William Kennedy - Legs

Jack came to Albany to see me four days after my time on the mountain. He was full of Europe and its glories, the spas at Bad Homburg and Wiesbaden, the roulette and baccarat in the casinos where croupiers spoke six languages, the eloquent slenderness of the Parisian whore. He came to my office with Fogarty; he was in town on other business we didn't discuss but which I presume was beer supply for his expanding clientèle. He handed me five hundred cash as my initial retainer.

"What do I do for this?"

"Buy a ticket to Europe."

"Jack, I've got no good reason to go to Europe."

"You owe it to your body," he said. "All that great wine and great food."

"All right, maybe," I said. But what, really, did I need with this kind of action? Where was the profit? Jack merely said he'd be in touch within the week and that was that. Then I got a weird call at three the next morning from him, saying he'd decided to go to New York immediately instead of next week and leave for Europe in the afternoon if he got the booking, and was I ready, did I live in control of the quick decision or was I going to take a week to think it over? It meant being in Manhattan in about nine or ten hours and committing myself to the booking and turning off my practice. He kept saying, "Well? Well? What do you think?" And so I said, "All right, yes," against all sane judgment, and he said, "You're a winner, Marcus," and I rolled over and went back for two more hours. Then I closed off my Albany life with four phone calls and caught the ten thirty train to New York.

A fox terrier leaped overboard, an apparent suicide, the day the news broke aboard ship that Charlie Northrup's bloodstained Buick was found in a Sixty-first Street garage near the Brooklyn Army Base. The garage was owned by Vannie Higgins, a pal of Jack's and the crown prince of Long Island rum-runners. Oxie and a Brooklyn couple, the wife a pal of Alice's, were arrested in their apartment with an arsenal: tear-gas grenades, ammo, flares, fountain-pen pistols, bulletproof vests, and enough explosives to blow up a city block. Brooklyn war with Capone, said the papers. Oxie said only that he was sleeping on Jack's porch at Acra when two men he wouldn't identify woke him and offered him fifty bucks to take the Buick to New York and dump it. Cops saw him and the other man near a Fifty-eighth Street pier acting suspiciously, and Oxie admitted that the blocks in the Buick were to be used to run it over the stringpiece.

We were two days out of New York on the Belgenland, bound for Plymouth and Brussels, and suddenly our foursome-Jack, Count Duschene, Classy Willie Green, and myself-was the center of all attention. Jack was traveling under the name of John Nolan, a name of notable nautical import, and he got away with it until the radio brought news bulletins from the New York City police commissioner, a feisty old Irishman named Devane, that Jack was fleeing from a foul murder and was now on the high seas, bound for England to buy dope.

He wasn't wanted by the police, but Devane felt it his duty to alert the nations of Europe that a fiend was approaching. The Northrup car was the subject of daily bulletins in the ship's newspaper, and as the mystery of what happened to Charlie intensified, so did Jack's celebrity. Passengers snapped his picture, asked for his autograph, assured him they didn't believe such a nice person as he was would have anything to do with such terrible goings on.

The fox terrier: He appeared as I stood on the sports deck near the rail, while Jack was shooting skeet. I saw nothing chasing the dog, which came at me in a blur of brown and white, but there must have been something, for he was panicky or perhaps suddenly maddened. He took a corner at high speed, dead-ended into a bulkhead, turned around, and leaped through the rail, flailing like a crazy-legged circus clown falling off a tightrope into a net. I saw him surface once, go into a wave, bob up again, and then vanish. I doubt anyone else saw it.

A man finally came toward me at a brisk pace and asked if I'd seen his dog, and I said, yes, I'd just seen it leap overboard.

"Leap overboard?" the man said, stunned by the concept.

"Yes. He leaped."

"He wasn't thrown?"

'"Nobody threw him, I can tell you that. He jumped. "

"A dog wouldn't leap overboard like that."

He looked at me, beginning to believe I'd killed his dog. I assured him I'd never seen such a thing either, but that it was true, and just then he looked past me and said, "That's Legs Diamond," the dog instantly forgotten, the man already turning to someone to pass along his discovery. In a matter of minutes a dozen people were watching Jack shoot. He had been reloading during my encounter and saw the crowd before he put the shotgun again to his shoulder. He fired, missed, fired, missed. The crowd tittered, but he looked at them and silenced the titters. He fired again, missed again, fired again, missed again, and thrust the gun angrily at the man in charge of lofting the clay pigeons. Then he and I went quickly down to the parlor where Classy Willie and The Count, a dapper pair, were jointly relieving four other passengers of their vacation money in a poker game. I knew neither The Count nor Willie before I boarded the ship with Jack, but it turned out that The Count was Jack's international associate, an expert bottom dealer who spoke French, German, and Spanish and did not lose his head in the presence of too many forks, and that Classy Willie was a card thief, specializing in ocean liners, who had been hired by Jimmy Biondo to represent him in the dope deal. Willie had a certain suavity behind his pencil-line mustache, but he was also known for his erratic violence on behalf of his employer.

I understood these relationships only much later. At this point in the trip I assumed both men worked for Jack. I asked Jack about Oxie and the car and he said, "I take no responsibility for mugs like him once they're out of my sight."

"Goddamn it, Jack, you've got me involved in the biggest murder case in upstate New York in Christ knows how long and you give me this evasive routine?"

"Who said you're involved? I'm not even involved."

"You're involved. On the radio is involved."

"Tomorrow there'll be an earthquake in Peru and they'll try to stick me with it. "

"Bullshit."

"Shove your bullshit up your ass," he said and walked away.

But he came back an hour later and sat down beside me in a deckchair, where I was brooding on my stupidity and reading Ernest Dimnet on how to think better, and he said, "How's things now?"

"I'm still involved."

"You worry a lot, Marcus. That's a bad sign. Gets you into trouble. "

"I'm in trouble now because I didn't worry enough."

"Listen, you got nothing to be afraid of. Nobody's after your ass, nobody wants to put you on the spot. I never knew a fucking lawyer yet couldn't talk his way out of a sandstorm. You'll do all right if you don't lose your head."

"There was blood in that car, and Oxie was with it. And Oxie is your man. "

"Somebody could've had a nosebleed. For chrissake, don't fuck me AROUND!" And he walked away from me again.

We didn't speak a direct word to each other, apart from pass the salt, for two days. My plan was to get off at Plymouth and get the next boat home. I observed him from a distance, seeing people go out of their way for a look at him playing cards in his shirtsleeves. I saw a blond librarian ask him to dance and begin a thing with him. He was a bootlegger and, as such, had celebrity status, plus permission from the social order to kill, maim, and befoul the legal system, for wasn't he performing a social mission for the masses? The system would stay healthy by having life both ways: first, relishing Jack's achievement while it served a function, then slavering sensually when his head, no longer necessary, rolled. This insight softened my hard line of Northrup. Maybe it was all a bootlegger's feud, which somehow made the consequent death okay. Let others assess the moral obliquity in this.