Under the Skin Page 6

  LQ heard me one time too, and later that night when we were in a waterfront beer bar he said I was the only guy he knew besides Sam who could chivvy Rose like that. LQ was thirty years old and had been Rose’s main Ghost until I came along, but he swore he wasn’t jealous about me replacing him.

  “I never was all that much at ease around the man,” he said. “Truth to tell, I never seen nobody at ease around him but you and Big Sam. I figure it’s on account of you and him are two peas in a pod.”

  The idea that Rose and I were alike had never crossed my mind. “How so?” I said.

  “Well, lots of ways. Like how the both you sometimes look at somebody you know like you never seen him before in your whole entire life and you aint decided yet whether you even like him or not. There’s never no telling what’s going on in you-all’s head, either of you. You and him both got this way of…aw, hell, you both can be creepy as a graveyard is how so.”

  I gave him the two-fingered “up yours” sign, and he just laughed.

  “The problem,” Rose said, “is this Healy guy said his organization wants fifty percent of what their slots in Galveston County bring in.” He signaled the waiter for a refill on our coffee.

  “So,” Rose said after the waiter withdrew, “I told him that far as I’m concerned, his organization can have a hundred percent of what their machines take in.”

  “Really?” I said. I knew a punch line was coming. “Bet he didn’t expect to hear that.”

  “The only thing is, I says to him, his organization aint got no machines in Galveston County. The only slots in Galveston County are my slots. I said if his company was a little short of machines, I’d be happy to sell him some at bottom dollar, help them out, one businessman to another. Just be sure and don’t put them in Galveston County, I told him.”

  “Well hell,” I said, “that’s a very generous offer. I hope he appreciated it.”

  “Every mick I ever met got a potato for a brain. They don’t understand nothing, don’t appreciate nothing. Here I’m giving them a chance to buy back the slots at a bargain and all the guy says is they’re willing to negotiate the percent. I said to him he still didn’t get it, there’s nothing to negotiate. And he says, well then, I can just give the machines back. Said he could send his boys around to pick them up.”

  “Give them back? He said that?”

  “My hand to God. So I tell him again: any machine in Galveston is my machine, so there’s nothing for me to pay a percent on and nothing to give back to nobody. And, I tell him…anybody who tries to take any machine out of Galveston would be trying to steal from me. Know what that fucker said then?”

  I arched my brow. I always got a kick out of his outrage at the rest of the world’s inability to understand things as clearly as he did.

  “Said if I wanted my own machines in those joints I shoulda had them in there already. Then Ragsdale wouldn’ta had no place in Galveston County to put theirs. Like I’m to blame for them cutting in on me.”

  “Brass balls, I’ll give him that.”

  “Brass fucken brains. I told him it was none of his business how I run mine. He tells me I oughta think it over. I tell him I just did—and hung up. Fucken guy.”

  “So? Now what?”

  “Who knows? They might be stupid enough to think they got to get even somehow, and stupid people are the hardest to predict. They don’t think logical and they don’t plan careful.”

  He shook out another cigarette and lit it. “So you stick around,” he said. “You don’t have to be at the Club, just stay in town and check in with the office every now and then. Let Bianco know where you are in case I gotta get you in a hurry.” Mrs. Bianco was his office secretary.

  “You talk like I’m the only one on the payroll. There’s two dozen Ghosts in town every day, a half dozen always right there at the Club.”

  “I only got one the best.”

  “Oh, Christ, spare me the charming con, Don Rosario.”

  “I’m just telling the truth, Kid, like always.” And we both laughed.

  Then Caruso started singing about the clown who laughs to hide his sorrow, and Rose leaned out of the booth and gestured for somebody at the register to turn up the volume. I lit a cigarette and looked out at the distant trawler lights. Rose sat back and stared out at the gulf too, and softly sang along with the great tenor.

  Before Prohibition came along and changed their lives the Maceo brothers had been barbers for years, and Sam told me they often harmonized with opera recordings on the Victrola while they cut hair. Sam’s favorite was The Barber of Seville, which I’d never heard until he played some of it for me one night. He said he’d work his scissors in quick, jumpy time to the music and laugh at the way the customer in the chair would cringe in fear of getting an ear snipped off.

  They started out in the barbershop of the Galvez Hotel and then opened a little shop of their own downtown. They’d learned the haircut trade from their father, who brought them from Palermo to New Orleans when Rose and Sam were still children. Sam once told me that on the ship coming over from Sicily he’d gotten beat up and had his pocket watch stolen by an older boy, a big dark bully from Naples. The watch had been a present from his grandfather and he didn’t want to tell his daddy what happened. But he told Rose. They hunted all through the steerage sections but didn’t find the guy until Sam finally spotted him on the topside deck and pointed him out. The boy was about fifteen, Sam said, a couple of years older than Rose and much bigger, but Rose lit into him like a bulldog and got him down and beat the hell out of him while a crowd of kids cheered him on. He banged the bully’s head on the deck till he was almost unconscious, then dug through his pockets and found the watch, then started dragging him to the rail to shove him overboard, but a deckhand intervened.

  Another thing the brothers learned from their daddy in the early Louisiana days was how to make wine. When they moved to Galveston they made it in tubs in a shed behind their rented house. At first they made it just for themselves and a few close friends, then they started selling jugs of it to some of their regular barbershop customers. When Prohibition became the law, they produced the stuff in greater quantity and sold it under the counter to anybody who wanted it. Pretty soon they became partners with one of the two main gangs fighting for control of the island’s bootleg business. Over the next few years there were gunfights in the streets and killings in broad daylight, but the Maceos were able to stay legally clear of the worst of it. Once the top dogs of the two gangs were all in prison or the graveyard, Sam and Rose brought the factions together and took over the whole operation. By then they were also in the gambling business, which swiftly became their most lucrative enterprise.

  Most of the Maceo stories you heard were about Rose, of course, and no telling how many were true. That’s always how it is—the guy nobody really knows is the guy who gets the most tales told about him. Like the story about his first wife, who’d been murdered way back when the Maceos were just starting in the bootleg business. I heard it from LQ, who’d heard it from somebody else, who’d heard it from who-knows-who. The way the story went, one evening Rose invited three friends home for dinner on the spur of the moment—although he’d never invited anybody to his house before—and when the four of them got there, they found his wife in bed with another man, both of them naked and both of them dead.

  “You could say they died of natural causes,” LQ said, “since it’s pretty natural to die when somebody shoots you in the brainpan.”

  According to the witnesses, Rose wept like a baby, but there was a lot of secret curiosity about the true cause of his tears—whether he was crying because his wife was dead or because she’d put the horns on him. The police investigated but the killings were never solved.

  “Way I heard it,” LQ said with a sly look, “the cops had no idea who mighta done it. About the only thing they knew for sure was that it wasn’t suicide. The old boy who told me the story did say real quiet-like that it was sorta like suicide, sin
ce a woman who’d cheat on Rose Maceo might as well wear a big ‘Kill Me’ sign on her back.”

  Caruso finished wailing about the tragic clown. Rose dabbed at his eyes with his napkin, then blew his nose.

  “Fucken guinea,” he said. “Voice like an angel.”

  The waiter came and topped off our coffee. A moment later the window abruptly brightened with an explosion of light and sparkling skyrocket trails arcing over the gulf. There was a muted staccato popping of firecrackers, an outburst of car horns. Somebody in the kitchen began banging pots and shouted “Happy New Year!”

  Rose raised his coffee cup and I clinked mine against it.

  I drove Rose back to the Club and parked the Lincoln in the reserved spot by the back door of the building. The moon was down now, the stars larger and brighter. Rose said he had to take care of a few things before he went home. He slapped me on the back and said goodnight, then went into the Club.

  I walked up the alley and into the bright lights of 23rd Street. The haze and smell of spent fireworks were still on the air. The theaters had let out and the line of people waiting outside the Turf Grill was even longer than before. I’d been vaguely edgy all through supper and wasn’t sure why—but as I stood there, watching the passing traffic in its clamor of klaxons and clattering motors, what I hankered for was to get laid.

  I usually took my pleasure with one or another of the hostesses or waitresses who worked at the Maceo clubs, but then I’d have to wait for the girl to get off work, and I didn’t feel like waiting. Besides, I was in no mood for the banter and kidding around that was required for a free one. I just wanted to get to it.

  It was an urge you could satisfy more easily in this town than probably anywhere else in the country and I was already in the neighborhood for it. Post Office Street—the heart of the red-light district—was right around the corner. With my balls feeling heavy as plums I headed on over there.

  For a span of five or six blocks, Post Office—and portions of Market and Church, the two streets north and south of it—was mostly one cathouse after another. Most of the houses were narrow two-story buildings with latticework screens in front of the porches to give a little privacy to guys who didn’t want to be seen going in or out. I always wondered who they were afraid might see them, since anybody who was in the neighborhood sure as hell wasn’t shopping for shoes.

  The houses were owned by a variety of different people but they were all managed by women. The madams paid rents that were practically robbery, but the district was so well established they didn’t have to pay off the cops to leave them alone—at least not as long as there was no bad trouble in the place. Most houses turned a nice profit by simply staying honest and clean. The madams wouldn’t stand for their girls getting drunk or fighting on the job, and they made them get regular medical checkups. A man might have to pay a house price of fifty cents for a dime’s worth of booze or a quarter for a nickel glass of beer, but he could be pretty sure he wouldn’t catch a dose from his three-dollar hump. And if he gave the madam his money to hold while he had his fun upstairs, he knew none of it would be missing when he got it back.

  Tonight the district was as raucous as I’d ever heard it. Every house had a jukebox, and a crazy tangle of oldtime rags and recent big-band instrumentals streamed from the parlors to mix with the racket outside. Cars honking and jarring over the uneven brick pavement, the sidewalks full of soldiers and sailors and college boys, dockwallopers, businessmen off the leash from home, laughing and looking damn happy. Bad fights were uncommon in the houses—guys eager to get laid or who’d just had their ashes hauled weren’t usually in a fighting mood. There’d be some hothead every now and then, or some guy too drunk to know better, but every house had its bouncer to take care of them.

  The best thing about the Galveston houses—and the most surprising to me when I first arrived on the island—was that so many of the whores were actually pretty. Where I’d grown up, there had been only two whorehouses inside a hundred miles, and of the handful of women who worked in them only one looked to be under thirty years old, and only if you’d had enough to drink would you call her fair of face. It was a widespread joke that most of the girls at both those houses were so ugly they ought to pay the guys who humped them. But it was also a common saying that you always paid for it with any woman, one way or another, and a whore was the only one honest enough about it to charge you a specific dollar price and give you what you paid for and leave the complications out of it. The steepest price for it was marriage, of course, and lots of men paid it. “The full freight,” LQ called it, and he’d already paid it twice. But he still preferred trying to woo a woman into bed rather than giving her cash.

  “A man needs to feel like he’s getting it because the woman thinks he’s handsome or charming or can make her laugh,” LQ said. “Like he’s getting it for some goddamn reason other than he’s got three bucks in his pocket. A man’s got to at least feel that way every now and then, no matter it aint true.”

  Not even Brando argued the point with him. But we all knew that sometimes a man wanted it the other way, too—straight and simple and without the bullshit. Here’s the money, honey, let’s get to it. Which is how I was wanting it just then.

  I had intended to go into the first house I came to, but as soon as I turned onto Post Office Street I remembered a Mexican girl who’d been working at Mrs. Lang’s the last time I’d been there, about three months before. She wasn’t really Mex—she’d told me she was born in Colorado and that her grandparents had been the last real Mexicans in her family—and I knew she didn’t speak Spanish any better than Brando. But she looked every bit Mexican, and tonight that was what I wanted.

  A skinny Negro maid with sullen eyes greeted me at the door. A loud jazzy version of “Sweet Georgia Brown” was playing on the juke, and the parlor was hazed with cigarette smoke. About nine or ten guys were in there, waiting their turn to go upstairs. They sat on sofas along the walls or stood at the small bar at the rear of the room, where they were served by a little gray man with a hangdog face. Some of the younger guys were talking low and snickering among themselves, but the older ones just sat and smoked and stared at the nude paintings on the wall or down at their own shoes. Even through the smoke and the scent of incense candles, you could detect the faint odor of disinfectant and a musky hint of sex.

  Mrs. Lang came toward me with a bright red smile, blond hair braided in a bun at the back of her neck, gold hoops dangling from her ears. She gave me a quick hug and said happy new year and been so long and so forth. She had bright green eyes and a wide sexy mouth and looked pretty good for a woman in her forties. She gave my briefcase a curious look—not a lot of guys carried a briefcase into a whorehouse—but said nothing about it. As she led me toward the bar with her arm hooked around mine I asked if Felicia still worked there.

  “She surely does, honey. She just this minute went upstairs. But sweetie, we’re just so busy tonight, you’re going to have to wait a bit. Another fella’s already waiting specially for her too.”

  I wasn’t disposed to wait. I slid a twenty out of my pocket and slipped it to her.

  “My, we are in a hurry, aren’t we?” She slid the bill up her sleeve. “But you know, baby, the other fella waiting on her is in a hurry too. It’ll be awful hard to explain things to him just right.”

  I gave her another ten and said she ought to at least have the decency to pull a gun on me.

  She laughed and patted my arm and discreetly tucked the money in a side pocket of her skirt. Then looked across the room at a big guy leaning against the wall with his thumbs hooked in his pockets. The bouncer, a different one from the last time I’d been here. A young guy wearing an open coat over a black T-shirt stretched tight across his chest. He caught Mrs. Lang’s look and straightened up, made a little nod and began cracking his knuckles.

  Mrs. Lang fitted a cigarette to the end of a long holder and I lit it for her, then bought her a glass of sherry and had a beer for myself whil
e we waited for Felicia to finish up with whoever she had upstairs. Over the next few minutes three guys, almost one right after the other, came out of the upper hallway and down the stairs and only one of them waved so long at Mrs. Lang before scooting out the door. Each time a guy came down, she nodded at another one in the parlor and he’d go up to the girl waiting at the top of the staircase. Most whores couldn’t remember your name from one minute to the next, but they had damn good memories for faces, and madams had the best memories of all, never losing track of their customers’ order of turns even on the busiest nights.

  The girls wore short little camisoles, and one of the whores on the upper landing grinned down at everybody in the parlor and flicked up the front of hers to give us a glimpse of her trim brown bush, then busted out laughing and retreated into the hall with her next trick.

  “That Carolyn is such a slut,” Mrs. Lang said, but she was smiling. Girls like Carolyn were great for business.

  Now another guy came out of the upper hall, still adjusting his tie, and started down the stairs. And Felicia stood up there, her skin dark against the pale yellow camisole.

  Mrs. Lang took me by the hand and hurried me to the stairs and gave me a little push up the first few steps. “Move it, honey,” she hissed at me. “You’re the one in such a rush.”

  Somebody said, “Hey!” and I stopped on the stairs and turned.

  A burly redfaced guy in a derby hat who’d been sitting on a sofa was coming toward us. But the bouncer cut in front of him, saying something I couldn’t hear over the loud volume of “Let’s Fall in Love” coming from the jukebox. I knew he was hoping the derby man would try something, if only to break the monotony. I’d been a bouncer in San Antonio for a time and knew how boring the job could get.