Page 104 of Shadow Ticket
“Who are you?”
“Christopher Keegan, but everybody calls me Stuffy.”
“Whose bright idea was this? It’s that goddamned Praediger, isn’t it?”
“Somebody else, some cheese syndicate. A while ago they say you skipped with a good-size piece of their cash, and they still want it back.”
“I’ve spent some of it.”
“No regrets, I guess.”
“Why? What else do you do with money? Eat it, smoke it? Take it out on a date?”
“They’re OK with whatever percentage is left. But they intend to be less than courteous if they ever get hold of you.”
“And how much are you delivering me for?”
“We’re not working for them.”
“Who?”
Shrug. “See, there’s a difference between the Al Capone of Cheese and the AC of C in Exile. One sooner or later gets the paving-material overcoat. The other goes where he’ll do no harm. Our racket happens to be exile.”
“You’re telling me there are death squads going around with a list of targets while friendly submarines meantime are also cruising around benevolently picking them up before any harm can be done. This is crazy.”
“Latest from Stateside,” handing over a copy of theChicago Tribune, delivered out of the darkness by transoceanic radio facsimile. Seems revolution has broken out in the U.S., beginning in Wisconsin as a strike over the price per hundredweight that dairy farmers were demanding for milk, spreading across the region and soon the nation. Milk shipments hijacked and dumped at trackside, trees felled across roadways and set aflame to stop motor delivery, all-night sentinels, crossroads pickets, roundups, ambushes, bayonet charges, gunfire, casualties military and civilian.
“They’re out to destroy Cheese,” is Bruno’s immediate assumption. “Todestroy everything I’m Al Capone of.” Nobody wants to hear about it. The real Al Capone can’t help, he’s in the pen now and the Outfit has other problems on its mind. The Red Hour has struck at last. Bankers, capitalists, club-fellows, Fascists locally and abroad ignore Bruno’s pleas, offer no aid or comfort, fail to return ship-to-shore phone calls, often too busy thrashing desperately themselves against the relentless vortex of a sinking world order, others relying on their faith in the realities of blood and soil, which never go away, to save them.
“I knew it. The minute that damned Bolshevik Roosevelt got into office—”
“Only for a minute and a half. There was a coup. Gang of millionaires including a couple of Roosevelt’s own Brain Trusters, like that Hugh Johnson. General MacArthur is in command now.”
“The one who broke up the Bonus Army.”
“Says he understands the insurrectionary mind.”
“Old Milwaukee family. I think Doug went to West Division High around the time I was in Chicago Latin.”
“Might be a useful contact for you back there.”
“We never met, we didn’t move in the same circles.”
38
Meantime on the Korzo who should show up one morning at Caffé Impresa but Dippy Chazz Foditto, wearing a Borsalino, a bespoke Neapolitan suit, and Lenthéric Men’s After Shave Lotion, waving around an unlit full-length Toscano. Being deported, in style it seems, back to his ancestral Sicily, in fact on the way down there right now after a quick detour through Naples to see about another suit fitting with Bebè himself, “That’s Gennaro Rubinacci to you.”
Chazz has become something of an international adventurer, having at the moment just signed on to a scheme hatched and run by U.S. ruling-class elements who are betting that the island of Sicily will be a strategic factor in the next war, and that therefore a local anti-Fascist guerrilla force, trained, armed, and ready to roll, might someday prove helpful.
“They hate Mussolini, who’s been trying to bring the island under Fascist control—sorry, Duce, no sale—which has not been lost on my principals.”
“Which is who again?” Hicks inquires.
“Rich white guys I used to see all the time in that chop house next door to the Union League that Jake Guzik worked out of, Saint something…It was ol’ Greasy Thumb who introduced us, in fact. The deal is I do them this one li’l international intrigue job, and they drop everything they got against me which if you add up the beefs just since I saw you last is already plenty. Plus now I’m on a federal swindle sheet with a nice-size wagonload to spend.”
“Better watch it, Dipster, this could put you only about a sawbuck short of respectable.”
“Stepped right into it, can’t remember how long ago anymore, and now I’m stuck. There’s no catch and release with these trawlers, they eat what they pull in. They call it duty to my country but it’s really penance for my sins including all that double-dating you and me did back in the olden days, remember, hey, that Lois and her crazy friend,” kissing his fingertips, “couple a tomatizz, huh? strictly San Marzano.” By now they have strolled as far as theribarnica, or fish market, where they are gazed back at by the bright though regrettably dead eyes of a full assortment of recent dwellers in the Adriatic.
