“What you want?” he replied.
“Nitti’s men are after me. The cops are after me. I’m trying to save my client, Chico Marx, from getting cut down for a debt he doesn’t owe, and Nitti won’t listen.”
The voice told me to keep talking, so I did.
“I need to get Marx and a guy named Gino Servi together to prove Marx isn’t the guy who owes him. Nitti’s going to have to stop trying to kill me and Marx long enough to listen.”
“I think Chico Marx is funny,” said the voice soberly.
I put my hand over the receiver and told Chico the guy at the other end thought he was funny. He shrugged his shoulders.
“I like the one doesn’t talk, too,” he said. “The other one talks too fast.”
“Nitti doesn’t think Chico’s funny,” I said.
“He has a right,” said the voice reasonably. “I’ll see what I can do about Nitti. I can’t do anything about the cops. There was a time a few years back when I could. Understand?”
I said I did.
“I give you no promise,” said the raspy voice. “Nitti might say no. And I’m going to check you out with Al. If he didn’t give you the O.K., I’ll be looking for you. You’re Peters, right?”
“Right. And you’re Capone, right?”
“Where do we reach you?” he said, avoiding an answer.
I suggested that I call back, but he wasn’t having any.
“Page a Mr. Pevsner in the lobby of the Drake,” I said. “I’ll have someone answer it and get the message to me.”
“Right,” he said and hung up.
“That was very nice,” said Groucho. “Very tricky. Who’s going to pick up the message?”
“I will,” I said. “There’s no problem.”
I proved there was no problem by looking at my watch and leaning back in my chair with a false yawn. There was a very good chance that Al Capone wouldn’t remember who the hell I was, and the only other guy who could confirm the Miami meeting was Bistolfi, who had been permanently punctuated at the LaSalle. The chances were good to even that Capone or Nitti’s men would soon be in that lobby ready to break the arm of whoever picked up their message, and would keep breaking it into smaller pieces till they were led to me. I figured I’d save them the trouble and one of the Marxes a broken arm. The odds were bad if you were betting your life, but I had the feeling Chico, with his lousy gambling instinct, would have thought they were reasonable.
“Well,” sighed Groucho. “I’m going upstairs to sit in on a regional convention here-the American Psychiatrist’s Association.”
“You got the right,” said Chico, examining his cards and rubbing his chin pensively. “You played a horse doctor.”
Groucho stood up, put on his jacket, combed back his hair, and tightened his mouth into a serious and painted grimace. He looked like a bored doctor.
“It’s about time someone spoke up about Freud and his disciples,” he said, moving to the door. His brothers ignored him, and Groucho went on. “I’m sick of that nonsense. ‘Parents are responsible for all their children who turn out wrong. They hated their mother, father, or both. Show people had especially unhappy childhoods and made up for it by going into acting.’”
“I know,” said Chico, still not looking up, but knowing what was coming. “You loved our mother and father.”
“Our parents were wonderful people,” Groucho went on. Harpo nodded in agreement and played a card, which Chico snapped up with a ha-ha.
“Our parents were terrific,” said Groucho. “We had great times. We didn’t go into show business to escape our home. We went into show business because my mother’s brother was Al Shean, who was pulling down $250 a week. We wanted a piece of that.”
“Analysis may have done some good for a handful of people,” Groucho said, “but if I know, it left a lot of people with a hell of a lot less money. Well, maybe Doctor Hackenbush can get in a few words of scorn on the twelfth floor. Take care of yourself, Peters.”
He exited and I went to the door.
“Toby,” said Chico, without looking up, “you don’t have to get yourself killed for me. Grouch just left the room because he was embarrassed to tell you that he and Harpo agreed to pay the $120,000 even if I don’t owe it.”
Harpo didn’t look up from his cards.
“You want them to pay?” I said.
“Hell no,” he said with a smile.
I left the room, closing the door behind me, and took the elevator down to wait for a message from the man with the raspy voice I assumed was Ralph Capone.
The lobby was crowded with men in dark suits and white name tags, pipes, and a few beards. I took a seat facing the door after buying a Life magazine for a dime. I flipped through it.
Some New Zealand soldiers in Libya were on the cover. There were stories about Nazis killing Poles and the British effort to keep smiling through the bombs. There were two pages of pictures of a yogi doing contortions, and a piece on a newsy named Angie S. Rossitto, a thirty-five inch high midget who was running for Mayor of Los Angeles. “As short as I am,” Life quoted him, “I won’t sell the people short.”
Somewhere around eleven in the morning, about thirty minutes after I had sunk into Life and the leather black chair, three familiar forms came through the front entrance. Costello’s arm was still in a sling. Chaney was wearing a scarf. Maybe he had caught my cold, since I was pretty well rid of it. The juke box man came right after them. Life magazine covered my face, and I was nose-to-nose with a picture of Ingrid Bergman, but they knew I was around or someone was who could lead them to me. The juke box stayed at the door while the other two moved forward with hands in pockets. It looked like Ralph Capone had turned me over to Nitti, but I didn’t have time to be bitter. I got up slowly as two men passed by, talking close together and seriously. One of the men was fat. I moved behind him as they headed for the elevator.
Through the crowd, the two familiar figures bubbled in and out of sight, searching faces. I ducked, pretending to listen to the conversation of the two talkers. One guy was saying something about subconscious wishes.
If the elevator had come five seconds earlier, I would have made it clean-but you can check off the turning points of your whole life and punch them into a total of a few minutes of chance and choices.
Chaney spotted me as the elevator doors were closing. I didn’t think he’d take a shot at me in a crowded lobby, but I wasn’t sure. I expected him to give out a yell or make a rush for me. Instead, his face twisted into a sour smile and he slowly moved forward.
The elevator filled and the doors closed before Chaney made it to a close-up. I thought fast: there were two or three of them coming for me. If they knew what they were doing, one would stay in the lobby, another would go up the stairs, and the third would wait for the elevator and ask the operator if he remembered which floor I had gotten off. I had to figure they’d do it right. Nitti’s boys weren’t smart, but they had probably done things like this before.
One of the guys in front of me was smoking a cigar. He had a short grey beard and looked like a picture I had seen once of Sigmund Freud. I rode with Freud and his bunch up to twelve and followed them into a maroon-carpeted lobby. A desk with a white tablecloth and a sign over it reading “Registration” stood ten feet from the elevator. A smiling women sat behind the desk, flanked by two unsmiling women. All three had flowers pinned over their right breasts. They looked like a plump, aging version of the Andrew Sisters getting ready to sing “You’re a Lucky Fellow, Mr. Smith” to a roomful of recruits.
The woman in the middle looked at me hopefully and stood up. Her dress was a purple thing with big white flower patterns all over it. She nodded at me and I walked over, wondering if I should go to the fire escape. If they had the fire escape covered, that would be the worst way for me to go because there wouldn’t be any witnesses out there. I considered calling the cops and hiding till they arrived, but that would be the end of protecting Chico. He’d have no choice but to accept his brother’s offer. He was stubborn enough not to take that choice.