by Peter Quinn
Outside the window of Mike Manning’s Saloon, two currents flowed: the stronger away from the river, toward Chatham Square, Brooklyn trudging to work in Manhattan, ferry load after ferry load; the other, lesser current toward the river, workingmen mostly, gangs of longshoremen on their way to the docks. At the corner of Cherry Street, the two streams collided and created a turbulent mix, like the waters of the Hell Gate.
Another rule: Never drink on the job. God, that one Dandy Dan didn’t just break but slipped on, an icy roof in January, too much whiskey, an iron railing shoved up through his jaw, poking out of his mouth. They said it was a sight, the crowds fighting to get close and catch a view, the booly dogs pushing them back.
The flow of the lesser current grew heavier, more longshoremen on their way to shape up for the morning shift. Those in need of a morning dose to get the shaking out of their hands and tame the confusion in their heads found their way into the warmth of Mike Manning’s place. As soon as they arrived, Manning dispensed a line of shots. The whiskey rose to the rim, trembled, but didn’t overflow. Without a word, Manning’s customers lifted their glasses, the bottoms turned up toward the picture of Robert Emmet, Ireland’s young martyr, his outstretched arm pointed toward the door.
Dunne watched the street. A cold, leaden mist clung to the waterfront and hung heavy with river smells, salt mixed with offal, smoke of coal furnaces and foundries, pungency of rotting fish. The customers, hunched over glasses that Manning instantly refilled, gathered at the end of the bar, close to the stove with its small pile of coals. An old man broke loose and ran into the street. He retched into the gutter, wiped his mouth on his sleeve, and came back in. Manning refilled his glass. The man threw down the contents, blinked, closed his eyes.
Frail-looking, his face as serious as a priest’s, Manning walked to the end of the bar, by the window. He glanced at Dunne’s full glass with a tavern keeper’s smile: involuntary grin, small and insincere. “’Tis a grim day on the River Styx,” he said.
The whistle of the Catherine Street ferry gave three short shrieks.
Dunne nodded. Christ, it was places like this Dandy Dan ended his days, shebeens that in better times he wouldn’t have stopped to piss in. A man is knowed by the company he keeps. The Gospel according to Dan.
Manning lifted the brimming glass in front of Dunne and wiped the bar with his rag. “Yer up early.”
Dunne nodded again. He kept looking out the window. Could do it all day. The first thing he had done when he came back from the West was find a stool, pull it to a window, and stare. He drew a thrill from the continual press of people, the endless traffic, the ceaseless hurry, but what exactly that thrill was he couldn’t say. Something to do with what the gold seekers found in California, whether they struck it rich or not: the assurance that, though poor, they lived amid great possibilities.
A woman carrying an umbrella strolled up to the window, stopped, and leaned forward, the plume on her hat touching the glass as she peered in. She had the face of a dockside whore, white as a ghost, a layer of Lady Emily Bowden’s Face Creme and Emulsifier to cover the sores and pockmarks. Her lips were apple red.
Manning waved her away. She stuck her tongue out. “Bloody whores,” he said. “A dog has more shame, and you’d be better in a dog’s company. No dog ever caused a man to be robbed, his lifeless body tossed into the river.” Manning shook his head. “The way they’re multiplying, they’ll soon be more whores in this city than men.”
The tavern keeper’s smile returned to Manning’s face. He tapped the bottom of the whiskey bottle against the bar. “Drink up,” he said. “The next is on me.” He went back to the other patrons. When he returned, he said in an offhanded way, “Is it a job you’re going to?”
“Coming from.”
“Nights you work, is it?”
“Last night I worked the entire time, from the moment her husband left till the dawn’s early light.”
“Whose husband?” Manning asked. He seemed confused.
Dunne winked. “I’m not one to give out names. The seal of the confessional is what I work under, at least when it comes to the ladies. No names and never any addresses.”
“Ach, you’re one of those,” Manning said.
“One of what?”
“A squiffer, that’s what, all dressed up for the ladies, doesn’t matter whether they’re married or not, no respect for the state of matrimony.”
“And you take no interest in skirts?”
“My younger days, well, I danced a few dances; but I’ve left the floor, prefer to sit and listen to the music. Far less dangerous, both for the soul as for the body.” Manning turned and walked back to the other end of the bar.
Dunne stuck a finger into the glass, then sucked it. Bitter as oil, it stung his mouth. Knew he should have changed his clothes before he came. Be a gentleman among gentlemen. A workingman among workingmen. A Roman in Rome. Never stand out. But there hadn’t been time to go back to the hotel. More of Dandy Dan’s advice disregarded.
Manning pretended to gaze out the window, a vacant stare, but his attention was concentrated on Dunne, the mathematical brain trying to add up the several visits Dunne had paid to these premises. Most times he had come in the early evening; this was the only morning visit. First time he saw him, Manning thought he might be a detective hired by one of the employers’ associations to spy on the longshoremen, listen to them talk, and take it back to the bosses. Or maybe an agent from the Provost Marshal’s office on the lookout for deserters. Either case, an omen of these disturbed and troubled times. But he never seemed much interested in who came and went or what they said. Nursed a single drink while sitting on a stool by the window. Always turned aside a conversation. Hard to figure.
Manning ran his rag over the bar in the same unthinking way he smiled when he poured a drink.
Across the street, on the northwest corner of Cherry and Catherine, the clerks of the Brooks Brothers store stood in the doorway waiting for the manager to appear and let them in. They poked out their heads and looked at the sky.
“Could save them the trouble of looking,” Manning said. “These bones of mine got the marrow of prophecy in them. They can tell whatever weather is coming, wet or dry, and can’t remember a time they told me wrong.”
“What’d they tell you this morning?”
“A stormy day, for sure.” Manning crossed his arms and rubbed his shoulders. “And won’t be just the skies fill with trouble. Mark my words, there’s great botheration in this ward. Been building for some time, since prices started rising so fast and the men not being able to keep pace, their wives complaining that the children were going without. Talk of a strike is in the air. Last month, over on the West Side, was a strike on the Erie docks, and the railroad brought in a tribe of freed niggers to fill the jobs. Caused a fearful row. Two saloons looted, the owners wiped out, nothing left but empty bottles and shattered glass.” Manning shivered. “Sure, that’s the way with the Metropolitans. Fought to protect the property of the railroad, but left the tavern keeper to God’s protection. Wouldn’t be any different here.” He pointed across the street. “Them there the Metropolitans would fight like terriers to protect. Me, well, the intervention of the saints is what I’d be left to call upon.”
“Protect who?” Dunne said.
Manning jabbed his finger in the direction of the clerks. “There. Them there. The Brooks Brothers crew.”
Dunne looked in their direction as though he hadn’t noticed them before, hadn’t learned their functions as well as faces, hadn’t followed their routines as he browsed through the store, hadn’t chatted with several as he contemplated making small purchases. They had been eager to help.
“There’s a Brooks Brothers down here?” Dunne said. He stood and moved directly in front of the window to get a better view.
Manning came from behind the bar. “Are you blind?” he said, with annoyance in his voice. “The place is as well marked as Barnum’s.”
“B
een to the Broadway store, but I didn’t realize there was another down here,” Dunne said.
“Have you now?” Manning’s eyebrows lifted at the thought that one of his patrons was also a patron of Brooks Brothers on Broadway and Grand, clothiers to gentlemen. This was the first could make that claim. “I hear their clothes is awful dear.”
“They’re not cheap.”
“Nothing is anymore, not in this city.”
“Have they been here long?”
“Been here forever. The two Yankees started the business set up shop right where you see it. Over forty years that was the only place they had, then about five years ago they opened uptown. Fashionable people weren’t coming down here no more, so the Yankees went and opened a new emporium on Broadway. Kept this store to catch the ferry trade.”
His last visit, Dunne had purchased a felt hat. Only a limited stock of goods. Yellow oilskins, sou’westers, shirts, pants, hats sent down from Broadway and discounted to attract the clerks traveling to and fro from Brooklyn, catechumens who, if success smiled on them, might one day be received into the communion of the uptown store.
“Pack of thieving Protestants,” Manning said.
“Who?” Dunne asked.
“The whole lot of ’em runs that store, Yankee bastards, the worst of the rat-nosed race.”
The men from the rear of the bar filed past, happier than when they entered. Manning said good-bye to each by name. They walked in front of the window and almost instantaneously blended into the crowd.
“My mother sewed for them for years,” Manning said. “Was all we had to support ourselves them first years in New York. Damn near starved, was never enough to eat, so she’d sew harder, and all the women like her done the same. The more they produced, the bigger the supply and the lower their wages fell. We wasn’t much better off than we’d been in Ireland. Jesus, I think I was sixteen before I knew what it was like to have a full stomach.”
It didn’t seem to Dunne that it would take much to fill Manning’s stomach. The tavern keeper was of a type. “Skinballs” is what they used to call them, a term borrowed from a card game of the same name, a version of faro. It wasn’t applied to every kid who was as slight as a playing card (there were hordes of those), but to a special species: the stunted, small-boned boys who came over from Ireland and never grew to any size, a perpetually wizened look to them, sunken eyes and cheeks, an air of secrecy about them.
Dandy Dan’s observation: The heart of a skinball is the shrunkenest part of him. And the rule derived: Beware the skin-ball. He’d sell his own mother.
In the orphanage on Randalls Island, the Irish born in Ireland fought the Irish born in New York for the right to run the place, a war fought out of view of the warders with fists, sticks, homemade knives. Dunne led the American faction. He boxed the leader of the Irish Irish, a strapping lad of twelve, two years his elder, beat him into the dirt, kneed him when he was down and broke two of his ribs. After that, the rest of the Irish fell in line. Except the skinballs. They had no leader. Each was a faction of his own, stayed to himself, devoting his time to acquiring and selling what the other boys wanted: liquor, tobacco, a deck of cards. If you wanted the loyalty of the skinballs, you had to conquer them one by one. Even then you couldn’t be sure.
Manning stroked his chin. The face was smooth, the yellow skin as translucent as waxed paper, the veins clearly visible. It was difficult for Dunne to tell how old Manning was. You never knew with skinballs. As kids, they already seemed aged.
Manning let go his chin and pointed to the coat of arms mounted above the door of Brooks Brothers. “See that?” he said.
Dunne had glanced at it several times on his way in and out of the store. A sheep in a sling, Latin or French words around it. It reminded him of the lamb sometimes depicted in church windows. He had never given it much thought.
“Symbol of the Knights of the Golden Fleece, that’s what I’ve been told, and a proper symbol it is for the likes of a store that’s fleeced not only them who sew for it but the United States government as well, supplying uniforms to the Army that fall apart as soon as the soldiers put them on. The needleworkers are threatening to strike. ‘Good luck to ’em,’ says I.”
The store manager appeared and opened the door. The clerks went in behind him. Dunne followed them in his mind: each clerk to his station, takes out his cashbox, removes his receipt book. The manager walks to the rear of the store, mounts a stairway to an office that looks out over the selling floor, kneels before a safe emblazoned with the sheep in a sling, symbol of the Knights of the Golden Fleece. The dial turns with an unfamiliar ease, no click of resistance. A pull on the handle. The door swings open to reveal an empty top shelf. The two stacks of paper that had been left the night before—gone.
The money was in one of the long pockets sewed into Dunne’s pants, inner pouches that reached down to the calf, one on each side. In the other were the file and claw used on the store’s FEDERAL CERTIFIED ALL-SECURITY SAFE. PATENTED. Broke open easier than a candy box. More security in a locked desk drawer.
“You’d think they’d forget about a store that small, and in this vicinity, when they got the likes of that palace on Broadway,” Manning said. “But that’s not the rat-noses’ way. Where there’s a dollar to be made, that’s where you’ll find ’em; it’s a religion with ’em.” He left the window and gathered up the glasses. “You’re not in the clothing trade, are you?” he called over to Dunne.
Dunne kept watching out the window. Any minute a clerk should dash out the door and run up Cherry toward the precinct house. The crime discovered and reported. He didn’t want to miss it.
“No, I’m not,” Dunne called back. Still no sign of any clerk.
“You live around here?” Manning spit into each glass, rubbed it hard with the same rag he used to wipe the bar.
“Not far.” Much too close. Pulling a job like this so near to Dolan’s New England Hotel: something new, and dangerous. Some clerk passing in the street, remembering the face: I can’t tell you why I was suspicious of him, Officer, but there was an aspect to the visage that impressed itself upon me. Perhaps it was the Paddy nose and jaw, lineaments of criminality that cannot be hid by the respectable set of clothes. And yesterday, quite unexpectedly, I saw him only a few blocks from here, on Bayard, outside a hotel. Was dumb luck like that brought the booly dogs most of their success. They liked to pretend it was hard work and persistence. But it was luck. They depend on it as much as any man, maybe more.
Manning rubbed the glass until it squeaked. He spit some more and kept polishing. He glanced at Dunne as if to ask another question, but dropped his head without speaking.
A clerk came out of Brooks Brothers, his hat jammed on his head, a hand holding closed the collar of his coat. He hurried up Cherry.
Dunne took up the glass of whiskey, put it under his nose, and dipped his tongue in. He took a deep breath and threw the liquor down his throat. A toast, then, to the burgle of Brooks Brothers. Not exactly a crime to be remembered by the citizenry of New York, like the piracy of Albert Hicks, a True American pug shanghaied by the captain of an oyster sloop, the unsuspecting mariner unaware he had brought aboard a denizen of the waterside more deadly than any ever swam the deep. Returned to his senses, Hicks murdered the captain and the entire crew—slew them in their sleep—gathered up their valuables, and rowed a lifeboat to shore. Had a party for himself in the Five Points—a sailor’s holiday, whiskey and whores—before the law caught up with him. They hanged him in the middle of the harbor, on Bedloe’s Island, the July before the war started, a waterborne festival, the place crammed with boats. Barnum had a special one for him and his guests. So did the sachems of Tammany. Hicks gave the whole town a thrill. Newspapers ate it up, the crime and punishment alike. The crowds paraded in front of the Tombs to catch a glimpse of Hicks. The pickpockets said they never worked a more good-natured assemblage, not even when the Prince of Wales arrived. The day they hanged him, the city seemed to have lifted
a burden from itself, as if it was done with everything undesirable in its midst. But the good feeling didn’t last. One victory didn’t win a war, everyone in the country knew that by now, and that’s what it had become, war, What it had been since ’57, when the Protestants up in Albany decided to throw out the Municipal Police, men who didn’t care what was lifted so long as they got their share, and replaced them with the Metropolitans, a pack of hounds answering to the Governor and the Commissioners, a bite to match their bark, everyone lifted for breaking the law treated alike, kicked and manhandled, given a taste of the locust stick. No more holidays for the likes of Hicks, and no more shrugging off the pilfering of the city’s merchandise.
Manning refilled Dunne’s glass. Dunne tried to wave him off, but Manning poured it full. “On the house,” he said with a regulation grin.
“I’m obliged, but this isn’t an hour I’m accustomed to take a drink.”
“Yer on your way to work?”
“In a bit.”
“Well, if you’ve had no sleep, this will see you through to lunch.”
Dunne didn’t want to argue. He drank the shot in a single gulp and turned the glass over. He looked again to see if the clerk had returned, a platoon of embarrassed Metropolitans in tow, the job done right beneath their noses.
Manning set the glass right and refilled it. “Expecting someone?” he asked.
Dunne nodded. The whiskey burned its way across his tongue. His cheeks and ears reddened. What was it drove Dandy Dan to his ruin? Whiskey, for sure. But what was it drove him to whiskey? A piece of advice delivered that day in the penitentiary on Blackwells Island, Dan’s hands shaking, the eyes bulging out of his head: Get out while there’s time, Jim. Set yourself up in a saloon if you can.
Sure, Dan, first thing.
Manning went back to rubbing glasses. “Them streets are no place for loitering, not today, not with the mood hereabouts.”
Dunne felt a little dizzy. He pulled a stool up to the window and sat. Still no sign of the Metropolitans. The pleasure of seeing their faces. They were getting used to having things their way, maybe not in the Five Points or Corlears Hook, where they only ventured to collect the dead, squads of them coming down the middle of the street and the people on the stoops and rooftops screaming, Bloody peelers, go back where you came from! Booly dog sons of bitches! But everywhere else they’d set to sniffing and barking, the watchdogs of the respectable quarters of the city, bloodhounds for the propertied classes. Had a special squad to patrol the dollar side of Broadway, and some of them didn’t wear uniforms, just walked around, listening, spying, looking for the chance to pounce. There was the Strong-Arm Squad, or the Iron Brigade, as some had taken to call it, roaming the streets at all hours, climbing across rooftops or hiding in doorways or lurking in alleyways. After dusk, they’d be up the ass of anyone looked out of place. If you was lucky or seemed half-respectable, they’d let you give an explanation, but all the while they’d be wearing that smirk on their faces and tapping the locust sticks against the sides of their legs, like they was just waiting for you to finish so they could lay you out. And it didn’t stop with the Metropolitans. Some of the storekeepers had banded together to hire their own detective force; so had the railroads and hotels. The pack grew bigger all the time, the worst of them your own kind, Paddies who barely escaped spending their days in the penitentiary now hunting the very friends they once ran with.