A Hanging at Cinder Bottom (16 page)

Abe slipped Bushels a fin. “I need twenty-five decks,” he told him. “Devil Backs, the ones with the false name and New York address. Ten wrapped, fifteen free. I need the wrappers flat-packed, stamps separate.”

Bushels nodded. “I’ll bring em to the office.”

Abe followed him through the open warehouse doors.

Inside, Bushels made for the packing department and Abe climbed the stairs three at a time.

When he knocked at the big office door, Moon said to enter.

The office was wide and dark. It smelled of hot grease and newsprint. Moon was having his lunch. He stood from behind his desk and waved Abe inside.

He was an average-sized man with a well-groomed beard. The embroidered handkerchief tucked at his shirt collar was streaked in grease. On the desk was a massive
book weighted open by a skillet of fried rockfish. He walked to Abe and shook his hand. He took him by the shoulder and there he squeezed and patted heavy. “Sit down for just a minute,” he said. “You want some fish?”

“I might have a bite.”

They sat and ate with their hands. “I know you need to get on a train as fast as you can,” Moon said.

“I’ll make the early morning.” Abe wiped his fingers on a stack of newspapers and pulled from his inside pockets the bankrolls he’d stashed at his temporary woman’s place. “Here’s the take from New York,” he said. “Fifty-five hundred and change.”

It was a good take from a cut-short trip. Moon held his hands up to indicate he didn’t want the money. With what he expected to soon rake in, the fifty-five hundred could walk.

Ben Moon was a wildly rich and adventuresome man whose business practices had grown increasingly bold. He was not bound by law or convention. No woman could settle him. Recently, he’d decided to fundamentally alter the path of his life’s work.

He spoke with his mouth full of fish. “You keep that and take it home with you. Matter fact,” he said, and he stood and walked to the room’s corner. There, behind a three-foot portrait, was his wall safe. The portrait was black and white and depicted a man in a flat cap with his hands in his pockets.
King of Aspromonte
it read across the top. He
swung it open and worked the combination and returned to his desk with two thousand dollars. “Here,” he said. “God knows how long you’ll be gone.”

Abe thanked him.

From a stack of targets with eight-inch bullseyes, Moon took up a sheet. “You want to shoot a little?” Moon believed a man must keep keen his shooting ways. He’d installed a single-stall range running the length of the building. Its only entrance was at the end of his office.

“Not today,” Abe said.

A tow’s foghorn sounded from out on the water.

Moon was unsure of how to tell the young man his news, so he simply told him. “I’m getting out of the card business,” he said. “I’m selling this place.” He looked at the walls, the ceiling over his head. “It’s going to be an assembly plant for automobiles. Can you imagine it? The Chambers Motor Car Company.” He shook his head. He said, “I have some investment opportunities in New Jersey and southern California.”

“Investment opportunities?”

“Cards are on the downslope.” Moon sat back down and continued to eat. “Anti-saloon leagues will be the death of us all,” he said. He stared blank at a stack of books about birds.

Abe couldn’t think of a thing to say.

“I’ve partnered with a fella of means who’s built one of the finest rigid airships in the world. You should see it Abe,” Moon said. He thought for a moment on pulling out the
blueprints, showing the young man the oversize rudder and the long sleek gondola basket. He knew Abe would appreciate such work, and the same could not be said for the other men he employed. But time was short. He said, “Took him five years, but it’s near done, and it’s sitting in Atlantic City now.”

“Man’s name a secret?” Abe asked.

“No,” Moon said. He regarded the cracks in the cold skillet grease. His new partner didn’t want their names linked. Ben Moon didn’t care for such a policy. “His name is Walter Melvin. You heard of him?”

Abe shook his head no.

“You ought to have. Man’s photographed the North Pole. Sydney, Australia, from a hot-air balloon too, with a camera he built himself. Made his money in newspapers, now he’s moved on to moving pictures.”

“That’s somethin,” Abe said. “Moving pictures.” He nodded, looking all the while at the floor.

“Got to follow the money.”

It was small talk by then.

Moon knew the young man had real matters to attend to. “You don’t want to be here for a while anyway,” he told him. “Swollen Man’s got his collectors back in town. They scalped a fella and tossed him in the water.”

Swollen Man was better known as Dropsy Phil O’Banyon, a big-time, ill-tempered Chicago bookmaker-turned-gangster who frequented Baltimore and always
had bad luck at the tables there. In February, he’d lost nine hundred to Abe at a high-stakes game in Butchers Hill. He didn’t shake hands before he left.

“Phil’s sore at me,” Moon said. “I wouldn’t come down on price to sell him my outfit.” He laughed. “Crazy son of a bitch wants to get into card manufacture.”

Abe unfolded the telegram and put it on the desk. “I need you to help me understand this,” he said.

“I’m so sorry about that.” Moon wiped his hands again and yanked the hanky from his collar. He produced from a drawer the original telegram. It gave no indication as to how or why. Again, it was only
Jake dying
. Moon poked his finger at it. “Family,” he said. “There is nothing without family.” He’d lost his mother to cancer the year before. She was the only family he had. When he was a boy, she’d kiss him goodnight and tell him, “You are my radiant moon.”

Abe said, “I didn’t know you and Daddy had any contact.” For six years, Abe had wired money to his father, once in winter and once in summer, but there had never been any telegrams.

Moon said, “Well, once in a while over the years he’s checked on you.”

“I wish I’d known. There are people there I could have . . .” And he blinked and saw again the face of Goldie. He put his fingers to the pump knot on the back of his head and winced.

Moon watched him close. “They are all just fine until this telegram, far as I know.” He had always wanted to tell the
young man what little he knew of life in Keystone by way of Al Baach’s letters, which came every five or six months. “Your father was grazed in the knee by a ricocheting bullet two years back,” Moon said, “but he gets around. Your mother is well, as is your younger brother. Goldie too is well as far as I know, though her father died last year.” In all of his letters, Al Baach had written to Ben Moon, in one form or another, the following:
Abraham must not know of what goes on here with us. If he knows, he will come here, and that is still not safe
.

Then came the telegram.
Jake dying
.

Moon said, “I know that your father has managed to keep the saloon open, but business has been slow.” He cleared his throat. “I believe he’s taken up shoe repair again.”

Abe stared at the words on the telegram and tried to imagine his family, less one. “How can business be slow with Keystone the way it is?” he said. “I’ve met more than a few men who travel there twice a year. I heard a fella in Boston once talking about Cinder Bottom girls.”

Moon didn’t know enough to answer. He knew some of it lay in the blackballing of the Baaches after Abe cut the wires and left town. He didn’t want to rile him. “Listen to me Abe,” he said. “I’m going to tell you something about your father and then you’re going to get on a train.”

Abe listened.

Moon told of a time when he was eleven years old, a time when the first of many letters arrived from Keystone. This
first letter, like all that were to follow, was addressed to both Ben Moon and his mother. In it, Al Baach wrote of what had happened that day in September 1877, and how sorry he was about Vic Moon’s demise. He inquired as to whether they’d received Vic’s body and the substantial monies he’d had on him. Al had suspicions already on the veracity of Trent’s promise to send the money, and he apologized for having not taken care of such business himself. A correspondence commenced then between young Ben Moon and Al Baach, and in each letter the boy received, there was a renewed promise to find Vic Moon’s body. There was also enclosed money. When the boy was thirteen, all one hundred and twenty-three dollars had been repaid.

“I bet he never spoke to you or anyone else about this.” Moon said.

Abe shook his head no. He wondered why Ben Moon hadn’t told him before. He wondered at the figure: one hundred and twenty-three dollars. It was chasing him.

There was a low roar inside his head.

“Your father is a good man,” Moon said. He opened a box of long cigars and took one. “He is one of the few left.” He trimmed his cigar with a letter opener and lit it and told Abe it was time to go home and make things right with his family.

Abe nodded.

“I do know a little bit about Mr. Henry Trent and Mr. R. Rutherford,” Moon said. “And the Beavers brothers.” He
scoffed, but beneath the scoff was the truth. Ben Moon feared no man, excepting those absurd West Virginia men about whom he’d only read in letters, those men living in a place he’d never been, the place his daddy had died. “You need to ready yourself, maybe bring a man or two along.” He cleared his throat. “Trent is mayor now, and Rutherford is chief of police.”

A dizziness came upon Abe then. He thought he might fall from his chair.

“You feeling poorly?” Moon asked.

“I’m just fine.”

“You certain?”

“I’m certain.”

He wished he had time to help the younger man, but too many needed help in this world, and he had always been a man without the time. “You all set for pistols?” he said.

“I’m all set.”

“I got a new five-shot .38. Little three-inch barrel.” Moon opened the big bottom drawer and took out a revolver. “Easy to conceal,” he said. “You still pack a second don’t you?”

“I do.”

“Might be time to pack a third.” He held it out. He said, “It’s good for close quarters.”

Abe took it. The gun wore not a smudge. Nickel finish, blued hammer. He tucked it at the base of his spine and cinched his belt a hole tighter. “Thank you,” he said.

“How about rifles?”

“Not on this trip.”

“You want to take along Bushels?”

“No.”

“He is a man of many talents.”

“No. It’s easiest on my own.” He tried to imagine himself back in Keystone. He considered a moment on how he might play it, on what he might find. “Second thought,” he said, “tell Tony Thumbs to watch for a telegram.”

Moon smiled at the sound of the old man’s name and wrote it down. “You haven’t used Tony in a long while,” he said.

Tony Thumbs was an eighty-two-year-old theater operator whose company Abe enjoyed. He had once been a large-scale buyer of Radiant Moon cards. Before that, he’d been a top card manipulator himself until a blacksmith, angry over losing at Tony’s monte table, chopped off his left thumb with a hammered-steel cleaver. Now he made small-batch powder remedies for insomnia and brewed syrup cures for indigestion. He ran a theater called Old Drury and kept a stable of actors and short-con specialists and oddball sideshow types.

“You hire on Tony Thumbs,” Moon said, “you get two bodies for the price of one.”

“How do you mean?”

“I mean Baz.”

Baz was a capuchin monkey who rarely left Tony’s shoulder.

“That monkey is still alive?”

“I figure each of em is waiting on the other to die first.”

They laughed at the thought of it.

They discussed their methods of communication. Ben Moon would wire Abe at the Keystone office on Wednesday mornings. He’d address the telegrams to Joe Visross, and he’d use a false name himself. They’d stick with the codes they’d developed. More than likely, the telegrams would shortly originate from New Jersey, where Moon had business to attend.

“Abe,” he said, “I will give you what you need to straighten affairs down there. My father’s life ended in Keystone, and many years ago, before all this other got in the way, I resolved—”

Bushels knocked on the office door and came on in. He had the forgery cards Abe requested—two boxes wrapped tight in oilcloth and strung with twine. Abe thanked him.

He shook Ben Moon’s hand, and again the older man grabbed him at the shoulder and patted him.

Abe walked down the back stairs and out to the loading docks. He took a last look at the water as he left, and he recalled the peace he’d found at the harbor all those years before, walking where his father had walked as a young man. Then he looked at the tall pilings where he’d nearly lost his life at twenty-three. It was on his second Friday night in Baltimore, just past the Frederick Street docks, that he’d run across a squat man named Dash who was known to parry and slash like his joints were oiled, a trained cutter in a fight. Abe hadn’t known Dash’s reputation at the time. He’d only known that he was a dip, a no-good pickpocket
whose buddy tried to stall Abe by the loading docks. The stall was clumsy when he bumped Abe, who recognized the strategy and kept walking. There was nothing in his pocket to pick. His money was in his shoes. But Dash was frustrated to come up empty-handed, and he hollered at Abe, “Watch where you step you fuckin tomato can.” Abe was drunk, and he’d turned and taken a swing. Dash pulled the blade and got him across the jaw on the second slash. Blood came in a sheet, quick, and Dash reared back to go again. That’s when Ben Moon shot Dash in the spine with a .45 revolver from where he stood against the back wall of his warehouse. He was more than forty feet off when he fired.

At that time, Moon had been president of the Radiant Moon Consolidated Card Company for two years. Everyone in the harbor knew not to cross him.

He stopped Abe’s blood with the fine starched shirt off his back. He used his necktie to cinch it tight, and when the police came, they nodded respectfully at him and said, “Mr. Moon, good evening.” He nodded back and stood there shirtless, lighting a cigar with his big bloodied hands.

The policemen knew he walked the harbor at night, watched the docks where his crates full of cards were loaded and shipped off to Norfolk and Savannah. They knew he wasn’t the kind to shoot a man in the back for no good reason.