Though unsaid, all acknowledged privately the theory of mutually assured destruction that kept the peace, fragile as it was, in their tough little world of things. All knew that if any thing grew too powerful, it would wage war on the others. Alliances would be formed, treaties broken, it would be city against city, thing against thing. Worst of all, of course, it would embolden the class of men these men feared the most: The FBI? Not a chance: No, far worse: their own children and grandchildren, eager to take over, eager to drink from the river and to strut their strength and to push the old bastards aside. These people really frightened the old men. The kids: they wanted their thing.
But at last the one from New York, the wisest of them all, spoke, and all listened.
"The Chicago thing has Las Vegas. We have Cuba. As long as we have Cuba, we need not fear Chicago. Chicago needs to fear us. Next to Cuba, Las Vegas is nothing but an annoyance."
"This is very true," someone said.
"He speaks what is real."
He continued.
"We have our best man down there. He is clever, oh so clever with the numbers―"
"The Jew? He is not one of us."
"He is in cunning. Only he lacks our will to do what is necessary. He has not killed, I believe."
"No, he has not. He is an arguer, a fixer. With the guns, the boomboom, the flying blood, the puddles all sticky and black, the faces blown off, the hair mussed, the newspaper shots of what happens in alleys to men who have transgressed. No, not for him."
"That is a shame. Sometimes that is where it must end. In an alley, with a pool of blood and the face gone."
An amen chorus agreed. That was where it had to end some time. Nothing else would satisfy.
"This is why I have made an arrangement, which I now put before you, for your approval," said the New York thing representative. "I have done this already. It can be undone, if you demand, but I think you will see some wisdom in it."
"So, go ahead."
"What is needed down there is someone with our kind of hot blood. The balls to get close with knives or guns. Fists even. Sometimes necessary as we have said."
"It is not in the Jew to be that way. Any Jew. They have been beaten on too many times for them to take pleasure in that."
"It was in Ben, at least a little. It was in Lepke Buchalter, rest in peace. It was in Murder, Inc. and in Barney Ross, the boxer. They were all Jews. Now in this Israel. These Jews are fighters, too. With the machine guns, what have you."
"They are a new kind of Jew. Our kind of Jew is like our man in Havana. Or Abbadabba Berman: the numbers, the quickness, the sureness with the figures. That is your typical Jew. Certainly, yes, in certain times, it changes. You cannot, I think you will agree, count on it to be that way. You have to count on the typical, not the extraordinary."
"So what have you done?"
"I have sent him a man."
"One man would make such a difference?"
"One man, yes. This man."
"And who is this man."
"Frankie Carbine."
"Frankie Horsekiller? Frankie of Times Square? Frankie of the two policemen? That Frankie?"
"That Frankie, exactly."
"Oh, my god!"
The amen chorus rumbled nervously, then the wise man spoke again.
"He is crazy. He has no judgment. He likes too much to shoot. All his problems he solves with a gun. He wants to be big but he hasn't the vision. He just has his gun and his craziness. But sometimes you need craziness. You need that thing where there is no fear. Some of the old-timers had it. We had to move on, but there are throwbacks, and Frankie Carbine is such a man. We may have need of the crazed down there. Cuba is the lynchpin of all our things; we may have to defend it with crazy. Sometimes, crazy is necessary."
All amened in honor of crazy.
Chapter 13
"It's obvious," said Roger. "You were set up."
But Earl couldn't concentrate on what Roger was saying. He kept looking into the front seat at Frenchy Short and images returned of the young man in Hot Springs in 1946, his talent, his ambition, his anger, his hurry, his inability to fit in.
There'd always been something funny about it. They'd had to dump Frenchy because he was difficult to control and a politician couldn't stand having him around. And a week after, somehow the unit had been ambushed and so many other young men killed. All for nothing, as it turned out. It was as sorry a thing as Earl had ever been involved with.
And Frenchy? What of Frenchy? What had he known, who had he talked to, what was he capable of? To look at him, you'd never think he was capable of a thing. He looked, if anything, younger today than that first day in Hot Springs. Like Roger, he was blond and had a square, almost pretty face. He was dressed just like Roger too, in khakis, a white shirt, some kind of striped tie and a blue blazer with an insignia on the pocket. It was like the duty uniform with these guys. You'd look at him and you'd think, gee, this kid, he's probably a big man on some leafy campus somewhere. His eyes were guileless; he hardly shaved; he had freckles.
"Really, Earl," Roger was saying, "it seems so sleepy and tropical down here, but there's a war going on. It's the same war that's going on everywhere. The Reds sneak in and call it 'liberation' and get the brown people all heated up thinking they can have Cadillacs and freezers and televisions if only they overthrow the governments and take over, under communist supervision. That's the new war, Earl. Korea is an anomaly, because it's direct and involves actual combat. But we've studied the phenomenon and we know the wars of the future will be guerilla things, low-key dramas of assassination, subversion, sabotage and propaganda. Getting a congressman's dick in a wringer is exactly their kind of operation."
Maybe Roger meant it as a joke, but still, Earl had not laughed.
"They have to make us look ridiculous and weak. So along comes an idiot like Harry Etheridge and with his appetites and lack of judgment, he's an incident waiting to happen. And it happens."
They were driving an embassy car back from the Centro Havana jail after a stop at the emergency room, where Earl's wounds were tended, he was given shots and painkillers, and his knife cut was stitched. He was back in his suit even if it was a little bloodied; the Colt Super.38 had been restored to the Lawrence holster held by leather halter under his left shoulder.
It was early. The old city was coming awake. Gray dawn splashed across the white streets and a cool wind ruffled the trees. They seemed to have found the Malecon, that great Havana roadway that girded the waterfront, and a gray sheet of as yet unlit Caribbean spread off to one side, while a row of bricky-bracky pink and pale-blue colonnaded buildings dominated the other. Frenchy, who was driving, had rolled down the windows. All the smells of Havana-the sea, the fish, the fruit, the meat, the poultry, the tobacco, all of it rawly ripped from where it had been the day before-rode in on breezes, propelled by the smell of very hot, strong, sweet coffee.
"But, Earl," continued this talky Roger, "Earl, you stopped them, you stopped them cold. Walter said you were the sort of man for this kind of work and he was right."
"Who's Walter?" said Earl, then realized Roger was talking about the boy in the front seat. "Frenchy," he said, leaning forward, "what the hell is going on here?"
"Earl, we needed a good man. The best. I knew you. Whoever's been in Arkansas knows Earl Swagger. So I made a suggestion. That's all."
"It was a good suggestion," said Roger. "Walter, or should I say Frenchy, made a good suggestion. You handled the knuckleball they threw us, so Congressman Harry isn't on the cover of Life magazine beating up a whore in a blow job dispute and making the United States look like two cents worth of garbage."