City Of Fire Trilogy 1 - Dreamland (5 page)

At least the newsie had got out with him—at least the boy was safe. Breathless, Kid leaned down to the child with his big wondering eyes, huge flat cap pulled down over his head, and clapped a hand on his shoulder.

“All right, kid, you’re safe now.”

The little newsie looked back up at him, his blue beard starting to show through his soot-covered face.

“Who’s a kid?” he said, in a voice like pounded gravel.

I hid them out at Coney, in the Tin Elephant’s arse. Louie—the one who looked like an evening of Spanish passion dances—flagged down a hansom cab and I told the driver to head for Brooklyn. He peered down closely at us from the box—a tall, wraithlike figure under the Bowery el—and tapped his whip respectfully against his hat.

There was no doubt he would sell us as soon as he got back. We ditched the cab in Brooklyn Heights; the driver’s mouth turned down in dismay even though we tipped him handsomely. We walked a few blocks, past McCooey’s grand, futile city hall, then swung over on Joralemon and down the handsome, brownstoned streets, quiet as a country village.

Behind us, somewhere, we could hear the single, muffled clip-clop of the cab—trying to follow, looking for us. We dodged down an alley, then took another hansom back past Prospect Park and the Parade Grounds. Then we walked again: down a new avenue they had named after Coney, even though it seemed as far away as one of the islands of the Malays.

There was nothing around us. They had razed all the Irish shantytowns, and the old Negro villages that used to spring up along the flatlands like spring mushrooms after a rain. Now there was nothing but the rubbled ground—the blocks-to-be already carved out into tidy squares, neat little signs announcing the pretentious English names of the neighborhoods: Kensington and Borough Park, Bensonhurst and Gravesend, and on past them, trudging all the way out over that barren, optimistic landscape until we reached Coney Island.

I took them straight out to the old Tin Elephant. I could have put them up in my town—after all, I had a palace!—but they would have stood out like, well, like two sore thumbs.

Fortunately, even Coney Island has never been short on places where you could hang yourself in complete solitude and anonymity. It was easy to get a room in the Elephant’s arse at that hour. It was almost dawn by the time we got there, and the last tricks of the night were just stumbling out, hats pulled down over their eyes, reeking of sausage, and gin, and bed sweat.

The whores were still up, washing themselves in their room basins. We could hear them calling, each to each, as we climbed the winding, spiral staircase; lovely, bright voices, twittering like songbirds, happy to be at the end of the night. Though it was at this hour, too, that they tended to kill themselves, when all the sensation of the early evening—the promise of the brightly lit parlor, and the piano music downstairs and the smell of a first, freshly poured beer—had metamorphosed into nothing more than one more grunting, sweaty, two-hundred-fifty-pound brush salesman. One of the songbirds’ voices would be missing, and they would find her in her room, hung with her own kimono sash or doused with opium.

I took my new friends back to the last room—the one where I used to live, before I persuaded Marty Brinckerhoff to build The Little City for me and mine. Some mad predecessor to Brinckerhoff had put it up thirty years before, back when that sort of thing was the rage: an entire hotel constructed in the image of an elephant. Complete with tusks and a trunk, an observation deck up in its howdah, shops and penny arcades and entire shows and dance halls jammed into its immense legs. At night its yellow eyes shined out over the boardwalk and the ocean, some rough beast lurking amidst the more respectable hotels.

It had been slowly chipped away over the years, like everything else at Coney: a wonder surpassed by many other wonders, its rooms filled up with whores and other human flotsam. I had lived in my little room with only the bed, a basin, a table and chair I sawed off myself—the management didn’t care much what you did, so long as you paid every week—and the black steamer trunk I had hauled through thirty seasons of grand expositions and international spectaculars and other such degradations.

It was too noisy to actually sleep at night, with the mabs and their customers. The tin roof broiled when the sun was out, and it rang like hammers on an anvil when it rained. Fortunately, I had work: barker for a Son of Ham act among the Luna Park sideshows:

“Hit the nigger Hit the nigger in the head Three balls for the price of five Three balls and a big prize if you can hit the nigger in the head!”

Luke, the poor, addled Negro they had for the act, would stick his head through a crude yellow drawing of the moon, and grin a great, toothless grin at the crowd. It was a terrifying sight: his old prizefighter’s head, gnarled as an apple branch, odd lumps and contusions sticking up on all sides. Let’s face it, you could never get a man to do such work if he wasn’t more than a little punch-drunk already.

It wasn’t hard work—for me, anyway. I didn’t have to do very much, and how quickly and viciously the baseballs would start to fly! Real, hard-cored baseballs, too, tight as the ones Christy Mathewson threw up at the Polo Grounds. The rubes so excited to score a hit that half the time they didn’t even remember their prizes, and every hour or so I had to take old Luke back behind the stand and wash him down so the whole thing didn’t get too gory for the family crowd. Well, let’s just say that it was a less than edifying profession.

There were worse jobs on Coney Island, believe it or not—at least, worse jobs for me. Over at Steeplechase Park, where the paying customers came off the mechanical horses, there was another one of my kind: a smirking, demonic caricature of a dwarf, done up in a harlequin’s suit and hat and painted face.

I had watched him, chasing all the flushed-faced clerks, and the day laborers, and the factory girls, with a cattle prod, driving them back across the blowholes that sent the women’s skirts billowing up around their ears—and all for the benefit of their fellow patrons, sitting up in the bleachers of the Laughing Gallery. He made them howl: the men high-stepping through the air, holding their hands on their backsides like Mack Sennett’s Keystones—the women running and squeaking in fear, holding their hands over their sexes.

He leapt and skipped across his stage after them, pumping his tiny fists. Leering and winking back at the gallery, and all of them roaring back at him—all the the lady’s maids and the hod carriers, the streetcar conductors and waitresses and peanut politicians, rubbing their own damaged behinds.

Sometimes a big man would try to catch him, but the little demon was too quick. He scuttled around him, back and forth between his pursuer’s legs, harlequin’s pointed hat sliding back and forth over his greased white head—flogging away at the man’s genitals until he screamed for mercy.

As I watched, a once-innocent young girl tried to get by. She looked unsettled already by the shenanigans on the Steeplechase, plump, greasy fingerstains visible on the bosom of her white shirtwaist. The crowd screamed as he advanced on her, oversized clown’s head lolling grotesquely. He drove her backwards, terrified, the girl clutching her hands to her chest—her fellow passengers scurrying by, just glad to be unnoticed. Once outside, they exhaled in relief—and took their own seats among the screaming faces in the Laughing Gallery.

I had to turn away. That was my greatest fear, before the construction of The Little City, that I could be compelled by necessity to take such a situation. That is always the thing with depravity: just when you think you’ve plumbed the very depths, there’s always someplace lower to fall.

By night, I made my nocturnal rambles around the Bowery. It was there that I saw her—on an earlier, more successful visit to the Dudes, and the Grand Duke’s Theatre. The love of my life, my queen and empress of The Little City. The Mad Carlotta.

I was at the bar when he brought her in, just dipping into a whiskey sweetened with hot rum and camphor and benzene, and a few loose sweepings of cocaine and sawdust. You couldn’t get drinks like that just anywhere, or maybe you could.

He was calling himself Marconi, Master of the Invisible Airwaves, after the famous wop, all done up with waxed moustaches and greased-down hair. He even had a cape. He brought her in slung under one arm, like a salesman’s valise. Swung her right up on the bar, like a real doll, no more than three feet tall as she was, and announced himself to the denizens of the Grand Duke’s in his thunderous, idiot’s voice:

“La-dies and gen-tel-men! Intro-ducing a small sample of the even-ing’s enter-tain-ment: The Incredible—Mechanical—Thum-be-lina!”

She sat up there perfectly still, among the glasses and the puddles of needled beer, in her tattered black mantilla, and for just a moment I thought maybe she
was
a doll. I had never seen one of us who looked so perfect. Her hair was dressed in dolly curls, and her cheeks were painted with red dolly circles, but there was no obscuring the fine, porcelain skin, her blue china eyes staring rapturously out into space. Everything was there, in exquisite miniature, limbs and head and bosom—a perfect, little
woman’s
body.

I was in love.

“The latest in mechanical genius which I, the great Marconi, have invested with life through the invisible Kingdom of the Air!”

He flung his hands up, in a cheap, dramatic flourish—just the sort of thing the boy toughs loved—and she began to
move.
First her head, shifting haughtily, slowly, a few inches from one side to the other, like a doll’s head would move. It seemed to take forever, and by the time her perfect, porcelain profile was turned to us, we were mesmerized.

“It’s a miracle!”

“He’s another Edison!”

Yet she was not done yet. Slowly, slowly, with incredible, doll-like restraint, she began to move her right arm. The tiny, white, perfect thumb and fingers extended rigidly. They began to move up and down, up and down, in a steady, slicing motion—looking to me like nothing so much as the expressed desire to cut off all our heads.

“Look! It’s a blessing!”

“She’s blessing us! It’s luck, it’s luck!”

“That’s all for now! Showtime in one hour!” the ersatz Marconi cried, scooping her off the bar and shoving her back under his cape—limbs still extended in perfect, rigid, dolly fashion.

“Fraud! White slaver! He’s no more Marconi than macaroni!” I shouted from my stool, in vain falsetto. I was pushed aside, swept away by the real boys, crowding up around the stage, eagerly awaiting her reappearance.

“Could she
be
real?”

“What else can she do? Everything?”

I had to stay and watch then. I don’t know if it was the whiskey—or the sawdust sweepings—but I knew I had to save her. It was my destiny.

The Grand Duke’s was packed for the show, word racing through the street like it always did. The boys could barely contain themselves for the opening acts, even through another appearance by their beloved Bowery Boy. Before he had finished smashing up the stage furniture, they were calling for her:

“Thum-bel-ina! Thum-bel-ina!”

“Bring on the doll! Bring on the doll!”

Next up was a barbershop quartet of boys, dressed like whores—the sort of act that never failed to get a good reception at the Grand Duke’s, especially when the baritone sung. But they had no patience for it tonight.

“Bring on the beee-yooo-tee-ful dooooolllllll!”

Rotten fruit and eggs began to fly—something I had never actually seen in a theatre before. God knows where they got them; it was probably their night’s meal. The curtains closed on the barbershop quartet, setting off more cheers, and curses, and whistles-then opened again on “Marconi”—sitting with his “doll” balanced perfectly, uncannily still on one caped arm. The boys went wild.

“Gen-tel-men, gen-tel-men!” he announced—finally having realized, apparently, that there were no ladies in the house unless you counted the Water Street whores in the corners, giving prepubescent newsies blow jobs for the price of their day’s wages.

“Wel-come to the Won-der of the Age! The As-
tound
-ing-Mechanical-
Thum
-bel-ina! She can perform any act—
any
act
at all
—that a normal, human woman can!”

The response from the boys was predictable.

“Strip ‘er! Strip ‘er!”

“Have ‘er pull up her skirts an’ let’s see her quim!” somebody yelled, and the rest shouted with laughter and approval. Marconi faced them down, waving a grand, reproachful hand at them.

“Do I hear a le-
git
-imate request?”

There was another outburst, and the idea of stripping her and then seeing what was what still commanded considerable support. But then a more innocent voice made itself heard above the din.

“Make her walk!”

“What?”

The crowd was disappointed at first—but then they seemed to warm to the sheer simplicity of the test.

“Yeah! If she ain’t just a wind-up doll, let’s see her walk!”

The Marconi nodded gravely, in his best cheap carny style, as if he were summoning up all his powers from the vasty deep.

“Very well. Behold! The
Amazing
—Me-
chan
-ical—
Thumbelina
—walks!”

He lowered her gently to the floor, and she did even this perfectly. She was an amazing actress, sliding off his arm just the way a real mechanical doll might: head still bowed, limbs paralyzed. Her knees bent so far to the floor that the whole crowd, myself included, made a spontaneous stooping motion, trying to catch her as she fell.

Marconi thrust out his arms just as she sagged—and instantly—perfectly—without even seeing him, she sprung rigidly to life. Eyes alert, legs stiff—but still not moving, not even seeming to breathe.

He lifted his left arm—and slowly, excruciatingly, her left leg lifted up. He raised his right arm—and just as excruciatingly, her right leg jutted out, and she completed one small stride across the stage.