Not Quite Dead (17 page)

“I ask your pardon. I sustained a head injury in the war, as you know.”

“Of course. And God bless you for it, you are a credit to the city and a hero of the nation.”

“Much appreciated, sir.”

“You must tell me what is doing in this murder business. We cannot have murdering in the city.”

“Sir, I reckon that Mr. Topham was not just a book publisher. I judge that he drove a whole herd of fraudulent manufacture. Great guns, sir, surely you see the potential of it.”

“You are saying that the embargo with the English has made Philadelphia a city of fraudulent wrongdoing?”

“Well put, sir. That is the best face on it. At worst, we have a city of gangsters.”

“Inspector Shadduck, you could be in politics, sure.”

“Another time, Councilman.”

“The city must respond in a
kreftic
manner. We must be stopping this wrongdoing with vigor. As councilman for the Middle Ward I will support your investigation.”

“That is good news, sir.”

This shin business is most
greislich
. I gave a bone bracelet to my wife last Christmas!”

CHAPTER
SEVENTEEN

The Ancient Order of Hiberians, Moyamensing, Philadelphia

S
ituated between Locust Street to the north and Fitzwater Street to the south, the Moyamensing neighborhood paralleled the river around its elbow bend, and therefore did not follow the city’s normal street pattern. Instead, an intricate series of narrow lanes twisted their way down to the river, and to Devils Pocket to the southwest. It was a warren like St. Michael’s parish in Dublin, and like it a harbor for illicit and illegal activities.

Easily the tallest and best-repaired structure in the neighborhood, the Black Horse Saloon situated itself on McAfee Court at the mouth of Black Horse Alley; from here, an absurdly narrow passage slithered away downhill, with a sluggish brooklet in the center containing substances of various kinds.

On either side of the ditch stood a row of tiny wooden shanties. Known as “Father, Son, and Holy Ghost houses,” they stood three stories high, with one ten by twelve-foot room on each floor. These rooms were rented for twelve and a half cents a day to an entrepreneur who would, in turn, sublet spaces on the floor for two cents each. With such crowding on a daily basis, the few outhouses were always overflowing.

Lacking sun or ventilation, with ceilings six feet high and a family of twelve in each windowless basement, these habitations created as squalid a domestic situation as anything in a London rookery. Yet, were a visitor to venture inside, he might be surprised to see heirlooms on the mantel, pictures on the walls, a teapot and teacups stacked neatly on a shelf, and a crucifix on the wall.

By comparison, McAfee Court in the late gloaming was an oasis of gaiety, offering the visitor both mystic and worldly attractions. At the entrance to Passyuk Lane, a grand bone-fire had been lit for warmth, and now boys and girls jumped back and forth through it— the boyos to test their mettle, the girls that they might marry early
and bear many children. In the country it would ensure as well that the crops grew high, but there was no fear of vegetation in McAfee Court.

Other precautions against the evening chill were available in the opposite corner, where a beak-nosed French peddler dispersed spiced gin from a gleaming brass samovar. Among his customers stood four disconsolate nymphs of the pave, banished from the Black Horse Saloon until the meeting’s adjournment. With their usual custom beyond their grasp, they ignored the gaunt characters from the soup society, pale as mortuary cloth. Equally, their protectors absent, these judies on the stroll regarded with almost prudish suspicion the young men from the cricket pitch on Chestnut Hill, distinguishable by their camphor-soaked handkerchiefs, held inconspicuously to their noses against the stench, while they rummaged the area for forbidden adventures of various kinds.

Two pigs approached the fire, joined by three colleagues from the next street, with whom they lay down sociably in the gutter.

A
S BEFITTED ANY
meeting on a serious matter the Black Horse contained no women; nor was there a Protestant to be seen—no Slattery, McManus, or Gamaliel. On this evening, the saloon belonged to a grim, intense assembly of about fifty Catholic men in top hats, members of a society known as the Ribbonmen. Leaning intently forward on their walking sticks, their expressions grew steadily hotter while the speaker on the center table performed as fireplace and stoker, raising the cockles of their sectarian ire.

At the bar, orders of hob, nob, and other bevies took place using hand gestures, not to disrupt the speaker’s precious litany of ills, injustices, and impending threats. Though the list was as familiar as the stink of their own boots, the congregation would never grow weary of the ritual call for preemptive vengeance, against Protestant and Nativist enemies who would burn Moyamensing to the ground—every cathedral, every house—inspired, as ever, by the beastly English.

The Moyamensing district, dubbed Ramcat by the local citizenry, made wonderfully fertile soil for such a theme, for the slum landlords (with the exception of John McAfee) were predominantly non-Irish, unlike the equally sordid streets of Southwark and Port
Richmond, whose overlords sported names such as Boyle, Cassiday, and Quinn.

Devlin had spoken to many such gatherings since his arrival, and had greatly improved his oratorical skill along the way. With the help of Lieutenant O’Reilly, he had made grand progress in the quest for that which Young Ireland had lacked in the old country—a popular following. Where once he held forth to a scattering of bollixed drinkers, now he regularly hectored packed rooms such as this, crackling with intensity.

With the public alarm over the “Irish problem,” and the remedies applied so far—squads of goons, operatives, and informants—the running of the city had become a sneaky, nasty business, a Protestant sort of business, a British sort of business, and that was the making of the Irish Brotherhood. Where once Devlin and O’Reilly had counted themselves lucky with a handful of coppers, now it was a rare meeting they did not exit with pockets heavy with chink.

“Like you, I was born under the ancient scourge of Protestant persecution. Like you, I know the value and the price of civil and religious liberty.

“Like you, I seethe in anger that here in America, the home of liberty, we continue to suffer the almost universally received calumnies on our character and name, lies spread by England, spread as wide as ships can sail or travelers penetrate …”

Around the table upon which Devlin held forth, and in a semicircle facing the audience, stood a line of young men, who formed a protective barrier between the speaker and his public. For the charismatic orator, once a crowd had its blood up there could always be danger, whether due to the enmity of an enemy party or the embrace of an impassioned admirer. These young men were able to perform their function as bodyguards without obscuring the view of the speaker because none had reached a height of more than five feet.

These were
Na Coisantoiri
—the Defenders: street shavers who had accepted Lieutenant O’Reilly as their commanding officer, in return for which they received a better life than they had ever known in their born days.

Never in his life had one of these boys worn a proper hat or a set of even secondhand clothes. Now they wore top hats—tipped at a precise angle approved by Lieutenant O’Reilly. Now they sported
new duster coats and leaned on stout, pebbly walking sticks made of oak. Where once they had received kicks and curses as street ruffians, now they were given a wide berth—and with reason, for they made an unsettling sight, with clan markings on their faces in pen and ink, accentuating the brow and cheekbones in the fearsome way of ancient Celts and red Indians.

For close fighting, each boy carried blades of various size on his person, which he was prepared to put to use at any moment. Beneath his duster coat, each wore a glass-studded belt about his waist whose buckle had been sharpened to a razor’s edge. A few boys concealed barking irons—derringer pocket pistols—filched from an overfriendly fireman or thug. Glimpsed through a soup of pipe smoke, they made a sight as endearing as a pack of wolves. Yet because they were boys and not men, and because they were Catholics every one of them, Ribbonmen looked upon them in the way they might have regarded a squad of budding athletes—with nostalgic longing and a certain envy for their own younger days.

Originally, they were a street gang known as the Daybreak Boys, led by a gaunt twelve-year-old with the seamed face of a worrier, who went by the name of Pistol Ned.

Soon after his return from the war, however, O’Reilly befriended Ned with the gift of a bayonet; from there he proceeded to earn the trust of the Daybreak Boys, by providing instruction in fighting technique. A year later, now rechristened
Na Coisantoiri
and awakened to their Irish root, their short, violent lives had found new meaning in an atmosphere of military solidarity, a higher purpose to trim their daily round of theft, intimidation, and brutality for hire.

Standing on the table, Devlin launched into a kind of history lesson, putting the plight of the Irish on a par with the fall of Athens:

“Here in America, our eyes are open to the filthy web of misrepresentation with which England has surrounded us.

“Here in America, who knows the truth of the Irish? Who remembers that Ireland was already ancient when Christianity exiled the Druids from their sacrificial forests? That Tyre and Sidon bartered with Ireland before Romulus and his brother founded Rome? How Hiberian Celts under General Dathy trampled down the Roman fortifications and were about to scale the Alps, when a
handful of needy Normans overran the homeland, fanned the jealousies of rival chiefs, and seized the pleasant plains of Leinster?

“Over seven centuries of slavery, penal laws, and Protestantism completed the work of devastation: what the Vandals had done for Rome, and the Saracens for Spain, Henry and Elizabeth performed for Ireland …”

When the heavy front doors abruptly burst open, Devlin instantly saw that they parted at the middle seam—that the kick did not shatter the casing, though it was sufficiently powerful to do so. Therefore, it had been unlatched from the inside, by a traitor within the party. Devlin halted his speech in mid-sentence, and turned to Lieutenant O’Reilly for a signal as to their tactics and route of escape. The Irish Brotherhood had become well used to such abrupt interruptions, whether by Nativists, rival gangs, or firemen.

Nativists were members of a secret society called the Order of the Star-Spangled Banner, whose members had signed a pledge never to vote for a Catholic. By sifting among the ruins of the Whig Party, these anti-immigrant fanatics had managed to cobble together the American Party—also known as the Know-Nothing Party, for its selective memory when it came to criminal acts by its subsidiary groups, who went under names such as the Plug Uglies, the Black Snakes, and the Rip Raps.

If not Nativists, the invaders could be firemen—ruffians who started as many fires as they doused, and allowed many more to burn to the ground rather than see a rival hired for the job; who had taken to attacking Irish of all persuasions ever since the trouble of ‘48.

Whatever the identity or motive of the enemy, regardless of the issue or controversy or excuse, every mortal in the place immediately began making use of his fists, boots, and sticks in an effort to break the bones of another.

At a shrill whistle from the lieutenant, the boys of
Na Coisantoiri
proceeded to defend the position. Though possessing only the merest grasp of military strategy and discipline, they were eager students of the whiskey dance—a mainstay of faction fighting and the settling of scores, practiced since a century ago, when Irishmen were forbidden weapons by the occupying English. The “dance” was a cover for fight training, in the way of the dances of African slaves in America, whose fight practice gave lethal power to unarmed men.

To be sure, it did the lieutenant good to see the close attention on Pistol Ned’s prematurely aged face, as he ducked under a poorly aimed blow from an opponent twice his weight, delivered a two-handed stick punch to the attacker’s knee, then used the momentum of the man’s fall to break his teeth against the knob of the
bhata
, then on to another without pause. It is always a pleasure for a teacher to see a lesson well learned, and Ned made an outstanding pupil.

As the fighting continued, Devlin made his way to O’Reilly’s position at one end of the bar, which afforded a tolerable view of the contest, which the lieutenant followed with the intensity of an athletic coach. Since their partnership, the lieutenant had put no little effort into his little muzzies, so that Devlin and O’Reilly were now powerful men who could put force behind their words. The boys’ ability to earn a dollar through robbery and street fighting, when added to what was earned by Devlin’s tongue, had secured the financial position of the Irish Brotherhood as well.

Devlin leaned close to the lieutenant’s ear, the better to be heard over the din of fists, sticks, and cursing: “D’you mind the style of them? I’ll engage they are neither Nativists nor firemen.”

“Aye, true for you, Protestants. Orangemen if you go to that of it.”

“If that is so we are in for a party fight.”

“That is a danger,” said the lieutenant, “for the boys are unready for a donnybrook.”

There is something infinitely more deadly in the compressed vengeance and hope of slaughter that fuels a conflict between Orangemen and Ribbonmen. To be sure, in a faction fight between Catholics, skulls are broken and lives lost, but they are lost in pleasant fighting— the consequence of the sport, the beauty of breaking as many heads and necks as one can. In a party fight, the very air is loaded with apprehension as to be almost sulphury. The scowls, the grinding teeth, the deadly gleams that shoot from the kindled eye would fry a frog.