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  The fat Hungarian owner of the Budapest was good enough at his trade to spare the couple knowing glances, and smiles, and fulsome performance; Mike appreciated his courtesy. He wondered if Annie noticed, and concluded she had no need to do so. She was a convent girl, to Mike’s eyes incapable of guile or sin. For good or ill, he would, if he could, mediate between her magnificent, sad reserve and a world by which, if he had his way, she would never find herself affronted.

  It was unclear to Mike how their love might progress. He saw her gratitude for his restraint, and was delighted with himself for discovering how to make her happy.

  One evening, having safely put her on the trolley, he found himself singing softly. He stopped, and thought, “Oh. I suppose this must be courting.”

  Chapter 4

  Jackie Weiss, Mike Hodge wrote, had died of a broken heart, it being broken by several slugs from a .45.

  His funeral was notable for the display of his widow’s undergarments as she hopped down into the grave and upon his casket, whereupon she began to scream, “Jackie, don’t leave me,” and resisted the efforts of the chief mourners to haul her from the grave.

  It was, Mike wrote, as formulaic as a Gypsy wedding, with its ritual attempt at abduction by the groom, and the corresponding opposition of the brothers of the bride.

  On seeing the copy, Parlow had commented that Mike had the Irish girl on his mind, and if he desired to “tell the story of his love,” he should ask for the sob sister column, and stay clear of the City Desk.

  Also, he had said, if we believe the Viennese, the mind is controlled by various independent helmsmen, each at war with the rest; and chief of all was he who would fain scream to the world the secrets the others existed to keep hid.

  Mike lit a cigarette.

  “In this case . . . ,” Parlow continued.

  “. . . Alright,” Mike said.

  “The fantasy that you are going to abduct the no-doubt-flaxen-haired blond child from her family, and the deeper fear that they are going to kill you for it. IT’S AN EMASCULATION FANTASY.”

  “Go grow a goatee,” Mike said.

  “Yes, yes, I have my foibles,” Parlow said, “and, yes, my hobbies, too. One of which is the contemplation of that which I’ll call human nature. For is man not the measure of all things?”

  “I never knew what that meant,” Mike said.

  “No one does,” said Parlow. “It is a mystery.”

  The woman in the grave had screamed for an amount of time nicely calculated to observe the obsequies, while holding just short of the mourners’ tolerance for the February cold. There were fifteen Jews around the grave, five Irishmen from the Chez, two outliers. Two men in foreign overcoats stood just beyond the group. Parlow said that he didn’t like the overcoats.

  “Jack, Jack forged a machine in Chicago,” she’d called out, “and he will create another up there.”

  Mike thought it just on the right side of the pathos-bathos line, and had included it in his tale.

  Parlow objected.

  “It was a close thing,” Mike said, “but she did it well, and I thought she deserved some notice. What the hell.”

  He had omitted, in respect, the rabbi’s aside that Jackie had not touched his wife for thirty years, save to occasionally beat her up. But Mike told Parlow.

  “A sad thing,” Parlow said. “Further, what is this machine he supposedly forged here below? He owned, if’m not mistaken, two candy stores and a piece of a speak.”

  “If that,” Mike had said. For the speak, the Chez, though managed by Weiss, was nominally the property of the straw man, Morris Teitelbaum, and owned, in truth, as all knew, by the North Side, which meant Dion O’Banion. And no one save the widow, in her understandable grief, had ever voiced the notion that Mr. O’Banion ever shared ownership of anything with anyone.

  “People, in fact, have died for that belief,” Mike said.

  “And they were right to do so,” Parlow said, “for what is property?”

  “Property,” Mike said, “is theft.”

  The telephone rang on Mike’s desk. “Excuse me,” he said, and walked across the City Room, and answered it.

  Mike Hodge and Clement Parlow worked in the Coffin Corner of the City Room of the Chicago Tribune.

  It was known as the Coffin Corner, as it was the place where old stories went to die.

  Its north wall was covered in cork, and the cork covered with many layers of news deemed insufficiently pressing—and human interest considered too highbrow—for dissemination to the Reading Public: the death of a polo pony, escaped from its North Shore stall, having fought its way into an antique store and been shot for its pains; its animal brethren, lost dogs, cats with the foresight to warn their owners of the risk of fire; twins separated at birth, reunited; luxury limousines disappeared from their garage and never found again; the odd weeping Madonna, pet ocelot, infant chess prodigy, and their like.

  The reporters suspected that management kept the wall full to stand as an object lesson to the worker bees.

  Parlow and Mike, however, had been in France, and prided themselves on an immunity to both innuendo and omen, and had adopted the ancient partners desk in the corner as their retreat and resort.

  Parlow sat tilted back in the swivel chair, his paunch resting comfortably on his short legs. He took a kitchen match from the pocket of the old tweed jacket and lit it on the sole of his boot. He put the burning match to his pipe. The match went out, and Parlow fished out another. He shook his head and fiddled with the stem.

  “It won’t light ’cause the pipe’s broke,” Mike said.

  “‘Broken,’” Parlow said. “Broke is what you get after a night on the Levee. You know that . . .”

  Mike, at thirty, looked a decade younger than Parlow, who was thirty-two. He watched Parlow light the second match on the worn sole of his jodhpur boot, a souvenir of his war, which he’d spent as a railroad dispatcher in Vesy-le-Duc. Mike, who had flown in France, thought the boots an affectation, and had told Parlow as much. Parlow now puffed the pipe alight, and gestured to Mike to begin.

  “Jackie Weiss,” Mike said, “made the classic mistake of confusing his position with his best interest.

  “For: the guys come in the door, the correct response is not ‘I worked my whole life for this business and I owe you nothing,’ no, but ‘Blam blam blam.’

  “Jackie, however, paid for what seemed, to his mind, sound financial practice, but was found to be false economy.”

  “He was tight,” Parlow said.

  “He was tighter,” Mike said, “than Wilson’s asshole. I’ll grant you that. And that contributed to the disaster. His true error, his true error was the lack of that business acumen which allows one to choose between two rotten paths.”

  “Those paths being?” Parlow said.

  “Well, the choice was clear,” Mike said. “He was either eventually going to have to pay the vig or eventually go with Teitelbaum to talk to O’Banion. There was no third choice.”

  “If he was behind with the vig,” Parlow said.

  “Why else would they shoot him? So. What does he think he gains, the two goons bust in there, launching into Voltaire, or whatever he thought it was, on the Rights of Man to run a supper club and the odd whore, without paying tribute? This eludes me. Fucking, for it is going to come to a showdown. Alternatively, if Jackie, and God rest his soul . . .” Mike lowered his feet from the desk to the floor. He leaned over to Parlow’s side of the desk and took the battered silver lighter from the top of a package of Camels. He shook a cigarette out and lit it. He returned the lighter to its former place and returned his feet to the desk. “Alternatively, had he, scorning the craven counsels of indecision—”

  “Who said that?” Parlow said.

  “Napoléon said,” Mike said, “that all that separated him from the lesser generals was this: he knew what to do with five minutes.”

  “And Jackie?” Parlow said.

  “Goons walk in the door of
the Chez,” Mike said, “the bolder man goes to the riot gun behind the bar, ‘blam blam blam,’ continues on to Teitelbaum, drags him to the scene, shoots him dead, and blames the whole thing on him.

  “Now his problem is not how to skim four, five hundred bucks a week he won’t have to pay vig on, but how to deal with O’Banion. Which responsibility, it seems, Jack was unwilling to undertake.”

  “Understandably,” Parlow said.

  “Perhaps,” Mike said. “But see the alternative. I don’t know. Would I do it? I don’t know.”

  “What do you do with the law?”

  “Come on: the thugs? You hit ’em with the Winchester. You step over, you take the piece out, each one, from their no-doubt shoulder holster, you shoot up the back bar, break the mirror, you replace the guns in their now-lifeless hands, it’s self-defense.”

  “And why do you shoot Teitelbaum?”

  “Teitelbaum, alright, is Weiss’s pissboy and O’Banion’s stooge. You shoot Teitelbaum, throw him in the tableau vivant, what do we got? A guilty party. Goons bust in, it’s Teitelbaum went for the gun, because he’s the guy been skimming. Weiss is, thus, proved an innocent bystander.”

  “And now . . . ?”

  “Now? Everything’s hunky-dory, that foul excretion, that self-confessed thief, Teitelbaum, has been removed.”

  “. . . The cops?”

  “The cops don’t care.”

  “It’s fascinating,” Parlow said. “Save it for the Sally Port. Plus, who knows Jackie Weiss was behind on the vig?”

  “Then why’d they shoot him?” Mike said.

  “Let us leave conjecture at the province of philosophy, as freeing as it is,” Parlow said, “and submit ourselves to the tyranny of fact.”

  Mike sighed. He lowered his feet to the floor. He pulled open the top right drawer of his desk, and took from it two sheets of paper, leaving the drawer open. He squared the sheets and inserted them into the typewriter.

  “‘Jackie Weiss expired last night in a hail of gunfire’?”

  “Very funny,” Parlow said.

  Chapter 5

  Jackie Weiss, last night, made the fatal mistake of confusing his position with his own best interest, the column read. His position was that of restaurateur to the North Side’s sporting set, his God-given right to continue as such was the rock on which he stood and died; the noted devotion to the principles of free enterprise being replaced, in his head, by two slugs of .45-caliber lead. He is survived by his wife of twenty-two years, the former Margaret O’Neil. Floral tributes may be sent to Congregation . . .

  But Lita Grey, née Berenice Mancuso, was interested neither in the direction of floral tributes, nor in the death of Jackie Weiss, which had not, to her, been news since last night’s phone call, following hard upon the shooting. She was interested in determining those immediate steps most necessary for her continued preservation in a world made financially barren by the death of her protector.

  Her review of her assets was brief and, to her mind, unfortunately complete. She had the use of her apartment through the end of the month, some ten days off; she had her jewelry, worth, she assumed, something in the neighborhood of ten to fifteen thousand dollars; she had a closet full of clothes whose housing and upkeep she could not, at the moment, afford; and she had the face and form of a Circassian concubine: ivory skin, violet eyes, and, at most, another half decade in hand to exploit them.

  “You want to be careful of that newspaper ink on your fingers,” Ruth Watkins said. Lita nodded, and took a tissue from the box on the cigarette table at her side. She wiped her hands and let the tissue and the newspaper fall to the floor.

  “You want me to bring in the coffee?” Ruth said. Lita nodded.

  Ruth shook her head in comment on the wretched state of a world ruled by the vagaries of both men and a God of, no doubt, the same sex.

  “He could’ve fucking died,” Lita said, “in a month that wasn’t February.”

  “And in the beginning of the month,” Ruth called from the kitchen.

  “Well, that’s the truest thing you know,” Lita said.

  “What about the car?” Ruth said. She brought in the small tray and placed it on the low table. She sat on the edge of the chair across from the chaise longue. Lita motioned to her and Ruth nodded her thanks, and took a cigarette from the silver box on the tray, and lit it. She crossed her legs.

  “The car?” Lita said. “The whole fucking thing is in his name, and I am not sure that that bovine cunt of a wife does not have the right to send someone by to take the dresses and the shoes.”

  “Yeah. That’s too bad, honey,” Ruth said.

  “It is too bad,” Lita said. She stirred a drop of cream into her coffee with a minute silver spoon. She raised her eyes toward Ruth, who shook her head no.

  “Fucking men,” Lita said. This summation, it seemed, freed her from further self-pity, whose banishment she proclaimed by a squaring of her shoulders and the adoption of her “willing” smile.

  “Okay,” she said. Ruth, in response, sat up straighter, took a quick puff of the cigarette, and watched Lita as she walked from the chaise longue toward the windows.

  Lita looked out on East Lake Shore Drive, now sheathed in ice, the odd car swerving and crabbing against the wind.

  “You going to sing tonight, honey?” Ruth said.

  “I’m gonna. I am going to, I . . . ,” she said, both understanding that whatever her decision, her fate would, as always, be in the hands of a man, the peculiarity of this particular emergency only her ignorance of that man’s identity.

  The situation, both understood, rested on control of the Chez, which, following Jackie’s death, and in the short run, might mean Jimmy Flynn, the assistant manager. But the short run probably would not extend beyond the afternoon’s marshaling of forces for the evening’s entertainment, at which the various powers would declare themselves, the favorite being Teitelbaum, for his well-proven controllability, but bets on the widow as a long shot were still being considered.

  The Chez Montmartre had been closed for the week of the murder, the investigation, and the funeral. It was called a supper club, which all understood to mean speakeasy. It purveyed edible food, and liquor which, while it was not imported as advertised, was sufficiently cleansed of poisons as to not induce either dementia or blindness. The freehold of the Chez was extended to its manager (the late Jackie Weiss) by the North Side, which is to say, by Dion O’Banion, said writ entailing upon the proprietor the license to run girls and dope in addition to the noted comestibles, and to provide the after-dinner diversion of some reasonably honest games of chance.

  Jimmy Flynn perched on the kitchen prep table of the Chez. He was dressed in gabardine slacks; a lightweight yellow wool shirt, open at the neck; and a gray cashmere sport coat. His six tuxedos hung in the wardrobe in his office, and his anxieties ran from wondering if he would ever wear them again professionally, to wondering if he would see evening. For he did not understand what Jackie had been guilty of, nor of how far that guilt might be assumed to have run.

  He had debated wearing a gun to work, flight, and a preemptive visit to O’Banion to exhibit either fealty or a swift and irreversible decampment if such were desired.

  He had decided to wait. And he held the club’s preparation for evening in abeyance as a sign of respect for the wishes of its new proprietor.

  “The joint, we open up again,” said the maître d’, “is going to be hot: phone’s ringing since noon; though what they think they’re going to see . . .”

  “The aura of Jackie Weiss,” Jimmy said. “You got to keep up with the magazines.”

  The last of the busboys entered the kitchen through the alley door. Jimmy glanced reflexively at his watch, and then at the kid, who lowered his eyes. Eight people stood in the corners of the kitchen.

  “Well, fuck it,” Jimmy said. He stepped down, stepped forward, and pushed open the doors to the restaurant. He caught the low tone, and inferred the content of the conve
rsation of three busboys, seated, smoking, across the room, on the stairs leading down from the foyer. They rose as Jimmy entered, and began to take down the chairs which had rested, overnight, on the tabletops. Jimmy motioned for them to wait, and they stopped and stood, waiting.

  Jimmy looked toward the bar, in front of which Jackie Weiss had met his demise. He envisioned a line running from the foyer, where the thugs had stood, to Jackie’s last stand, in front of the bar, and turned to continue the line to a spot just to the left of the kitchen doors, where, sure enough, three gouges in the plaster showed the bullets’ former resting place—the slugs dug out by the police and safe, in envelopes, in the precinct’s evidence locker, never to be disturbed.

  “Where the fuck is Teitelbaum?” he said to the room, but there was no answer and he expected none. “Fucking kike is in hiding.”

  Jimmy shook his head. “Fucking Jackie, hit him two times with a forty-five. Two slugs through him, and stuck in the wall. Fat as he was.” His thoughts continued to the unpleasant image of this fat man on top of Lita Grey. “Well, he’s dead,” he said.

  Pops was the handyman and stage door keeper. He was a black man in his sixties, dressed in blue overalls. Jimmy Flynn looked up and saw him. “What?” he said.

  “We going to open up tonight, Mister Flynn?” Pops said.

  “Whadda you got, some personal interest in it?” Flynn said.

  The phone rang. The busboys turned their heads toward the maître d’s podium. The phone rang again. Then it was answered in the kitchen. After a moment the kitchen doors swung and Alan, the maître d’, leaned out, holding the door open, indicating he had work inside.

  “Mrs. Weiss’s guy, her ‘lawyer,’ called. She would like the club closed, for the evening, in memoriam of—”

  “Fuck this,” Jimmy said. “And I don’t know, anything in her name, in his name . . . ? Or belong to who? Some horse the fifth race Washington Park, the last twenty years. Lita the Torch Singer, the one before her, the front line at the Everleigh Club, the fuck do I know . . . ?”