City Of Fire Trilogy 1 - Dreamland (32 page)

Gangsters in bright checkered suits shuttled their women back and forth across the dance floor like streetcars. A small aggregation of musicians sawed away at their instruments up on the dilapidated stage—a piano, a harp, a bass fiddle.

Monk patrolled his realm benignly, with a smile and a glad hand for everyone. He tapped a huge club in one hand, a pair of brass knuckles prominent on the other.

“Drink up, drink up! Before de booze gets too old!”

Joseph sat up front, eagerly, shyly taking in everything around him. He had already been made one of the Eastmans by then, rechristened again as Kid Twist, after some long departed champion of the Dead Rabbits, or the Plug Uglies. Basking in the glow of a good cigar, a glass of whiskey infinitely smoother than anything he’d ever had at a block-and-fall joint.

On each table in the hall was bread and a stone: a thick red brick clapped between two pieces of moldering bread, so that the establishment could claim to be a restaurant, serving sandwiches—instead of the clip joint battening off the theft of whores and the blood of tourists that it was.

“You can’t eat this!” a salesman, seated between two hookers at the next table, howled—and in his drunken despair bit down on it so hard that his molars cracked, and the blood ran out of his mouth.

“See? That ain’t no goddamned sandwich!”

Monk was on him at once, signaling for Whitey and Spanish Louie. He lifted the taller drummer up by the collar with one hand, spinning him around toward the wall.

“All right, dat’s it. You broke de rules of de house,” Monk told him, pointing him toward the endless, nonsense list of regulations mounted there:

“Which one? Which one did I break?” the bleeding salesman demanded.

“Oh, believe me, you broke ’em all. Da drunkenness an’ de profanity I could overlook, but you know, if a man don’t dance, he
must
leave!”

Whitey and Spanish Louie rushed him on out through the throngs of dancers on the floor, the drummer still clutching his sample case to his chest—going slowly at first, then faster and faster, like the tiny Mack Sennett characters Kid watched racing through the nickelodeon at Union Square. They strolled back in presently, whistling and carrying all that remained of the drunken salesman—his suit, his bowler, his sample case, even his underwear, as if the rest of him had just evaporated into thin air.

“That was our play!” one of the trimmers who had been at the drummer’s table protested, but Monk struck her suddenly with his bare fist—hard enough so that it raised an instant welt, closing one eye and sending the woman stumbling, crying from her seat, the other prostitute sitting stock still where she was.

“Don’t worry, kid, I never hits da ladies wit’ me club,” he smiled reassuringly at Kid. “If dey gets out of line, I just gives ’em a little poke to raise a shanty on de glimmer. An’ I always takes me knucks off first.”

He turned back toward the stage—and a woman in a red velvet hussar’s jacket and silken harem pants walked over to his table and slid right into Kid’s lap.

“You got a girl, mister?” she asked, her voice low and tender, and all he could do was shake his head. She laughed at him, and he realized he must have looked terrified.

He had had girls before—young ignorant girls, barely teenagers, in the whorehouses on Elizabeth Street. Lonely Portagee girls from the factory he could barely speak a word to, in his single-room apartment. But she was different. She had beautiful grey eyes and smelled of lilacs, and she was so close to him—

She was also one of Gyp’s girls, he knew, and he wondered dully if he were being set up for something. He looked across the room, to where Gyp sat apart, with the rest of his women, all of them dressed in black, like a covey of nuns. His cold, deadly eyes swept back and forth across the dance floor, but he was not looking at them, and right at that moment Kid didn’t care what happened. All he wanted was for her to stay where she was on his lap, smelling like flowers, with her soft hand against his neck. She leaned down and wriggled her bottom against his cock, her laugh low and throaty.

“Don’t worry, it’s on the house,” she assured him. “How ’bout gettin’ us a bottle?”

“All right,” he croaked, and hailed weakly for a waiter, who was on them instantly, setting up two glasses and a bottle of cheap champagne, the house specialty.

“Whatcher name?” she asked, looking down at him, stroking his hair back from his brow.

“Joseph.”

“Joseph. That’s a nice name. It’s from the Bible. My name is Sarah,” she told him. “That’s from the Bible, too.”

“Sarah,” he repeated foolishly—while she expertly poured herself a glass of champagne with one hand, drank it off in one gulp, and poured another. He knew it was standard john’s patter, but she was smiling at him, and she smelled so good, she felt so good against him—

A hatchet-faced waiter stood up on the stage, a towel slung ceremonially over one arm, and began to sing. He had a high, tinny voice, and he hurried through the song as if he were afraid he was going to miss a streetcar. But to Kid’s surprise the dancers stopped and the whole room hushed while he sped through the maudlin ballad:

Slowly he realized, to his amazement, that everyone in the great hail was beginning to cry: Dago Frank, and Louie the Lump, and Whitey, and Spanish Louie—even Monk, his great, ugly face twisting grotesquely as he mumbled the words to himself. The whore whose eye he had blackened was crying, too—and so were all the gents, and their goohs and mabs in the private boxes, and the gangsters out on the floor in their gaudy suits and their molls hiding their pistols for them in their high Mikado tuck-ups.

So was Gyp the Blood—still taking in everything with his cold gaze from across the floor, but a tear running down his cheek. So was Sarah, seated so confidently in Kid’s lap, the tears streaming through her mascara and rouge, little sobs shaking her chest as she sang along:

—the whole hall full of pimps and ponces, killers and thieves, pickpockets and knockout-drop artists sobbing openly now, as the waiter reached the final line of the chorus—

When it finally came to an end, after many more maudlin verses and encores, the hall was filled with the sound of sniffling and nose-blowing. The gangsters and their women trailed back to their seats; a string of whores dancing the cancan took the waiter’s place on the stage.

“That was a sad song,” Sarah said to him, very close, in a small voice. He noticed that nearly half the bottle of champagne was gone already. Her face was a clownish mask now, where the black streaks of mascara had run through her powder, but he was aroused by her sadness, her vulnerability, gripping his hand more tightly around her waist.

“I like it when you hold me,” she whispered.

The can-can whores kicked up enthusiastically on the stage. They did not move even vaguely in time with each other, but they threw their skirts up higher and higher, whooping and laughing, the crowd starting to stamp along. Until, all at once, they threw the skirts right up over their heads and ripped down their tights in one motion: A whole line of their pale white legs, and hairy sexes, standing suddenly headless along the stage—before they sank into their splits, and the lights went out, and they scrambled giggling off the stage.

Afterwards there was more dancing, and the singing waiter, cranking out another tune that brought them all to tears again:

—and there was more champagne, and whiskey, and half a dozen drunken brawls, Monk wading in each time to cheerfully club the troublemakers.

Sarah clung to him for a long time, her head resting on his chest, one small hand around his neck. Finally she stirred, her small, blurred face floating up in front of him.

“Do you want to come upstairs?”

“What?”

“Do you want to come upstairs?” she asked again, and slid down from his lap, reaching out a hand to help pull him up.

He stumbled toward the stairs to the private booths, leaning on her shoulder. Down on the floor, he was aware, there was some kind of new commotion going on. Gyp had a man over his lap for some reason, gripping him firmly by the neck and knees, while a small crowd had gathered, taking bets over something.

“Come on, that’s not very nice,” she told him, towing him away by his arm.

“What?” He moved groggily up the stairs.

“You don’t wanna see that. Come on.”

She ran, laughing, on up the stairs ahead of him, into a darkened hallway with little curtained boxes on either side, muffled cries and groans coming from behind the red velvet curtains.

“Come find me!”

He lay on his back, on an enormous, zebra-striped pillow, the private box revolving around him. It was a cheap Bowery dream of a bagnio: a square little room, painted the color of blood. A table with something on it that looked like a samovar with a hose. A print of a naked young woman reclining on a bed, with a ribbon around her neck and a black lady’s maid behind her—

She slunk in through the curtains, doing a little dance for him along the far wall. Her face was somehow washed clean now, and surprisingly young and vulnerable. She shimmied out of her silk harem pants, unclasped the red velvet hussar’s jacket so that it revealed the plump, white sides of her breasts, just shy of her nipples. He dived for her, but she pulled effortlessly away from him, laughing again—then began to slowly swivel down over him, her hips swaying, pushing him back into the pillow.

“Say you love me,” she laughed. “Do you? Do you love me?”

He looked up at her, pale white body glowing in the gas light. Her face smiling but serious, as if she really wanted him to say it, and this was more than just some whore’s talk. Outside, he could hear the piano breaking into another maudlin melody, the waiter bawling through another tune like a runaway freight wagon:

“I do. I do love you,” he told her, as seriously as he could manage in his drunkenness because, of course, at this point he would say anything at all to be with her.

“Yes, I love you.”

—and she laughed as if it had all been a joke, which he knew it hadn’t, and pulled him to her on the bagnio cushions where they made love, and he sunk peaceably down to unconsciousness, wondering dully what he had done.

Yet when he awoke, with a splitting head, she was gone. There was no trace of her at all, even though most of his money was still intact—just enough deducted for the going rate—and he didn’t see her again for months, not until late that September when Big Tim Sullivan took him and Monk and some of the other Eastmans up to Washington Heights to watch the Highlanders and the Boston Pilgrims play for the pennant.

It was the last game of the year, and across the Hudson the Palisades were ablaze in reds and yellows. In the stands everyone was talking about whether they would get to play the great Christy Mathewson in the Series, and how Big Tim had one of the Boston infielders in his pocket.

Sullivan had some action going on the game with Bill Devery, one of the gamblers and pols who owned the Highlanders and who made his grand entrance into the park in a touring car, with a brass band striking up his campaign song:
Oh, I’m for Mr. Devery/Ev-ery, ev-ery time!
Devery had paid off his own first baseman, though—an ugly character with a pockmarked face—who would race in to snatch up some squib or bunt before unhurriedly straightening up and hurling the ball off into right field.

Kid sat in the stands, drinking beer and munching red-hots and watching it all unfold, enjoying the quick, serious action, though he didn’t understand any of it. Sarah arrived in the third inning with Gyp—wearing the same red velvet hussar’s jacket, a little the worse for wear by now. He turned around and tried to catch her eye, and hoisted his beer to her, but she didn’t seem to see him. He noticed now that everyone called her Sadie and on a nod from Gyp she went off, arm-in-arm, with one after another of the pols and gamblers hovering obsequiously around Big Tim. He kept looking out for her, but just as soon as she had returned, she was off with another of Big Tim’s pals, then another one after that.