City Of Fire Trilogy 1 - Dreamland (52 page)

Beansy Rosenthal was already up and moving to the door of the cafe, still smiling, waving his little green fan advertising Henderson’s Celluloid Collars in front of him. He stopped at the hotel desk, grabbed a breath mint, checked his tie in the polished brass counter. Then he walked through the revolving doors, folded back flat against the heat, and stepped out onto West Forty-third Street.

Two men were waiting in front of the car, and as Herman stepped out he could feel the third one come up behind him, out of the shadow of a service door. He frowned, thinking for the first time that he might have made a mistake. He recognized the men in front of him, and he didn’t quite care to look around at the third man. None of them, he knew, was Big Tim Sullivan.

“Hello, Herman,” said Gyp the Blood, grinning, his hands in his pockets.

Beansy looked over at the car, still fanning himself with the little hand fan. Relieved, he saw there was yet another man still in the backseat of the car.

“Hey, Dry Dollar,” he called out softly, in the hot, quiet night. “Hey, Big Tim! You got my money?”

The figure in the backseat leaned forward until his head could just be seen in the light from the street lamp, but it was just Arnold Rothstein again. His face was calm, almost expressionless—his very presence so surprising Herman that he didn’t even notice the guns coming up out of Gyp the Blood’s and Whitey Lewis’s pockets, or hear the hammer being cocked on Dago Frank’s pistol behind him:

“Ah, Beansy.” Rothstein shook his head just before the shots split the heavy, dank night.

“Ah, Beansy. You never did have the sense God gave a duck.”

The annual excursion chowder of the Timothy D. Sullivan Association was held on the last, glorious Sunday in August. It was an airy and cloudless morning, and one which gave no hint of the heat that would crush the afternoon like a day-old carnation.

The grand parade stepped off from Tammany Hall right on schedule, led by three brass bands, and two boxing champions, and every Regular ward leader, and district leader, and alderman and congressman and assemblyman in the City. Big Tim and Mr. Murphy marched at the head of the whole procession like archbishops at the Easter procession, bedecked in sashes and long coats and top hats despite the already rising heat. Marching so grandly and somberly that all the assembled nations of the world, waiting to board the excursion boats, could not help but give one great, spontaneous cheer, even those who didn’t have a word of the English yet, or know where they were going, or why.

They had begun to assemble down by the South Street piers before dawn: mothers in their babushkas and fathers in their beards and soup-strainer moustaches, kids still in their stiff, square, wooden shoes. The single young men, digging their hands shyly into their pockets, or the ones in groups, loud and exuberant and menacing, already passing the pint around between them. The factory girls, in their best new hats, laughing and grinning boldly.

It was an overwhelming multitude—but the Wise Ones had done their job faultlessly, and everything went off like clockwork. There were not one but two shiny white new paddle wheelers waiting at the docks, the
Annie LaForge
and the
Flo Murphy
, and when the gates were opened there was everyone marching on two by two, as neat as Noah.

The Jews in
payehs
and phylacteries, and head scarves and broad hats. Bohemians in buttoned-up shirts, still reeking of tobacco. The Italians in bright scarves, with mandolins and hand organs and penny whistles. Irish stuffed into Sunday suits, and a handful of scowling Ukrainians and the last Germans from old
Kleindeutschland
and Syrian Jerusalem-traders up from the Battery and even the occasional guarded black face, quietly taking up a place on the periphery of the crowd.

And on the boat, there was everything for the slow haul up to College Point: ice cream and candies and accordion players and jugglers for the women and children on the excursion deck. And for the men down below there were free cigars and an open bar, and stuss games and roulette wheels, where the house won back in an hour twice what Big Tim had laid out on the festivities. Until everyone was having such a good time eating and drinking and losing money that they broke out into all the old clubhouse favorites:

—the two boats singing back and forth to each other, resounding with one raucous nonsense verse after another, toothless old men from Russia mumbling along with drunken Irish gangsters and teenage factory girls—

It was a grand day, and the biggest turnout anyone could remember, but Big Tim felt unaccountably jittery and depressed all the way up to College Point. He sat in one of the private cabins, nursing a lemonade with Mr. Murphy and some of the boys from Albany, letting them cheer him up with some of their constant patter. Dignified, Germanic Bob; Al with his infectious grin and huge schnoz, and a gut jutting out like he’d swallowed a cannonball. Clever little Jimmy, swank as a card sharp, humming his Tin Pan Alley songs, head swinging alertly back and forth like a trained parrot’s. All of them trying not to show it but all of them, he knew, just as excited as any of the yoks to be going on a picnic.

How little they require of us—

Still restless, he stood up and paced around, looking out the portholes. He was gripped with a dreadful premonition that something would go wrong. He couldn’t even look when they reached the Hell’s Gate shallows—though the greatest threat to their safety came when everyone at once rushed to the rails, peering down eagerly to see where the
General Slocum
had foundered, and so many Germans had been lost.

When they docked at College Point, Big Tim felt as if a cloud had passed, and he adjusted his suit and sashes, and went out on deck with Mr. Murphy and the others to greet the crowds. Both boats ran Old Glory up the mainmast, and everyone on board rose as one, and put their hands over their hearts, and sang “The Star-Spangled Banner” with just as much fervor as they had the old Tammany songs.

Endless wooden tables awaited them, laid out end to end down to Flushing Bay, sagging under the enormous platters of chicken and fried clams, pots of clam chowder, countless schooners of beer. Later on there would be whole swamps of ice cream trundled out from the boat ice boxes, and great urns of iced tea, and coffee, and frosted cakes, melting brilliantly in the noon sun. There would be swimming races, and footraces, and diving contests, and pick-up baseball games, played out in the green fields. There would be a greasy pole, and boxing matches and wrestling matches, and more gambling—always more gambling, fleecing his loyal constituents of their last few disposable dollars—

Cousin Florrie and Flat-Nose Dinny scowled and paced about, barking out orders like drill sergeants, while Mr. Murphy sat ensconced among the other district leaders, close-mouthed as the wooden Indians carved along Tammany’s portals. Big Tim moved among the people, gladhanding and promising, handling the reporters along for the free feed:

“Big Tim, I noticed Mr. Murphy wasn’t singing when they played ‘The Star-Spangled Banner,’ ” said the man from the
Herald.
“Why would that be?”

“I’m sure I can’t say, boys. Maybe he didn’t want to commit hisself.”

He kept walking, while the newspapermen guffawed behind him, shaking more hands, nursing another lemonade in the growing heat.

“Big Tim, if you please, a real question—” asked the serious young man from the
Tribune.

“Is this for a real newspaper, then?”

More laughter.

“What can you tell us about the murder of Herman Rosenthal?”

The other reporters fell silent, embarrassed as if someone had farted in church. Big Tim only paused to look duly stricken.

“Poor Herman was a good friend of mine—as I think you can see from the affidavit he left with the district attorney. P’rhaps too good for this world.”

“Is there any truth to the feeling it was mixed up with politics?”

Big Tim stared at the man as if he hadn’t heard right.

“D’ya know anything in this world that’s not mixed up with politics, Frank? But if you look around yourselves, gentlemen, you can see that we’re in the business of makin’ voters, not bumpin’ ’em off.”

“Does it have anything to do with corruption in the Strong-Arm Squad?” the man from the
Journal
asked more precisely.

Big Tim started walking again.

“Are you implyin’ there’s corruption on the highest levels of City Hall? Why, by God, I know I’ve had my own fallings-out with the Little Little Napoleon, but that’s a very serious allegation to raise.”

There was an immediate little flutter of notebook pages behind him.

“Are you saying the
mayor
has something to do with it?”

“Good God, man, of course not! What’d I just get through tellin’ ya? I’m just pointin’ out the continuin’ wonders of Reform. I mean, here you have a Reform mayor, and a Reform district attorney, and a Reform police commissioner. Various little kiddie reformers chasin’ around their skirt tails—and what do you get? A state’s witness—a brave, righteous young man—gets shot down right out on Forty-t’ird Street. Well, it makes a body think.”

“So you blame them?”

“I don’t blame anyone, blamin’s not my business. Maybe there was no tipoffs; maybe no money changed hands. Maybe it was just simple incompetence, all around—but isn’t that all the more reason why we need a good, capable man like Judge Billy Gaynor to give us
real
reform?”

The man from the
Times
laughed.

“Are
you
a reformer now, Big Tim?”

He stopped again, looking off toward the American flags hanging limply above the
Flo Murphy
and the
Annie LaForge.

“I’m the people’s servant, boys. The day the people truly want reform, that’s what they’ll get from me. Now—how about somet’in’ to drink? This is a chowder, after all.”

The reporters surged eagerly over to the free schooners of beer.

Late in the depraved, wilting afternoon, he stood to speak on the makeshift scaffolding the Wise Ones had thrown up with their usual efficiency, the rude boards covered over with red-white-and-blue bunting, until it looked like a veritable throne of democracy. Behind him, in folding chairs, sat all the boys, Bob and Jimmy and Al, and Mr. Murphy, wiggling a straw between his teeth like some rube farmer.

They had all taken their long coats off, stripped down to their shirtsleeves and suspenders during the afternoon, to join in the baseball games, and the seafood, and perhaps even hoist a few, it was that hot. Now, though, the collective soul of propriety, they had rolled their sleeves back down, and put their coats and top hats back on for the speeches. Their bright-red, sunburnt faces looked up expectantly from under the high black hats, sweat rolling copiously down their cheeks—a row of pale, cautious men, dragged out to bake for a few hours in the sun.

“Sullivan! Sullivan! A damned fine Irishman!”

Out in the crowd below him, the faces were merrier, more pixilated, already beaten to a hard bronze by the sun. It was the perfect moment. The bloom was off the day, and the people below him were tipsy and tired and sated, but not so tired yet they wouldn’t stand for a speech. Big Tim turned to shake hands with Mr. Murphy, who smiled his polite, parson’s smile, then with all the rest of them in turn, the whole firmament of the Democracy. Milking the moment for all it was worth, letting the cheers rise steadily.

Then, when he was ready, he turned to face the people.

The words fluttered through his head again, and he thought he had it now. The beginning of the annual picnic speech:

Here in America—the land, the only land in the world that can truly be called the Land of the People—

And on like that. But what did it mean? It was the land of the people all right; they were as common as the ground underfoot, and as beaten down and uncomplaining.

Land of the people—

He thought of all he could tell them. All he had been thinking about for months now, about poor Herman, and Mrs. Perkins, and even his Nell, laughing on the deck of their excursion boat, years ago. About the street Arabs, and the working girls, and the proud, grim-faced men who stood in the back of his bars to ask him for favors.

He thought of telling them all that—and he knew they would not listen, for they already knew it. They milled about below him, the people, full and contented for once, thinking of little more than the boat ride home. When the men would be singing drunkenly down in the hold, the babes asleep in their mothers’ laps up on the deck, and the green lights of the pier glowing like fireflies before them.

And when they had docked at South Street, there would be a whole new procession home. A torchlight parade, winding its leisurely way through the streets of the Lower East Side, up the Bowery to Chatham Square, where there would be fireworks, and one more drunken toot, and then all of them—the sleeping babes, and the drunken men, and their long-suffering wives and mothers—would be carried off to bed, to their suffocating little homes, from which they would rise with the sun the next morning, and go out to work again.