![]() “Maximilian Horatio.” He hugged Max, patting his back twice, and then held him at arm’s length, taking him in. That was the first thing I noticed about Bernard Apache, the man who would ruin my life: He had banished all impulse from his body. The man laid down his cards, stood, and opened his arms. “Who wants to know?” the other said, rising.Īs soon as Max said his name, the older man smiled in a grand lying way, the way politicians smile when presented with a gift on television-the kind of smile that respects size over verisimilitude. ![]() He must have gone deaf, been someone else. Apache, hello.” Still, Apache, if it was him, didn’t respond. ![]() He ground his gum between the words, creating out of each syllable a discrete phrase. “Who wants to know?” the tanned one asked. Apache, hello,” Max said to the older man, but he didn’t look up from his cards. He had a thin, hideously tanned face, gap teeth and a lightning-shaped vein now flashing in his forehead. This one, like the other three, wore a pinstripe suit. “Who you?” asked the man next to the cigarette smoker. His tablemates, meanwhile, greeted Max and me with a uniform glower and even more hostile jawing of gum. His pale blue eyes-amused, I would call them-did not stray from his hand of cards, despite this arrival of strangers, us. As we approached, we saw four wiry men in suits sitting around a table, playing poker, all of them vigorously chewing gum-producing a street-firecracker chaos of pops and snaps-except the oldest, a man in his early fifties maybe, who held between his middle and ring fingers a cigarette from which he extracted long, vulnerable sips. Through the forest of upturned chair legs, a plume of smoke rose, like a signal in the woods, and we made our way toward it, around the sweepers. The voice hailed from the far end of the room. An illuminated box indicated a second bar above. Max stepped forward, and I followed, both of us coming out from under the low ceiling, which, we saw now, supported a grand balcony glutted with red-cushioned seats. The bar hands, a few feet away, continued to peer in our direction as if incapable of speech. The sweepers stopped their work to consider us. “Is Bernard Apache here?” Maximilian addressed no one so much as the hall itself. ![]() On the stage an unoccupied ladder stood under a massive dangling light rig. Many circular tables, chairs stacked on top of them, filled the space leading to the stage itself, between which hunched sweepers busily worked. It would now be known as the Communiqué.īookending the entrance were two copper-topped bars where men glared at us like deer. “He once said to me, ‘Max, if you’re good at killing in wartime, you’ll be good at turning profit in peace.’ This guy’s got something, boy.” According to the article, Apache, outside of basic renovations, planned to make no structural changes to the building. “Apache can do it if anyone can,” Max said, as the driver jolted to obey a stop sign and then peeled right onto a potholed street, stopping when we came to a redbrick building. And what would draw faithful theatergoers from their velvet-lined boxes in midtown to a rickety cabaret so far west?’ The nightlife and ne’er-do-wells of Aberdeen Row are close enough, this is true, but the theater will need more than a bohemian audience to maintain its costs. Renovating the Tinder has remained a cause célèbre among the more quixotic and nostalgic of the city’s philanthropists, but was considered foolhardy, if not impossible, given the reestablishment of the Theater District two miles north of what is now an industrial neighborhood. “‘The relic of the building remains in Western Downtown on Fourteenth Avenue,’” Max read, as our cabdriver nosed toward the Fourteenth Avenue exit ramp, “‘an anomaly among the warehouses and meat-packing plants that have since sprung up around it. But this-” He snapped open the paper with a businessman’s panache.Īccording to the Gazette, Apache had purchased the old Tinder Box Theater, a half mile west of Aberdeen Row, the heart of bohemia. That the theaters he owned were just a front. “Finnegan said there were rumors,” Max told me. To his few staunch champions, however, Apache was a maverick patriot, a genius of war and other things. He was discharged without punishment, though many in the navy still called for his head. In the end, the rear admiral’s fluency in Japanese, his keeping a handwritten facsimile of the correspondence, meticulously ordered and dated in the valise under his cot, his skill in prosecuting such communiqués from the secure distance of an aircraft carrier, and his extraction of valuable intelligence from the Japanese officer (as well as the secret intervention, it was widely believed, of higher-ups in the government) saved Apache from execution.
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