Gilded Needles (Valancourt 20th Century Classics)

by Michael McDowell

  Chapter 11

  Lena Shanks was clever in limiting her business to female criminals, refusing to purchase even a single yard of stolen lace from a male thief. Although she thereby forwent much rewarding custom, she also, in effect, protected herself against arrest. To convict a fence, the state of New York must prove that the receiver of stolen property had knowledge that the goods had been illegally appropriated. But this was so difficult a task for the law that the police rarely undertook to gather evidence except upon the most notorious, the most indiscreet, and the most successful fences of the city. Lena’s very financial mediocrity protected her from persecution.

  She had won the trust of female criminals by her scrupulous dealings and by frequent acts of charity. She was known to have advanced money to women who were incapacitated by bodily injury, to have sent baskets of food to the Tombs on the arm of her daughter Louisa, and even to have constructed a special dress for a woman who was intent on stealing whole bolts of silk from H. B. Claflin and Company. Lena rarely smiled, she rarely had a kind word, but her careful upright respectful dealings with these women—many of whom were used to gross mistreatment and abuse at the hands of men—was a far more welcome thing than smiles and kind words which might, after all, be only feigned.

  Lena did not trade at all with male thieves, nor with the wives or consorts of thieves, for she knew of too many fences betrayed by the criminals they supported. Resentment would be got up and allowed to fester over the price paid for some large haul and the fence would be turned over to the police in such a way as to prove his complicity. Women working on their own did not fall into such evil ways, and though Lena realized that she could do a much greater volume of business if only she would accept merchandise appropriated by men, she preferred to conduct herself in a manner that did not endanger her family or her trade.

  It happened once that an unruly male pickpocket tried to force Lena to accept seventeen gold watches that he had taken during President Grant’s funeral procession down Fifth Avenue. It was not that there weren’t other fences in the immediate neighborhood who would have been pleased to accommodate him, or that he might not get a better price elsewhere, but it rankled with the thief that this saturnine fat woman would have nothing to do with men. At last, enraged by Lena’s adamant refusals, the pickpocket screeched out a series of wild threats, and pulled a knife from his pocket to show that he was in earnest. With a surprising swiftness, Lena Shanks raised her cane and brought it down so hard upon the man’s wrist that the bones were fractured. At the same time, Louisa rushed from behind the curtain and kicked the thief out the door into the path of an oncoming water cart. He was trampled beneath the hooves of the horses, but lived; however, his wrist healed awry and he had to train himself to pick pockets with his left hand. He never regained his former proficiency, and died penniless in New Jersey a year after. This incident did not go unreported in the neighborhood, and no more men came to Lena Shanks’s pawnshop.

  There were in 1882 many hundreds of female criminals in New York, and this number certainly did not incorporate prostitutes, of whom there were many thousands. Each female had a specialty. She was a shoplifter, or a blackmailer, or she stole from gentlemen sleeping in the Central Park, or she lifted watches in gambling halls, or she lured drunken men into alleyways to be set upon, or she practiced any of a large array of confidence games upon the credulous of all description. But most common were the thieves, of one description or another, devoted to one method or another for the acquisition of one sort of plunder or another. These women, with daily mounds of ill-got clothing, jewelry, and fine stuffs, must resort to a fence to have that spoil turned to cash.

  A young girl called Evvie O’Shea operated a single effective ruse. Answering advertisements in the papers, she went to be interviewed for the position of a servant. Her references were false, as were her name, her antecedents, and even her hair. She was respectful to the mistress of the house and was sometimes offered the place. However, her purpose was not to secure a salaried position, but only to steal whatever could be pocketed during her brief minutes in the house of her prospective employer. Say she got three rings from a dressing table when a lady of Eighteenth Street made the mistake of receiving the applicant in her dressing room. An hour later, the rings were exchanged on West Houston Street for thirty-five dollars, and Evvie O’Shea went her way. By the time that the unfortunate woman on Eighteenth Street had applied to the police for the recovery of her jewelry, providing exact descriptions of the stolen rings, the property existed no more. Clothing and linen too could be altered quickly and easily, but with so drastic a change in appearance, that the owner herself would not know it, displayed upon a rack in the street.

  On this small scale, women were more successful as thieves than men. In shoplifting, pickpocketing, and petty confidence games, they excelled because of the lightness of their touch, because of their gentle address, because potential victims were less likely to suspect a female of perpetrating a crime. It was the men who succeeded in robbing banks, purloining enormous fortunes in negotiable securities, engineering fabulous swindles, denuding mansions of their contents. However, it was also men who were most frequently caught, because after a great haul in the way of profits they became reckless and extravagant, boasted drunkenly of their exploits to boon—but not entirely trustworthy—companions. Frequently they were betrayed by informers. Women were closer, more apt to hide their gain and remain mute concerning the state of their fortunes, displaying equable behavior in adversity and prosperity alike.

  Lena Shanks had no difficulty in selling precious metals and gems, for even the most respectable jewelers in the city paid well and without asking questions. Altered clothing, bolts of cloth, and items taken directly from shops were sold in lots to the second-hand dealers around Chatham Square and along Catherine Street, who with their faked auctions and their persuasiveness with the country visitors to the city, usually managed to sell an item at a price far above what they paid, or its actual worth.

  Furniture and objets d’art, which could not be disguised without substantially diminishing their value, were purchased only at a discount from the normal rate of one-third. These were more difficult to dispose of because of the chance that an object might be identified and traced. Lena Shanks was fortunate in having relatives in Philadelphia, who every couple of months drove a hearse up to New York, loaded it with stolen goods, and returned home again. The horses wore black plumes, and the father and two sons, dressed as undertakers, were never stopped or questioned.

  Bonds, securities, stolen cheques and money orders Lena refused altogether, as dangerous to those unversed in the intricacies of modern finance.

  With Louisa helping either her mother or her sister as was required, and keeping books—she was a competent forger as well, and often found little ways of exploiting this talent—the Shanks women made just about fifty thousand dollars a year. This would have been a fortune to many New York families living with every trapping of respectability and good breeding.

  The greater part of these receipts was kept undisturbed in half a dozen banks along Sixth and Seventh avenues and had accumulated a great amount of interest through the years. Lena Shanks considered that avarice was no virtue among criminals, for greed led one into danger, and such hazards might compel one to take rooms in Centre Street—at the Tombs. “Be like Louisa,” cautioned Lena, “always we should be like Louisa, quiet . . . quiet. . . .”

  Monday, January 9, was chill and raw in New York. The snow that had briefly turned the Black Triangle white on the previous Tuesday had long disappeared—trampled by men in search of liquor or marks, soaked into the skirts of women who trod the streets, lapped up by urchins to assuage their hunger, and even in a few places swept away by the municipal authorities who were paid millions of dollars a year to do so. In the middle of this short bleak afternoon, the Sapphic Pugilist, wearing thick boots and a plain gray-checked dress, st
rode briskly and with purpose along West Houston Street. Finding the pawnshop open, Charlotta Kegoe turned in there, rather than knocking at the private door of the second Shanks building.

  Lena Shanks sat behind the counter, sewing black frogs onto a red silk jacket, where before there had been round ebony buttons. Ella Shanks sat at the deal table building a house of cards, which promptly collapsed when Charlotta’s heavy tread set all the room to shaking.

  “ ’Lotta,” nodded Lena, in brief greeting.

  Charlotta Kegoe returned the nod and stepped forward to the counter.

  After sending her granddaughter to fetch Louisa, Lena asked, as she pinned a frog to the edge of the jacket, “News, ’Lotta?”

  Charlotta nodded. “Anyone show you the papers this week?”

  “Someone writing about us, about our street, nicht?”

  “Yes,” replied Lotta, and drew a folded Tribune from beneath her arm. “Brought you one in case you hadn’t seen today’s. Offering a reward and vowing to check all the pawnshops in all the streets around here, looking for the jewelry of this man who was murdered.”

  “Where?” demanded Lena, “where does it say so?”

  Charlotta opened the newspaper and pointed out the article. At that moment Louisa Shanks parted the curtain in the back of the shop and smiled at her friend. Ella slithered past her aunt and hopped onto a stool beside her grandmother.

  “ ’Lotta,” said Lena, “danke schön.”

  Charlotta passed into the back with Louisa Shanks.

  Lena continued to sew and listened to Charlotta’s resounding footfalls up to Louisa’s room on the third story. Ella stared out into the street, counting the passersby aloud. Some peered curiously into the shop but none ventured inside. Most of Lena’s business was conducted in the early morning or the very late afternoon, and the hours between were quiet.

  “Ella,” said her grandmother, “read to me.” She pointed to the article written by Simeon Lightner. Ella, who was nearsighted, leaned forward precipitously, with her elbows on the paper and her eyes only inches from the text. She stumbled through the article, skipping over the difficult words altogether and making rather a jumble of some sentences. Her grandmother, a poor reader herself in English, did not object to the lesions in comprehension and, in truth, was not much interested in the Tribune’s indignation over Cyrus Butterfield’s death, and the newspaper’s call for swift vengeance. But when Ella came to the paragraphs that talked of reward, Lena had the child read slowly and repeat each sentence before going on to the next.

  “Verstehst?”

  Ella nodded: “They’ll give money to anyone who’ll say who killed the man by the docks. Nana, do we know who killed him?”

  “Go on,” said Lena, and Ella continued. The next paragraph contained the description of the clothing and jewelry of which the dead man had been stripped. Ella looked up at her grandmother at the end of this recitation, but so discreet was the child that she did not say aloud what she knew very well—that Maggie Kizer had received three hundred dollars for the very items of jewelry there enumerated.

  “Again,” said Lena, but just as Ella had begun the paragraph for the second time, they were interrupted by the arrival in the pawnshop of a short, slender snub-nosed woman dressed in widow’s weeds. It was Weeping Mary, one of Lena’s most frequent customers, who always appeared as if she had just got over a crying jag and was desperately trying to prevent another from overtaking her.

  Weeping Mary was a pickpocket who plied her trade exclusively in churches. Each Sunday she attended divine services at some fashionable church in New York or Brooklyn, sitting with the servants in the loft and pretending to be of their number, mingling with the crowd outside, and sometimes managing to pick the pockets of gentlemen, but more often satisfying herself with pocket handkerchiefs or bits of lace and trim from the dresses of ladies. During the week she went to funeral services, where her morose appearance stood her in good stead, and she often passed as a bereaved devoted servant of the deceased. Funerals were easy, Weeping Mary said, for the mourners were frequently quite distracted with their grief and unlikely to feel the slight tug at their pockets or to hear the single snip of the fine scissors that cut away part of their dress.

  Though Weeping Mary rarely came away with anything really valuable, she did a great volume of business. She was not lazy, within the scope of her profession, and had developed quite an ear for sermons. She knew the hymns of half a dozen different denominations, could recite all the Catholic prayers and all the Protestant creeds; and though it might be dangerous to return too often to one church, she was sometimes drawn back by the eloquence or the fine appearance of one preacher or another. One of these was the handsome Presbyterian minister whose church was at Madison Square, and when Weeping Mary saw the open Tribune on the counter in Lena’s shop, she cried dolorously: “These handkerchiefs I brought you today, took ’em right off the widow and her two girls when they was getting into their carriage, took ’em at the funeral of the lawyer got himself killed down at the docks on New Year. Thought there might be a turnout for that one, and ’deed there was. Church was full, been there of course myself before that, but never saw so many there before. Hardly knew where to turn first. Don’t think they was all his friends, people wanting to see if they’d have the coffin open, as if they were going to have a little opening in his coat so you could see where the knife went in. Well the coffin was closed, and everybody thought that they was going away with a disappointment, but I tell you how it happened, Lena, nobody went away with a disappointment then, because that preacher—such a fine-looking man—climbed up into the pulpit and prayed a little prayer, and we sang a little hymn, and then he prayed another little prayer and spoke of the deceased like he was his own brother, and then just when everybody thinks that the coffin’s going to be taken away, this preacher suddenly starts in on railing against us!”

  “Us?” questioned Lena.

  “Yes,” nodded Weeping Mary mournfully, “you and me, and everybody who lives around here. He talked of Bleecker Street and he spoke of West Houston and the depravity of their inhabitants and mentioned the Cities of the Plain, and he spoke how we should all be swept into the North River. A lawyer wasn’t safe walking the streets of New York, a clergyman wasn’t safe, a lady had best stay within her own doors. He said a family of respectability might go to the top of their house—to one of the maid’s rooms or the nursery—and with a pair of field glasses gaze down on the streets of Sodom and see things they never knew existed, moral corruption that stank and burned like hell itself. Looking over the congregation, you could see ’em all getting ready to ride home post and take out their glasses and hang out the windows to see what all was going on. It was monstrous exciting, Lena, but not much of a comfort to the widow.”

  “Nee,” said Lena.

  “She looked terrible shocked, the widow,” said Weeping Mary, “just terrible shocked, I should say, and wouldn’t speak to the minister after. Went right to the carriage, and that’s when I come up behind her and pluck the handkerchief right out of her sleeve. I think I could have got her hat and her stockings too, if there hadn’t been so many by just then.”

  Weeping Mary received three dollars for the handkerchiefs and scraps of lace that she had brought—rather more than she had anticipated—and was about to leave when Lena stopped her with a question:

  “This preacher? Wie heisst er?”

  “Stallworth,” replied Weeping Mary: “Edward Stallworth.”

  Lena Shanks beat an angry tattoo on the counter with her stubby fingers.

  Chapter 12

  In 1853, when she was no more than sixteen, Lena Kaiser and her younger brother Aleksander came penniless to New York, from Bremen. At the pier they attracted the notice of a dishonest loafer called Cornelius Shanks who, when he was not involved in schemes to defraud assurance companies, practiced
smaller deceptions upon immigrants and visitors from the country. However, it proved that he had met his match in Lena Kaiser—and he shortly thereafter married her. Between that time and the Civil War, Lena bore Cornelius Shanks four children: two girls, Louisa and Daisy, and twin boys, who perished of diphtheria in their second year.

  Lena Shanks did not attempt to reform her husband, but rather asked that she be instructed in some skill that would increase the family revenues. Cornelius Shanks looked at his wife, saw that she was too slow in her movements ever to achieve greatness as a pickpocket, and that her English was too halting for her ever to succeed as a confidence trickster; but the fact that she was stout and wore voluminous skirts and capacious jackets suggested that she would do well as a shoplifter—and she did. At the same time, Lena’s brother, whose name had been amended to Alick Kizer, was apprenticed to a house thief, with equally happy results.

  All went well with the Shanks family, and in a modest way they prospered in the apartments that they occupied on Vandam Street. Then, in the last year of the Civil War, Cornelius Shanks unluckily became involved in the infamous Confederate plot to burn the six major hotels of New York. He and his five hired companions had tried the efficacy of their scheme by razing a lodging house on Twenty-third Street in which fire three unmarried women had perished. The six conspirators were apprehended the day before the Albemarle was to have been torched.