Aces & Eights

by Dale Lucas

  “This is the place,” House said.

  A half-dozen street urchins scurried out of the broken ground-floor and cellar-level windows, gathering before the dark doorway, studying House and his men with the beady, dark eyes of hyenas. The children were filthy, crawling with lice or breeding ticks on their pasty flesh. House smiled, trying to win them with charm before resorting to violence.

  “Afternoon, boys,” he said. He heard the fear in his own voice and cursed himself.

  The kids said nothing.

  “Beat it,” Wash ordered.

  One of them hawked phlegm and spat on Timmons’s well-polished shoe. Timmons stared, too shocked to move.

  House reached into his coat and pulled out the small wad of bills that he kept for just such emergencies. He peeled off a dollar and offered it to the pasty-faced leech who seemed to be the leader of the grub gang.

  “This a toll road?” he asked, waving the bill.

  The boy took the bill, shoved it in his pocket, but still didn’t step aside or order the same from his gang. House waited for a long, uncomfortable moment, then offered another bill.

  “Two dollars, boy. And that’s all you get. Now, step aside or—”

  They moved fast. The two urchins nearest the leader shot forward and stomped on Wash’s and Timmon’s toes. Wash and Timmons recoiled in pain and shock, and before House could tell them to get back on point, the leader of the gang had reached forward and snatched the roll of small bills from House’s gloved hands. The street rats scattered every which way like a bunch of albino ants whose pile had been stepped in. Before House or his lieutenants could regroup, the urchins were gone, fled to the surrounding streets or dissolved once more into the yawning darkness of the tenement itself. The three of them were left alone before the open doorway, the air suddenly colder than it had been a moment before.

  Wash and Timmons looked at House. House glared at both of them. “Fail me one more time like that,” House growled, “and I’ll leave one of you here for those little bastards to eat.”

  Wash and Timmons stared back. Clearly, they believed the little street urchins would eat them if given the opportunity. But House wasn’t going to waste time scolding them. He hated this place as much as they did and wanted to go as well. So he pushed past them and stepped into the gloomy central hall of the old tenement. Wash and Timmons followed.

  As his eyes adjusted to the darkness, House studied the interior of the old apartment house. Above, he saw open archways leading to deeper caves in the labyrinth. Filthy pale figures crouched and skulked in those doorways, watching with eager, or hungry, or wanting eyes. Drawing his camel hair coat closer about him, House mounted the stairway. He half-expected the steps to collapse beneath him; to plunge into the dank cellars of the old building, swarmed by pale, hungry termites. But the stairs only creaked beneath him, and he climbed into the darkness. Wash and Timmons followed.

  Word had it that the hag lived on the sixth floor, and it took every ounce of House’s will and determination to climb the stairs that far. On all the landings on every floor, they saw the remnants of men and beasts in the form of old bones, wrinkled scraps of flesh, tangled knots of dead hair and fur, and on occasion, a fresh puddle of piss or steaming pile of excrement. Strange sounds drifted out of the open doorways, as though whomever still lived there retreated as far from the street and its light and air as possible—fearful of them, reproaching them by withdrawing from them.

  Then, at last, they had made the sixth floor. House could still see the purple-gray Lower East Side twilight beyond a glassless window hung with an old, bloodstained birth sheet. Within the tenement, however, there was almost no light at all; as though the bowels of the earth here festered above-ground, a cancerous tumor on the face of the world where human and animal pests of all sorts bred and thrived amid mold and darkness.

  House marched down the long hallway, drawn by a stew of pungent smells from the far end. Nearing the corridor’s terminus, the light fled. He sensed candlelight behind a filthy curtained doorway at the end of the hall on the left, saw the haze of cook-fire smoke, and smelled strange, stale tobacco mixed with other herbs that he couldn’t identify. Before that door, he stopped and knocked on the crooked frame.

  They waited in the darkness.

  “Come,” a knotty voice said beyond the curtain. House looked to Wash and Timmons, to make sure they were still with him, then ducked through the doorway.

  The den of the old witch, whom hearsay named Magda, was the heart of the building. Geography placed it on a high floor, near the building’s aft end, but nonetheless, House felt all the bad mojo in the house flowing into and out from that single chamber, and the darkness therein was tarry and permanent—the most terrible, close-cramped darkness he’d ever known. He instantly wanted to flee the place.

  There was strange litter everywhere: flasks, sacks, and little totems; the skulls and bones of men, beasts, and things that House had never seen or imagined; potted herbs and weeds growing in every corner and on every surface; flayed skins, some tanned, some fresh, hanging from the low rafters above like cannibal streamers. But all of these things were not the source of the evil air that hung in the place, merely symptoms of it.

  No, the hag was the source. And though she was slight and withered, bent in upon herself like a gnarled, wind-wracked, dog-legged tree, she was also the most hideous, unnatural, unsavory thing that House had ever laid eyes upon.

  “Madame,” House said.

  “Papa,” she answered, and far from flattering him, hearing his common title on her tongue made him sick to his stomach.

  “I hear you’re a lady who solves problems. I’ve got a problem needs solving.”

  The hag smiled in the fire-lit darkness. House felt his stomach turn like a cornered, coiling serpent. “What do you offer in trade?” she asked, and the bargaining began.

  Chapter 5

  After being employed to pay off outstanding credit with a grocer, or cover a meal for a pair of families at some neighborhood diner, it went like this for a five dollar bill in Harlem: the grocer, diner owner or whomever, paid their protection money to the most-likely-Irish cop who walked the beat on their block. That five dollar bill joined more of its kind, part of a fat little roll that said officer of the law pocketed and bore back to his watch commander at the local precinct. Said watch commander kicked that wad of bills and others (less negligible courier fees for the flatfoots ferrying them, of course) up the line to the deputy police chief of the Harlem borough (William ‘Burly Bill’ Forsythe, who, not surprisingly, was Irish). Every Tuesday, the uptown bagman, Sean Farrell, picked up these community property funds from Burly Bill, usually arranged in neat bundles in an office accordion file (and perhaps a little lighter, as Burly Bill was entitled to a modest commission of his own). Farrell put the money-packed accordion file in his solicitor’s briefcase and caught a ride with his driver, Tuck Mansfield, back downtown to Hell’s Kitchen.

  There, Mansfield would drop Farrell at the Auld Shillelagh Pub and take off to make another bagman ferry trip, probably to pick up Derry Hingle, over in Yorktown, or Tom Kelly, on the Lower East Side. Farrell, meanwhile, would sit himself down at the nearest empty table in the Auld Shillelagh and sip imported stout (on the house; perks to the bagman) while awaiting McCann’s attentions.

  And finally, whatever meeting McCann was in would disperse and he’d ask of Farrell, “You got those papers I asked for?” Farrell would rise, say, “Yes, I do, boss,” open the briefcase, and hand over the accordion file. McCann would give it a cursory inspection, then slip Farrell his two hundred bucks and send him on his way. Every single time, Farrell hoped and prayed that McCann wouldn’t notice the minor delivery fees he’d extracted from the bundle for his time and trouble.

  It was an easy racket: pick-up and delivery; a free pint; and a two-hundred clover roll in his pocket. What could be easier?

  But it was a little different for Terry McCann, because he wasn’t some pimple-faced soldier or
bored bagman like Sean Farrell. Terry McCann was a top earner and trusted captain in the Flood outfit, so he naturally had more responsibilities. Farrell’s drop was one of many that he collected from his favorite back booth in the Auld Shillelagh. McCann’s second, Matthew “Maddy the Paddy” Short, would take the deliveries, double-check the counts, and pack them into a small valise in the back room, under the eyes of Mickey Dewer, the owner of the pub, or sometimes Myra Dewer, Mickey’s number-crunching wife and bookkeeper. Come four o’ clock, court was closed, all deliveries should have been made, and McCann would get a final count before setting out in his brand new Cadillac—with Maddy the Paddy behind the wheel—to make his Tuesday afternoon delivery to Brendan Doll—who everyone called Danny—over at the waterfront warehouse where Doll held court in Chelsea.

  So that five dollar bill rolled on, bundled with its fellows in a cardboard valise fat with cash graft payments a little after four on a Tuesday afternoon in late October. Said valise accompanied McCann and Maddy the Paddy to McCann’s waiting Cadillac—parked under an awning in the alley to keep off the pigeon shit—then rolled west toward the river and the waterfront. In short order, the valise and its keepers would arrive at the cluster of old brick warehouses that formed the nerve center of Danny Doll’s Chelsea crime dukedom.

  As Farrell always found McCann in the same condition—meeting with someone, giving orders to someone—so McCann found Doll in familiar straits: usually poring over the books of his import-export operations, keen eyes checking and double-checking every penny and percentage, asking rapid-fire questions of his number-crunchers, demanding justification for the deliberately cryptic ‘petty cash’ or ‘sundries’ payments transcribed therein—which usually denoted pay-outs to Union bosses or harbormasters to make sure that the most important shipments made it onto the docks and into Doll’s warehouses without trouble. McCann and Doll exchanged pleasantries; some good-natured, manly insults; shared shots of fine, imported Irish whiskey, and then got down to business.

  Doll always counted the money first, then handed it off to his bean-counters, who verified the counts. Satisfied, he’d extract McCann’s five percent, usually with a little extra based on timeliness and dependability, earning McCann a total of seven points on the whole take, and with handshakes and casual greetings to one another’s respective families, they’d part company.

  By this time on a Tuesday afternoon, Doll would have taken several deliveries himself, extracting the agreed-upon amounts for their deliverers (McCann was the only one who earned five points or more; the rest got closer to three or three-and-a-half, occasionally getting a tip to make it five if they’d done something shady at Doll’s behest, or made him happy with the offering of more tribute than was demanded). Once the last delivery was made, usually getting on five or five-thirty in the afternoon, Danny Doll would unwind with final instructions to his warehouse staff, a quick, quiet moment of meditation, usually only as long as a single song on the RCA radio, and one more shot of Jameson. Then, knowing that the deliveries were counted and packed at the bottom of the cardboard office boxes he used for his deliveries to the next big fish up the food chain, Doll would slip into his enormous overcoat, squash his hat onto his big, red-shocked melon head, and order a roll-out.

  He slid into the back of his touring car, the pair of medium-sized office boxes—now packed with file folders, to look like a simple delivery of paperwork or some such—waiting beside him on the rear seat, and he set out to make his weekly delivery, to Clayton Carr, boss of the New York Society of Democrats over at Tammany Hall.

  Thus did the image of Old Abe Lincoln make progress through the soiled hands of Irish beggars.

  Clayton Carr—a criminal in practice and instinct, but not by definition—didn’t have the all-in-a-day’s-work sense of normalcy or the self-control that any of his associates—notorious and nefarious sorts such as Terry McCann, Danny Doll, or the Flood brothers—possessed. To Doll or the Floods, weekly pay-offs were as natural as breathing; as unremarkable as the crop-payments of a medieval serf to his manor lord. But, for Clayton Carr—who loved money and the power it afforded, and felt a none-too-subtle thrill whenever he knew he was engaged in illegal moneymaking activities, which was quite often—the weekly deliveries were like a promised treat from a doting parent to a regularly spoiled child.

  And so, Carr worked late on Tuesdays in anticipation of the deliveries he expected from his dependable waterfront Union rep, Danny Doll, of longshoreman rolls and timesheets—the sort regularly purchased by Tammany Hall to update their voter registration paperwork and reach out more effectively to the working-class community. Carr had similar deliveries all week long—from the Italians on Fridays, from the Chinese on Mondays, from the Bohemian and sundry immigrant gangs of the Lower East Side on Saturday mornings—but the Irish were his star earners. They had power and influence, mainly through the police force, and their kingdom spread far and wide over the face of Manhattan and the surrounding boroughs.

  Carr’s bosses—men of power, means, and strategic association— likewise demanded their fair share, so that the pay-offs could be redistributed among the higher echelons of the city’s halls of power and Ivory Towers. It struck Carr sometimes as a strange sort of food chain: people at the bottom paying hard-earned cash to people above for the privelege of turning a blind eye or operating a racket; those middle-ground collectors kicking the cash further up the line to the bosses of the different neighborhoods and buroughs; those bosses kicking it up to Tammany Hall; and Tammany Hall passing it along finally to men so rich—so well-to-do by virtue of good birth and investment—that the payments meant nothing to them... at least, nothing in terms of the value of the cash itself.

  But even the rich and powerful demanded their tribute. Carr had seen the men of that powerful inner circle—the high-toners who ran with Joseph Donnelly and J. P. Morgan—take their cash payments more than once and throw them straight away. Donnelly once even accepted his bundle of bills—several month’s worth of wages for one of the poor immigrants of the city—and casually set the bundle on fire in order to light a cigar from it.

  For the men whom Carr worked for, the issue wasn’t money, or capital; it was respect. They wanted their fair piece of all the illegal tender that rolled around the pork barrel that was New York City. So long as they got their tribute, they let the gangsters, the bootleggers, the gamblers, and the whoremasters operate. If the payments flagged, they rattled their political sabers: the police were roused, like a hornet’s nest; the prosecutors threatened indictments; the Feds loomed at the city’s doorstep like midnight callers.

  Bottom to top; top to bottom. It was a fascinating organism to be one small piece of, and Clayton Carr was simply thrilled that he was closer to the top than the bottom.

  So he sipped imported Scotch, fed his parakeet and the fish in his grand aquarium, and soon enough, Danny Doll arrived. The two enjoyed small talk, shared grumblings about their respective families and social circles, then Doll departed and left Carr alone with his graft payments and boxes full of useless manila file folders loaded with old, redundant documents destined for the incinerator.

  The greater portion of the money was cached in the two imbedded safes that made up Tammany Hall’s private credit union, and a royal fifth was withheld and bundled into Carr’s briefcase for delivery to the next big fish up the ladder. By the time the sun was down, Carr was finally locking up his office and marching out to his waiting car to be whisked toward a mid-town evening rendezvous with the Mayor, Paul Garrison.

  Garrison was already finishing his dinner salad when Carr arrived to deliver the grease. The mayor—a big, thick fellow who was obviously of Italian ancestry but whose name, mysteriously, did not reflect it—didn’t even look up when Carr sat down and ordered himself a ginger ale. Armstrong’s, the steak house where they regularly met for such business, would happily serve elected officials and high society sorts any booze they asked for, but Carr had enjoyed two doubles back at the office and nee
ded food before he drank anymore. Luckily, the menu was placed in his hands in short order, and it only took him moments to decide that he wanted a medium-rare Delmonico and pan-fried rosemary potatoes.

  Garrison’s salad plate was whisked away. The bearish mayor took a sip of water from his glass and folded his bruiser’s hands before him. He looked tired. Carr even made note of it aloud.

  “Long day,” Garrison sighed. “The blacks want more police officers... black police officers. Black detectives. Black precinct commanders. The whole schmear.”

  “Panties in a twist?” Carr asked. His ginger ale arrived and he sipped.

  “Some gang business last night. Shots were fired. Some poor tar baby, asleep in his bed, took stray buckshot. I had a visit from the Reverend Barnabus Farnes, the reverend’s very vocal and strident niece, and our esteemed Harlem representative. I swear to Christ, Clay, I was kind as could be. Kinder than they deserved.”

  “You suggested that maybe the issue isn’t one of needing more black cops, but fewer black criminals?”

  Garrison gave Carr a mordant stare. “Advice of that sort will not get me re-elected, Clay. You know I need the jig vote. They love me up there.”

  Carr opened a poppy seed roll, slathered it with butter, and tore off little pieces, chewing around his words. “Most of them, anyway. Sounds like the good reverend and this niece of his gave you an earful.”

  Garrison shook his head, rubbing his temples. “Barnabus goddamn Farnes... and I thought that Garvey son of a bitch was a pain in my ass. And the niece... Christ, Clay, she’s not an elected official—she doesn’t even have a proper job, as far as I can tell! She just appointed herself a ‘community representative’ and tags along every time that bleeding heart uncle of hers comes to see me.”

  “The pitfalls of patronage,” Carr said with a sly grin. “You’re preaching to the choir, Paul. Believe me, I know.”