The Sound of Shoes on the Floor Will Be Louder
Ding.
Anthony came looking for me at nine in the evening. Ida had already clocked out, and I was just about to lock up the shop alone.
“Why’d you come in earlier only to leave right away?”
“Something important came to mind.”
“So, did you finish the job?”
I asked as I pulled down the roller blinds by the windows. Anthony nodded with a rather serious face.
“It was a bit tricky, but I managed it successfully enough.”
“Looked tricky, all right. Your body was pretty stiff—you ought to practice dancing a little more.”
A short silence followed. Once I had lowered the blinds on both large windows, Anthony spoke.
“If you hadn’t thrown me, it would’ve been a lot smoother.”
“So you went dancing that day too?”
“It’s a place that suits a lone wolf.”
His mental world seemed pretty unique. I switched off the lights in the shop and led Anthony into the back office.
“What were you doing in Chicago?”
“Before I answer, let me ask one thing. Do you manage the dance hall too? The staff?”
“I’m the owner.”
Anthony’s eyes twitched, then he spat the words out.
“In Chicago they called me a fixer.”
There are two kinds of fixers. Gunmen and hitmen—contract killers. Or the ones who bridge problems for political and social figures. Naturally Anthony was the former.
“So you botched a hit on someone?”
“I got tangled up in something complicated. Ever heard of John Powers?”
“No.”
“Chicago Democrat. Served as alderman, state senator, the works.”
John Powers, an Irish immigrant, had built his foundation running a grocery and saloon in Chicago while growing his political influence.
“You’re half-Irish, right?”
“If I wasn’t picked up off the street, yeah.”
“Hmm. You know what? Back then ninety percent of Chicago’s Nineteenth Ward was Irish like us.”
But gradually Jews and Italians poured in and the situation changed.
“Now the Irish are only half. What do you figure that means?”
“Elections got tougher.”
Anthony’s eyes sparkled as he went on.
“Exactly. So last year—ah, the year flipped, so two years ago. Anyway, there was an alderman election in Chicago.”
At the time James Bowler, John Powers’s political ally who had held the seat for ten years, was the candidate for the Nineteenth Ward. And a strong challenger appeared: the Italian immigrant Anthony D’Andrea.
“A Catholic priest.”
“Must not have been an ordinary priest.”
“You’re sharp as always. Priest in name only—D’Andrea was a Sicilian gang boss out of Italy. In New York terms…”
“Giuseppe Morello of the Bronx?”
Anthony looked intrigued by my answer.
“You know the Italian side well too.”
Not just that. If D’Andrea was the Sicilian boss on the Chicago side, I knew the next lineage as well. D’Andrea—Colosimo—Al Capone. As the succession of bosses continued and the Chicago mafia organization solidified, the powerful mafia centered on Al Capone, the Chicago Outfit, took shape.
“Anyway, once the campaign got under way the war started in earnest.”
Both sides hired election thugs and waged a bloody war. It continued even after James Bowler won, leaving dead and wounded in droves.
“I was hired by James Bowler and John Powers’s side and joined the fight.”
After taking out five, Anthony got wounded himself. That was when John Powers pulled strings so the Chicago police shipped the criminal Anthony off to Harlem in Manhattan. The cop involved then was Uncle Ted.
“But before you were a fixer, what did you do?”
“Soldier, mercenary.”
Same route as me. Anthony was an Irish-born British soldier. The conflicts he fought were part of the Great Game, the Anglo-Russian power struggle—the India-Afghanistan border battles. Right after he retired he joined the Balkan Wars. Since Britain stayed officially neutral then, he had to go as a private individual.
“You retired just to go to war?”
“Back then, yeah. I thought the battlefield was the only place for me. You wouldn’t know. The battlefield is where you taste tension and excitement, extreme terror and ecstasy all at once.”
I knew it well enough. I had lived like that, then gotten slammed with PTSD and gone downhill hard. You okay, Anthony? Watching you dance at the dance hall, it looks like you’re already dealing with PTSD.
“You don’t hear any voices or anything, do you?”
“Well. Maybe I do. Anyway, I learned something in the Mexican Revolution. Mercenary work isn’t for me.”
Low pay, plenty of friction with the local soldiers. Mercenary work is always extreme, but once you stick your nose into a national war you start wanting out. So Anthony bolted in the middle of the Mexican Revolution. He shed the uniform, crossed the Mexican border into Texas, and savored the taste of capitalism. And realized there was war even there.
“Is it okay to tell me all this?”
“People are born with a certain nature. Age has nothing to do with it.”
Anthony looked at me, one corner of his mouth curling up.
“You’re the same type as me. I can tell just from the eyes.”
“Those damn eyes of yours.”
“Be honest. You enjoy a dangerous, razor-edge life too, don’t you?”
“You be honest first. You just want to work at the dance hall, right?”
The moment I revealed I was the dance-hall owner, Anthony got talkative. Shall I check?
“There are three jobs you can do. The lingerie shop, labor slugger, or the dance hall.”
“Then the dance hall.”
Right now Oliver was helping out on Tanner’s labor-slugger side and Cale was focused on unit management. There was plenty for Anthony to handle. I was about to answer with a snort when hurried footsteps came from the secret passage connected to the dance hall. Soon the office door opened and a member looked back and forth between me and Anthony, hesitating.
“It’s fine—spit it out.”
“Uh, Boss. We’ve got a problem at the dance hall right now.”
The Jewish band Klezmer Kings who were supposed to play the second half hadn’t shown. They had never no-showed without a word before. On top of that the Italian band La Bella Notte responsible for the first half had already left for another joint.
“Music stopping at the dance hall? I simply cannot overlook that.”
That wasn’t me—it was Anthony. He already seemed to consider himself dance-hall staff and was steadily stacking up anger.
“We put the phonograph on for now, but the complaints about the volume being low are ridiculous.”
“The sound of shoes on the floor will be louder, I bet.”
The member shot Anthony a look and continued.
“Horace is up on stage stalling for time, but the reaction’s… not great…”
“Amateur comedy, huh. A killer that sends the mood straight to hell.”
Who the hell is this bastard adding a tail to every sentence? The member’s eyes were clearly asking that.
“He’s going to work with us from now on. Introductions later.”
I stood and headed downstairs. Anthony followed us through the secret passage into the dance hall. When we came in through the office, member Horace was drawing frowns with his clumsy jokes.
“Cut the lame jokes at the dance hall!”
“Get down right now and send the band up!”
“Aw, let’s just leave. This place is done for.”
Customers were filtering out one by one. The more they did, the more Horace broke into a cold sweat. Even Ida, the all-purpose fist-axe, was shaking her head this time, helpless. But just then—
Beep—
What the hell is that. A sharp note from behind me sliced through the space. Then a whistling tone followed, like wind sweeping up dust. Anthony was playing a worn-looking harmonica as he slowly made his way to the stage.
…
What’s with this guy. The low, rough breath-like harmonica sound carried sobs and loneliness, brushing against something in the listener’s chest and stirring vague emotions. Loneliness, rainy streets, desolate back alleys—it even felt like being at a funeral. The customers’ faces matched. One by one they frowned, saying it killed their buzz. Anthony was set on ruining the business. Just as I was about to frown—
Suddenly the notes bounced up fast like bullets popping from a magazine. A thrilling melody wrapped around the space, and customers one by one started catching the beat. Then a man on the floor climbed onto the stage and sat at the piano. As he loosened his fingers and placed them on the keys, the sharp Anthony stopped his harmonica. And taking the baton, a lively piano melody rang out through the hall. This was proper ragtime. Not half-learned—a professional pianist.
Like throwing wood on a barely revived ember, Ida stepped up. She signaled something to the junior girls, and they all took partners’ hands and led them to the floor. Thanks to that, other customers set down their bags and started coming out to the floor one by one. Thankfully the dance-hall atmosphere returned to normal. I gave instructions to the member beside me.
“Get that pianist’s contact info, and ask if full-time is possible.”
“Okay, Boss!”
Anthony, who’d put out the fire for the moment, approached me, subtly keeping the beat.
“Do you always carry a harmonica?”
“Essential gear for a lone wolf. Was the performance listenable?”
“Would’ve been better if you’d started with the upbeat stuff.”
“No fun just shooting right away. You gotta wrap them in extreme terror and slowly kill them. Touching the peak of emotion after the build-up, you know.”
Weird guy, a real weirdo. The problem was I was nodding in agreement. I called Cale and a few members into the meeting room to discuss countermeasures for the Klezmer Kings band. If they didn’t see us as pushovers, they wouldn’t no-show like this without notice. A rival dance hall must have pulled something.
“But why didn’t they mess with the La Bella Notte band that plays the first half?”
One member raised the question. Several interpretations were possible, but all just speculation.
“Tell the La Bella Notte band that if they no-show they’d better be prepared. And starting tomorrow, track down those Klezmer band bastards—find out what happened and who interfered.”
The next day, the thing we had feared happened. Even as dance-hall opening time rolled around, the La Bella Notte band didn’t show either. The one saving grace was the pianist who had appeared like a comet the day before.
Jimmy Durante. Age twenty-four. Born in LES, parents Italian immigrants from Salerno, Campania. He had dropped out of school in seventh grade—age twelve—become a ragtime pianist, and until recently had been playing at a piano bar. Patrick, who hadn’t come to the dance hall the previous day for some reason, had just met with Durante.
“He said full-time’s possible. Turns out he even has a band with New Orleans players.”
“That’s good.”
But the price was a bit high. He had demanded twenty percent more than the previous bands, yet there was no other way right now.
“Whoever these sons of bitches are who messed with our bands. Looks like the easy days are over.”
Rumors that we were running a gambling den under the dance hall were spreading quietly. Enemies all around, so the checks would only get worse from here. The more so, we needed to show that touching us meant getting utterly smashed—but I had no idea what force it was. I started tracking them using our intel network as best I could.
It took four days to find the band that had no-showed their schedule without a word and vanished. The members caught one bastard holed up in Hell’s Kitchen. He was the pianist from the Klezmer band, and after all sorts of threats he was terrified and hiding. Made sense—two of his fingers had been cut off. The other members must have been scared shitless seeing that. Moreover, he had no idea which dance hall or gang had done that to him. Same would go if we caught the other band members.
As I sat at my desk pondering, more news came in. A member expanding territory around Ludlow and Essex Streets rushed into the office.
“One of ours got stabbed.”
In broad daylight on the street, one of the unit members had been stabbed. Not a brawl—it was a sudden ambush.
“Aftermath?”
“Cale moved him to the hospital.”
A unit member had been hit. And the bastards seemed to have done it on purpose. They had left a message on the stabbed unit member, after all.
Do not expand the territory any further
Bastards who didn’t even know who I was or who we were were warning us. Of course I didn’t know who they were either. So if I was going to answer, I had to do it clearly. In a way anyone could understand.