City Of Fire Trilogy 1 - Dreamland (48 page)

“Oh, the jails, Dave. By all means, the jails.”

“What about His Nibs?”

They had another meeting scheduled with the mayor. There was always another meeting with the mayor.

“First the jails, I think. Doesn’t our Savior tell us not to let a soul languish in jail?”

They cut back along the
Chasir Mark
on Hester Street, then up to Broome Street, where the new police headquarters floated like a dreadnought above the traffic.

The thing was five stories of solid granite, with marble trimmings and plenty of Grecian flourishes. Its classical grandeur, its sheer ponderousness, were supposed to establish once and for all the authority of the Law—gleaming white and pure. Inside, everything was very modern, very professional. There was a running track and a forensic-sciences laboratory and a Rogues’ Gallery and even a chauffeur’s waiting room.

It was yet another self-deception of the reformers: if you built something big and new enough, you could make the people to fit it. On the day they had moved over from the old headquarters, on Mulberry Street, Sullivan had watched dozens of cops waddling through the streets in their long, old-fashioned coats, hauling armfuls of all the old junk: spittoons, and framed photos of the old boys. The usual green regimental flag, with a gold harp, from the Fighting Sixty-ninth. Dusty, red-bound arrest books, dating back to Boss Tweed’s day. Soon it all looked like any other station house around the City, snug as Paddy’s pub.

“Help you there, gints?” one of the jolly cops behind the front desk came sauntering over. He was full of the barely contained exuberance of men who worked all day with other men, and did as they pleased. But even he pulled up a little, once he saw who it was.

“Mr. Sullivan!” he exclaimed, immediately so respectful Big Tim half expected him to pull at his forelock.

“Oh, I know who yer wantin’, sir. He’s down below. Buckley brought him in last night. Possession of a great old pistol—”

“Ah, now there’s fast work for you,” Big Tim told Photo Dave, before turning back to the sergeant.

“Very well, then, Sergeant—play Virgil to our Dante, an’ lead us down to him.”

The basement holding cells stunk of piss, and puke, and unwashed flesh, and down the middle of the stairs there was already a well-worn groove, where the turnkeys walked their charges. The inevitable Paddy legend had it that the place was haunted, but Big Tim tended to doubt it. The cells were depressingly mundane, like every other jail in every other station house in the world: blurred, desperate faces staring out at them from behind the bars. Big Tim tried not to look back, afraid he might see a constituent, or someone he simply pitied. There was no time today—

Before Teddy and Reform there had been fewer cells. Instead, each station had its own flophouse in the basement: a row of hard, whitewashed slats for beds. Clotheslines hung above a potbellied stove. The ubiquitous sign on the wall, commanding
NO SWEARING OR LOUD TALKING AFTER NINE O’ CLOCK
. On the worst winter nights there might be two hundred, even four hundred sleepers in a precinct, whole families sacked out around the stove.

The stoves smoked something terrible, to be sure, and the sheets and the blankets were a sickly yellow color, and everyone was locked in until the morning—but it still beat the Tombs, or the street grates. Then the Holies had decided that you had to commit a crime to end up in a police station: another arbitrary distinction, separating the poor from the criminal. Now the sheltering cells were filled with drunks, while families froze out on the street—

They came to the last and largest cell in the basement, deep in its shadows.

“Here he is—number 99. Best one in the house, just like you wanted.”

The sergeant hesitated before opening the door, and one look made Big Tim understand why. The prisoner sat poised on the edge of his narrow cell bunk, staring back at them. A compact young man, dressed up like a dude, but dangerous and mad as a caged panther.

“All right, you—I don’ want no nonsense outta ya now,” the police sergeant blustered rather unconvincingly. The young man in the cell said nothing, just stared back out as if he were measuring the distance to their jugulars.

Big Tim cleared his throat gruffly to break the spell, tipping the sergeant like a headwaiter.

“Very good, Liam. Leave us to have a little chat now.”

“Certainly, sir,” the copper said, snapping into action and moving to unlock the cell door—but not, Big Tim noticed, before he pulled out his truncheon. He didn’t blame the cop; the man would clearly have killed any of them as soon as look at them. He felt a little flutter of fear himself—but he squared his shoulders and strode into the cell like a lion-tamer, leaving Photo Dave outside to make sure they were not interrupted.

“Well, well. Lazar Abramowitz,” he said, needling the young gangster immediately.

“Gyp’s my cap, don’t flog me with it,” he snapped, angry but also surprised.

Big Tim had never known a gangster, Jewish, Irish, or Italian, who wanted to be known by his real name. They liked their brave, outlandish monickers—but most of all they didn’t want their mothers to know.

“Whatever you say, Gyp. Anyhow, possession of a weapon, that’s a serious charge.”

He sat down on the bunk, as close to Gyp as he could get. When he did, he marveled that the gangster’s whole body was trembling, as if enraged by the injustice of it all.

“You know that’s a wheezer!” he burst out. “I do my work with a bully, or a neddy. I need a pop, I have the moll carry it. You know that as well as I do!”

“Uh-huh. Well, I can’t wait to hear you tell
that
to the jury. I’m sure it’ll make a very pretty defense.”

Gyp lapsed into a sullen silence, and Big Tim noticed in the dim light of the cell that his thick, handsome head of hair was matted with blood and makeshift bandages.

“My, my, did Buckley do that to you?” Big Tim tsked. “By God, he’s an enthusiastic man with a nightstick. You could take a few pointers—”

“That
vitzer
? He didn’t do more’n tap me. It was some other lump of horse, with a shovel,” Gyp snorted. “But I’m gonna see to him—”

“All right, now,” Big Tim snapped, suddenly grabbing Gyp by his red silk cravat with one hand, and resting his other forearm on his head wound, leaning in with just enough pressure to make the gangster wince despite himself. The man’s eyes spun with rage—but Sullivan thought he saw just enough caution, just enough sense to hold him back.

“There’s a certain t’ing I asked you to do, an’ the hour’s grown late.”

“I know,” hissed Gyp. “I’ll do it. Just as soon as I take care of—”

“There’s no time! Do whatever you like to Kid Twist or any of your other hoodlum pals after you’re finished. I don’t want to hear any more about you an’ your Lenox Avenue boys cavortin’ down the Grand Duke’s, or getting the sweet Jesus kicked out of you at a rat-baiting, for Christ’s sakes. You’ll do as you been told, an’ do it now, or I’ll see to it you do a full stretch up in Ossining.”

He flung Gyp roughly back against the cell wall, deliberately banging his head, and jumped up from the bunk—daring the gangster to come after him. Infuriated, Gyp started to push himself up, and for a split second Big Tim thought he had mistook his man and that he might actually go for his throat. Only at the last moment did he manage to restrain himself and settle back into his cot, glaring up at Sullivan with those cold, restless panther’s eyes.

“Good,” Big Tim told him. “At least you got that much sense left in your idea pot.”

Gyp nodded, his face a dour mask now.

“All right, then. Up wit’cha—we can’t have an innocent man like you takin’ up the taxpayers’ cell space. The Simon Pures wouldn’t go for it.”

They took care of the paperwork at the desk, where Big Tim paid off the sergeant. A small fine, or the bail money for a vagrant, or a bribe—he didn’t even bother to ask. It was yet another false distinction, obscuring the central fact of the matter: you paid money to get out of jail.

When they walked out of the station, Gyp scuttled quickly away without another word, lost in the sidewalk crowd within seconds.

“What, no thank you?” Big Tim called mockingly after him.

He got no response, but he was sure he had been heard. Whether he would be obeyed or not was another matter.

“Mind what I said now!”

“Ah, but he’s a runt,” Photo Dave said, shaking his head as he watched Gyp stride off into the city. “No John Morrisey, or Bill the Butcher, is he?”

“No.”

“But then they’re all small these days. Little runts. Why, I remember they used to come six feet at least, an’ built like a trolley car. They just don’t make gangsters like they used to.”

“No, they don’t.”

They descended the police station steps, Photo Dave Altman still reminiscing about the great clubbers and eye-gougers of his youth. It was true enough, though: they were all relatively small, quick men nowadays, adept with a blade, or a pistol. Thoroughly unintimidating at first glance, but more serious and deadly than ever.

When Tim had run with a gang himself they had seemed like mere boys, by contrast—Googy Corcoran and Baboon Connolly and Red Rocks Farrell and all the rest of the Whyos. They’d even had a price list printed up:
PUNCHING, TWO DOLLARS; EAR CHAWED OFF, FIFTEEN; DOIN THE JOB, $100 AND UP
.

Damned foolishness, all of it, and it was only luck that he had had the good sense to move up to politics, before he ended up in Sing Sing himself, or stretched out in a cold city morgue.

He had been saved, in the end, by another ward heeler, not much different from himself. Tammany always needed the gangs—to provide muscle at the polls, and to squeeze money out of the businessmen. To perform certain unsavory tasks such as this one. But they had to be controlled, to be kept under a few wraps, or they would be of no help at all.

It wouldn’t do to have the tail wagging the dog, which was why he had got his gun law passed. He’d made big, weepy speeches for it up in Albany, even got his name attached to it: the Sullivan Law, making it a felony for a citizen to carry a concealed weapon.

It had driven the reformers crazy. They couldn’t figure out his angle, though it was simple enough for those who had eyes to see. This way, a cop could plant a pistol on anyone they wanted to bring into line. The gangsters tried sewing up their pockets, or having their women carry the pieces, but as usual they missed the big picture. The point was having the law on the book; they could always be cold-cocked first and the pistols produced later on, down at the station house in the cops’ own good time.

That was the way of things. That was the way it had to be, with the Organization in charge. And that was why Handsome Charlie Becker and Beansy would both have to go.

Still, Big Tim couldn’t help but shiver, to think of the restless animal he had just let loose on poor Herman. He could just see the wide, handsome, fleshy face: lips full and red as an actor’s, small black eyes always moist with emotion. The cleft chin no doubt trembling a little with emotion, as he dictated his story to the district attorney:

It is purely a matter of friendship

Her mother would say that she was always meant to be a whore, that it was marked on her by that woman on the courtyard, and no matter what Sadie said she would not believe otherwise.

The trouble was that the woman refused to keep her curtains closed. She had her customers right there, on the narrow, white pallet, one story down and directly across from their bedroom window. Sadie and her sisters could see everything, even through the dirt-streaked glass.

The shuffling parade of men, heads down, still wearing their hats. Some of them touching her tentatively, some of them falling on her in one clumsy rush, pushing her down on the pallet. Fast or slow, skinny or fat, as different as each individual snowflake—though all of their things were so much the same.

Sadie and her sisters thought the woman was very beautiful, with her deep black hair and very pale skin—pale enough for the blue veins to show through everywhere but very delicate, very fine. They watched her as she lay sleeping in the morning, the sheets kicked off, lying flat out naked on her back, in a dead sleep. Her arms flung over her head. Her slowly heaving breasts, and the patch of black hair down at her thighs, a little comfortable flesh around her hips, bulging out from her fine, plump bottom the men seemed to like so much.

Her mother forbade them to watch. She was always very careful, alone with three girls, too chary even to take a
roomerkeh.
Yet when she came back from her job at the umbrella factory, pressing the spidery metal frames into their taut canvas sheaths, she would find them all at the window of their bedroom, gazing raptly down into the courtyard.

There was nothing she could do to get them to stop. She tried punishing them. She tried changing her bedroom for theirs, even though it was much too small for three growing girls—but still, whenever she was out, they would sneak across and peer out her window at the whore below.

She finally confronted the woman. From the same window, they could see her—their little mama—arguing agitatedly with the beautiful, dark-haired lady. She implored her to stop, she threatened to tell the police. She even offered to sew up curtains for the
kurveh
herself. But none of it did any good.

“Who are you to tell me my business?” the woman argued. “It’s my home, I can do what I want.”

“But my daughters. It’s my daughters who are seeing such a thing!”

“So? Who are your daughters, that they should live like Rockefellers? Better they should see how life is!”

“But why this, so soon? It’s not decent—”

“Better they should see how I have to live!” the woman had persisted madly, obstinately. “Better everybody should see how I have to earn my bread in this world, than to hide behind their curtains!”