“You do nice work, Harv.”
“It almost worked,” said Harv, but the arrogance was draining from his face like a poached egg with a slow leak.
“Why didn’t you play a safe shot?”
“When I’ve got a real shot?”
“A real shot? Willie Hoppe wouldn’t try that one.”
“I saw you break a bunch and kiss one in.”
“You never saw me try a shot like that, Harv.”
“If you can do it, I can do it too, sooner or later.”
Billy felt it rising. The sucker. Lowlife of Billy’s world. Never finish last, never be a sucker. Don’t let them humiliate you. Chick’s face grinned out of Harvey’s skull. Going to work, Billy? Lowlife. Humiliate the bastard.
“Harv, you got to play safe even when you’re ahead. Didn’t you learn anything playing against me?”
“I learned plenty.”
“You didn’t learn enough.”
And Billy leaned into the action and ran the table and broke a new rack and ran that and part of another. He missed a tough one and Harv sank eight and then Billy got at it and finished it off, a hundred to Harvey’s twelve, which, with his forty-point spot was still only fifty-two. Billy put his cue in the rack, feeling he’d done his duty. Suckers demand humiliation and it is the duty of people like Billy to answer their demand. Suckers must be stomped for their love of ignorance, for expecting too much from life. Suckers do not realize that a man like Billy spent six hours a day at pool tables all over Albany for years learning how to shed his ignorance.
Doc Fay watched the finale, shaking his head at what he heard from Harvey’s mouth. Harvey paid Billy the thirty-five dollars and put on his hat and suit coat. Billy actually felt something for Harvey then.
“You know, Harv,” he said, putting his hand on the sucker’s shoulder, “you’ll never beat me.”
“You’re good, Billy. I see how you play safe till the bunch breaks and then you get a streak going. I see how you do it.”
“Harv, if you play from now till you’re ninety-nine (play it, Fatha), you still won’t know how I do it.”
“I’ll get you, Billy,” Harv said, backing toward the door. “One of these nights I’ll get you.” And then he was gone, only his monkey smirk still hanging there by the door above the image of his orange and purple tie. Doc Fay broke up with laughter.
“I thought for a minute there, Billy, you were wising up the sucker,” the Doc said.
“You can’t wise up a sucker,” said Billy.
“Absolutely. It’s what I said to myself when Harv says he knows how you do it. I said, Doc, you know and Billy knows.”
“What do we know?”
“That a sucker don’t get even till he gets to heaven.”
“Right,” Billy said. “I learned that in church.”
Six
Red Tom Fitzsimmons, the four-to-two man at Becker’s, a good fellow, stood behind his mustache and amidst his brawn in a fresh apron, arms folded, sleeves rolled, waiting for thirst to arise anew in his four customers. Martin Daugherty sat at the end of the bar underneath the frame of the first dollar Becker’s ever made, and at the edge of the huge photo of Becker’s thirtieth anniversary outing at Picard’s Grove on a sunny day in August of 1932, which adorned the back bar. The photographer had captured two hundred and two men in varying degrees of sobriety, in shirtsleeves, sitting, kneeling, standing in a grassy field, clutching their beer, billowy clouds behind and above them. Emil Becker ordered a wall-sized blowup made from the negative and then spent weeks identifying all present by full name, and writing an index, which he framed and hung beside the blowup, which covered the wall like wallpaper.
Emil Becker died in 1936 and his son, Gus, put a check mark alongside his name, and a gold star on his chest in the photo. Customers then wanted the same done for other faithful departed, and so the stars went up, one by one. There were nineteen gone out of two hundred in six years. Martin Daugherty was in the photo. So was Red Tom. So was Billy Phelan, and Daddy Big, and Harvey Hess. So was Bindy McCall and his son, Charlie. So was Scotty Streck. The star was already shining on Scotty’s chest and the check mark alongside his name.
Martin looked at Red Tom, and at his mustache: in the photo and the real thing. It was a mustache of long standing, brooded over, stroked, waxed, combed, pampered.
“That mustache of yours, Fitzsimmons,” said Martin, “is outlandish. Venturesome and ostentatious.”
“Is that so?”
“Unusually vulgar. Splendid too, of course, and elegant in a sardonic Irish way. But it surely must be unspeakable with tomato juice.”
“Give up and have a drink,” Red Tom said, pouring a new bourbon for Martin.
“It’s pontifical, it’s arrogant. It obviously reflects an intemperate attitude toward humankind. I’d say it was even intimidating when found on a bartender, a mustache like that.”
“Glad you like it.”
“Who said I liked it? Listen,” Martin said, now in complete possession of Red Tom’s attention, “what do you hear about Charlie McCall?”
Red Tom eyed the other customers, moved in close. “The night squad was here asking your kind of question, Bo Linder and Jimmy Bergan.”
“You tell them anything a fellow like myself should know?”
“Only that the word’s out that he’s gone.”
“Gone how?”
“Disappeared, that’s all.”
“What about Jimmy Hennessey?”
“Hennessey? What’s he got to do with it?”
“Maybe something.”
“I haven’t laid eyes on Hennessey in months.”
“Is he all right?”
“Last I heard, he was drying out. Fell down the church steps and landed in front of Father O’Connor, who says to him, Hennessey, you should stop drinking. Hennessey reaches his hand up to the priest and says, I’m waiting for help from the Holy Ghost. He’s in the neighborhood somewhere, says O’Connor. Ask him to pick you up. And he steps over Hennessey’s chest.”
“He must be dried out by now. The McCalls put his name on a go-between list.”
“A go-between list?”
“It’ll be in the morning paper. Our guess is they’re trying to find an intermediary to talk with the kidnappers about the ransom.”
Martin put the list on the bar and ran down the names: Joe Decker, a former soft-shoe artist who ran the Double Dot nightclub on Hudson Avenue; Andy Kilmartin, the Democratic leader of the Fifth Ward; Bill Shea, a Bindy McCall lieutenant who ran the Monte Carlo, the main gambling house in the city; Barney O’Hare, a champion bootlegger who served four terms as Patsy McCall’s man in the State Assembly and no longer had need of work; Arnold Carroll, who ran the Blue Elephant saloon; Marcus Gorman, the town’s best-known criminal lawyer, who defended Legs Diamond; Butch McHale, a retired welterweight and maybe the best fighter ever to come out of Albany, who ran the Satin Slipper, a speakeasy, after he quit the ring; Phil Lynch, who ran the candy store that was Bindy’s headquarters for numbers collections and payoffs downtown; Honey Curry, a hoodlum from Sheridan Avenue, who did four years for a grocery store stickup; Hennessey, an ex-alderman who was one of Patsy’s political bagmen until he developed the wet spot on his brain; Morrie Berman, the ex-pimp and gambler; and Billy Phelan.
“Kilmartin never comes in anymore,” Red Tom said. “O’Hare comes in for a nightcap after he gets laid. Gorman hasn’t been in here since old man Becker told him and Legs Diamond he didn’t want their business. Most of the others are in and out.”
“Lately?”