Legs (36 page)

"There's a guy in a
car across the street, Jack. Two guys, in fact. One at the wheel
looks like he's got that eyepatch you been looking for."

* * *

"Would that be The Goose?" Packy asked. "I
heard he was around asking questions about you. "

"Probably him," Jack said.

"Then we've got to get you out of here,"
said The Pack. Of our little group of six, only Milligan did not know
The Goose. But he asked no questions. The song was over, and
Flossie's face showed it. Jack, on the other hand, seemed without
tension, which, of course, he was not. Yet his control under the
circumstances was almost equal to having none.

"It's tricky with The Goose," he said. "He
might break in here any minute and start blasting. That's
nonprofessional, but he's crazy all the way now. People have to
remember that."

"Sure he's crazy," said Packy. "In and
out of town all summer asking questions. "

"He's made a game of it," Jack said. "He
wants me to sweat."

"But now he's outside," Hubert said,
understandably perplexed by a discussion at such a moment. My own
first thoughts were to evacuate the uninvolved from the premises,
myself included. Yet it seemed cowardly to think of running away from
only the possibility of somebody else's trouble. Yet there was the
Hotsy to recall, where innocents were nicked by crossfire. So if you
didn't run away, you might eventually be obliged to duck. It was the
price of being Jack's companion.

"Oh, sweet mother," Flossie said when the
reality of The Goose hit her. Her face collapsed then, perhaps into a
vision of Billy Blue. She was having a good time just before Billy
got it, too.

"I'll call the dicks, have 'em come down and
pick him up," said Packy, nerve ends flaring, spinning on a
proprietor's understandable confusion.

"Pick him up for what?" Jack said. "Sitting
in a car?"

"I can think of half a dozen charges if
necessary," I said. "Getting them here seems to be the
priority."

Packy was already at the phone. Hubert locked the
front door and said the two men were still in the maroon sedan, fifty
feet from The Parody, across the street.

"Maybe you should just stay here all night,"
I said. Jack nodded, aware of that possibility. Milligan pushed his
chair away from the table, but didn't get up, an ambiguous gesture
which suited an ex-cop in such a situation.

"You don't know if they'll come or not,"
Packy said after his call. "I got Conlon on the desk, the prick.
You never know what they're gonna do for you. Or to you. He said the
lieutenant was at a big fire up in the West Albany railroad shops.
He'll try to tear a car loose. The prick, the prick."

"They want me dead, too," Jack said.

"I never liked that Conlon," Milligan said,
"but I never took a backstep from him or any of them up there.
I'll call him."

"It's not your problem, Milligan," Jack
said, amused by the old man's concern.

"'
I always try to keep down violence in the
city," said Milligan. "Valuable citizens involved here"—and
he gave me a quick eye and a wink and went to the phone. I was left
to look at Jack, who'd barely been able to move a shotglass with his
left arm all night. He was living mainly by the use of one hand, a
liability, should he be forced to confront The Goose in any physical
way. Hubert was a good shot, which was one reason Jack hired him; but
so was The Goose, and who knew about his faceless helper? Jack would
be on the short end of any fight. a fact I was just coming to
understand.

Milligan came back. "I called Cap Ronan, but no
answer. Maybe he's out at the fire, too. Then I called Conlon again
and told him the trouble here personally. He got the message."
Milligan sat down and waited, though he was free to leave. But he
would then miss how it all came out, miss the test of cop-to-cop
influence. No police came. Sorry, Milligan.

I've since concluded Jack was right. They would have
welcomed his assassination, were perhaps even aware one was
impending. The police were called often about Jack during this
period: Did Diamond get it yet? . . . He's going to get it tonight. I
sensed then, my innocence on such matters at last thinning out, that
Jack was not really an enemy of the police as much as he was an
object of their envy. I can imagine a roomful of them talking about
ways to annihilate his privilege.

Hubert announced from the door: "They put their
headlights on. They're moving."

"
Thank God," said the Floss.

"They're probably not going anyplace," Jack
said. And he was right again. Within a few minutes they had parked
facing the opposite direction, on The Parody side of the street now,
still about fifty feet away.

"They just wanted to look in," Jack said.

The car movement prodded all of us except Jack into
standing up and moving around. We turned our attention to each other,
and finally, one by one, to Jack for the decision was his alone. Go
or stay? Barricade or open season? Packy would probably resent, but
maybe not resist a barricade fight. Damage would be minimal, apart
from any death, but the legend would be immortal, a shrine of gold
established in perpetuity.

Only Hubert lacked doubt about what he was to do. His
pistol was already part of our little group because of the way he
kept fingering it inside his coat pocket. Jack knew what he was doing
when he hired Hubert.

"You have an extra pistol?" Jack asked
Packy.

"
How many? I got a collection."

"Two then, and shells."

Packy unlocked a closet beneath the back bar and
brought out a pair of unmatched handguns, one an old Smith and Wesson
.32 which I came to know well, its patent dating to 1877, an ugly
little bone-handled, hammerless bellygun that was giving in to rust
and had its serial number at the base of the butt filed away. No
serious gunfighter would have given it room in the cellar. Packy had
probably bartered it for beer. Useless, foolhardy, aggravating
weapon. It had a broken mechanism behind the firing pin then and
still has, but under ideal circumstances it would fire, and it still
will. Ugly, deformed little death messenger, like a cobra on a
crutch.

"This is insane," I finally said. "We
sit here watching a man prepare for a gun battle, and we know damn
well there are other ways to solve the problem. The whole world
hasn't gone nuts. Why not call the state police?"

"Call the governor," Jack said. "He'll
want to keep me healthy."

"Not a bad idea," I said.

"Call my relatives in Philadelphia," Jack
said. "Call your own relatives. Call all your friends and tell
them we've got an open house here, free booze. Build up a mob in
fifteen minutes. "

"Another brilliant idea," I said.

"But what do I do tomorrow night'?" Jack
said.

He loaded one of Packy's pistols while we thought
about that one. Flossie decided she was not ready for fatalism.

"If you go upstairs, he'll never find you,"
she said.

"Where upstairs?"

"My upstairs. Where I go in a pinch."

"You got a place upstairs?"

"A place, yeah. But not really a place."

"He comes in here, don't you figure he'll look
upstairs?"

"He'd never find my place, that's the whole
point. If you're up there and we go, and the place is dark, he'd
never find you in a thousand years. It ain't even in this same
building."

"The Goose is thick, but thorough," Jack
said. "I wouldn't trust him not to find it."

"Then let's go meet the Polack son of a bitch on
the street," Hubert said. "Goddamn fucking sitting ducks
here, the hell with it."

"None of this makes sense," I said. "Going,
staying, not getting any help, not even trying to get any."

"One night at a time," Jack said. "You
work it out slow. I know a lot of dead guys tried to solve a whole
thing all at once when they weren't ready. And listen. It's also time
you all cleared out."

'"
I think I'll have another beer," I said,
and I sat down at the end barstool farthest from the door. Milligan
sat alongside me and said, "I'll have one for the road."

"I'll be closing up after one drink," Packy
said, going behind the bar. "I'll put the lights out and leave.
I'll get a cop down here if I have to drag him down with a towrope."

Jack shrugged.

"Upstairs then," he said to Flossie. "I
guess that's the place."

"Follow me," she said.

"Is there a way back down except through here?"

"Two stairways," Packy said. "It's an
old loft. They used to have a peanut butter factory up there."

"Jesus, a peanut butter factory?"

"It faces the other side, on Dongan Avenue, and
there's no windows. Flossie is right. Nobody'd ever think we were
connected to it. Just a quirk of these antique buildings.

They made connections you wouldn't believe in these
old relics."

"Nothing'll happen if The Goose doesn't come in
here," I said. "Isn't that right?"

"I don't think he'll come inside anyplace,"
Jack said, "and he don't want to hurt anybody but me. But he's a
maniac, so how do you know anything he'll do? You all should wait for
Flossie to come back down and then clear the hell out of here. Hubert
and I can wait it out."

That seemed workable. But
I said, "I'll keep you company," and Jack laughed and
laughed. I didn't think it was that funny, but he said, "All
right, let's move," and I took my bottle of beer and followed
him and Hubert to the place where there was no longer any peanut
butter.

* * *

Flossie led us up an unsafe staircase, through musty
corridors, through a rough doorway in the brick wall of another
building, and through still more corridors, all in darkness, each of
us holding the hand of the other. When she finally lit a kerosene
lamp, we were in the loft, a large empty space with a warped floor, a
skylight with some of its panes broken and now an access route to a
pigeon perch. The pigeons had created a pair of three-inch
stalagmites with their droppings, rather brilliant aim, as I remember
it. The room held only an old Army cot with an olive-drab blanket and
a pillow without a pillowcase. A raw wooden box stood alongside the
bed for use as a table, and a straight-back wooden chair stood
alongside that. There was nothing else in the room except for the
cobwebs, the dust, the rat leavings, and a plentiful scatter of
peanut shells.

"You know, Jack," Flossie said, "I
never use this place except in special emergencies that can't wait. I
keep a sheet downstairs. I could go get it."

"Maybe another time, kid," Jack said, and
squeezed her rump with his good hand.

"You haven't grabbed me in years, Jack."

"I'd love to think about getting back to that."

"Well, don't you neglect it. Oh, sweet Jesus,
look at that."

She pointed to a wall behind Jack where an enormous
rat, bigger than a jackrabbit I'd say, looked out at us, his eyes
shining red in the light, white markings under his jaw. He was
halfway out of a hole in the wall, about four feet from the floor. He
looked like a picture on the wall. As the light reached him, we could
see he was gray, brown, and white, the weirdest, handsomest rat I
ever saw, and in the weirdest position. A bizarre exhibit, if
stuffed, I thought.

"I never saw him up here before," Flossie
said.

The rat watched us with brazen calm.

"
He was here first tonight," Jack said, and
he sat on the bed and took off his suit coat. Flossie put the lamp on
the box table and told us, "I'll come back and let you know
what's going on. I don't know if Delaney's going out, but I'm damn
well staying."

"
Lovely, Flossie, lovely," said Jack.

"He'd never find his way up here, Jack,"
she said. "Just stay put."

"I want Hubert to check all the stairs. Can he
be seen from outside if he walks with the lamp?"

"Not a chance."

Flossie took the lamp, leaving Jack and me in
darkness, the stars and a bright moony sky the only source of our
light.

"Some great place to wind up," Jack said.

"I'm sitting down while I consider it," I
said and groped toward the chair. "I mean while I consider what
the hell I'm doing here. "

"You're crazy. I always knew it. You wear crazy
hats."

Flossie came back with the kerosene lamp and put it
back on the box.

"I lit one of my candles and gave it to Hubert,"
she said. "I'll be back."

Some moths joined us in the new light and Jack sat
down on the cot. The rat was still watching us. Jack put the two
pistols Packy gave him on the box. He also took a small automatic out
of his back pocket. It fit in his palm, the same kind of item he
fired between Weissberg's feet in Germany.

"You've been carrying that around?"