Viking Blood
by Dennis Lynds
]o-]o Olsen was Norwegian, a descendant of the Vikings. But when you’re one of five kids trying to claw a life out of New York’s west side... it’s pretty hard to live up to your heritage.
It began with the mugging of the cop.
Person or persons unknown jumped the patrolman, dragged him into one of our dark alleys near the river, and cleaned him out. We all knew him: Patrolman Stettin on one of the river-front beats. A young cop, Stettin, not too long on the beat, and eager. The mugger took it alclass="underline" billy club, gun, cuffs, summons book, watch, tie-clip and loose change.
The story went around the back rooms like the news of free drinks at some grand opening. Because it didn’t figure. Who robs a cop?
“What’s a harness bull got worth stealing?” Joe Harris said.
“The pistol,” I said.
Joe thought about that while he poured me a second free shot of Paddy’s good Irish. Packy Wilson, the owner of this saloon, was too busy talking to his other morning customer about Stettin’s mugging to notice the free drinks. Some good comes out of everything.
“There’re a lot easier ways to get a gun,” Joe said.
Joe was right. Getting a gun isn’t exactly like picking fruit off a tree, even here in Chelsea, but there are easier ways than mugging The Man. Kids born between the river and Broadway know that much before they’re weaned.
“Cops make less than you do,” Joe said. “When you get around to working.”
Joe and I live together, we have for a lot of years, and his name is on my life insurance. That doesn’t tempt him, and it says a lot about his character these days when you read about kids who kill their parents to get the insurance money to go to college. Joe thinks I should bring in more money, but I point out to him that he really likes tending bar and I need a reason to work.
“Try hunger,” Joe said. “That’s my reason.”
“It’s not enough,” I said.
And it’s not. You don’t need much money to eat and sleep and get enough to drink to quiet the voices in your head or the pain in an arm that isn’t even there. The missing arm holds me back a little, but we make enough to eat. Real work is for something else. There has to be a reason for real work — a reason that’s part of the work itself. That was a fact Jo-Jo Olsen had to face before it was all over.
That morning I hadn’t even heard of Jo-Jo Olsen, and no one had mentioned the other robbery or the murder. Nothing is that neat in. real life, and the cops don’t tell all they know to the neighborhood grapevine. On the West Side we get maybe 40 burglaries a day alone, and another robbery isn’t news. The mugging of a cop is news.
“A cop gets killed, that I figure,” Packy Wilson said. The other morning customer had left and Packy had to talk to me. “It’s the robbing and not killing I don’t get.”
Packy’s Pub is kind of a fancy name for a Tenth Avenue saloon, but Packy has ideas of drawing the young executive crowd and their Vassar-girl secretaries. He might even do it. The bright kids are always running out of places to “discover” these days. It’s a nervous time we have, everyone on the go-go. It doesn’t matter where they go, just somewhere else.
“I guess it was the gun,” Joe said, decided.
“Even an out-of-town hood oughta have better connections,” Packy Wilson said. “Jumping a cop is the hard way.”
“A junkie, maybe,” Joe said. “A junkie could sell the gun, and the other stuff, for a couple of good fixes.”
“Even you don’t believe that,” I said. “A junkie shakes when he sees a cop in the movies.”
“Maybe just a cop-hater,” Packy Wilson said. “And he took what he could while he was at it.”
It was good for a lot of talk for a while, but after a week or so even I had almost forgotten it. People are strange. I mean, cops are killed somewhere every day, but cops don’t get mugged and robbed very often. Yet a cop-killing rates headlines, and a mugging, which is real news, gets forgotten. People are more interested in death.
That’s the way it is, and. the talk about Stettin faded fast. I guess I would have forgotten it completely in a month. But I didn’t get the month. I got Jo-Jo Olsen and a couple of killings, and I caused a lot of trouble myself.
The kid walked into my office about three weeks later. It was a Monday and Joe’s day off. The Mets were away, it was too hot for fishing, and I was broke anyway. So I was in my office. The kid was looking for his friend Jo-Jo Olsen.
The experts tell you that a man can’t think up an alias that won’t give him away if you know enough about him. I believe that. A man can’t have something inside his head that didn’t have a start somewhere. Sometimes you have to know a lot, and sometimes not very much, but if you know enough about the man you’ll spot the alias. That was one of the things I knew and Jo-Jo Olsen didn’t know, and it almost cost him.
Another thing they tell you is that a good man is a man who faces up to his obligations, accepts his duty. Maybe that’s true, too. Only I’ve seen too many who face up to every obligation except the hard one. The hard one is a man’s obligation, duty, to himself. It’s hard because it always has to hurt someone else, the way it had to for Jo-Jo Olsen in the end.
“You writing a gossip column,” Joe said, “or you telling about Jo-Jo Olsen?”
Joe likes to read over my shoulder when I decide to write about all of it instead of working. He’s my friend, and he’s got the right, and most of the time he was there when it happened so he can help me tell it the way it was.
“They pay by the word,” I said.
Joe thinks I go off on angles, don’t tell it straight. He’s right, and he’s wrong. He wants me to tell the story of Jo-Jo Olsen. But what I’ve been telling is the story, the real story of Jo-Jo Olsen.
Most of the time it’s not the facts, the events, that tell the story, it’s the background, the scenery. It’s all the things floating around a man in the air he breathes, the air he was born to and lives in. Things waiting for a spark to set them off. That’s the real story of Jo-Jo Olsen, not the spark that blew it all up, or the dead faces he never knew.
Joe would say it started on the day Petey Vitanza happened to find me in my office that Monday morning. Or maybe on the day Patrolman Stettin was mugged, and the woman killed. But it really began the day Jo-Jo Olsen was born, or maybe a hell of a long time before that when the Vikings still roamed the seas. Petey Vitanza, sitting in my dingy office with the brick wall for a view out the one window, was just one of the sparks.
“Almost three weeks, Mr. Kelly,” Petey Vitanza said.
“A rabbit act?” I said. “Try the police.”
“Jo-Jo wouldn’t never stay away three weeks on his own,” the Vitanza boy said. “He just bought a new bike. We was fixing it for racing.”
The kid was scared. That was one of the things I mean. He was scared, and should have minded his own business, but Jo-Jo Olsen was his friend, so he came to me. He picked me because I’d known his father, Tony, before Tony Vitanza died building the Lincoln Tunnel so people could get to Atlantic City faster.
Missing persons are jobs for the police. Even when I was working steadier at private snooping, I didn’t like them. Most of the rabbit cases I got were fathers after stray daughters, or wives after stray husbands who had all of a sudden wondered why they were working to their graves for women who weren’t any fun. There could be a message. I mean, what happens between the time the daughter runs and the wife is run on? Makes a man think.
This time was different. Jo-Jo Olsen was a nineteen year old boy. He hadn’t been lured into bad company, he’d been born into bad company. He wasn’t married or even going steady.