innocents were nicked by crossfire. So if you didn't run away, you might eventually be obliged to duck. It was the price of being Jack's companion.
'Oh, sweet mother,' Flossie said when the reality of The Goose hit her. Her face collapsed then, perhaps into a vision of Billy Blue. She was having a good time just before Billy got it, too.
'I'll call the dicks, have 'em come down and pick him up,' said Packy, nerve ends flaring, spinning on a proprietor's understandable confusion.
'Pick him up for what?' Jack said. 'Sitting in a car?'
'I can think of half a dozen charges if necessary,' I said. 'Getting them here seems to be the priority.'
Packy was already at the phone. Hubert locked the front door and said the two men were still in the maroon sedan, fifty feet from The Parody, across the street.
'Maybe you should just stay here all night,' I said. Jack nodded, aware of that possibility. Milligan pushed his chair away from the table, but didn't get up, an ambiguous gesture which suited an ex-cop in such a situation.
'You don't know if they'll come or not,' Packy said after his call. 'I got Conlon on the desk, the prick. You never know what they're gonna do for you. Or to you. He said the lieutenant was at a big fire up in the West Albany railroad shops. He'll try to tear a car loose. The prick, the prick.'
'They want me dead, too,' Jack said.
'I never liked that Conlon,' Milligan said, 'but I never took a backstep from him or any of them up there. I'll call him.'
'It's not your problem, Milligan,' Jack said, amused by the old man's concern.
''I always try to keep down violence in the city,' said Milligan. 'Valuable citizens involved here'-and he gave me a quick eye and a wink and went to the phone. I was left to look at Jack, who'd barely been able to move a shotglass with his left arm all night. He was living mainly by the use of one hand, a liability, should he be forced to confront The Goose in any physical way. Hubert was a good shot, which was one reason Jack hired him; but so was The Goose, and who knew about his faceless helper? Jack would be on the short end of any fight. a fact I was just coming to understand.
Milligan came back. 'I called Cap Ronan, but no answer. Maybe he's out at the fire, too. Then I called Conlon again and told him the trouble here personally. He got the message.' Milligan sat down and waited, though he was free to leave. But he would then miss how it all came out, miss the test of cop-to-cop influence. No police came. Sorry, Milligan.
I've since concluded Jack was right. They would have welcomed his assassination, were perhaps even aware one was impending. The police were called often about Jack during this period: Did Diamond get it yet?… He's going to get it tonight. I sensed then, my innocence on such matters at last thinning out, that Jack was not really an enemy of the police as much as he was an object of their envy. I can imagine a roomful of them talking about ways to annihilate his privilege.
Hubert announced from the door: 'They put their headlights on. They're moving.'
'Thank God,' said the Floss.
'They're probably not going anyplace,' Jack said. And he was right again. Within a few minutes they had parked facing the opposite direction, on The Parody side of the street now, still about fifty feet away.
'They just wanted to look in,' Jack said.
The car movement prodded all of us except Jack into standing up and moving around. We turned our attention to each other, and finally, one by one, to Jack for the decision was his alone. Go or stay? Barricade or open season? Packy would probably resent, but maybe not resist a barricade fight. Damage would be minimal, apart from any death, but the legend would be immortal, a shrine of gold established in perpetuity.
Only Hubert lacked doubt about what he was to do. His pistol was already part of our little group because of the way he kept fingering it inside his coat pocket. Jack knew what he was doing when he hired Hubert.
'You have an extra pistol?' Jack asked Packy.
'How many? I got a collection.'
'Two then, and shells.'
Packy unlocked a closet beneath the back bar and brought out a pair of unmatched handguns, one an old Smith and Wesson.32 which I came to know well, its patent dating to 1877, an ugly little bone-handled, hammerless bellygun that was giving in to rust and had its serial number at the base of the butt filed away. No serious gunfighter would have given it room in the cellar. Packy had probably bartered it for beer. Useless, foolhardy, aggravating weapon. It had a broken mechanism behind the firing pin then and still has, but under ideal circumstances it would fire, and it still will. Ugly, deformed little death messenger, like a cobra on a crutch.
'This is insane,' I finally said. 'We sit here watching a man prepare for a gun battle, and we know damn well there are other ways to solve the problem. The whole world hasn't gone nuts. Why not call the state police?'
'Call the governor,' Jack said. 'He'll want to keep me healthy.'
'Not a bad idea,' I said.
'Call my relatives in Philadelphia,' Jack said. 'Call your own relatives. Call all your friends and tell them we've got an open house here, free booze. Build up a mob in fifteen minutes. '
'Another brilliant idea,' I said.
'But what do I do tomorrow night'?' Jack said.
He loaded one of Packy's pistols while we thought about that one. Flossie decided she was not ready for fatalism.
'If you go upstairs, he'll never find you,' she said.
'Where upstairs?'
'My upstairs. Where I go in a pinch.'
'You got a place upstairs?'
'A place, yeah. But not really a place.'
'He comes in here, don't you figure he'll look upstairs?'
'He'd never find my place, that's the whole point. If you're up there and we go, and the place is dark, he'd never find you in a thousand years. It ain't even in this same building.'
'The Goose is thick, but thorough,' Jack said. 'I wouldn't trust him not to find it.'
'Then let's go meet the Polack son of a bitch on the street,' Hubert said. 'Goddamn fucking sitting ducks here, the hell with it.'
'None of this makes sense,' I said. 'Going, staying, not getting any help, not even trying to get any.'
'One night at a time,' Jack said. 'You work it out slow. I know a lot of dead guys tried to solve a whole thing all at once when they weren't ready. And listen. It's also time you all cleared out.'
''I think I'll have another beer,' I said, and I sat down at the end barstool farthest from the door. Milligan sat alongside me and said, 'I'll have one for the road.'
'I'll be closing up after one drink,' Packy said, going behind the bar. 'I'll put the lights out and leave. I'll get a cop down here if I have to drag him down with a towrope.'
Jack shrugged.
'Upstairs then,' he said to Flossie. 'I guess that's the place.'
'Follow me,' she said.
'Is there a way back down except through here?'
'Two stairways,' Packy said. 'It's an old loft. They used to have a peanut butter factory up there.'
'Jesus, a peanut butter factory?'
'It faces the other side, on Dongan Avenue, and there's no windows. Flossie is right. Nobody'd ever think we were connected to it. Just a quirk of these antique buildings.
They made connections you wouldn't believe in these old relics.'
'Nothing'll happen if The Goose doesn't come in here,' I said. 'Isn't that right?'
'I don't think he'll come inside anyplace,' Jack said, 'and he don't want to hurt anybody but me. But he's a maniac, so how do you know anything he'll do? You all should wait for Flossie to come back down and then clear the hell out of here. Hubert and I can wait it out.'
That seemed workable. But I said, 'I'll keep you company,' and Jack laughed and laughed. I didn't think it was that funny, but he said, 'All right, let's move,' and I took my bottle of beer and followed him and Hubert to the place where there was no longer any peanut butter.
