Harry Gibson arrived at work a little drunk.
But then Harry Gibson almost always arrived at work at least a little drunk, a condition that no one ever commented upon, and which some, perhaps, failed to discern. After all, few of the merchants, farmers, or truckers who frequented the Northern Ohio Food Terminal had ever encountered Gibson in any other condition. To them, he was never less than a swaggering, towering son of a bitch. That he had booze on his breath was just another detail, not necessarily telling.
Gibson was a massive six foot two, a bruiser with brown slicked-back hair and a flushed face and lumpy but deceptively pleasant features that were usually set in a smile. It was a smile that Gibson wore even as he demanded his various pieces of the action from the merchants in the market; a smile he wore when a whore took off her slip; a smile he wore when he was breaking a farmer's leg.
As for arriving at work half tanked, well, that wasn't his fault, was it? He had to show up at three A.M., didn't he, and what else was there to do till three in the goddamn morning but sit in a saloon and soak up some suds? Six days a week he worked the market from before dawn till late afternoon, when he headed back for his flop, hit the hay, and crawled out again around nine at night to find a bite, a broad, a bottle, starting the cycle anew. It was a full life.
The Northern Ohio Food Terminal, at East Fortieth, south of Woodland Avenue, was within a mile and a half of the rough-and-tumble East Side neighborhood where Gibson grew up. His pop, of whom Harry was said to be the spitting image, had been a coke shoveler at a steel mill in the Flats; at age forty-five the elder Gibson, his lungs shot after breathing in God knew how much coal dust, collapsed at work, losing his job, leaving the family re-sponsibility to his three boys. Harry, the youngest, had done his share, and still did help out the old man and old lady. But he'd decided early on that such a life was not for him; the steel mills, the factories, could do without Harry Gibson. Blessed with his pop's brawn, Harry, who was now thirty, had run with a street gang as a kid, got into bootlegging as an older kid, and graduated into being a union slugger, getting in tight with McFate and Caldwell, who had a lock on the construction unions.
Harry knew that he probably could have turned an even tidier buck if he'd followed some of his bootlegging pals into the mob. But that was risky work-you could wind up dead in a ditch, like with these policy-racket wars that had been flaring up lately; or in stir, playing fall guy for the big boys in the Mayfield Road gang, who made sure they never did any hard time.
Besides, union work was something a guy like Harry Gibson could be proud of. Helping the little guy not get took advantage of, like his pop had been.
Harry was chairman (a title Big Jim Caldwell suggested) of the Marketers Co-op Club; what this meant was vendors in the stalls inside and outside the sprawling food market had to pay him weekly dues. If anybody failed to pay, that's when Harry's negotiating skills were called into play: stalls would be smashed, produce trashed, your occasional arm or leg busted.
The service Harry provided the vendors, in addition to making sure nobody gave any of 'em a bad time, was being middleman between them and the farmers who brought their crops to sell at the market. The Marketers Co-op Club, which is to say Harry and his staff of twenty strong-arm assistants, informed the farmers coming in that they weren't allowed to unload their own trucks. Instead, they were required to hire two-man crews, handlers from the Drivers and Employees local, to do the work; it usually ran twenty-five bucks per small truck, fifty for a bigger rig. Any farmers or truckers who refused would again run into Harry's negotiating skills: tires slashed, vehicles wrecked, your occasional arm or leg busted.
There hadn't been much need for negotiation in the last couple weeks, not since Harry had sprayed one farmer's truck with machine-gun fire, lighting up the predawn morning like the Fourth of fuckin' July. It had been funnier than hell watching that farmer and his kid tuck their tails 'tween legs and go rattling out of the loading-dock area, barely able to steer that bullet-puckered hunk of junk out of the terminal. They were lucky it even drove.
Beyond his considerable negotiating skills, Harry, who was also the business agent of the Drivers and Employees local, could shut the market down with a snap of his thick fingers. With an item as perishable as produce, the union had the farmers and dealers by the balls; if Harry called a strike, forcing the handlers to quit work, the Northern Ohio Food Terminal would be a world of rotting goods.
The market, a big yellow-brick building, a block long and half again as wide, opened at five A.M.; but trucks began showing up shortly after three, jamming Fortieth Street, engines running, drivers waiting for the line ahead to move so they could pull up to the loading docks and empty their loads. It was a cool, clear morning, for now, though the sun would remind everybody it was July soon enough. Along the loading docks the unloaders in Harry's union stood in their leather aprons, waiting for the trucks to pull in; they looked bored, even though the air was filled with the shouts and honking horns of impatient truckers.
Soon the market would be crawling with buyers: men in business suits representing the chain stores; men without ties who were the smaller, local grocers, buying for their coming day, to fill the shopping lists not yet made out by housewives around the city, who were sleeping now but would be shopping later.
Some of the trucks were already being unloaded. One of Harry's unloaders was up in the reefer, as the refrigerated trucks were called, swinging boxes of butter down to another unloader, who was stacking them on the sidewalk, six high, eight deep, like a small building. As Harry passed by, his shoes crunched packing ice that had spilled onto the sidewalk.
Harry liked working the market. He liked the hustle and bustle. He liked the way the place smelled, even: barrels of sauerkraut, sheep's milk cheese, candied ginger; steam rising off the griddle of the hot-dog stand inside; the scent of turnips and carrots as an unloader threw back a tarp and hosed down piled bunches of greens. The place was a second home to him: He'd done odd jobs here as a kid; you could earn a few pennies and get some free produce at day's end.
These days, in his exalted position, Harry never did any physical labor, other than busting your occasional arm or leg. He wore a shirt and tie under a leather jacket; his khaki trousers were work pants, but rarely got dirty. He walked along the aisle connecting the loading docks, enjoying the sight of his union boys opening tailgates, untying ropes, pulling tarps back, taking loads down. Putting money in Harry's pocket. A relay team unloaded watermelons from an open truck onto the dock and into the market; crates of cantaloupes, sacks of potatoes, baskets of tomatoes, were passed along and hauled into storage bins; bunches of onions and turnips got stacked in a big green mound, as green as money. As green as the money Harry was making.
Now, just as the traffic jam out on Fortieth let up, another was forming here along the loading-dock area. Metal-wheeled dollies squealed as cooler boys trundled up the wide ramp inside the terminal to the freight elevator, next to which gigantic floor scales trembled under cantaloupe crates. Unloaders maneuvered their two-wheeled hand trucks, piled up with crates, around each other and stacks of produce and a dozen other obstacles, swearing, yelling, but steering clear of Harry as he passed, their expressions momentarily tightening into smiles for their business agent, who found the noisy hubbub of the loading docks as reassuring as the ringing bell of a cash register.
Not all of them appreciated what he was doing for them, but that was okay with Harry. As long as they stayed in line. Long as they paid their dues.
Up ahead, two docks down, a small crowd had gathered; it had to be something good, Harry knew, to interrupt market activities in these bustling predawn hours. He walked in a straight line down the connecting aisle, causing unloaders operating hand carts to weave around him and out of his way, like motorists avoiding a child who has wandered onto a highway.
Two men-obviously farmers-stood at the rear of a modest, battered tractor-trailer rig, where they had just as obviously been stopped in the process of unloading crates of greens onto the dock. Two other men were confronting the farmers. These men wore leather jackets and shirts and ties, like Harry's; without ever suggesting it, Harry's goon squad (though neither he nor they thought of themselves as such) had adopted their leader's style of dress as a sort of uniform.
Jack Rose, a big black-haired boy Harry had known since his kid gang days, was gesturing with a hand the size of a catcher's mitt.
"It's a buck an hour per man," he said in a raised voice, indicating he was repeating these words for perhaps the third or fourth time, "and it's a two-man job. And it's a good four hours' work."
"Four hours!" the older of the farmers said. A faintly freckled Swede, or maybe Norwegian, Harry figured; about thirty-five, thickly mustached, and pale for a farmer. He wore coveralls and a floppy straw hat. He was a hick if Harry ever saw one, and Harry saw plenty here at the market.
"My uncle told you, we can do it in under two hours ourselves," the other one said, a towheaded younger man, also in overalls but wearing a cap. He was pale, too, Harry noted, craning his neck to see better. License plate on their truck was New York.
"You don't understand," Rose said, smiling harshly. "It's union rules. You got to hire us. No choice in the matter."
"It's too much," said the mustached farmer, shaking his head no. "We can't afford it. We'll do it ourselves, thanks just the same."
Harry, staying in the second row of the small but steadily gathering crowd, decided not to get involved. Neither Rose nor the other man, O'Day, had spotted their boss looking on. It would be good to see how they fared in a confrontation. Two more of his boys, Callahan and Carney, in their leather jackets and shirts and ties, fell in next to their boss in the growing audience.
"I guess you never hauled into this market before," Rose was saying, in a slightly more friendly tone.
"Not in a couple of years," the mustached farmer admitted. "Now if you fellows would just go about your own business-"
Rose thumped the mustached farmer's chest with two stiff fingers. "This is our business. What are you, one of these smart guys? I got a good notion to pound you into this here pavement, pal. And we can tip over your truck, too, if you want, and if you ever come in here again, it'll cost you fifty fucking bucks to unload."
The two farmers looked at each other, shrugged, shook their heads no, and began unloading more crates onto the dock.
Jack Rose kicked one of the crates, splintering the wood.
The mustached farmer sighed, shook his head again, and calmly said, "That'll cost you, mister."
"No," Rose said, "it'll cost you,"
He picked up another crate and smashed it on the cement, cracking it open, spilling out the contents, turning produce into garbage.
And now Rose and O'Day seemed aware of the crowd around them, if not of Harry Gibson's presence in it, and that seemed to spur the pair on.
"Walk away now," the mustached farmer said, "or you'll have trouble."
"You got trouble," O'Day said, speaking for the first time, and he took a swing at the mustached farmer.
The farmer ducked out of the way, nimbly.
O'Day swung again, and his fist, his arm, cut the air like a saber, connecting with nothing, as the farmer slipped that punch as well.
Harry Gibson tapped Callahan on the shoulder and nodded at Carney, and the two men moved from the crowd to back up Rose and O'Day, who was swinging again. This time the farmer grabbed the arm as the punch swooshed by and swung O'Day like a square dance partner into the open tailgate of the truck and rocked the truck and its contents and O'Day and his contents. Struck hard at mid-thigh by the tailgate, O'Day shrieked like a woman, shaming Harry, and the mustached farmer moved forward, grabbed O'Day by the shoulder and hand of his left arm and threw him onto the pavement with a motion not unlike a grave digger heaving a shovelful of dirt. O'Day landed in the spilled produce and did not get up, the greens making a wreath around his head.
Rose, stunned by this display, finally swung into action and managed to land a blow against the side of the mustached farmer's face, only something strange happened: the mustache flew off.
And so did the floppy straw hat, and the face of the farmer minus mustache and hat was all too familiar to Harry Gibson, who sucked air into his chest like a drowning man coming up for the third time.
Meanwhile, the tow-haired younger farmer was kicking Rose in the stomach, doubling the big man over, and when Carney moved in to help, the other farmer flipped him, with one of those goddamn Jap moves, landing Carney flat and hard on his back on the cement. The sight of that froze Callahan in his tracks and the younger farmer swung a hard sharp right hand that about took Callahan's jaw off at the hinges. When Callahan failed to go down, however, and came back for more, the younger farmer stepped inside Callahan's follow-up swing, grabbed his arm, turned his back on Callahan, and threw him over his shoulder.
And Harry Gibson's men were spread out on their backs, unconscious or otherwise out of commission, like kids making angels in the snow. Only the pavement wasn't snow, and Harry Gibson's men weren't angels.
Harry rushed into the terminal and went to a wall phone. He dropped in a nickel and called Caldwell at home.
"Holy Mary mother!" Caldwell said. "Do you have any idea what time it is, man?"
"I ain't calling to tell you what time it is," Harry said. "Other than it's later than you think. I'm calling to tell you that Eliot Ness and some kid just beat the ever-living shit out of four of my men."
"What? Are you drunk, you simple bastard?"
"They came in dressed like farmers and started unloading a truck. They baited my boys into a fight."
"And nobody recognized Eliot fucking Ness? I know your boys can't read, but they at least see the goddamn papers, don't they?"
Harry shrugged elaborately, made a face, as if Caldwell could see him. "He didn't look like himself. He had on this fake mustache and a floppy old hat. And I never seen this kid before who was with him, who is probably also a cop."
"Did you get in and mix it up yourself?"
"No."
A long sigh. "Well, that's one thing, anyway. Praise God for small favors."
"What should I do?"
"Don't trade any punches, for Christ's sake. But stand up for your union. Speak your mind."
"Which is what?"
A long silence. "Use your head, why don't you, Harry? For something other than raising a crop of hair."
"Are you coming down?"
"Are you crazy, or just stupid? It's not my union. It's your union. You're the business agent."
"But boss-you're the brains!"
"Well, the brains are going back to bed. Good luck to you, my boy."
The click in Harry's ear told him he was on his own.
A paddy wagon had arrived by the time Harry rejoined the crowd. His four leather-jacketed men were being handcuffed and escorted into the back of it by bluecoats. Several press photographers were shooting pictures of the event. How the hell, Harry wondered, did everybody get here so soon?
Ness, who had not put his hat or mustache back on, was speaking to the crowd that had, by this point, swelled to at least a hundred people. Among them were truck drivers, farmers, vendors, buyers-men, and a few women, representing every branch of life and business at the food terminal.
"This little impromptu performance this morning," Ness was saying in a mild, mellow voice, "is only one small part of an ongoing criminal investigation here at the terminal. My office has been aware, for some time, of the activities of a gang engaged in a shakedown racket here at the market, extorting money by threats and force. This gang of racketeers, operating under the guise of a labor union, has preyed upon you people long enough. And they have preyed upon the city of Cleveland long enough- driving up food prices, pushing buyers and sellers into other markets in other cities."
Harry's jaw tightened as heads around him were nodding as Ness's words hit home.
"Right now," Ness continued, "my investigators are working undercover in this terminal. They are gathering evidence but will, if necessary, abandon their 'cover' and intervene, if this so-called union's goon squad interferes with the daily operations of this market. Undercover officers will continue to work the terminal until these acts of violence and extortion end."
Many heads were nodding now, and even some scatterings of applause broke out. Harry Gibson's face was reddening; his teeth were clenched-his fists were, too.
"But to really clean up this market," Ness said, hands on the hips of his coveralls, "I need the cooperation of those of you who have been victimized. If enough witnesses come forward, we can shut down this phony union."
Gibson shouldered his way through the crowd. Standing up on the loading dock, he gazed coldly down at Ness.
"My name is Harry Gibson. I'm the business agent of what you're calling a phony union. We are, in fact"-he searched for the words, tried to remember things he'd heard Caldwell say-"a legitimate labor union organized and operated to protect the, uh… interests of our members."
From the crowd came the sound of a raspberry. Gibson glared back at blank faces.
"I know who you are, Mr. Gibson," Ness said evenly.
Gibson turned back to Ness and pointed down at him. "And I know who you are. You're a cop in the pocket of the moneyed class. You're a union-busting copper."
From behind the press photographers stepped a satanic scarecrow in a seersucker suit and straw fedora with a red band. He had a pad and pencil in his hands and a smartass look on his face.
"Sam Wild," the man said, looking up at Gibson, introducing himself. " Plain Dealer. What makes you think Mr. Ness is a union buster?"
"He was just down busting heads at the steel mill, wasn't he? Then he climbs up on that truck and plays God for the press. Look at him here, in his farmer getup." Gibson turned to the crowd. "This is just some lousy publicity stunt!"
"Not that lousy," Wild said, smiling, scribbling. He turned to Ness, who stood with arms folded near the younger cop/farmer (whose name, Harry later found out, was Albert Curry). "How about it, Mr. Safety Director? Are you against labor?"
"I'm against racketeers in labor," Ness said. His eyes traced the crowd. "I'm against racketeers in the police department." He shrugged. "I'm against racketeers."
And now applause rang out-not just scattered: widespread.
Harry Gibson, feeling naked as a head of lettuce, scowled, and pushed his way through the crowd, disappearing inside the market, feeling depressingly sober.
Outside, the sun was coming up.