Part Two:

The Brain

AA t the Ansonia, Broadway and West 73rd, Arnold sets himself up with a desk, closets full of suits, a brand new sofa and refrigerator, he’s running various enterprises out of the place, creeping tendrils of real estate, dope, girls, the track, union negotiations, carpet joints. Plus, he’s married these days.

Carolyn Rothstein, née Carrie Greene, née Carrie Greenwald, daughter of a butcher, eighteen year old showgirl when he met her, was a snazzy snappy girl with a line of patter and a bumptious swaggering body, trim hips and gesturing hands with lacquered fingernails, that got a man musing about contortionists and trapeze artists. He felt rather astonished that he’d ever been capable of marriage at all: he’d come into this life constitutionally incapable of conventional measures, or of commitment to a single unretractable course of action. He was, however, getting somewhat acclimated to Carrie’s buoyant style, which, he sensed, gave his own preemptive fussiness an aura, probably unwarranted, of chic and electric vivacity. He and Carrie Green held out in room 467, taking meals when he wasn’t working. He was always working. His brain was a mechanism as active and sensitive as a spectroscope; he used higher math in pursuit of understanding the far edges of mortality. The Shylocking business had been increasing steadily—more than. On a good night the carpet joint on West 46th took in twenty grand. People came to him, seeking counsel, seeking advice, seeking a steady hand. He could sell anything. It was no different from selling door-to-door, the way he’d convinced Port Jefferson’s housewives of the benefits of a swimming pool, or a coffin. Or a vial of heroin. Things you need.

The Jews are tired of being the Jews, he says to Harpo. It’s a fool’s racket.

Speak for yourself, rabbi.

Then January 1915: the Feds outlawed the sale, possession, or use of opium and derivatives. By derivatives, heroin is what is meant.

A rule Arnold Rothstein lived by: obstruction is opportunity. Always.

Another rule: the way toward harmony is minimizing energy spent in fruitless opposition. Maximize and militarize all available pressure in favor of opportunity.

Another rule: humanity is utterly without will. Give the average man the smallest reason, he’ll conform to your expectations, he will try his best to be what’s expected of him. You need understand only that.

Flags and bunting were flapping like tenement laundry from the windows over 34th Street, and marching music—a pushy strut of drums and brass—reverberated along the corridors of Fifth Avenue, long before anyone could see the bands coming. Young doughboys in clean uniforms—their faces fresh, stiff, slightly bored—were marching uptown, toward the Park, a starchily patriotic panoply of rows and columns that put Arnold, as he watched from outside the B. Altman department store, in a state of mind that, for the moment, seemed to permit awe unspoiled by schemes. Nothing beat a parade of men going off to war for pageantry, he muttered to a guy in a yellow suit next to him. The country’s war economy was going like a steam engine, and these doughboys, all doomed to the trenches of Ypres, nerves frayed as they cowered under the gaudily murderous barrage of machine guns and artillery, were going to need serious calming to beat back the Boche. Along 34th, the pushcart men were doing a brisk business: oysters, pickles, lemonade, batter-dipped fish. News kids weaved in and out of the crowd, hawking early editions of the Observer and Tribune, their voices high above the tumult. Arnold raised his hand in salute to a rough-looking kid with a long jaw who returned the salute, a private moment between strangers that induced a tug of patriotic longing that rose in his stomach like nausea. But another brass band subsumed the moment till he couldn’t be sure if the salute happened at all, or if it was dreamed. He made his way along the parade route, past the Astor house, to the upper 50s, where he knew of a card game at the Park Central. At the table, he tugged the garters of his socks and sniffed, content in this suspended blissful state of belonging.

Arnold Rothstein could never not be the man who fixed the World Series of 1919, just months after the surviving soldiers of the American Expeditionary Force returned home to parades grander than those they’d left to two years earlier, ticker tape pouring down from the heavens. A week before the Series, a couple sports he knew approached him in the lobby of the Ansonia. They had, they told him in stagy sotto voce, an unassailable proposition: the Sox first baseman, the shortstop, a pitcher or two, had come to them offering to throw the Series for a price, and, well, backing was all was needed, the haul would be limited to whatever the market would bear before people began to take notice and the odds flipped. Over the summer of 1919, the Reds, in the tepid National League, had taken 96 games. The Sox, with 88 wins in the more ruthless American League, were 5-1 favorites. The Sox—Joe Jackson, Chick Gandil, Buck Weaver, streaking between bases like tarnished gods in grass-stained uniforms—would expose the Reds as hapless opponents. Arnold may have seen more challenges in the proposition than these amateur sports, but he would inquire, he promised, of his baseball friends, discreetly, and consider it.

And so Arnold became a backer really, no different from the role he’d taken in a million schemes, a million guys trying to get something going and just needing cash to dream. But they’d write it on his grave. If he’d discovered America, they’d still write it on his grave: That man that bought the World Series.

By the autumn of 1920, however, eight Sox players had been indicted—now looking, in civilian clothes in a Chicago courtroom, like mere demigods, the mass of their torsos and thighs cumbersome in three-dollar suits. Under indictment himself, Arnold was going to Chicago, dutifully, patriotically, he joked to Bayard Swope as they climbed aboard the train for a two-day journey through a land of strange and unfamiliar solitude, jumbled brick warehouses, tarpapered windowless backsides of nothing towns—vistas, Arnold considered, starker than those New York vistas that sometimes appeared, joltingly, between buildings, angular cutouts of blue above the Hudson River. I used to play stickball on the Upper East Side, he said to Bayard. I was the worst player on our street. Now I won the World Series. How ‘bout that? He walked into the Cook County courtroom in a subdued suit, subdued necktie, looking like a country doctor, or city politician. To questions about his holdings in real estate and shipping, he answered in earnest detail. He was, so he said, an upright citizen enjoined to come to an unfamiliar city to address questions he had no more knowledge of than anyone who read the newspapers. Not a single witness had put him at the Ansonia the night the gamblers and players met.

On the return trip, he stopped in Cleveland for some business about corn sugar supplies.

Bayard Swope wrote up his veneration: Arnold as the unjustly accused businessman submitting to cross-examination, a private citizen and cosmopolitan Broadway celebrity, not very different from his pal, the great Al Jolson.

H e took a telephone call at Lindy’s. A shipment of three hundred cases of good whiskey had been carted out of one of his warehouses on Pigeon Street, Queens, said the voice on the other end. Arnold nodded, took a spoonful of the chicken soup. Delicious. Simply delicious, he said. Two men—young turks off the boat from Paloma—had been killed. Examples. Hogtied. Shot in the back of the head. Their bodies rolled into weeds by the East River. Five others were let go, with baseball bats cracked across their backs, backs of knees, shoulders, said the voice. Arnold joshed across the table with Jack Dempsey, the boxing champion, who had the aw-shucks twinkle of a Cripple Creek scrapper. Like Arnold, he’d once had to wake up every morning and find a way to make a living, and managed, half by virtuosity, half happenstance, to find his way to being a moneymaker. Like Arnold, he was a long way from his past. Arnold understood.

Things ok? said Jack Dempsey.

Arnold removed the napkin from his collar. Another day at the office.

Next day he strolled into an opium den in back of Jack Smith’s chop-suey joint on Mott. Inside was Giuseppe Lombardo perched like a sultan on a divan, cross-legged, a ruby silk bowtie tight around his neck, his jacket folded by his feet. Giuseppe Lombardo, aka Socrates Joe, aka Don Socrates, was functionally illiterate, prone to dispensing rudimentary tidbits of world history he’d picked up in picture books to anyone who’d listen, expounding ad nauseam on Napoleonic tactics etc etc. A couple men with Thompson guns lounged on bunks, slack-jawed in lavender bowties that almost matched. Through the moted light of the room, Arnold discerned the Don raise a single eyebrow, looking perplexed but unbothered by his sudden appearance. In ambassadorial mode, Arnold could signal the end of the world or fraternal connection with the merest shrug or his shoulder, or tug of his cuff. Now he was inclined to let Lombardo figure it out for himself. Arnold extended his arms, submitting to the patdown from the Thompson gun boys, whose ineffectual slouches and imbecilic staring eyes seemed to render them ill-suited for employment other than precisely what they were here for.

For a Mustache Pete, Lombardo himself was surprisingly youthful, slender-shouldered, pretty you might say. He sprang from the divan, and shook Arnold’s hand, who accepted it with a formality more perfunctory than stiff.

Who are you?

Arnold picked up and examined an unused pipe.

I understand we are to have a conversation, he said.

I’s flattered to be in the presence of the Great Brain?

Obstruction is opportunity. Persistent obstruction shows fatal weakness in another’s character, the dread of the mausoleum.

I thought it would benefit us both to talk.

What can I do?

Return my property.

Oh?

To prevent further damage to our respective businesses.

I’m innocent of what you charge, Mr Rothstein.

Oh, and offer me two of your men as way of atonement.

Men?

Respect.

Go look outside, Lombardo said to one of the others.

When he came back, the man said, No.

Your brain must be too big for me. Tell me why I don’t kill you.

You can, of course. Free will.

Free will. Very good. Why don’t I just give you these two, and you do them what you please.

And my property.

At this point, you are dead. Capisce? I point, and—

Capisce.

Mr Big Brain, explain why I no point.

You are interested in succeeding in business, and in continuing to live?

Pointing my finger is good. No more Mr Big Brain, he said. His smirk, shameless, mirthless, pinched his dry lips, showing jagged edges of his bottom teeth.

My friends know I’m here, of course. They wish us to succeed. They wish you to give back the property that doesn’t belong to you. Initially they wanted me to execute you and your men. You can understand that? I suppose that was possible. You never know. But I had to provide a way that would appeal to my competing desires for vengeance and justice. Do you follow that? I’m not sure if it’s something people like you understand.

Even if I had your whiskey, Mr Rothstein, said Lombardo, I not in a position to return it.

Lombardo fell back onto the divan, inhaling from the pipe and letting the white smoke that hung in front of his face, which stared upward at the tin ceiling, form into a lovely arabesque. The room stank of air that had settled into it years ago, an irremediable stench of vegetables left rotting in the sun, underarm sweat, and whatever is left of flesh when it’s finished the duty of life’s torment. Arnold, habitually on guard against hazards to his health, dared not breathe too deeply.

There’s already a mark on you, Mr Socrates. Capisce? I expect, if I do not return, your turn would come tomorrow, perhaps the next day. A bullet. A blade. It’s how these things go. Watch the dinner invitations you accept.

You make me laugh.

That’s not the type of business I like to run, as you might know. To me, violence lacks imagination. Despite the counterexample of men like Napoleon, as you might say, violence is for those who lose sight of their visions and resort to dull coercion. Still—what is history?

See him out, Lombardo instructed the two.

Mr Lombardo—

He gestured with a gesture known in southern Sicily, and Arnold picked something from the edge of a nostril, and went willingly, the two men waving the guns at him, grinning like five-year-olds.

I t was a morning of promise and a gaudy sun. The body of Giuseppe Lombardo, no pants, no underwear, was perpendicular to the white line of a two-lane state road going into Hempstead Bay when a red Peerless touring car coming around the bend hit it straight on, ripping an arm out of its shoulder socket, and crushing the esophagus and left side of his head. Next day it was in the papers that the Peerless’s driver had found a garrote around what was left of Giuseppe Lombardo’s neck, pieces of a shattered whiskey bottle in his dry-lipped mouth. Then two days later, three of Lombardo’s men were ambushed outside a bowling alley in Albany, their heads bashed in with Honus Wagner model Louisville Sluggers. In another week, as Arnold was about to get into the Park Central lobby elevator, the two men from the opium den came at him with .22s, blasting away. Pop. Pop. An off-duty cop who happened to be in the lobby pulled a pistol that happened to have the serial numbers filed off and, implacably, unceremoniously, with no more malice than a parent tsking a child, shot one of the contract men through the cheek, and the other in the hip and eye. Like his friend Jack Dempsey, Arnold was living in a vortex of chance and astute calculation, a whorl of possibility and violence extemporaneous and premeditated. Pushing outer limits of mathematical possibility. With Jack it came with sweeping up shit in Wasatch Range saloons for a nickel, hoboing around half the western states, eye always shrewd for the hustle. With Arnold, it came from pacing the room of his father’s house, virtue weighing on him like the boulder of Sisyphus.

One of the men twitched on the floor, and with a cough into his hand Arnold gave the signal. Two rounds into the faces of each man for good measure, and the cop walking out into the glittering pedestrian pageantry of 7th Ave.

What’s a life anyway? A welter of days and the oddest assortment of memory, a flare upon the expressionless extent of eternity. One climbs to brief acclaim, assembles good opinions, furniture and fortune, before the lunatic urgency of being realizes final ebbing—leaving no trace of dust.

Arnold straddled universes. He was expanding the range of his interests, business, social, cultural, dining in plush rooms, he lit up Cuban cigars with Tammany ward bosses, in greenrooms nuzzled chorus girls’ perfumed shoulders, he read McClures, Colliers, Photoplay and attended negro pageants at Carnegie Hall, he cut through the old Sixth Ward back alleys and lay down $60,000 on six-day cycling races at Madison Square Garden, New Years Eve he shivered nearly to death watching a four hundred pound ball drop from a flagpole, he knew certain men in Harlem and in neighborhoods in Queens, at seaside hotels he and Bayard hustled for the fun of it, he talked with Navy Yard iron workers one hour, dined at the Waldorf the next. His prospects, in short, were expanding with New York’s.

Since he was a kid in his father’s house, the place had been accruing the rough nurturing aspect of a small town that happened to have scuffled its way to the edges of the Harlem and East Rivers and the Hudson, it was a place of jackhammered rubble on the corner one day, new skyscraper soaring the next. Everything was moving uptown these days, old neighborhoods plowed over for new. Sherry’s, a favorite haunt, settled into the Hotel Netherland, on 59th. They served terrapin, quail eggs, vichyssoise, braised sweetbread, a couple tables away was Mae West and a coterie of groomed young men, the moonpie-faced Babe Ruth feasting, poor old Evelyn Nesbit (a sex sensation at fifteen, washed-up drunk at thirty-five), a stray Astor or Vanderbilt, and assorted scions looking to get their picture in the papers. Delmonico’s, still stuck on 44th, was for the ancien régime, Newport and Saratoga matrons in chauffeured Pierce-Arrow and Duesenberg saloon cars that gleamed like silver-flaked water pouring out of a cloud. Arnold was for the new, the uptown, the chance of creating from nothing. America.

After dinner with Bayard, he excused himself. He wandered down to the Ambassador, on the block between 50th and 51st. Buda Godman kept an apartment there—paid for by her improbable lover, Charles Stoneham, a squat unattractive man who owned the Giants not to mention half of Havana. Buda answered the door in full Buda exhibition, her hennaed hair like a great pampered pet, Arnold removed his hat, bowing in a display ironic in presentation but sincere in intent. Her cocktails were exclusively Arnold’s whiskey, his rum. Inside were men throwing dice, spinning roulette wheels along Buda’s lavishly draped windows that looked over Fifth Ave. Buda was a young woman of lavish tastes and lavish stillness of figure and voice that slowly saturated your consciousness, she was from the midwest, Chicago, and had a midwestern way of being, of affectless amiability and unhurried charm. You didn’t discern the effect of her eyes glancing at you, nor the virtuosic camber of her figure, until you were quite in love. Arnold kissed her on the cheek, watching the hair, and edged along the periphery of the dice players, saying no to a drink, as always, or almost always.

If there’s a better view in all the world, Mr Rothstein— said Buda.

The view of the Park, a gray silhouette scarcely visible in the distance, was tempered by the dead November night. Below them streetlamps gave off dingy light, elegiac fluorescence diffused through onionskin, and the cars on Fifth crept in lumbering farce of their usual uptown progression, as if being dragged down by the chill. Arnold shrugged.

No, he said. There isn’t.

She’s a siren, a man Arnold didn’t recognize said to him. It was meant wittily, but it was dull-witted.

Mr Rothstein can close his ears if he likes, said Buda. Or lash himself to any available mast.

The man had a gnarled cartilaginous aspect, with slim fingers made for the display of gaudy jewelry. He had an intensity of focus in his gray eyes that was both arresting and repulsive. His name, he introduced himself, was Titanic Thompson.

On the whole, I’ll take my chances, Arnold sniffed.

Instinctively, he disliked and distrusted anyone who referred to himself by his own nickname.

The only man I’d wager you’d lose a wager to, said Buda.

Oh, I’m sure.

Anything you like, Mr Rothstein? Chuck-a-luck? A couple dice? Cards? I can juggle.

Pistols at twenty paces?

Gentlemen, said Buda.

Mr Rothstein is known to be violence-averse, said Titanic, grazing Arnold’s shoulder as he reached for a drink.

Buda wore a sailor blouse and a straight, low-waisted, fleur-de-lis-patterned skirt that grazed the tops of her pretty knees. She smelled of incense, citrus and gin, and some incorrigible fragrance that made her seem barely old enough to have a drink in her hand, let alone be left on her own among people of such dubious distinction. Her lips created a perfect oval, and were the color of a Coca-Cola sign.

Later, Titanic came over to Arnold again, and said, pointing with his head, I’ll wager you can’t step out onto that window ledge and climb over to the next window. You make it, you’re up ten thousand. Make it twenty.

I can think of better ways of insuring I enjoy my returns.

Two to one.

Sorry—

Arnold turned away.

Wager me I can’t, Mr Rothstein.

I don’t care to wager on a foot slipping.

Three to one—

No thank you.

He stripped some bills from the roll.

Buda will hold it— The full thirty. No fear my not paying up.

They moved toward the windows, unnoticed by the others. Below them the streetlamps glowed in furious refutation of the gathering night, a precise line extending uptown toward the Metropolitan Museum and the island’s outer limits, and downtown toward the docks where his grandparents had entered the country at the time of the Civil War. Titanic banged on the window, as if testing it.

Arnold prided himself on his adeptness in taking a man’s measure, fine and weak points, how he might vainly be mistaken about his own character, as every man he’d ever met was, invariably. Case in point, Titanic. Men like that were felled with the faintest stroke, a feather against a shin. Titanic cracked open the window. A rush of the night air, frigid and mystical from its occupation of the alien outside, entered the room.

Buda approached Titanic, her lips petulant, insouciant.

Stop this, she said. Whatever it is.

Taking another drink, Titanic went over the scheme with her, and impressed the bankroll into her hand, which she accepted with merest hesitation, without a change of expression.

I’m good for the money, Arnold said to Buda.

Titanic?

Arnold Rothstein. Sure.

Maybe at the moment you’re going to die, you don’t know the moment, you just don’t. You don’t. All you know is the impatient rapturous thrust of life, its dynamic urging since the day you came out of the womb and started knowing what you were onto, is there, and, evidence to the contrary, no hints will convince you the moment is the moment. Arnold never knew. Titanic. Buda Godman. Socrates Joe. They did not know. Life prevailed. You tempted it, daring to defy the moment’s claim. But life was the thing that killed you in its overwhelming tumultuous triumph. Arnold had to understand he’d been up against mathematics all along.

Announcing his intentions through cupped hands, Titanic directed all side bets to Buda. If, as he said, he was successful and didn’t fall into the middle of Fifth Ave, he was taking twenty percent off the top.

He approached the window, pushed it open and stepped out onto the ledge, as if he’d been walking along ledges all his life, eliciting an uncertain smatter of handclaps. There’s death, and there’s willing death and there’s death for the show of it. Politely, Arnold clapped too, and checked the roll in his pocket.

They could see Titanic step sideways a few feet, and presently his fingers, which were still gripping the edge of the window so the skin under the fingernails was visibly pink, disappeared. There was no sound, nor sight of him. The wind seemed to pick up a little, a little wafting that carried a small dark bird on it. Stories below could be heard noises of the city, horns, sirens, an argument as clear as if it were taking place in the apartment.

Someone went for the window, but Buda said, No.

Arnold set a hundred on the roulette table and lost it in less than ten seconds. A few men turned away, either in dread or because the feat’s novelty was wearing thin. Most were still staring, as if reluctant to miss the off-chance of a miracle. He’d had a few bad weeks—interest on two hundred thousand from an overextended dago was three days overdue, the Coast Guard had detained five of his boats by the Hell Gate Bridge, confiscating a quarter of a million in booze. The unfortunate prospect of Titanic Thompson plummeting to his death aside, short-term money would come in handy.

But in the time it took him to turn from the roulette table, Titanic came crawling through the other window, bounding into the apartment like a Russian acrobat, to the delighted applause of those who had wagered on him, an obligatory smatter from the losers. Buda ran up and kissed him on the mouth, and Titanic, abashed only an instant, returned the kiss with flair, provoking and embellished, that might have been part of stage performance but nevertheless came across as a charming coda to the whole episode. By the time all bets had been counted, he’d taken a total of twenty-three thousand two hundred and eight dollars, ten thousand of which had belonged to Arnold. Titanic and Buda promenaded around the apartment like co-generals of a conquering army: in a three-piece pinstriped suit and a gold and green Windsor-tied necktie, his eyes the color of sodden paper, Titanic looked like a discount general. Shaking Arnold’s hand he said,

You golf, Mr Rothstein?

Double or nothing going over Niagara in a barrel.

That summer he ran into him on lower Broadway.

Hello, Arnold. You son of a gun. Thought I recognized you.

Arnold shook his hand, patted him on the shoulder.

Whereupon Arnold’s man shoved Titanic against the Wannamaker’s window where the display was a mannequin wearing an ermine coat, and kicked him five times in the stomach, at least, and smashed his face with swift jackhammering fists that wore brass knuckles. Titanic was, surprisingly, unresistant, or too ambushed to get up a defense, the limber body slumped lifelessly against the window, a steady narrow slurry of blood coming from the left nostril. There was a gash right below his eye that opened like a geological cleft. Only the faintest register of his breathing showed the body was still alive.

This man slipped and we’re assisting him, Arnold said to the store manager who came out to investigate.

Arnold’s associate, Thomas Farley, was from Virginia, where his grandparents had been slaves, he was wearing a smart checked suit and still had on the brass knuckles. He was quiet and serious-minded, he studied the modern artists and dabbled himself, his violence came in tempests that came as swiftly as they quit. As he stood above Titanic, in contemplative stillness, Arnold’s gratitude extended to the slave ancestors who had given life to this man.

That’s right, Titanic said, speaking through busted-up lips.

Get to a hospital, the manager said, and walked back into the store, washing his hands of the situation.

Titanic tried to push himself up. I’ll do it again. Walk that window. No odds. Two hundred, cash on the table. Watch me. See if there’s a rope. Watch me.

Through the grapevine they’d heard the thing had been a set-up. Titanic had enlisted a confederate to hold a rope from the apartment above.

Fuck him.

He had eyes the shade of shale, one of which wasn’t swollen completely shut. He showed neither animosity for what had been done to him nor remorse.

Fuck him.

Cards? said Arnold.