City Of Fire Trilogy 1 - Dreamland (31 page)

But then the season shut down and he was laid off, just like the others, with not so much as a note from Bernstein in his final pay envelope, and Podhoretz and Kristol searched him at the door just like the machine girls to make sure he hadn’t tried to smuggle out any of the factory’s invaluable lint. He had to give up the room after that, and carry around all his possessions, and go back to sleeping in slung hammocks, or on the barroom floors, and the warm grates behind bakeries.

That was when he saw the felt wagon again.

He was just crossing Broome Street, and there it was—all but identical to the one that called every couple weeks at the Triangle. It was deserted, too—the carter and his assistants no doubt inside the factory, wrestling the scrap bins around—and in that instant he saw the golden opportunity he had always been sure was his.

Sure and steady as Ragged Dick himself, Joseph got up into the driver’s seat and flicked the reins. He didn’t give it a second thought, sliding into his life of crime as easily as he would bite into a white roll. It went slowly at first, for he had no idea of how to drive a horse and wagon—the wagon bucking and jerking down the street, little felt triangles spewing out into the gutter—but eventually, through luck or pluck, he was able to get them trudging through the densely packed, cobbled streets, guiding them to the headquarters of a felt dealer he knew on Great Jones Street.

“Where the hell’ja get this?”

The dealer, a huge, gotch-eyed slab of a man, stared up at him, suspicious as a cyclops.

“Heist it, didja? I should call the bulls right now—”

—but when Joseph offered him a price he knew was half the going rate for the cartful the man shrugged, and sent his own burly sons to unload it more quickly than they had ever loaded up the carts at the Triangle.

“Just make sure you dump the horse an’ wagon, an’ keep your mouth shut,” he grumbled, counting out the money.

That was the beginning. He left the emptied cart three blocks away, in front of a station house—the cops out front watching without the faintest curiosity while he stepped down and walked away into the crowds, leaving a perfectly good horse and wagon unhitched and unattended.

After that he took any wagon he could get his hands on. It wasn’t hard. They were all over the city, sitting there in the street unprotected, practically begging to be taken while their drivers hauled carpets down winding cellar stairs, teetered twenty-foot glass plates into barrooms, pausing on the fifth story to wipe their brows before carting a piano the rest of the way up a back fire escape.

He preferred felt carts because he knew the dealers, but he would take anything—redistributing,
rearranging
all the little pieces of the city. All it required was a moment to reconnoiter the situation, and an actor’s instinct to move into the driver’s seat with the weary aplomb of the regularly employed.

It was while hijacking a wagon that he first met Monk Eastman. He was driving a cartful of stolen celery up the Bowery near Chatham Square, early in the morning, when he spotted the crowd of cats and pigeons, peaceably fluttering and pacing about together. He stopped to look down—and saw the ugliest man he had ever seen in his life.

His nose was flattened, and his ears were chewed half off, and there was a neat pool of blood congealed around his head like a halo. He would have thought the man was dead if it had not been that his eyes were open, and his mouth puckered sardonically—as if he were not lying in a Bowery gutter but home in bed, measuring all the regrets of his life along the ceiling.

“You all right?” he asked.

“Eh,”
the man shrugged, his gaze still turned up to the sky. He was profoundly, awesomely ugly, short and thick, with no neck and veiny, pancake jowls, his hair sticking straight up off the point of his bullet head.

“You want a ride?”

“All right,” the man said, raising himself up on one elbow. “But da kits an’ da boids got to come, too.”

“All right,” Joseph shrugged back—since after all it wasn’t his wagon to begin with.

The man hopped up with surprising agility and started gathering up the animals around him, tucking the cats under his arms, the pigeons alighting on his shoulders as if he were Saint Francis of Assisi. Joseph leaned down to help him.

“Easy wit’ dem,” the man warned. “I take care a anybody what gets gay wit’ a kit or a boid.”

He straightened up, and Joseph noticed then there was blood still seeping through the white undershirt that was all he wore under his jacket. He casually covered the wound with his fingers.

“I t’ink maybe we should go to de Gouverneur Hospital,” he suggested, once he had deposited the birds and yowling cats in the back of the wagon and taken his place in the seat.

“Uh-huh.”

“Farshtinkener
Five Pointers. Dey caught me wit’out me irons. I got t’ree of ’em, but the last one had a pistol.”

“You’re shot?” Joseph gaped.

“Well, kid,” the man grinned. “He didn’t kiss me.”

Joseph flicked up the reins, starting the horses trotting toward the hospital, trying hard not to look at the oozing wound. Monk continued to grin at him, with his horrible, stubby brown teeth.

“Don’ worry, kid. Dis was a real
mitzvah
you done me.”

It was through Monk, in turn, that he met Gyp the Blood a week later, in the middle of the night. There was a knock on the door of the one-room, air shaft apartment he had been able to reclaim, and dazed with sleep he had opened it, not stopping to think who might be on the other side. Standing in the dingy hall before him was a man in an immaculate sky-blue suit, reeking of bay rum and hair pomade, and looking more immediately, palpably lethal than anyone he had ever seen before.

“Monk wants you t’come wit’ me,” he said.

Joseph hurried into his clothes and went with him unquestioningly through the milling nighttime crowds. At Lafayette Street the man swung onto a downtown trolley and Joseph followed him—still without a word passing between them about where they were going, or what they were doing.

He clung to the railing, ahead of him the trucks and wagons whifling past on all sides, people walking quickly across the street with little jerky motions. He stared into the car—full of leering, swaying sports and drummers. Fat, ringed fingers squeezing the knees of women with fixed and spectral faces

They reached Park Row, and the man in the sky-blue suit jumped off, Joseph doggedly following right behind. They hurried past the towering brick piles of the newspaper offices, the air thick with ink, windows blazing with light. The underground presses shaking the sidewalk beneath their feet; newsies and printer’s devils sleeping curled up, oblivious, on the grates.

They walked around a corner, then down a little alley off Ann Street, where the man pushed him through a dilapidated double door with the name doctor’s etched above it. Joseph staggered across the threshold into a barroom darker than the street outside, and tripped over something. A leg.

It went spinning woodenly across the floor, sock and shoe still attached. A beggar jumped down from the bar and ran over nimbly to shake a fist at him.

“Watch dat leg!
Watch dat leg!”

His guide shoved the beggar out of the way—and peering down through the grainy light of the bar Joseph could see that the floor was scattered with false legs and arms, crutches and slings, all closely watched by the fake cripples hunched around the room. They lay their good right arms on the bar like gross white worms; jabbing them back to life with needles, rubbing knee joints numb as real amputations after a long day bound up under their coats.

Above the bar he could make out a bit of crude, sanctimonious verse, carved onto a cruder plank, as much a threat as an entreaty:

His guide looked over significantly at the man behind the bar, and the man nodded back and pulled up a metal pail.

“What is it now?” he asked the bartender.

“Twen’y-six, Gyp,” the bartender told him, very respectfully. “Right now, anyways.”

“All right.”

The barman passed the pail over to Gyp. One of the fake crip beggars trying to grab it when he did, and spilling a swath of beer he could lick up from the counter in exchange for his beating. The bartender pushed him back.

“Get off! That ain’t the growler!”

The barman handed the bucket on over to Gyp, who immediately passed it over to Joseph.

“Here. Take this in back,” he told him—pointing to the dim outline of a door on the other side of the room.

Joseph peered down into the bucket. There was no beer, but something that sloshed like water, and smelled sharp and medicinal.

“What’s it about?” he asked.

“Do like I told ya! Give it to the corner of the man in the black trunks. You got that?”

“The black trunks.”

“That’s what I said.
Now!”

Gyp gave him a rough push toward the door, and Joseph stepped into an unlit hallway, painted black. It was darker even than the hold of the boat he had come over on, darker than anything he could have imagined and then he was afraid, but he groped his way down it, and finally through a door at the far end.

He came out at the top of a short stairs, where he looked down on a silent mob of men, writhing together like snakes. In the middle of the room was a ring laid out with sagging hemp ropes under a single, swaying lantern. Inside it the boxers wrestled and flailed away, one in red trunks, one in black, bodies sheathed in sweat and leaning into each other for support.

There was only the dimmest murmur from the men crowded in around them. They swayed and gestured, pumping their own fists furiously with each punch—gamblers and beggars, newspapermen and slummers in their evening clothes, all of them almost completely silent lest some chance honest cop hear the noise and break it up. An elegant gentleman in his shirtsleeves sat sketching the scene, sitting up in a high chair—the whole room so strangely quiet Joseph could hear the sound of his pencils against the pad.

“That’s it!”

A man in a vest in a neutral corner stepped forward, reading his pocket watch while a boy with him banged a padded spoon against the bottom of a frying pan. The referee moved between the fighters, and then the crowd broke apart, too, into little congregations, slapping down more money with the bookies.

Joseph came down the stairs and made his way through the crowd, unheeded. Only a weighty, dignified-looking man in the black-trunked boxer’s corner seemed to notice him at all, his eyes trained on Joseph as if he had been waiting for him the whole night.

Up close he could see the small wet smears of blood on the cornerman’s suit, as he kept working on his fighter. Massaging his arms and legs and sponging water over his head with the steady, continuous motions of a cat cleaning itself. Joseph put the bucket down—and the cornerman grabbed him by his shirt and pulled him up close.

“Tell
him,” he whispered fiercely. “Tell him next time he waits this long, he won’t have anyt’ing left to fix.”

He let go of his shirt and Joseph started to walk away, but the man grabbed him again, by his arm, his grip strong as iron.

“Not
yet,”
he hissed.

He stayed, unsure of what he was waiting for, while the cornerman kept watering down his fighter. He covered him over and over again with the sponge from his own pail of water—identical to the one Joseph had lugged in. Dipping the big gray sponge into the water, then over the fighter’s face, and back down in the water. Then, on his next pass, he dipped the sponge into the pail Joseph had brought—almost too fast for the eye to follow—and passed it this time not over his fighter’s face or chest, but the front of his gloves.

Then the sponge was back in his bucket, the cornerman tipping the whole pail over with his foot. For that instant it was exposed in the low, lurching light, and Joseph saw what he had brought: a green, brackish, evil-looking liquid. Then it was lost in the sawdust-matted floor, already soaked with sweat and blood.

“Look whach yer doin’, boy!” the cornerman snapped—a few eyes from the crowd already scrutinizing the spill suspiciously, more money silently changing hands.

Nothing went unobserved

“Now go get me some more water for the next round. Go—
now.
Up to the bar!”

He backed toward the stairs with the empty bucket, the silent crowd closing in around him. The boy banged the frying pan again, and the referee, a potbellied man in a bowler and a bow tie, stepped nimbly into the center of the ring and waved the fighters forward. Joseph turned and made for the stairs, looking back for a moment when he was at the top.

The two boxers staggered forward again, each man’s face a mass of welts and cuts, the bleeding only barely contained. The man in the red trunks ducked in, jabbing. All the man in black could do was flick a long, ineffectual blow to his face as he was moving backward—but suddenly his opponent stopped, his hands up around his eyes, stock still in the middle of the ring. The fighter in black moved in on him, looking suddenly renewed—

Joseph turned away and pushed through the door. In the blackness of the hall he heard the cheer go up that had been so long contained, savage and vicarious, a short, vicious bark of triumph.

He trotted back down the sightless hall, pushed open the door to the barroom and nodded to the handsome, deadly little man who stood by the bar, sipping a short beer. He held up the empty pail and Gyp nodded, listening to the distant cheer.

“All right,” he said. “All right.”

—and they were flying along the sidewalk again, around the corner back to Ann Street. Gyp shoved him into a cab, drew the shades after them, and said nothing all the way back to Monk’s place—sitting knee-to-knee across from him, cold, intelligent eyes level with his own through the darkness.