by Jerome Charyn
Excerpted from Fiction Number 65 (2020).
Photographs courtesy Thomas Gladyz , Director of the Louise Brooks Society.
1.
IT HAPPENED LIKE THIS.
Tom would deliver aria after aria at criminal court, while the most seasoned cops stuttered under his cross-examination. Even witnesses who had been coached by the Manhattan DA couldn’t stand up to the pounding. The DA scoffed at Tom, mimicked him, called him “Tonsils,” and that moniker remained. Tom hadn’t served overseas, but landed in the provost marshal general’s office in ’43 and visited prisoner-of-war camps in the South and Southwest. He’d been the boy wonder at Nichols & Bass, fresh out of Columbia. He’d grown up in a hovel on Eleventh Avenue, studied at Horace Mann on a full scholarship, and entered law school at nineteen. He never learned who his benefactor was. Some obscure Fenian society, he’d been told, a society that was just as real as any illusion. He could quote Aristotle and Captain Marvel in the same breath. He was impossible to resist.
The full story can be found in Fiction Number 65. Please follow the subscribe link for information on ordering.
Jerome Charyn’s most recent novel, Sergeant Salinger (2020), is about J. D. Salinger’s harrowing experiences during World War II as an intelligence agent. A new novel, Big Red, about Rita Hayworth and Orson Welles, will be published by Liveright/Norton in 2022.
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