City Of Fire Trilogy 1 - Dreamland (65 page)

We will prove that the real murderer, the most desperate criminal of all, was the cool, calculating, scheming, grafting police officer!

Of course the Holies had already taken up the cry. They were practically rubbing their hands over the idea of special investigators, and blue-ribbon commissions, and indignant public hearings. Stretching on and on until they had exhausted even the public’s appetite for scandal.

“Silk hats and silk socks, and nothing in between,” Tim muttered.

At most, all they would accomplish was marching poor old Handsome Charlie Becker off to the chair. One moderately corrupt, moderately stupid police lieutenant. It seemed a poor catch, for all their sound and fury, and Mr. Murphy would be glad to let them have it. Reform would be sated for the moment, and everyone could get back to business as usual.

It had been very courteous of Murphy to let him know, Sullivan reflected, before he heard it blurted from the newsies peddling the afternoon extras. It was the sort of consideration he had never had from old Croker. He was a deft man, Murphy, making all the right moves. No doubt he would raise Tammany to new heights—though for what purpose, Big Tim wasn’t exactly sure.

Whatever it was, Sullivan knew he should go up to Murphy’s place and consult on it. He rose up from his table and moved out into the street—so preoccupied that he neglected his usual ritual of checking himself in the barman’s glass, and leaving Feeley’s silver dollar on the counter.

Big Tim walked slowly up Centre Street, and then Lafayette. He could go only so fast, even if he wanted to; his groin was a perpetual mass of fire now. Nothing worked. He’d tried the mercury cure, and the fire cure, and the arsenic cure, but it still hurt worse than ever, and they only seemed to make him more absent-minded.

At Canal Street there was a road gang of Italians, tearing up paving stones in the middle of the street. Gaunt men, stripped to the waist, skin burned nearly black, wielding pickaxes in great, slow arcs. They worked under the supervision of a padrone with a big paunch and a shotgun tucked under one arm, who actually touched his cap to Big Tim as he went by.

“Just like the old country,” Sullivan wondered out loud.

He didn’t know the Italians so well, except that they worked sixteen hours a day when they could get it, and slept in alleyways or the back of stores, and sent half their pay home. They took the worst jobs in the City, except for the darkies, working the road gangs, sorting over the garbage scows for anything, anything at all they could salvage for the ragpickers’ market in Bottle Alley.

Land of the people—

He cheered up a little when the street children spotted him, as always, and swelled up around him—spilling out into the street, oblivious to the fast-moving traffic.

We must pass some kind of street regulations
, he thought vaguely. Other cities had them, after all; fine, progressive towns like Cleveland, or Portland, Orgeon. Something to slow the speed of the wagons, and the onrushing automobiles, some way to prevent the interminable tie-ups at every intersection.

“Big Tim! Big Tim!” the children were screaming delightedly. He had forgotten to load up, but there was still enough jake, enough old candies in his pockets for them to be satisfied. He smiled benevolently down at their gap-toothed grins, their matted hair, the boys and girls skipping along barefoot on the paving stones. They gathered around him until he was finally forced to stop altogether in the middle of the street, standing with his arms extended like some failed scarecrow, while all the little birds picked through his pockets.

They scrambled off when they had what they wanted. He left most of them at the corner of Broome and Centre, under the shadow of the great white police headquarters. One of them had found a rusty iron ring off a streetcar wheel, and soon they were all busy, clattering it back and forth across the granite paving stones. The policeman standing guard at the front entrance looked on disapprovingly but he didn’t dare run them as long as they were with Big Tim.

“I’ll be comin’ back this way presently,” he made sure to call out to the cop, “an’ I don’ want to see ’em disturbed.”

The man nodded as gravely as any salute, and Big Tim left them still playing happily, under the aegis of the ponderous white dreadnought.

“What do we owe this man?” Mr. Murphy said mildly, sipping his tea. “After all, he pushed the thing, right from the start.”

“To be sure,” Big Tim agreed. “God and the people hate a chesty man.”

“He was the one who insisted on saving his press agent. He was the one who insisted on all the rest of it.”

“What’s to keep him from talkin’, though?”

“What if he does? Who could he finger?”

Mr. Murphy’s logic was infallible, as always. After all, it had been Becker who had gone to
him
—not the other way around. Sullivan had kept him carefully separated from any of the actual shooters. Besides, Beansy’s own words, so carefully leaked by the D.A., indicted only Becker.

A ghost of a laugh played itself out along Murphy’s lips.

“Rosenthal already exonerated you before he died. You were his best friend, remember.”

“I’m sure Whitman wishes he’d kept that affidavit secret now,” Big Tim remarked dryly.

“Oh, I don’t think so,” Murphy said mildly, right as always. “This way, it’s all tied up neatly. He can take his little police lieutenant and run for Albany. Otherwise he’d have to raise a whole new row, and who knows where that would lead? Takin’ on the whole Organization—turning over stones he don’t want to look under.”

Mr. Murphy shook his head.

“These people. They think they’re pious, when in fact they’re only bilious.”

On his way back from Mr. Murphy’s he found himself thinking of poor Helen Becker, pleading her husband’s case to him. He had read in the paper that she had lost the baby. It had been a difficult delivery, and when the doctors had asked if they should choose her or the child, there had been no husband around to answer on his wife’s behalf. They’d had to put the question to the mother herself, and she had chosen to live, God help her. When that got out in the papers there was no stopping the invective and the death threats that poured down upon her. She had tried explaining that if she died, Charlie would have no one else in the world in his greatest hour of need, but of course that appeased no one.

That warm, sad-eyed woman, trying to smile at him. She brushed at the veil with her hand, and her face flitted before him like a moving picture image, merging with Herman Rosenthal’s.

I wonder why this could not have happened to two people who did not love each other so much.

He headed back down Centre Street, back toward the police headquarters. The children were still there, Sullivan saw, still rolling the hoop and playing any number of new games around it, spun off into their dreamy child’s world of visions and nonsense songs—before it was time to go search out a warm grate to sleep on again, a discarded crust of bread to eat.

He wondered if
they
played such games—down in the convent in New Jersey, or out West. No doubt they had better ones, more toys, and real lawns and fields. And always enough to eat, a warm place to sleep, good clothes. He was a good provider. He was a good father.

An automobile came wheeling fast around the corner from Spring Street, a big yellow touring car. It picked up speed, then seemed to swerve toward the clot of playing children—the driver struggling to keep all four wheels on the road.

“Fools!” Big Tim shouted in warning, and he broke into a bandy-legged run for the children, but he was still a block away, too far to do anything. The other pedestrians jamming the sidewalks just stared as he ran past.

“Fools!” he yelled again, hoping somehow that would get the cop on picket duty to do something—but the street kids had seen the touring car as soon as he had. Most of them scrambled easily out of the way with their youthful, street-trained reflexes—but a small knot of children remained frozen in the street, unsure of which way to jump. There was a little girl in a ragged dress, and two boys in bare feet and overalls, one of them wearing an oversized cap tucked down low over his eyes. The car bore down upon them so quickly that Big Tim could see the other boy was still smiling, blinking up from his game, not sure yet what was going on.

“Jump out!” he yelled, staggering down the street now, smashing into people on the sidewalk—but that was all there was time for.

The car’s horn sounded wildly, but it kept moving, careening toward the little knot of children like they were a gaggle of pigeons in the road. Perhaps the driver was still fighting with his gears, trying to find the brake—not many of them really knew how to operate the big, murderous machines they drove—but he didn’t slow down. Not then, not even after he had run straight through the children—still harooging and speeding down the street, anonymous behind his driving goggles, his only identifying marks a yellow hat and flowing scarf that perfectly matched the color of his car.

“Goddamned
fools
!”

Sullivan cursed after him, scanning the street in the car’s wake. Two of the children—the little girl, and the boy with the oversized cap—had miraculously jumped out of the way at the last possible moment, guided by whatever instinct for life had kept them alive on the streets this far. They sat in the gutter looking very scared, the other children gathering slowly around, staring at them with religious awe.

The third child—the boy who had been smiling—was still in the street, lying crushed and quiet along the cobblestones. One of his legs was flattened and bleeding, a dark tire track across the bare skin just above his knee. He lay on his face—and when Big Tim got to him and turned him over, he saw there was another mark, branded on his forehead by the car’s grill. The dirty pair of overalls that did not reach his knees were all he wore. His eyes were closed now, but his lips were open, and still smiling—like one of the street kids in the pictures Sullivan remembered—pretending to be asleep.

“Get his parents!” he cried at the frightened, uncomprehending children around him.

“Get someone to help!”

He looked up toward the enormous police headquarters, but all was quiet. Even the one cop on guard duty was no longer at his post. There was no one to help but him, and Big Tim slid one arm under the child’s limp neck, another under his knees, and torturously lifted the boy up himself.

“Whose child is this?” he demanded sternly of the children again. “Whose child is this, I must get him back to his home!”

There was no answer from any of the children. Most of them had already begun to melt away again, down their familiar alleys and cellars, but others followed from a safe distance as Big Tim walked slowly down Lafayette Street with the dead child, repeating his question to anyone he passed:

“Whose child is this?”

The crowds of people walking past gave them quick, surreptitious glances and kept walking, without breaking stride. Big Tim turned down Broome Street and lurched aimlessly toward the East Side, no longer repeating his question out loud but mumbling and humming a little to himself, holding the boy out before him in his arms, so that maybe whomever he belonged to could see he was there.

The ships glided through the brilliant fall sky: zeppelins and aeroplanes, Spanish galleons and battle cruisers and rocket ships, all making long, lazy loops above the oblivious crowds.

Esther sat with Kid in the front seat of a red airplane with big black crosses on the wings, leaning into him, clutching the safety bar in front of her. It was the next-to-last weekend of the season. The long Indian summer had finally ended, and the air had turned fine, and crisp, and clean. One more week of the rides and the shows and the dancing halls—and then on the unbearably sad and wistful last weekend there would be an
Oktoberfest
—a last excuse to lure the crowds out.

She would be back at work by then. The Triangle still stood, a scab shop, all but alone among the bigger shops and factories. The Triangle women who had gone out were blackballed, but she had arranged with Clara to go back in under another name, a different hairstyle—to start all over again, organizing the scabs and the new girls.

She was sure she could do it. Mr. Bernstein never looked too closely, and the foremen would be too busy squeezing and fondling the girls to notice. She would be on her own, depending on no one this time, not even Clara. And if she succeeded—who knew? Clara’s friend Pauline was not even twenty—a good seven years younger than Esther herself—but she had already been made a traveling delegate for the union. Leaving her machine behind, riding the rails from city to city to spread the cause.

And what about him?

Where would he go, when the summer ended? The Tin Elephant was nearly deserted now. It would be closing for the winter soon, the whores moving on already to more seasonal resorts. Her brother was persistent, she knew. It was only a matter of time before he found Kid—even if she never had anything to do with him again.

The night before, listening to the tide in bed, she had tried to persuade him to go away—become one of the Disappearing Men.

“Don’ worry, moon, I can take care a myself,” he had insisted, smiling at her. “There’s no need to go anywhere.”

They had talked on into the night about what to do. Until their words had started to slur and slow to the lapping pace of the waves, and they had fallen asleep in the mercifully cooler arse of the Elephant. He awakened her in the middle of the night, pulling up her nightgown—a small, insistent tugging—and they had made love still only half awake, drifting in and out of dreams, the only sound the bells from the buoys in the harbor.

It was really a
farpotshket
situation. Everyone talked about going, but no one did. He should leave, and she should leave him; this ice-cream-soda romance was over, despite all his fine words about marriage. Soon the birdcage hotels along Brighton Beach with their dancing pavilions and their champagne bars would be shutting down. The cool, healthful breezes off the ocean would blow harder and colder, until the island was inhabited only by the gulls and the sandpipers, and the midgets in The Little City, shivering in the darkness of their medieval streets.