The Big Crowd

By Kevin Baker

Two Irish brothers journey from New York’s East River to its halls of power in this “masterwork of historical fiction” by the author of Dreamland (Parade).
 
Inspired by one of the great, unsolved murders in mob history, this novel tells the sweeping story of Charlie O’Kane, a poor Irish immigrant who works his way up from beat cop to mayor of New York at the city’s postwar zenith. Famous, powerful, and married to a fashion model, millions of local citizens look up to him, including his younger brother, Tom—until he is accused of abetting a shocking crime.
 
The charges stem from his days as a crusading Brooklyn DA, when he sent the notorious killers of Murder, Inc., to the chair—only to let a vital witness fall to his death while under police guard. Now out of office, Charlie is hiding from the authorities in a Mexico City hotel. To uncover what really happened, Tom must confront stunning truths about his brother, himself, and the secret workings of the great city he loves.
 
From the Brooklyn waterfront to City Hall, the battlefields of World War II to the glamorous nightclubs of 1940s Manhattan, The Big Crowd is filled with powerbrokers and gangsters, celebrities and socialites, scheming cardinals and battling dockside priests. But ultimately it is an American story of the bonds and betrayals of brotherhood—from “the lit world’s sharpest chronicler of New York’s past” (Rolling Stone).

 

• Language: English
• Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media
• Release date: Sep 17, 2013
• ISBN: 9780544105911

Kevin Baker

Kevin Baker is the bestselling author of the novels Dreamland, Paradise Alley, and Sometimes You See It Coming. He is a columnist for American Heritage magazine and a regular contributor to the New York Times, Harper's, and other periodicals. He lives in New York City with his wife, the writer Ellen Abrams, and their cat, Stella.

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Contents

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Title Page

Contents

Copyright

Dedication

1

2

3

4

5

6

7

8

9

10

11

12

13

14

15

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18

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39

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41

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43

Notes on Sources and Acknowledgments

About the Author

First Mariner Books edition 2014

Copyright © 2013 by Kevin Baker

All rights reserved

For information about permission to reproduce selections from this book, write to [e-mail] or to Permissions, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company, 3 Park Avenue, 19th Floor, New York, New York 10016.

www.hmhco.com

The Library of Congress has cataloged the print edition as follows:

Baker, Kevin, date.

The big crowd / Kevin Baker.

pages cm

ISBN 978-0-618-85990-0 ISBN 978-0-544-33456-4 (pbk)

I. Title.

PS3552.A43143B54 2013 813'.54—dc23 2013010177

eISBN 978-0-544-10591-1

v3.1215

TO PAM AND MARK, WITH LOVE, AND MANY THANKS FOR ALL THEIR KINDNESS,

and

 TO DENNIS HOLT (1935–2012), WHO WAS COURAGEOUS WHEN IT MATTERED MOST,

and

AS ALWAYS, TO ELLEN, FOR EVERYTHING

1

New York, 1939

Big man.

He saw him for the first time looking up from the ship’s hold. His brother. Filling up almost the entire hatchway of the Saint George, a tall man in a good gray coat and matching fedora. Broad-shouldered and big-chested, standing wide-legged against the Manhattan skyline, smiling and confident as he bellowed out his name.

Tom O’Kane! Seaman Thomas O’Kane!

His eyes blinked and watered in the darkness. Blurred now after his five days in the hold, the fourteen before that zigzagging their way all over the North Atlantic, trying to give the slip to the U-boats. It was a month after the Athenia went down, just sixty miles past Rockall, and they were crazy with worry for the submarines. Any available hands scanning the rough gray waves of the Atlantic all day long, trying to spot the telltale periscope.

A madman’s task—and what would they have done if they did see one? A single freighter, ten thousand tons, out on the ocean alone in those days before the convoys. Say a Hail Mary, and kiss your ass goodbye. Keeping radio silence, trying to run outside the usual sea lanes, maneuvering this way and that like a staggered pig, trying to fool the torpedoes. Running with their lights off at night, the men sweating in their hammocks. Listening to the engines rumble, each silently asking himself did they have to make so goddamned much noise.

He loved every minute of it. His first big adventure, not five months out of Trinity. Setting forth from Lismirrane with the spalpeens, off to reap and bind the oats, and take in the harvest for the Cotswolds farmers. The lot of them walking thirty miles to Kilfree, just to catch the train for the coast. The poorest men in all Bohola: wiry and earth-hardened, bent in obeisance to the ground, from so many years of pushing some other man’s dirt about. Their traveling clothes already half in tatters, patched coats and threadbare shirts, boot soles flapping on the road. Carrying all the belongings they would need wrapped in a neckerchief or a flour sack. Lowly even compared to the sailor’s duffel he had made so sure to buy used from the gombeen-man in Dublin, knowing he would be traveling with them.

All his life he had seen them come and go. Men too poor to own any noticeable land of their own, and too proud to work the fields of their neighbors. Gone for the harvest at the end of each summer, to work the fields of Somerset and Devon, Gloucestershire and Hereford. Back with the first frost, thinner and browner than ever, to lie with the wife and sow another mouth they couldn’t feed, then off again in spring for the planting.

He’d always wondered what it was like, where they went and how they lived. Thinking of them years later when he heard something that a remorseless killer his brother sent to the chair liked to say, a man called Dasher Abbandando, who journeyed to cities all over America to murder other men for money.

Hey, Dasher, where you been?

On adventures.

Hey, Dasher, where’d you get all the cash?

More adventures.

They had no cash, these men of his village, had spent their whole lives laboring for the smell of a pound. They walked half the distance to Kilfree that first night, then made camp on the side of the road. He feared at first they did it for his sake. It had been many years since he’d walked fifteen miles in a day and never in shoes, wobbling openly from the blisters by the time they stopped. But no, he was relieved to see, they laid their burdens down by a familiar copse, the stumps and the circle of charred earth from old fires there like a faerie ring. He realized this was part of the adventure, too—camping out on the road like tinkers, and the wind rustling in the trees over their heads, telling themselves for a night that they were free men.

The talk and laughter around the fire seemed constrained at first, in the presence of the schoolmaster’s son. He was frantic to make sure it wasn’t, giving out with the two whole bottles of the White Bush his old man had made sure to slip into his duffel for just this purpose, fixing him with his hard look: This is for making friends, not for you. Nobody likes a drunken man.

He passed them both around liberally that night, though he had intended to save one for the boat. They wondered at its smoothness, their own small flasks filled with the raw poteen made out in the bogs behind the school, all they had ever had in their lives: "Ah, you can feel how that goes down!"

And as the night went on their reserve fell away, sharing their food around the fire. The talk gayer and the voices rising, men at the start of journey. Telling stories and singing the old songs, Travelling Doctor’s Shop and Kilkelly, and assuring him of the high regard they had for his father, a Cork man they couldn’t see fitting at first, until he married Pat-Peggy’s daughter and built his own house right among them, and helped out each year with the mehil. Talk he didn’t want, and was embarrassed by, but was pleased to hear anyway in the soft October night, so much the way he had always pictured it.

The next day they made the train at Kilfree—a wooden toy of a train, he understood later, laboring like the devil up and down the low hills. Taking six hours to get them to the coast, where they caught the boat for Liverpool. A ragged excitement running through the travelers even there, so soon after the Athenia—Do ya think we’ll be torpedoed, then? Ah, no, never, the Jerries want us on their side. Us, is it? You think we matter to them more than a flea on a pig’s backside?—all of it spoken with the confidence unique to those absolutely ignorant of a situation.

There were lifeboat drills, and on deck a soldier in full gear, with bayonet and washbasin helmet, much to the sniggering delight of the spalpeens. Grim gray destroyers knifing through the seas off both sides, signal flags bristling in the stiff wind—a startling change to the ageless world he had just left. He walked the deck the whole time, taking it all in, delighted to find that he kept his stomach even on the choppy crossing. Then they were over, the men from home chirping their goodbyes as they went to catch their train to the south. Whistling as they went, cheerful about the war, sure they would get a good wage with all the English lads off to play soldier boy.

It was easy enough for him to get a ship for much the same reason, the tramps all desperate for hands. Hired on without so much as a question about his experience, though he knew he must have looked as out of place as a bishop in a brothel. He was indeed the worst sailor alive, something Charlie twitted him about ever after. He set his hand at most everything, like the rest of their ragbag crew, and was good at none of it. The work more exhausting than he could have possibly imagined. Stoking the boilers for a watch, proud to be doing it because he knew that Charlie had once done the same all the way from New York down to Rio de Janeiro and back—his father reading his letter about it to them all, over the kitchen table.

A crew like that, it’s no wonder you missed the torpedoes, Charlie liked to tease him later. The Jerries couldn’t tell which way you’d steer the thing.

When they made New York Harbor, the captain half dead on the bridge from work and worry, he fairly danced about the deck to take it all in. The Frenchman’s statue, sure, with its green arm held aloft halfway between a salute and a traffic cop’s challenge. But more than that the mountains of skyscrapers around the Battery, and the madness of the harbor: tugboats and fireboats, freighters and garbage scows. Rail barges over from Hoboken and the fishing trawlers making for the Fulton Market, and the passenger ferries from Staten Island, and sleek, swift sailboats, and rich men’s yachts, sailed up from Long Island Sound or down the Hudson. Each of them as proud as an admiral’s flagship. A dozen collisions barely avoided every minute, as each blasted away with its horns and whistles and random, triumphant ejaculations of water shot high in the air.

All his life he would marvel on it. A whole city of people—the biggest city in the world—saying over and over, Here we are, here we are, here we are, in all their grand gaudiness, and their arrogance and self-obsession, and their wonderful audacity.

That was all he saw of it, then, before they were herded belowdecks. The captain rightly afraid he’d have no crew at all to sail back through the torpedoes once they got their pay and hit dry land.

Tom hadn’t counted on that. Sure that he’d be able to steal off once he reached New York, even if it meant jumping into the harbor. Finding himself stuck instead deep in the hull of the Saint George, with its thick stink of bilge water and diesel fumes, machine oil and human excrement. The rats running over their feet in the daytime and their faces at night. The captain keeping constant guard at the hatchway, himself or the first mate with a shotgun, promising to blow off the head of the first man who tried to come up. The rope ladders pulled up in any case, no way to rush him even if they wanted to call his bluff.

No one knew he was there. There’d been no time to wire off a cable to Charlie, they had left Liverpool so quickly to catch the tide and sneak out past the U-boats. There was no one in the world who knew where he was, no way to get word out to his brother, and he realized in his maudlin self-pity that if they sailed back with him still in the hold, and got torpedoed somewhere out along the broad Atlantic, he would die without a soul to know what happened to him.

It was the longshoremen who saved him. Swinging down into the hold like some lost tribe. Hooks slung over their shoulders, stripped bare to the waist despite the cooling days.

He had wondered, before leaving Liverpool, what there could possibly be left to ship out from England. All the last odds and ends of Empire: Frozen trout and salmon. Clotted cream, and single-malt whiskey, and fine-tailored tweed suits, and even a set of grandfather clocks. And underneath it all the gold. He and the shipmates spent a good deal of time staring at that, once they discovered it. Shipped in bars too long and heavy to possibly steal or hide, stamped with the imprimatur of the Bank of England, and His Majesty’s government, and packed in long, thick crates like coffins. The body of England, come to rest in America.

They moved it all, with astonishing alacrity. Using only a hook, a net, a rope and pulley. Communicating solely through a few knowing grunts and gestures, a symphony of leverage and brawn. Faces burnished and cryptic as Indians, eyes glinting at the work at hand. Saying nothing to them. Men held at gunpoint in the hold of a ship no concern of theirs, nothing they had not seen before, as he would come to learn.

He tried to talk to them, asking them to call Charlie, attempting to slip them a note with his name and last known address on it. One of them at last pausing in mid-haul of a grandfather clock, an item so ludicrously fragile and vulnerable in the iron hold of the boat—replying in a voice so low Tom didn’t realize he was even talking to him at first.

Charlie-O? Judge O’Kane? Yeah, all right, he’s a jake guy.

The precious slip of paper with Charlie’s telephone number and address disappearing into one giant hooked hand, the wicked point nearly scraping Tom’s chest. Summoned, he appeared at the hatchway not two hours later, calling out his name.

Tom! Tom O’Kane!

The next thing he knew he was being hauled up out of the hold, Charlie’s own thick hand grabbing onto his collar. Yanked up on the deck like a gasping mackerel, eyes blinking in the unaccustomed light of the Port of New York. Charlie propelling him down the deck, dismissing the protests of the outraged captain and his shotgun with a wave of his hand: Call the League of Nations, if ya don’t like it!

Then they were hustling down the pier that seemed to be a mile long, its glass sheds looking to him as high and ornate as cathedrals. Redolent with all the smells of the world—ripe bananas and oranges, cocoa and coffee beans, exotic spices and hard metal.

At the end of the pier sat a line of idling trucks, stretching as far as he could see. A streetcar careened around the corner like a runaway team, barely missing them, Charlie jerking Tom’s shoulder back with one hand. More trains twanged and rattled along the elevated line above their heads. The City a blur of motion before him, infinitely bigger, and busier, and faster than even Liverpool had seemed in his few hours there. He hung back involuntarily from this dynamo.

Charlie plucked him up again, literally hauling him into the City like one more errant crate. The black Plymouth sedan sidling up to the curb like a barracuda. The chauffeur a huge, looming man in a blue suit. Charlie introducing him as Neddy Moran, as he crushed Tom’s hand in his own first, wishing him well in America before ushering him into the car that looked as if it might hold the whole of Bohola.

They’re all waitin’ for ya, Michael an’ Jack, Charlie was telling him, referring to the brothers, who were already over in Ameri-kay too, and had been gone so long he barely knew them any more than Charlie. An’ my boy Jimmy, who you have to meet, he’s nearly your age now!

Then they were being driven through the streets of New York, Tom in the back seat with Charlie—Charlie his brother, who he had never met before this day—beside him. Old enough to be his father, with the hair gone silver around the temples, making him look all the more distinguished. Charlie the judge, in his fine coat and clothes, with his own court clerk to do the driving. It seemed funny to him then, and they laughed about it all the way up to Mrs. Maguire’s boardinghouse on West 103rd Street where everyone was waiting, and for many nights afterward, laughed about it all, unable to help themselves. Not having to say a word, each of them knowing what the other was laughing about, Tommy and Charlie, off to have adventures in America.

2

Mexico City, 1953

Turning and turning and turning, the plane began its descent, diving down between the snowcapped volcanoes at a dizzying angle. Tom’s eardrums popping under the pressure, his hands clenched around the armrests. Staring out the window at the endless expanse of green parks, and churches, and gracious white buildings that suddenly materialized beneath them.

Charlie’s city now.

He spotted the car, and the slender, solitary figure waiting beside it, before they touched down. By the time they disembarked she was waiting at the bottom of the stairs with the car—a blue, new-model Rolls, as sleek and curved as she was, pulled up on the tarmac beside her like a heeling dog. Waiting for him with her dirty-blond hair tied back and the same wistful smile he remembered. His brother’s wife.

Hello, Tom, she said as he came down the stairs, her arms wrapped around herself. Opening up only when he got to her, to pull herself up on him then and plant a quick kiss on his cheek and a hand on his shoulder. Just like that. As if there had never been more, casual and intimate at the same time. The familiar touch and the smell of her jolting him like an electrical shock.

How long had it been? Almost three years . . .

Hello, Slim, he said, fighting it, only squeezing her arm in return. Fighting it, fighting it already as he looked at her. Poured now into, of all things, a skin-tight, black matador’s costume with lavish gold embroidery. Like some child’s dress-up outfit, though, it made her seem all the smaller and more vulnerable, and he wanted to grab her up right there, and press her to him.

I didn’t know it was Halloween, he said instead.

I have a lesson with Chu Chu in half an hour.

"So you’re still doin’ that?"

You should meet him. She turned to saunter back to the car. He’s really an artist, you know.

Oh? Up north we call it an abattoir.

Have you ever seen a bullfight, Tom? We’ll have to go while you’re in town, she said brightly, refusing to rise to the bait.

No, thank you. I saw enough men cut to pieces in Italy.

Don’t mention it to Charlie when you see him, will you? He’s already crazy about it.

The Rolls Chu Chu’s? he asked, barely able to get that ridiculous boy’s name through his teeth.

No, she said without elaboration, her voice brittle as a pane of glass. Last month he was on about my water-skiing instructor. The month before that it was some cliff diver. He’s never stops being suspicious now.

He has reason to be.

She looked down, arms clutched tightly around herself again, and to his surprise he saw her lips trembling, all the defiance slipping away.

Jesus, Tom, will you give me a break already? You’ve been here two minutes, and you want to pin the scarlet letter on me.

Sorry, he said, and he was, more than he could say, and nearly overwhelmed by the desire to take her in his arms again. It was more my own self I was chastising.

Is it that bad? What you read at home about . . . us? she asked, facing him again, the wetness visible on her cheeks now, so that he had all he could do to keep from pulling out his handkerchief to wipe it away.

No, not really.

You never could lie, Tom. That’s why you shouldn’t go into politics, she said, half smiling now, lowering her sunglasses, and he realized that he had not yet seen her eyes.

They were eyes you could fall into. Eyes to draw you across a room full of important and powerful people. Inviting and challenging at the same time, with more than a hint of mischief in them when she was happy. They were colored a startling green, with flecks of gray in the iris, something he knew from staring into them for a long time. She had a small, perfectly straight nose, a wide, generous mouth, and what Life magazine called an aristocrat’s cheekbones—a direct and sensuous face, beautiful in many different lights and from many different angles, a photographer’s dream.

Did you really play the bull with him, Slim?

She laughed out loud at that. The sound high and clear as a chime, surprising him in its uninhibited mirth. Just like that she was the Slim he remembered again, fearless and delighted.

Oh, God. It was my Spanish literature class. They couldn’t understand how a woman could be learning to bullfight. They kept talking about it, sure I couldn’t understand enough to know what they were saying. I couldn’t stand it anymore, so I invited all of them out to watch a lesson. Once we got there, it was just an impulse. I picked up a pair of the horns they train the apprentices with, and then I put them on my head and charged Chu Chu with them, just like I was the bull.

She put a hand over her face and shook her head, the grin seeping through, the green eyes shining.

"I couldn’t help myself. I know I shouldn’t have, but Jesus, Tommy, you should’ve seen their stupid round faces staring at me. I knew then it was a mistake, it was nothing they could ever understand. Screwing the bullfighter, they could understand, but never the rest of it. So I charged at Chu Chu, and he waved the cape over me, made a perfect veronica, and for some reason it just made me laugh: Chu Chu standing there so serious and elegant, and me with the bull’s horns on, and all their fat, stupid faces staring at us. You see the absurdity in it, don’t you, Tom?"

Yes—

I started laughing, and then he started laughing, and then we were shaking with it, we couldn’t stop ourselves. And I looked over at all those grand ladies with all their airs, their mouths hanging open in shock for once without anything to say, the magpies. And I knew then that I’d made everything worse than ever.

They were both laughing then, too, in spite of themselves.

"A week later a photographer shows up, and I let him take some snaps with me facing a real bull. Thinking then at least they’d see I was serious—that Charlie would see I was serious. The next thing I know it’s in Look, and all my relatives and my mother’s friends are calling me up long-distance, asking me in that very genteel, very southern ladies’ way they have, if I haven’t lost my mind."

She sighed, shaking her head. The sadness washing over her all at once the way it used to do, too, the way he remembered it, and if she had taken a step closer, he would have grabbed her to him.

Oh, I’m a scandal, Tom, I know. I can’t seem to help myself anymore.

You’re not that, either.

Let’s be friends again, she told him, offering her hand. I know you’re here to help. God knows he could use it, after everything he’s been through. After everything I’ve put him through. Friends?

Like brother and sister, he said, holding her hand in both of his, giving her what he hoped was a reassuring squeeze.

Do you think you can help him, Tom? Like you wrote? she asked, her voice sincere. "It’s just so goddamned sad, the way he sits around that hotel all day. None of it’s really been the same since, well, you know . . ."

Yes, I know, he said softly.

Remembering when he’d talked to her last, two years before, once Charlie had made it back to Mexico City on President Alemán’s personal plane. Slim’s voice crackling and frantic over the long-distance line: He collapsed at the airport, and now he’s locked himself in the library! He won’t come out; he won’t eat anything. What the hell went on up there?

What had happened? But that was what he was here to find out . . .

I think I can help him, he told her, trying to sound official and reassuring. But he’s got to help himself. He’s got to tell me all of it. No more trying to shield Neddy Moran, or any of his other friends.

Ah, you know how he is with friends, Tom. She shook her head once, and he tried not to notice how the light struck her hair as the chauffeur, a short, muscular, smiling man with the map of the Maya upon his face, came back from the terminal with his bags and they got into the Rolls. She shook her head again.

He and his goddamned friends.

It was the biggest thing that ever happened. He didn’t understand that until later—didn’t understand it even in those hours when Charlie wasn’t on the stand, and he’d had all he could take of the sweaty, overstuffed hearing room in the federal courthouse. Stepping out across Foley Square, he could see for himself how deserted it was, no more than a few stray pedestrians, mostly unwashed, or wobbly, or exceedingly interested in pigeons, wandering by.

He walked a few blocks toward the river, then uptown, but it was the same. The sidewalks vacant, buses and subways half filled at best. The streets emptied out as if it were one of those science-fiction scenarios that were so popular now, after the Russians dropped the A-bomb on the City. Those solid citizens he did see were knotted up in front of the display windows in department stores, and television repair shops, watching the images raptly even if they couldn’t hear a word of what was being said. More still gathered around TV sets in bars and diners, barbershops and beauty parlors, offices and hotel lobbies. The marquees of the movie theatres even offering it up as a public service, as well as an enticement: FREE TO PUBLIC KEFAUVER SENATE COMMITTEE TV HEARINGS. The major department stores rearranging their hours, posting clever if puzzled notices all over the City papers:

LADIES

we know that Costello,

O’Kane et al were fascinating

BUT

you must look pretty for Easter

SO

Bonwit Teller will be open

tonight till 7:00.

He should have seen it coming, through all the months that the committee took to work its way up through one city after another: Los Angeles and Las Vegas, New Orleans and Chicago, Detroit and Philadelphia. Drawing closer and closer, like some out-of-town show en route to Broadway. Exposing, everywhere it went, the inner workings of their civilization. All the dirty deals and the sordid friendships, the festering stew pot of politics that everyone knew was there all along but still couldn’t look away from. The same material, really, they had been reading in their newspapers every day. But now with a difference: those damned pictures on the tube.

What he had always loved about his city was how he could look up from the top of a double-decker bus, or through the back window of a cab, and glimpse the rows and rows of bookcases in one line of apartments after another. Now all he could see was more television sets, their antennae like a bramble wood atop each apartment building. It was worse when he walked home through Bay Ridge at night, the spectral blue glow still emanating from the windows of each and every one of the semidetached houses, all of them showing the same thing—the words no longer necessary.

Just those damned hands. Clenching and unclenching, fiddling and crumpling up endless balls of paper. Hands that might as well have been around his brother’s neck.

It’s not just here, Tommy, it’s everywhere, his law partner and Charlie’s old friend, Natie Cohen, telling him back at their office downtown. Bleary-eyed behind his big, round glasses, wearily holding up a stack of out-of-town newspapers from Hotalings. The copies of Collier’s and Life with their twelve-page spreads.

It’s the same all over the goddamned country. Twenty million people! Nobody can eat, nobody’s on the street, they can’t take their eyes off it! It’s like they’re trying him in public, Tom. It’s supposed to be a hearing, but it’s like he’s already tried and convicted on their goddamned TV sets!

During those days they felt like drowned men, all of them who loved Charlie. Floating on the tide from one disaster to another. Watching helplessly as Charlie let himself get drawn into furious scuffles with Rudy Halley, the chief counsel of the committee. Bickering with the blustery, balding little Republican senator from New Hampshire, losing his temper and making wild accusations.

Charlie was still getting over the flu, but the cameras lovingly captured every movement. Patting his forehead repeatedly under the glaring TV lights with a precisely folded white square of a handkerchief. Looking as if he was sweating under questioning. Having to enter and leave each session passing the next gangster or gambler, the next mob boss or crooked union secretary on his way to the stand. The audience in the tightly packed room crowding in behind him, their faces clearly registering disbelief at the answers the witnesses gave.

Do you see them? Cohen railed, tie askew, shirt sticking limply to his belly by the end of a day in front of the television. "They’re like a cheering section, telling the audience at home what to think. They’re like a goddamned Greek chorus! What he says doesn’t matter anymore. It’s what the audience sees!"

Worst of all were the hands. Frank Costello, the Prime Minister of the Underworld. His lawyer wouldn’t give permission to focus on his face, so instead the cameras turned his hands into an epic. Costello continually folding little pieces of paper over and over again, fumbling with cigarettes and lighter. His avuncular, big-nosed, character actor’s face unseen. Just those guilty hands—and the scrape of his raspy voice becoming more maudlin and evasive with every question.

I just don’t remember.

I just don’t even remember that conversation.

I wouldn’t know. I never went into details.

Well, I can’t remember everything.

I am begging for you to treat me as a human being!

By then both he and Natie were begging Charlie to bring in an attorney. His brother still refusing, insisting that it wouldn’t look right to have one more mouthpiece at the witness table, raising objections and whispering in his ear.

I can’t have some lawyer there, telling me to take the Fifth like I’m some kind of goddamned communist! he insisted. I have to let people see that I have nothing to hide.

"Let me do it. I’m your brother, Charlie—"

"But I was the mayor, Tom. I was in charge. Besides, how would it look—"

Right now, Charlie, Natie said, cutting him off, "you look guilty."

He wouldn’t listen to them. Instead he stuck it out almost to the end. Tom had to give him credit for that much. Fighting back the flu. Coming in each new day of the hearings looking starched and pressed, in the best suits he had. Sparring with Halley and the righteous, sparrow-breasted Republican senator over everything, his eyes frosty and alert, refuting every accusation they made.

They put him through it. His interrogators poring over every peccadillo, every last detail of his administration. No administration on earth could look good if you went over it like that! Natie Cohen complained bitterly.

The deceptively soft-spoken, bespectacled lawyer hauling up before the cameras a seemingly endless parade of bookies and crooked cops, grifters and fixers, racetrack owners and strong-arm men. All the dirty underwash of the City government. Charlie demanding to have his say, confronting every charge—until, that is, they went all the way back to before his days in City Hall. To before the war, and the Little Man Who Would Not Stop Talking. The little man who went out the window . . .

Only after that had he folded up and let them put him on President Alemán’s private plane back to Mexico. Slim’s voice crackling over the long-distance line: What the hell happened up there?

And he had to admit, to this day, he still did not know.

3

New York, 1953

He went out the window. That much we know for sure. He did go out the goddamned window, Hogan repeated, rolling his chair back from the desk and slapping the file down. Five inches thick, at least, with the photographs spilling out, recording the same scene Tom had looked at live, a dozen years before.

Abe Reles. AKA Kid Twist. AKA the Little Man Who Would Not Stop Talking.

He lay stretched out on his back in the pictures, shirt split open to his waist. Those grotesque tattoos visible on his bared arms. His left arm flung up over his head, right one pointing down, as if making some last, secret sign.

That was a lie, too, he knew. All the lies upon lies, and here they were hoping they would add up to one big truth in the end.

They let the doctor turn him over, pull out his jacket and his shirt before the photographer got one goddamned shot, Hogan recited, his stern, thin mouth widening, one eyebrow hiked skeptically.

"Beside him are the bed sheets, and the insulated wire he was supposed to have used to climb out of a sixth-floor window. Tied-up bed sheets, for chrissakes. They posed them, too. Took the picture with them propped up against a windowsill. They posed the goddamn bed sheets! And for what? To show us what the sheets might have looked like coming out the window?"

Nobody was thinkin’ very clearly that morning, Boss.

He could still remember how Charlie’s face looked when he had stopped by the Brooklyn DA’s office on his way to law school that day. Firm-jawed and unruffled, trying to make a show of it for the men—but with every bit of color drained away.

Nine feet of sheets, tied to four feet of wire—to navigate a drop of forty-two feet, Hogan told him, though by now the numbers were engraved on his brain, along with every other fact of the case. Including the one he had concealed.

"The FBI lab boys say the whole contraption wouldn’t have held more than a hundred ten pounds. One hundred and ten pounds. When Reles, who knew more about ropes and knots than a goddamned Boy Scout, weighed one seventy. He could’ve told the moment he set foot on the ledge it wouldn’t hold him."

That’s right.

But laying a finger aside of his nose, out the window he goes!

Hogan flung himself back into the chair. The pinstriped Brooks Brothers suit jacket tucked away in the closet by now, three-point handkerchief still neatly folded in the breast pocket. The rest of him as meticulous as ever. Starched shirt still held at the wrists by cufflinks, stickpin stuck straight as a rail under a tightly knotted silk tie. A whiff of bay rum from his neck and his face shaved as carefully as a chorine’s leg.

In a moment he was up again, brainstorming over the case the way he liked to do late at night. Fiddling with his pipe, something else he had taught Tom. Always get yourself a good prop. It helps in court when you can’t figure out what the hell you’re going to say next. Going over the evidence again and again, gnawing at every contradiction like a dog with an old shoe.

None of it makes any sense. That theory the Old Man came up with, God bless him? ‘He was doing it for a laugh, a prank.’ Jesus jumped-up Christ. His wife says he was walking in his sleep. The men on duty said he was trying to escape—with two dollars and thirty-five cents in his pocket, and half of Brooklyn thinking they’d be set for life if they dropped a nickel on him!

He was sick. The TB.

And that was his greatest joy in life. You saw the testimony. Going around, showing everyone each time he coughed up another mouthful of blood. Saving it all in a glass he kept by the window. The man was a human spittoon, Tom. But like so many of us, he was precious in his own eyes.

I know it, Boss.

It was after the Kefauver hearings that he decided to go work for the district attorney’s office. The spectacle of his brother exposed before the TV cameras, melting under the light. Dabbing away at his forehead with that handkerchief, the dark splotches growing on his shirt . . .

Natie Cohen was incredulous when he told him. No more so than Hogan’s current assistant DAs. They told one another behind his back—sometimes to his face—that he was a red, a spy, a plant just trying to get information for his brother. Hogan as suspicious as any of them, at the start.

What, did you run out of government agencies to sue, Mr. O’Kane? he asked at his interview, leafing through a folder. He was a slight man, thickening a little around the midriff as he pushed fifty, with a once impish face grown a little priggish around the mouth. Hairline just beginning to recede, exposing a faint skirmishers’ line of liver spots. The feds, the state, the City. The Board of Ed. Met Life—

I didn’t realize they were part of the government. Yet.

Hogan didn’t look up.

Funny! You sued on behalf of Jewish war refugees. For the rights of a subversive alien operative during wartime—

He was a German hotel waiter.

—to keep the City from banning a book on Thomas Paine. To integrate Stuyvesant Town, to integrate Levittown, to integrate the major leagues—

Is that my FBI dossier you have there?

No, Hogan said, slapping it shut and looking up at him then. It’s our own. And that’s only about the half of it. Don’t think we don’t know about all that funny business on the docks. Shipping out bazookas to the Haganah so they could use them against this country’s closest wartime ally.

Just trying to even the odds a little.

Hogan gave a little snort. Actually, I don’t give a good goddamn about your liberal hobbyhorses. I only want to make it clear that the DA’s office is not the place for you to right the ills of the world. We’re here to catch criminals and enforce the law. Do you understand that?

I do.

I’m also not interested in salvaging your brother’s good name. What I want to do is to break the waterfront rackets, once and for all. I want to make a case, and I want to follow that case no matter where it leads. Is that clear?

That’s all I want.

What you want doesn’t matter. What matters here is what I want, and I want to make a case. I think you might be useful for that. I think you just might get all sorts of people who won’t talk to us to talk to you.

I think so, too.

The cops, the rats. Maybe Frank Bals and Jack McGrath. Maybe Neddy Moran, up in Sing Sing. Maybe even your brother.

Him, too.

Hogan’s eyes challenging, aggressive across the desk from him. Tom let him stare.

No doubt you’re sure he’s innocent, and you want to prove that, he said.

No doubt.

I can’t sway you from that, I know—not yet at least—and I don’t care. But I don’t want you lifting a finger on his behalf if it means endangering anything to do with this case. You got that?

I do.

All right. I trust you to be as good as your word. You know I’m sticking my neck out on this, but that’s my concern, not yours.

He tossed the folder he’d been reading from onto the desk in front of Tom—then pulled two more, much fatter ones from the briefcase on the floor next to his chair.

Here’s what we have on you, in case you’re interested. And here’s your brother.

He looked down now at his brother’s file, flipping aimlessly for the thousandth time through the clippings, the photographs, the police interrogations. The grand jury minutes. The articles from the tabloids with their headlines half an inch thick. The drawn-in lines and arrows in white chalk, showing Reles’s room on the sixth floor of the Half Moon, and where he had landed on the roof of the hotel’s kitchen, forty-two feet below. The Daily News headline, in gleeful block type, six inches high: THIS BIRD COULD SING BUT HE COULDN’T FLY!

It’s rotten, Tom. It’s rotten now, and it was rotten then. Abe Reles, the greatest mob witness of all time. The man who put away Murder, Inc. He sent seven men to the chair and made eighty-five capital cases in less than two years—and who knows but he wouldn’t have made two, three dozen more.

The man who would’ve sent up Albert Anastasia, Tom finished, and brought justice for Peter Panto.

That gently smiling boy, not yet thirty. Bringing twelve hundred longshoremen to their feet down at the Star Hall. Speaking of justice, and rights, and America there on the waterfront, as if it were a movie. His smiling face, under that silly little black hat. The thin moustache he was so vain about, which Tom used to joke made him look like a gigolo.

Then they were pulling the remains out of the lime pit, on the little man’s say-so. Brown bones and a skull sticking out of the gelatinous earth, while he retched behind the chicken house.

Charlie wanted that, too, Boss. I know he did.

I know you think he did, Tom.

I know. I was there.

Remembering the barely contained panic in his brother’s office that morning the little man went out the window. Uniforms and detectives running up and down the halls, the phones jumping off the hook. Everyone trying to keep it from leaking before they could figure out what the hell to say to the press. Frank Bals wringing his hands, his wide, red face melting like an old woman’s at a funeral.

"I swear to God, Charlie, I don’t know how the hell it coulda happened. I stopped in just before midnight, an’ everything was in order. They had orders to call me at once if anything—anything—went wrong!"

He was being kept under protective custody.

Hogan was counting the facts off his fingers, the way Tom had watched him do many times before a grand jury. Cherishing the hours they had to work together, especially at night like this, just the two of them. Learning something every time.

He had found the whole experience nearly unbearable at first. The offices up on Hogan’s eighth-floor fiefdom of the Criminal Courts Building more like a library, or the Harvard Yard. Swarms of Ivy League law grads to match the acres of red and gold broadloom on the floor. Nobody speaking above a murmur. Hogan insisting on opening everyone’s mail, issuing statements to the press in pretentious Victorian paragraphs. Displaying the huge plaque on his desk that read COURTESY IS THE GOLDEN KEY THAT OPENS EVERY DOOR.

Yet they had come to an unspoken understanding after their initial, mutual suspicion. Tossing back and forth the Latin aphorisms that both of them loved, two self-made Micks showing off. Tom having to admire how much more efficiently and orderly Hogan ran the DA’s office than his brother had back in Brooklyn. This was not a place where things would go missing. Things like a witness.

Twenty-four-hour police protection. An entire hotel suite—a whole goddamned wing, for chrissakes!—locked off behind an iron door. Eighteen cops on guard, working in shifts of six, twenty-four hours at a time. Three other witnesses in there with him, fearing for their lives. The iron door bolted and locked from the inside. Nobody gets in without the guards getting a good look at him first through the peephole.

That’s right.

Detectives supervising every single thing prepared for him down in the kitchen. More uniforms strolling the lobby, and the boardwalk outside. His testimony scheduled each day with no advance warning, no one told when he was coming or going. Taking him back and forth to court in a goddamned armored car, so no one can cut him off, stage an accident.

And instead he goes out the window.

Instead he goes out the window.

Hogan sighed and stood up, lacing the fingers of both hands behind his head while he walked around the room. He went back to the file and pulled out the autopsy report—Tom flinching involuntarily, and hoping he hadn’t noticed.

The autopsy said there was no sign of a struggle. Not a mark on the man—all trauma consistent with death by a fall from high places. No sign he’d been shot, or stabbed, or tapped on his pointy little head before they chucked him out. Nothing on the toxicology report. No one poisoned him or drugged him. Nothing at all—

Except the alcohol.

Except the alcohol. And not much of that. Only about the equivalent of a shot, the medical examiner said.

But it was in his stomach.

But it was still in his stomach. Too soon to be absorbed by the brain, where it might do any harm. And how did it get there? There wasn’t a bottle in the whole damned suite.

No.

And how did he drink it? The guards swore they walked up and down the hall every ten minutes, checking on all the sleeping little squealers. So we’re supposed to believe that—sometime between seven in the morning and seven ten—Abe Reles jumps up out of bed, dresses in his best testifying clothes, ties his bed sheets to a length of wire, ties the whole contraption to his radiator, takes a pop for good luck, and makes the bottle disappear. Then off he goes to join the Flying Wallendas.

He dropped the autopsy report back onto the desk, Tom’s eyes flicking over at it.

And that’s all, Tom said softly.

That’s all.

Not quite all. Tom thinking of the little slip of paper he had found tucked away in the autopsy report. Just a loose slip, not even paper-clipped to anything, its one line written in Dr. Robillard’s hand. Enough to hang a man, seen in the wrong light . . .

It’s the greatest locked-door mystery in the history of the world. And it’s twelve years old. Frank Hogan sighed, sitting back down.

At least we got to the bottom of some of it, Tom said softly.

I know we did, Tom. And it was because of the work you did.

I was just doing my sworn duty.

I know you did, and I appreciate your work, Tom. That’s why I want you to go down there and talk to him. That, and to show there’s no hard feelings.

He knows that, Boss.

I want to make sure he does. Honest to God, Tom, it’s nothing to do with the mayor’s race, or my ambitions. Tell you the truth, I’m just as glad not to have the job, Hogan told him, leaning forward to impress him with his sincerity, though Tom knew this was a lie, too. Wondering, Does anyone ever tell anything but lies to anyone else? Even those they love most in the world—especially those they love most?

I have no need to be mayor. I’d be just as happy to stay here till the day I die, putting the bad guys away. It’s nothing personal.

I know, Boss.

Tom the only one in the office able to get away with calling him Boss. Unwilling, even after he’d come to respect him, to give in to the airs of some Connecticut Mick like all the other, younger assistant DAs, worshipfully calling him Mr. Hogan. Going so far as to order the same lunch Hogan had Ida bring in every day from Schrafft’s, half the office gulping down a chicken salad sandwich and a cup of coffee.

It was another thing that separated them from Tom. He wasn’t just out of law school but already in his mid-thirties, a veteran, and not inclined to worship anybody anymore. Instead he insisted on using Boss with all its sarcastic, Amos ’n Andy connotations—his little way of keeping his independence.

"That’s why I want you to go down there. You know the case better than anyone. And with you he’ll know he’s getting a fair shake."

"He’ll appreciate that. I appreciate it—I appreciate