'You know what I'm talking about, Jack.'
'I suppose I do, Willie. I suppose I do.' Jack put on his weary tone of voice. 'But I'll tell you the truth, Willie, I'm not even thinking about money. What I'm thinking about is jewels.'
'What jewels?'
'I got eighty grand worth and I don't know how to get them off the boat. They'll go through my luggage with a microscope. ' '
'Let your friend Marcus carry them,' Willie said. 'He's legitimate.'
'Not interested, thank you,' I said.
'That's not a bad idea, Marcus,' Jack said.
'It's a terrible idea, Jack. I want no part of hot merchandise. No part whatever. Not my line of work.'
'If Marcus says no, it's no,' Jack said. 'We'll have to find another way. '
I believe Jack already knew what he was going to do with the jewels and was merely testing me for a reaction. My reaction was so instantaneous he didn't even press it a second time. I was more attuned to Classy Willie's problem. If Biondo ever had any sense at all, he wouldn't have sent a dapper thief, a man long known as the Beau Brummell of Forty-eighth Street, to play watchdog to a man as devious as Jack.
'Jimmy wants me to get off at England and come back home with the cash,' Willie said. 'That was the plan if there was a hitch. He said he talked to you about it.'
'I do remember something like that,' Jack said. 'But how do I know you won't take the cash and hop a boat for the Fiji Islands? I already told you I don't trust card thieves, Willie. I couldn't jeopardize Jimmy's money that way. No. We'll get to Germany and make the deal, and we'll all be a little fatter when we get home. Am I right, Count?'
'The beer is good in Germany,' said The Count, a diplomat. 'You don't have to needle it.'
The facade of the deal was that Jack was to buy booze and wines, and ship them from Bremen to somewhere off Long Island. That's what I was told, by Jack. But Devane was right that Jack was after dope-heroin, which Jack had been buying in Germany since '26 when Rothstein was financing the imports. A federal charge Jack had been dodging successfully since then had come with the bustup of an elaborate smuggling scheme in which Jack was a key figure. The present destination was Frankfurt and, after the deal was wrapped up, a week's vacation in Paris. I remember when we got back to the States that a federal narcotics nabob told the press that Jack's dope smuggling made his booze and beer business look like penny-candy stuff. But people didn't pay attention to such official guff.
Their image of Jack was fixed. He was a bootlegger. Locking him into dope was only a source of confusion.
I have vivid recollections of Jack and the press meeting in the hallways of courthouses, at piers and railroad stations in New York, Philadelphia, Albany, Catskill. I remember the aggression the newsmen always showed, persistent in their need to embarrass him with gross questions, but persistent also in their need to show him affection, to laugh harder than necessary at his bons mots, to draw ambivalent pleasure from his presence-a man they loved to punish, a man they punished with an odd kind of love. When the British newsmen invaded the Belgenland on our arrival in Plymouth, some thirty reporters and cameramen pushed their way into Jack's stateroom to be greeted by the presence himself, clad in black slippers, sky-blue silk pajamas with a white chalk stripe, a navy-blue silk robe, and a Rameses between index and middle fingers. The British behaved no differently from their American brethren, except that Jack's being a foreigner diminished their need to insult him for the sake of the homeland. But their self-righteousness shone through in their questions: Why does America tolerate gangsters? How long have you been a gangster? Was Mr. Charles Northrup murdered at your order? Do you think gangsterism will end when Prohibition ends? How many men have you killed in your life? What about Capone and your Brooklyn arsenal?
Jack treated them like children, laughing at their requests for a laundry list of his victims. 'First off, boys, I'm not a gangster, only a bootlegger. There are no gangsters in America. Too easy to get rich other ways. I'm just a civilized citizen. Not a dese, dem, and dose guy. Just a man of the people, trying to make a dollar. Over here getting the cure. Got some stomach trouble and I was advised to go to Vichy and Wiesbaden and take the waters. Brooklyn arsenal? I own nothing in Brooklyn. Capone used to work for me years ago, driving a truck, but I haven't seen him in years. That feud is a lot of nonsense. I get along with people. I'm a legitimate citizen. You newspaper guys scream at the cops to pick me up, and they hold me a few days and find out I'm clean and let me go. I'm not claiming you treat me wrong, but I never see anybody write big headlines when they tell me the charge don't stick. I'm sick of headlines, boys. I came to Europe to get away from it all for a while. Leave that hubbub behind. Make a kind of grand tour on my own, take the waters and cure what ails me. You can understand that, can't you, fellows?'
Sure they could.
Jack's fame at this point was staggering. About four hundred Englishmen had come to the pier by six thirty just to get a glimpse of him. The press of the whole Western world was following our transatlantic voyage, front-paging it with an intensity not quite up to what they did for Byrd, Peary, and other world travelers, but I'll bet with more reader interest. One English paper was so anxious for a story that it invented a phone interview with Jack two days before our boat reached an English pier. 'I'm here in London on a secret mission,' they quoted him as saying. So the newsmen, installing Jack in the same hierarchy where they placed royalty, heroes, and movie stars, created him anew as they enshrined him. They invented a version of him with each story they wrote, added to his evil luster by imagining crimes for him to commit, embellishing his history, humanizing him, defining him through their own fantasies and projections. This voyage had the effect of taking Jack Diamond away from himself, of making him a product of the collective imagination. Jack had imagined his fame all his life and now it was imagining him. A year hence he would be saying that 'publicity helps the punk' to another set of newsmen, aware how pernicious a commodity it could be. But now he was an addict, a grotesquely needy man, parched for glory, famished for public love, dying for the chance at last to be everybody's wicked pet.
He called the stateroom press conference to a halt after fifteen minutes and said he had to get dressed. The newsmen waited and he joined them on deck, clad now in his blue pinstriped suit, his wide-brimmed white felt hat, seven-and-a-half-B black wingtips, his purple tie, and his Knight Templar pin in his lapel.
'Hello, boys,' he said, 'what else do you want from me?'
They talked for another quarter hour and asked, among other things, about that lapel pin; and a story goes with that.
When we talked after the press left, Jack told me that Charlie Northrup was why he was in the Masons. Back in the Bronx in the mid-twenties Jack was playing cards in the back room of his garish Theatrical Club, orange and black decor, and Charlie was sitting in. For no reason he could remember, Jack wondered out loud what a jack was, the picture card. Charlie told him the symbolic meaning of a knave among kings and queens, and Jack liked the whole idea.
Charlie talked about the Masons and their symbols, and it was like the dawn of a new era for Jack. He pumped Charlie for more, then talked him into proposing him as a candidate in the order. He went through in a whoosh and obviously with attention to all the arcane mumbo jumbo he had to memorize. The Masonic books I inherited from him were well marked and annotated in the margins, in his handwriting.
Alongside one section on an old Templar rite of initiation, a Christly pilgrimage through red, blue, black, and then the final white veils of the temple, Jack had noted: 'Good stuff. Sounds like one of my dreams.'
Just after meeting the British press Jack complained to me of itching hands, small red dots which gave up a clear fluid when squeezed. The broken pustules then burned like dots of acid. A passenger shot off three of his toes at skeet and blamed Jack for hexing the weapon. Then the Minneapolis librarian cut her wrists, but chose against death and summoned help. Her condition became common knowledge on the ship.
I saw Jack on deck alone after that, toying with a rosary, the first time I knew he carried one. He was not praying-only staring at it, strung like webbing through his fingers, as if it were a strange, incomprehensible object.
