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“Maxx is Spillane with a vicious sense of humor. The book kept me up at night!”

—J. Christoph Amberger, author of The Lazarus Smile

Vic Del Frate isn’t your average hood. He is violent, crude, greedy—and he has a head for numbers. He’s a figurer, a schemer, a manipulator who’s as deadly with his hands as he is playing the stock market of pre-Crash Wall Street. Worst of all, he’s head over two-tone wingtip heels in love with the woman of a rich conman. Vic infiltrates a major stock market scam, derails the grand opening of a new railroad, and accidentally blows up a train station before his ugly past catches up with him. This first instalment of his memoirs, based on audio tapes discovered in a Miami yard sale, catapults the reader straight into the corrupt underbelly of Prohibition-era New York City—a world of brutal gangsters, reptilian frauds, and beautiful, vengeful broads, a lethal warren of Macchiavellian power struggles, Byzantine plots, and epic Fratricide...

WARNING: This tale contains rude language that reflect 20th-century ethnic rivalries and that some readers may find disturbing and/or offensive. Secret Archives Press recommends you don’t read this if you’re easily offended, or that you take the proverbial chill pill.

A Secret Archive Press QuickRead Book.

Fratricide:

No Good Deed A Sordid Tale by

SMT Maxx

2014 Published by Secret Archives Press, LLC, Towson, Maryland, USA

Copyright Secret Archives Press LLC, 2013 ISBN (pbk) 978-0-9843152-3-9

All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy, or transmission of this book, may be made without written permission of the copyright holder. The scanning, uploading and distribution of this text via the Internet or via any other means without permission is illegal and punishable by law.

12345 Printed in the United States of America.

First published in the United States by Secret Archives Press, LLC Fratricide: No Good Deed is a Secret Archives Press QuickRead work of historical fiction. Plot and characters of this tale are fictional. Similarities with people living or dead are purely coincidental.

On Secret Archives Press QuickRead books: “If any literary work is too long to be read at one sitting, we must be content to dispense with the immensely important effect derivable from unity of impression — for, if two sittings be required, the affairs of the world interfere, and every thing like totality is at once destroyed. (...) It appears evident, then, that there is a distinct limit, as regards length, to all works of literary art — the limit of a single sitting.”

—Edgar Allan Poe, The Philosophy of Composition (1846) Secret Archives Press QuickRead books are designed with the modern, multi-tasking reader in mind, optimized to fit the short, fragmented, opportunities of leisure in the airplane, on the bus, during a particularly boring class at school, or while you wait for the microwave to heat up your dinner. They aim to pack as much action and reading enjoyment into as compact and easy-toread a format as possible—a handy bucket of popcorn to be consumed to the soundtrack of your life.

On the Fratricide series: Fratricide is based on the unpublished memoirs of Vittorio Del Frate (1900-1973), transcribed from voice recordings discovered in a yard sale in Miami, Florida, in 2002.

(CARDOZO, CJ.) Plaintiff was standing on a platform of defendant’s railroad after buying a ticket to go to Rockaway Beach. A train stopped at the station, bound for another place. Two men ran forward to catch it. One of the men reached the platform of the car without mishap, though the train was already moving. The other man, carrying a package, jumped aboard the car, but seemed unsteady as if about to fall. A guard on the car, who had held the door open, reached forward to help [341] him in, and another guard on the platform pushed him from behind.

In this act, the package was dislodged, and fell upon the rails.

It was a package of small size, about fifteen inches long, and was covered by a newspaper. In fact it contained fireworks, but there was nothing in its appearance to give notice of its contents. The fireworks when they fell exploded. The shock of the explosion threw down some scales at the other end of the platform, many feet away. The scales struck the plaintiff, causing injuries for which she sues.

Palsgraf v. Long Island R. Co., 248 N.Y. 339 (1928).

1

“The law of causation, remote or proximate, is thus foreign to the case before us.”

—Benjamin Nathan Cardozo Chief Judge of the New York Court of Appeals Palsgraf v. Long Island R. Co., 248 N.Y. 339, 346 (N.Y. 1928).

“I dislike and despise the thug known as Vic Del Frate.

It’s only for the sake of Truth and History that I convinced myself that I should edit his memoirs.”

—SMT Maxx Editor of the Del Frate Estate (2014)

2

New York, 1924

Chapter 1

I

t hits you right in the gut. You feel your soul depart as if sucked down the yawning black hole of a 23rd Street sewer.

All kinds of stuff go through your head, none making any sense, but all building up to absolute certainty that you’ve had it. You’re about to die. Any second now.

That moment, you’re in a bad way, believe me.

It’s even worswe if one of the fingers curling around the checkered wooden grip of your own .45 is wearing a diamond solitaire that cost you the price of a brand-new Cadillac. When the hand aiming the gun at your vital parts belongs to the girl you’ve just married.

“What...,” I croaked, my mouth tasting of copper and black pudding.

“Be quiet, Vittorio,” she said. “Sit over there.”

The gat’s black eye winked at a corner chair, an antique Shaker number that had cost me— well, it didn’t matter now how much I blew on it. Its ladderback now looked liked a gibbet or pillory, something sadistic little Pilgrim minds had cooked up for the greater glory of Jehosaphat1. I sat, and, as a token of my good intentions and compliance, planted my hands palm-up on my knees.

1 Del Frate presumably means “Jehova,” “Jahweh,” or possibly “Jove”.

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Chapter 1

I’m a giver, after all. Thought I’d remind her. She didn’t need reminding, though. She knew. All of it. I saw it in the way she was sitting in my chair, at my desk, with my .45 in her hand. The way she looked at me. On the desk was an open bottle of Möet Chandon, vintage 1905, with a custom label right below the gold foil of the neck.

“Norddeutscher Lloyd,” it read, with a small vignette of the SS Prinz Friedrich Wilhelm under full steam. The label was smudged, the gold foil torn, the dark green glass smeared from me turning it in my hands ever so often. This was the keystone to my wealth. The starting point of my story. A holy relic, really, like Saint Anthony’s mummified dick: Sacred indeed, but not much to look at. I kept it to remind me how wealth was made whenever I feel the good life dulling my edge. Now I wished that I’d sharpened that edge recently.

“Vittorio,” she said in an quiet alto that was utterly devoid of the girlish giggle I’d fallen in love with. “I’ve got good news.”

She negligently waved the blue steel in her fist at a ramrodstraight figure standing in front of the opened cabinet. I turned and looked at a man whose picture I’d turned toward the wall a hundred times—shaved clean now and dressed in a grey suit. He was holding a tumbler of medicinal Scotch in his right hand. My medicinal Scotch.

I looked from her to him, and from him back to her. The two looked at me with the sympathy of a tommy gun. And I realized.

How could I’ve missed it?

5

Chapter 2

B

ut I better start from the top. If there’s a legitimate way of figuring out what exactly qualifies as such. That’s the problem. Do you start at the point that directly caused your current dilemma? Or do you just go back as far as it takes to explain a particular set of facts, like how you first ran into the people who’re about to punch a dime-sized hole into your forehead with your own .45?

I wish I knew.

My name’s Victor Del Frate. Friends call me Vic. My mother called me Vittorio for as long as she lived, which was until I was about twelve years old. I’m tall for my age, just shy of six three — tall for any Italian born between Bensonhurst, Howard Beach, and Rosebank. Then again, I’m twenty-four, as old as the twentieth century. I can pass for a Yank, a Kraut, or a Russki on account of my sand-colored hair and light skin. Which is why my Wop friends also call me tedescacco—bad German. They mean it as an insult. But coming from a mafia, a colera, a maroco, an africa2 with hairy knuckles and hairlines hovering straight above the eyebrows, I’ve never considered it such. It’s an Italian thing. You wouldn’t understand.

2 I’ve been assured by Italian experts that all preceding terms are highly offensive to natives of southern Italy.

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Chapter 2

I work for myself. I’m a self-made man, a tiller of the ground, if you will. I’m an entrepreneur and a figurer. My business is my business. It’s paid me well because I have a head for numbers. On of my favorites is .45, which is why I carry one under my left arm most of the day and all of most nights. That’s my idea of safety in numbers.

I first saw Hedy when she blew into a fancy shindig thrown

by Justice St. Andrews. And when I say “blew” I mean blew: She floated at his side like a spring gale, all honeysuckle, lilac, and lavender, a dream caressed by mother-of-pearl gauze and silver lamé ending two inches above two of the most perfect knees you can imagine. When she appeared, men fell silent, jaws dropped and women’s kissers puckered. Not the kissy way, but the whoput-the-fuckin’-vinegar-into-my-martini sort. Me? I forgot the punch line to the dirty joke I was telling the junior cazzi from J.P. Morgan. My chin bounced off the polished parquet and I reached for a tumbler of gin that one of the Hungarian waiters pushed through the crowd on a tray. I drained it in one gulp.

The hemlock punch to my gut suckered me back into the world and my mandible back into its sockets. “Pygmies are running c—, cunning runts.” I’d screwed up my joke and I didn’t give a damn. “’scuse me, boys, there’s a hand I need to shake,” I said and, like a moth drawn to a witch burning at the stake, followed in the couple’s wake.

The man I knew too well to need introductions. He was the reason I was at the party. Part medium-height armoire, part pugilist, with the deranged nose to go with it, Justice St. Andrews was surrounded by a gaggle of sycophants, those paid to suck up, and the rubes who lined his pockets in exchange for his wisdom.

The latter wore a small, purple ribbon in their lapels so they could tell each other from baboons even with their pants on. St. Andrews 7

No Good Deed

loved them like a father. The more they paid him, the better he loved ‘em. The others were here for the drinks and the food. Those he loved less.

He might’ve stood out from the salivating invertebrates all by himself, even without the frail at his side. His threads had them all beat. They were the finest money can buy, Italian fabrics (of course), cut and stitched together by Frog tailors and flown in from London via private aeroplane. For the money he’d spent, he might’ve had spiders weave, elves sew, and unicorns fly them in. It all went with the scheme. For a Bronx Paddy accursed with the name of Mike O’Foghladh, St. Andrews played the born-tomoney Wasp to perfection. There were times when I thought he’d sold himself on his own con. He was that good.

But Mickey O’Foghladh wasn’t who I was after. I wanted, demanded, needed a closer look at the blonde. Half a head taller than the Mick, her shortish, honey-colored curls framed a face that would’ve made Titian forget about his paintbrush and reach for his salami: Her eyes were pure light, like firework reflections on the sea off Rockaway Beach on the Fourth of July. Cherry mouth, the upper lip shaped like a Scythian bow (whatever the hell that may be), chiseled, ivory features that would’ve made the Madonna weep tears of poison-green envy.

But that’s not what got your attention, not all of it. It was her body, tall, straight, trim, with just enough padding to have me stand at instant attention, and a set of poppe on display that made your fingers contract involuntarily, like a blind man trying to divine the soft, tender ripeness of peaches the size of a child’s head.

“Vic, you old blaggard,” roared St. Andrews in his best poncey Britisher accent. “How are you, old fellow?! I’d like you to meet Hedy, the newest star of St. Andrews Productions!”

8

Chapter 2

The passing tray-Hunky3 gave me all the time I needed to tuck myself firmly under my cummerbund.

“Hedwig Sorensen, pleased to meet you,” she said in the most beautiful alto voice I’d ever heard. And I believed every word she said. Her eyes lit up the world around me, beamed right into my soul. I was a seagull trapped on the railing of a lighthouse at midnight, with a whole codfish rammed down my beak tail first.

“Vit... Victor Del Frate,” I managed to croak. “Pleasure’s all mine.”

“Vic’s one of my dearest friends,” boomed St. Andrews in his fake Drury Lane sing-song. He flashed shiny, brand-new porcelain chops. “A capital fellow.”

I don’t know what came over me then, but the twin alabaster bombs blessed by gauze and lamé made my head swim. Something clicked inside my head as my world realigned its axis. “We even have a common ancestor,” I said and grinned at her. “Sir Francis Drake.”

St. Andrew’s smile crumbled. I never knew if he hated it more to be reminded of who he was, or of the time he’d run another man’s scam. “Right,” he said without enthusiasm, suddenly eager to push on. “Well, old chap, let’s catch up later,” and he tried to nudge the angel at his side into the crowd.

“Give my love to Kathleen,” I said, knowing full well that my affection would never make it to his wife’s fancy digs in Miami.

The dregs of his smile weren’t pretty.

He pushed on and so did she, but not before she’d taken my right into her hands—cool, white, soft, tender hands: “What a true pleasure to meet you, Victor. You simply must tell me about Francis Drake. Soon.” And she shot me a look that shaved 20 years 3 “Hunky” originally was a pejorative denoting immigrants from Eastern Europe, especially Hungary. The more modern term “honky” (for white person) is directly derived from it.

9

No Good Deed

off my life and left me a four-year-old inside a candy store staffed by girl elves wearing nothing but gossamer nighties and handing out lollipops the size of New Jersey.

I watched her drift away, the immaculate heart shape of her rear, her endless legs in silk stockings as delicate and diaphanous as the breath of a spider goddess on a cold night, with silver straps embracing her ankles like the arms of midget acolytes. And I knew then and there that I had to make her mine. I can’t tell you how long I’d been standing like this when a sharp rap upside the back of my head brought me back down from leg show heaven.

“Vittorio!”

Maria Dolorosa’s voice grated like nails on a blackboard. “Put your tongue back into your mouth and take me home.”

My soul cried out as I looked at my fiancée, then it wept silently. She was a pretty girl, to be sure, in a dark, guinea kind of way. I suddenly noticed the olive tint of her skin, the hush of black hair on her lower arms, the nicotine stains on her front teeth. I looked past her. Whatever had happened to the Roman goddess I had taken to the party? “Sure thing, carissima,” I said, smiling like I meant it. We left, my mind reeling from the pure light, the smooth stockings, the glorious breasts. Figuring out how to set the bird on my arm free before the sun was up. Maybe after just one last good kiss bye-bye.

10

Chapter 3

N

ext morning, my man Gilbert brought Justice. Or at least an invite from St. Andrews to join him at his club.

Urgent, it said.

It was a summons, really, not an invitation. I laughed and used the writ to light my morning constitutional, a fat, hand-rolled Cuban dipped in 100-year-old cognac. It still tasted like shit, but noblesse oblige. I like to keep up appearances.

I had a large breakfast of eggs-over-easy on toast, melon and Parma, then read up on what was happening in the market. I do like to keep up on things, be it just another down in a long line of ups. I’d been in and out of the market for weeks now, not because I believe in bull, but because movement is money. And money is life. And life is movement. Believe me, I’m a cautious man. But I like seeing Fate at work: There’s beauty in numbers, just as there can be beauty in red ruin and death. If you’ve got an eye for it.

I made a point of being more than just fashionably late to St. Andrews’ “club.” It was quite literally his, just as much as it was about him. You see, much to his chagrin, the old money in town still didn’t acknowledge his existence. (After all, they had a generation or two between themselves and the scumbags who created the coin they now spent. And the old figlio di puttana 11

No Good Deed

had yet to father any bastard claim to legitimacy.) But in the end, their turned-up and pinched-shut noses really were a blessing and Justice knew it: Old-Money probes the past of newcomers more deeply than a country veterinarian going for a breech-birthing calf. After all, he was a con and a jailbird and there were no two ways about that. But it still rankled.

So he’d done the next best thing and turned an old brownstone into a display case to himself. He spared no expense: The place was lined with dark, hand-carved wood and as cheerful as the inside of a Quaker’s coffin. You couldn’t drop a nickel without it getting sucked into overstuffed leather chairs and horsehaircovered sofas. The heads of dead animals stared from the walls, dimly lit by crystal chandeliers. There were oil paintings in gilded frames, even a couple of marble broads showing off their assets in various artistic poses. And since St. Andrews fancied himself an art connoisseur of sorts, there was always a stack of unframed canvases leaning somewhere, absurd stuff from Frog and Hun painters I wouldn’t hang in my bathroom for fear they’d give me the shits for a week.

The club had a huge dining room, a library of unread books with gold-lettered spines, a weight room, even a boxing ring in the basement, where St. Andrews used to bounce on his toes in late afternoon, jabbing at whatever local hero money could hire to hold still for a couple of rounds. He’d recently discovered the joys of Jap wrestling. Now he’d spend an hour a day rolling around the floor with other sweaty men, prodded by a Filipino pretending to be a Chinaman pretending to teach the killing arts of the Japanese knights to a Bronx Mick posing as a Brit. (Myself? I prefer my enemies dressed, dry, and at a distance—ideally with a hole in the head put there by my .45.) And since I knew how much the Mick liked to drag visitors into his morning rolls on the mat—he kept 12

Chapter 3

an extra tricot or two for just that purpose—I’d timed my arrival to avoid getting my boys squeezed, but just in time to interrupt the obligatory rub-down by a well-used Swedish masseuse.

Justice rolled on his stomach when I barged past the fartsucker who tried to keep me from entering. The Swede quickly threw a towel over St. Andrews’ oiled ass and closed her white coat. I could see him fuming when he saw it was I. I could also see she was naked under the coat.

I liked her that way myself. A lot.

“You’re late,” he barked, propping himself up on his lower arms.

He now looked like a mangy seal copulating with the massage table. He must’ve realized it, because he made a brief attempt at rolling on his side, then remembered the emotional state of his dipstick and flopped right back on his belly.

“Sorry, chum. Business. You know how it goes.” I grinned and nodded at his groin: “Good workout? Don’t get what you see in those guys.”

Furious, he waved off the broad. With a sly grin and a wink, she shoved off, swinging her bareass buns at me under her short white nurse coat. By the time the mahogany doors cut off the vista, St. Andrews had swung himself into a sitting position, legs dangling, towel carefully draped to conceal the remains of his excitement.

“We need to talk,” he snarled, his fancy accent gone, overly conscious that a middle-aged man in a towel dangling his legs from a padded table was about as intimidating as a mole with pincenéz.

“Sure thing,” I said with a grin. “But put some pants on, Spartacus.”

He looked like he was going to bite my head off with his shiny new chops but thought better of it. Instead, he clicked his pearly 13

No Good Deed

whites, then called for his lickspittle to show me into his office.

Where I then waited for the better part of fifteen minutes, sipping his brandy and pondering the ways of the world.

Now, I think you’ll need a bit of backfill on St. Andrews and I. Just to understand who I was dealing with. If he was full of himself, and the man-high portrait of himself behind his desk implied that it was coming out his ears, he’d earned the rights to it the hard way. Mickey O’Foghladh may have been a run-of-themill grifter. But Justice St. Andrews truly was a prince of cons.

Call him the most successful practitioner of scientific fraud in the world and you’d not be all that far off. His specialty was selling dreams to insomniacs who weren’t aware they could nap.

I know they say you can’t cheat an honest man. That may be true. It might not be. I can’t say for sure because I’ve never met an honest man. Which is fine and dandy, especially with people like the Mick: Honest people are as attractive to a con as a rusty razor is to a hemophiliac. Cons prefer marks.

Luckily, there’s as many marks as there are stars in the sky.

They come in all shapes and sizes: Kings and beggars, priests and sinners, gamblers and pennypinchers. Marks paid for all the great achievements of humanity: They liked being fleeced to build the pyramids, the Parthenon, the New World, the railroads. Driven by larcenous appetites for easy money, they’ve turned the world into Swiss cheese mining for gold and diamonds from California to Cape Town. For ten bucks of unearned wealth, they’d part with a hundred, a thousand, a million even, eagerly and voluntarily.

Marks are what truew religion is made of: Believers—trusting, rationalizing, hoping against hope and fact and proof, even when the promise itself was crashing down their ears. Their’s is the Fool’s Golden Rule: Loving the hustler as they do themselves. Maybe even a tad more.

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Chapter 3

St. Andrews had embraced the study of Marks with the fervor of a convert. For more than two decades, he’d probed, disected, distilled their little minds and discovered that regardless of the phonograph, moving pictures, the automobile, the wireless, and flying machines, the quintessential sucker still dreamed of turning dirt into gold and shit into diamonds: Windfall treasure, come by without effort.

In the days before the Great War, when he was still just Mickey O’, he’d worked his way south, from country sideshows to the KuKlux Klan. He’d made it to King Kleagle, one of the top salesmen of the Klan in Alabama. Not a bad racket for a Catholic Irisher from the Bronx, conning angry Southern Baptists into giving him money to tar and feather the Papist Spics, Wops, Dagos, and the odd Polack4 who supposedly were after their daughters and wives.

Whom Mickey himself was knocking up by the dozen. It was a hustler’s paradise. Until one day, while nodding benevolently at a parade of dunce caps passing down a minor Main Street, he noticed one thing: Every set of pegs shuffling below the bed sheets ended in scuffed, scratched, worn brogans or work boots.

It struck him: How much money could you reasonably expect to squeeze from hillbillies in scuffed boots? Rubes who wouldn’t know and certainly couldn’t afford a custom-made pair of calfskin cordovans if it kicked them in the rear?

That night, Mickey took off with the Kleagle Kash box. Before the week was over, he had signed on with Otto Yant5, a drab Iowan Kraut with a thin mustache and a dreamy look in his eyes that people took for vision, but that Mickey found to be the result of the witch hazel he used to stir into his morning coffee. Otto, 4 It is frequently forgotten these days that the KKK was not only anti-black, but also antiimmigrant and especially anti-Catholic.

5 Otto Garrison Yant was born Apr. 25, 1885 in Calhoun County, Iowa, and died May 1, 1965 in Wisconsin.

15

No Good Deed

as you may remember, was the third lieutenant of Oscar “The Great” Hartzell6, proud inventor of the Drake Inheritance racket.

Hartzell raked in hundreds of thousands of dollars each month from his network of subcontractors working the Midwest. It was here that Mickey made the discovery that would eventually turn the little huckster with his improbable Paddy name into Justice St. Andrews, investor in souls. That insight was—you ready for this?—”no matter how smart, educated, or well-off people may think they are, you can clean them like catfish if you sell them exactly what they want to believe. No matter how obviously stupid it may be!”

The Drake scam was all the proof you’d ever need. German, Swedish, Swiss, Norwegian farmers plowing the prairies between the Windy and the Rapid City gorged on the idea that they were bastards of the English rogue Sir Francis Drake—and as such entitled to part of a twenty-billion dollar inheritance that some fearless philanthropist lawyers were prying from the clutches of the British Crown. It was pure hogwash, of course, every word a lie, and even the pauses in between a calculated deception. But even the most prudish cheesehead, who’d have whipped his own daughter into the street had there been a hint of “illegitimacy,” embraced the idea of being an English bastard if only it came with a million-dollar share of a fictitious inheritance.

While most cons shook down one mark at a time, Mickey set out to shear the herd, shepherd and dog included. For this, a con requires three things. A great name, a Big Idea, and marks receptive to both. Religions, prophets and small-time hucksters 6 Oscar Hartzell (1876–1943) was one of the greatest conmen before Bernie Madoff. The son of an Iowan farmer, he picked up on the already existing Drake scam in 1915 and managed to snare an estimated 70-100,000 victims, including members of the Royal Family, in both the U.S. and Great Britain. In 1934, he was sentenced to ten years in prison for fraud. He died in a prison hospital in 1943.

16

Chapter 3

tend to rely on end-of-the-world nonsense for their Big Idea. But in Hartzell’s Drake Scam, Mickey had found a perfectly seasoned and proven Big Idea that didn’t even require a semblance of fact.

All he really needed was a name.

He moved to Chicago, bought a case of whisky from a Drake of Albanian descent and a pot still in Michigan, rented a three-room apartment, and locked the door from the inside. The first week he spent crafting his new name and identity. Here’s how to do it if you should feel so inclined: It has to be posh, yet affect grandiose understatement. It has to project virtue and righteousness and just hint at Old-World nobility. This is the trick: It has to be fancy but not overdone, impressive without actually inviting scrutiny of social registers. Before he rechristening himself “Justice St. Andrews” a few years later, he’d created a masterpiece of scientific grift and applied psychology: Arthur Russ-Berkeley, F.R.S.I. No real title, no Sir, nothing that could be checked or verified. Just a hyphen, the implied secular imprimature of two proud patrician families pouring their all into one scion who bore a name of kings.

And the F.R.S.I.? Fellow of the Royal Society of Investors.

Royal Society of Imbeciles, I say.

It took another week to set up a small press, but then he was in business. Cutting out Yant and Hartzell altogether, he began working his Drake sucker list. Within another week, Arthur Russ-Berkeley, F.R.S.I., had become an inveterate crusader for inheritance rights, soliciting contributions to lobby Congress to put pressure on the English government: “Release Drake’s billions!” He began mailing regular memoranda on the progress of the fictitious law suit. And Drake’s bastards paid. They paid even more when his hacks started to churn out custom pedigrees that proved beyond a doubt they were descended from Drake, if not the Virgin Queen herself. And since it worked like a charm, he rented other sucker lists, started three, four other product 17

No Good Deed

lines: Claims to the Czar’s crown jewels for Russkis and Polacks and Jews. Promise of Attila’s treasure to Hunky descendants of Arpad the Gypsy. And since the Kaiser had just been kicked out of Germany then, there were plenty of American wild oafs entitled to Hohenzollern treasure, thanks to the grandpa of George Sylvester Viereck7.

No matter how stupid and implausible the premise, the marks kept biting. The Mick was living high on the hog, developing expensive tastes—until the U.S. Postal Inspector took a closer look at the Russ-Berkeley line of products. You know, the same guy who popped Charley Ponzi’s pretty little game. The Postal Inspector didn’t like what he saw and, after checking with the few genealogists who’d not yet been hired by the Drake men, confiscated $200,000—the only Drake treasure there was—right from the Mick’s bank accounts, and put Mickey O’Foghladh in the slammer for mail fraud.

That’s where I met him, in the chow line, as I was sitting out a charge of attempted murder. Of course, I was innocent. In my line of business, there’s no such thing as “attempted murder”: I take on a job, I do it right. First time, right away, nicely. Thankfully, a grave miscarriage of justice was prevented by the only witness falling into Lake Erie. Bad things happen to good people. Especially if you happen to know enough bad people ready to do bad things for a good cause.

So now you know why I wasn’t overly impressed by Mickey’s summons and the show he was about to put on for my benefit.

Even if his new name, Justice St. Andrews, was leagues better than its predecessor, familiarity does breed contempt: You’ll never again respect a man once you saw him waiting his turn to take a crap in a prison latrine. But given our history, you may rightfully wonder 7 Son of the German Socialist Louis Viereck, reportedly an illegitimate son of Germany’s royal and imperial Hohenzollern family.

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Chapter 3

why, after all these years, I was out to antagonize an old prisonmate who made good. Well, for one, I despise a con as much as I despise his marks, no matter what kind of genius he is. He lacks a moral core. For the other, I’ve got one word for you.

Hedy.

It hadn’t been eighteen hours since I first clapped eyes on her, and I’d already made major life changes. But I didn’t care. I believe in love at first sight. And those never-ending legs and swelling breasts under the lamé sure looked like love to me, well worth razing some obstacles from the road to sheer bliss. Who knows, I thought then, depending how she turned out in bed, I might even go all the way. Marry her. Maybe, possibly, even go straight!

Maybe.

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Chapter 4

I

figured it would take Mickey-Russ-Berkeley-St. Andrews ten, fifteen minutes to get the Swede’s grease off his body. At least that’s how long it takes me whenever she’s plied her subtle arts on me. Justice St. Andrews’ oily portrait, purple ribbon and all, frowned at me as I got up from my seat and took a look around.

First thing I noticed was that the legs of his chair were about three inches higher than those of mine. I almost laughed out loud. The old con simply thought of everything! He’d sit and look down at the lowly sap in front of him, a God behind His desk, dispensing plenty for a price.

So I switched the chairs. Honestly, wouldn’t you? Since they were identical except for the length of their legs, he wouldn’t notice at first. Then I turned my attention to the desk. Right in the center, between two under-endowed bronze nancy boys playing grab-ass in the buff, I noticed St. Andrews’ memento mori: Between two sheets of cut glass, held together by brightly polished brass, he’d framed a single, postmarked two-cent stamp, to be used as a paper weight. Nothing special, just a simple stamp. Small, almost square, predominantly red, with a bust of George Washington on it that looked like the old boy had a wattle or a goiter or hadn’t 20

Chapter 4

gotten laid all Civil War8 long. Enough to send a love letter from New York to Los Angeles, a court summons from Washington to Cincinnati, an order to kill from Chicago to the Bronx. Or a con to the clink anywhere in the United States of America. Its fifty-two offwhite teeth looked sharp and jagged, like their bite would hurt. Far more deadly than I figured George Washington’s own hippopotamus teeth must have looked. They reminded Justice St. Andrews stay clear of the Postal Service. Which has far more latitude in cracking down on frauds like him or Russ-Berkeley or the plain old Mick than any D.A. could dream of in his wildest, wettest dreams.

Left of the blotter was a stack of expensive envelopes, maybe a hundred of them, each handaddressed in the magnificent cursive of Justice St. Andrews. On the right, there was a sheaf of printed letters, each raving about a particular mining company whose stock was traded by curb brokers in front of J.P. Morgan’s Wall Street digs. Each was hand-signed in royal blue ink, “Your Obedient Servant, Justice St. Andrews.” He was a stickler for detail.

And then there was a hand-written list of names and addresses, ten, twenty pages of them.

I took his fountain pen, dipped it in the inkwell, and added two names to the list, one at the bottom of page three, another one on page twelve, using the blotter to keep the fresh ink from smudging. Then I addressed two envelopes in a beautiful cursive that looked every bit like Justice Himself had put pen to paper. I inserted both into the center of the envelopes stack. Another one I carefully placed into the inside pocket of my coat, after folding and inserting one of the printed letters.

No sooner had I draped my body back into my easy chair than the door opened and the Mick came in. His hair was still wet, 8 Obviously, Del Frate means the “Revolutionary War”. Given the obvious breadth of his cultural exposure and language ability, Del Frate’s grasp on American history and religion (see footnote 1) appear to be tenuous at best.

21

No Good Deed

slicked away from his face in long slices of black and grey. He wore a loose, grey silk shirt with a wide collar, unbuttoned far enough to expose some chest hair and a gold necklace.

“Thanks for coming on such short notice,” he said, making an effort to sound amicable. It almost busted his temporal arteries.

“For you, anything,” I grinned.

He settled behind his desk, picked up the envelopes and moved them next to the letters. Then he put the tips of his fingers together, index fingers on the tip of his nose, and gazed at me for a while. I guess he was going for thoughtful, melancholy, or constipated. This worked well on the limberhams in his employ.

On me, of course, it was lost completely. He finally realized that his chair was lower than he was used to and that he sat at his desk like a twelve-year-old at the grown-up dinner table. That’s when Justice the Snob yielded the floor to Mickey the Con. “What was the goddamn Drake bit about last night,” he snared, every bit the Bronx Paddy he was born and raised. I shrugged and grinned straight into his face: “No harm buffing my pedigree in front of a pretty dame,” I said. “And St. Andrews Productions? You movin’ into French pictures now?”

“Of course not,” he hissed, standing up, kicking back his chair.

“I’m investing in a serious motion picture company. But that’s neither here nor there. I called you in because we need to talk.

You’ve been badmouthing my business. Taking pot shots at my employees. That needs to stop, you understand?”

I leaned forward and looked straight into his face. “It’s a free country, Mick. I can say whatever the hell I feel like, and if you don’t like it, that’s just too bad.” I rose and put on my hat. “The only reason I stopped by was to tell you I’ll be asking out Miss Hedy Sorensen, starting tonight. Don’t care if you like it. Don’t care if you don’t.”

22

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Justice St. Andrews flushed bright red and opened his mouth.

But I cut him off. “Give my love to Kathleen. I’ll see myself out.”

And I left him standing there, mouth contorted in a furious sneer, fists tight and white on the desk in front of him.

“You have a very good day now,” I said.

Because I already did.

23

Chapter 5

I

admit, this might not have been my smartest move. Before the hour of noon, I’d made an enemy of a rich and influential con. For a girl I’d seen for less than two minutes the night before, and had absolutely no reason to believe that she even remembered me. Sometimes even a figurer like me acts like a fool.

It hadn’t been my only mistake. It looked like Papa Ilardo, Maria Dolorosa’s old-fashioned Sicilian father, sure wasn’t one to waste time to get even with me on account of his daughter.

When my cab dropped me off in front of my Upper East Side apartment building, Charles, the doorman, was not at his post.

In his stead, two hoods stepped from behind the potted orange trees. Mafias, the two of them, short, stocky, dark, with hair lines as liquid and low as puddles of fish oil on a Palermo dock on a Sunday noon. One slipped his stubby fingers into a pair of brass knuckles, the other picked at the back of a straight razor.

I’m not a great advocate of physical violence. But it has its place in the greater scheme of things. I hit the one with the razor in the throat with the edge of my hand before he even had the blade out. He crumpled, a puppet with his strings cut. Knuckles was coming at me with a straight right. I sidestepped the punch, pivoting on my toes while grabbing the pork hock he called his 24

Chapter 5

hand with my left, placing my thumb on top of the knuckle that sprouted his little finger and grabbing the meat of his thumb with the rest of my hand. Twisting his hand outward, I swung back to face him, and when I rolled his wrist further and helped it along with with my own right hand, his eyes got big, his mouth opened, and he suddenly did a cartwheel that terminated with the impact of his upper body on the sidewalk. My heel found his nose, driving it back into his skull. He started groaning as a viscous red puddle spread around him. I grabbed his compaesano by the collar and whacked his head into the concrete a few times.

Their mamas would’ve difficulties recognizing either of them ever again. If their mamas had ever acknowledged them in the first place.

Of course, I knew I had it coming. I’d ended my engagement to Maria Dolorosa last night, after one last and not entirely unacceptable roll in the hay. She’d turned very stridently dolorosa when, afterwards, I asked her politely to get the hell out of my bed, put her dress back on, and hightail it home. I even called her a cab.

There’d be hell to pay, I was sure. Sicilian mothers take their only daughter’s virginity and matrimonial status overly seriously. As do Sicilian fathers. Even if that virginity might’ve been peddled for a couple of gins and a smoke to a hairy mafia cousin at age thirteen.

This would not just cost me, but it also ended my prospects to tap into her father’s organization on the cheap, a not entirely pleasant but well-connected mafia business specializing in protection as well as the import and export of slightly used goods, both metal and human.

I stepped over the Wop with the razor, only bending over to scoop up the blade. It was a pretty thing, the handle inlaid with mother-of-pearl, the blade a soft, fluid rectangle of exquisite sharpness: If it comes to picking a blade or slitting a throat, there’s 25

No Good Deed

no-one better qualified than a terrone fresh off the boat from Palermo.

Inside the lobby, I helped Charles to his feet and placed his cap back on his head. He winced when the stiff rim pressed down on the welt the Wop’s sap had raised. I stuffed a fiver into his chest pocket and told him to keep up the good work. “And hose down the sidewalk when you get a chance.” When I looked down from my tenth-floor apartment a few minutes later, the two hoods were gone. Only a dual snail trail of wetness pointed at the direction they’d crawled off. Knowing Charles and the hickory ax handle he kept handy near the door, it wasn’t just their heads that would be hurting. He’s the pettty, vengeful kind.

Tracking down Hedy was less difficult than I’d feared. Turned out that Agnes Millay, the rumorspreading, gossip-mongering doyenne of the almost-famous knew she’d be at Tony Lupara’s this night. And since Tony was a good friend of mine, I invited myself to join her. But I still had two phone calls to make, one to my stock broker, and one to a little Armenian who sold insurance.

I’d have to stop by his place on my way to Tony’s for a stick of term-life.

26

Chapter 6

I

f you must know, I’ve known Tony Lupara for most of my life. Sure, he’s a Sicilian, and as Sicilian as they come. But I’ve never held that against him. At least not to his face. He was my first business partner, back in ’14, when he was 18 and I was, well, as old as the century. People thought we were brothers, promising young lads, the two of us. That’s when I made that first crucial bundle of loot that allowed me to set myself up in the liquor racket in the first place.

He, too, did well for himself. In fact, Tony was getting to be top dog in a business where only the wolves survived and the jackals cleaned up those who didn’t. But then he always had a knack for people. Me, I’m a private man. An entrepreneur rather than a businessman. Whatever I do, I prefer doing by myself.

Tony herded dozens of the best minds and fists, not counting the hundreds working for his legal and semi-legal businesses in Jersey, New York, even as far up as Chicago. In recent years, he’d focused his time and ambition on the shore, investing in casinos and hotels along Rockaway Beach, planning to expand it into something like Hot Springs, Arkansas: A public bath and play house where the rich, the dumb, the bored, the feckless would pay through their rumdum noses to be soaped, lathered, 27

No Good Deed

and shorn for whatever they were worth and love every minute of it.

Again, I arrived fashionably late at Lupara’s uptown digs.

Gilbert drove me in my Prussian blue Locomobile and dropped me off a block south. Small groups of fancy people were streaming past the liveried doormen, couples mostly, but also gaggles of men in tails or tuxedos, a strange petri dish of human mold thriving in the substrate of organized crime, business, and politics. The curbs were lousy with limousines, drivers dozing or reading the papers.

Tony wasn’t as happy to see me as he should’ve been, us being friends and all that. But it wasn’t quite unexpected. I’d had the impression recently that he was keeping me out of something.

Something big.

“Tedescacco, what are you getting yourself into again,” he said with a paternal frown. Those four years he had on me made all the difference, you see, both to his demeanor and his waist line.

He now was a big man with the face of a sawed-off shotgun, well fed on bonded scotch and veal, affecting age and experience by bleaching strands of his oiled black hair. With a white streak above each ear and one lining his center part, he reminded me of a badger. Which, I understand, are animals you don’t fuck with if you can help it.

“You couldn’t just have made an honest woman out of Maria Dolorosa, and then put in a stable of tail like the rest of us?”

“Sorry, Tony,” I grinned. “You know I’m not one for animal husbandry.”

Still frowning, he shook his head. “That’s Ilardo’s car across the street. He’s trouble, my boy!”

I, too, had noticed the large, ostentatious Duisenberg parked catercorner from Tony’s door on the other side of the street. In fact, I’d made sure the terrone behind the wheel got a good look 28

Chapter 6

at me sauntering in. Him and the two bandage-wrapped heads on the back seat, looking like King Tut and The Mummy.

“Just don’t drag me into it, tedescacco.”

Being mafia himself, Tony had a chip on his shoulder when it came to us northern Italians. Always had. In fact, I think they’re born with it. Even as a kid he’d call me tedescacco—bad German— whenever he wanted to rib me about something. But even after meeting Schmidt, a tedesco as cacco as they come, I never took it as an insult. But today I thought it was a bit rich, coming from the guy whose idea it had been to hook me up with Maria Dolorosa and her Sicilian father in the first place, for purely selfish reasons.

But I kept grinning.

“Didn’t plan to, terroncello. I know how seriously you take yourself these days. But maybe you could put in a word for me with Ilardo. Just to be on the safe side. Would be a pity if his africas would accidentally screw up the Ottawa deal.”

Tony didn’t like hearing that. His eyes turned cold and his upper lip involuntarily pulled tight to reveal his incisors. His badger face. He let the africas slide, usually a mortal insult to any Godfearing Sicilian. Money trumped blood, always: “The thought’s occurred to me. Let me see what I can do. Now go and have some fun while you still can, little brother. Use the rear exit if you need to.”

His slap on my shoulder was a bit too hard, but I’d known for a while that I was becoming a nuisance for Tony’s ambition. My break-up with Maria Dolorosa kept him from entering in closer relation with Ilardo’s clan as well. Whose direct wire to Palermo was a crucial element in his plan to add enough fire power to his organization to keep the rival firms of Joe Masseria and Salvatore Maranzano from accidentally rolling over Lupara & Associates, Purveyors of Prime Tail and Bootleg Hootch. He still considered 29

No Good Deed

himself my big brother. But he had even bigger plans for himself.

So had I. We both knew that the days of brotherhood were passing.

Soon, Cain would screw over Isaac and Esau would knock around Abel, brotherly love be damned.

But not tonight. Tonight was all fun and games, harmony and ecstasy. Mayor John F. “Red Mike” Hylan had made a brief appearance before I arrived. Some visiting Chicago and Cicero dignitaries had joined the merriment after his departure. Empty chatter and tobacco smoke had melded into a droning cloud that swayed from crystal chandeliers. Glasses clinked. A small band was playing. Too-old men were dancing with too-young girls, and judging by the placement of too-old hands on too-perfect derriéres, these were neither daughters nor nieces. It was a mixed guest list, mostly upscale hoods and the politicians who feed on them. And, of course, the broads that everything was all about. I recognized some municipal bigwigs, as well as the Mayor’s second man. I kept looking for Hedy but didn’t see her for the best part of an hour, during which time I started to wonder if it had been such a good idea to pick a Hun stick grenade, rather than a limey Mills bomb, as my life insurance policy and emergency exit pass. Then again, carrying a Mills pineapple in your front or back pocket of your fancy evening trousers looks far less flattering than a stick grenade discretely shoved into your cummerbund beneath your jacket.

And I care about appearance.

Finally, I saw Hedy across the room. St. Andrews hovered over her like a well-dressed undertaker eager to haul her on his slab. The old con’s presence at the party took me aback for a second. Hoods like Tony and cons like St. Andrews usually don’t mix. Neither do Sicilian guineas and Hibernian pigs. But just like I, Tony lived his life and compiled his guest lists with a purpose. If St. Andrews was drinking his champagne, Tony had already stuck him with the bill.

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But my mind was elsewhere. Down Hedy’s cleavage, for example. If she’d been a vision the previous night, she was an epiphany now. As were her thighs, which she showed off with wanton abandon through a short dress with a skirt of golden fringes that moved and revealed more with every step she took.

And did I mention her cleavage?

There was a bit of an irony here, of course. My ex-future fatherin-law had been bugging me for weeks to introduce him to St. Andrews. Knowing both men’s interest in each other’s resources, I had carefully to keep them apart, waiting for an opportune moment to get them together when it suited me best. Had I not traded up his daughter for a shot at Hedy last night, and had he not embarked on having me gunned down or beaten up or both, although not in any particular order, this would’ve been the perfect night for me to have him meet the Big Man and his royal purple ribbon wearers. Instead, he was fuming up the inside of his Duisenberg with his cheap stogey, trying to decide which body part of mine to violate first.

I gave Hedy and St. Andrews a few minutes to work their way through the press of dressed-up clowns. Then I left the room, winked at the pretty blonde piece of rump in the black dress and frilly white apron in the doorway, and headed for the back staircase.

I climbed two flights to reach a bathroom facing out back on the service alley. It was unoccupied and the window was open. Below, the alley was dark, lit only by a caged 20-Watt bulb attached to the side wall of the neighboring brownstone. Outside its semi-circle of mellow yellow, two orange dots flashed on and off, like lazy glow worms souzed on grappa. Papa Ilardo had covered the back exit. I almost pitied Tut and Mummy, his broken-nosed Wops, who were sharing the noxious reek of the garbage cans with a thousand flies and mosquitos, their heads, backs, and Sicilian egos bruised by 31

No Good Deed

Charles’ hickory ax handle and the pugnacious pavement in front of my building.

It was out of sheer human compassion that I put the nickel back into my pocket and picked a bright, new silver dollar instead.

Its elfin tinkle at the center of the yellow spotlight drew them from the shadows. Both bent down simultaneously over the shiny disk. I missed the satisfying coconut clonk of their africa heads as I pushed the window open further. Both looked up, rubbing their low hair lines, seeing the tell-tale outline of the Hun stick grenade in my hand against the light three floors above them. I gave them a second more than they needed to process the image, what with them being a tad slow on the uptake to begin with.

Then I pulled the cord and dropped the stick into the lit spot on the cobblestones.

A man can move like lightning in five seconds. Which happens to be the exact time between the cord being pulled and a Hun stick grenade exploding. That’s yet another advantage over the Mills bomb: Five seconds give a man time to run. The pineapple’s seven seconds allow him to pick the thing up and toss it right back at you! Tut and Mummy had covered just enough ground to not get killed in the blast, but still were close enough to have their rear ends peppered with enough scrap they’d be looking like skinned hare spiked with sticks of bacon, waiting to be pushed into the oven together with garlic, onion, and a nice burgundy sauce.

The flush of the water closet and the faint clink of broken glass were the only sounds you could hear in the universal silence that follows a major bang. Then the yelling started downstairs.

Without undue haste, I opened the bathroom door and discretely followed the half-dressed couple spilling out of a bedroom, admiring the nimble footwork of the rotund man running with his flag on half-mast and his pants half around his ankles. I kept a 32

Chapter 6

few steps behind, knowing that the bare ass of a prominent banker and a barefoot 17-year-old “actress” with one tit hanging out of her rumpled dress would absorb all the attention a frightened mob pushing for the exit could spare.

Downstairs, I saw Tony and gave him the wide-eyed look and shrug of innocence: Not me! God knows, enough people disliked Tony enough they’d throw a firecracker at his party. He grimaced furiously and turned to the men who were standing with their pieces drawn. They shoved off, one of them almost getting run over

by St. Andrews heading for the exit. As the house was emptying, I spied Hedy, standing quietly near the wall, a glass of champagne in her hand. I made my way over to her.

“Fancy meeting you here. Did your date get flushed?”

She laughed her beautiful effervescent laugh: ”Vittorio, is it?

Yes, chivalry’s quite dead it seems.”

“You’ve been looking in the wrong places, kid,” I said, puffing up my chest and sucking in my gut just a bit.

Police klaxons started to howl in the distance. I don’t care much for small-talk with coppers, neither about life in general nor about the .45 under my arm or the Hun firecracker in the back yard. Especially given the choice between talking and walking this angel out of here.

“Can I buy you a drink,” I asked, almost blinded by the pure light she gave off. She hooked her right arm under my left, not batting an eye at the .45 in the shoulder holster. “Thought you’d never ask,” she said and put down her champagne glass.

Outside, there was no trace of the Duisenberg or Papa Ilardo and his assorted Sicilian coleras. And as we walked down the stairs, my man Gilbert happened to drive up in my car.

Just as if someone had planned this one out to the minute...

33

Chapter 7

B

ut I realize I may have given you the wrong impression of me.

Let me assure you, I’m not the happy-go-lucky man about town you may think I am. I’m not a saint, just an average guy trying to make an honest buck in a world of lies, deceit, violence.

Some people say I have a mean streak. (Not to my face, of course.)

But consider it’s a tough crowd I run with, full of violent hoods and yeggs who think nothing of breaking a guy’s leg over a gambling debt, or shooting him through the kidneys for screwing with the wrong man. Or the right woman.

Despite the lies, however, it’s a straight-forward world. It keeps people reasonably honest and on their toes. Surviving means you can never trust anyone, because all friendships and alliances are made with a purpose in mind. And purposes change, just like friendships. It’s the way of the world. There’s only one thing a man in my circles can count on and that’s family. Maybe. No, scratch that. I know too many sons who rose on the backs of their fathers.

Right after they’d stuck a knife in it.

In my line of business, you keep your back to the wall and your eye on opportunity. Opportunity to rise in the world. Opportunity to turn a buck. Or opportunity to remove an obstacle. All are pretty 34

Chapter 7

much the same. It takes eyes to see and hands to do. Take myself, for example. At age fourteen, I was a poor Wop kid sweeping floors and wiping up sour beer for five bucks a week for the guy who delivered liquor and spirits to one of the big Kraut passenger lines. Now, ten years later, I’m what they used to call a pillar of the community. I own trucks, gasoline stations, and several storehouses full of barley, wheat, and hops way up in Canada. Not to mention a string of speakeasies in New York City, Rochester, and, of course, Jersey. To a wine and liquor man like me, Prohibition has been a godsend. Just like the Great War was before.

I say it again, it’s all about opportunity. Making it and taking it.

Of course, there’s risk. Opportunity can kill you. It’s up to you to decide if it’s worth it.

In the case of Hedy, I’d reckoned it was.

When Gilbert stopped the Locomobile at her Gramercy apartment building at three in the morning, after a glorious night of drinks, dancing, and an exquisite late dinner, she kissed me nighty-night for a good twenty minutes. She was warm and soft, firm and cool, passionate and withholding. The kind of woman who can drive a man to become a king or insane or both. I was all ready to scramble after her like a dog when she opened the car door, follow her up to her rooms or down into hell or wherever.

But she turned and gave my chest a playful push and said: “Not tonight, Vic.” My head was still reeling from her presence, her mouth, her body, so all I could croak was: “Tomorrow?”

“We shall see,” she smiled and blazed me with her eyes.

“Goodnight!”

And off she was, the golden fringes of her dress caroming round her thighs like rays of the morning sun.

It took a few minutes of heavy breathing until the blood threatening to blow apart my head and select parts of my anatomy 35

No Good Deed

began circulating freely through the parched rest of my body again.

Then I stuffed my shirt back into the kummerbund, straightened my tie, and looked at my watch. Three-thirty. Just in time.

“Gilbert, my man,” I said. “I have one last appointment left for tonight.”

“Very well, sir,” he said unperturbed. “Where to?”

36

Chapter 8

F

our in the morning is a nasty time to be woken by a rap at the door. S. Calvert Johnston opened, his hair a rat’s nest of dishwater strands and bristles, his face bearing the imprint of his pillow, his robe sad, saggy, and unbelted.

“Mr. Johnston,” I said cheerfully, pushing him back into the apartment. “Cal. I’m a big fan.”

“What...,” he began, his eyes suddenly wide awake with fear. I closed the door behind me and playfully grabbed him by the neck muscle. He wilted in instant pain. His mouth fell open and he followed me like a lamb, head askew, into his sparsely furnished living room, where I deposited him on his sofa.

I took a quick look around. The bedroom door was open, and there was no sign that anybody but him had been in the apartment for a long time. Especially no broad. Because the place was a dump. Which didn’t surprise me at all. Any half-wit curbside broker could make a bundle in the market these days. But hanging on to it was a different matter. Especially if you had a monkey on your back. And judging by the number of empty bootleg bourbon bottles scattered about—most, I noticed happily, of my own manufacture—Mr. S. Calvert Johnston had a fully grown mountain gorilla strapped to his narrow shoulders.

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No Good Deed

I pulled up a chair and then St. Andrews’ printed letter from my pocket, making sure he got a good look at the blued steel under my armpit.

“Mr. Johnston,” I said. “Cal. I see Justice St. Andrews thinks very highly of your stock picking acumen.”

Eyes still wide as saucers, he nodded, unsure. “How much does he pay you to choose just the right ones? Those his partners pay him to push?”

Johnston swallowed hard and ran his hands through his hair.

He may have been in his midthirties. But the tallowy, sallowy skin of his face made him look twenty years of hard livin’ older.

“Wh- who are you,” he asked, voice still shaky.

I bent forward. “That depends. I could continue to be a fan of yours. One that rewards a solid, reliable work ethic. Or...” I gently tapped his cheek with two fingers, “Or I can be a real pain.”

Johnston gulped. “What can I do for you?”

“That’s the spirit!” I rose, pulled a fountain pen from my jacket, and took hold of chin. “Hold still for a second,” and I wrote a phone number in mirror-inverted numbers across his cold, clammy forehead. Satisfied, I inspected my work. “I’d like you to call this number every time St. Andrews gives you a stock to write up.

Simply and slowly give the name of the stock and your target price to whoever picks up. That’s all. Couldn’t be any more simple.”

“I- I ca-can’t,” stammered Johnston. “Mr. St. Andrews made me sign papers.”

“Of course he di-did. But scissors cut paper.” I used my index and middle finger to go snip-snap. “Plus, I’ll pay you fifty dollars for every call. Cash, in small bills. And because I’m such a big fan, I throw in a case of bourbon.”

I leaned back and grinned straight into his face. “Let’s face it, it’s more than St. Andrews pays you to push junk shares—and 38

Chapter 8

certainly more than a washed-up huckster could make after the New York Curb Market kicks him out on his ass for participating in stock fraud.”

Again, Mr. S. Calvert Johnston gulped and swallowed. But his eyes had come alive. I could see the little wheels grinding. He could’ve cared less about the fifty bucks. But an alkie will do pretty much anything for a free supply of booze. Which cost me exactly fifty cents a quart to produce, bottles and case included. Finally, he extended his hand. The blue numbers on his forehead made him look a bit less than a professional. But I take what I get and shook on it.

“We have a deal,” he said.

“I know we do,” I said and grinned that my mouth hurt. “Just remember, it’s our secret.” And I patted my .45 through my jacket as a friendly reminder.

39

Chapter 9

B

ack at home, I picked up the early papers, gave Gilbert the day off and fixed myself breakfast. Toast, eggs over easy, some Parma over honey melon. (See a pattern here?) I skipped the coffee because I planned to catch up on my beauty sleep later.

The little bang at Tony’s had made it to the front page. My stick grenade had become a bomb, and people believed to have seen “little Italian men” in the neighborhood before the explosion.

They always do. And to be fair, Tony’s place had been crawling with Wops the previous night. It would’ve been hard not seeing little Italian men. Or big Italian men. Some scribblers mentioned the Black Hand and suspected the targets of the “bomb plot” were the poor captains of finance and industry who’d been congregating at a prominent local businessman’s humble home for a charitable affair. Others blamed the Galleanists, since Sacco and Vancetti’s judge Webster Thayer reportedly had been spotted at the party.

One paper even suggested it was directed against the Rockaway Beach direct rail line that Tony was in the process of lining up.

Which reminded me. Tony’s railroad. It suddenly dawned on me why St. Andrews had been at the party. I filed the latter away in my mind for later mastication. Right now, the stock market section was far more interesting. Especially certain small mining 40

Chapter 9

stocks trading curbside. Stocks like those recommended every two weeks by that wizard investor in businesses, Justice St. Andrews.

You see, with penitentiary memories of corned beef and lukewarm coffee from tin mugs fresh in his memory, old Mickey had built a very profitable little business on pushing stocks. He stuck within shouting distance of the letter of the law, but the key to his success still was still his sucker list—just as it had been back in the day when he took the Drake Inheritance scam to the bank.

Only he had learned from past mistakes. And reworked his con accordingly. On the surface, his now was a legitimate consulting business. He gave speeches and seminars on how to make one’s business more profitable. He sold a correspondence course on how to do the same. (Not that he knew a thing about legitimate businesses. But there were plenty of out-to-pasture suits ready to write for a fee.)

Those snared by his wisdom—and willing to spend a thousand big ones a year on it—he gathered in his royal purple ribbon posse, a flock of particularly gullible sheep longing for the clippers. Every other week, he’d send them a hand-signed, printed memorandum in which he laid out his sage advice and passed on stock tips to his readers. Small, volatile stocks researched and written up by washed-up brokers like my friend, S. Calvert Johnston.

Of course, St. Andrews being St. Andrews, being Arthur Russ-Berkeley, being Mickey the Mick, it all was a scam. Crooked mining executives and smeary market-makers paid one of St. Andrews’ shell companies to promote the stocks to his “Purples”.

This sucker list was managed so tightly, St. Andrews could orchestrate a buying frenzy that lasted for over a week, pushing up share prices in his promoted stocks by two-, three-hundred percent within days. (Understand now why Ilardo was so keen on meeting him?) St. Andrews and pals would ride the price all the 41

No Good Deed

way up and then sell at the top, while at the same time shorting the stock. They made money on the way up. They made money on the way down. And more than a hundred marks paid him an extra thousand bucks a year each for the pleasure of his advice. Paid him to blow their own money on inflating St. Andrews’ crooked stock deals. By the time the last of them had seen every penny of the promoted stock’s valuation dribble away, Justice was encouraging them to hold on patiently, no, to buy more in anticipation of the imminent turn-around, while at the same time flogging the next stock that was to make up for any losses anyone had ever incurred.

It was pure genius.

At seven, I called my broker, making sure he’d secured a healthy chunk of shares in the company St. Andrews was touting in the letter I’d purloined from his desk. Then I re-inserted the letter back into the envelope, sealed it, and walked over into my study, where I pulled a sheet of two-cent stamps from my desk drawer. I licked the back of Washington’s goiterous neck and stuck it on the envelope. Then I took my keys, walked downstairs, past Charles the doorman, and entrusted the letter to the tender mercy of the United States Postal Service. This done, I took the elevator back up to my apartment, kicked off my shoes, and went to bed.

I believe I still smiled like an angel when I drifted off. It had been a long and profitable day.

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H

edy woke me around noon. Or better, her calling me on the phone, which Gilbert answered. I may’ve given him the day off. But he’d nothing better to do than make himself useful around the apartment. I like a Protestant work ethic. Even though I suspected the young Nebraskan maid I’d hired to tidy up every other day may’ve even improved on his heretical disposition.

A lesser man than I might’ve been put off by Hedy calling me, instead of the other way round. Of course, a lesser man probably wouldn’t have made his play for her in the first place. Her asking me to meet for dinner was satisfying and, yes, just the tiniest bit flattering.

After Hedy had hung up, I picked up the noon mail, which included St. Andrews’ letter that I’d sent to myself earlier that morning. Washington had received a beautiful black postmark, a perfect circle, with date, place, and time imprinted right on his kisser. I got out the Wop’s razor and lovingly excised my name and street address, taking care not to cut through to the letter. I pulled out the City directory to look up a specific address, then put St. Andrews’ letter into a larger manila envelope.

I do love insurance, especially if the premium only costs me two cents first-class postage. Off it went into the outgoing mail.

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Since he was available, I had Gilbert drive me to J.P. Morgan’s offices, where I looked up one of the associates who owed me a $5,000 favor. He was a bit jittery, what with me suddenly bending over his desk grinning at him like Poor Yorrick’s skull, but he calmed down quickly as I generously knocked five C’s off his account with me, and opened two new trading accounts with the late John Pierpont, each furnished with five grand in cash, which I just happened to have on me.

As far as insurance went, this was more costly than a stick grenade. But you got an even bigger bang for your buck.

The rest of the afternoon I spent in my study. I went through the financial papers of the previous weeks, jotting down the names of the most heavily traded shares, going two, three months back on some of them. From among the American Cans, Anaconda Coppers, Union Carbide & Carbons, Radios, and Electric Bond & Shares and all the other big-name tickets that the masses poured their shekels into in the certainty of yet another miraculous multiplication of the fish, loaves, and egg money, I sifted a handful of small gold- and silver-related stocks. Whenever I found a spike in trading volume big enough to indicate sudden and undeserved interest, I went a few days back and then worked my way forward.

I may have mentioned that I’m a figurer. There’s truth in numbers, if you know where to look. It’s one thing to make a fortune. Anybody can, by plan or dumb luck. It’s quite another to hang on to it. It requires the ability to understand complex numbers. You see, a man has from the time he’s twenty years old, on up to maybe about fifty, to take certain risks to make large amounts of money. These opportunities must be evaluated based on sound judgment. To prosper, a young man has to acquire some science in selecting the risk and weighing its rewards. Become a figurer.

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But in my line of business, the chances that you actually make it to 50 are low. From an actuarial point of view, I’m a bad risk.

But I had a bit of a head start. I started when I was 14, when most other boys waste their time on baseball scores. I learned early that the world ran on money, and that money was numbers. Most people looked at them as if they were the mechanism inside a pocket watch—a kind of magic, incomprehensible in its intricate detail and minute purpose of placements. I’d taught myself to make that magic work for me.

Abracadabra, by the end of the afternoon and the second pot of coffee, I’d traced the price development of four small stocks that all acted according to a specific pattern. They were tawdry little things, Philosopher stones, the modern-day equivalents of alchemist scams promising to turn dirt into gold.

Here’s how it went: The stocks would be trading rightfully unnoticed, with nary a blip even during the biggest market ups and downs. Then, out of nowhere, trading volume would rise, but without a corresponding increase in the share price. That was St. Andrews’ buddies and the insiders at the promoted companies placing their bets. There’d be no movement for another couple of days, sometimes weeks, until a specific Monday afternoon, when suddenly both demand and price spiked enormously. It wasn’t the news that drove them up, because the morning papers’ news had been priced into the markets already, the evening papers hadn’t come out yet, and the tickers would be an hour or two behind the action by then. That was the first tier of St. Andrews’ purpleribbon pool buying in, right after reading his letter. Tiers two and three would follow over the next two days, with both price and volume stabilizing at a high level that lasted for about a week.

Then, seemingly out of the blue, there’d be a steep rise in volume as the insiders cashed out and went short, followed by an equally 45

No Good Deed

steep drop in price. A luke-warm news release by the company would squeeze the remaining air out of the shares. And after ten days, the stock would be exactly where it had been before.

The pattern was tight. Predictable. Probably not to the marks but to anyone who knew what he was looking for.

Of course, predictability makes complacent. And complacency turns you into prey.

I knew exactly what I was going to do next. I folded the paperwork for the new trading accounts up carefully and stuck it into my inside jacket pocket. It all fit in with the plan.

But first, I had a date with Hedy.

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S

he’d suggested the new Delmonico, at Park Avenue and 59th. I left Gilbert to cleaning and oiling my other guns (or bedding the maid, whichever made him happier), tucked my .45 into my shoulder holster, and sauntered past Charles the doorman, who had a shiner to show for yesterday’s scuffle.

Charles smiled at me with his teeth showing, nodding toward the street. “Friends,” he said without moving his lips. “Understood,” I said. At twenty bucks a week, he came cheaper than a guard dog.

It was dark when I stepped out the doors, into a warm, not-too humid summer night. The streetlights were on, providing islands of soft light on the dark sidewalks for the few pedestrians out and about during the lull between dinner time and hitting the shows and speakeasies.

I saw him the moment I left the building. He stood in the doorway of a barber shop across the street. He was tall, with scraggly blond hair, dressed in the overalls of an automobile mechanic heading home late with his lunch pail. I might’ve missed him but for a brief glint of spit-shined shoe leather poking out from his pant legs when he stepped into one of the lit circles. Unless you make a living shining shoes wearing oil-smeared overalls, these things usually don’t go together.

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I scanned ahead and, at the next intersection near a service alley, noticed two low-brow thugs pretending to be absorbed by the Cuban heels of a middle-aged woman hurrying past.

I was annoyed. For one, I was peeved that Ilardo was either ignoring Tony’s advice to cool his heels about me. Or that Tony hadn’t yet bothered mentioning it to him. Plus, I was wearing a brand-new suit. Which had set me back more than Ilardo was paying his entire staff in a week.

I looked at my watch. I had about ten minutes left before I was to meet Hedy. And maybe about a minute to spare to deal with my new friends. So, naturally, I put my hands in my pockets and paraded down the street like I didn’t have a care in the world. The spit-shined yegg kept pace with me on the other side of the street.

Then, unexpectedly, I veered right, crossed the street and headed straight toward my tail. “Hey,” I yelled. “Hold up for a minute!” He turned, surprised, slightly embarrassed, but sinking his right hand into his overall pocket.

About ten yards away from him, I pulled out my money clip, smiled at him, and began flipping ten-dollar bills. Quite naturally, he relaxed, his eyes drawn immediately to the green. “Hey, buddy, I wonder if you could do me a...”

“Favor,” is what he expected to hear, but by then I was close enough to hit him in the jaw with my right, followed by a vicious uppercut into his stomach, which the sight of sawbucks and the expectation of a business proposition had made sufficiently soft and receptive to internal organ damage. He doubled over, his right hand still in his pocket. I stepped around him, grabbed him by the hair, and slammed him flat against the next wall. Blood instantly bubbled up from a gash in his forehead. And there’s nothing like the sight of your own blood and the impact of a cinder block wall with your head to take the fight right out of you.

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“Give my regards to Ilardo, terrone,” I said into his ear, holding him so that he’d not soil my brand-new suit. “Tell him I’m a bit disappointed in his choice of people he’s been sending.”

I dropped him and he went down on his knees. I reached into his pocket and pulled out the revolver he’d been going for when I socked him, a .38-caliber, five-shot, nickel-plated Harrington & Richardson. I broke it open, scattered the bullets around him on the pavement and removed the cylinder, which I dropped into a storm drain at the curb. Then I let the weapon fall in front of him.

“Better luck next time,” I said and meant it. I looked for the other two, but they’d turned tail when they saw their closer go down.

Where they had stood, a drunk was relieving himself noisily in the alley. From what I could see, his shoes got the better of him.

The man on the ground was holding his head as he worked himself back up to his feet, peering at me with eyes that stood out like white ping pong balls against the dark red of his blood.

“Who the hell’s Lardo Terrone,” he coughed.

Before I could respond, he was up and staggering away from me. The sight of a prowl car turning the corner two blocks down and a look at my watch kept me from asking him what he meant.

I realized now he lacked the low brow that ran in Ilardo’s famiglia.

But if he wasn’t working for Papa, who’d hired him?

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Chapter 12

W

hat can I tell you about my dinner with Hedy? It was fantastic. I was polite, interesting, compelling, in short, the kind of date any girl would fall for. It made up for the fact that the new Delmonico couldn’t hold a candle to the old one that had closed in ‘23. Then again, any restaurant without a wine cellar is like a cathouse without hookers.

She wore a simple blue dress that only hinted at the goodies hidden beneath. She had a ginger ale and I made do with iced tea as we picked at a plate of fresh caviar with crackers. She ordered Green Turtle Soup and Filet Mignon with Marrow and Fresh Asparagus Tips in a Polonaise sauce. I had the cream of chicken and a fresh filet of sole, not bad but nothing to write home about.

If I were in the habit of writing home.

Hedy ate with an appetite, something I like in a woman.

When the waiter brought the raspberry sorbet, I knew more about her than I’d ever known about all the women I’ve known combined. Turns out she was an orphan. Her mother had died in ’17 of the Spanish Flu. And her father and brother had shipped out for Germany in August of ’14. Stupid Huns, the two of them.

Two weeks after the Kaiser declared war, they’d joined thousands of other German-American hyphens dumb enough to fight for 50

Chapter 12

a country that was no longer theirs. Suffice to say they didn’t return. Of course, I didn’t say that out loud. I nodded and made all appropriate noises when she told me she’d been raised by an aunt in Milwaukee, inherited enough money to return to New York City.

“So,” she said as she dug into her raspberry sorbet. “Now that you know all there’s to know about me, can I ask you a question?”

“Sure,” I said, wishing for a bourbon on ice.

“What’s the deal with all this railroad talk?”

“What do you mean?”

“Oh, come on,” she said, smiling that my heart skipped a beat.

“You know. Justice and Tony’ve been talking about nothing else for weeks. I hear they’ve ordered two locomotives.”

That was news to me. Of course, Tony’s railroad venture was common knowledge, as was his investment in the Rockaway Beach casinos and his ownership of the busted railroad company, which he had renamed Sunshine Rail Roads.

I told her what little I knew and she listened with interest.

“Not a bad idea,” she said after I had finished. “So if you’re such a good friend of Tony’s, why aren’t you part of the deal?”

I admit I had no answer. “Tony’s business is Tony’s business,” I said with a shrug. “We’ve other ventures we’re both involved in.” Like the Ottawa deal. But I couldn’t really mention that to her yet. We talked about this and that afterwards, and I took her home in a cab around midnight. Again, she kissed like the Great Whore of Babylon but then took off by herself, leaving me with an erection the size of a copper’s nightstick and a smirking driver.

But this time around, my brain didn’t mind quite as much as Little Vic did. Because there was something about this railway business that smelled.

Why hadn’t Tony mentioned something?

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And what in God’s green earth was Justice St. Andrews’ part in it?

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A

bout the days that followed? If I were the reading kind, I’d now come up with a bunch of hogwash about romance, candle-light dinners, walks in the park, true love, and fate. And all of it would be true. As would be the assertion that from the very moment I met her I couldn’t get her out of my mind. A passing thought, a reflection of light, a whiff of a scent would have Little Vic stand at attention.

But frankly, it’s none of your business. All you need to know is that the longer I knew her, the more I wanted her. The more I saw of her, the worse it got. Cupid had nailed me right through the heart, not with a rinky-dink arrow, but with a blast from a tommy gun.

For the first time in my 24-year-old life, I was in love.

Strangely, she seemed to be, too. Within three days of our first meeting, we were fucking like rabbits every night. After a week, the deal was signed, sealed, delivered. I married her in the most bombastic wedding money could buy, all the way wondering what a Teutonic princess like her could see in a Jersey polentone like myself. A Wop who’d made his money any which way he could since 1914. The year the Great War came to Europe.

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All of this would be true. Except for the wedding part. And the bedding part. That was wishful thinking on my side. Because as far as that goes, I didn’t get anywhere with her.

Instead, I got myself deeper in trouble.

And that’s where things got a bit more complex.

After all, I am a bit of a complex character. Or at least that’s what Maria Dolorosa called me after our last night together. Not exactly her words, but I wasn’t really listening. You get the drift.

I’ve told you how I met Hedy and ruffled the feathers of a few grifters and hoods. Turns out, this wasn’t exactly the beginning of my story.

That one’s under lock and key in the antique French cabinet in my study, which I call my Land of Nod: Whenever I can’t sleep, I go there to read, wearing my soft, calfskin slippers and a quilted Chinese silk robe. It makes me feel solid. Antique brass squeaks like tiny mice when I open the cabinet. Inside, next to where I keep a loaded .45 and a crystal carafe of medicinal Scotch, is a single bottle of champagne. Moët Chandon, vintage 1905, with a custom label right below the gold foil of the neck.

“Norddeutscher Lloyd,” it reads, with a small vignette of the SS Prinz Friedrich Wilhelm under full steam, happily chugging toward the Fatherland.

It’s the keystone to my wealth. To my history.

The only other living person who knows that story was Tony Lupara, my old friend and now partner. All others are dead. It’s not a pretty story, but heck, whose story really is. Times were different. I was different. And even if times had been the same, maybe things would’ve worked out just the same. Mind you, even here, in my plush study, far, far removed from the Hoboken docks, I’m unashamed of my past. I’m a self-made man. I’ve created my destiny, my wealth, my fortune, out of nothing.

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Now I also had a beautiful girl on my hands. Blond, stunning— and not at all curious just where the money came from that kept her dolled up in Parisian silks and Italian satins. Even better, Hedy came with no in-laws attached. After the misunderstandings with my ex-future mafia-inlaw Ilardo, I appreciated the lack of baggage.

The only problem with her was her cousin.

She sprung him on me a week or two after we’d met. He’d be arriving by steamer from Bremen just a day later. I didn’t mind postponing our planned trip to the Poconos during which I was hoping like hell to finally get lucky? Did I? And would I consider putting him up in my apartment? Just for a few days? Would I? Her building didn’t allow unattached female tenants to harbor unattached male guests. Not even cousins.

Of course I did mind. In fact, I thought this was quite an imposition. We’d just met, for crying out loud! What did she think I was, the YMCA? But I did what any good man eager to get into a pretty broad’s silk panties would do in this situation. I lied through my teeth: “But of course, it’s fine,” I said. After all, to us guineas, family’s family, even Hedy’s poor relatives from the old country. “How long did you say he was staying?”

Hedy insisted we pick him up from the Ellis Island ferry in my Prussian blue Locomobile.

Since I figured that this might be one of the last opportunities to spend time with her alone—alright, feel her up under her skirt!—I drove the car myself. Which, unfortunately, didn’t work out the way I wanted it, since between the horn, the turn signal and the gear shift, my right hand was too pre-occupied with locomotion to deal with her girlie parts. Understandably, I was in a bad mood even before we arrived at the Ellis Island ferry.

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It was a zoo. Polacks, Russkis, Krauts, Micks, all with kit and caboodle, steamer trunks, starveling bird-faced children, carpetbags full of junk, all jostling, pushing, arguing over pushcarts and haggling with porters over a nickel. A disgrace, if you ask me.

The broads, with their kerchiefs around their heads, looked like a hundred even when they’d barely cracked twenty.

I noticed one man quietly standing to the side, as if he weren’t part of the circus. He was tall and Germanic, in his early thirties, with short blondish hair and a full blondish beard. No hat, which was unusual, even for a summer day like this.

I knew that second that this was Cousin and that Cousin was trouble. Hedy yelled “Hoo-hoo,” and waved like a schoolgirl before running up to him and flinging herself around his neck.

After a few minutes of squealing and kissing, all of it done by Hedy, she hooked her arm under his right and dragged him over to me, all the while chattering away in German.

“Vittorio,” she’d started to call me by my Italian first name, “I want you to meet my cousin. Hauke, meet my friend Vittorio.”

“Vic Del Frate,” I said, taken aback by the “friend.” And Hauke? What kind of name was Hauke for a Fritz?

He grasped my extended hand and crushed it in a bear trap.

“Pleased to meet you,” he said in clear, unaccented American English. Again, I was taken aback. It wasn’t the strange, probing look he gave me—I guess any cousin would check out a girl’s “friend”. It wasn’t the scars in his face that threw me, jagged and crude as they were, like he’d obtained them jumping rope with a piece of barbed wire. But growing up at the docks, I’d met enough foreigners fresh off the boat. Few were fluent in English, even less in the American theater of politeness. The formulas. The back and forth of “How do you do”—”Fine, thanks, how about you.” Most never would be. But this Fritz came well prepared.

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Hedy having latched on to his arm, I carried one of Cousin Hauke’s trunks. I was the one putting the suitcases into the car, and opening the door for them. They both slid on the back seat, she chatting away in German, he occasionally responding in clipped, harsh-sounding sentences. All that was missing was a chauffeur’s hat on my head.

It wasn’t the imposition and indignity. It wasn’t the exclusion from the conversation. It wasn’t even the jealousy that I felt when I saw Hedy grafting herself to her cousin’s arm. But I drove with a distinct sense of unease. As if I’d been talked into adopting a schnauzer from the pound—and was taking home a timber wolf instead.

Because I knew for a fact that, this side of Eden, no good deed goes unpunished.

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C

ousin Hauke turned out to be a silent man, whose presence was felt rather than seen inside my spacious Upper East Side digs. He kept to himself, ate and drank little, and was gone for most of the day. It was like he wasn’t even there. My man Gilbert, a model of discretion, was intrusive by comparison.

I couldn’t quite put his finger on it. He spoke softly, in his tooperfect English. In fact, English words sounded foreign only when he spoke German with Hedy. He was all gristle and ligament. His eyes were the color and temperature of the North Atlantic. They gave me the willies: I knew from my youth at the Jersey waterfront what kind of creatures they dredged up from its depths.

It was as if a clammy, Atlantic darkness had moved into my apartment, causing a constant sense of nervous tension. I’m usually a sound sleeper, but I suddenly started to dream. Dreams of the Hoboken docks, with me as a boy trying to run, in my socks, through fresh tar that tugged at my feet like glue, as an unseen threat moved closer.

Still, apart from the elusive house guest, things went smooth as silk. Neither Ilardo nor St. Andrews bothered us, even though there were rumors that the Sicilian had requested a fixer from the homeland. I paid no heed. My business required more of my 58

Chapter 14

attention than I had devoted to it since the party at St. Andrew’s house. After all, money doesn’t grow on trees, and the expense of keeping Hedy in baubles, fancy dresses, and expensive dinners added up to a considerable chunk of ready cash. Enough even for me to notice. Also, the deadline on the Ottawa deal was coming closer. As the cousin’s novelty wore off over the next week, Hedy paid more attention to me again. Perhaps it was the dresses, the bracelets, the necklaces I presented her with. Maybe it was my charming conversation. We went out, saw a couple of motion pictures and shows. I even visited her Gramercy apartment a number of times. Of course, she kept the bedroom door closed.

Her living room was well-kept and tidy. She had a single picture on her desk, a young, seriouslooking man with pre-War arrowpoint collars and a humorless face that looked just like Cousin Hauke’s. “My brother,” she said and seemed sad when she said it.

Whenever I had a chance, I turned the picture to give the boy a good look out the window. No need for him to watch as I made out with his baby sister. Or at least tried to.

Things went well until about a week after we’d picked up Cousin from the ferry, a Tuesday when I went to inspect a truckload of Ottawa lager down in Jersey. The booze was fine, none better (I make sure of this kind of thing!), and “Izzy” Einstein and Moe Smith and their Prohis virtually guaranteed top dollar.

That’s when I saw Cousin leave the recently re-opened offices of the North German Lloyd shipping line.

At first, I was pleasantly surprised. Had Hauke decided to return to the Fatherland earlier than expected? The very thought spelled relief: Goodbye and good riddance and don’t let the door hit you in the back, you skulking Hun! But then I recalled: Hauke had come on a HAPAG steamer, the Lloyds’s big competitor. I’d seen the HAPAG return ticket, 59

No Good Deed

dated a month from now. So what was he doing here, at the Lloyd’s headquarters? Why was he now walking over to a public phone?

And who was he calling?

Being the cautious type, I asked a Pinkerton man on my gratuities list to keep an eye on the German for a few days. The Pinkie’s first report sounded in line with what you’d expect any Fritz to do in New York, at least if he had undeclared intentions to stay: “Spent Monday morning 9:43 to 11:57 at the Lloyd headquarters. Beer and sausage at Lüchow’s. Afternoon spent at Staatszeitung office.”

Hmmm. A German-language newspaper? Was Hauke looking for a job? Well, golly, he only needed to ask! I could always use a good man, especially one with low inhibitions to inflict grievous bodily harm if the situation required. So did Tony Lupara. But the next line put an icicle into my intestines: “Asking about one Friedrich Schmidt at the Lloyd.”

Schmidt! It couldn’t be! Seemed like every other German I had met was named Schmidt, and there were enough Friedrichs around to fill in the Hudson river—a thing New Yorkers hadn’t been all that ill at ease considering just a decade ago.

I couldn’t take chances, not even with a man dead and buried in Potter’s Field seven years ago: I did have a bit of a record with the Feds, back from my short stint in Illinois. And these days, they seemed overly eager to find any chink in the corporate armor that my shysters had spent countless billable hours building: With the Ottawa deal coming up, I needed some renegade Kraut turning over in his grave like a hole in the head.

But did I really have to worry? How many Schmidts had worked at the Lloyd? A hundred? I felt reassured. The Pinkie’d have to dig deeper. What was another sawbuck-a-day in exchange for piece of mind?

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Although this was not what the next crisp green ten-dollarbill bought. Out of all the Friedrich Schmidt’s in the world, it seemed Cousin Hauke was interested in just one. That one had been fished out of the water at the Hoboken waterfront in late 1917, beaten like a dog and drowned like a rat. Friedrich Schmidt, late quartermaster of the North German Lloyd’s Europe-bound steamer fleet, in charge of supplies and provisions.

Since he officially was an Enemy Alien by then, New Jersey’s finest hadn’t made much fuss about the body. America was finally and officially at war with the Krauts. If an enterprising soul turned killing them into a cottage industry down home, more power to him! But now, almost a decade later, this was getting too close for comfort. What was the Fritz up to? Why was he interested in old business? Who was he—and who the hell did he think he was?

Luckily, I knew someone who could help. It wasn’t like there was a shortage of Krauts in New York City, either. Plenty had excellent connections back in the old country. To the shipping companies.

And to the German crime syndicates, the Ringvereine, who ran both blue- and white-collar crime in Berlin and Hamburg with Prussian efficiency.

Hedy was starting to cost me.

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M

eanwhile, S. Calvert Johnston, my little snitch inside St. Andrews’ scam, earned his keep and his booze in a big way. Whenever he called my broker with a stock name and ticker, I’d buy up substantial positions in the stock in small and manageable blocks for different accounts. Once St. Andrews’ letter was received by the marks, prices would start going up. Not all at once, like a small-time con would’ve done. St. Andrews staggered the delivery of his letters based on a complex, rotating schedule.

I knew, because one of the addresses I’d added to his royal purple sucker list was the home of a little old lady I occasionally asked for favors of one kind or another. I’d paid her a hundred bucks for her signature. But her main job was putting a two-cent stamp on every unopened, hand-addressed envelope that St. Andrews had delivered to her and mailing it to herself before forwarding it to me.

Thanks to the staggered distribution of the letters, each stock took between four and six trading days to double or triple in price and maintain that level for a few credibility-building days.

The first tier of Purples got in near the lower end of St. Andrews’ recommended buying range. Then, for another two or three days—St. Andrews varied the timing not to create too many 62

Chapter 15

similarities in the price curves—tiers two and three would enter the game, further bidding up the rising price. Above St. Andrews’ recommended levels, the market would take over, those generalpurpose short-termers looking for “sustained” upward trends in stocks. The sudden interest of the general market gave the Purples the idea they’d been in on the ground floor, pat themselves on the back, and buy more stock at ever higher prices.

Up it would go until St. Andrews and his cronies took profits.

They’d then short-sell the shares, which is to say their brokers would borrow someone else’s shares at the high, intending to replace them with dirt-cheap shares once the bottom had dropped out.

It was ingenious and almost legal.

Another thing I had discovered was that each letter was handdelivered by messenger, not by the postman. A nice touch, all in keeping with the aura of exclusivity and secrecy St. Andrews used to sell to his suckers. Plus, it had the added benefit of steering him clear of the Postal Inspector: If you don’t use the United States Postal Service, it’s hard for them to nail you on mail fraud. Which had landed old Mickey O’ in the slammer back in Illinois.

Playing manipulated stocks is like betting on a fight you know has been fixed. You can make a lot of green. And of course I did, as the stocks went up, and then again when they came crashing down. The dough came in handy. I considerably increased my share in the Ottawa deal with Tony, and the rest I blew on Hedy. Who surely had expensive tastes for a Milwaukee “hyphen”.

One late afternoon, a few days after I’d seen Cousin Hauke leave the Lloyd, we stopped by my place for some champagne before hitting the Ziegfeld Follies on Broadway. Hedy was reading a magazine in the salon while I had to finish a bit of correspondence.

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From inside my study, I heard the apartment door open. I looked at the mantle clock. Seven-thirty-five. Cousin Hauke was back from his day-long prowl through the city. At least that’s what he wanted us to believe. But I knew for a fact that he didn’t give a hoot about the Statue of Liberty or the Empire State Building. The Jersey waterfront was far more likely.

Low bass notes rumbled as a coat passed from Hauke to my man Gilbert. Then Hedy’s happy alto chimed and giggled and gushed. Fast, excited German sentences followed as she pulled her cousin into the salon, from where the clitter-clatter of the grand piano soon began to fracture the silence.

Just knowing that Hauke was back in the apartment gave me the chills. Like a hiker in the woods who feels, rather than sees, the flick of the big cat’s tail—and suddenly realizes that he’s being stalked. That he’s lunch on the hoof.

I became aware that I was sweating. I remembered just how closely Hauke resembled Hedy’s brother. Or at least that one photograph of a tall, angular boy Hedy kept in a silver frame in the living room, the only thing that still bore witness that her family had ever existed. Same eyes, same mouth, same gristle. A hyphen if there ever was one! Despite destiny and fortune, I felt a pang of guilt whenever I saw it.

After all, it was I who’d killed Hedy’s brother. And her father as well.

Of course, she didn’t know—and never would. Heck, even I didn’t know at the time. It was business, plain and simple. Tony’s business, to be exact. If I hadn’t done it, others would. The two hyphens might’ve croaked anyway, in the filth of Verdun or the gas clouds of Ypres, or starved, bled, gagged, screamed themselves to death alongside thousands and thousands of others in Russia or Poland or Belgium, or in any of a thousand places on that 64

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godforsaken Old Continent. The only difference would’ve been that I wouldn’t have made any money. And where would Hedy be then?

I looked at the bottle of Moët Chandon. And jumped when the desk phone rang.

“Yes,” I barked, just a bit ashamed of my nerves. “Put him on.”

The mantle clock ticked loudly as I waited. Then: “Alright, spit it out! What did he find?” I picked up a gold-plated pencil and began to scribble furiously.

Hauke Hayen, I wrote. Bremen. Enlisted ’15. Iron Cross.

Verdun. Ehrhard Brigade.

“What was that last? Fry-core? What does that…? Oh. Kicked the Commies out of Munich? No shit!”

I listened intently, my eyes getting wider, and wrote down two more words: Organization. Console.

“Thanks,” I said finally. “No, that’s all for now.”

There was nothing wrong with my instincts. I’d known it all along. A Kraut killer. In my home!

I went back over to the cabinet and took out the Scotch. I peered into the ceiling light through the pale amber, then removed the crystal stopper. Not bothering with a glass, I lifted the bottle to my mouth and drank like a man drowning. When the whisky exploded in my stomach, I reached for my gat and put it in my pocket.

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Chapter 16

“

What’s wrong, honey,” said Hedy with a pretty pout as we sat down for a late drink after the show. “You’ve barely said a word all day!” She daintily slipped a piece of caviar on toast between her lips, then swirled a glass of champagne with a sterling silver swizzle-stick. My late swig of Scotch had left me with a sour stomach and a blasting headache and the other pint of gin I’d had since didn’t help at all. The ding-ding-ding of the swizzle stick was like a Black Forest gnome hammering away at my brain with a tiny pickax. She’s one of them, I thought bitterly, pain tink-tinktinking behind my eyes. A goddamn hyphen.

But at least she was easy on the eyes. A bit too perky, at least for a man with a monstrous hangover in the making.

“Nothing,” I said, my pounding head giving me the lie. “Why didn’t your cousin come along?”

“He says he wants to get up early. As they say, the early bird catches the worm.” She leaned over so I could smell the strangely sweet mix of mint and champagne and the sea on her breath and kissed me right on the tip of my nose. “Thank God we don’t care much for worms around here.”

It even hurt to smile.

“What do you really know about him,” I asked, listlessly 66

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spooning sugar into my coffee. “I mean, what kinda name is Hauke for a Fritz?”

Hedy crinkled her ivory forehead. “Oh, it’s a North German thing. Some book my uncle liked. The main character’s name is Hauke Hayen. And since Hayen was my mother’s maiden name…”

“What’s the book?”

“Schimmel-Reiter-shmershmer-or-other.”

“What the heck does that mean?”

“Oh, nothing special… Schimmel means white horse, Rappe means black horse, Brauner means, guess what, brown one. Hauke Hayen was the rider on a white horse. But don’t ask me what he did, other than ride along the sea shore in the fog. Why do you ask?”

Hedy’s carefree prattle pounded swizzle sticks into my quivering brain, straight through my eye sockets. I could almost feel the pounding of Schimmel hooves in my temples. “Nothin’ really. So what did he do during the war?”

“Hauke? Or the Schimmelreiter?”

I opened my mouth but she said, “Just kidding. Fight, of course. You saw his face!”

I nodded. My first impression of barbed wire hadn’t been all that far off. Barbed wire and a Frog trench knife.

“And after?”

“Oh, I don’t know, fight some more? Why are you suddenly interested in him?” Hedy put down her glass and plucked her silk stockings until the seams traversed the exact centers of her calves.

“Just making conversation, kid.”

With a shaky hand, I downed my coffee. Then I reached for the dark green bottle chilling in a silver ice bucket. Moët Chandon. Same brand. Different vintage. “Mott’ und Schotter,” as the hyphens riding First Cabin on the Prinz Friedrich Wilhelm 67

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jokingly had called it. Sure, if you’re a Kraut shipping out to kill the French, you have to Germanize their booze.

“While we’re at it, what does Mott’ and Schotter mean in German,” I asked.

“A Motte is a moth and Schotter’s gravel. Vittorio! The questions you’re asking today! Hey, waitadarnminnit, aren’t you going to freshen up my glass?”

I poured the sparkling gold into the crystal. Maybe I should have some, too, I thought. Hair of the dog that bit you. Hair of the wolf…

“Hedy,” I pleaded, signaling the waiter to bring another glass.

“Why do you call me Vittorio? Everybody calls me Vic.” She smiled. “High time to change things around. Don’t you think? Vittorio?”

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E

ven over the phone, Tony sounded annoyed rather than alarmed. “So what if some Kraut’s asking around? Who cares about what business we had ten fuckin’ years ago? You and I are the only ones who remember. Schmidt’s dead and nobody else gives a damn. ” “He may,” I said. “Give a damn.”

“You tellin’ me that after fifteen years and all those millions of stiffs, some damn Hun’s out to raise a stink for re-routing a few crates of Tedesci booze?”

“Seven years. French champagne. A few thousand crates. And yes, everything’s possible.”

“Tedescacco, you’re nuts. Why?” Well, I thought. To re-rout the champagne from the Prinz Friedrich Wilhelm and the other Germany-bound passenger ships, you had to re-rout those who’d paid in advance for drinking it.

Re-rout them, say, into some British concentration camp, ideally before they could pop open the first bottle. Color me pink but there still might be someone left who’d take offense.

“Forget it, terroncello” I said. “Thought you might wanna know. If you say it’s nothing, it’s probably nothing.”

“It’s nothin’” said Tony. “By the way. Had any problems with 69

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Ilardo? I had a chat with him after we talked. Told him not to make waves.”

“No,” I said. “Thanks for your help. I hear he’s been playing St. Andrews’ scams.”

I knew because Ilardo’s was the second address I’d added to St. Andrews’ sucker list. My way of saying arrividerci, colera. What a great son-in-law I would’ve made.

“Hey, watch it with the nasty talk. St. Andrews and I have business together. So tone it down. And regarding Ilardo. Don’t get complacent. I hear he’s shipped in a fixer from the Old Country.

My feeling is he ain’t here for Maria Dolorosa’s home cookin’.”

He hung up. I felt just a tad better. Maybe Tony was right.

Anything we might be blamed for paled in comparison with the war. You could argue that we’d actually saved lives: When the Kaiser declared war, thousands of German-Americans—hyphens!—felt compelled to ride the wave of Teutonic patriotism back to fight for Kaiser and Fatherland and all that jazz. But to get there, the Fritzes had to cross the Atlantic. Which meant buying passage on an ocean liner. The shipping lines made money hand over first: HAPAG, the Lloyd, even some of the non-German companies.

So did the suppliers of fuel, food—and of liquor. Because any respectable Tedesco drinks like a fish when in the company of other Tedesci. The Second Cabin and Steerage drink beer. The “von und zu’s” and money nobility prefer wine and champagne. Especially champagne. Especially French champagne, like Moët Chandon.

Mott’ und Schotter.

They drink even more when their tickets included room, board—and booze. Anyone would. It’s just numbers sense to drink yourself into the black ink, especially when you’re heading out to be turned to hamburger meat. Or Salisbury steak, as they started calling it after 1917. So if you had a hundred upper-class 70

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Germans aboard an all-expenses-paid German liner for the seven to eight days it took to cross the Atlantic, a good quartermaster would calculate each of them might average two bottles of wine and maybe two bottles of champagne a day. Some would drink less. Others would make up for it. Two times 100, times eight makes 1,600 bottles of champagne, meaning roughly 140 cases at 12 bottles each, each bottle at a wholesale price of $7: $11,200 worth of champagne—the equivalent of an upscale home in New York City. Or the latest custom Locomobile luxury limousine. Or 40 Ford Model-T’s, vintage 1924, for every 100 Germans!

And a ship like the Prinz Friedrich Wilhelm held almost 300 First Cabin passengers on each and every outbound trip. The Bremen, the George Washington, the Grosser Kurfürst, the Kaiser Wilhelm II held even more…

But what the homing hyphens didn’t know was that, a day out at sea, two bottles down the hatch, the Brits were waiting.

Their cruisers stopped every Europe-bound steamer, and took each ablebodied male hyphen prisoner. Since President Wilson considered the Brits a better risk, arms and munitions sales to Britain and France were worth considerably more to Yankee business than a few thousand hyphens like Hedy’s father and brother. Even if they were American citizens. Even if they ended up in British concentration camps, somewhere in the colonies.

Where thousands of them died of typhoid fever, pneumonia, disintery, influenza.

Just like Hedy’s father and brother.

But heck, it was war! There was no shortage of dolts volunteering to get killed! Someone had to make money on this insanity. Someone with an innate grasp of numbers—like myself, Antonio Lupara, and the square-headed Kraut Fritz Schmidt, chief quartermaster of the North German Lloyd, who accounted the 71

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bottles of Moët Chandon not drunk by battle-hungry, captivitybound Germans as a total loss and resold them for seventy percent off the wholesale price back to Vittorio Del Frate the stock boy and Antonio Lupara the stickup man, who in turn sold them back to the Lloyd’s supplier of liquor, wine and spirits at a discount.

It was a win-win for everyone. For Tony and I because we made gobs of money and didn’t know any better. For Schmidt because we kept our mouths shut about the underage Negro nancy boys he liked to spend his nights with. And even the Lloyd made money because it saved on the purchase price of the booze for each new run, thanks to Schmidt!

And the numbers magic just started there. Because the prices for French champagne shot up. A bottle whole-selling for seven bucks in June of 1914 could be sold for nine in August and for twelve by December. At which point the same bottle had been sold, liberated, resold, liberated again for a cumulative total of over thirty dollars—before it was sold to New York restaurants at fifteen points off market price.

Provided we could keep the Krauts from drinking it.

At first, it was easy as pie. But Krauts are cagey. So the sooner the Brits got the Germans, the more champagne would be left to sell. And the better the information was we could give to the Brits regarding the route and timing of the ships and who was on it, the sooner they stopped the Germans from drinking our bubbly. And the sooner the Germans stopped drinking, the richer Tony and I got.

Since the Brits had cut the Trans-Atlantic cable early in 1914, the hyphens back home took weeks to find out that their first, second, third, and fourth waves of homing Krauts had been snatched from their cabins before they could even get seasick.

By then, Tony and I were rich enough to branch out into the 72

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paper business, supplying fake Swiss, Swedish, South American passports to Germans hoping to escape the Brits at sea.

Rumor even had it that the British attaché paid well for names of high-net-worth Germans traveling with forged papers, although nobody could ever prove it. Of course, at some point there were no Germans left in the States who wanted to jump into the European meat grinder. At that point, the Enemy Alien Office had surpassed even the Brits with their haul of domestic hyphens.

And when Wilson replaced America’s covert warfare against the Kaiser with a declaration of war, I had followed the money to far more lucrative pastures. Tony, who was old enough for the draft, was getting ready to sit out the war in Mexico to keep from getting his Sicilian cazzo blown off in Flanders. Only Schmidt was left behind. And he had it coming. His startled expression when Tony hit him in the head with his blackjack made me laugh. It had remained with me over the years.

Now, checking the catch on my brand-new 1911-model .45 Colt, I felt a grim resolve: I’d restore ease of mind to my household.

Then I could deal with Ilardo’s fixer.

But first, I just needed to make sure.

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T

here’s only one thing I disliked about Hedy. She was a tease. She could get a man hard just by looking at him, or laugh that little, percolating laugh of hers, like champagne bubbles rising from a crystal flute. She could kiss that you’d forgotten your own name when you came up for air, if you still cared for breathing at all. She flaunted her legs, her chest, her tight buns, her neck and hair. But her silk panties were like glued to her bottom. Except for a roving pinch of ass or a squeeze of her immaculate tits, I never got anywhere with her.

Which makes a fellow cranky and in dire need to have his kidneys flushed every now and then. Luckily, a gentleman about town like myself has enough female company lined up to take care of such things even on short notice.

One of my favorite lays was Solveig, St. Andrews’ Swedish masseuse. Actually, she was a Polack named Anna, and a good ten years older than she let on. But what’s a bit of creative embellishment between friends?

With Hedy teasing heck out of me, just to pass on my wholesome goodness, Solveig was getting a bit more use that she was accustomed to. She didn’t mind, considering St. Andrews rarely called on her services these days, what with Hedy still stuck 74

Chapter 18

in his craw and a nagging feeling that someone was front-running his own scam. He still got his Swedish massages. But the bounce had gone out of his bedsprings.

I tried to make up for his shortcomings as best I could. Polack or not, her massages were exquisite. And no man asks about country of origin when two magnificent knockers swing down into your face. Besides, Solveig was a smart cookie. She knew what was going on at St. Andrews’ club. Which allowed me to fine-tune my own little schemes.

“He’s been grumpy,” she said one night, with the tongue-tip “r” that could pass for Swedish or Polish or Norwegian or whatever you damn well fancied. “Shouting a lot. Looking at charts.”

I had an idea about what was bugging him. But I looked at her innocent like a lamb.

“What about?”

“Stocks. He thinks someone’s playing his stocks. He’s been talking to his writers. Very angrily.”

Uh-oh. Would S. Calvert Johnston buckle under and spill the beans? It was possible. But I wasn’t concerned. Alkies are accomplished liars, especially those who manage to keep up a professional front. But the next bit of news was more interesting.

“Tony’s been by a lot,” she said and rolled on her belly. I traced the gracious curve of her spine from her neck down between her alabaster cheeks. “They talk about railways. Tony’s railway.”

That much I had guessed. But except for the brief mention on the phone, Tony was strangely reluctant to talk to me about it, changing the subject as soon as I brought it up. His frequent visits to St. Andrews indicated that whatever deal they had was closer than I thought.

Food for thought.

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Tony had been diddling with the project of a private railway for years. It was to connect Manhattan with his holdings in Rockaway Beach with an line that would get people from the City into his casinos in less than an hour, bypassing the slower Jamaica express of the Long Island Rail Road entirely. He’d purchased the majority ownership of a derelict railway company and renamed it Sunshine Rail Road. He’d lobbied and lubricated local politicos.

And given the traditional kickback lines, some of the great hyenas of organized crime had to be tied into the deal with substantial interests. I suspected that last month’s party was mostly about greasing the wheels of the current administrations, legal and illegal. Possibly very soon, there’d be a big shindig celebrating the breaking of ground for the new high-speed railway.

“What’re you thinking,” Solveig asked. “You gonna get all sulky on me, too?”

I turned her on her back and placed my hand squarely on her bleached-gold patch of hair. “Me, sulky” I asked. “Never!”

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O

ur little pillow talk had made me think. I called my broker to find out if remnants of Sunshine Rail Road stock were still available for purchase in the open market. There was none, just as I had thought. Tony’d bought up every last outstanding share at ludicrously low prices over the past two years. Which means he’d be able to set a new price when they went public again. But to make sure the price was high enough to spit out the money to bankroll a new railroad, they’d have to capture the market’s interest. Not the smart money, which was already in place. But those with money socked away for a rainy day who’d clamor to give it to them in exchange for visions of future riches: Tony needed marks.

Now, stocks frequently advance far beyond any reasonable value simply because some pools can control them for a short time and manipulate them beyond all intrinsic value. Then they collapse. Stocks with only a small number of shares outstanding work best for schemes like this. Just like Sunshine Rail Road, which by now had no shares outstanding. Tony owned them all, and probably was giving gratuitous shares of ownership dirtcheap to people whose support he needed. The new issue could be launched without blemish, attract the greed and dreams of 77

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those short on brain but long on cash. Those who’d never learn that it’s always safer to short-sell new stocks. Because when the underwriters are distributing the stock, the news is so bullish that those who buy hope for too much, until, a few weeks or months into it, they realize that they expected the impossible. Of course, there’s just as much money to be made in trading a manipulated stock as there’s in one rising on merit. As long as it’s going up, that is. As long as you get out at the right time. And then, as long as you’re shorting it at the right time.

I had Gilbert drop me off at the Public Library, where I spent an entire afternoon going through each and every edition of all New York papers that had been published over the past six months. And there I found it. Notices and brief mentions in articles dating back into early spring. And full features, with pictures of Tony in front of his Rockaway properties in some papers dating back just a few weeks. There was even a short piece on the possibility of an initial public offering of Sunshine stock, which the well-greased newspaper man called “possibly one of the financial highlights of 1924”.

I was hurt. All this stuff going on and my big Sicilian brother not telling me? Was he still sore about me mucking up his grand plans of marrying me off with his Sicilian cousins of the Ilardo clan? I’d pay him a visit to tease him about it. What are little brothers for, after all?

When I left the library, the steps and the lions were slick with rain. For a moment, I considered taking a cab. But at the spur of the moment, I decided to walk. I turned up the collar on my coat, pulled my Fedora over my eyes, melding with the dripping rush hour crowd that carried me toward Tony’s uptown residence.

That’s where I saw them.

I was about to cross the street when the front door opened and Papa Ilardo stepped out, shadowed by one of his mafias carrying 78

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an umbrella. Behind him, all smiles, Tony followed, his hand on the shoulder of a mean-looking Wop in a foreign-cut suit. You didn’t have to tell me. This was Ilardo’s fixer. Imported straight from Palermo for the single purpose of avenging the long-lost and unlamented virginity of Maria Dolorosa, my dear ex-fiancée.

I could hardly blame Ilardo, what with terrones being terrones, and Sicilians being stuck in their special brand of feral, dark-age Catholicism. Heck, had it been my daughter, the head of the guy who dumped her would be grinning down at his body from a steel rebar somewhere in the marshes outside the City.

What galled me was Tony. Here’s my old partner, my selfstyled big brother, playing hide the salami with the Wop hired to glom me. I knew I could be a pain. I knew Tony had plans. But such misplaced affection for the future murderer of your oldest and dearest friend was uncalled for. I rejoined the crowd, watching Ilardo’s Duisenberg collect him and his kill boy.

That wasn’t all, however. Behind Tony, inside the brightly lit hallway, I caught a fleeting glance of a tallish blond man in a dark suit. He had a fresh scar on his forehead. I recognized it because I’d put it there, we few weeks ago, when the mug had worn automobile mechanics overalls over spit-shined shoes and was trying to put a .38 from a nickel-plated Harrington & Richardson between me and my dinner with Hedy.

After they’d left and Tony had disappeared back into his house, I hailed a cab. The driver tried to talk Babe Ruth and baseball. I let him ramble on, trying to figure out the new situation.

If Tony was all chummy with Ilardo, it could mean that he’d be ready and prepared to assume the role of the grieving friend, shedding a manly tear or two over the open grave of his most beloved little brother, a certain Vittorio “Vic” Del Frate. Me. If he’d actually sent out the yegg to do me in, it meant I’d outlived 79

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my welcome for good. And it looked like he had.

The question was why. He suspected nothing about the little game I was playing with his new business partner, St. Andrews.

And even if he figured that it had been me busting up his little shindig with the stick grenade, the little big bang had turned out great for him. Two, three days of newspapers fantasizing about an anarchist bomb plot against a benefactor of the City—who’d shuttle gambling fools of all classes and creeds to be fleeced at his casinos at twice the speed, free of charge—had given him more attention than all the fluff pieces about the natural beauties of Rockaway Beach combined. You couldn’t buy publicity like this!

There was, of course, the Ottawa deal, which had gotten bigger and bigger over the months. We’d set up a shell company that leveraged grain futures and locked in a huge chunk of Canadian wheat and barley, which was going straight from the silos to a high-volume brewerycum-distillery in Ottawa, to be converted into lager and hair tonic. The tonic then was shipped to an upstate New York bottling plant, legally and respectably as far as the Feds were concerned. What we didn’t advertise was that we’d found a way to extract the galling agent from the tonic that made the alcohol undrinkable, which allowed us to re-bottle nine tenths of our Ottawa production in whisky bottles, ready to be sold for top dollar to flapper girls and washed-up alkies like S. Calvert Johnston. The remaining 10% was poured over balding men’s heads in the hopes of making new hair.

With most major American stills producing only small batches of industrial alcohol for fear of the Feds, it was a business worth millions. And since I’d been increasing my share in it thanks to the St. Andrews stock scams, I’d become a worthwhile target to inherit from. Once Palermo had done what he came for, everyone would be happy. Ilardo’d toast the avenging of his daughter’s bygone 80

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honor, the Feds would collect one heck of an estate tax check, and since we owned the shell company jointly, with rights of survivorship, Tony would graciously add my share of the business to his own. Only I’d not be happy. I’d be dead. This put my other problem, Hedy’s nosy cousin, into proper perspective.

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I

’ve never been one for stalking a man. I find it tedious, following him around to figure out his habits, sit for hours inside an unheated or uncooled car to catalog the comings and goings at his digs. Which is what my new friend from Palermo would have to do to get close to me. And with Tony’s apparent blessing readily and recently given, I thought I might be seeing him later that night.

And so I did. Hedy had gone out with her cousin and a broad she wanted to set him up with, and I had sent Gilbert upstate to check up on a shipment of my hair tonic. I left my apartment and took the elevator to the top floor. I then entered the attic, opened a hatch and stepped out on the roof. Taking cover behind any raised object I could find, I snuck across the flat roofs to the far side of the neighboring building, from where I descended the fire escape into the courtyard. I was wearing a black coat, black slacks, and had pulled a black stocking cap over my head. Slowly sauntering down the street like a man down on his luck, I made the Cad I’d seen from the window of my darkened bedroom. The one with the orange firefly going on and off inside.

Didn’t they know that smoking is bad for your health? Palermo was sitting in the back seat, discretely peering at my brightly lit 82

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study window through a set of binoculars. One of Ilardo’s hoods was sucking on a coffin nail behind the wheel. I looked up and down the street, waiting for a late insurance salesman to hasten by, home to a dull dinner in a desolate Midtown apartment. After he’d turned the corner, I stepped up to the car and rapped at the window.

Despite of what you may have come to expect, I’m not one for subtlety. Especially in dealing with a guy hired to turn me into Swiss cheese. I’d been dicking around with Tut and the Mummy, and with the guy in spit-shined shoes, out of respect for the tender memories of my ex-fiancée Marie Dolorosa and Tony’s Sicilian sensitivities. But sending for a down-home mafia to glom me was crossing a line. So when Palermo turned at the sound of my .45 knocking at the window, I was in a less than gracious mood. As he went for his gat, the first three slugs punched an ugly hole where is nose had been just a second before. His head flew back and I planted a fourth slug right between his eyes. Nothing personal.

The driver, his dropped cigarette burning a hole into his crotch, found the steering wheel detrimental to quick access to his gun.

His hat, containing half his head and most of his grey matter, little as there was of it, spun into the remnants of the windshield as my gun kicked twice. Then, blessed silence.

As the lights went on in the windows, I was already on my way down the street, my black stocking cap in my coat pocket, my coat leisurely draped over my right arm. When the prowl cars arrived, I was watching from my study window, sipping medicinal Scotch from a crystal tumbler.

Neither Tony nor Ilardo tried to contact me the next day. Just as well. This way, I had time to replace the barrel of my gun and give the thing a thorough cleaning. My coat and stocking cap, as well as anything that still could hold splinters of a Cad’s shot-out 83

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window or Palermo’s blood, had been incinerated in the building’s boiler room the night before. The morning papers wrote about the slaying of two unidentified men, lamenting crime’s incursion into the better neighborhoods of the City. But since one cadaver was a foreigner and the other a man of no consequence, it required just two paragraphs for the public to find emotional closure.

Far more ink had been spilled on the ground-breaking for the new express line of Sunshine Rail Road, which was to take place a week from now, on the very day of the much-anticipated stock offering of the budding new railway company. The paper quoted one “Anthony Lupara,” visionary principal of the new venture: “The operation is completely independent of fares. Sunshine Rail Road will carry pleasure seekers and businessmen to their destination free of charge.” A fleet of small shuttle buses would be collecting passengers from all around the City just for the hailing, dropping them off at the newly built station, from where highspeed trains would be running every twenty minutes to transport them to the Rockaway casinos in ultimate luxury. In return, the casinos would be splitting the profits with the railway, promising investors unlimited upside, stability, and instant dividends.

Who doesn’t appreciate stability and low risk? Especially in a company with no existing cash flow and a previous bankruptcy in its record. He’d sold me!

I called my broker and found out that my friend Calvert had indeed notified him that the next stock to be touted to the purpleribbon sucker pool was the new offering of Sunshine Rail Road.

Given the publicity, there was no chance in hell I’d be getting in early, let alone at any reasonable price. I told him I’d call him back when I had a better feel for the situation. Meanwhile, he was to liquidate my holdings in St. Andrews’ previous scam, taking profits and shorting the stock just ahead of the insider crowd for 84

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close to a hundred thousand dollars in good, clean, honest profits.

He was to try and borrow as many shares of Sunshine Rail Road from underwriters and private owners as he could possibly pull together.

Despite of my personal dislike of the man, I had come to appreciate the mendacious genius of Justice St. Andrews over the past couple of weeks. His acquaintance, and the money of his purple-ribbon fool pool, had been rewarding. Not to mention that he had introduced me to Hedy.

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W

ith Palermo out of the way and Papa Ilardo preoccupied arguing his case with the home office and playing the stock market ponies, there were still a few things I had to look into. Such as who exactly was my beloved Hedy’s Kraut cousin.

I recognized the man despite the dim light of the speakeasy.

He was pale, scrawny, with glasses as thick as the bottoms of beer steins. The dead giveaway were his fingers, which were dyed black from decades of handling newsprint. I waved him over to my booth, invited him to sit, and, with as imperial gesture a gesture as I could muster, had the waiter deliver two foaming glasses of bootleg Canadian lager to the table.

“Hmm,” the scrawny one said after a first cautious sip. “Not exactly brewed according to the Purity Law. What the hell do you make it from, acorns?” Foam clung to his thin mustache.

“What can I do for you?”

I don’t like to have my beer insulted, especially not by a Kraut.

Was it my fault if demand was so high it required us to speed the fermentation process along with a little hair tonic? But since I needed his information, I cut him some slack.

“They say you’re the best for information on Germany,” I stated, keeping my voice flat and emotionless. It simply doesn’t 86

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pay to indicate that the information you’re seeking is of supreme interest. The scrawny one shrugged cautiously: “You hear things when you publish a German paper.”

“I need to know just two things. What’s Fry-Core? And what’s an Organization Console.”

The scrawny one reflexively straightened and looked around.

“Herrjemine, look at the time” he said and downed the glass in front of him in one gulp, never mind the hair tonic. “It’s been nice meeting you.” And he rose to leave. But I grabbed him by the threadbare sleeve.

“Hold it! You stay right here.” The scrawny one hesitated. I let the sleeve go, reached for my wallet, and began laying out tendollar bills on the table: “I make it worth your while.” After the fifth green rectangle, the scrawny one sighed and sat. “Alright,” he said, pocketing the money. I motioned for another round as he melted into the back of the booth. He waited until the waiter was out of earshot, then leaned across the table.

“One doesn’t discuss these things out in the open. Not even in New York.”

“Why?” “You asked about the O.C.—Organisation Consul.”

“I did?”

“They’re trouble.”

“I figured. So am I. What kind of trouble?”

“The worst kind. The O.C. are ultra-nationalists, recruited from the most hardcore members of the Freikorps.”

I shrugged. Fry-core or Freikorps, it was all gibberish to me.

He explained. “The Freikorps are paramilitary units of combat veterans from the Great War, run by decommissioned officers— warlords, really. Heathens. Their aim is warfare against all antinationalists and internationalists; warfare against the Jews, the 87

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Social Democrats and leftist radicals. Get even with the Frogs and the Tommies. Then there’s the left-wing Freikorps, who want exactly the opposite, except they want to be part of the Russkis.

All want to overthrow the German constitution and, of course, the Jews and the banks and the capitalists. And they kill people.

Hundreds of them. Politicians, even government ministers, assassinated right out in the open. Everyone they consider traitors of the German cause. And the German Cause is revenge. Same goes for the Grand Cause of the Proletariat.”

The cold current in my stomach wasn’t caused by the beer. I tried to laugh it off. “Sounds like Snorky Capone up in Cicero.”

But the scrawny one shook his head. “Worse, believe me. In their day, they’ve taken entire cities by force.”

“Just like Snorky in Cicero. So what’d they be doing in America?”

The eyes behind the thick lenses widened. “Here? I don’t believe I’ve ever heard about them operating overseas—at least not on official business. Poland, yes. Silesia. France.” He downed his beer. “Then again, anything’s possible.” He rose. “I don’t know why you ask. But if you want my advice, stay as far away from them as you can. These guys mean business. They’ve survived the war, they’ve survived the revolution. They’ve seen death—all kinds of death, horrible, horrible death—and they don’t fear it. And,” he bent down to me, “they don’t forget. They don’t forgive, either.

Ever.”

“Just like Snorky’s boys,” I joked. But I didn’t like what I was hearing. “I need you to look into this man,” I said, pushing an envelope at him. It contained what little my contacts had dug up about Hauke Hayen and another quintuplet of sawbucks.

Before I could add anything, the scrawny one had scooped up the envelope and was scurrying out the door as fast as his scuffed 88

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shoes would carry him. I stared after him. I noticed that my right hand had instinctively reached for the grip of my .45 beneath my coat. With my left, I waved over the waiter. I required some medicinal Scotch.

So here I had it. My Kraut girlfriend’s cousin possibly was not just a killer. Even worse, he was part of a secret organization of killers. Who carry grudges for decades, well, seven years and counting, against people who’d acted against the German cause, whatever that meant these days. The latter was the only thing that half-way comforted me. After all, the whole world had acted against the German cause. Even if they ever came to America, there’d be much bigger fish to fry. Since Wilson had been pushing daisies for the past four years, they’d have the choice of each and every cabinet member in his administration, and each and every member of New York’s top banking magnates, from the late John Pierpont Morgan down to the bank tellers selling war bonds. My own part in it was small potatoes by comparison. Tiny potatoes!

One could even argue I’d helped keeping Germans alive. And that I was only fourteen years old at the time. A mere child, really!

Still, I knew that wouldn’t help me if Hauke ever found out.

But how could he? There were only two people in the world who knew. Myself and Tony Lupara. And I sure as hell wouldn’t talk.

And what interest could Tony have spilling the beans? After all, he was the man who had sold the champagne back to the Lloyd!

Tony. He was the man who’d sent out shoe shine boy to rub me out. He’d shaken hands with my prospective killer. And he was the man who’d quite legally inherit my shares in the Ottawa deal should I be terminally incapacitated.

So I went through my options. I could pack up and leave New York City for an extended period of time, a few months, maybe 89

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even a few years. I might go to Chi, where someone still owed me a favor. Or to Cuba. Or even to Firenze, the ancestral home of the Jersey del Frates. Heck, Mussolini was on a bender over there. He could use a smart, intelligent businessman like myself on his side.

But no. I didn’t like the idea of running. Chicago wasn’t far enough away to escape Tony’s connections. Also, my Italian is terrible and black jodhpurs might my ass look fat. I pay attention to appearances. So Firenze was out as well. I didn’t like Cuba, which I hear is full of Cubans. And then there was Hedy.

There was another other option. If I married Hedy and added her name to the title of everything I owned, it would knock out Tony’s right to inherit the entire Ottawa deal. My share of the property would pass straight to her in case I met with an inopportune accident. Tony would end up with just his half and probably find her a formidable opponent in the boardroom. If our company had a board, that is. Or a room, for that matter. In other words, a big, sparkly diamond ring on Hedy’s left hand would make me a far less attractive target financially. I’d also be part of Hauke’s family and possibly even protected from the revenge of the Consuls. But all I’d been able to do with Hedy over the last couple of weeks was cop a feel or two. She kept her legs closed tighter than a bad clam. And unlike other women I’d gone out with, she never once had mentioned marriage. What were the chances she’d accept my proposal?

The last remaining solution was the most straight-forward and most difficult. I could shoot Tony, shoot Hauke, shoot Ilardo, maybe throw in St. Andrews for good luck. Messy. And hard to pull off. Not to mention that the law would get involved and I ran the realistic chance of getting my brains poached on the electric chair. And Hedy might mind me glomming yet another family member, although three would be a charm.

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Of course, I could get someone else to do it for me. But even that required complex planning and selection: If Cousin Hauke was indeed a member of Organisation Consul, he was just one of an army of killers with an unwholesome interest in the Mott’ und Schotter business. Kill him and there’d be more. More silent stalkers with grey eyes that stripped you down to the lowlife you were when they looked at you. Who’d not forgive. Never forget.

And next time, I wouldn’t be warned, because what were the chances of Hedy having another cousin? Kill Hauke and another killer Kraut would replace him a month, a year, five years from now, asking questions about Fritz Schmidt, maybe finding out about Tony Lupara, maybe manage to get another name out of him. Like the name of Vittorio Del Frate.

Then there was Tony. Head of a well-established local syndicate, difficult to get at to be sure. But a single head. In fact, the only head in the world other than mine that stored information how my life was built on selling Germans to the Brits for leftover champagne. Furthermore, I did know everything there was to know about Tony’s summer home in the Rockaways. Knew about the well-disguised emergency exit from the boiler room in the basement, where a well-placed stick of dynamite, equipped with a blasting cap and a healthy bit of fuse, would bring the house down. Tony, however, was an old friend. My brother. But biz is biz and schnapps is schnapps, as Hedy would say when I happened to run late, only that she said it in German. As a friend, I could get close to Tony. Close enough to make sure Tony’s memory was erased and gone before he named names.

But explosions are messy. And there still was his railroad deal to consider.

If there was anything I know about railroads, it was that they’re constantly going broke. Building and maintaining a line is 91

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a money pit. Locomotives, especially the new diesel-electrics that General Electrics was building, cost almost $50,000 dollars a pop.

And to operate Sunshine as frequently and regularly as Tony was promising, he’d need at least four of them. Not to mention the rails, the stations, the new electric signaling systems. There would be no revenues from freight, and if Tony kept his word, there’d be no fares collected from passengers. All money would be derived from a percentage of the gambling receipts of the Rockaway Beach casinos and maybe businesses advertising on the passenger cars and the trucks. Overall, it made little business sense: Tony already owned most of the casino business. Unless he expected that Sunshine would double or triple the number of gamblers heading out to the shore, he’d be bleeding money he didn’t have to lose.

But maybe he was planning to use the line to move things other than passengers from point A to point B. Things like hair tonic minus the galling agent...

Of course, there could’ve been other reasons. What, for instance, was St. Andrew’s role in this? Why had Tony bothered acquiring a publicly traded if derelict railroad company, rather than starting a new one from scratch or buying into Long Island Rail Road, which was already servicing this route?

The longer I thought about it, the more sense it made. Tony was a strategic thinker. But he believed in combining long-term strategy with short-term cash flow. Cash is the purpose of all business, criminal or legitimate. And cash is the purpose of longterm strategy. As much cash as possible, as soon as possible, for as long as possible.

The short-term benefit was obvious. If Sunshine stock was floated to St. Andrew’s marks and then the greater market, Tony and his partners stood to make a mint in a few days. Possibly enough to offset the entire cost of building a railroad. So who were 92

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those partners? Obviously, not me. There was Tony, St. Andrews, and—considering Tony’s ambition to rise up the social ladder— probably a bunch of high-placed mugs in government and organized crime with a package of stocks or stock options. Favors would be returned, and new obligations and goodwill would be created toward Tony by channelling large amounts of money to select people who could be useful to him. So it had to pay off big. This was the big leagues. And big-league people wouldn’t take kindly to being ripped off. Especially not the Chicago crowd. With high-profile people involved, the venture had to seem legitimate. I remembered the news articles and feature stories that had peppered the New York papers over the past couple of months. The Mayor at the party. A mere prelude to what would come around the day of the stock issue.

Things started to fall into place. I knew what to do. And it all centered around the grand opening of the Sunshine Rail Road connection that would carry a never-ending stream of gamblers to Tony’s Rockaway Beach casinos every half hour.

First and foremost, I needed to place my bets. Then hedge them. Even as I was preparing my own solution, I had to make sure that business got taken care of even if my plan didn’t pan out.

I picked up the phone and called up my friend at J.P. Morgan. He was simpering a bit, but another five C of debt relief convinced him to set up another trading account. This one was in Tony’s name, with a Transfer-on-Death provision to yours truly. I lined it with a cool hundred grand I wired from our joint company account up in Canada.

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S

ince Hedy still preferred to sleep by herself, in her own bed, in her own apartment, my Saturday mornings tended to be quiet. Perfect to get some business done. And no business was more profitable for me right now than St. Andrews’ stock scam. This particular Saturday morning, there was a knock at my study door. Gilbert entered, looking a bit sheepish. “Sorry, sir, the lady just...” He was unceremoniously pushed aside by Maria Dolorosa.

“Where’s the whore,” she asked, her dark eyes sparking that I thought my hair’d catch fire.

“Well, good morning, Maria,” I said, only slightly rattled by the unexpected appearance of my ex-fiancée. Rattled enough to look for the Wop razor I kept on my desk. “Sorry, I don’t know who you’re referring to.”

“Of course you do,” she snapped. “Miss flash-my-tits-at-everymale-in-town Sorensen.”

I admit that seeing her standing in front of me, her cheeks and upper chest flushed with excitement, brought back pleasant memories. Maria’s an attractive girl. She was wearing a short white dress, with no hat. Her hair was jet black and shorter than the last time I’d seen her. God and she both knew she was a hot piece of tail.

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I, too, suddenly pictured her naked, her impressive chest pointing straight at me, with nipples the size of .45 slugs, dark aureoles as big as saucers, and her black bush trimmed back enough to flash a hint of pink. Good times. I knew there were several very good reasons to get engaged to this woman. And two of them right now swung just a few feet away from my face.

“Vittorio,” she said, suddenly calm. “What are you doing?

Have you lost your mind? Half the town is out for your blood.”

“I know,” I said, picturing her on her hands and knees, with her bottom straight up in the air, just like the last night we’d spent together, before I kicked her out. “Your Dad’s been a real pain. Not for me, personally.” I thought of Tut and the Mummy, of Palermo and the shoeshine man. She must have read my mind.

“One of them will get you,” she said quietly. “And for what?

A piece of pussy?” She bent over, her hands on my desk, revealing most of her substantial assets. “You can have pussy, Vittorio. Any time. You can have it all. There’s still time to stop all this.”

I didn’t like where this was going. Mostly because I knew how her pride must’ve been bucking right then, demeaning herself to appeal to my venal needs.

“Maria,” I started but was cut off. “No, you listen to me, Vittorio. It doesn’t have to be like this. Let’s forget about all that’s happened. Let’s get together again. Let’s get married like we planned. I love you, Vittorio, and I don’t want to see you get hurt.”

There were genuine tears in her eyes, genuine passion in her voice.

It made it very uncomfortable to turn her down.

“Maria,” I said, trying to remember my standard speech for such moments. “It’s not you. It’s me. I realized that I could never make you as happy as you deserve to be. I’m a loner. I hurt people.

I’m not marriage material.”

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“Yes, you are,” she said with half a sob, to all of it. I hated seeing mascara streak her cheeks. Crying women are such a turnoff.

“No, I’m not, Maria. And we won’t be getting back together.

It’s just not in the cards for us.”

It’s amazing how fast tearful sentiment can turn into violent hate. Which in Maria Dolorosa expresses itself in a stark, unnatural paleness that makes her dark eyes and red mouth stand out like those of a lamia.

“Puttaniere,”9 she said with a voice as cold and sharp as the Wop’s razor on my desk. “You do love her. Little Victor Del Frate’s in love with the little blond girl about town.” She turned, shooting me a look twice as deadly as a garrote wire. “She’ll be your death, Vittorio. I’ll make sure of it.”

She turned without another word, waltzed past Gilbert, who had been standing behind her with a meat cleaver, ready to intercede just in case she drew a gun. (From where, I hardly know.) I watched her leave, her grand ass shaking in righteous fury beneath her short white dress. She slammed the door so hard it sounded like a cannon going off. A framed print fell off the wall, shattering glass and wood on the floor.

“Whew,” I said, feeling slightly shaky. “That was something.”

There was a moment of silence. “She really is something.”

“That she is, sir,” said Gilbert, hefting the cleaver. I had no doubt he’d have used it.

Despite the disharmonious note that had ended it all, the memories her unexpected appearance brought back had put me in the mood for company. I stuffed the latest of St. Andrews’ letters into a large envelope, addressed it to a certain name in the employ of Uncle Sam’s Postal Service, and strapped on my gun.

9 Literally, “whore monger”.

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“I need to get some air,” I said. I really did. I don’t like confrontation, at least not when it’s me who’s being confronted. It makes me tense. I needed a massage. Needed it badly.

A Swedish massage, to be specific. Thank God I happened to remember that it was Solveig’s day off. But I was out of luck in the blowing-off-steam department. “No, Vic, not today,” she said, trying to remove my hand from her breast. “I have a dress fitting in twenty minutes.”

“So?” I slipped behind her, re-establishing my hold on her chest. “Didn’t you hear,” she asked.

“Tony and Justice will be opening Sunshine Rail Road the day after tomorrow. Monday morning.”

My hands froze. She laughed at me. “Where the hell have you been, Vic?”

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I

n my dealings with those of the Hun persuasion, I’ve discovered that they come in two varieties. Stocky, large-bodied, with square heads. And long, tall ones with narrow heads. I never quite could make up my mind which kind was the more dangerous.

After meeting Hauke, I was tempted to think it’s the latter.

Looking back, I realized that Friedrich Schmidt was not as old as he seemed to me back then. After all, I was only fourteen when I first met him. At that age, anyone over fifteen’s a god, anyone past twenty a geezer. It didn’t help that Schmidt’s shorn head was as square as a circle is round, with watery blue eyes and a bristling mustache the color of old hay. You were never quite sure where the head ended and the neck started or vice versa. He smelled of pipe tobacco and rye, which the supply lockers of the North German Lloyd provided in abundance.

Being a queer with a hankering for black boy tail, he’d never struck me as dangerous. Until the moment when he tried to charge Tony, down at the Hoboken docks back in 1917. Tony had deftly sidestepped his attack, turned on his toes, and cracked Schmidt’s skull wide open with a sap. The Kraut had landed flat on his face, his eyes wide open and unfocused as he clumsily turned over. What followed wasn’t pretty, and, ever since, I’ve felt 98

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slightly nauseous whenever I hear the impact of a hard implement on flesh. I’ve avoided fishmongers and Catholic schools ever since.

That’s why I send Gilbert to the butcher’s shop for my flank steak and Parma. By the time we’d finished, all that was left of Schmidt was a bloody smear on the dock and a limp form drifting away in the dirty water. That day, I forswore the use of physical force in ending a man’s life, sticking to bullets or, if absolutely necessary, cold steel instead.

Of course, on occasion, stronger stuff was called for. Something combustive. But most I knew about high explosives came from the luxury edition of the soft, leather-bound Encyclopedia Britannica that glowed from the mahogany barrister book cases in my study.

Which was that dynamite consisted of three parts nitroglycerin and one part of diatomaceous earth or kieselgur. I had no idea what that was, but it sounded too German for comfort.

I also knew that you could buy it by the case, in farm or quarry supply stores, if you didn’t mind or had time for a lengthy drive upstate. If you needed less, say, a single half-pound stick, you might steal it from a careless farmer. Or you could pull some strings, cash in a favor, pick it up in the back room of one of your warehouses at the Hoboken waterfront, maybe from a nervous rat of a man with more stubble than chin. Just follow a shaky index finger pointing at a wooden box about 15 inches long and 6 inches high, containing sawdust, twelve eight-inch sticks of dynamite wrapped in waxed paper, and more sawdust.

“Don’t drop it,” the rat quivered. “Whatever you do with it, don’t drop it.”

I didn’t intend to: A single stick could blast a boulder into smithereens or collapse a house in the blink of an eye. I’d seen the former and feared the latter, at least as far as my warehouse and Upper East Side digs were concerned. Neither use was of any 99

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interest to me. I just needed to blow up my past and a man’s future recollections. Like most things, it was a matter of life and math.

Earlier that morning, I had rung Tony’s brownstone, to be told that the Master of the House was resting up for tomorrow’s triumphal kick-off of Sunshine Rail Road in his vacation home at the shore. In Rockaway Beach, to be specific. In front of me on the desk, I had the printed weekend time tables for the old Jamaica express train of the Long Island Raid Road. Counting on Hedy’s obstinate celibacy, I was anticipating a pleasantly monkish morning and then exactly three hours and twenty-five minutes of time to do what needed to be done.

With any luck, the demolition of Tony’s vacation home— and its occupant—would coincide with the traditional firework displays of immigrant Wops celebrating St. Bartholomew’s Day. If my fortuitous stick grenade a few weeks ago, and the papers’ speculative tie-in to Italian anarchists didn’t present an obviousenough path of inquiry, at least they’d give the fire chief a very good and very cold line into why the domicile of a well-known Italian businessman might’ve spontaneously combusted.

At around eleven, I was in my study, cautiously wrapping a single stick of dynamite in yesterday’s copy of the Wall Street Journal when Hedy arrived early for our Sunday brunch. I asked her to wait in the salon as I was wrapping up some business and had just closed the door to my study when the phone rang. I picked up, instantly realizing that Hedy in the salon had beaten me to it. I was about to quietly hang up when I heard Hauke’s voice.

“Hedy,” Hauke said. “Wie komme ich am besten nach Rockaway Beach?”

“Rrroehkaveh Biihtsch,” I heard Hedy mimmick her cousin’s Kraut pronunciation. Which, strangely enough, only came through when he was using English words while speaking German. I could 100

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almost see her lovely red lips forming a perfect “O”. “Depends on where you are now.”

“Hoboken,” said Hauke and my heart just dropped.

“Hoeh-boeh-ken to Rrrroekaveh Biihtsch,” Hedy laughed. “I crack myself up! Well, considering it’s Sunday, just take…”

But I had placed the receiver on the desk and was heading out the door, the newspaper-wrapped package cradled in my arms, a blasting cap and a coil of fuse hastily stuffed in my jacket pocket.

Hauke was headed to Rockaway Beach! That could only mean Hauke knew about Tony. He’d be at Tony’s summer house in a few hours. If math was to work its magic, my reckoning had just been cut down to just two hours or so: Turn Tony, Tony’s house, and Tony’s memory of so many bottles of Moët Chandon into Moths and Gravel.

So much to do, so little time. With all due caution, I pushed the wooden crate with the dynamite under my desk.

“Something’s come up, kid,” I yelled as I raced past the salon on my way out. “Business emergency. I call you.”

I slammed the door, flinching when I realized I just might’ve set off my dynamite with thoughtless stuff like this. Seeing the elevator doors shut and the arrow pointing at “1”, I raced down the stairs, two steps at a time, down all ten flights, through the lobby, past Charles, and onto the street.

I wonder now. Had I looked up as I hailed the cab, even just for a second, would I’ve noticed that Hedy was watching me from the salon window on the tenth floor of my apartment building?

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umbers are unforgiving, I thought, looking at those on my watch face. My cab—you really can’t take a conspicuous Prussian-blue Locomobile for a delicate task like this!—was stuck behind an upturned carriage, just ten minutes away from the East New York station of the Long Island Railroad.

What kind of traffic was this for a Sunday morning!

I leaned out of the window and felt my heartbeat synchronizing with the merciless drum of the second hand.

Then I saw. A pale mare was lying on the cobblestones, a mounted policeman on a dappled white horse directing traffic around the wreckage. “Schimmelreiter,” popped into my mind.

Rider on a white horse. I didn’t like that I even remembered the word.

I looked at my watch again, felt my heart stumble: It was 11:15. The Jamaica express train to Rockaway was leaving in exactly ten minutes. Energized by the power of numbers, I threw a wad of bills at the driver. “Keep the change,” I shouted as I slammed the door shut. Holding the newspaper-wrapped package like a colicky infant, I began to trot, then run toward the station, sweat dripping from my face, pouring from my palms and arms, until my hands looked like those of the scrawny 102

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man back at the speakeasy and the paper was as soft and mushy as Tony’s brains would be in, oh, say an hour or two.

The train was moving and crowds were milling as I raced down the long, wooden platform, elbowing past a middle-aged woman who stood slack-jawed, head tilted back, studying the departure tables. I ignored her squalling, almost bumped into a large penny weight machine.

A penny to get your correct weight? What a gyp!

I poured the rest of my strength into one last scrum after the departing train. The conductor standing in the open door of the last carriage extended his hand. I jumped across the crack between platform and running board, clutched the conductor’s hand at the wrist. A porter had run up behind him me. Pushed from behind and pulled from above, I swung my body onto the rolling carriage.

I’d done it! I’d made the train, would be in the Rockaways in an hour, with Tony a cherished memory by early afternoon. I almost laughed, out of sheer relief, at the irony that Tony’s competitor, the Long Island Rail Road, might be doing him in at the eve of his grand moment in the Sunshine.

Then, at this exact moment, the Wall Street Journal, soaked with sweat and fear, tore, no, parted, no, liquified beneath my arm. The package slipped, slid, bounced off the last step and, with a thud drowned out by the screams of the iron wheels, landed on the rails.

But nothing happened.

My desperate attempt to leap after it was thwarted by the vise grip the conductor had on my coat.

“Let it go, laddie,” the man said in the thickest Irish brogue I’d ever heard. “Ye’ll break yer silly neck!”

Mouth open, eyes wide as saucers, I watched in horror as platform and package moved out of my sight. With the surprising 103

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agility of a serpent on fire, I twisted out of the Paddy’s grip, leaving him with a torn piece of fabric in his fist. I jumped off the train just as it left the station, twisted my foot on a railroad tie, then hurried, limped, ran, hobbled.

Then, suddenly, I flew when I heard the explosion.10

10 This allows us to precisely date this event to August 25, 1924. The explosion at the Jamaica express gave rise to the famous Palsgraf v. Long Island Rail Road case known to every student of American tort law. (According to a New York Times article from that day, Mrs. Palsgraf was one of the persons injured in the explosion.)

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he sky was blue and the sun continued to blast down on my New York purgatory. Dejected, slouching, shirt sticking to my body, I cut past the signals, scampered over rails and oil-stained ties, almost fell into the street a block south of the station. Thick, black smoke was pouring from the platform, with people yelling in all languages of Babel. Claxons, sirens, whistles.

The horns of stopped cars. I saw the NYPD Rough Rider prance through the crowd on his white horse. I stumbled on down the street. The current of pedestrians surged against me. Moments later, as the commotion faded in the distance, movement became easier.

Damn it. That stick of dynamite had cost me a mint! I turned around and looked back at where I knew the station was. The plume of smoke marked clearly where my undue haste had blown up my plan. I ran the numbers again. Then stopped. I laughed, suddenly flooded with a sense of relief. Given the delays the bang had caused to Sunday traffic, it would take Hauke hours to get to Rockaway Beach from Hoboken, hours to locate Tony, hours to jog his memory. If he was able to get to Tony at all. Who’d probably hear about the explosion at his main competitor’s station shortly, and possibly would have to entertain the one or other curious copper.

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My failure of blowing up Tony was actually keeping Cousin Consul from reaching him, too!

Which bought me time. And gave me an exquisite idea. I hailed another cab, had the driver drop me off at my apartment.

Neither Gilbert nor Hedy were home when I entered, which suited me fine. I made a few calls, took a magnificent hot bath listening to the wireless news reports. After I heard that nobody was killed and few people were seriously hurt at the Long Island Rail Road, I switched over to music. By the time the jeweler’s boy dropped off the small package, I was rested, fresh, and full of piss and vinegar.

I’d see Hedy at the Delmonico later that night. But in the meantime, I had a few hours to kill.

And a few schemes to crush.

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“

What happened, for crying out loud? Why did you take off in such a hurry?”

Hedy seemed genuinely upset. Again, she was a vision, dressed in a simple white summer dress, her hair in a golden wave, her red mouth pouting and sipping champagne at the Delmonico over canapées.

“Sorry, kid,” I gave her my most dazzling smile. “Something came up. Something I absolutely had to take care of.” I dropped to one knee, fished in my pocket, and came up with the biggest, shiniest, most expensive diamond solitaire ring that money and the righteous indignation of a Jew jeweler deprived of his Schabbes could procure on a Sunday afternoon.

“Hedwig Sorensen,” I declared as the other diners’ heads were tilting our way. “The great tragedy at the railroad station today reminded me how short life can be. And how we need to grasp and hold tight to our happiness when we find it.”

Boy, was I full of it! But I simply had to lay it on extra thick.

After all, by now even the waiters were paying attention.

“Hedy Sorensen,” I said. “Will you marry me?”

For a second, she seemed taken aback. Then she giggled her small, girlish, effervescent giggle and blazed me with those eyes of 107

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hers. She bent forward, revealing enough cleavage to set my heart racing and the solitaire jiggling in my fingers.

“Vittorio,” she said. “I thought you’d never ask!”

When I kissed her on her ruby red lips, I thought I heard applause. But I can’t say for sure because my blood was rushing through my ears like a mountain stream during Noah’s Flood.

Of course, her agreeing to marry me didn’t mean I’d get any closer to removing her panties that night. Nor was I especially disappointed at that. Because I still had a lot of work to do.

I had Gilbert step on the gas after dropping her off at her apartment.

The evening papers carried stories of my little pyrotechnical mishap at East New York. But since no-one had been seriously injured, it didn’t play huge. The Times mentioned that Captain Gegan of the Bomb Squad and detectives from the Rockaway Avenue police station were looking for three Italians bound for an Italian celebration on Long Island, “where fireworks and bombs were to play an important role.” I, that, is, the man who dropped the package, was supposedly jostled by the crowd. They were considering it an accident.

The phone rang as I was reading. “I found something,” someone said. “Good for you,” I said.

“Who are you?”

It was the scrawny German with the ink-stained fingers. He sounded even scrawnier over the phone. “About the name you gave me. Hauke Hay—” I cut him off. I was alone in the apartment, but there are things you don’t discuss over the phone. Like almostrelatives with ties to German assassins.

We met ten minutes later, at the small restaurant he’d called from. He sat in front of a ginger ale, his hand on a flattened newspaper, beaming at me through his thick lenses.

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“I knew I’d seen the name,” he said. “Outside the Klassiker library, I mean.” He pushed the paper at me. It was in German and as intelligible a Chinese menu. I shoved it right back at him: “I take the pork hock with kraut and dumplings. Tell me what is says!”

He rolled his eyes, then opened the paper to its second page.

His stained index finger stabbed at a photograph. “We get all the German papers at our office. By ship, just a few weeks late. This here’s from Munich, from April. Look!”

I looked. The caption said Arco-Valley and Hauke Hayen and Stadlheim. Plus, a whole lot of pork hock and kraut and dumplings. “Plain English, man! What does it say?”

“This guy,” he pointed to a grainy figure to the left. “Is Count Arco-Valley. He killed the Bavarian prime minister in 1919.

Released from prison this past April.” He took off his glasses. “Can you imagine: Someone kills a state governor and gets off with four years?”

“Sounds like Chicago,” I said. “What of it?”

The scrawny one sighed and stabbed again: “This guy’s the one you told me to look up. Hauke Hayen, suspected member of the O.C.” “Organization Console...” I said as I followed the finger.

“Kon-Sool!” The man he was pointing at was part of a group, but stood somewhat to the side. He was tall and broad in the shoulders under a long dark winter coat. He wore a hat. But even at this resolution of the picture, it was quite obvious that Hauke Hayen, of the Organisation Consul, bore no resemblance to Cousin Hauke. For one, he was older. He was shorter. He had a black beard. And he was short an arm. I looked at all the other faces, but they all looked like Schmidt.

“This?”—”Is Hauke Hayen! Member of Brigade Ehrhardt, suspected member of the O.C. and the Thule Society.”

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If mice could get triumphant, they’d look like my scrawny German.

“He’s not the guy.”

The ink-stained fingers snatched the paper from me. “Well,” my triumphant mouse sounded piqued. “That certainly isn’t my problem.” He rose indignantly.

“Wait,” I said. The mouse flinched when I reached into my jacket. I was only going for my wallet. I picked a C-note and handed it to him. Too much, I know. But a sense of relief caroused through me, as if a complex equation had just solved itself.

“Thank you for your services.”

Old World indignity melted into eagerness to please at the sight of Ben Franklin, just as it always does. “Well, certainly, if there’s anything else I can do for you...”

I was at the door before he finished babbling. Then I had a thought. I turned back. I said: “What about a scoop for your paper...”

It was a short walk home.

My mind worked overtime. Hedy’s cousin wasn’t who I thought he was. That was good news. For me and for him. With the prospects of German assassins messing up my plans a somewhat remote possibility, I didn’t need to kill my wife’s cousin. At least not yet. That only left me with two major problems.

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man has to set priorities. Especially when he’ about to make things interesting for himself and a half dozen of his best friends. Remember the accounts I had set up with J.P. Morgan? They were part of my priorities.

One trading account was in the name of the little old lady who I’d been paying a hundred a week to put a two-cent stamp on Justice’s memoranda every other week, right after the private messenger delivered them. Her account was set up to do exactly as Justice told her. When he recommended his purple ribbon fool pool buy a stock, that stock would be bought for her account just like the doctor ordered. And since he never sold even the mangiest loser and his inflated stock recommendations dropped like lead, my little old lady had managed to burn through eight thousand bucks of her egg money in less than two months. The fact that she’d once been one of the most notorious madams in Chicago is not essential, nor is that she’d done time in Joliet for burning through a lot more of other people’s money.

Can you blame her if an elderly widow was rightfully afraid of looming poverty—and had just signed a complaint to the United States Postal Inspector against Justice St. Andrews? Why, she’d 111

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even included the original post-marked envelopes that his advice came in...

The other two accounts worked exactly the opposite way. For the first, I’d forged St. Andrews’ name and signature on the forms when my J.P. Morgan friend was taking a powder. By doing as he did, not as he said—selling the stocks Justice recommended at the top and then shorting them when he advised to hold on and buy more—it had grown my initial $5,000 to over $50,000. Doing exactly as he and his insider friends did.

Tony’s account I had only just set up, being as familiar with his signature as I am with my own. Anyone doubting its legitimacy—DA,’s, coppers, Chicago hoods, maybe even Tony— would trace back the initial deposit to our perfectly legitimate Canadian business account, signed by himself on company stationary. Which inevitably would trigger the question why the majority owner of a railroad company would bet $100,000 of his own, easily traceable money on selling short his own, new public offering. Was he counting on the stock going down—taking all the money of his investors down with it? Did he know something bad might happen?

Perish the thought!

I made a few phone calls, found out the location of tomorrow’s groundbreaking for Sunshine Rail Road, and then took a latenight drive in the country. With eleven sticks of dynamite in a wooden crate, cradled in pillows, blankets, and whatever else I could find to protect them from the potholes in the gravel road leading to the depot where Tony’s new high-speed locomotives were kept.

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t ten o’clock the next morning, Hedy and I left City Hall, the brand-new Mr. and Mrs. Victor Del Frate, as witnessed by Cousin Hauke and one of Hedy’s girlfriends. The ceremony had been quick and without frills, befitting two people without family ties in the most corrupt city of the world. But I had promised Hedy and her sourpuss best girl we’d make up for it with the most spectacular bash the town had seen since the Great Victory Parade of 1919.

By the time we’d ordered lunch at one of our favorite restaurants—minus Gilbert, Cousin and the broad—, shares of Sunshine Rail Road had tripled from ten dollars a share to thirty.

And the ticker was already running twenty minutes behind. When the waiter brought Hedy’s raspberry sorbet dessert, they were hitting fifty. Which is when I excused myself to make another set of calls. When the waiter brought the check, Sunshine was at $55.

“Miracle on Wall Street” was something I heard mentioned as we left.

Gilbert took us to the site of the prospective Sunshine station in the Locomobile, where the circus had come to town: At one o’clock, Tony and Mayor John F. “Red Mike” Hylan were to break ground on the most exciting new infrastructure investment the 113

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City had ever seen, if you believed the press. And they would be doing so inside a magnificently endowed tent that would’ve made Valentino homesick for his desert sheikdom.

Tony was resplendent in his role as the new railroad magnate.

Smiles all around, congratulations to Hedy and me, a peck on her cheek, a slightly-too-hard punch to the shoulder for his no-good tedescacco. He headed on, shaking hands, nodding, smiling, on to the microphone that would help broadcast his vision to the world.

Sunshine hit $60.

There were probably a hundred people present. Each member of the New York Transit Commission appeared to be there. At least that’s what I picture these people to look like. Spic and span, reeking of moth balls and floor wax. In the crowd, I spied an exultant Mickey the Mick, a new, future star of St. Andrews Nudie Pictures Productions at his side, floating in a pool of purple ribbons. He pretended he’d never seen me before. Papa Ilardo was there, too. The old mafia seemed elated, his eyebrows playing pata-cake with his hairline—at least when he was trying earnestly not to look in my direction. I saw several plug-ugly faces that probably lined post office walls in Chicago and Cicero. Hoods I’d seen around Joe Masseria were keeping an invisible iron wall between those who walked with Salvatore Maranzano. None of the big men were in attendance, of course, but the second and third tiers that were left no doubt that Tony was using the opportunity to ingratiate himself with both families.

Finally, it was time. A procession of dignitaries was lead by Red Mike and Tony, followed by press flunkies and photographers. It moved to a small podium with the microphone. I maneuvered Hedy to a chair in the second row, right in front of the speakers, slightly to the left of the press. I held her hand, admiring the inordinately expensive diamond solitaire I’d given her.

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“Ladies and gentlemen,” a radio man announced with a sonic squeal as Tony and the dignitaries fanned out behind him. “I’ve been informed that shares of Sunshine Railroad have just hit $72.

A new record for public offerings, even in this record-heavy bull market!”

“Hear hear!”

I applauded with the rest of them. I even whistled and went “woohoo!” Because my brokers had started to short-sell Sunshine at $55, adding to the positions every time the price increased by five bucks. And as they sold Sunshine, they were buying up any share of Long Island Rail Road they could lay their hands on.

The Mayor spoke first. I’ve happily forgotten every single word he said, but I’m sure if you string the words “benefactor,” “for the people,” and “infrastructure of tomorrow and for tomorrow” together in no particular order, you will get the drift. I’m sure there were lines about invisible governments and the control of the parties, the City, the world by international banks. Which would’ve been quite amusing, considering the benefactor of mankind sitting at Red Mike’s left constituted an invisible, unelected, and utterly uninhibited government of his own. Fortunately, I was splitting my attention between Hedy’s silken thighs and Tony’s face. I’ve known him long enough to know when something troubled him.

His badger nose was twitching. Since I caught him looking at me a few times, I had a pretty good idea it had something to do with me.

Toward the end of Red Mike’s sermon, where you’d expect the “Amen!” or “Hallelujah!,” there was a small disturbance in the back of the audience. Several men had entered the crowd like houndstooth-clad sheepdogs. They carried themselves like Feds, but I knew for a fact they were members of the Postal Inspector’s force. They expertly isolated one animal from the flock and were 115

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now moving it toward the exit. I saw an exuberantly drab man with a grey homburg approach Justice St. Andrews and flip open a wallet, presumably to show off his badge. St. Andrews turned white as a Kleagle sheet but then began to protest loudly. The drab man said something and he shut up. He accompanied them to the exit like a lamb: Two more drab men lined up to his left and his right, and another brace of them was strutting right behind him. I got the feeling the Mick had a long and eventful day ahead of him.

St. Andrews’ departure went almost unnoticed in the applause that broke out after Red Mike had finished his sermon. When Tony stepped up to the microphone, there was another commotion in the back. Two reporters pushed in. I knew it then: The sun had set on Sunshine.

“Mr. Lupara, please,” called one of the new arrivals even before Tony could open his mouth. “Mr. Lupara, how were you planning to secure cash flow for the venture once engines were in service?”

It went downhill from here. It was as if suddenly Sweet Reason had asserted herself to make a last stand inside the glass prison that the collective hopes and dreams of unearned money had locked it in. Those were the questions a figurer would’ve asked weeks ago.

Where revenues, growth, valuations were to come from. Who were the major share-holders. What were Tony’s dealings with mobbedup casinos. And it got worse.

“Mr. Lupara, what’s your reaction to the police finding your two new locomotives wired with explosives?”

“Mr. Lupara, is it true the two engines were uninsured?”

“Mr. Lupara, what are the additional water tanks for?”

“Mr. Lupara, who could have an interest in sabotaging your new venture?”

I nodded at a scrawny character among the reporters. He reached into his jacket, pulled out a handful of papers.

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“Mr. Lupara,” he squawked with a strong Teutonic accent.

“Do you have anything to say about a J. P. Morgan account in your name that’s been executing short sales of Sunshine stock since it hit fifty this morning?”

He waved the papers. You could hear a pin drop.

I looked around and saw doubt spread among the audience like a dirty snowball picking up gravel as it rolls downhill. It spun into concern, which the turned into intestinal fear when another question about the dynamite bowled Tony over: “Mr. Lupara, did you have anything to do with the Long Island Rail Road bombing?”

Sheer panic now tickled the guts of not just the leaderless purple-ribboned sheep that Justice had brought to the tent like a Judas ram leading a flock to the slaughter. There were others. Some whose faces no mother could possibly love, blunt, cold, calculating mugs. Their expressions were turning from incomprehension to rage as every additional question shaved another dollar from the share price. A man broke for the exit. His departure triggered a stampede: Men in suits, men with hats, men in Ascots were heading for the gate, running as fast as they could to the nearest pay phone to sell, sell, sell, every last share of Sunshine Rail Road Corporation they had spent all morning to obtain.

I laughed until my sides hurt, which is, until Hedy’s elbow hit me in the ribs. Wiping the tears from my eyes, I saw Tony stare at me over the heads of the reporters like a sawed-off shotgun, his badger face on, pale and sweating like a white horse after blowing the Preakness. I laughed again when I saw a group of Chicago’s Wanted pugs mob up and begin an animated barking contest. But I stopped laughing when Tony suddenly spun around and pushed through the crowd behind him, disappearing behind the grimfaced fronts of his men who instantly closed the gap he made, a 117

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phalanx of low Sicilian hairlines lowered at a dozen out-of-town hoods.

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verall, it had been a perfect day. I’d married the bestlooking broad in town. I had made more money in the market than I’d ever made in my entire life. (And legally, too!) I even removed a number of headaches efficiently and elegantly, if I say so myself. St. Andrews was probably squawking First Amendment and protection of the press to the Postal Inspector right now: Armed with the now postmarked letters he’d hand-signed and messengered to my little-old-lady friend, her documented trading losses, and the trading records of the J.P. Morgan account I had set up in his name, the worthy Inspector had no doubt just informed him that the First Amendment didn’t apply to fraud.

Ilardo, too, had taken a financial body blow that would take him years to recover from. Palermo was already breathing down his neck for breaking a few of their native sons. And this time around, he had only himself, St. Andrews, and Tony to blame.

It was time now to consider enhancing my share in the Ottawa deal to, say, a full one-hundred percent. Almost legally, by rights of survivorship. But Tony’s timely departure from the press conference put a wrench into my gears. You see, the Canadian company we set up to handle the Ottawa deal had two owners.

Tony. And I. We’d drafted its charter fully aware that the two 119

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big risks inherent in our business were sudden death and the slammer. For the sake of propriety, we had politely circumscribed incarceration as “temporary or permanent inability to conduct the normal affairs of business.” Death required no further definition: Since Tony had divorced his wife a few years back in favor of an 18-year-old dancer whom he promptly abandoned, and neither of us had any family to speak of, whoever bought the farm first would leave the crop to the survivor.

Tony being taken into custody at the press conference would have made me the full owner of the company the moment the handcuffs clicked around his wrists. I could’ve done what I wanted with it. But Tony on the loose left me with just the half share I already owned—and a partner motivated and incentivized to trigger the survivorship clause. On me. The only thing left for me to do was surviving Tony. And quickly. Judging by the looks he’d shot me during the conference, there was no doubt that by now, he probably had a very good idea who’d played him like a harmonica. And that the next time he looked at me, it would be over the barrel of a .38.

I told Hedy that I’d see her later that evening and that I had some business to attend. Gilbert was to take care of her.

She seemed fine with it, that is, for a broad who’d just gotten married and was being asked to spend the first day of connubial bliss waiting for her husband to come home from business. Seeing my Prussian-blue Locomobile disappear into traffic with her and Gilbert inside, I hailed a cab and headed out to where I knew Tony would be waiting for me. In Jersey, at the Hoboken docks.

As I’ve mentioned repeatedly, Tony and I go back a long time. Back to the Hoboken tenement we both grew up in. The place smelled of diarrhea, garbage, and boiled cabbage and was inhabited by fresh-off-the-boat Wops, mostly Neapolitans and 120

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Sicilians. And by my family, who originally hailed from Florence.

Which, as anybody knows, made us—and especially my mother— better Italians than the swarthy folk from the south. Because in the minds of northern Italians, Europe ends and Africa begins about a mile north of Naples.

Consequently, as a small boy, I was forbidden to play with the terrone children, for fear I might contract unknown diseases, parasites, or learn bad language, which according to my mother included the entire thesaurus used by southern Italians. Instead, she and my father, who’d been a teacher in the old country and now held a job as the book-keeper at a fish market, made me read books on geometry and mathematics from an early age. When my mother became ill, several women in the building brought food to her. She made me throw it out. She claimed that Neapolitans and Sicilians were notoriously filthy, and her weakened constitution would be unable to deal with their parasites. She died despite her caution and prudence.

From the day of her funeral, I started to run with the other kids in the neighborhood. At first my lack of street smarts made me an unattractive companion to others my age. But Tony and his gang of older boys soon discovered I had a knack for numbers. Which came in handy when distributing the loot from the various little scams and stick-ups they were pulling. When the Great War rolled around and Tony got his claws into the German Schmidt, I was a seasoned street fighter, cat burglar, stick-up artist, as good with a knife as with one of the cheap guns we’d filched from plundered apartments, or the .22 zips we made ourselves from pieces of pipe, a nail, and scraps of wood.

Back then, we’d turned part of a dilapidated warehouse into our hideaway. A few years back, Tony had bought the property through one of his legal businesses and turned the unassuming 121

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interior into a fall-back position. He kept a few spare guns, a change of clothes, forged travel papers, booze, food, and coffee and, most importantly, a few thousand bucks in cash. A new life in a box, if you will. Just add water. And with the cops and the hoods and the sheep in the City screaming for his blood, it was a perfect place to let things cool down for a bit.

It was around nine o’clock in the evening when I arrived at the docks. At this hour, and in this part of the docks, you were more likely to encounter a bear or a buffalo than a man in the waisthigh weeds that waved in the rotting fish smell. I tried to avoid the oily puddles on the broken ground, sidestepped bleached logs and rusting metal, and almost twisted my ankle on a bit of broken brick that littered the dirt. It was then that I realized I’d come unarmed.

This easily was the biggest mistake of my life: I’d been so preoccupied with the wedding ceremony, Hedy’s legs, setting up the fall of Sunrise, the press conference, and Hedy’s legs again that I had left my .45 sitting on my desk. Freshly oiled, fully loaded, its nine hand-notched slugs were utterly useless to me now. I suffered a sudden pang of panic when I felt my pockets for a pen-knife. But apart from a fountain pen and my wallet containing the certificate of marriage, there was nothing on me that could be put to use to harm another human being. Apart from my hands and feet, I was as defenseless as a lamb.

Ahead of me, through the weeds, a light suddenly painted a faint yellow rectangle into the midsummer dusk. Reflexively, I ducked. My hand came down on the sharp edge of a broken brick, abrading skin. I paused. Another gust of dead fish from the water suddenly brought back memories of Schmidt. Of Tony hitting him with his sap until life wanted nothing to do with the broken body any more.

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I untied my shoes and took off my socks. Having pulled one over the other, I picked up suitable pieces of brick and stone and inserted them into the now double-layered toe until I’d made a usable weapon. I tried to knot it below but found that it reduced the striking power too much. I reached in my breast pocked, picked a paper clip from the marriage license and paperwork, and tightly wound the wire right beneath the rocks. This I stuffed up the cuff of my left sleeve, the mouth of the black socks protruding over my wrist. Now the leather of my shoes cut into my ankles, and I continued walking like a stork in a minefield, partly from discomfort, partly from fear to set off Tony before I was close enough to strike.

The rusted gate to the ruin was ajar. I entered like a cat.

One corner of the warehouse interior was dimly lit by a kerosene lamp. There was a cot alongside the wall, with a roll of blankets ready to be spread. A washstand and mirror showed my reflection. On a folding table an open metal cash box had disgorged a passport, papers, and several bricks of green. Tony was sitting on a chair at the table, facing me, a .38-caliber, fiveshot, nickel-plated Harrington & Richardson in his fist. Did he buy them in bulk?

He looked tired, much older than his 28 years. His badger markings had disappeared under oily black, and a stained towel around his neck advertised a recent dye-job. He still wore the dark suit pants I’d seen him wear this afternoon, but he’d discarded both jacket and shirt, wearing only a ribbed white undershirt that stood out sickly from the black thicket of his chest and arm hair.

“I knew you’d show,” he said, almost kindly. “You goddamn Judas!” He raised the gun at my head. “Should’ve listened to my mother. She always said your people were scum.”

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I kept walking toward him, hands raised in front of my chest, palms turned at him.

“Stop.”

“I’m not armed,” I said, slowing down my step. But I kept walking. I nodded at his rod. “Golly gee, terroncello. I haven’t seen that piece in, what, a month? Did you buy wholesale or is that the one you sent out your shoeshine boy with?”

“Shut up, tedescacco” he said. “I should’ve taken care of you myself.”

I still was moving ahead.

“From where I’m standing, I’d say we’re even. You sent out shoeshine boy to kill me and then you almost put your tongue down the mouth of Ilardo’s mafia fixer. Just happened to pass by.

And then cutting me out of your high-wire Sunshine act?”

“You’re a pain in the ass, tedescacco,” he said. “Your dicking around with that Tedesca broad of yours cost me a hundred G. And then getting some Kraut killer on our trail, a week before the biggest deal of my life? Now you’ve fucked that up, too? You’re a walking disaster.”

He spat.

“All I did was make some money in your name and put a few sticks of dynamite into your locomotives. I noticed they’re custom-made. That’s what, a 200-gallon tank between the cabin and the engine?”

He laughed. “Well, something had to pay for all the nonsense.

People drink more than we can ship in when they’re at Rockaway.

And 200 gallons of pure alcohol coming in every half hour would’ve taken care of that. We’d have had our own transit police force. It was perfect. Except you fucked it up.”

I still had my hands up and in front of me but was beginning to move them closer.

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“Don’t forget,” I said, “I guess with grain prices as they are, my share of Ottawa was more attractive than our long-standing friendship. Unfortunately, now my little Tedesca inherits.”

His badger face reappeared. “She’ll be dead before my ship sails.” He raised the gun. “And by the time they find your carcass, it’ll be impossible to say just when you got glommed. She’ll die broke.”

At least that’s the drift of what he wanted to say. Because as his gun barrel came level with my chest, I heard him cocking the hammer. In one motion, I crossed my wrists and pushed forward and upward. The gun roared like a cannon, heat singing my face, a sharp pain where my left ear had been. Half-numb and almost deaf, I kept pushing the weapon up. Another shot and another, both going wild and overhead. The warehouse exploded into clouds of birds, bats, seagulls, what have you, each squawking at the top of its miserable little lungs, not that I could hear over the droning inside my ears. Tony’s shoe kept raking my shins, his knee jabbing up against my groin. The revolver’s hammer fell on my left middle finger with the force and snap of—well, a hammer. Pain exploded against my temple as Tony landed a vicious right, but I managed to wrest the gun from his hand when I fell backwards. The gat still pinching my finger, I tugged at the sock in my sleeve, freeing it just in time to keep Tony from carving me like a Thanksgiving turkey with a knife he’d pulled from nowhere. The bits of rock in my improvised sap slammed into his head, powered by a back-handed swing. I felt the bones of his face give and he fell back, his eyes as wide as Schmidt’s when he’d hit him with his sap seven years ago.

My next blow broke his left jaw, but he was coming to again.

I missed with my next swing, stepped on something hard and uneven, losing my balance. The back of my head suddenly hit the ground. Shooting pains went through my body wherever my back 125

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slammed into broken bricks. Blood fouled my mouth as Tony suddenly was on top of me. His knife stabbed downward. Again I caught his arm in the cross of my lower arms. My left closed on his wrist and pushed it away from my head, across his body. All the while, I was squirming beneath his weight to get my left shoulder up, my right clawing at the back of his shirt. I finally got a grip on the moist cotton, twisted it in my fist and began to pull it back and toward my left until it caught under his chin. Tony made choking noises as the collar of his undershirt bit into his neck. His left stopped pummeling me and reached for his throat instead.

A brief wobble in his position and a tug on his shirt allowed me to flip him on his back. I rose, slammed my forehead into his nose, again and again, until he let go of the knife. My right fingers closed around a broken brick on the ground and before I knew it, I was beating the brick into his head, once, twice, many times. I lost count, until I slew him.

For several minutes, I lay next to his body in the dark, panting and retching. I was splattered in his and my blood, which mingled into ablack puddle in the dirt floor of the warehouse. I fingered the pain in my ear and was surprised to find it almost intact. Almost, that is, except for a perfectly circular hole seared into the lobe by Tony’s bullet, its fringes cauterized by the heat of the passing bullet.

I cursed, tears in my eyes from the pain. My arms were bleeding from superficial cuts, my back hurt as if a herd of wild horses had danced the Charleston on it, my shins were raw and each finger felt like it had been broken. I rose groaning and shuffled over to the washstand, looked into the dull mirror. Even in the dark I could see that the man groaning back at me was a bloody mess.

My forehead was bleeding from where it had encountered Tony’s teeth, I had a raging shiner, and my lip was puffing up like a carp’s mouth. The hole in my ear looked just terrible and there was a 126

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purple-and-black streak on my neck where the blast of his gun had burned my flesh. I looked around, found water in a pitcher and a clean towel on the bed. I washed my face and applied some whisky to the open wounds. The knife cuts on my arm were clean and shallow and had stopped bleeding already. But I worried about the teeth marks on my forehead. The human mouth is filthy beyond comprehension. Especially that of a Sicilian.

My shirt and jacket had been torn to shreds in the scuffle.

When I took my wallet and papers from my inside pocket, I noticed that, given the depth of the cut, it had stopped a thrust directed straight at my heart. Without my wallet and the wedding licnese, it would have been me lying where Tony was bleeding out quietly. I took off my jacket and shirt and wrapped them around some bricks, ready to disappear in the water, and traded them for Tony’s. Both the shirt and his coat didn’t quite fit, but that was the least of my worries. I shook the rocks from my bloodsoaked socks and put them back on, noting that the stiff leather of my shoes had cut deep, bleeding groves into my ankles. But I was alive and that was all that counted. Tony’s heater I put into my pocket and wiped down everything that I’d touched, all except for Tony’s body and the bundles of green. Those I stuffed into my jacket. It was over ten thousand dollars in C-notes. My own jacket and shirt I tucked under my arm.

I took a last look at Tony. I wasn’t quite sure what to do about him. I figured the risks of anybody stumbling over the body would be small. By the time anybody found him here, there wouldn’t be a whole lot left of Antonio Lupara, railroad magnate. After all, it was August and the flies were already gathering, and, as my shellshocked hearing improved, I heard the squawking of a thousand seagulls outside. Or I might call in a tip to the coppers when my wounds had healed up. Or I could torch the place. I’d figure it out.

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Tomorrow.

The City glowed in the distance as I limped down the gravel road, away from the docks, away from the ramshackle building holding Tony’s ruined body. My jacket and shirt rested at the bottom of the filthy, brackish water, barely leaving a ripple in the moonlight. I looked at my watch. It was nine thirty. And I realized that Hedy was probably waiting for me right now. Out of all nights, tonight was when I finally would consummate our marital bliss. Fuck her senseless. And if it killed me! I upped my limp to a hobble until I got past the docks. The gravel trail turned into a cobble-stoned street lined with dirty red brick warehouses.

Past them, where life picked up, I managed to get a cab, a sawbuck convincing the reluctant driver to take on a fare in an illfitting suit who looked like he’d been spit out by an alligator.

I sank into the back seat. My body was a single bruise, every joint filled with rusty razors. But my mind was wide awake: Even with Tony dead, there still was considerable risk for me. There was a chance that a nosy detective or investigator, or a certain lowlife stock broker bent on buffing up his cash flow with blackmail, might finger me to those who’d lost money due to my scheming.

People like Papa Ilardo, Joe Masseria, Salvatore Maranzano. And a whole slew of Cicero plug-uglies. In which case, it would become difficult for me to make a living. I’d be a fugitive, a vagabond in the earth; and, as the Good Book says, “it shall come to pass, that every one that findeth me shall slay me.” Unless I did some slaying of myself first.

I’d have to figure it out tomorrow. For now, I had the cab take me to the land of Nod, on the Upper Eastside of Eden.

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he door was open when I entered the apartment, and despite several loud harrumphs, neither Gilbert nor his Midwestern maid squeeze came to relieve me of my coat. Tony’s coat. That’s what you get for being too lenient with the help!

But a more cheerful thought struck me. Had Hedy given him off for the night? Was she waiting for me in my bedroom? She was the lady of the house now. And after more than a month of rising to the occasion, only to be frustrated by little Miss Iron Panties, not having anyone else around the house might be just what the doctor ordered.

I just dropped the coat, gun in pocket, on the floor, ready to throw it into the furnace tomorrow, and kicked off my shoes. After a hard day’s work, a hot bath would feel great now, be it just to get my and Tony’s blood off me. I was almost at peace with Gilbert’s impudent absence when I heard the clinking of crystal. It came from the study. My Land of Nod. I added it up quickly. To clink crystal, you need two people.

My wife and—who? Who dared to intrude on my wedding night?

Angrily, I charged across the hallway in my stocking feet and threw the door open. But the tirade that was ready to bellow from my throat was cut off after “What the…”

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Hedy was sitting in my chair, behind my desk. My .45 was in front of her, as was an open bottle of Möet Chandon.

“Be quiet, Vittorio,” she said. “Sit over there.”

The gat waved at a corner chair, an antique Shaker number that had cost me—well, I said already that it didn’t matter now how much I blew on it. I sat, and, showing my good intentions and compliance, planted my hands palm-up on my knees. I’m a giver, after all. Thought I’d remind her.

She didn’t need reminding, though. She knew. All of it. I saw it in the way she was sitting in my chair, at my desk, with my .45 in her hand. The open bottle was vintage 1905, with a custom label right below the gold foil of the neck. “Norddeutscher Lloyd,” it read, with a small vignette of the SS Prinz Friedrich Wilhelm under full steam. The label was smudged, the gold foil torn, and the dark green glass smeared from me turning it in my hand ever so often.

“Vittorio,” she said in an quiet alto voice utterly devoid of the girlish giggle I’d fallen in love with. “I’ve good news.”

She negligently waved the blued steel in her fist at the figure standing in front of the opened cabinet. I turned and looked at a man whose picture I’d turned toward the wall a hundred times.

Her cousin, now shaved clean and dressed in a grey suit. He was holding a tumbler of medicinal Scotch in his right hand. My medicinal Scotch.

“Meet my brother, Wilhelm Sorensen.”

“Call me Bill,” Cousin Hauke said and smiled with his teeth.

I looked from her to him, and from him back to her. The two hyphens looked at me with the emotion of a tommy gun.

Goddamn, how could I’ve missed that?

It suddenly struck me that their eyes were the same. I’d never seen it in her before, what with my eyes usually drawn elsewhere.

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But hers, too, were of the color and temperature of the North Atlantic. They gave me the willies: I’d seen what kind of creatures I’d dredged up from its depths.

“Hedy,” I began as Hauke tied me to the chair with the twine I’d used to secure my stick of dynamite in the Journal. She smiled and shook her head. “There’s nothing left to say,” she said quietly.

“I knew before we met. It was all part of the plan.”

“Hedy,” I tried again. Her head shake was more impatient now. “We had been looking for you for a while. You and Tony. We just had to make sure.”

“Hedy!”

“Be quiet now!” There was an edge in her voice now that reminded me of the Wop’s razor on the desk. “I know. If it hadn’t been Tony and you, there would’ve been others. Rats willing to sell the lives of good men like my father and Bill for a few bottles of fizz. There were plenty of them. But when it comes to rats, you and Tony are just some particularly mangy specimens.”

“Hedy, I was ten,” I yelled before Hauke crammed my own tie into my mouth.

She cut me off. “You were fourteen. But you’d have done the same if you’d been forty or seventy-four. Because you’re a rat at heart.” She smiled again. “It’s who you are. Turns out, even the Brits were less of a rat than you. They took my father.

But they let Billy go. He was sixteen back in 1914. And they only took the adults. So Billy had to watch how they arrested his father, put him and the other Germans on their ship. Made him watch how they took them away, letting him go on to Germany alone.”

I kept quiet, what with my tie stuffed into my mouth.

Somehow, I sensed I didn’t have much going in my favor at this point.

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“We never saw him again. My father died in a British concentration camp. Billy enlisted in 1916, the day he turned 18.

Made it through the war and the crazy time after. But he never forgot.”

I looked at Bill’s war-ravaged face and he grinned back at me.

“It took a while to track you down,” he said and his unaccented English no longer came as a surprise. “You’ve done well for yourself.

And I guess you took care of Tony for us.”

I shrugged sullenly. I had a bad feeling about this. Although I couldn’t pin down if it was the nine hand-notched bullets in the .45 that was pointing at me or Hedy’s leviathan eyes.

Hedy laughed. “Don’t worry. Much. You’ve been so kind and generous repaying your debt—leaving all your worldly possessions to your darling wife and soon-to-be grieving widow—and you’ve been so hospitable to ‘Cousin Hauke’. We’re not going to kill you.”

I didn’t like that she emphasized the “we”. Hedy and her brother smiled at each other. “In fact,” she continued, showing a trace of her previous effervescence. “We hope to be seen in public, impatiently awaiting your arrival to toast our marriage at Delmonico’s in twenty-five minutes.”

She bent down and looked me in the eyes. “Goodbye, Vittorio.

It’s been interesting knowing you.”

She turned to leave. That’s when Bill’s fist hit me like a sledge hammer.

When I came to, the study was empty and the place was dark.

My body was a single raw nerve, throbbing with pain. I shook my head and tried to adjust my eyes, which seemed to not work too well. Cousin Hauke, pardon me, my brother-in-law Bill, packed a decent punch. As did Tony. The other reason was that the chair I was tied to had fallen over, equalizing the collision of his fist with my left temple with the impact of the floor against my right 132

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temple. As things started to flow back into focus, I saw the study door was open, as was the door to the apartment. I could almost see the elevator.

Again I shook my head to clear the last wisps of fog. I spat out my tie. I found that my ankles were tied to the legs of the chair. A length of twine held my knees together. And my hands were tied behind my back and the back of the chair. I longingly thought of the Wop razor on the desk, but all I could see on its surface was the empty bottle of Mott und Schotter. I thought of Hedy drinking champagne and, for the first time, I did so without getting starryeyed.

She’d been doing a Paganini on my fiddle.

But the Wop razor on the desk offered hope. With a bit of effort, maybe I could jiggle my chair toward the desk, maybe break it against the desk, possibly get my fingers on the blade, cut the twine, and then catch up with the two hyphens before they could get their hands on my money.

That’s when I heard the elevator go “Ding!” and the doors slide open.

It was a load off my mind. Gilbert was back! I’d give him a piece of my mind, taking off on a Monday evening. But he’d free me in no time. I’d be calling my lawyers in five minutes, annulling the marriage, freezing my accounts. I heard steps in the corridor: “Gilbert!”

But there was something wrong. Gilbert wasn’t given to wearing high heels, unless there was a side to him I didn’t know about. And those were the unmistakable sounds of high heels hitting hardwood floors. The maid? Not at this time of night!

Hedy, coming back to me after seeing the error of her evil Kraut ways?

“Hedy?”

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“Hello, Vittorio!”

The ceiling lights seared my eyes as I turned in horror.

Her black hair framed the face of a Roman goddess. A grim, cruel, vengeful Roman goddess. She looked at me, then at the Wop razor her father’s goon had dropped a lifetime ago. Her smile was that of a lamia.

“I told you she’d be your death,” Maria Dolorosa said, her voice taut like a garrotte wire. “I’ll make damn sure of it.” ...

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Also available from Secret Archives Press: Novels: The Lazarus Smile by J. Christoph Amberger (ISBN-13: 978-0984315215)

“Page-Turning Excitement...”

—Jeff Mims, publisher, Man’s Take, January 26, 2010

“Three simple words may change the course of world events forever. I’ll leave it to the reader to discover what those words might be (and the how’s and why’s.) Suffice it to say that the idea is sound and makes for a great mystery and a solid conspiracy.”

—The Alternative, April 26, 2010