range somehow, and he had a proprietor's interest in it. We made a cigarette stop as we entered Haines Falls, a store where Jack knew they carried Rameses, his exotic, Pharaonic brand, and he dragged me to the souvenir counter and urged me to buy something.
'Buy your wife a balsam pillow or an Indian head scarf.'
'My wife and I split up two years ago.'
'Then you got no reason not to go to Europe. How about a cigarette box for yourself or a pinetree ashtray?'
I thought he was kidding, but he was insisting; a souvenir to seal our bargain, a trinket to affirm the working relationship. He fingered the dishes and glassware with their gaudy Catskill vistas, the thermometers framed in pine, toothbrush holders, inkstands, lampstands, photo albums, all with souvenir inscriptions burned into them, commemorating vacation time spent in this never-never land in the clouds. I finally agreed on a glass paperweight with an Indian chief in full war bonnet inside it, and Jack bought it. Forty-nine cents. The action was outrageously sentimental, the equivalent of his attitude toward that Algerian crone or the deceased brother, from whom, I would later come to know, Jack felt all his good luck had come. 'All my troubles happened after Eddie died,' Jack told me in the final summer of his life when he was learning how to die. Thus his replacement of the brother with Fogarty had a talismanic element to it. Talismanic paperweight, talismanic brother-substitute, talismanic memory of the Arthritic Witch of Fun. And here we were in old talismanic Haines Falls, the highest town in the Catskills, Jack said, and of course, of course, the proper place for him to stash the queenly consort of his fantasy life, the most beautiful girl I've ever known.
Jack said he once saw Charlie Northrup belly-bump a man with such force that the man did a back-flip over a table. Charlie was physical power, about six four and two forty. He had a wide, teeth-ridden smile and blond hair the color and straightness of straw, combed sideways like a well-groomed hick in a tintype. He was the first thing we saw when we entered Mike Brady's Top o' the Mountain House at Haines Falls. He was at the middle of the bar, standing in brogans with his ankles crossed, his sportshirt stained with sweat from armpit to armpit, drinking beer, talking with the bartender, and smiling. Charlie's smile went away when he met Jack eyeball to eyeball.
'Missed you the other night, Charlie,' Jack said.
'Yeah. I think you're gonna keep missing me, Jack.'
'That's a wrong attitude. '
'May be. But I'm stuck with it.'
'Don't be stupid, Charlie. You're not stupid.'
'That's right, Jack. I'm not stupid.'
Jack's face had all the expression of an ice cube, Charlie's full of overheated juices. He was telling Jack now about something I had no clue to; but from their tone there were confidences between them. It turned out Charlie was responsible for Jack being in the Masons. They had been young thieves together on Manhattan's West Side in 1914, running with The Gophers, a gang Owney Madden led until he went to jail for murder. They both wound up in the Bronx about 1925, with Charlie gone semi-straight as a numbers writer and Jack a feared figure in the New York underworld because of his insane gang tactics and his association with the powerful Arnold Rothstein. Jack had also opened a place he called The Bronx Theatrical Club, whose main theatrical element was Jack's presence as a performing psychopath. I say performing because I don't think Jack was psychopathic in its extreme sense. He was aberrated, yes, eccentric, but his deeds were willful and logical, part of a career pattern, even those that seemed most spontaneous and most horrendous. He was rising in the world, a celebrated hijacker, and Charlie was a working stiff with money problems. Charlie married Jimmy Biondo's sister and they vacationed in the Catskills. When times got very rough in New York, Charlie and some two-bit Jersey thieves bought a defunct brewery in Kingston and went into shoestring bootlegging. In the years after, Charlie opened his roadhouse and also became the biggest beer distributor in Greene and Ulster counties. He was tough, with a reputation for muscle if you didn't pay promptly for your goods. But he was different from Jack. Just a bootlegger. Just a businessman.
'I'm having a little meeting tomorrow night,' Jack told him, 'for those who couldn't make it to the last one.'
'I'm booked up.'
'Unbook, Charlie. It's at the Aratoga. Eight o'clock. And I'm all business, Charlie. All business.'
'I never knew you to be anything else, Jack.'
'Charlie, old brother, don't have me send for you.'
Jack left it there. turned his back on Charlie and walked down the bar and into the table area where only one table was occupied: by that beauty in a white linen suit and white pumps; and at the table with her a five-foot-five, one-eyed, waterheaded gnome. This was Murray (The Goose) Pucinski who'd worked for Jack for the past five years.
'Oh, God, Jack, oh, God where've you been?' was Kiki's greeting. She stood to hug him.
Jack squeezed her and gave her a quick kiss, then sat alongside her.
'She behaving herself, Goose?' Jack asked the waterhead.
Goose nodded.
'How could anybody misbehave up here?' Kiki said, looking me over. I was struck by the idea of misbehaving with her. That was the first logical thing to consider when you looked at Kiki. The second was the flawless quality of her face, even underneath all that professionally applied makeup; a dense rather than a delicate beauty, large, dark eyes, a mouth of soft, round promise, and an abundance of hair, not black as Alice had said, but auburn, a glorious Titian mop. Her expression, as we visually introduced ourselves, was one of anxious innocence. I use the phrase to describe a moral condition in fragments, anxious to be gone, but with a large segment still intact. The condition was visible in the eyes, which for all their sexual innuendo and expertise, for all their knowledge of how beauty rises in the world, were in awe, I suspect, of her rarefied situation: its prisonerlike quality, its dangers, its potential cruelties, and its exhilarating glimpses of evil. By eye contact alone, and this done in a few seconds, she conveyed to me precisely how uneasy she was with The Goose as her chaperon. A quick glance at him, then at me, then a lift of the eyebrows and twist of the pursed lips, was my clue that The Goose was a guardian of negative entertainment value.
'I wanna dance,' she said to Jack. 'Jackie, I'm dying to dance. Speed, play us something so we can dance.'
'It's too early to dance,' Jack said.
'No. it isn't'-and her entire body did a shimmy in anticipation. 'Come on, Joey, come on, puh-leeeze.'
'My fingers don't wake up till nine o'clock at night,' Fogarty said. 'Or after six beers.'
'Aw, Joey.'
Fogarty hadn't sat down yet. He looked at Jack who smiled and shrugged, and so Fogarty went to the piano on the elevated bandstand and, with what I'd call a semipro's know-how, snapped out a peppy version of 'Twelfth Street Rag.' Kiki was up with the first four bars, pulling Jack to his feet. Jack reluctantly took an armful of Kiki, then whisked her around in a very respectable foxtrot, dancing on the balls of his feet with sureness and lightness. Fogarty segued into the 'Charleston' and then the 'Black Bottom,' and Kiki split from Jack and broke into bouncily professional arm maneuvers and kicks, showing a bit of garter.
Interested as I was in Kiki's star and garter performance, it was Jack who took my attention. Was Legs Diamond really about to perform in public? He stood still when Kiki broke away, watched her for a step or two, then assessed his audience, especially the bar where Charlie Northrup and the barkeep were giving Jack full eyeball.
'C'mon, Jackie,' said Kiki, her breasts in fascinating upheaval. Jack looked at her and his feet began to move, left out. right kick, right back, left back, basic, guarded, small-dimensioned movements, and then 'C'mon. dance,' Kiki urged, and he gave up his consciousness of the crowd and then left out, right kick, right back, left back expanded, vitalized, and he was dancing, arms swinging, dancing, Jack Diamond, who seemed to do everything well, was dancing the Charleston and Black Bottom, dancing them perfectly, the way all America had always wanted to be able to dance them-energetically, controlled, as professionally graceful as his partner who had danced these dances for money in Broadway shows, who had danced them for Ziegfeld; and now she was dancing on the mountaintop with the king of the mountain, and they were king and queen of motion together, fluid with Fogarty's
