New York Nocturne (19 page)

Chapter Twenty-Six

The week previous, when I had been wandering, enraptured, through the city, I had made a brief foray into Chinatown. For a while, I had been captivated by the unfamiliar people pattering and chattering down the busy streets, all of them looking small and sturdy and self-contained. I had been fascinated by the incomprehensible ideograms emblazoned across the windows, and by the tiny smoke-filled shops and the bizarre foodstuffs crammed onto the counters within or hanging from the walls: vegetables I had never seen, orange-stained ducks and chickens, unidentifiable rusty slabs of meat.

But after a few moments, the foreignness began to unsettle me. I was an outsider, an alien here, and as often happens, uneasiness began to feed upon itself. Scenes from half-remembered stories rose up, unbidden, and hovered between the streets I walked and me. Vicious tong wars. Suffocating opium dens. White slavers snatching up naive young girls . . .

It was absurd, of course, and my response was deplorable, for I quickly reversed my steps and returned to Little Italy, where the language spoken was not quite so alien and the people seemed more familiar.

Now I was back in Chinatown. It was still alien and still unsettling.

Mr. Cutter drove through the dark, narrow streets, easing his way past the people hustling across them. We went by jewelry stores, more food shops, a tailor that offered “Ladies Dresses Made to Order in Chinese Styles,” and countless tiny emporiums whose windows were cluttered with paper fans, paper kites, jade and ivory figurines, and precarious pyramids of wooden boxes, lacquered red and black.

He turned onto Pell Street, drove for a block, and then rolled the car up against the curb and stopped. He reached down and plucked the gun from beneath the seat, leaned forward, and shoved it behind his back.

“Twenty minutes,” he said. “Keys are in the ignition.”

Miss Lizzie said, “Should we lock the doors?”

“Couldn't hurt,” he said.

Chinese people scuttled past the car, all of them ignoring it and us.

Amid the crowd, I saw a thin, beautiful young girl, perhaps my age, float by in a long red dress with a high collar, her hair spread like a shiny black cape across her delicate square shoulders. She held her head high, and she seemed utterly remote, utterly untouchable. My envy of her, of her impregnable self-assurance, was almost painful.

I asked over my shoulder, “Did you ever go to China, Miss Lizzie?”

“No,” she said. “I should have. I always wanted to see it. Siam, as well, and Japan.”

“Why?”

“Being in a foreign country, it seems to me, is one of the best ways to discover who you are. And the more foreign the country, the more compelling the discovery.”

Over the years, in various parts of the world, I have remembered those words.

Now I said, “But you never went.”

“No. A failure of nerve, perhaps.”

I turned toward her. I could not imagine her nerve ever failing.

She smiled at me. “Or perhaps I simply reached a stage at which I wanted to discover no more about myself. Which amounts to the same thing, of course.”

We talked for a bit longer, idly, about life, about families, about the police in New York City. She held her watch in her lap and glanced down at it every so often. After a while, she began to glance down at it more frequently.

Abruptly, someone rapped at the driver's window, startling me.

It was Mr. Cutter holding onto the arm of someone, or something, in a ragged black topcoat.

I leaned over and unlocked the door. He heaved it open, reached in his hand, unlocked the rear door, then heaved that open. I heard him say,
“In,”
and the ragged topcoat, like a bundle of dirty laundry, toppled into the backseat.

With it, billowing across the car, came the foulest combination of smells I had ever experienced. The pungent stench of old sweat—sharper, even, than the peppery stench of Mrs. Hadley, the prison matron—was muddled with the penetrating acid reek of ancient urine and with something else, something dense and loathsome and fiercely dark. Reflexively, I coughed and looked away. I rolled down my window. I heard Miss Lizzie roll down hers. I sucked in some air.

Mr. Cutter swung into the car. “Sorry,” he said, and pulled the door shut. He, too, rolled down his window. “He won't talk without an audience. Meet Joe Walters.”

“I don't want no tricks,” said the man in the ragged topcoat.

He was perhaps in his fifties; it was impossible to tell. Beneath that horrible coat he wore a tattered yellow sweater and a pair of stained, sagging black pants. His soiled gray socks were slumped down below his bruised ankles above a pair of dusty black pants. His thin gray hair barely covered a scabrous, purplish scalp. He had not shaved in several days, and his stubble was a dirty white. The rims of his pale brown eyes were inflamed.

Mrs. Norman had described Joe Walters as well dressed and clean. According to Miss Dale, he had been, only two years before, an associate of Arnold Rothstein's, and Mr. Rothstein, we were learning, was one of the major criminal powers in New York City. It seemed impossible to believe that the man sitting across from Miss Lizzie had ever been well dressed and clean, or that he had ever been connected to power of any sort.

“Get goin', get goin',” he said and flapped his hand at Mr. Cutter. “I don't want no one to see us.”

Mr. Cutter started the car. “Where to?”

“I dunno. North. Outta here. Across Canal.”

The car moved away from the curb.

The man turned to Miss Lizzie and bobbed his head. “Joe Walters.”

“Elizabeth Cabot,” she said. “My niece, Amanda.”

“Yeah,” he said. “Swell.” He leaned toward Mr. Cutter, and a wave of stink surged over me. “Hurry up, will ya?”

“Calm down,” said Mr. Cutter in his sandy whisper.

“Yeah, right,” said Walters. “Ain't
your
balls on the line here.”

He sat back, tugged the front of his topcoat together, held it there, leaned his stubbly chin down into his chest, and stared steadily down toward the floor of the car.

Mr. Cutter drove out of Chinatown, made a left on Canal, a right on Broadway, and followed that for some distance until he came to St. Mark's Place. He made another right there and then drove for three or four blocks until we came to a small park. He turned left at the park's east side and then drew up to the curb and stopped.

“Where are we?” asked Mr. Walters, looking around.

“Tompkins Square,” said Mr. Cutter.

“Yeah. Okay.” He turned to Miss Lizzie. “You got money?”

“Yes.”

“I want a thousand.”

“No,” she said.

“You want Arnold Rothstein, I can give 'im to you. On a platter. Cost you a grand.”

“I do not want Arnold Rothstein. I want information.”

He shook his head. “One grand. That's the price.”

“One hundred dollars,” said Miss Lizzie. “In cash. Now.”

“You know what happens, Rothstein tumbles to this? Me talkin' to you?”

“Mr. Rothstein will never learn that you spoke with us.”

“He'll find out. And he'll gut me. He won't do it himself; he's too high and mighty for that. He'll send some muscle. But same deal—I'm gutted, and next thing I know I'm in the river feeding the fishes. You, too, lady. He'll send someone after you.”

“Then there is really no point in your talking to us at all, even for a thousand dollars.”

Mr. Walters sucked on a tooth for a moment. Then he said, “Nine hundred.”

“One hundred dollars,” she said.

“Jesus, lady. You got no heart at all?”

“I have one hundred dollars.”

Mr. Cutter was partway turned in his seat, his arm along its back. “C-note buys a lot of H, Joe,” he whispered.

Walters looked back at Miss Lizzie. “Five hundred.”

“One hundred and fifty dollars. My final offer, Mr. Walters.”

With his left hand, thoughtfully, he rubbed at the open sore on his forehead. Then he held out his right hand. “Money first.”

“Half now,” said Miss Lizzie. “Half when we finish.”

He slapped the hand against the car seat. “Jesus!”

“Yes or no.”

Walters looked around, out the window, and turned back. “Okay, okay. Half now.” He held out the hand again.

Miss Lizzie opened her purse, took out her wallet, and opened it.

As she counted out the money, Walters watched her. Furtively, he glanced at Mr. Cutter. Mr. Cutter smiled. Walters blinked and looked back at Miss Lizzie's money.

Miss Lizzie held it out. He snatched it away and shoved it into the inside pocket of his topcoat.

“Okay,” he said. “What you wanna know?”

“What was Mr. Rothstein's connection to John Burton?”

“Burton? Who gives a shit about Burton?”

“I do.”

“He was a stuck-up society prick. An asshole.”

I flinched. Even in my numbness, even after all that I had learned about John, it seemed impossible that anyone could feel so casually contemptuous of him.

“You do know,” said Miss Lizzie, “that he is dead.”

“Good riddance. A scumbag.”

“Do you know why he was killed?”

“No idea. But probably Rothstein pulled his plug.”

“Why would he do that?”

“Who knows. Burton crossed him, maybe.”

“What was their connection?”

He shrugged. “Burton was Rothstein's guy in Europe. Used to go over there, arrange shipments.”

“Shipments of liquor?”

Walters smiled slyly. “That what you think?”

“What I think is irrelevant. What is relevant, just now, is whether you want the rest of your money.”

He scowled. “Drugs. Shipments of drugs.”

“Drugs? What sort of drugs?”

“Everything. Heroin. Morphine. It's all still legal over there, see.”

“Mr. Rothstein is importing drugs into this country?”

“See? That's the thing about Rothstein. He's a fuckin' genius. He's always about a hundred years ahead of everybody else. Prohibition—sooner or later that's over. They're gonna dump that amendment, the seventeenth—”

“The eighteenth,” said Miss Lizzie.

“Yeah, right. They're gonna dump it, see. Too much trouble, Rothstein says. Too much crime, too much shit goin' on, the citizens are gettin' all pissed off. And when they dump it, make liquor kosher again, all the money's gonna dry up. So Rothstein, like I say, he's thinkin' ahead. He's plannin' things out, right? He's got the distribution already set up. The boats, the trucks, all that. So he just changes the stuff that gets distributed. It's simple, right? But it's fuckin' genius.”

“At the moment, he's still importing liquor?”

“You don't get it, lady. Rothstein, see, he don't import nothin'. Not himself. What he does, he sets things up, you get me? He organizes things. He brings people together, he lends 'em money, he tells 'em how to do stuff. And then he sits back and collects his share. I mean, when Prohibition started, he put together a bunch of guys, Jews and Wops, to handle everything. Meyer Lansky, Benny Siegel, Carlo Gambino, Charlie Lucky. And look how good that worked out—money's still rollin' in, left and right. They're all over the fuckin' country. And now he's settin' up the drug stuff. And then later on, see, down the road, he'll be in the catbird seat.”

“But surely the market for narcotics cannot be as profitable as the market for liquor.”

“Are you nuts? It's a hundred times
better
. Pound of heroin costs you a few bucks in Germany. You bring it over here, you cut it, you sell a tiny little bag out on the street for a dollar. You make thousands.
Millions
. You're takin' the same risks, usin' the same trucks, same people, but the stuff you're pushing is a hundred times more valuable. Get it?”

“But there cannot be as many drug users, surely, as there are drinkers.”

“Don't matter, don't matter. What's it's all about, see, like Rothstein says, is your margins. Your profit margins. With drugs, they're a hundred times higher.”

“But to whom will the drugs be sold?”

“Anybody. Everybody. Way Rothstein puts it, people always want a little something makes 'em happy. Takes their mind off shit, you know? Heroin—you get some of that inside you and for a few hours everything is jake. Everything is peaches and cream.”

Mr. Cutter said, “That the way it works for you, Joe?”

“Fu—” He cut himself off. He looked down then looked up. “Okay, yeah. I got a habit. I know that. But I dumped it before, and I can dump it again. All I need is a head start.”

Mr. Cutter said nothing.

Miss Lizzie said, “I've read that other countries—Germany, France—will soon be changing their narcotic laws.”

“Right,” said Walters. “Right. Exactly. That's the beauty part. Because Rothstein, see, he's thinkin' ahead, like always. He's setting up things in
China
, so the raw stuff, the opium, gets shipped directly out. They got tons of opium in China—little fuckers over there, they don't know what to do with it. And Rothstein's got those Wops of his—Luciano and Gambino—and they're setting up places in Italy—factories, like—where they make it up into heroin. Presto chango, you got your product.”

I remembered that John had been in China last year.

“Okay,” said Walters. He looked out the back window then looked again at Miss Lizzie. “What else? You wanna know about Rothstein's frail? He's got a wife, but he got himself a sweet little piece of meat on the side also.”

“I don't believe so, no,” said Miss Lizzie.

“So what else you want?”

“The reason for John Burton's death.”

“Like I tol' you, lady. I ain't got no idea. Yesterday I heard about it, and I said to myself, now what did that stuck-up prick do to get Rothstein so pissed off at him?”