“Quite a bit, really. You know, them amateur nights? I was trying to get Barney’s help and advice in shutting some of the competition down, with this non-pro stripper bullshit. He has an in with the AGVA.”
That was the American Guild of Variety Artists. Somewhere in there among the violinists and sopranos and ballet dancers they represented were strippers. That is, “exotic dancers.”
Barney worked for the Milton Blackstone Advertising Agency in New York, where his celebrity had made him a successful press agent. Like Tom Ellison, though Tom never won a welterweight championship.
The music way up front wasn’t loud enough to make conversation difficult, but we did have to lean in a little to talk.
“So, what,” I said, “you’re trying to get these amateur nights banned?”
“Fucking A. Then maybe I can turn the Vegas back into a respectable joint. You know, I’m hoping to book Candy Barr in there. When her parole’s up on that pot bust, anyway. Broad’s got two of the most famous busts in America, huh?” He cackled at that.
“Sounds like Dallas is doing right by you.”
“
I’m
doin’ right by
it
. Place’s a shithole. When the boys sent me down there, fuck—why not California, or Florida? I had to make my own way, Nate. But you can
do
that in America, can’t you?”
“Sure. Look at me. Horatio Alger, eat your heart out.”
“Who?”
“Nothing. Can I buy you a drink, Jake?”
“Sure. But it’s Jack now. Jake’s history.”
I grinned at him. “Like Sparky?”
He grinned back. “Well, there’s still
some
spark left in the old kid yet, Nate.”
I waved a waiter over. Half a dozen guys in white shirts with black ties and black trousers handled all two-hundred-some customers in the 606, no female staff other than onstage. I ordered a Coke minus the rum this time, and Jake—Jack—asked for tomato juice.
“You don’t drink, either?” he said with an impish smile.
“I had two rum-and-Cokes already. But I’m not a big boozer. Don’t tell me a club man like you is a teetotaler?”
He squinted his little black eyes, shook his head. “Bad for you. Like cigarettes. Don’t touch ’em. I don’t see
you
draggin’ on one, neither.”
“Only time I ever really smoked,” I said, “was in the service.”
“When you and Barney shared a foxhole.”
“That’s right.”
“On Guadalcanal.”
“Skip it, Jack.”
“Well, you’re a true hero, Nate.”
“A true hero who got out on a Section Eight.”
“Don’t give me that fuckin’ noise. Barney told me. You got the Silver Star. They mentioned that in that
Life
article, too, right?”
Jack had been following my storied career, apparently.
“Hell,” he said, “me? I spent the whole damn war in the South.”
“Well, my understanding is the Japs never got past Birmingham, so you did fine.”
He didn’t find that funny. He damn near looked like he might cry. “Only action I saw was when I punched out a fucking sergeant.”
“You punched out a sergeant?”
“Goddamn right! He called me a Jew bastard! Wouldn’t
you
punch him?”
Jake was a lot more Jewish than me, despite my last name. With my reddish-brown hair and blue eyes, I took after my Irish mother, not my Jewish pop, who had been apostate and raised me that way. But I would have given that sergeant his due beating, all right—just not where or when I could be made for it.
My Coke and Jake’s tomato juice arrived.
He raised his red-brimming glass in a toast and I clinked my Coke with it as he said, “
L’Chayim
,” and we nodded at each other, then sipped.
Another dancer was onstage now, visible through the blue-smoke haze. The little combo was doing its best with David Rose’s big-band “The Stripper.” Didn’t really make it, but nobody cared—the blonde onstage, Leslee Lynn, had a nice smile and nicer legs in mesh stockings that showed under the fox-fur stole she’d strutted out in, and would soon be ridding herself of.
“So what brings you to Chicago, Jack? Talent hunt?”
He was turned toward the blonde, nodding as he took in her graceful, sexy moves to the clumsy music. “Yeah, a guy has to keep a finger on the pulse.”
“Is that what he has to keep his finger on.”
The bullet head turned my way. His smile was boyish, in a sleazy kind of way. “Lou says this girl is a class act. She’s a University of Chicago grad, he tells me.”
“What healthy male wouldn’t want to see
her
diploma? So you’ll hit a lot of the clubs in town, looking for dancers?”
“Sure.” He shrugged. “You go where the best shows are, at least in the Midwest and South. There are some talented gals in Frisco and Hollywood, but why ship them in, when there’s Fort Worth and New Orleans in my own backyard?”
We both watched the fox stole as it drifted to the floor and got dragged behind Leslee’s confident stride. She wasn’t as busty as the other girls, but she knew how to work the crowd.
“Class,” Jack said admiringly. “Your average stripper? Just ain’t got no class.” Without looking at me, he added, “And how about you, Nate? What brings you to the 606?”
So he
had
made me.
You didn’t need to ask a Chicagoan like Nate Heller what he was doing in a joint where good-looking girls took off their clothes. No. He’d seen me, all right.
“I met a client here earlier,” I said.
Had he seen me duck out, after Tom? And come back in?
“We finished our business,” I said, “and I decided to stick around and partake in a little culture.”
“You and Lou Nathan go way back.”
“That we do. But truth be told, nowadays the Chez Paree is more my speed.”
He nodded, half smiled, then sighed dreamily. “Someday. Someday that’ll be me, booking Sinatra and Sammy Davis.”
“Booking Sammy Davis in Dallas? You
are
ambitious.”
He found that real funny, or pretended to.
The combo moved onto “My Heart Belongs to Daddy” in honor of Leslee’s heart-shaped pasties (I may have been in my fifties, but I had twenty-twenty vision).
Jack turned his back on the stripper and showed me a different kind of smile. The kind with no teeth. Accompanied by hooded eyes.
“We been friends a long time, Nate,” he said.
Not really, but I gave him another little half toast and said, “Maxwell Street days.”
He didn’t bother clinking my glass. The beady black eyes were like buttons trying to sew themselves on me. “So, you … you’d
tell
me, wouldn’t you?”
“Tell you what, Jake?”
“Jack. It’s Jack.”
“Yeah, like the president. Tell you what?”
“You’d tell me, somebody sent you? Was having you check up on me? You know, keeping tabs?”
“Who would be keeping tabs on you, Jack?”
He sighed. Shook his head. “When it’s Nate Heller sitting there? That’s the thing. You’re connected to more places than AT and T. Could be Outfit. Could be union. Could be … company.”
Did he mean what I
thought
he meant?
I didn’t ask, but he answered anyway: “Company as in…” And this he whispered. “… Mongoose.”
That made the back of my neck prickle, and that didn’t happen very often these days.
But I didn’t play along. I played dumb. He wouldn’t buy it, but I played dumb.
“Mongoose, Jack?” I was whispering, too. That probably gave it away. Just the same, I said, “What the hell’s Mongoose?”
“Operation Mongoose,” he said, and he touched thumb and forefinger to his lips and made the twisting, locking motion that meant his lips were sealed. Like one teenage girl assuring another at a slumber party.
Operation Mongoose was not a phrase I heard every day. It was in fact a phrase I wished I’d never heard. Several years ago, following a high-level request, I had put the CIA in touch with various organized-crime figures, so they could pursue a common goal: eliminating Fidel Castro.
I sipped the Coke. “I’m not part of that anymore, Jack.”
“You
were
a big part of it, though.” The black eyes glistened now; it was almost like there was life in them. “You didn’t think a small cog like me would know, huh? Ha.”
I managed not to say,
Fuck no, I didn’t think an insignificant worm like you, Jake, would be involved in a top secret government assassination mission.
Instead, I just said, “No, I can see where you’d be a major player.”
For example, picking up a few grand in an envelope in a strip club.
“But I do wonder,” I went on, “who would have shared that information with you? I mean, discretion being the better part of valor and all.”
“Not important,” he said, shrugged, and sipped tomato juice. “Thing is, we’re both patriots, Nate. Heroes. We saw something evil, a cancer growing too close to our borders, and we did something about it.”
“Okay. Fine.” I found it best not to mention that Fidel was alive and well. “But it has nothing to do with why I’m here tonight.”
“You were here to meet a client, I heard you the first time.” He leaned in. “You wanna know what the sick joke is, Nate? The sick fucking joke?”
Other than that, how did you enjoy the play, Mrs. Lincoln?
“Sure,” I said.
“Once upon a sorry damn time, we …
I
… helped transport guns and jeeps and you-name-the-fucking-arms into Cuba
for
Castro. To help him take out that prick Batista.”
Well, that wasn’t quite right, was it? The idea surely had been to get on Castro’s good side
just in case
he got rid of Batista, who the mob guys already had in their pocket. To make sure the casinos stayed open, the narcotics kept moving, with the money still flowing, no matter which Cuban prick was in power.
Hadn’t worked out that way.
I said, “Guys like us, Jack, aren’t cut out for politics.”
He shook his head, but he was agreeing with me. “Naw, hell, you’re right. We’re just the foot soldiers. Who only make the whole fucking thing possible. Where would democracy be without guys like us, Nate?”
“Good question.”
“But I made up for it.” He leaned in again, deeper, and he went sotto voce: “You would not believe how many trips back to Cuba I made since. This time helping out
real
freedom fighters. Also…” He thumbed his chest. “… I’m the guy who kept Santo in touch, when that bearded bastard had him cooped up.”
I hoped he didn’t mean Santo Trafficante. The Tampa don who was among the most powerful and nastiest alive. Or dead, for that matter.
Jack wasn’t whispering now, but nobody else could hear. The band was playing a spirited “Peppermint Twist,” and a tall acrobatic redhead in a green bikini was doing an equally spirited twist.
“After all Santo done for Castro,” Jack was saying, “he locks him up like a common criminal. Keeps him in for damn near two years! Without me makin’ the occasional trip, Santo wouldn’ta knowed what the fuck was goin’ on back stateside.”
Jack was telling me more than I wanted to know. I had to wonder why anybody would ever trust this chatty, overactive little screwball with anything more important than a trip to the grocery store. And then it better be with a detailed damn list.
I raised a tentative hand, like a schoolkid reluctantly answering his teacher’s question. “Jack—nobody from the Company sent me to check up on you. Not from the Outfit, either. Nobody. I really was here to meet a client. I’m not going to tell you who that client is, because it’s privileged information.”
He thought about that. “Like with a lawyer.”
“Exactly.”
“… Okay.” The shark eyes blinked in the pasty, five-o’clock-shadowed face. Then he half smiled, suddenly cocky. “Anyway, why should the Outfit wanna keep tabs on me?”
“Why would they?”
“I can be trusted, can’t I?”
“Sure you can.”
The half smile turned full and feral, just the upper teeth showing as he leaned way across the table. “They were just down to see me, Nate, couple months ago. They’re gonna try again.”
I could have asked,
Who? What are they going to try?
Instead I said, “That right?”
He nodded, and the smile evolved into something just slightly maniacal. “Last June, they met at the Carousel, top Outfit boys, you don’t need to know their names, Nate.”
“No I don’t.”
“They’re gonna do what they wanted to back in ’47—Chicago finally takin’ hold of the rackets in Dallas. And the cops down there, I got them in my pocket now. They love me. They come to my club, their money’s no good there.”
I just smiled and nodded. I wanted out of here. I felt I’d convinced him that I wasn’t here to check up on him for either gangsters or spooks or any combination thereof. And that seemed plenty for one evening.
But had he linked my unnamed “client” to Tom Ellison?
I could not think of a graceful way to ask.
Then I said something that may have been stupid. But it was the best I could come up with, spur of the moment: “Just so you know…” And I nodded toward the bar. “… I didn’t see anything. Not a damn thing, Jack.”
“Huh? What?”
Shit.
That high forehead ridged in thought. Then he said, “Could you be more specific, Nate?”
I’d dug this hole. Might as well jump in.
“That handoff at the bar,” I said quietly. “To that civilian-looking guy. Amnesia. It’s a real problem for me.”
And I smiled and winked at him.
Yes, goddamnit, I winked. Sue my ass.
He was studying me, his face as blank as a grape; then he smiled, small and tight, and winked back.
Yes he did.
So I had finally found my exit line when somebody came in. Maybe half a dozen patrons had entered while we’d been talking, but this one looked around (with no apparent interest in the current stripper, a Latin type working “Tea for Two Cha Cha”) and quickly spotted us and came over.
He stood there like one of the waiters, a nebbishy guy in his early twenties, maybe five nine, with rain-damp brown hair brushed to one side. Despite the weather, he looked neat in a navy water-pearled Windbreaker over a white shirt and black tie, black narrow-leg slacks, and black loafers. A slightly squashed oval face was home to a high forehead, blue-gray eyes, a slightly prominent nose, and a small, smirky mouth over a cleft chin.