" 'Pardon me, your honor, but are you still in the market for a little greasy green as a way of encouraging Jack Diamond with his bootlegging, his shakedowns, and his quirky habit of making competitors vanish?' Is that my question?"
"Any fucking way you like to put it, Marcus. You're the talker. They all know my line of work. It'll be simpler if I still got the okay, but I don't really give a goddamn whether they like it or not. Jack Diamond's got a future in the Catskills."
"Don't you think you ought to get straight first?"
"You don't understand, Marcus. You can carve out a whole goddamn empire up there if you do it right. Capone did it in Cicero. Sure there's a lot of roads to cover, but that's all right. I don't mind the work. But if I slow now, somebody else covers those roads. And it's not like I got all the time in the world. The guineas'll be after me now."
"You think they won't ride up to the Catskills?"
"Sure, but up there I'll be ready. That's my ball park." I've often vacillated about whether Jack's life was tragic, comic, a bit of both, or merely a pathetic muddle. I admit the muddle theory moved me most at this point. Here he was, refocusing his entire history, as if it had just begun, on the dream of boundless empire. It was a formidable readjustment and I considered it desperate, but maybe others would find it only confused and ridiculous. In any case, given the lengths he was willing to go to carry it off, it laid open his genuine obsession.
I might have credited the whole conversation about the Catskills to Jack's extraordinary greed if it hadn't been for one thing he said to me. It took me back to 1928 when Jack was arrested with his mob in a pair of elegant offices on the fourteenth and fifteenth floor of the Paramount Building, right on Times Square. Some address. Some height. Loftiness is my business, said the second-story man. Now Jack gave me a wink and ran his hand sensuously along the edge of the chest bandage that was giving him such pleasure. "Marcus," he said, "who else do you know collects mountains?"
I've been in Catskill maybe a dozen and a half times, most of those visits brief, on behalf of Jack. I don't really know the place, never needed to. It's a nice enough village, built on the west bank of the Hudson River about a hundred or so miles north of the Hotsy Totsy Club. Henry Hudson docked near this spot to trade with the Indians and then went on up to Albany, just like Jack. The village had some five thousand people in this year of 1931 I'm writing about. It had a main street called Main Street, a Catskill National Bank, a Catskill Savings Bank, a Catskill Hardware and so on. Formal social action happened at the IOOF, the Masonic Temple, the Rebekah Lodge, the American Legion, the PTA, the Women's Progressive Club, the White Shrine, the country club, the Elks. Minstrel shows drew a good audience and visiting theater companies played at the Brooks Opera House. The local weekly serialized a new Curwood novel at the end of 1931, which Jack would have read avidly if he'd not been elsewhere. The local daily serialized what Jack was doing in lieu of reading Curwood.
Catskill was, and still is, the seat of Greene County, and just off Main Street to the north is the four-story county jail, where Oxie Feinstein was the most celebrated resident on this particular day. Before I was done with Jack, there would be a few more stellar inmates.
The Chamber of Commerce billed the village as the gateway to the Catskills. The Day Line boats docked at Catskill Landing, and tourists were made conscious of the old Dutch traditions whenever they were commercially applicable. A Dutch friend of mine from law school, Warren Van Deusen, walked me through the city one day and showed me, among other points of interest, the home of Thomas Cole on Spring Street. Cole was the big dad of the nineteenth-century's Hudson River school of painting, and one of his works "Prometheus Bound," a classic landscape, I remember particularly well, for it reminded me of Jack. There was this giant, dwarfed by the landscape, chained to his purple cliff in loincloth and flowing beard (emanating waves of phlogiston, I'll wager) and wondering when the eagle was going to come back and gnaw away a few more of his vitals.
I called Van Deusen, who was involved in Republican county politics, as a way of beginning my assignment for Jack. In the early days of our law practice, his in Catskill, mine in Albany, I recommended him to a client who turned into very decent money for Van, and he'd been trying for years to repay the favor. I decided to give him the chance and told him to take me to lunch, which he did. We dined among men with heavy watch chains and heavier bellies. Warren, still a young man, had acquired a roll of well-to-do burgher girth himself since I'd last seen him, and when we strolled together up Main Street, I felt I was at the very center of America's well-fed, Depression complacency. It was an Indian summer day, which lightened the weight of my heavy question to Warren, that being: "What does this town think of Jack Diamond'?"
"A hero, if you can believe it," Van said. "But a hero they fear, a hero they wished lived someplace else."
"Do you think he's a hero?"
"You asked about the town's feelings. My private theory is he's a punishment inflicted on us for the sins of the old patroons. But maybe that's just my Dutch guilt coming out."
"You know Jack personally?"
"I've seen him in some of our best speakeasies and roadhouses. And like most of the town, I at least once made it a point to be passing by that little barbershop right across the street there when he and his chums pulled up at eleven o'clock one morning. They always came at eleven for their ritual daily shave, hair trim, shampoo, hot towels, shoe shine, and maybe a treatment by the manicurist from up the street."
"Every day?"
"Whatever else I say about him, I'll never accuse him of being ill-groomed. "
"I can't imagine this being the extent of your knowledge, a political fellow like yourself."
Van gave me a long quiet look that told me the subject was taboo, if I wanted to talk about a subsidy from Jack—that he was not in the market and knew no one who was.
"I know all the gossip," he said, finessing it. "Everybody does. He's the biggest name we've had locally since Rip Van Winkle woke up. I know his wife, too; I mean, I've seen her. Alice. Not a bad-looking woman. Saw her awhile back at the Community Theater, as a matter of fact. They change the movie four times a week and she sees them all. People seem to like her, but they don't know why she stays with Diamond. Yet they kind of like him, too—I suppose in the same way you find him acceptable."
"I accept him as a client."
"Sure, Marcus, And what about that European jaunt? Your picture even made the Catskill paper, you know."
"Someday when I understand it all better, I'll tell you about that trip. Right now all I want to know is what this town thinks."
"What for?"
"Grounding purposes, I suppose. Better my understanding of the little corner of the world where my candle burns from time to time."
Van looked at me with his flat Dutch face that seemed as blond as his hair. He was smiling, a pleasant way of calling me a liar. Van and I knew each other's facial meanings from days when our faces were less guarded. We both knew the giveaway smirks, the twitches, puckers, and sneers.
"Now I get it," he said. "It's him. He wants to know if the town's changed, how we take to his new notoriety. Is he worried?"
"What are you talking about?"
"All right, Marcus, so you won't play straight. Come on, I want to show you something."
We walked awhile, Van singling out certain landmarks for my education: There stood the garage the Clemente brothers used before Jack terrorized them out of the beer business. Over that way is a soft drink distributor's warehouse, which Diamond also took over. This was news to me. But I suppose when you set out to corner the thirst market, you corner it all.
Then Van turned in at the Elks' Club and led me to the bar. I ordered a glass of spring water and Van a beer, and then he motioned to the bartender, a man who might have been twenty-eight or forty-five, with a muscular neck; large, furlable ears; and a cowlick at the crown of his head. His name was Frank DuBois and Van said he was a straight arrow, a countryman of
old Huguenot stock, and a first-class bartender.
"I was just about to tell Marcus here about your visit from the Diamond boys," Van said to him, "but I know you tell it better."
DuBois sniffed a little air, readying his tale for the four-hundredth telling, and said, "They come in all right, right through that door. Come right behind the bar here, unhitched the beer tap and rolled the barrel right out the door. 'Say,' I says to 'em, 'what'd ya do that for?' And one of them pokes me with a gun and says it's because we wasn't buying the good Canadian beer and they'd deliver us some in the mornin'. 'Yeah,' I says, 'that's just fine, but what about tonight? What do the fellas drink tonight?' 'Not this,' said one of 'em, and he shoots a couple of holes in the barrels we got. Not a fella I'd seen around before, and don't want to see him again either. Then they went out back, two of 'em, and shot up the barrels out there. Took me and Pete Gressel half a day to get the place mopped up and dried out. Dangdest mess you ever saw."
"You know the fellow who poked the gun at you?" I asked.
"'I knew him all right. Joe Fogarty. Call him Speed, they do. Nervous fella. Been around this town a long time. I seen him plenty with the Diamond bunch."
"When was all this?"
"Friday week, 'bout eleven at night. Had to close up and go home. No beer to serve. No people neither, once they saw who it was come in."
"Is that the right kind of beer Van's drinking now?' '
"You betcha, brother. Nobody wants no guns pokin' at them they can help it. Membership here likes peace and quiet. Nobody lookin' for trouble with Legs Diamond. He's a member this here club, you know. In good standin' too. Paid up dues and well liked till all this happen. Don't know what the others think now."
It was tidy. If Jack let his men point a gun at his own club, what other club could be safe? DuBois moved up the bar and Van said quietly, "A lot of people aren't just accepting this kind of thing, Marcus."
"I don't know what that means, not accepting."
"I'll let you use your imagination. "
"Vigilantes?"
"That's not impossible but not likely either, given the people I'm talking about. At least not at the moment."
"What people are you talking about?"
"I have to exercise a little discretion too, Marcus. But I don't mean helpless people like Frank here."
"Then all you've got for me is a vague, implied resistance, but without any form to it. People thinking how to answer Jack?"
"More than vague. More than thinking about it."
"Van, you're not telling me much. I thought I could count on your candor. What the hell good are riddles?"
"What the hell good is Jack Diamond?"
Which was the same old question I'd been diddling with since the start. Van's expression conveyed that he knew the answer and I never would. He was wrong.
JOHN THOMSON'S MAN
When the police went through Jack's house in one of their fine-combings near the end, somebody turned up a piece of plaster, one side covered with the old-time mattress ticking wallpaper. The paper was marked with twenty-five odd squiggles, which the police presumed were some more code notations of booze deliveries; and they saved the plaster along with Jack's coded notebooks and file cards on customers and connections all over the United States and in half a dozen foreign countries.
I asked Alice about the plaster before she was killed, for it turned up in the belongings they returned to her, through my intervention, after Jack died. When she saw it she laughed a soft little laugh and told me the squiggle marks were hers; that she'd made them the first weekend she and Jack were married; that they stayed in an Atlantic City hotel and hardly went out except to eat and that they'd made it together twenty-five times. After number five, she said, she knew they'd only just started and she kept the score on the wall next to the bed. And when they checked out, Jack got the tire iron from the car and hacked out the plaster with all the squiggles on it. They kept it in their dresser drawer until the police took it away. Alice made Jack give the hotel clerk twenty-live dollars for the broken wall. A dollar a squiggle. Half the price of professional action.
I thought of Warren Van Deusen telling me people didn't understand why Alice stayed with Jack. She had her reasons. Her memories were like those squiggles. She was profoundly in love with the man, gave him her life at the outset and never wanted anyone else. She was in love with loving him too, and knew it, liked the way it looked. She won a bundle of psychic points sitting at his bedside after the Monticello, cooing into his ear while the reporters listened at the door and the nurses and orderlies carried messages to tabloid snoops. Alice heroine. Sweet Alice. Alice Blue. When the crash comes they always go back to their wives. Faithful spouse. Betrayed, yet staunch.
Adversity no match for Alice. The greatest of the underworld women. Paragon of wifely virtue. Never did a wrong thing in her life. The better half of that bum, all right, all right.
Texas Guinan let her have a limousine, with chauffeur, all the time she was in New York, so she wouldn't have to worry about hawking taxis to and from Jack's bedside. The press gave Kiki the play at first, but then they caught up with Alice at the police station (that's where Kiki and Alice first met; they glowered at each other, didn't speak). The press boys tried to make her the second act of the drama, but Alice wouldn't play.
"Did you know the Roberts girl?"
"No."
"Did you know any of his friends?"
"He had many friends, but I'm not sure I knew them."
"Did you know his enemies?"
"He didn't have any enemies."
Alice was no sap, had no need for publicity. Not then. It was all happening in her ball park anyway, whether she talked or not.
"You know," she said to me after the shooting, "I hardly even brought up the subject of Marion with him. Only enough to let him know I wasn't going to die over it, that I was bigger than that. I was just as sweet as I could be. Gave him the biggest old smile I could and told him I remembered the squiggles and let him lay there and fry."
* * *
She said she was thinking about her Mormon dream and how it didn't make any sense when she had it, even after she told John about it and they talked about him having another wife. It was in the time of the roses, after he was shot the first time, on Fifth Avenue, when he was afraid he would die before he had done what he set out to do. He saw girls at his Theatrical Club. She knew that. But that was a trivial thing in the life of Alice Diamond because she had John as a husband, and that superseded any girl. Alice Diamond was bona fide. The real thing. A wife. And don't you forget it, John Diamond. A wife. For life.
She sat on the arm of his chair one night in the living room and told him she dreamed he'd brought home a second wife. He stood alongside the woman in the dream and said to Alice, "Well, we'll all be together from now on." And Alice said, "Not on your Philadelphia tintype."
But even as she said no to him she knew it was not no. Never a total no to anything John wanted. Then the other wife came in and started taking over little things Alice used to do for John. But after Alice told him the dream, he said, "Alice, I love you, nobody else." And Alice said to him, "No, you've got another wife." And they both laughed when he said to her, "Alice, we'll be together as long as we live."
Alice did not think her dream would ever come true. Maybe he'd see a woman now and then. But to move into a hotel, to keep a woman permanently, to see her just hours after he'd seen Alice, and maybe even after he'd been with Alice, was terrible. It was not incomprehensible. How, after all, could anything be incomprehensible to a person like Alice, who knew what everybody along Broadway thinks, wants, does, and won't do? Alice was as smart about life as anybody she ever came up against. She knew the worst often happened, worse than the worst you can imagine, and so you made provisions. Her prayer book helped her make provision for the worst: for the sick, the dying, for a happy death, for the departed, for the faithful departed, for the souls in Purgatory, for the end of man, for release from Pu
rgatorial fire. Even a special one for John. She knew she was deceived by John's capacity for passion, and so she sat by his bed and read the Prayer to Overcome Passions and to Acquire Perfection: "Through the infinite merits of Thy painful sufferings, give John strength and courage to destroy every evil passion which sways his heart, supremely to hate all sin, and thus to become a saint."
Saint John of the Bullets.
"Alice, there you are, Alice," Jack said when he woke up and saw her. The beginning and the end of his first coherent sentence.
She smiled at him, picked up the wax rose she'd brought him, the one rose, the secret nobody else knew, and said, "It's wax, John. Do you remember?" The corners of his mouth eased upward and he said, "Sure," so softly she could barely hear it. Then she ran her fingers ever so softly through his hair. Bittykittymins. Sweet baby. Son of a bitch. Bittykittymins. And when he was really awake for the first time, when he'd even had a little bouillon and she'd combed his hair and they put a new hospital gown on him, she said to him in her silent heart: I wish you had died.
"How are you, kid'?" she said out loud, the first time in a long, long while she called him kid, the code word.
"I might make it."
"I think you might. "
"They got me good this time."
"They always get you good. "
"This time it hurt more."
"Everybody got hurt this time."
Alice was hurt, and she knew why. Because she loved an evil person and always would. She now wondered about her remarkable desire to see Jack dead. She had at times wished death to bad persons. Because Alice was good. Alice would not stay long in Purgatory. Because she was good. But now she wanted to die herself when she wished John dead and saw how deeply evil she herself was. She prayed to Jesus to let her want John to live. Let me not think that he's evil. Or me either. I know he's a good man in certain ways. Don't tell me I should've married somebody pure and holy. They would've bored the ass off me years ago. After all, I didn't marry a priest, Jesus. I married a thief. And landed on the front pages alongside him. My hubbydubbylubbybubby. People asking me questions. Coming for interviews. Forced to hide. Hide my light under the bushel. It will shine brighter for all that hiding. Light polishes itself under the bushel. What an awful thing for Alice to think: polishing up her own private brilliance through the troubles of Johnny-victim-on-the-boat. Oh, Alice. How awful you really are. It is so enormously wrong and wicked and evil and terrible, loving John for the wrong reasons; wanting him dead; profiteering from your marriage. Alice was evil and she truly hated herself.