The dancers never let up. They spun and kicked, dipped and swayed, shimmied and sashayed, all propelled by Carter’s electrifying arrangements. He ran them through “Blues in My Heart,” “Oh, Lady Be Good!,” and “I Ain’t Got Nobody.” But what sent the crowd into a frenzy—and what had been driving the Savoy dancers into a dervish whirl for three nights straight—was a new addition to the band’s repertoire: a light, popular tune from a few years back that Carter had reengineered into a full-blown stomp. The original had been breezy, lilting; a melody for whistling on a balmy day in May, with the sun shining and your best girl’s hand in yours. Carter had turned the song into a heavyweight-title fight pitting the sax against the trumpet. The horns bobbed and weaved, feinted and jabbed. As the song gained steam they began to assemble combinations: haymakers from Carter’s alto followed by a roundhouse from the trumpet. But the kicker, the essential element that drove the dancers into the stratosphere of joy and motion, was a hesitation between each round in this slugfest—the vocal equivalent of the ring girl parading across the canvas with a numbered card held high above her lipsticked smile. At the end of each rapturous solo, Carter leaned in close to the microphone and hissed, “Now that’s more like it!” It was the only lyric he had salvaged from the song—the tune’s title, in fact—and the crowd began to anticipate it, to want it, and so Carter withheld it that much more. The horns would scream and die, the band would crash to a halt, and Carter would slowly draw the microphone to his mouth, dragging out each word as the Savoy faithful whooped and hollered. Just as suddenly as they had stopped, the band would reignite, burning hotter and hotter until it seemed that the ceiling of the Track was about to blow sky-high.
Francis and Peggy had chugged through the first few numbers, feeding on the energy of the other dancers, but as the band tore into this new floor-burner, they retreated into the mob of spectators basking in the union of music and motion. The band fed the dancers and the dancers pushed the band: Hotter! Louder! Faster! The band and the dancers skated together on the edge of the precipice, and the thrill of seeing them, or being them, came from the sense that all of this could collapse into chaos but that right now, in this moment, it had not and would not. They were an engine that ran on rocket fuel, the gears in perfect alignment, the pistons humming.
And through all of this, it never once occurred to Francis or Peggy that this song was Martin’s song—that what Benny Carter had rearranged was in fact Martin’s one entry to the Hit Parade, the ditty that had briefly raised his hopes about a prosperous future, and that now seemed to him like a mirage he had been foolish enough to mistake for a leafy oasis. They’d heard Martin’s version as recorded by the Chester Kingsley Orchestra in 1937, but hearing that song in this one would have been like recognizing the face of the model in a painting by Picasso. And in those moments, Francis and Peggy were too drunk and happy, too hot and overwhelmed by the music and the dancing and the play of shadow and light, to trace the ways that Benny Carter had added muscle to the bones of Martin’s song.
OUTSIDE THE SAVOY, in a car parked on Lenox Avenue, Cronin kept an eye on the doorway of the ballroom. If anyone noticed him they tried hard not to show it. A man his size and his color, camped out on the busiest street in Harlem, could only be in the employ of the police or some gangland boss. Either way, he wasn’t someone you wanted to cross.
After spying the missus and her children the day before, he’d had to wait only another fifteen minutes before he saw someone else bound for the apartment house. The man crossing the street was unmistakably a Dempsey. His profile gave him away; he was his mother’s son and there was no doubting it. Cronin should have felt some satisfaction—he was one step closer to finding his quarry—but all he felt was whiplash. Everywhere he turned, he saw reminders of other places he should be and older times he could not forget.
Cronin was ready to follow Martin wherever he went—sooner or later he would go to his brother, Cronin was sure of it—but hours later, when the last upstairs light was finally switched off, Cronin called it a night. His instincts were failing him. He was rusty, plain and simple. On Sunday, he had returned to a spot down the street from the apartment house and sat watch all through the day, but aside from morning Mass, the Dempseys stayed close to home. He was expecting another wasted day when a taxicab rolled to a stop in front of the apartment and disgorged a stout redhead and his spindly companion, who was coming out on the losing end of a wrestling match with an enormous wine bottle.
Again, it was Bernadette—Mrs. Dempsey—who confirmed what Cronin suspected. She had marked each of her sons as her own. Martin had her face, as did the younger one, who had been a baby when Cronin had—when she—when Bernadette died. Francis was built like his father but he had his mother’s wild shock of red hair. It rose above his head like a flame, as though he didn’t care who saw it.
Cronin could have taken him, but he stuck to his promise—his vow—to give the front door a wide berth. He didn’t approach Dempsey then, just as he didn’t approach him later when he came down the steps with the blonde on his arm. If he’d done that, Dempsey and the girl might’ve made a break for the cab and he might’ve lost them. It was possible Dempsey had a gun on him—hadn’t he left three dead already?—and who knew who this girl was, and whether she meant anything to him. He might use her for cover. Cronin had seen men do that before. Or she could turn out to be a witness, someone who could point the finger at Cronin, and he’d be forced to do something about that.
He could say he was playing it smart, but he knew what Frank Dempsey would say: that he had gone soft. Cronin spots a woman and two children walking up the front steps and suddenly the house and all who enter it are off-limits? It had to be a joke. The old Tom Cronin wouldn’t have let a houseful of children put him off his task. Hadn’t he gut-shot a police inspector in Cork—what was his name? Browne? Yes, William Browne. Hadn’t he gut-shot William Browne in the front hall of his own home with one of the man’s children watching it all from between the spindles of the staircase? Cronin had waited until the family gathered for their supper—he figured that would be the moment when he would have Browne to himself at the front of the house while the rest of the family feasted in the back. He didn’t count on the boy still being upstairs. Hadn’t the boy heard his mother calling him down to eat, when Cronin himself had heard her from the alleyway? Why had the boy lagged behind so? It troubled Cronin, the way it happened, but it didn’t stop him. And it wasn’t as if he noticed the lad’s saucer-eyed face only after he shot his daddy dead. First he saw the boy, then he looked Browne square in the eye, and then he pulled the trigger. The boy’s shriek followed Cronin down the front steps, out into the street, and down through the years. But it didn’t stop him the next time. Or the time after that.
This was why Frank Dempsey had chosen him. Not because he saw Cronin as a diamond in the rough. Not because he thought the fire of revolution burned in Cronin the same as it did in him and his sainted wife. Not because he liked Cronin, or saw him as a comrade-in-arms and boon companion. Frank Dempsey had singled out Cronin and cultivated him because he knew that Cronin was the kind of brute who could stand at a man’s front door with the man’s own son looking at him and pull the trigger that would put the boy’s daddy in the ground.
It was a simple thing when you considered the mechanics of it, but most men couldn’t do it. Their skin went clammy and their hands shook. The gun weighed a thousand pounds and they would stutter and stammer at the point of action. He had seen men piss themselves when they should have been pulling the trigger. But not Cronin. He was a man who could do it, and Frank Dempsey knew that about him. He had read it in Cronin’s eyes. He had seen it inked on his skin. He knew it even before Cronin did.