City Of Fire Trilogy 1 - Dreamland (40 page)

The man didn’t avert his eyes from Freud’s gaze, but stared back with the expressionless, neutral stare he had seen so often in New York—as if he were looking right through him, neither giving ground nor presuming intimacy.

It is the stare of nomadic tribesmen,
he thought,
each circling the same water hole.

It was a Semitic face, swarthy and sharp, unshaven, his eyes dark and hollowed. Not a Viennese or German Jew, he felt sure, but from some point farther east—long, religious curls hanging down from underneath the immense burden of cloth that covered his hat. A face not unlike that of the apparition, the monolith he had seen wandering up the Ringstrasse before he left Vienna, staring around himself like a creature from another age, suddenly transported to modern Europe.

In the Chinese restaurant, there had been a large, rather fiendish-looking Oriental at the front door, standing with his arms crossed, a pair of silver-handled axes and an opium pipe by his feet. Inside, though, all the waiters had been whites, a young black man with incredibly long and elegant fingers playing a piano. What a stew—what an
ongepotchket
collection of peoples!

And then—in the middle of dinner—while Jung was throwing back his chopped meat and earthworms and something that looked like chicken feet, one of the waiters had stepped into the middle of the room and begun to sing.

Another Jew, Freud felt certain—a short, timorous-looking man, with a large nose and dark eyes, who nonetheless stood with his arms by his side, and began to belt out an infectious ragtime number:

His voice was only adequate, but he was accompanied by the elegant-fingered black man, and the other waiters—and then, to Freud’s intense embarrassment, most of the other diners joined in, thumping their fingers on the table, keeping time with their knife and fork handles. The song was another meaningless American ditty, attached to a bouncy, simplistic beat, but it proved absolutely irresistible—Freud himself, to his consternation, tapped his feet in time under the table:

—going on and on like that. And when it was finished, launching into more jaunty ragtime numbers, and sentimental ballads, and nonsense rhymes. Until Freud was quite unable to eat or even think anymore, rushing off to find the bathroom hidden deep downstairs by the kitchen while Jung kept munching contentedly away on his earthworms.

What was to be done with such a country?

He looked for Herman Rosenthal over at the old Garden Cafe on Seventh Avenue, where he knew Beansy liked to go with his wife. He wasn’t there, which Sullivan took for a good sign, at least. Maybe he had gone to ground—though he knew Herman was just as likely to be projecting magic lantern displays of his affidavit off the Times building.

He made the rounds of the old Tenderloin, checking all of Beansy’s favorite haunts, but he still could not find the man. His groin was still hurting him, and he felt thirsty. He wasn’t much of a man for a glass, but he thought just now a short beer or a whiskey might ease the pain. He pulled his boater down over his eyes and ducked down into a two-cent restaurant for a quick swamp.

One always took a chance going in such places, he knew, no matter who one was. A ponce or an alderman, a judge or a bum—you were just as likely to wake up in the river the next day, drowned for the jinglers in your pocket and the new collar on your shirt.

He was lucky; this one didn’t seem so bad. It didn’t compare to the cellar beer dives in the Mulberry Bend, where the walls crawled with cockroaches and the drinks were served in old tomato cans. Or the block-and-fall joints on Chatham and Pearl streets that catered to the tramp trade. In the winter, they had a woodstove in the middle of the room, which the tramps were welcome to sit around so long as they could swing at least one foot to show they were still awake. From the street they looked like some kind of great, collective insect, the men’s heads bent down by the stove—nothing but a huddle of rags, with dozens of legs swinging back and forth, even as they slept.

He drained a beer, needled to give it any kind of a head, then a finger of whiskey that burned like kerosene, which it might well have been. He walked up to the street again, swaying a little as he walked—the pain in his groin receding all right, all his other faculties blurring as well as the alcohol spread through him. Bad as the whiskey and the beer had been, he already felt a need for more. He could feel other appetites growing in him as well.

Think where this has led you before

And what if it had, where was the harm in it? What had he ever done to anyone? He thought of the soiled doves, lingering beneath the Bowery elevated. The older ones terrible to look at, plainly touched with the Venus curse. But there were always at least some new girls, peering shyly out from behind the steel pylons, faces filled with innocence, and trepidation, and sometimes a tremulous hope.

“Didn’t I always treat them right?” he murmured aloud to himself on the street.

Didn’t they say you couldn’t throw a brick over a workhouse wall without hitting one of the Liberator’s brats? And then there was Parnell, and King David in the Bible. A man of his station was due a little license, after all. He always took care of them—took care of his mistakes, too, even when there was ample reason to doubt their pedigree—

He swung toward the east, walking more rapidly now. If not the Bowery, then he knew of some places on Elizabeth Street. All young girls, all very young and tender. His oldest could be their age now but there was no chance of
that,
they were all out West, or in the convent—

And if he had the curse, that wasn’t his fault, was it? In their profession, a case was bound to come along, sooner or later. Besides, he wouldn’t have to do anything, just sit on the bed beside them and talk. Just bask in the pleasure of sitting next to a pretty young girl on her bed. How many times in his life did a man get to do that?

He noticed a saloon, and stepped down into it for another quick boilermaker. It was a Bohunk bar, workmen in their tattered jackets and hats and tobacco-brown-stained shirts staring dully at him. When he came out, he wasn’t sure where he was.

He stopped on the dark street, still full of people pushing past at that hour of the night. He really had to find Herman. Gyp could be hunting him even as he stood there. The faces of the soiled doves passed before him again, peeking shyly out from under the elevated.

“Just a quick one,” he told himself. “Just a quick refreshment. I’ll be very careful.”

His mother loomed up out of the dark street toward him: a thin, black, spectral figure, wearing a tricornered hat. He took a horrified step back.

“I’m glad I found you,” Mrs. Frances Perkins said, walking up to him and offering her hand, straightforward as a Brooklyn pol. “I didn’t know if I could get through your entourage at the saloon.”

“You know I’m always happy to talk to you, Mrs. Perkins.”

He recovered himself as best he could but she smiled knowingly, and held on to his hand—close enough to smell the whiskey on his breath, he realized, and he was ashamed. For a social worker lady, she was a natural-born politician, able to seize on any weakness.

“You know what I’ve come about.”

“Certainly, certainly,” he said bluffly, trying to back away a little.

“Can we count on you with the Hours Bill?”

“Well, now, you know you have me sympathies on that one, ma’am, but the next session’s a long way off, an’ there’s some would say it’s an infringement on private property—” he hemmed, driven to unseemly honesty by her uncanny resemblance to his dead ma.

“I’m glad to hear you’re on our side, at least in principle,” Mrs. Perkins cut through his regrets. “I’m sure you know from experience that fifty-four hours is more than enough for any girl or mother to work in a factory. Your sister was a factory girl, wasn’t she, Mr. Sullivan?”

“Well, yes, as a matter of fact—”

He could still see her in that tiny flat on Clinton Street, after his mother had died and she was the sole support of them all. Slumped over the kitchen table, struggling just to get up and make the supper.

“Of course, I don’t have to tell you how many votes such a bill would draw in your district. I’m sure you’re aware of how many it would siphon off from the Socialists.”

“You have a point, you do have a point, Mrs. Perkins,” he conceded, starting to smile despite himself. “That last labor bill did get us plenty of votes—”

“Good. Then what could be a happier coincidence of good conscience and good politics, Mr. Sullivan?”

Spoken like a Jesuit father!

“I don’t know,” he told her, and laughed out loud. “I’m sure I don’t know, Mrs. Perkins!”

“Fine then,” she said, and gave his hand another hard shake. She looked still more closely at him, studying his blurry, sleepless eyes.

“Take care of yourself, Tim,” she said, motherly again.

“I will, Mrs. Perkins. I certainly will.”

She gave his hand yet another firm, solicitous squeeze, then walked briskly, only a slight twirl of her umbrella betraying her satisfaction. She was headed down a dark street, in a bad neighborhood, but Sullivan thought she could take of herself.

Even as he watched her leave, though, a figure detached itself from the shadows, silent and smooth as a rat, and moved toward him. Big Tim recognized him right away. It was Arnold, another one of his Jewboys, a dapper little man in an elegant, gray silk suit, and an actor’s jaunty fedora.

They’re all so small

“Hello, Dry Dollar,” the man hailed him quietly, confidently using Big Tim’s childhood nickname, even though he hadn’t known him for more than a couple years.

“What brings you downtown tonight, Arnold?” Big Tim asked politely, knowing full well there was a good reason.

There always was—Arnold never did anything without a purpose. Of all his boys, Big Tim liked and trusted Arnold the least, but he was sure he would go the furthest.

For one thing, he was the best gambler Sullivan had ever known—unbeatable at pocket billiards, and nearly as good at poker as he was himself. More than that, though, he was unmatched in pulling in the big marks. A few years before, Big Tim had put him in charge of his casino upstairs at the Hotel Metropole, in Times Square. Arnold had promptly quadrupled the profits, luring in millionaire’s sons from all over the country and even the Continent—plying them with enough women and enough champagne that they didn’t mind being taken.

After that, he could hardly refuse when Arnold had asked for a place of his own up on Forty-Deuce. The other, gentile gamblers had been no more fond of the idea than they had been of Beansy Rosenthal butting in on them, but of course Arnold had made it all right; had charmed and
shmeered
and bullied them until everything was jake. There were never any problems with Arnold.

“I hear there’s a certain little sheep gone missing,” he told Big Tim now.

“Well, yes, that could be,” Big Tim admitted cautiously.

“Mmm. This one didn’t stray very far.”

“No?”

“I was just lookin’ around my old digs, and who should I see?”

“The Metropole?
That’s
as far as he’s got?”

“Uh-huh.”

Arnold’s eyes were hidden under the brim of his fedora, but Big Tim thought he saw a small, cruel smile around his lips.

“Only a
shlimazel
believes in
mazel,”
he said.

“All right. I’m much indebted to you, I’m sure.”

—but Arnold was already fading back into the shadows, waving him off.

“Consider this a little favor from an old friend. Maybe sometime down the road.”

He found Herman just where Arnold had said he would—in the cafe of the Hotel Metropole. The Metropole wasn’t Big Tim’s kind of place, even though he owned it. There were plush carpets, and candles with red shades at each table, and enough palm trees for a tropical forest.

He had invested in it once the Tenderloin had spread up past Times Square, hoping to pull in the toff trade, but the place had been something of a bust once Arnold had moved on. It felt unbearably stuffy in the summer heat, despite the two giant electrical fans, slowly wafting the curtains back and forth; a five-piece chamber orchestra from Hungary sawing away in the cafe. The room was infested with the types sitting at Herman’s table now: Boob Walker, and Dan the Dude, and Denny Slyfox—peanut gamblers and confidence men, who preyed on the rubens and scared the more respectable clientele away.

Big Tim stood in the cafe doorway watching Herman for a few minutes—so happy, so childishly confident, gesturing expansively as he told some story, his gold watch and cuff links glinting brightly as he swung his arms about. Then he retreated silently to the lobby desk, where he had the gambler paged. To his overwhelming regret, Herman came right out, eager as a puppy dog, his pudgy flesh rolling loosely beneath a swank new green suit.

“Big Tim!” he said, grasping his hand, his eyes so eager and grateful that Sullivan barely had the heart to tell him what he had to. “I knew you’d back me in my hour of need! You’re a true friend and a gentleman, and I won’t forget you.”

He gave him a wink, and a convivial elbow, until Big Tim finally had to pull him aside, behind one of the Metropole’s faux marble pillars.

“Herman, Herman, what’d ya come out for?”

Rosenthal looked baffled.

“Why, because you called was why—”

“How did you know it was me?”

“Because you said it was.”

“Don’cha see it coulda been anyone? Any brain tickler or hackum in the city, just
sayin’
it was me?”