Brain Guy: A gang killer meets his match in a TNT blonde Read online

  The liquor hadn’t warmed McMann, his small reptilian head poised, the features built close to the bone. “What the hell, Bill. It was figured out O.K. Madge was there, wasn’t she? You were covered. You were safe.”

  “I didn’t like it. It was too damn close.”

  The kids clamored for him to forget it, to be a sport and forget it, riding him about Madge. Man, what a dandy life with a dame chipping in her love for nothing. Ray said heartily he’d been searching for a nice dame to keep him going, but he had no luck.

  “You ain’t got no personality,” roared Schneck.

  “I ain’t got luck.”

  “No personality.”

  “Shut up, you guys.” McMann handed Bill his wallet and watch. “The brain guy’s here and we’re splitting. Them customers were chiselers.” Bill hated McMann and his young cubs, glancing away so McMann couldn’t see his hate. McMann opened the table drawer, heaping the watches and rings near the bottle like an offering. “Somea the jew’lry’ll gross cash. The Irishman and the wop had plenty. We got three hunerd in cash, two watches from the kids. Waltham’n Elgin. A swell watch and stickpin from the wop. A good ring from his pal. Not bad.” He admired the large white diamond glinting in a circle of blue chips. He counted out twenty bucks, added the Waltham’s octagon to the pile. “Mike’s cut.” The kids were watching quietly. They weren’t so drunk now, with all that dough to sober them up. “You might get ten in hock, Mike.” Mike took his share, dangling the octagon on its chain like a pleased child. “Thirty bucks’n the Elgin for Ray. Ray drove the car, that’s why he gets more’n you guys. And thirty’n no watch for Schneck.” The kids all had their share. There was two hundred left over, a watch, two rings, the stickpin. Who’d get them?

  “I’m in a hurry,” said Bill. “I’ve a date — ”

  “Hold your pants’n. Now, Duffy’n Spat don’t havta get a cut. Did’n Duffy say his share was to go for the boys? Hell with’m.” He gave the kids ten bucks more a man. “Two hunerd’s left. The watch ought be good for forty in hock.” He fingered the rings, squinting at the stones as if estimating how many carats, how many flaws, while they stared at him, the big shot turning jeweler easy as hell. “Them rings is a hunerd in hock. The stickpin’s a carat. Say another hunerd. That’s two-forty in jew’lry. Two hunerd in cash. Our pal’s in a hurry to be with Madge, an’ we don’ blame’m so here’s a hunerd for’m and a hunerd for me.” On the round table the platinum watch, the diamond rings, and the stickpin, resting on the crystal, were all that remained.

  Everybody had had a square deal. The kids exclaimed damn right they were. Holy Moses, it was square. They hadn’t seen so much dough in a million years. If it’d been Duffy’s job, Duffy’d akept more’n two hundred between him and Spat. Here Mac and Bill, planning it and all, working on the job and all, only taking two hundred. Everybody concentrated on the jewelry. What’d be done with that? McMann gulped another drink, grinning at Bill. “Me’n Bill’ve been thinkin’. This jew’lry’s worth two-forty about. That’s plenty for a clubhouse. A reg’lar place. We can get a house somewhere for about a hunerd a month.” The kids were speechless at this grandeur, shouting, laughing, important as hell. McMann promised them a future.

  “What about Duff?” asked Ray.

  “I’ll give’m the car. It’s a good car. I hocked it from a rich guy.”

  Schneck beamed. “A clubhouse, gee!”

  “Two-forty’s two months’ rent. We’re gonna be somebody. Don’ you worry. Me’n Bill don’ sleep. We’re gonna make dough’n be big shots. All stickin’ll wear diamonds.” He flashed the stickpin at the kids, intoning his fairy-tale. It was even money on it.

  Bill put on his overcoat. McMann had the kids hypnotized with that clubhouse, the clubhouse palace. They were drinking goofily. Somebody in the world. McMann wasn’t so dumb. They could rent a place for a hundred a month, a fifteen-footer on a sidestreet with three floors. That’d be one helluva palace. God alone knew what McMann was thinking in his bean. You couldn’t guess from the words he spoke. “Give Madge the works for me,” said McMann. “How’s the ball of your feet? Say, when a brain guy gives a dame the works it’s the works.”

  “You’re funny as a crutch.” This gab of his being a brain guy was n.g.

  “Don’t you be sassin’ your buddies.” He clowned.

  “I’d like to boot your fanny for a week.” Yes, kick him to death. That’d be fun. The kids might believe the spiel of brain guy, but the whole line stunk to him. Brain guy. So then you stuck this same brain guy in a hole as if brain guys were worth less than a nickel a dozen.

  “Boot Madge’s fanny. You’ll like it better.” McMann was a riot.

  “Maybe you know from experience,” said Bill, exasperated.

  They laughed like crazy men as if he’d hit the truth. The hell with them. He was the goat. If anything went wrong he’d be the goat. Proof was putting the so-called brain in danger of having it shot out. So long, they hollered. The cab jammed brakes on, at his signal. He shivered in its interior, staring numbly at the city, black, repellent, a huge desert fantastically shaped in the image of a city of the dead. There was no life in the world but that in his body and in one other body. Stepping out of the corridor into her room, he guessed something was wrong. A bottle of gin on the dresser was half gone. In violent yellow pyjamas, conservative on her who was so slim, her breasts and hips outlined modestly, Madge greeted him too gayly. She should’ve been drunker if she’d had all that gin. Yet she was almost sober, strolling towards him as he slammed the door, like a soldier in her yellow pants. Somebody’d been helping her put away that gin.

  “Hello.” He laughed. He was aware of his mind’s coolness. Oh, he was smart. So smart that Hanrahan was gunning for him, and McMann doublecrossing him like the rat he was, and Joe in trouble. His wisdom was sour. She neared him. He smacked her cheek, his eyes disgusted. Damn her. Damn Hanrahan and McMann. Damn them all. He was like a corpse defeated by the purposes of other men, striking out against life. All life, all life’s puppets were banded against him. God damn the lice. “You bitch. Turn my back and you go for any guy at all.”

  “What the hell’s eatin’ you?” she yelled bitterly. “I don’t get a bastard like you.”

  “But every bastard does.” She was perplexed at her emotion, by his dark figure lowering in the room. She stared, rocked by a puzzlement that was lust as well as curiosity. She didn’t know what to say or do. She couldn’t get the fact of chastity to one man. What difference was it? The guy was gone, wasn’t he? It was over. She only liked Bill. She pulled out three dollar bills from her pocketbook, offering them to him silently, her homage, her head obsequious as a slave’s. There. That was proof she liked only him. He could have all her dough. She looked like an abandoned child, her thin face so high above the carpet. This face was pleading, alone in space, alone in the space of his thought, her deep childish eyes almost causing him to forget the body in pyjamas, the torso in yellow silk, her legs and thighs. He concentrated on thought of her face, ravishing it with his mind and soul, so that his body also quivered and was gone, and he was but a pair of eyes isolated in immensity, glaring at the last human, the last woman’s face. He put the three dollars in his pocket. This was the action of a body forgotten, a body left on earth, obeying the earth’s laws. “All right, Madge, let’s forget it.”

  “How we gonna eat, honey?” she asked. Sure, she had to keep her job and he his. It was tough going, but what could they do?

  “I got a hundred bucks. We’re staying here until it’s gone. Then you can go back to Paddy.”

  “It’ll go like hot cakes. Once in awhile. A coupla guys a day’d help keep us, Bill. That ain’t much, an’t’s money.”

  “You ever been with McMann?”

  “Why not? He slipped me ten bucks once to show a good time to a coupla friends.”

  “Ray and Schneck? Or was one of them Mike?”

  “I don’t know their names, honey.” The life of the elapsed months covered hi
m. He was baffled by a huge mourning, sorry for her and himself. McMann’s head and grim body took shape before him like an apparition. His life was in danger, he thought with a detached grief, as if that life had already been slain. No trusting McMann. The day’d come, must come, when it’d be showdown. He stared into her eyes and saw the time to come.

  She pushed her body next to him. Was there anything wrong? She tried to comfort him, unbuttoning his vest. They clasped, but still he was black with the stupidity, the purposelessness of life. All he’d wanted was a few thousand. Was that wanting the world? It seemed that way. God, it was awful. They sat on the couch and he held her quiet the longest time, kissing the whore’s cheeks, gently treating the body that’d just been mauled by a customer. By loving her so he was handling himself gently, raising himself up again to God’s double, rebuilding the God in him. He was no better than she, and if she could become precious, he too must rise. He didn’t care what she thought. Perhaps she didn’t think. He only saw her childish eyes, believing in him.

  It was a new thrill for Madge. A new love. A new kick out of life. It was like her first memory of mass, the first purple wonder, the deep dark purple of something holy with fire. (As he gave the whore the sense of religion, his brother was negating it in Cathy.) He was her swell guy. Gee, she was lucky to have him. He was worth a million.

  He took a drink of gin, sharing the glass. They went to bed, the aura of the strange minute vanishing from their passion. After, he’d fallen asleep. Later rousing himself to stare from one elbow’s height at her sleeping faun body, he forgot altogether, pressing his body down, his mouth on her lips feeling a joy from God, but not like that other greater joy. His breath was foul from gin and the exhaling odors of the flesh. This love perspired. Their mouths were flat. It was the love of those who are to die.

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  WELL, he had no job and that was swell for a time. No more slaving at Metz’s. Every morning he toured New York, leaving the house around ten o’clock just as Bill’d be yawning over on his side for a second sleep. Not that it mattered when he left. There were entire days and nights when he never saw Bill, when Business kept him forty-eight hours and more in a stretch.

  First stop was usually the Library on Fifth. Entering the huge high marble hush, slithering his feet along the stone floor, he’d take a seat in the magazine room. It was a poor man’s club if there ever was one, bums, the seedy genteel, young men and women without a cent, would get their magazines at the counter and waste an hour or so. Joe noticed one fellow who always read the Saturday Evening Post, a nickel mag. What a sap when he could borrow such high-class, expensive mags as the Cosmopolitan or the American Mercury. Shabby Spaniards, shabby Englishmen, shabby Germans would read the literature of their native lands. Joe’d get a magazine, read for two or three hours, finishing one, then tiptoeing to the desk for another, handing his slip to the pale people behind the counter, who appeared to have other lives, but not happy ones.

  He’d leave the club when his eyes hurt, zigzagging from avenue to avenue, from Park to Madison to Seventh, and then back again, exploring each little pool of life off the main rivers, playing sometimes he was dodging Hanrahan, dodging the cruel fate that must overtake the Last Of The Trents. He didn’t have any doubt that Hanrahan’d get them both one day. He’d’ve liked to run away even if Bill said they were safe. There were no jobs and he didn’t look for any. It was a city without work, although it seemed busy and prosperous. He’d tell Bill he’d searched high and low. In the beginning he’d sat around agencies, leaving the house at five in the morning. There was nothing. If he carried the paper in his pocket, the classified ads turned outwards, that was good enough. Mrs. Gebhardt knew he was faking, but she never said a thing to Joe outside of good-morning. He had a hunch the old lady was beginning to regard him as Bill’s kid brother after all.

  The walks were burials. Here, as if a thousand miles deep in the silence of the earth, stunned by the multitudes of the city among whom he walked like a ghost, he began to see with startled eyes the extent of the life of which he’d been but one stupid bug at Metz’s, never dreaming the magnitude he crawled. He lost Hanrahan and his own life in this other life, striding Fifth, among its tribes of scarlet-lipped women, their fox terriers and limousines, jostled on Sixth, where the unemployed mobbed the agencies, crowding in front of the white cards scrawled with sucker jobs, adventuring in his own neighborhood, where the poorest Irish and German and Americans had dug themselves in against poverty like soldiers against an atack. He’d cut east and south into the ghettos of Avenues A, B, C, retreating north to Gramercy Park’s green opulence. He slitted his eyes against the ever-flying dust of the city, dodging traffic, pausing a second on lower Eighth Avenue to witness a gypsy wedding party, greasy and smelling, exiting out of a store, the bride pale as a fish and dressed like a cheap Turkish princess, everyone piling into second-hand autos; or, pausing vaguely, dreaming on his city travels, the city of a million far-aways, he’d watch a peddler, or the pinhead at Hubert’s Museum, or be one of an excited crowd with a woman hollering: He cut her head off, the police shoving everyone back, an ambulance on the curb like a vulture. The city opened its blinds to him on a dozen streets and avenues. He witnessed the terrible vision of millions of lives, millions living and dying in a few miles. He had no love for the town. One could not love the city. It was one of God’s uglier creations, a dinosaur, a whale. And all the millions were shadows. He was bewildered, stopping at Union Square, by a Negro with Othello’s head hurling heart and soul against capitalism, by the thousand screamers and exhorters addressing the shadow folk. The city was thronged with machines like animals, and people like animals with heads like horses or cows or wolves. Panhandlers accosted him for a cupacoffee. Couldn’t they see he was broke? The city people were blind, shadows couldn’t ever see.

  Bill supplied him with cash, and around noon he’d duck in at a cafeteria and get a sandwich or a plate of spaghetti in a green-painted place on a sidestreet, the proprietor treating him as if he were a lord. Everybody was on the ragged edge, and all customers were millionaires. And all these days in early March would thunder into three o’clock, for the city respected one force, and that Time. No matter where he’d walked in early morning and afternoon, at three he’d be in the locale of the Washington Irving High School. The gongs ringing, the pretzel-sellers and candy-women, nearly all old squatty sexless creatures, competing for the nickels of the young girls. From the block-long school looking like an office building, the crowds of girls’d fill the afternooon with youth, with a feeling of fertility and potential motherhood. Some of them were rouged young ladies, but mostly they were awkward and loud as boys, their hard toughish bodies like boys’, too fat or too skinny, like some gawky intermediate sex before womanhood. He’d be at the corner drug store, observing the city in another of its aspects, the city of a million young girls.

  Taller and prettier than the majority, Cathy’s pale face with blue eyes, her yellow hair edging the dark hat, waving her hand at his smiling progress, would appear in reality as well as in thought, her hair seeming yellower, her eyes bluer, his heart rising to some function of sight so that he saw with heart as well as eyes, his body pulsing, his vision losing steadfastness so that she moved towards him on rhythmic beating successive waves of emotion. He’d take her brief-case and they’d walk home in the warming weather, sitting in Union Square, busy with conversations never remembered, that were not to be remembered, careless, light, giddy, like the incredible somersaults of summer grasshoppers. All about them the city hummed and thousands passed with distressed faces. They were a union of two hemmed in by the grand empty visages of the city’s banks and high buildings. Out of it all, they talked. Down among the gray glooms of lofts, they’d venture more happily towards Washington Square, with the kids playing and the Arch’s gallant but meaningless barrier. Through narrow streets like veins running through pale masses of little lives, they’d gradually approach their own house. He’d say good-by in
the hallway — this the only speech ever remembered during these March walking days.

  Upstairs in his room, thought of her was chaotic. He seemed to have no idea of what she looked like or what he looked like himself, as if both of them were enthralled by the city and made into shadows like everyone else. He couldn’t concentrate on eye color or lip movement. It seemed to him he was empty of gross hard life, light as air, unconfined as air, with but one thought, one idea, and that his love. This love was the sum of both their bodies and individualities. Their flesh shattered, mated in ecstasy, fleshless, wild. How could he tell how either looked or what they’d spoken of when his feeling for her was so voiceless, the shadow of another life? Good-by, Cathy. Good-by. Hell with that. He wanted to be with her, stay with her all the time. If he didn’t say good-by, didn’t float up to his room…. Love meant union, the real union of bodies, just as they now felt that other giddier mental happiness. One was good as the other. His eyes began to flicker craftily like those of a man honestly in love and wondering how he can love the more.