William Kennedy - Legs

Of course Jack never said who shot him. Strangers he could never possibly identify, he told Devane. Didn't get a good look at them. But the would-be assassins were neutral underworld figures, not Jack's enemies and not in Biondo's or Luciano's circle (nor Dutch Schultz's either, who was generally credited with the work at the time). Their neutrality was why Jack let them in.

Their function was to retrieve Charlie Lucky's money, but Jack refused to give it back, claiming finally that Luciano was lying about his role in the transaction. This was not only Jack's error, but also his willful need to affront peril. The visitors' instructions were simple: Get all the money or kill him.

He was sitting on the bed when they took out their guns. He ran at them, swinging the pillow off the bed, swinging in rage and terror, and though both men emptied their pistols, the pillow deflected both their attention and their aim so that only five of twelve bullets hit him. But five is a lot. And the men ran, leaving him for dead.

The Count called me to say that Jack mentioned me just before he went unconscious from his wounds. "Have Marcus take care of Alice and see she doesn't get the short end from those shitkickers up in the country," he told The Count. Then when Alice called me from the hospital and said Jack wanted to see me, I went down, and it turned out he wanted to make his will: a surreptitious ten thousand to Kiki, a token bequest, no more; everything else to Alice. The arrangement seemed to speak for itself: Alice, the true love. But Jack wasn't that easy to read even when he spelled it out himself. Money was only the measure of his guilt and his sense of duty, a pair of admitted formidables, but not his answer to his enduring question.

He was in good spirits when I saw him, his bed near the window so he could hear the city, the roar of the fans spiraling upward from Madison Square Garden during the fights, all the cars on Broadway squealing and tooting, the sirens and bells and yells and shouts of the city wafting Jackward to comfort him, the small comfort being all he would have for two and a half months, for Jack Diamond the organism, was playing tag with adhesions, abscesses and lungs which had the congenital strength of tissue paper. Jack's mail came in sacks and stacks, hundreds upon hundreds of letters during the first weeks, then dwindling to maybe a steady twenty-five a day for a month. A good many were sob stories, asking for his money when he shuffled off. Get well wishes ran second, and dead last were the handful who wanted him dead: filthy dog, dirty scum. Women were motherly, forgiving, and, on occasion, uninhibited: "Please come to my home as soon as you are up and around and I will romp you back to good health. First you can take me on the dining room table, and then in the bathroom on our new green seat, and the third time (I know you will be able to dominate me thrice) on my husband's side of the bed."

"Please when you are feeling better I would like you to please come and drown our six kittens," another woman wrote. "My husband lost everything in the crash. We cannot afford to feed six more mouths, and children come before cats. But I am much too chickenhearted to kill them myself and know you are strong enough to oblige."

"I have a foolproof plan for pass-posting the bookie I bet with," wrote a horseplayer, "but, of course, I will need protection from his violence, which is where you come in as my partner."

"Dear Mr. Legs," a woman wrote, "all my life I work for my boy. Now he gonna go way and leave his momma. He is no dam good. I hope he die. I hope you shoot him for me. I will pay what you think up to fifty-five dollars, which is all the extra I got. But he deserve it for doing such a thing to his momma who gave him her life. His name is Tommy."

"Dear Sir," wrote a man, "I read in the papers where you have been a professional killer. I would like to hire you to remove me from this life. I suppose a man in your position gets many requests like this from people who find existence unbearable. I have a special way I would prefer to die. This would be in lightly cooked lamb fat in my marble bathtub with my posterior region raised so you may shoot several small-caliber bullets into my anus at no quicker than thirty-second intervals until I am dead."

A package came which the police traced, thinking someone was trying to make good on the numerous threats that Jack would never leave the hospital alive. An eight-year-old girl from Reading, Pennsylvania, had sent it-an ounce of holy oil from the shrine of Ste. Anne de Beaupre.

"I read about Mr. Diamond being shot and how his arm is paralyzed, and I have been taught in school to help those who are down and out," the child told police.

"Punk kid," Jack said. "What does she mean down and out?"

On the street in front of Polyclinic little clusters of Jack's fans would gather. A sightseeing bus would pass and the announcer would say, "On your right, folks, is where the notorious Jewish gangster Legs Diamond is dying," and all would crane but none would ever see the lip quivering as he slept or the few gray hairs among all the chestnut, or the pouches of experience under his eyes, or the way his ears stuck out, and how his eyes were separated by a vertical furrow of care just above the nose, or that nose: hooked, Grecian, not Jewish, not Barrym0re's either, merely a creditable piece of work he'd kept from damage, now snorting air. He was twelve pounds under his normal one fifty-two and still five ten and a half while I sat beside his bed with his last will and testament in my pocket for his signature. And he wheezed just like other Americans in their sleep.

I'd been fumbling through a prayer book on Jack's bedside table while he slept and I had turned up a credo I no more accepted as mere coincidence than I did the congruence of his and my pleasure in Rabelais; which is to say I suspected a pattern hovering over our relationship.

The credo read:

You work much harm in these parts, destroying and slaying God's creatures without his leave; and not only have you slain and devoured beasts of the field but you have dared to destroy and slay men made to the image of God: wherefore you are worthy of the gallows as a most wicked thief and murderer; all folk cry out and murmur against you. But I would make peace, Brother Wolf, between them and you, and they shall obtain for you so long as you live, a continual sustenance from the men of this city so that you shall no more suffer hunger, for well I know that you have done all this harm to satisfy your hunger…

This paraphrased perfectly my private plot to forget Charlie Northrup the way everybody else was forgetting him. He was gone off page one, only a subordinate clause in Jack's delightful story. Charlie, thanks for giving us so much of your time. Such fun having a cadaver in the scenario, especially one we can't locate. But, Charlie, please excuse us while we say a little prayer for Jack.

I remember also the passing thought that maybe it would be better if Jack never woke up, and then I remember seeing him wide awake, swathed in hospital-white hygienic purity.

"Hey, Marcus," he said, "great to wake up to a friendly face instead of some snooping cop. How's your ballocks?"

"Friendly toward ladies," I said, and when he laughed he I winced with pain.

"I been dreaming," he said. "Talking to God. No joke."

"Uh-oh."

"Why the hell is it I'm not dead? You figured it out?"

"They were bum shooters? You're not ready to die?"

"No, it's because I'm in God's grace."

"Is that a fact? God told you that?"

"I'm convinced. I thought I was just lucky back in '25 when they hit me. Then when Augie got it, I thought maybe I was as strong as a man can be, you know, in health. But now I think it's because God wants me to live."