Dreams Bigger Than the Night Read Free

bills.
    “Jay, I feel you are lost. Aimless. A college graduate without purpose. I sometimes wonder if you’ll ever find yourself.”
    His father then lectured him on the value of hard work and self-discipline. With the admonishment over, Jay hoofed it toward the Tavern. As he walked past the tidy houses with their postage-stamp lawns, he wished he could share the certitude of those who inhabited them. Notwithstanding the country’s economic woes, the occupants seemed to know who they were and their function in life. Whether or not that assurance came from religion or self-regard or selflessness, he envied their certainty. He had seen many of these people in shul, which he and his mother occasionally attended on Friday night. As his coreligionists davened, he did as well, all the while remembering Turgenev’s definition of prayer: the hope that two and two will equal five. In light of the current state of the world, like his father, he asked, “Where is God?” Mr. Miller, his Hebrew teacher who prepared him for his bar mitzvah, had said enigmatically, “You come to God through helping others, not yourself.”
    Jay’s ruminations continued until he reached his destination. Although just a simple neighborhood restaurant at Meeker and Elizabeth Avenues, the Tavern attracted Newark’s political bosses, business leaders, Bears baseball players, and even mobsters, whom Sam Teiger, the owner, founder, and manager, treated like everyone else. That particular evening, Ben Unterman, a journalist, lamented, “No matter how hard I try to beat the crowd, I lose.”
    Jay didn’t mind waiting in line because Sam always supplied hors d’oeuvres, which Jews knew as forshpiesers . His wait, however, was brief because Puddy Hinkes and Willie Moretti invited him to join their table. He’d seen Moretti around and had heard about his involvement with “Longie” Zwillman, whose connections extended from the New York syndicate down to the cops on the beat and local ladies of the night.
    Puddy, a small-time hood and boxer, could juggle debits and credits as well as Abbadabba Berman, Dutch Schultz’s bookkeeper. A bagman, Puddy brought the payoffs to the mayor, the state senators, and even the governor. The guy knew the inside of federal buildings as well as a con knows the pen, and his loyalty to his employers stamped him as a comer. Four years Jay’s senior, Puddy had taken a shine to him a year before, during a pickup basketball game at the B’nai Abraham shul, when Jay sank the winning basket in a game of twenty-one. At the time, Puddy had said that Jay’s skinny legs reminded him of a spider and told him that if he ever wanted to make some extra cash, he should see him. But as the son of Honest Ike Klug, he had avoided the rackets.
    Willie Moretti kept busy overseeing the widespread New Jersey wire system and numerous plush casinos, as well as the many “sawdust” or dice barns that ran from the Garden State into Pennsylvania. A stocky, round-faced, puffy-cheeked loyalist, who talked out of the left side of his mouth, Willie had an edgy sense of humor. From the vestibule Jay had seen him bending Puddy’s ear. At the table, Puddy introduced them, and Willie cracked:
    “Been grinding it at Dreamland lately?”
    “I guess you read the papers.”
    Willie immediately began to occupy himself with the salt and pepper shakers. “Yeah, I seen them. I hear the gunsel was all bundled up. No one got a good look at him.”
    “That’s true.”
    “Except for them spats, the cops probably woulda’ never gone nosing around the Friends of the New Germany. Lucky they did.”
    Moretti was right. The killer had spats. But to that moment, Jay had forgotten, and the newspapers had never mentioned, the fact. So how did Moretti know?
    “Whoever remembered that krauts like to wear spats was no fool,” Jay said, hoping to elicit more information.
    “Yeah,” replied Willie, spilling some salt into his right hand and tossing it over his left