City Of Fire Trilogy 1 - Dreamland (70 page)

The night before, Sullivan had looked up some of the old folks, and got a little of the tongue. The election was to take place in the lavish new Wigwam on Fourteenth Street, with the voters passing between the candidates to put their ballots in the box. To make it fair, the candidates were supposed to wait back behind the rail, and refrain from making any last pitch for themselves.

But Big Tim had watched and waited, and whenever he spotted one of the old boys, the old braves, he would use the broken bit of the old tongue he had picked up.

“Remember the boy from home,” he would call out to them in the Gaelic.
“Nach cuimhin leat an buachill on bhaile!”

They couldn’t stop him because they didn’t even know what he was saying. And meanwhile the faces of the oldest voters glazed over with empathy, just to hear the words—just to hear the language they had not heard for a generation and had banished from their hearts.

It had been a walkover. The first of many. The first of so many good times.

He sat in his box at the Hesper Club, surrounded by judges and captains of industry. The Wise Ones were there, and Big Tom Foley, and Charlie Solomon, and Mr. Murphy. Watching the grand march of the Annual Timothy D. Sullivan Association Ball down on the floor. Watching all the gangsters and gamblers, the cutthroats and the pickpockets and the confidence men and the ponces and the whores—all of
his
people, saluting
him;
parading happily through the bands, and the confetti, the wild, frenzied racket:

He reached the bottom of the small ravine the path led to, and found it was not a river at all, but a rail bed. It was a very narrow gauge, an old branch of the Harlem line, the trees crowded so closely around that it barely seemed to make a disturbance in the thick underbrush. He walked along it like it was an old friend, recalling other good nights, other glorious victories.

Out in the snow, the line stretched for ten blocks. Eight thousand pairs of shoes they gave away that Christmas, right after the Panic, and eight thousand turkey dinners. And afterwards, after presiding over the whole thing, nodding and solemnly shaking their hands like some papal nuncio, he had walked around the corner and found them all squatting in the snow, swapping the new shoes back and forth. He hadn’t even thought about sizes—and they hadn’t asked. They had simply taken what was given, and gone around the corner to wriggle around in the snow, trying them on and swapping with each other. His people—American women, and children, and old men—squatting in the snow like peasants, not wishing to give offense to the mighty lord.

There had been all the Election Days, and all the grand, torchlight parades, and the brooms strapped to front stoops in hopes of a Tammany sweep. There had been all the platforms in their red-white-and-blue bunting, and all the mindless speeches, and the great cheers.

He remembered the Sleeping Italians, during the year of the great blizzard. They hired Italian road crews to dig out the rail lines, so food and coal could get through to the city, and some genius had hit upon the idea that they would work faster if they had their native cuisine. Wheelbarrows full of lasagna and spaghetti, Italian bread and chianti, had been carted down to the Grand Central station. And of course after eating all that the work crews had fallen into a deep and imperturbable sleep. Frantic officials of the New York and Erie lines ran about, trying to wake them up, but nothing could rouse them.

He remembered that night, his footsteps echoing through the station. The yellow gas lamps burning low, the waiting room silent save for the snoring and a stray man here or there, gently strumming on a mandolin.

And when they awakened, after a couple of hours, they had worked like piledrivers, clearing the ten-foot drifts off the rails in no time. How little they required, and how hard they had worked. A little food, a little rest. He had always wondered why it couldn’t be arranged, somehow, to do at least that little for them, for all of them. He was sure there was a reason, though he could not remember what it was.

Then there was the night they had found him, still wandering aimlessly around the East Side with the dead boy in his arms. He just didn’t know where to put the boy down once he had picked him up, until they had taken him out of his arms, and he had wandered away, walking all through the night, out to Brooklyn, and Coney Island, where they finally rounded him up the next day.

After the asylum, and the hospital, they had traveled all over the Continent, and everywhere they went, in every one of the ancient capitals, there was someone who knew Big Tim. He took them all home, sailing into the great harbor, with all the boys hallooing from the rail, backs to the Green Lady, straining to see the Bowery.

He had taken Nell on the Grand Tour, too, years before, to see if they could make it up. He could still see her, smiling on deck, holding one hand on her broad hat—
No, no,
he realized, that was just after they were married, and took the excursion boat up the Hudson to Bear Mountain. She didn’t smile much at all by the time he took her to Europe. It was to make it up to her, but she didn’t care much for a man’s things, she didn’t much care for a man’s thing, and what was he to do? He had scattered his seed; all through this great land of the people it would rise, and multiply—

Something rustled in the old leaves and the stickers near his feet, and he bent down to see what it was: some small rabbit, gone to ground, perhaps. But it was too subtle a disturbance to be that, he thought, and on bending down for closer inspection he saw that it was the rail—the narrow, steel rail, hard as a dagger, vibrating gently in the underbrush.

He got down on his knees, and put his ear against it, the way he’d read the Indians did, in the dime novels. Sure enough, he seemed to hear something coming. He squinted far down the track and spotted a single, round headlight moving briskly through the woods—though the moon was so bright any experienced engineer could have driven by its light alone.

He got down all the way, and laid across the track, his head resting against one rail, knees propped up over the other. How easy that skinny boy’s knees had been to maneuver, even in death. He could have walked with him all night. He laid his head back against the rail, and took his hat off his head, and held it over his abdomen.

Well, I was going to bed I’ll just bed down here

He wondered idly if it was a mortal sin, since there was no active hand involved. The rails vibrated more quickly under his head and knees. Out in the middle of the woods here, the train would not even blow its whistle; there was no need for it. Chances were they wouldn’t see him, even with the moonlight. He had just laid down for a sleep, and the train had just come along, and there was no one the wiser.

It was a question best left for the theologians. All he knew was he wasn’t going to get to the screaming, like Florrie and Little Tim. It was best left this way, out of sight and mind.

The rails began to gyrate madly.

Remember the boy from home!

They sent Charlie Becker to the chair, and later that same fall the Grabber finally got to Spanish Louie. They found him lying on the sidewalk one morning in Twelfth Street, near Avenue A. There wasn’t a mark on him, but nobody had any doubt it was the Grabber.

Just who the next of kin was, no one knew, and some of the boys thought they should inquire through the Mexican consulate or the Arizona Territory. But then, more or less to everyone’s surprise, the body was claimed by an elderly Jewish haberdasher from Flatbush Avenue. He gave his son an Orthodox burial, in a storefront synagogue on Hester Street, while the young men lounged around smoking on the steps, and their fathers sat inside, fingering the ceremonial slits in their lapels.

The old reb stood out in the street, contemptuously watching the funeral scene:

What a sacrilege to honor such a momzer! Well, what can you expect? Anything’s possible in America

He shuffled into the synagogue, to scrounge at the remnants of the funeral feast: the platters of sour cream and pot cheese, the plum brandy, and the herring and black bread.

Every day, he made the rounds of the storefront synagogues with his begging board, and he always picked up enough to get by: an apple, a piece of dried fish, a chunk of old bread. Even his old enemies from the controversy over the Grand Reb from Cracow gave something, to see him reduced to such a state.

Inside now, in the close, musty interior of the synagogue, he forgot for a moment the pot cheese and the thick chunks of black bread waiting in the back room. Instead, he sat down on a front bench and began to recite a prayer from his childhood, rocking slowly back and forth. He had spent his life in such close, darkened places, trying to comprehend the mind of God, and soon he forgot where he was. He kept rocking, as if in prayer, but singing instead an old song from Russia to himself:

The fire started in Hell Gate, while they were getting ready for the opening day of the season, on Easter weekend. Even that churlish Russian scribbler could not have written a better ending for it: Two workmen were trying to fix a short in the wiring, in the early morning hours of Black Saturday. There was a spark, some idiot knocked over a bucket of pitch, and then it was all over.

Before half an hour was up, Brinckerhoff’s tower was a pillar of fire, visible all the way to the Bronx. Tired old Satan was finally consumed by his flames, toppling back into the wreckage with a grateful sigh and the fire went on, leaping swiftly over to Venice, and the Doge’s Palace. It swept up Pike’s Peak and the Oriental Scenic Railway, raced down the trellises of the Whirlwind roller coaster, gobbled up The Rough Rider in one great wave of fire.

Soon all of Dreamland was burning. The fire commissioner pulled the only double-nine alarm in the history of Brooklyn, but it was already too late. The pumpers and the hook-and-ladders responded from ten miles around, whole companies clanging across the Brooklyn Bridge, galloping down lonely Long Island roads—too late, too late.

The fire spread to Wormwood’s Theater, where the educated chickens and anteaters, the monkeys and lemurs and trained pigs scampered for cover. The parrots and birds of paradise sailed screeching through the park, their tail feathers ablaze, tracing a brilliant path through the night before they, too, were consumed by the fire.

In Bostock’s Circus, the great cats screamed and clawed at each other in their terror, biting and tearing at their bars. Captain Jack and his helpers wrestled most of them into their traveling cages, but the Black Prince—the beautiful black Nubian lion who had cost him his arm—bounded away down Surf Avenue and was lost. He ran after it, begging it to come back with tears in his voice, but it clambered up the parapets of Dublin Castle, and there it roared against the night, singed and terrified by the burning splinters that fell out of the sky, until a Brooklyn cop finally put it out of its misery with his revolver.

The fire rolled up to the gingerbread walls of The Little City. The alarm bells rang, the sirens sounded—just as they did every afternoon and evening, six shows a day—and our miniature fire department, the best-drilled fire department in the entire world—came racing out.

They worked with a cool and quiet grace, I had to give them that much—hitching their horses, hooking up the hoses as swiftly and efficiently as any real fire company on the scene. They made a stand right under the wall of heat and flame, pouring water into the blaze that crested high above them. While behind them their wives and their children and all the other little citizens of The Little City worked with equally grim courage to wet down rooftops, and put out cinders, refusing to abandon their perfect, miniature town.

“My God, look at them!” a voice said behind me. “How they love the place!”

I turned to see Brinckerhoff, a salvaged bottle of gin gripped by the neck in one hand. I had wondered if he’d gone down with his tower, but here he was—his lemon-yellow linen suit singed a little ’round the edges, but otherwise none the worse for wear. I could see that he was still thinking, the gears of that relentless entrepreneur’s mind still whirring as he watched the little firefighters:

“What courage! What tenacity! If only we could show them this—it’s better than any show we ever put on! If we could bottle it, somehow.”

“Bottle what?” I yelled back at him, my words all but lost in the roar of the fire that seemed to tower higher above them the more water they pumped into it. “Bottle what? Sheer desperation? Pure, pig-blind foolishness?”

The wind whipped up from the sea, showering the sparks down now on our tiny dream city faster than they could put them out. It devoured The Little City as I watched—slowly at first, step by step, then in one lunging, triumphant gulp, like some Feltman’s diner wolfing down a plate of steamers. The people—
my
people—leaping and dashing out ahead of it, as fast as their little bodies would carry them. Left with absolutely nothing, now, not even the single trunks or traveling bags they had before, moving from town to town, sideshow to sideshow. Everything lost now, because they had chosen to try and make a stand.

Not me.

I was not about to contest anything with the City of Fire. I was going to get a few portables, at least—anything I could sell, or pawn, for cash money. I stuffed what I could from the doomed palace into a carpet bag—candleholders, gilt-edged china, a bottle of the best Madeira—and ran. At least I had something, and if it was not enough to last a lifetime, well then what was?