***The Dancer –With Eli Wallach’s The Line-Up In Mind-Take Two

From The Pen Of Frank Jackman

The Dancer was a craftsman alright, a perfect artist just like you see at the ballet or in the art galleries, places like that. He had beautiful moves, knew how to do his work right, once I broke his flame temper and got him to see each action as something to be thought through, planned, and then executed. Incidentally, in case you might have heard otherwise, I was the one who gave him the name Dancer after bringing him around, bringing him around from a rough-hewn kid, a punk maybe if left to his own devises, a punk with no sense of that perfect artist that I knew he had in him.

See we were partners for about a decade, actually maybe more like twelve years, but that decade is what counts because it probably took me two years to cut off Dancer’s rough edges, those rough edges that were holding back his artistry, so let’s call it a decade. I was his coach, at least that is the way I looked at it and after a while that was the way he looked at it too. See Dancer, and me too, were professional “hit men,” guys who big- time guys, guys with no names, no public names, but plenty of dough for what they wanted done, would hire to do what had to be done. And we were good, known far and wide in the right circles as being good, and so there you have it. Here’s the funny thing, funny in a way, I never fired a gun on a job, not in anger anyway, hated the damn things, hated the sight of blood, hated when the job called for a rub-out and nothing else. After a while though I got less squeamish, maybe more indifferent, but I never really liked it. So like I say the Dancer did his part, and I did mine and for that decade we were the walking daddies of the hired killer night.

Let me tell you a little about how I met Dancer, how we moved up the food chain in our chosen profession, and then maybe you will see how an artist was created out of pure rough stuff, almost from scratch except for that potential I saw in him. The Dancer grew up, or at least he told me he grew up and I had no reason to not believe him, in New York City’s Hell’s Kitchen, a rough place all the way around. You either figured out some stuff early, figured out fast or you were just another guy to be pushed around by guys who had figured things out. Before we met he was maybe jack-rolling drunks in some dark alley for fives and tens and leaving a bloody mess from what I could gather about his style back then, maybe pimping a couple of whores when times were tough and he needed quick dough, maybe an off-hand armed robbery, some freaking gas station or Mom and Pop variety store, Jesus, or a low level hit from some third-rate hood with a grudge. On that last thing that “hit” work was where he started to get a little wise about where the serious dough was for a guy who knew, knew deep in his bones he was slated to be just another soldier in this world of ours.

It went something like this, this low-level hit stuff, something like some guy needed dough bad, real bad, maybe was into the wise guys way too deep, gambling, drugs, women, an overdue loan, and so he would hire the Dancer to off his wife, or his partner, someone worth something, insurance something and he would do the deed. See rough stuff, kid’s stuff really. Wasting his talent on low-rent outings like that. I could hardly believe he never got caught working off some ten- percent commission stuff. Even our first jobs working our way up the food chain had bigger payouts, and came with expenses paid too. Jesus.

And the Dancer might have stayed there, stayed doing nickel and dime stuff, working hard, too hard for cheap dough, except Big Chief, that is the only name you need to know, the wise guy of wise guys had hired me to take care of some business, some business having to do with an underling of his in the drug trade, in the heroin trade to be exact, who was skimming way too much off the top in their international operations. So he had to fall, fall hard in order to be made an example of for other punks who might get too greedy as the money from the drug trade exploded a couple of decades back .

Now I had regular guys who I worked with, who I coached and planned with, but just that moment they were all either in stir or working some other job. So I asked Soldier McGee, one of the low-rider chieftains of the New York City bike crowd and a middle-level distributor of goods, whether he knew somebody who needed dough, and was not afraid to get his hair all mushed up. Oh yeah, and who did not, I repeat, did not have a criminal record, nothing. Soldier thought about it, thought about my requirements and came up with Sid Lorraine, the Dancer.

I almost didn’t take Sid on when we met, when I quizzed him on his approach his idea of a plan was all wild, all shoot ‘em up, bang-bang and collect the dough. Yeah, and then walk right up to Sing-Sing. So on that caper I showed him how to really do the thing right, how to do the thing with style, no muss, no fuss and gone. My idea was to get the underling’s confidence, play to his weak side, the side that was all wreck-less skim. So the deal was that Dancer was going to be a Big Chief “mule,” a rogue mule looking to go independent, and contact the underling about moving the material letting him cut himself in for a large slice of the proceeds for his efforts.

That underling went for it, went like a lemming to the sea. So when the meet occurred over in the Jersey marshes the Dancer had no problem with the problem guy. The cops as usual never ever found the guy, if they were ever looking for him once he wasn’t around anymore. That job was our ticket up the food chain, and the Dancer started taking my instructions more seriously, although like I said it wasn’t all a bed of roses because there was always a little bang-bang and done in him.

Once we moved up as far as we could go in our profession we were given nothing but high-end assignments. All strictly high-end drug deals. This is how it worked (the cops even if they saw this wouldn’t believe it anyway, or would take their cut and look the other way like usual). The Big Chief had agents all over the world, but with the heroin trade mainly in the Far East, places like the Golden Triangle, or South Asia, like maybe Afghanistan. Those agents would procure the stuff (cheap too, cheap to our eyes anyway), and then use “marks,” mostly unknowing people, tourists, businessmen, people like that, who purchased something, a vase, a doll, a figurine, for whatever reason and they would “carry” the stuff through customs. Beautiful right. Then when the dope got state-side we went to work. We went to“collect” the dope. Anyway we could.

That, after a while, was how the Dancer became a perfect artist. See, he would know who he would have to “hit”and who he wouldn’t. Say some sailor brought the stuff in. Dancer knew, knew deep in his bones, that there was no other way than a hit to get the merchandise. So we planned accordingly, set the bait, did the deed, got the merchandise then vanished, no trace. Other times, with the tourists though, he could almost just con his way into letting him have the carrier object and be done with it. And it worked like clockwork for that decade I mentioned before but like all things it went off the tracks.

We had a job set-up in Frisco, a town neither of us knew, but which looked like an average job. The China Star out of Hong Kong was coming in with three marks, all tourists, all carrying heroin in respectively, a horse figurine, a rag doll, and an intricate jade necklace. We had to kill the first guy because he just wasn’t going to give up the damn figurine, he had brought it back for his wife, paid big dough for it and so that was that. The second guy, or really his daughter, gave it up with, well, a little struggle but she lived for another day. . The third, a woman, we had to waste since she would not take off the necklace, no way, but we kind of figured that the way dames are about jewelry. So that part was no big deal.

But this is where some guys get kind of squirrely no matter how much training they get. No matter how you teach them the fact of life, the facts of our professional lives. The Dancer decided, after realizing that the three packages were worth a huge amount on the street, decided all by himself, that he was keeping this stash, was going into business for himself (or for us, the way he figured it at first). That was a problem a big problem, a Big Chief big problem.

I tried to talk him out of it, tried to say it couldn’t work out right no matter how it was cut up, that we had a our place in the food chain, a pretty good place. That we were soldiers and nothing else. Naturally he would not listen and naturally I had to “hit” him when Big Chief sent the word once the packages were not delivered. I was to do the hit myself, no outsiders, no assistants. Here was the beauty of it though. Dancer never knew what hit him I set the thing up so well. See, I pretended to go along with him, him and his rogue operation. We were supposed to meet some guy, some guy from down in Los Angeles over at the Sutro Baths, over on the Frisco ocean side of town. Now this Sutro Baths was a big attraction for the tourists and a place that was not only baths and swimming, stuff like that, but had an amusement park. In other words plenty of noise, kid noise especially. So all I did was get Dancer off in a corner, a corner near a drain pipe that led into the ocean, him in the lead, me behind, and plug him. Then slipped his body down the pipe and done, no muss, no fuss.

Sure I was nervous, what did you expect. My first kill. I still didn’t like it, still didn’t, don’t, like guns, still don’t like the sight of blood, didn’t like sending him out with the Japan Current like some easy mark. But I did it. I went solo after that, went solo out of respect for Dancer’s magic. And now these many years later, now that I have “retired”all I have is the memory of the Dancer, the perfect artist.