by John Jakes
“No.”
“It’s four or five times that of the rest of the city.”
“Good God.”
“The pestilence of the slums spills over into other sections and kills rich and poor alike. But that isn’t the end of it. The slums are the nurseries of the paupers and criminals who fill our jails and police courts to overflowing. They throw off a scum of forty thousand human wrecks every year. Forty thousand who wind up in the asylums and work houses! The slums create half a million beggars who by their very numbers doom our charities to failure. Above all, the slums touch family life, the very keystone of society, with death and deadly moral contagion.”
“Doesn’t anyone try to solve the problem?”
“Oh, yes—people try. But you might as well try to dam Niagara with a quart bottle.”
Crossly, Banks ordered them to lower their voices. Riis did so as he went on. “For more than ten years I’ve fought the landlords and the rental agents and their chief allies and protectors, the aldermen they pay off. Do you know what I’ve managed to accomplish in all that time? Two years ago, the Small Parks Act was passed. The worst block of tenements on Mulberry Street—the block on the west side, where the street bends—will be razed and the land converted to a park. But heaven knows when it will happen. I tell you this, Mr. Kent. One park won’t obliterate the Bend. It’s bigger than a single block. The Bend is a state of mind composed of equal parts of ignorance, fear, greed, and un-Christian disregard for fellow human beings. The Bend isn’t so much a geographical spot as it is a cancer whose growth is out of control.”
“And no one does anything?”
“Oh, efforts are made. The Board of Health and the sanitary police and the Society for Improvement of the Condition of the Poor do their best, but it isn’t enough. In ’67, the Tenement House Act cut forty-six thousand new windows in buildings that had never known daylight. But that still amounts to very little when compared to the size of the problem and the moral indifference of those responsible for it. Influential people don’t want changes, Mr. Kent. For one thing, the slums have been absorbed into the political system. The greater the density in a tenement, the greater the number of votes that can be easily located and controlled. Tenement votes can be bought very cheaply. But the tenements are much more than a source of extra votes. They’re a source of immense profits. That’s why so much money is paid to bribe city officials and inspectors to ignore the prevailing conditions.”
“The owners pay the bribes?”
“The owners, and those who operate the buildings.”
“Aren’t they the same people?”
“No, generally not. Most often, each building has a rental agent. A middle man whose main responsibilities are to collect the rents and to keep erecting partitions to create more rooms—without spending money on fripperies such as toilets or running water that’s safe to drink. The agent makes a handsome profit off the rents, and returns an equally handsome percentage to the owners.”
“How much?”
“It varies from fifteen to thirty percent. Twenty-five is usual. As one honest builder put it, why should a man take seven percent and save his soul when he can lose it and make three or four times as much?”
“Goddamn it, pipe down!” Banks hissed at them. “We’re getting close.”
This time Riis obeyed the order. One at a time, the four men stole through an opening in another plank fence, then moved down a narrow passageway. A cat meowed. Will stepped in something with a rank smell and a slippery feel. From the darkness overhead, a voice called, “Chi è là?”
No one spoke. Will’s heart was beating fast. He kept his eyes fixed straight ahead. He feared they’d gotten lost.
All at once he heard singing. Saw a few faint horizontal slits of light “Look sharp!” Banks warned.
Will realized there were no longer walls on either side of him. They were in another courtyard. Several stories above, he glimpsed faint stars behind a haze of stove smoke.
“School’s in—mind the step,” Banks said. The singing was louder—a filthy song, Will realized when he listened to some of the lyrics.
The light came from behind slatted shutters whose tops were level with the ground. The shutters covered windows in a sunken entrance way; the bottom was reached by a flight of stone steps. Banks was already down there. Drew’s soles scraped softly as he went down next, followed by Will and Riis.
Will discerned a door between the shuttered windows. Banks opened the door. His big shoulders and broadbrimmed slouch hat leaped out in silhouette against the feeble light of kerosene lamps trimmed low. A moment later, the four men were inside the stale beer dive.
Will followed the others to a pair of dilapidated benches that served in lieu of tables and chairs. Somehow he moved across the room without showing his shock and revulsion. If the tenement where Drew and Dr. Clem practiced was a notch above hell, then the subterranean lair to which Eustace Banks had brought them was hell itself.
ii
The room measured roughly fourteen feet on a side. It had been dug from the ground beneath the tenement, perhaps to serve as a storage cellar. A few pieces of studding had been nailed over the scraped earth which formed the walls. The floor was hard-packed mud, the ceiling low; Will and the policeman had to stoop to avoid exposed joists.
Will took a seat next to Drew on a bench. Riis and Banks walked to an open space in the center of the room. Will kept his dirt-smeared face averted from the eight patrons who were still awake. Several others appeared to be sleeping.
All at once, his eyes focused on the wall. Bile rose in his throat. Dozens of brown slugs crawled on the dirt, and in the two darkest corners, larger lozenge-shaped bugs darted back and forth.
He felt something crawling over the top of his shoe. He glanced down and shook his foot. An enormous roach fell out of his pants legs, then another.
He turned his head so the proprietor and his customers wouldn’t see him gag. Drew looked green. He’d seen the roaches too.
Will forced himself to examine the room more carefully. In the back, four patrons lay unconscious behind some packing crates. In the center, two broken chairs supported a beer keg. Beside the keg stood an immense, long-jawed man with slitted eyes and a bulging forehead. The man rattled coins in his pants pocket as Banks held up four fingers.
The proprietor slowly counted the fingers with his eyes. Then, with a witless grin he picked up two battered tomato cans and filled them at the keg tap.
He handed the cans to Riis. The reporter turned and started toward Will and Drew. Banks waited for the other two cans, counting out four pennies to pay for the order. What made Will nervous was the utter stillness of the place. The other customers—five men, three ragged and incredibly filthy women of indeterminate age—said nothing. They stared at the newcomers from seats near the keg.
All the customers wore clothes whose original colors were unrecognizable; dirt and grease had turned them black. Two of the men were afflicted with advanced cases of venereal disease; their faces and hands showed a great many weeping lesions. These, then, were part of the pitiable tramp population he’d heard about—
Suddenly one of the customers lurched to his feet. A sore-speckled hand shot out and closed on Banks’ left arm.
The policeman’s eyes registered anger. The other man, a hatless fellow whose greasy hair hung over his ears, peered at Banks and said in a drink-blurred voice, “Ain’t I seen you before? Sure I have. I know where it was! Elizabeth Street!”
Hearing that, the hulking proprietor reached for something hidden behind the keg. Will held his breath.
Banks stared down his accuser. “That’s the fucking truth, brother. We have met before. When the coppers closed that fine spot Salvatore Passaglia was running, I got shoved into a holding cell next to yours.”
“At Elizabeth Street?”
“That’s right, brother.”
“Oh.” Slowly, the man drew his hand back. He wiped his nose. “Oh, tha’s it—”
“That’s it,” Banks said with a nod. Under the hat brim, his eyes shone with an intensity that made Will shiver. Banks wanted to hurt the man who’d accosted him. The man was too drunk to see that, or to hear it when Banks asked, “All right with you if I get on with serving my mates?”
The man tried to answer with a mock bow. In the middle of it he sagged suddenly, passing out on his feet. He might have struck the keg and knocked it off its supports if the proprietor hadn’t given him a push. The man slipped sideways and sprawled, his mouth open and his upper teeth partially embedded in the mud.
The proprietor relaxed. After an exchange of nervous glances, so did Will and Drew.
Riis and Banks distributed the tomato cans. The four men huddled together, facing one another on the benches. The other patrons had lost interest in them.
Will raised his can and glanced inside. The so-called beer was the color of weak lemonade. Only a few bubbles showed on top. He swirled the contents of the can, a move Banks misinterpreted.
“For Christ’s sake don’t drink it!” he whispered. “That stuff’s brewed to kill at long range. They doctor it with drugs to bring back a head.”
So the foursome sat, merely pretending to drink until the proprietor was called on to dispense refills for two other customers. While the proprietor was thus distracted, Banks lowered his hand and emptied his can into the dirt. One by one, the others did the same.
A few minutes later Banks rose and stretched. With studied nonchalance he called good night to the tramps. One responded with a wave and a grunt but the rest were oblivious. A second man had collapsed beside the one who’d gone down a while ago. By the back wall, another customer had climbed on top of one of the scrofulous women. The man’s bare buttocks jerked up and down. The woman kept time by waving a tomato can above his shoulder. The proprietor’s tongue moved back and forth over his lips as he watched. No one else paid any attention.
The four men filed outside. “Jesus, Drew,” Will whispered when the door had thudded shut behind them. “That’s unbelievable.”
“But not unusual, I’m told.”
“You’re right,” Banks said as he marched up the steps. Will drew a deep breath. The heat-laden air smelled sweet compared to that in the cellar. He was queasy all at once.
As they moved along, Banks spoke to Riis in a low voice. “I recognize that cretin running the joint. A Cherry Street roughneck named Dave McCauley. We’ll give Dave and his crowd one more night of revelry and take ’em out on Wednesday—” A little louder: “What the hell’s all that racket back there?”
Although Will was responsible for the noise, he couldn’t answer. He was leaning against a brick wall, violently sick.
iii
Banks got them out of the vicinity of the stale beer dive without incident. Feeling somewhat better, Will caught up with the policeman and asked him a question he supposed was naïve. Yet what he’d seen had so shocked and sickened him, he had to have an answer.
“Who’s responsible for a place like that, Sergeant?”
Banks didn’t laugh at him. “Jake here would say every one of us. We really don’t care whether such dives exist because we don’t give a damn about the poor—neither the old poor who have been here for years, or the new poor arriving at Castle Garden every day. So we let ’em live in places we wouldn’t keep a dog, and we hope to God that disease and their own self-destructive behavior will keep ’em from our sight. Above all, we don’t give them any help. I know that’s how it works because my poor mother was Dublin Irish. She came here with just a few coins tied in a scarf and her soul brimming with hope. She went to work for a young swell as a household girl—about the only kind of job an Irish lass could find. I learned long afterward that the swell and two of his best friends were members of the Know-Nothing party. Despisers of the foreign born. One night the three forced my mother to drink a lot of wine. Her employer told her that if she didn’t, she’d lose her job and he’d see she never got another. She got sick from the wine but that made no difference to the swells. Each one of them carnally abused her. One of the three swells was my pa, but of course I don’t know precisely which—”
There was a vicious sound to those last words. His voice was barely audible. “She bore me and five years later died of shame because of her mortal sin. I reckon I’d like to kick those swells to death if I could find ’ em. I never learned their names. I was too little. Trouble is, if I killed them, I’d be sent to the Island. Maybe that’s why I do my kicking around here instead. When I’m in uniform, it’s legal.”
They’d reached the end of a passage. Banks took hold of the bricks at the corner and turned, a commanding, even frightening figure. “All here, are we?”
There were murmurs of assent. Will saw lighted windows along a street he recognized as Mulberry.
They moved on in a more relaxed way. Banks said to Will, “Want to come along and watch the sport Wednesday night?”
“Very much.”
“Nine o’clock. Elizabeth Street station. Be prompt. This time we won’t wait.”
“I’ll be there.”
“Then so will I,” Drew put in, though without enthusiasm.
Will said, “You didn’t really answer my question, Sergeant. Who’s responsible for that place?”
“I expect it’s owned by one of the padrones. My guess would be a big boss named Don Andreas Belsario.”
“Know him?” Will asked Drew.
“I’ve never met him, but I hear a lot about him,” Drew replied.
“Well, this I guarantee,” Banks went on. “Everything about him’s shady, including that title he hung on himself. He’s no don. He’s a Neapolitan thug who happens to look like your favorite grandfather. Good protective coloring, that. He takes advantage of it. He started a string of stale beer dives two years ago. A couple of tramps died from drinking his brew. One turned out to be the brother of a member of the Board of Health. Overnight, Don Andreas got out of the business and covered his tracks. We couldn’t charge him with a thing. Now I hear he’s back in the same trade, but we’ll never get him. Soon as we close one of his spots, he’ll open two more.”
“And you’re sure he’s behind the place?”
“Pretty sure. I don’t think Dave McCauley is working for the building’s rental agent. The agent’s dirty work is confined to bullying tenants who are late with the rent. For that, he hires a rockroller named Giuseppe Corso. Neighborhood boy. Good family connections,” he added with sarcasm. “It’s a cinch the building agent knows what’s going on in his cellar, though. Don Andreas wouldn’t open up without making an arrangement. Maybe the agent takes a cut and doesn’t tell the owners. Or maybe he passes a percentage along to them. Either way, it wouldn’t amount to more than pennies. Dives like that are worthless as a source of income. But as a source of votes—that’s another story.”
“But what about the owners?” Will persisted. “The men who actually hold title to the land and the building? Do they know about the stale beer dive?”
“Probably not. But they have to know in a general way that most everything happening in the tenement—and especially the overcrowding—is against the law. They couldn’t be ignorant when they’re drawing thirty percent, which I’ve been told is the rate of return for that particular tenement.”
“What kind of bastard would permit such conditions in a building that belongs to him?”
“A bastard who wants to get rich and stay rich and isn’t too finicky about his methods. We have a lot of bastards like that in America, Kent—where’ve you been? The whole tenement system is nothing but American enterprise at work.”
“You mean respectable people own such places?”
Banks guffawed. Then, with the faintly weary tone of a teacher instructing a hopeless pupil, he said, “Yes, Kent, very respectable people. I’ve studied the tax books on every tenement in the Sixth Ward, and I can testify to it. The building we just visited—that’s owned by a real estate corporation which is in turn owne
d by a holding company. The holding company has a splendid, impressive name. Pen-York Property Trust. It’s known but not legally provable that all the shares of Pen-York are held by a single family. A fine upstanding city family named Pennel. Ever heard of them?”
CHAPTER VII
THE TENEMENT
i
WILL’S ROOM ON THE top floor proved too hot for sleeping. Finally he picked up the clean, threadbare, and wholly superfluous comforter Nevsky had given him, and carried it into the hall.
He passed Drew’s door, then the landlord’s. Nevsky’s flat contained not only living quarters but eleven Singer machines—four owned, seven leased. Light showed under the door. Nevsky was complaining to his wife in Yiddish; perhaps it was the same complaint Will had heard before— Nevsky was unable to amass a decent dowry for each of his four daughters. All were of marriageable age, but still single due to the lack of a dowry.
Nevsky claimed that he detested sweating. It was, after all, a system of labor designed to circumvent the new laws regulating hours and working conditions in factories. But the landlord was devoted to his daughters, and he was determined to capitalize on the opportunity in America, and give the girls a better start than he and his wife had had in Russia.
Beyond Nevsky’s flat, there was light under Jo’s door as well. Will almost knocked, but held back at the last moment. As he climbed the stair at the end of the hall, he found himself picturing her eyes and the contours of her mouth.
On the roof it seemed slightly cooler, even though the air was oppressively damp. He almost stumbled across three youngsters sleeping on a ragged sheet. He apologized in English; they murmured sleepily in their own language. Soon he became aware of more than a dozen people occupying improvised pallets on the roof. He found a place against the stone cornice and spread the comforter.
He yawned. He was worn out. But. sleep still wouldn’t come. Troubling questions chased through his mind. He got up and gazed out across the rooftops of the Bend. Lamps glimmered in some of the buildings. Eastward, the colossal span of the bridge to Brooklyn hung across the night sky. But all he saw was the stale beer dive.