Sutton: A Novel Part 43

She stops before him, looks at his face. Joseph, she says.

Mam.

That's not your name, is it? Joseph.

Mam?

You're Willie Sutton.

She hands him the newspaper. He looks at the photo. Looks at her. Yeah, he says with a sigh. Yeah. You got me.

I-what?

I'm Willie Sutton, he says. What a relief to finally say it out loud.

The color slowly drains from Head Nurse's face.

I knew this day was coming, he says. I guess I'm lucky, I've had a few good years.

But-what?

Joseph waits. And waits. That's a hot one, he says. Me-Willie Sutton. With all his money? A high-flyer like Willie the Actor wouldn't be caught dead mopping floors at the Farm Colony. No offense mam.

Head Nurse looks at Joseph, looks at the front page. She inhales sharply. Right, she says, suddenly laughing. I don't know what I was. Well. But he does look like you.

I guess. Around the eyes a little.

He turns back to his mopping.

Sutton leads Reporter and Photographer behind the women's ward, down a hill slick with mud and wet leaves. Reporter grabs Sutton just before he falls. Thanks kid. They push through a group of intertwined trees, into a clearing. A spear of sunlight pierces the trunk of an enormous apple tree. Sutton approaches cautiously. He puts on his gla.s.ses, examines the bark. He smiles. Carved into the bark is a ragged heart. Inside are three letters.

What is that, Mr. Sutton?

Photographer moves closer. S-E-E?

Boys, you are now standing in Willie's sacred grove.

Hold the phone. S-E-E? Sarah Elizabeth-Bess? She was here?

After the Brinks job the Feds put me on their Most Wanted list. Their first list ever. Kind of an honor. They listed all my aliases, all my women-starting with Sarah Elizabeth Endner. I knew she'd be in a state. I looked her up in the phone book-I remembered her married name. And why did I remember? It was Richmond. And I was living in Richmond. You think that's not a sign? Sure enough she was in Brooklyn. And just as I thought, she was beside herself. She was panicked. She didn't know what to do. Reporters were calling her, cops were calling her. A few hours later I met her at the dock. We got in her car, drove to these woods. We only had a few hours before she had to get back. But that's all you get in life. A few hours here, a few there. If you're lucky. Mrs. Adams taught me that. She's buried on the other side of this hill.

Photographer shoots Sutton, the tree. Was Bess still married, brother?

Yeah kid. She was.

Reporter looks at the sky. The sun is getting low, Mr. Sutton. I hate to take you away from your sacred grove, but we're officially pressed for time. I have to file my story in a little more than two hours. So. We need to get to Brooklyn.

We're taking the Verrazano back, Photographer says. It's faster.

Okay, Sutton says.

Just one more stop on your map, Mr. Sutton. Dean Street. Then-Schuster?

Mm.

Mr. Sutton.

Yeah kid. Yeah. Whatever you say.

TWENTY-ONE.

Willie doesn't catch the landlady's name. Something like Mrs. Influenza. She speaks no English and he speaks prison Spanish, so they have a hard time communicating. He tells her that he's a veteran, that he needs quiet, that his name is Julius Loring. She smiles, bewildered. He peels off two hundred dollars, six months' rent in advance. The language barrier crumbles.

The address is 340 Dean Street. It's a narrow three-story clapboard in the barrio. Landlady gives Willie her best room, third floor, overlooking the street. It's tiny, but furnished. Dresser, Hide-A-Bed, club chair. He doesn't need more. The club chair sits by a window that catches the afternoon light. He spends the first few days sitting there, watching the sunsets, thinking. The first order of business, he decides, is his face.

He prowls the docks, wharves, waterfront saloons, looking for guys he knew in the joint. He finds d.i.n.ky Smith, who sends him to Lefty MacGregor, who gives him an address for Rabbit Lonergan, who sends him to an old coffee warehouse, in the back room of which he finds Mad Dog Kling reading a newspaper by a gooseneck lamp. Well f.u.c.k a duck in Macy's front window, Mad Dog says, squinting up through the corona of light. If it aint America's most wanted.

The years since Sing Sing have not been kind to Mad Dog. The years have kicked Mad Dog's a.s.s. Pursed mouth, goggle eyes, he has a bleary, defeated Book-of-Job air about him. He reminds Willie of those black-and-white photos: Dust Bowl Farmer. He wears a baggy brown suit with a frayed blue necktie, but looks as if he should be wearing denim coveralls and watching a cloud of locusts eat his crops.

Willie tells Mad Dog he needs help. Shrink once mentioned a network of disgraced doctors, guys who lost their licenses but still do back-alley stuff. Abortions, bullet removals, so forth. Willie asks Mad Dog if he has any connections in that network. Mad Dog relights a cigar stub.

I might, Willie. But those quacks don't come cheap.

I've got some-savings.

Mad Dog grins, mirthless. I bet you do, he says. I read the papers.

Not as much as you think, Willie says. Which brings me to my next question. What are you doing for dough these days, Mad Dog?

Odd jobs. Bits and s.n.a.t.c.hes. For the waterfront boys.

Bits and s.n.a.t.c.hes?

You know. Guy owes, guy can't pay, I drop by. Goodbye elbow.

What do you get for a thing like that?

Fifty bucks.

Willie looks away. He hates Mad Dog, and he's pretty sure the feeling is mutual. What kind of life is this, to seek out such people, to need such people? To ask such people for help?

Fifty bucks, Willie says. Not much.

Oh, elbows are easy, Mad Dog says, misunderstanding. It's just a hinge. You bend it the wrong way, snap.

Willie steps into the light of the gooseneck. What I'm saying, Mad Dog. How would you like to help me take down a few banks?

Mad Dog points his cigar stub at Willie. That's like Marciano asking if I want to spar.

Sutton stands before 340 Dean Street, pointing. I used to sit at that window right there. Afternoons, children would come running out of that school up the block. They saw me one day, sitting there, my face covered with bandages, they about-faced and ran in the other direction.

Photographer does a back-stretching exercise against the hood of the Polara. Bandages, Willie?

From the plastic surgery.

Reporter holds up his hand. Plastic what now?

He sees patients in the middle of the night, in the office of a legit colleague who gets a kickback for every illegal procedure. Mad Dog sets up the meet, and offers to drive Willie, but Willie wants to do this alone.

A nervous receptionist shows Willie into a small examining room. After half an hour the quack comes in through a second door. The underside of his chin hangs like an udder, his cheeks sag like bread dough. Willie wonders why Quack hasn't let one of his colleagues, disgraced or legit, fix his own kisser.

h.e.l.lo, Mr. Loring.

Willie hands him an envelope full of cash. Quack shoves the envelope quickly into the pocket of his white coat, tells Willie to sit on a paper-covered table. Holding up a sketch pad, he draws a giant circle, marks the circle with x's, dotted lines. The circle apparently is Willie's face.

First, Mr. Loring, I'm going to make a two-inch incision in the columella. That's the tissue just between your nostrils. Then I'm going to peel back the skin. Then I'm going to cut away any excess cartilage and scar tissue and take a grindstone to any protruding or asymmetrical bone. Essentially reshaping the nose G.o.d gave you. I'll need to work faster than normal, because of the, ah, special circ.u.mstances. And I won't have an a.s.sistant. So I must tell you, this may not be perfect, and there will be more risks than typically a.s.sociated with such a procedure. Infection, so on, so forth.

What were you thinking to do for the pain?

You'll be completely under.

Nah. Give me a local.

Willie isn't letting anyone put him under. He has too many secrets, too many memories of Shrink, the slippery hypnotist. Quack opens his eyes wider. Whatever you say, Mr. Loring.

He sounds tickled that Willie will be awake. He also sounds a little too keen to get down to cutting. He asks if Willie would like him to do the eyes while he's at it. Give the lids a lift? Stay away from my eyes, Willie says. Willie looks again at the diagram of his face on the legal pad. He's troubled that Quack has misspelled the word nasal. Willie wishes he'd asked Mad Dog what Quack did to lose his medical license. Watching Quack fondle his blades, Willie thinks it might have been something bad.

Willie lies back. In goes the needle. The pain isn't much. It's the other sensations that make the operation traumatic. Willie can feel every cut, every chip, every grind. Such violent acts on such a delicate appendage. He thinks about sawing the bars of his cells, chipping the rock under Eastern State. He thinks about Father hammering an anvil. He pa.s.ses out.

When he opens his eyes the lights are off. Quack is gone, the nervous receptionist is gone. Willie is still on the paper-covered table, still on his back. He feels as if his nose has been removed, the hole filled with a tent stake. He rolls off the table, staggers to a wall mirror. He has two black eyes and across the center of his face are two blood-soaked bandages in a large X.

His fedora pulled low, he walks home. Landlady happens to be coming down the stairs as he's going up. She shrieks, babbles. Thank G.o.d he's been brushing up on his Spanish with her grown daughter. Estoy bien, he says. No es nada. Gracias. Me meti en una pelea con unos hombres en un bar.

For weeks Willie hides in his room. Mad Dog brings him food and books-a bizarre a.s.sortment of t.i.tles. Willie told Mad Dog to ask the clerk for some great books. The clerk must have thought Mad Dog meant the Great Books. So while convalescing Willie encounters Dante, Woolf, and Proust for the first time.

Proust overpowers him. The sentences are so long they make his nose hurt. Either this Proust is bughouse or else Willie's having a bad reaction to Mad Dog's black-market painkillers. He can't make heads or tails of the plot. There is no plot. And yet sometimes an interminable sentence will end with an image that brings a lump to Willie's throat, or a turn of phrase will knock loose a piece of Willie's forgotten past. Something deep inside him responds to Proust's obsession with time, his defiance of time. Only a man at war with time would write a million-word book. Willie can't wait to get to the sixth volume-The Fugitive.

At Willie's request Mad Dog also brings him Peace of Soul, by Bishop Fulton J. Sheen. Willie read a review in the paper. He's been troubled about his soul, he longs for peace-it sounded interesting. In fact it rivets him. He sits up all night, reads the book cover to cover, goes back and rereads the parts about remorse. Whole pa.s.sages seem addressed to him. Remorse, according to Sheen, is a sin. Remorse is prideful, self-centered. Judas felt remorse. Instead, Sheen says, we must emulate Peter-who felt not remorse but G.o.d-centered regret.

Willie has no remorse, and some days he feels nothing but regret, so he's comforted. According to Sheen, his account with G.o.d is square.

Then, however, Sheen says something that haunts Willie, that stays with him longer than the memory of Quack's blades. Along with regretting, Sheen says, a sinner must fully confess. Willie sets the book down, lights a Chesterfield. Regret and a full confession? Pretty steep price for eternal salvation. He looks at the ceiling. Being a fugitive has made him more acutely aware of the Eyes that always see. The One from whom we can never hide. He asks the ceiling of his tiny furnished room if Sheen is right. Confess? Really? And if he doesn't-what then?

He feels an answer coming. A judgment. He has a hunch it's going to hurt. Distracted, he blows smoke through his sutured nostrils, causing a tiny atom bomb of blinding pain.

A week after the surgery Willie is due to have Quack remove the st.i.tches. He can't face that ghoul again. Mad Dog brings him a bottle of Jameson and a pair of needle-nose pliers. Willie gulps the whiskey, bites a rag, yanks the st.i.tches himself. Mad Dog holds the mirror.

After, Willie apologizes to Mad Dog for all the screaming.

Mad Dog laughs. Please. I'm used to guys screaming.

Sutton takes one last look at his former window. When you're a kid, he says, wondering how your life is going to turn out, you never imagine you might end up living under an a.s.sumed name, in a furnished room, your face covered with bandages, scaring schoolchildren.

Reporter fetches his briefcase from the Polara. He puts it on the hood, clicks it open. I saw nothing in the files, he says, about plastic surgery. But now that you mention it, these old photos-there is a difference. They really don't look like you.

Maybe we do have the wrong guy, Photographer says.

Sutton touches his nose, gives it a squeeze, looks up the block. That quack was insane but he did nice work. Then one day I was walking back to my room and right here I met a girl. Right about where you boys are standing she gave me the big eye. I thought that meant my new nose was a hit. But of course she was a hooker. They can spot a lonely guy from a mile away. With just one look she knew who I was, what I needed. Turned out, though, I was what she needed too.

She has pale white skin, jet-black hair, large black eyes. One eye is slightly larger than the other. Willie tells her it's cute. She taps a finger below the larger eye.

This one, she says, was always the same size as its brother. But lately it keep getting bigger, I don't know why.

He tells her she should see a doctor. She says she doesn't like doctors. He insists, but she's stubborn. Half Irish, half Egyptian, she tells Willie.

That explains it, he says.

She was born and raised in Cairo. Her mother was from Dublin, her father was a Mizrahi Jew. During the war, she says, their life was hard. But peace was much harder. Peace unleashed a more localized chaos. Mobs surged into her neighborhood, carrying clubs, torches. They blew up buildings, set houses ablaze, pulled people from their beds. They dragged men through the streets and bludgeoned them in front of their families.

Why? Willie asks.

Israel, she says. Land. Religion. Why people do anything?

The last time she saw her father, he was standing at the front door of their house, waving a carving knife, keeping the mob at bay. He yelled to her mother, Run, run, I'll find you!

She and her mother bolted out the back door to a neighbor's house. In the morning her father lay in the street. Pieces of him, she says. She and her mother fled with the neighbor, overland on foot, then by boat to America. On the boat they had to fight off men, even boys. One night they had to fight off the neighbor.

Her mother died four days before the boat reached New York Harbor. Grief, shame, illness, maybe all three. When the boat docked she watched immigration officials carry her mother off like a bag of mail.

She tells Willie her name is Margaret. Willie tells her his name is Julius. They're in a coffee shop near his room on Dean Street.

Why you wear these dark gla.s.ses, Julius?

Some people are after me, Margaret.

Why they after you, Julius?

I'd rather not say, Margaret.

You did crimes, she says softly.