City Of Fire Trilogy 1 - Dreamland (36 page)

He waited while Charlie Becker put on his big lieutenant’s cap and left, cocksure as ever—then still sat awhile in the tiny, windowless room, pondering the situation. He didn’t like it, that was for sure. He didn’t like it so much that he had already broached as discreetly as possible with Mr. Murphy the idea of ridding themselves of this troublesome cop:

“If, say, we was to excise the complainant, we would excise the complaint.”

“It’s a solution with the immense benefit of simplicity,” Murphy had conceded in his blandest, country parsonage voice, putting down the teacup he held as delicately as an egg in two fingers.

“The trouble is, keeping it quiet.”

“Oh, certainly, we would be very quiet.”

“Somethin’ always comes out. It always does, you know that as well as I do.”

Mr. Murphy had brooded over his teacup.

“The, uh,
absence
of a police lieutenant could not be overlooked. Unless there were a
reason
for it.”

“Such as? Hypothetically speakin’?”

“Well, it seems to me as if you have two problems on your hands.” Mr. Murphy blinked, as if he were explaining transubstantiation to a particularly dim Sunday school student.

“One is Herman, raising such a ruckus in the papers, hurting business all around. The other is Lieutenant Becker, with his overzealousness. It seems to me that one problem could take care of the other.”

His meaning began to come clear to Sullivan.

“That would take care of things, all right,” he conceded. “But I don’t know as how Charlie could ever be induced to perform such a rash act himself.”

“He wouldn’t have to be,” Mr. Murphy blinked. “It just needs to get done—now that Herman has so helpfully fingered the lieutenant in the papers.”

“I see—but wouldn’t that give the Holies all kinds of fodder? Corruption permeating New York’s finest, all that kind of thing?”

“Oh, I think it would make for a nice diversion. By the time they’re done running after their police lieutenant everyone will be thoroughly sick of Reform.”

Mr. Murphy’s political logic was unassailable, as always. If Beansy Rosenthal were to be knocked off now, the good government types would go for Lieutenant Charlie Becker hook, line, and sinker. Big Tim could sit back and let Becker take the splash—secure in the knowledge that Beansy had already got him off the hook with his newspaper statement.

It was brilliant—
but Jay-sus, what a thing it was!

Knocking off two men—one of them a police lieutenant? Politics was a rough game, Big Tim had always known that. He had played it with Boss Croker himself, who had once shot a man dead at the polling booth. He kept, on salary, at least two dozen seasoned cutthroats to take care of various matters. But it was one thing to tolerate murder, another thing to plot it.

He thought of the big, blunt, ignorant cop, so oblivious to the grave he had dug for himself. And he thought of Herman’s trusting face.

Whatever
you
say, Big Tim

He had already sent a reminder down to Gyp the Blood, through a fat, odious little cop named Buckley, that there was a chore waiting to get done. It was so tempting to just walk back into his poker room. To go back to his easy chair, and the overburdened sideboard, and his whiskey and cigars. To let that little monster do the job he had given him, and go back and sit around the fire, and the light, and listen to them tell all the old stories.

Instead, he stood up and followed Charlie Becker out into the dark. He couldn’t just let it go at that. The whole key to the thing was Beansy: with him out of the way, everything else would be taken care of. He had to warn him, he decided—one more time. He owed him that much, at least, though he wasn’t sure why. He limped blindly out into the dark alley, his groin beginning to ache again, trying to think where he might find that fool Herman this time of night.

By the middle of the morning there was a pile of shirtwaists rising inexorably from the bench next to her station. A cloud of lint rose too from the shop floor, and the gas jets had been lit so they could see the cloth before their faces. Esther thought of nothing but her
dybbuk
on the roller coaster, against the constant drone and whine of the machines.

The thread jammed, and the needle pulsed through her fingers as she held the fine cloth in line—tiny drops of blood trailing along the excellent cloth. She was not sure if it was because she was thinking of him, or because she was not fully back in the rhythm of her work yet, but at least dreaming of the boy helped to kill the time. Usually she looked forward only to her next little respite: her allotted bathroom break, a stolen cigarette, lunch. She refused to consider anything more, such as when the day would end, or the week, or the next season—or when everything might finish, once and for all.

But now—she had her
dybbuk
to think about. Not that it was really thinking, so much as mooning:
Him
on the Iron Pier with her.
Him,
on the Steeplechase, up on the roof. . . She should, she supposed, be considering how to ease him into marriage, or banish him from her thoughts altogether, but she didn’t want to do either one. Mostly, she just wanted to be with him all the time, to be around him.

How foolish it all was!
How like her father—dreaming of the impossible. Wanting to live like nobody had ever lived before. There were real things to take care of, besides all this useless wanting. She had work, and her parents, and after she got off tonight she would go to collect dues for the union, and then meet Clara over at the Clinton Street Hall.

Was that all there was, though? Just one thing after another?

She dreamed of him kissing her on the Alpine Sleigh Ride until the floor at the Triangle revolved, and the needle bit into her finger again.

Just before noon, and the lunch whistle, there was an unscheduled interruption—a small disturbance that spread in ripples across the floor from the back of the shop, near the stairs. A long file of women, most of them very young, straggled into the room, holding their heavy black sewing machines in their arms.

“This way, this way!”

It was the daily visit of Wenke, the
shadchen
—the labor subcontractor, a bony, excitable man with pop eyes and waxy white hair. Nearly every day, during the peak of the season, he hauled a new string of girls into the factories. He would leave them standing behind the last, back bench, the heavy machines still in their arms, while he went up to Mr. Bernstein’s office on ten to dicker over the rate. The other women refused to make room for them on the benches, spat through their fingers at the newcomers the way they did when they passed a church. Their very presence was a reminder to the regular operators of how precarious their existence was, and the women knew it, and hated them the more for it.

“Look at them, these
bummerkehs.
They will starve us yet!”

Most of the day girls were younger than the youngest operators in the shop—though Esther spotted a few older, gray-haired women among them, no doubt widows desperate to get back into the trade. The day girls were the poorest and the most desperate, the newest and the clumsiest of them all. They hired out from firm to firm at the height of the season, renting their machines from Wenke and handing over half of what they made to him. In return, he walked back and forth behind them on the shop floor, helping and chastising them, replacing needles and thread, straightening the lawn and yelling at them relentlessly.

“There! You call that workmanship—a
miesse meshina
to you!” he would point out, thrusting a finger at a missed stitch or a tiny tear.

“That will cost me—I will never hear the end from Bernstein about
that!”

He would mark the girl’s mistake down with a little pencil, in the tattered black notebook he carried in his vest pocket.

“That’s a penny off for you,
metsieh
that you are!”

Esther had seen him go through a girl’s whole pay that way—until after ten hours work and hundreds of perfectly good shirtwaists she had nothing to show for her stint, nothing at all, and was reduced to crying over her machine. Then Wenke the
shadchen
might hand her a nickel back:

“Here, here—at least so you don’t starve on my head.”

The contract girls were the
shadchen’s
responsibility—though the women supervisors walked constantly around them in their silent, rubber-heeled shoes, searching for any mistake that could be deducted from their pay. The foremen, Podhoretz and Kristol, would lay their hands heavily on the women’s shoulders, kneading and pulling fiercely at them, pinching and prodding and taking liberties the regulars wouldn’t let them get away with.

“You are starving the marrow from my head!” Wenke came down from the office, screaming and gesturing at Bernstein, who walked imperturbably beside him. It was the same old story.

“No one can work at this rate. Better you should be
dead
than work for this!”

“You don’t got to take it,” Bernstein calmly pointed out.

For a moment, Wenke looked like he actually might entertain the offer, his eyes wilder than ever. Finally, he threw up his hands.

“All right. I don’ know what game this is, but you want corpses on your head, so be it! Girls!”

The new girls were put immediately to work, at whatever empty spaces could be found, the other women moving as far away from them as possible. They worked with their heads down, not daring to so much as sneak a glance around themselves—though after a few minutes they had been all but forgotten.

At noon, when the whistle blew, the machines all shut down together, and there was a sudden, ringing hush throughout the big room. The women sat at their work places to eat, or on the windowsills, or the boxes of waists—anywhere they could get a seat. They sipped their tea out of saucers, ate chunks of thick black bread and little tins of sardines, talking eagerly, rapidly even as they chewed.

Esther eased her bum down gratifyingly on the biggest, softest bundle of longerine she could find, staring idly over at the
shadchen’s
girls where they half stood, half sat along the wall in the back like birds on a wire, nibbling at their own bits of bread or fish—their heads still down, not even talking much to each other.

It occurred to her that she should go over and chat with them, make them feel at least a little at home—but she knew her friends would not understand. The
shadchen’s
girls were driving down the rate, and if there was another strike they would be the first ones called as scabs. Their only hope for acceptance was to get a regular position somewhere, somehow—and that depended on replacing one of them.

When the Triangle had opened the papers had been full of what a bold new model of rationalized industry it was. They had raved about the smart new benches, the airy, well-lit work spaces—the new, shiny black electrical outlets hanging down from the ceiling like so many snakes. A whole shop, just devoted to making waists!

The waists—the shirtwaists—were the light, shapely blouses the Gibson girls wore: the wasp-waisted, sleek young society women—and the department store clerks and ladies’ maids who tried to imitate them. They
all
wore them now, every woman on the street, every woman in the shop, save for the greenest greenies, just off the boat. The factory was supposed to put them out—more quickly, safely, efficiently, than ever before.

Yet once they had set to work it was much the same. They were packed in like herrings, and Mr. Bernstein and his supervisors drove them just as hard as any sweatshop. There were still layoffs in the slack seasons, and during the rush they simply hired the
shadchen’s
girls to keep down the rates. It was still work, much as it had ever been.

The whistle blew again, and Esther had to leave her throne of lawn. The
shadchen’s
girls trudged back to work with the rest of them.

They would not have another break until they got off, just at the end of the long, late-summer dusk. The shirts kept coming—the shop boys bringing up more and more heaps of lawn from the cutters on the eighth floor below, floppy, enigmatic cuts of clothing for them to sew, within a matter of minutes, into another perfect shirtwaist.

They wasted almost nothing—and at the end of the day, before they could leave, they would all be searched to make sure no one was stealing so much as a scrap. Podhoretz and Kristol would stand by the single shop door, and the elevator; and the other door, the fire door, was closed and padlocked, lest anyone get away with even a few pennies’ worth of the fine cloth.

Their big, meaty hands rummaging blind as a dog through her well-ordered bag, their odious, smirking faces only inches away from her own—making some nasty remark, before she could snatch the bag back, and run all the way downstairs to the street—where she could dream her ice-cream-soda daydreams again, kissing her boy on the roller coaster.

Delancey Street was melting in the heat, the carters’ horses suctioning up tar with every step they took. Winos lay in the street, dousing their stomachs with buttermilk, and everyone moving up and down the avenue dabbed at their faces with little white handkerchiefs, until the whole street was a sea of fluttering white flags.

The deep, soggy heat of the day had not relented, even in the last light of the evening. Esther pushed her way past the window shoppers, and the vendors peddling pink paper roses and Italian ices and slices of coconut swimming in water, until she stood before the little shop at Essex Street. She had told herself she was not going to stop. She had told herself she was not even going to look, but there it was.

There was a new hat in the window.