William Kennedy - Roscoe

It was 8:04 a.m. and Joey Manucci would be making Roscoe’s coffee at headquarters. But Roscoe was not up for coffee, or even for walking across the street this morning, and so he told Joey by phone to get the car and pick him up at the hotel. Roscoe brewed a Bromo-Seltzer for his stomach, ate the two Hershey almond bars he’d bought last night, all the breakfast he could handle, and took the elevator down to the street.

The heat was already unbearable, a day to sleep in some lakeside shade or loll about in a tub of ice. Roscoe, tie open, cord sport coat on his arm, asked doorman Wally Condon for his report on the state of Albany this morning (“Going to hell, Roscoe, be there by noon”), then he went out and stood at State and Chapel Streets to wait for Joey and to watch the city opening its doors: jewelers, cafeteria workers, newsboys, cigar dealers lowering awnings, sweeping sidewalks, washing windows, stacking papers, all dressing their corner of the universe for another day of significant puttering. Lights were on in Malley’s, across the street, begun by the Malley brothers as a saloon, then a speakeasy, now grown into a major restaurant. Here came Jake Berman, up from the South End on his way to his Sheridan Avenue walkup, where, with staunch backbone, he defends, for pennies, every socialist caught in the hostile legal system, admirable penury. And Morgan Hillis going into the State Bank, a man born with an outdoor privy, now a vice-president handling Democratic accounts in the modest millions. And Glenda Barry, Mush Trainor’s girlfriend, manicurist at the Ten Eyck barbershop, who, when she cuts your cuticles, wears a white, freshly starched, skintight, wraparound smock, removable for special occasions. And, ah me, coming down State Street with that aggressive stride of his, Marcus Gorman, Pamela’s barrister, clear the way for Mighty Marcus, who won Jack (Legs) Diamond two acquittals and never got a nickel for it. Stiffed by the stiff. But you coasted miles on those acquittals, old man.

“Morning, counselor,” Roscoe said to Marcus.

“Roscoe. I understand I’ll see you later this morning.”

“You will indeed.”

“Wellllllll, bonne chance, my boy.”

Boy? Two years younger than your own creaking bones, you arrogant Republican bastard. And we almost made you a congressman; but proximity to Jack Diamond killed that. And so Gorman the Grand rose another way: becoming Albany’s Demosthenes, Albany’s own Great Mouthpiece for a continuing line of criminals after Diamond: Dutch Schultz, Vincent Coll, Pittsburgh Phil Straus, Pamela Yusupov.

Watching the stirrings of these myriad creatures of significance in the city — even the robotic repetitions of Ikey Finkel, the fifty-year-old newsboy, hawking his papers, “Mawnin’ pape, mawnin’ pape”—shot Roscoe through with depression. He would, in an hour, make his way to headquarters for another day of Party rituals that would perpetuate the bleeding of his soul.

Joey stopped the car at the corner, and Roscoe, with difficulty, climbed in beside him. Joey, six six and two fifty, barely fit behind the wheel. Roscoe was wide but not so tall. Ordinary automobiles were not made for their like, especially for Joey, a genuine giant, the kind of giant you wish you were, Ros, an authentic military hero for pushing forward alone after the rest of his squad had been killed, seeing four Nazis putting a machine gun into place, killing them all with his pistol, then holding the position until reinforcements arrived and forty more Nazis were captured, all of which won Joey the Congressional Medal of Honor. Now Patsy’s running him for the State Senate. What will Joey do with a stack of legislative bills when he can’t even understand the Ten Eyck lunch menu and Roscoe has to read it to him? You think people want an illiterate senator? And Patsy: You think anybody’ll vote against the Medal of Honor?

Medals? Roscoe has medals. The same Senate seat Joey will soon occupy was Roscoe’s for the asking in the early years, after the Democrats took City Hall; and it would have moved him one step closer to matching his father’s political achievements. For a few minutes, back then, Roscoe felt safe as a hero, for not even Patsy knew that after Ros rejoined the Engineer Train he worked in company headquarters and wrote, in the dead captain’s name, and forged, in the dead captain’s hand, the citation lauding Roscoe Conway’s bravery in drawing enemy fire, a prize-winning work of fiction that earned Roscoe the Distinguished Service Cross. Fraudulent? Perhaps. But he was in the heavy action, he was under direct fire at the German line, and his own buddies shot and damn near killed him. Must we quibble about motives? When is a hero not a hero? If a hero falls alone in a trench does he make a heroic sound? Take a guess.

Patsy was convinced the DSC would easily win Roscoe the Senate seat, but Ros said, Thanks, Pat, but I would prefer not to. For by then the malaise had set in, and Roscoe was just another time bomb waiting to explode with shameful publicity for everybody. The Party didn’t need that.

“You sick?” Joey asked.

“Do I look sick?”

“I would never say so, and don’t hold me to it, but you look like a dying dog.”

“I am sick but not that sick. Stop talking about it and let’s go to Hattie’s.”

And Joey drove to Lancaster Street, to the modest brownstone from which Hattie Wilson managed her real-estate empire: forty-six three- and four-story rooming houses, four hundred and forty tenants whose rents Hattie collected personally, except for the eight buildings that functioned as brothels, and for those rentals Hattie received monthly cash payments in person from Mame Ray, Bindy McCall’s woman, and the supervising madam of all eight thriving whorehouses. Dark history had been made by some of Hattie’s tenants: Mrs. Falcone, who brought home two drifters to stab her husband fifty-seven times and who then moved from Hattie’s basement to Death Row in Sing Sing; history made also by visitors to Jack Diamond, who was in bed in a Hattie house on Dove Street — Hattie herself was actually in the basement to stoke the furnace that very early December morning — when the boys went upstairs and put Jack into deep cool.

Roscoe’s mission this morning was to talk to Mame Ray, but he couldn’t use the phone and, with the spies watching him, he couldn’t pull up to her whorehouse in daylight, especially before breakfast. Hattie’s place was safe, and Hattie was a storehouse of gossip herself, for her tenants were a cross-section of The Gut, Albany’s night city: bartenders and waitresses, burglars on relief, family outcasts and runaways, semiaffluent winos who could still pay rent, motherless queens, hula dancers, B-girls and strippers, horseplayers doing their best to die broke, dishwashers aspiring to be short-order cooks, good-time girls learning what it takes to go pro, and all the flakes, flacks, and flukes who got around to putting their heads on their greasy pillows just as the sun was also rising on the rooftops of The Gut. A famous question in the neighborhood was: Are you married or do you pay rent to Hattie Wilson?

The word on the street was that Hattie hoarded cash in her walls, but the last burglar who checked that one out turned up mostly dead in a ditch, courtesy of the Night Squad, which protected Hattie and her empire not only because she was O.B.’s wife, but because she was a prime snitch for the cops and a treasure to the Party for two decades, a compelling force in getting four hundred and forty people to the polls on Election Day — no relief checks, no mail, no heat or water in the joint until you vote the right way, the Democratic way, and we do know how you vote.

Joey parked and Roscoe went up Hattie’s stoop slowly.