“Ike Campaigns in Cleveland” was the caption under a picture of Dwight Eisenhower waving from the window of his train pulling into the city. Stan Riddman got the Daily News delivered every day. He didn’t read much of it, but was big on the pictures. The tabloid was boffo on photographs, calling itself “New York’s Picture Newspaper.” Every picture tells a story was the motto of their kind of doorstep reporting. The fewer words the better was what they said.

   “I bet I can get you to use more than two or three words,” a reader said to an editor.

   “You lose,” the editor said.

   “Did you see the president is in Cleveland, your dad’s hometown?” Vicki Adams asked her boyfriend’s daughter.

   “I saw it,” Dottie said, reading “Little House in the Big Woods,” ignoring her breakfast. Laura was the hero of the book. She was about half Dottie’s age but still managed to help her Pa and Ma dress and preserve animal meat. When she went into the woods she had to be careful about panthers coming after her. She helped Pa make bullets. She and her older sister slept in a trundle bed together. Dottie whistled in admiration. She felt lucky to be living in Hell’s Kitchen.

   “Have you got your lunch?” Vicki asked, a Wirephoto glance away from the Soldiers and Sailors Monument on Cleveland, Ohio’s Public Square.

   Dottie held it up. It was a Roy Rogers and Dale Evans metal lunch box with wood grain printed sides. On the front Roy was riding away on his horse Trigger, and Dale, in a red dress, was waving goodbye from beneath the Double RR Bar Ranch sign.

   “Let’s go, hustle it up.” Vicki said. “Is that one of your schoolbooks you’re reading?”

   “No, but it’s the word from the bird,” Dottie said.

   She attended the Sacred Heart of Jesus School on West 52^nd Street. It was a boy and girl school. It was the reason Stan had taken their apartment on West 56^th Street, so that Dottie could walk there. It was a large schoolhouse, more than a thousand students, most of them Irish kids. A new convent for the Sisters of Charity, who were the teaching nuns, had been built a few years ago. The Congregation of Christian Brothers, who had a reputation for raking boys and girls over the coals, lived in their own residence on West 51^st Street.

   “If Jesus had been killed twenty years ago, Catholic school children would be wearing little electric chairs around their necks instead of crosses,” Stan and Vicki heard Lenny Bruce wisecrack at one of his shows. Stan didn’t think it was funny. He knew what electric chairs were about. There was nothing laughable about them. Vicki laughed her head off. Dottie didn’t wear a crucifix or an electric chair. Both of them made her feel eighty-sixed.

   Across the East River in Brooklyn, Bumpy Williams was following the two men who were following the boss and his Girl Friday. When they got to Ebbets Field, the men parked across the street from the main entrance to the ballpark. Bumpy passed them, doubled back, and parked a block behind them. He turned the engine off and got comfortable. It was inside of fifteen minutes when the young man on the passenger side of the black panel truck got out, walked down the street, stepped into a corner store, and came back with a brown bag wrapped around a bottle of Sneaky Pete.

   “Dumb asses,” Bumpy hee-hawed to himself.

   He understood when the pie isn’t perfect, a man has got to cut it into wedges, but if it was him, he would have thrown the two slices of stupidity in the truck out of the roll call and sent them back to Sicily where they came from. The one-year sale on fresh blood from the homeland had been going on for seven years. It was getting thin back in southern Italy. On the other hand, Bumpy thought, it isn’t like I’ve got to reinvent the wheel with them.

   When Stan and Bettina Goertzen walked out of the ballpark and hailed a cab, the two hoodlums in the panel truck didn’t follow them. Instead, the man on the passenger side got out again, sauntered to a phone booth outside the corner store, and made a call.

   “All right, and you’re sure they didn’t make you?” 

   “Nah.”

   “And no one was on your tail?” 

   “No way.”

   “All right, I’ll pass it on to the boss. You two go to the house and lay low. Stay handy, stay straight, don’t boost anything, stay out of trouble, just in case we need you, understand?”

   “I got it,” the man in the telephone booth said. 

   The man on the other end of the line hung up. The errand boys sat in the panel truck and finished their Sneaky Pete.

   When Stan and Bettina got to Brighton Beach, Ezra was there to meet them. “He’s gone,” Ezra said. “The lady of the house says he left yesterday, with a couple of guys, had an overnight bag with him. She saw the truck, thinks it might have been black, but doesn’t know the make, much less the plates. I asked around, talked to some of the neighbors, nobody saw anything, so that’s a dead end. My guess is they’re guessing we’re on to him and have got him on ice somewhere until Wednesday.”

   “That sounds about right,” Stan said. “We’ll have to run him to ground him at the ballpark. We’ve got tickets, so getting in won’t be any problem. The only problem is going to actually see any of the game.”

   “We can get in early and spread out,”  Ezra said. “The more eyes the better.”

   “We’re still on the same page about keeping this to ourselves?”

   “Yes,” Ezra said. “The Secret Service is always on high alert, so our ruffling their feathers won’t make any difference. Besides, they don’t trust anybody. Whatever we tell them is more than likely to get us into a jam.”

   “I’m stirring the same pot,” Stan said. 

   “What if we don’t get to our man and he gets too close for comfort?” Bettina asked.

   “We’re not anybody’s bodyguard,” Ezra said. “Besides, he’s got all the bodyguards he needs.”

   “But we know who our man is and what he looks like,” Bettina said. “They don’t.” Lefty had delivered his drawing of Tony de Marco, Bettina had double-checked it, and they had their Most Wanted within range.

   “That’s how the biscuit crumbles,” Ezra said. They walked down to Brighton Beach Avenue.

   “Did you read that tawk from Ike about Stevenson?” a man fat as a late-summer duck asked his companion as they strolled past the detectives going the other way.

   “Yeah, just more smoke and mirrors from the Republicans.”

   “The thing is, how do you even know he’s telling the truth, when you know you’d lie about it if you was him?”

   “Fawget about it.”

   They were approaching a diner. “Yeah, yeah, I get that. Let’s stop in here.”

   “Let’s get some cawfee and a bite.”

   “That’s a good idea, I’m with you.”

   “We can’t be sure we know with one hundred percent certainty what our man is up to,” Stan said. 

   “No, that’s true enough,” Ezra said.

   “It puts us in a tough spot.”

   “Yes,” Ezra said.

   “OK, we’ll play it the way we have been up to now. It might be a tight squeeze, but I don’t want to get in the middle of a political assassination, if it is an assassination, and everything that would bring down on us, which would be hell in a hand basket.”

   “No good deed goes unpunished,” Ezra said.

   “We’re getting paid to find out what happened to Jackson Pollack, not make more trouble than it’s worth,” Stan said, disgruntled. “Let’s try to not get too crazy derailed.”

   Bettina wanted to argue, but when she remembered some of the things Pete had told her, after their ping-pong games, or out for a drink, she bit her tongue. TF is what Pete always muttered whenever what he said fell on deaf ears. She didn’t want to be the deer in the headlights with the Feds at the wheel. She knew Pete was right about the high and the low.

   Two teenagers slouched past them. Both of them were wearing medallions. One of them had a girl’s ear-clip stuck onto an earlobe.

   “You going to the skin battle tonight?” asked one of the other.

   “Diddley bop,” the other one said.

   “You got your stenjer ready?”

   “You bet.”

   He had doused his Alpine-style hat, his stenjer, under a faucet the night before, rolled the brims tight, and dried it on a radiator.

   “Don’t forget to pull it down over your ears.”

   “Ain’t that like punking out?” 

   “No, it’s going to be tight fighting, but you still want to take care of your two South Brooklyn babies.”

   “I got it.”

   “You got to have heart, though.”

   “I’ll tell you who’s got heart, and that’s Blood. Blood’s got big heart.”

   “You got that right. He ain’t afraid of nobody. He will do anything. If he has to fight five against one, he’ll fight five against one. He’s a butcher, man. If you need someone to pull the trigger, he’ll pull the trigger.”

   “Give that man a stenjer.”

   “Fast, faster, disaster!” They both laughed, taking their own sweet time.

   “Anybody hungry?” Bettina asked.

   “I’m dog hungry,” Ezra said.

   “Same here,” Stan asked.

   “How about H & S? We could walk there, it’s not far.”

   They passed an apartment house. At the top of it an inscription in vanishing block letters read MOTHER JONES. Bettina knew who she was, which was Mary Harris Jones, a labor organizer for the Socialist Party of America, fifty or sixty years ago. A New York district attorney had called her “the most dangerous woman in America.” Pete had told her that women couldn’t vote back then, which was what made them angry and dangerous, pivoting into the 20^th century. “When you want something bad enough is when you get dangerous,” Pete said.

   Stan, Ezra, and Bettina strolled towards the deli on Sheepshead Bay Road. “There it is,” Bettina said, pointing to the blue and white H & S Hebrew National Deli porcelain sign across the street. Once inside, she had mushroom barley soup and toasted challah, while Ezra and Stan ordered pastrami sandwiches. Bettina winced at the tongues on the menu. One of them touted itself as center cut tongue, better than the other parts of the tongue. That is disgusting, she thought.

   “Look at that,” Stan said. He pointed to a sign and a picture on the wall. “Instant Heart Attack,” the sign said. The picture was of a three-quarter pound meat sandwich, choice of animal, with potato latkes instead of bread.

   “Our food is delicious, but it can kill you,” the waiter explained.

   After they finished, and were having coffee, Ezra said, “I didn’t want to mention it while we were eating, but some of the deli’s I eat at, you find tidbits you can’t find anywhere else. There’s one place, they have something called pitcha, which is made by cooking calves’ feet and making a gel block of it, then chilling it, with bits of more meat in it.”

   “That sounds like the Dark Ages,” Bettina said.

   “Believe me, Betty, I’ve never had it,” Ezra said.

   Outside on the sidewalk they heard a man calling out in the distance. He was coming their way. He had something for them. “Ice cream! Get your Good Humor ice cream here, ice cream, orange drinks. Get your Good Humor ice cream here.”

    The ice cream man was a rail thin Negro wearing black shoes, khaki pants, and a safari shirt. He had two large boxes slung over his shoulders. One was filled with ice cream and the other one with orange drinks. His face was shiny and wet.

   Stan asked if he had vanilla.

   “Yes sir,” the man said.

   “I’ll have one, too,” Bettina said.

    “What other flavors do you have?” Ezra asked.

   “Strawberry, chocolate, eclairs, fudge.”

   “I’ll take a strawberry.”

   When the Good Humor man opened his box, white smoke from dried ice spilled out. After they paid him, he grunted when he lifted the two boxes up, slinging them over his shoulders, and wiped his face with a handkerchief. In the second the boxes were up in the air, Stan saw a gravity knife taped to the underside of one of them. He knew what it was since Luftwaffe paratroopers had carried them.

   Switchblades had been made illegal in New York City two years earlier, but not gravity knives. They lacked a spring, so everybody with a warehouse full of worthless switchblades took out the springs and sold them as gravity knives. That summer, after borough flatfeet got tired of being taunted by punks with gravity knives, the city banned them, too . 

   “Ice cream, ice cream, get your Good Humor ice cream here.” The Negro’s voice trailed off as he went down the sidewalk.

   Stan, Ezra, and Bettina wiped their lips clean and went back to their business, looking for their goose on the loose.