Just as I liked Jack, I also liked the old bagman. He was a dandy and a curmudgeon and a wily and wise old Irishman who had read his Yeats and Wilde as well as his Croker and Tweed. I also liked the men who were next to me at the bar. They were men I'd been raised with, men who knew my father and my uncles: tradesmen and sportswriters and other lawyers and politicians and factory hands who liked pinochle and euchre and salesmen who liked to bowl and drink beer, and, of course, of course, Jack.
Most of the Elks who talked frankly with me were confused by his presence. They knew what his minions had done at the Elks Club in Catskill, which bothered them far more than the kidnapping of Streeter or making Charlie Northrup disappear. They didn't really want Jack around. But they were also awed when he walked in, flattered when he bought them a drink, and marked forever when he put his arm on their shoulder and talked baseball with them. Hello, Bill! Hello, Jack! Brotherrrrrrrrrrrrr!
"Counselor," Jack said to me when he moved in alongside me at the bar, "I'm going to buy you a new hat."
"'So you're at that again," I said.
"The heat must've got to it, Marcus. It's dead for sure. Take a look."
I looked at my trusty old Panama, which had aged considerably since I last examined it, I must admit. "Well, it's getting old, Jack, but then so are we all. And I do feel compassion for things that are deteriorating visibly."
"Whataya say, you want to take a ride?"
"Sounds sinister, Jack. My father warned me about taking rides with strange gangsters. "
"Little business trip, and what the hell, it's too goddamn hot to stand here smelling armpits. The air'll do you good. Blow the stink off you. "
"You're right, I could stand a change. Who's driving?"
"Hubert."
"Ah, Hubert. I still find it hard to believe you've got somebody named Hubert in your employ."
"Good kid, Hubert. Does what he's told."
We left the bar and walked out to the top of the club's stone stoop, which faced on State Street. It was middle evening, the streetlights on, but the sun still making long shadows. We looked up toward Capitol Park, where Hubert went for the car, where General Philip Sheridan, another Albany Irishman, sat astride his horse, riding into eternity. There were only the two of us on the stoop, which struck me as unnecessarily foolish, given the recurring rumor of gunmen out to get Jack.
"We make nice targets for your friends here," I said.
"Fuck it. You can't live like a rat in a hole forever."
I could only agree with that, which straightened my back. How little encouragement it takes to place oneself in jeopardy.
"What's this business trip you've got planned?"
"A small delivery to a customer."
"You don't mean you want me to join you on a booze run."
"Relax, would I do that to you? We won't be in the same vehicle with the stuff. And it's only beer. We'll follow the truck, well back. Plenty safe. Up to Troy, back down to Packy Delaney's. It's a favor for Packy and I'm glad to do it. I like The Pack."
"I do myself."
"I'm glad for the ride, too," Jack said. "Jesus, I get bored easy lately. "
"We've got the same affliction."
Hubert pulled up and we headed for Stell's, a busy Troy brewery run by a gang of beer-savvy Dutchmen Jack had been doing business with for years. But the pickup and delivery of the moment would be a departure for Jack: made in a borrowed truck by the man himself, notable status reduction. His excuse was he was doing Packy a favor. "He's in a bind with his Albany supplier, hates the beer he has, but he's gotta take it." It proved to be the other way around, Packy responding to Jack's request for a loan with a pragmatic substitute-a deal. Packy would buy the beer at Jack's price, even though he didn't need it; Jack would show a profit, Packy would avoid making a cash loan that would probably never be repaid, and Packy would have the beer, at least, to show for his investment.
We drove up Broadway and through North Albany, past the streets of my own neighborhood: Emmett, Albany, Mohawk, Genesee, Erie, then the park in front of Sacred Heart Church on Walter and North Second Streets, a view which provided me with a pang of recognition and a sliver of insight which made this trip worth recording. I remembered how my father looked, sitting on a park bench in the years just before his death, teeth too prominent, like a skull's mindless grin, his brain almost as white as his hair, watching the trolleys go to Troy and back. I tried to imagine what that man, who never stole a nickel in his life, would make of his son being on Jack's payroll, a speculation which, I know, reveals more of me than of the old man.
My father was not a religious man in his youth and middle years. He routinely did his Easter duty, kept the Commandments, but often slept through the Sunday slate of masses. Yet he ended his days at daily mass, even serving for the priest when the altar boy of the day overslept. I've long tried to persuade myself that his final conversion to piety was more than simplistic fear of the next, for my father was complex, a teacher, a Latin scholar who named me for his favorite Stoic. Remembering him, then, at that moment by the park when I was also conscious of how Jack was regularly telling his beads, and when l was questioning my own irrational reading of Aquinas long after I'd lost my faith, I knew all three of us were hounded by religious confusion: Jack out of Saint Anne's, both my father and I out of Sacred Heart, products all of the ecclesiastical Irish sweat glands, obeisant before the void, trying to discover something.
And as we passed Sacred Heart, I looked at Jack and said to him, "My old man used to sit in that park and watch the world go by when he got old."
Jack craned his neck for a look, smiling at the thought. His own yellowing skin, and his teeth with too much prominence, gave me back the face of my father. And thought then that I knew what they were both looking for. I thought: They have misplaced tomorrow and are looking for it. And the search is ruining today.
We stopped at a garage on Fourth Street in Troy to pick up the truck Jack was borrowing from a fellow named Curley, who once drove for him. Curley had gone off on his own and now had a fleet of Macks and Reos which did heavy duty on the highways on behalf of public thirst. Hubert got the keys for our truck and drove it from a back lot to the gas pump in front of the garage, where a kid attendant in overalls gassed us up with Socony.
"You want any cupcakes tonight, Legs?" the kid asked. "Why not?" Jack said and gave him a ten-dollar bill. When the tank was full, the kid ran across the street to an old lady's grocery and came back with three cupcakes in cellophane and an opened bottle of sarsaparilla. Jack ate a cake and sucked at the soda for the kid, who wanted to be near Jack, do things for him.
"You think you can beat that federal rap on an appeal, Legs?"
"A sure thing, kid. Don't bet against me."
The kid-with his freckles, his large Irish teeth, and a cowlick his barber didn't understand-laughed and said, "Bet against you? Never do that."
"Listen, kid," Jack said, and I can hear Cagney telling Billy Halop almost the same thing years later, "don't get the wrong idea about me. I'm not going to live much longer. I got more metal in me than I got bones. Stay in school. The rackets are a bum life. There ain't no heroes in the rackets."
"I heard you were on the spot," the kid said. "That true?"
Jack gave him a happy grin. "I been on the spot all my life."
"I heard a rumor there's guys around want to get you."
"The word's even out to the kids," Jack said to me.
"I wouldn't tell 'em nothing if they come here," the kid said.
"Attaboy," Jack said.
"You know I didn't say nothin' about the panel truck."
"I know that."