As Time Goes By (24 page)

"You was young, boss."
       

"I was old enough to know better."

"Whatever you say." Sam laid out the pieces on the oilcloth and reassembled them carefully. "Ain't it nice
the way everything goes together," he said. "Each part
fits in so well with the other. Don't you wish every
thing in
life was like that?"

"Well, it isn't." Rick had finished the bottle and was
wondering what to do with it. "You know, Sam," he
said, "this may be it."

Sam didn't even look at nun. He knew what he was
talking about, and he didn't like it any more than his
boss did. "Now don't you go talking that way, Mr.
Richard," he said. "You done more dangerous things
before, and you always come back. You know you do.
So you just take this here gun and go do what you have
to do, and then you come back here and you'n me'll
light out for the territories, like we always plannin'."

Rick snorted. "Things are different now," he said.
"In Africa, in Spain, I didn't care whether I came back
or not. That's probably what kept me alive. Now I do."

"Because of Miss Ilsa?" asked Sam.

"Mrs. Laszlo, you mean."

"Miss Ilsa," insisted Sam. "She's the reason, ain't
she?"

Some questions didn't require answers. Rick lit a
cigarette. Sam snapped the last pieces of the gun back
into place and handed it to Rick. "Boss," he said,
"why you got to go? This ain't your fight."

"What makes you so sure?" Rick asked.

Sam muttered something to himself. Rick didn't
even have to hear it to know what he was saying. He
decided to ignore it.

"She's different, Sam. After Paris, I thought she
might be Lois all over again, and when she showed up
here with Laszlo, I was certain of it. Just another girl who married the wrong man, the kind of guy I could never compete with, and now wants me to save her
from herself. But I was wrong. She's given me some
thing to live for again. That's why I'm scared."

He blew some smoke out of his lungs and crushed
the cigarette viciously into the ashtray. "So has Victor
Laszlo, except he doesn't know it yet."

"Boss, you never been scared of nothing," said Sam.

"That's just the problem." Rick threw the bourbon bottle into the fireplace, where it shattered with a re
sounding crash. He listened carefully until the last of
the glass shards had stopped clattering to the floor.

C
HAPTER
T
WENTY-
O
NE

New York, July 1932

If God had wanted to smile on those for whom He
otherwise had very little time, Prohibition was surely a
sign of divine favor. What had been meant as punish
ment for the most despised members of American soci
ety, the new immigrants from Ireland, Italy, Poland,
Russia, and the Ukraine, had turned out instead to be a
great gift to them. For Solomon Horowitz, who ap
preciated a present when it was offered and never
turned one down, this turn of events only reinforced his
notion that most laws achieved exactly the opposite of
what they were intended for. He had learned this lesson
as a young man, in the old country, and he had applied
it, with great success, in the New World.

The summer sun was casting its first light over the
Queens flatlands. The Tootsie-Wootsie's first custom
ers would not begin arriving for hours, even the ones
who couldn't control their thirst. Still, there were bills
to be paid and proceeds to be counted, and the only
people Solly trusted to do that were himself and Rick.
Reclining slightly in an easy chair, his waistcoat mostly
unbuttoned to give free rein to his expanding belly,
Solly was puffing contemplatively on a cigar. He was
the very picture of Central European ease and wisdom, transplanted to Manhattan.

"Ricky, you know what mistake that
shmendrick
Sa
lucci makes?" inquired Solly.

Rick shook his head, even though he knew the answer. Solly liked his questions to go unanswered, ex
cept when he didn't: his boys had to tell the situations
apart.

"He takes himself too serious!" Solly slapped his hand on the countertop, hard, and laughed heartily.
"And he takes business not serious enough. This is
why I take him to laundry every day!" For a moment
Rick wondered whether Solly was having a heart at
tack. His face habitually turned purple whenever he
heard—or more likely told—a funny one, or at least
one he thought was funny. "He even drinks his own
booze!"

"But you play the numbers," objected Rick, who
otherwise had no objection to gambling.

"I
run
the numbers," Solly retorted.

"So you cheat yourself."

"It ain't cheating when you cheat yourself!" Solly
said heatedly.

"Sure it is," replied Rick. "It's the worst kind of cheating. Only a chump lets himself get cheated, and
only an even bigger chump cheats himself. You told me
that yourself."

Solly looked over at his prot
é
g
é
. "Maybe. Some
times. Now and then."

They were sitting in Rick's office at the back of the
club, which was located on the second floor of an otherwise nondescript Harlem building near the intersec
tion of 136th Street and Lenox Avenue. The only
indication of the Tootsie-Wootsie's presence was a
small awning, in front of which stood a uniformed col
ored doorman. A small grocery store occupied the
ground floor, and three floors of flats topped the club.
Solly owned the building and collected the rents. It was
just one of the many buildings he owned in Harlem proper, which had turned mostly black, and East Har
lem, which was holding the color line. "East Harlem,
you can't go wrong," Solly would often say. "You got the Polo Grounds and the new Yankee Stadium across the river in the Bronx. The white people will never let
them go. It's baseball, for chrissakes!"

Solly belched loudly. "Enough baseball," he said.
"Let's talk business." He glanced at bis pocket watch,
which he kept tucked in his vest. "We gotta hurry."

Rick Baline had the best head for business Solly had
ever encountered outside of himself. Indeed, in Rick
Solly saw much of himself, except with more advan
tages in life. Rick wasn't saddled with a thick shtetl accent; he talked real American. He wasn't like most
other young fellows these days, chasing after the false
gods of booze, broads, and Stutz bearcats when there
was money to be made.

No, Rick was different. He had taken to the Tootsie-
Wootsie Club as if he had been bom in it. His sharp
eye missed nothing. He knew which customers could
pay and which couldn't and which of the latter it was
important to let in anyway. He kept the staff from steal
ing, he kept the musicians from fighting over women,
he kept the angry fathers whose young daughters were
in the chorus line from getting too obstreperous, and
he kept the band members away from the young daugh
ters. He kept the songwriters paid and mostly sober. He
made sure the pianists knew which songs were the
most popular. Once in a while he even let a customer
sing along, especially when that colored boy Sam Wa
ters was at the keyboard playing "Knock on Wood." He kept his gat in his trousers or in the pocket of his dinner jacket just as smooth as silk and nobody the
wiser, not even the cops who came there to drink and
ogle.

From the day Solly had put Rick in charge, the Tootsie-Wootsie Club had become his most profitable busi
ness venture. Almost instinctively Rick knew where
and how to get the best beer, and his connections with
the whiskey manufacturers running product down from
the French
Department
of St. Pierre, an island off the Canadian coast, had quickly become second to none.
He played every angle and drove trucks through every
loophole. For example, the law specifically exempted sacramental wine from its proscription, so Rick did a
thriving trade with synagogue and church alike, using
them as front organizations for his importation of fine
French wines and kicking back a generous share of the
profits to support charitable activities. He had gotten
the notion one day down on Grand Street, when he saw
a line of Irishmen outside a kosher wine store and suddenly realized just how attractive Judaism had become
to a host of nominal anti-Semites.

Rick's taste in music was similarly well developed.
Prior to the club's opening, the best place for jazz
music in town had been O'Hanlon's Boll Weevil, a few
blocks up the street, but Rick was not about to let his
customers either drink second-rate liquor or listen to
third-class music. He began aggressively to court the
best songwriters and musicians, hiring Herman Hup-
field as the house composer, bringing in bandleader Jimmie Lunceford from one of the Capone mob's Chi
cago clubs. Everyone agreed, however, that his greatest
find was Sam Waters, a stride piano player from
Cooper Street, north of the railroad tracks in Sedalia, Missouri. As a lad Sam had known Scott Joplin and,
more important, had learned from him. Sam's ear for a
tune was legendary, and his ability to pick up anything
and play it had won him a large following.

Some members of the gang looked askance at Rick's
friendship with Sam. They complained to Solly that it wasn't right for a white boy to be on such good terms
with a
shvartzer.
Rick and Sam would sometimes disappear together on weekends, tooling up to the Cats
kills in Rick's DeSoto to go fishing. Tick-Tock said a
Jew and a colored boy shouldn't be hanging out to
gether, but Solly told him to shut up and mind his own
business. "If the rest of you bums could take care of
your business the way Ricky takes care of his, why, we
would all be rich instead of just me," he told them.

Finally, Rick was always on good terms with the cops. Personally he had nothing against policemen,
who by and large were working stiffs like himself, trying to get ahead. The way Rick saw it, the police were
his friends. With the right amount of financial encour
agement, they kept the booze trucks running smoothly
(some off-duty cops even rode shotgun for him), kept
the rival gangsters off each other's backs, and deflected
the feds as much as they could. And when they
couldn't, they warned him about it, so he could close
the club down for "renovations" until the feds ran out
of expense money and went back to Washington, where
they belonged.

It was a good life. The only person who didn't quite
see it that way was his mother. The last time he'd seen
her, which was months ago, she had asked him about
the money and the clothes and most of all about the
car, and he had been afraid to answer her. In fact, he hadn't even bothered to try, because he knew that she knew, and it was easier for both of them to pretend
otherwise. He'd call her tonight, and if not tonight,
soon, just as soon as he could. Really, he would. It was
long past time for a mitzvah.

"Well, Solly," said Rick, clearing his throat, "there is some business I'd like to discuss. It's got to do with
Lois."

"Nu?"
said Solly.

Rick had been putting off this conversation for three months, since the night he'd met O'Hanlon at Rector's.
Since the night Lois gave him the brush-off. He had
been fearful of telling the boss about meeting the Irishman and Meredith, and he still hadn't delivered O'Han-
lon's message, afraid of Horowitz's unpredictable rage,
afraid to reveal that he'd been taking his daughter to a
gangland hangout when that was expressly against his
orders.

So far, nothing untoward had happened. Solly and
Dion continued their uneasy standoff, with Salucci and
Weinberg lurking somewhere in the bushes south of 14th Street. Maybe O'Hanlon had forgotten all about
it. Maybe enough time had elapsed that Solly wouldn't
be tempted to put two and two together. Maybe Rick's
proven ability to pour profits into the boss's pockets
would make everybody forget about everything else.

Rick was still trying to figure out a way to broach the
subject when Horowitz beat him to the punch. "Isn't it
great about her and that fancy lawyer!"

"Which fancy lawyer?" asked Rick.

"You keep this quiet now," Solomon commanded
him, tapping a finger alongside his nose, "but she's
thinking about maybe marrying. To a big man, too!"
Solly rose from his chair and drew himself up to his
full sixty-five-inch height. "Make her papa proud!" He played with a cigar. "Mrs. Robert Haas Meredith—it's
got a good gong to it!"

"What?" exclaimed Rick.

He sat back with a particularly contented expression
on his face. "It's the American dream," he said. "Off
the boat and aboard the ladder."

He was bouncing both hands off his belly in delight
when the first shot splintered the wood behind Solly's head. If he hadn't leaned back at just that moment, it
would have hit him right between the eyes.

An instant later, the second shot skidded across the
desktop, ricocheted off a cheap lamp, and crashed into the ceiling, sending down a shower of plaster.

The first two shots were nearly simultaneous. By the
third shot both Rick and Solly were on the floor, guns drawn, and had come up firing. Rick marveled briefly at the boss's reflexes.

Neither he nor Horowitz had seen the gunmen—
there must be at least two—nor could they see them
now. But from prone positions on the floor they poured
back return fire. Rick had a momentary impression of
a splintering doorjamb and of a groan from just beyond if, of a shattering glass transom, of exploding light fixtures in the hallway.