Winter at Death's Hotel (34 page)

“I wouldn't mind that.”

“Your enthusiasm is infectious.”

“Don't talk down to me, awright? You get snifty wit' me, I'll give you a couple good ones.”

“Only a couple? I'm disappointed in you.”

“My name's Phil.”

“Well, Phil, my dear, why don't we get out of this hole and find ourselves a spot where we can get beautifully drunk together and see what the night will bring.”

Phil looked around. He shrugged. “Suits me.”

Newcome nodded slowly, as if Phil had confirmed something rather sad. He had a fleeting nostalgia for somebody nicer, younger, fresher. He smiled and nodded toward the door. Phil was what was on offer.

A wagon pulled by a broken horse dragged out of an abandoned abattoir near the Produce Exchange and came up West Street. Along the docks. It was the dead hour of the night, nearer three than two. The bustle of the docks hadn't begun yet; the fleets of wagons that would pick up goods from the warehouses that lined the river were still in their barns. West Street was an urban desert at this hour, only scraps of newspaper and even a few leaves from God knew what tree blowing along the cobbles and pavements like sad imitations of sagebrush. If there was another living human being out, the driver of the wagon certainly didn't know it: he was hunched down, as dispirited as his horse, the stub of pipe in his mouth as dead as the night, his lank white hair hanging around his face like a ripped curtain.

Opposite Pier Thirty-Four, he lifted a weary rein and piloted the horse to their right into Spring Street, then left again into Washington, the dark shadows of the El at the end of the short block to his right silent and unpeopled. Ahead of the wagon now was a street lined with ancient buildings turned into warehouses. Some had started as houses, put up so long ago that they were of frame construction; some had begun as shops and commission houses, when New York had grown only this far and was bustling with primitive trade. On the right was a strip of one-story sheds, perhaps once carriage houses, now either crumbling storage or abandoned derelicts. Even so, there would be life here in two hours, chaos in three—cursing drivers and warehousemen, percussive iron wheels on cobble, slamming doors.

Now, nothing but the man and the wagon and the horse.

Beyond the wooden sheds was an old brick building three stories tall, its false façade half a story higher than what stood behind, its windows boarded over. Across the front, barely legible in the feeble lamplight, were old painted letters, once white and now almost the dirty brown of the brick: SAUSAGE.

The wagon turned into the open space next to the building and went halfway along and stopped. The driver got down. If he had looked up, he would have seen another sign, also painted long before on the brick, “Baum's Sausage.” But he didn't look.

He pulled a heavy roll from the bed of the wagon and hoisted it on his shoulder with a grunt; he carried it to the foot of the building's wall and put it down by bending forward and flipping the thing so that half of it landed with a thump. He stood, put a hand on his back, stretched. Bent back like that, he could just make out “Sausage,” and under it a row of meat hooks. Here, presumably, Baum had once had the deliveries of offal and bone scrapings hung.

He grabbed the sides of the canvas roll and pulled, and the cloth unrolled. He raised his arms as he pulled so that the thing inside the roll fell free almost at his feet. He dropped the canvas, got his hands under what lay there and raised it to his own height, then bent his knees and heaved upward, then upward again, and he slammed the thing over one of the meat hooks and let its own weight come on it, and it hung there.

Breathing hard now, he went back to his wagon. He was getting a second roll out when a voice said, “Hey, you!”

A light shone on him. He peered into the light like a man with bad vision. His crumpled bowler hid the upper part of his face; his white hair obscured the rest. He said, “I ain't got nuttink to steal, mister.”

“Who the hell are you and what're you doing here?” The light came forward; barely visible next to it were a hand and a cudgel that a trained eye would have seen was not a policeman's stick.

“Oi, Mister Policeman, you give me a scare. I t'ought you was one of those shicers robs old men. I'm only looking for bones, mister. I'm in the rag and bone trade.”

“You are, huh?” He sounded a cocky little bastard—little, because the light and the stick were being carried low. He shone his lantern over the old man and the wagon and said, “Stealing, are you, Yid?”

“Stealing never, I'm telling you! Only looking to pick t'ings up.”

“Yid, there haven't been bones around here in twenty years. Cripes, you do stink like it, though.” The guard blew out a breath, then turned and shone his light on the side of the building. It caught something pale, moved, and he said, “Oh, Christ Jesus!”

But that was the last thing he would ever say. The old man had had his hand on a three-foot crowbar, and as soon as the guard had turned away he had swung it up and out of the wagon and two-handed it the way a baseball player swings a bat, and it hit the back of the guard's head with a sound like a coconut being broken with a hammer to get at the meat. The guard went down, his lamp bouncing once and going out. The old man never paused but swung again and hit the skull with another blow and then one more, then pushed the guard's body with a toe and waited for him to move.

After that, he moved quickly. He dropped the crowbar back into the wagon and got out the canvas-wrapped package he had been going for before, trotted with this to the wall, and opened it the same way as the first. A terrible smell rolled out, excrement and garbage and death; he never hesitated but dipped into the mass that lay there and got some of it into his hands and pulled it up and then turned to the hanging thing and began movements that were hard to decipher in the darkness—reaching up and spreading his arms, then reaching down and up, then circular motions with both arms, then a pulling again at the mass on the ground, as if he were making magical signs over the side of the building that said “Sausage.” As if blessing it, the religion unclear.

Then from half a street away, another voice came: “Herman! Hey, Herman!”

The old man stopped dead still. He bent, took the last of his load from the ground, disposed of it on the wall, and wiped his fouled hands on the fallen guard's coat. He threw the canvas into the wagon.

“Hey, Herman! Where're you at?” Closer now.

He got up on the wagon seat and slapped the rein down on the horse's back to set it going. The wheels ground over the stones. The horse's hooves made sounds like wooden boxes being struck together. He made the horse go faster.

“Hey!”

He shot a look behind him to see the glow of another dark lantern almost at the corner of the building, then turned away and whipped the horse with the reins.

“What the hell? Hey, you—stop there, you sonofabitch! Herman, where the—? Oh, shit! Oh my God! Oh my God! Help! Help! Police!”

***

The wagon careened into Van Dam Street, actually up on two wheels as it took the corner, and rattled to Varick, the old horse at a gallop, and took the turn south at such a speed that it slid sideways on the cobbles and almost toppled over. The driver was using his whip now; the horse, frightened and pained, plunged ahead with whatever strength was left in it. As they crossed Canal, a police whistle sounded off to their right, then another from the left and somewhere behind them. The horse began to slow, but the driver whipped it on. Another whistle came, this one from up ahead, and the reins pulled and the whip fell and the wagon turned into Worth Street and clattered under the West Broadway El for a few heartbeats and then was out of that shadow, and they were pounding along between rows of tenements that rose into the blackness above.

They seemed to be free, and the horse was trying to rear, to give in to its fatigue, to stop, and the driver pulled up a little and let it fall into a trot, which it wanted to make a walk, but he touched it again with the whip. He half-stood in a crouch and looked around them, looked back, heard a whistle far behind and sat down, slumped, and slowed the horse to the walk it wanted. For one street, two, they were again the decrepit, dying pair they had seemed at first. They stopped being the hell-bound evil spirit of the night and became the first glimmer of the morning—the first slow outriders of the day's invasion.

They crossed Broadway at a walking man's pace. The driver glanced to his left and saw a moving light; then came the sound of galloping horses and a bell.
From
the
precinct
building. Heading west.
They went another block and turned north into Elm, but up ahead another Black Maria was racing westward, and they turned right again and headed east, now like an animal that has lost the scent, trying this way and that, getting its nose into the wind to find the way—south, then east, more east, a jog to the north.

And then ahead, a police carriage with its lights bright, and policemen on the pavements and in the street with lanterns, one of them standing right in their path and waving the lantern back and forth like a trainman at a crossing.

He wheeled the wagon in the middle of the block and whipped the horse to a gallop again. Whistles and shouts rang out behind them; the police carriage backed and policemen piled into it.

The wagon raced north, then east again as he saw another barricade. Now he was approaching Mulberry Street, with police headquarters only a few blocks to the left. Behind them, the police carriage, pulled by two fresh, decently young horses, was gaining ground, and there were the sounds of other hooves. He looked back: policemen on horseback!

He flew into Mulberry Street with the whip falling on the nag. The inertia of the wagon almost pulled the poor beast down, but it recovered, its iron shoes sliding and striking sparks. Behind, voices were shouting, “It's the Butcher! In the wagon! The Butcher! Stop him!”

A stunned-looking beat cop stared at the wagon and too late ran into the street with a hand out. The whip lashed across his face; he staggered; the wagon was past him and a moment later was crossing Hester Street.

The driver rose in the seat again. He shouted, but gone was the Jewish accent of before. He seemed younger, stronger—and Irish. “The cops is coming! Get out the bhoys! It's the cops! Git out the bhoys!”

It was an old cry, a cry from the days of the great Irish gangs. But it still worked. Lights came on. Men put their heads out of windows, ducked back. Women came out on fire escapes. Street-level doors flew open and men, young and old, poured out as the leading police in the pursuit flashed past—two cops on horseback, a running roundsman, now puffing and not long for the pace, a carriage.

Paying no attention to them, the men of Mulberry Street did what they always had done when that cry had come: they smashed the street lamps; they pulled up the manhole covers; and they raised the steel lids of the chutes that ran from the pavements down to the cellars. Within seconds, that whole block of Mulberry was gloomy, then dark as every apartment light went out. Iron clanged on stone. Feet scurried. Then a remarkable silence fell, with only the scuffle of a few feet. And then men and boys began to appear on the fire escapes to watch the show.

In the darkness, the next wave of police came riding and running and driving. A horse screamed as its leg went into a manhole and snapped; a running man swore and then cried out as he fell down a delivery chute. A carriage tried to veer out of the middle of the street, but the lead horse's rear foot went into a manhole, and although he recovered, the carriage swayed and pitched, and the driver lost his bearings in the dark and the horses went over the curb, then swerved away from the dark mass of the tenements and tipped the carriage on its side.

It was pandemonium, with the residents of the street cheering like Milton's demons from the balconies. There was glorious laughter when a dazed policeman wandered away from the crash of the carriage and fell into an open manhole. Shouts for help were greeted with curses and jeers. “Cry for your mama, copper! Come into the cellar, copper, we'll give ye what ye gave us at the station! Put your nightstick in your gob and bite it, copper!”

Far ahead, the wagon clattered along. The horse was failing. Its ears were back, its breathing labored, with a terrible rasp at the end of each breath. The two mounted policemen had tried shooting at the wagon, had of course hit nothing but the street and the tenements. Aware now of the tricks the gangs played with manhole covers, they were reluctant to gallop, the more so because the street was lined with empty pushcarts and they were forced to go right down the middle. The police carriage, which had lost ground at each turn, was again catching up, but only the driver could see ahead to what was happening. All in all, even with a nearly dead horse, the wagon was holding its own.

It took the shallow right into Center Street. Behind it, the mounted cops had let the carriage catch up to them and were shouting to somebody inside. A word came out clearly—“bridge.”

The bridge?

Ahead, at the end of Park Row, lay the approach to the Brooklyn Bridge. The approach was nearly a mile long but open. At its top were toll gates, then the mile of the bridge itself.

“Get people to the bridge, I said! You're fucking deef, are you? Get on that horse and get to a fucking telephone and tell them to man the fucking toll gates! We'll stop him at the toll gates!”

One of the mounted cops saluted, and so the other one did, too. They looked at each other, looked around as if a telephone might appear in the opening into Center Street, and then galloped back toward the red lights of the Tenth Precinct station. Meaning, of course, that they would have to get through the chaos of the still-dark block where men and horses were screaming.

The carriage started moving again. It turned into Center, went one street, then a second. The wagon wasn't to be seen. The officer inside was pounding on the ceiling and shouting, “Park Row, you fools! Park Row!”

He was right. They found the wagon in Park Row. It was stopped pretty much in the middle of the street. The horse was down, its harness tangled, the wagon itself pulled partly over. All the cops got out of the carriage—there were four, with the officer—and looked around. One of them decided the horse was done for and shot it. Another walked in front of the wagon and found the body of a man in a cheap suit. His head had been beaten in.

“Christ in a crock, he won't go to the bridge now. Goddammit! He's on foot!”