Westside, page 17
Mrs. Greene clutched her notebook like a barber wielding a straight razor. She wanted, not for the first time that day, to take off my head. Ugly took the smallest possible step, to put himself between us, in case sweet Ida charged. Instead, she spoke, sweetly and serenely, as she took Van Alen’s hand.
“I regret terribly, Miss Carr, that you think I am capable of such unpleasant things.”
“You tried to cut off my head.”
“You were spying. You broke my lamp. You mustn’t blame me for protecting my business.”
“You said you ran a railroad station and nothing more.”
“And for telling that simple white lie, you would accuse me of betraying my employer, of bringing guns into the Upper West, of killing three young boys?”
“It’s a damned serious accusation,” said Van Alen.
“I think a woman who cuts out her workers’ tongues would be capable of anything,” I said.
“Cuts out her workers’—oh my lord!” said Mrs. Greene, chuckling. “Oh, Dick, Dick. She has no idea!”
“Please, then,” I said. “Won’t you enlighten me?”
“They came that way!” said Van Alen. “I got ’em from the boys’ home on Fifty-Fifth, near the river, which closed down when the fence went up. Ida found them, and she came to me, and said, ‘Hey, boss, something awful was going on here. We got three dozen boys had their tongue cut out by the bastards running this place. They got nowhere to go.’”
“That’s vile,” I said.
“You were here in ’14. You remember. There was a lot worse than that.”
“There was.”
“So I took them in, gave them work. They wanted to stick together—they told me, with this sign language they’ve worked out—and Ida takes good care of ’em.”
“But that isn’t the best part,” said Mrs. Greene.
“It ain’t. The guy who done it? The cretin run that boys’ school? He thought he was safe over on the Eastside, but we found him, and we let him have it. You know what Ugly here did to him?”
“Cut out his tongue?”
“No. Hell, that would have been good. Ugly just beat him till the marrow leaked out through his nose, threw him in the river. Shit. I like your way better, but you can’t have it all.”
“So you see,” said Mrs. Greene, “at worst we are thieves, and we steal for a righteous cause. We do not stoop to violence unless provoked.”
She took that step toward me.
“I still think you lie,” I said.
“And that simply breaks my heart. Now, Dick—”
“I know, I know. The schedule,” he said, and we turned the corner and I felt the heat of the biggest fire I’d ever seen. It stretched three stories high, throwing sparks a mile into the sky, lighting up Haven Avenue as bright as the surface of the sun. Guards ringed the base, clubs at their side, protecting the flame. A hundred or more people stood on the sidewalk, not minding how the heat scorched their skin, occasionally venturing forward to toss an offering onto the blaze.
“What are they burning?” I said.
“Whatever they like.”
There was laughter at every corner—the honest, unstoppable wave of ordinary human mirth. Young boys played stickball, and couples danced in the firelight—not the miserable shuffling of the Hyperion Hotel, but a sweeping waltz, sloppy with life. Old men played the accordion, and others kept time on bass or bucket or anything else they had at hand. A grand piano blocked the sidewalk and thundered out ragtime. Hellida was right. She would be very happy here.
“Come on,” he said. “One more stop.”
As the fire disappeared behind us, Ugly got close, carrying a torch to keep his lord bathed in light.
“If you didn’t take the guns,” I said, “your thieves may know who did.”
“That is your problem, not mine.” Van Alen took the last four candles out of my bag and dropped them into the pocket of his apron. He opened the front door of the building, whose windows were broken and whose air was stale. This time, he crossed the threshold, taking Ugly’s torch and bounding into the darkness before I could think of a way to make him answer me.
“No one follows,” said Mrs. Greene. “Never.”
“Is that so?” I said and pushed past her. Ugly’s hand snapped out to stop me, but he was still too slow.
I took the stairs two at a time and found Van Alen at the top, standing in front of an apartment door, eyes closed, hands rubbing his temples like a man unsure if he should cry or scream. I watched him for what seemed like a long time before he noticed I was there. His gruff mask went up again, but it did not fit as well as it had before.
“How ’bout you get the hell out of here?” he said. I shook my head. “Just like your daddy. Stubborn as a goddamned statue.”
“Who lives here?”
“My parents been here since 1910, ever since they put enough away to get out of the Village.”
“The lord of the Upper West keeps his parents in a burnt-out tenement?”
“A thousand times I offered to find them someplace better, but no. That’s not what they want. At least, it’s not what my mother wants. My daddy, he’s far gone. The man doesn’t know . . . he doesn’t know where he is half the time. All I can do is make sure they’ve got plenty of candles.”
The door was locked. He knocked, and it opened slowly. Van Alen’s mother was only a few inches taller than me, but she was as solid as a brick wall. She welcomed her son with a wordless hug and cast a suspicious eye at me.
“Gilda,” I said. “Gilda Carr.”
“Clubber’s daughter,” said Van Alen.
“Clubber,” murmured the old woman, and a smile flickered across her face. “Then you’ll need to have something to eat.”
The apartment was small, with one room serving as kitchen, dining room, living room, and everything else. The furniture was ragged but comfortable. A candle stub flickered in a groove cut in the center of the round wood table that dominated the room. Mrs. Van Alen lit the new candle off the old, setting it on the table with holy precision. The spark of flame caught the eye of Firecracker’s father, who sat in the corner, staring out the window at the fire in the distance. His head snapped toward the match, then lolled back to the view.
“Fresh vegetables,” said Mrs. Van Alen, placing a bowl of soup in front of me. “All from Dick’s bazaar. You shop there?”
“Whenever I have the time.”
“You can’t do none better, not on Westside or East. Now you eat. I got something in the bedroom you’ll be dying to see.”
A few sips of soup, and the last remnants of my hour in the coffin washed off me. It was hot and strong. Van Alen drained his bowl before his mother returned. He dragged his sleeve across his mouth and swallowed a belch.
“Clubber Carr was a hard-nosed son of a bitch,” said Mrs. Van Alen. She set a long, flat scrapbook on the table and opened to the first page—a photograph of my father having a medal pinned on his chest by Commissioner Roosevelt. “Even as a boy, I knew he was tough as steel. He made a good cop. Most Westside boys grew up without much respect for law and order.”
She shot a look at her son. He blushed, and I slipped back into the past. The Sentinel morgue had nothing on Mrs. Van Alen. Every great case, every front-page spread was carefully pressed, preserved, and treasured. A diamond robbery on First Avenue. A bludgeoning in an Eastside high-rise. A fraud at the Chrystie Street bank. A woman killed on East Broadway when her father, irritated that she had violated curfew, set his dogs on her. Every case solved by the great Clubber Carr, who always came through in record time and with as many clever quotes as the reporters asked for. How strange to see my father working on the Eastside. How strange to see my father doing well.
There wasn’t a page in that book that didn’t make me want to cry.
I turned to a full-page spread from 1912, and Mrs. Van Alen tried to take the book away.
“Don’t read that page,” she said. “I hate that page.”
Naturally, I read on.
It was an account of my father’s last press conference, the final embarrassment in his career with the NYPD. Asked about the recent spate of disappearances in the Westside, Virgil launched into a tirade against the mayor, the chief of police, and anyone else whose name he could recall. He was clearly drunk, wrote the unnamed reporter, his uniform stained and his badge missing. My father’s ravings were incoherent, and according to the newspaper, not worth recording. Instead, they gave the article over to a long quote attacking the deranged detective, a quote from a respected voice inside the department who declared that the time had come to put Virgil Carr out to pasture.
The source’s name was Lieutenant Edward Thorne.
“He stuck that knife in hard, did Thorne,” said Van Alen.
“I never thought he had the spine.”
“Even a spineless man can only take so much. Eventually, he’ll lash out, try to prove to himself that he’s tough.”
“And then what?”
“Usually, they go back to being spineless. Spend every night curled up in the bottle, telling themselves the story of the time they stood up to the bigger man.”
“That’s the Thorne I know and love.”
“Your daddy had a good run there, till he went off the rails. Last time I saw him, he was crowing about how he’d made a breakthrough in some case, some insignificant little thing, must have been almost as old as you.”
“Was it Alice Pearl?”
“Now how’d you know that?”
“Fathers are so predictable.”
“He said he’d cracked it, and it was all tied up with . . . how did he put it? With what had poisoned the Westside. That was the word he used. ‘Poison.’”
“Did he say what killed her?”
“He said quite a bit. Man was as drunk as a jockey. Didn’t make a lick of sense.”
“Did any of it stick with you?”
“Blamed Copeland for it. Can you explain that? Galen Copeland, of all the insignificant creatures New York has ever produced. It was gibberish. And Barbarossa too—a thought that made your dad nearly well up with tears. He loved that woman something fierce.”
“I don’t want to hear it.”
I dug deeper into Mrs. Van Alen’s scrapbook and found something even more upsetting than the image of Andrea Barbarossa with my father in her arms.
“I hear you,” he muttered. “The way they were together—vile. And him a married man.”
“Shut up.”
“Watch how you talk to me, girl.”
“You goddamned illiterate, I’m trying to read.”
I took the candle and held it up to the page, close enough that wax dripped on the newsprint. A class photo. NYPD cadets, 1878, faces hard and buttons shining. My father in the back, ramrod stiff. Thorne beside him, as always, his face not yet fattened by drink. And up in front, a man with thick lips and a half-inch gap between his two front teeth.
“Who is that?” I asked.
“It’s a cop, isn’t it?”
“Do you know him?”
“Barstow. Victor, Val, something like that. A real pig, he is. A sadist. In the old days, the Tenderloin girls would start running when he came up the block. You didn’t want him with his hands on you. He’d beat a girl raw, then start to cry, clutch her hair to his face, and beg for forgiveness. Only bastard I ever met sad enough to look up to Eddie Thorne. You know him?”
“As a matter of fact, I watched him die.”
“I hope he died badly.”
“In a puff of smoke. What time is it?”
“Just gone eleven.”
“Then get me downtown.”
“When you finish your soup,” said Mrs. Van Alen.
“I can stop this war. I know who stole Barbarossa’s guns.”
“And who was it, then?” said Van Alen.
“The people in the city who need guns more than anyone else. The cowardly, the corrupt, the frightened. It was the cops who took them, Eddie Thorne, Barstow—the whole Fourth Precinct. They stole the guns, they blamed it on you, and now they’re trying to start a war.”
Van Alen’s gut brushed the table as he stood up, and the whole room rattled. He ripped the napkin off his collar and dropped it on the floor.
“You’re not skipping dinner,” said his mother.
“Business, Ma.”
“Some business, giving out candles. How much can he really make? I mean, I ask you,” she said to me.
I couldn’t answer her. I was already out the door and charging down yet another darkened stairwell. I’d gotten to the first landing before I felt Van Alen’s hands around my waist, lifting me over his shoulder. He took the stairs three at a time, each step a thunderclap that threatened to bring the building down. At the front door, he set me down as gently as a young girl picking a flower.
“Never lay your hands on me again,” I said.
“Apologies,” he said, unapologetic. “Now where are they crossing the line?”
“Eighth Avenue.”
“Ida, send runners to Ninth, Seventh, Sixth, and Fifth. Tell them to send every man. At Eighth, we make a stand.”
“You shouldn’t trust her,” said Mrs. Greene.
“Why not? Didn’t you hear—her father and I are old friends. Now run!”
She ran, and I snapped for Ugly.
“Get the hearse,” I said. “We’ve a rendezvous downtown.”
“Like hell,” said Van Alen. “We’re taking my coach.”
It was a hulking thing, made of gleaming wood, butter-soft leather, and metal as slick as the pistol in my bag. The horses—four of them, all white and all muscle—pawed like bulls ready to charge. While Ugly took refuge in the cab, Van Alen hoisted me onto the driver’s box. He gathered the reins in his left hand and raised his whip high.
“This might be fun,” he said, and I had no doubt he was wrong.
He snapped his wrist, and we exploded onto the avenue like sudden thunder. I pushed my feet against the baseboard and braced my back against the cab, my hands scratching the wood for someplace to hang on.
“Drive easy, boss,” cried Ugly from below. “I’m trying to sharpen your knives.”
The horses churned downtown, relentless as a runaway train, and Van Alen kept them on course with constant, nearly imperceptible twitchings of his left hand. He swung the whip precisely, even gently, a conductor guiding a temperamental orchestra to the performance of its life.
“Every boy under Barbarossa’s banner will be stewed,” he said. “They’re not gonna march on the Borderline—they’ll stagger. We’ll turn ’em away without a fight.”
“I’d still rather it not come to that.”
“Oh, what I would give to have your father back among the living, just for one moonless night. There was no man on the Westside quicker to snap a neck or crack a skull. Clubber understood. A night like tonight, a bloody pitch-dark night, was always one to savor.”
“You called him a snake.”
“Did I, then? I stand by it. But remember this: on a night this dark, it’s the snakes that get out alive.”
We came to Broadway and hung a hard right, running south between the fence and the sidewalk, then broke down Eighth Avenue at the monstrous wall that cut around Columbus Circle.
Twenty minutes till my deadline, we hit traffic. Sixteenth Street was filled with guardsmen, and when they saw Van Alen’s coach they stopped us dead. They crowded around us, hammering the sides, chanting until he dropped the reins, wiped the sweat from his eyes, and raised a fist for the crowd.
“I’ll get out here,” I said. “I could never stand watching boys play soldier.”
“Before you go—you wanna know who killed your daddy? The night he disappeared, after he was finished raving to me, he went to see another old friend.”
“Who?” I said.
“That crooked son of a bitch that’s too rich for his own good. Calls himself Brass.”
I might have thanked him, but there was no time. I leapt down and went looking for a war. The crowd parted easily for me—they had no interest in something as trivial as a woman—and I worked my way toward Fourteenth. It wasn’t hard to find. Like a spoiled child, the great iron brazier was fed constantly, by a team of soot-covered boys whose hair had been scorched down to nothing. They shoveled more fuel on when I passed, and the flame belched just a few feet higher, fouling the air with an unnameable stench. I kept far to the side. I was starting to prefer it in the shadows.
I crossed the street, the light from the fire glinting on the glass just enough to show me the safest way through. I checked my watch. The deadline had passed.
Three blocks past the Borderline, I heard children singing. First “Benjy’s Bloody Stump,” then “The Night Mae Traynor Died.” And then I saw the banners. The Sparrows, the Gophers, the Swamp Angels, the Claw-Boys, the West Fourth Particulars, and the Dead Barrow Toughs numbered close to a thousand, and there were a few hundred more under flags I couldn’t identify. I scanned the crowd until I saw Roach, the ten-year-old standard bearer, waving the dead feline.
“Go home,” I said. “Please, Roach. Go home.”
“The chief says to fight,” he said. “And we fight. Ain’t it glorious?”
“Turn back now, or I’ll break that oar over your head.”
It was, I thought, a persuasive threat, but the boy marched on.
I grabbed Cherub by his kerchief. He staggered and smiled as sweetly as ever. His saber was unsheathed, and his eyes were glassy with gin. The bandage on his left ankle was loose and grimy, but Cherub had swallowed enough clear liquor to quiet the limp. When I saw him, I found I had failed to shake the feeling that had descended on me in Barbie’s subway tunnel: I could not bear for him to die.
“Turn back,” I said. “They’re waiting for you.”
“That just means more of them to kill,” he said, to great approval from the pack.
I screwed the kerchief tight against his throat. He slumped on my shoulder, his breath as hot as moonshine.
“Let me walk you home,” I said.
“These boys need their chief.” I wasn’t sure who he was trying to convince—me, or himself. The boys were too young, too deeply Westside, for such subtlety. All they did was cheer.
