Roscoe

Women He Has Known

Picture Roscoe: he is wearing his blue-and-white-vertical-striped pajamas; his stomach pain from the accident seems worse, though he is trying to ignore it, trying to sleep in the double bed of his suite in the Ten Eyck. He is a hotel-dweller and probably will remain so for the rest of his days. He has no yen to live the landed life of Patsy of the mountain, or Elisha of the manor, though Veronica could talk him into the manor if she played her cards right. He is by nature a guest, not a host, though he usually picks up the check. He has never craved the permanence so many others desire, but he does seem permanent here, at least in open-ended continuity; for in these rooms his father lived the last years of his life: in this very same bedroom, bath, and sitting room, though the rug is new.

His father’s influence is every where in Roscoe, even in those names of his: Rosky, Ros, Rah-Rah (what Gilby used to call him), diminutives of Roscius, from Quintus Roscius, the Roman comic actor and friend of Cicero, “so you wouldn’t be typed as an Irishman,” Felix told him. Roscoe is a lawyer because Felix read law in Peter Coogan’s office but never finished law school. He’s in politics because it was in his bones; and Felix, before he died in 1919, counseled Patsy, Elisha, and Roscoe regularly on how to invent themselves as the saviors of Albany Democracy. It’s true Roscoe has gone beyond his father by becoming a lawyer, but, no, he’ll never match his father’s political fame, indeed has never held a public office.

Roscoe, unable to sleep any more this morning, rises from his bed and stands amid his possessions, almost all he has in the world — an overflowing bookcase, overflowing desk, overflowing closet, overflowing bar, plus the evidence that he exists amid a population outside his mind: photos on the walls of himself with Al Smith, FDR, Jimmy Walker, Harry Truman, Bing Crosby, Connie Boswell, Jock Whitney, Earl Sande, Sophie Tucker, Patsy, Elisha, and Veronica; above the mantel the cockfighting painting Patsy gave him after Flora wouldn’t let it hang in his own house; over the sofa, a Falstaff poster heralding a London production of Henry IV, Part One, a gift from Elisha.

Roscoe’s pain, he discovers as he moves, is worsening. It comes but no longer goes, and he realizes that, once freed of today’s obligations, he must attend to it. It is a nonspecific malaise in stomach and chest that he’s had since his blunt trauma in the car accident. It occupies the same area as his wound by gunshot during the Great War, and because of this Roscoe believes the pain is self-generated: You are doing this to yourself, you idiot.

In the past when he’s said this, the pain has diminished, then vanished; but not now. He speculates that this pain may be rising from powerful forces of fraudulence far beneath the shallow hysteria that usually creates Roscoe’s phantom pain, then banishes it when it’s recognized. This could be a new element in his soul that is resistant to unconscious reason. An alternative explanation is that the pain is genuine, and so weird that it may be fatal.

Fatal.

The endgame of the immense life that lives in Roscoe’s brain? What will the unfinished world do without him? He asked himself this in 1918, when his first blunt trauma was imposed upon him — The one that should have killed you, Ros. Now you’ve got another chance to do yourself.

How Roscoe’s First Wound Came to Pass

Roscoe and Patsy join all-volunteer 102nd Engineer Train, 27th Division, of New York National Guard, at Albany in the summer of 1917, mustered into federal service, leave Albany for Manhattan, Spartanburg, Newport News for training through April 1918, board one of six transports in convoy with ten destroyers, cruiser, sub chaser, shot at by German subs, one sub blown out of the water, staging camp at Noyalles-sur-Mer, then Agenville and Candas, where Jerry’s bombs kill seventeen horses of the Engineer Train, Roscoe and Patsy together on the same wagon in the Train, but not hurt, four horses at each end of their new wagon, four men in the middle, each man controlling two horses, Roscoe in the saddle on left horse of lead team as they move, Patsy riding with rear team, moving from nightfall to daybreak on bombed-out roads, through towns in ruins, Saint-Argues, Saint-Omer, German planes always overhead as they near front with ammo and rations, to Cassel, heading for Belgium, Engineers gassed by a long wave, don’t lose that gas mask, no civilians in ruined towns, rain is constant, feet and clothes never dry, water flowing into tents, mud the mattress whose ooze you settle into, Jerry overhead, then with Patsy in a French church for high mass said by Father Skelley from Cohoes, chaplain for the 27th, Train bringing tools and trench irons to infantry to shore up trench walls, plus equipment to Engineers repairing roads so the heavy artillery can pass, battlefield laid out in lines of trenches, front-line trenches, then the approach trenches, and reserve trenches in rear, infantry in each trench, first line pushes forward to the objective, second follows to mop up wounded or straggling Germans and bring back our own wounded, the boys are driving Jerry backward and he’s moving fast, so Train returns to reload and heads up to the line again, hip boots issued, Train shelled by pilot who personally tosses bombs from his cockpit, Roscoe and Patsy meet John McIntyre from Albany, halfback with Patsy on the Arbor Hill Spartans, who’s retrieving dead and wounded, dangerous duty, for the corpses may be booby-trapped, back again to load up ammo, trench irons, rations, barbed wire, sand bags, gravel for trench work, all trenches infested but don’t try to get rid of cooties with creosote, then a break and there’s a big crowd at mass and we move up again, fearing gas more than anything, animal loss heavy, road so badly bombed it’s not a road, sudden shell burst and Patsy’s leg is hit with shrapnel, he’s carried to the rear, barrage from 1 to 4 a.m and it’s as bright as under the electric lights at State and Pearl Streets, everybody waiting for an attack by the Huns, too quiet, we ride all night in cold rain, no food and almost no sleep, our troops massing on front line, 106th Regiment of our 27th doing the main push, so we’re in for overtime, Train is up the line as far as possible and it’s a slaughterhouse, except in a slaughterhouse they kill the cows and here some boys are only half killed, fields covered with so many English, German, Yank dead you walk on them, drive your wagon over their faces, we’re 50 percent dead but others are worse off, and a shell blasts all four of our horses and wagon, Dumas knocked senseless, Weeper Walters blown off his horse and the wagon runs over his arm and hand, horse returns with dead Dumas lying across his back, Sammy Jones’s horse cut in two by a shell, another horse dosed badly with gas, everybody got a whiff, Sammy puked in his gas mask and took it off, God knows what’ll become of him, everybody’s half blind and you don’t move because that spreads the gas in your lungs, only two on the wagon now, Roscoe and Mike Ahearn from Worcester, roads are mined and we’re moving ammo, taking it as far forward as wagons can go, no way to turn back in this rain, this mud, so Roscoe and Mike dig a hole three feet deep beside roofless barn walls, sink four posts with corrugated iron as a roof, a large can for a stove, keep those shoes on or the rats will steal them, enemy planes upstairs so the 106th isn’t budging yet, but the word is that a great drive by Yanks, French, English, and Aussies is about to begin, and here comes the British artillery with its rolling barrage to soften up Jerry, our shells carrying shrapnel, smoke, mustard gas, the first time we’ve used the gas, and then the 106th moves out, heading toward the outworks of the Hindenburg Line, which the Germans think is unbreakable, and maybe it is, one Yank unit moves beyond the point it was supposed to hold and those Yanks are bottled up by a Hun machine-gun nest and waiting, Aussie regiment coming up to help them, and Roscoe thinks of his pals blown apart, shot, gassed, dead of fright or exhausted hearts, and he lies down in the mud and closes his eyes so he can stay awake and, by a mundane miracle, sleeps, or seems to, until a shell explodes the barn wall and Mike Ahearn wakes screaming for his mother, he and Roscoe overrun by a colony of black rats from the blasted barn floor, half a dozen rats crawling on Roscoe, one sucking blood from his neck, and he screams, rolls over, and shakes himself and the rats fall away but not the one on his neck, a goddamn snapping-turtle rat, and Roscoe reels, never having known terror like this, not even from the mustard gas, pure rat terror, and he tries to smack the rat with his rifle but still it clutches his shoulder and his neck, a goddamn warrior rat, don’t shoot it, Roscoe, or you’ll shoot yourself, and Roscoe stands and whirls in a circular frenzy, drops his rifle, squeezes the rat to death, but not before he’s bitten on both hands, and then he runs, done with this war, runs toward the rear, bleeding at the neck, poisoned with rat plague and surely dying, he’ll run to Albany to get well, fuck all rats, double-fuck this army and this war, and he runs, oh how he runs, but without his rat and without his rifle, Roscoe lost in the night, and he turns back toward the barn-that-was — is this the way back? — but all is blackness until a star shell lights up the field and he sees he’s in no man’s land, running toward the German barbed wire, and he’ll get there if he keeps going, and he leaps into a shell hole, drawing fire from a machine gun, probably that goddamn nest everybody wants, and in another star shell’s light he heaves a grenade toward the gun and it blasts back at him, no cigar, Ros, but an Aussie one-pounder finds the nest and that’s that for those Hun sonsabitches, and Roscoe is up again and running low toward his own line, yes, go back and get that rifle, he’s got the direction right this time and the boys see him coming, but what they really see is crazy Jerry coming after them single-handed — Hey, hey! it’s not Jerry, for God’s sake, don’t shoot, it’s only The Roscoe! — but Roscoe in the dark is Jerry on the attack and they shoot Roscoe and he falls at his own line, speaks, and is recognized, and they pull him bleeding into the trench and ask him, Roscoe, what the hell you doin’ out there, tryin’ to get ’em all by yourself? What guts this guy’s got, drawin’ their fire like that, sorry we shot you, buddy, Roscoe bleeding under his tunic and he feels a nonspecific pain in chest and stomach — ratness and a bullet transformed into the malaise of the heroic deserter.

It was 8:04 a.m. and Joey Manucci would be making Roscoe’s coffee at headquarters. But Roscoe was not up for coffee, or even for walking across the street this morning, and so he told Joey by phone to get the car and pick him up at the hotel. Roscoe brewed a Bromo-Seltzer for his stomach, ate the two Hershey almond bars he’d bought last night, all the breakfast he could handle, and took the elevator down to the street.

The heat was already unbearable, a day to sleep in some lakeside shade or loll about in a tub of ice. Roscoe, tie open, cord sport coat on his arm, asked doorman Wally Condon for his report on the state of Albany this morning (“Going to hell, Roscoe, be there by noon”), then he went out and stood at State and Chapel Streets to wait for Joey and to watch the city opening its doors: jewelers, cafeteria workers, newsboys, cigar dealers lowering awnings, sweeping sidewalks, washing windows, stacking papers, all dressing their corner of the universe for another day of significant puttering. Lights were on in Malley’s, across the street, begun by the Malley brothers as a saloon, then a speakeasy, now grown into a major restaurant. Here came Jake Berman, up from the South End on his way to his Sheridan Avenue walkup, where, with staunch backbone, he defends, for pennies, every socialist caught in the hostile legal system, admirable penury. And Morgan Hillis going into the State Bank, a man born with an outdoor privy, now a vice-president handling Democratic accounts in the modest millions. And Glenda Barry, Mush Trainor’s girlfriend, manicurist at the Ten Eyck barbershop, who, when she cuts your cuticles, wears a white, freshly starched, skintight, wraparound smock, removable for special occasions. And, ah me, coming down State Street with that aggressive stride of his, Marcus Gorman, Pamela’s barrister, clear the way for Mighty Marcus, who won Jack (Legs) Diamond two acquittals and never got a nickel for it. Stiffed by the stiff. But you coasted miles on those acquittals, old man.

“Morning, counselor,” Roscoe said to Marcus.

“Roscoe. I understand I’ll see you later this morning.”

“You will indeed.”

“Wellllllll, bonne chance, my boy.”

Boy? Two years younger than your own creaking bones, you arrogant Republican bastard. And we almost made you a congressman; but proximity to Jack Diamond killed that. And so Gorman the Grand rose another way: becoming Albany’s Demosthenes, Albany’s own Great Mouthpiece for a continuing line of criminals after Diamond: Dutch Schultz, Vincent Coll, Pittsburgh Phil Straus, Pamela Yusupov.

Watching the stirrings of these myriad creatures of significance in the city — even the robotic repetitions of Ikey Finkel, the fifty-year-old newsboy, hawking his papers, “Mawnin’ pape, mawnin’ pape”—shot Roscoe through with depression. He would, in an hour, make his way to headquarters for another day of Party rituals that would perpetuate the bleeding of his soul.

Joey stopped the car at the corner, and Roscoe, with difficulty, climbed in beside him. Joey, six six and two fifty, barely fit behind the wheel. Roscoe was wide but not so tall. Ordinary automobiles were not made for their like, especially for Joey, a genuine giant, the kind of giant you wish you were, Ros, an authentic military hero for pushing forward alone after the rest of his squad had been killed, seeing four Nazis putting a machine gun into place, killing them all with his pistol, then holding the position until reinforcements arrived and forty more Nazis were captured, all of which won Joey the Congressional Medal of Honor. Now Patsy’s running him for the State Senate. What will Joey do with a stack of legislative bills when he can’t even understand the Ten Eyck lunch menu and Roscoe has to read it to him? You think people want an illiterate senator? And Patsy: You think anybody’ll vote against the Medal of Honor?

Medals? Roscoe has medals. The same Senate seat Joey will soon occupy was Roscoe’s for the asking in the early years, after the Democrats took City Hall; and it would have moved him one step closer to matching his father’s political achievements. For a few minutes, back then, Roscoe felt safe as a hero, for not even Patsy knew that after Ros rejoined the Engineer Train he worked in company headquarters and wrote, in the dead captain’s name, and forged, in the dead captain’s hand, the citation lauding Roscoe Conway’s bravery in drawing enemy fire, a prize-winning work of fiction that earned Roscoe the Distinguished Service Cross. Fraudulent? Perhaps. But he was in the heavy action, he was under direct fire at the German line, and his own buddies shot and damn near killed him. Must we quibble about motives? When is a hero not a hero? If a hero falls alone in a trench does he make a heroic sound? Take a guess.

Patsy was convinced the DSC would easily win Roscoe the Senate seat, but Ros said, Thanks, Pat, but I would prefer not to. For by then the malaise had set in, and Roscoe was just another time bomb waiting to explode with shameful publicity for everybody. The Party didn’t need that.

“You sick?” Joey asked.

“Do I look sick?”

“I would never say so, and don’t hold me to it, but you look like a dying dog.”

“I am sick but not that sick. Stop talking about it and let’s go to Hattie’s.”

And Joey drove to Lancaster Street, to the modest brownstone from which Hattie Wilson managed her real-estate empire: forty-six three- and four-story rooming houses, four hundred and forty tenants whose rents Hattie collected personally, except for the eight buildings that functioned as brothels, and for those rentals Hattie received monthly cash payments in person from Mame Ray, Bindy McCall’s woman, and the supervising madam of all eight thriving whorehouses. Dark history had been made by some of Hattie’s tenants: Mrs. Falcone, who brought home two drifters to stab her husband fifty-seven times and who then moved from Hattie’s basement to Death Row in Sing Sing; history made also by visitors to Jack Diamond, who was in bed in a Hattie house on Dove Street — Hattie herself was actually in the basement to stoke the furnace that very early December morning — when the boys went upstairs and put Jack into deep cool.

Roscoe’s mission this morning was to talk to Mame Ray, but he couldn’t use the phone and, with the spies watching him, he couldn’t pull up to her whorehouse in daylight, especially before breakfast. Hattie’s place was safe, and Hattie was a storehouse of gossip herself, for her tenants were a cross-section of The Gut, Albany’s night city: bartenders and waitresses, burglars on relief, family outcasts and runaways, semiaffluent winos who could still pay rent, motherless queens, hula dancers, B-girls and strippers, horseplayers doing their best to die broke, dishwashers aspiring to be short-order cooks, good-time girls learning what it takes to go pro, and all the flakes, flacks, and flukes who got around to putting their heads on their greasy pillows just as the sun was also rising on the rooftops of The Gut. A famous question in the neighborhood was: Are you married or do you pay rent to Hattie Wilson?

The word on the street was that Hattie hoarded cash in her walls, but the last burglar who checked that one out turned up mostly dead in a ditch, courtesy of the Night Squad, which protected Hattie and her empire not only because she was O.B.’s wife, but because she was a prime snitch for the cops and a treasure to the Party for two decades, a compelling force in getting four hundred and forty people to the polls on Election Day — no relief checks, no mail, no heat or water in the joint until you vote the right way, the Democratic way, and we do know how you vote.

Joey parked and Roscoe went up Hattie’s stoop slowly.

“You even walk sick,” Joey said, and he hit the doorbell.

“Just shut up and open the door,” Roscoe said.

They went into the hallway and Roscoe knocked at Hattie’s inner door.

“Open up,” he said. “It’s a raid.”

“At this hour it couldn’t be social,” Hattie said from the other side of the door, and then she opened it to Roscoe and Joey, with Bridget, her Irish setter, at her heel. Hattie was fifty-one, wearing a flowered housedress, her hair both prematurely white and unchangingly bobbed since the mid-1920s, smoking a Camel, as usual, moving into a bit of broadness at the hips but still with that hourglass waist, and, to Roscoe, even at raw morning, a woman worth looking at, as she had been since he first intersected with her at Patsy’s victory party in 1919. He would have married her if he wasn’t so down on marriage and she wasn’t already married; and she was always married, except for brief pauses between the “I do”s: the perpetual bride, outthinking or outliving her husbands, or leaving them behind and finding another, always eager for that ring, because it meant a focus on the hearth and not just the bed. It also meant she had not another breadwinner, for she’d already won all the bread she’d ever need, but another cohabiting love slave, a focus on one man, even though she always had her eye on half a dozen, couldn’t help it, the poor thing, always such a magnet for men, such a triumph when they won her, had her, not knowing that it was she who had them, that they could never win her if she hadn’t first singled them out of the crowd, faithful to each in her own way, never trespassing on the previous or the current one, no matter how many mounted up on her scorecard; and Roscoe always in on her action, whatever, whom ever she did.

“You’re right again, old Hat,” Roscoe said, and Hattie stepped aside to let him and Joey into her parlor, whose furnishings, like much in her life, like Roscoe, were secondhand and at least a generation out of fashion.

“Turn on your fans,” Roscoe said. “A day like this, even dogs leave town and head for water. Why aren’t you out at the lake, Bridget?” And the dog licked his hand. Hattie was as intense about dogs as about husbands, and visited some of her neighbors only to talk to their dogs. Roscoe draped his suit coat over a chair back and sat on the sofa facing one of Hattie’s electric fans, waiting for air.

“You don’t look like yourself, Rosky,” Hattie said, and she switched on both her fans.

“I told him he looked sickly,” Joey said.

“You got any iced tea?” Roscoe asked.

“In the kitchen. You go make it, Joey,” Hattie said, and Joey left the room. “What’s wrong with you, Rosky? Your color is off. And you’re puffing.”

“The hell with that. You hear about anybody making a move on the whorehouses?”

“Anybody who?”

“The troopers, the Governor.”

“I thought you got the Governor off your backs last year.”

“He won’t quit. Election’s coming.”

“All I hear is that business is great since V-J Day. Now that the war’s over, people can think about something else.”

“They didn’t think about it during the war?”

“Don’t get on me. You want me to call a doctor?”

“No doctors. I’ve got too much to do.”

“Somebody else to punch out? You’re in the papers again.”

“Some people need punching out for their own good.”

“You never change, Rosky.”

“I change like an emanation of nature, my dear. I change like an oak tree developing acorns. I change like churned milk, I change like a turnip growing ever larger, ever rounder, and palatable only when seriously boiled.”

“You still look like the boy I got to know in Malley’s back room.”

“That billygoat. You knew so many like him. You ever keep count?”

“I can’t count that high, love.”

“If we’d gotten married, I’d be dead and gone like your first five husbands. You’re a lethal woman, Hattie.”

“Floyd is still alive, out west. He sends me postcards. And O.B. is holding his own.”

“O.B. is alive because he sees you in moderation. Smart man, O.B. Floyd I never understood.”

“Floyd made me laugh, read me poems, played the harp. I bought him a lovely big one and he played it every night.”

“But you never screwed him.”

“I never had to.”

“Not his preference.”

“I couldn’t take him serious after I caught him parading around in my stockings and garters. He took a drawerful when he left. The harp too.”

“Your figure still makes me giddy. I’m feeling the need to take it in hand again.”

“In your condition it might do you in.”

“What better way to go? Better than Elisha. Are you ready if I come by some night?”

“If you promise not to die on me, I’ll love you like a husband.”

“Good. Now I need a favor.”

“Of course you do.”

“Call Mame and ask her to come over. So many politicians move through her place, and she does loosen their tongues. Don’t mention me on the phone.”

“You’re worried about this.”

“I’m paid for what I know about this town, and what I don’t know will eat my gizzard.”

Hattie went to her telephone table and called Mame, out of Roscoe’s earshot. Joey came in from the kitchen with a pitcher of tea, three glasses, a cut lemon, ice cubes, and the sugar bowl. No spoons, but otherwise a wonderful achievement. Roscoe would not ask anything more of him today.

Mame Ray was forty, child of a whore, raised in a whorehouse, a practitioner at puberty, a madam at twenty-five, who brought to whoring an attitude which her man, Bindy McCall, articulated to Roscoe early on in his relationship to her: “She’s a degenerate broad, but all broad.”

Roscoe could agree, having known Mame on and off for three months before Bindy took her over, a wild trimester of melodramatic sex that curdled when Mame invited paying spectators to watch them through peepholes. Roscoe now avoided Mame unless he had a reason to see her. He considered her a narcissistic cauldron of spite, a felonious virago if crossed; but an acute manager of business and people, effective scavenger in grocery marts and ten-cent stores for poor but shapely salesgirls ready to be rented, a wizard concerning the textures of desire, and at turning even casual customers into slaves of their own sexuality. In her early twenties she was a roving freelancer, and then princess of whichever house she settled into — in New York, Hudson, and finally Albany in 1930, when Roscoe found her. Bindy, after he took her over, saw to it that she spent less time on her back, more time counting revenue from the eight houses he gave her to supervise, all eight in Hattie’s buildings.

Mame’s main brothel, Hattie’s only building outside the rooming-house district, was an old Prohibition roadhouse in the city’s West End, known first as the Come On Inn, now called the Notchery, and it was all gold. Its first two floors were luxuriously furnished for a whorehouse, and Mame lived amid high-fashion décor on the third floor. It was also the collection depot for payoffs to Bindy from all city brothels, and these sums he passed on to Roscoe three times a week at Party headquarters after he took his cut, which Patsy suspected was getting larger lately, a point of contention between the brothers.

When Hattie saw Mame step out of the taxicab, she opened the inner door for her and went back to her chair. Roscoe, sipping his second glass of iced tea, watched Joey playing solitaire on the coffee table. Joey was cheating, yet losing. What kind of a senator is this? Mame flounced through the open door, her hair a new shade of auburn since Roscoe last saw her, her seductive amplitude unchanged, and wearing a tan linen skirt and white blouse. Mame’s face was not her fortune: her nose was a bump, her eyes too small, her cheekbones lost in the puff of her cheeks, but her mouth and its savvy smile offered serious intimacy.

“My God, Hattie,” she said, leaving the door ajar, “it’s hotter here than outside. Pour me one of those teas, Roscoe.”

“Glad to see you, too, Mame,” Roscoe said.

Hattie closed the door, then poured an iced tea for Mame, who sat on the other end of the sofa from Joey.

“Hiya, Mame,” Joey said.

“How’s it hangin’, Joe?”

“Down to my knees.”

“Send my regards,” Mame said.

“Never mind the shoptalk,” Roscoe said. “We hear the Governor may make a surprise raid on some of the girls.”

“How could that happen?” Mame asked. “We pay off everybody, including one of the Governor’s lawyers, and a couple of the very best state legislators.”

“You hear any rumors?”

“Pina said the troopers were talking to South End pimps, and she mentioned they’re interested in Division Street.”

“Tell me something I don’t know.”

“They’re also talking to the Dutchman, and Pina says they know a beat cop taking payoffs, eight dollars a week.”

“Eight dollars. A fantastic specific, but not quite grounds for a raid. Who told Pina that?”

“I didn’t take it serious,” Mame said.

“Who could it have been? When was it?”

“Last night. Could’ve been anybody.”

“You and Pina worked last night?”

“We never close.”

“Everybody else closed,” Roscoe said.

“So I heard.”

“Patsy sent the word out yesterday to shut down.”

“Patsy, Patsy, Patsy. Fuck Patsy. We’re using the peephole. Only people we know get in.”

“Did you say fuck Patsy?” Hattie asked her.

“I did. He came to our place years ago, then all of a sudden he stays home and says his Rosary. What I think is his dick fell off. I hope it did.”

“Oh, Mame, Mame,” Hattie said. “You’ve gone bedbugs.”

“What you’re saying is Bindy won’t close? All eight places are running?”

“Just the Notchery,” Mame said. “You know how much money we’re losing with seven places dark? How are people supposed to live?”

“You know the money it’d take to get you and your girls out of jail? Lawyers, bail, greasing judges we don’t own, appeals if anybody’s convicted? This is happening at the state level, sweetheart, and the election is coming.”

“We’ve had raids before,” Mame said. “Nothing changes and then we go back to work. God, Hattie, I can’t stand this heat.” Mame opened her front burtons and slipped off her blouse. She wore a corselette that put much of her chest on exhibit.

“Lookin’ good, Mame,” Joey said.

“I don’t overeat,” Mame said.

“Wanna go in the bedroom?”

“Thanks, Joe, but I never fuck before lunch.”

“So,” said Roscoe, “you’re saying Bindy’s now in business for himself?”

“Wasn’t he always?” Mame said.

“I’ll think about that,” Roscoe said. “In the meantime, madam, I suggest you guard your peephole very vigorously.”

Roscoe walked slowly down the hallway toward Supreme Court at one minute to ten, Veronica and Gilby beside him. Photographers from the local papers were ahead of them, shooting, walking backward as they reloaded their Speed Graphics. You’re on tomorrow’s front page, Ros. Suck in your gut.

As they entered the courtroom, Roscoe moved Gilby a step ahead, then he and Veronica walked down the aisle together, maybe his only chance to do this. Pamela and Marcus Gorman had not arrived, but the courtroom was half filled, mostly with women who had come to see the socially notorious Pamela. The Times-Union this morning carried a capsule history of her marriages and scandals, her liaisons with millionaires, royal exiles, and Caribbean gigolos, and it highlighted the night she spent in jail for smashing a woman’s face with a champagne glass, thirty-two stitches, because the woman had insulted President Roosevelt. Give the devil her due. She’s still a Democrat.

“She’s not here yet,” Roscoe said to Veronica. “Have you figured out what you’ll say to her?”

“That I’ll cut out her heart and throw it to my dogs the way she bounced hard-boiled eggs to her poodle.”

“Splendid,” Roscoe said.

He settled his clients at the defense table and checked on the press: Frank Merola, who covered courts for the Times-Union, a friendly face, another way of saying he was on the Party’s payroll and would not be hostile to a Roscoe client, especially Elisha’s widow; Bill Cooley of the Knickerbocker News, who was also on the payroll but whose story might be less friendly, for one of his editors was born and would die a Republican; and also Vic Fenster from the goddamn Sentinel.

Roscoe heard Pamela before he saw her, her volume announcing the grand dame’s arrival. She wore a lavender picture hat, more suitable for the racetrack than the courtroom, a matching lavender dress, and red shoes. Her nylon stockings had a rare sheen, unlike any Roscoe had seen when he shopped with Trish, these surely from the haute-couture black market.

“I feel so secure with you on the case,” Pamela was saying as she entered, smiling up at Marcus Gorman, who was beamish beside her. They came toward the bench, Marcus nodding a restrained collegial greeting to Roscoe. Pamela paused to stare at Gilby, who sat at the defense table beside Veronica. She walked to him.

“Oh, Gilby, sweet boy, how handsome you look.” She grasped his hand and squeezed it.

“Leave him alone,” Veronica said. Pamela ignored her and went to the table where Marcus was waiting. A court bailiff entered the judge’s chambers, and then George Quinn, the court crier, announced that court was in session, the honorable Francis Finn presiding, all rise. Finn was a young question mark, for, although he owed his presence on the bench to Patsy’s endorsement, it was Marcus who had used his influence to get him into Albany Law School right out of high school, without an intervening college education.

“I’ve read your petition, Mr. Gorman, and your response, Mr. Conway,” Judge Finn said, “and it seems to me there are issues of fact to be determined here. Do you agree?” He looked to Marcus, a formal figure in dark-blue suit and subdued red tie, who stood and spoke with unusual restraint — flamboyance, not understatement, was Marcus’s trademark.

“No, Your Honor,” Marcus said, “for we are dealing here with the biological right of a mother, under law, to possess her own child. There was no legal adoption of this boy by Veronica Fitzgibbon, only a temporary custody arrangement agreed to by a deeply troubled mother whose circumstances would not allow her to raise the child as she wanted him raised. But she has triumphed over adversity and now reclaims her right to cherish her own flesh and blood, to give him the upbringing he deserves from his true mother. And we ask that immediate custody of her only son be granted to her — today.” And he sat down.

“What do you say to this, counsel?” the judge asked Roscoe.

And Roscoe stood and recounted the Gilby prenatal adoption plan, noted the absence of contact between biological mother and child for three years after the birth, and only eight mother — son meetings during the next nine years.

“And so Pamela Yusupov,” said Roscoe, “who gave her child away with a great expression of relief before he was born, has seen the boy only ten times in his entire life, including the day of his birth and this sighting today. Yet she wants to take him from the mother who, while cradling him as her own when he was only hours out of the womb, heard Pamela Yusupov say, ‘Thank God, thank God I’m no longer a mother.’ Now this unnatural mother seeks to wrench that child out of the only mother’s arms he’s ever known. The boy does not want to leave, and it would be tragic to place him, against his will, in custody of this stranger. What’s more, this stranger’s sole purpose here is to obtain money from the estate of her late ex-husband, who disowned her five years ago, who was father to this boy but never saw him — not once — in his entire life. Should the profoundest of human bonds, between mother and son, ever be measured by the financial gain it will bring? Your respondents ask that this mischievous suit be dismissed.”

Judge Finn shook his head and said, “Let’s not waste the court’s time here, Mr. Gorman, Mr. Conway. The way to resolve this is through sworn testimony, and we must hear from the infant.”

“Then we request that testimony be taken in chambers,” said Roscoe, “to make the environment less frightening for the boy.”

“We will reconvene here, in my chambers, two weeks from today,” the judge said.

To Roscoe, Veronica had been a savvy childhood goddess, creature of heavenly body to which he had modest privilege; but then she became, oh yes, high priestess of betrayal and venal dreams, human after all. Pamela was Veronica manquée, savvy and single-minded, the vulvaceous creature of devilish body and venturesome sin. Roscoe loved the blood that flowed in the young sisters’ bodies, loved their vitality and, of course, their beauty. That both were beautiful no one disagreed. When Veronica was nineteen and about to marry Elisha, she was photographed in a white parlor of her home, wearing a white, off-the-shoulder evening dress with no trace of vulgarity in her bare shoulders, standing in a smoky light that obscured her right hand and gave her an aura of ethereality. The photo was everybody’s favorite when it appeared in magazines and rotogravures, and so Pamela, at nineteen and about to marry Roscoe, had an identical photo taken to prove Veronica’s image was not a singular phenomenon, and proved the reverse. Pamela’s photo accented her shoulder bones and her curiously inelegant posture, and Roscoe concluded that, though she tried to stand upright for the portrait, her crooked soul betrayed her. Now, twenty-nine years later, here she was in court, still getting even for genetic inequities.

When he married Pamela, Roscoe had a modest income from his father’s Stanwix brewery, an enterprise that dated to 1886, when Felix bought it from John Malley, who gave up making beer in order to sell it retail in what his sons would develop into the city’s largest saloon. Two years later, Felix was elected Albany’s first mayor of Irish extraction, and the day after his election he led a parade of twelve Stanwix wagons, each drawn by a double team through the entire city, to let it be known that good things would happen to saloonkeepers who served Stanwix beer and Shamrock ale, the Democratic Party’s new official beverages. The brews remained such even after Felix was removed from office for fraud, for he continued as a figure of power in the Party, and the brewery made him a fortune. It also kept his wife, Blanche’s regal standing in the First Irish Families, that elite social unit with which Felix would have nothing to do, for, as all know, elevated social status turns the Irish into Republicans.

When the Democrats lost City Hall in 1899, Stanwix beer had a sheer falling off. But its quality kept it popular and, by 1914 its profits gave Roscoe enough income to travel comfortably in the Fitzgibbon social circle, which included the Morgan sisters. And it was these sisters, not money, or politics, that focused Roscoe’s mind. He had proposed to Veronica Morgan when he finished Albany Law School, but she married Elisha and his fortune.

Then came Pamela.

Roscoe studied Pamela the plaintiff, who remained photogenic for the newspapers, her essential blond hair durably bottled in bond. But her smile had changed: two of her incisors gone crooked. And that tantalizing body he had pressed against so often, on sleigh rides, at dances, even when pursuing Veronica, had developed into one of Pamela’s worst fears: the thickening middle. Together at Veronica’s wedding reception at the Albany Country Club, Roscoe and Pamela had watched thick-middled Honey Mills, fiftyish, hair like straw dyed black, talking with three men sitting on chairs across from her, and offering them all a prolonged revelation of her thigh. Pamela said an ugly, shapeless woman doing such a needy thing was pathetic, but then she and Roscoe went off to the shadowy cloakroom, where Pammy kissed him and gave him exploration rights. Divested of one sister, Roscoe took the other. He courted Pamela, went with her downtown, even to Fifth Avenue on the New York train, shopping for hats, coats, dresses. He kept her company when she was blue, took her to Dr. Warner’s office when she had the stomach pains, sometimes associated with her monthlies, took her to dinner at Keeler’s, to dances at the Yacht Club and the Hampton Roof Garden, and went with her on vacation to Tristano, the great Adirondack camp Lyman had started building in 1873. It was both Ariel’s and Elisha’s favored retreat. Elisha always invited Roscoe, and Roscoe always went, for Veronica would be there.

But Pamela became his primary interest during this visit to Tristano, where social fantasia pervaded the air like the scent of pine trees. Accessible from the railhead at North Creek only by horse-drawn carriage and then by steamer across the lake, Tristano was isolated amid the loons and raccoons, the foxes, eagles, and great horned owls, and surrounded by alders, spruces, cedars, white pine, and hemlocks. Its twenty-four buildings along the shoreline seemed on first approach to be the edge of a small city that extended infinitely backward into the estate’s two thousand wooded acres. And indeed it bustled like a city when family friends and servants put it to full use. Life amid this animated isolation, this log-cabin luxury of the uncommonly rich, offered the visitor a transformation of expectation. What happened here seemed a charade played out among real people by unreal rules with improbable consequences — Roscoe, for instance, alone on the floor with Pamela on two raccoon coats at four in the morning, proposing marriage, being accepted, then bringing her back here as a bride.

Their honeymoon was romantic solitude in front of open fireplaces, long walks in the pineydown woods, cool swims in the lake’s morning stillness, and pointed talk, never about tomorrow, but about how they would spend the abundance that was today. Looking at Pamela in the courtroom, Roscoe remembers that vivid yellow hair when the yellowness was real, can see her in a shimmering blue summer evening gown, then slipping effortlessly out of it, remembers how she walked or provocatively sat, and how much he loved her. But he now knows this love was independent of Pamela, a consequence of his own unruly capacity for love.

After Veronica married Elisha, Roscoe could no longer love her as before; and so loved Pamela instead, and she loved him, and they married, made love, and made love again, half a dozen times the first day. In between they ate what the Tristano servants cooked for them: fresh fish from the lake, a pheasant shot by Kendrick, Ariel’s resident woodsman. They drank lightly to keep love at a sharp edge, took the boat out on the lake to find a place where there was no sound. Their lives became elemental, centering on the forest, the water, the bed, and the belief that life was purposeful, even though its only discernible purpose was love, effortless love that Roscoe could give and receive at will. And he loved it, loved Pamela, loved that he loved her, loved women, loved love.

When they woke into the third day of the honeymoon, Pamela was revisited by her old pain. She ate sparsely and said she would not give in to it. They fished off the dock by the Trophy House, and Roscoe was reeling in a small trout when they saw the steamer coming across the lake. He threw the trout back and stowed the fishing rods in the house, and they walked to the pier to meet the invaders. Ariel was first off the steamer.

“Ah, my little ones,” he said to Roscoe and Pamela, “I didn’t expect to find anyone waiting for us.”

“We’re three days into our honeymoon,” Roscoe said.

“What a pity to disturb you.”

“But we’re disturbing you in your own house, Ariel,” Roscoe said. “Elisha did know we were coming. I’m surprised he didn’t tell you.”

“Elisha and I aren’t talking,” Ariel said.

Ariel on the pier was a handsome, salient figure in blue blazer and white slacks, pencil-line mustache, a preposterously large ruby on his left ring finger, and a full head of pure white hair. He did not look his sixty-eight years, and he exuded a sense of mature dignity that was wholly unearned. Ever since Elisha relieved him of power at the steel mill, he had been in perpetual motion between Albany, Manhattan, Miami, Saratoga, and the pleasure domes of Europe, never alone, devoting all his days to the hedonistic carnival his life, in late years, had become. Now, as his servants unloaded everyone’s luggage, Ariel introduced Roscoe and Pamela to his traveling companions as they came down the ramp: Lamar Kensington, the insurance executive who backed the Broadway musical with him, Encore, Maestro, a hit that renewed Ariel’s exchequer after he left the mill; three Broadway dancers, Billie, Lillie, and Dolly, from another Ariel-Lamar show that had just flopped; two judges from downstate whom Ariel introduced only as Jerry and Ted; Ariel’s chauffeur, Griggs; his personal chef, Philippe; and, last off the boat, his physician, Roy Warner, and Warner’s bosomy wife, Estelle. Ariel saw or talked with Warner every day of his life to combat the shifting pains, maladies, and other multifarious disguises that death assumed in its never-ending pursuit of Ariel’s ailing soul and body.

“Oh, Dr. Warner,” Pamela said when she saw him, “thank heaven you’re here. You don’t know the pain I’ve been in.”

“She’s been suffering since yesterday,” Roscoe said to Warner.

Dr. Warner, an affable, jowly man in his forties, with large ears and a perfect bedside smile, shook hands with Pamela. “Your stomach acting up again?” he asked.

“It gets better, then it comes back.”

“Do you have the pills I gave you?”

“Gone. But I haven’t needed them for weeks.”

“I’ll get you some when we settle in and I find my bags.”

“You’ll join us for lunch, and late dinner,” Ariel said. “We have a continuing feast, you know.”

“Of course,” said Roscoe, who was already making plans to leave.

Half an hour later, Roscoe had escorted Pamela to the Warners’ cottage and was walking with Ariel, both of them coatless under the ardent July sun. They were nearing the Swiss cottage, the most elegant of the secondary buildings, built to match the main lodge, with twisted cedar and shaggy spruce. On the sloping lawn in front of it, Billie, Lillie, and Dolly were sunbathing on the grass, all supine and naked under small lap-towels.

“Excessively lush, the scenery at Tristano,” Ariel said, and he waved to the women. They all waved back and Billie removed her towel.

“And it changes radically from minute to minute,” Roscoe said.

“You hardly need anything along these lines at the moment, Roscoe, but you should know that these young women are very friendly.”

“But I have a very friendly bride.”

“You also have a reputation for diversity, and it’s a comfort to have excess on hand for emergencies.”

“I can’t imagine one arising,” Roscoe said. “Which of those excessive creatures belongs to you?”

“Oh, that’s not how it’s done. We have no ownership here.”

“Sweet land of liberty. E pluribus unum?”

“There you have it.”

Ariel’s sexual excesses distanced many, but they amused Roscoe. Since childhood he had developed a friendship with Ariel that was familial. It had been painful to watch him squander his money and weaken the steel mill as he became a full-time satyr. But the dream assumes curious shapes.

“I suppose you miss the mill,” Roscoe said.

“Not at all,” said Ariel. “I gave it all I had. Now I’m doing the same for myself.”

“I grieve over the trouble between you and Elisha,” Roscoe said. “The war between fathers and sons is unwinnable and usually a self-mutilating pursuit. And Tivoli isn’t the same without you around.”

“Ah, you grew up well, Roscoe, and you have the gift of talk. I thought you’d rise in political office like your father.”

“I wasn’t cut out for public life.”

“We never know what we’re cut out for. Who could have predicted I’d swap my stable of horses for a stable of women?”

“Some might consider that an improvement.”

“As do I, on those days when I don’t think I’m dying.”

“Psychic sex as an antidote to psychic illness. Are you dying now?”

“Not at the moment. But the day is young.”

“We won’t clutter your demise,” Roscoe said. “We’ll get out of your way by morning.”

“Don’t be in a hurry. There’s always room for two more at Tristano. Too many is just enough. And the time allotted for frolic runs out, Roscoe. Take my word.”

Estelle Warner was alone on the porch of the main lodge, drinking what looked like gin, when Ariel and Roscoe settled into green rocking chairs. Lee, an Oriental servant, appeared at their elbows as they arrived, asking whether he might bring drinks. Whiskey and whiskey, the two men said, and Lee vanished into the lodge.

“Did you have a nice walk, Ari?” Estelle asked.

“We did. The girls are taking the sun.”

“I thought of doing that myself,” Estelle said, “but it’s a bit too high in the sky for me. I’ll get the freckles in odd places.”

“Nothing wrong with freckles in odd places,” Ariel said.

“You like the odd places,” Estelle said.

Estelle smiled at Roscoe, revealing a set of teeth so egregiously false they neutralized all meaning in her smile. Her manner, like her bosom, was ebullient.

“Are you waiting for the doctor?” Roscoe asked her.

“He’s having a session with his patient.”

“Pamela, you mean.”

“Oh yes, Pamela. They do drag it out.”

“I know,” Roscoe said. “I’ve taken her to his office.”

“She takes you with her, does she? He’s had her in hand since she was fifteen. He’s brought her along.”

“Oh yes? How do you mean that?”

“He’s taught her how it’s done. Roy does love the little chickadees.”

“Estelle, Roscoe and Pamela are married.”

“Married, are you? How cozy! You and I should have a matching consultation. We could have it right now, right here on facing chairs. The servants would never intrude, and Ari could cheer us on. You know, I’d wager that Roy is re adjusting her pelvis even as we speak.”

“They’re on their honeymoon, Estelle.”

“Honeymoon! Oh, that is very spicy, and the doctor having a house call from the bride.”

Roscoe remembered Pamela’s face that day when she walked up the steps of the porch with Dr. Warner. It was a half-smile, a mask of relief at the presumable banishing of pain, the restoration of light to her dark condition, but also, in her cheeks and lips, the flush of gratification that Roscoe knew well. The force of the doctor’s jaw, his parsimonious grin, expressed quiet triumph.

“Walk me back to the room, Roscoe,” Pamela said. “I still feel lightheaded. I need to lie down.”

As they left the porch, Roscoe decided that none of what Estelle had suggested was true, that it was Tristano imposing its aura of fantasia. In their room Pamela opened her body to Roscoe with such fervid immediacy that he understood, even if he could not confirm, that it was not Tristano’s fantasia but the experience of receiving a second lover within a quarter-hour of the first that was driving Pamela’s ecstasy; that this arose not from either act of love but from their whor ish succession. Roscoe then realized this had been the pattern of their love since he first came to know it, that hers was no more related to him than his was to her, that they were both artful stylists enacting a loveless ritual that had no meaning beyond the orgasmic. Meaning would destroy the ecstasy. Roscoe now thought of it as loathsome pleasure, consummated by mutual traitors. Life without betrayal is not life.

He finished her off, then left her to sleep away her loathing. He walked out the back door of the main lodge and into the woods, took a circuitous path to the boathouse, and when he looked back at the city of Tristano he could not see any aura of fantasia, nor could he believe there ever was such a thing. Your only fantasia, Roscoe, is your gullibility.

He untethered the outboard motorboat and rode it almost across the lake, where it sputtered and stopped, out of gas. He dropped anchor, dove into the water, swam the last hundred yards to the steamer dock, then walked to the railroad station at North Creek. With damp money he bought a ticket back to Albany, where ecstasy was the impossible love of Veronica, plus two dozen oysters at Keeler’s.

“You were always a malicious bitch,” Veronica was saying to Pamela in the courtroom, “but this is an evil act.”

“I only want what is mine,” Pamela said.

“Gilby is not yours and never was.” Veronica turned to see if the boy was still at the table, and lowered her voice. “Do you even know who his father is?”

“Oh, I do indeed.”

“Your dead Russian never accepted him.”

“What is your point, Veronica? Do you have secret information about his father? By all means, let me in on it.” Pamela was smiling.

“You won’t get this boy.”

“We’ll see, won’t we?”

“Veronica,” said Roscoe, “there’s nothing to be gained by this. She’ll do what she’ll do, and we’ll overthrow it.”

“Still slobbering after her,” Pamela said, “like the fat little Roscoe you always were. And still so insufferably smart. But you know better than anyone what you’ll never have and never be. I love how that must torture you.”

“My torture ends, Pamela,” Roscoe said, “when you leave the room.”

Gilby stood up from his chair and Pamela walked to him.

“We will be together, my darling one,” she said for all to hear, and she embraced him. “I love you and I’ll take care of you forever.”

“I don’t even like you,” Gilby said.

Pamela stood away from him.

“You will,” she said, “you’ll love your mother. Remember that I love you.”

“You’re not my mother,” Gilby said.

“Cut your losses,” Roscoe said to Pamela. “Go home and put a dagger in what’s left of your heart.”

In Pamela’s face Roscoe saw raw malice, malignant need. Elisha was right: she was desperate, would do anything to attain her goal. But despite this lawsuit, her goal wasn’t necessarily Gilby’s custody. She confirmed that when she whispered to Veronica, “It’s a wise child that knows its father.”

Roscoe sat alone in Keeler’s Sadler Room, beneath a W. Dendy Sadler print of twelve happy and fat old monks being served a sumptuous supper by six sullen and thin young monks. When he ate, Roscoe identified with the fat monks. On the room’s walls were dozens of other Sadler prints of eighteenth-century English men, and now and then women, always celebrating or ritualizing, or pensive or bereaved, amid food and drink. Roscoe dipped an oyster cracker into his cocktail sauce, well into his second splendid bottle of Cheval Blanc, and five oysters into his second dozen of bluepoints. Would he go for a third dozen? He would consider it, for this might be his last meal in the civilized world. Now he stopped dwelling on oysters to consider the news just given to him by O.B., who was sitting across the table with Mac, the odor of witch hazel, O.B.’s aftershave lotion, mixing with the aroma of cocktail sauce, not a happy fusion. The news also was not happy: the Dutchman, proper name Vernon Van Epps, a pimp with a nightclub, had been found murdered in his flat upstairs over his Hudson Avenue club, the Double Dutch.

“Two dozen stab wounds, back and chest,” O.B. said.

“I’m cheering,” Mac said.

“Don’t cheer too loud,” O.B. said.

“He was a worthless bag of chicken guts,” Mac said. “They should bury him in pig shit.”

“You didn’t care for him,” Roscoe said.

“He was a no-good fat fuck,” Mac said.

“Keep this up,” O.B. said, “they’ll lock you up for it.”

“What’d he do to you, Mac?”

“He took Mac’s girlfriend off the street and put her to work in his bar,” O.B. said. “Then she wasn’t Mac’s girl anymore.”

“Are you talking about Pina?” Roscoe asked. “Giuseppina?”

“Pina,” Mac said.

“She’s a working girl,” Roscoe said. “She’s been on the street ever since I know her.”

“Right,” Mac said, “but she came home to me.”

“Touching,” said O.B. “The Dutchman was informing for the Governor’s people. He probably told them about the Division Street payoffs. The troopers found him dead.”

“Who said he was informing?”

“A plainclothes trooper, Dory Dixon. He’s an inspector and was making it his investigation. Our beat cop, Eddie Miller, saw trooper cars and called the desk. I went down and they got guards at the Dutchman’s door. ‘Wait a minute,’ I say, ‘this is still Albany. Who the hell are you to set up guards without us?’ Dixon says somebody killed their informant. ‘Maybe so,’ I say, ‘but they killed him in my town, and this is my investigation from this minute on, and my coroner is in charge, and the coroner, as you goddamn well know, can arrest you if he’s in the right mood, so get your troops the fuck out of here and if you’re nice I’ll let you sit in on the autopsy.’ He was boiling, but he pulled off his guards. I called Nolan and he came down and took the body over to Keegan’s.”

“They probably think we did it,” Roscoe said.

“Wouldn’t surprise me,” said O.B.

“We didn’t, did we?”

“Not that I know of,” said O.B.

“You tell Patsy?”

“I couldn’t find him. That’s why I came here.”

“He’s up in Troy for a chicken fight. He and Bindy are going at it.”

“You want me to go up and tell him?”

“I’ll go,” Roscoe said. “I was going to sign myself into the hospital after my oysters.”

“Them goddamn things’d put anybody in the hospital. What do you mean, hospital?”

“The pains from the accident. They don’t go away.”

“You go to the hospital, then. You go, and let me find Patsy.”

“No, I want to see him and Bindy both on this.”

“You got a ride to Troy? You want a car?”

“Bart’s coming here to take me to the hospital.”

“Where’s Manucci?”

“He went to New York to get Alex. You have a clue who did this?”

“Anybody can stab a pimp,” O.B. said.

“Pimps need to be stabbed,” Mac said.

“Whoever it was knew him pretty well. He was in bed, naked.”

“You find the weapon?”

“We found a lot of clean knives,” O.B. said. “No money in his wallet. The whole place ransacked. He must’ve had five thousand dirty pictures.”

“Robbed and stabbed,” Mac said, “and he dies naked, broke, full of holes, and covered with blood. I like it.”

The Game Game

Patsy and Bindy McCall were born into short-heel cockfighting, “short-heel” referring to the modest inch-and-a-quarter length of the needle-pointed spurs, or gaffs, their birds wore to fight. The boys’ grandfather, Butter McCall, had owned the Bull’s Head tavern on the Troy Road, where chickens and bareknucklers battled from mid-century; and their father, Jack McCall, grew up serious about chickens. Then, in 1882, Butter sold the tavern to Bucky O’Brien, who kept on with the ’knucklers but didn’t like chickens. Elisha’s grandfather Lyman also bred birds and fought them at the Bull’s Head, which was where the first interlocking of the McCall and Fitzgibbon families took place, the alliance that would control city politics far into the next century.

Jack McCall, after his father sold the Bull’s Head, fought his chickens at Iron Joe Farrell’s cockpit in the North End. Patsy and Bindy learned the game there and matured into dedicated breeders, eclipsing their father’s local fame. Roscoe entered this world through Felix Conway’s tie to Iron Joe, which was strictly political. The only animals that won Felix’s attention were the horses that pulled his beer wagons; and he liked his chickens roasted. Roscoe, passing time at Iron Joe’s, developed friendships with Patsy, Bindy, and also Elisha, who fought a few birds as a boy but faded away from the fighting to become, like Roscoe, a spectator at the McCall brothers’ rivalry, and at their battles with other chickens of the world.

At their peak, Patsy and Bindy probably owned eight hundred birds. Patsy’s Albany and Half Albany strains developed into some of the great fighters of the Northeast in the late 1920s and 1930s; and Patsy claimed his fighters were the best in the world. Some agreed he had a claim. Bindy’s strain was subordinate until the late 1930s, when he crossbred his Whitehackles and Spangled Blues with Spanish cocks from Cádiz and Jerez, birds he bought and flew up from Puerto Rico. He then began beating the best, including Patsy’s, which intensified the chicken wars on into the present moment.

To Roscoe, spectating at cockfights was a lifelong education in tension, cowardice, unpredictable reversals, and courage. The birds, bred for battle, fought for neither God nor glory, neither to eat nor for love. They fought to conquer the other, to impose death before it was imposed. Just like politics, Roscoe decided, but without the blood. Well, sometimes there’s blood.

One idea defined the purpose of this sport: to have, to understand, and to witness gameness, and to profit from it psychically or financially, or both. Roscoe had watched Patsy test a Blueface stag for gameness out at his country place, setting six birds to fight the Blue, who battled for five, or ten, or maybe twenty minutes against each one of the six in sequence, without a rest. They tore him, pecked holes in his head, disabled one wing, blinded both his eyes, riddled him with their spurs till he was all but bloodless, yet he kept fighting, hurt all six, and died only when he could no longer kick, or stand. He gave one final peck at enemy number six just before his body finally failed his spirit. Patsy bred his Albanys from this brave stag’s relatives and created a line of suicidally aggressive winners, one of them the granddaddy of the Ruby, Patsy’s bird in the next fight.

But winners did not win by suicidal aggression alone. As usual, winning could also be begat by imaginative fraud. “Forty-five years of teaching by crooks,” Patsy once said to Roscoe, “means you always have to come up with an ace.” How did the crooks do it, and how did Patsy show his ace? Let Roscoe count the ways. The instant a crooked handler (the other fellow’s or yours) touches a chicken, he can secretly break his thigh with a thumb, or incite pain by pressure on his kidneys or his vent, or rub his eyes to blind him. Or, if your bird is hung up with the other bird’s spur in his chest, when the handler separates them he can wrench the spur so your bird’s flesh is torn open and he’ll bleed to death fighting. Your handler can do the same to your own chicken, if you prefer to bet against yourself. You can also train your bird to lose: practice him with muffs so he becomes a coward, take away his protein or his water, give him a candle to study all night before a fight to paralyze his pupil, give him diarrhea with Epsom salts, drug him with cocaine, tie his spurs so they’re too tight, or too loose and fall off, or so their angle will make him miss his target; and if an eye is gone, pit him on his blind side so he can’t see the enemy. Or, conversely, put curare on your bird’s spurs to paralyze the enemy; put grease, or drops from a heated lemon skin, on his head to make it slippery, so the enemy’s bite won’t hold; put cocaine or Xylocaine on his feathers so when the enemy bites his mouth goes to sleep and precision is skewed; put grease or flour or stove black on your best fighter’s head to make him look sick and people will give you the long odds; feed one of your cowards tomato juice to give him a suntan, the color of winners, but bet him to lose. If you have patience, create a bleeder out of one of your best fighters: slowly feed him an anticoagulant — coumadin, say — until a tap on his hip or thigh raises a hematoma; and then you’re ready. Collude with another owner and both birds will wear spurs one-sixteenth of an inch shorter than regulation, so your bleeder won’t be able to hit, fatally, the carotid artery of his enemy, but when he himself is hit he will bleed. His neck will swell with blood and he’ll be cyanotic, presumed dead. The savvy handler will quickly massage the blood out of his neck in the ring and revive him before he goes into irreversible shock, then will do it again at the first-aid bench, and the bird will recover, but now be known as a loser. Take him off the coumadin and fight him again, with long odds against him now as the loser; but this time he’ll be wearing proper-length spurs to kill, he will have fought and lived, and he will think with the serrated edge of a survivor. When he makes his kill, collect your winnings.

The chicken war between the McCall brothers was taking place at Fogarty’s, in South Troy, which was, in the opinion of cockers east and west, north and south, the most famous cockpit in the Northeast, maybe in all of America. Tommy Fogarty, a grocer, butcher, and hotel owner who became superintendent of the Public Market under Troy Democrats, grew up at cockfights, illegal then and now. But, since he opened his pit in 1917, he’d never been raided. He functioned in the Irish neighborhood that bordered Troy’s nineteenth-century riverfront iron foundries. By the mid-1920s, cockfighters high and low, lumber handlers, lawyers, ironworkers, bankers, bricklayers, politicians, judges were streaming into South Troy with money and chickens, for this had become headquarters: more big-money mains fought here than in all other pits in the U.S. and Canada put together, so they said. Under Fogarty’s twelve 100-watt pit lights, there strutted, bled, and died the gamest chickens mankind could breed: forty-four one-thousand-dollar mains, some drawing crowds of a thousand, almost one main a week in 1928 alone, the pit’s peak year. Even now, in 1945, a waning year for the sport, seventeen mains had been held, and it was only August. Tom Fogarty’s reputation for fairness, and his intolerance for cheaters, made his pit a place where cockers challenged the best, and where they expected and got a fair deal.

Patsy, who met Tommy Fogarty when they were boys, had fought chickens in the Fogarty pit since it opened. If Patsy had a friend closer than Roscoe or Elisha, it was Tommy. The most honest man alive, his knowledge of chickens uncanny, Patsy said — he can feel a young chicken and tell how firm his flesh is, how strong his thighs and his beak, how muscular his breast will be, how much of a truly coiled spring he will or won’t become when he’s ready to fight. All his life Patsy never found a handler that smart. Maybe five times a week he and Tommy talked on the phone about breeding, feeding, and fighting chickens — cockadoodledoo, Patsy called it.

Bart Merrigan let Roscoe out of the car near Fogarty’s door, and went to park in an abandoned foundry lot, a hundred cars here already. A pair of Troy detectives sat in their sedan, guarding Fogarty’s peace. Roscoe, using the cane Bart had bought him, walked slowly into what was once Fogarty’s four-story hotel, now only a place where favored chicken-fighters could stay, and then into the barroom, Kayo Kindlon behind the small bar reading The Sporting News, nobody drinking, the fights are on. Roscoe went through the back hall and into a separate wooden structure with exposed, unpainted beams, and a circular dirt pit twelve feet in diameter, with a padded canvas wall three feet high encircling it. Maybe five hundred men and three dozen women sat on wooden bleachers watching the fight in progress, the crowd bigger than usual, for it wasn’t every night you saw the McCall brothers, their bankrolls, and their fierce breeds of chickens, fighting each other.

Roscoe saw the blur of two birds in the air, one falling, bleeding from the head, and landing on its back, a wing twisted outward. Patsy and Bindy were faced off across the pit, Bindy smiling. Roscoe sat down beside Tommy Fogarty and shook his hand.

“Seven to six, Patsy,” Tommy said, “but Patsy’s chicken is on his back.”

“What’s the bet?”

“I’m holding forty thousand, and the betting’s heavy.”

“They’re fairly serious.”

“There’s sparks tonight. They’re not talking.”

“It’s been going that way,” Roscoe said.

Cy Kelly, Patsy’s white-haired handler, who worked mornings as Judge Rosy Rosenberg’s clerk in Albany Police Court, stepped into the pit and folded the fallen bird’s wing under his side, then put the bird on his stomach. But clearly he could not stand. Even so, Bindy’s bird kept his distance from Patsy’s downed bird, whose head followed his enemy’s every move. Then Bindy’s bird feinted, and Patsy’s thrust his bleeding head at the comer with fierce strength, a game but fatal move. Bindy’s bird, with wicked speed and unexpected strength, caught that extended neck in a bill-hold and worked it, worked it, finally snapped it. Then he stepped on the corpse and crowed victory. Some of the crowd roared.

Seven to seven.

Roscoe edged his way to the first row of the bleachers, where Patsy was sitting between his driver, Wally Mitchell, and Johnny Mack, who ran the White House on Steuben Street, Albany’s oldest gambling parlor. Johnny, Patsy’s personal bookie, was paying off bets against Patsy’s dead chicken.

“How’s life, John?” Roscoe asked.

“Life looks dead, Roscoe, but there’s always another chicken.”

Some of the crowd moved to the bar for a ten-minute drink, and Cy Kelly carried the dead bird to a corner where the corpses were stacked.

“I hear you’re winning,” Roscoe said, sitting behind Patsy.

“Not with that one. What’s with the cane?”

“Protection against women who find me irresistible. Anybody tell you yet that somebody murdered the Dutchman?”

Patsy shook his head and waited.

“Stabbed two dozen times. He was informing for the troopers.”

“Informing on what?”

“Whores, pimps, that’s all he knew. I wonder what Bindy thinks of it.”

“Ask him. I won’t talk to the stupid bastard. He kept the Notchery open last night. I had O.B. put a prowl car out in front. That’ll stop his traffic.”

“My guess,” Roscoe said, “is they’ll link us to the Dutchman, even if they know better. Coming after that Roy Flinn business, it can’t be coincidence.”

“Sounds like a passion killing, hitting him that many times.” Cy Kelly was coming toward them with chicken in arms. “Here comes the Ruby,” Patsy said. “I gotta pay attention.”

“I won’t see you later,” Roscoe said. “I’m checking into Albany Hospital with these pains of mine.”

“You need any help?”

“Bart’s driving me up.”

“Have him keep me posted.”

The crowd drifted back in from the bar, and Roscoe went to where Bindy was sitting with his driver-bodyguard, Poop Powell, and his handler, a man Roscoe didn’t know. The handler was holding the next battler, a speckled bird with a black breast and dark-brown wings, one of Bindy’s Swigglers. It was Bindy’s pride in this new breed that had led him to challenge Patsy, their first main in a year.

“Bindy, old man,” Roscoe said, “you’re doing okay. I saw that last one.”

“We’re moving,” said Bindy. “What’s on your mind, Roscoe?”

“The Dutchman. He was stabbed dead last night. And a trooper told O.B. he was one of their informers. After that business with Roy Flinn, I doubt this death is a coincidence.”

Bindy just looked at the bird his handler held. It was serene and only half visible in the handler’s arms. Bird, you don’t look like you might be about to die. I’ll bet the Dutchman didn’t either. And certainly not Elisha.

“You ever figure the Dutchman as an informer?” Roscoe asked.

“He’d rat on his mother for a free beer,” Bindy said.

“You have anybody in mind we oughta talk to?”

“I’ll think about it.”

“He hang around the Notchery?”

“He came looking for Pina when she went to work for Mame.”

“Maybe Pina has an idea,” Roscoe said.

“She was all done with him. Leave her out of it. Sit down and watch the chickens. You want some candy?”

He offered Roscoe the half-empty two-pound box of Martha Washington chocolate creams he’d been eating, a remarkable gesture. On a trip to Saratoga with Roscoe, Bindy had eaten an entire box in twenty minutes; and when Roscoe asked for a piece, Bindy told him, “Get your own candy.”

“I’m on a diet,” Roscoe said to the new candy “Who’s your handler?”

“Emil,” Bindy said. “Say hello to Roscoe, Emil.”

“Hey, Emil,” Roscoe said.

Emil looked up and said “Uhnnn,” and turned his attention back to the chicken in his arms.

“Emil’s worked with chickens in New Orleans, San Francisco, all over.”

“This bird got a name?” Roscoe asked.

“This is the Swiggler,” Bindy said. “You ever been swiggled?”

“Not by a chicken,” Roscoe said.

Bart came over to Roscoe. “How you feeling? You want to leave?”

“I feel terrible,” Roscoe said, “but I can’t leave now.”

“I’ll be at the bar,” said Bart, who loathed chickens, even in sandwiches.

Roscoe moved away from Bindy to a center position between the brothers, taking no sides. Jack Gray, Tommy Fogarty’s matchmaker and referee, gave the birds their second weighing-in of the night on the corner scale, the Ruby three pounds nine ounces, the Swiggler three eight and a half, a near-perfect match, and Jack pronounced them ready to fight. Emil took the Swiggler off the scale; Cy Kelly lifted the Ruby into his arms and then both men circled the pit to give the spectators a close look at the combatants. The birds, spurs on, rested easefully in arms, healthy, the color of winners. The betting was six to five on the Ruby, who was a veteran of one fight, which he’d won in the first twenty seconds. The Swiggler was also a one-time winner who had taken some cuts, but danced the better dance.

“Five hundred on the Ruby,” Johnny Mack said.

“You’re on,” Bindy said, and the betting dialogue began, the crowd’s overture of grunts and gestures, fingers raised and fingers back, money, money, and more where that came from, an escalating hum, the electric music of rising expectations.

“I like the speckled, fifty dollars,” a woman said, and Roscoe saw Bridie Martin, who cleaned houses for a living, a durable gambler.

“You got it,” a man said, “but if I win we go for a drink.”

“I’m not fond of knickknacks,” Bridie told her suitor.

“You’re on anyway,” the suitor said.

“Bill your cocks, boys,” said Jack Gray, the third man in the pit. Emil and Cy stood behind their chalk lines, four feet apart, facing each other, each bird held with both hands. They moved the birds’ beaks till one pecked the other, hackles rising, pecked again; and then both handlers crouched behind their lines. Jack said “Ready,” and the birds’ feet touched the dirt, they stood; Jack said “Pit ’em,” and each bird, set free, went at the other’s head, chest, throat, flew up and kicked, up and kicked; and with each kick by those flying needles the bettors roared, they know punishment when they see it, kick, kick, and kicks too fast to see, whap, whap and the Ruby is seriously punched, flies backward, falling, but up again and at that sonofabitch, they’re in a smash-up now, rolling, stabbing each other, then hung, spurs in each other’s chest, thigh, anyplace, and Cy and Emil approach the bundle, disengage the spurs — Easy, boys, don’t hurt anybody.

“Pit,” said Jack Gray, and the handlers took the birds to their lines while Jack counted to twenty.

Bindy said, “Way to go, Swiggler.” And that bird of yours really is a bit of all right, Bin. Patsy, you’re not happy, but what the hell, it’s chickens. You only think you know them.

“I got a hundred to eighty on the Swiggler,” somebody said.

“On,” said Johnny Mack.

“. nineteen, twenty,” said Jack, and the electric hum rises again as the birds resume the dance, the Ruby with wings wide to hit the Swiggler from the top down, but where the hell did that Swiggler go? There he is, up, up, and slashing with both feet at the Ruby one’s head and chest, but the Swig feels steel himself — through the throat, is it? And he’s on his side, the Ruby’s beak holding his neck, Break it, Ruby, bust him in two, but the Swiggler rises from below and whack, whack, you bitin’ bastard, and they stick each other and fall over, the Swig bleeding from the throat, and it rattles, but lookit that Ruby fella, gushing it from his chest, pooling.

“Pit.”

“Five hundred to two fifty on the Swig,” a bettor offered.

“On,” said Johnny Mack.

So it’s two to one against, Patsy. Your boy is game, but what about the fabled strength and cunning of those Albanys?

“Give him hell, big fella,” Patsy said.

“. eighteen, nineteen, twenty.”

The birds rise, flying up to heaven, high as Jack Gray’s belly, a pair of wild fliers pecking, pecking, popping their wings, born to fly but not far and not high, those bloody heels shuffling now on the way down, faster than angels dance, feathers cut and fluttering, a wing broken — the Swig’s or the Ruby’s? The Ruby’s — but, hey, that won’t stop that Ruby fella; wing or no wing, he’s kicking, on his back and he’s gotcha, Swig, got your eye. Oh, how we all hum as the one-eyed Swiggler moves and kicks, but oh so slowly, where’d he go, that Ruby sucker? He flies at the Ruby, sinks a needle into his heart, yes? No. But it’s close and it’s hung, one more time.

“Pit.”

Pull that needle from the flesh, Cy. How’s your Ruby lad doing? Not well. But we won’t count him out.

“Two fifty to fifty,” said a sport.

“On,” said Johnny Mack.

“. fifteen, sixteen. ”

Patsy cleans his glasses at five to one, and Roscoe knows the gesture means Patsy is worried. Roscoe is worried by the pain in his own chest, maybe what Ruby feels with those holes around his heart. Roscoe has stayed longer than he planned (he does that), but who could leave now? He holds the wooden post by his seat. Don’t fall over, Ros, and, no, you’re not identifying with wounded Ruby. None of that maleficent animal death symbolism, you did that with rats. No more martyrdom to your own ineptitude. But to tell the truth, Ros, if you had any sense you’d be in the hospital.

“. nineteen, twenty.”

The noise of this crowd will destroy Roscoe’s hearing. This is a fight and a half, a sweet-Jesus-lookit-that kind of fight, them are dead-game chickens, I’m givin’ ten to one on the Swiggerooney — gutsy bastard, that bird — and, hey, Bindy’s offering fifteen to one now; come on, little chicken.

The pain is gouging Roscoe’s heart, and he again wonders if he’s doing it to himself: all this tension with pimps, cops, lawsuits, whores, votes, birds. Same old story, Ros. You can’t get away from yourself. If he could, if he could even stand up, he’d blow this joint, but he can’t take his eye off the Swiggler, who faces off Ruby boy, both chickens too tired to fly to heaven, so whack that chest, Ruby, knock out his other eye, kill that fucker. But good old Ruby can’t quite. He’s got the Swiggler’s neck, going for the break, “Break it, break it,” and they’re moving, the Ruby’s wing dragging, blood flying. Whose? Who knows? The Swig has a spur in Ruby’s chest, Ruby’s kicking, and they roll, then the Swig’s spur is out but Ruby’s second wing is dead and he’s on his side looking mortal, so up goes Swig, his very last flight tonight, up and then down onto fallen Ruby, and the hum is a roar as the spurs go in, one a heart shot? Did he hit it? Doesn’t matter. He whaps into the Ruby head, straight into the old medulla oblongata, and Ruby is stilled, but on and on the Swiggler stabs.

That’s quite enough now, Swig. Your work is done.

Let’s hear it for the Swig.

And he does crow, for now he knows, and he stands and preens with his own steady blood-flow, where’d you learn to fight like that, young fella? He crows victory. Ruby is dead, long live swingin’ Swig.

And Roscoe saw it all, even Patsy’s head shaking out the loss, and Emil picking up the Swig, who’s still crowing the news in Emil’s arms. Cy Kelly picks up dead Ruby — give him to the Little Sisters of the Poor. Johnny Mack pays Patsy’s debts, and the winners smile as the losers lean back. Bridie Martin collects her fifty, and Tommy Fogarty hands the forty thousand to Bindy, who is halfway out the door as soon as he takes it. Roscoe should follow suit, but Bart is asking, “What’s wrong, Roscoe?”

Roscoe doesn’t reply. All he knows is that people are leaving and taking their noise with them. It’s quiet, which is nice, and the chickens have gone away. And you know what else, Ros? All of a sudden, so has the light.