Roscoe

Negotiable Love

There is nothing like the back room of a dimly lit bar on a summer afternoon when the heat is smothering the city’s life; and so Roscoe has come to a half-walled private corner in Mike Quinlan’s dark dungeon of drink to triumph over this unseasonable heat, a ninety-eight-degree day when summer should be spent. A cold beer in a short glass, and then another, cures the heat in Roscoe’s heart, and the sweat of the glass cools the palm of his hand. Slowly the sweet placenta overgrows his brain, and the afternoon moves weightlessly along, as he waits for whatever comes next in his scheme to unleash the new Roscoe.

He has lost fifteen pounds since they stuck the needle in him, has recovered provisionally, is not out of the woods, but out of the wheelchair, and has sought retreat in Quinlan’s (proper name the Capitol Grill), across State Street from the Capitol, a spa for lawmakers, politicians, and newsmen, where Roscoe has been palming beer glasses since Mike Quinlan opened the place two days before repeal. It is where political winners host banquets in the large back room, and it’s a consolation pit for losers: piano music nightly (Al Smith often sang with this piano). Its walls are dense with photos of major, minor, and less-than-minor pols — FDR, Wendell Willkie, Jim Farley, Thomas E. Dewey, Patsy, Elisha, and Roscoe, among many — also with cartoon images of governors, senators, presidents in Napoleonic hats, dunce caps, admiral’s uniforms, Santa Claus suits, Roman togas, and underwear, riding donkeys, elephants, and dead horses, commanding sinking ships. Wherever you look you see images of yesterday’s politics fading away.

But the place has also given Roscoe pleasure, song, blue romance, and, in off hours, peace and solitude, which is what he is now seeking: an hour alone before Mac arrives with his difficult news. Mac had called headquarters asking Roscoe to meet him, a first for this exemplar of self-reliance, and when Roscoe asked, “What’s the problem?” Mac answered, “Chickens,” and Roscoe understood that the Patsy-Bindy feud was heating up.

What the hell ails Bindy? Why would he con Patsy after all these years? Well, there’s the usual rub of money, never enough, plus the brothel shutdown reminding him again he’s only a second banana in this town, which Mame often tells him. Patsy gives the orders, Patsy controls the wealth, Patsy has the famous chickens; and so Bindy needs to win. But he usually does: eight winners in eight races at his favorite trotting track last July, when Roscoe went with him; nine winners with his own trotters at nine different tracks the same season. He can’t gamble in Albany, because everybody knows he can’t lose—his dice, his cards, his dealers, his joints, his town — and players drop out when he drops in. Even when the game is straight, Bindy wins. So he leaves town to gamble, goes maybe to Troy, to Fogarty’s.

“Bindy always does exactly what he wants to do,” Patsy once said. Well, yes, but how could he think he could con not only Patsy but also the unconnable Tommy Fogarty? It seems to be in the man’s nature to believe the con will prevail, for he learned it early. Hawking newspapers at age ten, he also worked as lookout (for strolling cops) for young Midge Kresser as Midge worked his three-card monte game in front of the Broadway hotels. Bindy grew up among grifters and gamblers who liked sure things — Mush, for one, who taught him that stuffing a sponge up the nostril of a racehorse enhances its ability to lose. He and Mush subsidized card thieves who worked the trains and the night boats. He won twenty thousand at a crap game one night in Saratoga and was then arrested for using slugs to make calls on a public phone.

Yet Bindy is no miser, just a man who delights in deceit. He was always cheerful, a right guy, yes, generous, paid his debts, good company in joints like this, bought drinks for the crowd, gave losers taxi money home, always good for a touch, if you paid it back. Roscoe drank many a night with Bindy, always liked him, still does. But then he turned sour, grew farter after the Thorpe gang broke in on Mush, still Bindy’s partner, and burned his testicles with a candle to get the combination to his safe, which Mush yielded in exchange for medium-rare testes.

The Thorpes also brought in Lorenzo Scarpelli from Newark to kill Bindy over beer, for he and Mush (Patsy the true power, but always in the background) managed its total flow into Albany, and the Thorpes could not enter the market. Scarpelli fired three shots at Bindy on his front porch, all near misses. Bindy leaped into the bushes, betrayed by his spaniel, which wagged its tail at the bush. Scarpelli shot the bush and missed again, Bindy returned fire with the pistol he kept in his milk-bottle box, and Scarpelli sped away. Starved for action, Scarpelli crossed the river to Rensselaer, held up a bank, killed a guard, and was sentenced to the chair. Mush, Bindy, and Roscoe, all close to the warden at Sing Sing (who came to Albany to straighten himself out with gin after every execution), drove down to watch the Scarp sizzle.

The afternoon was so quiet that Roscoe could hear Georgie Moisedes open the tap and let the beer, still Stanwix, flow into one glass, then another. Cutie LaRue and Eddie Brodie had been sitting at the bar when Roscoe came in, and now he heard them talking.

“Let’s go tell Roscoe the campaign plan,” Cutie said.

“You don’t want to be seen talking to Roscoe,” Brodie said. “You’re supposed to be the enemy.”

“Yeah, don’t bother Roscoe back there,” Georgie said. “He wants company he’ll come out here.”

“He wants to be alone,” Cutie said.

“He’s figuring it out,” Georgie said.

“Figuring what out?”

“Whatever it takes.”

Smart. Georgie is smart; but not entirely; finally got enough money to open his own poolroom and card game, then bet it with Mush against Billy Phelan in a nine-ball match. When Billy won, Georgie handed Mush the door key, and went back to drawing beer for pols like Roscoe, whose glass is empty. Ros got up and walked to the bar, stood next to Cutie. Is this a free country? Cutie can’t talk to me? What will they accuse us of, conspiracy to confuse the election process? Cutie can’t win, can’t begin to win, so why is he running? Must be a Democratic trick — I saw him talking to Roscoe. Republicans already saying such things.

“Mr. Brodie, Mr. LaRue,” Roscoe said, pushing his glass toward Georgie with another in his eye.

“Glad to see you out and about, Roscoe,” Brodie said. “You had a siege of it.”

“A martyr to the caprice of automobile travel,” Roscoe said.

Edward Brodie began his newspaper work as a reporter on the Sentinel, and later, after Patsy had forced the paper to close, moved to the Times-Union and enshrined himself on Patsy’s high altar by rebutting a federal report that Albany, an incorrigible city of speakeasies, was also one of the most openly sinful cities in the nation, abounding in bawdy houses and streetwalkers. Brodie conducted a survey of civic and city agencies, plus man-in-the-street interviews for his article, and found that in ten years no one had complained of any vice. One arrest had been made for procuring in 1928, along with four transient women convicted of prostitution, jailed, then exiled forever from the city by police. Men on the street told Brodie: “Albany is a clean town. Albany is nowhere near as bad as they say.” Three weeks after his story appeared, Brodie was appointed Albany’s commissioner of charities and communication, writing speeches for every politician Patsy allowed to make one. Roscoe called him the Oracle.

“Cutie, I heard you say you wanted to talk to me,” Roscoe said.

“Since you’re the opposition in this election, Roscoe,” Cutie said, “I wanted to warn you we’re organizing heavy attacks. I plan to campaign as Uncle Sam, in a suit of stars and stripes, a beard, and a tall hat, and I will put you and Mayor Fitzgibbon on notice that I mean what I say about good government.”

“Will Uncle Sam make speeches?” Roscoe asked Brodie.

“He will,” said Brodie. “He will insist on lowering the price of meat, for, as you know, Uncle Sam was a butcher in the War of 1812. He will stump for the right of soldiers to get out of the army now that the war is over, and he will demand more shade trees be planted downtown. Uncle Sam will also sing ‘God Bless America’ at the close of every rally.”

“Sounds like this’ll be our toughest fight ever,” Roscoe said.

“Watch out for me, Roscoe,” said Cutie.

Mac came through the open door in hat and shirtsleeves and nodded at Roscoe as he approached. He only looked at Georgie, Brodie, and Cutie, then back to Roscoe.

“Beer, Mac?” Georgie asked, pushing Roscoe’s beer across the bar.

“Vichy water,” Mac said. He didn’t drink anymore, except a little port now and then with Gladys.

Georgie poured Mac’s Saratoga Vichy on ice. As Roscoe paid for a round, picked up his beer, and started back to his corner, a sparrow flew through the door and panicked, soaring the length of the bar and back, corner to corner, lost, trapped.

“Jesus, Mary, and Joseph,” said a lone middle-aged woman at the end of the bar, a martini in front of her. Roscoe knew her, but not by name: a reporter who covered the Capitol for downstate newspapers. She rummaged in her purse, pulled out a rosary, and waved it at the sparrow, which was still soaring frantically from wall to wall. “It’s bad luck when a bird flies inside the house,” she said, and raised her arm higher to swing the rosary like a lariat.

“He’s just getting out of the sun,” Brodie said. “Buy him a beer, Georgie.”

“You’re right that birds are bad luck inside a house,” Roscoe said, “but never in a saloon.” He watched the crazed bird, which hovered, then changed direction, in quick and aimless flight. Georgie flapped a bar towel at the bird, intensifying its panic.

“Don’t hurt it,” the woman said. “That’s worse.”

“Just waving it toward the door, dear,” Georgie said. “First time we ever had a bird in here.”

“Who you kidding?” Roscoe said. “This place caters to cuckoos.”

Back and forth went the bird.

“Now, everybody calm down,” Roscoe said. “Sit perfectly still and just shut up. Don’t make him more nervous than he already is. Quiet.”

No one moved or spoke. They all watched the bird fly back and forth, back and forth. As the bar fell unnaturally silent and still, the bird perched on a hanging light fixture. It twitched its wings, looked up, down, sideways. Then, with coordinates under control, it zoomed straight down from the fixture and out through the open door. The woman kissed her rosary and put it back in her purse.

“Thank you, sir,” she said to Roscoe. “You understand birds.”

“I know what it’s like when you’re in the wrong place,” Roscoe said.

“So,” Roscoe said to Mac, “tell me about the chicken war.” They were alone in Roscoe’s corner.

In a whisper Mac answered: “Patsy wants to bust the Notchery, with Bindy in it. He wants Bindy in jail.”

“He can’t want that. That’s insane. Where did you get this?”

“O.B. got it from Patsy last night and gave it to me this morning. It’s my baby.”

Roscoe had talked with Patsy and O.B. both at morning and Bindy was never mentioned. So, Roscoe, Patsy doesn’t trust you on this. He’s afraid you’ll find a way to stop the raid before it happens; and O.B. joins him in a second brotherly conspiracy.

“You’re organizing the bust? O.B.’s not going in with you?”

“He’ll be on the outside, but that’s fine,” Mac said. “I wanted a second opinion before I made the move. You’re the only second opinion in town.”

“How do you even know Bindy’ll be at the Notchery?”

“We saw him go in this morning and he didn’t come out.”

“You still have that prowl car out front?”

“Gone. Let him think we left. But we’re watching from two houses.”

“Don’t you think he knows that?”

“He might.”

“You move in with your troops, knock down the door, back up the wagons, and haul off Bindy, Mame, the lot.”

“Right.”

“Who’s in there?”

“Pina, anywhere from three to eight girls, the maids, and Mame’s bouncer and bartender. Plus Bindy, and maybe some customers.”

“You get to bust Pina.”

“Would you believe.”

“But you can’t do it. That’s why you’re here.”

“I can do it,” Mac said. “Mac does what he’s told. But Patsy and Bindy been going at each other like this for as long as I know them. They fight and then patch it up. If that happens after I bust Bindy, where the hell am I?”

“Very astute, Mac. When is this happening?”

“Tonight.”

“What if Bindy’s not there when you break down the door?”

“I don’t know. Buy Mame a new door?”

“Can you imagine how happy the Governor will be over this? And what it’ll do to Alex’s campaign?”

“I’m only a lieutenant, Roscoe. I got an order I gotta go with. Unless you know how to stop it.”

“I’ll go up there with you now. We’ll have a cup of tea with Bindy, talk things out. How’s that sound?”

“Cup of tea.”

“Bindy likes his cup of tea. Four and a half teaspoons of sugar.”

“Something you oughta know, Roscoe,” Mac said, and he leaned closer, spoke in the softest possible whisper. “Pina did the Dutchman. Her prints were all over his room. O.B. and Patsy know this, but nobody else.”

“Nobody except you, now me, the fingerprint boys, Pina herself, who told Mame, who told Bindy, and by this time every whore in town knows.”

“The troopers don’t know about the prints. The FBI don’t.”

“Let’s hope that’s true,” Roscoe said, standing up, once again readying his backbone for a move into the hideous maw of subsequence. Dutiful Ros, should be elsewhere, he’s still here. And the blue devils are running loose.

Mac, Who Was Once a Child

In 1914, Jeremiah McEvoy’s father left his wife with five kids in their rotten house in Sheridan Hollow. Mac was eight and went to work at Bensinger’s Steam Laundry. Heat, stink, lifting, hauling, fourteen hours, buck fifty a week. He came thirty minutes late one day, they docked him fifty cents. Mac broke two plate-glass windows, spread ashes on two rooms of clean laundry. Mrs. Bensinger shoved two dollars at him, saying, “Leave us alone.” Mac danced on the street for nickels and pennies, got a fiver from Jimmy Walker, the assemblyman, which gave him lifelong affection for politicians. When he was ten, the city took all five McEvoy kids from Mac’s mother, too sick. She moved in with her sister, who had a house. Mac, too old for the orphan asylum, went on the job auction block. This farmer looked at his teeth, no rot there, made him walk and pick up a chair, told him, “Get in the wagon,” and they rode eight miles to one hundred and eighty chickens.

Mac ate rotten smoked ham every day, hates ham, collected eggs, fed chickens, cleaned coops, hates chickens, walked horses to the pond, got squeezed between them, doesn’t like horses either. The farmer cursed Mac for mistakes, knocked him down with the flat of a pitchfork, he’ll kill me, Mac decided. At dawn he turned the horses loose, threw the sleeping farmer’s only shoes into the pond, left on the run, got a ride to Albany with a housepainter who hired him to do first coats, but the weather changed, no painting. His aunt also told him the bank was kicking her and Mama out of the house, three months’ rent overdue, so Mac went to Albany City Savings Bank and asked for President Henry J. Goddard, who was eating a banana.

“You want a banana, young fella?” President Goddard asked.

“My mother is losing her house and I have to help her.”

“How can you help?” the president asked.

“I’m a housepainter,” he said. “I clean and paint houses.”

“A regular contractor.”

“I can fix houses for the bank,” Mac said.

“This is a great, great country,” President Goddard said. “Put the boy to work.”

A bank guy took Mac to one of the bank’s worst houses, three floors, five apartments. “Forty dollars when they’re all cleaned, painted, and papered,” said the bank guy. “Here’s ten on account.”

Cleaning, painting was easy, but the wallpaper was peeling, filthy, Mac ripped it down. How do you put it up? Woman across the street saw Mac going in with armloads of wallpaper, watched him dump the same paper in the trash, something wrong. Woman, Hattie, asked Mac what happened. Mac said he’d put fifteen double rolls on five ceilings but it fell off. Hattie said she’d fix that and showed him the secret: a broom that swept the paper tight and straight. Mac got the knack, collected his thirty dollars, and bought his mother a hundred roses and a toy diamond ring.

Mac moved into Hattie’s house, went to school, got work delivering oysters anyplace for Bill Keeler’s restaurant, including whorehouses. One of the Poole sisters let him in one night, took the oysters, put them in dirty dishwater. She left Mac in the kitchen, didn’t pay him, went into the parlor, and fell over. Mac looked in and saw the four Poole sisters, good-looking whores, all whacked on the pipe, money on the table. Mac pocketed the money and grew out of oyster transport, but not before he got to know whores, and liked a few.

He stayed on with Hattie, quit school after eighth grade, and grew up with chalky teeth and the wrong jobs, housepainter, would-be carpenter. Then, one day, Hattie told him to go see O. B. Conway, the police detective who was king of the night, and Mac became a cop.

Mac Rising

In 1928, after he disarmed, with a garden rake, a one-eyed Polish psychotic wielding a shotgun, an act of indisputable initiative, dexterity, and courage, O.B. persuaded the chief: Take Mac out of uniform, make him a detective.

In 1929, after Pauly Biggers killed two people and took a fourteen-year-old girl hostage and said he’d kill her, too, if they didn’t let him drive to Canada, Mac, unarmed, talked an hour and ten minutes to Pauly, making the Canadian escape arrangements. When Mac and Pauly finally agreed and shook hands on it, Mac shot Pauly between the eyes with a.22 pistol device he had rigged into the left armpit of his coat, in emulation of Albany’s Silent Gunman of 1916. O.B. got Mac a ten-dollar raise.

In 1930, Mac and O.B. found four members of the Polka Dot Gang, who all wore polka-dot ties on the job, raiding a boxcar loaded with alcohol destined for Al Brisbane’s two downtown drugstores. Mac shot two of the three, but O.B. got hit in the leg and went down in the open. Mac stood up and covered him, two guns blazing, pulled him out of danger, shot a third Dotter (the fourth got away), but took a bullet in the side, and everybody went to the hospital. Mac was wearing a silk shirt, and when they pulled the shirt out of his wound, out popped the bullet, no surgery needed. Mac realized bullets don’t go through silk, and after that O.B. also wore silk shirts. O.B. threw a party for Mac, thanks for saving my life, and bought him a new.38 police special with a pearl handle.

Mac and O.B., close as brothers, roamed the city, and Mac met Patsy, who was Jesus, also Moses. O.B. had organized the truck convoys that brought Patsy and Bindy’s beer into town early in Prohibition and was so savvy and ruthless Patsy made him deputy chief of the Night Squad, with orders to keep out hotshot hoodlums and freelancers with beer to sell. Nobody but the organization sells beer in Albany. Let no hoodlum set up shop in our town. Mac and O.B. shot up several trucks of Italian bootleggers who ignored the rules, also several Italians. Patsy thought the world of Mac and his shooting, but O.B. was Patsy’s man, and in 1930 Patsy made him supreme boss of the Night Squad.

Mac and Pina: A Love Mess

Mac met a cute singer at the Kenmore and they married and lasted long enough to have twins. One morning Mac’s wife, in her small black hat and fur jacket, stood in the doorway saying, “If you want me, come after me.” Mac said, “You’re back in two days or don’t bother,” and watched her high heels, her black stocking seams, and the sweet swagger of her ass as she walked to the taxi. The end. Mac bought a two-family house on Walter Street, moved his sister in downstairs, no rent if you raise the twins, Sis. Mac lived upstairs and saw the twins sometimes. One night at Joey Polito’s Spaghetti House (opens 3 a.m., two broads always, no spaghetti), Mac saw Giuseppina serving drinks, just off the boat.

“You like?” Joey asked Mac. “I dress her up for you.”

Joey sent Pina into the ladies’ room with a suitcase and she came out, Madonna santa, too much for this joint. You shoulda seen her. Mac got her a waitress job in a real restaurant with good tips, and then it was Mac and Pina. One customer, a car dealer, gave her a Pontiac. She had no license, but she drove to Atlantic City for a garment makers’ convention, came back, and threw eleven hundred in tens, twenties, and fifties on her bed for Mac to see. Some tips. He could have cried over how great she looked, that long black hair, those perfect calves, those fantastic tits, how she rose so high in the world working for tips, which is what she called it. Do what you know how, was Mac’s credo. Mac and Pina, for months and months. Mac and Pina, this could last.

O.B. got to like Pina’s looks. One morning, after work, when Mac was going to Pina’s place, he saw O.B. come out and get into his car. Some say O.B. should not have done this, and Mac is a member of that club. Pina said O.B. paid for what he got, just another Giovanni. Mac made an effort to believe her. Pina could’ve given Mac the clap, the crabs, and the syph, he wouldn’t mind as long as she was there after work. But then she stayed out. Where? Mac tried patience, but had none. The way his wife left him, bingo, he left Pina, who moved out of her place and in with the Dutchman, upstairs over the Double Dutch nightclub, where the Dutchman had B-girls of his own but none like Pina. Pina liked the Dutchman’s big apartment, nice plants, thick rugs, picture window looking at the river, watch the boats go by. Dutchman played Italian music for Pina, Mac never thought of that. Dutchman gave her a diamond big as the end of a cigarette, Mac couldn’t afford that. Dutchman bent her in two, tied her up, gagged her, Mac didn’t go for that stuff, didn’t know Pina did, a girl’s gotta have her fun. Pina would still screw Mac silly if he came around, but Mac gave up Pina. Everything except thinking about her.

Mac and Jack

Roscoe stuffed himself into the front seat of Mac’s car for the ride to the Notchery, imagining what was happening inside Mac’s head, same old thing, revving himself up with the necessary iron to face the unknown worst the world offered him day after day. But today had substantially more gravity, as Mac prepared to lead the invading army into a war between the McCall men maddened by the will to excess, power gone berserk, not a first for either brother. When these fellows are wrong they are wrong fortissimo.

Today was also different for Roscoe, the outsider about to become the intermediary; and nobody but Mac knew that yet. There was an antecedent for such a condition: late fall 1931, Jack (Legs) Diamond, still recovering from being shot in the arm, lung, and liver seven months earlier, on bail waiting for his second trial in Troy for kidnapping and torturing a trucker, here he was suddenly in the Elks Club, pulling up a chair to sit down for a little pinochle with Roscoe, Marcus Gorman, and Leo Finn, one of the Party’s aging bagmen, an ex-schoolteacher and still a bit of a literatus, who knew his Yeats and Keats and could call up fragments on cue, which amused Jack.

“So — how are all your bullet holes doing, Jack?” Roscoe asked.

“You don’t have to answer that,” said Marcus, whose fame was in a crescendo from representing Jack in court.

“They’re coming along,” Jack said.

“You don’t seem to mind being shot,” Roscoe said, “you handle it so well and so often.”

“Being shot’s not so bad,” Jack said. “The problem is getting even.”

“My buddies gut-shot me in the war,” Roscoe said.

“Accidentally on purpose?” Jack asked.

“Exactly.”

“Amazing,” said Leo. “Just what Willie wrote.”

“Willie?” said Jack. “Is that one of your old poets?”

“The same. ‘A heavily built Falstaffian man / Comes cracking jokes of civil war / As though to die by gunshot were / The finest play under the sun.’ ”

“Civil war,” Jack said. “I know about that. It was my buddies who shot me in the back with two shotguns.”

“Your war never ends, does it?” Roscoe said.

“No, but I’m too young to retire,” Jack said, and Roscoe dealt the cards.

Jack was thirty-four and had been an outsize presence in Albany all that summer, turning up at the Elks, at the best restaurants, a regular at the Kenmore’s Rainbo Room, headlines in the papers every day about his upcoming trial and his crushed mountain empire. Since the late 1920s Jack, the best-known gangster in the East, had been the Emperor of Applejack in the Catskills, doing business in eighteen counties, running beer out of the Kingston brewery he took over after Charlie Northrup disappeared, highjacking fellow bootleggers, his specialty. He’d terrorized most Catskill roadhouses and hotels into handling his goods, converted law enforcement to his persuasion — the sheriff of Greene County gave pistol permits to his whole gang, made Jack a deputy with a badge. But then Jack kidnapped and tortured Clem Streeter (burned his feet, hung him from a tree) for refusing to say where he was hauling twenty-four barrels of hard cider, the raw element of applejack. And when Clem told his story next day, well, that did it. We can stand anything but torture, said Governor Roosevelt. And in the spring of 1931, he sent state troopers and his attorney general down to rupture Jack’s empire up the middle and sideways.

Marcus won Jack a change of venue from Catskill to Troy, and Jack then transferred his wife, girlfriend, and select henchmen into a six-room suite on the second floor of the Kenmore. In July, the jury at Jack’s first Troy trial acquitted him of assaulting the trucker, and Jack the celebrity soared socially over Albany rooftops, ubiquitous in the town’s speakeasies, awaiting the second trial — another acquittal? His ultimate plan: go into business upstate, away from the Catskills, new gang, new territory, new connections.

Long story short: Jack, after the Elks Club pinochle game, offered Roscoe a business proposition — cheap beer, no matter what price he had to undercut, cheaper by a dollar a barrel than the Waxey Gordon beer Mush and Bindy were bringing into Albany. Save your money! Buy from Jack! Where was Jack getting his beer now that the troopers had closed his brewery?

“There’s beer everywhere,” said Jack, who had links to breweries in Fort Edward, Troy, Yonkers, Manhattan, Coney Island. But Jack’s beer came with Jack’s baggage. Albany Detective Sergeant Freddie Robin had been slouching on a sofa in the Kenmore lobby, assigned to watch Jack’s pals troop in and out for business and sociality: the Thorpe brothers, homegrown thugs who, a year hence, would bring in Lorenzo Scarpelli to kill Bindy and Mush; also Honey Curry and Hubert Maloy, who would evolve into kidnappers themselves in 1938, holding Bindy’s son, Charlie Boy, for ransom; plus Vincent Coll, Fats McCarthy, and Dutch Schultz, a trio of swaggering notables who had left corpses all over Manhattan in the beer wars. Newsmen had kept score on who was ahead in the corpse count, and Jack won. Did Albany need beer that came in coffins?

“Jack, your proposition sounds tempting,” Roscoe said, “but Waxey’s beer is well liked. I can’t imagine the boys switching.”

“Can you check it out with Patsy and Bindy?” Jack wondered.

“I’ll pass the question along,” said Roscoe.

When he told Patsy about the offer, Patsy said, “That fella’s going to be a serious nuisance if they don’t put him in jail.”

Roscoe at that moment became the outsider in future Jack talk: Patsy trusting him like nobody else, but keeping him apart from certain cosmic decisions. You run the Party, Roscoe, I’ll run the nighttown — as if they could be separated. But Patsy believed in separate realms of power, pitted even his closest allies against one another when it suited him. Like pitting chickens. Competitive truculence. See who survives.

And so monitoring Jack fell to O.B. and Mac. They followed him when he left the Kenmore and moved into the Wellington Hotel, next to the Elks Club. They pressured the Wellington to put him out, and followed him to the Pine Hills where he stayed with the bootlegger Nick Farr. With the Thorpe brothers, Farr was helping set up Jack’s embryonic upstate beer network. Farr’s neighbors hadn’t known what he did for a living, but they recognized Jack from the newspapers and alerted the police. O.B. and Mac told Jack he was upsetting the citizenry and was no longer welcome in Albany. Get lost, Jack.

Jack sent his wife, Alice, to her apartment on 72nd Street in Manhattan, then moved in with his girlfriend, Marion (Kiki) Roberts, upstairs over Sylvester Hausen’s card game on Nineteenth Street in Watervliet. He switched between there and a house in North Troy until the second week of December, when the trial was about to begin. He also called Bindy and said he’d dropped the idea of bringing in beer, but how about permission to go into the insurance business in Albany? Insurance meant collecting premiums that insured the buyer against Jack Diamond’s resentment of people who wouldn’t buy his insurance. Bindy, like Roscoe, passed Jack’s request on to Patsy.

Jack then rented rooms for himself and Alice; his brother Eddie’s widow, Kitty; and her seven-year-old son, Johnny, named for Jack, who were all humanizing presences at Jack’s trials. A fella with a family like that, he’s gotta have some good in him. The rooms were ten dollars a week each in one of Hattie’s houses, 67 Dove Street, rented under the names of Mr. and Mrs. Kelly.

Jack was back in Albany.

His residential slide from Kenmore luxury to a ten-dollar rooming house was strictly financial. Heavy expenses for hotels and high life, hospitals and lawyers, payoffs to politicians, keeping his women happy, were taxing. He had booze of every kind stashed in a dozen drops upstate but, being under surveillance, he couldn’t get to it to peddle it — a prisoner of his own glittering infamy. The stash, much of it originally stolen by Jack, was eventually rounded up by troopers and valued at ten million, its street price. But it wasn’t worth forty cents to Jack at the moment. He was broke.

On the afternoon of December 17, Jack, with Marcus Gorman’s assistance, was acquitted of the Clem Streeter kidnapping. He celebrated with a party at Packy Delaney’s Parody Club in Albany; fifty people — Alice, Marcus, the night crowd of gamblers, pimps, grifters, a few newspapermen, a priest, an ex-railroad cop named Milligan — came to his party. Assorted Albany detectives also came: Freddie Robin, Tuohey and Spivak from the Gambling Squad, taking notes, and O.B. and Mac, who had been at the trial and now, from their car, watched the celebrants enter and leave, all night long. About one o’clock, Jack left them all and went up to Ten Broeck Street to see Kiki in the new apartment he’d rented for her. They drank and whatnotted while his cab driver, Frankie Teller, and his lookout, Morty Besch, waited three hours for him. After four o’clock, Frankie dropped Morty downtown and drove Jack to Dove Street, then helped him climb the stoop and the inside stairs to his room. Alone, Jack undressed and fell into a drunken sleep in his underwear.

At 4:30 a.m., a dark-red Packard sedan that had been idling with its lights out a block to the north, moved up to the curbstone in front of 67 Dove. O.B. and Mac got out and went up the stoop, into the house, past the ported plant in the hall, and up to the second-floor-front room where Jack lay sprawled in sleep. Mac and O.B. shone their flashlights in Jack’s face and pointed their.38s at his head.

Roscoe and Jack

From the Times-Union and Knickerbocker Press, both delivered to his room at the Ten Eyck, Roscoe learned of Jack Diamond’s murder at 4:30 a.m., police not called until 6:55 a.m. The police Teletype was silent all morning: no messages sent to State Police or any other police agency to announce the killing, or to ask for help in finding the killers. The State Police had to confirm Diamond’s death by calling the newspapers, which wrote that it was a gangland slaying, and probably we’ll never know the truth. So many out there who wanted vengeance on the man. Whoever did it, give him a medal, one cop said.

Yet hadn’t Jack neutralized or eliminated those old enmities? He behaved as if he had, running free like a public man, playing pinochle, drinking, dancing, partying with friends, talking of a Florida vacation, spending those late hours with his light o’ love, Kiki — not an unusual way for a liberated man to celebrate. Jack wasn’t living in some psychic cave of fear. He went to his bed ready to wake into a new day of freedom from justice. But he went to his bed alone, in Albany. Mistakes. You usually ride them out, and Jack the nimble, Jack the quick, had ridden many. But now he’s Jack the dead, and a mystery is here. Why did he go it alone?

Roscoe dwelled on that silent police Teletype. Why ask for help in solving a murder when you know who did it? Jack back in Albany: didn’t he believe O.B. about leaving town? Here’s the new message: “Welcome back, Jack. Patsy sends his best.” Roscoe would hear the story more than once from O.B., never from silent Mac. Unsolved murder. Everybody knew the rumor, but who dared say it out loud?

Roscoe saw himself as an accessory in bringing Jack’s life to a close. So many people discover ways to destroy themselves — Elisha, maybe Pina, and Jack — and sometimes we help them along. Roscoe had liked Jack, an excessive fellow, deadly, yet a charmer. But Jack had become careless, a thief all his life, a creature of fraud and deceit, walking around for years with an open wound of the soul (many have it), plus all those body wounds, and then behaving as if he was just another legitimate citizen with nothing to fear, a man who could do what he couldn’t, be what he wasn’t. That’s the way to bet, of course, and who knows better than Roscoe? Go for the impossible. But now Jack knows: sometimes the impossible is impossible.

Prelude to a Whore

Mac pulled the car into the driveway of the Notchery, blocking access to the side door of the old three-story roadhouse that once was the Come On Inn. The place was an antique with a swayback roof, cedar-shingle siding, and the promise of ribald, unsanctioned pleasure. Olive Eyes Wheeler, Mame’s beefy new bouncer, came out immediately and waved Mac away. Mac turned off the motor, and as Roscoe got out of the car he felt chest pain. Another needle in the heart to look forward to? He and Mac went up the stairs from the parking lot, and Roscoe saw Mame inside the doorway. Mac wore his suit coat to cover his pistol.

“You can’t leave that car in front of the stairs,” Olive Eyes said.

“Yes, I can,” Mac said, and he showed his shield.

“We’re looking for Bindy,” Roscoe said.

“Don’t know anybody by that name,” the bouncer said.

“Very good, Olive. You should look for work in the movies. Tell Mame Roscoe is here to see Mr. McCall.”

Roscoe could hear violin music, classical, maybe Bach? Who could tell in this heat? He walked through the doorway and Mac followed. Mame had vanished. Olive Eyes bolted the door, still fitted with the steel kick-plate that had slowed down several break-ins by dry agents during Prohibition. The old walnut bar was still in place, and bartender Renny Kilmer, who’d had the yearning but not the brass to be a pimp and made a career compromise by working as Mame’s bartender, was sitting behind the bar reading the year’s hot novel Forever Amber.

The inn’s modest dance hall had been expanded to create the main parlor, where a three-piece band entertained Fridays and Saturdays, solo upright piano every night but Sunday, when the Notchery closed to honor the Sabbath. The area bordering the dance floor was covered by a maroon-and-purple Oriental rug that was impractical for spilling beer and throwing up on, but Mame had chosen it for its elite tones. One of her regulars, an architect, had redesigned the place in exchange for several months of free visitations, and had bought artwork for the walls, female nudes by Degas, Goya, Renoir, Botticelli. You could order a whore on the half-shell for an extra five.

The violin music upstairs continued — very fine stuff, Roscoe decided. Why am I listening to fine stuff in a whorehouse? It wasn’t the radio — they don’t allow one — and it wouldn’t be on the jukebox. Another mystery.

Two women in transparent white panties, negligees, and white high-heeled slippers were sitting in the cones of two electric fans near the jukebox. A dozen arm- and armless chairs and two sofas, where the whores waited for, or sat on, customers, were spaced along the walls. One of Mame’s regulars, whom Roscoe knew only as Oke, a retired insurance salesman, was dancing to the violin music (a Bach partita, yes) with the whore Roscoe knew as the Blue Pigeon. The Pigeon could drink a fifth of whiskey in an evening and stay aloft. Her negligee was off both shoulders to ensure contact of her very contactable breasts with the naked chest of Oke, whose blue shirt was open from throat to belt. The two whores in armchairs stood up for the arrival of Roscoe and Mac, and slinked toward them.

“Pina around?” Mac asked.

The whores looked at each other, shrugged, how would we know?

“Upstairs with the fiddle player,” Oke said, breaking his stride with the Pigeon and coming over to visit. The whores zapped Oke with their eyes, couldn’t believe how stupid. Oke didn’t notice. Oke wore dentures, and the joints of his palsied hands were swollen with arthritis. His face had the deep-smiling fissures of a man who didn’t brood.

“What fiddle player is that?” Mac asked.

“Don’t know his name,” said Oke, “but can’t you hear him? Is that great fiddle? Forty years in whorehouses, I never heard anything like it.”

“What is he, a snake charmer?” Mac asked. “Plays for customers who can’t get it up?”

“If he can do that I’ll give him a job for life,” Oke said. “I couldn’t come if you called me.”

“I know how to fiddle if you’re interested,” the whore Trixie said to Roscoe. Trixie was a candidate for the beef trust if she didn’t watch her diet.

“Some other time, sweetheart,” Roscoe said. “You know where Mame went?”

“Are you a cop?” Trixie asked. And Roscoe smiled.

“Mame,” said Oke, “has the most powerful pussy in the North Atlantic states. You couldn’t get into it with a crowbar if she didn’t want you to. Then she says okay and takes you in and you can’t get out. She’s got pussy muscles doctors don’t know about.”

“You’re good friends with Mame,” Roscoe said.

“I been coming here for years, here and Lily Clark’s joint. Tell the family I’m going fishing, then stash the fishing rods in a locker at the train station and come here for the weekend. One whore, Rosie, the way she liked me you’d think I was the greatest screw in town. ‘Marry me, Oke,’ she says. ‘We’ll have fun and then you can divorce me.’ She was a hot one.”

“You see Pina down here today?” Mac asked Oke.

“Pina,” said Oke. “Now, there’s a broad. I’d give my left ball for one night with her, a lotta good it’d do me. I couldn’t come if you called me.”

“You’re here just to dance, is that it?” Roscoe asked

“If that’s all there is it ain’t bad,” Oke said.

“How much a dance?”

“Twelve bucks for all afternoon, with anybody who’s free, once a week.”

“Like paying dues at the Elks Club,” Roscoe said.

Oke lifted the Pigeon’s negligee to her shoulders. “You don’t get these at the Elks Club,” he said.

“Anybody want a drink?” Renny Kilmer asked.

“Ginger ale, lots of ice,” said Roscoe.

“Two,” said Mac, and the slender whore whose name Roscoe didn’t know brought their drinks.

“How long has that fiddle been going?” Mac asked.

“About an hour,” said Oke. “He stops playing and gets a little action.”

Mame came down the back staircase and across the parlor to Roscoe, Madam of the Afternoon, red hair in a businesslike upsweep, professional body camouflaged by a floral tent-like frock. Her whores went back to their chairs and Oke followed them.

“We can go up,” Mame said to Roscoe. “But only you.” She gestured at Mac. “Why is he here?”

“He’s my driver for the day.”

“I don’t believe you.”

“That’s smart. I don’t believe anything I say either. But that’s my story, Mame, and you’re stuck with it.”

Roscoe quaffed his ginger ale and went over to Mac. “I’ll be right back. Wait here.”

“I don’t wanna wait,” Mac said.

“Don’t get excited till I tell you.”

“I’ll go up and get Pina.”

“Not yet, for chrissake. Not yet.”

Mac sulked and sipped his ginger ale. The violin music stopped, and Mac stared bullets through the ceiling. Mac never liked the violin, although hillbilly fiddlers weren’t bad. Last week he saw a report on a stolen violin worth a lot of money. Mac liked the piano. Trixie pushed a button on the jukebox and “Paper Doll” played: the Mills Brothers lamenting about playing the doll game. Mac has played that game.

Bindy was naked to the waist, three electric fans blowing directly on him, two pitchers on an end table beside his chair, one with iced tea, one with ice cubes, plus a pile of small towels next to the pitchers. He was toweling his chest, his arms, and his high forehead, a sweating Buddha in the love shrine. Behind him sat his large safe, covered by a velvet tapestry, which was Mame’s way of preventing it from offending the plush décor established by her decorators: George III armchairs, pink linen drapes on the windows, marble horse figurines on the marble coffee table, a baby-grand piano given to Mame by an ardent customer, a portrait of Mame as a young beauty — in sum, the escalation of Mame’s sense of herself as mistress of a world different in kind from her hot-mattress domain downstairs.

Bindy gave Roscoe a serious handshake with the old Bindy smile, always so likable; but does today’s smile mean he thinks he’s a winner?

“What’s on your mind, Roscoe? You got trouble I can help you with?”

“We all got trouble, Bin. I’m trying to solve it.”

Roscoe, awash in the sweat of his own brow, sat facing his host, who turned a fan in his direction. The last time Roscoe saw him, Bindy offered candy; now air currents. In thrall to generosity.

“Iced tea?” Bindy asked. He poured the tea into a tall glass and added ice.

“That bet you won up at Fogarty’s,” Roscoe said, taking the tea, “Patsy wants to get even.”

“He should get better chickens.”

“He’s not happy about the switch.”

“Wasn’t any switch.”

“Haven’t you heard, Bin? Fogarty found the Swiggler was twins, and the wrong twin won. The way out is give Patsy back his forty thousand.”

“Is that all?”

“No. Pay him another forty. The wrong bird’s a foul, which doesn’t cost anything if they don’t catch you. But they caught you. Pay the man, Bin, the trouble’ll fade.”

Bindy’s naked flesh rollicked with heavings and ripplings as he laughed. “That’s good, Roscoe. Very funny.”

“Not funny. Patsy is ready to close this place and bust everybody in it, including you.”

“He wouldn’t do that.”

“That’s what he said about you switching chickens. But he put the order out last night. I kid you not. And if I can’t stop it, everybody loses except the Governor. We could blow the election.”

“Patsy raids us, he goes down with us,” Bindy said. “I could put him in Sing Sing. And I’ll fight the Governor, too. We got sound movies of one of his top guys in fishnet stockings in bed with three broads.”

“Won’t that be great? First Pina and the Dutchman, now orgy movies.”

“What about Pina and the Dutchman?” Mame asked. She had been hovering nervously.

“They know she did it, Mame. Her prints were all over his place.”

“She used to live there,” Mame said.

“Prints with his blood.”

And Roscoe listened to their silence. “Maybe you should get Pina a lawyer.”

“We should get her out of town,” Mame said.

“She wouldn’t get off the block. This place is under surveillance.”

“It was self-defense,” Mame said. “That Dutch bastard tied her up and tortured her.”

“The word’s around she likes tie-ups.”

“Who cares what she likes? He hurt her bad.”

“You’re saying O.B. is ready to raid us?” Bindy asked, the news finally penetrating.

“Patsy might charge you with harboring a murderer. He can get nasty when he puts his mind to it.”

Roscoe watched Bindy think. Having organized that harebrained chicken-switch, here he goes again, considering the defiance that will destroy what he’s spent a lifetime creating, his empire of negotiable love, plus splitting the Party all to hell in an election year, and maybe crash-landing himself in jail. Money in the safe, surrounded by love-seekers, and all he wants to do is beat his brother, another impossible bet. Is everybody nuts?

Olive Eyes came into Mame’s parlor, knocking as he entered, and said, “That cop is gonna shoot the guy with Pina,” and Mame moved on a run down the stairs, Olive Eyes after her, and Roscoe following. And there, indeed, in the parlor was Mac, 38 in hand, Pina in her negligee next to him, pistol not quite pointed at the young man holding a violin by its neck.

“No doubt about it,” Mac was saying, “this is the stolen fiddle. Worth thirty thousand, they say.”

“It’s not stolen. I’ve owned it seven years,” the young man said, handsome kid, the look of a gigolo. “I bought it for two hundred dollars.”

“I think you’re a thief,” Mac said.

Pina looked convinced that Mac might do something with that.38. The barman and Oke were in a corner with the whores, behaving like wallpaper.

“Put the gun away, please,” Mame said. “We don’t need this.”

“I’m arresting a thief,” Mac said. “Are you protecting a thief?”

“I’m no thief,” the young man said.

“He stole this violin in Chicago,” Mac said. “Took it off a musician about to give a concert.”

“I never been in Chicago,” the young man said.

“He called the musician and said he found it in a taxi and he could have it back for ten thousand dollars,” Mac said. “That’s not a thief? That’s extortion set to music.”

“I didn’t do any of that. That’s crazy.”

“Can you prove you own the violin?” Roscoe asked.

“I bought it, ten bucks a week, at the Modern Music Shop downtown. They know me.”

“We can check this out, Mac,” Roscoe said.

“He’s a nice-a boy,” Pina said. “Never no trouble.”

“We’ll check it out,” Mac said, and he holstered his pistol. “I want to talk to you,” he said to Pina, and he took her arm and sat with her on an empty sofa. He stroked her hair, kissed her, like old times, then talked to her. Giving her the news?

“They shouldn’t let him near a gun,” Mame said to Roscoe.

“Sometimes he’s right about these things,” Roscoe said.

Olive Eyes looked twitchy, ready to do something to restore peace to the Notchery, but what? Shoot a cop? Renny Kilmer went back to his bar.

“Anybody want a drink?” Renny asked, but got no takers.

Oke stood up from his seat among the whores, buttoning his shirt and tucking it into his trousers. “Too much stuff goin’ on here,” he said. “Guess I’ll move along.”

“See you next week, Oke,” Mame said.

“That guy gonna be here?” Oke asked.

“No, he’s just here today,” Mame said.

“This kind of stuff ruins the atmosphere,” Oke said.

The violinist stood up and asked Roscoe, “Is he really arresting me?”

“I don’t think so,” Roscoe said. “Leave the violin. Pick it up tomorrow.”

“Thanks, mister, thanks,” the young man said, and as he and Oke walked toward the door, Roscoe heard Bindy’s heavy step coming down the stairs, also heard the sound of gunshots, and the front door being smashed open, and he thought, Goddamn, O.B., why are you doing this now? We’re nowhere near ready.

But it wasn’t O.B. It was half a dozen state troopers, and more on the street, a dozen cars with thirty troopers surrounding the Notchery and every street bordering it, the Governor coming to visit. Roscoe noted that Bindy had put on a shirt for the occasion.

The troopers moved through the building, confiscating papers and taking note of Bindy’s safe, which he would not open for them. They arrested Mame for running a disorderly house, her four whores for whoring, and Renny Kilmer and Olive Eyes for abetting prostitution.

Dory Dixon, the State Police inspector whom O.B. had ejected from the Dutchman’s murder scene, said he was padlocking the Notchery, and holding Mac, Bindy, Roscoe, Oke, and the violinist, for consorting with whores. The women and the two johns were escorted to police vans waiting in the parking lot. Two Polish women who did cleaning and laundry for Mame were let go.

“Sorry to interrupt your afternoon fun, Roscoe,” Dixon said.

“If you’re really arresting us,” Roscoe said, “my fun has just begun.”

“Tell me you weren’t here to see the girls,” Dixon said. “Tell me I didn’t see McEvoy in a corner with a naked whore.”

“The lieutenant had a tip that a stolen, priceless violin was here. I refer you to the instrument on top of the piano.”

The inspector went to the piano and picked up the violin.

“This is priceless?” he said.

“I couldn’t say,” said Roscoe. “I’m no expert on the Stradivarius. Are you?”

“No.”

“We’ll have an expert appraise it,” Roscoe said.

“You came along to help the lieutenant carry the violin?”

“I was conferring with Mr. McCall about my client in a homicide case.”

Bindy had collapsed onto a sofa in glum silence when the raiders entered, but this remark won his attention.

“Quite a busy afternoon,” Dixon said. “A priceless violin recovered, and a homicide. What homicide?”

“I can’t tell you that.”

“It’s a unique defense, Roscoe. I’ll give you that.”

“Where are you taking us?”

“Justice Dillenback in Colonie.”

“And we travel in your vans?”

“I think you can get there in your own vehicle,” Dixon said.

“My clients as well? Mr. McCall and Lieutenant McEvoy?”

“Agreed. We’ll follow along in case of any confusion.”

“Fine. And take care of the cow, Inspector.”

“Cow? What cow?”

“The cow that’s going to follow you around after you leave here.”

Roscoe, Bindy, and Mac went in Mac’s car to a pay phone, where Roscoe called O.B. with the bad news: as chief of a raiding party, you’ve been one-upped.

“What the hell are you doing out there?” O.B. asked.

“Saving the world,” Roscoe said.

“Mac is with you? On whose orders?”

“Mine. And because he and I both have more brains than you.”

“You don’t know what I’m dealing with.”

“Hey, O.B., an avalanche is coming. Get Patsy and meet us at Black Jack’s grill. Patsy without fail, you hear?”

Roscoe called Freddie Gold, the Party’s bondsman, and told him where to post bail for anybody who needed it, and to bring a car for the working girls.

In Justice of the Peace Elgar Dillenback’s court in Colonie, a Republican stronghold, the Governor’s investigators could feel secure in filing their charges, comparable security not always likely in a court presided over by one of Patsy’s judges. The press had been notified, and photographers awaited the arrival of Mame, her ladies, and her courtiers. Pina, the beauty in the bunch, won star attention, but Mac, Bindy, and Roscoe were the catch of the day. Another front-page coup for Roscoe. How does he do it?

Before Justice Dillenback, a bland little man with hair dyed the color of stove black, everybody pleaded not guilty, Oke weeping as he did so, his way of life, and maybe his family, exploded. “I only went there to dance,” Oke said. “I don’t consort with whores. I couldn’t come if you called me.”

All charges were misdemeanors and bail was obligatory, five hundred each. Sin is an act, vice is a habit, whoring is dicey.

“You are charged with consorting with prostitutes; how do you plead?” the justice asked Roscoe.

“Less guilty than yourself, with all due respect, Your Honor, for you weren’t there and, really, neither was I. Not guilty.”

“Curb your remarks, Mr. Conway.”

“Curbed, Your Honor.”

“Bail is set at five hundred dollars.”

The justice called Bindy, another not-guilty five hundred, and then Mac, for whom Roscoe had another defense: “A policeman investigating a theft is himself arrested. This should not be, Your Honor.”

“Perhaps not, but that’s how it is. Five hundred.”

Bindy pulled from his pants pocket a double-fold of cash three inches thick and held by a rubber band. He peeled two one-thousand-dollar bills off the fold, more of the same underneath, paid bail to the court clerk for Roscoe, Mac, and himself, and waited for change.

“Is that your cash from the safe?” Roscoe asked him.

“Pocket money,” Bindy said.

“Any left in the safe?”

“Nothing.”

Roscoe focused on Pina across the courtroom: disheveled beauty in a clinging blue dress and high heels, hair in need of sprucing for the next photo shoot. The bondsman was posting everybody’s bail, and Pina was about to leave with the other whores. Roscoe nudged Mac.

“Tell Pina she’ll ride with us,” Roscoe said.

Roscoe and Bindy moved toward the door, and Mac brought Pina. Dory Dixon was talking to a reporter from the Sentinel.

“Your cow will be along any minute, Inspector,” Roscoe told Dixon.

In the car, Roscoe asked Pina, who sat in the back seat with Bindy, if she knew why she was here.

“Mac tells me,” she said.

“What did he tell you?”

“That I go to jail.”

“Are you ready for that?”

“I no want go to jail.”

“But you killed the Dutchman.”

“Sometimes.”

“Once is enough.”

“He’s-a no good.”

“True. And we’ll try to help you.”

“Why you help me?”

“Because he was no good.”

“Okey dokey. What I do?”

“You tell us what happened.”

“When?”

“When you killed him.”

“I’m-a no guilty.”

“Good. Now tell us what he did to you.”

Pina’s Story

Pina liked it when the Dutchman tied her up and punished her, and the Dutchman liked it because Pina liked it. She had often submitted to him this way when she lived with him. But after she left him to work for Mame, why did she go back and do it again? Well, he pursued her and promised her a major payday. Mame told her to go with him and find out what he’d told the troopers about Bindy’s seven houses. Did he know how much, and who they paid off at the state level?

The Dutchman, Vernon Van Epps, age fifty-four, drinking more than usual, decided that only the rope trick would activate his engine, and Pina, because she had not yet gotten the information from him, said okey dokey. He sat her on the bed, put the gag in her mouth, tied her hands behind her, raised the skirt of her dress, and looped another rope around her ankles and up between her legs, leaving her exposed, pulling the rope tighter than usual over her shoulder. She shook her head no and he laughed and pulled it tighter still. She writhed in resistance but she was his bundle now, and he lifted her, fully wrapped, off the bed and carried her to a corner of the room near the bed and sat her on a wooden chair. He tied her to the chair, and the chair to a heating pipe that ran floor to ceiling, then he blindfolded her.

Pina, alone in her darkness, hears the Dutchman drinking, clinking glass and bottle. Time. He removes her blindfold and she sees him standing naked before her, toying with himself, drinking while he toys. He readjusts her skirt upward and goes to bed with himself and watches her. He gets up and blindfolds her again. Time. She smells the ganja. She cannot loosen her bonds, and serious pain is developing in her legs and thigh the way she is bent. A long darkness. A long silence, then voices. He removes the blindfold and she sees a naked woman in bed with him. Pina doesn’t recognize her. The woman and the Dutchman use each other as they watch Pina. The Dutchman reapplies the blindfold. Pina does not know how long she has been here, but it is night and silent. When he removes the blindfold again it is daylight. She does not think she has slept. The Dutchman is alone, wearing a robe, and asks if she is ready. She nods and he undoes her legs but she cannot stand. The clock says four. He says he went on the nod and forgot her. She has been his prisoner for eighteen hours. She is very, very hungry. He has on his bed photographs of favorite starlets, tied up and not, from his pornographic lending library. He takes the gag from her mouth and loosens the rope between her legs. He carries her to the bed. She lies on it feeling wretched, stretching her legs to ease her pain. She asks him for whiskey to stop the pain and he pours her three fingers, which she drinks, and then she lies silent. Time. He watches her. The pain diminishes and she pulls herself into a sitting position by grasping the headboard of the bed. She stands, very wobbly. The Dutchman moves in front of her, unbuttons her dress, and takes it from her. He helps her step out of her panties and removes his own robe. He seems to be drunk again. She says she needs water and he nods once and falls back on the bed. She walks very slowly to the kitchen and fills a water bottle, takes a glass from the cupboard and drinks, puts the large steak knife inside the fold of a dish towel. She carries bottle, glass, and knife on a tray to the bedroom and sets it on a bedside table and puts herself between it and the Dutchman. She smiles at the Dutchman, who is now toying. She picks up one of his dildos and penetrates herself with it. He likes to watch this. He sits up in the bed, leans toward her, and watches. Balancing himself on one elbow, he takes the dildo in hand and works it in and out of Pina. He throws the dildo aside and puts his mouth on her. She takes the steak knife out from under the towel and pushes it into the left side of his throat, then into his chest. He rolls and she stabs him in the back, again and again. When he rolls over, she stabs his chest until she is sure she has hit his heart. While he gurgles his last, she washes the blood off herself in the bathroom, then washes the knife in the kitchen sink and puts it back in its drawer. She finds sliced Swiss cheese in the Frigidaire and puts it on saltine crackers from the pantry, dabs it with mustard, eats. She dresses herself and stands by the window watching a tugboat push a barge down the river. She thinks she will never see this sight again. It is five o’clock in the afternoon and the sun is shining. Pina does not have the information Mame wanted from the Dutchman, but some things did get done.

Roscoe chose Black Jack McCall’s grill in North Albany as a meeting place because the Governor’s investigators wouldn’t be listening there. After Jack McCall died in 1937 at age seventy-nine, the grill was locked, and iron grids installed on its windows against intruders. But Roscoe chose it also because it was where the original McCall faction of the Party had taken root in Black Jack’s day. Patsy perpetuated that tradition by opening it at election time for the annual meeting of ward leaders and candidates — a spread of roast beef, turkey, salads, and Stanwix — and Roscoe delivering Election Day street money to ward leaders, one by one, in the back room. Then it was locked till next year. O.B. was already inside with Patsy, the two of them leaning against the empty bar, when Roscoe, Mac, and Bindy arrived with Pina. The place was a cube of dead heat, punishing; but Roscoe closed the door.

“What’s she doing here?” Patsy said. “I don’t want whores in here.”

“Hear me out, Pat,” Roscoe said. And he took three chairs off the tabletop and set them upright, put one in a far corner for Pina and gestured for Mac to keep her company, pushed one at Patsy, and sat backward on one himself. Then, in the rapidly spoken shorthand he had used all his life with Patsy, he told the story of Pina’s bondage and retaliation and, in a whisper Pina could not hear, mentioned this was usable, which Patsy heard with reluctant clarity, frustrated that his own Notchery raid had not put his brother in jail. He stared with frigid eyes at Bindy, who, with O.B., moved closer as Roscoe talked softly of Dory Dixon and Dillenback. And we have to arrest Pina, Roscoe said. He would speak as her attorney.

“She’ll have to go inside,” Patsy said. “She know that?”

“Vaguely.”

“She won’t be very friendly when that happens.”

“We’re the only friends she’s got. We’ll go for justifiable homicide, and the grand jury may not even indict. You know those grand juries.”

“We’ll give it back to those rat bastards,” Patsy said. “We go public now with all we got.”

What Roscoe had heard from Patsy was evidence on an undercover state cop who was a wife beater, but his wife wouldn’t talk against him — a weak case, but something. Also, an aide to the Governor had gotten drunk and punched a bartender; not much mileage there. But the best bit, and we’d find a way to use it, was the Spanish pimp held by his ankles out a tenth-floor State Office Building window by undercover state police trying to make him talk about Albany cops on the take. The pimp truly had been ankled out the window, but the anklers were two New York cops on their day off, doing Patsy a favor by impersonating sadistic state troopers.

“Bindy also has a movie, don’t you, Bin?” Roscoe said.

Bindy shook his head. No deal, Roscoe.

“Whatta you got?” Patsy asked Bindy.

“Nothin’ for you,” Bindy said.

Patsy came up out of his chair, a bear in a wild lunge, and flung a right hand to Bindy’s chin. Bindy rammed him with a high elbow on the side of the head, and both brothers shook off their blows, Patsy gut-butting Bindy with his head, staggering but failing to topple the fat man, Patsy taking more head blows from Bindy’s fists as the improbably nimble Bin bounced out of Patsy’s range. O.B. and Roscoe moved between the brothers, brothers on brothers, and stopped the fight.

“Let’s fight the Governor,” Roscoe said.

“Cheatin’ sonofabitch,” Patsy said.

“You’re a bad loser,” Bindy said.

“This isn’t over,” Patsy said.

“You want your money back, welsher?” And Bindy took the cash from his pocket and tossed it at Patsy, who caught it, undid the rubber band, riffled the wad of thousand- and five-hundred-dollar bills.

“You get a rematch anytime you want it,” Bindy said.

Patsy pocketed the money and turned to Roscoe, trying seriously not to smile.

“Better get that little lady’s story in writing,” he said.

Roscoe called Veronica and told her his news so she wouldn’t discover it in the newspapers, the way she discovered the Gilby scandal-mongering.

“They’re going to say I was consorting with whores,” Roscoe said. “But I wasn’t. This was political business, strictly. Do you believe me?”

“Do you ever go with whores?”

“No.”

“But you did.”

“Years ago. Years. I go with you, or I like to think I do. I want only that. You’re the only woman in my life.”

“What makes a woman be a whore?”

“Need, money, bad luck, stupidity, a fondness for pimps, sometimes too much talent for sin.”

“Do I have that talent?”

“You have a bit of it. I like to think that you have a talent for love.”

“So do you,” she said.

The daily Times-Union and Knickerbocker News carried subdued front page reports on the raid on the Notchery and six other brothels operating cautiously, but not cautiously enough, and listed the names of those arrested. Both papers carried photos of Mame and Pina on inside pages, none of Roscoe, Bindy, or Mac. The Sentinel, printing its edition two days before its usual publication day, obviously with inside information, used banner headlines with photos of Roscoe, Bindy, and Mac on page one, and half a page of whore photos inside. The paper also had, exclusively, the addresses of every whorehouse in town, the number of whores working in each house, and names of madams and owners of each building in which a house operated. Hattie Wilson was listed as an owner. “Upper-echelon members” of the McCall political machine were said to have masked financial interest in the real estate. Elisha was not mentioned. An unnamed Governor’s spokesman called this a major crackdown on prostitution controlled by the Albany political machine. The Notchery, he said, was the collection point for money from all the brothels in the city. The Sentinel also carried an editorial calling the raids an overdue move to clean up the city, so sullied by wartime transients who used the city as a sewer. It argued for throwing out the Democratic scum in the upcoming election.

Patsy reacted by having the city fire commissioner condemn Roy Flinn’s Sentinel building for multiple transgressions of fire and building ordinances that would keep Roy in court for years. He also had two dozen rats trapped at the city dump and then let loose into the Sentinel’s basement, with witnesses calling the infestation a neighborhood menace to children, and a photographer on hand to document the rats. Bindy gave Patsy his movie of the Governor’s aide, in hose, bedded with three women, with a transcript of their conversation; and this was sent anonymously to the Governor, to newspapers, radio stations, and the Albany Catholic Diocese. By day’s end the aide had resigned.

The dailies sought second-day comment from mayoral candidates, and Republican Jay Farley deplored the brothels and cheered their closure. Alex, who had returned to Fort Dix for discharge, issued a statement in absentia saying he favored a postwar renewal of moral purpose, and would pursue it upon his return. Cutie LaRue said the brothels should stay where they were. “If you take away the opportunity to sin,” he said, “you also take away the opportunity not to sin, which eliminates the opportunity for virtue. Those places should exist so we don’t have to visit them.”

Albany County District Attorney Phil Donnelly announced he was empaneling a grand jury to investigate the Governor’s police methods — hanging men out of windows, using degenerate dope fiends as informants against private citizens. O.B. announced Pina’s arrest for second-degree murder, and her confession to the crime.

People gathered as Roscoe’s mid-morning press conference took shape in front of the Double Dutch bar: merchants from down the block, gamblers from the horse room next door, stray winos, passing soldiers, teenagers on the prowl, six policemen to monitor the crowd. The bar was padlocked, its shades were drawn, its neon tubes rat-gray in daylight. Roscoe had invited all local newspapers, radio stations, wire services, and out-of-town correspondents who covered the legislature; and two dozen reporters came to hear how Pina had killed a State Police informer to escape torture, rape, even death.

“The Dutchman had been after secrets,” said Roscoe, standing on two milk crates to be visible, his shirt so wet it was soaking through his coat, and drops of sweat from his chin spotting his tie. “The Dutchman thought Pina knew secrets about prostitution and politics, which he planned to pass on to his partners, the state troopers, a cabal of pimps and prosecutors designed to persecute Albany Democrats. But Pina knew no such secrets. She made her living as a dancer and singer. She had worked in roadhouses like the Notchery ever since her flight from abuse, first by her father, then her husband, men who violated her beauty until all she could do in her rage was flee her native land for America. She made her way from Italy to Albany, using her beauty to find work, caught by the Dutchman, who hired her for this abominable place, this Double Dutch bar. It is sad that such places as this exist, but because of the low urges of the human being, they do. The Dutchman preyed upon these urges, hiring women to ply men with fake whiskey at inflated prices for the right to sit next to them at his bar. And that was Pina’s profession, bar girl, B-girl, singer of songs for this vile man.”

Roscoe showed photos of the Dutchman’s ropes, the chair he tied Pina to, the pipe he tied the chair to, the bed strewn with obscene photographs, the dildo he raped her with, “. and I do not expect you to photograph this or even mention the substance of these photos to your readers or listeners. I show them to reveal the obscene life of this man — and lower than he the lowlife of this city does not get — the opium and the dope he smoked, the books of pornography that agitated his warped mind, his sadistic quest for beautiful young women to enslave and torture. But Pina broke away from him and found the best friend she ever made in this city, Mary Catherine Ray, who gave Pina a job in her nightclub. There is no shame in expressing your God-given talent for song or dance in this world, and Pina had these talents. She sings like an angel, dances the way the clouds move. She had been at the Notchery singing with a violinist, a friend who recognized her ability. But suddenly she was arrested by State Police and put through ignominy and absurd rituals. This happened just as an Albany detective and myself were about to accept her surrender. For Pina’s remorse over the death of the Dutchman had brought such an ache to her heart, and such disquiet to her soul, that she gave her confidence to Mary Catherine. And Mary, on hearing her story, sought advice from her friend Benjamin McCall, a figure of known stature in this community Ben McCall then asked me to protect the rights of this young beauty when she surrendered, and I went to the Notchery to meet him and Pina, bringing with me one of the most respected detectives on the Albany police force, a man I trusted to move Pina through the legal process without prejudice. And as her surrender was about to take place, this detective and I were both arrested by the troopers and charged with a low misdemeanor.

“Why? Why did state troopers, working for the Governor’s special investigators, do this? Publicity was their goal. Publicity to use against the popularly elected Albany Democratic organization they so irrationally hate and seek to destroy.

“And why do they want this publicity so badly that they stoop to such tactics as arresting a detective who is making a major arrest? I’ll tell you why. I direct your attention to the great building at the top of State Street, the Capitol of New York State, where some of you work, but which is now the captive office of a gnarled and mustachioed little gnome who wants to be President of our nation — I refer to the power-maddened Governor, who will do anything to get elected. That’s why we’re here today, my friends, because of the lunacy of presidential ambition. May God deliver our city from it, and from that man so possessed by it.”

The Knickerbocker News, in its midday final, reported Roscoe’s speech on page one, with his photo in front of the Double Dutch. The paper also carried an editorial wondering why a State Police inspector would make a politically motivated misdemeanor arrest of a detective lieutenant who was arresting a surrendering murderess. “Have the State Police lost their brains?” the newspaper wondered.

In a sidebar, Cutie LaRue suggested that the Democrats nominate Roscoe as their next candidate for governor. When Roscoe read the paper, he sent a one-word telegram to Inspector Dory Dixon. “Moo,” it said.

The heat was fierce after the press conference, and the pain was niggling at Roscoe’s heart. He had never felt more vital or necessary, yet he knew he was not well. He should go home to Tivoli, let Veronica take care of him. But he could not go directly from the Double Dutch to Veronica’s presence. He went to Hattie’s, to comfort her in her time of public embarrassment.

“Gin and food is what I need,” Roscoe told Hattie, and she brought out her Canadian gin and phoned in an order to Joe’s Delicatessen for pastrami sandwiches on rye (two for Roscoe) with coleslaw and dill pickles, which Joe sent down in a taxi. They ate in front of Hattie’s parlor fans, and Roscoe apologized for not foreseeing the publication of her name in the paper. Roscoe opened his shirt to beat the heat and he thought of poor old Oke. Hattie waved the skirt of her housedress to air her thighs.

“They made a whore out of me, Rosky,” she said.

“They made me a consort of whores,” Roscoe said.

“I could’ve been a good whore.”

“Well, yes, but no. You’ve got too much heart.”

“Whores have heart.”

“Maybe at the beginning. Whoring eats your heart.”

“Everything eats your heart,” Hattie said.

“Nothing ate your heart, Hat. You’re still the love queen of Lancaster Street. How can I make this thing up to you?”

“You could love me like a husband.”

“And you’d kill me like a husband. My heart couldn’t handle it today.”

“You have to do something about that heart, Rosky, if it gets in the way of love.”

“I’ll talk to it,” Roscoe said.