City Of Fire Trilogy 1 - Dreamland (18 page)

This was not at all regular. There was something, Big Tim had come to realize, that wasn’t quite right about Herman. No amount of punitive police raids seemed able to cure him of the habit: he actually seemed to like publicity. There was something childlike and disarming about the short, fleshy man in his dapper suits and flashy jewelry, yet it was a wonder that he hadn’t got himself killed. Big Tim had taken pity on him, given him one last chance—a sweet setup in Times Square, no less. He had squared it with Lieutenant Charlie Becker and his Strong-Arm Squad; even loaned Beansy a couple thousand for start-up money.

But then Herman had queered it again. Becker had raided his joint—not a real raid, just one of the annoying, showy assaults Handsome Charlie had taken to arranging for the newspapers, as part of his never-ending campaign to become police commissioner. The strong-arm squad hadn’t even smashed up the roulette wheel or the stuss table, and instead of breaking down the front door with the customary axe, they had politely rung the doorbell.

The idea was just to shut Herman down for a day or two, win Becker a headline. Handsome Charlie had even brought along his press agent, a ridiculous little man named Plitt, for the purpose. Yet somehow, it had all come apart, the way it always seemed to happen with anything involving Herman. Beansy had put up a stink, everything got out of hand—and before it was all over Plitt the press agent had managed to kill the house janitor with a revolver.

Sweet Jesus, but it was foolish enough already! Only in New York would a vice squad lieutenant have a press agent, and a murderous one at that. But there it was . . .

Big Tim had tried to quash it all, but of course it had only got worse. Furious, Becker had kept Herman shut down until he handed over five hundred dollars for a lawyer for Plitt. Herman had refused to pay, and gone to the newspapers again—and this time, before Big Tim could fix it, dear Beansy had sworn out an affidavit for the new Reform idjit of a district attorney. The details of which had been immediately leaked to the D.A.’s pet reporter over at the
World:

There is only one man in the world can call me off, that is the big fellow, Big Tim Sullivan, and he is as honest as the day is long, and I know he is in sympathy with me. If I need money I can go to him for it and he will give it to me or get it for me. It is purely a matter of friendship, and he never expects to make a nickel profit out of it. He is the only man that could call me off, and he has told me that he believes I am doing right in trying to protect myself and my home.

No doubt Herman was making some typically misguided effort to exonerate him. Instead, he had only queered it further. There was no way that Big Tim could back him against every other power in New York—no one but a gambler could be so relentlessly optimistic. Well, there was no other way around it. Beansy would have to be settled, once and for all.

“Send a reminder through our friends, if you don’t mind,” Sullivan said, turning to Sarsaparilla Reilly. “That’s a boil we have to lance.”

“Gentlemen.”

Big Tim rose ponderously to his feet.

“Photo Dave, you come with me today. Sarsaparilla can meet us at City Hall after he sees to his errand. I have to go see the Little Little Napoleon, an’ I’ll want to be properly attended.”

The men were already heading out the door, Sarsaparilla Reilly and Photo Dave snickering obligingly at his little jest about the mayor, George B. McClellan, son of the famous Civil War flop by the same name. Big Tim paused by the bar before he went out. Feeley the barkeep had his towel ready for him, and a mirror in which he could fix his hat and tighten the knot of his tie.

A hard, florid slab of a face looked back at him: intelligent, skeptical eyes, ironic mouth. The face of Tammany Hall? Or what? The words tumbled together in his mind until they had no meaning: the same insults, flatteries, and tributes. A political thug? A shield against the vagaries of a hard, new world? A
father?

He felt the stirrings within him again—a small, sticking pain in his groin now. Nothing much—but nothing quite like anything he had felt before.

It was all chaos outside the Organization, he knew. There was only the clubhouse, the neighborhood, the home, the church—the same eternal verities, like the Celtic snakes of life, coiling over and over on themselves.

But for what?
For what?

Land of the people—

He looked up from himself, confused and frightened in the moment, but he saw no alarm registered on the faces of Feeley the bartender or Photo Dave. He could still keep up a politician’s face, at least. Thank God for that.

“Thank you, Richard,” he said, placing a shiny silver dollar quietly on the bar, same as he did each morning.

“Don’t let those lawyers skin you on the draughts today”—their standard morning joke.

“Aye, I’ll keep on me toes.” The bartender grinned.

He looked around the place one more time. He owned three more saloons officially, and had a sporting interest in countless others across town. They were all placed strategically: this one by the Tombs, another right across from City Hall, another next to the newspapers down Park Row, the fourth one by the new police headquarters up at Centre and Grand. Then there were the vaudeville theatres and the race-tracks, the nickelodeons and the movie houses-and the three vast amusement parks out at Coney, Steeplechase, and Luna Park, and Dreamland.

He had at least a controlling interest in them all—and then there were his kickbacks from the trolley line, and the electric power, and the water concessions, the cuts from every prizefight and every gambling house and every rat pit throughout the City. A good living he made, and he knew he would have made it one way or another, and damn what the newspapers said.

“Dave, me boy,” he said, turning to his self-appointed bodyguard, perennial clubhouse nominator, and bearer of the sacred grease that made the wheels turn:

“Load me up.”

“Certainly, Dry Dollar,” Dave grinned, using Sullivan’s old, childhood nickname that only the Wise Ones called him by.

Photo Dave pulled fistfuls of jinglers from his coat, carefully stuffing them into the many pockets of Big Tim’s custom-tailored, his coat, his pants. Sullivan stood patiently in front of him, arms extended like a scarecrow, not unamused by the spectacle he knew he presented.

“Ah, me God, Dave,” he said when the man had finished. “If the Gold-Plated Holies had it in mind to finish me, all they’d have to do is t’row me in the East River right now.”

Another standard joke, delivered in the exaggerated brogue from the variety houses, the old Joe Millers that he knew Photo Dave loved. The man roared with laughter on cue, and Big Tim was settled by the ritual.

“Now some greenbacks for the booly dogs, and all the Little Little Napoleon’s little needs.”

With due solemnity now, Photo Dave produced great rolls of currency, clipped together thicker than a man’s fist, for his inner pockets. How the Reform papers would howl if they could see it! The public’s money—spent to bail felons out of jail! Secure employment and housing for the indolent!

Of course, neither Big Tim nor anyone else could tell the goo-goos, the Simon Pures, how much money there was, or whether it was really the public’s money at all. Did the weekly shakedown from the gangs and the whorehouses count as the public’s? How about the money extorted from honest merchants, or Chinatown dope dens, or semi-legitimate-to-thoroughly-incorrigible saloonkeepers?

It was a different world
they
lived in, the good government types—a place where everything was carefully marked down and accounted for, in great, separate ledger books. Commerce in this hand, corruption in the other. Progressive reforms here, and the buying of votes or gangsters there. It was a world which had nothing to do with the inside of a police station, or a polling booth, or a tenement house.

But you can decide
—that mocking, inner voice again.
You know what’s best.

He shook off the cobwebs, smiled up at his valet and the bartender again.

None of that matters None of us picks our position in this life

“All right, Dave,” he said. “Let us be on our unappointed rounds.”

They were surrounded by children as soon as they stepped out on the street. He smiled to see them, they looked so delighted, so determinedly grown-up. The boys wore overalls and big caps, the girls, dresses cut from old sacks or horse blankets, nearly all of them barefoot on the granite-cobbled city street.

Once, a few months before, in the fetid alley that ran behind the Dirty Spoon, he had come upon a little girl of at least seven who was completely naked. Not a stitch of clothes on her, and none that she owned—and even though it was no surprise to him, even though he knew well that such things and much worse went on, he had not been able to stop crying.

“Hey, Big Tim! Big Tim!”

“Hey, Mr. Sully-van! Whattaya got for me?”

His groin kicked, and he almost broke his stride. The pain was spreading, burning. He had had a case before, back when Nell, the wife, was still with him, but it was nothing like this. The grinning, dirty faces swirled around him, little hands groping at him, and he made himself smile back.

“Hey, Big Tim!”

They pushed their fingers into his outer pockets, pulled up shiny new quarters and dimes and nickels, marveling at the prizes. They laughed and skipped, leaped around him like any other children—though if you looked closely enough, he knew, you could see how thin they were, how quickly they tired.

The newspapers liked to romanticize them. They called them Street Arabs, and wrote about the city as if it were one big playground for them. He knew the truth: how they fought to sleep over a warm grate in the winter; in an outhouse, or maybe an abandoned boiler in the summer. They were at the mercy of older cutthroats and panderers. The wagons and the streetcars cut them down in droves, and now, too, the big new auto cars, swooping and careening recklessly through the crowded city streets.

Yet they were the pictures he had liked best in the Swede’s book, he had to admit. Not the worked-out adults—vacant, staring eyes, the last spark snuffed out—but the children, still so fiercely proud, so independent. They scared the tourists; when the sightseeing omnibuses came by they would throw rocks at the guide with his megaphone, yelling, “Here are the monkeys!” but he loved their spirit.

You could see it in the faces of the boys, if you looked closely enough—pretending to sleep at the photographer’s behest, barely able to fight back the laughter, their smiles over this make-believe already curling around the edge of their lips. Or a girl in an apartment sweatshop on Ludlow Street, already condemned to a life of cutting and sewing knee pants in an endless series of suffocating little shops but
smiling,
smiling back at the camera anyway. Smiling through a pair of scissors, of all things, holding it up flirtatiously to her lips like she was one of Goya’s senoritas with a fan—

“Gimme! Gimme there!”

He scanned their faces as they thrust their hands in, looking for some semblance of his own. Of course he had set aside something for
them
—all the ones he knew were his, anyway: the girls down in Jersey, the boy out West, where there was air, and room. They were all well provided for. He took care of his own—

Unless there were others. Ones he didn’t know about—
his
children, living out on the street. When, irony of ironies, Nell could never give him one—

His groin kicked again, making him bend down to the children.

“That’s all, that’s all now, kiddies, you milked the man dry,” Photo Dave was shooing them away.

With a great effort he straightened up, moved on up Broadway as jauntily as he could, trying to ignore Photo Dave’s quizzical looks. Behind him the children scampered off, waving and hollering.

“Good-bye, Big Tim!”

“Big Tim, Big Tim!”

“I love you!”

He turned at that last cry. It seemed to him it came from a girl with curly black hair, who looked almost familiar. But then she was gone-then all the children were gone, disappearing down their holes and alleys, back to their unending game on the streets of New York.

Esther met him at the main gate of Dreamland by the Angel of Creation—its great wings spanning the whole width of the entrance arch, perfectly formed breasts pointing the way to the future. He was waiting for her at its foot, in a white summer suit with a kelly-green vest that looked as cool and elegant as an ice cream sherbet—gazing up at the angel’s exquisite teats.

Kid Twist grinned, and squeezed her hand when she came up, and she couldn’t help but grin back at him.

“I’m glad you came.”

“Didn’t you think I would?” she mocked him.

Inside, the park was just gearing up for the day, looking almost wholesome in the morning light. The pavement was pristine, the coasters making their first tentative whooshes around the tracks. A long line of the Dreamland cash girls filed by in their immaculate white academic caps and gowns, marching like so many novitiates to their registers.

“We have the whole day,” he said, and pulled her along.

They rode on the Alpine railway, past tiny Swiss chalets and frozen waterfalls, and pink snowy peaks. The little open cars shaped like sleighs, with bells that tinkled as they careened around the curves, climbed laboriously up the Starnbergersee. They plunged over—and a long, delighted cry rose from the women and children filling the cars ahead.

They rode in the back, the only couple on the train, squeezed into the childlike seats of their car. His hand was around her waist, dangling over her hip, brushing her waist and thighs.

They sped into a tunnel with a sign inscribed gratuitously no kissing allowed in this tunnel. As soon as they were in the dark she felt his hands on her, pulling her to him. He smelled like fine bay rum, and peppermints, and she wanted to laugh to think of her first kiss with the cockroach boss, grappling in his room of coats. She shut her eyes and kissed him back, ignoring the women and children shifting and giggling all around them.