by Pete Hamill
A lot of the money stuck to him, of course, and Cormac knew it. So did Cahill and Edelstein. Tweed owned the building on Duane Street where he ran his office on the third floor and accepted the bundles of cash. He owned property on both sides of the new Central Park. He moved from one large Uptown house to another as his family grew bigger, and each house was grander than the last, with three carriages always waiting at the curb. He had a seven-room suite at the Delevan Hotel in Albany and a more luxurious one at the Broadway Central, a hotel he loved because it had a back door. The Americus Club on the Connecticut shore had started as a fishing club where his friends could smoke cigars and drink brandy. But it became grander too, with formal clothes on Saturday night and testimonial dinners instead of clambakes. The old modest skiffs were replaced by yachts, and a separate cottage was built out in the woods for his mistress of the moment. Tweed hid almost nothing, which was why the voters loved him. He bought that diamond stickpin, which Cormac urged him to hide at once in a coal bin. It was the size of a nose and glittered in every room he entered. Tweed laughed and laughed, and flaunted the stickpin on every possible occasion. This added still another symbol to the sunken eyes, the swollen belly, the polished shoes, and the Tammany Tiger that flowed from the pen and brush of Thomas Nast.
They knew all that. They didn’t care. They lived in the real world, where bullshit warred with horseshit and sin was part of the deal. And besides, they were his friends.
Luke brought the ice cream, and Edelstein asked the Boss to tell Cahill about the great fights between the Dead Rabbits and the Bowery B’hoys in the 1840s, and Tweed smiled and wolfed down ice cream and started telling the old stories. Cormac had heard them all before, and surely so had Cahill, and even Charlie Butts. But they made Tweed happy in the telling, and in the remembering. Cahill and Edelstein lit up cigars. Luke brought brandy and took away the ice cream dishes.
“The thing you learn in a street fight,” Tweed said, “is that it’s not how big you are, but how smart you are. So…”
As Luke laid slices of birthday cake before them, Tweed talked about those days when he was a big lean street fighter, one of the Cherry Hillers, long before he joined the Big Six fire company on Gouverneur Street. They first fought two dozen Dead Rabbits on Bayard Street, and beat them badly, and then joined forces with the Bowery B’hoys to beat them again, and then the Rabbits came with guns and they dropped bricks on them from the Bayard Street rooftops and the police came and they shoved a chimney down on one of them too. And then…
“It was a rough old school,” Tweed said.
“I’m sorry I missed it,” Cahill said.
“Don’t be,” Tweed said. “Many’s the lad didn’t escape it.” He glanced away. “Or was broken by it.”
He looked tired again, staring at his hands. Then something in memory turned him to Cormac.
“Play the piano, Cormac,” he said. “Play that thing that the little blond girl loved.”
Cormac flexed his fingers, remembering the little blond girl named Rachel who had intoxicated Tweed for one long winter in the Broadway Central. There was a nocturne that she loved hearing.
“I hope I can remember it,” Cormac said.
“Give it a try.”
He went to the piano, gazed at the keys, saw—as he did each time he sat on a bench like this—the face of the Countess de Chardon, and began to play. The music of a nocturne filled the room in the Ludlow Street Jail. Full of night, with clouds scudding across the moon and a distant sound of the sea pulling on the shore. Cormac’s technique had been acquired the hard way, at the keyboards of tuneless pianos jammed against walls in saloons, in the studios of teachers, and, after moving to Leonard Street, at the piano he bought with the money from his first cheap novel. He played to the end, and then the four men clapped.
“Just beautiful,” Tweed said, his voice lower. “Just beautiful.”
Cormac started to get up.
“No. Nononono, Cormac. You know what you’ve got to play now. All of us need it. Me most of all.”
Cormac smiled. He’d learned the song in Tweed’s company, at clambakes and Fourth of July celebrations, at rowdy election night parties at Tammany, in oyster bars and a hundred saloons. Tweed called it the Fight Song.
Cormac started to play, plunking the keys as if the piano were a percussion instrument, the song a march of some kind, an American tune. He began singing in a light voice. Cahill and Edelstein knew the words too, and the three of them were singing together, with Butts finally joining too, and the music pounding, and then, without help, Tweed got up. He just stood there, the backs of his knees jammed against the seat of the chair. Then his arms were moving, his face was grinning, his eyes were sparkling, and he swung his arms like a bandmaster and joined in the final words:
Then pull off the old coat!
And roll up the sleeve!
Bayard is a hard street to travel.
Pull off the old coat!
And roll up the sleeve!
The Bloody Sixth is a hard ward to travel…
I BELIEVE!
They roared at the end, and Cormac hammered the keys in punctuation.
Then Tweed sighed in a wheezy way and collapsed slowly into his chair, everything gone out of him, even the fight.
The bells in the Essex Market tolled eleven. Luke appeared from the bedroom, to signal with looks and hands that the warden wanted them all out, except, of course, Tweed.
“Happy birthday, Bill,” Cahill said.
“We’ll keep fighting for you,” said Edelstein.
“Thank you, fellas,” Tweed said without conviction. “Thank you, it was a grand night, thank you…”
When he looked behind him through the doorway, Cormac thought Tweed was the loneliest man in the world.
79.
Cormac, Cahill, and Edelstein stood for an awkward moment on the sidewalk in front of the jail. Butts was already on his way home. Music drifted from the saloon across the street. A few women chatted on the corner, gazing up at the dark windows of the prison. A drunk staggered across the street, heading south.
“Can I give you a ride home, Cormac?” Cahill said.
“Thank you, no. I’ll walk. It’s a lovely night.”
“It’s a lovely night in a bad part of town,” Edelstein said.
Cormac laughed. “I know the way. I’ll be all right.”
They shook hands, and Edelstein climbed into a carriage behind Cahill and the driver flicked a whip and they trotted away.
Cormac glanced once more at the jail and began to walk south. Into the past.
He told himself, Be careful now, you’ll be up all night. Be careful, you’ll be trapped again in memory.
He did know the way, walking down the Bowery until it became Chatham Street, and then turning west into the Five Points. That was the fastest way to Broadway and Leonard. He still knew every street and most of the houses but no longer knew the people who now lived in the houses. The name Five Points, after all, came from the meeting of five streets: Mulberry, Anthony, Cross, Orange, and Little Water, the noisy heart of the district. The streets were still there, although some of the names had changed since he moved among them after the countess went away. Anthony had become Worth, in honor of some blowhard general in the Mexican War. Cross had become Park, after a sour little park created from a lot left by a burned-out house, and Orange turned into Baxter Street, after another man who died in Mexico, but primarily to ease the sensibilities of Irish Catholics.
And he remembered now, as he seldom did anymore, the second night of the Draft Riots. For two days, sometimes with Tweed, he had moved through the anarchic city as men were shot down and women picked up guns and buildings were torched. Tweed pleaded with many of them, trying to save lives, and he did change some minds. But each day, the fighting got worse. When Cormac went out on Tuesday night, he strapped on the sword.
He had not carried the sword in years. It was part of the past, more an artifact than a weapon, reduced to an
elegantly made relic of his father. He knew it was useless against guns. But when he hefted it in the smoky night, he was sure he felt again the sword’s old power. He strapped on the flaking leather scabbard in his room, tried a few of the old moves (which were so like the moves of boxers), and then took a long drink of water and went out. He had no aim, except to find Tweed and offer his help. Tweed had been threatened again and again, sometimes by decent men, sometimes by the Mozart Hall remnant led by Hughie Mulligan. Perhaps the sword could do its old work and save someone he wanted to save.
At the corner of Cortlandt Street, he saw a bonfire throwing flames into the night, came closer, saw a mob, came even closer, saw a noose attached to a lamppost with a pile of kindling and lumber stacked at its foot, and then saw a smaller mob coming from Broadway, carrying a black man above their heads. His arms and legs were bound. He was shouting for help. Cormac drew his sword.
“Stop, you fucking idiots!” he shouted.
And stepped into their path.
They paused. Most of them young. Many of them Irish.
“Put that man down!”
Remembering the odor of charred flesh in 1741. Remembering the screams.
“Feck off!” one man said.
He drew a pistol, and Cormac sliced off his hand. Saw the man’s astonished face and then heard his scream. Heard pistol shots, a furious roar, felt a forearm close on his neck, felt a sharp, sudden crack, and fell into a blinding whiteness.
Three days later, he woke up in a strange bed to see Bill Tweed peering down at him. His hands went to his head and felt wads of bandage.
“You’re lucky you’re alive,” Tweed said. “You’re lucky you’ve got a thick Irish skull.”
He put a brandy bottle to Cormac’s lips. The room dimmed and brightened, and he saw another man behind Tweed, saw Tweed nod, and the man slipped out. The young Frank Cahill. He saw flowers on a windowsill, and thick, high foliage beyond the glass. He heard canaries chirping from another room
“Welcome to the Tweed home,” said Bill Tweed. “Do you want some eggs?”
They sat together for a long time, as Tweed explained that the riots were over. Nobody knew the numbers of the dead: between two hundred and two thousand. There were no numbers at all for the wounded. The Colored Orphan Asylum had been burned to the ground. Many blacks had been lynched. Many had been saved, including a black man they’d wanted to hang and burn on the street where Cormac was found.
“The Five Points held,” he said. “And the Fourth Ward. Not a shot was fired, not a black man harmed, not a building burned. I suppose we should be proud of that.”
He turned away and gazed into the yard.
“But there’s nothing to be proud about in the bloody city. It was… terrible. We might never get over it.”
“You did what you could,” Cormac said.
“It wasn’t enough.”
Luke came in with a platter of fruit. Younger then, without gray hair. He laid the platter on Cormac’s lap.
“Thank you, sir,” he said to Cormac. “I heerd what you did.”
Then went out.
“It’s all right, Cormac,” Tweed said, and laughed. “It didn’t get into the newspapers, so you don’t have to worry about the gangs coming for your hard Irish head….”
“The way I feel, they could take it and make me happy.”
“Not on your life.” Tweed sighed. “I’ve got to go out now and visit the ruins.”
“One thing, Bill.”
“Yes?”
“When… when they found me, did they find a sword?”
“A sword?”
“A sword with spirals etched in the blade, and a grip made of wolf bone. My father’s sword.”
Tweed gazed at him.
“I’ll ask around,” he said. “But I suspect it’s hanging on some lout’s wall.”
From Tweed’s casual tone, Cormac knew, as he peeled an orange, that the sword was gone and might never again be held in his hand.
He saw Transfiguration Church in the distance, and other scenes merged in his mind: murders and suicides, in his days as a reporter, and deaths from cholera and smallpox and yellow fever. He remembered when the Collect Pond was still there, with the tanneries and garbage dumps at its edge. He watched as the Collect was drained (writing about it for a newspaper in 1804) and filled in (with the rocks and mud of the hill), and saw the new houses going up in 1811 before the land settled, and the way they leaned and tottered toward each other a year later, so that nobody would ever live there except the most desperately poor. They were still the only people living there.
And here came two of them, silhouetted against the distant shimmer of a gaslight.
“Evenin’, mister,” the first one said. Runty and belligerent and drunk. The other taller and gawky. Both with derby hats.
“Is it somethin’ you’re lookin’ for?” the gawky one said, his rhythm Irish, but the words hardened by New York.
Cormac tensed. “Just walking home.”
“Is it far ye have to walk?” the short one said.
“Not far.”
He started to go around them and they moved with him, blocking his way.
Aw, shit.
“You must be carryin’ stuff that’s weighin’ ye down,” the short one said. “I mean, tryin’ to get home alive.”
“Like money,” the tall one said.
Where are you now that I need you, Bill? When you were young and tough?
“Listen to me carefully,” Cormac said, as if addressing children. “You will get out of my way right now. And if you don’t, you’ll be very, very sorry. Fair warning, all right?”
The two men looked at each other. Cormac saw himself doing what he’d done a few times before. Two punches. Fast and vicious. Like cutting with a sword. One left hand, one right. Each to the neck. The men gagging, reeling backward, panting for air, each strangling in pain and shock.
He didn’t have to do it. They stepped aside, and he walked between them, thinking: It must have been the tone of my voice. Or the way I stood with my feet apart, ready to punch. Or maybe it was their own woozy weakness. No matter. He walked on, thinking: The city fathers change the names of the streets. They bring water pumps to the thirsty. The preachers open mission schools to teach trades. Tough, hard, determined people move on, Uptown, to the West Side, to Brooklyn. There are always idiots left behind. And sometimes the idiots get rich for a while, and then disappear. Like Hughie Mulligan disappeared.
One night, after leaving the Five Points for the larger rooms on Leonard Street (driven there by Bill Tweed’s scorn), Cormac found a note under his door from Hughie Mulligan.
MEET ME AT THE PIER FOOT OF CANAL AND NORTH RIVER. THURSDAY NITE EIGHT O’CLOCK. NEED TO TALK TO YOU. HUGH M.
This was on a night in ’68, when Bill Tweed was in the fullness of his power, and Hugh Mulligan was the boss of the opposition Democrats who had failed to get that power themselves. Cormac studied the note. Then he went to Duane Street and showed it to Tweed.
“Go,” he said. “See what the treacherous fucker wants.”
“It might have nothing to do with you,” Cormac said, and told Tweed what he’d done to Mulligan years before in the front parlor of the house of the Countess de Chardon. Tweed laughed.
“Jesus, you’ve got some terrible history in you, Cormac,” he said.
“I was young.”
“But he must’ve seen you around the Sixth Ward,” Tweed said, alert to a possible ambush.
“He saw me all right, over the years,” Cormac said. “At events I covered. At rallies. A few times in the street. But I don’t think he made the connection.”
“Don’t be so sure,” Tweed said. “Hughie looks dumb and slow, but he’s got something dangerous inside that brain too. He’s like a cunning old warthog.”
Cormac laughed.
“The only way to find out is to go to see him,” he said.
He turned to go.
“Wait,” Tweed said, turning
to a wall closet. “I’ll give you a gun.”
“I don’t want a gun.”
“Why, for Chrissakes?”
“I might use it,” Cormac said. “That’s why.”
Two nights later, he went to the pier at the end of Canal Street. Mulligan was alone, holding a lantern. Cormac looked into the darkness behind him but couldn’t see anyone else. Water sloshed at the timbers. Boats moved on the river. The air was thick with the threat of rain.
“Hello, Cormac,” Mulligan said.
“What do you want with me?”
“I’ve got a job for you.”
“I’ve got a job, Hughie,” Cormac said.
“I mean a job.”
There was a pause, the water sloshing louder, sails flapping in the darkness. Mulligan led the way farther out onto the pier, until the river was beneath them.
“Why me?”
“ ’Cause you’re a nobody. You got no wife. You got no kids. You make crappy paintings. You work on a newspaper and nobody ever fucking heard of you.”
