I called Warren Van Deusen to see if I could pry Jack loose by greasing local pols, but found him haughtily supporting the state's heavy anti-Jack thrust. "Kidnapping kids now, is he? I hear he's holding up bread truck drivers too. What's next? Disemboweling old ladies?" I wrote off Warren as unreliable, a man given to facile outrage, who didn't understand the process he was enmeshed in.
It has long been my contention that Jack was not only a political pawn through Streeter, but a pawn of the entire decade. Politicians used him, and others like him, to carry off any vileness that served their ends, beginning with the manipulation of strikebreakers as the decade began and ending with the manipulation of stockbrokers at the end of the crash, a lovely, full, capitalistic circle. Thereafter the pols rejected Jack as unworthy, and tried to destroy him.
But it was Jack and a handful of others-Madden, Schultz, Capone, Luciano-who reversed the process, who became manipulators of the pols, who left a legacy of money and guns that would dominate the American city on through the l970's. Jack was too interested in private goals to see the potential that 1931 offered to the bright student of urban life. Yet he was unquestionably an ancestral paradigm for modern urban political gangsters, upon whom his pioneering and his example were obviously not lost.
I hesitate to develop all the analogies I see in this, for I don't want to trivialize Jack's achievement by linking him to lesser latter-day figures such as Richard Nixon, who left significant history in his wake, but no legend; whose corruption, overwhelmingly venal and invariably hypocritical, lacked the admirably white core fantasy that can give evil a mythical dimension. Only boobs and shitheads rooted for Nixon in his troubled time, but heroes and poets followed Jack's tribulations with curiosity, ambivalent benevolence, and a sense of mystery at the meaning of their own response.
Fogarty, sitting at a bar and waiting for a female form to brighten his life, and meanwhile telling a story about a gang-bang, felt alive for the first time in a week, for the first time since they hauled Jack in and he took off up the mountain. A week in a cabin alone, only one day out for groceries and the paper, is enough to grow hair on a wart, shrivel a gonad.
Fogarty found solitude unbearably full of evaporated milk and tuna fish, beans and cheese, stale bread and bad coffee, memories of forced bed-rest, stultifying boredom with one's own thought. And then to run out of candles. The old shack on stilts was down the mountain from Haines Falls, half a mile in an old dirt road, then a quarter of a mile walk with the groceries. He walked down from the cabin to his old car every morning and every night to make sure it was still there and to start it. Then he walked alone in the woods looking at the same trees, same squirrels, same chipmunks and rabbits, same goddamn birds with all that useless song, and came back and slept and ate and thought about women, and read the only book in the cabin, The World Almanac. He related to the ads-no end to life's jokes:
Last Year's Pay Looks Like Small Change to These Men Today; Raised Their Pay 500% When They Discovered Salesmanship… Have YOU Progressed During the Past Three Years?… Ask Your Dealer for Crescent Guns, 12-16-20-410 Gauge… A Challenge Made Me Popular!… This Man Wouldn't Stay Down… It Pays to Read Law… Success-Will You Pay the Price?… Finest of All Cast Bronze Sarcophagi.
Fogarty closed the book, took a walk in the dark. A wild bird call scared him, and he retreated to the cabin to find only half a candle left, not enough to get him through the night. It's time, he said. It was ten o'clock. The Top o' the Mountain House would have some action and he needed a drink, needed people, needed a look at a woman, needed news. His old relic of a Studebaker started all right. Would he ever again see his new Olds, sitting back in the shed behind his house in Catskill? No chance to take it when he left Jack's in such a hurry.
There were four men at the bar, two couples at one table in the back room. He checked them all, knew nobody, but they looked safe. The bartender, a kid named Reilly he'd talked to, but never pressured, was okay. Fogarty ordered applejack on ice. He made it, sold it, liked it. Jack hated it. He had three and was already half an hour into a conversation with Reilly, feeling good again, telling about the night he and eight guys were lined up in a yard on 101st Street for a girl named Maisie who was spread out under a bush, taking on the line.
"I was about fourth and didn't even know who she was. We just heard it was on and got in line. Then when I saw her, I said to myself, 'Holy beazastards,' because I knew Maisie, and her brother Rick is my pal and he's in line right behind me. So I said to him, 'I just got a look, she's a dog, let's beat it,' and I grabbed his arm and pulled, but he was ready, you know, and I couldn't talk him out of it. He had to see her for himself. And when he saw her, he pulled off the guy on her and whipped him, and then beat hell out of Maisie. Next day everybody had trouble looking Rick in the eye. Guys he knew were there all said they were behind him in the line and didn't know who she was either. Maisie was back a couple of nights later, and we all got her without Rick breaking it up. "
Fogarty paused nostalgically. "I got in line twice."
The barman liked the story, bought Fogarty a drink, and said, "You know, was a guy in here last night askin' about your friend Diamond. Guy with a bandage on his eye."
"A bandage? You don't mean an eyepatch?"
"No, a bandage. Adhesive and gauze stuff."
"What'd he want?"
"Dunno. Asks has Jack Diamond been in much and when was the last time."
"You know him?"
"Never seen him before."
"You remember a guy named Murray? Called him The Goose."
"No."
"Nuts."
"You know this guy with the eye?"
"'I don't know. Could be he's a friend of ours. Your phone working?"
"End of the bar."
Fogarty felt the blood rise in his chest, felt needed. Reilly had told him Jack was out on bail, so it was important for him to know Murray was around, if he was. All week in the woods Fogarty had cursed Jack, vowed to quit him, leave the country; that if this thing straightened out, he'd find a new connection; that he couldn't go on working with a man who wasn't playing with a full deck. Northmp first, then Streeter. Crazy. But now that feeling was gone, and he wanted to talk to Jack, warn him, protect his life.
"Don't touch that phone."
Fogarty turned to see old man Brady, the owner, standing alongside him with his hand on a pistol in his belt.
"Get out of here," Brady said.
"I just want to make a call."
"Make it someplace else. You or none of your bunch are welcome here. We're all through kissing your ass."
Brady's beer belly and soiled shirt pushed against the pistol. The spiderweb veins in Brady's cheeks Fogarty would remember when he was dying, for they would look like the crystalline glaze that covered his own eyes in his last days. Brady with the whiskey webs. Old lush. Throwing me out.
"If it wasn't for your father," Brady said, "I'd shoot you now. He was a decent man. I don't know how in the hell he ever got you."
Fogarty would remember that drops of sweat had run off Brady's spiderwebs one day long ago, the day Fogarty stood in front of him at the bar and told him how much of Jack's beer he would handle a week. Told him. Two of Jack's transient gunmen stood behind him to reinforce the message.
"You're lucky I don't call the troopers and turn you in," old Brady said to him now, "but I wouldn't do that to a son of your father's. Remember the favor that decent man did for you from his grave, you dirty whelp. You dirty, dirty whelp. Go on, get out of here."
He moved his fingers around the butt of his pistol, and Fogarty went out into the night to find Jack.
Fogarty stopped the car and loaded his pistol, Eddie Diamond's.32. If he saw Murray, he would shoot first, other things being equal. He wouldn't shoot him in public. Fogarty marveled at his own aggression, but then he knew The Goose, knew Jack's story of how The Goose stalked a man once who went to the same movie house every week. The Goose sat in the lobby until the man arrived, then shoved a gun in his face, and blew half the head off the wrong man. A week later he was in the same lobby when the right man arrived, and he blew off half the correct head. Jack liked to tell Goose stories, how Goose once said of himself: "I'm mean as a mad hairy." What would The Goose have done to Streeter? Old man'd be stretched now, and the kid too. Was Fogarty the difference between life and death on that night?