Page 7 of The Bootlegger’s Bride

I n the downtown Statler Hotel dining room, the waiter—in black dinner jacket and bow tie—approached their table. He took two conical glasses from his silver tray and placed the drinks before them. “Anything else, Mr. Nowak?”

“No, thank you, Hans.”

The man bowed and retreated. He had spoken with a seeming German accent—not that unusual in St. Louis.

However, it recalled to Hazel Robinson what she read in the newspaper that morning: The previous day Germany had invaded Poland.

Though it was a surprise to no one, judging from what the newspaper said.

Jan raised his martini to hers. They touched rims of the etched crystal and drank, astringent yet clean tasting, with structure. Greek tragedy in a glass, she mused. Something she might have said aloud had she known him better. His voice brought her back into the moment.

“So you’ll be back in the classroom next week.”

She nodded. “Reading, writing, and ’rithmetic.”

“No hickory stick?”

“Not part of the modern curriculum. However, Mrs. Thornhill, who has the classroom across the hall, keeps a paddle on her desk. Old school.”

“And educators wonder why some of us drop out.”

Hazel smiled then glanced toward the corner of the crowded dining room where she heard laughter. Their waiter—Hans—hovered over a party of four older men to whom he had apparently told a good joke. She turned back.

“Have you been following what’s going on in Europe, Jan?”

He nodded. “A sovereign Poland—that won’t last long the way things are going.

Barely twenty years. Lots of worried talk in the neighborhood since so many still have family back there—Poles and Jews alike.

Both of whom Hitler detests. Not to mention Gypsies, Communists, the infirm, et cetera.

Not sure what he thinks of Slavic bootleggers, but I can guess…

What’s going on in Germany has people scared that the same will happen in Poland.

The Jews likely the first to go though few will be spared. ”

“The Nazis seem so monstrous.”

“Their Prussian predecessors weren’t choirboys either, according to my father. He got out from under them soon as he could. Thank God.”

“You’re understandably worried for the Poles.”

“And the Czechs and French and Dutch and everyone else in Europe. But yes: poor Poland. The end of their brief breath of freedom. When you lose that you lose everything.”

As he said it he seemed to pull into himself, thoughtful, or reminiscing.

“Hard to imagine,” she said, trying to picture it and failing. “We take it for granted, being able to live our daily lives without interference, without fear.”

“Why my parents risked everything to get here. To a place where you can make something of yourself without someone slapping you down at every turn. My father disembarking in Baltimore forty years ago is more central to who I am than the blood in my veins. True for all of us, no matter how we got here and where our people came from.”

Hazel nodded. “I see that in my students, the children and grandchildren of immigrants—Poles, Germans, Greeks, Italians, Macedonians, Irish. Now they’re all American, through and through, and nothing else.”

“If I ever have kids, Hazel, they’ll learn no Polish from me. The sooner you throw off the Old World folkways and adopt American ways the sooner you can mix in and prosper.”

Hazel again lifted her martini—a rare treat—and sipped.

She also drank in the opulence of the hotel restaurant, the crystal chandeliers, crystal goblets on the white tablecloth, polished silverware, polished walnut on the floor, and wainscoting.

At the center of the table sat a slim vase with a lone rose.

A din of conversation from the packed room on a Saturday night despite the lingering economic depression.

The clatter of silverware and china, the mingled aromas of grilled meat, cigarette smoke, and perfume.

European strife, war, and death seemed so far way.

“This is quite an extravagance, Jan.”

“A simple quid pro quo. Having beer and barbecue on the lake with birds singing was a rare treat for a city boy.”

Another waiter passed nodding at Jan. “Good evening, Mr. Nowak.”

Hazel pursed her lips. “You dine here often, Jan?”

“On occasion.”

“You live nearby?”

He lifted his chin. “Upstairs.”

She stared at him and raised an eyebrow. “Isn’t that convenient.”

“Room service is great for someone who doesn’t know how to cook,” he said, deflecting her insinuation.

“Don’t tell me you have the penthouse.”

“Just a small suite on the sixteenth floor. It’s all I need.

I like living above everything. I once lived in a cellar with rats and vowed I’d rise someday, literally as well as figuratively.

Besides, living up there keeps disgruntled clients from banging on my door at night or coming through the window.

The Statler bellhops are meaner than guard dogs. ”

“You have a lot of unhappy customers?”

He lifted a skewered olive from his martini and chewed.

“Hard times are lasting far longer than most people thought they would. Optimists sometimes borrow money believing things will soon turn around for them. When things don’t, they get scared and angry, realizing they made a costly mistake.

Sometimes they direct that anger not at the cause, which often is beyond their reach, but at the nearby result. ”

Hans returned, again bowed, and handed them menus. Hazel scanned hers: Veal Cutlet Milanese, Columbia Shad Roe, Spring Lamb Chops a la Nelson, Steer Sirloin Steak, French Claret or Chardonnay, Roquefort Cheese, and Chocolate éclair.

She looked up. “No prices listed.”

“Not on the ladies’ menu. Order whatever you like. We’re still enjoying our racetrack winnings.”

Hazel pursed her lips. So you say. But of course she had no idea how much he might have wagered and won.

She asked him to order for them both. He suggested the veal cutlet and chardonnay, the éclair for dessert.

He wore a beige linen suit, light blue shirt, and red tie with gold clasp.

All of which went just fine with his tanned face, blond hair, and greenish-brown eyes.

For the occasion—their first real date—she had splurged with her remaining pari-mutuel cash on a high-waisted and slinky zebra-print dress that draped to mid-calf.

Nothing she would ever dare wear in the classroom.

“You always have good luck, Jan?”

He studied her for a moment and nodded. “At this moment I feel quite fortunate. Lady Luck has been good to me for some time. I pray she continues to blow on my dice.”

He had an odd way with words at times. She ascribed it to English not being his mother tongue. Then, Hazel noticed him surreptitiously peel back a corner of the tablecloth to knock wood. The pagan supplement to his prayers brought a smile to her lips.

“Let’s hope she’s not too fickle… Tell me, Jan, did Lady Luck help you prosper in business.”

He chewed his bottom lip and nodded. “Yes, she and Charles Dickens.”

Hazel sat up straight. “Dickens! My favorite! You’re not joking, are you?”

“Not at all. It’s somewhat of a long story. First tell me who else you like besides Dickens.”

She set off summarizing her lifelong love of fiction, drama, and poetry, beginning with playing make-believe, then listening to fairy tales, Mother Goose, and the Brothers Grimm stories.

Next reading Hans Christian Andersen and King Author and His Knights of the Round Table .

She told him of her childhood fascination with Lady Guinevere and other women, like Cinderella and Maid Marian, who were courted by knights, princes, and rogues.

She graduated to Sir Walter Scott and Robert Louis Stevenson, then to Shakespeare, the Brontes, Jane Austen, and the Romantic poets and finally on to the Americans Twain, Dreiser, Cather, Fitzgerald, Whitman, and Porter, all of whom Jan said he too admired when she finally took a breath. Nonetheless she went on.

“Granite City’s only a streetcar ride away from St. Louis, but it’s a different world.

A doughty steel town where virtually no one looks beyond its smokestacks.

At least that’s the way it seemed to me growing up there.

No crystal goblets and chandeliers, no hotels serving roe and French wine.

A place where most everyone was happy to settle for what was placed before them.

But for me it felt like prison. Literature was my only escape.

I’m afraid it still is. I have no one there to talk to—not about fiction and poetry and what I feel and what I want from life. ”

“Which is?”

Hazel gazed upward toward the crystal chandelier. “Something transcendent and beautiful. Something adventurous and meaningful. If that’s not asking too much.”

Jan appraised her, nodding. He himself could have spoken at length on the subject. But she had already said it in just a few words. “No, Hazel. It’s not asking too much. But getting it ain’t always easy.”

Over dinner he told her his own tale. The Hogan Gang—after getting rid of Egan’s Rats, its main rival—had been working with his boss Leo Gold to distribute liquor in North St. Louis.

“Then someone apparently got greedy, and Leo got shot. People say it might have been the work of Jellyroll Hogan or maybe some East Side gangsters, the Shelton brothers, who we’d been doing business with.

“Bad luck for Leo, certainly, though fortunate for me as it turned out. I was the only one who knew about some warehoused inventory that Leo had squirreled away. The real McCoy, genuine London gin, Canadian whiskey, and Jamaican rum. Not the bathtub stuff with phony labels that we pushed. And since he was a lifelong bachelor with no wife or kids, I decided to honor his memory by keeping his business running as best I could…”

He said it with a straight face. Hazel fought back a smile at his obvious appropriation—some might call it theft—and prevarication about it. But then what else could he have done? It was the smart move. He continued—

“Just a few weeks later the stock market crashed, changing everything. Lean times came fast and hard for lots of folks, and I saw an opportunity…

“Like I said, at the Central Library where I’d been hanging out,” he tilted his head over his left shoulder toward the posh Andrew Carnegie-funded edifice just a few blocks away on Olive Street, “the librarians had been feeding me books, which I devoured. I happened to be reading Oliver Twist . St. Louis, I saw, was a lot like Dickens’s London; folks out of work, lots of families with very little dough, things growing tougher every day.

Oliver and the Artful Dodger reminded me of guys from my neighborhood that I grew up with and ran with, reliable rascals.

All spoke Polish as their mother tongue and all having trouble pressing two dimes together.

“In Oliver Twist I saw how Fagin had organized London street urchins like Oliver and the Dodger to turn a tidy profit. I figured I could do the same here. I had this plan to use my neighborhood boys to bypass the speakeasies and retailers and sell direct to the Polish community door-to-door with secure delivery by an innocent looking kid…”

“Eliminating the middleman.”

“Exactly! Just like Sears and Roebuck. I was only sixteen then myself and pulled together guys who were thirteen, fourteen, fifteen. Fellas whose families were suffering. They were eager and honest and hard workers.

“The real kicker came when I started extending credit. Until I came along no one did that. Maybe because no one wanted to owe money to the Hogan Gang, who played rough. People knew me and my team and trusted us, knew we weren’t violent thugs, just kids helping out their families.

“In turn I trusted my customers, knew that they, too, were honest people who would pay me back eventually. So that got me into the banking business, which was a sideline at first. When I heard the chatter about Congress maybe repealing the Volstead Act, I knew I had to milk the liquor business while the sun still shone.”

Hazel felt a little dizzy. The martini, the wine, and Jan’s story—true or not—had her head spinning. She’d never met anyone like him, to be sure, or heard such tales except in storybooks.

“That’s quite a yarn, Jan. Dickensian for sure.”

“Worked like a charm. Best part was Jellyroll Hogan winked at it. His father was chief of police and he himself a Deputy Inspector for the Missouri State Beverage Department. He couldn’t go around beating up or bumping off street kids.

“After two years when I had built up the customer list and depleted my special inventory, I walked up Cass Avenue to his bar on Jefferson and offered to sell him the whole liquor operation, keeping the credit business for myself. Jellyroll laughed. I guess my youthful impudence amused him, but he liked cutting deals. We ended up shaking hands on a buyout. As events passed, what with Prohibition soon ending, he didn’t get much for his money. Though he never bothered to complain.”

“And everyone lived happily ever after?”

“I know I did. As to Jellyroll…” Jan shrugged. “He’s been in Jeff City now for five years.”

“The Missouri State Prison?”

Jan shook his head. “Missouri State Legislature. We both went legit. I timed it just right. After FDR and his lot lifted Prohibition in ’33, folks could get all the liquor they needed. What they didn’t have was cash. But I did. Another commodity I could sell on credit.”

Hands in her lap, Hazel sat staring at the decidedly handsome but dubious character sipping wine across the white tablecloth from her—shocked by the audacity of the thieving opportunist, stunned by his bravado, and amused by his over-cooked self-confidence.

As to his amoral, self-serving approach to life, she didn’t know quite what to think. Never had she met someone so seemingly blasé about death and law breaking, about ignoring society’s rules, and making up his own. Someone so materialistic, ruthless, and conniving.

She took another sip of wine and studied him. He was like a Shakespearian character—a self-possessed Petruchio, perhaps, or a discretely plotting Hamlet—or someone darker and more sinister, like Lady Macbeth.

On the other hand, he might have just stepped out of a fairy tale, a cunning Prince Charming, a man with real gumption. Someone who would likely use all his corner cutting and guile on behalf of his beloved—say, perhaps, on her behalf.