A shudder of liveliness moved through Mr. Q. like a roll of thunder and settled in his moist brown eyes. “You know I . . . count on you for that,” he said.
It was Dexter who had divined, even before Prohibition ended in ’33, that rather than howl like scalded dogs, as so many in the underworld were doing, they should open a series of legitimate clubs that would cleanse Mr. Q.’s gargantuan liquor trade earnings. Aside from inoculating his fortune against the Bureau of Internal Revenue, the arrangement had allowed them to profit from an array of ancillary rackets both legal and illegal—everything from hat-checking to cigarettes to love matching, as Dexter thought of it. His own role as figurehead had been essential: not once arrested; pedigreed by marriage, with the foresight to have shed his tongue-twisting name in favor of a short, stylish one (you might say) long before anyone cared to know it.
And oh, how the plan had worked! Buoyed them both on a tide of legitimacy that swept Dexter into the presence of picture stars and newspapermen and elected officials, state and national, into whose pockets Mr. Q.’s influence had then been pressed. A beauteous arrangement all around. There had been one mistake: Ed Kerrigan, Dexter’s sole misjudgment in twenty-seven years of employment. People had gotten hurt, as the parlance went. But in the end, the trouble had brought down a rival and left Mr. Q. unscathed. This felicitous outcome was surely what had prompted Mr. Q. to declare three years ago, in his primordial hush, “It is forgotten. We won’t speak of it again.” Afterward, in the privacy of his automobile, Dexter had wept with relief.
When the beans were sufficiently boiled (something Mr. Q. seemed to know innately), it fell to Dexter to ladle them, upright, into mason jars. When each jar looked like an overcrowded elevator, Mr. Q. instructed him to pour scalding water over the beans, filling every jar to the neck.
“Now we screw these lids on tight . . . but not too tight . . . and we . . . put them into the pressure canner,” Mr. Q. said, sounding overly winded for the little they’d done. “And then . . . you tell me our . . . idea.”
Dexter had wanted to lead up to it gradually, like steps in a waltz, until there was nowhere left to move except his inevitable conclusion. But the broiling beanwork had cleared his mind of those steps, as perhaps it was meant to. In this atmosphere of heat and truth, preambles fell away and you ended up just saying the thing. He helped Mr. Q. screw the mason jars closed and place them carefully in a tarred pot that looked as if it had been dredged from the bottom of the sea. Mr. Q. covered the pot and hefted the flame underneath it. Then he sank onto a chair, breathing hard.
Dexter mopped his face with his handkerchief, resumed the seat across the small table, and began. “I’d like to approach Uncle and offer our services, and our businesses, for the war effort.”
No immediate response; there never was. The onus was on Dexter to illuminate the bedrock layers underneath.
“The Allies will win, it’s only a question of time,” he said. “At that point, the U.S. will be more powerful than it has ever been. More powerful than any country ever, in the history of the world.”
He quoted Arthur Berringer knowingly; it pleased Dexter to feel adjacency between the two. He’d been too lowly at the time of his wedding to warrant Mr. Q.’s attendance; as far as he knew, his boss and father-in-law had never met. But he’d sensed in each an oblique curiosity about the other, and it was conceivable that their paths might have crossed without his knowledge. He rather liked the thought.
“Mr. Stalin won’t . . . expect a reward?” Mr. Q. asked.
“He’ll get it. But his country will be wrecked.”
Mr. Q. lowered his chin, his version of a nod.
“The Europeans,” Dexter went on. “Broke and broken. That leaves Uncle. I want us—you—to have a legitimate part in the victory. A seat at the table.”
Mr. Q. roused himself for the Socratic rumble that inevitably followed, sometimes extending over a subsequent visit. “As long as we’ve . . . money in hand,” he said, “we’ll have our . . . seat.”
“At the table,” Dexter said. “Not underneath it.”
“The advantage?”
“Power. Legitimate power.”
“All power is . . . legitimate.”
“All right, then, legitimacy. Which would let us use our power in ways we can’t now.”
He was tempted to air his suspicion that a newly strengthened United States might use the rule of law to make their way of life extinct. Tammany had already gone—something no one had believed possible. But Mr. Q. didn’t like worries. And Dexter sensed the idea already working on him.
“Lucky made a deal,” Mr. Q. said, meaning Luciano. “Helped Uncle seal . . . up the port.”
“And it’ll likely get him sprung from Comstock.”
“They came to him.”
“We’ll go to them.”
“And offer . . . what?”
Here was the leap. Dexter took a long breath and leaned across the table. “We buy an issue of war bonds at a discount and resell them through every arm and leg of our business. Put everything liquid into the purchase. Sell off what we don’t want and put that in, too. Our business becomes the war bond business.”
“We’re . . . a bank.”
“In a manner of speaking, yes. Temporarily. When the war ends, our money is clean. We take it anywhere we want.”
The pressure canner had begun to hiss, steam mounting behind a pin-size hole in the top. Mr. Q. tottered from his chair and clamped down a weight, sealing off this vent and anchoring the lid into place. A needle gauge on the side of the pot began to jump. He turned his soft brown eyes back to Dexter, who sensed that the moment had come to play his trump.
“If you work for Uncle, boss, Internal Revenue can’t touch you. Probably ever again.” The sealed pot began to shudder on the stove directly behind Dexter’s head. “How long does it have to stay on?” he asked mildly.
“Long enough to . . . kill the botulism spores,” Mr. Q. said. “Boiling isn’t enough. The jar has to . . . stand a certain pressure.” He remained upright, steadying the canner with a floral pot holder that was an artifact of Annalisa, his late wife.
“You’re a . . . patriot,” Mr. Q. said, regarding Dexter fondly.
“It’s the right thing to do,” Dexter said. “How often can we say that?”
“Our interests and . . . Uncle’s are . . . aligned.”
Dexter was surprised at how easy Mr. Q. was making this. Had he already been thinking along the same lines? The canner thrashed like a trapped squirrel against the cast-iron stove, threatening to wrest free of Mr. Q.’s quavering pressure. Dexter stood up, lest the pot disgorge its scalding contents over his head.
“We all want to win,” Mr. Q. said softly amid the racket.
Dexter found himself grinning, he couldn’t help it. And Mr. Q. grinned back. There was something wrong with his smile, something missing—teeth, was always one’s first thought, but he had his teeth; they were just very, very small. The result was a dark, asymmetrical void, more gash than face. Dexter’s own smile wilted at the sight of it.