Joe (Speed) Fogarty picked me up at the Catskill railroad station, and when I saw him I said, 'Eddie Diamond, right?'
'No,' he said. 'Eddie died in January. Fogarty's the name.'
''You look like his twin.'
'So I'm told.'
'You're Mr. Diamond's driver-or is he called Legs?'
'Nobody who knows him calls him anything but Jack. And I do what he asks me to do.'
'Very loyal of you.'
'That's the right word. Jack likes loyalty. He talks about it.'
'What does he say?'
'He says, 'Pal, I'd like you to be loyal. Or else I'll break your fucking neck.' '
'The direct approach.'
We got into Jack's custom, two-tone (green and gray) Cadillac sedan with whitewalls and bulletproof glass, armor panels, and the hidden pistol and rifle racks. The latter were features I didn't know existed until the following year when Jack had the occasion to open the pistol rack one fateful night. Now what I noticed were the black leather seats and the wooden dashboard with more gauges than any car seemed to need.
'How far is it to Jack's house?' I asked.
'We're not going to Jack's house. He's waiting for you over at the Biondo farm.'
'That wouldn't be Jimmy Biondo, would it?'
'You know Jimmy'?'
'I met him once.'
'Just once? Lucky you. The bum is a throwback. Belongs in a tree.'
'I'd tend to sympathize with that view. I met him during the Hotsy Totsy business. We swapped views one day about a client of mine, Joe Vignola.'
'Joe. Poor Joe'-and Fogarty gave a sad little chuckle.
'Some guys'd be unlucky even if they were born with rabbits' feet instead of thumbs.'
'Then you knew Joe.'
'I used to go to the Hotsy when I was in New York even before I knew Jack. It was quite a place before the big blowup. Plenty of action, plenty of gash. I met my wife there, Miss Miserable of 1929.'
''So you're married.'
'Was. It broke up in four months. That dame would break up a high mass.'
It was Sunday morning, not quite noon, when Fogarty left the station in Catskill and headed west toward East Durham, where Jimmy Biondo lived. My head was full of Catskill images, old Rip Van Winkle who probably would have been hustling applejack instead of sleeping it off if he'd been alive now, and those old Dutchmen with their magical ninepins that lulled you into oblivion and the headless horseman riding like a spook through Sleepy Hollow and throwing his head at the trembling Ichabod. The Catskills were magical for me because of their stories, as well as their beauty, and I was full of both, despite the little crater of acid in the pit of my stomach. After all, I was actually going to Sunday dinner with one of the most notorious men in America. Me. From Albany.
'You know, two and a half hours ago I was talking to a whole roomful of cops.'
'Cops? I didn't know cops worked in Albany on Sunday.'
'Communion breakfast. I was the speaker and I told them a few stories and then looked out over their scrubbed faces and their shiny buttons and explained that they were our most important weapon in saving the nation from the worst scourge in its history.'
'What scourge?'
'Gangsterism.'
Fogarty didn't laugh. It was one of his rare humor failures.
Fogarty was the only man I ever met through Jack who wasn't afraid to tell me what was really on his mind. There was an innocence about him that survived all the horror, all the fear, all the crooked action, and it survived because Jack allowed it to survive. Until he didn't allow it anymore. Fogarty told me he was eleven when he understood his own weak spot. It was his nose. When tapped on the nose in a fight, he bled, and the sight and feel of the blood made him vomit. While he vomited, the other guy punched him senseless. Fogarty avoided fistfights, but when they were unavoidable he packed his nose with the cotton he always carried. He usually lost his fights, but after he understood his nose, he never again bled to the vomit point.
He was thirty-five when I got to know him, pretty well recovered from a case of TB he'd picked up during his last year of college. He had a Fordham stringency that had gone sour on religion, but he still read books, liked O'Neill, and could talk a little Hamlet, because he'd played Laertes once in school. Jack used him as a driver but also trusted him with money and let him keep the books on beer distribution. But his main role was as Jack's sidekick. He looked like Eddie. And Eddie had died of TB.
Fogarty was working as a bartender for Charlie Northrup when he first met Jack. He talked flatteringly about Jack's history when they sat across from each other at Northrup's roadhouse bar. Jack was new in the mountains and he quizzed Fogarty on the scene. What about the sheriff and the judges? Were they womanizers? Gamblers? Queers? Drunks? Merely greedy? Who ran beer in the mountains besides Northrup and the Clemente brothers?
Fogarty gave Jack the answers, and Jack hired him away from Northrup and gave him the pearl-handled.32 Eddie Diamond once owned. Fogarty carried it without loading it, giving it the equivalent menace of a one-pound rock. 'You boys don't know it, but I've got you all covered with a one-pound rock. '
'I don't want to get into any heavy stuff' is what he explained to Jack when he took the pistol.
And Jack told him: 'I know you better than that, Speed. I don't ask my tailor to fix my teeth.'
This arrangement suited Fogarty down to his socks. He could move among the big fellows, the tough fellows, without danger to himself. If he did not fight, he would not bleed.
Fogarty turned onto a winding narrow dirt road that climbed a few minor hills and then flattened out on a plateau surrounded by trees. Jimmy Biondo's place was an old white farmhouse with green shutters and green shingled roof. It sat at the end of the drive, and behind it stood a large unpainted barn as dilapidated as the house was elegant. Three moving shapes sat on the long front porch, rocking in green wicker rockers, their faces hidden from me by the newspapers they were all reading. The faces opened themselves to us when Fogarty stopped on the grass beside the house, and Jack, the first to stand, threw down the paper and bounded down the stairs to greet me. The woman, Alice, held the paper in her lap and looked at me with a smile. The second man was Jimmy Biondo, who owned the place but no longer used it, and rented it to Jack. He detached himself from Andy Gump to give me a look. 'Welcome to God's country, Marcus,' Jack said. He was in white ducks, brown and white wing tips, and a yellow silk sport shirt. A tan blazer hung on the back of his rocker.
'God's country?' I said. 'Fogarty told me Jimmy Biondo owned this place.'
Jack laughed and Jimmy actually smiled. A smile from Jimmy lit up the world like a three-watt bulb.
'Look at this guy,' Jack said to his wife and Jimmy, 'a lawyer with a sense of humor. Didn't I tell you he was beautiful?'
'I only let my mother call me beautiful,' I said.
What can I say? Jack laughed again. He liked my lines. Maybe it was my delivery or my funny old hat. Fogarty recognized me from the hat as soon as he saw me. It was all discolored at the front from where I touched it, crown and brim; the brim was split on the side and the black band raveling a little. It happened to be my favorite hat. People don't understand that some men need tradition as much as others need innovation. I doffed the hat when Alice came down the steps and characteristically asked me after our handshake, 'Are you hungry? Have you had breakfast?'
'Catholic eggs and Irish bacon. That's extra greasy. About three hours ago at a communion breakfast.'
