City Of Fire Trilogy 1 - Dreamland (43 page)

The other one was different. He was smarter, and quieter—but also more careless in his way. I saw him. He strolled out on the boardwalk on Sunday mornings like a man who was spying on life from a safe distance. Waiting, watching—like he was weighing all the possibilities.

I was intrigued, despite myself. I started going along with him, and he never seemed to mind. He would stride along, one arm looped paternally over my shoulders, explaining all the ways there were to make money.

“Anybody can be gulled,” he said, gazing appreciatively at the customers moving up and down the wooden boardwalk. “Cops, pots, gangsters. Anybody. The only question is how big a racket you need to do the job.”

“Anyone? Really? For how much?”

“Oh, for anything.”

“
Any
thing? Anything at all?”

“Uh-huh. You just have to know how to do the job.”

“Really? I bet you couldn’t sell someone, say, the Brooklyn Bridge.”

“Sure.”

“That ain’t true,” the big dumb one in the sombrero insisted. “You can’t do
that
one no more. Not the Brooklyn Bridge.
Never
the Brooklyn Bridge.
Manhattan
Bridge, maybe.”

“Sure you could,” he said, rubbing his chin and looking over his friend. “You wanna lay a little money on it?”

“You’re on. A finiff.”

They spit on their palms and made a quick, furtive handshake.

“I wanna see this,” I challenged, my voice skeptical—but so desperately hoping he could do it.

He grinned again, set his shoulders, and said the words I most wanted to hear.

“All right. But you gotta help.”

I lay snoring in the Bowery gutter, dressed in my best suit, my head soaked in bad gin. Through slitted eyes I could see him leaning down, plucking me over like one of Herman Weedom’s scavenging hyenas—Pancho Villa sombrero nearly covering me while he rummaged through my pockets. Finally, he pulled out the stock certificates: the green, cheaply printed shares they had shown me before, and that I was certain no one, not even the most gullible ruben, would buy.

“You! You there! Stop that at once! Where is a police officer?”

The mark came forward, a middle-aged man with his wife, stern and respectable as a dentist. Spanish Louie made to run off—but then
he
was there, grabbing his arm, holding him in place, pulling the cheap, smeared shares out of Louie’s hand.

“What’s this? What’s this?”

That was my cue. I opened my eyes, pushed myself blearily up to my feet. I staggered toward him, carefully slurring my speech, vibrating inside with the excitement of this new acting job.

“He’sh tryink to rob me?”

The dentist intervened, obviously disgusted as much with me as with the pickpocket, his wife averting her head while he clutched her arm as firmly as he would an impacted molar.

“He certainly was!” The dentist could no longer control himself. “Only this gentleman prevented it.”

“Julius!”

The dentist’s wife was trying to pull him away, red-faced and sweating under the broiling afternoon sun, but old Julius wouldn’t budge.

“I’m just trying to see that justice is done here—”

I pretended to focus on the green pieces of paper, still in his hands.

“My shares! Did—did he get them?”

“No, thanks to this gentleman!”

My eyes went back to Kid, peering sympathetically down at me, the drunken freak.
How I loathed that look, even in our play-acting—

“Julius.—”

“You
saved ’em?” I belched, for good effect. “Well, I owe
you
a reward!”

I pulled the crumpled bills, one by one, from my pockets, as slowly and methodically as I had been instructed. The dentist frowned; his wife looked away again. Kid put up a hand—

“That’s not necessary—”

—but I would not be dissuaded.

“No, no! You earned it. These are invaluable!”

I counted out all the money—some twenty dollars, all the ready bills and silver dollars I was able to dig up around my palace. He handed over my shares—and I shoved them hastily back into a breast pocket just as he had instructed, tipsily doffing my hat and staggering off to a saloon around the corner—while Kid steered the dentist off down the midway by his elbow. There in the saloon, with larceny still racing through every inch of my being, I ordered up a whiskey and sat in the exact seat in the back of the room he had stipulated.

I sat down, to wait for the next part—and waited, and waited, slowly sipping through one whiskey, and then another. Until after the better part of two hours I couldn’t take it any longer, and hurried back to the Tin Elephant; huffing and puffing up the stairs on my miniature legs, past the lounging whores to the Elephant’s Arse.

I burst into their little, curved room—as much as I can burst into anyplace—relieved to find them there, and not in jail or worse. Unable to keep from blurting out my question even as I saw the broad grin plastered over the dumb one’s face, and the smaller, subtler one spread slowly over
his,
and knew the answer before I heard it. Though of course I still had to ask.

“Tell me! Tell me—did it come off? What about the mark?”

“Why, you were, kid,” he said.
“You
were the mark.”

Monk taught him everything, with the quiet seriousness of a father teaching the Talmud to his son. It was Monk who taught him how to run a stuss game, and the banco scam, and the drop scam, and the mysterious art of how to render a man senseless by tapping a cigar ash in his beer.

He taught him all the short skin games: the ones that were new, and the ones that were old, and the ones that were so old they could be used as if they were new again. It seemed to him that Monk made some of them up on the spot, as if he were continuing a good joke, or a story:

“A man walks into a bar with a dog—”

He sat quietly in the back of the bar, cool and dim in the late afternoon, nursing a short beer and a cigarette, idly watching the scene out on the sidewalk—until he saw the man walk in with the dog.

“Hey, Mac, mind de mutt fer me,” the man told the bartender, setting the animal down on a stool, pressing a shiny, fresh silver dollar into his palm.

“I got a big deal goin’ on. You mind him, der’ll be more in it for ya later.”

“Sure,” the barman grunted, casting a baleful eye on the animal. The man went out again, and Kid was on.

He drained the glass, took a last drag or two on his cigarette—forcing himself to move slowly, slowly, the way Monk had taught him. Making his way nonchalantly, a little wobbly, toward the barroom door.

He swayed in toward the bar, banged into a stool, almost knocking it over, drawing the bartender’s attention. That was when he noticed the dog.

Nothing too dramatic, nothing too obvious.
You’re playin’ to one man, Kid, not de galleries.
He did a little double take, that was all—and walked on. Just before he reached the door Kid stopped, and looked back at the dog. He started out again, walking backwards this time, and bumped beautifully into a much smaller man—still staring at the dog.

That’s when you come back—

“Pardon me, bub, is that, uh, is that your dog?”

“No, it ain’t,” the bartender told him, vigorously squeaking his towel around a mug. Suspicious but curious already.

He had been all the way across the room, he couldn’t possibly have heard their conversation—

“No? Hmm. Well, you know that’s a Rhodesian ridge-back, don’cha?”

“Dis?” The barman looked down incredulously at the dog—skinny little black-and-white mutt, picked up from the East River garbage docks, trained just long enough in Monk’s inimitable fashion to sit still on a bar stool.

“Sure it is. A genuine, full-blooded Rhodesian ridgeback, unless I miss my guess. In Africa, they train ’em to hunt lions. It’s a great hunting dog, friend—can’tcha see the way it’s sittin’ there?”

The bartender stopped wiping his glass, looked down at the dog again, a glint of disbelief still in his eyes.

Now was the time to whip out the money.

“Say,” he half whispered, leaning over the bar. “Say. You
sure
that ain’t your dog?”

Kid pulled out the billfold—a Hoboken roll, fat with ones, a couple twenties on the top, held in place with a gaudy, ruby-studded clip. The bartender twisted his neck around uncomfortably.

“I told you—”

“Say it was your dog. What wouldja take for it? Two hunnerd? Five hunnerd?”

“I told you. It ain’t my dog,” the bartender said firmly now, resisting temptation, thinking of the ferocious mug on the man who had left him—the bull neck and cauliflower ears, the flattened, pugnacious nose that just shouted trouble.

“But just say. Just say it was,” Kid persisted. “How much? A thousand? Thousand five?”

“Look, mister.” The voice steely now with regret. “It ain’t my dog.”

“All right. All right for now.”

Slowly, ever so slowly, he slipped the billfold back into his pocket. The barkeep’s eyes followed it down, trailing over Kid’s duded-up clothes, the diamond stickpin in his tie, diamond studs on his shirt and cuff links.

“You say so, mister. But, you know, whose dog is it if his owner don’t come back? You read me? Whose dog is it then, huh? Full-bred Rhodesian ridgeback an’ all.”

He ambled toward the door again, setting his hat carefully on his head. Looking back toward the barkeep once more.

“Maybe I’ll be back. You think it over, an’ just maybe I’ll be back in a couple hours, okay? We’ll see whose dog it is then.”

He was out and around the corner quickly then, down an alley, and through a back cellar to another bar. The idea was not to give the man time for a second thought—not right away, that was.

Kid slid into his seat at the bare little table, where Monk already had his beer for him.

“So?”

“He’s soaked,” he told him, and Monk nodded with satisfaction. He sat there, slowly sipping at his drink.

The rule was always to wait through at least one slow beer, maybe two—while they talked and whiled away the hour, letting desire rise and blossom. Wait until it was time for Monk to go back in, and proclaim loudly that his deal had fallen through, and he was left penniless. Wait for the barkeep, with smug and greedy eyes, to ask innocently if he might help Monk out, by taking the dog off his hand for a few dollars. The perfectly ordinary dog, which the bartender had convinced himself by now was a purebred Rhodesian ridgeback, and would fetch thousands of dollars. Whenever Kid returned.

Of course, it didn’t do to wait too long.

“Did I ever tell ya da time I waited too long?” Monk asked him.

“No.”

“I waited too long, an’ I picked de wrong dog. It hadda little cold when I picked it out, but I thought I nursed it right. Turns out it was pneumonia. Mutt drops dead. Falls right off de bar stool while I’m out.”

“So what’d you do?”

“Whattaya think I done? I go back in dere, wailin’ away, right on schedule: ‘Oh, I lost me last dollar, I got squeezed outta me life’s savin’s, wha’do I got left in dis world to my name?’

“Only dere ain’t no dog dere for me to sell. I’m just wailin’ an’ wailin’ away, lookin’ for de dog dat ain’t dere. I’m noticin’ de bartender ain’t makin’ no move to buy de dog, de way he’s supposed to. So I finally gets t’rough an’ simmers down, wonderin’ what de hell is goin’ on. An’ all de bartender says is, ‘This just ain’t your day, fella. Yer dog is dead, too.”

Kid pulled the tourist aside, into the theatre alley off Fourteenth Street, produced the wondrous machine from its bag.

“Gimme a bill—”

“Oh, no, Mac,” the chubby-faced rube smirked. “I know this trick. You use your own bill, if this is so great.”

You know nothing

“All right.”

He pulled out a tenner, fed it carefully into the top of the miracle machine—rubbed up to a silvery glow, and shaped suspiciously like a meat grinder, if you wanted to look too closely. He cranked the handle—and two more, identical tenners slid slowly out the other end, one after the other. Before the last one was out, the tourist was reaching for his wallet—

He tapped the sailor coming out of a Water Street bar, gave him the story on the up-and-up:

“Look, I can see you been around, I’ll play it straight. This is all counterfeit.”

He held the weighty bag of money up before the tar’s eyes; opened it for him, let him see the bank notes there: tens and twenties so good they might have been, well,
real.

“Not a bad job, huh? Thing is, the cops got it in for me, an’ one more collar I go up to Sing Sing for life. What’ll ya gimme for the whole lot?”

He was around the corner like a shot, shoving the gob’s money into his vest pocket before he could sort through the top bills and discover the sawdust and torn-up bits of newspaper below—

Of course that was all their recreation, their fun and games, as it were. The rest of the time they went back to the steady drudgery of shaking down peddlers for protection money, of poisoning horses and cheating at stuss and heaving ballot boxes into the East River. All that, and sometimes worse.

“Remember, kid,” Monk always told him. “Whatever you do, make sure you do it in the dark. All kinds a t’ings can go on in de dark—an’ nobody knows just who did what.”

He sat in the cellar of the stuss den on Rivington Street, waiting for the Bottler. The dank, plain little room cleared out of bens and sams for once—just Gyp the Blood and Spanish Louie and the Grabber sitting with him behind the felt cloth with the cards in the deck painted crudely upon it.

The Bottler padded cautiously down the steps, bowler tucked down low over his eyes like a turtle in his shell, his own boys right behind him. Kid stood up to greet him:

“All right, let’s see if we can’t work this out—”