Legs

PLAYING THE JACK

Jimmy Biondo visited Kiki three hours before we knocked on her door. The result was still on her face. She'd met him with Jack frequently, and so, when he knocked, she let him in. He then dumped his froggy body into the only easy chair in the room, keeping his hat on and dripping sweat off his chin onto his bow tie.

"Where's your friend Diamond?"

"He hasn't called me yet."

"Don't lie to me, girlie."

"I don't lie to people and don't call me girlie, you big lug."

"Your friend's got trouble."

"What kind of trouble?"

"He's gunna grow great big holes in his belly."

"He better not hear you say that."

"He'll hear it all right. He'll hear it."

"Listen, I don't want to talk to you and I'll thank you to leave."

"I'll tank you to leave."

"So get lost."

"Shut up, you dumb cunt."

"Oh! I'm tellin' Jack. "

"Just right. And tell him I want my money and tell him he shouldn'a done what he done to Charlie Northrup."

"He didn't do anything to Charlie Northrup."

"You dumb cunt, what do you know? You think he's a nice guy, wouldn't hurt anybody? I wanna tell you what a nice guy your boyfriend is and what nice guys he's got workin' for him. You ever hear of Joe Rock? Your boyfriend's pals took him up inna woods, and when he said he wooden pay off the ransom, Murray the Goose pulls himself off inna cloth and rubs it in Joe's eyes and ties the rag on the eyes and Joe goes bline because The Goose has got the clap and the syph, both kinds of diseases, and that's your. boyfriend Jack Diamond. I tell you this because Joe Rock was a business associate of mine. And after your boyfriend burns up Red Moran inna car over inna Newark dump and finds out Moran's girl knows who done it, he ties her up with sewer grates and dumps her inna river while she's still kickin'. That's your boyfriend Jack Diamond. How you like your boyfriend now, you dumb cunt?"

"Oh, oh, oh!" said Kiki as Joe left the room.

After we heard her story Jack shoved a fifty into my hand with the suggestion: "How you like to take a pretty girl out to dinner?" He called somebody and went out with word to us that he'd be back in a few hours and was gone before I found the way to tell him we were quits. I can't say the idea of Kiki's company repelled me, but I was intimidated. I've talked about her beauty, and it was never greater than at that moment. She'd been primping for Jack, calling up all her considerable wisdom of sex and vanity, and had created a face I've since thought of as The Broadway Gardenia. It was structured with eyebrow pencil, mascara, an awareness of the shape of the hairline and the fall of the loose curl. It was beauty that was natural and artificial at once, and the blend created this flower child of the Follies. No carefree Atlanta belle, no windblown, wheat-haired Kansas virgin, no Oriental blossom, or long-stemmed Parisian rose could quite match her. Beauty, after all, is regional. I remember the high value the Germans put on their rose-cheeked Frauleins. And to me the cheeks were just blotchy.

"Are you leaving me alone?" Kiki said as Jack kissed her.

"I'll be back." He had sobered considerably in less than ten minutes.

"I don't want to be alone anymore. He might come in again."

"Marcus is here."

That's when he gave me the fifty and left. Kiki sat on the bed looking at the door, and when she decided he was definitely gone, she said, "All right, goddamn it," and went to the mirror and looked at her face and took out some black wax I've since learned is called beading and heated it in a spoon and dabbed it on her eyelids with a toothpick. Her eyes didn't need such excess, but when she looked at me, I saw something new: not excess but heightening.

Magic beyond magic. I've never known another woman in the world who used that stuff and only one who even knew what it was. It was an object out of Kiki's mystical beauty kit like all her other creams and powders and soft pencils and lip brushes, and as I looked at the bottles and jars on the dressers, they all illuminated something central to her life: the studied passivity of being beautiful, of being an object to be studied, of being Jack's object. Her radio was on the dresser and exaggerated the passivity for me-lying there waiting for Jack, always waiting for Jack, and letting the music possess her as a substitute; the pink rubber douche equipment on top of the toilet tank-more proof of Kiki as Jack's vulnerable receptacle.

She stood, after she finished her eyebrows, and lifted her dress over her head, a navy-blue satin sheath with silver spangles on the bodice-Jack loved spangles. Her slip went part way up, and there flashed another view of some of the underneath dimension, to which I reacted by saying, memorably, "Whoops." She laughed and I stood up and said, "I'll meet you in the lobby."

"Why?"

"Give you a little privacy."

"Listen, I'm all fed up with privacy. Stick around. You won't see half what you'd see if I was in one of my costumes. I'm just changing my dress."

She moved around in her slip, sat down at the dressing.table and combed the hair she had mussed, then turned quickly, faced me, giving me a full central view of upper, gartered thigh, and I thought, oh, oh, if I do what I am being tempted to do, I will end up with very substantial trouble; thinking also: vengeful concubine. But I was wrong there.

"You know," she said, "I don't know why I'm here."

"In this room or on this earth?"

"In this room waiting for that son of a bitch to come and see me whenever he goddamn feels like it, even after I tell him a story like I told him about Jimmy Biondo."

I sensed she was talking to me this way because she had taken her dress off and felt powerful. She was a sexual figure without the dress and merely a vulnerable beauty with it. Sitting there giving me an ample vision of her hinterlands was a gesture of power. Tenors shatter glassware. Strongmen bend iron bars. Sexual powerhouses show you their powersources. It reassures them in the place where they are strongest, and weakest, that they are significant, that the stares that automatically snap toward that sweet region of shadow are stares of substance and identification. With this stare, I thee covet. Desirable. Yes, yes, folks, see that? I'm desirable and everything is going to be all right. Feeling powerful, she could talk tough.

"Do you work for him all the time now, Mr. Gorman?"

That "Mr." destroyed my fantasy of being seduced. A disappointment and a relief.

"I've done some things for him."

"Do you remember Charlie Northrup from that day up on the mountain?"

"I do indeed."

"Do you think Jack really did something to him? Hurt him?"

"I have no firsthand information on that."

"I don't think Jack would kill him like that Biondo man said. And what he said about that man's eyes and that girl in the river. Jack wouldn't do that stuff."

"I'm sure he wouldn't."

"I couldn't stay with him if he did that stuff."

"I understand."

"I'd leave right now if I thought he did that stuff. You think I could love a man who could do something to somebody's eyes like that?"

"Didn't you say it was Murray who did that?"

"That's what Biondo said, but he said Jack knew about it."

"Well, you can't believe Biondo."

"That's just what I think.

"I know Jack liked Charlie Northrup. When he spit that beer at Jack up on the mountain, Jack told me that night, 'If I didn't like that guy, he'd be in a lot of trouble.' Everybody thinks Jack is such a tough guy, but he's really sweet and gentle and never hurts nobody. I never even saw him pop the guts on a fly. Jack is a gentleman always and one of the tenderest, sweetest human persons I've ever come across, and I've come across my share of persons and they're not all human, I'll tell you that. I saw him with Charlie Northrup up in the mountains, and they were talking together and walking around the front yard. So I know Jack wouldn't hurt him. It's a bunch of lies what's in the papers because I know what I saw."

"That happened after that day we were all on the mountain?"

"Five days after. I counted the days. I always count the days. At Biondo's farm up there. Jack said staying up on the mountain was too far away for me, and he moved me down to the farm for a few days."

"What about dinner?"

"Jesse cooked for me. The old nigger man who runs the still."

"I mean now."

"Oh, now. All I have to do is put my dress on."

She closed her gates of power and stood up.

"You know," she said, "I like you. I could talk to you. Don't take this the wrong way now."

"I take it as a statement of friendship."

"That's just what I mean. Some people you talk to them and ka-zoom, it's a pass, just because you said something nice."

"You like me because I didn't make a pass?"

"Because you wanted to and didn't and you had such a good chance."

"You're a perceptive girl. "

"What's that mean?"

"You see inside people."

"I see how they look at me, that's all."

"Not many people see that much."

"You see, I knew I could talk to you. You don't make me feel like a dumb bunny."

The night I went to dinner with Kiki, Tony (The Boy) Amapola was shot through the head and neck four times and dumped outside Hackensack. The papers said he was a close pal of Jimmy Biondo's and that Biondo was Capone's man in town, which wasn't true. Another victim of another beer war, was the consensus, but I suggest he was a victim of Jimmy's bad manners toward ladies.

I sat talking with Kiki that night until Jack came back around midnight, and then I drove to Albany without telling him I was all through. A call from Jesse Franklin was waiting for me when I got to the office the next day, asking me to come and see him. I don't think I'd have remembered him if Kiki hadn't mentioned him as her cook at the farm the night before. I called him back and got a hotel which turned out to be a flophouse for Negroes in Albany's South End. I told him to come and see me, but he said he couldn't, and would I come to see him? I never met a client in a flophouse before, so I said I would.

It turned out to be the ground floor of an old converted livery stable with a dozen cots, two of which were occupied: one by a man wheezing and ranting in a drunken, mumbly wine coma, and the other by Jesse, who sat on his cot like a bronze sculpture of despair, a weary old man with nubby white hair, wearing ratty overalls and staring downward, watching the roaches play around his muddy shoes. He hadn't been out of the flop in three weeks except to go to a corner store and buy food, then come back and sleep and wait.

"You remember me, Mr. Gorman?"

"I was talking about you with Kiki Roberts only last night."

"Pretty lady."

"That's her truth all right."

"She didn't see nothin' what I seen, what I wants to tell you 'bout. Nobody seen what I seen."

"Why do you want to tell me about it?"

"I got some money. I can pay."

"I would expect it."

"I sent my boys away but I don't wanna go myself, don't know where to go. Only one place to go I know of is back to the farm and work for Mr. Jack, but I don't wanna go back there. Can't go back to that old place after what I seen. I fear 'bout those men. I know the police lookin' for me too 'cause they askin' Mr. Fogarty 'bout me before he go to jail and I don't want no police, so I highfoots it up to Albany 'cause I know they got coloreds up here plenty and nobody know me, and then I know I gonna run out of money and have to be on the road and I gonna get picked up sure as Jesus. So I been sittin' here thinkin' 'bout what I gonna do and I remember Mr. Jack got a lawyer friend in Albany. I been sittin' here three weeks tryin' to 'member your name. Then yesterday this old bum he fall right in front of me, right there by them little roaches, and he got a newspaper in his pocket and I seen your picture and Mr. Jack's picture and I say, that's my man all right, that's my man. Man who runs this place got me your phone number all right. I gets picked up you goin' help me?"

"I'll help you if I can, but I've got to know what this is all about."

"Yep. I gonna tell you but nobody else. No how. What I see I don't want no more part of. I see it when I just about finished at the still for about five hours, sun goin' down and I throwed down my head to sleep off the miseries when I heerd this automobile pull up in front of the barn. I sleeps in the back of the house, so I look out and see Mr. Fogarty openin' the barn doors and other fellas Mr. Jack have around him all the time in the car and they drives right inside. Now I never did see this before. Mr. Jack use that barn for storage and he don't want no automobiles drivin' in and out of where he keep his beer and his whiskey 'cept for loadin' and that ain't no loadin' car I see. But Jesse ain't about to tell them fellas they can't use Mr. Jack's barn.

Bye 'em bye, Mr. Fogarty he come in the house and then he and Miss Kiki go out with Mr. Jack. I spies out the window at the gay-rage and I sees the light on there. I don't see nobody comin' or goin' out of that old place so I figure it ain't none of Jesse's business and I tries to go back and sleep. Bye'em bye, I hear that car again and it's dark now and in a little bit Mr. Fogarty comes in and gets some old newspapers and calls up to Jesse, is you up there and I say I is and he say Mr. Jack say for me not to go near the still tonight and I say okay by me and I don't ask why because Jesse ain't a man who asks why to Mr. Jack and his friends. Mr. Fogarty carries them papers back out and about twenty minutes go by and I heerd that car again and I sits right up in the bed and says, well they's done whatever they's done and I look out the window and they's no light in the gay-rage and I call down the stairs to Mr. Fogarty, but he don't say nothin' back and nobody else does neither, and I know my boys won't, 'cause they sleep like fishbones on the bottom of a mud pond, and so I think of what they been doin' in the gay-rage and I can't figure it out. But I say to myself, Jesse, you ought to know what's goin' on hereabouts since this is where you livin' and maybe they up to somethin' you don't want yourself fixed up in. So I takes my flashlight and I spokes quiet like down them stairs and out into the backyard and they's no light in the gay-rage so I sprites 'r0und by the back in case somebody pull up. And inside it's the same old gay-rage, a couple three newspapers on the floor 'longside the wheelbarra. Coolin' room's the same as usual and Mr. Jack's tahger's on the back wall's the same as usual and all the tools on the bench. I can't see no difference nowhere. Then I see in the corner of the coolin' room a big piece of somethin' all wrapped up and I knows this wasn't there before and I knows what I think it is soon as I sees it. And I shines the light on it. It look like a rug all rolled up 'cept it ain't no rug. It's canvas we throwed over the beer barrels first time the roof leaked. And I goes over and touches that canvas with my toe and it is solid. It feel just like I 'spect it to feel. And Jesse beginnin' to worry what gonna happen if he caught here with this thing alone. But I got to make sure it's what I think, so I puts my wholefoot on it and feel how it feels, and it ain't exactly like what I 'spect, so I touches it with my hand. And that ain't exactly like I 'spect either and so I opens one end of the canvas to peek inside and see what is this thing that ain't like what it ought to be like, and out come this here head. All by itself. It roll out just a little bit, and I tell you if I ain't 'lectrified dead now, I don't know why I ain't. And I highfoots it out of that barn and back into the house and up them stairs and back to my own room and under the covers so's I can think by myself what I ought to do. And I thinks. And I thinks.

And I don't hear nobody comin' back. Then I say to myself, Jesse, if somebody do come back, you is in mighty trouble. Because that head ain't where it ought to be and they is goin' to know somebody been out peekin' into that canvas. And first thing, they comin' back in here and say to you, Jesse, why you foolin' around with that head out in that barn? What you say then, old man? So bye'em bye, I sits up, and gets up, and goes downstairs and out to the gay-rage and what scare me now ain't that head, but them lights of the car if they come shootin' back in the road. But I say to myself, Jesse, you got to go put that head back where you got it. So I goes back in the coolin' room and shines the light down and sees the old head lookin' up at me three feet out from the end of the canvas where it rolled.

And I gets a good look at that face which I can't reckonize and maybe nobody on this earth gonna reckonize over again, because it been beat so bad it ain't no face at all. It just a head full of beat-up old flesh. I feels sorry for that poor fella 'cause he got his. No doubt 'bout that. But I say, Jesse, feel sorry for this man when you gets back to your bed. Right now, get yourself busy puttin' that head back in with the rest of him. Now I don't like it nohow, but I pick up that old head and opens up the canvas so's I can put it back in and, oh God A'mighty, there's two hands and a foot side by side like the Lord never intended nobody's hands and foot to be put together. And I opens up the canvas wider and oh God A'mighty, they ain't one whole piece of I that poor fella no more. He is in ten, fifteen pieces, oh my Jesus, I gonna die. I put that head back where it used to be and fold that canvas up the way it used to be. Then I look around on the floor for any little blood drippin's I might of spilt, but I can't see none. I can't see none they might of left either, so I guess they got it all mopped up with them newspapers Mr. Fogarty picked out. Oh, sweet Jesus. And I go back out of the coolin' room then, and back into the house. I ain't worried now whether they gonna find me out there, because they ain't. It just like it was before I seen it the first time. Now I'se worryin' about somethin' else, which is how I gonna get myself and the boys out of this here butcher shop. I sure can't do it right away or they gonna know I knows more'n I s'pose to know. So I lays there thinkin' 'bout how long it'd be before it be right for me to go my own way and take my boys with me. And wonderin' where we gonna go, 'cause we ain't had no job good as this in mighty a year. But I ain't worryin' now 'bout no job. I worryin' 'bout the jailhouse gettin' me, and what my boys gonna do then? I'se still thinkin' 'bout this when I hears the car pull into the yard and I looks out and there comes Mr. Murray and somebody I can't see and they pulls in the gay-rage again but with one of Mr. Jack's trucks and stays 'bout five minutes and they back out and close the door. Then good-bye. They gone. I know the canvas and the head and the rest of the pieces of that poor ol' boy done gone too, but I don't move, 'cause it's daylight just beginnin', and ain't nobody gonna see Jesse Franklin in that barn today. Not any of those fellas, not Mr. Jack, not any stranger, not Jesse hisself. Jesse is gonna stay clear of that ol' gay-rage till somebody come who got business to do in it. And when it all simmer down, Jesse gonna take his boys and he goin' waaaay 'way from here. These is bad people, cut a man up like that. How he gonna make it all back together again come judgment time? Bad people, doin' that to a man. "

It was Fogarty who told me how Charlie Northrup got it, told me later when he was figuring out where his life went, still drunk, still ready to muzzle any pussy that showed itself. He never changed and I always liked him and I knew all along why Jack kept him on-because he was the opposite of Murray. He was Fogarty, the group's nice guy.

I liked him in that context, probably because of the contrast. I no longer think it strange that Jack had both kinds-Fogarty kind, Murray kind-working for him. Jack lived a long time, for Jack, and I credit it to his sense of balance, even in violent matters, even in the choice of killers and drivers, his sense that all ranges of the self must be appeased, and yet only appeased, not indulged. I make no case for Jack as a moderate, only as a man in touch with primal needs. He read them, he answered them, until he stopped functioning in balance. That's when the final trouble began.

Charlie Northrup drove his car to the Biondo farm at dusk to keep his appointment with Jack. Fogarty said Murray and Oxie were on the porch, rocking in the squeaky, green rockers while Jack waited inside.

"I don't go inside," Charlie said at the foot of the steps.

"Then you wait there," Murray said, and he went for Jack, who came out through the screen door and walked down the stairs and put his hand out to shake Charlie's hand. But it wasn't there.

"Never mind jerking me off," Charlie said. "Get to the point."

"Don't talk nasty, Charlie," Jack said, "or I'll forget we're brothers. "

"Brothers. You got some rotten fucking way of being a brother. What you done to me, you're a bum in my book, a bum in spades."

"Listen, Charlie. I got something to say to you. I ought blow your face off. Anybody talks to the federals has a right to get their face blown off, isn't that so?"

Fogarty said Charlie shut up at that point, that he obviously didn't think Jack knew.

"I got some good friends who happen to be federals," Jack said.

Charlie kept quiet.

"But the way I look at it, Charlie, I blow your face off and I lose all that money I'd have had if the federals didn't pick up my cargo. And what I figure is, set up a working relationship with Charlie and he'll pay me back what I lost. All we do is cooperate and the problem is solved."

"Cooperate," said Charlie, "means I give you my shirt and kiss your ass for taking it."

"Partners, Charlie. That's what I got in mind. Partners in an expanding business. I produce the business, you provide the product. We split seventy-thirty till you pay off the debt, then we reduce it, fifty-fifty, because we're brothers. Business doubles, triples at higher prices and a locked-up market. It's brilliant, Charlie, brilliant."

"You know I got partners already. They're nobody's patsies."

"I take the risk about your partners."

"I don't want no part of you," Charlie said. "I wouldn't hold onto you in an earthquake."

Charlie stopped walking. They were under the maples, a few feet from the porch, Jack in a tan suit and Charlie in his sweat shirt.

"I said it before, Jack. Stuff it up your ass. You're not talking to a man without power. Play with me you're not playing with some apple-knocker up here, some dummy saloonkeeper. You know my friends. I'm done talking about it."

He walked away from Jack, toward his car.

"You stupid fucking donkey," Jack said, and he looked up at Oxie and Murray, who stood up and pointed their pistols at Charlie. Fogarty remembered only his own rocker squeaking at that point. He kept rocking until Murray gave him the gesture and then he got out of the chair and in behind the wheel of Northrup's car and drove it back into the garage with Oxie and Murray inside it holding their pistols against Charlie's belly. Fogarty remembered Jack climbing the porch steps and watching them all get in the car.

"Now, Charlie," he said, "you got to get a lesson in manners."

Murray always wore steel-toed shoes and I never knew that either until Fogarty told me this whole story. He used a gun or the long, pointed, three-cornered file he carried (his improvement on the ice pick Flossie remembered) when necessary, but he used his feet when he could. The story is he took lessons from a French killer he met in jail and who used to box savate style. Murray had the rep of being able to kill you with one kick.

He kicked Charlie in the belly as soon as they got out of the car. Charlie doubled up but charged Murray head down, two hundred and forty pounds of wild bull. Murray sidestepped and kicked Charlie in the leg. Charlie crashed into a wall and bounced off it like a rubber rhino. Murray the shrimp gave a high kick and caught Charlie under the chin, and as Charlie wobbled, Murray kicked him in the kneecap and he went down. Murray kicked him in the groin, creased his face, crunched his nose with the side of his shoe. He danced around Charlie, kicking elbows, ribs, shins, calves, and thighs, kicking ass and back and then kicking Charlie's face lightly, left foot, right foot, lightly but still a kick, drawing blood, rolling the head from side to side like a leaky soccer ball.

Fogarty left the garage and went inside the house. He poured himself a double whiskey and stood looking at a fly on the front screen door. Jack and Kiki came down the stairs, Jack carrying Kiki's suitcase.

"Can I see you, Jack?" he said and they went out on the porch, and Fogarty said, "I don't need that stuff going on back there. That cocksucker's not going to leave any face on the man. "

"All right. The Goose and Oxie can handle it alone."

"The Goose is a fucking maniac. He oughta be in a cage."

"The Goose knows what he's doing. He won't hurt him too bad."

"He's gonna kill him. You said you didn't want to kill him."

"The Goose won't kill him. He's done this before."

"He's a sick son of a bitch."

"Listen, don't get your balls out of joint. Drive us to town. Have a drink in the village while we have dinner. Change your mood."

So Fogarty drove them in, and Jack checked Kiki in at the Saulpaugh to get her away from the farm. He moved her around like a checker. Fogarty drove Jack back to his own house at midnight and went to sleep himself on the porch sofa where he was awakened at two in the morning by the private buzzer, the one under the second porch step. Jack was at the door almost as soon as Fogarty got himself off the soda. Jack was wide awake, in his red silk pajamas and red silk robe. It was Oxie at the door.

"Northrup's shot," Oxie said.

"Who shot him?"

"Murray."

"What the hell for?"

"He had to. He acted up."

"'Where are they?"

"In Northrup's car, in the driveway."

"You half-witted cocksucker, you brought him here?"

"We didn't want to leave him no place."

"Get him over to the farm. I'll meet you there in ten minutes."

Fogarty pulled up behind the Northrup car which Oxie had parked in shadows on the farm's entrance road.

"He looks dead," Jack said when he looked at Charlie's crumpled frame in the back seat. The seat was full of blood near his head.

"He ain't peeped," Murray said. "I think he's a cold fishy."

Jack picked up Charlie's hand, felt it, dropped it.

"What happened?"

"I was past Newburgh when he got the rope off," Murray said.

"Who tied him up?"

"Me," said Murray.

"He got free and swung a tire iron and hit me in the neck," Murray said. "Almost broke my neck."

"I was followin' in our car and I saw him swerve, almost go in a ditch," Oxie said.

"Where'd he get a tire iron?"

"It musta been down behind the seat," Murray said. "It wasn't on the floor when we put him in."

Jack kept nodding, then threw up his hands in a small gesture.

"You had to shoot him?"

"It was only one shot, a fluke. What am I supposed to do about a guy with a tire iron?"

"You're a fucking maniac. You know what this could cost me? Front pages. Not to mention a fucking war." He hit the roof of the car with his fist.

"What do we do with him?" Oxie asked.

"Get some weights, we'll put him in the river," said Murray.

"Goddamn this," Jack said. He kicked Northrup's fender. Then he said, "No, the river he could float up. Take him in the woods and bury him. No, wait, they could still find the son of a bitch. I want no evidence on this. Burn him."

"Burn him?" Fogarty said.

"Use the fire out at the still. You can make it as big as you want, nobody pays attention." And then he said to Fogarty, "If he's dead, he's dead, right? A lump of mud."

"What about Jesse and his kids?"

"Go see them. Tell them to stay away from the still tonight."

"You can't burn a man's body in that pit out there," Fogarty said. "It's big but not that big. "

"I'll take care of that," Murray said. "I'll trim off the edges."

"Christ Almighty."

"Try not to burn down the woods," Jack said. "When you're done, let me know. And you won't be done till there's nothing left, even if it takes two days. And then you clean out the pit and sift the ashes and smash the teeth and the bones that don't burn, especially the teeth. And scatter the pieces and the dust someplace else."

"Gotcha," said Murray. It was his kind of night.

"Speed, you better give 'em a hand," Jack said. "Drive and stand guard. He don't have to touch anything," Jack told Murray.

"What does he ever touch?" Murray said.

Fogarty's stomach was burbling as he drove Northrup's car inside the barn. Murray said he needed a lot of newspapers, and so Fogarty went into the house and got some and told Jesse to stay clear of the still until he was told he could go back. Fogarty walked slowly back to the barn, feeling like he might puke. When he saw what Murray had already done to Charlie with the hatchet, it shot out of him like a geyser.

"Tough guy," Murray said.

"Marcus," Kiki said from the other end of the phone, and it was the first time she called me that, "I'm so damn lonely."

"Where's your friend?"

"I thought you might know. "

"I haven't seen him since the night I took you to dinner."

"I've seen him twice since then. Twice in seventeen days. He's up in the country with her all the time. Christ, what does he see in that fat old cow? What's the matter with me? I wash my armpits."

"He's all business these days. He'll turn up."

"I'm getting bedsores waiting. What he don't know is I'm not waiting anymore. I'm going into a new show. I just couldn't cut it anymore, sitting, waiting. Maybe he sees me dancing again he'll think twice about playing titball with his fat-assed wife. I bet when she takes off her brassiere they bounce off her toes. "

Kiki was tight, another road to power.

"What's the show and when does it open? I wouldn't miss that. "

"Smiles is the name of it, and I do one routine by myself, a tap number. It's swell, Marcus, but I'd rather make love."

"Sure. Had any more visits from Jimmy Biondo?"

"Nobody visits me. Why don't you come down to the city and see me? Just to talk, now. Don't let the little lady give you the wrong impression. "

"Maybe I will," I said, "next time I'm down there on business."

I had no pressing business in New York, but I made it a point to go, and I presume it was for the same reason I'd helped old Jesse frame a new identity for himself and then got him a job in Boston-because I was now addicted to entering the world of Jack Diamond as fully as possible. I was unable not to stick around and see how it all turned out. And yes, I know, even as a spectator, I was condoning the worst sort of behavior. Absolute worst. I know, I know. I called Jack when I decided to go down, for I had no wish to put myself in the middle of the big romance.

"Great," he said. "Take her to a movie. I'll be down Friday and we'll all go out."

"You know I still have some of your belongings."

"Hang onto them."

"I'd rather not."

"Only for a little while more. "

"A very little while."

"What's the problem'? They taking up too much room?"

"Only in my head."

"Clean out your head. Go see Marion."

So I did and we went to dinner and talked and talked, and then I took her to see Garbo in Flesh and the Devil in a place that hadn't yet converted to talkies. Kiki was a Garbo fanatic and looked on herself as a femme fatale even though she was nothing of the sort. The main thing she had in common with Garbo was beauty. There is a photo of Garbo at fifteen that has something of Kiki about it, but after that the ladies were not playing the same game. "The spiritually erotic rules over the sensually erotic in her life," an astrologist once said of Garbo, which was a pretty fair critical summary of her movie self at least.

Kiki was something else: a bread-and-butter sensualist, a let's-put-it-all-on-the-table-folks kind of girl. She actually enjoyed the feeling of being wicked. In the movie Garbo rushes to save her two loves from a duel, repentant that she started it all as a way of simplifying her choice between them. She falls through the ice on the way and it's good-bye Greta. Kiki leaned over to me and whispered, "That's what you get for being a good girl. "

Kiki started out with the glitter dream, a bathing beauty at fifteen, a Follies' girl at eighteen, a gangster's doll at twenty. She yearned for spangles and got them quickly, then found she didn't really want them except for what they did for her head. They preserved her spangly mood. She was in spangles when she met Jack at the Club Abbey during his fugitive time, and he loved them almost as much as he loved her face.

"I always knew exactly how pretty I was," she told me, "and I knew I could write my own ticket in show business, even though I don't dance or sing so great. I don't kid myself. But whatever you can get out of this business with good looks, I'm going to get. Then when I met Jack it changed. My life started going someplace, someplace weird and good. I wanted to feel that good thing in me, and when I did it with Jack, I knew I didn't care about show business except as a way to stay alive and keep myself out front. I'm Jack's girl, but that's not all I am, and supposing he drops me? But I know he won't do that because what we have is so great. We go out, me and Jack, out to the best places with the best people, rich people, I mean, society people, famous people like politicians and actors and they fall all over us. I know they envy us because of what we've got and what we are. They all want to make sex with us and kiss us and love us. All of them. They look up my dress and down my front and touch me any place they can, stroke my wrist or hair or pat my fanny and say excuse me, or take my hand and say something nice and stupid, but it's all an excuse to touch. And when practically everybody you come across does this to you, women too, then you know you're special, maybe not forever, but for now. Then you go home and he puts it up in you and you wrap around him and you come and he comes, and it mixes up together and it's even greater than what was already great, but it's still the same fantastic thing. You're in love and you're wanted by everybody, and is anything ever better than that? One night, when Jack was in me, I thought, Marion, he's not fucking you, he's fucking himself. Even then I loved him more than I'd ever loved anything on earth. He was stabbing me and I was smothering him. We were killing everything that deserved to die because it wasn't as rich as it could be. We were killing the empty times, and then we'd die with them and wake up and kill them again until there wasn't anything left to kill and we'd be alive in a way that you can never die when you feel like that because you own your life and nothing can ruin you.

"And then he leaves me here for seventeen days and keeps track of everygoddamnbody I buy a paper off or smile at in the lobby, and so I stay in and practice my dance steps and listen to Rudy Vallee and Kate Smith, and I don't even have a view of the park because Jack doesn't want to be a target from the trees. This is a nice little suite and all, and do I mean little. Because you can lose your mind staying in two rooms, and so I fix my hair and pluck my eyebrows. I know when every hair in my eyebrows first pokes its way out. I watch it grow. I take a hot bath and I rub myself off to forget what I want. One day I did that four times and that's not healthy for a young person like me and I'll tell you straight, I'm to the point where I'm not going to be so damn particular who's inside me when I want to feel that good thing. But I never cheated on him yet, and I don't want to. I don't want to leave him, and that's the God's truth. I almost said I can't leave him, but I know I can. I can leave if I want. But I don't want to leave. That's why I took the job in Smiles. To show him I can leave him, even when I don't want to."

At 9:30 P.M. on Saturday, October 11, 1930, three men, later identified as members of the Vincent Coll gang, walked into the Pup Club on West Fifty-first Street in Manhattan. One walked up to the short one-eyed man at the bar and said softly to him, "Murray?" The one-eyed man turned on his stool and faced two guns.

"You're out, Murray," the man who had spoken to him said, and the other two fired six bullets into him. Then they left.

An hour and a half later, in an eighth-floor room at the Monticello Hotel, across the hall from the room occupied by Marion Roberts, two men stepped off the elevator at the same time that two others were touching the top step of the stairs leading to the eighth floor. The four fanned out into the cul-de-sacs of the hallways and returned to the elevator with an all clear, and Jimmy Biondo stepped out past a blanched elevator man. The five men, Jimmy at the center, walked down the hall to Room 824 and knocked three times, then twice, then once, and the door opened on Jack Diamond in shirtsleeves, a pistol on the arm of the chair he was sitting in. Count Duschene said he stood to Jack's left, and at other points around the room were the men who had confronted Murray earlier in the evening: Vincent Coll, Edward (Fats McCarthy) Popke, and Hubert Maloy.

"Hey, Jimmy," Jack said. "Glad you could come. How you getting along?"

Pear-shaped Jimmy, still mistrusting the room, stared at all faces before settling on Jack's and saying, "Whatayou got to offer aside from my money?"

"Sit down, Jimmy, chair there for you. Let's talk a little."

"Nothing to talk about. Where's the money?"

"The money is in good hands. Don't worry about that."

"Whose good hands?"

"What's the difference if it's safe'?"

"Never mind the horseshit, where's the money'?"

"What would you say if I told you it's on its way back to Germany?"

"I'd tell you you ain't got very fucking long to live."

"I'm going back there, Jimmy, and this time I'll get in. Don't you like instant seven-to-one on your money?"

"I like my money."

"We made a deal. I want to keep my part of the bargain is all."

"No deal. Tony Amapola knows how you deal. Charlie Northrup knows how you deal."

"I knew you'd think of me when Tony got it. But I had nothing to do with that. I like Tony. Always did. As for Charlie I do know what happened. It was a free-lance job. Charlie made enemies up in the country. But Charlie and I were as close as you and Tony. We were like brothers."

"Charlie had a different story. He said you were a fuckhead."

"You don't believe me, ask any of these boys who it was gave it to Charlie. "

Jimmy looked around, settled on Fats McCarthy. Fats nodded at him.

"Murray The Goose," Fats said. "He give it to Charlie."

"You heard yet what happened to Murray The Goose?" Jack asked Jimmy.

"No."

"Somebody just dealt him out, up in the Pup Club.

Walked in and boom-boom-boom. Cooked The Goose. Somebody got even for Charlie is how I read it. Now how do you like your friends?"

"It's a fact," The Count said. "I happened to be in the club at the time."

"There's a coincidence for you," Jack said.

"Puttin' it on The Goose don't mean he was even in the same state. "

"Ask around. Don't tell me you didn't hear the rumors."

"I hear nothin'."

"You oughta listen a little instead of talking so much about money. There's more to life than money, Jimmy."

"Fuck life. I been listenin' too long. I been listenin' to your bullshit here five minutes, and I don't see no money onna fuckin' table. I tell you what-you got a telephone. I make a call to an old frienda yours. Charlie Lucky."

"Always glad to say hello to Charlie."

"He be glad to say hello to you too because half the two hundred come outa his pocket. Whataya think of that, you Irish fuck?"

"I'll tell you what, you guinea fuck, call Charlie. He tells me it's half his I'll have it for him in the morning."

Jimmy moved his elbow at one of his young gunmen: early twentyish, pencil-line mustache. The gunman dialed, said something in Italian, waited, handed the phone to Jimmy.

"That you, Charlie?" Jimmy said. "I'm with our friend. He wants to know were you my silent partner. Okay. Sure." He handed Jack the phone.

"Charlie, how you doin'? You staying thin? Right, Charlie, that's the only way. You were. You did. So. Yeah. Now I get it. You're not saying this just for Jimmy. You wouldn't con me after all these years. Right. I understand. Let's have a drink one of these days, Charlie. Any time. Beautiful."

Jack hung up and turned to Jimmy. "He said he loaned you twenty grand at fourteen percent."

"He don't say that."

"I just talked to the man. Did you hear me talk to him? What am I, a guy who makes up stories you see with your own eyes?"

"He's in for half, no interest"

"I tell you what, Jimmy. I'll have twenty available in the morning. I'll call you and tell you where to pick it up and you can pay Charlie back. Meantime we still got a deal with what's left."

"Charlie, give me a hundred, you fuckheaded fuck!" Jimmy screamed and stood up, and everybody's pistol came out at the same time. Jack didn't touch his. All the pistols were pointed at all the other pistols. Anybody moved it was ten-way suicide.

"We don't seem to be getting anyplace," Jack said. He lit a Rameses and sat down and crossed his legs. "Why don't you go have a drink and think about life, Jimmy? Think about how rich you'll be when I come back with all that beautiful white stuff. A million four. Is that hard to take or is that hard to take?"

"I'm talkin' to a dead man," Jimmy said.

"Dead men pay no debts, Jimmy."

"Keep lookin' for me," Jimmy said.

"Watch yourself crossing the street," Jack said.

These were atrocious melodramatics, and I would not give them the time of day, despite my trust in Fogarty, except that when Jimmy and his friends left the Monticello and walked down West Sixty-fourth Street, a car came in their direction at low speed and two shotgun blasts from a back window blew apart two of Jimmy's shooters. Jimmy and the other two escaped with only a certain loss of dignity.

Count Duschene later remembered Jack's reaction when he heard the news: "Mustache cocksuckers. Fast as you knock 'em off they bring in another boatload." The rest of the news came out in the morning paper: Murray, with six bullets in him, was not yet dead.

Kiki said that the positively worst time of her life was when she was hiding at Madge's apartment and the knock came on the door and Madge turned to her and said, "Get in the bedroom and hide." So she went first behind Madge's big Morris chair, but then she said to herself, Gee, they'd look here right away, and so she started to roll under Madge's canopy bed with the beaded curtain, but then she said to herself, 'Won't they look under here, too'? And so she stood in the closet behind Madge's summer and winter dresses and coats until she realized that anybody opening the door would look right through the hangers into her great big beautiful brown eyes, and so she took Madge's dyed muskrat everybody thought was mink off the wooden hanger and covered herself with it and rolled into the smallest ball she could make out of herself and faced the wall with her rounded back to the door so they would think the coat had fallen off the hanger on top of a pile of shoes and little boxes and galoshes. And then they'd go away. Yes. Go away. Let me alone.

Right then, Kiki would have said if anyone had asked her, she ordinarily didn't like to be alone. But now it was quite necessary, for she had to figure out what she was going to do with her life. She never had to hide in a closet before, ever. Jack's fault. Her fault too for staying with him, waiting for him. She had decided to leave him for good, truly leave this time and not just go back into show business or take a train home to Boston with her mad money. No. This was the end. Nothing on earth could make her stay with Jack Diamond for another day because he truly did kill people.

She had read all the news stories when he was in Europe, but she didn't read past the parts where they began to say things about him. She'd just throw the papers in the bottom of her closet for Jack because she knew how he loved to save clippings about himself. And what a big stack it got to be! She didn't even read any of the long series of articles they wrote about him because the first one began by calling him Eggs Diamond. Because eggs are yellow. And though she knew Jack wasn't yellow, she didn't really know what color he was. She didn't know anything really deep about him except what he said and what she wanted him to say and what he said was "You're gorgeous in my life" and "You're the most beautiful thing in the world. I deserve you." And she said to that, "And I deserve you, too." And they went into their silk cocoon then. Her warm bed with the pink silk sheets and her white silk nightgown and Jack in his yellow silk pajamas with the green dragon on them, and slowly they took the silk off one another and just smothered themselves in the cocoon and fucked and fucked and fucked. And when they were all through they went to sleep and woke up, and then they fucked and fucked some more and took a shower and went to see Jolson again in Mummy, and had dinner and came back to the cocoon, and didn't they fuck even more? They certainly did. Oh, wasn't that the cat's knickers? Vo-de-oh-do! There was never anything like that in her life before Jack, though she knew about fucking all right, all right. But fucking is one thing and fucking with Jack was another thing altogether. It was not the glitter. Sometimes when you fucked it was just to get something or because you thought you ought to or because you liked his looks and he was nice to you and it was expected of you and you wanted to do what was expected. It was your role to fuck men who were nice because you're only young once, isn't that so? Isn't that why you wanted to be in the glitter dream? To glitter by yourself? And what better way to glitter than to fuck whenever you felt like it? Fuck the best people, the most beautiful people. Do you like to fuck? Oh, I love it, don't you?

But then she met Jack and she didn't want anybody but him. Now it wasn't just liking to fuck. It was liking to fuck Jack. And it was feeling wanted and taken and also taking and also wanting, which was the key to the thing that changed in her. She wanted in a new way. Jack taught her that. She wanted not just for the moment or the hour or the day, but she wanted permanently.

"We'll always live in the cocoon, won't we?"

"Sure, kid."

"We'll make love even when you're seventy-five, won't we?"

"No, kid. I'm not going to live to be seventy-five. I didn't expect to make it to thirty-three."

And that changed her again. She wanted him and wanted what he gave her forever and ever, but now she had to think about outliving him, of this maybe being that last time she would ever put her arms around him and bite his ear and play with his candy cane because then he might get up and get dressed and go out and die. Well, then she wanted him more than ever. She didn't know why. She just called it love because that's what everybody else called it. But it wasn't only that, because now she wanted not just Jack himself but Jack who was going to die. She wanted to kiss and fuck somebody who was going to die. Because when he died, then you had something nobody else could ever get again.

And then Jimmy Biondo came and talked to her and she said she didn't believe what he said about Jack being so awful. But she went and read all the papers she was saving in the closet and oh, the things they said that Jack did all his life, and she couldn't believe her eyes because they were so awful, so many killings and torturing people and burning prostitutes with cigarettes. Oh, oh, oh! And so she knew then she would leave him. She knew it and she knew it and she knew it all Saturday night even after he came to her room and they went into the cocoon killing the bad things. She forgot while that was happening that she was going to leave him, for how can you leave a person when they're making you forget the bad things? But when it was over she remembered and when she went to sleep alongside him she thought of it and she was still thinking about it when she woke up and saw him drinking the orange juice he'd ordered for them both, with toast and eggs and coffee and a steak for him, and she thought of it while he ate the steak in his blue pajamas with the red racehorses on them. I am seeing you eat your last piece of steak. I am seeing you wear your last pajamas. She would kill him in her mind and that would be the end of Jack Diamond for Marion Roberts. So long, Jackie boy. I loved your candy. Gee it was swell. But you're dead now for me. You're mine forever. Marion Roberts is not going to go on living her life as a gangster's doll, a gangster's moll. Marion Roberts is her own woman and she is not going to live for fucking. She is not going to live for any one man. She is not going to live for killing because she knows better. She knows how good life is and how hard it is to make life good. She's going to move on to something else. She can go on dancing. She will find a way to live out her life without gangster Jackie.

But then she wondered: What is it about a gangster like him'? Why did I take up with him? Why didn't I believe what everybody said about him, that I might wind up in the river, that I might get shot in bed with him, that he might ruin my face if he ever caught me cheating? Because gangsters are evil and don't care about anybody but themselves. Why didn't she believe those things? Because she wanted it all out of life, all all all there was to get. The top, the tip, the end, the reach, the most, the greatest, the flashiest, the best, the biggest, the wildest, the craziest, the worst.

Why did Kiki want the worst? Because she was a criminal too? A criminal of love? Birds of a feather, Marion. You knew even as you were saying that you were leaving him that you wouldn't leave. You knew as you read about the torture he did and the killing he did that you wouldn't give him up because you knew about the other side of that glorious man, with his candy up in your sweet place and his mouth on yours. You wouldn't give that up. Even when those men came to the hotel this morning and Jack went to meet them and said to them while you were lying there in the half-empty cocoon, even when he said: "Hello, boys, how are you? Be right with you," and said to you that he'd only be a few minutes, and that he had some business to finish up, and went out in the hallway still in his blue pajamas with the red racehorses and the darker blue robe with the white sash and the white diamond embroidered on the breast pocket, even then you knew.

You got up and went into the shower and you let it smother you like you smothered him and you were standing in that sweet heat after love in the morning when you heard the shots: two, four, six, then none, then three more and another and another and another. And you froze in all that heat because you said to yourself (Oh, God forgive you for saying it), you said: That murdering bastard, he's killed somebody else.

Later, when she started to dance, she remembered looking at her feet and said to herself: These are going to be the most famous legs on Broadway. And she danced on that for live minutes to the piano man's rippling repetition of a tune of four-four tempo whose name she couldn't remember any more than she could remember the piano man's name or the director's name or the name of the musical itself. Black mesh stockings enveloped her most famous legs. White trunks covered her most famous hips. A white blouse tied at the midriff covered her most famous breasts. And black patent leather tap shoes covered her most famous toes, which nobody realized yet were famous. She thought of how people would behave when they found out how famous they were and tried to let that thought crowd out the rest. But she couldn't. Because her mind went back to what it was that was going to make her toes so famous and she stopped dancing, seeing it all again, seeing herself see it this time and knowing she was webbed in something that wasn't even going to be possible to get out of. So she looked at the piano man and then at the director, and while the other girls went on dancing, she decided to fall down.

The next thing she knew she was sitting at her mirror with all her theatrical makeup on the table in front of her, and the calico kitten Jack had won for her at the Coney Island shooting gallery, all cuddly and sleepy in the middle of the table. In the mirror she saw Madge Conroy sitting on a chair beside her, and Bubble, the chorus boy who had helped Madge pick her off the floor. They both stared at her.

"She finally blinked," Bubble said.

"You all right?" Madge asked.

"Close your eyes, for heaven's sake," Bubble said, "before they explode all over us."

The mirror was outlined by a dozen bare bulbs, all illuminating her face, so famous to be, so unknown to even its own exploding eyes. Why aren't you running away, pretty lady in the brilliant mirror? What brought you to the theater? Is it that you don't know what to be afraid of yet? Do you think the theater will protect you? Do you think the mirror will?

Bubble said, "Mirror, mirror on the wall, who's got the Kikiest eyes of all?"

"Shut up," Madge said, "and get her a drink someplace. " Madge rubbed Kiki's wrists as Bubble went away.

"Oh, Madge, I just got to talk to somebody."

"I had a hunch you did. I kept watching you dancing out there. You looked like somebody kidnapped your brain. Like a zombie. "

"Honest to God, Madge, it's something awful. It's so awful."

Bubble came back with an unlabeled half-pint. Madge grabbed it and looked at it, smelled it and poured Kiki a drink. She capped the bottle, set it on Kiki's table, and told Bubble, "Will you please, please, please get lost?"

"What's the matter with her?"

"I'll find out if you let us be."

"Yes, nursie."

"You oughta be rehearsing out there," Kiki said to Madge.

"They can do without me. I know the routine."

"It was so awful. Honest to God, this is the worst thing that ever happened to me."

"What? What the hell happened?"

"I can't tell you here. Can we go someplace? I don't know what to do, Madge. Honest to God I don't."

"We can go over to my apartment. Change your clothes."

But it took so much effort for Kiki to take off her trunks that she left on the rest, her mesh stockings and the rehearsal blouse and only put on her skirt and street shoes. She threw her other street clothes and the trunks and tap shoes into her red patent-leather hatbox and saw, as she did, her street makeup and her purse, the only things she took when she ran out of the hotel.

"I'm ready," she said to Madge.

"You better buy a paper," Kiki told Madge when they came to a newsstand at Broadway and Forty-seventh. And as Madge did and after Kiki saw her utter a small "Oh" and throw her face into the paper, Kiki turned to see an old man in a gray bowler, with a yellowing white walrus mustache and pince-nez specs, wearing a frock coat with lapel gardenia and a brocaded yellow vest across which dangled an old watch chain and fob in the design of a mermaid. Blank cards, an ink bottle, and a quill pen lay in front of him on a table that folded into a suitcase. Samples of his script-for-sale, tacked to the table's drop-leaf front, were splendid with antique swirls, curlicues, and elegant hills, valleys, and ovals.

"I hope you're in show business, young lady," the old gent said to her over his pince-nez.

"As a matter of fact, I am."

"It's the only safe place for talentless beauty, miss."

"You've got some crust saying I don't have any talent."

"Anywhere else you'll be destroyed."

"As a matter of fact, I'm quitting show business."

"A disastrous move. "

"But none of your business."

"Forgive me for speaking so freely, but you look to me like a bird wounded in the heart, the brain, and between the legs, and we in the Audubon Society do what we can for the wounded. My card."

"I'm Jack Diamond's girl. What about that?"

"Ah, then, ah. I had no way of knowing"-and the old man retrieved his card and handed her another. "Jack Diamond is an entirely safe place. You have nothing to fear, my dear, as long as you have a role in Jack Diamond's hilarious tragedy."

She looked at the card and saw in the obsolete glory of his pen strokes the biography of her vampy, bondaged, satin-slippered addiction. The card read: "There is no good and bad in the elfin realm." When she looked up, the man had packed his table and was halfway down the block.

Kiki looked over Madge's shoulder at the headline which read: JACK DIAMOND SHOT FIVE TIMES BY GUNMEN IN 64TH STREET HOTEL.

"I was there," Kiki told Madge.

"You didn't shoot him, did you'?"

"Oh, Madge, I love him."

"What's that got to do with it? Come on, we've got to get you off the street."

And so they took a cab to Madge's place and Kiki had a stiff drink, a very stiff one, and then she started to weep. So Madge held her hand and Kiki knew that even though Madge was her friend that she was touching her because she was a special person. Because Madge never touched her like that before, stroking the back of her hand, patting it with her fingertips; and Kiki felt good because somebody was being nice to her and she finally told Madge then how she heard the shots as she stood in the shower. And she thought somebody would come in and shoot her. And she would die in the bathtub, her blood going down the drain.

Maybe Jack would be the one to shoot her. Why did Kiki think that about J ack?

Then she heard the running in the corridor, and she said to herself, why, Jack wouldn't run away and leave me, and so she quickly got into her pink robe and went next door to Jack's own room and saw the door open and Jack on the floor with his eyes open but not moving, looking up at her. And she said, "Oh, Jackie, you're dead," but he said, "No I'm not, help me up," and they were just the best old words she'd ever heard and she put her arms under him and lifted him and he put one of his hands over his stomach and the other over his chest to hold in the blood where they'd shot him. Blood was coming down his face and all down his blue pajamas so you couldn't even see the red racehorses anymore.

"Get the whiskey," Jack told her when she had him sitting on the bed, and she looked around the room and couldn't see it, and Jack said, "In the bathroom," and when she got it, he said, "In my mouth," and she wiped the blood off his lips and poured in the whiskey. Too much. He choked and coughed and new blood spurted out of one of the holes in his chest, and like a little fountain turned on and off by the pumping of his heart, it flowed down over his fingers. "Get The Count," he said, "across the hall," and she knocked on The Count's door until her knuckles hurt and he came to Jack's room and Jack said to her then: "Get the hell out of here and don't come back and don't admit you were here or you're all washed up." And Kiki nodded but didn't understand and said to Madge, "How would I be washed up, Madge? Did he mean in show business?" And Madge said, "Go on," so she said The Count called a doctor as she was leaving and then took Jack to another room in the hotel, down the hall, because Jack said the killers might come back to see if they did the job right. And Kiki, still in her pink robe, backed down the hallway toward her own room, and watched The Count walking and holding Jack, who was bent like a wishbone, and in they went to another room, which was when Kiki decided she would go to the theater and behave like nothing at all had happened. And things went along perfectly well, didn't they? They went along fine, just fine until she saw it all again while she was dancing. What she saw was that little spurt of blood coming out of Jack's chest like a fountain after she gave him too much whiskey. That was when she decided to fall down.

Madge read in the paper that two gunmen came running out of the hotel about the time Jack was shot and got into a car with its motor running and its door open and drove off with their New Jersey license plates. Those men, awful men, had shot Jack two places in the chest and once in the stomach and once in the thigh and once in the forehead, and the doctor said he was certainly not going to be able to go on living with all those holes in himself. The paper made no mention of the pretty little lady who was the first to see it all, but Kiki knew that her time of attention was going to come.

She caught the faintest smell of mothballs in Madge's closet, and she thought of marriage because only married people need mothballs. Kiki would never keep anything long enough to worry about moths unless she happened to be married. Last year's things? She stuck them away and bought new ones and let the moths have their fun. Kiki never thought of herself as married, even though she and Jack talked about it all the time. She talked about it and Jack tried to change the subject, is more like it.

"I'll marry you someday, kid," he told her once, but she didn't believe that and wasn't even sure she wanted to believe it. Kiki doing the wash. Kiki beating the rugs. Kiki making fudge. It was certainly a laughing matter.

When the second knock on the door came, just seconds after Madge told her to hide in the bedroom (and she was in the closet by then, under the muskrat and smelling the mothballs by then), she heard Madge say to somebody,

"What the hell are you bothering me for? You have no right to come in here. " But they didn't go away. Kiki heard them walking in the rooms and heard them just outside the door, so she breathed so silently that not even a moth would have known she was there.

Who are those men is what Kiki wanted to know. Are they after me? And at that the light flashed into the closet and the muskrat unwrapped itself from her back and a hand grabbed her and two great big faces stared down at her.

"Go away," she said. "I don't know you men." And she pulled one of Madge's dresses over her face. She could hear Madge saying, "I had no idea she was involved in any shooting. I certainly wouldn't have brought her into my own home if I thought she was mixed up in any sort of nasty shooting business. I don't want this kind of publicity."

But they put Madge's picture in the papers too. With her legs crossed.

Jack didn't die. He became more famous than ever. Both the News and the Mirror ran series on him for weeks. The News also ran Kiki's memoirs: How I went from bathing beauty to the Ziegfeld chorus to Jack Diamond's lap. She and Jack were Pyramus and Thisbe for the world and no breakfast table was without them for at least a month. Kiki overnight became as famous as most actresses, her greatest photo (that gorgeous pout at the police station) on every page one.

Jack recovered at Polyclinic Hospital, and when he came to and saw where he was, he asked to be moved into the room where Rothstein had died. The similarities to this and A. R.'s shooting, both shot in a hotel, both mysterious about their assailants, money owed being at the center of both cases, and Jack being A. R.'s man of yore, were carefully noted by the press. You'd think it was the governor who'd got it, with all the bulletins on conditions and the endless calls from the public. The hospital disliked the limelight and worried too about the bill until a delivery boy brought in an anonymous thirty-five hundred dollars in crumpled fifties and twenties and a few big ones with a note: "See Jack Diamond gets the best." This the work of Owney Madden.

Of course Jack never said who shot him. Strangers he could never possibly identify, he told Devane. Didn't get a good look at them. But the would-be assassins were neutral underworld figures, not Jack's enemies and not in Biondo's or Luciano's circle (nor Dutch Schultz's either, who was generally credited with the work at the time). Their neutrality was why Jack let them in.

Their function was to retrieve Charlie Lucky's money, but Jack refused to give it back, claiming finally that Luciano was lying about his role in the transaction. This was not only Jack's error, but also his willful need to affront peril. The visitors' instructions were simple: Get all the money or kill him.

He was sitting on the bed when they took out their guns. He ran at them, swinging the pillow off the bed, swinging in rage and terror, and though both men emptied their pistols, the pillow deflected both their attention and their aim so that only five of twelve bullets hit him. But five is a lot. And the men ran, leaving him for dead.

The Count called me to say that Jack mentioned me just before he went unconscious from his wounds. "Have Marcus take care of Alice and see she doesn't get the short end from those shitkickers up in the country," he told The Count. Then when Alice called me from the hospital and said Jack wanted to see me, I went down, and it turned out he wanted to make his will: a surreptitious ten thousand to Kiki, a token bequest, no more; everything else to Alice. The arrangement seemed to speak for itself: Alice, the true love. But Jack wasn't that easy to read even when he spelled it out himself. Money was only the measure of his guilt and his sense of duty, a pair of admitted formidables, but not his answer to his enduring question.

He was in good spirits when I saw him, his bed near the window so he could hear the city, the roar of the fans spiraling upward from Madison Square Garden during the fights, all the cars on Broadway squealing and tooting, the sirens and bells and yells and shouts of the city wafting Jackward to comfort him, the small comfort being all he would have for two and a half months, for Jack Diamond the organism, was playing tag with adhesions, abscesses and lungs which had the congenital strength of tissue paper. Jack's mail came in sacks and stacks, hundreds upon hundreds of letters during the first weeks, then dwindling to maybe a steady twenty-five a day for a month. A good many were sob stories, asking for his money when he shuffled off. Get well wishes ran second, and dead last were the handful who wanted him dead: filthy dog, dirty scum. Women were motherly, forgiving, and, on occasion, uninhibited: "Please come to my home as soon as you are up and around and I will romp you back to good health. First you can take me on the dining room table, and then in the bathroom on our new green seat, and the third time (I know you will be able to dominate me thrice) on my husband's side of the bed."

"Please when you are feeling better I would like you to please come and drown our six kittens," another woman wrote. "My husband lost everything in the crash. We cannot afford to feed six more mouths, and children come before cats. But I am much too chickenhearted to kill them myself and know you are strong enough to oblige."

"I have a foolproof plan for pass-posting the bookie I bet with," wrote a horseplayer, "but, of course, I will need protection from his violence, which is where you come in as my partner."

"Dear Mr. Legs," a woman wrote, "all my life I work for my boy. Now he gonna go way and leave his momma. He is no dam good. I hope he die. I hope you shoot him for me. I will pay what you think up to fifty-five dollars, which is all the extra I got. But he deserve it for doing such a thing to his momma who gave him her life. His name is Tommy."

"Dear Sir," wrote a man, "I read in the papers where you have been a professional killer. I would like to hire you to remove me from this life. I suppose a man in your position gets many requests like this from people who find existence unbearable. I have a special way I would prefer to die. This would be in lightly cooked lamb fat in my marble bathtub with my posterior region raised so you may shoot several small-caliber bullets into my anus at no quicker than thirty-second intervals until I am dead."

A package came which the police traced, thinking someone was trying to make good on the numerous threats that Jack would never leave the hospital alive. An eight-year-old girl from Reading, Pennsylvania, had sent it-an ounce of holy oil from the shrine of Ste. Anne de Beaupre.

"I read about Mr. Diamond being shot and how his arm is paralyzed, and I have been taught in school to help those who are down and out," the child told police.

"Punk kid," Jack said. "What does she mean down and out?"

On the street in front of Polyclinic little clusters of Jack's fans would gather. A sightseeing bus would pass and the announcer would say, "On your right, folks, is where the notorious Jewish gangster Legs Diamond is dying," and all would crane but none would ever see the lip quivering as he slept or the few gray hairs among all the chestnut, or the pouches of experience under his eyes, or the way his ears stuck out, and how his eyes were separated by a vertical furrow of care just above the nose, or that nose: hooked, Grecian, not Jewish, not Barrym0re's either, merely a creditable piece of work he'd kept from damage, now snorting air. He was twelve pounds under his normal one fifty-two and still five ten and a half while I sat beside his bed with his last will and testament in my pocket for his signature. And he wheezed just like other Americans in their sleep.

I'd been fumbling through a prayer book on Jack's bedside table while he slept and I had turned up a credo I no more accepted as mere coincidence than I did the congruence of his and my pleasure in Rabelais; which is to say I suspected a pattern hovering over our relationship.

The credo read:

You work much harm in these parts, destroying and slaying God's creatures without his leave; and not only have you slain and devoured beasts of the field but you have dared to destroy and slay men made to the image of God: wherefore you are worthy of the gallows as a most wicked thief and murderer; all folk cry out and murmur against you. But I would make peace, Brother Wolf, between them and you, and they shall obtain for you so long as you live, a continual sustenance from the men of this city so that you shall no more suffer hunger, for well I know that you have done all this harm to satisfy your hunger…

This paraphrased perfectly my private plot to forget Charlie Northrup the way everybody else was forgetting him. He was gone off page one, only a subordinate clause in Jack's delightful story. Charlie, thanks for giving us so much of your time. Such fun having a cadaver in the scenario, especially one we can't locate. But, Charlie, please excuse us while we say a little prayer for Jack.

I remember also the passing thought that maybe it would be better if Jack never woke up, and then I remember seeing him wide awake, swathed in hospital-white hygienic purity.

"Hey, Marcus," he said, "great to wake up to a friendly face instead of some snooping cop. How's your ballocks?"

"Friendly toward ladies," I said, and when he laughed he I winced with pain.

"I been dreaming," he said. "Talking to God. No joke."

"Uh-oh."

"Why the hell is it I'm not dead? You figured it out?"

"They were bum shooters? You're not ready to die?"

"No, it's because I'm in God's grace."

"Is that a fact? God told you that?"

"I'm convinced. I thought I was just lucky back in '25 when they hit me. Then when Augie got it, I thought maybe I was as strong as a man can be, you know, in health. But now I think it's because God wants me to live."

He was not quite sitting up in bed, his prayer book there all soft and black on the white table and his rosary twined around the corner post of his bed, shiny black beads capturing the white tubing. Did he appreciate the contrast? I'm convinced he created it.

"You've got the disease of sanctity," I told him.

"'No, that's not it."

"You've got it the way dogs get fleas. It's common after assassination attempts. It accounts for the closeness between the church and aging dictators. It's a kind of infestation. Look at this room."

Alice had hung a crucifix over the bed and set a statue of the virgin on the windowsill. The room had been priest-ridden since Jack moved into it, the first a stranger who came to hear his confession and inquired who shot him. Even through quasi-delirium Jack recognized a Devane stooge. The next, a Baltimore chum of Alice's who dropped in without the press learning his name, comforted Jack, blessed him through opiated haze, then told newsmen: "Don't ask me to tell you anything about that poor suffering boy in there." And then came good Father Skelly from Cairo, indebted to Jack for the heavenly music in his church.

"God won't forget that you gave us a new organ," said the priest to the resurrecting Jack.

"Will God do the same for us when ours gets old?" Jack asked.

The priest heard his confession amid the two bouquets of roses Alice renewed every three days until Jack said the joint smelled like a wake, and so she replaced them with a potted geranium and a single red wax rose in a vase on the bedside table.

"I thought you'd given up the holy smoke," I said. "I thought you had something else going for you. "

"What the hell am I supposed to do after people keep shooting me and I don't die? I'm beginning to think I'm being saved. "

"For dessert? Looks classic to me, Jack. Shoot a man full of bullets and he's a candidate for blessedness."

"What about you and your communion breakfasts? Big-shot Catholic."

"Don't be misled. That's just part of being an Albany Democrat."

"So you're a Democrat and I got fleas. But it turns out I don't mind them."

"I can see that, and it all ties in. Confession, sanctity, priests. Yes, it goes with having yourself shot."

"Come again?"

"The shooting. I've assumed all along that you rigged it."

"You're not making sense."

"Could it have happened without your approval? You saw them alone, you know what they were. I know what such go-betweens can be, and I'm not even in your business. And you never had any intention of turning over that money. You asked for exactly what you got. Am I exaggerating?' '

"You got some wild imagination, pal. I see why you score in court."

But when he looked at me, that furrow of care between his eyes turned into a question mark. He ran his fingertips along the adhesive tape of his chest bandage, pleasurably some might say, as he looked at the author of the bold judgment. Jack Diamond having himself shot? Ridiculous. He fingered the rosary entwined over his right shoulder on the bed, played the beads with his fingertips as if they were keys on an instrument that would deliver the music he wanted to hear. Organ music. A sound like Skelly's new machine. No words to it, just the music they play at benediction after the high mass. Yes, there are words. From a long time ago. The "Tantum Ergo." All Latin words you never forget, but who the hell knows what they mean? "Tantum ergo sacramentum, veneremur cernui; et antiquum documentum, Novo cedat ritui."

A bridge.

A certain light.

Something was happening to him, Jack now knew.

"I want you to talk for me," he said. He had recovered from my impertinence, was restoring the client-attorney relation, putting me in my place. "I want you to talk to some people upstate. A few judges and cops, couple of businessmen, and find out what they think of my setup now. Fogarty's handling it, but he can't talk to those birds. He's too much of a kid. I got through to all those bastards personally, sent them whiskey, supported their election campaigns, gave 'em direct grease. All them bums owe me favors, but the noise in the papers about me, I don't know now whether it scares 'em or not."

" 'Pardon me, your honor, but are you still in the market for a little greasy green as a way of encouraging Jack Diamond with his bootlegging, his shakedowns, and his quirky habit of making competitors vanish?' Is that my question?"

"Any fucking way you like to put it, Marcus. You're the talker. They all know my line of work. It'll be simpler if I still got the okay, but I don't really give a goddamn whether they like it or not. Jack Diamond's got a future in the Catskills."

"Don't you think you ought to get straight first?"

"You don't understand, Marcus. You can carve out a whole goddamn empire up there if you do it right. Capone did it in Cicero. Sure there's a lot of roads to cover, but that's all right. I don't mind the work. But if I slow now, somebody else covers those roads. And it's not like I got all the time in the world. The guineas'll be after me now."

"You think they won't ride up to the Catskills?"

"Sure, but up there I'll be ready. That's my ball park." I've often vacillated about whether Jack's life was tragic, comic, a bit of both, or merely a pathetic muddle. I admit the muddle theory moved me most at this point. Here he was, refocusing his entire history, as if it had just begun, on the dream of boundless empire. It was a formidable readjustment and I considered it desperate, but maybe others would find it only confused and ridiculous. In any case, given the lengths he was willing to go to carry it off, it laid open his genuine obsession.

I might have credited the whole conversation about the Catskills to Jack's extraordinary greed if it hadn't been for one thing he said to me. It took me back to 1928 when Jack was arrested with his mob in a pair of elegant offices on the fourteenth and fifteenth floor of the Paramount Building, right on Times Square. Some address. Some height. Loftiness is my business, said the second-story man. Now Jack gave me a wink and ran his hand sensuously along the edge of the chest bandage that was giving him such pleasure. "Marcus," he said, "who else do you know collects mountains?"

I've been in Catskill maybe a dozen and a half times, most of those visits brief, on behalf of Jack. I don't really know the place, never needed to. It's a nice enough village, built on the west bank of the Hudson River about a hundred or so miles north of the Hotsy Totsy Club. Henry Hudson docked near this spot to trade with the Indians and then went on up to Albany, just like Jack. The village had some five thousand people in this year of 1931 I'm writing about. It had a main street called Main Street, a Catskill National Bank, a Catskill Savings Bank, a Catskill Hardware and so on. Formal social action happened at the IOOF, the Masonic Temple, the Rebekah Lodge, the American Legion, the PTA, the Women's Progressive Club, the White Shrine, the country club, the Elks. Minstrel shows drew a good audience and visiting theater companies played at the Brooks Opera House. The local weekly serialized a new Curwood novel at the end of 1931, which Jack would have read avidly if he'd not been elsewhere. The local daily serialized what Jack was doing in lieu of reading Curwood.

Catskill was, and still is, the seat of Greene County, and just off Main Street to the north is the four-story county jail, where Oxie Feinstein was the most celebrated resident on this particular day. Before I was done with Jack, there would be a few more stellar inmates.

The Chamber of Commerce billed the village as the gateway to the Catskills. The Day Line boats docked at Catskill Landing, and tourists were made conscious of the old Dutch traditions whenever they were commercially applicable. A Dutch friend of mine from law school, Warren Van Deusen, walked me through the city one day and showed me, among other points of interest, the home of Thomas Cole on Spring Street. Cole was the big dad of the nineteenth-century's Hudson River school of painting, and one of his works "Prometheus Bound," a classic landscape, I remember particularly well, for it reminded me of Jack. There was this giant, dwarfed by the landscape, chained to his purple cliff in loincloth and flowing beard (emanating waves of phlogiston, I'll wager) and wondering when the eagle was going to come back and gnaw away a few more of his vitals.

I called Van Deusen, who was involved in Republican county politics, as a way of beginning my assignment for Jack. In the early days of our law practice, his in Catskill, mine in Albany, I recommended him to a client who turned into very decent money for Van, and he'd been trying for years to repay the favor. I decided to give him the chance and told him to take me to lunch, which he did. We dined among men with heavy watch chains and heavier bellies. Warren, still a young man, had acquired a roll of well-to-do burgher girth himself since I'd last seen him, and when we strolled together up Main Street, I felt I was at the very center of America's well-fed, Depression complacency. It was an Indian summer day, which lightened the weight of my heavy question to Warren, that being: "What does this town think of Jack Diamond'?"

"A hero, if you can believe it," Van said. "But a hero they fear, a hero they wished lived someplace else."

"Do you think he's a hero?"

"You asked about the town's feelings. My private theory is he's a punishment inflicted on us for the sins of the old patroons. But maybe that's just my Dutch guilt coming out."

"You know Jack personally?"

"I've seen him in some of our best speakeasies and roadhouses. And like most of the town, I at least once made it a point to be passing by that little barbershop right across the street there when he and his chums pulled up at eleven o'clock one morning. They always came at eleven for their ritual daily shave, hair trim, shampoo, hot towels, shoe shine, and maybe a treatment by the manicurist from up the street."

"Every day?"

"Whatever else I say about him, I'll never accuse him of being ill-groomed. "

"I can't imagine this being the extent of your knowledge, a political fellow like yourself."

Van gave me a long quiet look that told me the subject was taboo, if I wanted to talk about a subsidy from Jack-that he was not in the market and knew no one who was.

"I know all the gossip," he said, finessing it. "Everybody does. He's the biggest name we've had locally since Rip Van Winkle woke up. I know his wife, too; I mean, I've seen her. Alice. Not a bad-looking woman. Saw her awhile back at the Community Theater, as a matter of fact. They change the movie four times a week and she sees them all. People seem to like her, but they don't know why she stays with Diamond. Yet they kind of like him, too-I suppose in the same way you find him acceptable."

"I accept him as a client."

"Sure, Marcus, And what about that European jaunt? Your picture even made the Catskill paper, you know."

"Someday when I understand it all better, I'll tell you about that trip. Right now all I want to know is what this town thinks."

"What for?"

"Grounding purposes, I suppose. Better my understanding of the little corner of the world where my candle burns from time to time."

Van looked at me with his flat Dutch face that seemed as blond as his hair. He was smiling, a pleasant way of calling me a liar. Van and I knew each other's facial meanings from days when our faces were less guarded. We both knew the giveaway smirks, the twitches, puckers, and sneers.

"Now I get it," he said. "It's him. He wants to know if the town's changed, how we take to his new notoriety. Is he worried?"

"What are you talking about?"

"All right, Marcus, so you won't play straight. Come on, I want to show you something."

We walked awhile, Van singling out certain landmarks for my education: There stood the garage the Clemente brothers used before Jack terrorized them out of the beer business. Over that way is a soft drink distributor's warehouse, which Diamond also took over. This was news to me. But I suppose when you set out to corner the thirst market, you corner it all.

Then Van turned in at the Elks' Club and led me to the bar. I ordered a glass of spring water and Van a beer, and then he motioned to the bartender, a man who might have been twenty-eight or forty-five, with a muscular neck; large, furlable ears; and a cowlick at the crown of his head. His name was Frank DuBois and Van said he was a straight arrow, a countryman of old Huguenot stock, and a first-class bartender.

"I was just about to tell Marcus here about your visit from the Diamond boys," Van said to him, "but I know you tell it better."

DuBois sniffed a little air, readying his tale for the four-hundredth telling, and said, "They come in all right, right through that door. Come right behind the bar here, unhitched the beer tap and rolled the barrel right out the door. 'Say,' I says to 'em, 'what'd ya do that for?' And one of them pokes me with a gun and says it's because we wasn't buying the good Canadian beer and they'd deliver us some in the mornin'. 'Yeah,' I says, 'that's just fine, but what about tonight? What do the fellas drink tonight?' 'Not this,' said one of 'em, and he shoots a couple of holes in the barrels we got. Not a fella I'd seen around before, and don't want to see him again either. Then they went out back, two of 'em, and shot up the barrels out there. Took me and Pete Gressel half a day to get the place mopped up and dried out. Dangdest mess you ever saw."

"You know the fellow who poked the gun at you?" I asked.

"'I knew him all right. Joe Fogarty. Call him Speed, they do. Nervous fella. Been around this town a long time. I seen him plenty with the Diamond bunch."

"When was all this?"

"Friday week, 'bout eleven at night. Had to close up and go home. No beer to serve. No people neither, once they saw who it was come in."

"Is that the right kind of beer Van's drinking now?' '

"You betcha, brother. Nobody wants no guns pokin' at them they can help it. Membership here likes peace and quiet. Nobody lookin' for trouble with Legs Diamond. He's a member this here club, you know. In good standin' too. Paid up dues and well liked till all this happen. Don't know what the others think now."

It was tidy. If Jack let his men point a gun at his own club, what other club could be safe? DuBois moved up the bar and Van said quietly, "A lot of people aren't just accepting this kind of thing, Marcus."

"I don't know what that means, not accepting."

"I'll let you use your imagination. "

"Vigilantes?"

"That's not impossible but not likely either, given the people I'm talking about. At least not at the moment."

"What people are you talking about?"

"I have to exercise a little discretion too, Marcus. But I don't mean helpless people like Frank here."

"Then all you've got for me is a vague, implied resistance, but without any form to it. People thinking how to answer Jack?"

"More than vague. More than thinking about it."

"Van, you're not telling me much. I thought I could count on your candor. What the hell good are riddles?"

"What the hell good is Jack Diamond?"

Which was the same old question I'd been diddling with since the start. Van's expression conveyed that he knew the answer and I never would. He was wrong.