"Taking a pee."
"I also have to say. Now that I'm started. You're always off somewhere in your mind. Carrying on your own conversation. You don't listen to people."
"You don't know how deep they're digging me."
"That's why there is all this yelling all night long in this place."
"I have my dogs and I."
"Which you're very welcome."
"You should know my early life, Brenda, which I'm still obsessed. My mother, this is the God-honest truth, I swear to God, she spent thirty years of her life claiming there was a fishbone stuck in her throat. We listened to her constantly. Doctors, clinics, they searched for years with instruments. Finally she had an operation. There was nothing caught in her throat, absolutely, guaranteed. She comes home from the hospital. The fishbone is there."
"Well this is just a woman and a mother."
"So help me, thirty years, my brothers and sisters, never mind. And that's the least of it. I'm just showing you some idea. My father was the drunk of all time. But I don't care anymore what they did to each other or to me. I'm not a person who maintains a malice. I feel only love and respect for those people because they suffered in this world. So forget it, I don't care, go away."
"You never married, Jack, but how come."
"I'm a sloven in my heart."
"Personal-appearance-wise, you dress and groom."
"In my heart, Brenda. There's a chaos that's enormous."
They heard the MC telling jokes out on the stage. Jack leaned toward the radio and listened some more.
"I love the patriotic feeling I get, hearing this stuff. I am one hundred percent in my feeling for this country. What else do I trust? My own voice goes creepy at times. I can't control the inner voice. There are pressures unbelievable."
"Everybody gets pressure. We get pressure. You work us seven days a week."
"I'm about halfway out of it in common terms."
"Why don't you marry your Randi Ryder? She'll straighten out your life."
"She's a famous lay in New Orleans but she won't do anything unnatural."
Somebody shouted around the corner. Visitor for Jack. He touched Brenda on the shoulder and went out of the room. It was six paces to his office, where Jack Karlinsky was sitting on the sofa with one of the dogs.
"This is my dachshund Sheba," Jack Ruby said. "Get down, baby."
Jack Karlinsky was in his sixties, an investment counselor who had no office, no business phone, no employees and no clients. At his twenty-room house outside Dallas, a Coast Guard fog light played over the grounds all night long.
"I want to know did you hear."
"Be calm, Jack. That's why I'm here. To discuss terms."
"There are people who'll speak for me out of long association. I talk to Tony Astorina on the phone."
"I know you have connections," Karlinsky said. "But this is not the same as so-and-so is connected."
"What is Cuba, nothing?"
"I understand full well you took some trips for people."
"This is when Cuba was popular in the press."
"You did some things for the Bureau too," Karlinsky said.
"Where is this? Is this something I'm just hearing?"
"Please. You volunteered your services to the FBI in March 1959. They opened a file."
"Jack, you know as well as I."
"Potential criminal informant. You informed a little bit here, a little bit there."
"This is for my own protection in case something is held against me, so I can say look."
"Jack, it means nothing to me personally. I appreciate you are known in New Orleans, you are known in Dallas, You are a constant face in Dallas."
"I have associations going back to the old Chicago days which I am prouder of than anything in my life, Newberry Street, Morgan Street, the pushcarts, the gangs."
"We all love the old Chicago stories. What do you think I was born here? Nobody is born in Dallas. We all carry the old Chicago thing, and the street life, and the scrappy days. But we are speaking here about a very sizable loan and the boys are naturally picky who gets the use of their capital."
Jack went through his desk drawers.
"Look, I can show you notices of tax liens, rejections of compromise offers. They're all over me about excise taxes. I am getting killed, Jack. They have history sheets on me this thick. I keep running in to pay cash in trickles. Two hundred dollars, two hundred and fifty dollars. In other words to show them some concern. But it's like a kid on an errand. I am in for over forty-four thousand dollars to the IRS alone and on top of that there is this union that wants me to ease up on the hours of the girls, there is this competition next door that is killing me with amateur nights and there is this girl from New Orleans that's gonna close me down for popping her G-string."
Jack Karlinsky had an invisible laugh. You heard it down in his throat but didn't see anything in his face that resembled mirth. He wore a sport coat over a turtleneck shirt and smoked a panatela. Jack checked out the shoes and haircut. He admitted left and right he was still learning how to live.
"I am telling my lawyer to settle eight cents on the dollar."
"Jack, they will tell you."
"I know."
"This is not a proposal they are drooling to accept."
"So I have to resolve in my own mind."
"You have to resolve in your own mind who you want to owe this money to. It is not found money. I have structured a deal here that I am not looking to pull in five points a week like the neighborhood loanshark. We are talking about a forty-thousand-dollar loan. We are speaking in a range of one thousand dollars a week vigorish."
"Which is ninety-two thousand total after one year."
"Or you keep paying the vig."
"Till my balls drop off."
"This is correct, Jack."
"Just to say. What if I can't pay one week?"
"One week, they will let it ride. They don't want to pop you on the head, Jack. They let it ride."
"Two, three weeks."
"The procedure you would do here is take out a second loan. This is not a good idea because you would pay the vig on one amount while they are actually giving you a lesser amount. Frankly, do you want my advice?"
"What?"
"Frankly, don't take the loan. You can't make a vig like that with your kind of operation that you're running here. You will fall deep into the pit."
"It's my pit, Jack."
"It's your pit but it's not your money."
"What happens, just saying, if I miss five weeks, six weeks?"
"If you are bled totally dry and white, they will simply stop the clock. Which is, pay the principal, forget the interest. In other words this fellow is known to us and we will settle for a piece of his business plus the original sum. They don't want to blow up the building."
"But they will grab my business."
"This is the ballfield you're playing on."
"What if I can't pay the principal?"
"Jack, this is what I'm telling you. I'm saying explore other avenues."
"A bank would make a credit check. They won't give me ten cents."
"Think of friends, relatives. Take a partner into the business."
"I can't work with other people. I already have backers. My sister manages the Vegas for me. We fight all the time."
"You strike me a little unreasonable. You have to grasp a major point. You are not outfit, Jack. Understand connected."
The drums were going out front.
"All right. Say this. I am willing to go for five hundred a week interest over one year when the convention business will pick up by then."