"I heard one of the guys looking for you is called Goose."
"Yeah'? What else do you hear?"
"That they were asking questions up in Foley's last week."
"Nothing since then?"
"Nothing."
"I heard about that," Jack said. "It's all over with. The Goose flew south."
"It's okay then," the kid said. "Good news."
"Give your old lady some good news, kid. Don't mess in the rackets."
"Okay, Legs."
Jack tipped him five and got behind the wheel of his Lincoln, which he was buying on time. Within a month he'd be too broke to keep it. I got in and we followed Hubert to the brewery, where Jack paid for the beer and saw it loaded. Then we headed for Packy's in downtown Albany. We took a back road from Troy through North Greenbush and into Rensselaer, a town like Albany, where Jack was safe passing through with wet goods, across the Dunn Bridge and up to Packy's on Green Street.
"What was that panel truck the kid mentioned?" I asked when we were rolling again.
"Heavy load of booze. We parked it there one night we were being chased. Oxie sat in it all night with a machine gun."
"That was nice advice you gave the kid. But I can't believe you don't want disciples in your own image, like the rest of us."
"Kid's too soft," Jack said. "If he was tougher, I'd tell him, 'Go ahead kid, see how tough you really are,' line him up behind all the other tough guys waiting to die young, let him take his chances. Sure I'd tell him about the easy money, easy pussy, living high. But I like that kid. "
"You liked Fogarty too. Why'd you take him in?"
"He reminded me of Eddie."
"But you let him sink."
"Did I? You had more say over that than me."
"I told you I get paid for what I do. And it was you who said the hell with him, that he was never any good."
"He wasn't. You saw he turned stool pigeon. He was a weak sister. What'd he expect me to do, mother him? Rothstein not only dumped me, he tried to kill me. But I never blew the whistle on him. Never trust a pussy freak. Fogarty's cock ran ahead of him like a headlight. Made a sucker of a good guy. Why not let him sink? I'd let anybody sink except Eddie. And Alice and Marion. I'd even let you sink, Marcus."
"I know. And I'd do the same for you, Jack. But the difference is that I'm just a businessman and you're a prick in your heart."
"Pricks are the only ones got it made in this world."
"That's a chump's line."
"Maybe. I look like a chump these days."
"Chumps never know who their real friends are. "
"Friends," said Jack. "I got no friends. You and me, we're just knockin' around, passing the time. You're all right, Marcus, and I always said so, but I only had one friend my whole goddamn life. My brother Eddie. Came down from Saranac when he was dying to help me during the Hotsy thing. Christ, we set up a meeting in the subway, Twenty-eighth Street, and he was all dressed up, coconut straw, brown palm beach, and a new white silk shirt with a lemon tie, looked like a million except you could've got two other guys inside the suit with him. He wanted to make collections for me, wanted to run the operation while I was hiding out. Said he'd do anything and the poor bastard could hardly breathe. We talked an hour, and when we got up to go, I was holding him and he started giving me the Holy Roller malarkey. He got religion up in Saranac and they were calling him The Saint. Used to go around visiting in his wheelchair, seeing guys who couldn't move a muscle, who were afraid to fucking breathe. Really selling me hard, and so I said to him, forget that guff, Ed, it's not my style. You'll come around, he said, and I say in a pig's whistle, and he keeps at it, so I finally say will you for crissake shut up about it? And we're up in the street by then, so I hailed a taxi to get him back to the Commodore where he had a room. And when I let go of his arm, he fell down and Christ Jesus, he let out a cough I thought his whole insides was liquid. Death rattle is what it was. Fantastic horrible goddamn gurgle. He only lasted a couple of months more. Shortened his life coming down to help me out. Couldn't do a goddamn thing for anybody, but he tried, the son of a bitch tried with all he fucking had. That's what's friends, Marcus. That's what I call friends."
Jack, the gush, was crying.
Old Joe Delaney opened The Parody Club in 1894 to appease a capricious thirst that took hold of him at odd hours, often after the city's saloons had closed. He ran it until 1919 and dated his retirement to the day a hod carrier swooned at the bar and crumpled like a corpse. Delaney's son Packy (né Patrick), apprenticing as a bartender after a stint with the AEF, looked the hoddy over, kicked his ass, and yelled in his ear, "Get up and go home, you stewbum."
"A born saloonkeeper," the elder Delaney rejoiced, yielding swiftly then to the pull of retirement in his favorite chair, where he died five years later with a bent elbow and foam on his handlebars.
Music greeted us when we walked through the old swinging doors, original doors that led to the Delaney time capsule. We walked under a four-globed chandelier and a four-bladed ceiling fan, past photos on the walls of old railroad men, old politicians, old bare-knuckle fighters, dead Maud Gonne's likeness sketched on a handbill announcing her appearance at Hibernian Hall to raise funds for a free Ireland, defunct Hibernian Society marching down State Street on a sunny Saint Patrick's Day in '95, disbanded private fire companies standing at attention in front of their pumpers, K. of C. beer drinkers, long in their graves, tapping a keg at a McKown's Grove clambake. I went back to Packy's now and again until the place burned down in 1942, when fire dumped all that old history of faces into the powdery ashpit. Nothing ever changed there, till then.
Flossie was making the music when we walked in, the piano being her second talented instrument of pleasure. Flossie was a saucy blond cupcake then, not working directly out of Packy's, where sins of the flesh were traditionally prohibited on premises. But she was advertising from the piano bench and specializing in private sessions to augment her income after her musical workday. Ah, Floss. How well I remember your fingers, so educated to the music of joy.
She was jangling away at the keyboard while Packy and another man delivered up some two-part harmony, not half-bad, of "Arrah-Go-On, I'm Gonna Go Back to Oregon," a song from the war years.
"Now this is something like it," Jack said, and he walked ahead of me past the crowded bar toward an empty back table that gave a view of the door. Hubert, having deposited the truck for unloading inside Packy's garage, followed us; but Jack told him, "Watch the door and the street." And without a word Hubert went to the end of the bar and stood there alone while Packy pined for Oregon, where they'd call him Uncle Pat, not Uncle John. He gave Jack a smile on that line and an extended left arm that welcomed and introduced the hero to the customers who hadn't yet recognized him; Jack waved to half a dozen men at the bar looking our way.
"You know those fellows?" he asked me.
"I guess I've seen one or two around town."
"All thieves or hustlers. This is a good place to buy yourself a new suit or a new radio cheap."
Jack bought the drinks himself at the bar, then settled into a chair and gave full attention to Flossie's piano and Packy's baritone. Packy came to the table when his harmony ran out.
"Fellow singing with me says he knows you, Jack."
"I don't place him. "
"Retired railroad cop and not a bad fellow for a cop. Nice tenor too, and he carries a tune. Hey, Milligan."
The tenor came over and looked at us through cataract lenses. His hair was pure white and standing tall, and his magnified eyes and cryptic smile gave him the look of a man in disguise.
"You don't remember me," he said to Jack.
"Give me a clue."
"Silk. New Jersey. l924."
"Ah, right. I make you now. You pinched me."
"You've got it. You were stealing the railroad blind, you and your brother."