Mushy’s Persona
J. Quinn Quisben
People could never figure out where Mushy got the big words he used sometimes. He would use the word “agon” when he was talking about aboxing match, talk about the “catharsis” produced by a good drama, say that a buddy who was down in the dumps had a touch of “weltschmerz.” None of his close acquaintances had ever seen him with a book; those young women and poker players who frequented hos suite at the LaSalle Hotel was sure he read nothing but Variety, Ring, The Daily Racing Form, and possibly the Gideon Bible.
He sometimes went to the track with Nelson Algren and was seen in converation with Sydney J. Harris, but was not often among bookish types. Most of his friends were ex-boxers, show business personalities a=of varying eminence, and those who liked the excitement of gambling.
It was not that anyone thought Mushy was putting on airs or was using a vocabulary beyond his intelligence. He was as natural as it is possible for the publicly visible partner in a popular saloon and restaurant to be, and anyone who held onto a fairly lavish lifestyle for many years swhile betting on most of the horse races in North America and playing weekly poker with professionals must be fairly shrewed.
One night in 1956 he was talking to a young reporter from the Sun-Times who had expressed surprise at his use of the word “oligopoly.”
“You don’t think a word like that fits in with my persona?” Mushy asked.
“There you go again,” the reporter said, “and I’m going to call you on that one. Just what in hell is a persona?” This was back in the days when respectably dressed young women who worked for newspapers said hell and damn alot.
“The Greeks in the old days had their actors put on maskes when they did a play,” Mushy said. “They had these theatres about the size of Dyche Stadium up in Evanston. They had only two or three actors playing all the solo parts in a play. The audience could tell of the actor was supposed to be a king or a god or a servant or whatever by the kind of mask he had on. They called a mask a persona.”
“But you aren’t wearing amask,” the reporter said.
“The hell I’m not. Take a good look at my face and tell me what you see.”
The reporter looked hard. She had not been allowed to apprentice at City News, but whe had hung around enough policemen to know some tricks if description.
“Well,” she said, “You have the face of a male Caucasion probably in his late forties, dark brown hair starting to go gray, brown eyes, there’s a scar that splits you rleft eyebrow, your nose is off center, your front teeth are probably false, you need a shave even though you probably already had on today, your skin is swartny, and you have a tissue build up in your cheek bones and above your eyebrows. Thats called acromegaly, isn’t it?”
“Yes it is. So we can both agree that I have a real mess of a face. not the face of a man who once in a while says oligopoly or persona.” Mushy shifted slightly and asked, “So what do you think you know about me?”
“Nothing that everybody else doesn’t know,” the reporter said, suddenly feeling that she ought to go to the powder room to see if her seams were straight. “You were a boxer, a welterweight contender once. Then you were a movie actor, mostly small parts in gangster movies. Then you were in the army during the war. Then you got in trouble with the House Un-American Activites Committee and were blacklisted. Then you came back to Chicago and Charlie and Nick Maltese set you up with this place. Four or five years ago the Kefauver committee asked you about the Maltese brothers, and you said you did not know anything except that they were very generous with capital to set up restaurants; you were not widely believed. You’re a poker player who once broke Nick the Greek, and you break better than even most days out at Hawthorne. that’s about all, except that someone I know in the sports desk says that the consensus down at Postl;s gym is that you were a good fighter, but you kept talking people into over-matching you; that’s how you got the face.
“That’s very good,” Mushy said. “Now tell me just one thing more. Why is it that you’re so nervous and flustered looking when I have just given you your second drink on the house and we are having an innocent chat about my vocabulary.”
“Because you look like you are going to shoot me, the way you did all those people in the movies,” the reporte said.
“I think I’ve made my point,” Mushy said. “You’re reacting to my face and the way I was cast in movies, and maybe to a reputation that I’ve done almost nothing to earn. I have neer fired a real bullet except in the army, and even there I spent most of my time being a cook, which I am very good at. I have never hit anybody for real since I retired from the ring, and I have never hit anybody outside the ring since I was about seventeen years old. I made my living for years by looking like a hood in the movies, but I’ve never been one, or anything close. This face isn’t really me. Ut was manufactured for me by thirty-five guys that I fought, especially in my last fight, when Barney Ross did to me approximately what Henry Armstrong did to him a few years later. Not throwing in the towel in that fight made me very popular with the boxing fans for the last twenty years, but it gave me a face that doesn’t really match what I am, a persona, the way I look to the world, which is not necessarily the way I am.”
Mush paused and took aa sip of Seven-Up, the only thing he ever drank when he was with the customers. The reporter was still a bit nervous, and Mushy was pleasedwith the way he had produced the effect just by shifting his head so that the light played on his face a bit diferently. He was convinced that he could have handled bigger and more complex parts than he had ever been given in Hollywood.
“Did you ever hear of Aldus Huxley?” Mushy asked.
The reporter had. She had read Brave New World and had heard that some of his other books were good, too.
“I wouldn’t know; I never read any of them,” Mushy said. “I met him at this party some producer was giving a few years ago. He was working on something for Lana Turner, I think, and having a hard time with it. Anyhow, we got to talking. He wasn’t fooled by my face. I think that’s because his eyesight is pretty bad. He kept talking about the Greeks and their theatre, and I kept listening. That’s how I heard of persona.
“Oliogopoly I picked up from Cliffor Odets. It means that a small group of companies dominate a market, not one company, which is a monopoly. Like there’s sic companies that manufacture nearly all the cigarettes in this country, and they all charge the same price.”
“I’m impressed,” the reporter said, “and not just because you scared the hell out of me.”
“Don’t be. I’m not smart because U used to hang out with smart guys andy more than I’m tough because I sometimes hang out with tough guys. You shouldn’t be scared, either. Usually when I got that look on my face, I got killed before I could kill anybody. George Raft killed me, James Cagney killed me, it even got so that people like Jack LaRue and George Bancroft were killing me.”
Mushy paused for some more Seven-Up.
“Did you ever hear of a director named Fritz Lang?”
The reporter never had.
“He did some very good movies in germany until Hitler came in, and then he has done some more good ones over here. In my first movie he made me turn from an ordinary looking palooka into a guy who was going to kill somebody just by shifting the lighting a little. I was part of a mob that was lynching Spencer Tracy. I didn’t have any lines, but I didn’t needany. That little trick got me steady work for a lot of years.”
Mushy had unobtrusively summoned a bartender to the table, an ex-heavyweight.
“Stash, this lady of the press and I have just been discussing killers and people who look like killers. I wanted her to see a real killer.”
Stash let the reporter take a good long look. He did not know exacty what Mushy was up to, but , sincedoing what Mushy wanted usually increased trade and tips, he was willing to go along.
“Tell the young lady about all those people you killed for Joe Saltis,” Mushy said.
“That was back during Prohibition,” Stash said. “Joe Saltis would tell people to be missing, and, if they wouldn’t be missing all by themselves, it was my job to help them be missing adn stay missing. It was just a business thing.”
Stash looked at Mushy to see if he had done all right. He had. He went back to his place at the bar.
“Stash’s big thing is dressing up as Santa Claus every year,” Mushy said to the reporter. “The Maltese brothers and I buy a big bunch of toys, and Stash goes around and gives them to kid in orphanages and children’s hospitals. WHen he has his Santa costume on, you would wear he was the real thing. It’s a comfortable persona for him, more than just a business thing.”
The reporter thanked Mushy for the drinks and for the vocabulary lesson and left.
Charlie Maltese came in about closing time to check up on things. He looked at thenight’s receipts and grinned.
“Mushy, when are you going to start losing some money for Nick and me?” he said.
“If you want to take a temporary loss right away, lease the building next door, and I’ll expand into there. We had people waiting in line all night, and I could have another dozen tables,” Mushy said.
“I’ll talk to Nick about it,” Charlie said. “He says that are going to have to find a few tax losses pretty quick. He doesn’t understand how you get people to come in here with the prices you charge when you don’t even have a floor show or dancing.”
“The drinks are honest, the food is good, abd people like sitting under an autographed picture of Chester Morriss or Hunts Hall and letting their waiter how Rocky Graziano caught him with a lucky punch. Like the advertising boys say, you don’t sell the steak, you sell the sizzle.”
“Nick says he likes the way you get publicity for the place, but that you should be careful not to mention him or me when you talk to reporters,” Charlie said. When Charlie talked, he always pretended that Nick was the head man. When Nick talked, he made it sound as if Charlie ran it. The two of them had used this tactic ever since they worked for Capone back in the Twenties.
“Tell Nick I never do mention your names to reporters unless the reporters mention them first,” Mushy said. “Ican’t help it if they’re fascinated by two respectable suburbanites like you guys.”
“Nick says be careful,” Charlie said.
“I’ll be careful,” Mushy said.
The Maltese brothers had a sizable proportion of the off-track betting action in the metroplitan area and sometimes extended credit to their steady customers, using some awesome methods to collect overdue payments. Mushy figured that this was part of the thrill of gambling for a lot of people and that anyone who tried to welsh on people like that more or less deserved what they got.
Mushy himself was not like that. He liked horses and spent a lot of time sstudying the bloodlines, records, and special characteristics. He was a forst-rate handicapper. He had mastered the mathematical part of poker when he was very young, and his psychological skills had been developing ever since. He took risks, but he did not mind short odds, and he had a good instinct for holding back when a winning streak was running out. Unlike most gamblers he was content to be a small winner, and whatever self-destructive impulses he had once had diminsihed sharply when he first looked in the mirror after the Barney Ross fight.
He got along well with nearly everyone, but he had no real intimates. He enjoyed sex and the company of women, but he never had nor wanteda relationship which lasted more than a few months. He had never quite gotten over his amazement that women found him attractive despite his and his unwillingness to make any commitment to them.
He was good in bed, generous, and tolerant of a wide range of what seemed to him to be irrational behavior. Nevertheless, women eventually became enraged at his essential indifference to them. His reputation as a lover was mostly based on a series of spectacular confrontations with departing companions, which had the usual effect of attracting still more women to him. Mushy treated the women who tried to ensare him with the same opaque geniality as he treated the men who tried to get him to make sucker bets.
His sister-in-law and his nephew’s wife thought Mushy needed a good woman rather than the show girls and other raffish types with whom he was usually seen. It was Mushy’s experience that good women cried more than bad ones and wanted a lifestyle unsuited to a man whose businessseldom alowed him to retire before three A.M.
Mushy willingly spent at least one Sunday afternoon a month in Skokie with his nephew, his only blood relation. He was fond of young Morris, who was his late older brother’s only son. Mushy had paid his nephew’s way through college and had provided a subsidy for him and his mother until the young man had established himself. Although Morris was not yet thirty, he was making good money in a LaSalle Street brokerage house and was planning to set up as a commodities trader on his own. Mushy made a good profit on the money he had invested with his nephew. They were both the same type of knowledgeable and conservative gambler.
They were namesakes as well. Mushy’s father had been known as Moe. Mushy was a nickname that was still common among Jewish athletes when he had entered the ring professionally in 1931 at the age of twenty. Morris, who had been born in 1928, had been given a version of the name thought to be more American. The Hebrew name for all of them was Moishe, which most English translations of the Bible render as Moses.
Morris’s wife was a stylish young woman who had expensive schooling in the East, where she had suffered many social slights because of her heritage. Her father owned a chain of dry cleaning stores and was active in a North Side Jewish congregation which had once been Reform but whach had become Conservative after World War II. She was determined that the form of the name which any child of hers bore would be Moishe.
She and her father had got Mushy to buy a lot of Israel bonds as well as contribute to the temple and to loca Jewish charities. Mushy did this in good spirit and not merely to keep the peace in his nephew’s family. His parents had not been observant and his father, old Moe, had loved to argue loudly that Socialism, not Zionism, was the wave of the future, but Mushy had always accepted himslef as part of the Jewish community.
The Judaism of his nephew’s impeccable home with its expensive and separate sets of cooking etensils and the princess phone disconnected at sundown Friday was very different from the men with beards and the housewives in their identical wigs who haggled among the pushcarts in the side streets west of the river. Mushy was impressed with the new state of Israel with its well-tended fruit trees and efficient army in khaki shorts, but he wondered how someone who had run mails for Nails Morton and had bought a ten derby with part of his first boving boxing purse would fit in there.
“When I was a kid,” Mushy told his nephewed wife one Sunday afternoon, “everybody used to beat up Jews, mostly just because they could. Morriss’ grandfather used to say that would stop once there was socialism, but the hoods who used to bust unions for the garment factories would work him over for being a socialist, them give him a few licks for being a Jew on top of that. Me, I figured I wouldn’t wait for socialism to stop being beaten up, so I worked out every chance I got in the gym at Hull House, and I started hanging around the pro fighters.”
There were oranges that Morris’ mother had just brought back from Florida, and Mushy peeled one expertly. A fresh orange was something that he had always enjoyed. In his childhood they had been considered a great luxury. Morris and his mother were at the other end of the room watching Alistair Cooke introduce some egghead thing on “omnibus”. Mushy gestured toward the television set.
“Boxing is dying because of television,” he said, “that and the fact that nobody except colored people are hard enough anymore to want to get their brains knocked out for a few bucks that most of them won’t be able to hold on to anyhow. In my day, though, there were clubs all over the city where you could make fifty or a hundred bucks any weekend you were up to it, and a fight card at the coleseum where you could make really big money.”
“Did you keep any of your money, though?” Morris’ wife asked.
“Enough for a compartment for me and a blonde manicurist on the super chief, and enough to go to Santa Anita every day until my face healed up and I started getting regular acting work. Boxing paid for a first-class wardrobe, a lot of steaks when everyone else was living on air, and it bought Morris’ grandparents those nice tombstones out in Waldheim next to the Haymarket monument. Also, it set Morris’ parents up in the grocery store in central park avenue, which was a classy neighborhood at that time. Although Karl and Sadie had paid me back every cent that I had lent them long before Karl died, you maight say that Morris had a more comfortable childhood and eventually could appeal to a better class of girls because I was a pug.”
“He knows that,” Morris’ wife said, “although that isn’t the part about you that he likes best. He’s always talking about how the other kids at Crame Tech let him aline because your reputation scared them, and how the best day in his life was the one when you picked him up in front of the school in a limosuine.”
“That was Stash’s idea,” Mushy said. “I had this furlough before going overseas in 1944, and I was able to get a flight into Midway with some people I knew in a USO show. Stash was driving a limosine for this company that had a contract to haul V.I.P.’s with goverment busines around town. We used to fight on some of the same cards, and Stash had fixed it so he could drive me around town for a couple of days. Nobody had a very cleat idea of how a buck sergeant could rate a chauffered limo, but it sure got me and my friends treated like royalty. Stash had a punctured eardrum and couldn’t get into the service, so he wanted to be patriotic by showing his old buddies a good time.”
“Morrics has told me about it,” his wife said. “His father was dead by then. His mother was doing alright with the store with Morris’s help, but she wasn’t getting out much. She kept that picture of all of you at a ringside table at the Chez Paree right by the cash register for as long as they had the store. She still has everything momorizedthat you and Joe E. Lewis said to each other.”
“That’s the nie thing about being a little bit famous,” Mushy said. “You can live it up like that once in a while and still have your privacy most of the time. A lot of people wave to me on the street because they vaguely recognize me from someplace, but nobody except people who really know me can call my name. Of course, when I got in trouble with the Un-American committee a few years back, there was a while when nobody seemed to know me, but that didn’t last very long.”
“I never figured out how that happened to you,” Morris’s wife said. “You don’t sem like the left-wing type, or anything political for that matter.”
“My only politics has been to pay off anybody I had to in order to stay in business,” Mushy said. “Oh, I used to vote for Norman Thomas whenever he ran, but that was just a thing to remember my father by, just like I buy those Israel bonds from your father to remember a bunch of people that my parents used to talk about. I wouldn’t talk to that committee because I wanted to preserve my integrity as a poker payer.”
Morris’s wife knew that she was suposedto respond to that one but chose no to do so. Mushy saw the trick and grinned. She immediately said “How’s that?”
“Nobody will play poker with you if you change the rules in the middle of the game,” Mushy said. “That’s what people like that Parnell Thomas and Nixon were putting pressure on me to do. I had joined a few committees against Franco, and I was a strong union man, but, basically, they had nothing on me. What they wanted me to do was talk about a bunch of dumb things that I had heard people say at parties about ten years before, and I wasnot going to repeat a buch of stuff that overpaid drunks had said to impress me about what great revolutionaries they were going to be once they had their swimming pools paid for. That stuff was not really serious even if they had thought it was, and I was more ready to lose work by mot talking than I was to get the good opinion of the committee by repeating things that sounded even sillier in 1947 that they did in 1937.
“I could get some people to understand that in Hollywood, but not very many. That’s on of the reasons I came back to Chicago. People here in business, spports, politics, in the rackets, too, for that matter, they inderstand personal loyalty.”
“Like Nick and Charlie Maltese and their nephew,” Morris’s wifre said, “I hope you shoild never be so loyal to you rown family.”
“Very funny,” Mushy said. “I took Morris to see Joe E. Lewis at an impressionable age, so he marries someone who likes to needle people too. Lewis kept being funny like that even afterJack KcGurn cut his throat for it.”
“Don’t shift the light so you look like you’r going to shoot Bogart,” Morris’s wife said. “I’m on to that one.”
“All right,” Mushy said, “but seriously, Charlie and Nick set their nephew up in a liquor store and saq to it that he made hugh money when some of their friends worked that racket with teh phony revnue stamps. Then the kid started talking to the alcohol tax people the first time they leaned on him. It may be a little extreme to blow your nephew’s skull aprt for something like that, byt that kid knew the family rules and he broke them.”
“So tel me what our family rules are, so the same thing shouldn’t happen to me or Moris ir Sadie.”
“Rule number one is that everybody in the family except me should stay the hell away from the Malteses,” Mushy said. “I know Moris was hired by that bunch of Lake Forest snobs to get some new types of suckers into the commodities market, but dropping around my place while Nick and Charlie are there and trying to get them to take a flyer in frozen pork bellies or something is not such a hot idea. It is true that they have a lot of cash and a history of sending some of it with his family, but, if they took a few big losses, which has been known to happen to people with the very best advice, they might feel they had been double-crossed and threat Morris and me they way they do with their own relations. Deep down they really don’t understand a speculation that goes sour for any reason other than a double-cross.”
“Then, if trade at your restaurant starts to fall off, Morris should maybe buy you a huge life insurance policy with a double-indemnity clause for being found dead in the trunk of a car in a forest preserve?”
You shouldn’t worry,” Mushy said. “Restaurants and saloons are among the few things that Italians and Jews both know enough about not to get auspicious for no good reason. Besides, if I had gone to a bank, fedora in hand and a face looking like a chopped liver and said I was a blacklisted bit player and ex-welterweight contender with some experience as am army cook who wanted maybe a hundred grand to start a fashionable saloon, I do not think I would have got it. I met Charlie and Nick one day out at Hawthorne, and I did get it. They needed a place to launder some cash so the internal revenus did not bother them about how they can afford their Cadillacs and places in Palm Springs on the profits of that little candy store over on West Taylor. One of the conditions of our partnership is that I do not look too closely at the books, but I would probably be amazed at how well we are doing. All I know is that the accountants keep transferring a very nice sum to my personal account every month and that Nick and Charlie sometimes give me an envelope full of cash so that I shouldn’t embarass them by being a piker at five-card stud. Their only complaint is that I shouldn’t get their names into Kup’s column every time the place is mentioned. “You made the column the other day,” Morris’ wife said. “Kup said that when you were in Hollywood you palled around with big brains who wrote books and things like that.”
“Kup may eat lunch at Fritzel’s instead of my place, but he is one hell of a news hound,” Mushy said. “He is right to say that I have associated with the intelligensia.”
“With who?”
“That’s goyisher talk for the smart asses, misses suburban smart-ass.”
“You don’t mind it when I needle you a little?” Morris’ wife asked.
“No,” Mushy said. “It is one thing you do that actually makes me think that a punchy old hoodlum like me might belong now and then out here in this gorgeous split-level. Let me tell you how I needled the reporter who gave that item to Kup.”
A few days later Nick Maltesedd dropeed by after the peak of the lunch business had passed.
“Jake Guzik died,” he said. “He had a heart attack.”
“Always sorry when anyone dies,” Mushy said. “that must be quite a shock to you and Charlie, though. You’re not used to having your old business assiates die of heart attacks and old age and things like that.”
“You’re a very funny man,” Nick said. “Charlie says that’s one of the things that brings in the customers here. He says you should go to Guzik’s funeral.”
“Why me?” Mushy asked. “I only met him half a dozen times in my life, and I never did business with him except once in a while getting a bet down with people who workedfor him. I’ve always heard that you and Charlie and him have been pretty close for a long while.”
“That’s the point,” Nick said. “The feds show p at funerals and take everybody’s picture, and the reporters make a big deal out of it. Charlie’s got two daughters in high school, and he doesn’t like it when stories get in the paper that make him out to be a hood. His daughters’ friends make fin of them when that happens.”
“They could learn to be careful when they’re making jokes,” Mushy said.
“ We ought to put up a stage so you could be another Joe E. Lewis,” Nick said. “Anyhow, Charlie doesn’t think we ought to show up at the funeral and get our picture taken, but we ought to have someone there from one of our businesses, because we knew Guzik a long time, and it would look like disrespect if we didn’t send someone. Charlie figures that it ought to be you because Guzik was a Jew and you’re a Jew.”
“Gus Alex has been Guzik’s number one boy for years and will probably take over ofr him,” Mushy said. “Maybe you ought to send a Greek and start getting in good with Gus.”
“No,” Nick said. “It’s a showing respect for the family thing. Charlie says you should go.”
Mushy did not like the precedent he was setting of letting the Malteses send him on errand that had nothing to do with the restaurant, but he did not think that challenging Nick on this issue would be worth the trouble it might cause.
Nick was not alone. A young man had come in with him and had occupied an empty table near Mushy and Nick. He was without a hat or overcoat despite the blustery weather, wearing a checkered sportscoat whose tailoring Mushy recognized. The Maltese brothers frequently sent the young men they hired to collect debts to a tailor on South State Street who specializedd in clothing designed to conceal weapons without unsightly bulges.
This was not surprising. Young men of this type often accompanied Nick or Charlie on their business rounds. What surprised Mushy was the reaction ofStash. He had moved behind one end of the bar where he had a cleat field of fire on both the young man and Nick Maltese. A couple of dish towels concealed what Mushy was reasonably certain was a sawed-off shotgun. Stash was impassive and did not move until both visitors were well out the door.
“that punk is crazy,” he said when Mushy asked him for an explanation.
“He had a belly gun as well as the one under his shoulder, and he almost went for it when you were cracking wise with Nick. You better watch out, Mushy. Nick and Charlie are getting old. They wouldn’t have hired anybody that crazy in the old days.”
“You make it sound like one of the movies I was in,” Mushy said.
“”Except that maybe you wouldn’t have got up when it was all over,” Stash said. “remember in all those movies, they would have this close-up of you undoing a button on your jacket when you were talking friendly just before you pulledout your piece? That kid kept his eye on you rhand all the time, and, once, when it moved toward your jacket, he looked like he was about to get his rocks off. He’s a big fan of you rold movies, Mushy, only he wants to kill you for real.”
“How is he any crazier than any of the other James Dean look alikes that Nickand Charlie hire to break legs for them?” Mushy asked.
“You remember Jack McGurn, or Scalise with the garlic on his bullets so that everybody got gangrene? For that matter, do you remember that dish washer you hired when I told you not toolast year who pulled a big knife when someone stepped on his shoes? Guys like that don’t just kill people when the army or their boss tells them to. They kill people when they feel like it, which is practically all the time, because they know what miserable stacks of shit they are when they’re not killing people.”
“You may be right about that, Stash, toward the end in Hollywood, even before I wouldn’t talk to the committee, I was losing parts because I didn’t look crazy enough when I shot people. The writers and directors were all doing time on the couch, and they thought crazy killers were the only ones worth mentioning. So ghow do I tell Nick and Charlie that their new kid is a nut when they’re in this mood today when they think it is still 1929 and I have to go to funerals for them. Next thing, they’ll be wanting me to drive their old mother to mass.”
“Maybe the Malteses know the kid is crazy,” Stash said. “Maybe they’ll turn him loose on you , then kill hi, so they’ll still have a reputation for doing right by a loyal guy like you that looked so tough telling Kevauver that you didn’t knowwhat you didn’t know, only everybody thought you did because you always did in the movies.”
“What the hell would Charlie and Nick want me dead for?” Mush asked. “I’m a golden goos for them right now, and I’ve proved my loyalty. THere’s no percentage in getting rid of me just becasue the restaurant gets their names in the papaer. If I got killed, the publicity would be awful, and this place would have to fold in a couple of months.”
“When people like Nick and Charlie get nervous, they have been known to get rid of people like they were swatting flies,” Stash said, “and Ithink you make them nervous. You may have gone the limit with Barney Ross without throwing in the towel, but you really don’t understand people who use fists or guns if they are making a decent living without. On theother hand, I understand the Maltese, and they understand me. Maybe I should walk around with you for a couple of days.”
“thank you, no,” Mushy said. “I don’t take that kid as seriously as you do.”
“I didn’t say he was serious,” stash said. “I said he was crazy. It isn’t the same thing.”
