“I don’t want much.”
“I would’ve given you more, Nat. I just wanted to put you where you wanted to be, that’s all. Quince put me wise about you, told me you were around. I heard a little from other people but he gave me a name and a little background. He said I could do worse than find a slot for you. Were you in his pocket all along?”
That was a hard one to answer. I wasn’t too sure myself.
“He brought you in,” he said. “He brought you in all on his own, set you up with me. That it?”
‘“No.”
“You were running from something. You—ah, the hell with it. I don’t know about you and I don’t care about you. I played it straight with you, Crowley. I gave you more than I had to give you.”
“Let’s say we used each other.”
“So? Who gets more than that out of anybody?”
I let that one go.
“I got time for a cigar?” Baron asked.
“No.”
“Then end it, Crowley.”
The gun was cocked and ready. A Smith and Wesson thirty-eight primed and ready to go. The gun worked beautifully. It had one notch coming already. Porky was lying in his own blood at our feet and we were both ignoring him.
I said, “There’s something I want to say.”
“Then say it. You got the gun.”
“You had me wrong all the way, Lou.”
“That’s something new?”
“Wrong all the way and more than you know. My name’s not Crowley.”
“Who cares?”
“My name’s Donald Barshter,” I said. “I had a gun in my hand in Korea, never before and never since. Until I hit Buffalo I lived in Connecticut and I sold insurance. I was married and lived in a little house with trees in front of it.”
“Huh?”
“I was a square. Then I killed my wife by mistake and ran. I decided to play mobster. And here I am. I faked everybody out, Lou. I’m a phony all through.”
“You’re full of crap.”
“You think so?”
He stared thoughtfully at me. “Maybe not,” he said. “God damn. You put on a good act, Crowley. But I don’t get it. Why tell me all this?”
I wasn’t too sure myself.
I steadied the gun. “It won’t do you any good,” I said. “You’re not going to run around shouting about it. And I had to tell somebody.”
We could have talked about it for another five days the way we were going. But it wouldn’t have made much sense. I shot Baron once in the face, wiped off the gun and tossed it in his lap. Then I got the hell out of there and drove the Lincoln back to the Stennett.
I called Tony.
“It’s over,” I said.
“It worked?”
“I’m talking to you. If it hadn’t worked…”
“Yeah,” he said. “I know.”
“So tell people,” I said. “Do whatever you want to do. I’m going to bed, I’m beat.”
And I went to bed.
* * *
From there on it was Tony Quince’s ball and he ran with it. The routine was what he called it, a palace revolution with the organization staying intact and just the very top turning around. He had spent the last three months laying the groundwork and it couldn’t have run more smoothly. There were no more killings. A few men who had been fairly close to Baron left town in a hurry. Nobody went chasing after them. They weren’t that important.
A few others found themselves with a little less responsibility and a little less money. A bookie had his area cut down. Another man had one of his three after-hours’ joints taken from him and handed to somebody else. You didn’t need a bloodbath for this. Just quiet conversation, backed up with power—power held carefully in reserve.
Somebody found Johnny and Mustache and their community-property female in the rooming house that afternoon, and that one made the papers. The story was about as colorful as you could get—a trio, so nude and so dead, after an obviously hectic evening of fun and games. A ménage à trois if there ever was one. The newspapers called it a sex killing and the cops were too tired to argue. There was never a kick on that one.
Scarpino never got found. The gravediggers covered him up and put grass in place over him and that was it for Scarpino. There were conflicting rumors, the way there always are—some people said he left town on the run, others that he was weighted down in the middle of Lake Erie. Nobody much missed him, except maybe his father. And his father wasn’t talking.
Baron was something else.
The cops picked us up Tuesday night and hauled us in—Tony Quince and Angie Moscato and me. The cops were the same pair of bulls who had pulled me in the first time around, a Fred Zeigler and a Howard Kardaman. This time I didn’t get slapped at all. There was no booking, no hard wordplay. They were being very cagy—if we were going to run things in Buffalo, they didn’t want to rub us the wrong way. As far as evidence went, they knew better than to look for any. They knew we had alibis and that we wouldn’t leave calling cards on dead bodies. They put Baron and Porky on adjoining slabs at the morgue and didn’t worry about them.
By Wednesday even the police realized that Tony Quince had the city in his pocket. Patrolmen started nodding respectfully at me when I walked down the street. Zeigler and Kardaman wrote Baron and Porky off as jobs done by person or persons unknown. And the newspapers had fun with it. It was the biggest story since McKinley got his.
They called it a Mafia job, performed by syndicate hoodlums under the direction of the all-powerful Unione Siciliano. They made Baron an ancient henchman of Dutch Schultz, with connections with Touhy, and explained that he’d been assassinated by remnants of the old Capone mob. It was a brilliant job of theorizing and the only thing I could find wrong with it was that it had no basis in fact. But you can’t expect much more from newspapermen. Their sourcebook on crime is a mass of printed matter on the topic, all of it written by other newsmen. They make the myths and wind up believing them.
So I spent a week sitting around the apartment, sometimes with a bottle handy, sometimes without. I took Annie out for dinner twice and wound up in bed with her once—at my place, the Stennett.
It was brutal sex, murderous sex.
Because I was a murderer now. Not just a killer, a man who’d accidentally knocked his wife’s head in, a man who’d once been to war. I’d looked men in the eyes now, men who begged me for their lives, and I’d taken their lives instead. I’d felt my finger tighten on the trigger. I’d sent bullets into their bodies. And I made love now like I was sending bullets into Anne’s.
But Anne, who knew damn well what I’d done even though I hadn’t told her and she hadn’t asked, performed as if she were a killer too—between the stretches where she acted as if she were my victim.
Both roles had rubbed off on her, the killer’s and the victim’s. Because I was murderer and victim both. Anybody who kills is his own victim—each time you kill you destroy something of yourself.
And in the sex with Anne I was destroying some of my own sensitivity—Barshter’s or Crowley’s, it didn’t matter which.
I had never had sex like this before, sex that went on and on until Anne begged me to finish her off, bring her to climax for God’s sake.
But I wouldn’t bring her to climax. I stretched out the act to the point of the sadistic, so that Anne finally had to finish herself off. And I wouldn’t let her alone even after she did that—I kept on going, starting her off again on the ascent toward orgasm. She tried to wrench herself away from me but I wouldn’t have that. I pinioned her and stroked her until she was a twitching mass of sensation—and then I abruptly stopped and she had to finish herself again while I watched. And I did watch, my breath coming hard, well past my limits but not done, as if there was a hole inside me deeper than the hole we put Scarpino in, and I’d been shoveling as hard as I could but it just wouldn’t get filled.
Anne tormented me in retaliation, abruptly stopping when I was finally on the verge an
d laughing while I tried to bring myself to gratification. In a fury I hit her and she sank her teeth into the soft flesh near my armpit and closed her fist like a vise around my main male armament.
I slapped her face but she wouldn’t let go.
“Cool it,” I said.
“No,” Anne said.
“You’re a bitch,” I said.
“And what kind of name do they call you, Nat? Maybe you have no name at all. Maybe what I’m holding onto is anonymous—it could belong to anybody.” She squeezed mercilessly.
I slapped her again, harder, and this time she let go. I fell on her and she flexed her legs and she screamed and took me inside her.
Both of us rocked and plunged. We slammed at each other as if we were out for blood. We reeked with sweat and started sliding all over each other. It was a savage act, a killer’s act—but neither of us died. Only parts of us died. Parts of our humanity died.
What was left was the inhumanity. I plundered Anne’s breasts until she sobbed. I dug at her until there was blood, real blood, not something I saw in a nightmare. And she again used her teeth on me until I saw red and I chopped at her ruthlessly.
We acted like a couple of stone-age animals. Like a couple of dervishes whirling to sacrifice each other.
We were exhausted, finally, and we fell asleep. When I awoke, Anne was gone, back to her own place, I guessed. It was morning and I went out to breakfast. Without Anne it was a quiet time.
Which was good, because I didn’t feel much like noise. I’d had noise enough for a lifetime, the sort you hear and the sort you feel in every nerve ending. There had been Garstein in Philadelphia, then Johnny and Mustache and Porky and Scarpino and Baron. And the girl, the girl whose name I had never bothered to find out, the hard little blonde who had picked the wrong time to wake up and who had died for it. The girl who had been killed as an afterthought.
Seven of them, if you bothered keeping score. Three of them were mine—Garstein and Baron and Porky. The rest were Angie’s but I had watched them die.
It was more blood than I was used to—outside of a movie screen. And this was the sort that doesn’t vanish when the lights come up.
14
As I said, things had changed at the top, and I had an office now on the eighteenth floor of a downtown office building. I had a free-form desk, a few soft chairs, a Modigliani reproduction on the wall and a taut-hipped redhead who answered the phone when it rang and typed things now and then. The redhead was somebody’s sister and the job was a soft touch for her—she spent most of her time either talking to her girlfriends on the phone or polishing her nails. She didn’t even have to put out for the boss, although I’d thought about giving her a tumble. But she was somebody’s sister and it wasn’t good form to fool around with someone’s sister even if you outranked him. Besides, I had enough going between Annie and Brenda. I might try the redhead on sooner or later, the way you try on any stray female who looks as though she might be fairly good at it, like an occasional hooker from one of our downtown houses, an occasional stripper from one of our nightclubs—and all of them more than happy to do it for free, because I was Nat Crowley. But for now I had my fill, and so far I’d let the redhead alone. She didn’t exactly know what I did in my office, only that she was supposed to keep her mouth shut. Whenever somebody important came around I sent her out for coffee. That’s where she was now.
Tony said, “You could have more interests, Nat.”
“I’ve got enough.”
“If you say so. You could meet people, do more things, make more dough. This way you just sit around and handle bookkeeping. That’s a job for a goddamn accountant.”
It was more than that but I didn’t bother saying so. Tony knew it anyway. I had my office and I handled all the paperwork that had to be handled. I kept the two sets of books—one for us and another for the government—and I made sure that both sets balanced neatly. I made sure that the right amount of dough was coming in from our various income properties and that not too much was getting siphoned off into private pockets. I looked at the bills and wrote the checks. We had a lot of things going for us and there were a lot of bills to pay and a lot of records to check.
The income came from three sources. There was the legitimate stuff, which took care of a big portion of our revenue. We ran jukeboxes and vending machines and a lot of local trucking. We owned a few construction outfits and a batch of nightclubs and smaller taverns. The ownership may have started because we used muscle a long time ago but now the whole routine was puritanically straight.
Then there were the rackets, everything from dope to dirty pictures, and we had a little of everything in those departments. They were illegal but they had to be run the same way as a legitimate business. The same rules applied—supply and demand, profit and loss, income and expenditures.
The third class was investments. You could buy a piece of a stock swindle or a satchel of hot money or anything else. You invested your dough and took a capital gain or loss the way Wall Street plays the market or the way Swiss bankers bet on Latin American revolutions. We had a lot going for us there, too, and I kept busy.
“There are people to meet,” Tony said. “You’ve got a little dough—you could get something going on your own. Open a club, start a business. The dough is there. All you got to do is take it.”
“I’m happy.”
“You sure?”
“Positive. I like to sit in the background, Tony. It’s quieter.”
“You hot?”
I shook my head. “I just hate flashbulbs. They hurt my eyes.”
“You must be hotter than hell,” he said. “What’s the charge?”
“No charge.”
“Nothing that can get fixed?”
He couldn’t fix murder in Connecticut. And that would be the charge if they started printing my picture in the papers. The captions didn’t have to call me a hood. They could refer to me as a captain of local industry and the payoff would still be the same. A trip to Connecticut and the end of the ballgame.
“Nothing you can fix,” I said.
Tony walked over to the window and looked out. He asked me if I had anything to drink. I kept a bottle of the red wine he liked in a desk drawer. I poured him a glass and he sipped it.
“You been working hard, Nat.”
“Not too hard.”
“It’s September,” he said. “You worked all summer without a break. I took a few weeks, went up in Canada to catch fish. Everybody takes a vacation in the summer. Even the slobs who work for a living get away for a week in the mountains. You stayed cooped up in a lousy little office…”
“It’s a good office. And I’m here a hot three days a week.”
“Still, you need a vacation.”
I didn’t say anything. I took out a cigarette and lit it with my lighter. The lighter was fourteen-karat gold and it worked perfectly. It was engraved, To Nat From Tony.
“Ever been to Vegas?” Tony asked.
“Not for a while.”
“You’re not hot there, are you?”
“I told you,” I said. “I’m not hot at all. Anywhere.”
“Sure,” he said. “I forgot. Vegas is a nice town, Nat. You’d like it there for a week. Everything on the company, of course. A paid vacation. Stay at a good hotel, eat good food and drink good liquor.”
“You mean there’s a job for me?”
He shook his head. “Strictly a vacation,” he said. “Oh, there’s a guy or two you should see. Just to talk to. It’s good to keep in touch with people, good for business. But I could send anybody down. Hell, I could go myself. I just think you could use a vacation.”
“Maybe I could.”
“Stay a week or two weeks. Put up at the High Rise. It’s a good place and I know the guy who runs it, guy name of Dan Gordon. A sweet guy—you’ll like him. When can you leave?”
“Any time.”
“I’ll call Gordon,” he said. “Tell him to have the red carpet ready. You
want me to tell him to keep a broad on ice for you? Or do you want to bring your own?”
I put out my cigarette. “I’ll bring my own,” I said.
* * *
I saw Anne that night. I picked her up and we ran over to our favorite place for steaks and then drove out along the lakeshore. There was a summer-stock outfit out there and they were doing an Arthur Miller thing that she wanted to see. The meal was good, the drive cool and fresh, the play not too bad. It was a tight gutty script and even a bunch of amateurs couldn’t louse it up too badly. Annie enjoyed it.
The relationship we’d managed to drift into was a kind of cockeyed one. We didn’t talk about that night we’d had, after the killings. We hadn’t forgotten it—we just didn’t talk about it. It hung there between us, a violent moment I think neither of us wanted to face squarely. Instead, we kept things on the surface. We saw each other two, three times a week. I rarely called her. I would run into her at one of the spots she frequented or, occasionally, pick her up at the club where she worked. She waited tables there a few nights a week. It was a sucker trap. The pay was a joke but tips were good and she made enough to cover the rent on her apartment.
We ate together some of the time, saw a show together some of the time, drove around together some of the time, slept together some of the time.
So far as I knew, Anne wasn’t seeing anybody else.
Still, we weren’t going together exactly. We had no claims on each other, no strings to pull. She was pretty familiar with my apartment at the Stennett, but she still lived in her own humble flat and spent most of her nights with no bedroom company. It was loose and uncommitted, the rules not too well defined.
On the way back from the summer playhouse I had the Lincoln’s top down. The wind played with Anne’s hair. The air was cool and clearer than usual. The moon wasn’t around but there were a hell of a lot of stars in the sky. I draped an arm around her and she leaned against it.
“Good play,” I said.
“What would a hood like you know about plays?”