'"Loretta came runnin' then, and was she mad.
"Why the hell'd you do that here?' she asked Jack. 'What'm I supposed to do with him? Goddamn it all, Jack, I can't handle this. '
"Billy was moanin' a little bit, so I sat down alongside him, just to be near him. He looked at me like he wanted me to do somethin' for him, get a doctor or somebody, but I couldn't do anything except look at him and nod my head, I was so scared. I thought if they decided to leave maybe I could help him then.
" 'We'll take him with us,' Jack said. 'Wrap him up.'
"The Goose and Biondo walked over to the bed and stood over Billy. Billy's eyes were still open and he looked at me.
" 'It's sloppy,' The Goose said, and he took an ice pick out of his coat and punched it half a dozen times through Billy's temples, first one side then the other. It happened so fast I couldn't not look. Then he and Jimmy Biondo wrapped Billy in my yellow blanket and carried him down the back way to the alley. Billy was still straight up and still had the safety on. I'd told him I was clean, that I got regular checkups, but he wore it anyway. I didn't see The Goose or Biondo again for years, but I saw Jack quite a lot. He was our protector. That's what they called him anyway. Some protector. It was him and his guys beat up Loretta and Marlene-the bastards, the things they could do and then be so nice. But they also took care nobody shook us down and nobody arrested us. I don't know how he did it, but Jack kept the cops away, and my whole life I never been in jail except for being drunk. Jack didn't own us, though. I always heard Arnold Rothstein did, but I never knew for sure. Loretta never told us anything. Jack did own some places later and got me a job in a House of All Nations he was partners in, up in Montreal. I was supposed to be either a Swede or a Dutchie because of my blond hair. Jack brought me back down to Albany a couple of years later and I've been here ever since.
"I really hardly knew him, saw him in Loretta's a few times, that's all, until he gave Billy Blue his. Then one night about a month later he come in and buys me a real drink. None of that circus water Loretta dished us out when the chumps were buying. Jack bought the real stuff for us.
" 'I'm sorry about that whole scene, Stars,' he said, 'but we had to settle a score. Your guinea friend tried to kill me six months ago.'
"Jack took my fingers and ran them over the back of his head where he said there were still some shotgun pellets. It was very bumpy behind his left ear.
" 'Were you scared, Stars?'
" 'Was I! I been sick over it. I can't sleep.'
" 'Poor kid. I was really sorry to do that to you.'
"He was still holding my hand and then he rubbed my hair. The first thing you know we were back up in my room and we really got to know one another, I'll tell the world."
The Wilson, Rothstein, O'Hagan, and Blue confessions came out of Jack so totally without reservation that I told him, "I believe you about Northrup now."
"Sometimes I tell the truth."
"I don't know as I'm so sure why you've told me all these stories, though."
"I want you to know who you're working for."
"You seem to trust me."
"If you ever said anything, you'd be dead. But you know some people well enough they'd never talk. I know you."
"I take that as a compliment, but I'm not looking for information. Now or ever."
"I know that. You wouldn't get a comma out of me if I didn't want to give it. I told you, I want you to know who I am. And who I used to be. I changed. Did you get that? I come a long way. A long fucking way. A man don't have to stay a bum forever."
"I see what you mean."
"Yeah, maybe you do. You listen pretty good. People got to have somebody listen to them."
"I get paid for that."
"I'm not talking about pay."
"I am. I'm for sale. It's why I went to law school. I listen for money. I also listen for other reasons that have nothing to do with money. You're talking about the other reasons. I know that."
"I knew you knew, you son of a bitch. I knew it that night you cut Jolson up that you talked my language. That's why I sent you the Scotch."
"You're a prescient man."
"You bet your ass. What does that mean?"
"You don't have to know."
"Blow it out your whistle, you overeducated prick."
But he laughed when he said it.
My memories of Jack in Europe during our first stops are like picture postcards. In the first he walks off the Belgenland at Antwerp in company of two courteous, nervous Belgian gendarmes in their kicky bucket hats and shoulder straps. He had hoped to sneak off the ship alone and meet us later, but helpful passengers pointed him out to the cops and they nailed him near the gangway.
Down he went but not without verbal battle, assertion of his rights as an American citizen, profession of innocence. In the postcard Jack wears his cocoa-brown suit and white hat and is held by his left arm, slightly aloft. The holder of the arm walks slightly to the rear of him down the gangplank. The second officer walks to their rear entirely, an observer. The pair of ceremonial hats and Jack's oversized white fedora dominate the picture. They led the angry Jack to an auto, guided him into the back seat, and sat on either side of him. A small crowd followed the action. The car turned a corner off the pier into the thick of an army that had been lying in wait for the new invasion of Flanders. Poppies perhaps at the ready, fields of crosses under contract in anticipation of battle with the booze boche from the west. Four armored cars waited, along with six others like the one carrying Jack, each with four men within and at least fifty foot-patrolmen armed with clubs or rifles.
You can see Jack's strong suit was menace.
We left Belgium the next day, the twerps, as Jack called them, finally deciding Jack must be expelled by train. Jack chose Germany as his destination and we bought tickets. The American embassy involved itself by not involving itself, and so Jack was shunted eastward to Aachen, where the Belgian cops left off and the German Polizei took over. A pair of beefy Germans in mufti held his arms as he looked over his shoulder and said to me through a frantic, twisted mouth: "Goddamn it, Marcus, get me a goddamn lawyer."
Instead of turning the money over to Classy Willie, Jack gave a hundred and eighty thousand of it to me, some in a money belt, which gave me immediate abdominal tensions, and the rest inside my Ernest Dimnet best seller, The Art of Thinking, out of which we cut most of the pages. I carried thirty thousand in thousand-dollar bills in the book and kept the book in the pocket of my hound's-tooth sport jacket until I reached Albany. The money that didn't fit into the book and the money belt we rolled up and slid into the slots in Jack's bag reserved for the jewels. And the bag became mine.
Police were still dragging lakes all over the Catskills. They preferred to do that rather than follow the tip that led to a six-mile stretch of highway near Saugerties that was paved the day after Charlie disappeared.
Jack's home was searched; Alice was nowhere to be found. A shotgun and rifle in a closet were confiscated. Fogarty was seminude with a buxom Catskill waitress of comparable nudity when the raid came.
Life went on.
I noticed that Jack had a luminous quality at certain moments, when he stood in shadow. I suspect a derangement of my vision even now, for I remember that the luminosity intensified when Jack said that I should carry a pistol to protect myself (he meant to protect his money) and then offered me one, which I refused.