Garden of Beasts Read Free

out a pack of Chesterfields. He lit one. “Go on.”
    Gordon said, “You’ve got that gym over on Ninth Avenue. Not much of a place, is it?” He asked this of Avery.
    “You been there?” Paul asked.
    Avery said, “Not so swank.”
    Manielli laughed. “Real dive, I’d say.”
    The commander continued, “But you used to be a printer before you got into this line of work. You liked the printing business, Paul?”
    Cautiously Paul said, “Yeah.”
    “Were you good at it?”
    “Yeah, I was good. What’s that got to do with the price of tea in China?”
    “How’d you like to make your whole past go away. Start over. Be a printer again. We can fix it so nobody can prosecute you for anything you’ve done in the past.”
    “And,” the Senator added, “we’ll cough up some bucks too. Five thousand. You can get a new life.”
    Five thousand? Paul blinked. It took most joes two years to earn that kind of money. He asked, “How can you clean up my record?”
    The Senator laughed. “You know that new game, Monopoly? You ever play it?”
    “My nephews have it. I never played.”
    The Senator continued. “Sometimes when you roll the dice you end up in prison. But there’s this card that says ‘Get Out of Jail Free.’ Well, we’ll give you one for real. That’s all you need to know.”
    “You want me to kill somebody? That’s queer. Dewey’d never agree to it.”
    The Senator said, “The special prosecutor hasn’t been informed about why we want you.”
    After a pause he asked, “Who? Siegel?” Of all the current mobsters Bugsy Siegel was the most dangerous. Psychotic, really. Paul had seen the bloody results of the man’s brutality. His tantrums were legendary.
    “Now, Paul,” Gordon said, disdain on his face, “it’d be illegal for you to kill a U.S. citizen. We’d never ask you to do anything like that.”
    “Then I don’t get the angle.”
    The Senator said, “This is more like a wartime situation. You were a soldier….” A glance at Avery, who recited, “First Infantry Division, First American Army, AEF. St. Mihiel, Meuse-Argonne. You did some serious fighting. Got yourself some medals for marksmanship in the field. Did some hand-to-hand too, right?”
    Paul shrugged. The fat man in the wrinkled white suit sat silently in his corner, hands clasped on the gold handle of his walking stick. Paul held his eye for a minute. Then turned back to the commander. “What’re the odds I’ll survive long enough to use my get-out-of-jail card?”
    “Reasonable,” the commander said. “Not great but reasonable.”
    Paul was a friend of the sports journalist and writer Damon Runyon. They’d drink together some in the dives near Broadway, go to fights and ball games. A couple of years ago Runyon had invited Paul to a party after the New York opening of his movie Little Miss Marker, which Paul thought was a pretty good flick. At the party afterward, where he got a kick out of meeting Shirley Temple, he’d asked Runyon to autograph a book. The writer had inscribed it, To my pal, Paul—Remember, all of life is six to five against.
    Avery said, “How ’bout we just say your chances’re a lot better than if you go to Sing Sing.”
    After a moment Paul asked, “Why me? You’ve got dozens of button men in New York’d be willing to do it for that kind of scratch.”
    “Ah, but you’re different, Paul. You’re not a two-bit punk. You’re good. Hoover and Dewey say you’ve killed seventeen men.”
    Paul scoffed. “Bum wire, I keep saying.”
    In fact, the number was thirteen.
    “What we’ve heard about you is that you check everything two, three times before the job. You make sure your guns’re in perfect shape, you read up about your victims, you look over their places ahead of time, you find their schedule and you make sure they stick to it, you know when they’ll be alone, when they make phone calls, where they eat.”
    The Senator added, “And you’re smart. Like I was saying. We need