City Of Fire Trilogy 1 - Dreamland (27 page)

“You sound like papa,” he said bitterly. “They’re the beasts. Get out now, before they devour you.”

“And be kept by you? Like your other ladies?”

“You think they won’t? You think they won’t eat you up ‘til there’s nothing left?”

“Lazar—”

She held out her arms to him, in that same gesture—the same insufferable, helpless pity. He went down the stoop, away from her, and began walking back up Orchard Street. The wound along his scalp throbbing, and hating her, hating himself, most of all hating the old man—

He would make her see Even though she would never forgive him for it

“Okay. You think so? You just wait an’ see.”

He waved to her as he walked away, his open hand folding into a fist as he went.

“I’ll prove it to you. Just wait an’ see I don’t.”

“ ‘Girls in Their Nightgowns’! ‘French High Kickers’! ‘The Soubrettes’ Picnic’!”

The Little Little Napoleon stared down uncomprehendingly at the piece of paper before him.

“A flirt,” Sullivan said helpfully. “A coquette.”

“I know what a soubrette is!”
thundered the mayor. “It’s filth, is what it is! Undermining the moral character of our city!”

Big Tim settled back into the sofa between Photo Dave and Sarsaparilla Reilly. It was beginning to look like another one of those days when the mayor pretended he had never heard of politics.

“Look at these!” McClellan commanded, holding up a sheaf of photographs—and to Big Tim’s amusement both Sarsaparilla and Photo Dave craned their heads forward, hoping to catch a glimpse of some naughty soubrettes in action. To their infinite disappointment the photos were only the front of moving picture parlors, and the Automatic Vaudeville nickelodeon on Fourteenth Street.

“Do you see? Do you
see?”

“Yes, I see,” Big Tim said calmly.

“Next to everyone of these establishments is a
saloon.
Most of them with a
common entrance,
no less!”

“Sure dogs will have fleas, yer honor.”

And men would not know how to get a drink, or find a whore, unless they dropped in a nickel to watch the tiny, flickering image of a girl in her nightgown and bare feet.

“We must crush them, then.
We must give this dog a proper bath, sir!”

Big Tim sighed. The man had an unnatural obsession with the moving pictures. Big Tim had his own reservations about the movies and the nickelodeons but it hadn’t stopped him from investing in a whole chain of them with Fox and Loew. They were inevitable, the movies, and he never believed in trying to stop anything that was inevitable. Man was born to trouble, and it was not the part of politics to keep the sparks from flying upward.

He had to admit that the movies were the best way to lie yet invented. Newspapers lied, but nobody took them very seriously. Photographs lied much better. His own mother, to the day she died, had kept at her bedside some spiritualist photo of his father’s shade, hovering protectively above her.

Yet even photographs lacked the vital element of animation. The movies were
real
—as real as life. What couldn’t you sell people with such a device? Out in the Sunken Gardens at Feltman’s, he had watched the audiences flinch when a gun was fired, or a train came hurtling at them on the screen. No wonder Hearst was already reaching for this new marvel—you could create any reality you wanted with it.

“Do you hear me? We must close these vice pits, once and for all!” the Little Little Napoleon was still expounding, dark eyes flashing fiercely.

Leave it to Tammany to choose the scion of a well-known bust for mayor

Well, the Democracy was a forgiving institution. Its heroes included all the spectacular failures: Stuart and Emmet, Tone and Parnell, Kossuth and Mazzini. Only the most tragic exiles, and the greatest uncrowned kings, and the men who said the most beautiful things from the gallows.

McClellan, at least, was even more handsome than his dashing father, and just as formidable in appearance: square-jawed, clean-shaven face; cold, aristocratic eyes. He
looked
like the very model of a mayor, which was all that Tammany required and not a drop more.

There was no controlling him sometimes—like the day they opened the new subway system. The mayor was only supposed to start up the first train, but he had insisted on keeping the helm and driving it all the way to Grand Central himself. The train bucking and jerking wildly, pitching the notables about in their cars until all the politicians, and the society ladies, and the ambassadors and the generals and the great money men were puking in the aisles.

“The nickelodeons were bad enough, but
parlors?
Young people of both sexes, sitting together in the dark? Where will it end?”

Sullivan felt suddenly weary.

“Do you want us to give up the boodle from the movies then? Not to mention the saloons. Shall we give it all up? Hand it over to Mr. Hearst, along with a whole new subject to git up on his high horse about? Or wasn’t the last race close enough for you?”

He meant to hit home with that. McClellan had only just beaten the newspaper prince last time out, and that was with the boys tossing entire ballot boxes into the East River. Yet now the mayor put on his finest airs, literally turning his face away from Big Tim.

“I should like to think that my office rests on firmer ground than that,” he said loftily, gazing out the delicate Georgian windows at what appeared to be a squirrel’s nest high in the trees of City Hall Park.

“Ah, so it’s like that, is it? Planning to run against
us
again, are you, George? Well, it worked a treat last time.”

It was Mr. Murphy who had come up with the idea. The man was a genius, even if he did look like a country parson, and not a very bright one at that. He and Big Tim and all the other Tammany sachems had ensconced themselves conspicuously on the second floor of Delmonico’s. There they sat each day lunching in a blood-red room, on a magnificent table with four carved tigers’ paws, summoning the rest of the City’s pols and money men before them.

THE COLOSSUS OF GRAFT
! Hearst’s headlines had screamed:
WHAT GOES ON IN THE SCARLET ROOM OF MYSTERY???!! LOOK OUT MURPHY! IT’S A SHORT STEP FROM DELMONICO’S TO SING SING
!

McClellan’s role had been to run
against
the Colossus of Graft. It was the ultimate trick: Tammany running against Tammany. The mayor had hired on a Reform police commissioner, and stuck the cops in sharp new uniforms, and fired a few decrepit old clerks. Meanwhile Mr. Murphy had released anguished statements about Benedict Arnolds, and the unkindest cut of all, and the sharpness of serpents’ teeth. And the day after the votes were in, it had been business as usual.

“I am the mayor of the city!” McClellan harrumphed to Sullivan now, with all the indignation he could muster. “You will address me properly.”

“You’re
our
mayor, and
we
have a real problem on our hands,” Big Tim snapped. “Not the fact that grown men like to look at pretty girls in their underwear. We need you to squash this t’ing, an’ squash it right now, before it gets even more out of hand.”

“You mean Rosenthal?”

McClellan cocked his handsome head at him, like a curious terrier.

“It would be improper for me to interfere in any way. That’s the district attorney’s responsibility now!”

“George, George. Do ya really think anyone’s gonna go quietly? Just to git you another term?”

“Then they must be ripped out, root and vine!” the mayor declaimed, slapping his desk for emphasis. “Let the chips fall where they may! We must wipe the slate clean!”

“Ah, George. It’s more of a mandrake root, this one—a root in the shape of a man, and one that screams when you pull it out. Face facts: if Beansy Rosenthal keeps hollerin’ to the D.A., there’s bound to be an investigation—an’ I don’t mean the usual, blue-ribbon panel of distinguished citizens wit’ well-trimmed beards, revealin’ to a stunned public that policemen take bribes an’ bars stay open after hours. It’ll go deep this time—there’s no tellin’ where it’ll end if we don’t put a stop to it now.”

“I cannot risk the integrity of my office. That’s all there is to it!”

Big Tim stood and moved over to the mayor, suddenly hovering over him.

“It never does to play the same hand a second time around, you know,” he said softly.

“I’m the mayor of this city!”

“Uh-huh,” said Big Tim, gesturing to Dave and Reilly that it was time to go.

“That you are. And as such you’re made of clay, and another can be fashioned in your image. G’day.”

He gave a little tip of his straw boater as he left the room, leaving the Little Little Napoleon still blustering in his wake.

“Jay-sus, didja ever see anyt’ing like that?”

Big Tim smiled as they cantered down the front steps of the City Hall.

“Oh, but you told him, Tim!”

“You showed him his duty, Dry Dollar.”

“Oh, but he’s a pip! Didja ever see him at his rallies?”

Of course they had, but they wanted him to tell it, their faces grinning and eager around him.

We are a people enchanted by stories

“—he’d always make sure to have a plant in the crowd. And at just the right moment, the man would flog hizzoner like a real heckler:

“ ‘Speak to us in our own language!’ the plant would yell out. An’ people would boo, an’ McClellan would look uncertain, like he didn’t know if he could do it.

“ ‘Speak to us in our own language!’ the cull would yell out again, an’ pretty soon more people would take it up—in Italian, or German, or French, whatever they was: ‘Speak to us in our own language!’

“And then he would straighten up an’ launch right into the most beautiful speech you ever heard. Oh, marvelous, marvelous! Like he was makin’ it up right there. Italian, or German, or goddamned Mandarin Chinee. The most gorgeous, elegant stuff you ever heard in your whole life, whatever the hell it was. He’d memorized every word the night before, but oh! Sweet Jesus, it was a piece of work!”

The three men stopped to shake with laughter. They had come around the City Hall now, and stood at the center of all the world that was worth knowing. Behind them were the towering, red-brick buildings of newspaper row, Hearst’s and Pulitzer’s kingdoms. Over to the east was the white new Municipal Building, and the great bridge rising across the river. And directly in front of them, squatting behind the elegant City Hall like a beggar woman behind a lady, was the Tweed Courthouse—The Building They Never Stopped Building.

Tweed had dreamed it up after the Civil War, and it represented the apotheosis of his genius. He had contracted the work out to his usual cronies, for the usual kickbacks. When the goo-goos had squawked about what a shoddy job it was, Tweed had simply handed out new contracts, to more cronies, for more kickbacks—the circles of corruption and mutual benefit spreading ever wider.

By the time they finally locked him away in the Tombs they had ordered up enough theoretical carpet to circumnavigate the globe, and enough brooms to sweep it clean, and enough paint to give it two good coats. And there still wasn’t a roof on the thing.

There was brilliance,
he couldn’t help admiring; thinking with admiration.
Standing before it like Aristotle contemplating a bust of Homer—

“How ’bout we go in, shake a stick with old G.W.?” Photo Dave suggested hopefully, but Big Tim just grunted. The mere mention of the man brought on the twinge in his groin again.

“No, I think today I can spare meself the story of how George Plunkitt created the moon, an’ the stahrs, an’ the seven planets in three days, paddin’ it all out to six wit’ honest graft,” he told them.

“You go on if you want, though—the both a ya. I’ll find me own way home.”

“Thanks, Dry Dollar.”

“See you back there.”

They moved off apologetically but quickly, anxious to be inside, swapping more stories.

We are a people enchanted by stories

Down on the first floor of the courthouse, placed strategically next to the men’s washroom, George Washington Plunkitt sat like a king on his bootblack stand. A canopy of American flags and framed Tammany chieftains on the wall behind him, puffing on his cigars and telling one story after another about Croker and his race horses, and Black Pete Sweeney, and Honest John Kelly.

Plunkitt didn’t actually own the stand, though he might as well have, for all the hours he spent there since The McManus had ousted him. He was an old Tammany district leader from up in the Fifteenth, cannier than most, and richer than Midas. At one point he had managed to get himself made magistrate, alderman, supervisor, and state senator, all at the same time, and raked in the money.

The trouble was George Plunkitt had never been able to resist showing off, and he had got some newspaperman to write up his windy monologues on practical politics in a book. Just more hot air, most of it, but it had attracted plenty of attention, and Big Tim didn’t think it was wise.

In the men’s room behind G.W., he knew, in back of the last urinal, lived a gigantic cockroach. Sullivan had seen its antennae for years, whenever he went in to take a leak—the two stalks, maybe six inches long, wavering just above the porcelain; as chary as any good district leader.

That was all he ever saw of it: Just the two antennae— and many a time he had been seized with the urge to grab those two wavering stalks, drag the giant roach out, and crush it on the cold, tiled floor.

But in all those years he never had. No doubt it was many different roaches by now, whole generations of roaches carrying on at their post, but he would never know for sure. Some things were better left unseen.