"Max ... They say you shoved a red-hot poker in a man's eyes."
"I did it," said Max.
"My God!"
"That man," said Max, "was the last of the gang that tortured and murdered my father and mother. One of 'em carried a tabacca pouch made from my mother's tit, cut off her whilst she was still alive. Tanned and sewed up into a tabacca pouch."
"My God!"
"None of 'em died easy," said Max. "I shot the balls off one. I shoved a red-hot poker into the eyes of the last of 'em. I wisht they was all alive so I could kill 'em all again."
"What are you gonna do now, Max?"
"'Nough of this shit," said Max. "Got some money in a ranch. Gonna change m' name, shave off m' beard, and go to livin' honest. What you gonna do, Maurie?"
4
1
MAURIE DIDN'T SEE MAX AGAIN FOR MANY YEARS, until after Max had changed his name.
They parted with a handshake, at a railroad station in Missouri: two young men, each twenty-six years old. Max gave him a hundred dollars, from the proceeds of a year-old bank robbery, and rode off on a horse. Maurie boarded a train for Kansas City and began to work his way east and north.
For a while he was a grifter. It was all he knew how to do. In Missouri and Kansas, then across the river into Illinois and Indiana. For five years he struggled as a flimflam man, working every game he could devise. He sold fake insurance policies again — this time smart enough to scram while the scramming was good. He played cards in Kansas City, St. Louis, and Chicago. The players there weren't as dumb as the ones in Texas, and the profits were slim.
He had catalogs and order blanks printed and sold everything from railroad watches to basketballs, asking as little as ten percent in advance as "earnest money" or an "order-handling charge." He sold wholesale to stores and retail door-to-door, and when he had collected a few hundred dollars in cash he would slip away from his boardinghouse and catch a train.
His best flimflam was with automobiles. He would buy a new Chevrolet or Ford for four hundred dollars, drive it fifty or sixty miles to another country town, let it be known that he was a factory representative who could discount automobiles as much as forty percent, and sell it to some happy buyer for two hundred fifty dollars. Then he'd say he could sell a few more. Of course, he would have to collect down payments — after all, he had to buy the cars at the factory. Having collected maybe five hundred dollars, he would return to the dealer fifty or sixty miles away and buy another car. When he delivered that one to a happy buyer, his bona fides was established, and more down payments would come in. It was of course a pyramid scheme. He could continue collecting money, buying and delivering cars, and collecting more down payments until he judged the time had come to take his profits and scram.
The scheme was ruined in 1913, when an article warning of the scheme was syndicated and appeared in scores of small-town newspapers. Maurie decided the time had come to go home to Manhattan.
It was a strange experience. He had left home at sixteen and now came home fifteen years older and fifty years wiser, with scars on his back and purple circles around his ankles, marks of the Plaquemine prison, that he would carry the rest of his life. Odd. The first time he undressed with a girl and she saw them — "Maurie! You got these? You went down sout'! You shoulda never gone down sout'! Wha'd they do to you? You don't let your mother see, no?" And then she would give him the best sex she knew how, because he was the adventuresome man who had gone down south.
Word got around. Maurie Cohen was back from down south. Prob'ly carrying a fortune he'd taken off the rednecks. No? Well, the goyim could be bastards. Anyway, he was back, in a good suit, a sharp guy, a wise guy. Guys could use a man like Maurie.
A little fellow like him could not work as a legbreaker. But he was sharp. He had a head for figures. He was honest. Well ... you could trust him. He was given a job as a numbers runner, then as a numbers book. He made money. He had everything a man could want: nice clothes, a comfortable apartment, a girl when he wanted her ... Some good years. Then He had suffered nightmares. At last a dream. The Christians, in their smarts and beauty, imposed Prohibition on a nation that was going to drink, one way or another. A whole new business! Numbers was suddenly small potatoes. And Maurice Cohen was smart enough to see it.
In a small way at first. Then bigger and smarter. Smuggling the stuff in from ships or across the Canadian border was a fool's game. Make it here! You could make gin easy, and beer easier. It could be done by anybody. Of course, where there was real money there would always be thieves, guys that skimmed money off the take. To make money go where it was supposed to, you needed a trusty guy who could keep books — and cook them, too, when you wanted him to.
That was for Maurie. He had a head for figures. He started in New York. But the Eye-tyes began to take over. Sicilians. Maurie looked around. He'd been around and knew the country. Guy like him would be valued anywhere. In 1922 Maurie went to Detroit to talk to a guy named Firetop — so known for his red hair. They made a deal, and Maurice Cohen became a member of the Purple Gang.
Prestige. Everybody had heard of the Purple Gang. In Detroit and Toledo, the guy who kept books for the Purple Gang was somebody. He was forty years old, and suddenly everybody wanted to know him. Guys wanted to know him. Broads wanted to know him.
He was the guy who toted the revenues and payouts. To pay him, they gave him a piece of a numbers book. The guy who worked it cheated. When Maurie reported that to Firetop, the guy disappeared into Lake St. Clair.
Maurie counted the shipments and the bucks. He never knew, or professed not to know, what happened to guys who shorted. He knew he didn't see them again. He was never tempted to count wrong. His reputation was that he never shorted. He cooked the books, sure, but he cooked them to rook other guys, never the Purple Gang.
Trouble was, it was small-time. He wore handsome suits. He wore spats over his shiny patent-leather shoes. His gray fedoras were of beaver felt. Wearing no more celluloid collars, he now wore silk collars and paid twenty-five cents apiece for them. He was shaved by a barber every morning. He had his hair trimmed twice a week. He lived in a comfortable apartment and listened to a six-tube console radio that worked on socket power and required no batteries. He smoked dime cigars and drank real Scotch smuggled over from Canada. He drove a 1926 Chevrolet.
Small-time. He could not afford to buy a house in the suburbs. He could not afford a new Cadillac or Packard, the kind other guys drove. He didn't take vacations in Florida or sail to Europe. He bought girls when he wanted them but didn't feel he could afford to keep one, not a classy one anyway.
The worst thing was, he took orders, and he knew where he'd stand if he made any kind of a mistake — dead at worst, on the street at least. They liked him. Sure. He was a good boy. An errand boy.
Oh, they'd sell him a piece of something, sure. But only for cash. When you bought a piece of the action, there was no such thing as time payments.
In 1927 they made him manager of a carpet joint on the road between Detroit and Toledo and just across the Ohio line — a roadhouse called The Clock, where a customer could buy a drink, gamble, and take a girl upstairs. It was called a carpet joint because it was fancy enough to have carpet on the floor. It attracted a high-class clientele, including Harry Daugherty and Will Hays, the late President Harding's attorney general and postmaster general. They came to The Clock because they were assured that Maurie Cohen, the manager, was an absolutely trustworthy guy. Hays was now the czar of the movies, responsible for the nation's morals. His sexual predilections were so bizarre that Maurie could never persuade a girl to see him twice, no matter what he paid.