kewpie doll, with her fetching freckles and her spray of blond hair and her crinkly blue eyes.
The other specimens were not so perfect. One was the writer John P. Marquand, surrounded by some admiring fans, all of them exquisitely turned out. Another was the football star Bob Waterford, a gigantically muscular man with a thick mane of hair. He was so big he looked as though he could play without pads. Walter Winchell was expected later. Mickey Rooney was also rumored to be planning an appearance, although with the Mick, one could never be too sure. The Mick burned legendarily hard at both ends of the candle, and he kept to his own schedule. That was the Mick. Then there were the usual assorted politicos, gambling figures and their well- turned-out, even high-bred women.
But the center of attention was another beautiful woman. Her shoulders, pale in the golden light, yielded to the hint of breasts so soft and pillowy that an army could find comfort there, and were cupped as if for display by the precision of her gown, just at the crucial point, where there was but a gossamer of material between her nipples and the rest of the world. She had almost no waist at all, a tiny, insect's thing. Her ample hips were rounded and her buttocks especially firm. The red taffeta evening gown she wore showed all this off, but it was cut to reveal a hint of her shapely legs, made muscular and taut by the extreme rake of her high heels. Her face, however, was the main attraction: it was smart, but not intellectual, say rather cunning. Her features were delicate, except for that vulgar, big, luscious mouth. Her eyes were blue, her skin so pale and creamy it made everyone ache and her hair genuine auburn, like fire from a forbidden dream, a rapture of hair.
'Hi, babe,' called the Sporty Guest from across the room, for she was with him.
She ignored him and continued to jiggle ever so seductively to the music, as if in a dream world of rhythm. Her dance partner smiled nervously at the boyfriend and Our Host. He was a small, pale boy, weirdly beautiful, not really a good dancer and not really dancing with the woman at all, but merely validating her performance by removing it from the arena of sheer vanity. He had thin blond hair; his name was Alan Ladd, and he was in pictures too.
'I better watch her,' said the sport to our host, 'she may end up shtupping that pretty boy. You never know with her.'
'Don't worry about Alan,' said Our Host, who knew such things. 'It's not, as one would say, on Alan's dance card, eh, old man? No, worry instead about the blackies. They are highly sexualized. Believe me, I know. I once owned a club in Harlem. They like to give the white women some juju-weed, and when they're all dazed, give them the African man-root, all twelve inches of it. Once the white ones taste that pleasure, they're ruined for white men. I've seen it happen.'
'Nah,' said the sport. 'Virginia's a bitch but she knows if she fucks a schvartzer I'll kick her ass all the way back to Alabama.'
Our Host aspired to British sophistication in all things, and made a slight face at this vulgarity. But, unfazed and in his own mind rather heroic, he kept on.
'Ben,' he said. 'Ben, I must show you something.'
He took his younger compere through the party, nodding politically at this one and that one, touching a hand, giving a kiss, pausing for an introduction, well aware of the mysterious glamour he possessed, and led his guest to an alcove.
'Uh, I don't get it,' said Ben.
'It's a painting.'
'I understand that it's a painting. Why is it all square and brown? It looks like Newark with a tree.'
'I assure you, Ben, that our friend Monsieur Braque has never seen Newark.'
'You couldn't tell that from the painting. Looks like he was born there.'
'Ben, try to feel it. He's saying something. Use your imagination. As I say, one must feel it.'
Ben's handsome face knitted up as if in concentration, but he appeared to feel nothing. The painting, entitled Houses at UEstaque, depicted a cityscape in muted brown, the dwellings twisted askew to the right, a crude tree stuck in the left foreground but the laws of perspective broken savagely. When Our Host looked at it, he did feel something: the money he'd spent to obtain it.
'It's the finest work of early Cubism in this hemisphere,' he said. 'Painted in 1908. Note the geometric severity, the lack of a central vanishing point. It predates Picasso, whom it influenced. It cost me $75,000.'
'Wow,' said Ben. 'You must be doing okay.'
'I'm telling you, Ben, this is the business to be in. You cannot lose. It's all here and the rule of numbers says over the long haul each day is a profitable day, each year a profitable year. It just goes on and on and on, and nobody has to get killed or blown up and sent for a swim with the fishies of the East River.'
'Maybe so,' said Ben.
'Come, come, look out from the terrace. At night, it is so impressive.'
'Sure,' said Ben.
Our host snapped his fingers and instantly black men appeared, one with a new martini and the other with a long, thick Cuban cigar, already trimmed, and a gold lighter.
'Light it, sir?'
'No, Ralph, I have told you that you don't hold the lighter right. I have to light it myself if I want it done correctly.'
The Negroes disappeared silently, and the two men slipped between the curtains and out into the sultry night.
Pigeons cooed.
'The birds. Still with the birds, eh, Owney?' said Ben.
'I got to like them during Prohibition. A pigeon will never rat you out, let me tell you, old man.'
The pigeons, immaculately kept in a rack of cages against one wall, cooed and shifted in the dark.
Owney downed his martini with a single gulp, set the glass on a table, and went over to the cages. He opened one, reached in and took out one bird, which he held close to his face, as he stroked its sleek head with his chin.
'Such a darling,' he said. 'Such a baby girl. So sweet. Yes, such a baby girl.'
Then he put the pigeon back in the cage, plucked the cigar out of his pocket, and expertly lit it, scorching the shaft first, then rolling the end through the flame, then finally drawing the smoke through the thing fully, letting it bloom and swell, sensing each nuance of taste, finally expelling a blast of heavy gray smoke, which the breeze took and distributed over midtown.
'Now come, look,' he said, escorting the younger man to the edge of the terrace.
The two stood. Behind came the tinkle of the jazz, the sounds of laughter, the clink of glasses and ice.
Before them curved a great white way.
lights beamed upward, filling the sky with illumination. Along the broad way, crowds hustled and milled, too far to be made out from this altitude, but in their masses recognizable, a great, slithering sea of humanity. The traffic had slowed to a stop, and cops worked desperately to unsnarl it. Beeps and honks rose with the exhaust and the occasional squeal of tires. Along the great street, it seemed the whole world had come to gawk at the drama of the place, and the crowd seemed an organism its own self, rushing for one or another of the available pleasures.
'Really, it's a good place,' Owney said. 'It works, it hums, everybody's happy. It's a machine.'
'Owney,' said Ben, 'you've done a great job here. Everybody says so. Owney Maddox, he runs a great town. No other town rims like Owney's town. Everybody's happy in Owney's town, there's plenty of dough in Owney's town. Owney, he's the goddamn king.'
'I'm very proud of what I've built,' said Owney Maddox, of his town, which was Hot Springs, Arkansas, and of the grand boulevard of casinos, nightclubs, whorehouses and bathhouses that lined it, Central Avenue, which curved beneath his penthouse on the sixteenth and highest floor of the Medical Arts Building.
'Yeah, a fellow could learn a goddamn thing or two,' said his guest, Benjamin 'Bugsy' Siegel, of Los Angeles, California, and the organized crime confederation that had yet to be named by its investigators but was known by its members, in the year 1946, simply as Our Thing?to those of them that were Sicilian, 'Cosa Nostra.'
Chapter 4
