Billy Phelan's Greatest Game (14 page)

And passing the United Traction Company building at the corner of Columbia Street he saw Francis Phelan, again cocking his arm, just there, across the street, again ready to throw his smooth
stone; and he remembered the bleeding and dying scab, his head laid open, face down on the floor of the trolley, one arm hanging over the top step. The scab had driven the trolley down Broadway
from the North Albany barns, and when it reached Columbia Street a mob was waiting. Francis and two other young men heaved a kerosene-soaked sheet, twisted and knotted into a loose rope, over the
overhead trolley wire and lit it with matches. The trolley could not pass the flaming obstacle and halted. The militiamen raised their rifles to the ready, fearful that the hostile crowd would
assault the car, as it had the day before, and beat the driver unconscious. Militiamen on horseback pushed the mob back from the tracks, and one soldier hit Fiddler Quain with a rifle butt as
Fiddler lit the sheet. But even as this was taking the full attention of the military, even before thoughts of reversing the trolley could be translated into action, other men threw a second
twisted sheet over the trolley wire to the rear of the car and lit it, trapping the trolley and its strike-breaking passengers between two pillars of flame.

It was then that Francis uncocked his arm and that the smooth stone flew, and the scab fell and died. No way out. Death within the coordinates. And it was the shooting of the innocent onlookers
which followed Francis’s act that hastened the end of the strike. Violence enough. Martin saw two of the onlookers fall, just as he could still see the stone fly. The first was spun by the
bullet and reeled backward and slid down the front of the railroad station wall. The second grabbed his stomach as the scab had grabbed his head, and he crumpled where he stood. Fiddler Quain lay
on the granite blocks of Broadway after his clubbing, but the mob swirled around that horseman who hit him, an invasion of ants, and Fiddler was lifted up and swept away to safety and hiding. Like
Franny, he was known but never prosecuted. The hands that carried the violence put honest men back to work. Broadway, then and now, full of men capable of violent deeds to achieve their ends.

“Listen, Billy,” Martin said as they walked, “that business between you and Daddy Big, that’s not really why the McCalls put you on the list. There’s something else
going on, and it’s about Morrie Berman.”

Billy stopped walking and faced Martin.

“What Morrie says could be important, since he knows people who could have taken Charlie.”

“So do I. Everybody does on Broadway.”

“Then what you or the others know is also important.”

“What I know is my business. What Berman knows is his business. What the hell is this, Martin?”

“Patsy McCall is making it his business, too.”

“How do you know that?”

“I talked to him this morning.”

“Did he ask you to snoop around Morrie Berman?”

“No. He asked me to ask
you
to do that.”

“Me? He wants me to be some kind of stoolie? What the hell’s the matter with you, Martin?”

“I’m not aware that anything’s the matter.”

“I’m not one of the McCalls’ political whores.”

“Nobody said you were. I told him you wouldn’t like the idea, but I also know you’ve been friendly with Charlie McCall all your life. Right now, he could be strapped to a bed
someplace with a gun at his head. He could even be dead.”

Billy made no response. Martin looked at him and saw puzzlement. Martin shaped the picture of Charlie Boy again in his mind but saw not Charlie but Edward Daugherty, tied to a bed by four
towels, spread-eagled, his genitals uncovered. Why such a vision now? Martin had never seen his father in such a condition, nor was he in such a state even now at the nursing home. The old man was
healthy, docile, no need to tie him to the bed. Naked prisoner. Naked father. It was Ham who saw Noah, his father, naked and drunk on wine, and Noah cursed Ham, while Shem and Japheth covered their
father’s nakedness and were blessed for it. Cursed for peering into the father’s soul through the pores. Blessed for covering the secrets of the father’s body with a blanket. Damn
all who find me in my naked time.

Billy started to walk again toward Clinton Avenue. He spoke without looking at Martin, who kept pace with him. “Georgie the Syph knocked down an old woman and took four bucks out of her
pocketbook. I came around the corner at James Street and saw him and I even knew the old woman, Marty Slyer the electrician’s mother. They lived on Pearl Street. Georgie saw me and ran up
Maiden Lane and the old lady told the cops I saw him. But I wouldn’t rat even on a bum like Georgie. What I did the next time I saw him was kick him in the balls before he could say anything
and take twenty off him and mail it to Mrs. Slyer. Georgie had to carry his balls around in a basket.”

“That’s a noble story, Billy, but it’s just another version of the code of silence. What the underworld reveres. It doesn’t have anything to do with morality or justice
or honor or even friendship. It’s a simplistic perversion of all those things.”

“Whatever it is it don’t make me a stool pigeon.”

“All that’s wanted is information.”

“Maybe. Or maybe they want Morrie for something particular.”

“No, I don’t think so.”

“How the hell do you know what they want, Martin?”

“Suit yourself in this, Billy. I was asked to put the question to you and I did.”

“I don’t get it, a man like you running errands for the McCalls. I don’t figure you for that.”

“What else can I tell you after I say I’m fond of Charlie, and I don’t like kidnappers. I’m also part of that family.”

“Yeah. We’re all part of that family.”

“I’ll be around later to root for our money. Think about it.”

“What exactly did Patsy say?”

“He said to hang around Berman and listen. That’s all he said.”

“That’s all. Yeah.”

And Billy crossed Clinton toward the alley beside Nick’s haberdashery, where Nick, Footers O’Brien, and Morrie Berman were talking. Martin walked up the other side of the street,
past the Pruyn Library, and crossed to The Grand Theater when he saw the Laughton film on the marquee. He looked back at the library corner and remembered the death of youth: his cousin’s
suicide in the wagon. Sudden behavior and pervasive silence. But sometimes living men tell no tales either. Francis Phelan suddenly gone and still no word why.
The Beachcomber.
Martin
hadn’t told Billy that his father was back in town. Duplicity and the code of silence. Who was honored by this? What higher morality was Martin preserving by keeping Billy ignorant of a fact
so potentially significant to him? We are all in a conspiracy against the next man. Duplicity And Billy Phelan saw through you, Martin: errand boy for the McCalls. Duplicity at every turn. Melissa
back in town to remind you of how deep it goes. Oh yes, Martin Daugherty, you are one duplicitous son of a bitch.

In the drugstore next to The Grand, Martin phoned Patsy McCall.

“Do you have any news, Patsy?”

“No news.”

“I made that contact we talked about, and it went just about the way I thought it would. He didn’t like the idea. I don’t think you can look for much information
there.”

“What the hell’s the matter with him?”

“He’s just got a feeling about that kind of thing. Some people do.”

“That’s all he’s got a feeling for?”

“It gets sticky, Patsy. He’s a good fellow, and he might well come up with something. He didn’t say no entirely. But I thought you ought to know his reaction and maybe put
somebody else on it if you think it’s important.”

“I’ll take care of it,” Patsy said curtly and hung up.

Martin called the
Times-Union
and got Emory. Yes, the lid was still on the Charlie story. “Everybody went along,” Emory said, “including Dunsbach. I seared his ass all
right. He wouldn’t touch the story now with rubber gloves.”

“Heroic, Em. I knew you could do it.”

“Have you smoked out any kidnappers yet?”

“You know I don’t smoke, Em. What happened with the A.L.P.?”

“I don’t give a damn about that piss-ant stuff when I’ve got a story like this. Here. Talk to Viglucci.”

Viglucci, the city editor, explained that some twelve hundred new voters had enrolled in the A.L.P, twice as many as necessary for Patsy McCall to control the young party. No, the desk
hadn’t reached Jake Berman, the phone constantly busy at the A.L.P. office. Martin volunteered to go there personally, being only two blocks away. Fine.

Jake Berman had been barely a specter all day for Martin, whose sympathy was all with the McCalls because of Charlie. But now Jake could surely use a little consolation. Martin had known Jake
for years and liked him, a decent man, a lawyer for the poor, knew him when he was a city judge, appointed by McCall fiat as a sop to the Albany Jews. But that didn’t last, for Jake refused
to throw out a case against a gouging landlord, an untouchable who was a heavy contributor to the Democratic Party. Jake quit the bench and the party, and went back to practicing law.

In 1935, when the A.L.P. was founded to gain another line for Roosevelt’s second run, Jake spearheaded the party locally and opened headquarters in his father’s old tailor shop on
Sheridan Avenue, just off North Pearl Street. Old Socialists and laboring men, who wanted nothing to do with the Democrats but liked F.D.R.’s New Deal, made the new party their own, and by
1936 the Albany branch had one hundred and eighty-four members. Patsy McCall tolerated it because it was a stepchild of the Democratic Party, even though he had no use for Roosevelt, the snob son
of a bitch. The Catholic Church grew restless with the new party, however, as its ranks fattened with anti-Franco radicals and socialist intellectuals who spat on God. What’s more, it
promised the kind of growth that one day could be a power balance in local elections, and so Patsy decided it was time to pull the plug.

The word went out to the aldermen and ward leaders of the city’s nineteen wards that some sixty voters in each ward should change their enrollment from Democrat to American Labor. As
enrolled members, they would then be entitled to vote at A.L.P. meetings, and would vote as Patsy told them to. Jake Berman’s few hundred regulars would be dwarfed by the influx, and
Jake’s chairmanship negated. In time, all in good time, Patsy’s majority, of which Chickie Phelan was now one, would elect a new party chairman.

The garmentless tailor’s dummy that had been in Berman’s tailor shop for as long as Martin could remember was still visible behind the Lehman-for-Governor posters taped to the old
store window. The shop had stood empty for several years after the death of old Ben Berman, a socialist since the turn of the century and a leader in the New York City garment industry’s
labor struggle until strikebreakers fractured his skull. He came to Albany to put his life and his head back together and eventually opened this shop, just off Pearl Street at the edge of an old
Irish slum, Sheridan Hollow, where Lackey Quinlan once advertised in the paper to rent a house with running water, and curious applicants found he had built his shack over a narrow spot in the old
Canal Street creek. This was the running water, and in it Lackey kept his goose and his gander.

Ben Berman worked as a tailor in the neighborhood, though his clients came from all parts of the city, until he lost most of his eyesight and could no longer sew. He died soon after that, and
then his son Jacob rented the shop to another tailor, who ran it for several years. But the new man was inferior to Ben Berman with the needle, and the trade fell away. It remained for the A.L.P.
to reopen the shop, and now it looked as if its days were again numbered.

Martin pushed open the door, remembering when Ben Berman made suits and coats for his own father, those days when the Daughertys lived under the money tree. Martin could vividly recall Edward
Daugherty standing in this room trying on a tan, speckled suit with knickers and a belt in the back, mottled buttons, and a brown, nonmatching vest. Martin mused again on how he had inherited none
of his father’s foppery, never owned a tailor-made suit or coat, lived off the rack, satisfied with ready-made. A woman Martin did not know was coming down the inside stairs as he entered.
She looked about forty, a matron in style. She was weeping and her hat looked crooked to Martin.

“Jake upstairs?”

She nodded, sniffled, wiped an eye. Martin yearned to console her with gentle fondling.

“Can I help you?” he asked her.

She laughed once and shook her head, then went out. Martin climbed the old stairs and found Jake Berman leaning back in a swivel chair, hands behind head, feet propped up on an open rolltop
desk. Jake had a thick gray mustache and wore his hair long, like a serious musician. The elbow was out of his gray sweater, and he was tieless. The desk dominated the room, two rooms really, with
the adjoining wall knocked out. Folding chairs cluttered both rooms, and at a long table two men younger than Jake sat tallying numbers on pink pads. The phone on Jake’s desk was off the
hook.

“Why don’t you answer your phone?” Martin asked.

“I’m too busy,” Jake said. He moved only his lips and eyes to say that. “What can I do for you?”

“I heard the results.”

“You did. And did they surprise you?”

“Quite a heavy enrollment. I was told twelve hundred plus. Is that accurate?”

“Your information is as good as mine. Better. You get yours from McCall headquarters.”

“I got mine from the city desk.”

“Same thing really, isn’t it, Martin?”

“I wouldn’t say so. The McCalls do have some support there.”

“Some?”

“I for one don’t see myself a total McCaller.”

“Yes, you write some risky things now and then, Martin. You’re quite an independent-minded man in your way But I didn’t see you or anybody else reporting about the plan to take
us over. Didn’t anybody down on that reactionary rag know about it?”

“Did you?”

“I knew this morning,” said Jake. “I knew when I saw it happening. Fat old Irishmen who loathe us, drunken bums from the gutter, little German hausfraus enrolling with us. Up
until then, the subversion was a well-kept secret.”