City Of Fire Trilogy 1 - Dreamland (56 page)

One of the biggest cops, who must have stood at least a foot taller than Clara, ran forward and hit her a quick blow with his nightstick under her arm. She doubled over, but quickly stood up straight again. She had no breath to curse them anymore, but her eyes still shone contemptuously. Another cop ran up, from the other side, and hit her in the ribs, and then they were all over her, slamming shot after shot into her sides, pummeling her face with their fists until she slumped over on the sidewalk, and Esther heard herself screaming Clara’s name, over and over again, as she tried to scramble back out of the truck, certain they were killing her.

But they hadn’t. Two cops picked her up like a sack of coal and toted her over to the paddy wagon, dropping her roughly on her back. Clara’s eyes were closed, and her face was already swollen and covered with blood, but she moaned when they threw her in, and Esther, crawling over, could see she was still breathing. They threw Sadie in on the other side of her—a little less banged up and still conscious, but with her eyes spinning in her head, the red ribbons in her hair now torn and matted with blood.

One of the cops came up to the doors, and began to shove them back, as roughly as if he were reordering cords of firewood. He pushed the doors shut, and bolted them, and chained them from the outside, until they were left in the unbearably overcrowded darkness for the fast, jolting ride over the cobblestones to the Tombs. The only sounds the hard breathing, and groans, and soft crying of some of the girls.

Before they left, before the doors were slammed shut almost in her face, Esther stared out at the jeering crowd of gangsters—most of them by now looking a little bored by the action, a little annoyed at the wailing and weeping of their beat-up whores. She kept searching, until she was sure she had seen what she was looking for: a slim, neat man, decked out in an immaculate, three-piece russet suit. His hands in his pockets, surveying the scene as casually as if he had just wandered upon it.

Then she knew he was there. Then she knew for sure her brother had seen it all.

At the Tombs they were hauled back out of the Black Marias, again like so much firewood, and marched off to the holding cells. There they were handcuffed to each other and to the cell bars, and left for hours without anything to eat or drink. Most of the women could only lean, or crouch down around the bars of the overcrowded cells, balanced against one another, careful not to twist the cuffs that held them together. None of them talking much, trying to conserve their strength—

Deep in the prison, they could not even hear the distant church bells Esther had used to mark the passage of time at the sweatshop. There was only the sound of distant, receding footsteps, the slam of doors and the jangling of keys—a fun-house echo of noise that sounded like a moan, or a scream, but was only another door closing. The only way they could tell time at all was a slow, gradual darkening, as the light faded from unseen windows, and the night rose around them like a fog.

Esther stood silently among the restless, softly groaning mass of women—trying to help Sadie, who was still dizzy, to keep her cuffs up so they didn’t tear her wrists so much. Trying to help Clara, who was hurt worse than anyone else. Trying to be brave and quiet, a pillar of strength among them until she was sure that they had been utterly abandoned, and gave in to her despair.

“Where are we?” she cried out, despite herself. “How long can they keep us here? What are they going to do to us?”

“Easy, little pigeon, easy there.” Clara soothed her, rocking back and forth on her haunches, whistling through her teeth in her pain. “Don’ worry, they won’t forget about
us
.”

Yet it was all she could do to keep from crying out again as the darkness rose—to keep from wailing, and rattling her cuffs against the bars until she got
somebody
to pay attention.

He is right
, she thought of her father, clenching her chattering teeth together, trying anything she could to still herself.

He is right and I cannot get through this I am nothing on my own—

“Easy, easy, this will all pass,” Clara was still soothing her, her voice dreamy and clotted with pain and fatigue, but Esther still could not keep herself from despairing.

He is right He is right
, the unreasoning thought kept resounding in her brain, until she herself had fallen into a restless half-sleep, there against the cell bars.

I am nothing myself—

They were unshackled, and hauled out in the middle of the night, for the state to do its business.

The night court was a low, musty wooden courtroom, overheated by a potbellied stove, and barely lit by a couple of dull balls up around the magistrate’s bench. Bailiffs sat sleeping in the corners like fat old toads, and the night court reporters leaned their chairs back against the wall, feet stuck up against the benches with practiced cynicism, spewing long brown jets of tobacco at the cuspidors.

The magistrate was another Tammany ornament, an impressive old Yankee with a hoary beard and flaming blue eyes. He sat up behind an ancient, whittled bench, flanked by the dull yellow balls of light—the great seal of the City of New York, with its windmill and tulips and beavers, glowing faintly on the wall behind him.

The strikers sat on the Whores’ Bench, made to wait while the magistrate set to rights all the disorders of the night: dispatching the drunks and the brawlers, the wife beaters and pickpockets and procurers. At least they got to sit, finally, and many of the women, the younger girls particularly, fell asleep even though their fingers were turning blue from the tightness of their cuffs.

The cops, the reporters—even the other prisoners—all craned their necks to get a good look at them. Sitting next to Esther was a real prostitute, beaten up and hauled in because she had stopped paying protection money to the cop on her street. After her was a young girl who had been seduced and abandoned by her employer, and another one, no older, who was accused of luring a man to her room for the purpose of robbing him. They sat upright and defiant, basking in the attention, staring back at the judge and the idle gawkers, proud as aristocrats.

Finally, at four in the morning, they were arraigned in a long line before the magistrate, who spoke in a rolling, stentorian voice for the benefit of the press, and told them they were on strike against God and nature and sentenced them each to fifteen days in the workhouse:

“If you women are determined to work outside the home, you must show a proper respect for those good enough to employ you. Loyalty to your employer is the first part of learning to love your work.”

After the sentencing, they were led out another door of the courtroom, along with the whores, across a dizzying, latticed metal walkway called the Bridge of Sighs. Below them, a great chasm spun down into space; crisscrossed by more metal bridges and walkways, dotted with small, oven-like cell doors.

They were in jail.

First they were were made to strip and hosed down with freezing cold water, deloused and crudely cropped of their hair, until they were left blind and naked and humiliated, choking and coughing on the thick white powder.

“But where does it all go? What do they do with it all?” Esther wondered out loud, watching the thick, beautiful, brown and black curls of their hair pile up in one corner of the room. A matron came by and hit her so hard and so suddenly on the back of her calves that she dropped to her knees.

“No talking!”

They were issued heavy wooden shoes and striped tents of dresses that they had to pin to keep from falling off. Their cells were no more than seven feet by three and a half, with barely enough room to stand between their iron cots and the wall. There was no running water, only one tin pail to drink from and another to go in. There were no windows, and the only air came through small chutes built like chimney flues into the ceiling. When it rained, water dripped in on them, and even when it didn’t, the walls of their cells were always wet, as if the prison were constantly bleeding from its stones.

Their job was to scrub the stone floors over and over again, on their hands and knees, with only a hand brush and a few filthy rags.

“This is a workhouse, so you will work!”
the head matron, a lean, gray, slab-faced woman, smirked at them, as if they had no idea what real work was.

In fact, the scrubbing was almost a relief. Esther found that it used a whole different set of muscles from the sewing.

The Almighty must have given us an infinite number of bones and muscles and sinews to be tortured!

She was more worried about her friends. Sadie wasn’t used to this sort of work; her hands blistered and bled copiously into the gray, polluted wash bucket. Clara was still aching from her broken ribs, and coughing up blood. Esther tried to help them, but it was forbidden to talk or to let them lean against her, the matrons stooping over and whacking them with their rubber truncheons when they tried—or just for the fun of it.

At least the three of them got to share a cell together. They would take down their iron beds, and talk in whispers or even sing a little before falling asleep, holding hands. There were large gray rats in the darkness, and enormous cockroaches that ran over their legs, but with the three of them together it wasn’t so bad. Once she got over her shame for having panicked in the holding cell, Esther decided that she had to talk to Sadie.

“It was a brave thing what you did,” she told her shyly, a little enviously.

“
Ach
, it was just doing what a person would do,” Sadie shrugged, turning her head away, even more embarrassed than Esther was.

Sadie’s fantasy came flooding back, so strong she could barely speak:
The two of them, living down the hall from each other, visiting during the day. And on the holidays, all of them around the table together—

“I’m so ashamed of what he has done,” Esther muttered—unsure even how to address this woman who was—what, to her? Her brother’s woman, almost her sister-in-law, almost her sister.

“He doesn’t know how to live like a decent person anymore,” she said, as if in explanation.

“I know, I know,” Sadie sighed. “I love him more than silk and velvet. But oh! What a bastard!”

Twice a day, they were marched in their heavy Dutch shoes and shapeless, sexless dresses to a room as large as the shop floor—with the same long benches and table laid out end to end. There they ate, instead of sewing. The matron ordered them to say grace, then they were served raw gruel, in the morning; old bread made out of bran and corn, and stale potatoes, and sickly yellow soups, crawling with maggots, for supper. Clara took it only until she had recovered enough to speak clearly and forcefully again.

“No, we won’t say grace!” she announced one night, as determined as ever, rapping her tin spoon against her bowl for attention.

“Who are you to force your religion on us? This isn’t the Czar’s Russia. And we won’t eat any more of this filth! We aren’t swine, you know. You must feed us real food, like real people!”

The other, more permanent prisoners seized the opportunity to turn over their bowls, and bang gleefully on them with their spoons until the matrons surged in among them, thrashing away with their truncheons. All of a sudden there was a small riot under way, and Esther cringed down below the table, not wanting any more of this, not wanting to get beaten again, but she had no choice. They grabbed hold of Clara under her arms and started to pull her up, but she yelled so loudly that Sadie impulsively grabbed hold of her on one side, and then what could Esther do but to hold on to the other side—trying somehow to pull her back down and away from the vicious matrons.

A bell started clanging insistently somewhere, and more guards, men and women, came charging in. They pried their fingers off of Clara, clubbing away at them until Esther felt dizzy and sick to her stomach. By now the whole room was in an uproar, the women hurling their bowls at the matrons and overturning the tables, still more guards pouring into the room and beating them back against the walls.

They were half hauled, half marched back over the stone floors and the Bridge of Sighs to the warden’s office—a remarkably well-appointed suite of rooms within the grim gray prison. Real drapes, and bookshelves, a thick Persian carpet and an enormous globe—altogether a better apartment than any they knew.

The warden himself leaned back against the front of his desk, his gently rounded gut pushing out his buttoned brown vest. Staring mildly at them as they were dragged in and set in straight-backed chairs before him, their hands cuffed together, feet fastened to the chair legs.

“I understand you won’t eat,” he informed them, tapping the bowl of a pipe against one palm. “I understand you won’t say the blessing.”

“It’d be a blessing if we could eat that filth!” Clara retorted.

The warden brought over a felt-bottomed chair of his own, and leaned in toward them, speaking confidentially:

“Why is it you don’t want to say the grace?”

“We’re not the same faith.”

“Is it that—or is it that you’re really atheists, without any faith at all?”

Clara laughed at him.

“Sure, I’ll proclaim it to the world: I’m an atheist. Though some of the girls are still believing Jews. Not to mention Catholics and Protestants, God help them.”

“Enough of your insolence! Come on, now. Tell me: who put you up to this?”

“What?”

“Was it anarchists? Some gangster? Who got you girls to go out?”

“Do you think these heads on our shoulders are made of straw?” Clara snorted. “These women can make up their minds for themselves;
they
don’t jump like a puppet when some boss tells them to!”

“All right, you’ve brought this upon yourself!”

Suddenly the warden was shouting at them, standing up and calling in the matrons again.