"I'd tell you you ain't got very fucking long to live."
"I'm going back there, Jimmy, and this time I'll get in. Don't you like instant seven-to-one on your money?"
"I like my money."
"We made a deal. I want to keep my part of the bargain is all."
"No deal. Tony Amapola knows how you deal. Charlie Northrup knows how you deal."
"I knew you'd think of me when Tony got it. But I had nothing to do with that. I like Tony. Always did. As for Charlie I do know what happened. It was a free-lance job. Charlie made enemies up in the country. But Charlie and I were as close as you and Tony. We were like brothers."
"Charlie had a different story. He said you were a fuckhead."
"You don't believe me, ask any of these boys who it was gave it to Charlie. "
Jimmy looked around, settled on Fats McCarthy. Fats nodded at him.
"Murray The Goose," Fats said. "He give it to Charlie."
"You heard yet what happened to Murray The Goose?" Jack asked Jimmy.
"No."
"Somebody just dealt him out, up in the Pup Club.
Walked in and boom-boom-boom. Cooked The Goose. Somebody got even for Charlie is how I read it. Now how do you like your friends?"
"It's a fact," The Count said. "I happened to be in the club at the time."
"There's a coincidence for you," Jack said.
"Puttin' it on The Goose don't mean he was even in the same state. "
"Ask around. Don't tell me you didn't hear the rumors."
"I hear nothin'."
"You oughta listen a little instead of talking so much about money. There's more to life than money, Jimmy."
"Fuck life. I been listenin' too long. I been listenin' to your bullshit here five minutes, and I don't see no money onna fuckin' table. I tell you what—you got a telephone. I make a call to an old frienda yours. Charlie Lucky."
"Always glad to say hello to Charlie."
"He be glad to say hello to you too because half the two hundred come outa his pocket. Whataya think of that, you Irish fuck?"
"I'll tell you what, you guinea fuck, call Charlie. He tells me it's half his I'll have it for him in the morning."
Jimmy moved his elbow at one of his young gunmen: early twentyish, pencil-line mustache. The gunman dialed, said something in Italian, waited, handed the phone to Jimmy.
"That you, Charlie?" Jimmy said. "I'm with our friend. He wants to know were you my silent partner. Okay. Sure." He handed Jack the phone.
"Charlie, how you doin'? You staying thin? Right, Charlie, that's the only way. You were. You did. So. Yeah. Now I get it. You're not saying this just for Jimmy. You wouldn't con me after all these years. Right. I understand. Let's have a drink one of these days, Charlie. Any time. Beautiful."
Jack hung up and turned to Jimmy. "He said he loaned you twenty grand at fourteen percent."
"He don't say that."
"I just talked to the man. Did you hear me talk to him? What am I, a guy who makes up stories you see with your own eyes?"
"He's in for half, no interest"
"I tell you what, Jimmy. I'll have twenty available in the morning. I'll call you and tell you where to pick it up and you can pay Charlie back. Meantime we still got a deal with what's left."
"Charlie, give me a hundred, you fuckheaded fuck!" Jimmy screamed and stood up, and everybody's pistol came out at the same time. Jack didn't touch his. All the pistols were pointed at all the other pistols. Anybody moved it was ten-way suicide.
"We don't seem to be getting anyplace," Jack said. He lit a Rameses and sat down and crossed his legs. "Why don't you go have a drink and think about life, Jimmy? Think about how rich you'll be when I come back with all that beautiful white stuff. A million four. Is that hard to take or is that hard to take?"
"I'm talkin' to a dead man," Jimmy said.
"Dead men pay no debts, Jimmy."
"Keep lookin' for me," Jimmy said.
"Watch yourself crossing the street," Jack said.
These were atrocious melodramatics, and I would not give them the time of day, despite my trust in Fogarty, except that when Jimmy and his friends left the Monticello and walked down West Sixty-fourth Street, a car came in their direction at low speed and two shotgun blasts from a back window blew apart two of Jimmy's shooters. Jimmy and the other two escaped with only a certain loss of dignity.
Count Duschene later remembered Jack's reaction when he heard the news: "Mustache cocksuckers. Fast as you knock 'em off they bring in another boatload." The rest of the news came out in the morning paper: Murray, with six bullets in him, was not yet dead.
* * *
Kiki said that the positively worst time of her life was when she was hiding at Madge's apartment and the knock came on the door and Madge turned to her and said, "Get in the bedroom and hide." So she went first behind Madge's big Morris chair, but then she said to herself, Gee, they'd look here right away, and so she started to roll under Madge's canopy bed with the beaded curtain, but then she said to herself, 'Won't they look under here, too'? And so she stood in the closet behind Madge's summer and winter dresses and coats until she realized that anybody opening the door would look right through the hangers into her great big beautiful brown eyes, and so she took Madge's dyed muskrat everybody thought was mink off the wooden hanger and covered herself with it and rolled into the smallest ball she could make out of herself and faced the wall with her rounded back to the door so they would think the coat had fallen off the hanger on top of a pile of shoes and little boxes and galoshes. And then they'd go away. Yes. Go away. Let me alone.
Right then, Kiki would have said if anyone had asked her, she ordinarily didn't like to be alone. But now it was quite necessary, for she had to figure out what she was going to do with her life. She never had to hide in a closet before, ever. Jack's fault. Her fault too for staying with him, waiting for him. She had decided to leave him for good, truly leave this time and not just go back into show business or take a train home to Boston with her mad money. No. This was the end. Nothing on earth could make her stay with Jack Diamond for another day because he truly did kill people.
She had read all the news stories when he was in Europe, but she didn't read past the parts where they began to say things about him. She'd just throw the papers in the bottom of her closet for Jack because she knew how he loved to save clippings about himself. And what a big stack it got to be! She didn't even read any of the long series of articles they wrote about him because the first one began by calling him Eggs Diamond. Because eggs are yellow. And though she knew Jack wasn't yellow, she didn't really know what color he was. She didn't know anything really deep about him except what he said and what she wanted him to say and what he said was "You're gorgeous in my life" and "You're the most beautiful thing in the world. I deserve you." And she said to that, "And I deserve you, too." And they went into their silk cocoon then. Her warm bed with the pink silk sheets and her white silk nightgown and Jack in his yellow silk pajamas with the green dragon on them, and slowly they took the silk off one another and just smothered themselves in the cocoon and fucked and fucked and fucked. And when they were all through they went to sleep and woke up, and then they fucked and fucked some more and took a shower and went to see Jolson again in Mummy, and had dinner and came back to the cocoon, and didn't they fuck even more? They certainly did. Oh, wasn't that the cat's knickers? Vo-de-oh-do! There was never anything like that in her life before Jack, though she knew about fucking all right, all right. But fucking is one thing and fucking with Jack was another thing altogether. It was not the glitter. Sometimes when you fucked it was just to get something or because you thought you ought to or because you liked his looks and he was nice to you and it was expected of you and you wanted to do what was expected. It was your role to fuck men who were nice because you're only young once, isn't that so? Isn't that why you wanted to be in the glitter dream? To glitter by yourself? And what better way to glitter than to fuck whenever you fe
lt like it? Fuck the best people, the most beautiful people. Do you like to fuck? Oh, I love it, don't you?
But then she met Jack and she didn't want anybody but him. Now it wasn't just liking to fuck. It was liking to fuck Jack. And it was feeling wanted and taken and also taking and also wanting, which was the key to the thing that changed in her. She wanted in a new way. Jack taught her that. She wanted not just for the moment or the hour or the day, but she wanted permanently.
"We'll always live in the cocoon, won't we?"
"Sure, kid."
"We'll make love even when you're seventy-five, won't we?"
"No, kid. I'm not going to live to be seventy-five. I didn't expect to make it to thirty-three."
And that changed her again. She wanted him and wanted what he gave her forever and ever, but now she had to think about outliving him, of this maybe being that last time she would ever put her arms around him and bite his ear and play with his candy cane because then he might get up and get dressed and go out and die. Well, then she wanted him more than ever. She didn't know why. She just called it love because that's what everybody else called it. But it wasn't only that, because now she wanted not just Jack himself but Jack who was going to die. She wanted to kiss and fuck somebody who was going to die. Because when he died, then you had something nobody else could ever get again.
And then Jimmy Biondo came and talked to her and she said she didn't believe what he said about Jack being so awful. But she went and read all the papers she was saving in the closet and oh, the things they said that Jack did all his life, and she couldn't believe her eyes because they were so awful, so many killings and torturing people and burning prostitutes with cigarettes. Oh, oh, oh! And so she knew then she would leave him. She knew it and she knew it and she knew it all Saturday night even after he came to her room and they went into the cocoon killing the bad things. She forgot while that was happening that she was going to leave him, for how can you leave a person when they're making you forget the bad things? But when it was over she remembered and when she went to sleep alongside him she thought of it and she was still thinking about it when she woke up and saw him drinking the orange juice he'd ordered for them both, with toast and eggs and coffee and a steak for him, and she thought of it while he ate the steak in his blue pajamas with the red racehorses on them. I am seeing you eat your last piece of steak. I am seeing you wear your last pajamas. She would kill him in her mind and that would be the end of Jack Diamond for Marion Roberts. So long, Jackie boy. I loved your candy. Gee it was swell. But you're dead now for me. You're mine forever. Marion Roberts is not going to go on living her life as a gangster's doll, a gangster's moll. Marion Roberts is her own woman and she is not going to live for fucking. She is not going to live for any one man. She is not going to live for killing because she knows better. She knows how good life is and how hard it is to make life good. She's going to move on to something else. She can go on dancing. She will find a way to live out her life without gangster Jackie.
But then she wondered: What is it about a gangster like him'? Why did I take up with him? Why didn't I believe what everybody said about him, that I might wind up in the river, that I might get shot in bed with him, that he might ruin my face if he ever caught me cheating? Because gangsters are evil and don't care about anybody but themselves. Why didn't she believe those things? Because she wanted it all out of life, all all all there was to get. The top, the tip, the end, the reach, the most, the greatest, the flashiest, the best, the biggest, the wildest, the craziest, the worst.
Why did Kiki want the worst? Because she was a criminal too? A criminal of love? Birds of a feather, Marion. You knew even as you were saying that you were leaving him that you wouldn't leave. You knew as you read about the torture he did and the killing he did that you wouldn't give him up because you knew about the other side of that glorious man, with his candy up in your sweet place and his mouth on yours. You wouldn't give that up. Even when those men came to the hotel this morning and Jack went to meet them and said to them while you were lying there in the half-empty cocoon, even when he said: "Hello, boys, how are you? Be right with you," and said to you that he'd only be a few minutes, and that he had some business to finish up, and went out in the hallway still in his blue pajamas with the red racehorses and the darker blue robe with the white sash and the white diamond embroidered on the breast pocket, even then you knew.
You got up and went into the shower and you let it smother you like you smothered him and you were standing in that sweet heat after love in the morning when you heard the shots: two, four, six, then none, then three more and another and another and another. And you froze in all that
heat because you said to yourself (Oh, God forgive you for saying it), you said: That murdering bastard, he's killed somebody else.
* * *
Later, when she started to dance, she remembered looking at her feet and said to herself: These are going to be the most famous legs on Broadway. And she danced on that for live minutes to the piano man's rippling repetition of a tune of four-four tempo whose name she couldn't remember any more than she could remember the piano man's name or the director's name or the name of the musical itself. Black mesh stockings enveloped her most famous legs. White trunks covered her most famous hips. A white blouse tied at the midriff covered her most famous breasts. And black patent leather tap shoes covered her most famous toes, which nobody realized yet were famous. She thought of how people would behave when they found out how famous they were and tried to let that thought crowd out the rest. But she couldn't. Because her mind went back to what it was that was going to make her toes so famous and she stopped dancing, seeing it all again, seeing herself see it this time and knowing she was webbed in something that wasn't even going to be possible to get out of. So she looked at the piano man and then at the director, and while the other girls went on dancing, she decided to fall down.
The next thing she knew she was sitting at her mirror with all her theatrical makeup on the table in front of her, and the calico kitten Jack had won for her at the Coney Island shooting gallery, all cuddly and sleepy in the middle of the table. In the mirror she saw Madge Conroy sitting on a chair beside her, and Bubble, the chorus boy who had helped Madge pick her off the floor. They both stared at her.
"She finally blinked," Bubble said.
"You all right?" Madge asked.
"Close your eyes, for heaven's sake," Bubble said, "before they explode all over us."
The mirror was outlined by a dozen bare bulbs, all illuminating her face, so famous to be, so unknown to even its own exploding eyes. Why aren't you running away, pretty lady in the brilliant mirror? What brought you to the theater? Is it that you don't know what to be afraid of yet? Do you think the theater will protect you? Do you think the mirror will?
Bubble said, "Mirror, mirror on the wall, who's got the Kikiest eyes of all?"
"Shut up," Madge said, "and get her a drink someplace. " Madge rubbed Kiki's wrists as Bubble went away.
"Oh, Madge, I just got to talk to somebody."
"I had a hunch you did. I kept watching you dancing out there. You looked like somebody kidnapped your brain. Like a zombie. "
"Honest to God, Madge, it's something awful. It's so awful."
Bubble came back with an unlabeled half-pint. Madge grabbed it and looked at it, smelled it and poured Kiki a drink. She capped the bottle, set it on Kiki's table, and told Bubble, "Will you please, please, please get lost?"
"What's the matter with her?"
"I'll find out if you let us be."
"Yes, nursie."
"You oughta be rehearsing out there," Kiki said to Madge.
"They can do without me. I know the routine."
"It was so awful. Honest to God, this is the worst thing that ever happened to me."
"What? What the hell happened?"
"I can't tell you here. Can we go someplace? I don't know what to do, Madge. Honest to God I don't."
"We can go over
to my apartment. Change your clothes."
But it took so much effort for Kiki to take off her trunks that she left on the rest, her mesh stockings and the rehearsal blouse and only put on her skirt and street shoes. She threw her other street clothes and the trunks and tap shoes into her red patent-leather hatbox and saw, as she did, her street makeup and her purse, the only things she took when she ran out of the hotel.
"I'm ready," she said to Madge.
* * *
"You better buy a paper," Kiki told Madge when they came to a newsstand at Broadway and Forty-seventh. And as Madge did and after Kiki saw her utter a small "Oh" and throw her face into the paper, Kiki turned to see an old man in a gray bowler, with a yellowing white walrus mustache and pince-nez specs, wearing a frock coat with lapel gardenia and a brocaded yellow vest across which dangled an old watch chain and fob in the design of a mermaid. Blank cards, an ink bottle, and a quill pen lay in front of him on a table that folded into a suitcase. Samples of his script-for-sale, tacked to the table's drop-leaf front, were splendid with antique swirls, curlicues, and elegant hills, valleys, and ovals.
"I hope you're in show business, young lady," the old gent said to her over his pince-nez.
"As a matter of fact, I am."
"It's the only safe place for talentless beauty, miss."
"You've got some crust saying I don't have any talent."
"Anywhere else you'll be destroyed."
"As a matter of fact, I'm quitting show business."
"A disastrous move. "
"But none of your business."
"Forgive me for speaking so freely, but you look to me like a bird wounded in the heart, the brain, and between the legs, and we in the Audubon Society do what we can for the wounded. My card."
"I'm Jack Diamond's girl. What about that?"
"Ah, then, ah. I had no way of knowing"—and the old man retrieved his card and handed her another. "Jack Diamond is an entirely safe place. You have nothing to fear, my dear, as long as you have a role in Jack Diamond's hilarious tragedy."