Black Mask

The Phantom of the Concourse Plaza
by Jerome Charyn

1.

I was nine years old, and I lived at the Concourse Plaza with Nick Etten and eleven other New York Yankees, most of them scrubs, like Hersh Martin and Don Savage, who would disappear from baseball once the war was over. Etten was a star by default, since Joltin’ Joe DiMaggio was playing exhibition games for the Armed Services, and having chicken à la king with all the generals. Nick would go on to win the American League’s home-run crown with an anemic twenty-two homers, since both leagues were filled with scrubs. He was always nice to me.

My dad was a scam artist and used the Concourse Plaza as one of his official addresses. But he was hardly ever there. He was out selling stolen merchandise and phony insurance policies, a salesman of sorts. He never bothered to register me at any school. He didn’t have the time or the inclination, and the Board of Ed never bothered him or me, because I had no official status. I didn’t exist on paper.

The Plaza was a luxury apartment hotel, the first of its kind in the Bronx, and my dad and I had six of the sweetest rooms on the tenth floor, which was monopolized by the Yankees and Digger Welles. That’s me. It was my neighbor, Nick, who began calling me Digger. He was a first baseman. And in baseball parlance, a digger was someone who could scratch around in the dirt and scoop up ground balls with his first-baseman’s mitt. But it didn’t mean much. Nick called a lot of people Digger, because he wasn’t good at remembering names.

So Digger I was, and Digger I would always be—even after Nick Etten left the Yanks.

But don’t think I was idle for a minute. A good number of judges and defense attorneys lived at the Concourse Plaza, because the Bronx County Criminal Court was right across the road. And one of the attorneys, Rodman Reed, who represented the most notorious crime family in the borough, the Irish Hellcats of Fordham Road, used me as his favorite runner. I was clever. I was swift. And I never asked questions. Rodman dined with me at the judges’ table in the Plaza’s grand ballroom, even if the ballroom had been rented out that night for a wedding or a bar mitzvah. The judges’ table was sacrosanct, according to Rodman, who enriched my vocabulary, and taught me how to behave with the hoodlums he represented, and with the judges, who were handpicked by the Democrats.

There wasn’t a single Republican to be found near the Concourse Plaza. Ed Flynn, boss of the Bronx, would have hired the Hellcats to cripple any landlord who dared rent space for a Republican club. So we had a picnic at the Plaza. When I wasn’t running back and forth between the Plaza and the courthouse with notes from Rodman to his associates, who were defending one of the Hellcats for some heinous crime, I was at Yankee Stadium with Nick. The stadium was a five-minute walk from the Plaza, and Nick must have been stopped a hundred times along that route. I was his social secretary, who carried Nick Etten baseball cards with his signature on them and hand delivered these cards to autograph seekers. With DiMaggio gone, Nick had become the reigning prince of baseball in the Bronx.

“Digger,” he asked me on one of these walks to the stadium, “where’s your mom?”

“She’s gone.”

I could see the ripple in his forehead. “Gone? Gone where?”

“She hanged herself when I was three.”

“That’s peculiar. Leaving a child like that, leaving him flat.”

“Dad said she was unhappy all the time.”

Nick stopped in the middle of the street to contemplate what I had told him.

“Do you remember her, son?”

“I have vague memories floating around. But I can’t recall the color of her eyes or the color of her hair. I remember her hands, mostly. They were very big.”

“Like a catcher’s mitt?” Nick asked, still deep in contemplation. He had children of his own.

“Not that big,” I muttered, and that ended the conversation. It thickened our relationship, though. He never barked at me or uttered an unkind word. I didn’t leave him at the players’ entrance and return to the hotel. Nick took me with him. No one questioned the Yankees’ home-run champ of 1944. I sat with him in the locker room while he put on his uniform, walked through the tunnel with him, and entered the Yankee dugout. All the players welcomed me, but the batboy gave me a dirty look. He must have thought I’d come to replace him. Nick tousled his hair.

“Hey, Jimmy, meet my neighbor, Digger Welles. I invited him to sit with us.”

The batboy wasn’t hostile after that. He was fourteen and had dropped out of school. He traveled with the team, but lived at home with his parents on Pelham Parkway whenever the Yankees were in town and after the season was over.

Nick hit two doubles that afternoon, and the Yanks beat the Brownies, who were in first place. I could tell how troubled Nick was about my mother’s death. I became his mascot. I’d be lying if I didn’t tell you how invaluable that was. Rodman, my boss, advertised me as Nick Etten’s best friend at the Concourse Plaza. Soon the Hellcats Rodman represented would ask me about Nick and the other Yankees. I was untouchable, because you can’t put a nine-year-old kid on the witness stand. And the Hellcats were very brazen. Mario, the gang’s financial wizard, who had furry eyebrows and a very big head to accommodate his outsized brain, asked me right near the judges’ chambers, “Digger, do you think you can get to Etten?”

I had to play dumb. “What do you mean, Mr. Mario?”

“Well, if he could strike out in three pitches the first time he’s at bat in his next game with the Brownies, there’s five grand waitin’ for him and a fifty-dollar bill waitin’ for you.”

You couldn’t fool a wizard like Mario. “I might ask him to hit a homer for me as a favor. But I don’t have the heart to ask a slugger like Nick to strike out.”

“A homer, then,” Mario said. “On the first pitch. It doesn’t pay as much, kid. But it has potential.”

I said nothing to Nick. And behold, he hit a cannonball into left center—on Nels Potter’s first pitch, a slider right down the middle. A busboy slipped an envelope under my consommé while I was having dinner with Rodman and the judges. I knew it contained a crisp fifty-dollar bill. Mario must have realized that I hadn’t swayed Nick, and that the homer was a fluke, but the wizard rewarded me anyway. Now I belonged to the Hellcats. I always did.

Sometimes the judges wore their robes to dinner. They looked like religious men—rabbis or priests. All the judges were in Rodman’s pocket. They didn’t have envelopes under their consommé, but Rodman paid their rent at the Plaza. Not a single Hellcat had ever gone to jail under Rodman’s watch No jury ever seemed capable of convicting them, not at Bronx Criminal Court. And these same judges were treated like kings at the Concourse Plaza. They controlled Party politics, right under Boss Flynn.

They were discussing the presidential campaign, but their language skirted over my head. I sensed it had something to do with FDR’s proposed visit to the Plaza in November, right before Election Day. Even at nine I knew the president had suffered from polio and that he was never pictured in a wheelchair. But Willy Wilkinson, chief of all the judges in the Bronx, and known as Lord William in our circle, wasn’t worried about FDR’s path to the dinner table. He was worried about Tom Dewey, New York’s Republican governor, who was running against FDR.

“Governor Tom controls the state troopers,” Lord William said, “and that’s a bit of a concern. They can block traffic wherever we campaign.”

Rodman had a special grudge against Governor Tom. When Mr. Dewey was Manhattan D.A., he just about annihilated the Hellcats, sending more than half the gang to Sing Sing. The Hellcats couldn’t rebuild until Dewey left Manhattan and sat in the governor’s seat. According to Rodman, it was the Bronx Democratic machine that elected Governor Tom, switching sides during that particular campaign.

Lord William’s eyebrows knit. “Should the runt know all this? Etten is his pal and he could blab to the baseball commissioner about political shenanigans at the Concourse Plaza.”

“Your Lordship,” Rodman said. “Digger’s with us all the way.”

“That’s good to know,” Lord William said. The chief judge had a silver beard like the movie star Monty Woolley. “But how do we stop Governor Tom and his troopers from gumming up the president’s parade?”

“Ah,” Rodman said, “that’s simple. We whisper in the ear of Commissioner Valentine. We’ll have one of his special details prepare a path for the parade.”

Police Commissioner Valentine stayed clear of the Bronx, but he was still a Republican.

“I won’t have to pay him. He loves the president. He’ll provide an escort.”

“But how do you know?” Lord William asked in a silky voice.

“Because we have target practice together.”

There was a shooting range in the subbasement of the Concourse Plaza. Rodman had a permit to carry a pistol because he had to deal with such desperate characters, and he was one of a select few with a key to the range. He had dinner every Thursday night with Commissioner Valentine at D’Angelo’s, a Yankee haunt on Jerome Avenue, and a bit of target practice in the subbasement. I was a kid. I couldn’t tell you what deals they made.

Rodman must have been in fine fettle after his consommé. He invited me to the inner sanctum, the pistol range in the subbasement. You couldn’t get there by any of the elevators. We had to go through a fire door near the front desk. We climbed down three flights of dimly lit stairs and entered a storage room filled with trunks that must have been for ocean voyages; the trunks were bigger than coffins and were made of the finest leather. I’d never been on an ocean voyage, never been on a voyage at all, except that Dad did drive us from New Hampshire after my mother broke out of her body with a hangman’s necktie. I can’t tell you why he picked the Concourse Plaza. Maybe it was his own idea of a target.

Rodman used his key to get us into the pistol range. The range boss was sore as hell.

“Rodman, you didn’t put that big-eared boy on the invitation list.”

I do have big ears, I have to confess.

“Well, Curly,” Rodman said, “I keep this range afloat. Half your members come from me.”

Like everyone else at the range, I was given a helmet with goggles and a pair of rubber-and-metal earmuffs, covered with sheepskin. Curly had made them himself, since mufflers were getting scarce in wartime. He provided the pistols and the shells. I stood behind Rodman in his firing lane. The target was a silhouette of Governor Tom with a flaming red moustache and eyebrows that were equally red. Rodman must have been a sharpshooter. He ripped into that red moustache with every second shot. All I could hear in my metal earmuffs was a series of soft plops.

*   *   *

2.

There was no pennant fever in the Bronx. The Brownies went all the way with the fierce right arm of Nels Potter. Nick Etten seemed sad to return to Illinois.

“Wish I could take you with me, Digger. But the wife wouldn’t admire a kid who hovers around a courthouse. She’s the suspicious type.”

But he did shove a wrinkled twenty-dollar bill into my pocket.

I returned it. “I couldn’t take money from you, Mr. Etten. We’re friends.”

“Then how come you never call me Nick? Everybody does.”

“My father says I should be respectful to anyone in the major leagues. It’s a hard climb.”

His brow wrinkled, like he was readying to face Nels Potter and hit a grand slam. “Your father’s gone AWOL, son. I’ve never see him once.”

He travels a lot,” I said.

“Digger, he’s left you at the Plaza with a baseball player and a bunch of thieves from the courthouse. Why aren’t you at school?”

“School?” I said. “I make a mint as Rodman Reed’s private messenger.”

Nick Etten looked alarmed. “Digger, that man represents murderers.”

“You can’t call them that, Mr. Etten. Not one of them has ever been convicted.”

“How come the Plaza lets you live here all alone?”

I couldn’t tell Nick that Rodman’s legal team paid off the manager and his entire staff to keep silent about the boy on the tenth floor. I was indispensable. Rodman needed a runner who was young enough to slip through all the cracks at court and would never betray him.

The bellhop took Nick’s luggage down to the lobby. “I hate to leave you like this,” Nick said. He swung an imaginary bat with that wide left-handed stance of his and got into the next elevator car.

I could have cried. I didn’t. I was Digger Welles. I belonged to the Hellcats. I raced between Criminal Court and Rodman’s penthouse at the Concourse Plaza. It wasn’t really a penthouse. His suite had a lot of little terraces and balconies. He rarely spent much time at any trial. He’d appear at the beginning and at the very end, make his pitch to the jury, and return to his suite. But there was a constant stream of messages to his associates. Nothing on paper. Rodman would never commit himself. I guarded his notes inside my head. I had no idea what he was talking about. He’d tell an associate of his to follow a particular line of attack. If the district attorney’s man was unusually rough, Rodman would stride into court with a white rose in his lapel and hammer away at whatever witness was on the stand.

“Counselor,” I said, “you sure have the gift.”

“It’s all in the details, Digger. You have to pay attention to every word.”

I had a honeymoon at the Concourse Plaza, with thirteen thousand dollars at the Bronx Savings and Loan. Dad had cosigned the account, so I could withdraw whatever I wanted. I didn’t need much. Dad paid for all my meals at the Plaza. But I needed a new pair of shoes, so I went to Thom McAn. The shoe clerk was startled to see a kid like me with a wad of ten-dollar bills that I kept in a rubber band, like the Hellcats. He was very suspicious. He wouldn’t sell me a pair of dress shoes. So I mentioned the counselor’s name. Rodman Reed had become a legend in the Bronx. His picture was always in the Mirror and the Journal-American because of all the cases he had won.

“I work for the counselor,” I said.

The guy began to show off in front of all the other customers and clerks. “That’s a laugh. A pipsqueak like you.”

I wasn’t frightened of a shoe clerk. “Why don’t you call him at the Concourse Plaza?”

“It cost a nickel, you know,” he said with a sneer.

I peeled off a ten-dollar bill. “Make the call,” I said.

Reluctant at first, he finally called the Concourse Plaza. The operator reached Rodman, and the clerk described the situation. I could hear Rodman scream through the wires. “I’m sorry, Counselor,” the clerk said. “I couldn’t picture this child in your employ. . . . Yes, Counselor, I will.”

I bought the best shoes in the house, with high heels and silver taps on the toes. The clerk wouldn’t let me pay for the Thom McAns with my wad. “The counselor has authorized the purchase,” he said. “We couldn’t accept payment, Mr. Welles. Please, it would embarrass us.”

Next I went to Robert Hall. The clerks must have been forewarned. They doted on me. I bought a charcoal gray suit, like Rodman favored in front of a jury. I didn’t have to come back to have the suit fitted. The tailor was right there. He fixed the cuffs on his sewing machine. I bought an Arrow shirt and a silk tie. I bought a tie clip and a calfskin belt with a brass buckle.

When I took out my wad with its rubber band, the manager shook his head.

“You get the counselor’s usual markdown, young man.”

“How much is that?” I asked.

“One hundred percent.”

So I walked out of Robert Hall with my purchases and wearing my Thom McAn taps.

 

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Copyright © 2024 The Phantom of the Concourse Plaza by Jerome Charyn