Step on A Crack

him,” Frankie told me.

  “Would you count yourself among them?” I asked him.

  He snorted.

  I raised my eyebrows. “Does that mean he has few friends,” I inquired, “or merely that his friends are better-chosen?”

  “It means he considers me below the salt,” Frankie the Lie said, with no small amount of venom in his tone. “He’s too high and mighty for Harp primitives the likes of us.”

  I nodded. “It’s often the case that when the upper classes go slumming, they find the company not to their liking.”

  “You know more about this than you’re telling.”

  Of course I didn’t. I was laying chum.

  “He’s a man for the great unwashed masses in principle, our Bunny is, but not in their smelly particulars,” he told me.

  Suffice it to say that the man was no simple snob, or so I understood from Frankie. It was a phenomenon I’d seen something of. There were people who came from money, or privilege, who felt guilty about their advantages. But in the event, the folk they wanted to raise by their bootstraps turned out to be either unworthy or simply too damn stubborn to take instruction from their betters, and I counted myself among that number. It was apparently an eye-opening experience for someone like D’Oench to discover that so many of us desired no moral improvement.

  “He’s a man of divided loyalties,” Frankie the Lie said.

  “How so?” I asked.

  Frankie tipped me a wink. “A leopard who’s changed his spots,” he said. “He worked for the War Department, not so long ago.”

  I thought of the military personnel on the dock, earlier.

  “He left, it seems, under somewhat of a cloud.”

  “You can speak plainer than that,” I said.

  Frankie shrugged. “His sympathies were in question,” he told me. “It’s said he had a soft spot for Uncle Joe Stalin, or at the least a certain leftward spin to his footwork.”

  “He’s an upper-class Red?”

  “Hammer-and-sickle, no swords into ploughshares, neither.”

  Premature anti-Fascist, before the war. Active in rallies for the Loyalist side in Spain. Broken-hearted and confused, like so many other American lefties, by the non-aggression pact between Hitler and Stalin, but after the German invasion of Russia, a devoted commitment to defeating the Axis. It was a not uncommon curriculum vitae. What separated Bunny D’Oench from the pack, according to Frankie, was that beating the Nazis was only a signpost on a longer road. World brotherhood, arm in arm toward the greater good for the greatest number.

  Frankie the Lie was to my knowledge only concerned with the greater good for a constituency of one.

  “Idealism,” he said, shaking his head. “It’s all the same to me. A mark’s a mark, whatever his motives. It makes not a particle of difference whether you understand the man’s weakness in fine, only that you know the weakness is there.”

  We understood each other, certainly. “I’m intrigued by his motives,” I said.

  Frankie looked at me askance. “You’d be wanting to see the Hannahs out of harm’s way,” he commented.

  I hadn’t thought to put it that way, but since he’d been so kind as to supply me with an alibi, I went along.

  “It’s none of their concern, or yours,” he said.

  I took the carbon flimsy out of my breast pocket and spread it on the table between us.

  Frankie looked at it with cautious attention.

  It was a copy of the cargo manifest, which I’d taken off of Gyp, almost as an afterthought.

  “Cocoa, peanut oil, flax,” I said, with an inquiring glance at Frankie. “Which of it would you be buying at discount?”

  “A thousand pounds of cocoa,” Frankie the Lie said.

  “Why’s the Army there?” I asked him.

  “I don’t know,” he said, and I took him at face value.

  “Gyp O’Fearna means to sidetrack the cocoa for you.”

  He spread his hands. It was too obvious to require answer.

  “Suppose the entire shipment goes astray?”

  “What’s that to me?” he asked.

  “You’re only bothering with chocolate.”

  “Where’s the profit, else?”

  “Would you think D’Oench to be in it for profit?”

  “Ach,” Frankie sniffed, “he answers to a higher calling.”

  “But this,” I said to him, reading from the manifest. “Bauxite, manganese, lithium chloride? Metallic ore, chemicals, I’d imagine, in one form or another.”

  He shrugged.

  I was at a loss to imagine the ready market. Contraband it might be, but neither fungible nor recognizably utilitarian.

  “You don’t steal what can’t be sold,” Frankie said, putting my thought into words.

  “Not if you’ve only the one client,” I agreed.

  “Why would they be fool enough buy it back?” Frankie asked. “They’d simply hunt you down, the Army and the FBI.”

  Then what was Gyp selling D’Oench? I wondered, and answered my own question. Information.

  Frankie the Lie, however, dealt in more tangible goods. “I wouldn’t want you to queer this,” he said.

  “I’ve no need to,” I told him.

  “You’ve other villainy in mind,” he said, suspiciously.

  “Gyp knows where the Army intends to ship that ore,” I said to Frankie.

  “Where would you be going with this?” he asked.

  “Is the higher calling Bunny D’Oench answers to represented in the person of Des Morrissey’s daughter Rose?”

  He gave me an odd look. “Funny you’d know that,” he said.

  “You’re hand in glove with Gyp,” I said. “And more power to the both of you. I won’t interfere. But leave Bunny D’Oench to me. D’ye take my meaning?”

  “I do,” he said.

  I let it go at that.

  Where did this leave me? You might well ask. I’d certainly gone beyond my mandate from Young Tim. I was working without portfolio. There was something unquiet about, though. Nothing I could quite put my finger on, mind you, but a thing altogether disturbing. Too many anxious people, in too much of a rush, and all of them eager to seem without haste. It smelled of fear, of stupid men in collusion, apprehensive and out of their depth.

  I thought I understood Gyp O’Fearna’s motivation. If the Mafia were crowding him, he’d turn to any port in a storm. But it was a mistake to turn too far left. Out in California, it had already taken a turn for the worse. There’d been an effort before the war to deport Harry Bridges, head of the West Coast C.I.O., as an undesirable alien---Bridges was Australian by birth---because of suspected Communist affiliations, and now the national leadership had stripped him of his union post.

  There’s a saying that when you sup with Devil, you eat with a long spoon, but in and of itself, the fact that O’Fearna and the dock union were jumping from the frying pan into the fire was of little consequence to me, or so I thought. I was a good deal more interested in the suggestion that this man D’Oench was a political bedmate of Rose Morrissey’s. Not that I was any expert on Communists, but it was my gut feeling that birds of a feather might very well nest together. I didn’t know where this line of thought was taking me, and I let it flutter about.

  The question Johnny Darling had raised was on my mind. How had Rose and Young Tim met?

  Rose couldn’t manage on her own, that was clear. Given her physical handicap, she’d need a helpmeet. I didn’t feature her father squiring her to some assignation, or a gathering of the Party faithful, nor did Dermot quite fit the picture. Rose wouldn’t want a chaperone who had designs of his own, peripheral and perhaps antagonistic to hers. Who would she call on?

  Certain sure, there were young men aplenty who’d take up her baton, among the shifty boys her father commanded, but their loyalty would be to Des. She’d have to reach out beyond that immediate orbit, so as not to have her secrets c
ommon knowledge, but I didn’t imagine she’d go that far afield.

  Young Tim Hannah’s meeting with Des and Rose Morrissey took place in neutral territory, or neutral territory of a sort, down in Little Italy, at an Irish tap owned by one Timilty. Timilty was a Mick, but he had no traffic with the West Side mob or with Morrissey’s bold Fenian ambitions. He paid protection to the Maranzano family, a Sicilian clan of the old school who policed their neighborhood vigorously, to discourage street crime, and took the sensible approach that a small tithe on local merchants paid everybody a fair return.

  It was early evening, not much past six o’clock, that magic hour in New York when the light turns watery and time stretches out. Kids were playing stickball on the street, with a tenement stairwell for home plate. Young shopgirls in cotton dresses were just getting home from work, their fathers and brothers out on the stoops in Guinea tees, having a beer before supper.

  Des and his daughter turned up in a pre-war Packard. They sat in back. Dermot was sitting shotgun. The car was driven by a lad who was certainly no chauffeur.

  Dermot got out of the car first, scanning the street like the professional he was, and nodded courteously to me. The youngish-looking man got out and opened the back door of the Packard, letting Des out, and then helping Rose across the seat. She managed to get out of the car rather gracefully, finding her feet and standing, using a pair of braces. It reminded me again of Roosevelt.

  She glanced at me and smiled. “This is a comforting scene, Mickey,” she said. “A sentimental choice.”

  “A stroll about the perimeter?” Dermot said to me.

  We cased the joint together. I wasn’t offended by his