reagan testified he was too drunk after drinking twenty shots of gin to remember what happened. Also, Tim Reagan's last words, originally said to have incriminated Diamond and Filetti, were not about them at all, a detective testified, but rather a violent string of curses.

Jack was a fugitive for eight months, and most of his gang, which was an amalgam of old-timers and remnants of Little Augie Orgen's Lower East Side Jews, drifted into other allegiances. The bond had not been strong to begin with. Jack took the gang over after he and Augie were both shot in a labor racketeering feud. Augie died, but you can't kill Legs Diamond.

Eddie Diamond died in January, 1930. Jack was still a fugitive when he met Kiki Roberts in April at the Club Abbey. and he immediately dropped Elaine Walsh. Half a dozen gangland murders were credited to his feud with Dutch Schultz during these months.

He saw the Jack Sharkey-Tommy Loughran fight at Yankee Stadium, as did Al Smith, David Belasco, John McGraw, and half the celebrities of New York. Jack couldn't miss such a show, even if he did have to raise a mustache and sit in an upper deck to avoid recognition. He bet on Loughran, like himself a Philadelphia mick; but Sharkey, the Boston sailor, won.

The crest of his life collapsed with the Hotsy shooting. All he'd been building to for most of a decade-his beer and booze operations, the labor racketeering he built with and inherited in part from Little Augie, his protection of the crooked bucketshops which bilked stock market suckers, an inheritance from Rothstein, his connections with the dope market, and, most ignominiously, his abstract aspiration to the leadership mantle that would somehow simulate Rothstein's-all this was Jack's life-sized sculpture, blown apart by gunpowder.

Dummy, you shoot people in your own club?

Jack got the word from Owney Madden, his old mentor from Gopher days, a quiet, behind-the-scenes fellow who, after doing his murder bit, came out of Sing Sing in 1923 and with a minimum of fanfare became the Duke of New York, the potentate of beer and political power in the city's underworld. Madden brought Jack the consensus sentiment from half a dozen underworld powerhouses: Go someplace else, Jack. Go someplace else and be crazy. For your own good, go. Or we'll have to kill you.

Jack's pistol had punctuated a decade and scribbled a finale to a segment of his own life. He had waged war on Schultz, Rothstein, and half a dozen lesser gang leaders in the Bronx, Jersey, and Manhattan, but he could not war against a consortium of gangs and he moved to the Catskills. I knew some of this, and I was certain Charlie Northrup knew much more, which is why Charlie's spitting beer at Jack and mocking him to his face did not seem, to say the least, to be in Charlie's own best interest.

After Charlie walked out of the Top o' the Mountain House Kiki said she was sick of the place and wanted to go someplace and have fun, and Jack-the-fun-seeker said okay, and we stopped at a hot dog stand, Kiki's choice, and sought out an aerial bowling alley which intrigued her and was a first for me. A genuine bowling ball was suspended on a long cable, and you stood aloof from the pins below and let the ball fly like a cannon shot. It then truly or falsely spun through the air and knocked over all the pins your luck and skill permitted. Kiki scored sixty-eight and almost brained the pinboy with a premature salvo, Jack got one fourteen and I won the day with one sixty-four. Jack was coming to respect my eye at least as much as he respected my legal acuity.

From bowling we went to miniature golf, where we played eighteen holes. Some holes you climbed stairs to and putted downhill. Kiki went first at one of those, and when you stood to the rear of her, as Jack and I did-Fogarty and The Goose were consuming soda pop elsewhere-you had total visibility of the girl's apparatus. She wore rolled silk stockings with frilly black garters about five inches above the knee, the sheerest pair of lace panties I'd theretofore seen, and areas of the most interesting flesh likely to be found on any mountain anywhere, and I also include the valleys.

I see her there yet. I see her also crossing and uncrossing her silkiness, hinting at secret reaches, dark arenas of mystery difficult to reach, full of jewels of improbable value, full of the promise of tawdriness, of illicitness, of furtiveness, of wickedness, with possibly blue rouge on the nipples, and arcane exotica revealed when she slips down the elastic waistband of those sheerest of sheers. They infected my imagination, those dark, those sheer, those elasticized arenas of that gorgeous girl's life.

I did not know that the infection would be prophetic of Kiki, prophetic of revelations of flesh, prophetic of panties. Nor did I know that this afternoon, with its sprinkles of rain interrupting our sport, would be the inspiration for Jack to initiate his organized shakedown of hot dog stands and miniature golf courses all over Greene and Ulster counties.

Kiki showed me a clipping once with a coincidence that made her believe in destiny. It's was an item out of Winchell, which said, "Dot and Dash is a mustache. Yaffie is an arrest. Long cut short is a sawed-off shotgun. White is pure alcohol. Simple Simon is a diamond… " It appeared the day before Kiki met Jack at a nightclub party, and she was just about to go into rehearsal for a new musical, Simple Simon.

I look back to those early days and see Kiki developing in the role of woman as sprite, woman as goddess, woman as imp. Her beauty and her radiance beyond beauty were charms she used on Jack, but used with such indifference that they became subtle, perhaps even secret, weapons. I cite the dance floor episode at the Top o' the Mountain House as as example, for she had small interest in whether it was Jack who danced with her or not. Her need was to exult in her profession, which had not been chosen casually, which reflected a self dancing alone beneath all the glitter of her Broadway life. "I must practice my steps," she said numerous times in my presence, and then with a small radio Jack had given her she would find suitable music and, oblivious of others, go into her dance, a tippy-tap-toe routine of cosmic simplicity. She was not a good dancer, just a dancer, just a chorus girl. This is not a pejorative reduction, for it is all but impossible for anyone to be as good a chorus girl as Kiki proved to be, proved it not only on stage-Ziegfeld said she was the purest example of sexual nonchalance he'd ever seen-but also in her photogenicity, her inability to utter a complex sentence, her candor with newspapermen, her willingness to trivialize, monumentalize, exalt, and exploit her love for Jack by selling her memoirs to the tabloids-twice-and herself to a burlesque circuit for the fulfillable professional years of her beauty and the tenacious years of Jack's public name. More abstractly she personified her calling in her walk, in her breathing, in the toss of her head, in her simultaneous eagerness and reluctance to please a lover, in her willingness to court wickedness without approving of it, and in her willingness to conform to the hallowed twentieth-century chorus-girl stereotype that Ziegfeld. George White, Nils T. Granlund, the Minskys, and so many more men, whose business was flesh, had incarnated, and which Walter Winchell, Ed Sullivan, Odd McIntyre, Damon Runyon, Louis Sobol, and so many others, whose business was to muse and gossip on the ways of this incarnated flesh, had mythicized. And as surely as Jack loved pistols, rifles, machine guns-loved their noise, their weight, their force, the power they passed to him, their sleekness, their mechanical perfections, their oily surfaces as balm for his ulcerated gangster soul-so did he cherish the weaponistic charms of Kiki. And as the guns also became his trouble as well as his beloved, so became Kiki. She did not know such ambivalence was possible when she met Jack, but her time alone with The Goose on the mountaintop was the beginning of her wisdom, painful wisdom which love alone could relieve.

A quick summer storm blew up and it started to rain as Fogarty drove Kiki, Jack, and me back to Haines Falls after the golf. There was talk of dinner, which I declined, explaining I had to get back to Albany. But no, no, Jack wouldn't hear of my leaving. Wasn't I done out of a champagne lunch by the canary scene? We went to the Top o' the Mountain House to freshen up before we ate, and Jack gave me the room The Goose had been using, next to Kiki's. Jack joined Kiki in her room for what I presumed was a little mattress action, and I pursued a catnap. But the walls were thin and I was treated instead to a memorably candid conversation:

"I'm going back to New York," Kiki said.

"You don't mean it," Jack said.

"'I don't care what you do. I'm not staying in this prison with that goon. He never says a word."

"He's not good at talking. He's good at other things. Like you."

"I hate having a bodyguard."

"But your body deserves guarding. "

"It deserves more than that. "

"You're very irritable tonight. "

"You're damn right I am."

"You've got a right to be, but don't swear. It's not ladylike."

"You're not so particular in bed about ladylike."

"We're not in bed now."

"Well, I don't know why we're not. I don't see you for two days and you show up with a stranger and don't even try to be alone with me."

"You want a bed, do you? What do you want to put in it?"

"How's this? How does it look?"

"Looks like it's worth putting money into."

"I don't want money in it."

"Then I'll have to think of something else."

"I love to kiss your scars," Kiki said after a while.

"Maybe you'll kiss them all away," Jack said.

"I wouldn't want to do that. I love you the way you are."

"And you're the most perfect thing I've ever seen. I deserve you. And you don't have any scars."

"I'm getting one."

"Where?"

"Inside. You cut me and let me bleed, and then I heal and you leave me to go back to your wife. "

"Someday I'll marry you."

"Marry me now, Jackie."

"It's complicated. I can't leave her. She's in a bad way lately, depressed, sick."

"She goes to the movies. She's old and fat."

"I've got a lot of money in her name."

"She could run off with it, wipe you out."

"Where could she run I couldn't find her?"

"You trust her, but you don't trust me alone."

"She's never alone."

"What is she to you? What can she give you I can't?"

"I don't know. She likes animals."

"I like animals."

"No, you don't. You never had a pet in your life."

"But I like them. I'll get a pet. I'll get a cat. Then will you marry me?"

"Later I'll marry you."

"Am I your real lay?"

"More than that."

"Not much more. "

"Don't be stupid. I could lay half the town if I wanted to-Catskill, Albany, New York, any town. Unlimited what I could lay. Unlimited."

"I want a set of those Chinese balls. The metal ones."

"Where'd you hear about those?"

"I get around. I get left alone a lot now, but I didn't always."

"What would you do with them?"

"What everybody does. Wear them. Then when nobody's around to take care of me and I get all hot and bothered, I'd just squeeze them and they'd make me feel good. I want them. "

"Will you settle for an Irish set?"

"Can I keep them with me?"

"I'll see they don't get out of range. "

"Well, see to it then."

"Everything was still incredible with me and Jack back then," Kiki said to me much later, remembering the sweet time. "It was thrilling just to see him from a new angle, his back, or his stomach, any part of his bare skin. He had gouges and scars from knife fights when he was a kid, and where he'd been shot and kicked and beaten with clubs and boards and pipes. I got sad up on the mountain one night looking at them all. But he said they didn't hurt him anymore, and the more I looked at them and touched them, the more they made his body special, the way his head was special. It wasn't an all white and smooth and fatty body like some I've seen but the body of a man who'd gone through a whole lot of hell. There was a long red scar on his stomach just above his belly button, where he'd almost died from a cut in a knife fight over a girl when he was fifteen. I ran my tongue over it and it felt hot. I could almost taste how much it hurt when he'd got it and what it meant now. To me it meant he was alive, that he didn't die easy. Some people could cut their little toe and give up and bleed to death. Jack never gave up, not his body, not anything."

Well, we all did have dinner on the mountain, and then I insisted on leaving. "It's been a special day," I told Jack, "but an odd one."

"What's so odd about it?"

"Well, how about buying a paperweight for starters?"

"Seems like an ordinary day to me," he said. I assumed he was kidding. But then he said, "Come to dinner next week. I'll have Alice cook up another roast. I'll call you during the week to set it up. And think about Europe." So I said I would and turned to Kiki, whom I'd spoken about forty words to all day. But I'd smiled her into my goodwill and stared her into my memory indelibly, and I said, "Maybe I'll see you again, too," and before she could speak Jack said, "Oh you'll see her all right. She'll be around."

"I'll be around he says," Kiki said to me in a smart-ass tone, like Alice's whippy retort had been earlier in the day. Then she took my hand, a sensuous moment.

Everything seemed quite real as I stood there, but I knew when I got back to Albany the day would seem to have been invented by a mind with a faulty gyroscope. It had the quality of a daydream after eight whiskeys. Even the car I was to ride down in-Jack's second buggy, a snazzy, wire-wheeled, cream-colored Packard roadster The Goose was using to chauffeur Kiki around the mountains-had an unreal resonance.

I know the why of this, but I know it only now as I write these words. It took me forty-three years to make the connection between Jack and Gatsby. It's should have been quicker, for he told me he met Fitzgerald on a transatlantic voyage in 1926, on the dope-buying trip that got him into federal trouble. We never talked specifically about Gatsby, only about Fitzgerald, who, Jack said, was like two people, a condescending young drunk the first time they met, an apologetic, decent man the second time. The roadster was long and bright and with double windshields, and exterior toolbox, and a tan leather interior, the tan a substitute, for Gatsby's interior was "a sort of green leather conservatory." But otherwise it was a facsimile of the Gatsby machine, and of that I'm as certain as you can be in a case like this. Jack probably read Gatsby for the same reason he read every newspaper story and book and saw every movie about gangland. I know he saw Von Sternberg's Underworld twice; we did talk about that. It was one way of keeping tabs on his profession, not pretension to culture. He mocked Waxey Gordon to me once for lining his walls with morocco-bound sets of Emerson and Dickens.

"They're just another kind of wallpaper to the bum," Jack said.

I accept Jack's Gatsby connection because he knew Edward Fuller, Fitzgerald's neighbor on Long Island who was the inspiration for Gatsby. Fuller and Rothstein were thick in stocks, bonds, and bucketshops when Jack was bodyguarding Rothstein. And, of course, Fitzgerald painted a grotesque, comic picture of Rothstein himself in Gatsby, wearing human molar cuff buttons and spouting a thick Jewish accent, another reason Jack would have read the book.

I rode with The Goose in Jack's roadster and tried to make a little conversation.

"You known Jack long?"

"Yeah," said Murray, and then nothing for about three miles.

'"Where'd you meet him?"

"'Th'army," said Murray, not spending two words where one would do.

"You've been working with him since then?"

"No, I did time. Jack, too."

"Ah."

"I got nine kids."

Murray looked at me when he said this, and I guess I paused long enough before I said, "Have you?" to provoke him.

"You don't believe me?"

"Sure I believe you. Why shouldn't I?"

"'People don't believe I got nine kids."

"If you say it, I believe it. That's a lot of kids. Nobody lies about things like that. "

"I don't see them. Once a year. Maybe, maybe not. But I send 'em plenty."

"'Uh-huh."

"They don't know what I do for a living."

"Oh?"

Then we had another mile or so of silence, except for the thunder and lightning and the heavy rain, which kept Murray creeping slowly along the snaky road down the mountain. I judged him to be about forty-five, but he was hard to read. He might've seemed older because of the menace he transmitted, even when he talked about his kids. His mouth curled down into a snarley smile, his lone eye like a flat spring, tightly coiled, ready to dilate instantly into violent glare. He was obviously the pro killer in the gang, which I deduced as soon as I saw him. Oxie may have had some deadly innings in his career, but he looked more like a strongarm who would beat you to death by mistake.

Murray's clothes were a shade too small for him, giving him a puffy, spaghetti-filled look. I thought I detected tomato sauce stains on his coat and pants and even his eyepatch. I choose to believe he was merely a slob rather than inefficient enough to walk around with bloodstains from his last victim. I doubt Jack would have approved of that sort of coarseness.

"You workin' for Jack now?" Murray asked me.

"Tentatively," I said, wondering whether he understood the word, sol added, "for the time being I guess I am."

"Jack is a pisser."

"Is he?"

"He's crazy. "

"Is that so?"

"That's why I work for him. You never know what'll happen next."

"That's a good reason. "

"He was crazy in the Army. I think he was always crazy."

"Some of us are."

"I said to myself after he done what he done to me, this is a crazy guy you got to watch out for because he does crazy stuff. "

"'What did he do to you?"

"What did he do to me'? What did he do to me?"

"Right."

"I was in the stockade at Fort Jay for raping a colonel's wife, a bum rap. I only did her a favor after she caught me in the house and I rapped her one and she fell down. Her dress goes up and she says, 'I suppose you're gonna strip and rape me,' and I hadn't figured on it, but you take what comes. So I'm in for that, plus burglary and kickin' an MP when Jack comes in to wait for his court-martial.

" 'Whatcha in for?' I asked him.

" 'Desertion and carrying a pistol.'

" 'That's heavy duty.'

" 'I figure I'll do a little time,' he said. 'They want my ass.'

" "Likewise,' I said and told him my story.

" 'What'd you do before you got in'?' he asks me and I tell him, 'I was a burglar.' He got a kick out of that because he done a bit for the same thing when he was a kid. So we talk and Jack gets a pint of whiskey from the corporal who made bedcheck. I don't drink that shit, so Jack asks me if I wanna drink some rain instead. It's raining out just like now, and Jack puts a cup out the window. Took about five minutes to fill it up part way, and by that time Jack's whiskey is most gone and he gets the cup of rain and gives it to me.

" 'I don't want no rain,' I says to him. 'It's dirty.'

" 'Who says it's dirty'?'

" 'Everybody says.'

" 'They're wrong,' he says. 'Best water there is.'

" 'You drink it,' I says, 'I don't want no part of any dirty, shitty rain.'

" 'Goddamn it, I told you rain wasn't dirty. You think I'd drink rain if it was dirty?' And he takes a drink of it.

" 'Anybody who'd drink rain'd shit in church,' I says to him.

" 'Did you say shit in church'?'

" 'Shit in church and then kick it out in the aisle.'

" 'That's a goddamn lie. I'd never shit in church.'

" 'If you'd drink rain, you'd shit in church all right.'

" 'Not me. I'd never shit in church. You hear that, goddamn it? Never!'

" 'All them rain drinkers. They all shit in church.'

" 'Not me, no sir. Why do you say that'?'

" 'I never knew an Irishman wouldn't shit in church if he thought he could get away with it.'

" 'Irishmen don't shit in church. I don't believe that.'

" 'I seen four Irishmen at the same time, all taking a shit in church.'

" 'Polacks shit in church.'

" "I once seen an Irishman shit right in the holy water fountain.'

" "That's a goddamn lie.'

" 'Then I seen two Irishmen takin' shits in the confessional boxes and about a dozen more takin' shits up on the altar all at once. I seen one Irishman shit during a funeral. Irishmen don't know no better.'

"I was layin' on my cot while this was going on. Then Jack got up and punched me in the right eye so hard I lost the sight of it. Jesus, that was a crazy thing to do. I didn't even see it comin'. I had to kick him all over the room, broke ribs and stuff. The guards pulled me off him. I woulda killed him if I knew the eye was gone, but I didn't know it then. When I saw him a week later he got down on his knees and asked me to forgive him what he done. I said, 'Fuck you, Jack,' and left him on his knees. But we shook hands before I left and I told him 'Okay, don't worry about it.' But I was still sore about it. I done six years because the MP I kicked died, and when I come out I looked Jack up because I figure he owes me a job. He thought he did a tough thing about the eye, but shit, once you get used to one eye it's just as good as two. And workin' for Jack, you get to do everything you got to do, so I got no complaints."

We were about halfway down the mountain when Murray hit the brakes, but not soon enough, and we skidded into a rock slide and smashed into a boulder that must've just landed because other little rocks kept bouncing off the car. Both of us hit the windshield, and I got a hell of a bump and a four-day headache out of it. Murray's forehead was cut, a horizontal gash like a split seam.

"We better haul ass before another one falls on top of us," Murray said, a thought I hadn't had yet since I was preoccupied with my pain. He tried backing up, but the car made a weird noise and was hard to move. He got out in the rain and so I got out after him. There was about one foot between me and about a four-hundred-foot drop, so I got carefully back inside and out Murray's door. He was pulling on the front left fender, which was smashed and rubbing against the wheel. Murray was a small man but a strong one, for the fender came almost straight at this tug. He cut his right hand on the edge of it, and when I offered him my pocket handkerchief, he shook his head and scooped up a handful of earth and grass and patted it on his forehead and then globbed a wad into his sliced right palm. "Get in," he said, his face and hand smeared and dripping with bloody mud.

"I'll drive," I told him.

'"No, I'll handle it."

"You're in no shape to drive. "

"This is not your car, mister," he said in a tone that was unarguably the last word.

"All right, then, back up and turn around. I'll direct you. You're damn near over the edge right there, and it's one hell of a long way down."

It was dark now and I was wet to the underwear, standing in the middle of desolation, maybe about to be buried in a landslide, giving traffic directions to a bleeding, one-eyed psychopath who was, with one hand, trying to drive a mythic vehicle backwards up an enchanted mountain. I'd come a long way from the K. of C. library.