Hell Gate

by Jeff Dawson

  The wind kicked up and the American clutched his homburg.

  ‘What’s your name, friend?’ he asked.

  ‘Collins,’ replied Finch. ‘Bradley Collins.’

  They shook.

  ‘Glad to make your acquaintance, Mr Collins.’

  There was a swell of excitement, the decks packed, the air peppered with the audible gasps of those viewing the Manhattan skyline for the very first time. Finch was not immune. Superficially, it was just as he’d seen in the photographs, in the moving picture shows and imagined in every novel – so familiar it felt like greeting an old friend. But the majesty, the sheer scale eclipsed all expectation – from the towers springing up around Battery Park to the turrets of Midtown and the cranes and skeletal steel of visions still in progress.

  The American pointed.

  ‘The Flatiron Building, see it? Damned near 300 feet high. I tell you, Mr Collins, you think you’ve seen it all, then, sure enough, the city goes and outdoes itself.’

  To the right lay Governor’s Island, the Brooklyn Navy Yard and the massive suspension bridges – parts still under construction – that spanned the East River. To the west of Manhattan lay the Hudson.

  Where the Thames was an artery, the Hudson was like a giant arm, mused Finch – gently crooked around the island, shielding it from the Atlantic. On it, the river traffic ploughed up and down – the freighters, the steamers, the barges. Across the Hudson’s lanes cut the ferries, bobbing on the wakes, plying their trade between the city and New Jersey, both shores an endless row of docks, wharves and jetties.

  In early spring, the air was crisp but the sky bright blue. As they sailed upriver, closer to the detail, Finch watched the steam rise from seemingly every flue and chimney stack of every single building in the city, swirling past the barrelled water towers teetering on struts way up on the rooftops.

  The ship had been slowing since the Narrows and gave a sharp, deafening blast on the horn, which elicited a tangible fairground thrill. The black smoke from the twin funnels began wafting erratically, confused by the change in wind and direction.

  As it executed its turn, the ship started to roll, a burst of spray slapping up and catching them all unawares, something which only added to the exhilaration. You could feel the turbines dropping in pitch, the hiss of the wash at the stern. Gulls squawked over it, scanning for titbits. The pilot’s cutter appeared and a gaggle of blunt-nosed tugs grunted out, belching soot, ready to shepherd RMS Baltic to the White Star quays.

  * * *

  Finch edged down the first-class gangway, gripping the rope more tightly than he had imagined. The riot of sounds, colours and smells hit him smack in the face. His legs weren’t yet steady and his left knee was always a weakness. After nearly eight days at sea, he had been warned it would take time to recover his land legs. The sensation reminded him of his first ocean voyage, some six years ago now, when he sailed from Southampton to Cape Town.

  Six years…? Jesus.

  The White Star quays were bespoke – three large docks to accommodate the never-ending expansion in the size of the vessels. The Baltic was, currently, the world’s biggest ocean liner. But between the White Star Line and its rival Cunard, whose quays were right next door, size and speed seemed mere records to be broken – and broken frequently. Throw in Manhattan’s ‘skyscrapers’, thought Finch, and the Western World seemed engaged in some internecine trouser-dropping, countries contesting the prodigiousness, the prowess, of their respective manhoods.

  Huge red-brick buildings lined the quays. Railway tracks ran across the cobbles to the yards beyond where mounds of coal and stacked crates for the outbound passages were being marshalled by teams of longshoremen.

  Below was a sizeable number of excited locals, there to receive home their loved ones – waving handkerchiefs, hollering up names. They were for second class or steerage, knew Finch – they would have to wait. Behind them on the road purred the limousines of the first-class passengers – himself among their number – all feigning nonchalance at global travel, and whose expensive tickets came with the privilege of disembarking ahead of the hoi polloi.

  Despite the furs, silks and fineries of the VIPs, there was still the grubby business of passports to deal with. Finch produced his dark blue British one and took his place in the queue while uppity customs officers proceeded with a sadistic slowness in applying their stamps, causing the patriarchs and matriarchs to mutter.

  In the high-ceilinged customs hall, hung with a huge Stars and Stripes flag, the chatter echoed, the city lying tantalizingly beyond the far open doors.

  ‘Collins… Mr Collins!’

  Finch hadn’t fully adjusted to his new name. It took him a moment.

  ‘Mr Collins,’ it went again.

  Standing off to the side, a thin man in a brown suit was beckoning him.

  Finch gestured that he had yet to clear immigration, but ‘brown suit’ shook his head at the absurdity of the notion.

  There was no handshake, no smile. He had a pinched face, a sharp nose.

  ‘National Bureau of Criminal Identification,’ he said and discreetly flashed a shiny agency badge. A customs official waved them both through.

  Added the man, matter-of-fact: ‘We got your luggage taken care of.’

  He led Finch out into the late-morning sunshine. Passengers and goods carts bustled round the ticket offices for the Troy Line and Central Railroad ferry over to New Jersey. An assignment of timber set for the Southwest service to Jacksonville, Florida, was being loaded. A saloon across the road boasted a tempting sign proclaiming the merits of its cold ‘lager beer’.

  There were other vessels moored – a paddle steamer, a smaller passenger ship and still some grand sailing ships, clippers, whose days, Finch fancied, must surely be numbered. He cast an eye back at the good old Baltic, his recent home, and wondered when he would be boarding for his return.

  The man uttered a curt, insincere enquiry as to the comfort of ‘Mr Collins’s’ voyage, though didn’t listen to the answers, then steered him towards a black open automobile waiting at the far kerb, driver standing next to it, a squat man who avoided eye contact.

  ‘Hop in,’ said the agent.

  ‘Where are we headed?’

  ‘No need to be suspicious. To your hotel, Mr Collins. Not far. And don’t worry, the Bureau’s really pushed the boat out…’

  Did Finch detect a faint smile?

  ‘…in a manner of speaking.’

  The name on the radiator grille said ‘Cadillac’. It was sizeable and, Finch noted, well-sprung. The driver wound the engine with a hand crank. It coughed into life and he climbed behind the wheel. He released the handbrake lever and they turned inland, picking up Tenth Avenue, heading north.

  Finch had had ample time at sea to study the maps and guides; to familiarize himself with the layout of the city; but he hadn’t bargained for its sheer assault on the senses, from the laundry flapping from the tenements on high, all the way down to the street-corner hawkers with their handcarts of roasted peanuts and pretzels.

  The further they penetrated, the greater the noise, the greater the colour, the whole of Midtown coming across like one giant billboard – huge signs for Coca-Cola, Kellogg’s Toasted Corn Flakes, Palmolive Soap and Folger’s Golden Gate Coffee. New York seemed as riotous as London, but in concentrated form, everything crammed onto the bottom end of a not especially big island.

  Like London, the majority of the traffic was still horse-drawn, but there were red electric trolley buses ploughing up and down and quite a few motor cars, their horns honking more for the hell of it than for anything in particular. Just like London, at the intersections, white-gloved policemen waved arms and blew shrill whistles, more in hope than expectation. The uniforms and domed helmets were not unlike that of a British bobby, but bigger, such that each police constable, down to his big copper buttons, seemed like a boy dressed up in his father’s clothing.

  About 50 yards back, Finch noticed, was a silver au
tomobile, not dissimilar to their own, which slalomed in and out of the traffic in their wake. The agent gave it a glance, tapped his driver on the shoulder, who then appeared to deviate off the designated route. They zigzagged north, past cigar stores, knife sharpeners, Italian barbershops, delivery boys scurrying hither and thither, and firehouses with bright red shiny engines.

  On the broad avenues it was sunny, even warm. On some of the cross streets, in the shade, there was still ice – dirty ice – like it had sat there all winter.

  They took a right on 42nd Street, heading east, where the ‘mom and pop’ stores gave way to oyster bars and chop houses as they moved up to cross Broadway. Finch tried to suppress a thrill at just reading the names on the street signs. To the south, a few blocks down, sat the new Palladian edifice of Macy’s department store, which dwarfed anything back home on Oxford Street. He noticed the silver car again, just hanging back.

  They turned up through Times Square with the famous tall newspaper headquarters at the far end. The area was wall-to-wall with theatres.

  ‘The Great White Way, Mr Collins… Because of all the lights.’

  ‘The lights aren’t on.’

  ‘They will be.’

  Huge marquees jostled and vied for the public’s attention – a matinee for Who Goes There? at the Princess Theatre; Ethel Barrymore playing Ibsen at the Lyceum; a production of Twelfth Night at the Knickerbocker.

  Finch wondered whether the Bard could have envisaged anything like this. Or, for that matter, Robert Louis Stevenson. Outside the New Amsterdam, two men trudged up and down wearing sandwich boards – one dressed as a city gent, the other with fiendish fur and fangs, extolling the dramatic transformation of the new hit show, Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde.

  They headed up Seventh Avenue towards the grand Carnegie Hall, the road unfolding onto the open land of Central Park, then turned right along Central Park South where the sightseeing buggies queued for holidaying punters, the aroma of idling horse dung suggesting that business was seasonally slack. There was clearly money along the park’s edge – every apartment building, every hotel, adorned with gilded decor.

  At the eastern end of the street, scaffolding framed the huge, near-complete Plaza Hotel, the air rent with the rat-a-tat-tat of pneumatic-driven jackhammers billowing clouds of dust. Across the corner junction rose the slender structure of an apartment hotel, a green awning with gold lettering proclaiming, ‘The New Netherland’.

  ‘Here,’ instructed the agent and the car came to a halt.

  He gestured up and indicated for Finch to alight.

  The silver automobile slowed past them, then accelerated off. The badge on the trunk said ‘Buick’. There were two men riding in it, but beneath their baggy caps and goggles, they were anonymous.

  ‘I’m not being funny,’ spluttered Finch, ‘but were we…?’

  ‘…being followed?’ said the man. ‘The big surprise would be if we weren’t, Mr Collins. You’re a stranger in town – a lone-travelling “businessman” – people want to know what business. We got the mobs – Italian, Irish, the Jews; we got the socialists, the communists, the anarchists; all of them looking for leverage. You’ve had people checking you out for a week at sea. New York City’s a big town, but it’s also a small town.’

  ‘Should I be concerned?’

  ‘Just a welcome wagon,’ he said. ‘Someone lettin’ you know that they know. Believe me, they meant harm, they wouldn’a showed themselves.’

  He nodded again at the hotel.

  ‘Like I say, your bags will be along soon.’

  Finch slid across the leather and eased down onto the sidewalk.

  ‘One more thing, Mr Collins. Listen good. You’re to make a rendezvous with a colleague of mine, a fellow who will look after you from this point on. You’re to meet him at 1.52 p.m. precisely, Columbus Circle.’

  ‘That’s pretty specific.’

  ‘I don’t make the rules.’

  ‘Columbus Circle? Where’s th—?’

  ‘You’ll figure it out.’

  Finch sighed.

  ‘What’s your name?’

  ‘I don’t have a name.’

  ‘What’s his name, the one I’m meeting?’

  The agent shrugged and tapped the driver on the shoulder. The engine revved and they pulled out into the traffic.

  A liveried porter wandered over, all top hat and tails. He seemed disappointed at Finch’s lack of luggage.

  ‘This way, sir,’ he said.

  Chapter 3

  The building stood tall on St Mark’s Place. With its Renaissance revival adornments and mansard roof, it was conspicuous among the row of town houses – a little piece of Mitteleuropa on the Lower East Side. Home of the German–American Shooting Society, its facade was dominated by an imposing terracotta emblem – of crossed rifles, a target and eagle wings. Underneath ran a motto, ‘Einigkeit macht stark’ (‘Unity makes strength’) – a threat, mused Sammy Proctor, as much as an imploration.

  By day, the clack-clack-clack of air guns, BB pistols and .22-calibre weapons issued through open windows. With its gymnasium and punchbags, there was an added smack of glove on leather. The club exuded a disciplined virility in a part of town that was uniquely devoid of evidence of misspent adolescence.

  By night, and by contrast, the place betrayed a distinct Grimm menace. Sammy had taken extra care as he jemmied open the fifth-floor window and began his descent – treading softly, careful not to ping any stray bullet casing across the parquet floor. He was drawn all the while to the incessant, curious humming, a low resonant chant of human voices, male voices, emanating from deep within the bowels of the building.

  He had heard rumours of the strange comings and goings in the dead of night – of flickering lights, of furtive entries and exits via the basement. There had been whispers… of events within… of weird things… very weird things…

  Sammy pressed his face against the ornate iron grille of the air duct. Whilst he could not yet divine the source of the strange cantillation, what did lie before him certainly aroused his interest – the subterranean changing room where, under dull electric light bulbs, members of the St Mark’s Youth League were stripping to their underwear.

  Not yet 20 years old himself, Sammy could not deny a certain prurient interest in a score of hard-bodied young men. It had been the reason behind his sessions with the psychiatrist; behind the searing pain of the electro-convulsive therapy that still affected his speech and made him appear slow – dim to others.

  Despite his mother’s efforts to inveigle Sammy into the company of society debutantes, even being dragged by an uncle to a house of ill-repute to see if the ladies there might ‘fire up the engines’, the forbidden impulses remained.

  For over a month, he’d been venturing Downtown – sitting on a stoop or mooching in an alleyway, close to the waft of sweat, oil and cordite. Sammy knew enough of the layout to seek out the ventilation shafts and had located the horizontal duct behind the ground-floor wall – its dimensions as tight as a coffin’s, forcing him to shuffle his slight frame along on his elbows.

  He watched as the lads wisecracked and jostled and flicked each other with wound towels. Yet, the boasts of sporting and sexual prowess, it was all just gallows humour. As they arranged themselves on the benches, they too could not ignore the ongoing resonant hum. It was coming from somewhere close… very close.

  The door opened, then slammed shut, giving the boys a start. Two men stood before them. Sammy shuffled, rapt. They were dressed in full-length velvet robes of forest green – on the left breast, woven in gold, a sort of broken Maltese cross. Their hoods were pulled down over bowed heads, obscuring their faces – sacerdotal, like monks…

  Sammy watched as the boys stopped and stood to attention.

  Sure that he was commanding the room, the first man spoke deeply and methodically, at pains to be crystal clear in his instruction, never once revealing his face in full, affording only occasional glimpses of his mouth or the tip o
f his nose.

  ‘If none of you has the stomach for what is about to happen,’ he warned, ‘he must leave now.’

  Sammy watched as the youths cast furtive sideways glances, but none demurred.

  ‘Very well,’ he said, and pointed to a trestle table, upon which lay folded a pile of similar robes.

  There was a flail of limbs as they wrestled them over their heads.

  ‘Like this,’ corrected the second man and showed them how to tie the braided gold cord around the waist. The detail was specific. Then they lined up, standing to attention like soldiers. Once inspected, they were told to sit back down.

  Sammy twisted in his vantage point.

  ‘Here…’

  The second man produced a goblet of sorts – medieval-looking, wooden with gold rivets – and poured a cloudy liquid into it from a copper jug.

  He handed it to the first youth.

  ‘Three long sips. Pass it on.’

  The youth did as he was told. The next one did the same.

  Sammy felt a pang of cramp in his left calf and fought to stretch his leg.

  ‘It goes without saying,’ said the first man, ‘that what you are about to witness tonight shall remain privileged. Never to be discussed. Not even amongst yourselves. Not a word. This instruction shall come only once.’

  There were nods.

  ‘It has been made patently clear to all of you of the penalty, the ultimate sanction… We have eyes and ears.’

  They nodded again.

  ‘Very well.’

  The second man cast an eye to a clock on the wall. It was just before two in the morning.

  ‘Another minute while it takes effect.’

  The cramp had not subsided. Sammy stretched his leg again but his foot connected with a drainage pipe, giving a sudden metallic clang.

  He froze.

  It was not loud, but enough for the first man to prick up his ears.

  Sammy clamped his hand to his mouth. He pulled his face back into the darkness. The searing pain in his calf demanded his body correct his alignment. But he remained stock-still.