Up in the Old Hotel (Vintage Classics)

by Joseph Mitchell

  One side of Centre Market Place is lined with red brick tenements whose street floors are occupied by gunsmiths, police tailors, and police-equipment stores. An old, black, and obese cat was sitting in the show window of one of the police-equipment stores, in the middle of a display of cartridge belts. ‘She’s the biggest store cat in the neighborhood,’ Captain Campion said. ‘I’ve stopped and watched her many a night on my way past here. One night I saw her catch and eat a rat.’ We paused and stood in front of the show window. While Captain Campion continued to talk, he and I watched the cat, and the cat stared fixedly at us and slowly waved her tail.

  ‘You remember I used to say the more I studied gypsies the less I knew about them,’ Captain Campion said. ‘Well, I’ve changed my tune. After all these years, I really believe I’ve got to the bottom of a good many gypsy matters. To tell you the truth, I found out more about some aspects of gypsy life the last few years than I did in all the years that went before. For one thing, there was an unusual amount of informing going on. During 1951, ’52, and ’53, the bajour women in three or four of the bands that hang out in the city had a run of luck pulling off bajours on mental cases. A high percentage of the women who go to gypsies for advice are off balance to some degree, and the gypsies would starve to death if they weren’t, but what I’m talking about now are serious mental cases, advanced mental cases – women who should be in institutions or they already have been and shouldn’t have been let out. As a rule, gypsies are leery of such cases. When women are that far gone, they’re a good deal harder to swindle than you might think. Some of them are much more suspicious than normal people, they suspect everything and everybody, and some of them their minds are off in space and they don’t retain and the gypsy can work on one of them a week and still be right where she started, and some of them are so shaky they’re liable to throw a leaping, scratching, screaming hysterical fit at any moment and create a disturbance and attract the whole neighborhood into the ofisa. And the very best of them, when the gypsy tries to worm the facts out of them concerning do they have any money put away and they let drop they do have, it may be true and it may be a complete delusion. All the same, around 1951 the bajour women in the bands I’m speaking of got to be very good at handling serious mental cases and began concentrating on them. They learned how to detect which ones were safe enough to work on, and how to see things their way, and how to calm them down and reason with them and plant ideas in their minds.

  ‘One of their victims was an Italian woman of fifty-four, a widow. She had been a widow around two years, and she and a son-in-law ran a bakery that her husband had left her, a small bakery in an Italian neighborhood on the lower East Side. She hadn’t been herself since she lost her husband – she would stay in her room for days at a time and lie in there with the bedclothes pulled up over her and refuse to speak, and about the only time she went out in the streets was to go to church. A pair of bajour women opened an ofisa in an old store in the neighborhood, and one day this Italian woman was passing by on her way to church and they stopped her and talked to her and said they could see something was bothering her, why didn’t she come in and visit them, maybe they could help her. She visited them several times, and they wormed out of her that she had a total of seventeen thousand six hundred dollars in two savings banks, and then they planted the idea in her mind this money had a curse on it and that was what was making her feel bad. So she went to the banks one morning and drew it out, every cent of it, and carried it to the ofisa and asked the gypsies to take the curse off it. They said to leave it with them and they would work over it all night and do their best. She returned to the ofisa the following morning and naturally the ofisa was empty and the gypsies were gone, and her reaction was she went on home and didn’t say a word. This was in the latter part of October. Four months went by, and then one day early in March the son-in-law was filling out her income-tax return and she was lying in bed that day refusing to speak and he got her bankbooks out of her bureau drawer to see how much interest he should report, and both books had ‘CANCELLED’ cut in them, perforated in them, the way savings banks do when an account is closed, and he was shocked, and he dragged her out of bed and forced her to explain to him and the rest of the family what in the name of God had happened. And when she finally did so, he took her to the police station in the neighborhood, and the detectives there sent them to the Annex to see me, and I did the usual thing – I got out the file of photographs of bajour women and started showing them to her. She just kind of glanced at the first one I showed her and saw it was a gypsy, and then she bent over and put her head in her hands and wouldn’t look at any more. She wouldn’t reply to questions or make any further response. I asked the son-in-law to step out in the hall with me, and I urged him to take her to a psychiatrist, which he said he would. And some days later he phoned me that the psychiatrist said she was suffering from involutional melancholia in an advanced state.

  ‘Another victim was a forty-two-year-old blonde, a member of a prominent family in Brooklyn. She’s had three husbands, all well-to-do, and three divorces, and she has a daughter by her first husband that the husband has the full custody of; she isn’t even allowed to visit her. She has a small income of some kind, and she lives alone. She hits the bottle and she picks up men who beat her up, but what’s really wrong with her, she’s a schizo and she’s subject to auditory hallucinations. She’ll be all right for a year, a year and a half, sometimes longer, and then she’ll start hearing voices and she’ll wander in the streets and scream and moan and run right in front of cars, trying to get away from the voices, and she’ll wind up in the psychopathic division at Kings County Hospital; it’s happened over and over. She spent three or four evenings in an ofisa in a store on Flatbush Avenue Extension, telling her troubles to the gypsies, and the gypsies sympathized with her from the bottom of their hearts and took twelve thousand dollars from her – twelve thousand three hundred and fifty, to be exact. It was part of the settlement from one of her divorces, and for some reason of her own she had been keeping it in cash in a safe-deposit box.

  ‘They made several touches almost as big as these, and touches amounting to a couple of thousand, a thousand, five hundred, two hundred and fifty, and the like of that were just routine. The men in these bands began driving big brand-new cars instead of used cars and drinking whiskey instead of wine, and they began throwing their weight around at gypsy parties and talking out of turn and showing entirely too much interest in the women in the other bands. The men in the other bands got sick and tired of this, and certain ones of them decided to do some informing, and instead of just getting on the phone and refusing to give their names and jabbering a minute or two and hanging up, the way gypsy informers usually do, they came right into my office and sat down and put their hats on their laps and talked and talked, and much to my surprise about twenty per cent of what they told turned out to be true. In addition to straightening me out on who did various bajours, they gave me a lot of incidental information on gypsy customs.’

  The obese cat stirred herself and jumped clumsily out of the show window and waddled into the darkness in the rear of the store. Captain Campion and I resumed our walk.

  ‘Another good source of information on gypsy customs I had in recent years,’ he said, ‘was an investigator in the Department of Welfare named Harry Brunner. In April, 1951, the Department of Welfare put all the gypsy relief cases in the entire city into one center, the Non-Residence Welfare Center, and started weeding them out. They had had trouble with gypsy families who were using several sets of names and several addresses and getting relief from several centers at the same time, and they shouldn’t have been on relief in the first place. Such as a family that owned a new Buick Roadmaster with about a thousand dollars’ worth of accessories and extra equipment on it – it was practically a rolling auto-supplies store – and they were getting relief from a center in Queens and a center in the Bronx, and were also on relief over in Newark. Brunner was assigned t
o the Non-Residence Center, and he got in behind the gypsies. He’s a big, quiet, gloomy-looking fellow from Brooklyn. He’s six feet two, and he’s absolutely fearless and absolutely honest. His mother taught in public schools in Brooklyn for thirty-five years. She taught ungraded children – children with psychological problems – and Brunner must’ve learned from her how to get along with people. In a short while, he threw dozens upon dozens of gypsy families off relief, but for some reason I’ve never been able to figure out, instead of hating him, the gypsies liked him and respected him. They called him Bruno, and invited him to parties and weddings and funerals. He ate gypsy goulash with them and drank gypsy tea with them, and sat up all night talking with them, and they told him things right off the bat that it took me years to learn. Gypsies ordinarily don’t like it a bit when people try to find out what’s the gypsy word for this, what’s the gypsy word for that, but all Brunner had to do was ask; they gave him hundreds of words. I had hopes that he would become a real gypsy scholar, which is something we need in this country – when I read about American professors studying strange tribes of people in the far corners of the earth, it burns me up; you’d think at least one of them would study a strange tribe that’s right under their noses. However, he disappointed me. He was a college man – he had a B.S. in psychology from Long Island University – but he wanted to work with his hands. In August, 1952, right out of a clear sky, he quit the Department of Welfare and went down to Fort Worth, Texas – he was married to a Texas girl – and the next thing I knew, I had a postcard from him saying he had become a structural steelworker.

  ‘Another thing I might mention that happened in recent years was an experience we had with a bajour woman named Pearsa. Pearsa belongs to two of the biggest gypsy families in North and South America, the Nicholases and the Demetros. Her father was George Nicholas, a Serbian gypsy, and her mother was Sabinka Demetro, a Russian gypsy, and she was born in Buenos Aires in 1907. She was brought to the United States when she was a little girl, and she was married when she was fourteen. She’s married to Steve Bimbo, who’s the oldest son of old man Tene Bimbo, who’s the head of the Bimbo family, which is another big gypsy family. Her main stamping grounds are New York City, Baltimore, Chicago, Detroit, Buffalo, and Boston, and the record we have on her dates back to 1926 and shows thirty-two arrests in eleven cities, but that’s not as bad as it sounds. There’s quite a few gypsy women with a hundred or more arrests on their records. Men, too. Old man Tene Bimbo himself, he’s rolled up a hundred and forty arrests for everything from murder in the first degree to stealing an automobile jack. Still and all, you can just imagine how much she’s paid to lawyers and bail bondsmen. Pearsa’s a red-haired gypsy, the only one I’ve ever seen, and she used to be extremely good-looking in a wild and woolly sort of way. She’s been a big money-maker, and other bajour women talk about her with the greatest respect, but she’s had thirteen children and her back bothers her and she’s developed sinus trouble and her nerves are all shot and she and Steve fight like cats and dogs and she doesn’t have much patience any more and she’s begun to take chances she wouldn’t’ve dreamed of taking when she was in better command of herself. Well, in February, 1952, with the help of the District Attorney’s office, we managed to plant a certain mechanical device in an ofisa that Pearsa was running in a flat above a store on East Broadway, and we listened to her actual words while she worked on a victim during the final stages of a bajour. It was the first time we’d ever been able to use such a device on a gypsy, and it was a very educational experience. When did I see you last? It must’ve been around four years ago.’

  ‘It was around that,’ I said. ‘I ran into you in Grand Central and we went and had some coffee.’

  ‘I remember,’ Captain Campion said. ‘Then I’ve never had a chance to tell you about the devil’s head. Every so often, all through the years, we’d hear from a bajour victim about a little devil’s head that the gypsy used on her to convince her she had cancer, which only the gypsy could cure, but we couldn’t seem to find one. Every time we arrested a bajour woman, we’d search her right down to the seams in her skirts, and every time we made a raid on gypsy premises we’d turn everything upside down, and we came across a good many queer things, but a devil’s head just never showed up. Well, in the summer of 1952 we finally found one, and it was a nasty thing. It was carved out of ivory, and it was about the size of a hazelnut, and it was grinning, and it had human hair glued on it – coarse, black gypsy hair. On January 3, 1953, we found another one.’

  We reached the back door of Headquarters.

  ‘What did you do with them?’ I asked. ‘I’d like to see one.’

  ‘The District Attorney’s office has the last one we found,’ Captain Campion said. ‘It’ll be put in evidence when the gypsy woman who was using it’s case comes up in General Sessions, if it ever does – she jumped bail, and I suspect she went to Mexico City, which is where they generally go when they jump bail. The other one belongs to me – the gypsy we took it from died before her case came up; she was burned to death in a tenement fire in Coney Island. I’ve got it home. If you’d really like to see it, I tell you what I’ll do. I was going to talk to the young detectives about gypsies sooner or later, and if you want to come down to the Annex next Sunday night, I’ll devote the entire session to gypsies, and you can sit in on it, and I’ll bring along the devil’s head.’

  ‘What time should I come?’ I asked.

  ‘Meet me in the squad office in the Annex a little after eight,’ Captain Campion said.

  Captain Campion is fifty-one years old. He is blue-eyed and black-haired, and he has a calm, ruddy, observant, handsome, strong-jawed, Irish face. He is five feet ten, and he weighs around a hundred and fifty. He was born on Fifty-eighth Street between Ninth and Tenth, in Hell’s Kitchen, and he grew up on Twentieth Street between Second and Third, in the old Gashouse District. He went through the second year of high school. He was an amateur fighter. He fought in four weights, beginning as a flyweight and ending as a lightweight, and he had fifty-four fights and won forty-nine. He entered the Police Department in January, 1927. It soon became apparent that he was unusually intelligent, and that he had a remarkably accurate memory for faces, names, conversations, and sequences of actions, and that he was deeply curious about human behavior, and after two years as a patrolman he was transferred to the Detective Division and assigned to the Pickpocket and Confidence Squad. He was an exceedingly hard-working detective; he made over two thousand arrests, and was cited for bravery nine times. He is serious by nature, but friendly, and he has a cheerful, youthful smile. People talk to him willingly, and he is a good listener; he is one of those who believe very little of what they hear but always look and act as if they believe every word. He is a self-taught linguist. He can speak rough-and-ready Italian, German, and Yiddish, he can speak a little Romany, the gypsy language, and he is studying Spanish. He keeps a paper-backed Spanish-self-taught manual and a Spanish-English, English-Spanish dictionary in his pockets and studies them on the subway. He is religious, and he often reflects on death. For over ten years he was a member of a committee in the Society of St Vincent de Paul that was composed of detectives and patrolmen and that went to Welfare Island every Sunday and called on terminal patients in the City Home and the old cancer hospital and talked or listened to them, whichever they seemed to want, and brought them cigarettes and magazines and playing cards and flowers. He goes to fights and horse races. He and his wife, Gertrude Campion, live in an apartment in Flushing. They have two sons, one of whom is a graduate of Fordham and both of whom are in the Air Force.

  The next Sunday night, I went down to the Annex and took the elevator to the seventh floor, where the Pickpocket and Confidence Squad is quartered. When I stepped off the elevator, I found that Captain Campion was standing in the hall, waiting for me. ‘We won’t be able to use the squad office tonight,’ he said. ‘The ex-girl friend of a confidence man came in just now and stated she wanted to give some i
nformation concerning him, and a couple of detectives are questioning her in there. She’s telling everything she knows, and enjoying it to the full, and she’ll be hours, so we’re going to use the private office of the commanding officer of the squad. In other words, my old office.’ I followed Captain Campion down the hall and into his old office. I remembered it as being about as plainly furnished as it could be, and I saw that his successor had not made any changes in it. A battered old golden-oak desk stood in the center. In back of the desk was a swivel chair and facing it were three straight chairs. On one wall was one of those maps of the city that can be rolled up and down like a shade. In one corner was a coat tree. There was one window, at which two young men were standing looking out, each with one foot resting on the sill. ‘These are the young detectives I told you about,’ Captain Campion said. ‘I explained to them that the text for tonight is gypsies.’ They came over, and Captain Campion introduced us. One was Detective Joe Kane, and he was thickset and solemn, and the other was Detective Al Gore, and he was thin and solemn. They appeared to be in their middle twenties. Captain Campion’s briefcase was on the desk, and he unbuckled it and took out some file folders. ‘Well, gentlemen,’ he said, ‘let’s be seated.’ He sat in the swivel chair and put on spectacles and opened one of the folders, disclosing a rat’s nest of notes. The young detectives and I sat in the straight chairs.