Page 16 of The Bootlegger’s Bride

J an Nowak should have known better. He had heard stories about Leo Gold and his taste for young men. Now he had inadvertently roused the beast inside his boss.

July third had been a scorcher, and Jan had a lot of deliveries to organize, package, and load onto the truck for the coming holiday.

He didn’t want to soil his only clean shirt before going out to meet his customers in their speakeasies, so he took it off, hung it inside the dank cellar where he lived, and worked bare chested.

A mistake. He now guessed that Gold had been watching from behind the curtains of the upstairs window.

Focused on the job, Jan did not sense him admiring and coveting his body, damp with perspiration and shimmering in the sun.

So, he didn’t figure anything wrong Friday evening the next week when Gold summoned him upstairs for a drink—a first.

“Business has been good, Jan. Let’s take time to celebrate a bit.”

They sat in tufted wing chairs in the upstairs front room before a cold fireplace with marble mantle. Red-and-gold brocade wallpaper lined the room. A Persian rug covered the polished slat floor. Gold even had had indoor plumbing installed for the upstairs.

Gold’s housekeeper, a thin woman, black hair streaked with gray, entered carrying a silver tray holding crystal wine glasses and a bottle of Champagne in a silver bucket. She placed the tray on the coffee table by the fireplace and stared at the bottle biting her lip, unsure how to open it.

“I’ll take it from here, Mrs. Glazer,” said Gold. “That will be all for today. You have a fine weekend.”

“Thank you, Mr. Gold.”

The tall windows facing the street stood wide open.

An electric oscillating fan on the floor beside Gold helped move air about.

Nonetheless the room felt stuffy and smelled of the mutton Mrs. Glazer had boiled for Gold’s dinner.

This time of year, Jan was glad to sleep in the cool cellar despite the rodent aromas and coal dust most everywhere.

Through the open windows he heard kids playing jump rope in the street below—the rope slapping the bricks, the girls calling in cadence with the rope and giggling. Gold popped the Champagne cork—it was the real French stuff, Jan noted—and poured.

“The take before Independence Day was very good. You are doing fine work, Jan,” he said handing him a glass.

“Thank you, Mr. Gold.”

“I think, Jan, that you should call me Leo. We’re working hand-in-hand. Almost like partners.”

Jan nodded. “Sure,” he said, though the familiarity of the older man didn’t sit right with him. Nor did the slippery way Gold had said it. Though most everything he said had that flavor, like he was always trying to sell you something.

They raised glasses toward each other and drank. First time he had tasted real Champagne, and its intensity surprised him. Sure better than beer. Something a guy with a few bucks could develop a taste for.

Gold looked fifty-years-old though was likely younger.

A shiny baldhead with gray fringe. Portly, full-lipped, clean-shaven.

His face glistened with a patina of perspiration.

As most always, he wore a white shirt with striped tie, gray wool worsted slacks, and Stacy Adams cap-toe oxfords.

It made him look more like a haberdasher than a bootlegger.

Gold went on:

“In fact, I was thinking we should have even more of a partnership. More responsibility, more in it for you…” He paused, lips parted, as he appraised Jan.

“You work well with your people and have become invaluable to me. I think a reward is in order, a more secure future for you. I think we might even become good friends.”

Jan shifted in his chair and became conscious again of the children laughing and yelling on the herringboned sidewalk below. He could not speak. He knew he should say something though nothing came. As if to encourage him Leo Gold smiled and reached across to pat Jan’s knee.

“What do you say to that, Jan Nowak?”

Jan took a deep breath, heart thumping. “Gee, Leo. That sounds great,” he said. But his thoughts were on what happened to Eddie Jankowski. Jan squirmed in his chair and Gold finally withdrew his hand.

“We can discuss details later. Maybe over dinner some night soon.”

Jan sensed a ringing in his ears.

After two glasses of Champagne, he told his boss that he had to meet a friend and retreated downstairs.

He stood on the darkened bricks of the backyard staring up at the lighted windows of Leo Gold’s home above.

Then Jan’s gaze fell to the coal chute and worn marble steps that led down to the dark hovel where he lived.

§

Jan needed to get out of the house and get a real drink to clear his head and think straight.

He strode across the brick backyard, past the outhouse on the alley, and over to Cass Avenue.

Jan walked east toward 10th Street and the brick-bound passageway that led to Czeslaw Oswiecki’s basement speakeasy.

A clear night though with the usual humid July air that dimmed whatever starlight penetrated through city streetlights.

A waxing crescent moon floated above tenement roofs.

He had to face facts. He was dependent on Leo Gold. For his job, his sustenance, and his home. For his rank as a young man of substance who knew his way around the Cass Avenue neighborhood and the larger city. If he lost Gold’s patronage he’d be out on the street. Literally.

On the other hand, if he became Leo’s “partner” he’d have everything—big bucks, Champagne, fine clothes, security, and an escape from the cellar, where winters he had to shovel coal into the furnace to heat Gold’s home upstairs.

All he likely had to do was let the guy French him once in a while.

He pictured it—Gold’s baldpate, fleshy face, and greedy lips. It made him sick.

How could he live with himself? How could he respect himself or expect anyone else to if he sold himself out in that way?

Not to mention if folks conned onto the arrangement.

People were not blind and stupid. And they always talked.

Who knows, maybe there’s already talk, given Gold’s dubious reputation in the community.

Vicious, jealous people fabricating lies about Janusz Nowak.

My, how they liked to talk. Particularly when they could help bring somebody down.

Like little Eddie Jankowski, who couldn’t stand up to anybody.

Certainly not to a rich bootlegger like Leo Gold.

So maybe Gold used him. No reason to belittle, tar, and humiliate the kid.

Human nature at its worst. The more he saw of it the more he questioned Father Marek’s characterization of a benevolent and merciful Creator.

Then Eddie—only twelve years old—disappeared.

Maybe he hopped a freight. Maybe he got a job on a riverboat.

Or maybe he took a swim downriver, all the way to New Orleans. Not that Leo Gold would give a fuck.

But without Leo, Jan saw he’d be homeless and penniless.

No way he could go crawling back to kiss his father’s butt for a two-bit backbreaker job at the steel mill.

Yeah, there was other factory work. Henry Broz worked a ten-hour shift at Brown Shoe Company for four bucks a day until he lost his hand in a cutting machine.

Safe, clean employment like department store work paid even less.

Hardly enough to make rent somewhere, feed himself, and buy decent clothes.

How will I eat, how will I survive? As a beggar who lives in the caves beneath the streets with the alkies and opium addicts?

Those were the practical, physical concerns. There were also intangibles of equal or even greater import if he lost Gold’s support. No one wants anything to do with a bum or groveling errand boy.

The status and friendships he possessed as a bootlegger—someone with cash and swagger who lived outside the law—would disappear overnight.

His life would spiral down and down. Janusz Nowak forever a nobody.

Demonstrating to the Cass Avenue Polish community that his father had been right about his wayward son.

He was trash that should be kicked down the stairs to the gutter.

Someone to beat like an animal, like a mule, to make it move in the right direction.

He felt his father’s fists hammering his face.

He tasted his own blood. He heard his father’s Polish harangues—a dog, he had called him, a blood-eating dog.

And now Leo Gold also sought to control Jan, to bend him to his will.

He moved down the dark alley toward Czeslaw’s place, broken glass cracking under the soles of his brogues.

Past the outhouse there and across another brick backyard, ducking under damp laundry dangling from clotheslines.

Down hollowed marble steps to a solid wood door where he knocked once then twice then repeated it.

Soon he heard the bolt slide back. The door opened to reveal Czeslaw, round Slavic face, watery blue eyes, thinning blond hair combed down over his forehead.

He wore a light blue workingman’s shirt with sleeves rolled to the elbows.

He smiled and took Jan’s hand. Czeslaw pulled him into the smoky room smelling of stale beer, patted his back, and bolted the door behind him.

“Bogdan was just asking about you.” This said in Polish.

He followed Czeslaw across the low, candlelit room to the homemade bar in the corner where sat a radio playing dance music and where eight men carried on in Polish all at the same time, arguing, laughing, bellowing, cursing.

A ninth man, Bogdan Zawadski, occupied one of two barstools.

Jan took the other one, and the two men lifted their chins at each other.