Jack of Diamonds (86 page)

Jack, darling, I’ll try to find a way, but in the meantime I guess we shouldn’t make any contact under
any
circumstances, not even through the pastor. Know only that I love you with all my heart and always will.

Bridgett ‘Love in a Laundry Basket’ Fuller X X X X

P.S. Be sure to burn this letter.

I borrowed a pair of scissors from Martha and carefully cut out the lines
Know only that I love you with all my heart and always will. Bridgett ‘Love in a Laundry Basket’ Fuller X X X X.
These I carefully folded into a compartment in my wallet before burning the remainder of her letter.

That afternoon the laundry truck arrived with the blanket-lined linen basket. I said my thanks to Pastor Moses and Martha, adding, ‘I wish there was some way I could repay you, sir, ma’am.’

‘Jack, you already done that many, many times before. Black folk, dey love you.’ He gripped my hand and smiled into my eyes.

Booker T. consulted his railway timekeeper, a large silver fob watch. ‘Better we be off now.’ He then handed me a small parcel. ‘Miss Bridgett says to give you this; she says you open it only when you on the train, Jack.’

‘Booker T., when you get back, please tell Miss Bridgett her plan about my apartment and bank deposit is fine.’

‘Jack, that already changed, only because maybe somebody get that letter by mistake. She gonna bide a while, then she gonna send that money through me and the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters. That be by far the safest. Then it go hand to hand, nobody know nothing, jes delivery to Mr Jack McCrae.’

As usual and despite the chaos at the Firebird, Bridgett had all the bases covered. The driver and Booker T. then helped me into the basket and lowered the lid. And that was how I left Las Vegas.

The first thing I did was open the parcel from Bridgett. Inside was a small black leather case with the initials J. McC. in gold on the outside. Inside was a gold fob watch. I opened the lid and read the inscription in tiny letters covering the entire back of the watch:

Love bears all things,
believes all things,
hopes all things,
endures all things.

Bridgett may have left her hillbilly past far behind, but when she needed to express her deepest feelings, she turned back to the Bible, the first poetry she would have heard as a small girl. I stared at the watch for a long time, then tucked it away in my breast pocket.

We eventually reached Chicago, and I was wrapped in a railway man’s overcoat and transferred into a private compartment on the Commodore Vanderbilt’s premium service to New York via Albany. In that city I felt everyone was a potential assassin.

I dozed when I could, but the pain kept me from becoming too comfortable. The service was splendid; nothing was a problem. I felt a bit like the legendary ‘man in the iron mask’, kept in total seclusion while I was being transported, so no one else knew I was there.

It made me realise I was benefitting from a parallel black universe that I never knew existed. No doubt it had helped Hector and Sue escape safely, too. Miss Frostbite had previously written to say Chef Hector was an absolute blessing to the Jazz Warehouse kitchen and he’d been elevated to head chef on the retirement of Mr Charlie Blinker. Sue was also proving a great success as a waitress three nights a week and was being put through a modelling course as well as going to college. At the time, a black model in a white fashion magazine would have been unthinkable anywhere in North America and, I’m ashamed to say, possibly in Canada as well, but Sue’s blue eyes and fair skin disguised her Negro parentage.

I arrived in Albany very early in the morning, the city I had mistaken for New York when I was still a boy. Wrapped up again in a long railway man’s overcoat, head covered by a warm scarf, I was hustled down onto the tracks when the train stopped just before Albany station. I crossed two sets of tracks and was handed over to two young Negroes, who nodded silently and escorted me to a waiting car. ‘Hello, Jack. Welcome to Albany,’ Dr Koroush Haghighi called from the driver’s seat.

I got into the passenger seat and turned to thank the two young guys who’d escorted me but they’d disappeared. We watched as the train drew away, then drove off.

‘Jack, I’ve booked you in under my care using your assumed name, as Mrs Fuller instructed. From now on you’ll be known in the hospital as Jack McCrae. You’ll be safe here for as long as we need.’

‘Thanks, Doctor. I’ve got enough money to pay you for all this,’ I hastened to say.

‘Good. I’ll do my part
pro bono
but if you can cover the hospital costs, it will mean there’s less paperwork and fewer questions asked.’

I was to spend a little over three months in Albany and undergo several operations under Dr Haghighi’s care. I left the hospital after two weeks and stayed at a small boarding house close by. My hand was still painful but most of the time it was bearable. Gradually I began to get back limited movement in my fingers. For instance, I could grip things, such as a cup or a spoon, but I couldn’t imagine sitting down at the piano. I bought a kettledrum and used it to exercise my hand and wrist, slowly increasing the speed of my movements, but using my fingers separately was a major problem. I was still a musician only in my head.

Fortunately, my thumb had been damaged less than my hand and fingers. The one-eyed Sammy Schischka was probably concentrating on the easy target of my palm.

‘The thing now, Jack, is to build up the strength in this hand. Work it until you want to cry from the pain and it will reward you. The more exercises you do, the better.’ Then Dr Haghighi would ask, ‘How is the feeling in your fingertips?’

My reply was always the same. ‘What feeling?’ But gradually I started to get a little more sensation in my three middle fingers, although my little finger was still numb. For a piano player, that’s a bit like being a baritone without his lowest note.

‘I was afraid of that,’ the surgeon said. ‘There is nerve damage and I can’t do much about it, unfortunately.’

The other thing exercising my mind was the future. Bridgett kept silent for six weeks, then a typewritten letter arrived via the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters. It opened with ‘Dear Mr McCrae’ and ended ‘Yours sincerely, H. Billy’, without a signature. I smiled fondly over the reference to her childhood. It was wonderful to hear from her, although she was forced to write about ‘Mrs Fuller’ in the third person. She explained that ‘Mrs Fuller’ now ran the entire Firebird, after the death of Mr Lenny Giancana, and I had no doubt that her paperwork regarding the basement full of cement would have helped. Miss H. Billy never signed her letters or expressed any loving sentiments but, even so, it wouldn’t have been difficult to trace the letters back to her if one went astray. At least if it fell into someone’s hands, they wouldn’t know of our love.

H. Billy informed me that she had sold my apartment and deposited the money in a local Albany bank under the name Jack McCrae, as well as the balance in my Las Vegas bank account, which gave me a total of $15,600; a very pleasing sum. She must have decided it was too risky to send that much cash via the Brotherhood. Included in the letter was a new ID card and social security number in the name of Jack McCrae, ‘compliments the interior decorator’. She’d obviously used Anna-Lucia Hermes and her husband, the mayor, to obtain it.

After I’d been in Albany for three months I received a letter from H. Billy, via the usual means, with distressing news. Johnny Diamond had been shot and killed outside his parents’ home in Ohio, hunted down by those animals, basically, because he had been in the wrong place at the wrong time. The murder had been reported in the local newspaper, simply headlined: EX-PIT BOSS MURDERED. In her note she cautioned me that Sammy was back on his feet, although with the permanent support of crutches. The article repeated the usual no-suspects line, but told of the fight at the Desert Inn and Johnny Diamond’s hurried exit from Las Vegas. Shortly after Johnny’s death, a frightening note had been slipped under Bridgett’s door:
The Diamond has hit the deck. The next card to go will be the Jack of Spayds
.

It didn’t sound like anything Sammy could possibly have composed and I guessed it was sent from the Chicago Mob, warning that godfather Tony Accardo, and his big guns were out to get me, and that, unlike Sammy, they were not a bunch of Chicago hicks carrying meat hooks. My unsigned statement to the police was worthless, and I suspect a signed one would have made little difference. I was still a loose end that needed to be snipped off. Slipping the note under Bridgett’s door meant they suspected she was keeping in touch with me, so I wasn’t surprised when H. Billy ended her letter:
Mr McCrae, future contact will now cease
, but I felt my heart sink.

I suddenly felt very lonely. I had contacted my mother and Nick Reed via the porter network, which carried over the Canadian border. It was complicated, though, and Booker T. insisted they couldn’t guarantee it. I had warned my mom and Nick not to contact me and told them about my hand and that the Mafia were involved. If I came home, it wouldn’t be safe for me or anyone involved with me. I didn’t give them my address or even tell them I was in Albany but simply said that I was being treated by one of America’s best hand surgeons, and that I’d be in touch as soon as I felt it was safe to do so.

Several days later, Dr Haghighi surprised me, after a regular check on the progress of my hand, by saying, ‘Your stepfather will be here tomorrow, Jack. He’s officially here to consult on some burns patients. While he’s not aware of being watched, he doesn’t want to expose you to any more danger.’

‘How the hell —?’

He cut me short. ‘Surgeon’s network.’

Nick arrived and I spent the day telling him the whole story, after Dr Haghighi had filled him in on the details of my hand injury. Nick thought about it for a few minutes before saying, ‘Jack, your treatment is all but finished, the dressing is off and you know how to care for yourself. Dr Haghighi says that, with time and exercise, you’ll get more movement in your hand, and that the movement you’ve got already is pretty remarkable. As one surgeon to another, he’s done a great job.’

‘Yeah, but no piano,’ I said softly.

‘Afraid not, son; not as a professional, anyhow.’ He didn’t carry on – there was no point – and how could I tell him that life as a musician was everything to me, and that without jazz, the blues, my life was finished as far as I was concerned? He hadn’t told me anything I didn’t know. ‘What seems obvious to me, Jack, is that you need to get the hell out of North America for a good bit.’ He paused. ‘And that includes Canada.’

‘The Mafia has a very long arm, Nick. I’m not broke, but it’s a question of where? I imagine Jack Spayd is not a common name on a passport.’

Nick, as usual, was pretty calm, almost laconic, but I knew his manner covered deep concern; he was, by nature, a man of few words. ‘I’ll come back next week . . . see what can be done.’

He was back six days later. ‘I’ve had a quiet word to a friend or two in the Royal Canadians, permanent brass in our old regiment, and they connected me with some friends of theirs in the Mounties who run Canadian Intelligence. As we discussed, they recommend you leave the country, get away someplace where they’ll never look for you.’

‘Yes, but where, where the hell do I go?’ I said. ‘I’ll need a passport under another name if I want to do that safely . . .’

‘I guess we’re thinking alike. Canadian Intelligence have come up with a legal trick. They’ve arranged for your passport using my family name, without any of the usual adoption paperwork. No need for any complicated legal stuff. Your mother has found a snap of you that can be made to work as your passport photo. That should be enough to throw anyone off your trail.’

‘They did that?’

‘Well, normally it would be a bit tricky. The guy involved is pretty high up in the security section of the Mounties. He’s repaying what he says is a favour because I saved his brother’s life. Guy received burns to fifty per cent of his body after being rescued from a burning tank at Normandy.’ Nick shrugged. ‘Just doing my job, I guess, but he insists he owes me this one. Your medal didn’t hurt either.’

‘Missing earlobe pays off at last,’ I laughed. ‘Thank you, Nick,’ I said simply. There wasn’t much more I could say, anyhow. I’d become the owner of a new Canadian passport in the name of Jack Reed, a new man with a new life.

‘Africa, Jack; for a while, anyway – somewhere in the middle or to the north, that’s what the Intelligence guys say. That’s where a lot of the German SS disappeared after the war. Just one more thing and I stress that it’s very important: you cannot,
must not
, contact anyone in Canada or tell any person who may have previously known you your new surname. The same goes for any friends in America. Not a word until you’re settled. You have simply disappeared . . . gone, vanished for the time being.’ He looked at me sternly. ‘No Miss Frostbite, no Joe, no Mac. Please, Jack?’ He paused, then said, ‘and no one in Las Vegas. You’re not the only one involved in this.’ He stood up, and removed a new Canadian passport from the inside pocket of his jacket and handed it to me. ‘It’s got all the right visas you’re going to need from the bottom of Africa to Ethiopia. I’ve also prepared a set of papers on regimental notepaper outlining your career as an army medic; the courses you’ve passed, medical experience while in action. I’ve signed these but also got your old CO, as well as the battalion commander – now a major general – to do a reference for you. You never know when they may be useful,’ he concluded. ‘Now, I’ve got a train to catch. Good luck, son.’ We shook hands (he wasn’t the kind of man who hugged) and he grinned, but it wasn’t one of those grins intended to indicate mild humour. ‘Only one other person can know any of this, so my next concern is how I am going to explain all this to your dear mother.’