At home, Julia hadn’t gotten a wink of sleep. Her head was swimming, awash with the incredible sights she’d seen. The next morning, she decided to shelve her old novel and start a new one, based on the new world she’d discovered. To meet Nolan again, she told her mother she was going out with her school friend, Lavinia. She delighted in coming up with these lies. As a writer, she realized, she had a great talent for altering the truth.
“Shouldn’t we be going? You said it starts at one on the dot,” she said.
Nolan frowned, seemingly unsure. But when he saw Julia’s pretty face and looked into her brown eyes, the size of silver dollars, he relented. “It’s on Twenty-Seventh Street.”
The Tenderloin had its own specific geography, she learned. West Twenty-Eighth Street was for high-end gambling, West Twenty-Seventh Street for low-end. West Twenty-Ninth Street was exclusively row houses for the ladies of the evening. She and Nolan passed the Cairo Dance Hall, where they’d gone the day before yesterday. Julia didn’t think it was as nice as the Haymarket. The Cairo, Nolan told her, was a clip joint—it watered down the drinks.
All the streets had saloons. They’d visited two: the Star and Garter and the Ruins. Each had a long bar to the side with a mirror behind it, sawdust-covered floors, a pot-bellied stove, and chromolithographs of prize fighters and plump nude women on the walls. All women had to be escorted, and if you had two beers, a free sandwich lunch was offered, which Julia found delicious but quite salty. In her society world, a saloon was considered low class. But it was really a club, she learned, a second home for the men who played cards or pool and argued about politics and sports. In a way, it was no different from her father going to the Union League or Knickerbocker clubs.
Nolan was delighted to show her the sights and had proudly escorted her by the arm into dance halls and saloons. On the streets, he pointed out colorful local characters like Dan the Dude, a knockout drop artist—although Julia didn’t quite understand what that was yet. Nolan was also flattered to be asked about his profession, and Julia laughed delightedly when she discovered that he’d been trained in a Fagin school right out of Oliver Twist. Nolan spilled trade secrets about how to distract a mark and then pull a wallet or purse. The bicycle trick she’d seen was taught to him by one Crazy Bob, who had even trained his dog, Whiskey, to snatch purses!
Nolan hadn’t hesitated to show her anything—until now. They stopped at the Last Hope. From the outside, it looked like any other saloon. “Here we are,” he said.
“Lead the way, Mr. Nolan,” Julia chirped. They addressed each other as mister and miss because, as etiquette dictated, they hadn’t known each other since childhood.
Nolan smiled and took her by the arm. They strode into the saloon, past the patrons with their shot glasses and mugs of beer. The men and women looked up, surprised by the sight of Julia, who wore a stylish blue afternoon dress.
When they reached the rear of the first floor, Julia gasped, “Just like ancient Greece.”
In front of her was a wooden amphitheater that stretched down into the basement. The benches were filled almost completely with men, some of whom had gaudily dressed women at their sides. Nolan paid the attendant four dollars and guided Julia down the steep steps. They found seats near the arena floor. Men called out greetings to Nolan, who raised his derby in return, proud that they were admiring Julia.
The wall surrounding the arena was about four feet high and lined with zinc sheets. The floor was packed earth and gave off a damp, moldy smell. Off to the side stood a man in a green three-piece suit. He held an excited fox terrier on a leather leash.
“How does this work?” Julia asked above the din of the spectators.
“Fifty in a twenty-minute limit and three-to-one odds on Sampson, the mutt.”
“What should we bet?” asked Julia, removing a bill from her red and gold embroidered purse. “I’ve got a five,” she said, handing it to Nolan.
He caught the attention of a bookie standing at the top row behind them and nodded. “Get ready,” he yelled.
A gate opened at the side of the arena wall. In one fluid motion, two burly men set a large wooden box on the dirt floor and opened a front flap. Out came dozens of rats, scurrying like mad around the arena. The men pulled the box in and closed the gate. At that moment, a whistle blew. The man in the green suit released the dog and climbed over the wall, taking a seat.
The fox terrier ran into the mass of rats, grabbed one by the neck, sank his white teeth into him, shook him violently, and flung the dead carcass away. Then he attacked another, and another. At each kill, the crowd roared with delight. The dog killed systematically, with great discipline. He didn’t waste a second chasing the rats about. The spectators cheered raucously, urging Sampson on.
Seated on a bench near the floor was a man holding a pocket watch. A man next to him held a slate, on which he made a chalk mark for each kill. As the tally mounted, the crowd went into a frenzy. The dirty gray rats formed a vortex in the arena, colliding with one another, leaping over the dead bodies of their comrades. The man holding the watch yelled out, “Ten minutes left! Twenty-nine kills.”
Julia found herself screaming Sampson’s name. At five minutes left and forty-one kills, the volume of the cheering increased fourfold. The dog kept attacking without the tiniest sign of fatigue. Julia thought dizzily that he must be enjoying himself. But some rats evaded him, scattering here and there, making him race around the arena to run them down. Only three remained, and they were determined to live. Sampson sat back and waited for one rat to run right into him. Two left. The dog chose his first victim and went in for the kill.
“One minute!” yelled the timer, and the crowd went mad. The last rat was not only fast but wily, as if he knew the remaining time. In a burst of speed, Sampson caught up with him and hurled his body to the ground as the timer yelled out, “Time!”
Some of the crowd was ecstatic; others were angry and disgusted. Julia and Nolan threw their arms up in victory. “We won fifteen dollars,” Nolan yelled.
Sampson’s handler had him back on the leash. He paraded him in front of the cheering crowd like a gladiator in a Roman arena. The white curly fur around the terrier’s mouth was bloodstained, but Sampson was triumphant. To the delight of his fans, he stopped, picked up a dead rat, shook it, and threw it to the floor.
A few moments later, Julia and Nolan found themselves back on the sidewalk of West Twenty-Seventh Street.
“That was exciting, Mr. Nolan,” Julia said breathlessly. “Thank you for taking me.”
“Would you believe the record is one hundred in fifteen minutes, Miss Cross?”
“One hundred in fifteen minutes? That’s amazing!”
“I must be honest: I didn’t know if you’d like it.”
“Oh, Mr. Nolan, rats are evil. Did you know that they spread the Black Death in the fourteenth century? The plague killed half of Europe!”
It was a hot July afternoon, and Julia was fanning herself.
“Would you like something to drink, Miss Cross? Perhaps a cold sarsaparilla?”
“No, I must be getting back. I told my mother I was at the Natural History Museum with Lavinia.”
“I suppose you did get to see some animals.”
Julia gave an unexpected burble of laughter. “And they weren’t stuffed.”
“I had a wonderful time, Miss Cross.”
“Next Tuesday at ten a.m.?” Julia asked, shaking his hand and smiling.
21
Sitting in a rowboat in the East River across from Blackwell’s Island at 2:00 a.m., Cross was surprised by how cool and refreshing the air was.
A strong wind swept up the river. In Manhattan, the August night had been unbearably hot and humid; to feel the wind was a sweet relief. All day, he’d dreaded this moment. He hadn’t bothered to ask whether he would accompany Kent’s men tonight. He knew his presence woul
d be mandatory.
The three men sat in a long rowboat tied to an overhanging tree. They were hidden in the shadows on the banks of the river at Long Island City, less than a thousand feet from Blackwell’s. To avoid detection by people on Manhattan’s piers, it was safer to approach from the less-populated Queens County side in the east.
“Here they come,” Brady whispered, nodding to a passing guard boat. “It won’t be back for another two hours.”
The steam-powered prison patrol boats continuously circled the twelve-mile-long, cigar-shaped island. As this one passed, a barrel-chested man named Wild Jimmy Coogan untied the line and began rowing them to the island. The prison, a forbidding stone fortress topped with castle-like crenellations, was located near the southern end of the island, just north of the smallpox and municipal hospitals. Coogan expertly guided them across, taking advantage of the speedy south current. Cross guessed he must have been a seaman before embarking on a career in crime. To Cross’s relief, they encountered no other boats. No one said a word during the trip, and only the sound of the oars cutting softly through the water could be heard.
From the middle of the river, the men could see a few lights on in the prison.
Coogan continued rowing until they were fifty yards away from the sloping granite seawall that circled the island.
“What now, Mr. Engineer?” whispered Brady.
Cross took out his tracings. It was a moonless night and hard to read. He struck a match and looked up at the seawall.
“I’m an architect, not an engineer,” he whispered indignantly.
“Goddamn you, which way?” Brady snarled, punching Cross hard in the right arm.
“Head about twenty yards to the south,” Cross said, trying not to grimace from the pain. After a minute, he called out, “That’s it.”
A circular opening in the seawall appeared before them, and Coogan steered toward it. If it had been high tide, they never would have seen the sewer tunnel, which sloped up almost 150 feet to the new addition at the prison’s south end. When Kent told Cross about Hardenbergh’s addition, Cross had remembered an article he’d seen in the trade journal American Architect and Building News. Back at his office, he’d looked it up. Instead of having a slop bucket in each cell for the prisoners to relieve themselves, the men had unenclosed toilets that dumped into waste lines between the two hundred back-to-back cells. During the day, a huge cistern on the roof of the addition periodically flushed the lines into a sewer tunnel, which dumped into the river. The addition had been designed according to the wishes of the Prison Reform Society, a do-gooder group that lobbied the state legislature for more humane prison conditions.
To Cross’s surprise, Hardenbergh’s drawings showed no iron gate over the opening. The state had skimped on money, he guessed, and never installed it. All the better. They wouldn’t have to saw off a padlock.
About ten feet from the opening, Brady grabbed Coogan’s arm and pointed along the top of the seawall. They saw a single light by the edge, coming toward them from about twenty feet away. It swung to and fro as it moved.
“It’s a guard,” Brady hissed, and the men immediately crouched low in the boat. With several powerful stokes of the oars, Coogan slid the craft inside the opening as the guard stopped directly above them. They froze and waited, listening to the river lap against the walls of the tunnel. With an oar, Coogan steadied the boat, keeping it from drifting out of the tunnel.
After five minutes, Brady nodded, and the men started to gather their equipment. Without the gate, there was no place to tie up the boat. It took several minutes to concoct a mooring. The distinct sound of streaming water interrupted their work. Brady raised his hand as the signal to halt, and the men froze again, struggling to meet one another’s eyes in the darkness.
Outside the tunnel, they saw a thin jet of liquid falling from above the opening. The stream began to taper off, and someone said, “Ah.” A minute later, a cigar butt was tossed into the water. Brady and Coogan exchanged smiles. Brady lit a lantern and ordered Cross to lead the way.
The diameter of the tunnel was only four feet, but it was big enough to bend over and walk through. Past the point at which high tide rinsed the tunnel clean, a powerful putrid odor hit them like a shovel to the face.
“Keep your mouths open and you won’t smell it,” whispered Cross. Looking down, he realized he shouldn’t have worn his good shoes.
The tunnel sloped at a very steep angle. Good for drainage but tiring for walking. About fifty feet from the prison, they heard a rumbling.
“Brace yourselves and don’t let go of the bag,” Cross yelled.
A few seconds later, a wall of brown water crashed into them.
“Christ, I’m covered in shit,” Coogan screamed as the torrent swept around his waist.
“Goddamn you, Cross,” Brady hissed, clutching the bag of tools to his chest.
“How the hell should I know when they flush the lines?” Cross snapped, thinking he shouldn’t have worn his Brooks Brothers trousers either.
Stinking and angry, the men kept walking until they reached the exterior prison wall. They climbed through a hatch into a plumbing cavity in the addition, a towering three-story space filled from top to bottom with waste lines from each cell. The space was barely four feet wide. Cross pulled the drawings from inside his soaking shirt. Brady raised the lantern.
“He’s in cell twenty-four, second tier,” whispered Cross. He started pacing off a small distance to his right, trying to find the actual position of the cell as displayed on the drawing. “Right up there.”
Using the labyrinth of piping like a ladder, Brady began climbing up to the cell, his dirty canvas bag of tools bouncing against his side. When he grabbed for an upper piece of lead pipe, it pulled out of its joint and crashed to the cement floor. The sound reverberated through the space like a pistol shot. The men froze, waiting for a reaction.
The minutes passed like months. Cross’s wet body was drenched in sweat. He tried to imagine how he would explain his presence. Nothing he thought of was very convincing. He could see the front-page article in the Tribune, imagine the ruin that would befall his family.
But there was nothing but silence. Brady, still above them, took another route to the second tier. Coogan followed. To provide ventilation, each cell had a two-foot-square grille made of wide bands of iron; it looked like the weave of a basket. Above them, in the roof over the cavity, ventilators drew in fresh air. Hardenbergh was no fool; he knew the grilles could be escape routes, and he took great care in detailing their anchorage to the massive stone walls. Huge bolts and iron plates secured them to the inside face of the cavity wall. There was no way a prisoner could unfasten them from inside the cell, but from the outside, it was a simple matter of unbolting—as Brady was about to do with the huge wrench he’d brought along.
“Sanders, we’re here to get you out,” he whispered through the vent grille.
“I’ll keep watch by the bars while you work,” a voice said.
Brady placed the spanner on the first bolt and threw his weight on the handle. The bolt loosened with a tiny squeak. He quickly attacked the other three. Once loosened, he unscrewed them, placed them in his bag, pulled out the vent, and handed it to Coogan, who was perched on the pipes. The shiny, round pate of Bald Jack appeared in the opening. Being skinny and small, he squirmed through without difficulty.
“Good evening, Mr. Brady,” whispered Bald Jack. He wore a gray-and-black-striped prison uniform of rough wool but otherwise looked much the same.
As Brady and Coogan helped Bald Jack keep his balance on the piping, a head of red hair appeared. “Who the fuck is this?” hissed Brady, watching the man wriggle his shoulders and arms through the opening.
“That’s Gordon, my cell mate,” Bald Jack said. “This isn’t the Fifth Avenue Hotel. I don’t get my own goddamn room.”
“And I’m com
ing too. Ya ain’t leaving me behind,” Gordon snarled. He bulled his way through to his waist, and then Bald Jack and Brady pulled him the rest of the way out.
Brady carefully inserted the vent into place and tightened the bolts.
“They’ll think we vanished into thin air,” said Bald Jack with a smile.
“Let’s move,” said Coogan, leading the way down.
“Who the hell is he?” asked Cross, who had been waiting for them at the bottom of the plumbing cavity.
“Never you mind,” said Brady, who took the lead as they moved back into the sewer tunnel.
“Holy shit, it stinks,” Gordon said.
“Shit smells like shit,” said Coogan with a smile.
The five men splashed through the tunnel to the boat. Brady scanned the seawall for guards. Satisfied, he gave Coogan the signal to shove off.
“You know, the grub wasn’t bad in there. Ya got a pound of meat for dinner every day,” Bald Jack said, looking back at the prison as they rowed away.
“And a whole quart of vegetable soup,” added Gordon.
“We can turn around and take you back if you liked the place so much,” said Coogan.
“Shit no. You know the worst part of bein’ in there? They made you go to evening school,” Bald Jack said.
Brady laughed. “Hell, let’s take ’em back. You would’ve finally learned to read and write at the age of forty.”
The rowboat silently made its way back across the river. To Cross’s relief, there wasn’t a boat to be seen. Just a few hundred yards more, and they’d be safe on the Queens side.
“So what were you in for, Gordon?” Brady asked.
“Got caught robbing Saint Jerome’s Rectory on East Forty-Seventh Street.”
“Tough break,” Brady said sympathetically. “Lotta silver in those places.”
“You bet. When I get back to Manhattan, I’ll get set up, maybe go back to the same place and try again.”
House of Thieves Page 12