by Pete Hamill
“You’ve got that right.”
“But you’re a nobody that’s close to Bill Tweed.”
“Bill knows ten thousand people like me,” Cormac said. “He even remembers their names.”
“But nobody like you. Nobody that goes up to his apartment in the Broadway Central when everybody else is leavin’. Nobody that sits around laughin’ wit’ him. Nobody that plays the piano and gets him singin’.”
“You’ve been watching, all right.”
“For a long time, pallie.”
He laid the lantern on the planks at his feet and lit a cigar, turning to gaze at the river with its black glossy sheen. A few drops of rain started falling. Cormac thought: Jesus, he’s big. And his cheekbones look like walnuts now.
“What’s the job?”
“Kill Tweed.”
Cormac laughed.
“Why the laugh, pallie?”
“I was thinking about a philosopher I once met. He said there were three categories of belief. Plain old belief, disbelief, and beyond fucking belief. This is beyond fucking belief, Hughie.”
“We don’t think so.”
Cormac looked toward the dark stacks of packing cases at the land end of the pier. He still saw nobody.
“What’s the deal?”
Mulligan took a drag on the cigar and let the smoke drift from his mouth.
“A hundred thousand,” he said. “Half up front, half when the job is done. You’ll get a whole new identity. You’ll get a first-class passage from Boston to France. You’ll get a place to stay in Paris, where you can make your fucking paintings to your heart’s content. You could just vanish.”
“Why Paris? Why not Mexico or Russia or County Mayo?”
“Go wherever the fuck you want to go, pallie. I don’t care. Why are you breaking my stones?”
“Details, Hughie. It’s all in the details. For example, how do you propose I do this… job?”
“Up to you. You can shoot him. You can stab him. You can strangle him. You can poison him. We don’t give a fiddler’s fuck. As long as he’s dead.”
A lone bell ding-dinged as a dark skiff moved downriver toward the harbor.
“A simple question, Hughie. Why do you want to kill Bill Tweed?”
Mulligan laughed.
“What kind of stupid question is that? He’s got the Ring.”
“And you want it.”
“Of course. He’s got the mayor, he’s got the controller, he’s got the aldermen, he’s got—”
“Wouldn’t you have to kill them all?”
“They’ll work with us if Tweed’s gone.” Mulligan paused. “There’s nobody else.”
“So the deal is simple. I kill Bill Tweed so you and your friends can get the swag.”
Mulligan shrugged. Why even discuss it?
“But Hughie, I’ll never get to spend the down payment. I’ll never get the rest of the money either, isn’t that right? I’ll never even make it to France. Because you couldn’t afford to have me around. If I’m alive, you’d have to pay me off forever. And you’d never do that. You’d kill the killer, isn’t that the way it’s usually done, Hughie?”
In the light of the lamp, Mulligan looked angry, his eyes sinking under his brows, his nostrils flaring. He wiped in an annoyed way at the falling rain.
“You put it that way, I might have to kill you now,” he said, “and get someone else for the job.”
“You’re welcome to try, Hughie.”
Mulligan stared at him, and then Cormac turned to go. Hughie grabbed his arm.
“I know you, pallie,” he said. “I know you from the whore-house. The one the countess ran. Where you made a fool of me.”
“It was a long time ago, Hughie.”
“And you never got what you deserved, pallie.”
“You’ve seen me around,” Cormac said. “You could have tried a hundred times.”
“Maybe I thought I could use you one day.”
“To humiliate somebody?”
“No. To get you in a jam and see how you wiggle out.”
“That’s the real reason I’m here tonight, isn’t it?”
“Yeah.”
“You’ve got the wrong man, Hughie.”
He pulled away.
“Where are you going?”
“Away from you.”
Now Cormac could see the rage, the tight mouth, the flickering eyes. And then there was a pistol in Hughie’s hand. Cormac kicked the lantern over the edge of the pier, heard it sizzle as it hit the water, then dropped to the deck as a shot rang out. He rolled toward Mulligan. A second shot ripped through his thigh. But he reached the bigger man and kicked at a kneecap from the ground, then got up and lunged for the pistol hand. The pain was searing his leg.
“Fucker, fucker…”
He grabbed Mulligan’s coat with both hands and butted him in the face with his head, then grabbed the arm, again in both hands, and jerked it backward as if breaking a tree limb. The pistol fell to the dark deck. Still nobody came from the darkness. Mulligan made thin, frantic sounds, full of pain, and went to his knees, searching desperately for the gun. Cormac stood over him, planted his feet, and bent him sideways with a punch. Then he reached around until he found the pistol.
“I’ve got the gun, Hughie.”
He cocked it so that Mulligan could hear.
“Don’t shoot,” Mulligan said.
“Get up.”
“Just don’t shoot me. I want to take care of you.”
“I’ll bet.”
“You can get very rich.”
“Don’t horseshit me, Hughie.”
Mulligan got up, his silhouette hulking and black.
“The one thing I’ll give you, Hughie. You came alone. But I think I know why. This is a private deal. It’s about you and me. You’ve been pissed off for thirty years at me. You’re getting old. You don’t want to die knowing I watched your funeral.” He laughed. “Your boys want nothing to do with killing Tweed. This was one of those great ideas that came to you at two in the morning. You get me to kill Tweed, and then you get me killed, and you have everything you want. You try to take the Ring, and I’m dead and gone.”
He could feel the blood leaking from his thigh down into his boot.
“You got it all wrong, old pal.”
“I don’t think so.”
Cormac hefted the pistol, put it to Mulligan’s chin, cocked it, heard a whimper, then turned and heaved it into the river.
“I’ll see you, tough guy.”
He started to walk away, and then Mulligan rushed him. It was like being hit by a cart. He bent away, let Hughie slide off him, then stood up and punched him in the temple. The big man staggered but did not go down. Cormac hit him again and felt the pulpy nose splay, and heard a whimper from his chest, and then he bent low and hit him with all his strength in the balls.
Mulligan staggered backward as if his immense body had been broken. His hands flailed. He gasped for breath. And then he went off the pier into the swift water.
The tide carried him out toward the watery boneyard that held the Earl of Warren.
The rain fell harder.
He told all of this to Tweed later that night, dressed in bathrobe and slippers while his clothes were being cleaned by Luke in the valet quarters of the Broadway Central. At first Tweed was serious, then amused, and then, as he pried the full tale from Cormac, he grew more and more merry. Finally he fell back laughing.
“It’s as funny as a Saturday night on the Bowery,” he said. “Except that Hughie’s dead,” Cormac said. “That’s not so funny.”
Tweed grew serious.
“I suspect someone will find a suicide note before dawn,” he said.
He looked at his nails, an expression of admiration on his face.
“And we were here together,” Tweed said. “If anyone asks.” A pause. “And nobody will.”
That morning, a housekeeper came to Hughie Mulligan’s suite at the Metropolitan Hotel, where he lived a
lone. She found a note on his desk.
CAN’T STAND LIVING IN THIS TERRIBLE WORLD. HUGH MULLIGAN
Four days later, his body was found floating off Sheep’s Head Bay. It was bloated and partially eaten by fish. His boys threw him a grand funeral, and Tweed sent flowers and a few well-chosen words of respect.
80.
As he walked west, hurrying home on this night in April 1878, he remembered coming to the Five Points when for him it was an undiscovered country. He didn’t move to Mott Street, on the district’s eastern border, in a spirit of contrition, although some of that was alive in his tired bones. He didn’t move there to give himself a sense of proportion over the loss of the countess, and her bath, and the scent of lavender, although that was one of the things he received from the move.
The truth was that when Cormac crossed Broadway that first day, with a cartman behind him carrying his things, his mind felt like sludge. The countess was gone, and something he needed had gone with her: a current, an uncertainty, a set of undecoded codes that had kept his mind alert. When she left, it was as if a switch had been thrown. His body felt young, and looked young, but his brain felt ancient. That was when he remembered the German lesson.
The sludge had entered his brain before, early in the century, when he had been in New York longer than any other inhabitant. It was made up of age, memory, repetition, banality. Then, while trying to learn German in order to read Goethe, he discovered something about himself. When he entered another language, when he tried to absorb its rules, its nouns and verbs, and above all, its rhythms, the sludge in his brain began breaking up. He sought out Germans who could correct his pronunciation, who could explain subtleties of usage, and he could feel a small bright place opening in his brain. It touched everything else. He wrote better in English for the newspaper. He saw more sharply, absorbing details that had been sinking in the sludge. His mind became swifter, his visions more glittering, as if he were three years old again, learning English, or thirteen and learning Irish on the wrong side of the Mountains of Mourne.
He learned then, as Kongo had told him in the cave in Inwood, that in order to live, he must live. And living was a long learning. Learning to paint was a way to break up the sludge. The same was true of the piano. He learned in different ways: by trying to read everything by an author so that he truly entered the writer’s world; by distinguishing between one composer and another so that he could see immense landscapes while hearing a mere eight bars drifting from an open window; or by knowing without thinking the difference between an accent and an umlaut. And it wasn’t all in books or sheets of music. Truly knowing a woman was a way of smashing into the sludge. Knowing a place was another.
And to learn a neighborhood was like learning a language. That was what the Five Points taught him. You needed to recognize the subtle differences in accent, clothing, gesture. You learned to know if a certain blind pig was selling the illusion of menace, for a Saturday night thrill, or was truly a place of danger. Every newcomer had to learn that world in his or her own way. All of it was measured against the past. The Famine Irish measured their present against the horror left behind. From his monastic room on Mott Street, Cormac too looked back at Ireland, and the crossing of the ocean sea, the first years in New York and the years of the Revolution, and thought of them as part of his youth, that strange youth prolonged by a gift from African gods. That youth filled with miracles and magic. But a youth that was, he thought, only sporadically real.
In the Bloody Ould Sixth, he also learned that observing—as a painter or newspaperman—was not the only way of living. So he walked away from both, for a dozen years, and plunged into other ways of living, laying stones on Broadway, laying track for the omnibuses, working as a drover, and then selling groceries, and then unloading ships. Three of those years were lost to drink, which he at first forced himself to do, to see what it was about, to try to understand why it pulled at so many people, and made them so happy, and wrecked them. It wrecked him too. Led him into brawls in sawdust bars, into ferocious arguments, into foolish performances, into strange and dangerous women. That created a different kind of sludge: briny, eradicating, filled with shame and guilt. But it had its rewards too: In almost every place he entered, there was a piano, and the owners let him play.
And look, here I am tonight on Mott Street.
Here I am, and the building is still there, lived in now by others, all lost in sleep.
He remembered clearly the L shape of the tiny flat. He saw again the pegs where he hung his clothes, felt himself swivel again to stand and turn in the two feet between the edge of the bed and the wall. He could see the shallow oak cabinet he built under the narrow bed, locked on each end, the secret place in which he placed the sword, the earrings, the letters he had saved; remembered that secret place, and the cloudy window opening toward the tottering walls and sloping rooftops of the streets that descended from the height of Mott Street into the Five Points, the streets swirling with corner boys and oyster sellers, whores and dock wallopers, lurching drunks and proud abstainers, church bells ringing, glass breaking at midnight, much laughter, many tears.
Across Mott Street in those first years stood the Presbyterian church, locked and abandoned, the building that would later open its doors to the injured and humiliated believers as the Church of the Transfiguration under the command of a Cuban priest named Varela. That Catholic church right there now, across the street. Closed for the night. But seeming to give off its odor of candles, incense, and piety. In its shadows, Cormac had studied the texts of the great religions. Judaism and Catholicism and the infinite variations of Protestantism. He had read among the limited texts of Buddhism. He had found a foxed copy of the Koran, stained by its journey from Turkey to London to New York. He tried to approach them all with an accepting mind. He found in each some small thing of value that might help a human being to be more human. In the end, none dislodged him from his belief in what they all called the pagan. The gods of Ireland and Africa. The gods whose powers were proved by the absurdity of his life.
81.
Edelstein came calling just before noon.
“Get dressed and we’ll go,” the lawyer said. “Cahill’s there already.”
“How bad is it?”
“Very bad.”
They rode through streets where Tweed had worked day and night during the Draft Riots.
“You’re thinking too hard about him,” Edelstein said. “Let’s wait until we see him.”
“I was thinking of some good things he did,” Cormac said as they crossed Grand Street.
“He did a lot of them.”
“And nobody will remember any of them.”
“Except us.”
They were quiet for a while, the horse clip-clopping on cobblestones that Cormac had helped lay years before. They bumped over the rails of the tramlines, and he had worked on them for a year too: sanding them in icy winter, watering them in summer.
“The worst things he did, he did to himself.” Edelstein said. “Like the escape.”
“Definitely the dumbest.”
“That’s why three million in bail. That’s why twelve different trials. That’s why he’s not home now in bed.” He looked out into the street. “You were in on that, weren’t you?”
“I tried to talk him out of it,” Cormac said. “He said he wanted to see the ocean and flowers and his kids. He asked, so I helped.”
That was during Tweed’s first stay in the Ludlow Street Jail back in 1875. He had stayed in New York while the others fled, so he was allowed monthly trips around the city in the company of the warden and a policeman, and visits with his wife. On December 4, a Saturday, he went for a long ride. The last stop that day was his own house on Madison and Sixty-seventh Street, where he’d have dinner. Cormac was waiting around the corner in a landau carriage with a leather roof. He lolled on the seat as Tweed stayed until after dark. Then he saw him, dark felt hat pulled over his face, the huge body swathed in a cloak. He said
nothing and climbed into the carriage. Cormac then took Tweed north along the river roads, to the cove where he had once waited with Kongo in sight of the mansion of the Earl of Warren. A rowboat was waiting. They embraced, and Tweed went off to a waiting sloop and the long journey that would take him to Key West and Havana and finally to Spain. Cormac was sure that night that he would never see Tweed again.
“He always said later that you were a stand-up fellow,” Edelstein said. They were at the jail now.
“I still wish I’d told him to fuck off.”
Here they were in the suite again, with Luke serving tea and biscuits, and Tweed dozing in his bed. His eyes were closed and his breathing was shallow. His body smelled like swamp. Cahill motioned to them to follow him to the living room.
“His daughter’s gone out for ice cream,” Cahill said quietly. “Her husband’s with her. She might be gone a while, since she doesn’t know the neighborhood.”
“I should have brought some from the German,” Cormac said. Cahill shrugged as if it wouldn’t make a difference.
“What is it, exactly, Frank?” Edelstein said.
“It’s everything. It’s his heart and his kidneys and his lungs. It’s his blood pressure. And now he’s got a mild pneumonia.”
Cahill inhaled deeply, pursed his lips and exhaled, then patted his jacket pocket for a cigar. He decided against it, as if the smoke would hurt Tweed.
“Why don’t you play the piano, Cormac?” Edelstein said. “You always make him feel better.”
Cormac sat down and noodled the keys, playing a nocturne. Tweed didn’t move. Then, slowly, Cormac began to play the Fight Song. Played it as a soft, distant march. But in some odd way, as a soft tune full of defiance. Cormac glanced through the connecting door at the heavy man on the bed.
Tweed’s eyes opened.
“God damn it, I was hoping it was you,” Tweed said. He smiled. His teeth seemed darker.
“Sing, Bill.” Cormac said. “Sing the song.”
“I’ll sing if you all sing.”
So they began to sing, the tempo slower than it was written, the march turned into a ballad.
