He smiled: wider, more at ease. 'I spent years sleeping in worse places than my own office… lofts, pool halls, subways. Times are tough. You're lucky to be in business.'
'You're kind of lucky yourself.'
He got a silver cigarette case out from his inside coat pocket. 'You said it. You mind?' I nodded I didn't, and he lit up a long cigarette with a bullet-shaped silver lighter.
'What's this really about, Raft?'
'Let's keep it friendly. Let's keep it 'George' and 'Nate,' all right?'
'Sure, George.'
'I get the feeling, from that remark about Camera and Madden, that you know a little about me.'
'I know you used to be a bootlegger for Madden, and that he helped pull some strings to get you started in Hollywood.'
Raft shrugged. 'That's no secret. The columnists have had hold of that, and it hasn't hurt me. Nobody thinks a bootlegger's a bad guy; nobody who drinks, that is.'
'You don't drink.'
'I grew up in Hell's Kitchen. It was no fuckin' picnic. I was in a street gang with Owney. You woulda been too, if you grew up where I did. He went his way. I went mine. I was never a hood, really. I used to see them, though, when I was sitting 'round the dance halls. Sharp young hoods in candy-stripe silk shirts, flashing their roll. Was I green with envy. They had money to spend and their pick of the skirts, and I wanted a candy-stripe silk shirt so bad I was ready to pull one off the first guy I could catch alone in a dark alley.'
'But instead you became a movie star.'
Raft's hooded eyes blinked a few times, his face impassive. 'I'm no saint. I was a pickpocket, a shoplifter. Then I found a trade- dancing. I got into taxi-dancing, I worked up a Charleston act, eventually. Did some vaudeville. Owney was in Sing Sing through all this, but when he got out, after Prohibition came in, he helped me climb. I worked the El Fey with Texas Guinan, and I was doing a little bootlegging on the side, for Owney. And Owney helped me make it to Broadway, and Hollywood. And I ain't ashamed of that. What are friends for?'
'This is all real fascinating,' I said, 'but what the hell does it have to do with me?'
Raft inhaled on the cigarette. Blew smoke out, like a movie tough guy. 'This office. Barney set you up, right? Did a friend a favor?'
'Yeah. Right. So?'
'Friends do favors for friends. Sometimes you even do favors for friends of friends.'
'You ought to sew that on a sampler. George.'
'Don't be testy. I didn't come 'round here to look up Barney Ross; that was just for appearance sake. though Barney don't know that. It's you I come to see.'
'Why, for Christ's sake?'
'I used to work at a place called the Club Durant. Jimmy Durante's place. There was a small garage below street level, connected with the club, that was the largest floating crap game in New York. That's where I got to know Al Brown.'
'Al Brown.'
'I saw him later, at El Fey's. And he was a good friend of Owney's. too. They were business associates.'
'Oh. That 'Al Brown.''
'Yeah. That one. I was in New York last week, and a friend asked me to do a favor for Al Brown.'
'Why you?'
'It had to be somebody neutral. Somebody who could come around and see you without anybody getting any ideas. But somebody important enough for you to take it seriously.'
'What does he want?'
'He wants you to come see him.' Raft reached in his other inside pocket, withdrew a flat sealed envelope. Handed it to me.
Inside was a thousand dollars in hundreds, a round-trip ticket to Atlanta on the Dixie Express, and credentials identifying me as an attorney with the Louis Piquett firm.
'These tickets are for Monday,' I said.
'That's right. I'm told if there's a conflict, they can be switched to any other day next week. No pressure,
Nate.'
'Do you know what this is about?'
Raft got up. 'I don't want to know what this is about. But I can guess. If it doesn't have something to do with another friend of mine, Frank Nitti, getting shot up by your mayor's favorite cops, I'll go back to taxi-dancing.'
I got up. I extended my hand to Raft, who smiled tightly and shook it. 'Sorry I was a wiseass,' I said.
'I take it you'll do it.'
'Why not? A grand is a nice retainer for a guy that sleeps in his office. And it isn't every day that George Raft stops by to play middleman.'
'It isn't every day you take on Al Capone for a client,' Raft said, and we went down and spent some time with
