William Kennedy - Legs

"I really hardly knew him, saw him in Loretta's a few times, that's all, until he gave Billy Blue his. Then one night about a month later he come in and buys me a real drink. None of that circus water Loretta dished us out when the chumps were buying. Jack bought the real stuff for us.

" 'I'm sorry about that whole scene, Stars,' he said, 'but we had to settle a score. Your guinea friend tried to kill me six months ago.'

"Jack took my fingers and ran them over the back of his head where he said there were still some shotgun pellets. It was very bumpy behind his left ear.

" 'Were you scared, Stars?'

" 'Was I! I been sick over it. I can't sleep.'

" 'Poor kid. I was really sorry to do that to you.'

"He was still holding my hand and then he rubbed my hair. The first thing you know we were back up in my room and we really got to know one another, I'll tell the world."

The Wilson, Rothstein, O'Hagan, and Blue confessions came out of Jack so totally without reservation that I told him, "I believe you about Northrup now."

"Sometimes I tell the truth."

"I don't know as I'm so sure why you've told me all these stories, though."

"I want you to know who you're working for."

"You seem to trust me."

"If you ever said anything, you'd be dead. But you know some people well enough they'd never talk. I know you."

"I take that as a compliment, but I'm not looking for information. Now or ever."

"I know that. You wouldn't get a comma out of me if I didn't want to give it. I told you, I want you to know who I am. And who I used to be. I changed. Did you get that? I come a long way. A long fucking way. A man don't have to stay a bum forever."

"I see what you mean."

"Yeah, maybe you do. You listen pretty good. People got to have somebody listen to them."

"I get paid for that."

"I'm not talking about pay."

"I am. I'm for sale. It's why I went to law school. I listen for money. I also listen for other reasons that have nothing to do with money. You're talking about the other reasons. I know that."

"I knew you knew, you son of a bitch. I knew it that night you cut Jolson up that you talked my language. That's why I sent you the Scotch."

"You're a prescient man."

"You bet your ass. What does that mean?"

"You don't have to know."

"Blow it out your whistle, you overeducated prick."

But he laughed when he said it.

My memories of Jack in Europe during our first stops are like picture postcards. In the first he walks off the Belgenland at Antwerp in company of two courteous, nervous Belgian gendarmes in their kicky bucket hats and shoulder straps. He had hoped to sneak off the ship alone and meet us later, but helpful passengers pointed him out to the cops and they nailed him near the gangway.

Down he went but not without verbal battle, assertion of his rights as an American citizen, profession of innocence. In the postcard Jack wears his cocoa-brown suit and white hat and is held by his left arm, slightly aloft. The holder of the arm walks slightly to the rear of him down the gangplank. The second officer walks to their rear entirely, an observer. The pair of ceremonial hats and Jack's oversized white fedora dominate the picture. They led the angry Jack to an auto, guided him into the back seat, and sat on either side of him. A small crowd followed the action. The car turned a corner off the pier into the thick of an army that had been lying in wait for the new invasion of Flanders. Poppies perhaps at the ready, fields of crosses under contract in anticipation of battle with the booze boche from the west. Four armored cars waited, along with six others like the one carrying Jack, each with four men within and at least fifty foot-patrolmen armed with clubs or rifles.

You can see Jack's strong suit was menace.

We left Belgium the next day, the twerps, as Jack called them, finally deciding Jack must be expelled by train. Jack chose Germany as his destination and we bought tickets. The American embassy involved itself by not involving itself, and so Jack was shunted eastward to Aachen, where the Belgian cops left off and the German Polizei took over. A pair of beefy Germans in mufti held his arms as he looked over his shoulder and said to me through a frantic, twisted mouth: "Goddamn it, Marcus, get me a goddamn lawyer."

Instead of turning the money over to Classy Willie, Jack gave a hundred and eighty thousand of it to me, some in a money belt, which gave me immediate abdominal tensions, and the rest inside my Ernest Dimnet best seller, The Art of Thinking, out of which we cut most of the pages. I carried thirty thousand in thousand-dollar bills in the book and kept the book in the pocket of my hound's-tooth sport jacket until I reached Albany. The money that didn't fit into the book and the money belt we rolled up and slid into the slots in Jack's bag reserved for the jewels. And the bag became mine.

Police were still dragging lakes all over the Catskills. They preferred to do that rather than follow the tip that led to a six-mile stretch of highway near Saugerties that was paved the day after Charlie disappeared.

Jack's home was searched; Alice was nowhere to be found. A shotgun and rifle in a closet were confiscated. Fogarty was seminude with a buxom Catskill waitress of comparable nudity when the raid came.

Life went on.

I noticed that Jack had a luminous quality at certain moments, when he stood in shadow. I suspect a derangement of my vision even now, for I remember that the luminosity intensified when Jack said that I should carry a pistol to protect myself (he meant to protect his money) and then offered me one, which I refused.

"I'll carry the stuff, but I won't defend it," I said. "If you want that kind of protection give it to The Count to take home."

Since that perception of Jack's luminosity, I've read of scientists working to demystify psychic phenomena who claim to have photographed energy emitted by flowers and leaves. They photograph them while they are living, then cut them and photograph them in progressive stages of dying. The scientists say that the intense light in the living flower or leaf is energy, and that the luminous quality fades slowly until desiccation, at which point it vanishes.

I already spoke of Jack's energy as I saw it that memorable Sunday in the Catskills. The luminosity was further evidence of it, and this finally persuaded me of a world run not by a hierarchy of talents but by a hierarchy of shining energetics. In isolation or defeat some men lapse into melancholia, even catatonia, the death of motion a commonplace symptom. But Jack was volatile in his intensifying solitude, reacting with anger to his buffetings, also trying to convince, bribe, sweet-talk, harass his way out. At Aachen he argued with the German cops, saying, yes, he had the same name as the famous gangster, but he wasn't the same man. In protest of their disbelief he did a kind of Indian war dance in the aisle of the first-class coach, a dance at which one could only marvel. Ah, the creative power of the indignant liar.

I remember my own excitement, the surge of energy I felt rising in myself from some arcane storage area of the psyche when I strapped on the money belt. No longer the voyeur at the conspiracy, I was now an accessory, and the consequence was intoxicating. I felt a need to drink, to further loosen my control center, and I did.

At the bar I found a woman I'd flirted with a day or so earlier and coaxed her back to my cabin. I did not wait to strip her, or myself, but raised her dress swiftly, pulled her underclothing off one leg, and entered her as she sat on the bed, ripping her and myself in the process so that we both bled. I never knew her name. I have no recollection of the color of her hair, the shape of her face, or any word she might have said, but I still have an indelible memory of her pubic region, its color and its shape, at the moment I assaulted it.