The man in faded Levi’s chased his final shot with his final short beer, stood up and left. The soldiers stopped lying about women and went out looking for some. The old drunk ordered another shot. I pushed his money back at him and made it on the house. He smiled and swallowed rye.
A sweatless, painless job. So far Round Seven was nothing but a tax loss for Ruby Enterprises. No packages had come, no messages had been given or received. There was a small steel safe in the bar’s back room but for the time being it stayed empty. I wondered what would be put in it later on.
The drunk asked for another rye. I poured it and let him pay for this one. I tossed the dough in the cashbox without ringing it up. That was where the second half of my two hundred a week came from, money that never went through the bar’s books in the first place.
Soft. The right people said hello to me at the right times. The cops let me alone whether they liked me or not—I was local, I fitted, I belonged. My name was Nathaniel Crowley—that was the way I signed my checks and that was the name on the Bartenders’ Union card in my wallet. A friend of Baron’s had arranged the card.
A newscast came on the radio and I switched to another station. I caught the tail end of a commercial, a station break, some friendly words from a friendly disc jockey. I poured another shot for the drunk and wondered when he would fall off his stool. The disc jockey stopped talking and played a record. The door opened and Tony Quince came in.
He walked to the far end of the bar and parked himself on a stool. I took my time getting to him. I stopped on the way to pour out a glass of the sour red wine he liked. I gave it to him and he smiled at me.
“Working hard?” he asked.
“Not too hard.”
“Nobody should work too hard. Life is too short. You play poker?”
“Sometimes.”
“There are a few fellows having a game tonight. Soft action, just stud and draw for table stakes. Small table stakes most of the time. You drop fifty and you’re the big loser. I thought maybe you’d like to play.”
“Who’s in?”
“Berman and Bippy and Moscato and Weiss. You know them?”
I knew Berman from an evening at Cassino’s. I didn’t know the others.
“I quit at three,” I said.
“We start at three-thirty. Fair enough?”
I told him it was fine.
“You got a car yet?”
“I get one the middle of next week,” I said. “It’s on order.” It was a Lincoln convertible that someone had stolen from a doctor in Santa Monica. It was costing me about half the book price and they were shipping it into town Tuesday or Wednesday unless they hit a snag.
“I’ll pick you up then. Three o’clock?”
“I can grab a hack.”
He shook his head. “No trouble for me,” Quince said. “It’s on my way, stopping here. And we can talk on the way. You and me, we have things to talk about. Maybe.”
I told him three was fine. He took his time with the sour wine and I let him alone from there on. A fellow came in with a girl who looked like somebody else’s wife. I gave them rye and ginger ale and they took the drinks to a table. The next time I looked their way the guy had his hand up the girl’s skirt.
The girl was squirming around in her seat, her eyes glazed over with passion. Her mouth dropped open and she looked as though she wanted somebody to put something in it. The guy kissed her mouth and kept his hand busy. She locked her plump thighs around his hand and rocked back and forth, moaning softly. I wished they would get the hell out and go to a motel. Round Seven wasn’t licensed for a floor show.
Tony Quince finished his wine and left without saying goodbye. The old drunk left too. He said goodbye and walked out on wobbly legs. A few more people drifted in and out. The guy with somebody else’s wife stopped playing little games and took her home to one bed or another. It got to be three o’clock and I closed up for the night.
Quince drove up just a few minutes after I finished locking the front door of the bar. He leaned across to open the car’s door and I got in next to him. His car was a Cadillac, an old one, made before they ruined everything with tail fins. I closed the door and he drove.
“Berman lives in the suburbs,” he said. “But first we talk.”
“We can go to my place.”
“You still at the Malmsly?”
I shook my head. “The Stennett.”
The Stennett was a fine old residential hotel. I had three rooms and a bath. The hotel service was fine and the rent was not too steep.
The Stennett had everything I needed, including my little chambermaid from the Malmsly. She had switched jobs when she had found out I was moving—the pay was as good at the Stennett, the work no harder, and she knew I was good for a fifty-dollar bill each time we fell into bed. I was seeing Annie now and then but I didn’t see what difference that made. I still had a thing for women in uniform, and breasty Brenda filled out the black-and-white Stennett uniform nicely. And when she got out of it she knew just what I wanted her to do and just how to do it…
Quince said, “Let’s stick to the car. I don’t have too much to say.”
That was fine with me.
“I’m not going anywhere special,” Quince said. “The car goes by itself. Just driving, so we can talk.”
“Sure.”
“You met Lou,” he said after a pause. “The guy who handed you the job at Round Seven. I mean Lou Baron.”
“I met him.”
He nodded, as much to himself as to me. “I set that up,” he said. “You meeting him, I mean. I told Anne she should hang around Cassino’s until you showed and then call Lou and set up a party. I told Lou what I knew about you and that he ought to tie you in with what’s happening. I arranged things, you might say.”
“Thanks.”
He shook his head impatiently. “Don’t thank me—just listen. You know anything about me? Or about Baron?”
“Not much. I guess he runs things. I don’t know what you do.”
He turned the Caddy onto a side street heading back toward Main. It was easy to see that he and the car knew each other. His hands moved lazily and the car did everything he wanted it to do.
“Yeah,” he said, “Lou runs things. You could put it that way.”
“And you?”
“This and that.”
I didn’t say anything. I took out my cigarettes and offered the pack to him. He shook his head and I lit one for myself.
“I got a few things going,” he said. “A horse room downtown, a few phones, a few people to answer them.”
We crossed Main again but in a little while he swung a sharp right on a street that ended at a cemetery. Then he drove the Caddy into the cemetery.
“I come here all the time,” he said. “Late at night, early in the morning. It’s peaceful. You can talk. If it bothers you…”
“It doesn’t bother me.”
“To some people it’s spooky. But I was talking about the things I have going for me. Part of a few roadhouses out on the lakeshore. And some legit stuff. Moving vans, vending machines. Stuff like that.”
I looked out the window at an imitation Washington’s Monument with a cross on the top. Something ran across the Caddy’s path and disappeared into shrubbery. It looked like a rabbit but it was hard to tell.
“You know what’s happening in this town, Nat?”
I shrugged. “A little. Not much.”
“All calm on the surface and all set to boil underneath. The cops handed you a hard time, Nat. A pair of bulls named Zeigler and Kardaman. They put you through the wringer. You know why? They thought you were an imported gun. Talent from someplace coming into town to do a job. A job on Baron.”
“They thought I was hired to hit him?”
“To hit him in the head. To give him an extra mouth.”
There was very little to say to that.
“I’ll take a cigarette now, Nat.”
I gave him one. He lit it wit
h the dashboard lighter and blew out the smoke without inhaling. We were still driving around and I was getting an unguided tour of the cemetery. He was right—it was peaceful as hell.
“Lou’s a funny guy,” he said. “He’s been big for ages. A hell of a long time to ride tall. He made friends, he made enemies. That’s what this is all about, a matter of friends and enemies. Your friends stay big and you’ve got everything nailed. Your friends fall on their faces and you fall on top of them.”
I threw my cigarette out a window. It missed a tombstone by a few feet and landed in wet grass.
“Baron had friends,” Quince went on. “One of them got shot in a barbershop. You remember that one?”
“I remember.”
“Other friends. None of them got picked up at Apalachin. The boys there didn’t invite Baron’s friends. You understand?”
I nodded.
“So Lou is in a little trouble,” Quince continued. “Right now things are cool, everybody smiles at everybody. The governor’s been throwing this state crime commission at everybody, he wants to be president or something, and nobody sticks his face out. Everything is cool. This won’t last forever. They’re cool now, they’ll be warmer later.”
“And Baron?”
“Dies,” he said.
He let the word sit there and float in the air. It was the right word in the right place. I looked out the Caddy’s window at a million graves, each one neatly marked, each one as cold as death. I saw a hole where someone had been digging a fresh one. I thought suddenly of Ellen. Then I thought about Baron again—who was going to die.
“Not today, not tomorrow, maybe not this year. But soon. It’s a matter of friends, a matter of who has what kind of leverage. This whole business is a business of levers, of who has what hold on who. But all the bricks are going to fall on Baron. No choice. Even he knows it.”
For a few minutes I didn’t ask the question. “What’s your angle?” I finally said.
“Baron dies. Somebody has to be the new Baron.”
“You?”
He shrugged. “There are other guys. There’s also me. We wait and see.”
“And why tell me all this? What’s my angle?”
He shrugged again. “It’s all a matter of friends,” Quince said. “I said that before. I got some friends. I can use other friends. I don’t know much about you. All right, I don’t have to know much, I’m not asking you your religion. What I know, I like. I like your style.”
“Thanks.”
“When Baron falls, I might need you.”
“So?”
The palms spread upward. “That’s all.”
“My father told me never sign a contract. Not even a verbal one.”
“So you had a smart father. But there’s no contract, Nat. I didn’t bring a contract along. Not even verbal. Just things to say, just information so you can start thinking about things. That’s all.”
“Uh-huh.”
“We can be friends,” he said.
“We’re friends now.”
“Better friends. We can do each other favors. And if things break right after Baron goes, you could sit in a nice spot. You could do worse.”
“I probably could.”
We drove out of the cemetery. He must have known the place pretty well. We were on Main now, heading north. I had got lost the minute we entered the cemetery.
“So we talked,” he said. “So I told you things and you listened. That’s all. Now let’s find Berman’s house and play poker. I feel lucky tonight.”
* * *
We played cards around an octagonal table in Mel Berman’s recreation room. It was a small and pine-paneled room in the basement of his ranch house in a middle-class suburb of Buffalo. We played stud and draw. Nobody had much to say.
Berman ran an appliance store in one of the city’s shopping districts. The appliance store lost a little money every year. Berman made money because he wrote numbers and booked horses when he wasn’t busy selling television sets and dishwashers. His family didn’t know this.
The Bermans belonged to a synagogue and country club. Berman’s wife worked on fund-raising committees. His daughter went to dancing class at the synagogue. His son was a sophomore at a public high school. Berman loved his wife and his son and his daughter.
The game was going when Tony and I got there. It didn’t break up until eight or nine in the morning. Somewhere around seven-thirty Berman’s wife came in with a tray of food. She gave us scrambled eggs, toast, jelly, coffee. The food was good. Berman apologized for the lack of bacon, told us his wife kept a kosher kitchen.
A little while before we called it quits Berman’s son came in to say goodbye to his father. His name was Sanford, Sandy for short. He and his father were buddies.
“Take it easy on the broads,” Berman told him. “You can catch more than a cold.”
Sandy punched Berman on the arm. “Watch out for him,” he told all of us. “He draws to inside straights.”
We went on playing. I wound up around fifteen bucks ahead for the evening. Then Tony drove me back to the Stennett. We didn’t talk on the way, at least not about Baron and how he was going to die. We coasted on small talk and he let me off at the hotel. I walked inside, went upstairs and climbed into bed.
When I woke up a few hours later a warm hand was rubbing my back, massaging the nape of my neck. I rolled onto my side and opened my eyes.
Brenda was smiling down at me.
“You said I was to come around this morning,” she said.
I mumbled something.
“You want me to come back in a few hours?” But tired as I was, I wanted her anyway. I told her to get undressed and I rolled over on my back and watched as she took off her clothes. Her body looked better every time I saw it.
“You know what to do,” I said, closing my eyes. “My wallet’s on the dresser. Help yourself to fifty before you go. And take it nice and slow now, and put me back to sleep again.”
I lay there, more asleep than awake, and she did all the things she was supposed to do.
I fell back asleep again. I never even heard her leave the room.
9
It was my second Sunday, my second day off. I crawled out of bed somewhere in the middle of the afternoon and found my way to the phone, which was ringing. It was Anne Bishop.
“That date of ours,” she said. “It’s still on?”
I shook my head to clear it, which hurt. The night before I’d been Round Seven’s best customer and an even better customer of an after-hours joint called Moon High. Now my head was the size of a basketball and ached.
“Date,” I said.
“You were going to take me for a long ride. And dinner.”
I remembered. “An hour,” I said. “I’ll pick you up.”
I put the phone to bed and turned into the bathroom for a shower and a shave. I cooked water for coffee and drank it scaldingly black until things settled down between my ears. I put on a new suit and a sincere tie, and went downstairs.
I slipped into a restaurant around the corner for breakfast. I sat at a table and ordered bacon and eggs and some more coffee. The coffee was grim—I tried to drink it without tasting it. I looked at my watch. It was time to get Annie.
The watch was pancake flat, the size of a half dollar. Lou Baron had given it to me a couple days ago. First there had been a phone call one afternoon telling me about someone who owed money and hadn’t paid. I had gone to the address Baron gave me, had found the guy and had beaten him up. I had used fists on his face and feet on his ribs. The next day somebody had dropped off a package at Round Seven and had told me it was for me. The watch had been inside. Engraved neatly on the back was the legend, To Nat from Lou Baron, in tiny script. The watch even kept time.
The sky outside was seven various shades of gray. I went back to the Stennett and told the doorman to find my car for me. He brought it out from the garage and I gave him a dollar. I looked at the Lincoln and smiled. It was low and lov
ely with plenty of spirit under the hood. I got behind the wheel, put the top down and looked up at the gray sky again. I turned a key in the ignition and drove to the house where Annie lived.
I hit the horn. Time passed while she hurried down four flights of stairs. Then the front door flew open and she ran down the walk to the car. I opened the door for her and she bounced into the seat beside me.
She was wearing brown loafers, black tights, a soft brown skirt and a black cashmere sweater. She looked like a wood nymph. “A ride in the country,” she said. “It sounds like a groove.”
“It’s the wrong day for it.”
“That doesn’t matter, Nat. I want to look at trees and smell fresh air. I want to get high on oxygen. And it’s not a bad day.”
I told her it would probably rain.
“I hope not,” she said. “I like this car with the top down. Wind blowing my hair around. I like it.”
We drove around looking for the country and we couldn’t find it. We took one of the principal streets straight out of town and that didn’t do any good. It was just a big city street that kept on in the same vein even when the city stopped. We tried other roads, still looking for the country, and we found everything else. We found housing developments and school districts and country clubs. We found highways and freeways and throughways and causeways. We did not find the country.
“Oh, hell,” she said. “We’re halfway to Albany, I think. This isn’t working out, Nat.”
“Should I turn around?”
“I guess you might as well.”
I found a Texaco station and pulled in for a transfusion. He wiped my windshield, checked my oil and water, filled my tires. I gave him a credit card and he performed rituals with it. Then I turned the Lincoln around and aimed it at the city again.
“There used to be country,” Annie said. “The city ended at the Kenmore line and after that there was country. I used to live just inside the city line. There were big vacant lots to play in. Now they’re all ranch houses.”
She stretched out a hand. I lit a cigarette and put it between her fingers. She took a very long drag and blew out smoke.