City Of Fire Trilogy 1 - Dreamland (44 page)

That was when the lights went out. There was a string of bright flashes, the pistol shots incredibly loud in the close little room, and then they were all racing up the stairs and out into the street. So that when the police finally arrived and turned the lights back on there was only the Bottler, lying over the painted ace, shot through the heart, and who was to say who did anything?

They turned the Bottler’s share over to the Grabber, just to make sure that one was pacified, and Kid sent a huge green wreath to the funeral, and wore a black armband to the stuss game for the next two weeks, which everyone agreed was a thoughtful and considerate gesture.

But the Bottler was a Five Pointer, so the price had to be paid. The next week they found Denny Holt dead as a mackerel over on Avenue A, and then Matty Holt swore revenge, and the war was on—

Kid stood under the elevated, sticking his arm out around the pillar, pointing blindly across the street in the general direction of where the Five Pointers were. He squeezed the trigger, felt the pistol jerk—laughed out loud at the joy of firing a gun in the middle of the street.

Bullets pinged all around him like a Bowery shooting gallery—ricocheting off the el pylons, smashing windows, bouncing off the trains above. Citizens coming home from work screamed and tumbled down the elevated stairs, scrambling for cover, the gangs still blazing away.

A flying squad of cops marched determinedly down Allen Street, tapping their nightsticks along the manhole covers. A hail of bullets from all sides sent them running back down the street, their high hats tumbling after them. The shooting went on into the night—the gangs intoxicated with their control of the street, boys from the Hudson Dusters and the Gophers and just plain freelancers joining in, until the darkened street was wreathed in smoke, and the air was pungent with the smell of powder. Bullets whizzing past his ear, knocking birds off the telephone wires, winging off fire escapes and trash cans and trolley cars. The whole neighborhood pinned down in their homes, nobody able to sleep or venture out from under their beds—until finally, well past midnight, another, much larger column of cops came barreling down the street from the Rivington station house, now firing their revolvers as they came.

The gangsters slipped away, quiet as smoke, back down their familiar alleys and courtyards. Leaving a few of their number curled up like old dogs on the pavement for the sanitation men to clear away in the morning.

The trouble was that this one was too big to cover over with a few arrests and a few dollars to the police reporters. The Hearst papers had ahold of it, and too many citizens were outraged. Big Tim and Mr. Murphy himself had felt obliged to call a meeting at the Palm with Monk and Paul Kelly, the elegant little I-tie who led the Five Pointers, and it was agreed that Monk and Kelly would settle their differences in a boxing match, to be held on neutral ground up in the Bronx.

“This’ll be a clean fight, by the rules,” Big Tim warned.

“You ain’t got no worries dere. I done some sparrin’ in my day,” Monk told him.

“I done some myself,” Kelly retorted. “You know I once beat Benny Leonard—”

“Dat’s a goddamned lie, because Benny’s a Yid, which means a wop like you wouldn’t have a tooth left in his mouth if you really fought him, instead a in your dream world—”

“Shut up,” Big Tim told them brusquely. “You think I don’t know the two a yas can fight? Why d’ya think I chose this? It’ll be a draw, by the way. You two’re such experts, I expect you to make it look good.”

“What da hell!”

“I can take that yegg—”

“That’s it!”

Big Tim slammed his hand on the table for silence.

“I want you two bummies to carry each other. Bang away on each udder all you like. But that’s the end of it, you got me? I need you both for the election. Somebody wins, this goes on, and if it does I’ll come down on both your necks.”

The Bronx car barn was pungent with the smell of straw and old leather, motor oil and horse piss. The makeshift bleachers filled with cheering, shouting gangsters and their mabs. Big Tim himself seated down front, with two solid rows of cops—just to make sure everything came off like it was supposed to.

It was a fight they would talk about forever after on the East Side. The two gangsters battering each other back and forth across the ring like a pair of bantam roosters: Kelly a little slimmer, a little swarthier, a slightly more elegant boxer. Monk making up for what he lacked in finesse with ferocious, bull-like rushes across the ring. Both of them splitting lips, knocking out teeth, closing each other’s eyes to dark little slits. Until finally, having pummeled each other for more than three hours and convinced all present with the sheer magnificence of their struggle, they collapsed at the exact same moment in a heap—still trying weakly to punch and gouge each other where they lay on the blood-splattered canvas.

Then their men, shouting and weeping openly at their splendid performance, had lifted them both up and carried them out of the car barn, into a pair of beautifully appointed carriages. Releasing the horses and drawing their champions back downtown themselves, all the way to their respective brothels.

Two weeks later, before their wounds were barely healed, Big Tim threw a ball for them all up at the Haymarket, in the no-man’s-land of the Tenderloin. Monk and Kelly met at the center of the old hall and shook hands, before their devoted minions, and after that they sat up in their boxes like a pair of pashas, surrounded by their molls and their lieutenants, presiding regally over the grand march of the Eastmans and the Five Pointers.

But it couldn’t last. It never had before, and there was no reason it would now, and soon the two gangs were black-jacking each other up blind alleys, cutting themselves up in Water Street dives, and firing pistols down crowded sidewalks.

“We’ll wipe up de earth wit’ dose guys,” Monk boasted. “No mick or wop is ever gonna run de Lower East Side again”—but by then the election was over, and people were fed up with the gangs. The pois removed their protection, and the cops were looking out for anything to run them in on.

They got Monk one night up in Times Square, for trying to roll a drunken young gentleman for his calfskin gloves. He had spotted the gent staggering up Seventh Avenue, with a lushroller already on his tail, and the gloves as fine a piece of goods as he had ever known, soft and yellow as butter. But the bruiser he took for a lushroller was actually a Pinkerton detective, hired by the sport’s daddy to look after him, and equipped with a police whistle and a big horse pistol. It was just the mistake they had been looking for, and before it was all over Monk found himself stuck away in the Tombs, with bail denied and every door now shut to him. Kid had gone up to Fourteenth Street with Gyp, to plead for him at Tammany Hall, but even Big Tim wouldn’t hear it this time.

“Who’s gonna toss your ballots in the East River next time you need help with Mr. Hearst?” Gyp had asked him menacingly.

“Anyone, lads, anyone,” Sullivan replied, seemingly unperturbed by Gyp’s impertinence—sounding almost sad about it all. “That’s just it—I can get anyone what wants a favor from me, or needs my protection. An’ I can get ’em to do it wit’out turnin’ all of Jewtown into Dodge City, there’s the rub.”

“What makes you think we’ll stand for it?” Kid challenged him.

“Oh, my boys, my loyal
bhoys.
D’ya think any of us is just free to do as we please? I got to answer to Mister Moiphy, an’ he’s got to answer to the financial interests, and the governor, an’ the voice of the people. Even Jesus Christ Hisself only sits on the right hand of God the Father Almighty, an’ don’ think the Holy Ghost ain’t lookin’ to take His place.”

There was talk about springing Monk before his trial could take place—a big, dramatic breakout from the Tombs, or the courtroom—but that’s all it was, was talk. Big Tim saw to it that he was too well guarded for anyone to get ideas, and even if they had sprung him, there was no place to go—not with the big man’s protection lifted. The judge gave Monk ten years in Sing Sing, and when the news came down Paul Kelly himself was quoted in the papers as saying it was a great shame, and that he, personally, would pay ten thousand dollars to see Monk free—though somehow the money was never forthcoming.

The day Monk was sent up, all the Eastmans who had stayed loyal to him gathered down by the Chambers Street ferry to see him off—though the booly dogs hustled him out of the wagon and onto the Sing Sing boat too quickly for anyone save for the news photographers to get more than a glimpse. They had waited around anyhow, standing in the rain, until the prison barge was loaded with its sad cargo and shoved off. And that night back in the dance hall, there were many toasts drunk to his health, and the waiters led them through one slow, dirgelike chorus of “The Boston Burglar” after another:

—until there wasn’t a dry eye left in the house, and everyone was having a pretty good time.

Not that
he
forgot Monk. Every week, at least at first, Kid would take the Hudson line up to Ossining, to bring him some smokes and maybe a new fantail pigeon or a pouter he thought he might like. There was a turnkey they could
shmeer
so he let him right into Monk’s cell, and they sat on his bunk and jabbered about the boys, and old times, and his chances for parole. But invariably, after a few minutes their conversation would peter out, and both men would find themselves staring at their shoes.

“It ain’t so bad, Kid,” Monk rasped, sardonic as he had been when Kid first saw him, lying shot in the gutter. “I got me boids t’rough de window, an’ dere’s even a kit or two down in the kitchen. I lived t’rough worse already.”

But Kid noticed every time he came how much lumpier and yellower Monk looked in his baggy prison stripes—how low, and damp, and lightless his cell was. It was depressing, and soon he was going up less frequently, only every few weeks or so, then every few months, then he barely had time to see him at all.

After that, after the big shootout and Monk’s arrest, it was the end of the big gangs. Paul Kelly and most of his Five Pointers laid low for a while, and then they turned straight, or went into the real estate business. Kid and Gyp and anyone else divvied up the Eastmans, and fought over their rackets. The last time he saw them was huddled under the East River dump:

Above their heads the leavings of a city spilled down the wooden platforms and into the river, where it wound around Corlears’ Hook. They could hear the ragpickers and the bonepickers, the coal dusters and the hair weavers and the dog renderers, methodically digging and scratching their way through the teeming shore.

They had carved out their own space, down below the dump platform, among the piles of beer cans piled up as proudly as skulls: seven or eight men with boys’ faces, wearing bowler hats and black suits that were too big for them. Dicing over the scraps from a break-in job: a few cheap shirtwaists, a rhinestone necklace, some cuff links. All the possessions of a lifetime, which might bring them ten or twenty cents apiece from a fence.

Kid stood up and started to walk away. He went slowly, picking out a path, careful not to cut himself on the rusty can lids, sharp as razors. He just stood up, and walked away, with no good idea of where he was going or what he would do, but moving on. They were too busy with their dice game to notice at first. Gyp saw him, of course—nothing got by him—and he nudged one of them, and then he nudged another one, until they were all watching him make his way out through the garbage.

Kid looked back when he was a good twenty or thirty yards away, and saw them all there, still staring out at him from under the low-beamed wooden platform of the dump, their faces as shy and wary as rabbits. They turned back, one by one—going back to the dice game, to the bit of junk they were appraising, to the cans of beer they were drinking, soon to be added to the sea of empty tin cans all around them.

Spanish Louie was tired of waiting. Kid could tell. He paced and moped all day, occupying himself only by endlessly brushing up his sombrero and his black studded flamenco pants and jacket. Tsking like some
yenta
at the white ranges of salt that grew along them.

“Lemme go back, Kid. I can fix things—I know I can. Lemme go back, Kid,” he pleaded, over and over again, and Kid might just have let him—save that he couldn’t think of any possible way it
could be
fixed.

“Uh-huh. You can make it so’s Gyp the Blood’ll forget about bein’ hit over the head with a coal shovel?”

“You’ll see. We can talk to Big Tim about it. He’s the big
macher.
He’ll fix it up.”

“And what about the Grabber? Don’t you still owe him over that racket?”

The mere mention of the Grabber made even Spanish Louie desist for a moment—the jaunty, idiot’s grin fading from his face like the spray salt melting off their window. But only for a moment.

“C’mon, I gotta get back, Kid,” he kept begging. “I got business to attend to.”

“Yah. I know what you got, you got a
kurveh
an’ a
miesse meshina
waitin’ for you, that’s what you got.”

“Don’ be like that.
Kine hora,
Kid—there’s ain’t nothin’ ever been done that can’t be fixed.”

“That’s where you’re wrong, Louie. That’s where they lie to ya: nothin’ that’s been done
can
ever be fixed. Not really.”