Page 26 of Shadow Ticket
Hicks figures he’d better do a courtesy drop-by at the New York branch of U-Ops, which he finds slightly west of Broadway beneath a neon sign featuring a pair of eyeballs electrically switching back and forth between bloodshot vein-crazed and lens-blank pop-bottle green.
“Boynt wired, said you’d be by.” Connie McSpool is a former city cop obliged to retire early after his enthusiasm with the dizzy-stick finally disheveled a hairdo too well-connected to be squared that easily.
“You just missed Judge Crater, he was in here looking for you.” Even if as a radio gag the Crater disappearance has pretty much had its day, people still can’t let go of it.
Everybody knows the story, or thinks they do—after dinner in midtown Manhattan with a girlfriend and a lawyer he knows, the Judge, in cheerful enough spirits, gets into a taxi and rides away, never to be seen again by mortal eye.
“Still an active ticket around here, I see.”
“No kiddin, Crater was pals with Arnold Rothstein and Legs Diamond, both as you’ll recall recent recipients of the bump, and it’s not only the crime syndicates, not just Tammany Hall, but worst and least merciful…” lowering his voice. A moment’s respectful hush. “New York real estate.”
Going on to explain how Judge Crater, acting as receiver in a bankruptcy, acquires a piece of property for chicken feed, the city then pays millions to get it back, the Judge, having just shelled out 20 Gs for his judge appointment and maybe looking for a quick offset, thinks his piece of the profits should be more generous.
“There’s a dispute, bang bang, decision made.
Zzt, there and gone. All that cement you notice they been pouring up around 181st, anchoring for the new bridge over to Jersey? he’s more likely under that.”
Hicks’s eyes must’ve unnarrowed for a second.
“What—they never heard of that in Milwaukee?”
“Oh, well, sure, but usually we get into an argument about which brand to use, Portland sets faster, Rosendale lasts longer, on into the late-night hours, neighbors complain, by that point the stiff’s already been ditched in the Lake anyway…”
“Don’t fall for the rube act,” Connie advises, “this gent is straight out of Chicago, where he dodges more bullets per work shift than all the donuts the lot of ye’s eaten in yer careers.”
“Milwaukee, where is that again…”
“Just down the road from Racine, where Danish pastries were invented.”
“Known for beer, bowling, and Daphne Airmont. Oops—”
“Sorry, Hicks.”
“How’s that?”
“You just missed her, she’s off on that midnight liner for overseas. Maybe you’re getting a lucky break.”
“Some tickets are jinxed. Every time the name Daphne Airmont gets typed into one, somebody sooner or later has to go wake up a doctor.”
“By which point the paperwork mysteriously got lost someplace everybody forgot to look.”
“Which always turns out to connect back somehow to that Big Al of Cheese himself in exile, natch, keeping an eye on his li’l girl. Oh—sorry, Hicks. Not tryin to talk you outa nothin here.”
Overseas. That ought to be as far as it goes. The U-Ops wouldn’t be crazy enough to, or put it another way…
—
Not that Hicks has spent that much time in and out of banks, but there’s something weirdly off about Gould Fisk Fidelity and Trust. It doesn’t smell like a bank, for one thing.
No clean paper and ink smell, but enough inexpensive cigar smoke.
More like a speak with its own distillery located somewhere on the premises.
He is immediately escorted to a desk in back with a quick exit to the street, where a shifty junior officer avoiding eye contact slides over an envelope holding an advance on two weeks’ pay plus expenses, plus—
“Oh no, wait a minute—” There seems to be a steamer ticket and a brand-new passport too. “No, I wasn’t supposed to—”
“Not to worry, we do this all the time. Like they sing it on the radio, ‘At Gould Fisk, it’s worth the risk.’ ”
This shouldn’t be happening, but is. Out the back exit and into the street Hicks finds a phone booth, tries to call Boynt at the Milwaukee U-Ops.
“Didn’t expect to hear from you so soon, no difficulties with the boat ticket, I hope?”
“Now you mention it—boat ticket, yeah, feels like being under a sort of handicap here, not having the whole story, Boynt?”
“Only a harmless episode of international transnavigation…”
“Saw you play the Majestic once, Mr. Fields, fun-filled evening for sure, but could you put Boynt back on?”
“Have we been keeping something from you? Answer is yes, moron, of course we have, and was there anything brzzghhllkk-kk-kk—”
“Hello? Hello, Boynt, there’s some noise on the line—”
“Ghzzmm ngngngng zzzngtt—” The line goes dead.
No operator to apologize, no background hum, nothing.
In his idiocy Hicks keeps trying. Broken connections, runarounds, wrong numbers, busy signals, hung up on, told not to call anymore, telephonically 86’d, till finally after a while the coins don’t even register when he drops them in.
He goes to a Western Union office and wires Milwaukee—60￠, means he’ll have to skip lunch, You Crazy No Dice Wire Fare Home Soonest, leaving him two words under the limit, the two words that come to mind not being allowed, and stranded on the “beach” in front of the Palace Theatre along with jugglers, ventriloquists with dummies, ukulele virtuosos, casualties of acts no longer sure, in these final days of vaudeville, of being hired anywhere, not even along the death trail stretching southwest through farm towns, broken country, and deserts toward L.A.
like a panhandler’s arm seeking the tiniest handout of mercy from the source of its sorrows.
Hicks ends up later that night with Connie McSpool and a few of the boys, at Club Afterbeat up in Harlem, where there’s a radio show in progress.
Whoopin and troopin,
Doin’ th’ Heav-y-side Bounce,
Swingin and sportin,
Snortin up, ounce af-
-ter ounce…
c’mon and
let’s…
go…
truc-kin on down-that floor…all
night-till
quarter to five, ’n’ then
th’ cops’re arrivin, ’s when
we’re jivin on out, the back door,
until
th’ very-next evening—just, as, th’
sun, goes, down—
once again…o-
-ver-the-ra-di-yo,
here comes that far-away beat,
Street by street—
it started
down-by-the levee-side,
Hmm!
soon it will be at your,
ev’ry side!
Uh huh,
Right up there where it counts,
Just, waitin to pounce,
It’s that Heavysi-i-ide Bounce!
“Yes it’s time for Rex and Rhonda, the Civilized World’s Most Sophisticated Couple, and ‘Speak of the Week.’ ” In which the two R’s broadcast remote from a different Manhattan nightspot every Saturday on into Sunday, and it’s really a show for everybody who’s stuck at home Saturday nights beside the radio, while the rest of the world’s out making whoopee—for those of us who like to hear about it even if we don’t get to do it, here week by week are the friendly bars of our dreams, a welcoming communion of regulars, romantic strangers, and traveling rogues who breeze in past the bouncers, cause some commotion, then vanish back into the unlit ether, bartenders reliable as the law of gravity, one of the more appreciated side effects of Prohibition being what a bartender doesn’t do, and with how much finesse, sometimes genius, he doesn’t do it.
You lean forward, radioside, you have your own supply of hooch, perhaps, as this is a drink-along show…
“And a Happy After Hours to radio sophisticates everywhere…Have you noticed, Rex, how the closer we get to Repeal, the less and less drinkable becomes the sort of thing they’re putting in bottles these days, it’s a disgrace, and we do hope you won’t be running across any of the shipment we got needled by this week… ”
“Ever so true, yet what li’l Rhondayvoo here neglects to mention is how she in particular, with her willingness to drink anything she doesn’t have to pay for, has been doing her best, every night for the duration, to give alcohol a bad name—”
“Mmm, but Rex, darling, those who actually listen to what I say know what a gay old personality I can be, and those who don’t like it, well, do feel welcome to your choice of impolite suggestions, a sophisticate like you has surely heard them all—”
Continuing to bicker, at first charmingly, but then with more of an edge.
Are they “fighting,” really, or only pretending to?
Depends on how much radio listening you do.
Audiences go for this, while at the same time secretly hoping that one day one of the two R’s will go so far as to murder the other, ideally while on the air…
“But somebody,” Hicks meanwhile has been trying to explain, “wants me 86’d clear out of the U.S.A.”
“Their money’s good,” shrugs Connie McSpool, “which if that’s not the problem then why worry? Horrors of the Deep, forget it, there’s plenty of shipboard activities to keep you busy, gambling casinos, glamorous tomatoes aplenty, why sure and you’ll be back on dry land again before you know it.”
“Yeah, but meantime instead maybe if I could just donate this boat ticket here to one of your cop benevolent funds—”
“Cash only, lad, sorry. Tradition and all.”
“It’s the bum’s rush.”
“I know. We just got a memo from the Home Office to that effect, requesting our assistance if needed.”
“Con, you wouldn’t.”
“Me, no I wouldn’t, but there’s plenty on the payroll these days who would, and I can’t speak for everybody, can I?”