1
When trouble comes to town, it usually takes the North Shore Line. What with tough times down the Lake in Chicago, changes in the wind, Prohibition repeal just around the corner, Big Al in the federal pokey in Atlanta, Outfit affairs grown jumpy and unpredictable, 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.
Hicks McTaggart has been ankling around the Third Ward all day keeping an eye on a couple of tourists in Borsalinos and black camel hair overcoats up from the home office at 22nd and Wabash down the Lake, the Chicago Outfit handling whatever needs to be taken care of in Milwaukee since Vito Guardalabene cashed in his chips ten years ago, though Vito's successor Pete Guardalabene is still considered head man in the Ward, gets his picture in the social pages smiling at weddings and so forth.
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.
It's still the topic of conversation a little later when everybody comes piling out into the street.
"Come up lookin for a little peace and quiet, next thing you know . . ."
"Startin to sound like Chicago around here."
Everybody is looking at everybody else like they're all in on something. Beyond familiarity or indifference, some deep mischief is at work.
Over the next few hours till the happiness twins are back on the train again, Hicks gets to hear a number of different stories, related to gangland matrimonials or hooch heists everybody's heard about before, not much of it helpful, even at the combination drug and hardware store plus lunch counter known as Oriental Drugs, heart and soul of the East Side and Hicks's usual source of reliable lowdown in Milwaukee, and sometimes lunch when it isn't too close to payday, which sends him instead over to Otto's Oasis, a speak disguised as a neighborhood Imbisswagen, with a refreshments list ranging from hours-old bathtub product to blockade-run imports of the real McCoy, where by dumb luck he does happen to arrive next to the kitchen door just at the exact moment Otto's wife Hildegard is bringing a platterful of free lunch items out to the bar area, so while others are making grabs at Hildegard, Hicks, still brooding about the Sicilian food back at Pasquale's, manages to divert enough eats his way to see him through a couple more hours at least.
Later at the Unamalgamated Ops detective agency, Hicks finds his boss, Boynt Crosstown, waiting on the doorsill, shoes beating a nervous eight to the bar.
"Flash bulletin," grabbing Hicks and pretending to pull him by the necktie through the length of the shop and into his office, "just a minute's all I ask."
Hicks trying to stay professional, "Don't suppose you happened to hear anything back around lunchtime . . ."
"Pineapples come and pineapples go, never mind that Santa Flavia Chamber of Commerce meeting, write me a memo, small change anymore, got us a ticket just in and it's a lulu, I'm telling you this is the one'll put us all swimming in the gravy . . ." and so forth.
"Wish you wouldn't come to work when you're like this, Boynt."
"Sure, sure, well, this isn't just daydreaming through the Depression for a change, I guarantee you there's money in this, big money, I've seen it!"
With Boynt this usually turns out to be an illegible IOU written in pencil on a wet bar napkin. Hicks tries to keep the doubts out of his face.
"This time it's the goods, right there on the table, and green? Wisconsin before they started logging it off should only've been this green."
"Too bad about my mattress, already over legal capacity, corners of bills hanging out, sure you understand-"
"You always worked too cheap," Boynt headwagging, "even before the Crash you were dime-a-dance." Reaching for a switch on his intercom, "Thessalie, would you mind fetching us in that file?"
"Whole different tax bracket up there in Shorewood, you people, ain't it." Boynt has come in for a major share of the class needling around here, which goes on at industrial sewing-machine tempo and pretty much nonstop, ever since a page from his confidential file mysteriously folded itself one day into a paper airplane and went sailing into the room where the mimeograph machine is, and before you could blink, copies found their way to everybody in the office, announcing Boynt's yearly income at a bit north of ten grand, plus profit sharing in a number of side ventures we may someday hear the end of but not anytime soon.
Thessalie Wayward comes breezing in with a file folder of some size, which Boynt opens dramatically. Hicks spots a familiar tabloid clipping.
"What's this, ol' Bruno back in the picture once more?" referring to local multimillionaire Bruno Airmont, known throughout the dairy industry as the Al Capone of Cheese in Exile since one middle of the night not that many years ago having packed a trunk full of banknotes and skipped, "Supposed to be taking it easy in a hammock," Hicks pretends to recall, "some remote tropical island nobody's sure which, drinkin Singapore Slings out of a fire hose. What's up, retirement's making him a li'l restless?"
"Actually this one's more about his daughter Daphne, with whom, if I'm not too misinformed, you have some history."
"Long time ago," reaching smokes out of his shirt pocket, latching one onto his lip, lighting up. "What's she up to now?"
"Seems your old romance has just run off with a clarinet player in a swing band."
"Keepin busy. Last I saw, she was supposed to be engaged to some North Shore loophound."
"Just off the phone in fact with that happy fiancé himself, G. Rodney Flaunch of the Glencoe Flaunches, acting as spokesman for an assortment of interested parties who've just hired us, and let me point out, for this crowd the fee scale doesn't seem like much of an object."
"And the job would be . . ."
"To locate Miss Airmont wherever she's off to, smooth-talk her out of her involvement with this clarinet player, bring her back. Simple pickup and delivery."
"Lot of fun for somebody, too bad that matrimonials, as you'll recall, were never my line-"
Back when he was getting into the business, one of the first things Hicks noticed was how many pre-divorcées just in Milwaukee and Waukesha counties alone seemed disposed to linger over forbidden liquids, going into all the intimate details as if mistaking him for a lawyer that doesn't charge much, with muscle thrown in for free, leading to romantic outcomes easy to imagine, except for the ones Hicks never saw coming, after enough of which he found himself more than ready to hand matrimonials off to energetic junior hires like Zbig Dubinsky, who regards the invention of the trouser-front zipper as a major advance in civilization and can put up with any long sad story that promises the least possibility of domestic cinder disposal.
Ignoring which as usual, Boynt continues.
"Except for your personal connection with the lady, of course-excuse me, what's this expression on your face?"
"This? Close attention, I think."
"No, if it's anything it's 'poor old Boynt,' and insincere at that. Who are you to act so virtuous? You're the one with the glamorous, some might even say lurid, past here."
"Making me even less qualified-"
Sudden commotion in the outer office now, as in through the door without an appointment comes running Skeet Wheeler, a flyweight juvenile in a porkpie hat, with Thessalie close behind attempting grabs which Skeet doesn't seem all that eager to avoid.
"Hicksie! Ya gotta do somethin! You heard it, right?"
"Sure, everybody in town must've heard it, but what was it?" Anybody has the straight dope it'll be Skeet.
"Stuffy Keegan's hooch wagon-somebody rolled a bomb, blew it all to hell."
"Language," Boynt murmurs.
"Stuffy's all right?"
"Nobody's sayin nothin, the hush is on. If he hasn't skipped town, if he's still alive, he ain't advertising."
Hicks has known, at least kept a mental file on, Stuffy Keegan since his early career as a petty offender and eventually MPD snitch who can be bought for a song, which is seldom "Puttin' on the Ritz." By the standards of these times and this neck of the woods, Stuffy's rap sheet, while technically criminal, is nothing special except for the number of paranoid lapses of judgment including the one that landed him here to begin with. Out on some otherwise routine run, possibly owing to lack of sleep, he began to observe in the rearview mirror growing numbers of law enforcement which, even if that's what it really was, might not really've been planning to pull Stuffy over, or even notice him at all, but by the time he got to Waukesha it was too much for his nerves, so he found a telephone and called the police and asked them to just please come and get it over with.
"It was highway coppers, I tell ya, a whole armored division, lights 'n' sirens 'n'-"
"Sure, Mr. Keegan, we understand, now don't worry, we'll take steps."
Convinced there was something screwy about his rearview mirror, every time he looked into which now he had started seeing something he didn't want to see, Stuffy traded in the rig he was driving for a REO Speed Wagon with a normal rearview mirror, soon familiar among the tattered convoys out in the wind between here, Detroit, and Toledo carrying a load typically of pint bottles, whose rectangular cross-section allowed more to fit into the limited cargo space, bought for $2 in Canada, sold on this side for $7 to retailers who then diluted the contents two, sometimes three to one. Return trips from Toledo often brought a wagonload of Lake Erie perch under ice, to be listed on local fish-joint menus as "Lake Michigan perch," the real critter having in recent years been pretty much fished out.
"That rig," Skeet looking forlorn, "got him out of so many bad situations . . . Called it his li'l tramp freighter of the streets and in the end a blown-up wreck with zero resale value."
"Getting sentimental, kid, better watch 'at, once."
Boynt meanwhile, having run his usual unsociable O-O of Skeet, "Recall there's a Depression on, we can only afford so much pro bono work anymore, there was a memo, I handed you it myself." Taking the runaway cheez heiress file, tapping Hicks gently on the head with it, handing it over and heading for his office. "Soon as you've had a look through this, Hicks, let me know what you think." Doesn't quite slam the door, but there is some emphasis to the way it shuts.
"Was that steam comin out his ears? Did I barge in on somethin again?"
"Nothin that can't wait. New watch, I see."
"Hamilton, glows in the dark too."
"Pretty classy there, Skeet."
"Can't help it, she just thinks I'm cute. Her way of showing it."
"Uh-huh." As likely lifted off somebody staggering out of a speak, but with Skeet you never know, so Hicks only makes with the avuncular beaming. 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.
Skeet lights up a cigar stub that never seems to change length much, the very blackest of Italo fumigators, dense as a rock, goes out if you don't keep puffing on it so after a while you let it go out, but keep it in your kisser anyway.
"OK, how do we approach this?" coming out of somewhere with a snub nose service .32, and pretending to check to see if it's loaded.
"Gosh sakes, Skeet."
"Kids' Special."
"You've been firing this thing much?"
"Only out at the dump so far. But keep your shirt on, one of these days you'll be readin all about it on the front page of the Journal."
Hicks used to talk like this back in high school. For a minute and a half he's taking a bounce back in time, and looking at himself as a kid.
"OK, OK now, Skeet, now about this bomb, what'd be your guess?"
"There was some talk of a Third Ward type of person."
"Uh-uh." Out with the cautionary finger. "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. Now what about money, social life, how much does Stuffy owe and who to and is he carryin on with some big shot's sweetie."
"Love life among the grown-ups, better ask a newsie, you really want to know. Those guys are the ones that get around."
Though Skeet doesn't read the papers much, he manages to follow gang wars like some kids follow pennant races, carrying in his wallet a photo of Al Capone, clipped from the
Journal, across which Skeet, or somebody, has inscribed, "To my old goombah Skeet, who taught me everything I know, regards and tanti auguri, always, Al."
Mostly his news of current events comes from keeping an ear aimed at the radio and staying in everyday touch with the kid underworld-drifters, truants, and guttersnipes, newsboys at every corner and streetcar stop-who in turn have antennas of their own out. "It's like Mussolini," Skeet explains, "the little ones report to bigger kids, who report to me, then I report to you, then on up the pyramid."
"And . . . the Mussolini here again being who, Pete Guardalabene?"
"You know better. Pete is no more'n mid-level, same for Joe Vallone-both bein run like everybody else in this burg by remote control from Chicago."
Hicks and Skeet go back a couple years, to one of those spells of bank robberies and pineapple detonations that now and then would sweep through town, leaving civilian nervous wreckage in its wake. Hicks had put his nose into a recently stuck up bank on Wisconsin Avenue on behalf of a client whose bank account had just disappeared, either in the robbery or into some soon to be ex-spousal pocketbook.
Copyright © 2025 by Thomas Pynchon. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
