SCARFACE
CHAPTER I
Tony Guarino, destined to be the greatest of all America's notorious gang leaders, was eighteen when he committed his first serious crime. And the cause, as is so often the case, was a woman.
But what a woman! Standing there in the dark alley that gave access to the street from the sheet-iron stage door of the cheap burlesque house, Tony could visualize her easily. A tall, stately blonde with golden hair, and a pink and white complexion and long, graceful white legs. From the audience he had watched those legs many times while she danced her way through the performance and they never failed to give him a tingly thrill that left him rather breathless.
The stage door opened suddenly, letting a square of yellow light out on the throng of dark, over-dressed men and older boys waiting, like so many wolves, for their night's prey. Then the door slammed shut with a dull clang, plunging the alley into darkness again, and a girl swished rapidly through the crowd, seemingly oblivious of the hands that reached out to detain her and of the raucous voices that brazenly offered invitations.
It was she! Nobody but Vyvyan Lovejoy used that particular heavy, sensuous perfume. Tony plunged after her, toward the lights and noise that indicated the street.
She paused at the sidewalk, a lithe, slender figure, overdressed in a vivid green ensemble suit with a skirt that was both too short and too tight, and glittering with much imitation jewelry. People with a proper perspective would have recognized her for the false and dangerous beacon of allure that she was, but to Tony she was marvelous, something to worship and possess.
He moved up beside her and took off his cap. That was one of the things he had learned from the movies, the only social tutor he had ever had.
"Good evening, Miss Lovejoy."
She turned on him the face he thought so lovely. He couldn't see that its complexion was as false as her jewelry; couldn't see the ravages of dissipation that lay beneath the paint and powder; didn't notice the hard cruel lines about the garish mouth, nor the ruthless greed in the painted, rather large nose. As she surveyed him, contempt came into her hardened bold face and her greenish eyes took on a strange glitter.
"You!" she said. "Again."
"No—yet." Tony laughed at what he thought a brilliant witticism. "And I'm goin' to keep on bein' here every night till you gimme a date."
The girl laughed, a short, sharp, mirthless sound that was more like a grunt.
"Can y'imagine the nerve o' th' punk?" she demanded, as though addressing an audience, but her cold green eyes bored straight into Tony's defiant black ones. "Just a mere child without even a car and tryin' to date me up. Say, kid, do you know who my boy friend is?"
"No, and I don't care," retorted Tony with the passion-inspired recklessness of the Latin. "But I'm goin' to be."
"Well, it's Al Spingola."
Something inside of Tony suddenly went cold. Al Spingola was one of the city's important gang leaders, a ruthless man with a big income, a lot of hoodlums who were loyal to him because they feared him and he paid them well, and a quick trigger finger himself. A dangerous man!
"Aw, I bet he ain't so hot," answered Tony stubbornly.
"Well, maybe not," conceded Vyvyan, "but at least he can give a girl somp'm more substantial than kisses. . . . Whenever you get a flock o' dough, kid, an' a big car, why come around and then maybe I'll talk to you."
She laughed again and stepped out to the curb as a big shiny limousine drew up with a rush and stopped. Tony started after her. Then he paused as he recognized the man at the wheel of that car. It was Al Spingola! A heavy-set, swarthy man with hard, reckless dark eyes and a cruel mouth with thick, brutal lips, handsomely dressed in gray and with an enormous diamond glittering in his tie. As every one knew, the most important part of his dress lay snugly against his hip, a snubnosed blue steel revolver seldom seen, but when it was, sure to be heard and felt by somebody. Tony realized that for him to say another word to Vyvyan then would be certain death. Not at the moment, of course, because that place was too public. But within a few days his body would be found in an alley somewhere.
Spingola glanced at Tony as the girl climbed into the car. And the boy felt cold and nervous until the expensive machine purred away at high speed. Spingola, like other of his ilk, always drove at high speed, thereby lessening his availability as a target.
Tony watched the car race away, then he put on his cap and lighted a cigarette. Walking around the corner to a pool room which was his main hang-out, he sat down in one of the high chairs to think out this thing that was his first adult problem. Usually his mind, even though uneducated, was alert and precise, its processes rapid and sound. But now it was dulled by the gnawing, overpowering hunger of his first great passion. Of course he had had any number of affairs with the neighborhood girls; no boy as good-looking as he could help that. But somehow they hadn't satisfied him. He wanted something bigger, more mature than the shallow, entirely physical emotion that these girls offered. He was shockingly old for his age, as is almost every boy from such an environment. He looked twenty-five with his wise eyes, cynical mouth and well-developed beard that left a heavy pattern on his swarthy cheeks. And he possessed more actual knowledge of mankind and its vagaries than most men acquire in a lifetime. You could have set him down flat broke in any city in the world and he wouldn't have missed a meal. Nor would he have needed to steal; stealing was the way of people without brains. He held a contempt for thieves; particularly those of the "petty larceny" variety.
"Say!" whispered a surly voice in his ear.
Tony looked up into a rat face topped by a dirty, rumpled checked cap.
"Well?" he said coldly.
"Some of us are goin' out and knock over some gas stations," answered the other boy hoarsely. "Want to come along?"
"No."
"It'll be an even split all round."
"No, I said. I ain't riskin' a pinch for a coupla bucks."
"Aw, there'll be more'n that, Tony. All them places got fifty, sixty bucks layin' around. An' there'll only be about four of us."
"Screw!" snarled Tony. "Before I paste you one."
The other boy hurried away, muttering to himself. To the other boys who loafed around this pool room, Tony was a puzzle. They never became intimate with him the way they did with each other. Somehow it just never occurred to them to do so. They realized the difference; so did he. But neither of them knew the reason. A psychologist would have explained it by saying that Tony had a "mental percentage" on the others, that it was the difference between a man destined for leadership and men destined to run in the pack.
Most of the boys in the neighborhood made illegal forays nightly. Never in their own ward, of course, because that would have alienated the alderman. Whereas when they made raids only in outside wards, their own alderman—in case they were arrested—would come down to the station, tell what fine reputations they had in their neighborhood, and help get them out. Then on election day, each hoodlum not only voted fifteen or twenty times, but hordes of them swept through the ward and threatened everybody with dire reprisals if the alderman were not reëlected by a handsome majority. And the people, realizing the truth of these threats, reëlected the alderman, even though they knew he was a grand old thug.
Tony always refused to join these nightly expeditions for ill-gotten gains. "Petty larceny stuff," as he contemptuously referred to their depredations, did not interest him. He wanted to be a "big shot," a leader, perhaps a politician. He had a hunger for command, for power, for wealth. And he meant to have it all. In the meantime, though he had no job that anybody knew of and although he refused to fall in with the criminal ways of his neighbors, he dressed better than they and seemed to have all the money he needed. Many of the boys wondered about that, but inasmuch as he chose to volunteer nothing, it was likely to remain a mystery for, in that neighborhood, one did not inquire into the source of income of even an intimate friend. And Tony had no intimate friends.
There was a sudden commotion at the front door of the pool-room and several burly men came in. Some of the people already present tried to escape by the back door, only to be confronted and driven back in by other burly men coming in there. Detectives, of course, going to look over the crowd.
Knowing that they had nothing on him, Tony watched with faint amusement and a large sense of virtue while the dicks when through the poorly-lighted, smoke-filled room, tapping hips, asking questions, occasionally bestowing a hard, backhand slap on the ugly mouth of some hoodlum who tried to talk back. As he had expected, they made no move to molest him.
"This kid's all right," said a man he recognized as Lieutenant Grady from the neighborhood station. "He's Ben Guarino's brother."
"That don't mean anything," retorted a burly, cold-eyed man whose hard-boiled demeanor identified him as from headquarters.
"Does to Tony!" snapped Grady. "We've never heard of him bein' outside the law yet, either in this ward or any other."
"Thanks, Lieutenant!" smiled Tony. "Can't I buy a cigar for you and the boys?"
They all laughed at that. Not a man of them but what was old enough to be his father, yet he called them "boys" and they liked it. With all the poise and self-possession of a judge on his own bench, Tony led the crowd of officers to the front of the pool-room and purchased cigars for them all. Then they exchanged cheery "Good-nights" with him and departed. Already Tony had learned the manifold advantage of having a good "rep" with the cops. Also he knew the great power that came from having people in one's debt, even for such little things as cigars. Tony seldom accepted a favor from any one, but if he did, he always tried to return one twice as big, thus removing his moral debt to them and making them indebted to him. He had the mind and soul of a master politician.
Tony suddenly realized that the stuffy, smoke-filled atmosphere of the pool-room had given him a headache, and decided to go home. Except for occasional oases like the pool-room, the neighborhood was a desert of gloom and deserted frowsiness. Street lights were infrequent and those that existed were of the old-fashioned, sputtering type that, like some people, made a lot of noise but accomplished little. It hadn't rained that night, yet there was an unhealthy dampness about. The dingy old buildings, with their ground-floor windows boarded up like blind eyes, seemed to hover malevolently over the narrow, dirty streets. One street that served as a push-cart market by day was littered with boxes and papers and heaps of reeking refuse. An occasional figure, either hunting or hunted, skulked along. Infrequently, a car raced past, awakening echoes that could be heard for blocks through the quiet streets. Over all hung a brooding stir of everpresent menace, an indefinable something that made sensitive strangers to the neighborhood suddenly look back over their shoulders for no good reason.
This was the setting of gangland, its spawning place, its lair and one of its principal hunting grounds. It was also Tony's neighborhood, the only environment he had ever known. But he could not see that a great scheme of circumstances, a web much too intricate for him to understand, had gradually been shaping his destiny since the day of his birth, that it was as difficult for him to keep from being a gangster as it was for a Crown Prince to keep from becoming King.
Tony reached the little grocery store that his parents owned, and above which the family lived, passed to the door beyond, inserted his key and clattered up the dirty, uncarpeted steps. A light was on in the dining room, which also served as the parlor. Seated in an old rocker which had been patched with wire, sat Ben Guarino reading the paper, his blue uniformed legs and heavy, squaretoed black shoes resting on the dirty red and white checked tablecloth. His revolver, resting in its holster, hung suspended by the cartridge belt from the back of another rickety chair upon which rested his uniform coat and cap.
As Tony came in, Ben looked up. He was a stocky chap in the middle twenties with a brutal mouth and jaw and defiant dark eyes that usually held a baleful glitter. For a number of reasons, all of which he kept to himself, Tony felt that his brother was going to be a big success as a policeman. To Tony, the only difference between a policeman and a gangster was a badge. They both came from the same sort of neighborhoods, had about the same education and ideas, usually knew each other before and after their paths diverged, and always got along well together if the gangsters had enough money.
"Where you been so late?" demanded Ben truculently.
"What the hell's it to you?" retorted Tony, then remembering the favor he was going to ask, became peaceable. "I didn't mean to be cross, Ben. But I got a nasty headache."
"Down to that O'Hara joint again, I s'pose?"
"Well, a fellow's got to have some place to go in the evening. And the only other place is some dance hall with a lot o' them cheap, silly broads."
"Gettin' choosy about your women, now, eh?"
"Yes,"
"Well, that's right," answered Ben with a grin. "There's nothin'll take a man to the top—or to the bottom—faster than a high-toned woman eggin' him on." Suddenly his feet struck the floor and he leaned forward, his eyes boring straight into those of his brother. "Say, what's this I hear about you deliverin' packages for Smoky Joe?"
"Well?"
"Didn't you know there was dope in them packages?"
"No, I didn't. But now that I do, it's goin' to cost him more."
"You let that stuff alone."
"Oh, all right. I s'pose some cop belly-ached to you about it. Well, he can have that little graft, if he wants it. I got other things I can do."
"Yes, I guess you have," agreed Ben dryly, "from all I hear. So you been a lookout down at Mike Rafferty's gamblin' joint, too?"
"Yes. And why not? That's a decent way of makin' a few bucks. Would you rather have me out pullin' stick-ups like the rest of the guys in the neighborhood?"
"Of course not." He leaned forward and spoke seriously. "Don't ever get in no serious trouble, Tony; it would ruin me at headquarters."
"I won't. Don't worry about me. You got enough to do to watch your own step."
"What do you mean?"
"Nothin'," answered Tony casually with a smile, enjoying the sudden fear that had come into his brother's face. "That's just a friendly tip from a fellow that knows more than you think he does."
"Who?" demanded Ben hoarsely.
"Me." Tony grinned again and flipped his cigarette ashes on the bare floor. "Say, Ben, can I have your car to-morrow night?"
"No. I'm usin' it myself. That's my night off."
"How about the next night?"
"No. You'd prob'ly get in trouble with it. Kids and cars don't go together."
"All right. I'll have one o' my own pretty soon and I'm goin' to get it as easy as you got that one."
With which parting shot, Tony went in to bed, slamming the door shut behind him. How a fellow making a hundred and fifty a month could acquire honestly a car that cost nearly three thousand dollars was too much for Tony. But then all policemen had big cars, and captains had strings of apartment buildings and sent their children to European finishing schools.
The strange quiet that momentarily descended over the Guarino household at this time of night was balm to Tony. It was the only period of the twenty-four hours that he could spend at home without feeling that he was about to go crazy. The rest of the time it was noise . . . noise . . . noise. . . . He wondered if other people's homes were as uninviting and repellent; all those he had ever seen were.
He undressed quickly and climbed into the grimy bed which he and Ben shared. He wanted to sleep before Ben came in so that they couldn't argue any more. But his mind was racing and it kept swinging around to Vyvyan Lovejoy. Even to think about her made him alternately hot and cold all over and left him trembling with anticipation. He would have her; nobody could stop him—not even Al Spingola.
The fact that the woman he wanted belonged to another made not the slightest difference to Tony. All life was a battle and the strongest man got the gravy. Anyway, she had said she would talk to him if he had a car and some money. Well, he'd get 'em both, and be back at that stage door to-morrow night.