A Hanging at Cinder Bottom (34 page)

He cut them all loose.

Rutherford and Reed chained the de-bolted Baach safe to the hand-truck and rolled it to the alley, where they blew off its door with dynamite. Inside was nothing but a Devil Back Joker. Stuck to its front was the business card of Mr. Tony Sharpley, 57 Great Jones Street, New York.

Rufus Beavers returned to the Alhambra, where he could only stare at the emptied insides of his own thrown-open safe. It was taller than he, and it had not been so bare since the day of its purchase in 1894. All that remained was a foreign metal case. Rufus pried it open to find twenty card decks and one business card. The decks read:

B
IG
S
UN
P
LAYING
C
ARD
C
OMPANY

N
EW
Y
ORK
C
ITY
, USA.

The business card read:

P
HIL
O’B
ANYON

1 E
AST
S
UPERIOR
S
TREET

C
HICAGO
, I
LLINOIS
.

Tony Thumbs had survived. Knocked unconscious, five front teeth gone, he’d been helped to the train by the suspendered man, who’d thought to seek out and load the luggage too. On the eight o’clock eastbound, the old man rocked with his head against the window glass.

He rode in this fashion through Princeton and on past Lynchburg too, the fear in his bones subsiding as the mountains gave way to flat. He held a frozen Delmonico steak to his mouth and rocked in his red velvet seat. He looked at the empty cushion beside him. Baz had not been so lucky as him.

The monkey was wrapped in the suspendered man’s jacket and stuffed in Tony’s medicine trunk. His little body was cold and stiffening quick, clacking against brown and red bottles of curare and opium and valerian and maypop.

At Silver Spring, Tony peeked inside the trunk to see his oldest and dearest friend in this world. He pulled back the
lapel of the fine worsted jacket and looked at the white face and cold open eyes. He cried, and he did not care who saw.

He drank from a red medicine bottle before he closed up the trunk.

He hoped the others had made it out alive. He hoped they would meet him in Baltimore, and that they’d let him rest awhile. He was eighty-two years old after all.

At Ellicott City, he finally slept. He dreamed of Abe and Goldie, flying on the air above the Old Drury stage before the glow of new electric lights. They had no need for wires. They tossed money upon the air, and it floated there, as if unbound by gravity’s rule. And Tony stood at stage’s edge and asked if he could have his cut of the touch, and they told him yes. Of course, Goldie said. Of course. And she looked at Abe and commanded, “Climb!” And the Kid and the Queen levitated, high above the money to the flylines. And Tony held out his hands, and his missing thumb was there, twiddling quick as could be, and above him, the money never fell. It only grew thick. He watched it multiply, and he was happy, for he knew that it was sum enough to procure five golden teeth and a six-month supply of Camel Alley opium, high grade. He knew the money was sufficient to buy a black granite headstone and a silver shoe-box coffin, lined in mulberry Egyptian silk.

TEN FUN OF THE NUMBER ONE

July 22, 1910

The moon over the Baltimore wharf was full and low. Abe and Goldie sat on the Frederick Street docks and watched the towboat lamps dance on the water’s black chop. He’d already pointed to the tall pilings and told her how he’d earned his scar. Now he aimed a hand in the direction of Locust Point and said, “See those lights way out there? That’s where Daddy landed in ’77.” He shook his head. “Can you imagine that? Alone and twenty years old. Stepped on a boat in Germany and stepped off it right here.”

The big water suited Goldie. She had even grown fond of its smell. And though Baltimore’s flatness did not likewise fit her fancy, she enjoyed walking the streets, knit close on all sides with tall buildings.

“I believe I’d be seasick most of the way,” she said.

He nodded his head. “Stick with trains.”

Los Angeles, California, was where they’d soon travel, though Goldie wondered if the East Coast might better suit her than the West. Ben Moon was living temporarily then in Atlantic City, where he’d purchased a saloon and a home on the inlet too. He’d given both to the Baaches upon their arrival and told Al he could tend the business in whatever measure he pleased. Little Donnie played cards at the new saloon under the name Caleb Shook. At night he slept in a ground-floor white iron bed, inside the Maine Avenue home of Al and Sallie Baach. Under the floorboards was a door and under the door was four hundred thousand dollars. Sallie had looked at the money only once. She sat mornings and evenings in a wicker throne on the home’s front lawn. She could see the water and the lighthouse both. She could watch Agnes and Ben duck in the high cordgrass and run on the sand. And all the while, as she watched them hide and seek and build castles and knock them down, as she heard them squeal and whistle and mimic the song of the laughing gulls, she bit the tip of her tongue to keep from crying. The children were all she had to beat back the sorrow. The place itself was nothing to her. She’d stay on their account, but such a place was not meant for Sallie. She belonged in the hills, where she suspected her Samuel had returned. Her daddy’s letters told nothing of her youngest—none in Welch had heard a word. Old Man Hood’s last letter had read:

I built that home on Hood Hill Plateau in 1851. I meant it to be a meeting ground for the preachers of God’s good word. It burned to the ground on July the seventh
.

The dirt still smoldered when Oswald Ladd and his daddy arrived from Virginia. They left inside a day, afraid for their lives. They’d found that Keystone was in an uproar over the death of their mayor. The circuit judge wore hatred in his eyes and the tiny police chief had told them he cared little for their property deed, and they’d do best to clear off before dark. Sallie cried at the words her daddy had written. She thought often to go and find her Samuel back home, to go too in the ground with the others she’d borne. To go on finally and rest.

Abe and Goldie had stayed five nights at the Maine Avenue home. He’d proposed marriage to her at a boardwalk cafe. She’d smiled then, even lost some of the ache she’d felt since the foul business with Munchy back in Keystone. Still, when Abe left Atlantic City for Baltimore on the eleventh, Goldie had refused to stay at the shore as planned. He went back primarily to line up work for Chesh and Talbert and Rose Cantu, who’d taken to Baltimore right off. When Abe told her it was safer in Atlantic City, Goldie had said, “I’ll die at your side just the same as I’ll live.”

Now they sat where dead fish and chicken-wire bobbed, and the foghorns blew back at the B&O whistles.

He watched her watch the water. He rubbed at her back.

Presently, he felt a rumble in the pier boards beneath him. He turned to see Bushel-Heap Lou McKill walking in their direction, lamp in his grip, another man at his side.

Abe stood to meet them. The man was familiar. A black fellow, tall and thin. He wore a glass eye where once none had been.

“Fella here come up from Keystone,” Bushels said. “Won’t say much other than he needs to speak with you.”

A fluttering commenced at Goldie’s middle.

“You check to see if he came alone?” Abe asked.

“Already backtracked and lit up the crannies.”

Together, they walked to the warehouse. The Radiant Moon sign had been painted over.
Coming Soon!
the bricks read,
Chambers Automobiles!

Inside, the place was emptied, stripped of presses and cutters and long table lines of wrapper assemblage. The four of them stood beneath a single electric bulb tacked to the ceiling in Moon’s empty office.

The tall officer from Keystone took an envelope from his pocket and handed it over.

The photograph nearly fell to the floor when Abe opened the letter. He had not yet read its greeting when he saw his brother’s face in black and white, the eyes both swollen shut, the lips split and sunken where teeth no longer rooted.

A sound came up from deep inside him and he bent a little at the waist.

Goldie turned away. “Oh Samuel,” she said.

The letter was penned in an unfamiliar script.
Abe Baach and Goldie Toothman, you have two days from receipt of this letter to return to Keystone to face the crimes of murdering officer Munchy Briles and Mayor Henry Trent. You shall bring with you what you have stolen. The man on delivery of this letter shall not be harmed and shall travel alone before you to advise. If you fail to surrender within two day’s time, Sam Baach will be hung by the neck until dead. If you surrender within two day’s time, he will be set free.

Abe looked at the glass-eyed man, who shook where he stood, pointy-shouldered in a white shirt he’d sweated through.

“Rutherford is whittled down all the way to you?” Abe said. He’d gotten word from Chicago and New York of what had happened to the others who’d tracked him. On July 16th, Harold Beavers had ventured alone and drunk to the office building at 1 Superior Street. It sat across the lane from the Cathedral of the Holy Name, and before he’d stepped inside 1 Superior, Harold had looked up at the spire, two hundred feet above. He’d hesitated, then entered the squat building through the front door, expecting to see secretaries and spectacled types with pencils behind their ears. Instead, he found himself in a smoke-filled lounge of pitiless men playing pocket billiards. He’d said, “I’m looking for Phil,” and the ones who were bent across the felt had straightened and stared him down, and the ones leaning at the wall had put their hands
inside their coat. When Harold Beavers moved his own hand to the small of his back, they drew down and fired all at once. They were not the timid kind. They spent their days at 1 Superior Street, headquarters of Dropsy Phil O’Banyon’s North Side Gang. The bullet hole in Harold’s manhood had barely scabbed black when they filled him with fifty more.

Abe studied the tall man’s real eye. “I know you,” he said. “You’re the first fella I met when I came home in April. Believe I gave you a silver dollar.”

The man’s breathing turned quick. He looked to his right at the giant.

“How’s your short friend?” Abe asked him. “One with the titties?”

“Dead,” the man answered, but Abe already knew.

When Harold Beavers had sent no word from Chicago for three days, Rufus tasked the short tittied man to New York, for he was wholly unintimidated by a producer’s lair. But 57 Great Jones Street was no variety theater. In truth, it was home to Little Naples Saloon, and when the short Keystone officer turned up there, having drunk considerable courage to run his mouth, Paul Vaccarelli himself pulled his piece, and he shot the tittied man through the cartilage of his nose.

The glass-eyed man’s tremble had increased and he feared he’d wet his pants. “I’m just a messenger,” he managed. He’d been drunk when he agreed to do it. Rutherford had paid him two fifty-dollar notes.

The lightbulb was hot above them.

Abe said, “You ought to consider how you align yourself in this life. You tell that to Taffy Reed and the other police too.” He folded the letter around the photograph of Sam. He took out his watch. “You tell Rutherford and Rufus Beavers that I will do what’s been asked. But I will come alone.”

“No,” Goldie said. “That’s not right.” Her voice was quiet but sure.

Abe did not look in her direction. He stared hard at the glass eye and said again, “I’ll be traveling alone.”

The man started to speak. He’d been given a script which demanded that both of the accused answer for their crimes. A witness had said with certainty that it was Goldie who’d shot Munchy Briles. Now the man could not remember what he’d rehearsed on the train.

Goldie said, “You tell them all that two of us are coming home.”

Abe looked where she stood. She wore no expression. He remembered what she’d said on the docks.
I’ll die at your side just the same as I’ll live.
He winked at her and went on. “Tell them we will come with one man watching to be sure they hold up their end. We’ll step off the train when we see Sam step on it, alone.”