Legs

JACK AMONG THE MAIDS

The Streeter incident took place in mid-April, 1931. Eight days later, the following document was released in the Capitol at Albany:

Pursuant to section 62 of the Executive Law, I hereby require that you, the Attorney General of this state, attend in person or by your assistants or deputies, a regular special and trial term of the Supreme Court appointed to be held in and for the County of Greene for the month of April, 1931, and as such term as may hereafter be continued, and that you in person or by said assistants or deputies appear before the grand jury or grand juries which shall be drawn and sit for any later term or terms of said court for the purpose of managing and conducting in said court and before said grand jury and said other grand juries, any and all proceedings, examinations and inquiries, and any and all criminal actions and proceedings which may be taken by or before said grand jury concerning any and all kinds and-or-criminal offences, alleged to have been committed by John Diamond, also known as Jack (Legs) Diamond and-or-any person or persons acting in concert with him, and further to manage, prosecute and conduct the trial of any indictments found by said grand jury or grand juries at said term or terms of said court or of any other court at which any and all such indictments may hereafter be tried, and that in person or by your assistants or deputies you supersede the district attorney of the County of Greene in all matters herein specified and you exercise all the powers and perform all the duties conferred upon you by Section 62 of the Executive Law and this requirement thereunder; and that in such proceedings and actions the District Attorney of Greene County shall only exercise such powers and perform such duties as are required of him by you or by the assistants or deputies attorney general so attending.

Franklin Delano Roosevelt Governor of the State of New York

Jack thus became the first gangster of the Prohibition Era to have the official weight of an entire state, plus the gobble of its officialese, directed at him. I find this notable. I did what little I could to throw a counterweight when the time came. I cited the whole affair as a cynical political response to the harsh spotlight that Judge Seabury, his reformers, and the Republican jackals were, at the moment, shining on the gangsterism and corruption so prevalent in New York City's Tammany Hall, with Democratic Gentleman Jimmy Walker the chief illuminated goat. FDR, I argued when I pleaded Jack's case in the press, was making my client the goat in a Republican stronghold. I voiced particular outrage at superseding the Greene County District Attorney.

But my counterweight didn't weigh much. Jack went to jail and I understood the spadework done in Albany by Van Deusen's vigilantes. FDR even sent his personal bodyguard to Catskill as an observer when the swarm of state police and state attorneys moved toward Jack's jugular.

Knute Rockne told his men: "Don't be a bad loser, but don't lose. "

Fogarty got me out of bed to tell me Jack had been arrested and that he himself was going into hiding. Jack and Kiki were in the parlor at Acra, and Fogarty was playing pool in the cottage when the trooper rang the bell under the second step. Three times. Jack's straight neighbors thought three was the insider's ring, but it was the ring only for straights.

Jack tried to talk the trooper into letting him surrender in the morning by himself, avoid the ignominy of it, but the trooper said nix, and so Jack wound up on a hard cot in a white-washed third-floor cell of the county jail. Tidy and warm, not quite durance vile, as one journalist wrote, but vile enough for the King Cobra of the Catskills, as he was now known in the press.

I worked on the bail, which was a formidable twenty-five thousand dollars: ten each for assaulting Streeter and Bartlett, five for the kidnapping. Uh-oh, I said, when I heard the news, heard especially how young Bartlett was. What we now are dealing with, I told Fogarty, and Jack too, is not a bootleggers' feud, which is what it was in a left-handed way, but the abduction of children in the dead of night. Not a necessary social misdemeanor, as most bootlegging was contemporaneously regarded, but a high crime in any age.

I called Warren Van Deusen to see if I could pry Jack loose by greasing local pols, but found him haughtily supporting the state's heavy anti-Jack thrust. "Kidnapping kids now, is he? I hear he's holding up bread truck drivers too. What's next? Disemboweling old ladies?" I wrote off Warren as unreliable, a man given to facile outrage, who didn't understand the process he was enmeshed in.

It has long been my contention that Jack was not only a political pawn through Streeter, but a pawn of the entire decade. Politicians used him, and others like him, to carry off any vileness that served their ends, beginning with the manipulation of strikebreakers as the decade began and ending with the manipulation of stockbrokers at the end of the crash, a lovely, full, capitalistic circle. Thereafter the pols rejected Jack as unworthy, and tried to destroy him.

But it was Jack and a handful of others-Madden, Schultz, Capone, Luciano-who reversed the process, who became manipulators of the pols, who left a legacy of money and guns that would dominate the American city on through the l970's. Jack was too interested in private goals to see the potential that 1931 offered to the bright student of urban life. Yet he was unquestionably an ancestral paradigm for modern urban political gangsters, upon whom his pioneering and his example were obviously not lost.

I hesitate to develop all the analogies I see in this, for I don't want to trivialize Jack's achievement by linking him to lesser latter-day figures such as Richard Nixon, who left significant history in his wake, but no legend; whose corruption, overwhelmingly venal and invariably hypocritical, lacked the admirably white core fantasy that can give evil a mythical dimension. Only boobs and shitheads rooted for Nixon in his troubled time, but heroes and poets followed Jack's tribulations with curiosity, ambivalent benevolence, and a sense of mystery at the meaning of their own response.

Fogarty, sitting at a bar and waiting for a female form to brighten his life, and meanwhile telling a story about a gang-bang, felt alive for the first time in a week, for the first time since they hauled Jack in and he took off up the mountain. A week in a cabin alone, only one day out for groceries and the paper, is enough to grow hair on a wart, shrivel a gonad.

Fogarty found solitude unbearably full of evaporated milk and tuna fish, beans and cheese, stale bread and bad coffee, memories of forced bed-rest, stultifying boredom with one's own thought. And then to run out of candles. The old shack on stilts was down the mountain from Haines Falls, half a mile in an old dirt road, then a quarter of a mile walk with the groceries. He walked down from the cabin to his old car every morning and every night to make sure it was still there and to start it. Then he walked alone in the woods looking at the same trees, same squirrels, same chipmunks and rabbits, same goddamn birds with all that useless song, and came back and slept and ate and thought about women, and read the only book in the cabin, The World Almanac. He related to the ads-no end to life's jokes:

Last Year's Pay Looks Like Small Change to These Men Today; Raised Their Pay 500% When They Discovered Salesmanship… Have YOU Progressed During the Past Three Years?… Ask Your Dealer for Crescent Guns, 12-16-20-410 Gauge… A Challenge Made Me Popular!… This Man Wouldn't Stay Down… It Pays to Read Law… Success-Will You Pay the Price?… Finest of All Cast Bronze Sarcophagi.

Fogarty closed the book, took a walk in the dark. A wild bird call scared him, and he retreated to the cabin to find only half a candle left, not enough to get him through the night. It's time, he said. It was ten o'clock. The Top o' the Mountain House would have some action and he needed a drink, needed people, needed a look at a woman, needed news. His old relic of a Studebaker started all right. Would he ever again see his new Olds, sitting back in the shed behind his house in Catskill? No chance to take it when he left Jack's in such a hurry.

There were four men at the bar, two couples at one table in the back room. He checked them all, knew nobody, but they looked safe. The bartender, a kid named Reilly he'd talked to, but never pressured, was okay. Fogarty ordered applejack on ice. He made it, sold it, liked it. Jack hated it. He had three and was already half an hour into a conversation with Reilly, feeling good again, telling about the night he and eight guys were lined up in a yard on 101st Street for a girl named Maisie who was spread out under a bush, taking on the line.

"I was about fourth and didn't even know who she was. We just heard it was on and got in line. Then when I saw her, I said to myself, 'Holy beazastards,' because I knew Maisie, and her brother Rick is my pal and he's in line right behind me. So I said to him, 'I just got a look, she's a dog, let's beat it,' and I grabbed his arm and pulled, but he was ready, you know, and I couldn't talk him out of it. He had to see her for himself. And when he saw her, he pulled off the guy on her and whipped him, and then beat hell out of Maisie. Next day everybody had trouble looking Rick in the eye. Guys he knew were there all said they were behind him in the line and didn't know who she was either. Maisie was back a couple of nights later, and we all got her without Rick breaking it up. "

Fogarty paused nostalgically. "I got in line twice."

The barman liked the story, bought Fogarty a drink, and said, "You know, was a guy in here last night askin' about your friend Diamond. Guy with a bandage on his eye."

"A bandage? You don't mean an eyepatch?"

"No, a bandage. Adhesive and gauze stuff."

"What'd he want?"

"Dunno. Asks has Jack Diamond been in much and when was the last time."

"You know him?"

"Never seen him before."

"You remember a guy named Murray? Called him The Goose."

"No."

"Nuts."

"You know this guy with the eye?"

"'I don't know. Could be he's a friend of ours. Your phone working?"

"End of the bar."

Fogarty felt the blood rise in his chest, felt needed. Reilly had told him Jack was out on bail, so it was important for him to know Murray was around, if he was. All week in the woods Fogarty had cursed Jack, vowed to quit him, leave the country; that if this thing straightened out, he'd find a new connection; that he couldn't go on working with a man who wasn't playing with a full deck. Northmp first, then Streeter. Crazy. But now that feeling was gone, and he wanted to talk to Jack, warn him, protect his life.

"Don't touch that phone."

Fogarty turned to see old man Brady, the owner, standing alongside him with his hand on a pistol in his belt.

"Get out of here," Brady said.

"I just want to make a call."

"Make it someplace else. You or none of your bunch are welcome here. We're all through kissing your ass."

Brady's beer belly and soiled shirt pushed against the pistol. The spiderweb veins in Brady's cheeks Fogarty would remember when he was dying, for they would look like the crystalline glaze that covered his own eyes in his last days. Brady with the whiskey webs. Old lush. Throwing me out.

"If it wasn't for your father," Brady said, "I'd shoot you now. He was a decent man. I don't know how in the hell he ever got you."

Fogarty would remember that drops of sweat had run off Brady's spiderwebs one day long ago, the day Fogarty stood in front of him at the bar and told him how much of Jack's beer he would handle a week. Told him. Two of Jack's transient gunmen stood behind him to reinforce the message.

"You're lucky I don't call the troopers and turn you in," old Brady said to him now, "but I wouldn't do that to a son of your father's. Remember the favor that decent man did for you from his grave, you dirty whelp. You dirty, dirty whelp. Go on, get out of here."

He moved his fingers around the butt of his pistol, and Fogarty went out into the night to find Jack.

Fogarty stopped the car and loaded his pistol, Eddie Diamond's.32. If he saw Murray, he would shoot first, other things being equal. He wouldn't shoot him in public. Fogarty marveled at his own aggression, but then he knew The Goose, knew Jack's story of how The Goose stalked a man once who went to the same movie house every week. The Goose sat in the lobby until the man arrived, then shoved a gun in his face, and blew half the head off the wrong man. A week later he was in the same lobby when the right man arrived, and he blew off half the correct head. Jack liked to tell Goose stories, how Goose once said of himself: "I'm mean as a mad hairy." What would The Goose have done to Streeter? Old man'd be stretched now, and the kid too. Was Fogarty the difference between life and death on that night?

He wanted to buy a paper, find out what was happening. He hadn't asked many questions at the bar, didn't want to seem ignorant. But he knew from a conversation with Marcus after Jack's arrest, plus something Reilly said, that the state was sitting heavily on Jack. Old man Brady's behavior meant everybody'd be tough now. Jack is down and so is Fogarty, so put on your kicking shoes, folks.

Was it all over? No more money ("The boss needs a loan") coming in from the hotels and boardinghouses? No more still? Yes, there would be beer runs. There would always be beer runs. And there were the stashes of booze, if nobody found them. Reilly said four of Jack's men, all picked up at the cottage, were booked on vagrancy, no visible income. But they couldn't say that about Fogarty with his three bank accounts, fifteen thousand dollars deposited in one during the past six months. But he couldn't go near them until he knew his status.

Yet he knew what that had to be. Fugitive. They'd try to hang him by the balls. Jack's closest associate. Jack's pal. Jack's bodyguard. A laugh. But he did carry a loaded gun, finally, just for Jack. Why did Joe Fogarty feel the need to protect Jack Diamond? Because there was a bond.

Friendship. Brothers, in a way. Jack talked about Eddie, gave him Eddie's pistol, and they swapped TB stories. Eddie was a bleeder. Always had the streak in his sputum the last year of his life, almost never out of bed or a wheelchair except when he came to New York to help Jack during the Hotsy. No wonder Jack loved him. Jack cried when he talked about Eddie: "He used to bleed so bad they put ice on his chest, made him suck ice too, and the poor guy couldn't move."

Fogarty knew. He'd seen all that, spent five and a half years in sanitariums, twenty-eight months in bed for twenty-four hours a day. Got up only when they made the bed, a bed bath twice a week. Galloping TB is what Fogarty had, and if they hadn't used the pneumo he'd have been dead long ago. Blew air into his lungs, collapsed it, pushed up the poison. Hole in the bronchus, and when the air went in, the pus came up and out his mouth. A basinful of greenish-yellow pus. But after five months that didn't work anymore and the pus stayed in, and he had to lie still for those years.

Death?

Joe Fogarty wasn't afraid of death anymore, only bleeding. He died every day for years. What he was afraid of was lying still and not dying.

"Remember your fibrosis," the nurses would say.

"Don't raise your arms above your head. Don't even move when you do pee-pee. "

The woodpeckers would come around and tap his chest with stethoscopes and fingers, listen to his percussion. "Cough and say ninety-nine." It must heal, you know. Give yourself a chance to heal. Terrific advice. Bring your tissue together. Heal. Oh, nice. Fight off the poison. Of course. Then show a streak in the sputum and they don't let you brush your teeth by yourself anymore. A long time ago, all that; and Fogarty finally got well. And met Jack. And did he then make up for those months in bed doing nothing? Ahhhhhh.

"So you think The Goose is back?" Jack said.

"Who else'?"

"Maybe you're right. But maybe it was just a one-eyed tourist. Tourists always asking about me. "

"You want to take that chance?"

"Not with The Goose. He'll find a way if he's up here. I should stay away from the window."

"You been going out?"

"No, just sticking close here. But we'll go out now."

"Take me with you," Kiki said. She was alone on the couch, knees visible, no stockings, slippers on. But sweeeet lover, did she look good to the Speeder.

"No," said Jack. "You stay home."

"I don't want to be here alone."

"I'll call the neighbor."

"That old cow, I don't want her here."

"She'll be company. We won't be long."

"Where you going?"

"Down the road, make some calls, then we'll be back."

"You'll be out all night."

"Marion, you're a pain in the ass."

"I'm going back to Chicago."

"That show closed."

"You think that show is the only offer I got out there?"

"You can't come with us. I'll bring home spaghetti."

"I want to do something."

"We'll do something when I get back. We'll eat spaghetti."

"I want to hear some music."

"Turn on the radio. Put on a record."

"Oh, shit, Jack. Shit, shit, shit."

"That's better. Have a sherry."

Fogarty finished his double rye and Jack swigged the last of his coffee royal, and they went out the back door. Jack stopped, said, "We'll take your car. Nobody'd look for me in that jalop."

"Nobody looking for me at all?"

"Not yet, but that don't mean they won't be out with a posse tomorrow. They'll get to you, all right, but tonight you're a free citizen. Take it from me, and Marcus. He's down at the Saulpaugh while this stuff is going on. We talked before you got here. Joe, I'm glad you came down."

Jack clapped him on the shoulder. The old jalop was wheezing along. Fogarty smiled, remembered his plan to break with Jack. What a crazy idea.

Jack had taken a rifle from the hall closet, loaded it with dum-dums, and thrown it on the back seat. He wouldn't carry a pistol with all the heat on. He'd also put on his gray topcoat, fedora, and maroon tie with a black pearl tie tack. Fogarty, you bum, you wore a linty black sweater and those baggy slacks you slept in all week.

"It's like a dog race," Jack said.

"What is?" Fogarty asked, thinking immediately of himself as a dog.

"This thing. I'm the rabbit. And who'll get it first?"

"Nobody gets those rabbits. The dogs always come up empty."

"The feds are coming into it. The state, all the goddamn cops in the East, Biondo and his guinea friends, Charlie Lucky's pals, and now maybe Murray out there, driving around, trying to make a plan. The good thing about Murray is he can never figure out how to get near anybody. Once he gets near you, so long. But unless you figured it out for him, he could think all month without getting the idea to maybe ring the doorbell."

"Maybe you ought to get away from here."

"They're all keeping track of me. Let's see what news we come up with. Hey, you're heating up."

The temperature gauge was near two twenty when they pulled into the parking lot at Jimmy Wynne's Aratoga Inn on the Acra-Catskill Road. Fogarty unscrewed the radiator cap and let it breathe and blow, and then they went inside, Fogarty with his two pistols Jack didn't even know he had. Fogarty was ready for Murray, who was absent from the gathering of twelve at the bar. It was quiet, the musicians on a break. Fogarty asked Dick Fegan, the bartender, bald at twenty-five, if he'd seen Murray. Fegan said he hadn't seen Murray in months, and Jack went for the telephone.

Fogarty dumped four quarts of water into the car radiator and went back in to find Jack off the phone with a Vichy water in front of him, talking about heavyweights to the clarinet player.

Heavyweights. "I lost seven grand on Loughran," Jack was saying. "I thought he was the best, gave seven to five, and he didn't last three rounds. Sharkey murdered him. He says, 'Let me sit down, I don't know where I am,' and then he tried to walk through the ropes. Last time I ever bet on anybody from Philadelphia." Jack will talk to anybody about anything, anytime. Why shouldn't people like him?

"Seven grand," said the clarinet player.

"Yeah, I was crazy."

It seemed like a slip, Jack mentioning money. He never got specific about that, so why now? Must be nervous. Jack went back to the phone and made another call.

"He said he lost seven grand on one tight," the clarinetist said to Fogarty.

"Probably did. He always spent."

"But no more, eh?"

It sounded to Fogarty like a line at a wake. That man in the coffin is dead. Fogarty didn't like the feeling he got from shifting from that thought to a thought about Murray walking in the door. But Murray would have to come through the inn's glassed-in porch. Plenty of time to see him. What made Fogarty think he'd pick the one spot in the mountains where Jack happened to be at this odd moment? Did he think maybe he followed the car? Or that he'd been waiting near here for Jack to show up?

"He's probably still got a few dollars in his pocket," Fogarty said to the clarinetist.

"I wouldn't doubt that."

"You sounded like you did. "

"No, not at all."

"You sounded like you were saying he's a has-been."

"You got me wrong. I didn't mean that at all. Listen, that's not what I meant. Dick, give us a drink here. I was just asking a question. Hell, Jesus, it was just a goddamn silly question."

"I get you now," Fogarty said.

Wasn't it funny how fast Fogarty could turn somebody's head around? Power in the word. In any word from Fogarty. In the way people looked at him. But it was changing. Maybe you wouldn't think so, sitting here at the Aratoga, and Jack being respected and Fogarty being respected, with maybe that hint of new tension in the air. But it definitely was changing. Little signs: Jack's living room being different, messy, papers on the floor, the chairs not where they used to be. Authority slipping away from Fogarty, authority that he knew Jack well, could talk all about him, talk for him. Dirty dishes on the dining room table. Picture of Eddie on the coffee table never there before, which meant something Fogarty didn't understand. The parties at Jack's; they were over too, at least for now. Even priests used to come. Neighbors, sometimes a cop or a judge from the city, actors and musicians and so many beautiful women. Women liked Jack and the feeling rubbed off to the benefit of Jack's friends. Jack the pivot man at every party. Funny son of a bitch when he gets a few drinks in. Fogarty couldn't remember one funny joke Jack ever told, but all his stories were funny. Just the way he used his voice. Yes. The story about Murray shooting the wrong man. Split your gut listening to Jack tell it. A good singing voice, too. Second tenor. Loves barbershop. "My Mother's Rosary." A great swipe in the middle of that. One of Jack's favorites.

"Well, that's some kind of news," Jack said, sitting back down beside Fogarty. "Somebody saw him at the Five O'Clock Club last night."

"Last night? He must've gone back down."

"If he was ever up here."

"Don't you think he must've been?"

"After this, maybe not. He's not the only one-eyed bum in the state. The point is, where is he now? Last night is a long time ago. He could be here in a few hours. They're still checking him out. Give me a small whiskey, Dick."

And he went back to the phone. Everybody was watching him now. Silence at the bar. Whispers. The clarinetist moved away and stayed away. Dick Fegan set up Jack's drink and moved away. They're watching you, too, Joe. Jack's closest associate. Fogarty drank alone while Jack talked on the phone. The whiskey eased his tension, but didn't erase it. Jack came back and sipped his whiskey, all eyes on him again. When he looked up, they looked away. They always watched him, but never with such grim faces. More finality. Man dying alone in an alley. There's Jack Diamond over there, that vanishing species. That pilot fish with him is another endangered item.

"I can't sit still," Jack said, and he stood up behind the barstool. "I been like this for two days. "

"Let's go someplace else. "

"They're going to call me. Then we'll move."

The musicians started up, a decent sound. "Muskrat Ramble." Sounds of life. Memories of dancing. Like old times. Memories of holding women. Got to get back to that. Three-quarters of an hour passed, with Jack moving back and forth between the bar and the phone, then pacing up and down, plenty nervous. If Jack is that nervous, it's worse than Fogarty thought. Pacing. Jack's all alone and he knows it. And you know what that means, Joe? You know who else is alone if Jack is?

On his deathbed, when fibrosis was again relevant to him, Fogarty would recall how aware he was at this moment, not only of being alone, but of being sick again, of being physically weak with that peculiar early weakness in the chest that he recognized so quickly, so intimately. He would recall that he saw Dick Fegan pick up a lemon to squeeze it for a whiskey sour a customer had ordered. The customer was wearing a sport coat with checks so large Fogarty thought of a horse blanket. He would remember he saw these things, also saw Jack move out of his sight, out onto the porch just as the first blast smashed the window.

Fogarty ordered a hot dog and a chocolate milk and watched a fly that had either survived the winter or was getting an early start on the summer. The fiy was inspecting the open hot dog roll.

"Get that goddamn fly off my bun," Fogarty told the Greek.

The Greek was sweaty and hairy. He worked hard. He worked alone in the all-night EAT. Fogarty has a loaded pistol in his pocket, which is something you don't know about Fogarty, Greek. The fly could be a cluster fly. Crazy. Flies into things. Fast, but drunk. Few people realize where the cluster fly comes from. He comes from a goddamn worm. He is an earthworm. A worm that turns into a fly. This is the sort of information you do not come by easily. Not unless you lie on your back for a long, long time and read the only goddamn book or magazine or newspaper in the room. And when you've read it all and there's nobody to talk to you, you read it again and find plenty of things you missed the first time around. All about worms and flies. There is no end to the details of life you can discover when you are flat on your back for a long, long time.

"That goddamn fly is on my bun."

There is a certain amount of sadness in an earthworm turning into a fly. But then it is one hell of a lot better than staying an earthworm or a maggot.

"You gonna let that goddamn fly eat my bun, or do I have to kill the goddamn thing myself?"

The Greek looked at Fogarty for the first time. What he saw made him turn away and find the flyswatter. Naturally the goddamn fiy was nowhere to be found.

Fogarty had parked his 1927 Studebaker in front of the EAT, which was situated on Route 9-W maybe eight or nine miles south of Kingston at a crossroads. The name of the EAT was EAT, and the Greek was apparently the one-man Greek EAT owner who was now looking for the fiy while Fogarty's hot dog was being calcified.

"That's enough on the dog," Fogarty said to the Greek, who was at the other end of the counter and did not see the fly return to the bun. Fogarty saw and he heard his pistol go off at about the same moment the bullet flecked away slivers from the EAT'S wooden cutting board. There was a second and then a third and a fourth report from the pistol. The fourth shot pierced the hot dog roll. None of the shots touched the fly. The Greek fled to a back room after the first shot.

Fogarty rejected the entire idea of a hot dog and left the EAT. He climbed into his Studebaker and nosed onto 9-W, destination Yonkers, his sister Peg's, which he knew was a bad idea, but he'd call first and get Peg's advice on where else he might stay. He could stay nowhere in the Catskills. That world exploded with the ten shotgun blasts from a pair of Browning automatic repeaters, fired at Jack as he paced in and out of the porch of the Aratoga. A pair of shooters fired from the parking lot, then stopped and drove away. Somebody snapped out the lights inside at the sound of those shots and everybody hit the floor. Fogarty heard: "Speed, help me," and he crawled out to the porch to see Jack on his stomach, blood bubbling out of holes in his back.

"Bum shooting," Jack said. "Better luck next time."

But he was flat amid the millions of bits of glass, and hurting, and Fogarty got on the phone and called Padalino, the undertaker, and told him to send over his hearse because he was not calling the cops in yet.

When it was obvious the shooting was over, the musicians and customers came out to look at Jack on the floor of the porch and Dick Fegan went for the phone. But Fogarty said, "No cops until we get out," and everyone waited for Padalino.

"Find Alice, keep an eye on her," Jack said to Fogarty. "Sure, Jack. Sure I will."

"They're putting me in the meat wagon," Jack said when Fogarty and Fegan lifted him gently, carefully into the hearse. By then Fogarty had cut Jack's shirt away and tied up the wounds with clean bar towels. He kept bleeding, but not so much.

"I'll follow you," Fogarty told Padalino, and when they were near Coxsackie, he parked his Studebaker at a closed gas station and got into the hearse alongside Jack. He fed Jack sips of the whiskey he had the presence of mind to take from the bar, tippled two himself, but only two, for he needed to be alert. He kept watching out the window of the rear door. He thought the hearse was being followed, but then it wasn't. Then it was again and then, outside Selkirk, it wasn't anymore. He sat by the rear door of the hearse with a gun in each hand while Jack bled and bled. I know nothing about shooting left-handed, Fogarty thought. But he held both guns, Jack's and Eddie's, a pair. Come on now, you bastards.

"Hurts, Speed. Really hurts. I can't tell where I'm hit."

They'd hit him with four half-ounce pellets. They'd fired ten double-ought shells with nine pellets to a shell. Somebody counted eighty some holes in the windows, the siding, and the inside porch walls. Ninety pellets out of two shotguns, and they only hit him with four, part of one shell. It really was bum shooting, Jack. You ought to be dead, and then some.

But maybe he is by this time, Fogarty thought, for he'd left Jack at the Albany Hospital, checked him into emergency under a fake name, called Marcus and got Padalino to take him back to his car at Coxsackie, Then, with the leftover whiskey in his lap, he headed south, only to have a fly land on his hot dog bun. Bun with a hole in it now.

The temperature gauge on the Studebaker was back in the red, almost to 220 again. He drove toward the first possible water, but saw no houses, no gas station. When the needle reached the top of the gauge and the motor began to steam and clank, he finished the whiskey dregs, shut off the ignition, threw the keys over his shoulder into the weeds and started walking.

Four cars passed him in fifteen minutes. The fifth picked him up when he waved his arms in the middle of the road, and drove him three miles to the roadblock where eight state troopers with shotguns, rifles, and pistols were waiting for him.

Poem from the Albany Times-Union

Long sleeping Rip Van Winkle seems

At last arousing from his dreams,

And reaching for the gun at hand

To drive invaders from his land.

The Catskills peace and quiet deep

Have been too much disturbed for sleep.

The uproars that such shootings make

Have got the sleeper wide awake.

Fogarty called me and asked me to appear for him at the arraignment, which I did. The charges had piled up: Kidnapping, assault, weapons possession, and, in less than two weeks, the federal investigators also charged both him and Jack with multiple Prohibition Law violations. His bail was seventeen thousand five hundred dollars and climbing. He said he knew a wealthy woman, an old flame who still liked him and would help, and I called her. She said she'd guarantee five thousand dollars, all she could get without her husband knowing. Fogarty had more in the bank, enough to cover the bail, but unfortunately his accounts, like Jack's and Alice's, were all sequestered.

Two of Jack's transient henchmen-a strange, flabby young man who wore a black wig that looked like linguine covered with shoe polish, and a furtive little blond rat named Albert-also inquired after my services, but I said I was overloaded.

"What are you going to do about bail?" I asked Fogarty, and he suggested Jack. But Jack was having trouble raising his own, for much of his cash was also impounded. Beyond Jack, the woman, and his own inaccessible account, Fogarty had no idea where to get cash. His new Oldsmobile was repossessed for nonpayment a week after his arrest.

"How do you plan to pay me?" I asked him.

"I can't right now, but that money in the bank is still mine."

"Not if they prove it was booze profits."

"You mean they can take it?"

"I'd say they already have."

I liked Joe well enough-a pleasant, forthright fellow. But my legal career was built on defending not pleasant people, but people who paid my fee. I follow a basic rule of legal practice: Establish the price, get the money, then go to work. Some lawyers dabble in charity cases, which, I suspect, is whitewash for their chicanery more often than not. But I've never needed such washing. It was not one of Jack's problems either. What he did that had a charitable element to it was natural, not compensatory behavior. He liked the woman whose cow needed a shed, and so he had one built. He disliked old Streeter and showed it, which cost him his empire. I've absorbed considerable outrage over Jack's behavior with Streeter, but few people consider that he didn't really hurt the old man. A few burns to the feet and ankles are picayune compared to what might have happened. I understand behavior under stress, and I know Streeter lived to an old age and Jack did not, principally because Jack, when tested, was really not the Moloch he was made out to be.

Seeing events from this perspective, I felt and still feel justified in defending Jack. Fogarty took a fall-twelve and a half to fifteen, but served only six because of illness. I feel bad that anyone has to go to prison, but Fogarty was Jack's spiritual brother, not mine, and I am neither Jesus Christ nor any lesser facsimile. I save my clients when I can, but I reserve the right of selective salvation.

Jack took pellets in the right lung, liver, and back, and his left arm was again badly fractured. The pellet in his lung stayed there and seemed to do him little harm. The papers had him near death for three days, but Doc Madison, my own physician, operated on him and said he probably wasn't even close to dying. He beat off an infection, was out of danger in ten days, and out of the hospital in four and a half weeks. One hundred troopers lined the road for forty-seven miles between Albany and Catskill the day he left the hospital for jail, to discourage loyalists from snatching away FDR's prize. New floodlights were installed on the Greene County jail (lit up the world wherever he went, Jack did), and the guard trebled to keep the star boarders inside: Jack, Fogarty, and Oxie, who had gained fifty pounds in the eight months he'd been there. The feds indicted Jack on fourteen charges: coercion, Sullivan Law and Prohibition Law violations, conspiracy etc., and it was two weeks before we could raise the new bail to put him back on the street. It really wasn't the street, but the luxurious Kenmore Hotel in Albany, a suite of rooms protected by inside and downstairs guards. The troopers and the revenue men continued their probing of the mountains. They found Jack's books with records of his plane rentals, his commissioning the building of an oceangoing speedboat. They found the empty dovecotes where he kept his carrier pigeons, his way of beating the phone taps. They found his still on the Biondo farm, and, from the records and notations, they also began turning up stashes of whiskey, wine, and cordials of staggering dimension.

The neatly kept files and records showed Jack's tie-in with five other mobs: Madden's, Vannie Higgins', Coll's, and two in Jersey; distribution tie-ins throughout eighteen counties in the state; brewery connections in Troy, Fort Edward, Coney Island, Manhattan, Yonkers, and Jack's (formerly Charlie Northrup's) plant at Kingston; plus dozens of storage dumps and way stations all through the Adirondacks and Catskills, from the Canadian border to just west of Times Square.

The first main haul was evaluated at a mere $l0,000 retail, but they kept hauling and hauling. Remember these booze-on-hand statistics the next time anyone tells you Jack ran a two-bit operation. (Source, federal): 350,000 pints and 300,000 quarts of rye whiskey, worth $4 a pint retail, or about $3.8 million; 200,000 quarts of champagne at $10 a bottle, or $2 million; 100,000 half-kegs of wine worth $2.5 million, plus 80,000 fifths of cordials and miscellany for a grand estimated total of $10 million. Not a bad accumulation for a little street kid from Philly.

Catskill was looking forward to Jack's trial, which was going to be great for tourism. The first nationwide radio hookup of any trial in American history was planned, and I think somehow they would've sold tickets to it. A hundred businessmen, many of them hotel and boardinghouse operators, paying up to three hundred dollars in seasonal tribute to the emperor, held a meeting at the Chamber of Commerce, a meeting remarkable for its anonymity. Fifty newsmen were in town covering every development, but none of the hundred attendees at that meeting were identified.

What they did was unanimously ratify a proclamation calling on one another not to be afraid to testify against Jack and the boys. Getting tough with the wolf in the cage. There was even talk around town of burning down Jack's house. And finally, what Warren Van Deusen had been trying and not trying to tell me about Jack was that half a hundred people had written FDR letters over the past two months, detailing Jack's depredations. It was that supply of complaints, capped by the Streeter episode, which fired old Franklin to do what he did. That and politics.

The abandoned getaway car of Jack's would-be killers turned up with a fiat tire on Prospect Avenue in Catskill, behind the courthouse. The Browning repeaters were still in it, along with a Luger, a.38 Smith and Wesson, and two heavy Colt automatics with two-inch barrels, all fully loaded. The car had a phony Manhattan registration in the name of Wolfe, a nice touch, and when perspective was gained, nobody blamed Murray for the big do. Too neat. Too well planned. A Biondo job was Jack's guess.

My chief contribution to the history of these events was to snatch the circus away from the Catskill greed mob. They squawked that Jack was robbing them again, taking away their chance to make a big tourist dollar. What I did was win us a change of venue on grounds that a fair trial was impossible in Greene County. The judge agreed and FDR didn't fight us. He hopscotched us up to Rensselaer County. With Troy, the county seat, being my old stamping grounds, I felt like Br'er Rabbit being tossed into the briar patch.

Attorney General Bennett paid homage to Jack at the annual communion breakfast of the Holy Name Society of the Church of St. Rose of Lima in Brooklyn. In celebration of Mother's Day he said that if men of Diamond's type had listened to the guidance of their mothers, they would not be what they were today.

"One of the greatest examples of mother's care," the attorney general said, "is the result which the lack of it has shown in the life of Legs Diamond. Diamond never had a mother's loving care nor the proper training. Environment has played a large part in making him the notorious character he is today. A mother is the greatest gift a man ever had."

Alice came out of the elevator, walked softly on the rich, blue carpet toward the suite, and saw a form which stopped all her random thought about past trouble and future anguish. The light let her see the hairdo, and the hair was chestnut, not Titian; and the face was hidden under half a veil on the little clawclutch of a maroon hat. But Alice knew Kiki when she saw her, didn't she? Kiki was locking the door to the room next to Alice's. Then she came toward the elevator, seeming not to recognize Alice. Was it her? Alice had seen her in the flesh only once. She was smaller now than her photos made her out to be. And younger. Her face looked big in the papers. And at the police station. She had sat there at the station and let them take her picture. Crossed her legs for them.

She passed within inches of Alice, explaining herself with the violent fumes of her perfume. It was her. But if it truly was, why didn't she give some form of recognition, some gesture, some look? Alice decided that, finally, Kiki didn't have the courage to say hello. Coward type. Brazen street slut. Values of an alleycat. Rut whore. Was it really her? Why was she here? Would Jack know?

Kiki saw Alice coming as soon as she stepped out of the room, and she immediately turned away to lock the door. She recognized the fat calves under the long skirt with the ragged hem. On the long chance Alice wouldn't recognize her, Kiki chose to ignore her, for she feared Alice would turn her in. Kiki the fugitive. But would Alice run that risk? Jack would kill her for that, wouldn't he? Kitchen cow.

Why did life always seem to be saltwater life for Kiki, never life with a sweetness? Violence always taking Jack away. Violence always bringing back the old sow. Meat and potatoes pig. Why was fate so awful to Kiki? And then for people to say she had put the finger on Jack. What an awful thing to think. The cow passed her by and said nothing. Didn't recognize her. Kiki kept on walking to the elevator, then turned to see Alice entering the room next to Kiki's own. But how could that be? Would Alice break into Kiki's room? But for what? Why would she rent a room next to Kiki's? How would she know which one Kiki was in? Kiki would tell Jack about this, all right. But, Fat Mama, why are you here?

The Kenmore had status appeal to Jack: historic haven of gentility from the mauve decade until Prohibition exploded the purple into scarlet splashes. Its reputation was akin to Saratoga's Grand Union in Diamond Jim's and Richard Canfield's day. It was where Matthew Arnold stayed when he came to Albany, and Mark Twain too, on the night he lobbied for osteopathy in the Capitol. It was where Ulysses S. Grant occasionally dined. Al Smith's son lived there when Al was governor, and it was the dining room where any governor was most likely to turn up in the new century. It boasted eventually of Albany's longest bar, always busy with the chatter of legislators, the room where a proper gentleman from Albany's Quality Row could get elegantly swozzled among his peers.

Sure Jack knew this, even if he didn't know the details, for the tradition was visible and tangible, in the old marble, in the polished brass and mahogany, in the curly maple in the lobby, in the stained glass, and the enduring absence of the hoi polloi. Jack was always tuned in to any evidence of other people's refinement.

He dominates more memories of the place even now than Vincent Lopez or Rudy Vallee or Phil Romano or Doc Peyton or the Dorsey Brothers or any other of the greater or lesser musicians who held sway in the Rain-Bo room for so long, but whose light is already dim, whose music has faded away, whose mythology has not been handed on.

Jack didn't create the ambiance that made the Kenmore so appealing, but he enhanced it in its raffish new age. He danced, he laughed, he wore the best, and moved with the fastest. But I well knew he had conceived that style long ago in desperation and was bearing it along cautiously now, like a fragile golden egg. He was frail, down eighteen pounds again, eyes abulge again, cheekbones prominent again, left arm all but limp, and periodically wincing when he felt that double-ought pellet bobbling about in his liver. But more troubling than this was the diminishing amount of time left for him to carry out the task at hand: the balancing of the forces of his life in a way that would give him ease, let him think well of himself, show him the completion of a pattern that at least would look something like the one he had devised as a young man: Young Jack-that desperate fellow he could barely remember and could not drive out. Empire gone, exchequer sequestered, future wholly imperfect, it occurred to Jack that the remaining values of his life inhered chiefly in his women. Naturally, he decided to collect them, protect them, and install them in the current safe-deposit box of his life, which at the moment was a six-room second-floor suite in the Kenmore.

"Marcus, you won't believe what I'm saying, but it's a true. I'm in the kitchen one day and the boss come in and says, Sal, you busy? I say no, not too much. He says, I gotta friend of mine in such and such a room and his name is Jack Legs Dime. Have you heard him? Well, I say, in the newspaper, yes. He says you wanna be his waiter from now on while he stays uppa here? You go upstays every morning eight thirty breakfast, noon if he's a call, maybe sandwich now and then, don't worry dinner. Take care of him and his friends and he pay you. I say, sure, it's all right with me. So every morning I used to knock on the door with the same breakfast-little steak and egg overlight for Jack, coffee, toast, buns, some scramble eggs for everybody, some cornflakes, milk, plenty potsa coffee, all on the wagon, and Hubert, this rough-lookin' bast with a puggy nose, he's got a goddama gun in both hands. I say Hubert, you son um a bitch I won't come up here no more if you don't put them guns away. I talk to him like that more for joke than anything else. So I see Jack Dime and I give him the breakfast and sometime breakfast for two, three extra people they call to tell me about and Jack call to somebody and says, hey, give Sal twenty-five dollar. He says to me, will that be enough? I say Yeah, Legs, plenty. More than what I expect. Just take care a me and my friends and you down for twenty-five a day, how's that? Beautiful. Jesa Christ, them days twenty-five dollar, who the hell ever seen twenty-five dollar like that? Every day was a different five, six new people, I guess they talking about Jack's trial coming up. And one day Jack call the next room and say, hey, Coll, you wanna eat some breakfas? I gotta breakfas here. Hey, Legs, I say, that Vince Coll? He supposed to be you enemy it says in the pape. Jack says no, he's a good friend a mine. And I pour Coll a coffee and some toast. Then three, four weeks later I met another fellow, Schultz. I say, Hey, Legs, you and Schultz, you supposed to be the worst enemies. And he says no, only sometimes. Now we get along pretty nice. So I pour Schultz a coffee and some toast. I say, Hey, Jack, they's a big fight tonight, who you like, we bet a dollar. Nah, he says, them fighters all crooks. Punks, no good. Then how about baseball, I says. Yeah, he says, I bet you a dollar. I take the Yanks. Legs like Babe Ruth and Bill Dickey. Then one day he says to me, Sal, I want you to meet my wife, Mrs. Jack Legs Dime. I say it's a pleasure, and then another day I go up and he says, Sal, I want you to meet my friend, Miss Kiki Roberts. And Kiki she says hello and I say it's a pleasure. Jesa Christ, I wonder how the hell Jack Dime got these women together. I see them sit down together, have breakfast, and then go out together and shop down the stores on Pearl Street while Jack stay home. I say to Freddie Robin, the detective sergeant who sits in the lobby looking for punks who don't look right and who ask funny questions about Legs and I say, Freddie, son um a bitch, it's magic. He got the both women up there. Freddie says you think that's something _ you ought to see them Sunday morn. All in church together. No, I say. Yeah, Freddie say. All in the same pew, seven o'clock mass Saint Mary's. No, I say. Don't tell me no, Freddie says, when I get paid to go watch them. So I says this I got to see for myself and next Sunday seven o'clock mass son um a bitch they don't all come in, first Kiki, then Alice, then Jack, and little ways back in another pew, Freddie. Alice goes a communion and Jack and Kiki sit still. Then later every Friday I see the monsignor come into the hotel and go upstairs. To hear the confessions, Freddie says, and he thinks sometimes they go to communion right in the room. Hey, I says to Freddie, I don't know nobody gets a communion in this hotel. How they get away with that when they all living together in the same rooms? I took a peek one day, the women got a room each, and Legs, he got a room all his own and the bodyguards got a room and they got other rooms for people in and out, transaction business. Course when I was up there, everything was mum. Nobody say anything, and when I go back for the dishes and the wagon Legs is maybe getting a shave and an haircut, every day, saying the rosary beads. They got a candle in every room, burn all day long, and a statue of Saint Anthony and the Blessed Virgin, which, I figure out, maybe is through Alice, who is on the quiet side, maybe because she got too damn much on her mind. She don't smile much at me. Hello, Sal, good morning, Sal, always nice, but not like Kiki, who says, Sal, how are you this morning, pretty good? Howsa weather outside? She liked to talk, some girl, Kiki. Wow! Freddie says to me, Sal, you think they all wind up in bed together? I laugh like hell. Freddie, I say, how the hell anybody going to do anything with a woman when another woman alongside you? No, that's not it. Bad as the guy might be, if I had a swear, put my hands to God and say would the guy do anything like that, I would say no. Maybe he got a desire to stay with his wife, then he call his wife into his room. He gotta desire to stay with his girlfriend, he call his girlfriend. It's the only thing I can see. Nine time out of ten I would say his girlfriend. On the other hand, he had to take care of his wife too. She wasn't so bad-looking, and after all it was a legitimate wife. You ask me was he an animal, a beast-I say no. He was a fanat. lf he wasn't a fanat, why the hell he got Saint Anthony up there? He must've had some kind of good in him, I gotta say it. Not for the moneywise he gave me. I wouldn't judge him for that. But I couldn't say nothing bad toward the guy. I never even hear him curse. Very refine. Pardon me, pardon me. lf he sneeze sometime, it's pardon me, tank you, see ya tomorra. But, actually speaking, who's a know what the hell really goes on upstays?"

The night I went to dinner with Jack, Alice, and Kiki at the Kenmore, the ménage seemed to be functioning the way Jack wanted it to function. He'd called me to come down and see him, talk about the trial, and, more important, he wanted to pay me. I'd already told him I was fond of him as a friend, even though I disagreed with some of his behavior, and I enjoyed his company. However, I said, all that has nothing to do with business. If I work for you, I expect to get paid, and now that you've got your bank accounts under government lock and key, what are you going to do about my fee, which, I explained, would be ten thousand dollars payable in advance? I knew two aspiring criminal lawyers who waited until after trial for their pay and are waiting yet.

"Jack, let's face it," I said, "you're a crook."

He laughed and said, "Marcus, you're twice the crook I'll ever be," which pleased me because it implied prowess in a world alien to me, even if it wasn't true. What he was really doing was admiring my willingness to structure an alibi for his trial, give it a reasonableness that smacked lovingly of truth. I had fifteen witnesses lined up three weeks before we went to trial, and all were ready to testify, in authenticatingly eccentric and voluminous detail, that Jack had been in Albany the night Streeter and the kid were abducted. Waiters saw him, a manicurist, a desk clerk, a physiotherapist, a car salesman, a bootblack, a barber, a garment executive from the Bronx, and more.

I arrived at Jack's Kenmore suite half an hour ahead of schedule and was let in by Hubert Maloy, the plump Irish kid from Troy whom Jack had hired away from Vincent Coll as his inside guard. Hubert knew me and let me sit in the parlor. I immediately caught the odor of exotic incense and saw a wisp of smoke curling upward from an open door to one of the bedrooms. I glimpsed Alice on her hands and knees with a brushbroom, pushing a lemon back and forth on the rug in front of the incense, which burned in a tin dish. The scene was so weird it embarrassed me. It was like intruding on someone's humiliating dream. Alice was in her slip and stocking feet, a long run in the stocking most visible to me. Her hair was uncombed and she was without the protection of makeup. I quietly got up from the chair and moved to another one, where I wouldn't be able to see her room.

Jack arrived with Kiki about ten minutes later, and Alice emerged from the incense room like a new woman, hair combed, lipstick in place, lovely wildflower housecoat covering slip and run. She kissed Jack on the check, kissed me too, and said to Kiki: "Your black dress came from the cleaners, Marion. It's in the closet."

"Oh terrific, thanks," said a smiling, amiable, grateful Kiki.

Such was the nature of the interchanges I observed, and I won't bore you further with the banality of their civility. Jack took me aside, and when we'd finished updating the state of the trial, and of our witnesses (our foreboding reserved not for this but for the federal trial), Jack handed me a white envelope with twenty five-hundred-dollar bills.

"That suit you'?"

"Seems to be in order. I'll accept it only if you tell me where it came from."

"It's not hot, if that's your worry."

"That's my worry."

"It's fresh from Madden. All legitimate. My fee for transferring some cash."

The cash, I would perceive before the week was out, was the ransom paid for Big Frenchy DeMange, Owney Madden's partner in the country's biggest brewery. Vincent Coll, Fats McCarthy, and another fellow whose name I never caught, whisked Big Frenchy off a corner in midtown Manhattan and returned him intact several hours later after the delivery of thirty-five thousand dollars to Jack, who, despite being on bail, left the state and drove to Jersey to pick it up. Madden knew Coll and McCarthy were basically cretins and that Jack was more than the innocent intermediary in such a neat snatch, and so Madden-Diamond relations were sorely, but not permanently, ruptured. I had little interest in any of that. I merely assured Jack he would now have the best defense money could buy.

Kiki had flopped into the chair from which I'd witnessed Alice's lemon brushing, and she said to Jack when he and I broke from conference: "I wanna go eat, Jackie." I saw Alice wince at the "Jackie." Jack looked at me and said, "Join us for dinner?" and I said why not and he said, "All right, ladies, get yourself spiffy," and twenty minutes and two old-fashioneds later we were all in the elevator, descending to the Rain-Bo room, my own pot of gold tucked away in a breast pocket, Jack's twin receptacles on either side of him, exuding love, need, perfume, promise, and lightly controlled confusion; also present: Hubert, the troll protecting all treasures.

For purposes of polite camouflage, Kiki clutched my arm as we moved toward Jack's corner table in the large room.

"You know," she said to me softly, "Jack gave me a gift just before we came down."

"No, I didn't know."

"Five hundred dollars."

"That's a lovely gift."

"In a single bill."

"A single bill. Well, you don't see many of them."

"I never saw one before."

"I hope you put it in a safe place."

"Oh, I did, I'm wearing it."

"Wearing it?"

"In my panties."

Two days later Kiki would take the bill-well stained by then not only with her most private secretions, but also with Jack's-to Madame Amalia, a Spanish gypsy crone who ran a tearoom on Hudson Avenue, and paid the going fee of twenty-five dollars for the hex of a lover's erstwhile possession, hex that would drive the wedge between man and wife. Knowing whose wife was being hexed and wedged, Madame Amalia was careful not to make the five-hundred-dollar bill disappear.

"Did you see the new picture of me and Jack?" Alice asked me across the table.

"No, not yet."

"We had it taken this week. We never had a good picture of us together, just the ones the newspapermen snap."

"You have it there, do you?"

"Sure do." And she handed it over.

"It's a good picture all right."

"We never even had one taken on our honeymoon."

"You're both smiling here."

"I told Jack I wanted us to be happy together for always, even if it was only in a picture."

Despite such healthy overtness, the good Alice had pushed the lemon back and forth in front of the incense for three months, a ritual learned from her maid Cordelia, a child of Puerto Rico, where the occult is still as common as the sand and the sea. The lemon embodied Alice's bitter wish that Jack see Kiki as the witch Alice knew her to be, witch of caprice and beauty beyond Alice's understanding; for beauty to Alice was makeshift-nice clothing, properly colored hair, not being fat. And Kiki's beauty, ineffable as the Holy Ghost, was a hateful riddle.

When Jack's lucky blue suit came back from the hotel cleaners, a silver rosary came with it in the key pocket. I always suspected Alice's fine Irish Catholic hand at work in that pocket. The night of our Rain-Bo dinner Jack pulled out a handful of change when he sent Hubert for the Daily News, and when I saw the rosary I said, "New prayer implement there?" which embarrassed him. He nodded and dropped it back into his pocket.

He had examined it carefully when it turned up in that pocket, looked at its cross, which had what seemed to be hieroglyphics on it, and at the tiny sliver of wood inside the cross (which opened like a locket), wood that might well, the monsignor suggested, have been a piece of the true cross. The hieroglyphics and the sliver had no more meaning for Jack than the Hail Marys, the Our Fathers, and the Glory Bes he recited as his fingers breezed along the beads. His scrutiny of the cross was a search for a coded message from his mother, whose rosary, he was beginning to believe, had been providentially returned to him. For he remembered clearly the silver rosary on her dresser and, again, twined in her hands when she lay in her coffin. He studied it until its hieroglyphics yielded their true meaning: scratches. The sliver of wood, he decided, was too new to have been at Calvary. Piece of a toothpick from Lindy's more like it. Yet he fondled those silver beads, recited those holy rote phrases as if he, too, were rolling a lemon or hexing money, and he offered up the cheapjack stuff of his ragged optimism to the only mystical being he truly understood.

Himself.

No one else had the power to change the life at hand.

How does a mythical figure ask a lady to dance? As if Jack didn't have enough problems, now he was faced with this. Moreover, when he has a choice of two ladies, which one does he single out to be the first around whom he will publicly wrap what is left of his arms as he spins through waves of power, private unity, and the love of all eyes? These questions shaped themselves as wordless desires in Jack's head as he read his own spoken words about his own mythic nature.

When Hubert came back with four copies of the Daily News, everyone at the table opened to the first of a three-part interview with Jack by John O'Donnell. It was said to be Jack's first since all his trouble, and he corroborated that right there in the News very bold type:

"I haven't been talking out of vanity-the fact that I've never given out my side before would show pretty clearly that I'm not publicity mad."

Reasonable remark, Jack. Not publicity mad anymore. Too busy using interviews like these to generate sympathy for your cause, for the saving of your one and only ass, to worry about publicity for vanity's sake. Jack could be more pragmatic, now that he's a myth. But was he really a myth? Well, who's to say? But he does note a mythic development in his life in that bold, bold Daily News type:

"Here's what I think. This stuff written about me has created a mythical figure in the public mind. Now I'm Jack Diamond and I've got to defend myself against the mythical crimes of the mythical Legs. "

Legs. Who the hell was this Legs anyway? Who here in the Rain-Bo room really knows Legs?

"Hello, Legs."

"How ya doin', Legs?"

"Good luck on the trial, Legs."

"Glad to see you up and around, Legs."

"Have a drink, Legs?"

"We'd like you to join our party if you get a minute, Mr. Legs."

Only a handful in the joint really knew him, and those few called him Jack. The rest clustered 'round the mythic light, retelling stories of origins:

"They call him Legs because he always runs out on his friends."

"They call him Legs because his legs start up at his chest bone."

"They call him Legs because he could outrun any cop at all when he was a kid package thief."

"They call him Legs because he danced so much and so well."

Shall we dance! Who first?

"This is a good interview, Jack," said Marcus. "Good for the trial. Bound to generate some goodwill somewhere."

"I don't like the picture they put with it," Alice said.

"You look too thin. "

"I am too thin," Jack said.

"I like it," Kiki said.

"'I knew you would," Alice said.

"I like it when your hat is turned up like that," Kiki said.

"So do I," Alice said.

" Find your own things to like," Kiki said.

Who first?

Dance with Alice and have the band play "Happy Days and Lonely Nights," your favorite, Jack. Dance with Marion and have them play "My Extraordinary Gal," your favorite, Jack.

"Is it true what he says there about Legs and Augie?" Kiki asked.

"All true," Jack said.

"As a matter of fact I was never called Legs until after that Little Augie affair. Look it up and see for yourself. It don't make much difference, but that's a fact. My friends or my family have never called me Legs. When the name Legs appeared under a picture, people who didn't know me picked it up and I've been called Legs in the newspapers ever since."

O'Donnell explained that Eddie Diamond was once called Eddie Leggie ("Leggie," a criminal nickname out of the nineteenth-century slums) and that somehow it got put on Jack. Cop told a newsman about it. Newsman got it wrong. Caption in the paper referred to Jack as Legs. And there was magic forever after.

"I didn't know that," Kiki said. "Is it really true, Jackie?"

"All the garbage they ever wrote about me is true to people who don't know me."

The music started again after a break, and Jack looked anxiously from woman to woman, faced once again with priority. Did his two women think of him as Legs? Absurd. They knew who he was. If anybody ever knew he was Jack Diamond and not Legs Diamond, it was those two ladies. They loved him for his own reasons, not other people's. For his body. For the way he talked to them. For the way he loved them. For the way his face was shaped. For the ten thousand spoken and unspoken reasons he was what he was. It's wasn't necessary for Jack to dwell on such matters, for he had verified this truth often. What was necessary now was to keep the women together, keep them from repelling each other like a matched pair of magnets. This matched pair would work as a team, draw the carriage of Jack's future. Fugitive Kiki, wanted as a Streeter witness, needed the protection of Jack's friends until the charge against her went away. She would stick, all right. And Alice? Why, she would stick through anything. Who could doubt that at this late date?

A voluptuous woman in a silver sheath with shoulder straps of silver cord paused at the table with her escort. "This one here is Legs," she said to the escort. "I'd know him anywhere, even if he is only a ridiculous bag of bones."

"Who the hell are you?" Jack asked her.

"I saw your picture in the paper, Legs," she said.

"That explains it."

She looked at Alice and Kiki, then rolled down the right strap of her gown and revealed a firm, substantial, well-rounded, unsupported breast.

"How do you like it?" she said to Jack.

"It seems adequate, but I'm not interested."

"You've had a look anyway, and that counts for something, doesn't it, sweetheart?" she said to her escort.

"It better, by God," said the escort.

"I can also get milk out of it if you ever feel the need," she said, squeezing her nipple forward between two fingers and squirting a fine stream into Jack's empty coffee cup.

"l'll save that till later," Jack said.

"Oh, he's so intelligent," the woman said, tucking herself back into her dress and moving off.

"I think we should order," Kiki said. "I'm ravished."

"You mean famished," Jack said.

"Yes, whatever I mean."

"And no more interruptions," said Alice.

Jack signaled the waiter and told him, "A large tomato surprise."

"One for everybody?"

"One for me," Jack said. "I have no power over what other people want. "

The waiter leaned over and spoke into Jack's face so all could hear. "'They tell me you've got the power of ten thousand Indians."

Jack picked up his butter knife and stared at the waiter, prepared to drive the blade through the back of that servile hand. He would take him outside, kick him down the stairs, break his goddamn snotty face.

"The way I get it," the waiter said, backing away, speaking directly to Jack, "you know it all. You know who the unknown soldier is and who shot him."

"Where do they get these people?" Jack asked. But before anyone could respond, the waiter's voice carried across the room from the kitchen, "A tomato surprise for the lady killer," and the room's eyes swarmed over Jack in a new way.

Jack straightened his tie, aware his collar was too big for his neck, aware his suit had the ill fit of adolescence because of his lost weight. He felt young, brushed his hair back from his ears with the heels of both hands, thought of the work that lay ahead of him, the physical work adolescents must do. They must grow. They must do the chores of life, must gain in strength and wisdom to cope with the hostile time of manhood. The work of Jack's life lay stretched out ahead of him. On the dance floor, for instance.

He started to get up, but Alice grabbed his arm and whispered in his ear: "Do you remember, Jack, the time you stole the fox collar coat I wanted so much, but then I took it back and you insisted and went back and stole it all over again? Oh, how I loved you for that."

"I remember," he said softly to her. "I could never forget that coat. "

Kiki watched their intimacy, then leaned toward Jack and whispered, "I've got my legs open, Jackie."

"Have you, kid?"

"Yes. And now I'm opening my nether lips."

"You are?"

"Yes. And now I'm closing them. And now I'm opening them again."

"You know, kid, you're all right. Yes, sir, you're all right."

He stood up then and said, "I'm going to dance."

Alice looked at Kiki, Kiki at Alice, the ultimate decision blooming at long last. They both looked to Jack for his choice, but he made none. He got up from his chair at last and, with his left arm swinging limply, his right shoulder curled in a way to give his movement the quality of a young man in full swagger, he headed for the dance floor where a half dozen couples were twirling about to a waltz. When Jack put a foot on the dance floor, some, then all couples stopped and the band trailed off. But Jack turned to the bandstand, motioned for the music to continue. Then he looked at Kiki and Alice, who stood just off the edge of the floor.

"My arm, Marion," he said. "Take my arm."

And while Alice's eyes instantly filled with tears at the choice, Kiki gripped Jack's all but useless left hand with her own and raised it. As she moved toward him for the dancer's embrace, he said, "My right arm, Alice," and Alice's face broke into a roseate smile of tears as she raised Jack's right hand outward.

The women needed no further instruction. They joined their own hands and stepped onto the dance floor with their man. Then, as the orchestra broke into the waltz of now and forever, the waltz that all America, all Europe, was dancing to-'"Two Hearts in Three-Quarter Time," its arithmetic obviously calculated in heaven-Alice, Marion, and Jack stepped forward into the music, into the dance of their lives.

"One-two-three, one-two-three, one-two-three, one-two-three," Jack counted. And they twirled on their own axis and spun around the room to the waltz like a perfect circle as the slowly growing applause of the entire room carried them up, up, and up into the ethereal sphere where people truly know how to be happy.