Paradise Alley (31 page)

The bartender grunted and flipped a coin over to Finn, who tucked it away in his vest before it had time to glimmer. Then he hauled the cabinet on over to the bar, and stowed it away in a cubbyhole beneath the stairs.

“Damn ye, I never said I was sellin' that!” blurted Dolan, stammering with fever.

“Safe storage for your belongings.”

“Safe for who? Gimme here—”

But McCool cut him off, pulling him back toward the bar.

“Safe storage for us all, then,” he said, winking at Dolan. “Don't worry, son, it's as secure as the crown jewels! Trust old Finn! This is the best bondsmen's house in the City, it's safer than if it was at the police headquarters, or City Hall itself! Now, Pat, how 'bout a drop of the creature?”

Pat the bartender pulled a dusty bottle up on the bar, and poured out a long shot of liquor the color of a rusty nail for each of them. Ruth watched Dolan watch it for a long moment, the whiskey slowly clouding the glass before him—still casting one eye over at his treasure, in its cubbyhole under the stairs. Then he gave a quick nod and grabbed up his glass, and she followed his lead.

It was the hardest thing I ever tasted. It felt like I had swallowed fire—and as soon as it was down, I felt me head start to spin.

Finn was already towing them back to the men and women hovering around the table, and the dice game there.

“Here, lemme introduce ya to the house's own detachment of the Roach Guards—”

“That's right! You won't catch any Bowery Boys here!”

“True Blue sons a bitches—”

“No, this is a respectable house!”

Their sallow, dirty faces creasing with laughter.

“This here's One-Armed Charlie, an' Kate Flannery, and Slobbery Jim and Patsy the Barber. An' that's Sadie the Goat, and Jack Rat, who makes his money biting the heads off a rats down at Kit Burns's, an' George Leese, also known as Snatchem, who used to be with the Slaughterhouse Gang, but works the fights as a bloodsucker.”

The last sport shuffled forward, looking almost philosophical. His hat tilted at a jaunty angle, wearing a vest full of patches.

“I don't know if I would describe meself primarily as a bloodsucker,” he informed them. “I would rather be known as a kind of rough-an'-tumble-stand-up-to-be-knocked-down-son-of-a-bitch, if it's all the same to you. Sort of a kicking-in-the-head-knife-in-a-dark-room-fellow.”

An' what made them the Roach Guards or anything else I could not tell, save that all the men wore a blue stripe down their pant legs. They looked to me like they would all just as soon cut your throat or lift your purse as look at you, and the only thing you could say for them was that they came from Ireland.

“Ah, there's me own Gallus Mag!” Finn exclaimed, and the tallest woman Ruth had ever seen stood up from the table. McCool gave a little running start and managed to throw his arm up around her neck, and give her a kiss on the cheek. She smiled shyly when he did, showing the dainty, white tips of her teeth—each one sharpened to a dagger's edge.

“Aw, now, Finn!”

“Ah, I loves her, I do! No woman in the world like my Maggie!” McCool insisted, and planted another kiss on her lips, just to watch her blush again.

“C'mon an' have a snort with us, Mag! Let's have some more drinks, an' somethin' to eat, now!”

He jumped up again, banging on the table with one hand and whistling with his fingers in his mouth for the bartender.

“Hey—hey there, Pat! Ain't it time for dinner yet?”

“'S on its way,” the bartender grunted, and a red-faced woman even bigger and rounder than Pat himself came out of a back room holding an entire sow up on a platter. She put it right down in the middle of the table—and when she did every man and woman there instantly produced knives from somewhere, and began to tear at any parts they could, including the ear and the tail.

“Here now, you ain't got any hackers,” Finn said solicitously, cutting off still more pieces and handing them over to Dolan, and Ruth. The pig was plainly burned in some places, and barely cooked at all in others, and everywhere its skin was as grey and taut as a ship's canvas. But once they smelled it—once Finn had cut them several slices and laid it in their palms—Ruth and Dolan both found that they could not resist, choking it down as rapidly as they could and holding out their hands for more.

“Get away, you!”

“That's mine there!”

The crowd around the table made a fresh lunge at the pig, all at
once—stabbing at it so furiously now that the carcass rolled off its platter and onto the floor. It tumbled across the room—all of them chasing after it, still jabbing at it with their knives—until it finally came to rest faceup in the cold fireplace, staring back at them with its bronzed, openmouthed pig face.

That was when Ruth felt her stomach go. Dolan right alongside her, the both of them staggering over toward the spittoons in the corner to vomit. Her belly heaving convulsively, until there was nothing left to throw up, her head reeling in the close, smoky room.

“That's all right, then.”

Finn McCool materialized by her side, cooing sympathetically.

“You both been sick now, that's it. We need to get ya a room upstairs, that's the thing. Don't worry, this is the best bondsmen's house in the City—”

She found herself being led up a rickety wooden staircase, along with Dolan. Finn was towing them down a long hall on the second floor, past room after room. They were mere holes, most of them, without doors, and pitch dark inside, reeking of human filth, and sweat, and worse.

He finally stopped at one hole—how he knew which one, she never fathomed—and lowered them both through the gaping doorway. There was no furniture, only a floor covered with straw. Ruth thought dimly that it was not unlike the stall on the boat, though the stink was even worse.

“That's right. You rest for a spell now.”

She was trying to catch Dolan's eye, knowing that something was not right. But he looked barely conscious, and she could scarcely keep her own head up. Wondering vaguely what was to happen to them now, in this hole, but too exhausted to care—letting the goblin man's voice soothe her.

“You're in good hands with Finn, now. Nothin' to worry about—”

Sometime, much later, she awakened to Dolan kicking at her legs.

“Get up. Get up, now, if ya want to get out of here alive.”

She forced herself awake, crawling toward the gaping doorway. Still not sure she wasn't back in the hospital, or the boat.

“D'ya hear that?”

Dolan stood beside her, listening intently. The darkness around them was almost total, the only illumination a flicker of gaslight from down the hall.

“D'ya hear what they're about, then?”

Ruth could hear nothing, save for the low murmur of voices belowstairs, down by the bar. Her stomach was still turning over and her head was spinning, but she made herself follow Dolan out to the head of the stairs. From there she could look down with him, into the now nearly vacant main room.

The only ones left were Finn, and Pat the bartender—and even as she watched they lifted the cabinet of wonders up, and laid it out on the bar. Whipping the black covering cloth away, leaving its creamy, white-and-gold frame suddenly, indecently exposed upon the table.

“There it is!”

“The bastards,” Dolan whispered beside her. Gathering his strength, girding himself to go down there—but also anxious to have them take a look, she could see. To know how much it was truly worth—

“What is it, then?”

Their voices sounded incredulous. Then Pat the bartender snorted derisively.

“Cabinet of wonders! I seen better wonders any day of the week up at Barnum's!”

“
Bastards,
” Dolan whispered again, this time with rage in his voice.

“All cheap junk. Trinkets an' glass,” Finn McCool said sadly.

“An' to think I gave you a shilling York for this! That's one you owe me—plus the drinks!”

Pat shook his head again in disgust, and pulled out a hammer from under the bar. Bringing it down with one fierce, expert blow on the clasp of the cabinet door. A long fissure ran instantly down the length of the glass, but the clasp broke, and Pat flung open the door and stuck his arm inside, all the way to his elbow.

“Junk!” he pronounced it, even as he held up a hand full of its shiny baubles.

Dolan was already down the stairs, going for him before she could do anything to stop him.

“Worthless!”

The bartender's hand still trawled through the wonders. Idly
wrecking the carefully staged tableaux, the perfect tricks of light and mirrors and hidden catches, preserved through all those days on the road, and the voyage over—

“NO!”

He shouted like they had pulled his own heart out. An' I thought then, I don't care what he says, he ain't a dead man.

Dolan was on the bartender before he could look up, wresting the hammer away from him in an instant. The first blow caught Pat between the eyes, sending him staggering into the bar. The second broke his nose, and turned him around. There Dolan grabbed him by the back of his collar and began to pound his head into the bar, over and over again.

“
Worthless,
is it!”

He kept pounding away at the man, unrelenting in his rage, until Finn laid the barrel of a pistol very firmly against his temple.

“But that's enough now. You're
murderin'
the man.”

Dolan stopped then, though he still hovered over the bartender. Gazing at Finn and his pistol out of the corner of his eye.
Still thinking about it,
Ruth could see, from where she stood now at the foot of the stairs. But Finn saw it, too.

“Don't be daft! I'll put a ball through your brain. Take your damned box an' get out!”

Dolan continued to gaze at McCool out of the corner of his eye for another long moment. Then he stood up, and closed the broken clasp of the box as best he could, and pulled the black cover back over it. After that he walked slowly out the door with Ruth following, the box clutched tightly to his chest again. Pat still lying insensible along his bar, his face a ruin.

“Oh, but you are a darlin',” Finn called after them, chuckling—though he kept the gun pointed at them. Dolan looked back at him from the door, but said nothing.

“Oh, don't look at me so,” McCool called out, still laughing. “It's only to say that a man of your sensibilities could go far in this town—with the proper handlin'. Be sure to come back and I'll teach you to make some money!”

They had walked north, and west, all through the night, away from the endless forest of masts at the bottom of the island. Exhausted and
feverish, forcing themselves on. Amazed at how crowded the streets still were, with both people and vehicles—their feverish, leering faces hoving before them.

She followed though she had no idea what he was hoping to find, in the middle of the night, in a strange city. They walked past saloons filled with wedges of dim yellow light, and riotous laughter, and screams pouring out of the back door. They walked past sagging tenements, and boarded-up mansions, and new brick factory buildings that pounded and trembled—the furnaces still burning, the smoke still rising from their chimneys even in the middle of the night.

They walked until the blocks themselves began to thin out, along with the people. The houses dwindling, but getting larger and grander, until there might be just one to a block. Then there were no houses at all—just a low, scrubby marshland with a dismal odor. Yet still Dolan walked them on, until at last he came to a huge, grey rock, looming out of the darkness at them.

He insisted on climbing it, as if this had been some sort of real goal he had been marching them toward. And there, on the other side, he could see the shanties of Pigtown, sitting on the floor of a hollow like so many toadstools. Homes that were no more than crude shacks, rigged up out of a few loose boards and bricks. Each one with a small fenced-in yard, a dog howling and baying like a mad thing—and a pig. It was there that he finally put the cabinet down, to look over the site of their new home.

“This'll do,” he told Ruth—and much as the look of it dismayed her, she was just as glad to stop for the night.

They washed their faces in a cloudy pool of water, even though the dogs were howling now as if the Dark One himself had come walking by their homes. The only sign of their new neighbors were one or two who came out to whack at their dogs, and to shake their fists at them, before going back inside.

Dolan and Ruth paid no attention to them. Instead they settled down on a patch of grass to rest themselves for a few hours. Lying right out there, under the stars, until it would be morning and they could start to build their new home.

•
36
•

He did not know why he had hit the man, except that he'd felt like it, and that it had given him the first real satisfaction he had had in fourteen years. He had nothing against him, but he knew the man was giving a speech and then things would stop. Dolan wasn't even sure what he had been saying, he could barely make out what people said at all anymore. Ever since he had gotten out of the prison in the Sierras, it was as if he was underwater, only half able to hear or understand what anyone said to him.

But Dolan knew what he was doing from the faces of the people listening. The men looking a little shamefaced at what they had already done. The women's faces glistening with tears. He couldn't grasp it exactly, but he knew that something the police superintendent was saying would make it stop, and then the fires would be put out, and the whole street put back like it was, and he would be alone again—trying to make his way through this City that he had come back to, three thousand miles on a fool's errand.

So he had hit him. He knew when he did it that it would set everything going again. That was all he could do now. He could set things off.

For that they had made him their leader. Pushing him on ahead of them, down the Third Avenue. The block of wood hung around his neck—so natural by now he had almost forgotten it.

• • •

He had a distant recollection of the time a mob had carried him off on their shoulders, after a prizefight.
Dangerous Johnny Dolan.
How he had loved that name! Just as he had loved everything else about fighting.
The sweet fulfillment of hitting a man, and being hit in return—

It was the afternoon he had gone fifty rounds with the great John Morrissey, on a flatboat anchored in the Hudson, off Yonkers. A day much like today, with the taste of blood in his mouth. The July sun turning their backs and chests a painful, glowing pink. The rabbits and gamblers watched from the surrounding steamers and rafts, shouting and waving their money—ducking down out of sight, then bobbing back up with each ebb and swell of the river.

He had had no chance to win. Morrissey was a bear of a man, solid and muscled as a blacksmith. Cold, green eyes staring cannily out of his massive, bearded head, catching everything. Dozens of his Tammany braves were on hand to cheer him, and from the moment he came out of his corner of the raft, it was clear that he meant to finish Dolan as quickly and thoroughly as possible.
To murder him, if that's what it took.

He could not even hope to foul him. Right off the opening bell, Dolan had tried a trick he had learned from other raft fights, suddenly jumping at Morrissey and landing as hard on the deck as he could, hoping to throw him off balance on the rocking craft.

But Morrissey was too large to budge. Instead he saw Dolan's move coming, timed it so that he hit him with a tremendous uppercut just as he landed. It sent him reeling to the deck before he knew what was happening. The sports on the boats cheering and stamping their feet with pleasure.

“Shutters up, there's a death in the family!”

Morrissey giving him a small, hard sneer of satisfaction as he went back to his corner, his look plainer than words:
Is that all you got, then?

Dolan dragged himself back to his stool. The rules of the bout being the same as on land—each round ended when a man went down and the fight went on until one man or both could not answer the bell. Nicky Ward, his manager, swabbed him down with water pulled directly from the Hudson, while Snatchem the bloodsucker looked over the back of his head.

“Jesus, but you're already ripped open back there, ye'll have to
watch it—” Snatchem implored him, dabbing at the wound with iodine before Dolan pushed him away impatiently.

“I'll try not to turn me back on the man.”

They had circled each other around the raft for the rest of the afternoon, and into the evening. Dolan was faster than the champion, able to get in under him with his low, crouching stance. But there was always a price to be paid. Morrissey hit him harder than he had ever been hit in his life, worse than anything he had endured at the hands of Yankee Sullivan, or Bill the Butcher, or even Tom Hyer—and hitting Morrissey in return was like hitting a buffalo. Dolan's fists bounced off the man's head, the furrowed bone above his eyes. By the time he came back to his corner after the twentieth round, his fingers were like chopped meat, so many bleeding, stubby worms.

“You're gonna break both your hands, goin' at him like that,” Snatchem admonished him again. Holding them out professionally, then carefully sucking the coagulated blood and pus out of his bare knuckles. Spitting each mouthful into the bucket, then rubbing them over again with flour.

“I don't care,” Dolan told him, surprising himself with the words.
But they were true, he didn't.

Up against some other fighter, he might have used his torn-up knuckles to his advantage—have Snatchem paint them over with iodine or salt, let them sting and blind his opponent. But he knew if he tried any such thing now he would never get off the raft alive. Morrissey's Tammany braves, with their knives and their pistols and their heavy bets, would dispatch him on the spot.

He had no choice but to keep wading in, taking his beating
—and he liked it that way.
The old, uncaring exhilaration building up in him. The more he was hit, the more he needed to hit. Boring in, heedless of the blows raining off his head, his ribs and kidneys. Every punch only driving him on to hit again.

The fight went on through twenty-five rounds, then thirty—then forty. Each round ending with Dolan on the raft's deck. The sun burning his back and shoulders so badly by now that he wanted to scream every time he threw a punch. The chalk-outlined square heaped with sawdust between the rounds, but both fighters still sliding and slipping along the deck, slickened with their own sweat and blood.

Like the floor at The Place of Blood, covered with gore beneath his broom. His brother-in-law, Tom O'Kane, had gotten him the job, but he had not stayed long. Preferring to be somewhere—anywhere—that he got to do the killing—

The forty-first round had ended when Morrissey had slipped and fallen on his own accord, and Dolan wondered for a moment if he could actually be worn out. But he was back for the forty-second, battering him quickly to the deck, and after that Dolan gave over any hopes of winning once and for all.

Yet he kept moving right at Morrissey. Past any thoughts of self-preservation now, only curious to see what he had in himself. Here and there, Morrissey's own proud face showed the marks of his effort. A throbbing mouse along each of the granite ledges above his eyes. A few cuts on his nose and cheeks, his Viking's beard flecked and matted with blood.

Most of it his own,
Dolan knew. He had some idea of what he looked like from how Snatchem and Nicky Ward recoiled from him when he came back to the corner. He had already spat out two of his few remaining teeth, and the rest were wobbly. He could not feel his nose at all, there was a constant ringing in his head, and his vision had narrowed to two blurred slits, through which he could just make out Morrissey advancing on him once more.

Yet just before the fiftieth round began, Dolan realized that the crowd was yelling
his
name, now. Slapping down more coins and banknotes, the action on how long
he
could go. In his corner Nicky was begging him to quit, telling him he would be blinded or killed if he went back out.

“What, d'ya have money on the next round, Nick?” he grunted at him, and went swaying back out.

Who the hell were they to worry if he lived or died? Besides, he was dead already, they had said so at the workhouse gate—

But this would be the last round. He could not fight anymore even if he wanted to—his knuckles gone, his hands and fingers broken and useless. He had never been knocked out before in a fight. Wondering what it would be like to be beaten into oblivion.
Wanting it, craving it.

He walked out to the middle of the ring and threw a wild, looping right at Morrissey, intending to miss. The champ stepped inside and landed a short left to his chin that left him woozy but on his feet.
You
still have to earn it.
Morrissey moving in on him again, deliberate and implacable as a man-of-war. Dolan only dropped his hands, and then—in a moment they would talk about for years in the clubhouses and the stuss dens—had spat out a tooth that bounced tauntingly off the champion's chest.

“C'mon, ya fat bastard. What the hell're ya waitin' for?”

Morrissey stared at him curiously, suspecting a trap—or unable to make out just what Dolan was saying through his broken mouth, he never knew which. Then he came on—feinting once with his head, professional to the last. Dolan did not see the left coming, a straight, hard jab, remarkably accurate after so many rounds. The right following at once. A perfect combination, hitting him so hard that Dolan felt as if something had popped in his skull, and he was out before he hit the deck.

When he came to the crowd already had him up on their shoulders. The rabbits and the gamblers gleefully carrying him around and around on the raft and the steamers, strewn with their holiday bunting and pennants.

Dolan was so dizzy he thought he might be sick, but he couldn't summon up the energy to puke. Instead he stared dully across the ring, at Morrissey being sponged and rubbed down by his Tammany seconds. Still standing erect and unbending as an oak, staring back at Dolan and giving him a small, respectful nod that was obviously supposed to be some kind of acknowledgment of the fight he had put up.

Dolan had spat out a stream of bloody phlegm in his direction. Morrissey frowning and turning away—not understanding that he had failed in his job. That he was supposed to have pounded him until there was nothing left, until the thinking stopped, once and for all—

But it was too late. He was awake again, and the drunken sports kept circling him around and around the ring until he fainted, and had to be laid flat out on the deck, and doused with river water until he revived yet again, madder than ever to still be alive.