Legs

JOHN THOMSON'S MAN

When the police went through Jack's house in one of their fine-combings near the end, somebody turned up a piece of plaster, one side covered with the old-time mattress ticking wallpaper. The paper was marked with twenty-five odd squiggles, which the police presumed were some more code notations of booze deliveries; and they saved the plaster along with Jack's coded notebooks and file cards on customers and connections all over the United States and in half a dozen foreign countries.

I asked Alice about the plaster before she was killed, for it turned up in the belongings they returned to her, through my intervention, after Jack died. When she saw it she laughed a soft little laugh and told me the squiggle marks were hers; that she'd made them the first weekend she and Jack were married; that they stayed in an Atlantic City hotel and hardly went out except to eat and that they'd made it together twenty-five times. After number five, she said, she knew they'd only just started and she kept the score on the wall next to the bed. And when they checked out, Jack got the tire iron from the car and hacked out the plaster with all the squiggles on it. They kept it in their dresser drawer until the police took it away. Alice made Jack give the hotel clerk twenty-live dollars for the broken wall. A dollar a squiggle. Half the price of professional action.

I thought of Warren Van Deusen telling me people didn't understand why Alice stayed with Jack. She had her reasons. Her memories were like those squiggles. She was profoundly in love with the man, gave him her life at the outset and never wanted anyone else. She was in love with loving him too, and knew it, liked the way it looked. She won a bundle of psychic points sitting at his bedside after the Monticello, cooing into his ear while the reporters listened at the door and the nurses and orderlies carried messages to tabloid snoops. Alice heroine. Sweet Alice. Alice Blue. When the crash comes they always go back to their wives. Faithful spouse. Betrayed, yet staunch.

Adversity no match for Alice. The greatest of the underworld women. Paragon of wifely virtue. Never did a wrong thing in her life. The better half of that bum, all right, all right.

Texas Guinan let her have a limousine, with chauffeur, all the time she was in New York, so she wouldn't have to worry about hawking taxis to and from Jack's bedside. The press gave Kiki the play at first, but then they caught up with Alice at the police station (that's where Kiki and Alice first met; they glowered at each other, didn't speak). The press boys tried to make her the second act of the drama, but Alice wouldn't play.

"Did you know the Roberts girl?"

"No."

"Did you know any of his friends?"

"He had many friends, but I'm not sure I knew them."

"Did you know his enemies?"

"He didn't have any enemies."

Alice was no sap, had no need for publicity. Not then. It was all happening in her ball park anyway, whether she talked or not.

"You know," she said to me after the shooting, "I hardly even brought up the subject of Marion with him. Only enough to let him know I wasn't going to die over it, that I was bigger than that. I was just as sweet as I could be. Gave him the biggest old smile I could and told him I remembered the squiggles and let him lay there and fry."

She said she was thinking about her Mormon dream and how it didn't make any sense when she had it, even after she told John about it and they talked about him having another wife. It was in the time of the roses, after he was shot the first time, on Fifth Avenue, when he was afraid he would die before he had done what he set out to do. He saw girls at his Theatrical Club. She knew that. But that was a trivial thing in the life of Alice Diamond because she had John as a husband, and that superseded any girl. Alice Diamond was bona fide. The real thing. A wife. And don't you forget it, John Diamond. A wife. For life.

She sat on the arm of his chair one night in the living room and told him she dreamed he'd brought home a second wife. He stood alongside the woman in the dream and said to Alice, "Well, we'll all be together from now on." And Alice said, "Not on your Philadelphia tintype."

But even as she said no to him she knew it was not no. Never a total no to anything John wanted. Then the other wife came in and started taking over little things Alice used to do for John. But after Alice told him the dream, he said, "Alice, I love you, nobody else." And Alice said to him, "No, you've got another wife." And they both laughed when he said to her, "Alice, we'll be together as long as we live."

Alice did not think her dream would ever come true. Maybe he'd see a woman now and then. But to move into a hotel, to keep a woman permanently, to see her just hours after he'd seen Alice, and maybe even after he'd been with Alice, was terrible. It was not incomprehensible. How, after all, could anything be incomprehensible to a person like Alice, who knew what everybody along Broadway thinks, wants, does, and won't do? Alice was as smart about life as anybody she ever came up against. She knew the worst often happened, worse than the worst you can imagine, and so you made provisions. Her prayer book helped her make provision for the worst: for the sick, the dying, for a happy death, for the departed, for the faithful departed, for the souls in Purgatory, for the end of man, for release from Purgatorial fire. Even a special one for John. She knew she was deceived by John's capacity for passion, and so she sat by his bed and read the Prayer to Overcome Passions and to Acquire Perfection: "Through the infinite merits of Thy painful sufferings, give John strength and courage to destroy every evil passion which sways his heart, supremely to hate all sin, and thus to become a saint."

Saint John of the Bullets.

"Alice, there you are, Alice," Jack said when he woke up and saw her. The beginning and the end of his first coherent sentence.

She smiled at him, picked up the wax rose she'd brought him, the one rose, the secret nobody else knew, and said, "It's wax, John. Do you remember?" The corners of his mouth eased upward and he said, "Sure," so softly she could barely hear it. Then she ran her fingers ever so softly through his hair. Bittykittymins. Sweet baby. Son of a bitch. Bittykittymins. And when he was really awake for the first time, when he'd even had a little bouillon and she'd combed his hair and they put a new hospital gown on him, she said to him in her silent heart: I wish you had died.

"How are you, kid'?" she said out loud, the first time in a long, long while she called him kid, the code word.

"I might make it."

"I think you might. "

"They got me good this time."

"They always get you good. "

"This time it hurt more."

"Everybody got hurt this time."

Alice was hurt, and she knew why. Because she loved an evil person and always would. She now wondered about her remarkable desire to see Jack dead. She had at times wished death to bad persons. Because Alice was good. Alice would not stay long in Purgatory. Because she was good. But now she wanted to die herself when she wished John dead and saw how deeply evil she herself was. She prayed to Jesus to let her want John to live. Let me not think that he's evil. Or me either. I know he's a good man in certain ways. Don't tell me I should've married somebody pure and holy. They would've bored the ass off me years ago. After all, I didn't marry a priest, Jesus. I married a thief. And landed on the front pages alongside him. My hubbydubbylubbybubby. People asking me questions. Coming for interviews. Forced to hide. Hide my light under the bushel. It will shine brighter for all that hiding. Light polishes itself under the bushel. What an awful thing for Alice to think: polishing up her own private brilliance through the troubles of Johnny-victim-on-the-boat. Oh, Alice. How awful you really are. It is so enormously wrong and wicked and evil and terrible, loving John for the wrong reasons; wanting him dead; profiteering from your marriage. Alice was evil and she truly hated herself.

But listen, kiddo, Alice knew she was married to one of the rottenest sons of bitches to come along in this century. Just the fact that she was able to sit there stroking his fingers and the back of his hand and running her hand through his bittykittymins gave her the evidence of her moral bankruptcy. Yet she was still trying to reform John. She didn't want him to be a Mason on the square. She wanted a genuine four-cornered Catholic. Four corners on my bed. Four angels overhead. Matthew, Mark, Luke, John. Bless the bed we all lie on. She put a rosary around his neck while he lay under the influence of drugs to invoke grace and secret blessings God couldn't possibly deliver publicly to such a person. Hypocrisy for her to do that. Yes, another sin, Alice. But she knew that without being a hypocrite she could never love John.

Knowing this, knowing how evil she was for being married to evil, she therefore knew she must stay married to it, knew she must suffer all the evil that evil brings. For how else could a girl, an Irish Catholic girl brought up to respect grace and transubstantiation, ever get to heaven? How else could a girl hold her head up in her family? How else could a girl ever show her face among her peers, let alone her sneering inferiors, unless she expiated her awfulness, that black terribleness of marrying and loving evil, except by staying married to it?

Suffer the evil to come unto me, said doughty Alice. Perhaps she enjoyed that evil too much. More than she could ever expiate. Perhaps she will merit longer and more excruciating punishment than she can yet imagine. Yes, the very worst may be in store for this little lady.

But she sat there with the villain, stroking, cooing, telling the Good Lord Above: Go ahead and do me, Lord. I can take it.

Sitting beside his hospital bed watching him breathe perhaps the final breaths of his life, she knew he was unquestionably hers now forever. Nothing and nobody could part them. She had withstood the most scandalous time and had not stopped loving him. She was the victim of love: sucker and patsy for her own sloppy heart. But from suckerdom comes wisdom the careful lover never understands.

"I'm sorry what this is doing to you," John said to Alice.

"Are you, John? Or is that just another apology?"

"It's a bad time for you, Al, I know. But this ain't exactly a great big bed of roses I got myself into."

"You'll get out of it."

"We both will. We'll have a special time when I get my ass up out of here."

"Give your ass a rest."

"Anything you say."

"Give everybody's ass a rest."

"Whose ass you talking about now?"

"Maybe you could figure it out if you live long enough."

"I'm in no condition to tire anybody out."

"That's a nice change. I also mean no visitors. I already put up with more than I can stand, but I won't put up with her here. "

"She hasn't shown up yet. And if she does, it won't be my doing. But she won't."

"The police won't let her out of custody, that's why she won't."

"She knows better. She knows her place."

"Oh? And just what the hell is her place?"

"No place. Nothing. She knows she's got no hold on me."

"That's why you kept her in the hotel."

"I was doing her a favor."

"How often? Twice a night?"

"I saw her now and then, no more. A friend. A date when I was in town looking for company."

"The whole world's got it figured out, John. Don't start with the fairy tales."

She was talking to him as if he had the strength of a healthy man, but he was only an itty-bitty piece of himself, a lump of torn-up flesh. Why did Alice talk so tough to a sick lump? Because she knew the lump was tough. She was tough too. A pair of tough monkeys, is how John always said he saw this husband-wife team. Yes, it's why we get along, was Alice's way of looking at this toughness. She always treated him this way, even when he was most vulnerable, told him exactly what she thought. There now. See? See his hand move off the sheet and onto her knee? See his fingers raise the hem of her skirt? Feel him touch her with his fingertips on the flesh above her stocking? Home territory. Jack is coming home. Jack is not discouraged by her tough line. Tough monkey, my husband.

When Alice felt these fingers on herself she looked at the single wax rose on the bedside table and remembered the early growth of the rose. There will always be a wax rose in our life, Alice now insisted, and in his own way Jack remembered it too. With a tea rose in his lapel when he wore his tux. Never a gardenia. Never a white carnation. Always the red, red rose.

It was after the Fifth Avenue shooting in 1925 and he sat in the living room of their house on l36th Street in the Bronx with the top and back of his head shaved and bandaged, wearing the old blue wool bathrobe with the holes in the elbows, sitting alone on the sofa, looking at the floor and drinking coffee royals because he liked their name and potency; eating saltine crackers with peanut butter but no meals, awake all night for a week but saying almost nothing, just making soft whimpering sounds like a dog dreaming of his enemies. Keeping Alice awake until her ear got used to the rhythms of the whimpers. When the rhythm was right, she could always sleep.

She had tried the rosary, but he wasn't ready for that, and so it only sat on the coffee table alongside the wax roses in the orange and black Japanese vase. She had tried to calm him, too, by reading from the prayer book, but he wouldn't listen. He was as far from religion as he'd ever been. Alice told him he should take the shooting as a warning from God to get out of the rackets or die in the bullet rain.

"I don't want to be like that woman in Brooklyn who lost a husband and two sons in the gang wars," Alice said to him. But that had no effect. Alice didn't know what would have any effect.

"Come on out, boy," she had said one day, a little whisper in his ear. "We all know you're hiding in there."

But all he ever asked was did you call in my numbers: 356, 880, and 855. Jackie, Jack and John out of the dream book. Jack always played numbers, from the time he ran them as a teen-ager. Now he played five dollars on each number and she never knew whether he hit them or not. Her game was not played with numbers.

She would also turn the radio on for him, but when she'd leave the room, he'd turn it off.

"Jesus, they really almost got me, almost wiped me out," he said one night and shook his head as if this were an incredible possibility, some wild fancy that had nothing to do with the real life and potential of John Thomas Diamond. That was when Alice knew he was not going to quit the rackets, that he was committed to them with a fervor which matched her own religious faith.

"They can't keep me down forever" had been his phrase from when she first knew him. She hoped he would find another way up, but this thought still was the central meaning of his whimpers.

The bridge lamp was on the night Alice got out of bed, unable to accept the animal noises John was making. They had become more growls than whimpers or the whisperings of troubled sleep. She saw him on the floor where he'd slid off the couch. He was pointing his pistol at the Japanese vase.

"Are you going to shoot the roses, John?"

He let his hand fall, and after a while she took the pistol. She helped him back onto the sofa and then knelt in front of him in her nightgown, not even a robe over it, and herself visible right through the sheer silk. Her amply visible self.

"I can't sleep no more," he said to her. "I close my eyes and I see my mother screaming every time she breathes."

"It's all right, boy. It's going to be all right."

And then Alice rose half up out of her kneeling position, but without sitting either, stretched herself lengthwise and leaning, a terribly uncomfortable position as she recalls it. But John could see all of her very private self that way, feel her all along his arm and his hip and his good leg that wasn't shot. And without the pistol his hand was free. First she said the Our Father to him just to put the closeness of God into his head again and then she maneuvered herself until her perfect center was against the back of his hand. Then she moved ever so slightly so he could feel where he was, even if he couldn't see it or didn't sense it.

Did this maneuvering work'? Alice put an arm around his neck and kissed him lightly on the ear. He turned his hand so the knuckles faced away from her. Then, with a little bit of help, that sheer silk nightgown rose to the demands of the moment. John said she smelled like grass in the morning with dew on it, and she said he smelled like a puppyduppy, and with both their hands where they had every right in the world to be, Mr. and Mrs. John Diamond fell asleep on the sofa in their very own parlor. And they slept through the night.

When they killed Alice, she was sitting at the kitchen table of her Brooklyn apartment looking at old clippings of herself and Jack. One clip, of which she had seven copies, showed her beside his bed of Polyclinic pain. She sat beneath her cloche hat in that old clip, a few tufts of blond hair (not yet dyed Titian to match that of Kiki, The Titian-Haired Beauty of the tabloids; not yet dyed saffron to glamorize her for her Diamond Widow stage career) sticking out from underneath. She was all trim and tailored in the gray tweed suit Jack had helped her choose. "My hero!" was what Alice had written on the clipping.

I imagine her in her final kitchen remembering that bedside scene and all that came later up in Acra when Jack left the Polyclinic bed: Alice nursing her John back to health, massaging his back with rubbing alcohol, taking him for walks in the woods with some of the boys fanning out ahead and behind them, making him toddies and cooking him beef stew and dumplings and tapioca pudding. Now he was more handsome than he'd ever been in his life. Oh, brilliant boy of mine! Hero of the strife! From New Year's Day, 1931, when he left the hospital, on through early April, she possessed him exclusively. Oh, rapturous time! Nothing like it ever before, ever again. What a bitter cup it was for Alice to leave him after that.

She told me she left him the day after Lew Edwards and I paid a curious visit to idyllic Acra. Lew was a Broadway producer, dead now, who grew up next door to me in North Albany, became the impresario of most of Public School 20's undergraduate productions, and went on to produce plays for Jeanne Eagels, Helen Morgan, and Clifton Webb. Lew knew Jack casually, knew also my connection with Jack, and called me with an idea. I told him it was sensational and would probably die at first exposure to Jack. Lew said it was worth the chance and we met at the Hudson train station. I drove down from Albany to pick him up, we had lunch in Catskill, took a short walk to buy the papers, a fateful purchase, and then drove out to Jack's.

The chief change from my summer visit was the set of outside guards at the house, a pair of heavies I'd never seen before who sat in a parked Packard and periodically left the driveway to explore the road down toward Cairo and up toward South Durham for visitors who looked like they might want to blow Jack's head off. When that pair drove off, another pair on duty on the porch took up driveway positions in a second car, and a set from the cottage took up posts on the porch as inside guards.

"Just like Buckingham Palace," Lew said.

Alice gave me a big hello with a smooch I remember. That tempting appleness. Fullness. Pungent wetness I remember thee well. But she meant nothing by such a lovely kiss except hello, my friend. Then she said to me: "Marcus, he's wonderful. He looks better than he has in years. I swear he's even handsomer now than when I married him. And it's better other ways too. "

She shook Lew's hand and took my arm and walked me into the living room and whispered: "He's all through with her, Marcus, he really is. He hasn't seen her since the shooting, only once. She came to the hospital one day when I wasn't there, but I heard about it. Now she's all a part of the past. Oh, Marcus, you can't imagine how glorious it's been these past few months. We've been so damned happy you wouldn't believe we were the same people you saw the last time you were here."

She said he was upstairs napping now, and while she went up to rouse him, Cordelia, the maid, mixed us a drink. Jack came down groggy-and in shirtsleeves, baggy pants and slippers-and gave us a few vague minutes. Then we were a group-Jack and Alice on the sofa with Alice's pair of long-legged dolls in crinoline between them, his hand in hers across the dolls, Lew and I in the overstuffed chairs as witnesses to this domestic tranquillity.

"So you've got a deal," Jack said, and Lew immediately went for his cigar case to get a grip on something. Jack had met Lew five years back when Lew butted aggressively into a bar conversation Jack was having, without knowing who Jack was. That's another story, but it turned out Lew gave Jack a pair of theater tickets that introduced him to Helen Morgan, who became one of Jack's abstract passions. He never could understand why Morgan was so good, why she moved him so. It was perverse of him to want to understand the secrets of individual talent, to want secret keys to success. He was still talking about La Morgan the night he died.

"I got a million-dollar idea for you, Jack," Lew said, stuffing a cigar in his mush but not lighting it.

"My favorite kind."

"And you don't have to do a thing for a year."

"It gets better."

"I like it too," said Alice.

"You've got to be one of the most famous, pardon the expression, criminals in the East, am I right?"

"I wouldn't admit to any wrongdoing," Jack said. "I just make my way the best I can."

"Sure, Jack, sure," said Lew. "But plenty of people take you for a criminal. Am I right?"

"I got a bad press, no doubt about that."

"Bad press is a good press for this idea," said Lew. "The more people think you're a bad-ass bastard, the easier we make you a star."

"He's already a star," Alice said. "Too much of a one."

"You mean a Broadway star?" Jack asked. "I carry a tune, but I'm no Morgan."

"Not Broadway. I mean all of America. I can make you the biggest thing since Billy Sunday and Aimee Semple McPherson. An evangelist. A preacher."

"A preacher?" Jack said, and he gave it the big ho-de-ho-ho.

"A preacher how?" Alice said, leaning forward.

Lew said, "If you'll excuse me for saying it, there's about a hundred million people in this country know your name, and they figure you're one mean son of a bitch. Is this more or less true or am I mistaken'?"

"Go on," Jack said. "What else?"

"So this mean son of a bitch, this Legs Diamond, this bootlegger, this gang leader, he gives it all up. Quits cold. Goes straight. And a year later he hears the voice of the Holy Spirit. He is touched by a whole damn flock of flaming doves or tongues or whatever the hell they send down to touch guys with, and he becomes an apostle for the Big Fellow. He goes barnstorming, first on a shoestring. A spiritual peanut vendor is all he is. A man with a simple commitment to God and against Satan and his works. He talks to anybody who'll sit still for half an hour. The press picks him up immediately and treats him like a crazy. But also it's a hell of a story for them. Whatsisname, on the road to Damascus. You know the routine. Doesn't care about gin, gangs, guns, gals or gelt anymore. All he wants is to send out the word of God to the people. The people!

They'll sell their kids for a ticket. Tickets so scarce you've got to hire a manager, and pretty soon you, he, winds up on the vaude circuits, touches every state, SRO all over. A genuine American freak. Then he gets word from God he shouldn't play theaters with those evil actors. Oughta talk in churches. Of course the churches won't have him. Fiend turned inside out is still a fiend. And a fake. A show biz figure. So he has to play stadiums now, and instead of six hundred he draws maybe twenty thousand and winds up in Yankee Stadium with a turnaway crowd, a full orchestra, four hundred converts around him, the best press agent in town, and the first million-dollar gate that isn't a heavy-weight fight. More? Sure. He builds his own temple and they come from all over the world to hear him speak. Then, at his peak, he moves off to Paris, London, Berlin. And hey. Rome."

Lew fell against his chairback and lit the cigar he'd been using as a pointer, a round little man with a low forehead, thick black hair, and a constant faceful of that stogie. He worked at being a Broadway character, structured comic lines to deliver ad lib at the right moment: "Jack Johnson got the worst deal of any nigger since Othello" is one of his I never forgot.

Lew had bought the New York Daily Mirror and read bits of it in the car on the way to J ack's, and now he pulled it out of his right coat pocket in a gesture he said later was caused by discomfort from the bulk, and tossed it onto the coffee table. Jack opened it, almost as a relfex, and skimmed the headlines while all the silence was drumming at us. Jack turned the pages, barely looking at them, then stopped and said to Lew: "How the hell could I preach anything anybody'd believe? I haven't made a speech since high school when I did something from Lincoln. I'm no speaker, Lew."

"I'd make you one," Lew said. "I'd get you drama coaches, speech coaches, singing teachers. Why, for Christ's sake, you'd be a voice to reckon with in six months. I seen this happen on Broadway."

"I think it's a fantastic idea," Alice said. She stood up and paced in front of the couch nervously.

"You know the power you'd have, Jack?" Lew asked. "Hell, we might even get a new American church going. Sell stock in it. I'd buy some myself. A man like you carrying the word to America what the rackets are all about, giving people the lowdown on the secret life of their country. Jesus, I get the shivers thinking how you'd say it. Snarling, by God. Snarling at those suckers for God Almighty. Your stories don't have to be true but they'll sound true anyway. Jesus, it's so rich I can hear the swoons already. I could put together a team of writers'd give you the goddamnedest supply of hoopla America ever heard. Force-feed 'em their own home-grown bullshit. Tell 'em you've gotten inside their souls and know what they need. They need more truth from you, that's what they need. Can't you see those hicks who read everything they can lay hands on about crooks and killers? Organ music with it. 'The Star Spangled Banner', 'Holy, Holy, Holy.' You know what Oscar Wilde said, don't you? Americans love heroes, especially crooked ones. Twenty to one you'd get a movie. Maybe they'd even run you for Congress. A star, Jack, I mean a goddamn one hundred percent true-blue American star. How does it grab you?"

Alice exploded before Jack could say anything at all. "John, it's absolutely perfect. Did you ever believe anybody'd ask you to do anything as marvelous as this? And you can do it. Everything he said was true. You'd be wonderful. I've heard you talk when you're excited about something and I know you can do it. You know you can act, you did it in high school, oh, I know it's right for you."

Jack closed the newspaper and folded it. He crossed his legs, left foot on right knee and tapped the paper on his shoe.

"You'd like to do a little barnstorming, would you?" he said to her.

"I'd love to go with you."

Alice's faith. Love alone. She really believed Jack could do anything. Such an idea also had pragmatic appeal: saving herself from damnation. Show business? So what? As to the stardom, well, the truth is, Alice could no longer get along without it. Yet this promised stardom without taint. Oh, it was sweet! The promise of life renewed for Alice. And her John the agent of renewal.

"What's your reaction, Marcus?" Jack said. And when I chuckled, he frowned.

"I can see it all. I really can see you up there on the altar, giving us all a lesson in brimstone. I think Lew is right. I think it'd work. People would pay just to see you sit there, but if you started saving their souls, well, that's an idea that's worth a million without even counting next month's house." And I laughed again. "What sort of robes would you wear? Holy Roman or Masonic?"

Maybe that did it, because Jack laughed then too. He tapped Alice lightly on the knee with the newspaper and tossed it on the coffee table in front of her. It's curious that I remember every move that newspaper made, not that Alice would've missed its message without us, although I suppose that's possible. The point is that Lew and I, on our mission for American evangelism, were innocent bearers of the hot news.

Jack stood up. "It's a joke," he said.

"No," said Lew, "I'm being straight."

"Make a funny story back in Lindy's if I said yes."

"Jack," said Lew, who was suddenly drained of facial blood by the remark, "this is an honest-to-God idea I had and told nobody but Marcus and now you and your wife. Nobody else."

Jack gave him a short look and figured out from his new complexion that he wasn't practical-joking.

"'Okay, Lew. Okay. Let's say it's a nice try then. But not for me. Maybe it'd make a bundle, but it rubs me wrong. I feel like a stool pigeon just thinking about it."

"No names, Jack, nobody's asking for names. Tell stories, that's all. It's what you know about how it all works."

"That's what I mean. You don't tell the suckers how the game is played."

Alice picked up the Mirror and slowly and methodically rolled it into a bat. She tapped it against her palm the way a cop plays with a sap. I thought she was going to let Jack have a fast one across the nose. Good-bye barnstorm. Good-bye private Diamond altar. Good-bye salvation, for now.

Her crestfallen scene reveals to me at this remove that she really didn't understand Jack as well as I thought she did. She knew him better than anyone on earth, but she didn't understand how he could possibly be true to his nature. She really thought he was a crook, all the way through to the dirty underwear of his psyche.

"It'd be fun, Lew," Jack said, starting to pace now himself, relaxed that it was over and he could talk about it and add it to his bag of offers. "It'd be a hell of a lot of fun. New kind of take. And I know I got a little ham in me. Yeah, it'd be a good time, but I couldn't take it for long. I couldn't live up to the part."

Alice left the room and carried the newspaper with her. It looked like a nightstick now. I can see her unrolling it and reading it in the kitchen, although I was not in the kitchen. She turns the pages angrily, not seeing the headlines, the photos, the words. She stops at Winchell because everybody stops there and reads him. She is not really reading. Her eyes have stopped at his block of black and white, and she stares down at it, thinking of getting off the train in Omaha and Denver and Boston and Tallahassee and spreading the word of John and God and standing in the wings holding her John's robe, making him tea, no more whiskey, washing his socks, answering his mail, refusing interviews. Damn, damn, damn, thinks Alice, and she sees his name in Winchell.

In the living room, standing on his purple Turkish rug, framing himself against the blue silk he'd stolen from a Jersey boxcar eight years before, Jack was saying he couldn't be a hypocrite.

"That sound funny coming from me, Lew?"

"Not a bit, Jack. I understand." But I could see Lew too, watching a million-dollar idea curl up in the smoke of another Broadway pipe dream.

" 'Hypocrite? What the hell was he talking about'?" Lew asked me later when we were on the way back to the Hudson station. "Does he think I don't know who he is?"

"He had something else in mind, I'm sure," I said. "He knows you know who he is. He knows everybody knows. But he obviously doesn't think what he's doing is hypocritical."

Lew shook his head. "All the nuts ain't on the sundaes."

Lew too. Victim of tunnel vision: A man's a thief, he's dishonest. What we didn't know as we listened to Jack was that he was in the midst of a delicate, supremely honest balancing act that would bring his life together if it worked, let it function as a unified whole and not as warring factions. Maybe Jack thought he was being honest in his retreat from page one, in his acquiescence to Alice's implorings that he become a private man, a country man, a home man, a husband. This behavior generated in Lew's head the idea that if Jack could only stay down long enough, he was fodder for American sainthood.

But Lew's conversion plan was false because Jack's behavior in retreat was false. Jack wasn't a private but a public man, not a country squire but a city slicker, not a home but a hotel room man, not a husband but a cocksmith, not an American saint but an insatiable extortionist. ("Fuck 'em," he said when I told him about Warren Van Deusen's vigilantes.) And he was not the sum of all these life-styles either, but a fusion beyond them all.

In a small way this was about to be demonstrated.

Shirtsleeved, Jack shook our hands, walked us to the front door, apologized for not standing there with us, but said he didn't want to make it too easy for any passing shooters, and thanked us for livening up his afternoon.

The liveliness was just beginning.

The Winchell item in the Mirror read: "Stagehands in the Chicago theater where Kiki Roberts is dancing in 'Flying High' under the name of Doris Kane can set their watch by the phone call she gets every night at 7:30. You guessed the caller: Legs Diamond… "

"You son of a bitch, you said you weren't talking to her. "

"Don't believe everything you read."

"You're always out of the house at that hour."

"Doesn't mean a thing."

"You promised me, you bastard. You promised me."

"I talked to her once in four months, that's all."

"I don't believe that either. "

"Believe Winchell then."

"I thought you were being straight with me."

"You were right. I was. I didn't see her, I didn't see nobody."

"After all the goddamn nursing and handholding."

"I'm fond of the girl. I heard she was having some trouble and I called her. She's all right."

"I don't believe that. You're a liar."

"What's that on your housedress'?"

"Where'?"

"By the pocket."

"A spot. "

"A spot of what?"

"What's the difference what the spot is. It's a spot."

"I paid to have that housedress cleaned and pressed and starched. The least you could do is keep it clean."

"I do keep it clean. Shut up about the housedress."

"I pay for the laundry and you put these things on and dirty them up. Goddamn money going down the goddamn laundry sink.

"I'm leaving."

"What's that in your hair?"

"Where?"

"Behind your right ear. There's something white. Is that gray hair?"

"It might be. God knows I've got a right to some."

"Gray hair. So that's what you've come to. I spend money so you can get your hair bleached half the colors of the goddamn rainbow and you stand there and talk to me with gray hair."

"I'm going upstairs to pack."

"What's that on your leg?"

"Where?"

"Right there on the thigh."

"Don't touch me. I don't want you to touch me."

"What is it?"

"It's a run in my stocking."

"'Goddamn money for silk stockings and look what happens to them."

"Get your hand away. I don't want to feel you. Go on, get it away. I don't want your hand there. No. Not there either. No. You won't get it that way anymore. Not after this. No. Don't you dare do that to me with Cordelia in the kitchen and after what I just read. You've lied once too often. I'm packing and nobody on God's earth can do anything to stop me."

"What if I moved her in with us?"

"Oh."

"We could work it out."

"Oh!"

"She's a great girl and she thinks the world of you. Sit down. Let's talk about it."

Kiki lay naked on the bed that was all hers and which stood where Alice's had stood before Jack had it taken out and bought the new one. She was thinking of the evening being unfinished, of the fudge that hadn't hardened the last time she touched it, and of Jack lying asleep in his own room, his heavy breathing audible to Kiki, who could not sleep and who resented the uselessness of her nakedness.

They had been together in her bed at early evening, hadn't eaten any supper because they were going to have dinner out later. The fudge was already in the fridge then. Jack was naked too, lying on his back, smoking and staring at the wall with the prints of the Michelangelo ketches, the punishment of Tityus and the head of a giant, prints Jack told her he bought because Arnold Rothstein liked them and said Michelangelo was the best artist who ever brushed a stroke. Jack said Kiki should look at the pictures and learn about art and not be so stupid about it. But the giant had an ugly head and she didn't like the one with the bird in it either, so she looked at Jack instead of dopey pictures. She wanted to touch him, not look at him, but she knew it wouldn't be right because there was no spark in him. He was collapsed and he had tried but wasn't in the mood. He started out in the mood, but the mood left him. He needed a rest, maybe.

He wouldn't look at her. She kept looking at him but he wouldn't look back, so she got up and said, "I'm going downstairs and see if that fudge is hard yet."

"Put something on."

"I'll put my apron on."

"Take a housecoat. There may be somebody on the porch."

"They're all out in the cottage playing pool or in the car watching the road. I know they are."

"I don't want you showing off your ass to the hired help."

She put on one of Alice's aprons, inside out so it wouldn't look too familiar to Jack, and went downstairs. She looked in the mirror and knew anybody could see a little bit of her tail if there was anybody to see it, but there wasn't. She didn't want clothes on. She didn't want to start something and then have to take the clothes off in a hurry and maybe lose the spark, which she would try to reignite when she went back upstairs. She wanted Jack to see as much of her as he could as often as he could, wanted to reach him with all she could reach him with. She had the house now. She had beaten Alice. She had Jack. She did not plan to let go of him.

The fudge was still soft to her touch. She left another fingerprint in it. She had made it for Jack, but it wasn't hardening. It had been in the fridge twenty-eight hours, and it wasn't any harder now than it was after the first hour.

"What do you like-chocolate or penuche?" she had asked him the day before.

"Penuche's the white one with nuts, right?"

"Right."

"That's the one."

"That's the one I like too. "

"How come you know so much about fudge?"

"It's the only thing I ever learned how to cook from my mother. I haven't made it in five or six years, but I want to do it for you."

The kitchen had all the new appliances, Frigidaire, Mixmaster, chrome orange juice squeezer, a machine for toasting two slices of bread. But, for all its qualities, Kiki couldn't find the ingredients she remembered from her mother's recipe. So she used two recipes, her own and one out of Alice's Fanny Farmer Cook Book, mixed them up together and cooked them and poured it all into a tin pie plate and set it on the top shelf of the fridge. But it didn't harden. She tasted it and it was sweet and delicious, but it was goo after an hour. Now it was still goo.

"It's all goo," she told Jack when she went back upstairs. She stood alongside him and took off her apron.

He didn't reach for her.

"Let's go out," he said, and he rolled across the bed, away from her, and stood up. He put on his robe and went into his own room to dress. Even when Alice was there he had had his own room. Even at the hotel he had kept his own room to go to when he and Kiki had finished making love.

"Are you angry because the fudge didn't harden?"

"For crissakes, no. You got other talents."

"Do you wish I could cook?"

"No. I cook good enough for both of us."

And he did, too. Why Jack made the best chicken cacciatore Kiki ever ate, and he cooked a roast of lamb with garlic and spices that was fantastic. Jack could do anything in life. Kiki could only do about three things. She could dance a little and she could love a man and she could be pretty. But she could do those things a thousand times better than most women. She knew about men, knew what men told her. They told her she was very good at love and that she was pretty. They also liked to talk about her parts. They all (and Jack too) told her she was lovely everyplace. So Kiki didn't need to learn about cooking. She wasn't going to tie in with anybody as a kitchen slave and a fat mommy. She wore an apron, but she wore it her way, with nothing underneath it. If Jack wanted a cook, he wouldn't have got rid of Alice. Kiki would just go on being Kiki, somebody strange. She didn't know how she was strange. She knew she wasn't smart enough to understand the reasons behind that sort of thing. I mean I know it already, she said to herself. I don't have to figure it out. I know it and I'm living it.

Kiki thought about these things as she was lying naked in her bed wishing the fudge would harden. Earlier in the night, after Jack had rolled out of her bed, they'd gone out, had eaten steaks at the New York Restaurant in Catskill, one of the best, then had drinks at Sweeney's club, a good-time speakeasy. It was on the way home that everything was so beautiful and quiet. She felt strange then. She and Jack were in the back seat and Fogarty was driving. She was holding Jack's hand, and they were just sitting there, a little glassy-eyed from the booze, yes, but that wasn't the reason it was so beautiful. It was beautiful because they were together as they deserved to be and because they didn't have to say anything to each other. She remembered looking ahead on the road and looking out the window she'd rolled down and feeling the car was moving without a motor. She couldn't hear noise, couldn't see anything but the lights on the road and the darkened farmhouses and the open fields that were all so brightly lighted by the new moon. The stars were out too, on this silent, this special night. It was positively breathtaking, is how Kiki later described the scene and the mood that preceded the vision of the truck.

That damn truck.

Why did it have to be there ahead of them?

Why couldn't Joe have taken another road and not seen it?

Oh, jeez, wouldn't everything in her whole life have been sweet if they just hadn't seen that truck?

When he saw the old man in the truck, got a good look and saw the side of his face with its bumpkin stupid smile, Jack felt his heart leap up. When Fogarty said, "Streeter from Cairo-he hauls cider, but we never caught him with any," Jack felt the flush in his neck. He had no pistol with him, but he opened the gun rack in the back of the front seat and unclipped one of the.38's. He rolled down the window on his side, renewed.

"Jack, what's going to happen?" Kiki asked.

"Just a little business. Nothing to get excited about."

"Jack, don't get, don't get me, don't get…"

"Just shut up and stay in the car. "

They were on Jefferson Avenue, heading out of Catskill when the trucker saw Jack's pistol pointing at him. Fogarty cruised at equal speed with the truck until Streeter pulled to the side of the road across from a cemetery. Jack was the first out, his pistol pointed upward. He saw the barrels on the truck and quick-counted more than fifteen. Son of a bitch. He saw the shitkicker's cap, country costume, and he hated the man for wearing it. Country son of a bitch, where Jack had to live.

"Get down out of that truck. "

Streeter slid off the seat and stepped down, and Jack saw the second head, another cap on it, sliding across the seat and stepping down, a baby-faced teen-ager with a wide forehead, a widow's peak, and a pointy chin that gave his face the look of a heart.

"How many more you got in there?" Jack said.

"'No more. Just me and the boy."

"Who is he?"

"Bartlett, Dickie Bartlett."

"What's he to you?"

"A helper."

Streeter's moon face was full of rotten teeth and a grin.

"So you're Streeter, the wise guy from Cairo," Jack said.

Streeter nodded, very slightly, the grin stayed in place and Jack punched it, cutting the flesh of the cheekbone.

"Put your hands up higher or I'll split your fucking head."

Jack poked Streeter's chest with the pistol barrel. The Bartlett boy's hands shot up higher than Streeter's. Jack saw Fogarty with a pistol in his hand.

"What's in the barrels?"

"Hard cider," said Streeter through his grin.

"Not beer or white?"

"I don't haul beer, or white either. I ain't in the booze business."

"You better be telling the truth, old man. You know who I am?"

"Yes, I know."

"I know you too. You been hauling too many barrels."

"Haulin's what I do."

"Hauling barrels is dangerous business when they might have beer or white in them."

"Nothing but cider in them barrels."

"We'll see. Now move."

"Move where?"

"Into the car, goddamn it," Jack said, and he slapped Streeter on the back of the head with his gun hand. He knocked off the goddamn stinking cap. Streeter bent to pick it up and turned to Jack with his grin. He couldn't really be grinning.

"Where you taking that cider?"

"Up home, and some over to Bartlett's."

"The kid?"

"His old man."

"You got a still yourself?"

"No."

"Bartlett got a still?"

"Not that I know of. "

"What's all the cider for then?"

"Drink some, make vinegar, bottle some, sell some of that to stores up in the hollow, sell what's left to neighbors. Or anybody."

"Where's the still?"

"Ain't no still I know of."

"Who do you know's got a still?"

"Never hear of nobody with a still."

"You heard I run the only stills that run in this county? You heard that?"

"Yes siree, I heard that."

"So who runs a still takes that much cider?"

"Ain't that much when you cut it up."

"We'll see how much it is," Jack said. He told Kiki to sit in front and he put Streeter and Bartlett in the back seat. He pulled their caps down over their eyes and sat in front with Kiki while Fogarty drove the truck inside the cemetery entrance. Fogarty was gone ten minutes, which passed in silence, and when he came back, he said, "Looks like it's all hard cider. Twenty-four barrels." And he slipped behind the wheel. Jack rode with his arm over the back seat and his pistol pointed at the roof. No one spoke all the way to Acra, and Streeter and Bartlett barely moved. They sat with their hands in their laps and their caps over their eyes. When they got out of the car inside the garage, Jack made them face the wall and tied their hands behind them. Fogarty backed the car out, closed the door, and took Kiki inside the house. Jack sat Streeter and Bartlett on the floor against a ladder.

Shovels hung over the old man's head like a set of assorted guillotines. Jack remembered shovels on the wall of the cellar in The Village where the Neary mob took him so long ago when they thought he'd hijacked a load of their beer-and he had. They tied him to a chair with wire around his arms and legs, then worked him over. They got weary and left him, bloody and half conscious, to go to sleep. He was fully awake and moved his arms back and forth against the wire's twist until he ripped his shirt. He sawed steadily with the wire until it ripped the top off his right bicep and let him slip his arm out of the bond. He climbed up a coal chute and out a window, leaving pieces of the bicep on the twist of wire, and on the floor: skin, flesh, plenty of blood. Bled all the way home. Bicep flat now. Long, rough scar there now. Some Nearys paid for that scar.

He looked at the old man and saw the ropes hanging on the wall behind him, can of kerosene in the corner, paintbrushes soaking in turpentine. Rakes, pickax. Old man another object. Another tool. Jack hated all tools that refused to yield their secrets. Jack was humiliated before the inanimate world. He hated it, kicked it when it affronted him. He shot a car once that betrayed him by refusing to start. Blew holes in its radiator.

The point where the hanging rope bellied out on the garage wall looked to Jack like the fixed smile on Streeter's face. Streeter was crazy to keep smiling. He wasn't worth a goddamn to anybody if he was crazy. You can kill crazies. No loss. Jack made ready to kill yet another man. Wilson, the first one he killed. Wilson, the card cheat. Fuck you, cheater, you're dead. I'm sorry for your kids.

In the years after he dumped Wilson in the river Jack used Rothstein's insurance connections to insure family men he was going to remove from life. He made an arrangement with a thieving insurance salesman, sent him around to the family well in advance of the removal date. When the deal was sealed, give Jack a few weeks, then bingo!

'"You got any insurance, old man?"

"No."

"You got any family?"

"Wife."

"Too bad. She's going to have to bury you best she can. Unless you tell me where that still is you got hid."

"Ain't got no still hid nowheres, mister. I told you that."

"Better think again, old man. You know where the still is, kid?" Dickie Bartlett shook his head and turned to the wall. Only a kid. But if Jack killed one, he would have to kill two. Tough break, kid.

"Take off your shoes."

Streeter slowly untied the rawhide laces of his high shoe-boots without altering his grin. He pulled off one shoe and Jack smelled his foot, his sweaty white wool sock, his long underwear tucked inside the sock. Country leg, country foot, country stink. Jack looked back at the grin, which seemed as fixed as the shape of the nose that hovered above it. But you don't fix a grin permanently. Jack knew. That old son of a bitch is defying me, is what he thought. He hasn't got a chance and yet he's defying Jack Diamond's law, Jack Diamond's threat, Jack Diamond himself. That grinning facade is a fake and Jack will remove it. Jack knows all there is to know about fake facades. He remembered his own grin in one of the newspapers as he went into court in Philadelphia. Tough monkey, smilin' through. They won't get to me. And then in the courtroom he knew how empty that smile was, how profoundly he had failed to create the image he wanted to present to the people of Philadelphia, not only on his return but all his life, all through boyhood, to live down the desertion charge in the Army, and, worse, the charge that he stole from his buddies. Not true. So many of the things they said about Jack were untrue and yet they stuck.

He was a nobody in the Philadelphia court. Humiliated. Arrested coming in, then kicked out. And stay out, you bum. I speak for the decent people of this city in saying that Philadelphia doesn't want you any more than Europe did. Vomit. Puke, puke. Vomit. Country feet smelled like vomit. Jack's family witnessing it all in the courtroom. Jack always loved them in his way. Jack dumped about eight cigarettes out of his Rameses pack and pocketed them. He twisted the pack and lit it with a loose match, showed the burning cellophane and paper to Streeter, who never lost his grin. Jack said, "Where's the still?"

"Jee-zus, mister, I ain't seen no still. I ain't and that's a positive fact, I tell you."

Jack touched the fire to the sock and then to the edge of the underwear. Streeter shook it and the fire went out. Jack burned his own hand, dropped the flaming paper and let it burn out. Fogarty came back in then, pistol in hand.

"Kneel on him," Jack said, and with pistol pointed at Streeter's head, Fogarty knelt on the old man's calf. The pistol wasn't loaded, Fogarty said later. He was taking no chances shooting anybody accidentally. It had been loaded when they stopped Streeter's truck because he felt when he traveled the roads with Jack he was bodyguard as well as chauffeur, and he would stand no chance of coping with a set of killers on wheels if his gun was empty. But now he wasn't a bodyguard anymore.

"He's a tough old buzzard," Jack said.

"Why don't you tell him what he wants to know?" Fogarty said conspiratorially to Streeter.

"Can't tell what I don't know," Streeter said. The grin was there. The flame had not changed it. Jack knew now he would remove that grin with flame. Finding the still was receding in importance, but such a grin of defiance is worth punishing. Asks for punishing. Will always get what it asks for. The Alabama sergeant who tormented Jack and other New York types in the platoon because of their defiance. "New Yoahk mothahfucks." Restriction. Punishment. KP over and over. Passes denied. And then Jack swung and got the son bitch in the leg with an iron bar. Had to go AWOL after that, couldn't even go back. That was when they got him, in New Yoahk. Did defiance win the day for Jack? It was satisfying, but Jack admits it did not win the day. Should have shot the son bitch in some ditch off-post. Let the rats eat him.

"Where's that still, you old son bitch?"

"Hey, mister, I'd tell you if I knew. You think I'd keep anythin' back if I knew? I dunno, mister, I just plain dunno."

Jack lit the sock, got it flaming this time, and the old man yelled, shook his whole leg again and rocked Fogarty off it. The flame went out again. Jack looked, saw the grin. The old man is totally insane. Should be bugged. Crazy as they make 'em. Crazy part of a man that takes any kind of punishment, suffers all humiliations. No pride.

"You old son bitch, ain't you got no pride? Tell me the goddamn answer to my question. Ain't you got no sense? I'm gonna hang your ass off a tree you don't tell me what I want to know. "

But you can't really punish a crazy like that, Jack. He loves it. That's why he's sitting there grinning. Some black streak across his brain makes him crazier than a dog with his head where his ass oughta be. He's making you crazy now, Jack. Got you talking about hanging. You can't be serious, can you?

"All right, old man, get up. Speed, get that rope."

"What you got in mind, Jack?"

"I'm gonna hang his Cairo country ass from that maple tree outside."

"Hey," said Streeter, "you ain't really gonna hang me?"

"I'm gonna hang you like a side of beef," Jack said.

"I'm gonna pop your eyes like busted eggs. I'm gonna make your tongue stretch so far out you'll be lickin' your toes."

"I ain't done nothin' to nobody, mister. Why you gonna hang me?"

"Because you're lyin' to me, old man."

"No, sir, I ain't lyin'. I ain't lyin'."

"How old are you right now?"

"Fifty."

"You ain't as old as I thought, but you ain't gonna be fifty-one. You're a stubborn buzzard, but you ain't gonna be fifty-one. Bring him out. "

Fogarty led the old man outside with only one shoe, and Jack threw the rope over the limb of the maple. He tied a knot, looped the rope through the opening in the knot-a loop that would work like an animal's choker chain-and slipped it over Streeter's neck. Jack pulled open a button, one down from the collar, to give the rope plenty of room.

"Jack," Fogarty said, shaking his head. Jack tugged the rope until he took up all the slack and the rope rose straight up from Streeter's neck.

"One more chance," Jack said. "Where is that goddamn still you were headed for?"

"Jee-zus Keh-ryst, mister, there just ain't no still, you think I'm kiddin' you'? You got a rope around my neck. You think I wouldn't tell you anything I knew if I knew it? Jee-zus, mister, I don't want to die."

"Listen, Jack. I don't think we ought to do this."

Fogarty was trembling. The poor goddamn trucker. Like watching a movie and knowing how it ends, Fogarty said later.

"Shitkicker!" Jack yelled. "Where is it? SHITKICKER! SHITKICKER!"

Before the old man could answer, Jack tugged at the rope and up went Streeter. But he had worked one hand loose and he made a leap as Jack tugged. He grabbed the rope over his head and held it.

"Retie the son of a bitch," Jack said, and Fogarty knew then he was party to a murder. Full accomplice now and the tied-up Bartlett kid a witness. There would be a second murder on this night. Fogarty, how far you've come under Jack's leadership. He tied the old man's hands, and Jack then wound the rope around both his own arms and his waist so it wouldn't slip, and he jerked it again and moved backward. The old man's eyes bugged as he rose off the ground. His tongue came out and he went limp. The Bartlett kid yelled and then started to cry, and Jack let go of the rope. The old man crumpled.

"He's all right," Jack said. "The old son of a bitch is too miserable to die. Hit him with some water."

Fogarty half-filled a pail from an outside faucet and threw it on Streeter. The old man opened his eyes.

"You know, just maybe he's telling the truth," Fogarty said.

"He's lying."

"He's doing one hell of a good job."

Jack took Fogarty's pistol and waved it under Streeter's nose. At least he can t kill him with that, Fogarty thought.

"It's too much work to hang you," Jack said to Streeter, "so I'm gonna blow your head all over the lawn. I'll give you one more chance."

The old man shook his head and closed his eyes. His grin was gone. I finally got rid of that, is what Jack thought. But then he was suddenly enraged again at the old man. You made me do this to you, was the nature of Jack's accusation. You turned me into a goddamn sadist because of your goddamn stinking country stubbornness. He laid the barrel of the pistol against the old man's head and then he thought: Fogarty. And he checked the cylinder. No bullets. He gave Fogarty a look of contempt and handed him back the empty pistol. He took his own.38 from his coat pocket, and Streeter, watching everything, started to tremble, his lip turned down now. Smile not only gone, but that face unable even to remember that it had smiled even once in all its fifty years. Jack fired one shot. It exploded alongside Streeter's right ear. The old man's head jerked and Jack fired again, alongside the other ear.

"You got something to tell me now, shitkicker?" Jack said.

The old man opened his eyes, saucers of terror. He shook his head. Jack put the pistol between his eyes, held it there for seconds of silence. Then he let it fall away with a weariness. He stayed on his haunches in front of Streeter, just staring. Just staring and saying nothing.

"You win, old man," he finally said. "You're a tough monkey."

Jack stood up slowly and pocketed his pistol. Fogarty and one of the porch guards drove Streeter and Bartlett back to their truck. Fogarty ripped out their ignition wires and told them not to call the police. He drove back to Acra and slept the sleep of a confused man.

When Speed had brought her from the car into the house, Kiki had said to him, "What's going to happen with those men?"

"I don't know. Probably just some talk."

"Oh, God, Joe, don't let him hurt them. I don't want to be mixed up in that kind of shit again, please, Joe."

"I'll do what I can do, but you know Jack's got a mind of his own."

"I'll go and see him. Or maybe you could tell him to come in. Maybe if I asked him not to do anything, for me, don't do it for me, he wouldn't do it."

"I'll tell him you said it."

"You're a nice guy, Joe."

"You go to bed and stay upstairs. Do what I tell you. "

"Yes, Joe."

Kiki was thinking that Joe really and truly was a nice guy and that maybe she could make it with him if only she wasn't tied up with Jack. Of course, she wouldn't do anything while she was thick with Jack. But it was nice to think about Joe and his red hair and think about how nice he would be to play with. He was nicer than Jack, but then she didn't love Jack because he was nice.

She worried whether Jack had killed the two men when she later heard the two shots and the screaming. But she had thought the worst at the Monticello, thought Jack had killed those men when they had really tried to kill him. She didn't want to think bad things about Jack again. But she lived half an hour with uncertainty. Then Jack came into her room and said the men were gone and nobody got hurt.

"Did you get the information you wanted'?" she asked.

"Yeah, I don't want to talk about it."

"Oh, good. Are you done now?"

"All done."

"Then we can finish the evening the way we intended."

"It's finished."

"I mean really finished."

"And I mean really finished. "

He kissed her on the cheek and went to his bedroom. He didn't come back to see her or ask her to come to him. She tried to sleep, but she kept wanting to finish the evening, continue from where she and Jack had left off in the car in the silence and the chilliness and the brightness of the new moon on the open fields. She wanted to lie alongside Jack and comfort him because she knew from the way he was behaving that he had the blues. If she went in and loved him, he would feel better. Yet she felt he didn't really want that, and she rolled over and tossed and turned, curled and uncurled for another hour before she decided: Maybe he really does want it. So then, yes, she ought to do it. She got up and very quietly tiptoed into Jack's room and stood naked alongside his bed. Jack was deeply asleep. She touched his ear and ran her fingers down his cheek, and all of a sudden she was looking down the barrel of his.38 and he was bending her fingers back so far she was screaming. Nobody came to help her. She thought of that later. Jack could have killed her and nobody would have tried to stop him. Not even Joe.

"You crazy bitch! What were you trying to do?"

"I just wanted to love you."

"Never, never wake me up that way. Don't ever touch me. Call me and I'll hear it, but don't touch me."

Kiki was weeping because her hand hurt so much. She couldn't bend her fingers. When she tried to bend them, she fainted. When she came to, she was in a chair and Jack was all white in the face, looking at her. He was slapping her cheek lightly just as she came out of it.

"It hurts an awful lot."

"We'll go get a doctor. I'm sorry, Marion, I'm really sorry I hurt you."

"I know you are, Jack."

"I don't want to hurt you."

"I know you don't."

"I love you so much I'm half nuts sometimes."

"Oh, Jackie, you're not nuts, you're wonderful and I don't care if you hurt me. It was an accident. It was all my fault."

"We'll go get the doc out of bed."

"He'll fix me up line, and then we can come back and finish the evening."

"Yeah, that's a swell idea."

The coroner was Jack's doctor, and they got him out of bed. He bandaged her hand and said she'd have to have a cast made at the hospital next day, and he gave her pills for her pain. She told him she'd been rehearsing her dance steps and had fallen down. He didn't seem to believe that, but Jack didn't care what he believed, so she didn't either. After the doctor's they went back home. Jack said he was too tired to make love and that they'd do it in the morning. Kiki tossed and turned for a while and then went down to the kitchen and checked the fudge again, felt it with the fingers of her good hand. It was still goo, so she put it out on the back porch for the cat.

Clem Streeter told his story around Catskill for years. He was a celebrity because of it, stopped often by people and asked for another rendition. I was being shaved in a Catskill barber chair the year beer came back, and Jack was, of course, long gone. But Clem was telling the story yet again for half a dozen locals.

"The jedge in Catskill axed me what I wanted the pistol permit for," he said, "and I told him 'bout how that Legs Diamond feller burned my feet and hung me from a sugar maple th'other night up at his garage. 'That so?' axed the jedge. 'I jes told you it were,' I said. People standin' 'round the courthouse heard what we was sayin' and they come over to listen better. 'You made a complaint yet against this Diamond person?' the jedge axes me. But I tell him, only complaint I made so far was to the wife. That jedge he don't know what to do with hisself he's so took out by what I'm sayin'. I didn't mean to upset the jedge. But he says, 'I guess we better get the sheriff on this one and maybe the DA,' and they both of 'em come in after a little bit and I tell 'em my story, how they poked guns outen the winders of their car and we stopped the truck, me and Dickie Bartlett. They made us git down, but I didn't git fast enough for Diamond, so he hit me with his fist and said, 'Put up your hands or I'll split your efiin' head.' Then they hauled us up to Diamond's place with our caps pulled down so we wouldn't know where we was goin', but I see the road anyway out under the side of the cap and I know that place of his with the lights real well. Am I sure it was Diamond, the jedge axes. 'Acourse I'm sure. I seen him plenty over at the garage in Cairo. He had a woman in the car with him, and I recognized the other feller who did the drivin' 'cause he stopped my truck another night I was haulin' empty barrels 'bout a month back.' 'So this here's Streeter, the wise guy from Cairo,' Diamond says to me and he cuffs me on the jaw with his fist, just like that, afore I said a word. Then up in the garage they tried to burn me up. 'What'd they do that for?' the jedge axes me, and I says,"Cause he wants to know where there's a still I'm s'posed to know about. But I told Diamond I don't know nothin' 'bout no still.' And the jedge says, 'Why'd he think you did?' And I says, "Cause I'm haulin' twenty-four barrels of hard cider I'd picked up down at Post's Cider Mill.' 'Who for?' says the jedge. 'For me,' I says. 'I like cider. Drink a bunch of it.' 'Cause I ain't about to tell no jedge or nobody else 'bout the still me and old Cy Bartlett got between us. We do right nice business with that old still. Make up to a hundred, hundred and thirty dollars apiece some weeks off the fellers who ain't got no stills and need a little 'jack to keep the blood pumpin'. That Diamond feller, he surely did want to get our still away from us. I knew that right off. Did me a lot of damage, I'll say. But sheeeeee. Them fellers with guns is all talk. Hell, they don't never kill nobody. They just like to throw a scare into folks so's they can get their own way. Son of a bee if I was gonna give up a hundred and thirty dollars a week for some New York feller."