THE BYSTANDER
Harry Van Outten was sitting on the tall stool behind the bar at Decline And Fall when the chunky man with the straw snap-brim and the attaché case came in. He stood blinking as his eyes got used to the dark, and Harry got a good long look at him and decided who he was. The man ambled over to the bar and Harry took the usual deep breath and waited. The case was put down gently between the man and Harry, and of course the man did not sit down.
“If it’s about the fire policy, you’ll have to go see Pardie in the Maritime and Commercial Building. Suite H, tell him I sent you.”
“Mr. Van Outten?”
“Doctor. DDS. No matter. Listen, I’d like to help you, but the lawyer said I wasn’t to mess around with this insurance mess.”
“Dr. Harry Van Outten, Orthodontic Surgeon, NLP, 22053 Oceanic Avenue, Bournemouth, N.J.” (He said it “EnJay.”) “This address.”
“NLP.”
“No Longer Practicing.”
“How’d you know that? Would you like a drink?”
“My name is Roseboom,” said the chunky man, and pulled out a little vinyl card case with his picture and thumbprint set into it. The card had “Federal Bureau of Investigation” printed across the top.
“Oh, yeah,” said Harry, leaning forward on the stool. “What can I do for you, Mr. Rosenbloom?”
“That’s Rose-boom.” The man looked at Harry’s hand and took it and shook it.
“Sorry,” said Harry. “Drink?” He clinked the rocks in his gin-gin.
“Maybe later.” He looked closely at Harry for a moment. “You know, Doctor...Mister...”
“Call me Harry,” said Harry.
“You know, Doctor, you don’t look very much like your description.”
“I’ve been sick. What description?”
“Bureau files description.”
“Why would the FBI have a description of me?”
“Oh, you’d be surprised,” said Roseboom vaguely. “Could I talk to you? For a while?”
“How long? What about?”
“A while. Some of your...associates.”
“Which?”
“Your business associates.”
“You mean Joe the Nuts?”
“I hoped you’d come to the point.”
“We’ll come to the point of an icepick in here,” said Harry in a raspy whisper, “this place is bugged to the ears. We’ll go for a ride.”
Roseboom led the way out the door by several yards, and Harry gimped across the parking lot after him. “Slow down,” he called, “this hot blacktop is murder.”
“You could’ve gotten your shoes. I’d wait.”
“Never wear ‘em. Here.” Harry jumped up on the running board of an absolutely mint 1934 Packard Twin Six Phaeton, in buff aluminum with red piping and gray watered-silk upholstery. He twitched his scorched toes for a few seconds and scraped his feet on the running board, then deftly swung the door open and fell behind the towering wheel. “Come on.”
Roseboom walked cautiously around the beast and climbed up and in the passenger’s side. Harry piloted the big silver car out of the parking lot and turned north on Oceanic Avenue. Roseboom craned his neck to look behind, then slowly turned again to the front.
“That second windshield keeps the wind off your neck if you’re riding in front and is vital if you’re in the back.” Roseboom looked over the dash, which was real ebony, taking in the expanse of dials and instruments. “This hickey here is a stopwatch for testing your speedometer, this is a brake fluid gauge, this is a...now what the hell is this? Might be a manifold pressure gauge, but then again....”
“What would a car like this cost?”
“Invaluable. Priceless. There aren’t any more, you see.”
Roseboom looked straight ahead through the tall windshield. “You are a successful orthodontist,” he said. “Yet most of your income comes from that gin mill we just left. You command a very great deal of money. But I think a toy like this might be beyond even you.” He looked over at Harry.
“The car was a gift,” said Harry.
“From whom, may I ask?”
“Why?”
“I’m wondering—this is for the record—if any taxes were paid on this gift.”
“I honestly wouldn’t know,” said Harry, glancing back at Roseboom for an instant. The agent narrowed his eyes but saw no guile in Harry’s face. “My lawyer takes care of the money.”
“Which brings us back to the source of the gift.”
“Oh, Joe saw the thing at the opera one night—parked outside the opera house, that is—in Hollywood, I think it was. Said it reminded him of The Untouchables.” Harry gave one soundless snicker.
“And he bought it then.”
“I’ve got a bill of sale, title, everything’s in order.”
“I know,” said Roseboom after a time. He sat quietly, watching the honky-tonks on Oceanic Avenue fly past. Shortly, Harry noticed that the agent was inspecting him again.
“Something the matter?”
“This nags at me. There are only two elements of the description we have of you that jibe with your actual appearance. The height. The glasses. Now, it says here”—and he was not looking at any paper—”six feet, two thirty-five, brown hair, gray eyes—”
“Gray is right,” said Harry.
“If you like. And you are about six feet. The stoop fools you. White hair now, and you weigh”—a pause and a sidewise glance—”about one sixty, one fifty-five.”
“I told you I was sick.”
“Also, the beard. And mustache.”
“I quit shaving when I sold my practice. Only psychiatrists get away with beards. Who brings their kids to a dentist with a beard? You know, that poopsheet you have on me sounds like about four, five years ago.”
“At date of compilation, subject forty-two years of age.”
“I’m forty-six. This birthday.” He thumped the wheel with the heel of his hand. “You must’ve gotten that stuff from my driver’s license or something.”
“Mmmm,” said Roseboom, nodding vaguely, “I concede that you were sick.”
“Oh, yeah,” said Harry.
“What with?”
“Gastroenteritis,” said Harry, after a pause. “Recurrent. Gets worse as you get older, I guess.”
“I knew dysentery was recurrent. I never heard that about gastro-whoozis. When contracted?”
“You sound like a doctor.”
“Small talk. I don’t care—professionally—what you’ve got. What illness.”
“I picked it up in the Caribbean about four years ago,” said Harry, softly. “Somebody forgot to wash their hands Before Leaving This Rest Room and went and put together our hors d’oeuvres.”
“’Our’?”
“My wife and boy. They died of it. The boy on the island, my wife in Miami. After she heard. Never eat raw fish.”
“I’m sorry.”
“Thanks. I mean it,” he added quickly.
“To get back to Joe the Nuts,” said Roseboom.
“Just a minute,” said Harry. There was a pause of ten or fifteen seconds, then Harry braked the car to a near stop and turned sharply to the right, up a dirt road that was really only two ruts through a vacant lot overgrown with brown marsh grass. They breasted a low hill—really a sand dune, Roseboom realized—and saw the ocean. Harry let the car roll ahead a little into softening sand and then stopped it and turned off the motor. “Come on,” said Harry. They got out of the car. Roseboom sank to his ankles in soft, hot sand. “Leave your shoes and socks.” Roseboom sat on the wide running board and pulled them off. He knocked the shoes together, sending a cloud of sand downwind. “Don’t get it on the car,” called Harry.
Roseboom caught up with him, and they trudged together through the sand and grass tufts toward a tall oblong structure half on the beach and half in the low surf. There was a rusty metal ladder set in its landward side. Harry shouldered ahead, heaved himself up, and continued to climb without a word. Roseboom saw him disappear into a low doorway about twenty feet from the ground and then followed him. Roseboom heaved himself into a low-celinged room about thirty feet square and saw Harry on the seaward side, looking out a narrow horizontal window. The walls, Roseboom saw, must have been a foot thick. There were pocks and cracks in them, and bits of rusty reinforcing skeleton were visible here and there. He guessed that the thing must have been fifty feet high altogether. “What’s upstairs?”
“Another room like this. Roof. We could go up there now, but it’s like a frying pan this time of day.” He intercepted Roseboom’s look. “Watchtower left from War Two. There were a lot of tankers getting sunk off this coast. There’d be six or eight guys in here, Coast Guard, all weathers, looking for submarines, smoke, like that.”
Roseboom looked at him with a grin. “Not bugged?”
“Someday the thing’ll fall into the water. Anyway, I don’t think anybody knows the way I come here. At least nobody ever followed me or was here, except some kids who come to roast marshmallows and screw and like that.”
“You come here often.”
“Oh, yeah. I like to watch the sea,” he said simply, looking out the view slit again.
“How did you know your own place was bugged?”
“Well, I did it myself. Early in the game, that was. Then somebody, I don’ know, maybe Christmas Angel, some of the boys, added some little hickeys of their own. You can hear ‘em on the phones. Lights dim out every once in a while. You’d be surprised—no, I guess you wouldn’t—at what goes on in those back rooms some nights.” Roseboom nodded and continued to look straight at Harry, who wiped his rust-stained palms on his spotless white bell-bottomed slacks, looked once around the room, then back out at the ocean.
“You bought into Decline And Fall in nineteen sixty-six,” prompted Roseboom.
“Oh, yeah. I came back here, tried to pick up my practice. You know. I had this big-ass house down the coast, in Lochmere, on the Bay. Hundred’n a quarter thousand. Pool. Heated pool. Vacuum cleaners in the baseboards. Boat dock. Big playroom. You know how I felt when I saw that playroom. Jesus Christ.
“Well, I tried to stick it out there. The place wasn’t quite paid off, I had a good practice, lots of consulting work, my own lab, four bright young kid associates, going to all be partners someday. Whole floor in a new building. Eight chairs, little operating theater, even. Mostly just for show,
“And. I never had much time to indulge myself, really, just in that upper-middle suburbs kind of way. The lawn. The parties. The concerts. Running the pie throw at the church fair. You know. I really didn’t know how to go about it any other way.
“I tried. I had the people from Dunhill’s come down and survey the place, turn the next-to-biggest bathroom into a room-size humidor. Bought three thousand Royal Jamaica Churchills. Ever smoke a Churchill?” Roseboom shook his head. “Here. Buck twenty-five a crack.”
Roseboom did not smoke. He took the big cigar anyway.
“Then I called Frederick Wildman. I don’t mean Frederick Wildman’s goddamn secretary, I mean Frederick. Wildman. He came down. Him. We put together a wine and cordial cellar. He also sold me a couple of barrels of scotch. Glenlivet Waters, it’s called. Apparently they don’t bottle it at all. That’s how Decline And Fall got such a reputation for wines and brandies, by the way. That’s my cellar down in the cellar. If you follow me.
“I drank the scotch,” he added after a pause.
“Then I had a few more alterations made. A sauna. A seven-foot-deep bathtub. That just about killed my wife’s insurance. Turned the Buick in on a Cad with a few refinements. Mostly a bar.
“I got myself a maid after the first couple of big dinner parties I gave to dispel the...what? It wasn’t gloom, exactly... A maid, after a decent period of mourning. Lives-in-gives-out, as the saying goes. That was a little girl. Between her and that fountain of booze, I wouldn’t have lasted long. It was that empty, empty house. And I hadn’t even gotten started on drugs yet.” He was talking quietly, conversationally, but Roseboom saw that he was wringing his hands very slowly and very hard.
“Then one night. I think it was New Year’s, sixty-six, I was driving along Oceanic Avenue, blitzed out of my mind, as usual, when all of a sudden, this fire engine comes blasting by me on the right. Of course I was probably driving on the left anyway. Well, this aroused some atavistic drunk-ass response in me, so I took off chasing it. Now that was a wild ride. I should mention that there were a bunch of others behind me. I kept those red lights in sight up ahead and drove. Spray was coming over the seawall and freezing in the air, and that road was just like glass. Anyway, I stayed alive until I came up on the place that was burning. I spun out turning into the lot—hit the big marble seal by the exit sign—and crumpled the Cad up a little.
“Anyway, I was out there looking over the damage, freezing to death and staggering and falling on my face, half from ice and half from booze, up comes this little guy with tears running down his face, yelling, ‘No insurance! No insurance! No insurance even for fires! You might’s well go away, no money for you here!”
“Well, I told him I wasn’t going to sue, it was my fault, I was drunk, and so on for about a minute. After the third time I said ‘drunk,’ his face lit up, and he grabbed me and hugged me and said ‘Me, too!’ And be damned if he didn’t have half a Pinch bottle under his apron,
“So then, we got in the Cad and watched the fire and butchered the Pinch. What he’d left. The place didn’t burn badly, just a lot of decor and the kitchen wiped out. And there were some fur coats and so on that they were going to be liable for. Just for the record, his name was Tibor Telredy, and the place was called Ungaria, Goulash Our Specialty. Telredy was a Hungarian Freedom Fighter who’d gone into his family pretty deep to set up the place; his mother did the cooking, his father played violin and so on, besides their life savings on the line. He just hadn’t had anything left over for insurance.
“I don’t know if it was booze, boredom, or genius, but I started to talk the deal right then and there. Him being drunk didn’t hurt any. Anyhow, we worked it out, sitting there in that bunged-up Cadillac with the heater running fit to roast your ass off, guzzling raw booze right from that bulky bottle. My collar was wilted next morning from what ran down my chin that night. Anyhow, we worked it out. I’d cover all his liabilities, pay for incidentals like legal fees and so on, and buy him out for...” Harry looked appraisingly at the FBI man for a second. “If you want to know, I guess you could find out. Ninety thou. Go on, you say it if you want. Others have accused me of setting bombs in orphanages.
“I had to sell the house to cover it all, which wasn’t a bad idea. Didn’t take much of a loss. It cost me about forty to cover liabilities—there were a few cars on fire behind the place that he neglected to point out at the time—and about another sixty to get the place fixed up the way I wanted. The way it is now. With my penthouse on the third floor, the pool tables, the stage and all. You know, I looked up the original title on that land and house. Decline And Fall is a restaurant, bar, cocktail lounge, grill, and cabaret with occasional dinner-theater, which can seat four hundred people on two floors and in the Wine Cellar Room. It was built in nineteen ten as a summer house for one family! We’ve lost something somewhere.”
“What happened to the former owner?”
“I got a postcard from him about a year ago. He’s teaching Slavic history at Southern California. Asked if I wanted to join the Minutemen.”
“Did you?”
“Why should I? When I’ve got the Mafia?”
They looked each other in the eye for a little while, and then Harry looked back out to sea.
“Well, Decline And Fall opened, all right. I handed over the practice to the boys—taught them how to incorporate, first—and arranged for them to pay me a percentage for ninety-nine years or until my death, whichever happens first. Then I moved in on the third floor and tended bar and washed glasses. Didn’t even get help, at first. But this resort-area trade just keeps coming and coming. I got tired out at last. But it took time to build up a clientele, especially without a working kitchen—I didn’t know much about the business then—and I had some problems.”
“Such as what?”
“I’ll skip over the little ones, because you want to hear about Joe and the Family. Anyway, that summer, there was a motorcycle gang hit town. Remember?”
“No.”
“Well, they hit it. First it was just messing around a lot in the streets. Then the cops got on ‘em and they had to go to ground someplace.” Harry looked over his shoulder at the FBI man. “Usually it’s a bar they pick.”
“And it was yours.”
“You bet it was. My regular customers—gone! The furniture was crumbling. The bastards never drank anything but draft beer and they’d get on a jag where they’d break glasses after each round. Then they dragged some woman in off the street and just about gangbanged her on the pool table before I got back from upstairs with the shotgun. I kept it under the bar after that.”
“Got a permit?”
“You be damned. Anyhow, that cooled them down a little. Things were halfway back to normal. Things looked good, I was meeting expenses and beating trade out of the other locals. Then. Then one night the Big Sprocket or whatever they call him got paroled and crushed into town from California. The whole bunch came in and set up a long course of getting pie-eyed for themselves. They chased off the other customers in about five minutes.
“Except for a bunch of guys sitting in the back. In the big booth. These were guys I’d never seen before, off a charter boat. They were the usual fishing types—baseball caps, polo shirts, three-day beards—you know. They weren’t paying any attention to what was going on up front, and the Big Sprocket saw that they weren’t. He hitched up his jeans and walked back there and told them to buy a round for the house or get the hell out. One says, ‘Can we drink up before we leave?’ but Big Sprocket had wandered away.
“I guess somebody must’ve gone to the phone. I don’t know who or when. Anyway, a half hour later, Big Sprock remembered them, and he went back with a mug of beer in each hand and said, ‘Are you mutherfuckers still here?’ And the first guy he’d talked to stood up, very soft-spoken and almost fatherly, and said, ‘We better take this discussion outside,’ and Big Sprocket says, ‘You bet your ass we better,’ and he led the way out, with his whole mob following him. And those fishing types.
“By that time, I was on the phone, but somebody’d popped the wires out. So I had a gin-gin and I got the shotgun and filled my pockets with shells and started for the porch. By then, there were sounds of a real, earnest difference of opinion to be heard issuing from the front parking lot.” Harry grinned and smacked his lips at the memory.
“I opened those swinging doors and walked out like Long John Silver onto that quarterdeck,” said Harry, “and there was quite a rumble out there. But it was just about over. Down at the end of each driveway, somebody had parked a dump truck. In the middle of the lot there was a big pile of motorcycle parts. There were four or five guys down there, taking their time about tossing these little bits of motorcycles onto the one truck, the one parked in the ‘enter’ driveway. Then there were four or five guys with sledgehammers and spud bars tearing what must’ve been the last few motorcycles apart and throwing the bits and pieces onto the pile. And right in front of the big front steps were forty or fifty guys with baseball bats, brass knucks, sandbags, blackjacks, loaded canes, and what-all, just beating the living hell out of Big Sprocket and his mob.
“I just sort of stood there. Frozen, you know, at the sight. I thought I was really going to have to shoot somebody, and I was so relieved that I didn’t have to, at least right away, that I just fell into one of those big rattan chairs. You saw ‘em, the ones on the front porch for the neckers and honeymooners, moon over the vasty sea, and all that. Then, somebody put a hand on my shoulder. I practically had a stroke. Then I looked over beside me. There were those fishermen, sitting in these chairs, taking their lordly ease, sipping fresh boozes—and I don’t know where they came from, I didn’t serve ‘em—watching the show just like they’d watch the Wednesday night fights.
“ ‘Here, old buddy,’ says one of them, the one closest to me, who’d put his hand on my shoulder. ‘Have a drink. These are almost as good as yours.’ And I took it. What it was, I couldn’t tell you. I made it go in three seconds, and he grinned at me, and squeezed my shoulder really buddy-buddy and handed me another one.
“Well, to keep from boring you, those guys in the lot and in the driveway finished beating those motorbikers to a bloody pulp and disposing of their mounts at the same time. Some of them took a whack or two at some of the bodies, then started to throw the remains onto the other truck, the one parked in the exit.
“ ‘Hey, Frank!’ the guy beside me calls out. One of the batmen turned and came a few paces toward us. ‘Dump ‘em in the quarry. My quarry, not yours. Show ‘em the Hand.’ And the guy nodded and laughed and went about his business. Then the guy next to me turned and said, ‘And now a gentleman can drink in peace,’ and he drained his drink. Then he said, ‘You’ve got one of the best places I ever saw. Come on back in and build us some more.’ Then he said, ‘You like Italian food?’ “
Harry looked at Roseboom. “I guess that was the first hint I ever had.” Roseboom nodded.
“We got back into the bar,” said Harry, “and I was setting them up for the house—the fishermen and about five others—when he introduced himself. ‘I’m Joe Nucci,’ he said, and I told him who I was. He nodded and said, ‘Uh-huh. Glad to meet you.’ Then he told me who the other guys were.” Harry looked at Roseboom again. “All out-of-towners, except Christmas Angel.”
“Yeah,” said Roseboom.
“Well, we all socked ‘em down with both hands for about two hours, and a couple of guys all covered with dust, T-shirts, work pants, you know, came in, and they looked at Joe and he lifted his eyebrows and they just nodded and sat down at the other end of the bar. I just served them two triples and they said ‘Thank you,’ and ‘Thank you.’
“I guess it was that ‘Italian food’ business that got Joe and I talking about...business. ‘Goddamn it, Harry old buddy,’ he kept saying, ‘a guy who runs such a hell of a bar has got to have a kitchen, too! And what could it be with a name like that but a guinea kitchen?’ And I explained how I was going to get the kitchen running early next year, with help and all, and hire a pianist, and have a free lunch in the bar, and he kept pounding on the bar and hissing, ‘Yeah! Right! Great!’ Hell, I told it to him just like it is now—you saw it. And he nodded, and grinned, and kept punching me in the shoulder, and I never had a chance to think about closing time, so they stayed till four thirty. But somebody thought to shut off the sign.” Harry stared off at the sea, remembering. “We were telling each other our life stories all night. Then he waved from the front porch, wiggled his fingers, he still had a drink in each hand, and he yelled, ‘Don’t forget what I said, Harry, boy!’ and he said, ‘Don’t worry any more about that dentist shit! You’re a community service now!’ “ Harry turned around. “And you know, I’m as good a restaurateur as I ever was an orthodontist?”
“What then?” asked Roseboom.
“Well, I started to get phone calls. This designer. That manufacturer. Beautiful terms. If I sounded reluctant, why, they’d come down a few thousand! I couldn’t afford not to get that goddamn kitchen all outfitted and working! Then, when the stuff was all installed, and painted, and the drawers full of knives and like that, and we had lots of flour and all around, this fat guy comes walking in one day. ‘I am Ercole Barone,’ he says. ‘Where is my kitchen?’ “ Harry paused. “You don’t know who Ercole Barone is.”
“No,” said Roseboom. “Should I?”
Harry sighed. “Vulgarian,” he said. “I shouldn’t say that, because I didn’t know myself. All I knew was that this huge guy who looked like Oliver Hardy, if Oliver Hardy had been born in Rome, had come in and started to turn out these unbelievable meals. There was one sent to me on the third floor, every day, nine a.m., three thirty, and nine p.m., unless I sent word to hold it. My God,” said Harry, remembering.
He recovered himself. “Ercole Barone is the master chef of a well-known restaurant in New York whose name I dare not divulge. He plans the menus for a shipping line and four airlines on the side. He works in town nine months out of the year.” Harry looked at Roseboom, saw he was not impressed, and scowled. “The other three, he works for me. The Italian legation and the Italian Mission to the UN drives here once a week, summers, in DPL-licensed cars, to eat Barone’s cooking. I have seen a silver-haired diplomat weeping into a plate of scampi Fra Diavolo, and there is hardly a man among them who is not in tears when he has to leave.
“Then there is the little old lady who comes in every day to make the pasta dough and pizza crusts. She does not speak a word of English. She arrives in a rented limousine. She turns out more starch than the farms of Idaho, finishes at four p.m., walks to the back door, and Barone gives her two twenty-dollar bills I have given him for this purpose. I ask why only forty bucks? Why two twenties? And I always get the same reply: ‘Twenty for pay, twenty for carfare.’ She comes in by private plane from somewhere, is met by a limousine, driven to my doorstep, and then every day at four, driven back to meet her plane at the local airport.
“Then there’s the clientele. And the entertainment. The old days of serving gin and tonics to the beach bums are long gone. Sure, we let the suntanned, windblown crowd in afternoons, but at night, it’s different. If we ever had a fire like poor Telredy’s, the bill for the furs in the checkroom would be bigger than the cost of the whole building, burned flat. We don’t just get the gold-plate trade from the trotting track, and the wanderers from the city! There were plates from nineteen states in that parking lot one night!”
Harry caught himself and lowered his voice. “The entertainment. Yeah. We don’t have any. It’s taxed. But what do we do when a truck rolls up one afternoon, delivers us a very special concert piano, and at nine that night, a certain blind jazz pianist shows up for dinner and then kids on the keys for a few hours afterward? Or when a British rock group comes for fettucine Alredo and gigs until five the next morning? Now, this is not every day. The everyday stuff is Joe the Nuts singing Verdi, or his buddies singing...what they sing. What he sings.”
Roseboom started to speak, and Harry put up his hand wearily. “I’m not naming any names.” He scratched his chest reflectively. “One night he even had his daughter with him. Nobody even thought to turn out the sign that night.
“And then there’s Joe. He’s really pretty good. And he puts his heart into it, it’s as much fun to watch as to listen. You know how he worked as a singing waiter when he was a kid. Do you know one thing that preys on Joe’s mind? That he’s never been able to get Franco Corelli to come in for a few days. Corelli is his idol.”
“A capo don of the Mafia,” said Roseboom, “working as a singing waiter. Dear God, no!”
“We don’t say ‘Mafia,’ “ said Harry. “ ‘Mafia’ is a bad word. Old hat. It’s usually ‘the Family,’ or ‘the Honored Society,’ or—this is Joe talking—’We the People.’ “
Roseboom gave him a hard look. “When were the firm financial arrangements made?”
“Weren’t,” said Harry.
“You keep no records? I think, just speaking off the top of my head, that you people are all in trouble.”
“Records? My taxes are in order. I’m not a vital industry, subject to audits by state or federal governments. As somebody or other once said, as long as the law can’t require me to be a literate, it can’t make me keep records. They tell me I’ve got a pretty good tax lawyer.”
“Don’t you know for sure?”
“I’m in pretty good shape,” said Harry, quietly. “I’m rich, and I’m not in jail. I’m enjoying life for the first time ... in a long time.”
Roseboom was silent for a while. Then he said, “I was going to ask you—I do ask you to testify at some future date, to a grand jury soon to be constituted, against your Mafia connections.”
“Why?” said Harry.
“Why?” yelled Roseboom. “They’ve taken over your business, they’ve put you under their thumb—”
“How’s that? I run my business. And I do a good job. What they’re doing is throwing business my way and helping me keep on top. And, mister, it’s pure cream.” He paused reflectively. “Now, it is true that Joe put a safe in my office that only he and Christmas Angel know the combination to, and that the Angel handles the receipts. But the Angel is Joe’s employee, and Joe is my friend. My own take has gone up every year, and I can’t see anything significant being drained off.”
“ ‘Thou shalt not muzzle the ox, when that he treadeth out the grain,’ “ said Roseboom, through his teeth. “What do you mean by ‘significant’?”
“I mean that two places have changed hands on that strip this year. Nothing to do with the Family. They just couldn’t hack it. If I was being milked the way you seem to think I am, I’d be in the street myself. As it is, I was asked to bid on one of them. By the owner’s lawyer, not by the Family. And as far as being under any thumbs,” Harry continued, “I went to Martinique last spring to visit my son’s grave. To Miami to visit my wife’s. I visited my uncle in Chicago, he’s a surgeon. I went to St. Petersburg to look into some real estate stuff I got into in the fifties. I could’ve run out any time, if I wanted to. Your point eludes me.”
“Listen to me,” said Roseboom. “Joe the Nuts, born Giuseppe Nucci, known as Joseph Nucci, is a capo don. He is a big, big gangster, if I may use an old-hat word.” He sneered just the slightest bit. “He has operated all over the country as a special representative of the Mafia, gouging small businessmen into signing over their livelihoods to his...organization.”
“Did you ever hear of the Supreme Protective Agency in New York?” asked Harry. “They go around hitting shopkeepers for ten bucks a month, for ‘protection.’ Now, that is really old hat. And all they do for that ten is to string tape around the edges of the shopwindows, you know, like a burglar alarm, but without alarm wires in it.”
“Well?” said Roseboom.
“But it works,” said Harry. “That green tape is like a danger signal. Joe described it to me once in very memorable terms. He said, ‘Those storefronts are Territory.’“ He paused. “Maybe what you’re saying is that I’m Territory, too.”
“Yes,” said Roseboom, between his teeth, “I guess you are.”
“And there’s another thing,” said Harry. “Joe Nucci is my friend. Now, I’ve had friends who were drunks. Queers. Cruel people, both men and women, and that’s the worst of all. Joe is just a nice little guy who loves singing and booze and screwing and who takes pleasure keeping his house in order. That could be me, except I can’t sing. When I compare him to some of the other friends I’ve had, he comes out pretty good.
“And now you come in here and tell me that I’ve got to chuck away my livelihood, my friend, and put myself in criminal suspicion, just because somebody sent you a report or a memo or what the hell to that effect. ‘Casino owner’—these places like mine are always ‘casinos’ in your language—’with Mafia connections,’ that’s what I’ll be for the rest of my life.”
“Wait a minute,” said Roseboom.
“No. Let me finish with the most cogent argument I’ve got, again, so as not to stretch this interview out unduly. Now, suppose I am a Mafia patsy. What happens? I’m caught between them and you, remember. They come to me and they threaten to cut off my balls, pull out my tongue, kill me, sink me in a block of cement into the bottom of New York Harbor. Kill a few of my friends, burn my house—and my business, they’re in the same building—poison my cats, sink my boat...and so on.
“Now, what do you threaten? You threaten to put me in jail.” Harry looked at Roseboom for a long time. Roseboom was looking at the floor. “I’m afraid, Mr. Roseboom, that the Mafia is leading in the bidding for my ass.”
“Don’t you know we can protect you?” asked Roseboom, but Harry could see that he was tired, and he himself knew that he spoke without conviction.
“Thirty years?” asked Harry. “I might live thirty years. But the chances are against it if I listen to you.”
Roseboom stood up and automatically brushed a cloud of cement dust off the seat of his pants. He moved toward the doorway, turned and faced Harry, then stepped gingerly down onto the ladder.
Harry took one-last look at the sea, sighed deeply, and followed him down.
* * * *
Sleet and snow were racketing at the front windows of Decline And Fall, and Harry looked up, and then curled closer to the blaze in the new fireplace in the empty cocktail lounge. He guessed that he had another hour before the first of the wintertime regulars pulled in—if they came out at all on a night like this. The floodlit pillar Joe the Nuts had sent from Leptis Magna was sheathed in ice. Harry looked out at it and grinned to himself. “Good for the image,” Joe had said. God knew it was phallic and classic and Roman enough for anybody. Harry had his sixth gin-gin of the evening at hand and was feeling no pain, literally. The small of his back had begun to bother him late in the fall. He pulled out the letter that had arrived with the pillar and read it again.
Dear Harry:
Thanks for the news about Uncle Freddie once again. Everybody needs a vacation. But you know them bastards wouldnt even let me in to SICILY? Then when I left Palermo I couldnt get into Rome. Anyway I got the pillar for you then, dont ask me how, you keep your nose clean like always. Beirut was nice but I like Spain much better. This is just a little fishing village Harry the name of which I will divulge when you call at Wagon-Lits Internationales, Barcelona. There are lots of Swede college girls here, made me think of my man the DUTCHMAN. Im making out OK with the wife of the local boss of guardia civil, thats state cops. Harry the wine here is as good as real Vino Rosso and is thirtyfive cents a quart. Oops thats a leter here in the old country. I never was as happy traveling for the family as I am here. To tell you the truth Harry I think them bastards are just as happy if I stay over here indefinitely. I didnt mention I get to sing in the local bar, what they call a bodega! And for money! Its’ the greatest moment of my life, more fun than when I was a kid. You know I love to sing. All I really need to die happy is to get paid to sing in your place Harry with Corelli beside me. But its real good here too. When are you coming over Harry? It isnt going to be too cool for you now that theres been all that noise around there. Frankie Buttons was pulled in to a special grand jury they convened just for him. You remember Frank. Come over here Harry, well have a ball. Between the two of us theres nothing we cant do.
Joe (The Nuts)
Harry refolded the letter and put it back in his breast pocket. He was glad Joe had gotten out. Of course, he thought, it would be easy anywhere for Joe. He was like a cat, always landed on his feet. Now, he, Harry...But that was water under the bridge. Harry drained the gin-gin. He got up—it took him a distressingly long time—and walked to the bar. The barman came to him, but he continued around behind it. “Never mind,” he said. “I’ll build my own.”
He sat oil the high stool—his high stool—as he worked. He could not feel the rung of the stool under his feet, and knew that his ankles and feet must be swelling again. Sitting there reminded him of the previous summer, when Inspector Roseboom had finally appeared, as Harry had known he, or some other, would.
Roseboom had been blown to tatters by the bomb under the floorboards of his car two days after the interview with Harry. Then an anonymous call had sent FBI men from the local office after one Angelo Christofori, known as Christmas Angel, who was suspected of killing an agent. The Angel might have gotten clear if he hadn’t locked his car. As he stood there, panting, trying to work the lock on his Lincoln Continental, two agents had come up on him and shot him eleven times, as he attempted to escape and/or resist arrest. The coroner noted that no single one of these bullets lodged in a vital spot.
After that, it had gone back and forth, for five months or more. An agent here, two or three torpedoes there, killed, bombed, wounded, taken into custody. A file of documents confiscated. An informer made to disappear. A little war, up and down the Jersey coast from the storm center at Decline And Fall. Harry thought that what he had done was better than what Roseboom had wanted him to do. First Harry had warned the Family, through Joe, that the FBI was interested in Decline And Fall. Joe had escaped, Roseboom was murdered, and Harry had blown the whistle on Christmas Angel. By then both sides were at each other, and Harry saw in each day’s papers how the battle raged around him. Each morning’s edition was delivered by special courier to Decline And Fall at eleven fifteen the previous night. Harry liked a head start on the news.
He had known for fourteen months that he was dying. The back pains had been cancer of both kidneys. It was a while before he could handle his gin-gins altogether comfortably. But Harry persevered. He had been a dentist, and a good one, all his life, except for a few timid and colorless childhood years. His student days were a blank to him once they had passed. He had never been able to get close to any woman but his dead wife. The passing of the boy who had been partly his wife and partly himself had burned something out of him. He reflected that he had not lied completely to Roseboom when he laid his sickness to a plate of pickled fish on a hot night in Martinique. Then he had bought Decline And Fall; he had discovered that his only pleasure was in making, rather than merely doing. He had made Decline And Fall well, and it would be his monument. With Joe’s help, he had made it good beyond his dreams. Then came the thing that would unmake him and his creation, and he had done a bit of unmaking himself. Except for Joe, they were all expendable; and he would live—he would—to see the outcome of the battle that he had posed between his enemies as it raged around his house.
He finished the mixing and laid the long spoon down carefully, took up the fresh gin-gin and walked slowly back to his chair by the fire. The paper boy was on his way out but came back for his tip. Harry sat down gently and opened the paper, flipping it so that the pages stood by themselves, the headline boldly exposed. He could hardly wait to see what he had done tonight.