Ghostheart Page 14
The kid laughed too. ‘Name’s Harry Rose,’ he said. ‘Maybe you heard of me?’
I shook my head. ‘No more heard of you than I heard of your sister.’
The kid frowned. ‘I ain’t got a sister.’
‘See, that’s how much I heard of you then.’
The kid didn’t take offence at the dig I gave him. ‘So you were asking about a crew?’ he asked.
‘I was,’ I said. ‘Asked whether you were a loner or running a crew.’
‘Sometimes a little of both, but I’m the kind of guy who figures that there’s many a deal where two heads are better than one. Yourself?’
‘Looking for a partnership,’ I said. ‘Looking to kick the ass of this neighborhood, shake it down some, you know?’
Harry Rose nodded, and then he turned and looked directly at me again with those painfully old eyes of his. ‘Figure we could share a fifth of something dangerous and see whether there might be something mutually beneficial for us.’
The kid was okay. Had some balls. I nodded. ‘Figure we could.’
‘We’ll walk a block or two, find some place and have a sit-down, okay?’
‘Okay,’ I said, and I started away from the stoop.
Kid’s hand had been in his pocket all the time, and as we moved away he withdrew his hand, and there within it was a long stiletto blade. He folded the blade back into the handle and tucked the knife back in his pocket.
‘You’d have had that through your eye before you ever reached the .38,’ he said quietly, and though I thought he was kidding himself, though I thought that such an idea was both a wish and a prayer, there was something about the kid’s cojones that impressed me.
We walked. Johnnie Redbird, six-foot tall, wide like a wall, dark-haired with two helpings of face, and Harry Rose, a good five or six inches shorter, fair hair greased back against his skull with bangs hanging down in front, handsome kinda kid if you didn’t look directly at him, the pair of us like some mismatched circus act in sharp suits and cordovan wingtips, ugly hearts and ugly minds, and a darkness inside that resonated like a bell. Walked three blocks and sat in a bar, and we talked like there was little time to talk, all full of ideas and scams and twists and turns, all fired up with liquor and ready to kick everyone else six ways to Sunday if that’s what it took to get what we wanted. We fell in like brothers, and just as there had been that unspoken and unidentifiable something between Harry Rose and Alice Raguzzi, so there was also something between me and this teenage kid from out of nowhere.
And me? Well, I had my own story altogether. I was twenty-two years old, hailed out of Staten Island, but that was not my place of birth. My mother was a prostitute, kind of prostitute with a meter ticking under her skirt, from out of Cabarrus County, North Carolina. My father was an unnamed and forever unknown trick my mother often referred to as ‘no better than dog puke’, and the room I grew up in was a sweat-smelling, peeling-wallpaper, damp-floorboard honky-tonk where whore-hoppers and junkies came to alleviate the tensions of the world by knocking a hooker around and then fucking her in the ass. How many times did I hear my mother screaming? I lost count. Perhaps in some way there were similarities between my own childhood years and those of Harry Rose. Granted, my room was not in Dachau, and my mother did what she did for money, not for fear of her own life or the life of her son, but there were similarities enough for us both to have our view of the world twisted upon its axis and set on its head. People used people. Everyone was a prostitute, up for fucking someone else for money. Perhaps I believed that was the way it was meant to be. I don’t know, and now I don’t honestly care. My mother died when I was twelve, and that was the end of that.
Three months after her death I was held over by the Cabarrus County Sheriff’s Department for stealing hubcaps from an auto shop. Truth be known I liked the way they looked. Truth be known I have no idea why I stole them, but I did, and I got the crap kicked out of me for my trouble. That was the start of a long and meaningful relationship with the law. I knew where they were at, and they knew where I was coming from, and so I left, hightailed it out of North Carolina as fast as I could and arrived in New York. Why Staten Island? Because that’s where the train ended up, the train I hitched a ride on. I traveled with vags and hoboes, watched them rob their own traveling companions while those same companions slept, watched them drink their canned heat and sleep on Pittsburgh feathers, and dodge the harness bulls who came looking for them as the train hurtled into the darkness of an unknown future. I went into that future knowing nothing, wide-eyed and hungry just like Harry Rose, and believed that the America that waited for me could only have been better than the one I’d left behind.
There were days I didn’t eat. Not a mouthful. There were days I stole more food than I could carry and gorged myself sick. And then there was the day I killed a man for seventeen bucks and change in a narrow back alley near Woodroffe’s Poker Emporium. Seventeen and change was a lot of money, seemed reason enough to kill a man, and besides he was fat and he stank bad and he was just like the kind of full-of-shit wiseass who came down to the honky-tonk to take my mama for a ride. Killed him with a tire iron, beat his skull to pulp. Kicked what came out of his head around the alleyway and believed there had to be no better feeling in the world.
Later, when Harry told me about Weber Olson, there was something so similar in the way that we had felt, something that made us connect I s’pose. It wasn’t that life counted for nothing, Harry had said, but that a life could always be traded. At that time a life was worth seventeen dollars and change to me. For Harry the life of Weber Olson had been about pride and honor and doing what was right. We saw things the way we saw them. Harry Rose saw them like some wide-eyed and terrified kid whose mother got herself beaten and tortured by some Nazi asshole. I saw them in a different light, but somehow that light came from the same spectrum and cast the same kind of shadows.
And out of that alleyway near Woodroffe’s Poker Emporium I ran like the devil. Ran and hid. Knew there’d be questions, knew there’d be interest from the law, but I knew the law, and they knew me and my kind, and so I crossed the Bayonne Bridge into Jersey City and slept rough for a week in Liberty State Park. Made it as far as Hoboken, where I got caught robbing a newspaper vendor on Bergenline Avenue. Sent to Juvy. Helluva place. Thousand and a half crazy kids banged up with a bunch of pedophile screws. Lasted three weeks. Did a runner. Couldn’t take any more shit from any of them. Place was a sprawling compound of low-rise buildings, high razor-wire fences, lights and towers and God only knew what. Screws didn’t carry guns, hell we were just kids, but they managed their billy-clubs well, practised after lockdown, could throw a club like that and bring a running kid to the ground without even thinking about it. Went in that place with my eyes wide open. Could see the loopholes and the gaps within a few days. They would divide us into chain gangs, work parties of ten or twelve, all of us hooked up together with ankle shackles. We’d walk out of that place at five in the morning, take a hike for a mile, maybe a mile and a half, and then we would set down for a drink of water before we started work. Had us cleaning loose stones and gravel from the hot-top before the maintenance men came down to lay new bitumen. Smoke like Hades, fires setting off in the scrub and bush as they pasted that shit down, and we were there to run with buckets of water and douse the edges down before things got out of hand and the National Guard had to come down.
It was hard work, sweated like a locomotive engineer, but it was during those times that they had to take our shackles off. Remember standing there at the side of the road, all mayhem breaking loose as a tree caught ablaze. Screws were hollering like banshees, smoke and filth shuddering out of the road, and all ten or twelve of us charged down there, yelling and hauling pails of water to put the fire out. Took a good hour to get things under control, and by that time I was black from head to foot, and before they had a chance to gather our crew together and do a tally another tree caught up on the other side of the road and everyone went o
ff like a hare at the track.
I dropped to the ground, lay there for a moment while the side of the road cleared of kids and screws, and then I took handfuls of that black bitumen-soaked ash and started rubbing it into my skin, onto my clothes, my hands, my face, my shoes. Dropped back into the edge of the undergrowth and stood there for a while like a cigar store Indian. Could hardly breathe, not only because I didn’t want to make a sound, but because I had that filthy shit in my eyes, my nose, my mouth. Nearly fainted from the heat, and because every pore of my skin was clogged with that mess I thought for a moment it might dry up and I would be stood like a statue until they came and found me upright and suffocated.
The fire went out of control, and in the chaos I took my chance to cut loose. I could move – it was hard work, but the more I ran the faster I got, waded through a river and cleaned off much of the shit that was covering me, and I just kept on running, running into tomorrow and another life.
Crossed the North River into Manhattan and hid out in a derelict tenement a stone’s throw from Yankee Stadium near Webster and Tremont. Late nights could hear the crowds roaring. Knew what it was like to be alone. Whosoever knows the sound of loneliness, there’s a man I can look in the eye. Whosoever knows the pain of hunger, three days of the sweet-fuck-all kind of hunger, there’s a man I can talk to and gain some kind of sense. Perhaps these things, these little things, were other reasons me and Harry Rose connected on the same wavelength so many years later.
So I robbed and tricked and conned and gambled some kind of survival out of nothing at all. Run-ins with the law became a stock-in-trade, an occupational hazard, and by the time I finally collided with Harry I ran a booking sheet the length of the Constitution and a reputation second to not very many at all. I was bad news. It was good to be bad news. I had accomplished something. I had made a mark. I was dangerous. My reputation for willingness to go the extra mile preceded me, and I figured that anyone who crossed me was a man carrying stainless steel cojones. But stainless steel cojones are heavy, and when they drop they drop with a sound like thunder.
I told Harry these things, and Harry told his things back. We connected. We came together like two halves of the same bad penny. Could’ve been brothers. Could’ve been twins. Figured we could be anything we wished, and we wished for a great deal.
Like I said, it was early ’55, a heady time, a prosperous time. The war was done with, those who survived were home, and America was convincing itself it was sophisticated and wealthy and cultured and great. We figured her for an overweight, varicose-veined, dipsomaniac widow, ready to lay down for any young stud who showed her the slightest interest. We possessed the interest, figured we’d fuck anyone for enough money, and America seemed as ready as anyone we knew.
So Harry, he took a girl, a centerfold sweetheart working out of a speakeasy on Vine, a girl who looked like heaven but couldn’t have carried a tune in a bucket, and the three of us moved into the St Luke apartment and made it our home. I ran protection for Harry Rose, ran it well, like a professional, and when the boys came back short on change, when the dollar counts didn’t square, I would make it my business to kick them from hell to breakfast until the books were straight again. Harry never asked me for details, I never gave them, and for all the years we would live and work together Harry would never hear a word of my methods – those things you perhaps would care to know, and perhaps some day I will tell you. Those are things I will speak of face to face, for to put them in writing would perhaps turn you away from me. I write only of things that I feel you need to know, and I need you to know about Harry Rose. Bear with me a while longer, this is all I ask.
Harry’s girl, the singer, was called Carol Kurtz. ‘Indigo Carol’ to the regulars who trawled the gin-joints and speakeasies looking for easy lays and cheap laughs. She came from New Jersey, had left home for California three years before, made it back as far as New York and never took another step. Perhaps, had events conspired to find Harry Rose in some other bar on some other night, she might have eventually made it, but Harry saw her, and Harry got what he wanted, and what he wanted was Carol Kurtz. Some said she looked like Marilyn, others like Veronica Lake. To Harry she looked like paradise in cheap nylons and fake fur. He took her out of the life, he gave her money and freedom, he gave her a name and a face and a sense of belonging. She belonged to Harry Rose, and any man that cast an eye or two in her direction would find themselves sharing words with me and a snub-nosed .38. I figured Carol was Harry’s way of finding Alice Raguzzi again. They couldn’t have been more different in the way they looked, but in spirit they could have been twins. She was a smart girl, she knew which way her bread was buttered, and she treated Harry with the degree of respect he deserved. Harry treated her the same way back. He treated her like a human being, someone with a heart and mind and feelings. She was as quick as he in the way she figured shit out, and Harry liked that. She could tell a dirtier joke than any man I’d ever met, and if she set her mind to drinking you down she would go all the way. Never seen a girl put away so much liquor and still keep a tight tongue in her head.
I cared for Carol too, but not in the biblical sense. Carol was Harry’s girl, Harry’s all the way, and sometimes I’d see them together and recognize that I was a third wheel. I was business, Carol was pleasure, but that didn’t make her any less than family. She held her own, I held mine, and Harry liked it just the way it was and I wasn’t going to spoil it.
We did well – Harry and Carol and me – coming on like gangbusters down the sidewalks and streets of Queens, rolling out money like we owned the presses, like the Federal Reserve sat in our back pockets and the world was our mall. We drove limousines and Cadillacs, ate at De Montfort’s and Gustav’s where the busboys were called ‘garçons’ and the Rothschild came at forty bucks a bottle and never stopped flowing. This was the high life, the way it was always meant to be, and never a word was shared regarding Harry Rose’s past, the years that came before, the horrors he had witnessed as a child and the color he carried in his heart.
And then it all changed: 1955 saw the death of Charlie Parker; a civil war in some godforsaken hellhole called Saigon; Ike laid up for seven weeks after a coronary, and James Dean committing vehicular suicide at twenty-four years of age. Sugar Ray took back his middleweight title in December, and Christmas was upon us once more. It was a cold season, bitter and resentful, and me and Harry took our business uptown for a few days to collect the dues on those who’d figured Carl Olsen would keep his belt. We were gone less than a week, five days in fact, but when we returned – all of seventy thousand dollars richer – Carol Kurtz had gone.
I was despatched, was gone three days, and when I carried the news home it was with a heavy heart and a blackened mind. I’d been the one to identify Carol Kurtz’s raped and strangled body down at the city morgue, and I’d been the one to turn a few tongues when it came to naming names and sharing truths. Karl Olson, Weber’s brother, a racketeer out of South Brooklyn, a man who was as tight as Kelsey’s nuts with his dues and pay-offs, and thus hadn’t earned any friends in Harry Rose’s patch, had come down here with vengeance on his mind. Out for revenge, you dig two graves, the Sicilians said, one for your mark and one for yourself. Me and Harry Rose went out to Brooklyn, drove a plain sedan, inconspicuous in our dress and manner, and we soon found where Karl Olson had holed himself up.
Night of 23 December 1955, rain hammering on the sidewalks, lightning fracturing the darkness, we broke in through the basement windows of the Chesney Street Hotel, south side of Brooklyn. We took rope and hammers and a screwdriver. We slugged two of Olson’s kickers, woke him up and tied him to a chair. We jammed his mouth with his own underwear before I smashed each of his ten toes one by one with a hammer and Harry Rose screwed holes through the guy’s hands with the driver. When he passed out we woke him up again, and then we tortured him till he passed out once more. Finally his heart gave out, but Olson was a big man, a horse, and he’d lasted the best part of two hours b
efore the pain got the better of him.
Me and Rose committed first-degree murder, vengeance yes, but murder all the same, and though Olson was never free with his dues when it came to his winners, he was nevertheless as prompt as a schoolma’am when it came to the law. Those who’d talked to me sang the same song for the law, and on Christmas Eve, snow falling on the roof of the St Luke apartment, the police busted wide the doors and took us both down. Backhanders aside, there was little that could be done for either me or Harry Rose; the gambling, the liquor, the fights and the hookers, the speakeasies and juke joints, the nose candy and mighty mezz passing beneath beer-stained tables in backstreet diners – these things could be forgotten for an extra hundred a month to the Widders ’n’ Orphans, but not murder. Murder was as murder is, and there wasn’t a way to see it any other how.
So I took the fall, not out of choice, but out of some sense of retribution for history. The cops were all too quick to nail me. There was word about the other things, the things from my past, and it seemed those things had caught up with me. Hell, they still had a ticket on me for running from Juvy, and they wanted to punch that ticket just so they could straighten their books and keep the house in order. Harry had been the one to grease their palms, not Johnnie Redbird, and when it came to a choice between nailing me or Harry there was in fact no choice at all. They wanted my head, they wanted their Johnny the Baptist, and hell if they didn’t take it. Harry greased more palms than he ever had before, and with the right attorney and a paid-up judge they let it run on a second degree. I skipped the chair and took a lifer. Sent me out to Rikers Island to grow old in an eight by eight. And Harry Rose packed up St Luke, sold the leases on his bars and juke joints, and took his business south; disappeared for a handful of years, did all he could to help me survive through visits and dollars and favors owed. Loyalty was his strong point, had been his downfall in some respects, but Harry Rose would always remember the man who took the stand and swore the oath and bowed his head when sentence was passed.