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anybody needing an excuse to get out of town in a hurry comes breezing up here to Milwaukee, where it seldom gets more serious than somebody stole somebody’s fish.
Loitering in the alleyway in back of Pasquale’s Bella Palermo, Hicks can hear sounds of noodle-flexing sociability, smell spaghetti sauce and garlic frying and sfinciuni bagherese baking over an olive-branch fire, and it’s making him hungry, though this close to payday his lunch menu is a thermos of coffee and a buttermilk cruller stashed in a pocket someplace.
The explosion when it comes seems to be from somewhere across the river and nearer the Lake. Forks and glassware pause between tabletop and mouth, as if everybody’s observing a moment of stillness, and nobody seems surprised.
Everybody is looking at everybody else like they’re all in on something. Beyond familiarity or indifference, some deep mischief is at work.
Skeet is one of the modern young breed of dip, no longer interested in the pocket watches of the old and inattentive, finding more challenge in lifting a watch right off of a wrist in broad daylight, where any trick buckle or extra keeper can slow you down by some fatal splinter of a second.
“Still want to be a detective when you grow up, first thing to learn is keep an open mind. Maybe for the MPD and them, bomb always equals Italian no matter what, but in real life there’s bomb rollers in all parts of town, even among the German and Polish races.
“You may not pay everything you owe, but some of us do.”
Skeet came to learn about outdoor city light and how much and how little to expect from it in the way of comfort—plate glass window reflections, penumbras of lampposts at the ends of trolley lines to the edges of suburbs still officially to be named—haunting given stretches of sidewalk just as the shops close down and the girls come out dazy and chattering, cigarette smoke and perfume in the slowly more intensifying light of the evening street, immersed too deep in lives that Skeet could never quite see any plausible way to step into…A Milwaukee bildungsroman, as they call it locally.
“But that’s the thing, ain’t it. Nobody knew what safe meant anymore.”
While not as common as a nose or needle habit, April’s married-man fixation does bring along its own set of health risks. Wronged spouses within easy reach of firearms can no longer be ruled out of the national domestic melodrama, where the list of everyday household appliances now routinely includes hardware such as the Colt .32
April has this habit of unexpectedly squeaking into a high-pitched flapper voice which men then have the choice of pretending is cute and going along with, or remembering they’re out of smokes or parked illegally someplace blocks away from.
in the back at any moment might be standing in wait some hopeful kid, his own instrument bouncing back highlights, his face still in shadows he’s never felt at home in, as if, when the spot finds him at last, as he steps into the full light, he’ll turn out to be somebody we already think we know…
Seems like the chief topic of supper conversation is going to be Adolf Hitler, children present or not. This being Wisconsin, where you find more varieties of social thought than Heinz has pickles, over the years German American politics has only kept growing into a game more and more complicated, in some cases even deadly.
“You can’t trust the newsreels, you only think you’ve seen him, the Jews who control the movie business only allow footage that will make him look crazy or comical, funny little guy, funny walk, funny mustache, German Charlie Chaplin, how serious could he be? But there also exist other Hitler movies, yes, some even filmed in color, home movies, a warmer, gayer Hitler, impulsive, unorthodox, says whatever comes into his head, what’s wrong with that?”
“Jumpin up and down all nutty and screaming the minute anybody brings up the topic of Jews, sure, everybody’s welcome to their own sense of humor.
it would take a couple of days for Hicks to understand that the strange feeling he couldn’t get a handle on was relief at not having killed somebody, slow-arriving because it seemed too much to hope for, one of those opportunities for second thoughts that with luck sometimes can come along. It felt almost like flying.
“As with life in general, always better to guess right, of course, though it’s all those poor souls who never do that keep us private ops in business, ain’t it.”
it’s dumb, overfed coppers who are destined to inherit earthly power,
“Yes, to look at it you’d think, easygoing, midwestern, nothin much going on, but step around the corner, try another angle, and it’s a different story.
as if in his sleep, he has somehow aged from a bright-eyed juvenile song-and-dance artist into a street-hardened, less often shaved and brilliantined specimen, one that the most level-headed of starlets these days might have trouble keeping still for even a couple bars of being crooned to by, Hicks finds himself ambling along the old worn pathways that lead into whatever the label “civilian” is currently being used for, a nationwide consensus including house chores on weekends, a dutiful ear to the radio, a disinclination to pick up any lengthier of a rap sheet than he’s already got.
“You’ve somehow come to safety, Hicks,” it seems to his aunt Peony, “safe in the featherbed of your destiny, not by refraining from violence but by embracing it, surviving it.”
a human soul can be defined as a structure of memories, if to ‘read’ an object is somehow to gain access to what it remembers, then how can we begrudge it a soul?”
some think it’s the Outfit, some say the Nazi Youth.” “Two different kinds of trouble, ain’t it, one you end up dead, the other dead and in hell.”
this is the next wave of Feds you’re talking to. We haven’t even begun to show how dangerous we can be, and the funny thing? Is, is we could be running the country any day now and you’ll all have to swear loyalty to us because by then we’ll be in the next war fighting for our lives, and maybe that’ll be all you’ve got.”
Rain in Chicago today, a downbeat hush. Yard bulls in slickers moving among the gaunt steel monsters, rain-brightened rails, treacherous footing. Taxi-war veterans, Yellow, Checker, and Parmelee, all at curbside, exhaust brightening visibly into the air like the breath of coach horses not that many winters ago.
Republicans and gangsters? How can such things be?”
another jingle-bells excursion out onto the ski slopes of commentary.
his client the Count belongs to a secret community of lampadophiles, or persons sexually attracted to lamps. “You may not have run across it that much in the States.” “Spend enough time around emergency rooms, you’re apt to see anything. Light sockets, vacuum cleaners, that general diameter, the minute it gets invented, some genius finds a way to put their johnson into it.”
The room is turbulent with kleptos conferring in Esperanto, featuring a lot of words ending in u (“Volitive mood,” comments Zoltán, “used for yearnings, regrets, if-onlys…”), hurried exchanges of goods for cash, contraband of all kinds just in from across various borders, loupes flourished like daggers, with a lot of peering up and down through eyeglasses, an unslackening interplay of hands from time-battered to just-manicured, among pockets, sleeves, lapels—traffic, scaled to the human palm and the briefness of time allotted, in antique watches, knickknacks, earrings, finger rings, cigar
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“how insulting to me personally, to, to be mentioned in the same breath with this feeble impersonation of a crime boss? To waste my talent not on an evil genius but on an evil moron, dangerous not for his intellect, what there may be of it, but for the power that his ill-deserved wealth allows him to exert, which his admirers pretend is will, though it never amounts to more than the stubbornness of a child…”
The room by now lit up in some unearthly color process, timed in a faraway film lab so as to present an outward and visible sign of some strange underacknowledged link between Hungary and tropical Brazil, energetic dancers in vivid flashes of parrot colors and fanciful hats gliding elaborately by, camera angles growing dutched and dizzy, as it all goes sweeping down a long depth of focus away toward, and perhaps at last funneling into, an elaborate ladies’ lounge or toilet, and who knows what further vistas of streamlined modernity…
they have hurtled on into that warm patch somewhere between heartburn and mittelschmerz at the immensity of everything they don’t want to happen to them, together or separate.
keeping still and listening to a story isn’t always the same thing as falling for it,
Sometimes all Hicks wants is to be back in Milwaukee, restored to normal life, to a country not yet gone Fascist, a place of clarity and safety, still snoozy and safe, brat smoke from a lunch wagon grill, some kid practicing accordion through an open window, first snow coming into town off the prairie, barrooms where the smell of beer is generations deep, women in round little hats. Penny scales, newsstands run by war veterans named Sarge, everyday street doors that lead to nothing deeper than friendly speakeasies, El Productos in glass tubes, fried perch and coleslaw on Friday nights.
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“Have you ever really looked at your employment history? One high-risk orangutan job after another, always in the service of someone else’s greed or fear?”
Don’t expect a philosophical cop.
the plaintext rapidly proves elusive. An encryption that somehow cannot, must not, be broken, allowing Alf only glimpses behind a cloak of dark intention at something on a scale far beyond trivialities of known politics or history, which one fears if ever correctly deciphered will yield a secret so grave, so countersacramental, that more than one government will go to any lengths to obtain and with luck to suppress it. Which will no doubt also mean a death sentence for any poor blighter unlucky enough to have broken it.
Daphne finds herself next day almost relieved to be clamorously back in the air, moving at pretty much the altitude and speed of lucid dreaming,
“Whatever it is that’s just about to happen, once it’s over we’ll say, oh well, it’s history, should have seen it coming,
Rollicking youth grow old, the middle-class condition goes on forever.
Some of us, if consciences had toenails, would be hanging on by just that margin. Yet conscience must find ways to go on operating inside history.”
All night long, between watches, sleepless, not always sure what they’re dreaming and what they’ve drifted out of dreaming back into however briefly…faces turning from time to time to gaze back down their wake, turning together and drifting upward as if for signs of intention from above, if not quite yet in terror or wonder, at least put on notice—their sight lines briefly converging at the same place in the sky where clouds invisible till dawn are towering toward an altitude still to be reached, a shape as yet untaken, unimagined. Whatever counter-domain of exile this is they have wandered
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