thinking about retiring his prewar limo. It was time to be modern and American. It was the '40s. The Nazis and the Japs were whipped! We had the atom bomb!
But even as he was going about his public business, he was relaying orders through runners to various of his employees, directing a search, putting pressure on the police, sending out scouting parties, setting up surveillance at Becker's office in City Hall and convening a meeting.
The meeting was scheduled for 5:30 P. M., in the kitchen at the brand-new Signore Giuseppe's Tomato Pie Paradise, where Pap Grumley and several ranking Grumleys, F. Garry Hurst, Jack McGaffery and others showed up as ordered. Everybody gathered just outside the meat locker, where about a thousand sausages hung in bunches and strings. The smell of mozzarella and tomato paste floated through the air.
'No siree, Mr. Maddox,' said Pap. 'My boys, they been up, they been down. These coyotes have vanished. Don't know where they done gone to ground, but it ain't in no goddamn hotel nor no tourist camp. Maybe they's camping deep in the hills. Shit, my boys couldn't find a thing. We may have to go to the hounds to git on these crackers. Know where I can git me a troop of prize blue ticks if it comes to that. Them dogs could smell out a pea in a pea patch the size of Kansas. One particular pea, that is.'
He spat a gob of a fluid so horrifyingly yellowed that even Owney didn't want to think about it. It landed in the sink with a plop.
'You got boys coming in?' Owney, the high baron of New York's East Side, asked in his native diction.
'Yes sir. Got boys from Yell County. The Yell County Grumleys make the Garland County Grumleys look tame. They're so mean they drink piss for breakfast.'
Owney turned to Jack McGaffery.
'And you? You made the fuckin' calls I told you?'
'Yes sir. We can get gun boys from Kansas City and St. Paul inside a week if we need 'em. It ain't a question of guns. We can put guns on the street. Hell, there's only a dozen or so of them.'
'Yeah, but we gotta find the fuckers first.'
He turned to Hurst.
'What do you make of it?'
'Whoever thought this out, thought it out well,' said the lawyer. 'These boys were well armed and well trained. But more to the point, whoever is planning this thing has thought long and hard about what he is attacking.'
'Garry, what the fuck are you tawkin' about?' said Owney.
'Consider. He?whomsoever he may be?has certainly made a careful study of Hot Springs from a sociological point of view. He understands, either empirically or instinctively, that all municipal institutions have been, to some degree or other, penetrated and are controlled by yourself. So he sets up what appears to be a roving unit. It stays nowhere. It has no local ties, no roots, no families. It can't be reported on. It can't be spied on. It can't be betrayed from within. It permits no photographs, its members do not linger or speak to the press, it simply strikes and vanishes. It's brilliant. It's even almost legal.'
'Agh!' Owney groaned. 'I smell old cop. I smell a cop so old he knows all the tricks. You ain't pulling no flannel over this old putz's eyes.'
He looked back at Jack.
'The cowboy was the fast one. The rest were punks. But you said a old man was in command. That's what you said.'
'He was. But I only heard the name Earl. 'Earl, that was a great shot,' the old man said to the fast cowboy after he clipped Garnet. But no other names were used. The old one was in charge but the cowboy was like the sarge or something.'
'Okay,' Owney said. 'They will hit us again, the bastards. You can count on it. They are looking for the Central Book, because they know when they get that, they got us. Meanwhile, we will be hunting them. We got people eye-balling Becker. We follow Becker, he'll be in contact with them, and somehow, he'll lead us to them.'
'Yes sir,' said Flem Grumley, ''ceptin' that Becker never showed at his office this morning, and when we sent some boys by his house, it was empty. He moved his family out. He's gone underground too.'
'He'll turn up. He's got speeches to make, he's got interviews to give. He wants to be governor and he wants to ride this thing into that big fuckin' job. He's just another husder. He don't scare me. That goddamn cowboy, he scares me. But I've been hunted before.'
'Pray tell, by whom, Owney?' asked Garry.
'Ever hear of Mad Dog Coll?'
'Yes.'
'Yeah, well, Mad Dog, he comes gunning for me. He steals my best man, fuckin' Jimmy Lupton, and holds him for ransom. I got to pay fuckin' fifty long to get Jimmy back. He was a pisser and a half, that fuckin' kid. Balls? Balls like fuckin' steel fists. Crazy but gigantic balls. So you know what the lesson is?'
'No sir.'
'Bo Weinberg catches him in a phone booth with the chopper. The chopper chops that mick fuck to shit. Don't matter how big his fuckin' balls are. The chopper don't care. So here's the lesson: everybody dies. Every- fiickin'-body dies.'
After the meeting, Owney went to his car. He checked his watch to discover that it was five o'clock, 6:00 New York time. He told his driver where to go.
The driver left Signore Giuseppe's, drove down to Central, turned up it, then up Malvern Avenue and drove through the nigger part of town, past the Pythian Hotel and Baths, past cribs and joints and houses, then turned toward U. S. 65, the big little Rock road over by Malvern, but didn't drive much farther. Instead, he stopped at a gas station along the edge of Lake Catherine.
Owney got out, looked about to make certain he was not followed. Then he went into the gas station, a skunky old Texaco that looked little changed since the early 1920s, when it was built. The attendant, an old geezer whose name should have been Zeke or Lum or Jethro nodded, and departed, after hanging out a sign in the window that said CLOSED. Owney checked his watch again, went to the cooler, took out a nickel bottle of Coca-Cola, pried off the cap and drank it down in a gulp. He took out a cigarette, inserted it into his holder, lit it with a Tiffany's lighter that had cost over $200, and took a puff.
The cigarette was half down when the phone rang.
Owney went to it.
'Yeah?'
'I have a person-to-person long-distance call for a Mr. Brown from a Mr. Smith in New York City.'
'This is Brown.'
'Thank you, sir. I'll make the connection.'
'Thanks, honey.'
There were some clickings and the rasp of interference, but a voice came on eventually.
'Owney?'
'Yeah. That you, Sid?'
'Yeah.'
'So what the fiick, Sid? What the fuck is going on?'
'Owney, I tell ya. Nothing.'
'I got a boy busting my balls down here. Some hick exsoldier prosecutor who thinks he's Tom Fuckin' Dewey.'
'Not good.'
'No, it ain't. But I can take care of it. What I'm worried about is that fucker Bughouse Siegel. Frank and Albert and Mr. Lansky all like the little fuck. Is he behind my trouble down here? Is he trying to muscle me out of the business? It might do him some good.'
'Owney, like you said, I asked some questions. What I hear is he is just pissing money away into a big hole in the ground out in some desert. That hot-number babe he's got with him, you know, she ain't too happy. She's been talking to people about what an asshole he is. She has friends. She has a lot of friends and he leaves her alone in Hollywood to go out to the desert and piss some more money into a hole. Only I hear that broad ain't ever alone. She still has the hotsies for Joey Adonis, among others.'
