Murphy's a lunk. Hits like half a pound of sausage. Benny ate him up.'
'I like Benny,' Filetti said. 'Don't get me wrong. I just like what Murphy did in his last fight. Murphy looked good that night I saw him.'
'You don't know, Charlie. You shouldn't bet on fights. You just don't know. Ain't that right, Walter? He don't know?'
'I don't follow the fights, Jack,' Walter Rudolph said. 'I got out of the habit in stir. Last fight I saw was in '23. Benny Leonard whippin' a guy I don't even remember. '
'How about you, pal?' Jack asked Lukas, the new bar-man. 'You follow the fights? You know Benny Shapiro?'
'I see his name in the papers, that's all. To tell you the truth, Mr. Diamond, I watch baseball.'
'Nobody knows,' Jack said. He looked at Elaine. 'But Elaine knows, don't you, baby? Tell them what you said tonight at the light.'
'I don't want to say, Jack.' She smiled.
'Go ahead.'
'It makes me blush.'
'Never mind that, just tell them what you said.'
'All right. I said Benny fights as good as Jack Diamond makes love.'
Everybody at the bar laughed, after Jack laughed.
'That means he's a cinch to be champ,' Jack said.
The mood of the club was on the rise and midnight seemed only a beginning. But forty minutes behind the bar was enough for Jack. Jack, though he had tended bar in his time, was not required to do manual labor. He was a club owner. But it's a kick to do what you don't have to do, right? Jack put on his coat and sat alongside Elaine. He put his hand under her loose blond hair, held her neck, kissed her once as everyone looked in other directions. Nobody looked when Jack kissed his ladies in public.
'Jack is back,' he said.
'I'm glad to see him,' Elaine said.
Benny Shapiro walked through the door and Jack leaped off his chair and hugged him with one arm, walked him to a bar stool.
'I'm a little late,' Benny said.
'Where's the girl?'
'No girl, Jack. I told you it was a man. I owed some insurance.'
'Insurance? You win a fight, break a man's nose, and then go out and pay your insurance?'
'For my father. I already stalled the guy two weeks. He was waiting. Woulda canceled the old man out in the morning. I figure, pay the bill before I blow the dough.'
'Why don't you tell somebody these things? Who is this prick insurance man?'
'It's okay, Jack, it's all over.'
'Imagine a guy like this'?' Jack said to everybody.
'I told you I always liked Benny,' Filetti said.
'Get us a table, Herman,' Jack said. 'Benny's here.'
Herman Zuckman, counting money behind the bar, turned to Jack with an amazed look.
'I'm busy here, Jack.'
'Just get us a table, Herman. '
'The tables are all full, Jack. You can see that. We already turned away three dozen people. Maybe more.'
'Herman, here beside me is the next welterweight champion of the world who's come to see us, and all you're doing is standing there making the wrong kind of noise.'
Herman put the money in a strongbox under the bar, then moved two couples away from a table. He gave them seats at the bar and bought them a bottle of champagne.
'You feeling all right?' Jack asked Benny when they all sat down. 'No damage?'
'No damage, just a little headache.'
'Too much worrying about insurance. Don't worry anymore about shit like that. '
'Maybe he's got a headache because he got hit in the head,' Charlie Filetti said.
'He didn't get hit in the head,' Jack said. 'Murphy couldn't find Benny's head. Murphy couldn't find his own ass with a compass. But Benny found Murphy's head. And his nose.'
'How does it feel to break a man's nose?' Elaine asked.
'That's a funny question,' Benny said. 'But to tell the truth you don't even know you're doing it. It's just another punch. Maybe it feels solid, maybe it don't.'
'You don't feel the crunch, what the hell good is it?' Jack said.
Filetti laughed. 'Jack likes to feel it happen when the noses break, right Jack?'
Jack mock-backhanded Filetti, who told him: 'Don't get your nose out of joint, partner'-and he laughed some more. 'I remember the night that big Texas oil bozo gave Jack lip. He's about six eight and Jack breaks a bottle across his face at the table, and then you couldn't stop laughing, Jack. The son of a bitch didn't know what hit him. Just sat there moppin' up his blood. Next day I go around to tell him what it costs to give lip to Jack and he says he wants to apologize. Gives me a grand to make Jack feel good. Remember that, Jack'?'
Jack grinned.
The Reagans, Billy and Tim, came into the club and everybody knew it. They were brawny boys from the Lower West Side, dockworkers as soon as they knew they were men, that God had put muscles in their backs to alert them to that fact. Behind his back people called Billy The Omadhaun, a name he'd earned at seventeen when in a drunken rage he threw repeated football blocks at the crumbling brick tenement he lived in. Apart from the bleeding scrapes and gouges all over his body, an examination disclosed he had also broken both shoulders. His brother Tim, a man of somewhat larger wit, discovered upon his return from the Army in 1919 that beer-loading was no more strenuous than ship-loading, and far more lucrative. Proprietorship of a small speakeasy followed, as Tim pursued a prevailing dictum that to establish a speakeasy what you needed was one room, one bottle of whiskey, and one customer.
'That's a noisy bunch,' Elaine said when they came in.
'It's the Reagans,' said Filetti. 'Bad news.'
'They're tough monkeys,' Jack said, 'but they're pretty good boys.'
'The big one's got a fist like a watermelon,' Benny said.
'That's Billy,' Jack said. 'He's tough as he is thick.'
Jack waved to the Reagans, and Tim Reagan waved and said, 'Hello, Jack, howsa boy?'
'How's the gin in this joint?' Billy asked Joe Vignola in a voice that carried around the room. Herman Zuckman looked up. Customers eyed the Reagans.
'The best English gin is all we serve,' Vignola told him.
'Right off the boat for fancy drinkers like yourselves.'
'Right out of Jack's dirty bathtub,' Billy said.
'No homemade merchandise here,' Vignola said. 'Our customers get only the real stuff. '
'If he didn't make it then he stole it,' Billy said. He looked over at Jack Diamond. 'Ain't that so, Jack?'
'If you say so, Billy,' Jack said.
'Hey, he can get in trouble with that kind of talk,' Filetti said.
'Forget it,' Jack said. 'Who listens to a drunk donkey Irishman?'
'Three of the good gins,' Billy told Vignola. 'Right away.'
'Comin' up,' said Vignola, and he rolled his eyes, dropped the serving tray he carried under his arm, but caught it just before it hit the floor, then lofted it and caught it again, well over his head, and spun it on the index finger of
