When the tabloids came out with stories and pictures of a mobster’s murder the regulars at our table postponed discussion of it, but we could not help looking at the smallies’ table to see how they were taking it. Sometimes their table would be vacant, which usually meant that one or more of the smallies had been picked up by the police and the others were in hiding. The big shots were always at their own table, gabbing away as though nothing had happened, and probably from their point of view nothing had; the murder we were reading about had been ordered weeks before, and the actual killing was old hat to the big shots. This was New York, not Chicago, and it has never ceased to amaze me how few of the real big shots got killed. But of course there is the old saying that generals die in bed, too.
If we often stole glances at the smallies’ table, they in turn spent a lot of time staring at us. Plainly they resented us and our presence; obviously they thought we did not belong in the same joints that they frequented—and in a way they were right, but we were sun-dodgers and had no place else to go. If they had had their way they could easily have got rid of us, and without working us over. I know I would not have gone to a joint after being warned off by a couple of those hoods. They had a neat trick of pushing a man to the sidewalk, laying his leg across the curbstone, and jumping on it. No guns, no knives, no acid. They had a hundred other tricks, too, to maim or cripple people, of either sex, who got in their way. But the big shots’ visits to our table gave us a sort of laissez-passer, which, though it increased the smallies’ resentment of our presence, protected us from abuse. I must qualify that statement a little bit: they would not have abused the detective from the Broadway Squad. He abused them, sometimes beat them up just to keep in practice. But he was a special case, a terrifying man with fist and boot, and not really one of our group. Two things were always, always said of Tommy Callaghan: he was a law unto himself, and he led a charmed life. He has been written about in articles and in fiction, and I think there was even a movie that was more or less based on his career. His attitude and policy were expressed very simply. “I hate hoods,” he would say, and he made no distinction between the big shots and the smallies. One of the biggest of the big shots always had to tip his hat to Tommy Callaghan, no matter where they ran into each other; at the fights in the Garden, at the race track, or in a hotel lobby. But this is not a repetition of the legend of Tommy Callaghan. In this chronicle he plays a minor part, and having introduced him I will go on until I need him later in the story.
However, since I have been rambling along with digressions where I felt like making them, I want to put in a warning to those readers who may still retain an impression of those days and those people that may be charming, but has nothing to do with the truth. Broadway really was not populated by benevolent bookmakers who gave all their money to the Salvation Army, and bootleggers who were always looking around for a paraplegic newsboy who needed surgery, and crapshooters who used their tees and miss-outs—crooked dice—in order to finance a chapel. There is something about the words rogue and rascal that brings a smile to the eyes of people who never spent any time with rogues and rascals. And I have never been able to accept the paradox of the prostitute who was faithful to one man. The big shots and the smallies that I saw—and I saw dozens of them—were unprincipled, sadistic, murderous bullies; often sexually perverted, diseased, sometimes drug addicts, and stingy. The women were just as bad, except when they were worse. The picture of a band of jolly Robin Hoods on Times Square is all wrong and not very romantic to those who knew that perhaps the most spectacular gambler of them all was nothing but a shylock—a usurer—and a fixer. And now back to Jack Pyne.
The joint that usually was our last stop before going home was a place called The Leisure Club, Fiftieth Street near Eighth Avenue, on the second story. It had several things to recommend it: it stayed open until nine o’clock in the morning; it was considered neutral territory by the important mob leaders; the booze was basically good liquor that had been cut only once; and it was not expensive. The Leisure offered no entertainment more elaborate than a colored piano player who also sang dirty songs. His name was Teeth, the only thing he would answer to. He played quite good piano, in spite of not having eighty-eight notes to work with. It was a studio piano, and he had to be inventive to do right by Youmans and Gershwin and Kern on an abbreviated keyboard. The dirty songs were the work of anonymous composers, and they were the same dirty songs that could be heard in little joints all over town, or parodies of songs by Cole Porter and Noel Coward. It was rather high-class stuff for a joint like The Leisure, most of it too subtle for the big shots and the smallies, but their girl friends liked it.
The Leisure had not caught on with the Park Avenue-Junior League-Squadron A crowd, probably because they would be flocking to Harlem at just about the same hour that The Leisure was showing signs of action. In any event, The Leisure was strictly a Broadway joint, not for post-debutantes or squash players. It was for show people, newspaper men, various kinds of hustlers, and mobsters, in addition to the regulars whom I have already mentioned. Since for most of the customers it was the last place before going home, it was usually well filled, with no new male faces from night to night. There were, of course, new girls from the musical comedies and other night clubs, and women who had come in from out of town; but some of these girls and women soon became steady customers too.
At The Leisure our group gathered at a booth in the middle of a row of booths. When we were more than nine in number the waiters would put a table against the booth table as an extension, but that seldom was necessary. We hardly ever numbered fewer than five or more than nine and eight was the most comfortable; four on each side of the table and two at the open end. I describe the seating arrangements because I never saw anyone make room for Jack Pyne. If he joined our table, he had to sit at the open end. And I never heard anyone actually ask him to sit down.
He would come in, say a few words to the hatcheck girl, and head for our table. “Hello, there, you muggs,” he would say.
Somebody would say, “Jack,” and the others would nod—or not nod. There was one fellow, a newspaper reporter, who would be a bit more loquacious. “Why, hello there, Jack. We were just talking about you.”
“Oh, yeah? What’d you say?”
“Just saying what a great fellow you were. We just got finished taking a vote.”
“Come off it.”
“On the level. We’re raising a little purse to send you on a trip. Where would you rather go, Jack? Devil’s Island? You speak French, don’t you, Jack?”
“Lay off, lay off, you muggs.”
There was no insult he would not take, whether it concerned his honesty, his morals, his manhood, his appearance, or his methods of earning a living. The newspaper reporter who suggested Devil’s Island (and who had first called him a mystery man) would mention an extraordinary sexual perversion and suddenly say, “What’s it like, Jack? I hear that’s what you go for.” Always, when they were making a fool of him, he would pretend to think they were kidding him, as though they would only kid a man they were fond of. But it was all insulting, often straight-factual, and finally not very funny. We all had a crack at insulting Jack Pyne, but he was so totally lacking in self-respect and so completely unable or unwilling to make any kind of retort that we finally did lay off, and he became a bore. I think we began to hate him then. He was a bore, and a terribly cheap individual, and because we had given up the mean sport of insulting him, he convinced himself that he was one of the boys.
We all read the same newspapers and heard the same gossip, and that went for Jack Pyne. He had the same information we had out of the newspapers, but now he had opinions as well. He was one of the boys, and he would hold forth on politics and sports and other topics of the day, and I’ve never known anyone who could be so consistently wrong about everything. We would sit in glassy-eyed silence while he told us what he thought was going to happen at City Hall or the Polo
Grounds or the Garden. And why. If there were only four or five of us at the table we would fiddle with matchbooks, make rings on the table with our highball glasses, and neither look at Jack nor say a word to him. Then when he had said his say we would resume talking, but not about the topic Jack had just discussed. We would not agree with him, we would not contradict him; we would simply ignore all he had said. Almost literally we were giving him the freeze. When our group was larger, when there were so many of us that the waiter added the extra table, Jack Pyne was no problem. The larger group always meant that one of the Broadway columnists was present, and Jack Pyne knew better than to interrupt their monologs. The Broadway columnists were his gods, his heroes—and his bread and butter.
You may wonder why we put up with Jack Pyne. The answer is easy: in the beginning he had been a pathetic clown, and later there was no way to get rid of him. And I guess we were not very selective on the late shift. The meat salesman was no Wilson Mizner, the radio announcer no Oliver Herford, the Broadway doctor no James Abbott MacNeill Whistler. We did not pretend to be the Algonquin Round Table, and there was no test of wit that a man had to pass to be welcome in our group. We were brought together by the circumstances of our jobs and their unconventional hours, and the attraction of convivial drinking. The married men among us never brought their wives, and the rest of us rarely brought a girl. Our conversation would have bored women, and women would have inhibited our conversation. From this distance I could not repeat one of our conversations, not so much because the talk was rough—although it was that—as because it was so immediately topical. It was lively, but evanescent, and the interruptions by Jack Pyne only gave us a chance to get our breath.
Then one night—say around four o’clock in the morning—the character of our meetings began to change. It was not something we noticed at the time, but I know now that the change began when one of the smallies came to our table and said to Jack Pyne, “Hey, Pincus, I want to talk to you.” Jack got up and followed the gangster to an empty table. They talked for five minutes or so, and Jack came back to our table and the gangster returned to his group.
“Who’s your friend, Jack?” said the newspaper reporter. “I don’t remember seeing him before. Don’t want to see him again, either.”
“I went to school with him. We grew up together,” said Jack Pyne.
“He didn’t look as if he went to school very long.”
“No. I knew him in sixth grade. Seventh grade. Around then,” said Jack Pyne.
“He’s been away?”
“I’ll say he has. He was doing five to ten up the river. He only got out about a month ago.”
“What was the rap, Jack?”
“Why, I guess it was felonious assault. I didn’t ask him, but I remember hearing about it. I think he was up twice. I don’t know. I don’t know for sure.”
“He knew you. He made you the minute you came in tonight.”
“Yeah. Yeah, I guess he did. I guess he was kind of expecting me.”
“What has he, got some little broad he wants you to get her picture in the paper?”
“I didn’t say that, did I?” said Jack Pyne.
“You didn’t say anything, but that’s a pretty good guess, isn’t it? Your fame has spread far and wide, Jack. You’re getting somewhere. Who’s the broad? We’ll find out, so don’t be coy.”
“Ella Haggerty. She’s in the Carroll show.”
“Mixed up with a hood like that? She does better than that, Jack.”
“Not now she doesn’t, and she better not. He’s stuck on her.”
“She doesn’t need you to get her picture in the paper. I know Ella. You guys know Ella Haggerty.”
Some of us did, and some of us didn’t.
“I know her myself,” said Jack Pyne. “She recommended me. She told Ernie to hire me, and Ernie said he went to school with me.”
“Small world. What’s Ernie’s last name?”
“Black, he goes by. Ernie Black. It used to be Schwartz.”
“Well, what the hell? Mine used to be Vanderbilt, but Buckley’s easier to remember. I’ll tell you something, Jack. Your friend Ernie, whether it’s Black or Schwartz, he’s got himself a very expensive lady friend.”
“I know that.”
“You know whose girl she was for a couple of years.”
“I know.”
“And where he had her living and all that? Those fur coats and diamonds.”
“I been to her apartment. I know all that,” said Jack Pyne.
“You know all that. Then what’s she doing with some smallie like this Ernie Black? You don’t go from J. Richard Hammersmith to some cheap hood just out of stir.”
“She did.”
“She did, but you better find out why, and you better get your money in advance. The way I see it, Jack, you’ve got nothing but trouble ahead of you. This coffee-and-cakes mobster, he hasn’t got enough dough to keep her in bath salts. So he’s going to have to get big all of a sudden, and how do you get big in his racket? You know as well as I do. From where he is, you start by killing somebody. That’s the only way to make a fast big score. Homicide.”
“I know, I know,” said Jack Pyne.
“And even then you don’t get rich, unless you happen to kill somebody very big. And if you kill somebody very big, you end up very dead. Jack, you ought to get out of this contract as quickly and as gracefully as you can.”
“I can’t,” said Pyne. “I made a contract.”
“Then leave town.”
“Sure. Where would I go? My show closed Saturday and I got expenses.”
“Well, if you don’t want to take my advice, that’s up to you,” said Buckley.
“Who’s the banker tonight?” said Jack Pyne.
“I am,” I said.
Jack tossed me a five-dollar bill. “I had two drinks. Give me three bucks change.”
I did so, and he left.
“You know,” said Buckley. “I wouldn’t be surprised if I accomplished something tonight. I think we finally got rid of the mystery man.”
“Is that what you were doing?” I said.
“Sure. Everything I said was true, but Pyne hadn’t looked at it that way. It just needed me to point out certain disadvantages.”
Buckley was entirely correct. Days, then weeks, then years passed, and no more was seen of Jack Pyne. It was as though the sewer had swallowed him up. Our group, I have said, changed in character, and I may be putting too much emphasis on the effect Jack Pyne’s disappearance produced. But there is no use denying the coincidence that the only time we were visited by one of the smallies, one of our number disappeared. We didn’t talk about the coincidence, but one of the smallies had invaded our territory despite the implied protection we enjoyed from the big shots.
Several months after Jack Pyne vanished a body was fished out of the East River. It was identified as Ernie Black, né Schwartz, and the mutilations indicated to police that Black had been tortured in gangster fashion. I advanced the theory that we might soon be welcoming Jack Pyne back to the fold, but I was wrong. Wherever he had gone, he liked it better than The Leisure, and not long after that The Leisure itself was raided and permanently closed. We had to find a new late spot, and in so doing we lost some of our group and recruited some newcomers. Then I changed jobs and got married and moved to Great Neck, and began leading a very different life from the one I had known.
That was more than thirty years ago. We have grandchildren now, and my wife and I last year bought a little house near Phoenix, Arizona. I have my retirement pay, a few securities, and an unsteady income from my writing. I occasionally sell a piece to a magazine and I have written two books, one of which did well as a paperback. Our two daughters are married and living in the East, and until about a month ago it looked as though we had it made. We liked Arizona; the climate suited us, we made
new friends, we had no money worries, the future looked good. So did the past. Our new friends seemed to be entertained by my reminiscences of the old days, and now and then I could convert my reminiscences into an honest buck. For instance, I wrote a story about Ella Haggerty that I sold as fiction but was almost straight fact. Ella married a clarinet player in 1930 or ’31 and shortly after that dropped out of sight. The piano player from The Leisure, the man known as Teeth, went to Paris, France, during the depression and became a great hit. He was married briefly to an English lady of title, and after World War II he was awarded the Medal of Resistance, which must have amused him as much as it did me. I had a letter from him in 1939. He was thinking of writing his memoirs even then, and he particularly called my attention to his new name—Les Dents. “It sounds like ‘let’s dance’ if you pronounce it English style but I talk mostly French these days,” he wrote. Only one of the former big shots is still alive. He is living, I believe, in Hot Springs, Arkansas. My friend Buckley, the newspaper reporter, was killed in the War. He and another correspondent, riding in a jeep in Italy, hit a land mine. His old paper established the Buckley Scholarship at a school of journalism, a memorial he would object to as he hated the very word journalism. My friends of the old days who have survived are in the minority, and Madge and I have our aches and pains as well as the obituary pages to remind us of the passage of time, but things were going all right until last month, when one afternoon Madge came to my workroom and said a man wanted to see me. “Who is he?” I said.