Detective Kevin Hoffman briefly regarded his handiwork. He replaced the knife in its scabbard beneath his pant leg. Then removing his gloves, he stepped out into the vacant hallway and exited the central lock-up. There were spots of blood on his shoes.
Dutch Schultz exited the Hotel Astor to his waiting Packard Phaeton. The sun was bright and the birds chirped overhead. He should be in a good mood, having just had a series of his sexual fetishes indulged by the two working girls he’d paid well for the efforts. But the debacle at Liberty Hall haunted him, and if anything, he only got madder and more determined that he was going to take over the Harlem rackets from those coons who were laughing up their sleeve at him. Nor could he believe that Luciano and the others on the commission were giving him shit about this. They kept telling him he didn’t see the bigger picture and that it was in the interest of everyone to have the colored run the numbers to keep the peace and they’d still be able to take their cut. Fuck that. The kidnap he put on Holstein had been busted up by that broad St. Clair. With his man Bernstein headed for a stint in the big house, busted by that negro cop Rodgers who he’d put the hit out on. These turns of events were absolutely infuriating. And it continued to rile him that St. Clair had been saved by that burr head Matt Henson no less. The same cocksucker who saved Rodgers. He vowed that he too was going to get what was coming to him. Schultz needed to get drunk.
“Take me to my saloon,” he said to his new man behind the wheel. Word had reached him that Vin O’Hara had been gunned down in Newark over a gambling debt. Though so far, no body had been found. Too bad, he’d liked the kid.
As they pulled away from the curb a guy riding a bike passed by their car on the driver’s side, nearly crashing into his pristine vehicle.
“Hey, asshole, if you put a scratch on my car, I’ll lop off your ears,” Schultz yelled.
“Queenie says hello,” the bike rider said, tossing an object through the car’s open window
“Jesus Mary,” the driver said, eyeing the object on the floorboards. Like a cartoon come to life, it was a rough-hewn canon ball-like sphere with a lit fuse sticking out of it. A modification of what had been called coal torpedoes during the Civil War. As his boss screamed and the driver reached for the bomb, the thing went off. The explosion blew the roof off the Packard, sending the shorn metal and one of the driver’s severed arms pinwheeling through the air. Schultz had managed to get partially out the rear door, and was sent flying through the air across the sidewalk. He collided with the brick face of a building, breaking numerous bones, his clothes partially burned away and the skin dangling like tinsel from his scorched back and legs. But he was still breathing.
The bomb thrower was Venus Melenaux dressed in knickers, rolled up sleeves and a newsboy cap. She rode on, ditching the bike a few blocks away in an alley where she’d left a skirt to wear to disguise herself as a lady.
At the hospital that afternoon, as reporters were kept at bay by the police, his hoodlums stationed in the hallway, the Dutchman was consumed with fever and frustration. Morphine pulsed in his veins. He was in traction and wrapped in bandaging. A nurse put a finger to her lips for her co-workers to be quiet as they witnessed his mumblings interspersed with rants.
“Yeah, I did him good. Tied a rag soaked in clap sores around his eyes, leaked in and mad him crazy in a Siberian tiger who rode him till he got home.”
“The last train carried the loot all the way under the mountain of the moon where it’ll never be found only I know the way.” He would chuckle and thrash, rattle on and at various intervals remain silent for long stretches.
“The prince is sure to come to dinner if the feathered octopus says so. But the cosmic girls piloting the blimps will want orange payment.”
As the setting sun projected light and shadow slanting though the Venetian blinds, he’d been quiet for nearly half an hour. From somewhere nearby a radio broadcast a swing orchestra. The sound muffled through the walls of Schultz’s room. During a break, the announcer did a commercial for Clicquot Club Pale Dry Ginger Ale. Schultz licked his chapped lips and began mumbling.
“Yes, yes, of course,” he gulped, “Henson is not to be touched until the time of the sun goddesses returns with her forever light of blue. Oh, great and awful Grim Destroyer, grant me this passage down the tunnel of the seven spears that I too may rescue the fruit cups.”
As the wounded gangster babbled on, Matt Henson received an envelope by messenger at his residence. It had the look of something you’d get inviting you to a dinner party. Inside was a note on cardstock. He read this and set this and envelope aside. At his cupboard, he had a taste of his bathtub hooch and sat in his lounge chair in the living room, staring at the mantle but not seeing it. As Kodama had taught him in the monastery in Kyoto, he centered himself in himself to reach the exquisite state of unconcerned immersion. He moved his mind past
