Johnny Blue Jaw sighed. “I didn’t think you would.” He fingered the bandage. “You’re one guy I trust. You and Mack there.” But he had also trusted the man who’d slashed at his throat that morning — Bugs Dennis, one of the Sullivan boys, on his payroll for years. Johnny Blue Jaw’d come out of Reagan’s and Dennis was there waiting for him. With a knife. “A lil closer and he’d’ve cut through my juggler vein,” Johnny said gloomily. “Nolan reached him. Nolan maybe reached some of my other boys. You two guys—” He didn’t finish his sentence.
Willy peered over at Mack. They were the two guys Johnny Blue Jaw trusted most.
“We’re gonna knock down that Nolan bastid once and for all,” Johnny Blue Jaw said. “Nolan, we’ll let alone a while. Nolan expects us so we’ll let’m alone a while. There’s others...”
The next few weeks, for Willy, went off like an — endless bad dream. One night with the fog in from the waterfront, he was at the wheel of a car, piloting it into a sidestreet below 14th. Burnham’s block, it was. Burnham, the third or fourth biggest guy in the Nolan mob. The fog swirled around the big yellow street lamp and Willy thought giddily that only a few blocks away on 23rd, Alice was sitting cozy in their apartment. “Wait here,” Mack said. There were just the two of them. Willy watched Mack ease out of the car, cross the sidewalk and climb the stoop of a brownstone.
When the shots burst out, they sounded far away, muffled, as if the walls of the house had also turned into layers of blanketing fog.
Down the stoop, Mack came on the double. Into the car! Willy stepped on the gas while from behind them the muffled screaming of a woman tore at all his strained nerves.
It was Burnham’s wife who had roused the neighborhood.
“An easy mark,” Johnny Blue Jaw said grimly a couple hours later. “That Burnham never figured we’d want him.”
The next day Willy read the newspaper headlines WATERFRONT WAR... Following instructions, he stayed in his apartment. At night when Alice came home from her job he was drunk. He couldn’t eat supper. He couldn’t sleep. After a few hours, he awoke and began to curse his luck. She poured him a shot of whiskey like a mother feeding a baby medicine. And as he lay there in bed with his big head between her breasts, she whispered soft as a mother with a sick child. “It’s a ratrace, honey, so what can you do? Walk out on Johnny? No sense in that. Always been shootings on the waterfront. The cops never convict nobody. It blows over and things’re like before. It’ll blow over, you’ll see. And you’ll be set.”
Clancy’s secretary had latched onto the big numbers collector with the desperation of a woman whose mirror has begun to show the first silver hairs among the touched-up beauty-parlor gold.
“You’ll be set,” she repeated. “That’s one thing about Johnny. He don’t let his friends down. Look at Red Rizzo. Look at Al Linn—”
“Why don’t he have them gunning at Nolan’s mob?”
“They’re in it!” she assured him, stroking his hot forehead. “The whole organization’s in it one way or another. That is, everybody he trusts.”
“Yeh, but who gets the dirty work? Me and Mack. That Blue Jaw’s just trouble,” he said miserably.
He awoke in the morning, a hangover grinding inside his head like hundreds of raking little wheels. The newspapers Alice brought up only made those little wheels spin faster. The police had questioned a lot of characters, including Johnny Blue Jaw Gibbons and Nolan. But nobody could explain the Burnham killing. Nobody at all. “See!” Alice said triumphantly. “It’ll blow over.”
Towards the end of the second week, at supper-time, Mack called on them. He sniffed at the platter of pork chops and French fries on the table. “I’ll wait’ll you eat,” Mack said and sat down in his dark brown top coat, his brown felt hat balanced on his knees.
“What’s up?” Willy asked, pushing his plate away.
“Better eat,” Mack advised him and turned his eyes on the woman. He seemed to be sniffing all her curves over as he had the food. She smiled and brought him a cup of coffee. “Thanks,” said Mack.
It was drizzling when the two men walked downstairs. The lights of the stores on 23rd shone brightly from the wet black sidewalks. They walked east and Mack, who wouldn’t answer Willy upstairs, began to speak. “It’s Nolan, Willy. He’s out in Brooklyn in his sister’s house. With the flu. He wouldn’t lay up in his own place or go to the hospital. Had to go to his sister’s house. He’s got two of his boys with him.”
He’s out in Brooklyn in his sister’s house... Willy thought over and over again, riding the BMT subway. Johnny Blue Jaw’s stool-pigeons hadn’t missed a trick. That Johnny had himself an organization. An organization and a half. His heart thudded heavily. “Mack, what do I do? You haven’t told me.”
Mack eyed him. Reaching into his pocket he silently passed Willy a slice of gum.
“Well?”
“What’s the rush, Willy?” Mack said.
It wasn’t drizzling or raining in Brooklyn when they stepped out at their subway station, elevated here, and walked down to the street. In I front of a stationery store, a car was waiting for them. Inside they saw four men. As Willy squeezed into the front seat, glancing at the two pale blobs of faces there, he wondered why he was needed tonight. That damn Blue Jaw’d just gotten into the habit, he thought.
As if reading his mind, Mack said, “Willy, the boys Nolan got with him maybe know us. They don’t know you. You’ll ring the door bell. You’ll say you’re from Cunningham’s. That’s the drugstore they’ve been getting Nolan’s medicine from—”
“What am I? The clay pigeon!”
“Nobody’s going to pop at you. You’re from this Cunningham drugstore and we’ll be right behind you. That’s all you do! Ring the bell and get back into the car — to the wheel.”
The car cut into a quiet neighborhood of two-story brick houses, each sitting snug and solid behind its lawn.
“Okay,” Mack said to the driver. “Here’s good enough.” They all piled out on the sidewalk. “It’s the corner house. Willy, you go ahead!”
Willy walked up three stone steps to a door with two triangular panes of glass set in the wood. The pane’s shone yellow from a lamp inside the foyer. He rang the bell, saw a woman, followed by a man, come to the door. Their faces were framed in the yellow glass triangles, the woman fat and middle-aged, the man dark and slab-chinned, a face not too different from the faces of the mobsters who’d come to Brooklyn this night.
“I’m from Cunningham’s, Cunningham’s drugstore,” Willy said in a quick jittery patter. And miraculously, for he didn’t believe his own eyes, the door was opening. Wider and wider it opened, as Willy felt his heart turn into an empty hole. His nerves were laced across that empty hole, stretched tighter and tighter. What were they waiting for, his nerves shrieked. For the Nolan boy to pull his gun. And then in a rush, they weren’t waiting any more, hurling past Willy into the foyer. “Don’t try nothin’ or I’ll kill you!” Mack was warning the woman and the man.
Frantically, Willy dashed down towards the car. The woman shrilled, “No, no!” and then her voice suddenly vanished, the house door closing.
Willy sat at the wheel of the car: a car in another world.
He learned later that the Nolan bodyguard, seeing five gunmen, had folded like a folding chair, with only the woman having the guts to yell and warn her brother. A gun butt’d floored her. Johnny Blue Jaw’s Sullivans had moved fast. Two of them’d rounded up the woman’s husband and son and daughter listening to the radio in the living-room, while Mack and the others marched the disarmed bodyguard up to Nolan’s room. Up the stairs they raced, the radio blaring downstairs. Nolan’s second bodyguard had run out onto the landing, gun in fist. He’d hesitated a second because the first man coming up was his side. While he hesitated, one of the Sullivans’d plugged him through the head. They stepped over his body and finished off Nolan. The whole thing’d taken maybe ten minutes.