City Of Fire Trilogy 1 - Dreamland (35 page)

“Doesn’t it . . . don’t you feel . . . it
humbles
you?” I asked her, mortified now that she would do such a thing for me.

“Nothing humbles a queen,” she informed me. “Haven’t you learned that by now?”

I picked her up, fragile china package that she was, and carried her right back to her imperial bed in her royal bedroom, and ravished her thoroughly. But it was never the same: the queen in exile, the queen in chains, dancing for a gang of orphaned toughs was one thing. The queen at her duties, presiding over our sequestered, sideshow world was another, and I no longer wanted any part of it.

I returned to my Bowery dives, hunting for—what? Another such fantasy? It was foolish, I knew: a mindless debauch of drinking and voyeurism. I didn’t care. I went too far, was far too careless—which was how I came to be dangled on that monster’s knee at the dog pit, my back nearly cracked open like a lobster’s.

The thing was, I still preferred the old dream, the old pretense, to this new, fantastic existence: the one where I pretended to be a boy. Nobody else wanted to see that act. I could walk, invisible, through the nighttime streets, and I would be the only witness to my depravation. That was how it had to be.

I had decided: There would be no issue. No fruitful marriage, no happy, make-believe existence in our gingerbread city. The joke had gone on long enough, and it was an iron law of vaudeville—every gag must have its end.

He walked uptown as the long, summer dusk painted the evening sky, strolling toward his saloon across from the police headquarters. Soon he was away from the official buildings, and the newspapers, and walking among the tenements.

He was in a Bohemian neighborhood, he knew, from all the ash barrels stuffed with stripped tobacco leaves. The Bohemians rolled cigars piecework; they hung the tobacco to dry in long strips hung all over their tiny rooms, even blocking up the windows. He reminded himself to learn a little bit of their gab, start getting acquainted. Downtown was filling up with them now—along with the Italians, and the Poles, and even the heathen Chinee.

What a place to be a politician, where the leaders stay the same but the people always change

Big Tim’s specialty had always been Jews, which was how he had made his way in Tammany. He liked them as a people; they liked to read a book, and keep themselves clean, and they stayed away from the drink.

He cultivated their gang leaders and peanut politicians.
My Jewboys,
he called them affectionately. They were an infinite source of help at the polls, though you had to watch them all the time. They were idealists at heart—born splitters, and purblind, pigheadedly stubborn when they got a wind up. Their own book put it best, in Exodus, if he recalled correctly:

“And the Lord said unto Moses, ‘I have seen thy people, and behold, they are a stiff-necked people . . .’ “

Like Beansy. His wide, trusting face swam up before Big Tim again, unbidden. Like a child, he’d always been—like a wayward, simpleton son.

By God, he didn’t like this business. His job was to help such people. He was used to making the hard deals, to doing what had to be done-but this,
Jay-sus—

When he reached the saloon, his eyes watered in the weak yellow light, and the cigar smoke, and the ready love that it offered.

“Hey, Big Tim, Big Tim!”

They all hailed him when he came through the door: Jake the night bartender, and the elbow lifters at the bar, and the cops from the police headquarters across the street, working over their free steaks and chops.

“Heard ya saw the mayor today, Tim—”

“Hey ya, Big Tim!”

Over in the corner, the piano player had launched into a sloppy, sentimental new number:

It was a standard pol’s saloon, much like the one down by the Tombs: Starched white tablecloths, fresh from the Chinee laundry. Pickled eggs on the bar. The ubiquitous painting of that ass Custer—Irish, of course, somewhere on his mother’s side—making his last stand against the savage Sioux. Many saloons, he knew—even good, loyal organization ones—were supplanting that barroom staple with monochromes of the Great Man’s charge up San Juan Hill, but Big Tim felt it safer to stick with poor old Custer. Better another historic flop than a very lively success.

He could have thrown in all the fashionable trimmings, like Mr. Murphy’s joint up in the Tenderloin: potted palms and pink lights, waiters in military uniforms, and a string orchestra on the balcony. A maudlin tenor in tails, and a waxed moustache. But he liked it better this way. It made his constituents feel more at home. Even now, he knew without looking that there was a small group of nervous men standing at the bar, shifting uneasily from one foot to another, fixed smiles on their faces. They were always there, every night, at all of his saloons. They were, he knew—from their faces, from their nervousness—men who had never asked him for anything in their lives before.

“Come, have a drink on me, my friend, and tell me how it is wit’ you this day,” he would call them over, one at a time.

It was the preeminent politician’s trick, and the one he had taken the most care to learn: the art of making a favor to
them
seem like a favor to
him.

Grudgingly, they would come over, and he would talk to them—no matter what their race—as if they were no more than old townsmen, reunited in the new world. He talked to them about their families, and their neighbors, and their work. He remarked upon the beauty of their children, and the modesty of their wives, and the rectitude of their forebears. And then—only
then
—did he extract what they wanted. So delicately, so painlessly, that it did not seem like they had asked for anything at all.

Once it was determined what they needed, the transaction could be completed effortlessly. A few dollars, a note with a name and an address on it—

How little they want from us—

A job with the street cleaners. Money to buy the kiddies shoes. Admittance for the wife to the consumptives’ hospital on Blackwell Island. He provided it all, any request within reason, executed with speed and grace. After all, he was a boss.

They were grateful enough. He knew, to his embarrassment, that there were tinted lithographs of another live politician going up on the walls of saloons and even private homes, all over the Fourth Ward: a man with a florid, Irish slab of a face.

And yet he wondered if—an hour or two later, well into his third beer, smiling gratefully at how here, that hadn’t been so hard after all—the man did not feel the pickpocket’s touch on his soul.

“Give that racket a rest, why don’cha,” he called over to the piano player, as good-naturedly as he could. “Play something from home.”

Immediately, the piano player swung into an old tune from County Kerry, and Big Tim waded through his saloon, gladhanding his way to the back room where there was a poker game that had been going on continuously, night and day, for over five years.

“Boys—how are ya settin’ tonight? Boys—”

All along the walls were murals of voluptuous blond nudes, romping before some token classical ruins. They reclined under grapes, or fled laughing from red-eyed satyrs. Just below all their grand, pink pulchritude lay a sideboard groaning with turkeys, and hams, and carved roast beef. Waiters in white smocks padded diligently back and forth, keeping the beer and whiskey circulating. Half a dozen men clustered around the big table where the game went on; at least two or three times as many loitered around the room, making deals or looking for handouts, filling themselves from his table.

Here were all the full-time jobbers and the grafters, men with connections, or an angle. Most of them were pols, now that the legislature wasn’t in session—Al and Bob and Jimmy, and the rest of the boys, down from Albany—but there were also firemen and police captains, contractors, and reporters and union delegates, even actors off the kerosene circuit.

“Big Tim!”

“Dry Dollar!”

“Boys.”

He threw himself back in the great, padded chair that was always kept open for him, with a fresh seltzer water kept by one arm like Elijah’s glass. He grabbed up a fistful of chips, threw them absently down on the table before him. When he wanted to, he could play cards with any man in the City, but that wasn’t the purpose of this game. Here he was content to dribble away a few small pots, and attend to more important business.

“Say, do you remember that dinner Big Tim gave over at the Occidental, for Johnny Hitt, the elevator boy?”

They started to tell the old stories, the bald-faced flatteries as soon as he had sat down.

“God, that was a feast—”

“Now, boys, why not? He was a good man, was he not? Well-liked by all?”

He had sunk into the soothing bath of their chatter, the endless card game before him—when Cousin Florrie came up and whispered in his ear. Big Tim’s poker face broke in his surprise.

“He’s here? Now?” he whispered back.

Florrie nodded grimly.

“Jesus jumped-up Christ!”

He threw in his cards and stood up, his expression amiably blank again. No one really seemed to notice.

“Now boys, I can’t hear no more a this or you’ll be causin’ me to blush—”

They all laughed, and went on telling stories about him as he left the table. They didn’t need the real Tim Sullivan, he knew, to honor his generous shade. Florrie led him down a hallway to the back entrance, where the man was waiting—menacing, bloodhound’s face jutting out from under one of Commissioner McAdoo’s new gleaming white caps.

“Jaysus, Charlie. Why di’n’tcha wear yer sash from the Policemen’s Benevolent Association while you was at it.”

“I need to talk to you,” Handsome Charlie Becker said, direct and to the point as ever.

“Uh-huh. And I guess no brass bands were available for hire. Come into me office, before every reporter in town gets here.”

He ushered Becker into a windowless anteroom, only slightly bigger than a broom closet. There was nothing inside save an empty desk with a telephone on it, a couple of hard-backed chairs. When they were seated Becker looked directly at him, with his same unwavering, bloodhound stare.

“I want him dead,” he said simply.

“Jesus, man! No wonder yer head of the Strong-Arm Squad. Could you maybe repeat that a little louder for the payin’ customers?”

Becker just sat there staring at him. There was a general air of belligerence about the man. He had a sharp, sardonic mouth, a granite chin—and an incongruous, boyish dimple in his left cheek that was responsible for his nickname. He was a huge man, bigger even than Big Tim, a towering, broad-shouldered Hessian from some hick farm town upstate.

Big Tim could see at once why he was such a favorite target of the newspapers, and the Holies, in their latest crusade to root out corruption in the police force. He had great, hairy hands, and it was said he could kill a man with one punch. Not that he didn’t seem to be trying. A few years before he had got into trouble for slugging a housewife who asked him the way to the subway, and then there was the teenager he had beaten up before a lobby full of theatergoers, and the suspicious shooting of an alleged burglar. Misunderstandings seemed to follow Charlie Becker around like a Pinkerton detective.

Once a goo-goo D.A. had been elected, and the Little Little Napoleon had appointed McAdoo commissioner, most of the force had got the message and soft-pedaled the boodle for the time being. Not Charlie Becker.

Instead of toeing the line, he had come up with a little game of his own. He had kept collecting his payoffs from the gambling houses scattered all over the new Tenderloin, up in Times Square. Only now, he took protection money
and
raided the houses as well.

Not badly, mind you—not in classic strong-arm style, breaking down doors, and busting up the furniture. Just a little—the way he had done with Herman’s joint—so the gamblers would have to close down for a day or two, but could then open up again, more or less intact, and with their payoff money ready.

Jay-sus, but everybody had a racket goin’ in this town

It was a cute game—too cute by half. The gamblers didn’t like being shut down, even for a day or two at a time, and especially when they were already shelling out for protection. It ate into profits, and it scared the respectable trade away. But Handsome Charlie didn’t seem to care.

“I paid my dues,” he insisted now, resting his fine white lieutenant’s hat on one knee. “I been the bottom dog long enough, workin’ my way up from roundsman. I done what everybody asked of me, and now I want what I got comin’.”

“What you deserve.”

“What I deserve,” he nodded.

Handsome Charlie was not a man for irony. But what the hell was he doing here, done up in his Sunday best uniform and his shiny new white hat like a goddamned commodore?

“All right, Charlie,” he sighed. “You got a case. Just whattaya want us to do with Herman?”

“I dunno,” shrugged Handsome Charlie Becker. “Murder ‘im.”

“Ah. You said it.”

“I don’ care,” the cop went on, oblivious. “Run him outta town, if you want. I don’ care what ya do with the lyin’ Jew bastard, just so long as you shut him up.”

“All right, Charlie,” Sullivan soothed him. “Whatever you want, Charlie.”

Becker picked up his hat and stood to go.

“Tell ’em to hurry it up, too,” he said, the belligerent policeman even here, in the back of Big Tim’s own saloon. “That indictment’s comin’ down any day. Tell ’em to hurry or I’ll do it myself.”

“Oh, that you will, Charlie, that you will, I have no doubt of it,” Sullivan told him, by now thoroughly sick of the man. “Now git yourself home—an’ don’t be leavin’ by the front door, neither.”