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.And that goes for you.” And he had looked with those pale eyes of his that rarely saw cockeyed at the quiet kid.“You didn’t have a gun on you up there in the sticks, did you, Joey?”“I don’t own no gun, Spotter.”“You’re gonna get one now,” the Spotter had guessed; and when the kid didn’t answer that one, the Spotter said, “I don’t blame you, but keep on bein’ smart like you were up there in the sticks.You’re aces high with everybody so don’t spoil it.You come see me out my hotel, Joey.Around eight.Thursday.And don’t buy no gun.Let me treat you for Christmas, Joey.”Thursday! Joey walked on air all that week.He couldn’t believe his luck.A guy had to be somebody to rate an invite to the Spotter’s hotel.And his own gun! When he climbed up the subway stairs to Times Square Thursday night, he almost laughed out loud.The Broadway lights whirled in his sight, a pin-wheel of glitter, with himself the center of all brightness.He hurried four blocks north to Forty-Sixth Street, turned up to the Spotter’s hotel.The Hotel Berkeley was another narrow-fronted off-Broadway stone box like a dozen others in the sidestreets between Broadway and Sixth Avenue.Two pillars flanked the entrance, the name of the hotel carved above the door and looking as if it had been borrowed from some mausoleum: BERKELEY.Through the dingy lobby, forgotten schemers and dreamers had flitted on their way to the rooms upstairs; vaudevillians hoping to make the Palace around the corner, actresses seeing their names in lights, gamblers and con-men, and now a kid from a furnished room on Twenty-Fourth Street.On his way, up.Up into the cloudland floating above Broadway.“This is doctor’s prescription whiskey” the Spotter said upstairs in his room, setting the bottle down on the table.“It’s been cut, not much, but it’s been cut.You haffta go to Montreal for a straight drink.Or gay Paree,” the Spotter added, who not so long ago had seen days when he couldn’t have raised the fare between New York and Brooklyn.He patted the bottle, a Broadway princeling in his black silk robe, his feet in black slippers.“Help yourself, Joey.I don’t drink, you know.God damn doctor’s orders.”Joey poured himself a couple of inches, swallowed it in one shot.“Help yourself!” the Spotter said, studying the kid in the chair before him.He recalled how he’d first brought Joey into the Badgers and how Clip Haley’d beefed.Now Clip was dead and buried, and a lucky break that was, for otherwise the Spotter might’ve been hiring somebody to get rid of Clip.The Spotter refilled Joey’s glass and on the impulse he lifted it to his own lips.He tasted the whiskey, just tasted it, and then passed the glass to Joey.“Don’t squeal on me to the doctor,” he smiled, but felt a pang like some dark hand pressing down against his heart.“Joey, I been thinkin’ how you handled the Bug,” the Spotter said when he was seated in an easy chair.“You done what I would’ve done.Joey, I gotta gun for you here like I said.And you’re gonna be good with it! Remember what you told me — how you fired at that guy over the East Side? Sure, he had a table in front of him, but a good shot would’ve got him.I gotta phone number for you, Joey.It’s a cop, a Jersey cop who’s on the payroll of a beer-maker I know in Jersey.This cop, he got his own pistol range in the cellar of his house.He rents it to guys, see?”Joey nodded and the Spotter continued, “Remember this, Joey.Don’t carry your gun ‘cept on a job.”When Joey left the Spotter’s room, walking under the carven legend BERKELEY, he felt as if he owned the whole damn town.In his jacket pocket, under the cloth of his overcoat he carried his deed of title — written in iron.But only the Spotter, sleepless in his bed, knew that iron was like any other ink, with all inks fading in the wash of time.The Spotter couldn’t sleep that night for thinking of Joey and as he brooded, his left hand glided under his pajama top to his beating heart.Steady, it beat.Steady, steady.A fake, the Spotter thought: One punch from the Bughead’d be enough to finish me.An old bum like me, worse than an old bum, I’m only thirty-one.Thirty-one and made of paper, my heart bad, my stomach bad, while a kid like Joey goes around shaking off punches like Jack Dempsey himself.Smartest shellacking he ever took, that one from the Bug, he proves to the gang he’s game.He’s got ‘em all behind him.Smart, smart, like me, only I’m smarter than any Jew who ever lived.Okay, he’s packing a gun now, just like Al Capone.I give it to him myself and I’ll bury him myself if I have to.That Al Capone was nothing ‘til Johnny Torrio give him his chance, another tough wop over the East Side, the Five Points gang, and now Al Capone’s one of the biggest guys in Chicago, with Johnny Torrio playing second fiddle….The man in the bed stared into the darkness, this sleepless midnight into which he sank night after night as if in a breathing coffin.Then, the long thin fleshless body under the blanket shook with the silent, the almost silent, laughter of those who cannot sleep nights.The Spotter thought: the trouble with Johnny Torrio, he didn’t know how to handle Al Capone, or how to bury Al Capone.• • •Maybe it was the holiday air, the green fragrance of the Christmas trees for sale on the sidewalks, maybe it was the soft snow blanketing the streets, maybe she was sorry to see Joey’s bruised face — “Some gangsters beat me up,” he’d told her cunningly.“They tried to rob the warehouse where I work.” — maybe it was the lonely winter nights, the white stars glittering lonely too, and yet splendid like the most wonderful of all snowflakes, never-melting, but whatever it was, Sadie Madofsky finally agreed to go to a movie with Joey
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