21 July 2008
Really Hot
Crusading Prosecutor Tom Dewey
I have not got to the Times yet this morning, the obligatory plunge in the miasma of whatever it is New York wants us to think on this day. Before dawn it was still cool, and the brain-cooking heat had not started to rise.
I rose thinking about the office, and the week ahead, and the heat robs me of the focus to do a story.
There are some loose ends to tie up about the Mafia’s relations with Naval Intelligence, I know that, and I will get to it presently. I wish the tempo of activity was as lazy as the heat makes me feel. I find myself going through the office e-mail at the desk in a defensive reflex as soon as the Times is done, and frankly it saps the juices.
I wish I had a chance to go research the papers of Governor Dewey. He chartered Judge Herland to set up a Commission to get to the bottom of it, stung by the accusation that he had Lucky Luciano sprung from jail in exchange for cash.
The report the Judge issued after he completed his investigation was published in 1954. Hundreds of interviews with Mobsters and Naval Officers lay out what happened in a perfectly straightforward manner about the relationship, even if it was suppressed until 1975, when Dewey was dead and no one seemed to care very much.
What happened in Sicily during the war is a little more obscure, but the truth is out there. The Mob wound up the big winners in their alliance with the Allies, since Benito Mussolini had them pretty well on the ropes before the Yanks knocked him out of the ring. Then the Old Moustaches came back to power, with Lucky in exile as an American broker to the Good Fellows in New York.
It is too hot to think about that, though, and there are so many rabbit holes to jump down where it is cool and dark and the earth smells of worms.
I worked on a paper most of Sunday morning, and even the best day of the Times could not deflect things. My eyes crossed around two and I decided to clock out and not think any more.
The pool deck sizzled, but the water was almost cool enough to make it all right. The cool group was clustered on the couchettes on the west side, by the parking lot, where the afternoon sun is the best.
Some of the new residents were curious about the history of the vast pink structure that looms above the pool.
I like to think Big Pink has a past and a future,20though that is the subject of a meeting this week that has the attention of the residents, at least the ones who are aware enough to read the flyers in the elevators.
I talked to some of them at the pool as the shadows lengthened to the west. The Building is beginning to reproduce. Genevive and Mike are starting a new phase of life together with the prospect of adding a little boy to the citizenry before the year is out. State Department Sue blew through, and she is pregnant as well, hoping to have the baby here rather than at her duty station in Sarajevo. They will be Fall and Winter infants, their first months of development will be in swaddling against the chinks in the old single-pane windows of the building.
They like it here; Mike is a bit of a history bug, and I regaled him with some stories of the roadside attractions just off the super-slab between the two cities with imperial dreams, just ninety miles apart.
The 7-11 parking lot where the Generals were laid out below Marye's Heights, the Stonewall Jackson Shrine, where I am almost always alone south of Fredericksburg; the Cold Harbor Unit of the Petersburg National Battlefield and the silent and eerily-well preserved trench lines. Robert E. Lee's boyhood home, still stately and echoing the flamboyance of his father, Light Horse Harry. "King" Carter's remarkable colonial-era church of England is just as20it was then, constructed at a time when the Northern and Middle Necks of Virginia's Tidewater were home to all of the American history worth learning, the Pilgrims up north be damned.
They were a sideshow to the original colonial experience, which happened right here in Virginia. It is a pity the myth of the stern northerners had to be adopted during the Civil War. The Union couldn’t very well let the Confederates define the Founding, could they?
Anyway, the question of the moment was not about whose narrative ruled Thanksgiving. That work was as ho t as thinking about the Mob, or the scalding asphalt that Management wants to pour out in the parking lot.
Old Pat said that someone took a reading of the temperature over the blacktop on Saturday, and it was nearly 120 degrees.
The meeting to talk about what it is all going to cost will happen Wednesday night, and I suspect the Board wants to break the bad news in phases.
We replaced most of the water pipes at the end of Spring, when the heating season was over and the radiators could be taken off line. It was out of cycle, and drained Big Pink’s financial reserves.
The Board wants to talk about replenishing the fund, and about the new windows that could save some money on the heating and cooling. Fuel oil, if you hadn’t noticed, is through the roof along with gasoline, and the poor old building leaks hot-and-cold air like a sieve.
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They are going to tell us about a special assessment to pay the piper. Maybe a couple special assessments, since between the fuel oil and pipes and the windows and the new pavement, we are probably looking at several thousand apiece. The condo fees are already among the highest in Arlington, and there is simmering discontent about that already.
I predict there will be rioting amongst those people on fixed incomes, and I might just raise a pike in revolt myself. I don’t know if I have the energy, what with the heat.
We will find out what is up on Wednesday. The change in weather might cool things down enough for people to get really hot.
Copyright 2008 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com