William Kennedy - Legs

"Always glad to say hello to Charlie."

"He be glad to say hello to you too because half the two hundred come outa his pocket. Whataya think of that, you Irish fuck?"

"I'll tell you what, you guinea fuck, call Charlie. He tells me it's half his I'll have it for him in the morning."

Jimmy moved his elbow at one of his young gunmen: early twentyish, pencil-line mustache. The gunman dialed, said something in Italian, waited, handed the phone to Jimmy.

"That you, Charlie?" Jimmy said. "I'm with our friend. He wants to know were you my silent partner. Okay. Sure." He handed Jack the phone.

"Charlie, how you doin'? You staying thin? Right, Charlie, that's the only way. You were. You did. So. Yeah. Now I get it. You're not saying this just for Jimmy. You wouldn't con me after all these years. Right. I understand. Let's have a drink one of these days, Charlie. Any time. Beautiful."

Jack hung up and turned to Jimmy. "He said he loaned you twenty grand at fourteen percent."

"He don't say that."

"I just talked to the man. Did you hear me talk to him? What am I, a guy who makes up stories you see with your own eyes?"

"He's in for half, no interest"

"I tell you what, Jimmy. I'll have twenty available in the morning. I'll call you and tell you where to pick it up and you can pay Charlie back. Meantime we still got a deal with what's left."

"Charlie, give me a hundred, you fuckheaded fuck!" Jimmy screamed and stood up, and everybody's pistol came out at the same time. Jack didn't touch his. All the pistols were pointed at all the other pistols. Anybody moved it was ten-way suicide.

"We don't seem to be getting anyplace," Jack said. He lit a Rameses and sat down and crossed his legs. "Why don't you go have a drink and think about life, Jimmy? Think about how rich you'll be when I come back with all that beautiful white stuff. A million four. Is that hard to take or is that hard to take?"

"I'm talkin' to a dead man," Jimmy said.

"Dead men pay no debts, Jimmy."

"Keep lookin' for me," Jimmy said.

"Watch yourself crossing the street," Jack said.

These were atrocious melodramatics, and I would not give them the time of day, despite my trust in Fogarty, except that when Jimmy and his friends left the Monticello and walked down West Sixty-fourth Street, a car came in their direction at low speed and two shotgun blasts from a back window blew apart two of Jimmy's shooters. Jimmy and the other two escaped with only a certain loss of dignity.

Count Duschene later remembered Jack's reaction when he heard the news: "Mustache cocksuckers. Fast as you knock 'em off they bring in another boatload." The rest of the news came out in the morning paper: Murray, with six bullets in him, was not yet dead.

Kiki said that the positively worst time of her life was when she was hiding at Madge's apartment and the knock came on the door and Madge turned to her and said, "Get in the bedroom and hide." So she went first behind Madge's big Morris chair, but then she said to herself, Gee, they'd look here right away, and so she started to roll under Madge's canopy bed with the beaded curtain, but then she said to herself, 'Won't they look under here, too'? And so she stood in the closet behind Madge's summer and winter dresses and coats until she realized that anybody opening the door would look right through the hangers into her great big beautiful brown eyes, and so she took Madge's dyed muskrat everybody thought was mink off the wooden hanger and covered herself with it and rolled into the smallest ball she could make out of herself and faced the wall with her rounded back to the door so they would think the coat had fallen off the hanger on top of a pile of shoes and little boxes and galoshes. And then they'd go away. Yes. Go away. Let me alone.

Right then, Kiki would have said if anyone had asked her, she ordinarily didn't like to be alone. But now it was quite necessary, for she had to figure out what she was going to do with her life. She never had to hide in a closet before, ever. Jack's fault. Her fault too for staying with him, waiting for him. She had decided to leave him for good, truly leave this time and not just go back into show business or take a train home to Boston with her mad money. No. This was the end. Nothing on earth could make her stay with Jack Diamond for another day because he truly did kill people.

She had read all the news stories when he was in Europe, but she didn't read past the parts where they began to say things about him. She'd just throw the papers in the bottom of her closet for Jack because she knew how he loved to save clippings about himself. And what a big stack it got to be! She didn't even read any of the long series of articles they wrote about him because the first one began by calling him Eggs Diamond. Because eggs are yellow. And though she knew Jack wasn't yellow, she didn't really know what color he was. She didn't know anything really deep about him except what he said and what she wanted him to say and what he said was "You're gorgeous in my life" and "You're the most beautiful thing in the world. I deserve you." And she said to that, "And I deserve you, too." And they went into their silk cocoon then. Her warm bed with the pink silk sheets and her white silk nightgown and Jack in his yellow silk pajamas with the green dragon on them, and slowly they took the silk off one another and just smothered themselves in the cocoon and fucked and fucked and fucked. And when they were all through they went to sleep and woke up, and then they fucked and fucked some more and took a shower and went to see Jolson again in Mummy, and had dinner and came back to the cocoon, and didn't they fuck even more? They certainly did. Oh, wasn't that the cat's knickers? Vo-de-oh-do! There was never anything like that in her life before Jack, though she knew about fucking all right, all right. But fucking is one thing and fucking with Jack was another thing altogether. It was not the glitter. Sometimes when you fucked it was just to get something or because you thought you ought to or because you liked his looks and he was nice to you and it was expected of you and you wanted to do what was expected. It was your role to fuck men who were nice because you're only young once, isn't that so? Isn't that why you wanted to be in the glitter dream? To glitter by yourself? And what better way to glitter than to fuck whenever you felt like it? Fuck the best people, the most beautiful people. Do you like to fuck? Oh, I love it, don't you?

But then she met Jack and she didn't want anybody but him. Now it wasn't just liking to fuck. It was liking to fuck Jack. And it was feeling wanted and taken and also taking and also wanting, which was the key to the thing that changed in her. She wanted in a new way. Jack taught her that. She wanted not just for the moment or the hour or the day, but she wanted permanently.

"We'll always live in the cocoon, won't we?"

"Sure, kid."

"We'll make love even when you're seventy-five, won't we?"

"No, kid. I'm not going to live to be seventy-five. I didn't expect to make it to thirty-three."

And that changed her again. She wanted him and wanted what he gave her forever and ever, but now she had to think about outliving him, of this maybe being that last time she would ever put her arms around him and bite his ear and play with his candy cane because then he might get up and get dressed and go out and die. Well, then she wanted him more than ever. She didn't know why. She just called it love because that's what everybody else called it. But it wasn't only that, because now she wanted not just Jack himself but Jack who was going to die. She wanted to kiss and fuck somebody who was going to die. Because when he died, then you had something nobody else could ever get again.