Jack went through a tango with the librarian, who was from Minneapolis, a fetchingly rinsed-out blonde who wore schoolmarmish tweed suits with low-cut blouses beneath. You saw the blouses only when she peeled off the top covering as the dancing went on and on. Jack invited her to eat with us when he started up with her, and he saw to it that none of us lingered over coffee.
Then one day at dinner she wasn't there. Her empty chair went unremarked upon until Jack himself gestured toward it and said, "She wanted my autograph on her briefs," which I thought was a quaint euphemism for Jack.
Everyone laughed at the absurdity, even me.
"I gave her a bullet," Jack said, and I fell into uncertainty until he added, "She says to me, 'It's the right shape but the wrong size.' And I told her, 'Use it sideways."
We were swilling duck a l'orange when the librarian came up to the table with her jacket off and put her face inches away from Jack's.
"You turn women into swine," she said.
Jack nodded and bit the duck.
The morning news was that the search for Charlie Northrup had turned into one of the biggest manhunts in New York State history. He was presumed dead, but where? On top of this came a cable from Jimmy Biondo to Classy Willie, precipitating an impromptu meeting of our small quartet in Jack's cabin. Willie arrived, visibly equipped with a pistol for the first time since we boarded ship. Sensing tension, I got up to leave. But Jack said stick around, and so I did.
"Jimmy wants to call off the deal," Willie said to Jack, the first time a deal had been mentioned on the trip.
"Is that so?"
Willie handed the cable to Jack, who read it to us. "Tell our friend we can't stay with him," it said.
"I wonder what he's worried about'?" Jack said. Classy Willie didn't say anything.
"Do you know what he means, Willie?"
"He's talking about the money. Wants me to take it back to him."
"Our money?"
"Jimmy figures it's his money until we make the buy."
"Until I make the buy," Jack said.
"You know what I mean, Jack."
"No, Willie, I can't say that I do. You're a card thief. I never knew a card thief who could talk straight. "
"Jimmy must figure you're too hot. The radio says they won't let you into England."
"I wasn't going to England. "
"You know what I'm talking about, Jack."
"I suppose I do, Willie. I suppose I do." Jack put on his weary tone of voice. "But I'll tell you the truth, Willie, I'm not even thinking about money. What I'm thinking about is jewels."
"What jewels?"
"I got eighty grand worth and I don't know how to get them off the boat. They'll go through my luggage with a microscope. ' '
"Let your friend Marcus carry them," Willie said. "He's legitimate."
"Not interested, thank you," I said.
"That's not a bad idea, Marcus," Jack said.
"It's a terrible idea, Jack. I want no part of hot merchandise. No part whatever. Not my line of work."
"If Marcus says no, it's no," Jack said. "We'll have to find another way. "
I believe Jack already knew what he was going to do with the jewels and was merely testing me for a reaction. My reaction was so instantaneous he didn't even press it a second time. I was more attuned to Classy Willie's problem. If Biondo ever had any sense at all, he wouldn't have sent a dapper thief, a man long known as the Beau Brummell of Forty-eighth Street, to play watchdog to a man as devious as Jack.
"Jimmy wants me to get off at England and come back home with the cash," Willie said. "That was the plan if there was a hitch. He said he talked to you about it."
"I do remember something like that," Jack said. "But how do I know you won't take the cash and hop a boat for the Fiji Islands? I already told you I don't trust card thieves, Willie. I couldn't jeopardize Jimmy's money that way. No. We'll get to Germany and make the deal, and we'll all be a little fatter when we get home. Am I right, Count?"
"The beer is good in Germany," said The Count, a diplomat. "You don't have to needle it."
The facade of the deal was that Jack was to buy booze and wines, and ship them from Bremen to somewhere off Long Island. That's what I was told, by Jack. But Devane was right that Jack was after dope-heroin, which Jack had been buying in Germany since '26 when Rothstein was financing the imports. A federal charge Jack had been dodging successfully since then had come with the bustup of an elaborate smuggling scheme in which Jack was a key figure. The present destination was Frankfurt and, after the deal was wrapped up, a week's vacation in Paris. I remember when we got back to the States that a federal narcotics nabob told the press that Jack's dope smuggling made his booze and beer business look like penny-candy stuff. But people didn't pay attention to such official guff.
Their image of Jack was fixed. He was a bootlegger. Locking him into dope was only a source of confusion.
I have vivid recollections of Jack and the press meeting in the hallways of courthouses, at piers and railroad stations in New York, Philadelphia, Albany, Catskill. I remember the aggression the newsmen always showed, persistent in their need to embarrass him with gross questions, but persistent also in their need to show him affection, to laugh harder than necessary at his bons mots, to draw ambivalent pleasure from his presence-a man they loved to punish, a man they punished with an odd kind of love. When the British newsmen invaded the Belgenland on our arrival in Plymouth, some thirty reporters and cameramen pushed their way into Jack's stateroom to be greeted by the presence himself, clad in black slippers, sky-blue silk pajamas with a white chalk stripe, a navy-blue silk robe, and a Rameses between index and middle fingers. The British behaved no differently from their American brethren, except that Jack's being a foreigner diminished their need to insult him for the sake of the homeland. But their self-righteousness shone through in their questions: Why does America tolerate gangsters? How long have you been a gangster? Was Mr. Charles Northrup murdered at your order? Do you think gangsterism will end when Prohibition ends? How many men have you killed in your life? What about Capone and your Brooklyn arsenal?
Jack treated them like children, laughing at their requests for a laundry list of his victims. "First off, boys, I'm not a gangster, only a bootlegger. There are no gangsters in America. Too easy to get rich other ways. I'm just a civilized citizen. Not a dese, dem, and dose guy. Just a man of the people, trying to make a dollar. Over here getting the cure. Got some stomach trouble and I was advised to go to Vichy and Wiesbaden and take the waters. Brooklyn arsenal? I own nothing in Brooklyn. Capone used to work for me years ago, driving a truck, but I haven't seen him in years. That feud is a lot of nonsense. I get along with people. I'm a legitimate citizen. You newspaper guys scream at the cops to pick me up, and they hold me a few days and find out I'm clean and let me go. I'm not claiming you treat me wrong, but I never see anybody write big headlines when they tell me the charge don't stick. I'm sick of headlines, boys. I came to Europe to get away from it all for a while. Leave that hubbub behind. Make a kind of grand tour on my own, take the waters and cure what ails me. You can understand that, can't you, fellows?"
Sure they could.
Jack's fame at this point was staggering. About four hundred Englishmen had come to the pier by six thirty just to get a glimpse of him. The press of the whole Western world was following our transatlantic voyage, front-paging it with an intensity not quite up to what they did for Byrd, Peary, and other world travelers, but I'll bet with more reader interest. One English paper was so anxious for a story that it invented a phone interview with Jack two days before our boat reached an English pier. "I'm here in London on a secret mission," they quoted him as saying. So the newsmen, installing Jack in the same hierarchy where they placed royalty, heroes, and movie stars, created him anew as they enshrined him. They invented a version of him with each story they wrote, added to his evil luster by imagining crimes for him to commit, embellishing his history, humanizing him, defining him through their own fantasies and projections. This voyage had the effect of taking Jack Diamond away from himself, of making him a product of the collective imagination. Jack had imagined his fame all his life and now it was imagining him. A year hence he would be saying that "publicity helps the punk" to another set of newsmen, aware how pernicious a commodity it could be. But now he was an addict, a grotesquely needy man, parched for glory, famished for public love, dying for the chance at last to be everybody's wicked pet.