My grandfather was Sidney Fogelman.
To basketball fans of a certain age, his name will still evoke memories of a time when they played the game in a cage through which the other team’s less inhibited fans might stab your leg with a lit cigar or a hatpin. When professional basketball was the college sport’s ugly little sister. A time before it occurred to anyone that you could shoot with one hand from the outside, when you played for fifteen or twenty-five bucks a game on your way to a career coaching or running a bar or selling real estate.
Grandpa Sidney was there in the early days of professional basketball and he was there thirty-five years later, after World War II, when, having nurtured basketball through decades of rough, raw regional play, he helped conceive the National Basketball Association. By then, of course, the number of Jewish players, who had been a dominant force on the court, had begun to dwindle. After the war, Jews began clambering out of the ghettoes that have always spawned most of our hungriest and best athletes. But Sidney had always been a short, dumpy coach and front office guy-ironically, he’d never been that good at the game-and in the late 1940s he had a visionary businessman’s belief in the game that would someday give Wilt Chamberlain, Larry Bird, and Michael Jordan a forum for their special skills.
When I was a little boy, he started at last to make some real money from the game. Since he was not a materialistic man, he decided to invest some of it for my sister and me, his only grandchildren. Twenty years later, that decision put Beth through law school and me through the Jewish Theological Seminary.
Back in the 1970s, when Grandpa Sidney was in his seventies, the National Basketball Association employed him to provide a variety of services of which he was uniquely capable. Among these jobs was the annual making of the league schedule, which, in the days before computers, required Sidney to hole up in a New York City hotel room with fistfuls of airline schedules and arena calendars. Miraculously, he would emerge a week or two later, like Moses with the tablets, clutching a handwritten plan. When the first computers came along, the league took the job away from Sidney and gave it to a machine. However, the computers of the day were unable to accomplish in any amount of time what Sidney Fogelman was able to do in a week or two on a legal pad, and so they gave the job back to him until they made better computers.
Grandpa Sidney thought his only grandson-me-would make a crafty point guard, quick off the dribble and able, as they say, to see the floor. (Sidney ’s only son, my father, had disappointed him in this area by proving to be no more gifted on the court than he had been.) After Grandma died, Sidney came to live with our family and he taught me the game in endless conversations, as well as on our suburban playground, where he would stand on the sidelines in a brown double-breasted suit and stained fedora, barking intructions at my friends and me as he had once screamed himself blue in the face coaching his most famous team in the 1920s and ’30s, a team composed entirely of Philadelphia and New York Jews.
Because Sidney had the gift of making others want to please him, I devoted far more time to the game than my talent warranted, and only gave it up in high school when even my own loving parents had to admit I was no good, and Sidney himself, now in his eighties, was beginning to retire from the affairs of the world and lose the aura of biblical authority that made me practice my jump shot long after I’d given up any hope it would go in the basket with any frequency.
Grandpa Sidney held on for several more years, body slowly failing but mind terrifyingly intact. In his last years, I’m quite certain he still would have been able, if called upon, to make up the NBA schedule. Although Sidney Fogelman himself was a barely observant Jew, he was so proud a product of first-generation American Jewish culture that the formal aspects of Judaism seemed almost beside the point. He may not have attended shul with any regularity, but he understood Hebrew and spoke Yiddish and he could effortlessly drop a quote from the Bal-shem Tov into a sentence about the pick-and-roll off the high post. His spiritual gene found its way to me, and around the time I went off to college, I decided I wanted to become a rabbi.
This pleased him enormously because his own father had been a poor but religious man in Poland. He was the shammes-the caretaker-of a small synagogue, whose job it was to sweep the sanctuary after service, dust the Torah, fold the yarmulkes and the tallises. In his last two or three years, when I was at the seminary in the city, Sidney would sit with me at my parents’ kitchen table, and after a few perfunctory comments about the triangle offense or the approaching NCAA basketball tournament, we would settle into a discussion about Israel, moral relativism, destiny, or a number of other topics that I, as a future rabbi, was ravenous to explore.
It was during one of these visits toward the very end of his life that Grandpa Sidney told me the story that only now, years later, do I feel safe in relating. I can see him now across the speckled Formica expanse of kitchen table, his face deeply furrowed, his nostrils dense with thick black hairs my mother would trim for him every few weeks.
“Did I ever tell you the story about the ’37-’38 season with the Planets?” he said, referring to the Philadelphia Planets, the all-Jewish professional basketball team that he owned and coached, which won numerous Eastern League championships in that faded, sepia-toned era.
“Which story?” I asked.
“The one I’m about to tell you.”
“I have no idea whether you’ve already told me the story you’re about to tell me.”
He waved a liver-spotted hand in my direction. “What do you know?” he said. This was his favorite rebuke-“What do you know?”-as if the listener were an idiot who couldn’t be trusted to understand what Sidney was telling him. Often the phrase would be accompanied, for emphasis, by a light backhanded slap against my chest.
“It’s impossible that I told you this story before, because never before have I told it to a single soul. You, Ronnie, my favorite grandson, are the first.”
“I’m your only grandson. Why am I so lucky?”
“Because you I like,” he replied.
This was a high compliment. Sidney often said about others, including people he might have led you to believe he liked: “Him I wouldn’t give you a nickel for!” or “I wouldn’t give you a penny for the whole lot of them!” To be liked by Sidney Fogelman was a particular honor, especially in his own mind. It was really hard to say what gave him this power, the power to make you infinitely glad that he approved of you, but you accepted it because people like Sidney, as I’ve learned over the years, are what give life its shape and its deeper meanings.
“Let me hear it,” I said, plucking a Marlboro from the pack in my pocket.
“No smoking,” Sidney said with coachlike command. I put the cigarette away.
“Now, in 1937, Ronnie, I had perhaps my best group of boys ever. Every one a Jew. Which wasn’t so unusual in those clays because I’d had many Planets teams that were every one a Jew. Just like the other teams were all micks or dagos or”-he seemed to pause here in deference to some particular racial sensitivity-“Negroes. We had Gordy Metzger, Vic Fine, Ted Morris, Leon Skolnik, Bakey Gumbiner. You name it.”
On his fat fingers he counted off some of the great Jewish ballplayers of that era, not one of them taller than six foot three, names familiar to me from the Philadelphia Planets’ memorabilia he kept in a box under his bed in the spare room: programs, newspaper accounts, autographed team photos. The team jerseys were emblazoned with Stars of David. They were proud to be Jews, these immigrants’ meaty kids, and tough enough to stand up to anyone who objected.
“And Al Newberger,” Sidney went on. “God, that young man could shoot the ball. Two-handed set shots. High-arcing sons-of-bitches. They used to hit the rafters in that Union City dump the Arrows played in. But he hardly ever said a word. Even on the court he used to take his licks with a quiet smile. Then he’d give it back to the guy two quarters later when his back was turned. And, Ronnie, I’m not talking about a time when your eight-million-dollar-a-year putz whines to the ref about a tap on the chin under the basket. Back then, you’d get clocked and the ref wouldn’t even blink. No blood, no foul. Sometimes it was like a prison yard riot.
“And Al was a good-looking guy,” he went on. “Could’ve been a movie star, except, as I said, he never opened his mouth. But he saw more pussy than a pair of ladies’ panties. Which is why I never understood why he was shacking up with this girl Vera, who made her living as a whore.”
“Al Newberger lived with a whore?” I said.
Sidney lunged across the table and backhanded me on the left breast. “What the hell do you know? Of course he was living with a whore!”
“What do you mean, of course? You just said you never understood it yourself.”
“That’s what I’m saying!” Sidney said. “He lived with her!”
It’s tempting to say that Sidney ’s exasperating conversational logic had been brought on by old age, but, sadly, it appears to have been a permanent fixture of his temperament.
“He lived with a girl who made her living shtupping other men,” Sidney said, shaking his head at the peculiarity of it.
“Maybe he was afraid of commitment,” I suggested.
Sidney looked at me as if I were out of my mind. Psychological speculation was not a hobby of his, while I, who was already in therapy-no doubt partly because of growing up around infuriating Jewish men-loved nothing more than speculating about the complexities of human relationships.
“I’ll tell you what he was afraid of Ronnie. He was afraid of not getting a first-class blow job, that’s what he was afraid of. If you want a job done well, get a professional-that’s what I’ve always said. I hope you don’t mind my plain speech.”
“I can take it,” I said. I not only loved his salty language-I loved hearing about these Jews who didn’t talk so much, who beat the shit out of their opponents, who lived with whores.
“Still,” Sidney said, “what kind of man wants to sleep with a lady you don’t know where her pussy’s been? What am I gonna do? He’s my best ballplayer. What’s the worst could’ve happened? The clap. Al even brings her around the National Hotel-you remember, don’t you, that we played our home games in a hotel ballroom?-and all the guys know her, and she’s a classy kind of whore, always with the tailored suits and a nice hat.”
It was dawning on me that Sidney was working up to something. Although I had no idea where the story was going, he didn’t seem merely to be trolling the past for glimmering little glories, as old men do, as Sidney had started to do the last few years. This story was already longer than most of them.
“So we’re leading the league by a game or two over the Bronx Black Stars, and it’s March, maybe two or three weeks to go before the playoffs. Now, we’ve won the championship two out of the last three seasons, five of the last seven, so everyone’s gunning for us. You should’ve heard the crowds at our road games, Ronnie: ‘We’ll get you, you bunch of kikes’ and ‘You fuckin’ sheenies!’ But we loved it. ‘We may be sheenies,’ I’d yell back, ‘but we’re the sheenies who are kicking your ass!’ I’ve got to tell you, Ronnie, it was a great time to be a Jew who could put a ball in the hoop. A great time. You should’ve been there.”
Like many American Jewish boys who had known only the suburbs growing up, who had never served in the military, I had gone through life feeling untested, but not especially eager to pass any of the tests I had in mind. Our energies had been rerouted, like traffic around a bad accident, to the world of intellectual pursuit. Through Sidney and his stories, I vicariously enjoyed the tough ethnic brothers I admired from afar. Not the thugs like Mendy Weiss, Arnold Rothstein, Bugsy Siegel, or Gurrah Shapiro. The good Jews, like Sidney.
Sidney yanked a hanky out of his pants pocket and mopped his brow, then ran the soiled cloth over his balding head, as if he were polishing it. “So what happens? What happens is Al Newberger’s home one night in the apartment he shared with Vera when he hears a car pull up outside and there’s an argument going on in there between Vera and one of her Johns. Apparently, the guy couldn’t perform and he’s saying he shouldn’t have to pay, and she’s telling him there’re no free samples and that she won’t get out of the car till he forks over the two bucks. And Al’s watching from the window and sees this guy get out, come around, and pull Vera out of the car and throw her on the ground and give her a kick for good measure.
“Well, Al’s out of the apartment building in no time flat-you gotta understand how quick he was, Ronnie-and Al picks up Vera, makes sure she’s all right, and sends her into the apartment. Then he and the guy have a few words. Before the other guy knows it, Al Newberger is kicking the crap out of him. By the time Al’s through with him, the guy’s face looks like a tsimmes. So Al throws him in the back of the guy’s car and then drives the car to the old railroad yard and leaves him there and walks back home, fuming.
“I forgot to tell you one thing, Ronnie. While Al was beating this john up, a gun, a five-shot revolver of some kind, falls out of the guy’s camel-hair coat, and now Al’s got it. He doesn’t know what to do with it, but he sure as hell isn’t going to leave it in the back of the car with the guy, so he goes home, wraps it up in some rags, and hides it up on a ledge inside the fireplace chimney.”
“How do you know all this?” I ask.
“Because Al told me later. I got it out of him later. Get me a glass of water, Ronnie, no ice. I’m not used to doing this much talking.”
He waited until I returned from the kitchen sink to resume the story. He took occasional, incongruously dainty sips of water. “So a couple of days later, after our next home game, Al’s walking home from the National when a guy falls in step with him. Spiffy-looking gentleman in his late thirties wearing a nice chalk-striped, double-breasted suit and rimless glasses. He looks like a well-dressed accountant, which, I happen to know, is what his mother once hoped he would be. But his father, who used to launder restaurant linen for the mob, seemed to get the upper hand with Irving. That’s this guy’s name, Irving Levchuck, but he introduces himself to Al as just Irving, and when Al tells him to get lost, Irving says very calmly that Al beat up an associate of his the other day, a guy named Itchy Weintraub. That’s the name of the guy Al left bleeding in the Packard in the railroad yard.”
“Is everybody a Jew in this story?” I asked.
“Yes. Absolutely. So Irving says to Al as they’re walking along that he’s in a position to propose a resolution to their squabble that will leave Al Newberger physically unharmed. So Al says, ‘I’m supposed to worry about some guy named Itchy hurting me?’ So Irving says, “Look, Al, you shoot basketballs for a living, and you’re pretty good at it. Well, Itchy Weintraub shoots people for a living, and he’s got an even higher shooting percentage than you.’
“Now Irving Levchuck has Al Newberger’s attention. Irving tells Al that this guy Itchy’s a schlammer who used to work for the Matteo brothers, who used to control South Philadelphia when the Italians were in charge. So if you were a little schmeggege like Itchy and you liked to shoot people, and you wanted to get paid for it, you worked for the dagos.”
“So why’s this guy Irving involved?”
“Do I interrupt you when you’re in the middle of a story?”
“Yes.”
“So here’s what Irving says to Al. He says if you’re good enough to make a basket, which you are, then you’re good enough to miss. Al knows just where this is going, of course, and tells Irving to take a hike. Why shouldn’t he? After all, Al Newberger’s a hero in Philly. He’s the biggest thing going. There’s only one professional basketball team in Philly and that’s us. For Jews, he’s like Michael Jordan. Whole families would come to the National on Saturday night to watch us play. After, there was a dance, with Ted Morris conducting his orchestra. Ted was one of our starting guards, fast as hell, but he had a band and they’d start up right after the game. Ted didn’t even have time to shower. He’d get out of his uniform and right into his tux. Ten minutes after the game’s over and the ballroom’s a sea of dancing Jewish couples. You never saw anything like it. This was before television, Ronnie-”
“I know that, Grandpa,” I said.
“What do you know? Where was I? You made me lose my place.”
“Al Newberger was telling Irving what’s-his-name to take a hike.”
“Thank you, Ronnie. So Al tells Irving to take a hike and Irving, very gentleman-like, explains that if Al doesn’t ‘play ball,’ something terrible could happen to him or, worse, Vera.
“Now Al’s even more interested, because he can’t figure out how this guy would know Vera’s name. But he’s still not giving in to Irving, and when Irving says Itchy wants his gun back, Al pretends like he doesn’t have it. ’Cause how’s Itchy going to shoot Al if he doesn’t have his gun?” Sidney laughed ruefully and went on. “I can laugh now, Ronnie, it’s a long time ago, but you can imagine that this encounter with Irving Levchuck, however inconclusive, would begin to play with Al Newberger’s mind. He should’ve come to me right away, of course, but it wasn’t Al’s nature.
“So a couple of days later, after a game, Al and some of the guys are drinking at a place in South Philly that they used to go to, called the Two Deuces or the Forty-two Queens, one of those. Al leaves to go home and that guy Itchy Weintraub-with his face all bandaged and fucked up-jumps out of a car parked at the curb, grabs Al, and throws him in the front seat. Irving is behind the wheel.”
“Itchy, Irving,” I said. “It’s a little hard to keep these guys straight, Grandpa.”
“Do your best,” Sidney said. “So Itchy gets in the backseat and before Al knows it, he’s pointing a pistol at the back of Al’s head and Irving ’s saying, ‘Look, Al, Itchy’s got a new gun.’ Then he tells Al that they’re spreading a lot of money around town that says the Planets won’t beat the Union City Arrows by more than two points at the National Hotel on Saturday night. Al tells him he’s not going to do it, not going to shave points, and before he knows it, now Itchy’s got a piano wire around Al’s neck and he’s choking him to death and that seems to do the trick. Al’s in the tank.
“So, wouldn’t you know it, on Saturday night we beat the Arrows by a single point. Instead of killing the clock at the end of the game with a three-point lead, Al takes a bad shot and gives the Arrows the ball and then lets his man waltz past him for an easy bucket. I figure Al’s having a bad night. He’s too proud to come to me with his problem. But somebody else isn’t.
“A few days later, Vera comes to see me at my office. An exceptionally good-looking girl, Ronnie. She tells me how Al beat this guy up who used to work for the Matteo brothers and how Itchy’s going to pay him back. I ask her if Al knows she’s coming to see me and she says no. So I ask, ‘How do you know what this guy Itchy’s going to do?’ She says, ‘Because everybody knows how these bums operate.’ You following me so far?”
“Yes.”
“Good. Then you’ll understand my problem. Because I can tell that Al hasn’t told her anything. He never talked to nobody in general. So Vera knows more about this on her own than she’s letting on. So I ask her, ‘What’s your relationship with these monkeys, anyway?’ Because I figure-”
“-that she’s tied in with Itchy and knows exactly how much trouble Al’s in.”
“When I want some information I’ll consult the encyclopedia. So I thank Vera for her concern and figure it’s time to make some inquiries. Meanwhile, Al’s up to his pupik in trouble. I can use this like a hole in the head. We already got a Depression that won’t end. We got the German American Bund parading around the city in swastikas and jackboots.
“Al gets another visit from Irving, who tells Al that when the Planets go up to Harlem in a few days, the Rens are going to win by four. Al tells Irving no, I’m through, that’s it. So Irving whispers an address in Al’s ear, ‘That’s where my mother lives,’ Al says, and Irving says, ‘And it’s where she’s gonna die if the Rens don’t win by at least four.’ So Al says, ‘You can’t make me do this,’ and Irving says, ‘You’d be amazed by what I can make you do.’
“But the next day I buy Al dinner at the old Horn and Hardart and I tell him I know he’s in the tank. I don’t say it was Vera who told me. He admits some guy named Irving says some guy named Itchy is going to shoot him. I’ve got to take care of this problem, right? So I take Al down to Atlantic City to see Mo Mo Scharf.”
“Mo Mo?”
“Big bootlegger I knew ’cause he was the moneyman for a team I coached in the late twenties. Not that I knew he was an untervelt mensch at the time. Now he’s semiretired, living on the boardwalk, and I figure he might do us a favor. He was always doing business with the Matteo brothers. But I’m in for a couple surprises. First of all, he’s become a schlump. He’s a nobody now, an old man in slippers with a bad memory. But he does know one thing, and that’s the second surprise. He tells Al and me the Matteo brothers are no longer running things in South Philly. Who, then? A guy named Levchuck, Mo Mo tells me. Irving Levchuck.”
At this point, I recall clearly how Sidney ’s demeanor changed. He no longer seemed to be telling me a story at all. The light in Sidney ’s face dimmed slowly, as if on a rheostat, and his voice became quieter and more determined, as if he was now being forced to tell the story. “Now, Ronnie, you understand that, until this point, I have no idea that the guy who’s got his claws into Al is Irving Levchuck. Al knows him only as Irving. Let me tell you, this throws me for a loop, because I grew up with the guy.”
“You grew up with him?”
“What did I just say? Our mothers were in the same canasta club. Even then I hated him. He was a little goniff. When we were about twelve or thirteen, he stole some athletic equipment from the Jewish Community Center and sold it to some Negroes across town. I ratted him out. From then on, he hated me. I wasn’t surprised that he became a bookkeeper for Mo Mo when he was still in his twenties. He was always good with numbers. But did I know the little goniff had moved up to run organized crime in Philadelphia? What did I know from the workings of the underworld? I was shocked when Mo Mo tells me this, but I don’t let on to either of them that I grew up with the mamzer.
“Because now I know why Irving Levchuck has Al by the balls and won’t let go. First of all, he’s getting back at me for ratting him out twenty-five years before. But the real reason? Owning a piece of the Planets was like owning a piece of God. We were the force of good, Ronnie, and Irving was the kind of guy who had to take a shit on everything he couldn’t control. And without knowing it Al had just handed him the opportunity of a lifetime.
“So we drove back from Atlantic City in silence and when we played our last regular season game in Harlem a couple of nights later, I kept Al on the bench. And that fucking Itchy had the balls to come down to the bench near the end of the game and yell at Al. I was right there and I heard him ask Al, ‘You got a death wish, Al? You got a death wish?’ His face was right down next to Al’s, and Vic Fine, who’s sitting next to him on the bench, throws an elbow right in Itchy’s face. Itchy opens his coat and shows them his semiautomatic. ‘I got something better than elbows, you pricks.’ I remember this like it was yesterday, Ronnie. I thought he was going to use the gun then and there. But I point a finger at him and order him back to his seat, and you know what? He goes. But after the game, since I figure these mamzers are going to be waiting for Al, we got him out of the Renaissance Ballroom with the Harlem team.”
Out of his pocket Sidney took the soiled hanky again and ran it around his forehead and skull. “But nobody had to tell me this story didn’t look like it was going to have a happy ending. I put Al and Vera up in the Rittenhouse Hotel. The next day, or the day after that, Vera pays me another visit at my office and says that if Al doesn’t play and do what they say, they’re gonna kill him. You don’t have to be a genius to know this is a distinct possibility. But how come she’s so sure? Well, since I last saw Vera I’ve been asking about her around South Philly, and now I know she’s been peddling her puss for Irving and his crowd since she was a teenager. This is the broad my best ballplayer chooses to shack up with?” Sidney clapped his hand against his forehead. “Gott in himmell!
“It took me about a minute and a half to turn her, Ronnie. I told her she had to choose sides. I told her from now on she was my spy. To let Irving ’s people know Al wasn’t going along with them and I wanted Vera to let me know exactly what they were going to do about it. The playoffs are about to start and Vera reports back to me that Al won’t make it out of the National Hotel Ballroom alive if he doesn’t go in the tank-the Planets win by two points in the first game, no more.
“If she’s telling me the truth, all I got to do is frisk all three thousand people who show up for the game. I hire every tough Jew I know to guard the doors that night. Irving and Itchy and their broads waltz right in, but not until we’ve patted them down. I put Al in the game. Only problem is, they smuggled a gun in somehow and Itchy comes out of his seat at the end of the game and tries to shoot Al as he’s leaving the floor. Some of my guys get to Itchy first and nobody gets hurt, but Itchy gets away.
“An hour after the game, Al goes back to his suite at the Rittenhouse, the one I got for him and Vera, and he walks in and there’s Vera asleep in the bed with the covers pulled up over her chin. She doesn’t wake up when he comes in, so Al goes over and pulls the covers down. Vera’s throat has been slit from ear to ear. Poor girl. And me, I figure I’m responsible for it because when Irving and Itchy saw all the security at the game, they must’ve figured Vera was talking to me, had tipped me off. And she paid a terrible price.
“So now it’s war. I’m ready to break Itchy in two when one of my guys who was watching the stands during the game tells me that it was Irving ’s seat that was empty since the middle of the game. Are you sure? I ask. Sure I’m sure, says my guy. So it’s Irving, who used to kill kittens when he was a boy. Now he’s killed a grown-up kitten named Vera.”
“This is quite a story, Grandpa,” I said.
“You haven’t heard nothing yet.”
“Is it true?”
“What’re you talking about?” Sidney said, genuinely enraged this time. “What do you know? Of course it’s true! Sit and listen. I’m trying to tell you something!” His eyes started to glisten with tears of old grief. “I make a few calls, people I know, and I set up a meeting with Levchuck. I knew he’d see me. The kid who made good and the kid who made bad. So we meet on a bench by the Schuylkill River, where there can be no surprises. He’s got three or four of his guys stationed all around, just like in the movies. Touching their weapons through their clothes.
“Let me tell you, I’m disgusted. I know the guy’s murdered Vera, but he’s blaming Itchy. Saying, ‘ Sidney, I can’t control him. For ten bucks, he’d shoot himself!’ I can’t say anything to him, because I’ve got to protect Al. Got to protect my team. I got to get Al and the team out of this alive. So I plead with this goniff to call the whole thing off.
“I say to him, I say, ‘Don’t you have bigger things to worry about?’ And he says to me, ‘ Sidney, what could be bigger than having you come to me on your knees?’ See? That’s what it was all about for him, Ronnie! Making me come to him on my knees begging for Al Newberger’s life.
“So he purses his lips and decides to change the terms. Doing me a big favor. Irving says the money on the street is swinging the Jersey Reds’ way now, saying we can’t beat ’em in the series. So Irving wants to put his money on us now, the underdogs.”
“So Al Newberger’s gonna have to bet his life that the Planets take the Reds,” I said.
“‘I’ll take your boys, Sidney,’ he tells me, pleased with himself. ‘All they’ve got to do is win. Everything’s kosher. You win, I’ll win, we’ll all win.’ What can I do, Ronnie? I’ve got to take the terms. At least Al’s not shaving points now, and he’s in charge of his own destiny. But the whole thing’s making me sick. That’s what I remember saying to Irving. ‘Guys like you make me sick.’
“And he says, ‘There aren’t any guys like me, Sidney. There’s just me.’”
“I think I’ve read about this guy Levchuck,” I said.
“Of course you have! He was a big k’nacker! Listen to me! I take Al aside and tell him what the deal is now: we win the series and everything’s copacetic. But he’s out of control. Irving ’s murdered his girlfriend and now he’s supposed to go out and win the championship? To save his own life? Being owned by Levchuck all because he beat up his scrawny schlammer, and now this? He’s out of control and he’s throwing things around the hotel room. I have no doubt he’d kill Irving if given half a chance.
“I know what I’ve got to do. I ask him where the gun is, the gun he took off Itchy two or three weeks before. He says he’s stashed it up his chimney at his apartment. So I drive him over there and make him give it to me. He hands it over, but first he takes the bullets out. ‘Give me the goddamn bullets,’ I say, because, sure, I figure he’s thinking he’ll get another gun and use the bullets. But Al says, ‘Fogey, I’m just taking them out because I’m afraid you might hurt yourself.’ You can imagine me handling a gun, Ronnie, right? So he hands me the bullets separate and now I feel a little bit safer that Al’s not going to do something stupid. And I tell him that we’ll be all right, that all we’ve gotta do is beat the Reds in seven, which is what we were gonna do anyway.
“Well,” Sidney said with a long sigh and a sip of water, “to make a long story short, the Reds beat us up and before we know it, we’re down two games to one. Now we’re shitting bricks. If we don’t win three of the next four, I don’t know how I’m gonna keep Al alive. The fourth game’s at the National, so I get every tough kid in the neighborhood to watch the doors and stand around the court, watching the stands, just in case. I tell ’em we’re expecting trouble. The place is all kocked up with people. Every Jew and half the Italians in Philadelphia are there, and none of them knows we’re playing for our lives. Just Al and me.
“Well, we lose by three in front of our own fans. We’re down three games to one now, with two of the next three in Jersey City, and I’m thinking of asking the league on the q.t. to move the rest of the series to an undisclosed location. I’m thinking of how to get Al out of Philadelphia, maybe out of the country.
“Then it happens, like manna from heaven. Sometime after midnight on the night of that fourth game, somebody pops Irving Levchuck in the alley behind the candy store where he likes to conduct his business. Ran his operation out of the storeroom in the back. Old Irving takes one right in the punim. Dead. It’s front page in all the papers the next day. No one can figure it out. There’s talk that the Matteo brothers sent someone to do it. That somebody in Atlantic City thought Irving was taking too big a piece of the heroin racket.
“And, of course, there’s talk that Al Newberger might’ve had something to do with it, because it turns out that Al hasn’t kept his mouth completely shut about his predicament, especially after Irving slit Vera’s throat. After Irving gets popped, it’s not long before the cops know that Al’s got a reason to kill him. Also, thanks to Vera, who knew these guys, that Al probably knows about Irving ’s comings and goings.”
“Wait a second,” I say. I disappeared into my parents’ den, where it took me only a minute to find a Time-Life illustrated history of organized crime, one of those volumes they used to advertise on television; when you signed up, they’d send you one a month. I used to be fascinated by this particular volume and brought it back to the kitchen table, where I quickly found what I was looking for and turned the book around so Sidney could see it.
It was a wire service photo of Irving Levchuck’s body in a South Philadelphia alley. He lay on his back, limbs akimbo, his hat sitting on its crown a few feet away. In the photo, a dark smudge on his cheek indicated where the bullet had entered. Blood, rendered black by the film, pooled behind his head on the alley’s gravel surface. The caption read: “On April 14, 1938, in a slaying that was never solved, Philadelphia mobster Irving Levchuck was gunned down in an alley near the candy store out of which he ran his various enterprises.”
“While you were telling me the story, I kept thinking it sounded familiar,” I said.
Sidney stared at the photo for a long time as he passed his hanky over his face and forehead. “That’s him, all right,” he said. “I haven’t seen that photo in a long time, Ronnie.” He looked up with that sad, hound-dog face in which the eyes still burned bright. “All right. So the cops were all over Al for a day or two, but Al had an alibi. He said he was drinking at the Two Deuces with some of the guys after the game and then they went to Horn and Hardart for eggs and bacon about three in the morning. The guys told the cops Al was never out of their sight until well after Irving had been shot. They had the time of death, you know, because a newsie at the end of the alley heard the shot and went immediately to tell a cop.
“Now the cops back off finally because none of the guys on the team will break and, frankly, the cops are glad Levchuck’s been rubbed out, maybe even the ones whose pockets he’s been lining. Everyone figures that it was a gangland slaying and they leave it alone. Except that one fact doesn’t quite fit. Irving ’s wallet’s gone, assuming he was carrying one, but he’s got a money clip with a couple hundred dollars in it still in his front pocket. That’s like walking around with a few grand today. Why would someone go to the trouble to take his wallet, but not his money?”
“The killer wanted a souvenir,” I suggested.
“Souvenirs are for tourists and children. At least the guy could’ve taken Irving ’s walking-around dough. Anyway, so Irving ’s suddenly out of the way, but who can predict what’s gonna happen to the deal now? Is it still in effect? We figured we could breathe a little easier, but Itchy Weintraub, that crazy bastard, might take the whole thing on himself. Who knows? So as the series goes on, Al doesn’t go nowhere without half a dozen boys from the neighborhood protecting him. But you know what? Itchy disappears. Without Irving, he shrivels up and dies. Al’s a new man. As I know you know, the Planets win three straight to beat the Reds and take our third championship in four years. And Al scores six points in the last period in the seventh game to win it for us.” With that, Grandpa Sidney leaned back in his chair and took a long swallow of water.
“Wow, Grandpa, that’s quite a story. You lived through some amazing times.”
Sidney yawned. He consulted the old Benrus on his wrist. “It’s late.” But he made no move to get up and pad off to the guest room he’d occupied for a few years now.
“So, Grandpa,” I said, “do you think Al did it?”
“Naw.”
“Then it was an incredible stroke of luck that Levchuck was murdered when he was.”
“Luck had nothing to do with it.”
“You don’t think so?”
Sidney was rummaging around in one of his pants pockets. He pulled out something wrapped in a white cloth, like a piece of an old undershirt, and said, “I’m an old man, Ronnie. It all goes so fast.”
“You’re good for ten more years,” I said.
He pushed the undershirt-wrapped package across the table, keeping his hand on top of it for a moment before leaving it in front of me.
“It’s for you.”
“What is it?”
“Open it, Ronnie.”
It finally occurred to me what it was, and when it did, tears filled my eyes. To this day, I can’t say whether they were tears of pride that he was my grandfather, tears of mourning because he was going to die soon, or tears of fear because of all I would have to do in my lifetime to feel worthy of him. Probably a combination of all three.
“Go ahead, Ronnie. It won’t bite.”
“I can’t.”
“Don’t be a putz. Open it.”
“No.”
“You’re telling me you can’t even open it?”
I opened it. I unfolded the cloth and there it was. A wallet, a brown rectangle of leather, remarkably well preserved.
“Go ahead, Ronnie. Take a look.”
Gingerly, I flipped the wallet open and took out the folded papers, one by one, soft with age. A Pennsylvania driver’s license describing Irving Levchuck as five foot ten, with brown eyes. A membership card to something called the Miracle Club. A Blue Cross card signed by Levchuck in faded blue fountain pen ink. A business card that read: “Detective Lieutenant John McGuire, Homicide, Philadelphia Police Department,” with a phone number. A folded piece of vellum on which Levchuck had written a series of initials in blue fountain pen ink followed by phone numbers. A hundred-dollar bill tightly folded into quarters. Four business cards that read: “Irving M. Levchuck, Accountant,” with a phone number.
A killer’s wallet, given to me by the killer’s killer, who happened to be my grandfather. My father’s father, who loved my father and me, but who also loved his “boys,” the long stream of brilliant Jewish basketball players for whom he would do anything. And had.
“So that someone should know,” he said.
“Jesus, Grandpa.” I looked down at the wire photo of Levchuck lying in the South Philadelphia alley, then at the wallet that had been taken from his pocket, then at Sidney. “You?”
He just looked at me.
“The gun you took from Al?” I said.
Sidney didn’t say anything.
“What do you want me to do with this, Sidney?”
“That’s your business, Ronnie. Whatever you want.”
“Jesus,” I said.
Then he coughed lightly into his fist, took a sip of water, and said, “We won that series in seven, Ronnie. We won that last game with a cute little play we had, springing Al loose in the corner coming off a double pick by Gumbiner and Morris. Fine got Al the ball right where he liked it and he turned and let go one of his high-arcing sons-of-bitches and put that game away for us. You should’ve been there.”