hangover from the days when Rothstein had money in everybody's mouth, all the way up to the Presidential cabinet. That money had bought Jack a delay on a federal charge of smuggling heroin for Rothstein, the noted bowling pin case, and Jack died without ever having to face up to the evidence against him.
'The fuckers are all the same, all the way to the top,' he said to me one night. 'They'll do you any favor you can pay for.'
But times had changed to a certain unpredictable degree in Manhattan, especially for people like Jack. The new federal crowd was young, imbued with Seaburyism, and still unbuyable. Even if we had found somebody to buy, there was the case of the diminishing bankroll. The first thing Jack did after he got out of the Catskill jail on bail was to take the one hundred and eighty thousand dollars I'd held for him in safe deposit. That still seemed like a lot of money to me, but it wasn't for Jack. He owed everybody: me, the hospital, the doc, his barber, his waiter, the hotel, his driver, Hubert the bodyguard, infinite numbers of bartenders who would now and in the future provide him with service. He was keeping apartments in Troy, Watervliet, Albany, East Greenbush, a house in Petersburg, and probably six or eight other cities I don't know about. He was keeping Kiki. He was subsidizing Alice in Manhattan. And, and most costly of all, he was paying off politicians everywhere to keep his freedom, keeping them from infecting him with further trouble. The one hundred and eighty thousand dollars went in a few months, or so Jack said, though I think he must have kept a secret nest egg somewhere, and if he did, of course, he kept it utterly to himself. He didn't leave the egg with me. I also know Vincent Coll offered him a loan of ten thousand dollars after a nifty Coll snatch of a Saratoga gambler, and a handsome ransom of sixty-five thousand dollars; and Jack took it.
He coped with the money problem like the pragmatist he had come to be. He went back to work. I met him at the Albany Elks Club bar on a steamy August evening after a day at Saratoga had given me nothing but the aesthetic boredom of picking losers under the elms of the track's stylish old clubhouse and paddock. I came back to town alone, feeling curiously empty for no reason I could explain. The emptiness was a new development. I decided, after six beers, that I hadn't felt this way since that day I was sitting alone in the K. of C. library. And when this thought registered, I knew the problem was Jack-related. My life was far from empty professionally. Since Jack's acquittal in Troy the calls were flooding in and I could name my price for trial work. Was it, then, the loss of a political career? Like an amputated leg, that particular part of me did pain, even though it wasn't there, and yet I was simultaneously relieved at never having to be a politician. It was such a vapid way to spend your life, and a slavish game, too, slavish to the political clubroom crowd, even to the Elks Club where I was standing, a superb fragment of all I found stagnant, repulsive, and so smugly corrupt in Albany. The Democratic bagman, though it was two months till election, was already in his corner of the card room (two city detectives watching the door), accepting tithes from everybody who fed at the county courthouse or city hall troughs-janitors, lawyers growing fat from the surrogate court, vendors, bankers, cops, firemen, secretaries, clerks, contractors. The pattern was consistent with Jack's notion of how an empire should be run. Everybody pays.
Just as I liked Jack, I also liked the old bagman. He was a dandy and a curmudgeon and a wily and wise old Irishman who had read his Yeats and Wilde as well as his Croker and Tweed. I also liked the men who were next to me at the bar. They were men I'd been raised with, men who knew my father and my uncles: tradesmen and sportswriters and other lawyers and politicians and factory hands who liked pinochle and euchre and salesmen who liked to bowl and drink beer, and, of course, of course, Jack.
Most of the Elks who talked frankly with me were confused by his presence. They knew what his minions had done at the Elks Club in Catskill, which bothered them far more than the kidnapping of Streeter or making Charlie Northrup disappear. They didn't really want Jack around. But they were also awed when he walked in, flattered when he bought them a drink, and marked forever when he put his arm on their shoulder and talked baseball with them. Hello, Bill! Hello, Jack! Brotherrrrrrrrrrrrr!
'Counselor,' Jack said to me when he moved in alongside me at the bar, 'I'm going to buy you a new hat.'
''So you're at that again,' I said.
'The heat must've got to it, Marcus. It's dead for sure. Take a look.'
I looked at my trusty old Panama, which had aged considerably since I last examined it, I must admit. 'Well, it's getting old, Jack, but then so are we all. And I do feel compassion for things that are deteriorating visibly.'
'Whataya say, you want to take a ride?'
'Sounds sinister, Jack. My father warned me about taking rides with strange gangsters. '
'Little business trip, and what the hell, it's too goddamn hot to stand here smelling armpits. The air'll do you good. Blow the stink off you. '
'You're right, I could stand a change. Who's driving?'
'Hubert.'
'Ah, Hubert. I still find it hard to believe you've got somebody named Hubert in your employ.'
'Good kid, Hubert. Does what he's told.'
We left the bar and walked out to the top of the club's stone stoop, which faced on State Street. It was middle evening, the streetlights on, but the sun still making long shadows. We looked up toward Capitol Park, where Hubert went for the car, where General Philip Sheridan, another Albany Irishman, sat astride his horse, riding into eternity. There were only the two of us on the stoop, which struck me as unnecessarily foolish, given the recurring rumor of gunmen out to get Jack.
'We make nice targets for your friends here,' I said.
'Fuck it. You can't live like a rat in a hole forever.'
I could only agree with that, which straightened my back. How little encouragement it takes to place oneself in jeopardy.
'What's this business trip you've got planned?'
'A small delivery to a customer.'
'You don't mean you want me to join you on a booze run.'
'Relax, would I do that to you? We won't be in the same vehicle with the stuff. And it's only beer. We'll follow the truck, well back. Plenty safe. Up to Troy, back down to Packy Delaney's. It's a favor for Packy and I'm glad to do it. I like The Pack.'
'I do myself.'
'I'm glad for the ride, too,' Jack said. 'Jesus, I get bored easy lately. '
'We've got the same affliction.'
Hubert pulled up and we headed for Stell's, a busy Troy brewery run by a gang of beer-savvy Dutchmen Jack had been doing business with for years. But the pickup and delivery of the moment would be a departure for Jack: made in a borrowed truck by the man himself, notable status reduction. His excuse was he was doing Packy a favor. 'He's in a bind with his Albany supplier, hates the beer he has, but he's gotta take it.' It proved to be the other way around, Packy responding to Jack's request for a loan with a pragmatic substitute-a deal. Packy would buy the beer at Jack's price, even though he didn't need it; Jack would show a profit, Packy would avoid making a cash loan that would probably never be repaid, and Packy would have the beer, at least, to show for his investment.
We drove up Broadway and through North Albany, past the streets of my own neighborhood: Emmett, Albany, Mohawk, Genesee, Erie, then the park in front of Sacred Heart Church on Walter and North Second Streets, a view which provided me with a pang of recognition and a sliver of insight which made this trip worth recording. I remembered how my father looked, sitting on a park bench in the years just before his death, teeth too prominent, like a skull's mindless grin, his brain almost as white as his hair, watching the trolleys go to Troy and back. I tried to imagine what that man, who never stole a nickel in his life, would make of his son being on Jack's payroll, a speculation which, I know, reveals more of me than of the old man.
My father was not a religious man in his youth and middle years. He routinely did his Easter duty, kept the Commandments, but often slept through the Sunday slate of masses. Yet he ended his days at daily mass, even serving for the priest when the altar boy of the day overslept. I've long tried to persuade myself that his final conversion to piety was more than simplistic fear of the next, for my father was complex, a teacher, a Latin scholar who named me for his favorite Stoic. Remembering him, then, at that moment by the park when I was also conscious of how Jack was regularly telling his beads, and when l was questioning my own irrational reading of Aquinas long after I'd lost my faith, I knew all three of us were hounded by religious confusion: Jack out of Saint Anne's, both my father and I out of Sacred Heart, products all of the ecclesiastical Irish sweat glands, obeisant
