I smiled at Alice to imply I was her friend, and Jack's, too. And I was then, yes I was. I was intuitively in sympathy with this man and woman who had just introduced me to the rattling, stammering splatter of violent death. Gee, ain't it swell?
We walked back to the porch where Fogarty was reading Krazy Kat.
"I heard the shooting," Fogarty said, "who won?"
"Marcus won," Alice said.
"I wiped out Mr. Schultz's mouth, if that's a win."
"Just what he deserves. The prick killed a kid cousin of mine last week in Jersey."
And so I had moral support for my little moral collapse-which sent a thrill through me, made me comfortable again on this glorious Sunday in the mountains.
We got into the car and left the Biondo place, Alice and I in the back seat, Jack up front with Fogarty. Alice previewed our Sunday dinner for me: roast beef and baked potatoes, and did I like my beef rare the way Jack liked it, and asparagus from their own garden, which Tamu, their Japanese gardener, had raised, and apple pie by their colored maid, Cordelia.
Alice bulged out of her pink summer cotton in various places, and my feeling was that she was ready instantly to let it all flop out whenever Jack gave the signal. All love, all ampleness. all ripeness, would fall upon the bed, or the ground, or on him, and be his for the romping. Appleness, leaves, blue sky, white sheets, erect, red nipples, full buttocks, superb moistness at the intersection, warm wet lips, hair flying, craziness of joy, pleasure, wonder, mountains climbable with a stride after such sex. I like her.
Oxie was asleep on the enclosed porch when we arrived, more formally known as Mendel (The Ox) Feinstein, one of the permanent cadre. Oxie was a bull-necked weightlifter with no back teeth, who'd done a four-year stretch for armed robbery of a shoe store. The judge specified he do the full four because, when he held up the lady shoe clerk, he also took the shoes she was wearing. Justice puts its foot down on Oxie.
He got up immediately when the key turned in the front door. We all watched as Alice stopped to coo at two canaries in a silver cage on the porch. When she went on to the kitchen, Fogarty sat down on the sofa with Oxie, who made a surreptitious gesture to Jack.
"Marion called about a half hour ago," he whispered. "Here'?"
Oxie nodded and Jack made facial note of a transgression by Marion.
"She wants you to see her this afternoon. Important, she said."
"Goddamn it," Jack said, and he went into the living room and up the stairs two at a time, leaving me on the porch with the boys. Fogarty solved my curiosity, whispering: "Marion's his friend. Those two canaries there-he calls one Alice, one Marion." Oxie thought that was the funniest thing he'd heard all week, and while he and Fogarty enjoyed the secret, I went into the living room, which was furnished to Alice's taste: overstuffed mohair chairs and sofa; walnut coffee table; matching end tables and table lamps, their shades wrapped in cellophane; double-thick Persian rug, probably worth a fortune if Jack hadn't lifted it. My guess was he'd bought it hot; for while he loved the splendid things of life, he had no inclination to pay for them. He did let Alice pick out the furniture, for the hot items he kept bringing home clashed with her plans, such as they were. She'd lined the walls with framed calendar art and holy pictures-a sepia print of the Madonna returning from Calvary and an incendiary, bleeding sacred heart with a cross blooming atop the bloody fire. One wall was hung with a magnificent blue silk tapestry. a souvenir from Jack's days as a silk thief. Three items caught my eye on a small bookshelf otherwise full of Zane Grey and James Oliver Curwood items: a copy of Rabelais, an encyclopedia of Freemasonry, and the Douay Bible sandwiched between them.
When he came down. I asked about the books. The Freemasonry? Yeah, he was a Mason. "Good for business," he said. "Every place you go in this country, the Protestant sons of bitches got the money locked up."
And Rabelais? Jack picked up the book, fondled it. "A lawyer gave it to me when I had my accident in l927." (He meant when he was shot three times by the Lepke mob when they ambushed and killed Little Augie Orgen.) "Terrific book. You ever read it? Some screwball that Rab-a-lee."
I said I knew the book but avoided mentioning the coincidence of Rabelais being here and also in the K. of C. library. where I made my decision to come here, and in the additional fact that a lawyer had given the book to Jack. I would let it all settle, let the headiness go out of it. Otherwise, it would sound like some kind of weird, fawning lie.
Alice heard us talking and came into the living room in her apron. "Those damn Masons," she said. "I can't get him away from that nonsense."' To rile her, Jack kept a picture of an all-seeing eye inside a triangle, a weird God-figure in the Masonic symbology, on the wall in the upstairs bathroom. Alice raised this issue, obviously a recurring one.
"It sees you, Alice," Jack told her, "even when you pee."
'"My God doesn't watch me when I pee," Alice said. "My God is a gentleman. "
"As I get it," Jack said, "your God is two gentlemen and a bird."
He opened the Rabelais to a page and began reading, walking to the kitchen doorway to serenade Alice with the flow. He read of Gargantua's arrival in Paris, his swiping of the Notre Dame Cathedral bells for his giant horse, and then his perching on the cathedral roof to rest while mobs of tiny Parisians stared up at him. And so he decided to give them wine.
" 'He undid his magnificent codpiece' "-Jack read with mock robustness; his voice was not robust but of a moderately high pitch, excitable, capable of tremolos-"and bringing out his john-thomas, pissed on them so fiercely that he drowned two hundred and sixty thousand, four hundred and eighteen persons, not counting the women and small children." "
"My God, John," Alice said, "do you have to read that?"
"Piss on 'em," Jack said. "I always felt that way." And holding the book and talking again to me, he said, "You know what my full name is? John Thomas Diamond." And he laughed even harder.
Jack threw the book on the sofa and went quickly out to the porch, then to the car, and came back with a bottle of champagne in each hand. He put both bottles on the coffee table, got four glasses from the china closet.
"Alice, Speed, you want champagne?" They both said no and he didn't ask Oxie. Why waste champagne on a fellow who'd rather drink feet juice? He poured our champagne, the real goods.
"Here's to a fruitful legal relationship," Jack said, rather elegantly, I patronizingly thought. I sipped and he gulped and poured himself another. That disappeared and another followed that, two and a half glasses in one minute.
"Thirsty," he explained, "and that's prime stuff." But he was getting outside his skin. He finished what was in his glass and then stared at me while I drank and told him my experiences with bad champagne. He interrupted me, perfectly, at a pause, with obvious intentions of letting me continue, and said: "I don't want to interrupt your story, but how about a walk? It's a great day and I want to show you a piece of land."
He led the way out the back door and along a stream that ran parallel to the highway, and at a narrow point we leaped across the stream and into the woods, all soft with pine needles, quiet and cool, a young forest with the old granddaddy trees felled long ago by loggers, and the new trees-pines, white birches, maples, ash-tall but small of girth, reaching up for sunlight. A cat named Pistol followed at Jack's heel like an obedience-trained dog. He was an outdoor cat and had picked us up as we left the back steps, where he'd been sitting, gnawing gently on a squirrel that wasn't quite dead and that still had the good sense to run away whenever Pistol relaxed his teeth. But that old squirrel never got far from the next pounce.