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

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 to 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 those rough edges, 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 Dancer and me met, 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. 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. Before we met he was maybe jack-rolling drunks, maybe pimping a couple of whores, maybe an off-hand armed robbery, or a low level hit from some third-rate hood with a grudge.

It went something like this, something like some guy needed dough bad, real bad, maybe was into the wise guys way too deep, gambling, drugs, 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. 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 to be made an n example of for other punks who might get too greedy as the money from the drug trade exploded.

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 yah, and who did not, I repeat, did not have a criminal record, nothing. Soldier thought about it, about the requirements and came up with Sid Lorraine, the Dancer.

I almost didn’t take him on, his idea of a plan was all wild, all shoot ‘em up, bang-bang and collect the dough. Yah, 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 cutting himself in for a large slice of the proceeds for his efforts. He 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 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. The second guy, or really his daughter, gave it up with, well, a little struggle. 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. The Dancer decided, decided all by himself, that he was keeping this stash, was going into business for himself (or we, 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. Naturally he would not listen and naturally I had to “hit” him when Big Chief sent the word. My first kill. I still didn’t like it, still didn’t, don’t, like guns, still don’t like the sight of blood, still didn’t like sending him out with the Japan Current like some easy mark. But I did it. And now these many years later all I have is the memory of the Dancer, the perfect artist.