City Of Fire Trilogy 1 - Dreamland (17 page)

It didn’t seem quite so bad, then—with the sun streaming through the windows, and that foolish little song stuck in her head. It seemed possible, even tolerable, then. She knew that would change, of course: the supervisors would hush the women to keep them from singing or talking, and the dust would billow up so thick it obscured the sunlight, and they would have to keep the gas jets open, day and night, just to see the cloth in front of them.

She knew it would change, she was at this too long not to know it. Yet still it was early enough that she could tell herself with a certain pride along with a sustaining and inveterate weariness:

Well, this is what I am I am a worker not an angel

Big Tim Sullivan sipped his coffee and watched the lawyers filing into the Tombs, the words running through his head:

Land of the people Land of the people Land of the people

They moved in a long, shuffling row, battered leather satchels in hand, disappearing behind the forbidding, gray walls of the prison. The new Tombs jail wasn’t ten years old but it was already sinking, much to the embarrassment of the organization. Like its predecessor, it had been built on top of the old Collect Pond in lower Manhattan, and it leaked like a sieve. The water kept seeping slowly, inexorably up through the cells, the walls dripping with moisture, the bottom cells often ankle-deep in water and muck.

“Look at ’em,” Cousin Florrie sneered at the lawyers from where they sat in Big Tim’s saloon across Centre Street, interrupting his reverie. “Leeches workin’ over the carcass.”

“An imprecise analogy,” Big Tim corrected him. “A vulture, say, or some other scavenger might pick over a
carcass.
A leech battens off living things.”

“Same t’ing.”

“No—no, it ain’t the same t’ing at all. Words matter, you know.”

Did they?
Land of the people Land of the people

He snapped out his pocket watch, and a small notebook and pencil from some inner pocket, and the men around the table sat up—his brothers, Paddy and Flat-Nose Dinny, and his half brother Larry Mulligan; Florrie, and the other cousins, Christy and Little Tim; and Big Tim’s own, self-appointed valets, Photo Dave Altman and Sarsaparilla Reilly.

The Wise Ones, they were called in the neighborhood, or simply The Sullivans, and they were nearly indistinguishable in their somber black suits and derbies. Stern as judges, inscrutable as bankers. Nothing stronger than coffee, or sarsaparilla, or soda water before them.

“You oughtn’t to blame the poor lawyers, Florrie,” Big Tim said, turning back to his cousin. “They’re joost out after the early worm, just like us, and if we are a bit more beneficent, perhaps it is because we have the more to give.”

“Can’t stand the lousy skinners,” Florrie insisted, arms folded grimly across his chest.

He had marked this obstinacy before in his cousin. Florrie had grown inexplicably darker, more unappeasable over the course of the last year or two—just like the other one, Little Tim. Sullivan felt the first sharp twinge of the day in his own groin.

Perhaps we are all cursed

“Personally, I still miss the Great White Hunter, meself,” he said, trying to turn the conversation to a lighter subject. News of the Honorable Ex-Prez Teddy Roosevelt’s exploits were plastered all over the morning papers.

“You could set your watch by the man, back when he was police commissioner. Marchin’ down through the Mulberry Bend, gabbin’ away to his Swede.”

“Sure, and a big hoss pistol in his pocket,” Photo Dave gloated. “Like it woulda done ‘im any good, goin’ t’rough the Bend, if some plug chose to do him.”

“Oh, you mustn’t underestimate the Honorable Ex. I’ve no doubt Teddy wasn’t
dyin’
to use it. Pot hisself a Yid, or a dago. Put ’em up wit’ the elephants and the Ben-gal tigers around his parlor.”

Big Tim had seen the parlor, some ten years ago, when he’d snuck out to Oyster Bay to get the great man’s help in his war with old Boss Croker. The whole place had been covered, wall to wall, with skins and horns and tusks. There was even a badger-skin rug, the creature’s tiny jaws set ferociously as a lion’s. Still, the man had understood the situation readily enough. His own great white teeth slashing away murderously, while Big Tim tried to recruit him in Tammany Hall’s civil war. A natural-born killer.

Now the Ex-Prez, Ex-Police Commish was away in darkest Africa, finding more things to shoot—slicing his way through that strange and wondrous land like a man in an abattoir. Big Tim remembered a passage from Teddy’s memoir of San Juan Hill, about shooting a Spanish soldier with the same huge pistol:
He doubled up like a jackrabbit.
Beware the muckraker, indeed.

“I remember that Swede of Teddy’s,” Sarsaparilla Reilly was saying. “He tried to take a picture of me cousin’s attic down the Dirty Spoon, in Blind Man’s Alley. Nearly burned down the place with the flash, then he goes out an’ tells a cop about the unfit conditions. Unfit! Sure it is, once you set it on fire!”

“Reform, there’s nothin’ to it!”

A fresh ripple of indignation ran around the table.

“Anybody ever see a nickel from it?”

“I ask you, anybody ever see a
penny
from reform? When did Teddy Roosevelt ever get anyone a job?”

Big Tim let them talk. He knew the Swede: a stern, self-righteous man named Riis, a Dane actually—though more a Yankee than the Yankees themselves. Sullivan had even read his book—
How the Other Half Lives—
and thought it naive right down to the title.

If it were
only
the half, we would have no problems. “How the World
Is”
would be more like it.

Yet the pictures had been compelling, staged and calculated as they were: Street boys huddled in alleys. Soot-covered immigrants staring blankly back at the camera in their basement hovels. Young women and children, numbed and listless, the look of death already in their face. In between were yards of damning statistics. Pictures and social statistics—what couldn’t you sell with those?

“Now, boys, let us go easy on the Ex,” he told the Wise Ones, starting to wrap it up. “Even Teddy has his uses.”

“Like what?”

“Teddy is a splitter,” Big Tim said, using the worst epithet anyone at the table could imagine. “He is a splitter in the caucus, and he will be a splitter at the polls. He is a young man, still in the full bloom of health, an’ when he is done slaughterin’ the poor, defenseless craytures of Africa, an’ done beatin’ up on the poor crowned heads of Europe, he’ll come back an’ split his party right down the middle over Mr. Taft. You see if he don’t.”

The table broke up in laughter—a hard, vindictive sound—and Big Tim called the board to order.

“All right, let’s get this aggregation under way. Now—how’re we comin’ along for the chowder?”

Every midsummer, the Timothy D. Sullivan Association hosted an enormous picnic for its constituents up on College Point. There would be a parade, and an excursion boat, and hogsheads of beer, and all the chicken and clams and ice cream they could eat. There would be gambling, and baseball, and they would sing all the old Tammany songs.

And at the pinnacle of it all—when the crowd was at just that perfect, glowing pitch of early tipsiness—Big Tim would rise and give them his speech:

“Boys, I’m a Democrat.” (Cheers.)

“I’ve been a Democrat all my life.” (More cheers.)

“I have voted the Democratic ticket straight all my life.” (Uproarious cheers.)

“I never scratched a ticket since I cast my first vote when I was seventeen, and I never will.” (Pandemonium.)

This year he was trying to work on something a little more, since he was leaving Congress to go back to his far more influential seat in the state senate. So far, though, all he had was that one, bothersome line:

Land of the people Land of the people

“How’s Charlie Solomon over in the Tenth comin’?” he asked. “I don’t want him thinkin’ he’s his own man just yet. An’ get on Tom Foley, he owes us forever—”

Everyone who owed him was expected to ante up, in money or goods. This meant damned well every politician and proprietor and public employee in what had become Big Tim’s kingdom, below the Line at Fourteenth Street.

“How’s the boat?” he asked, getting to the main question.

“Comin’ along,” Dinny said soberly.

The very mention of the subject cast a pall over the table. A few years before, another summer excursion from old
Kleindeutschland
had gone up the East River, on the paddle wheeler
General Slocum.
Somehow, a fire had started in the rough water at the Hell Gate rapids. Like a bad dream, the fire hoses and the life preservers were all rotten, and fell apart in the hands of the crew. Before the boat could be beached over a thousand Deutschers had drowned in the swift current or burned on the boat, most of them women and children. The procession to the German Lutheran Cemetery in Queens had stretched out for more than a mile.

At least, thank God, it had been a church outing, but the disaster had put a chill through every district leader in the city.
Kleindeutschland
had been completely wiped out and replaced by Jews, the church turned into a synagogue—an entire constituency wiped out overnight.

“You’re checkin’ her over?”

“Sure thing.”

Big Tim would not be appeased.

“I mean yourself—don’t leave it to anybody.”

“Sure thing, Big Tim.”

He turned to the daily business: the rents and evictions, the jobs and jails. He would take care of most of this himself, later on, down in the Poor People’s Court, where the magistrates picked the pockets of the poor. Then there was the ice to take care of, it being the summer, and the funerals, which went on at a steady clip all year.

“All in order, lads,” Big Tim said finally, snapping his book shut and putting away his watch. “This district can just about run itself. I have half a mind to retire to Ireland with Mr. Croker.”

“One t’ing,” Dinny interjected, flattened boxer’s nose turning up objectionably.

“What’s that?”

“That old black crow’s been comin’ around again, raisin’ a can racket about the next legislature session.”

“Ah, the iridescent Mrs. Perkins,” Big Tim needled his brother. He rather liked the woman himself. She was a queer duck, but she had none of the airs the other Yankee social work ladies possessed. She even wore a dowdy, tricornered black hat, just like the one his own mother used to wear.

“Goin’ on about the work hours bill again, is she?”

“The goo-goos are set on it,” Florrie said gloomily.

Officially, Tammany Hall was always on the side of the working man, and the working woman. The reality, of course, was that the money—the money that greased the wheels, and kept the whole world turning—came from the garment factories, and the sweatshops, and the cigar companies, and all the other noble concerns of American business that kept their employees sweltering twelve to sixteen hours a day in conditions unfit for a horse.

It was a terrible thing, but there it was. Sullivan had no illusions about it: business would be served. The trick was how to give up just enough to keep the voters out of the hands of the Socialists.

“Well they might be set on it,” Big Tim said expansively. “And what of it? Might not be the end of the world, you know, lettin’ babes an’ wimmin work a mere fifty-four hours a week. But we’ll see. Anyt’ing else?”

“Just that Mister Murphy sent his greetings. To remind you about a certain matter,” Little Tim hemmed and hawed, with impeccable Irish discretion.

“Ah, yes. Ah, that.”

The rest of the Wise Ones maintained a judicious silence. All of them knew what Little Tim was talking about, of course; there was only one police matter that he could possibly mean, and that was Herman Rosenthal.

“Ah, yes. Poor old Beansy.”

Whatever you say, Big Tim. Whatever
you
think I should do.

Big Tim had always had a soft spot for Beansy Rosenthal. He had started out as a newsie, just like Sullivan, even hawking his papers in front of the same Park Row beanery he had worked himself when he was seven years old.

“Stick with gambling. Gambling takes brains, and you’re one smart Jewboy,” Sullivan had told him, and Beansy had listened.

Herman had become a racetrack tout, then a proprietor. Big Tim had made him one of his favorites—one of his Jewboys, as he called them affectionately. From the start, he had helped him with loans, with protection, and for a time Beansy had done well—opening up gambling houses from Far Rockaway to Harlem, covering himself in the monogrammed gold jewelry he loved.

I’m just trying to stand up for myself I’m just trying to make a buck—

Yet everywhere that Beansy went, a problem was sure to follow. He was always getting into messy feuds with other gamblers, and when things didn’t go his way he had the amazing habit of filing his hollers against the cops through the daily newspapers.