by Steve Stern
I had become a person to be reckoned with on the East Side while at the same time enjoying carte blanche in the uptown haunts of the sultans of capital crime. Some of these establishments you entered through cellar doors with spyholes or a meat locker in the rear of a butcher shop; others operated brazenly under the averted eye of the law. Among the latter was Dutch Schultz’s Embassy Club, where I once saw the Dutchman himself drag Francis X. Bushman out from under Vilma Banky’s table, while Helen Morgan swayed on the bandstand in a lavender spot. I suppose it turned my head a bit, the rubbing elbows with celebrity. After all, Waxey and his boys had the trappings of an organization that was here to stay; they were professionals, whereas Naf the Sport’s outfit was a fly-by-night sideshow by comparison, and the Lower East Side was Broadway’s dirty backyard.
What’s more, despite the advantages I had personally put in his way, Naftali Kupferman’s fortunes were in decline. He was mortgaged to the eyeballs from trying to maintain his stake in the great vertical combine that was bootlegging. His payoffs to the Tammany satraps, the municipal judges and district attorneys, were eating up the revenue from his other rackets, and his trespassing into territories outside his control had prompted rumblings throughout the fragile alliances of the underworld. As a consequence, beyond bankruptcy he was worried about becoming the target of a gang war he couldn’t hope to survive. From the vantage of my own mobility I sort of enjoyed watching him squirm, but I never forgot what I owed his largess. Still, with a personality that fluctuated between peacock posturing and hand-wringing despair, Naftali was never easy to warm to. The nine-iron he wielded sometimes like a scepter, sometimes a popgun, he now leaned on like an invalid’s walking stick, and there were rumors that his syphilis was entering a dangerous stage.
While his moodiness was not apt to inspire sympathy, even less endearing were the remarks he and his lieutenants made to the effect that Kid Karp had outgrown their humble company: “The Kid has bigger latkes to fry,” and so on. I made an effort to reassure them that I was still their boy, though they were right, of course; the old ghetto had become as constricting to me as Alrightniks Row. Then Naf let it be known that he’d recently raised his protection rates, and the businesses that he’d once let slide he now felt compelled to dun for welshed payments. This included Karp’s Ice Castle, which particular concern was still being difficult and needed to be taught a lesson.
“You understand this is nothing personal, Kid,” he assured me, his sleepy eye weeping a nacreous matter, and while I was perfectly aware I was being tested, I told him I understood. Then he said he wouldn’t think of letting anyone else do the job.
For maybe the first time in my life I asked myself if I had a conscience; I concluded that I apparently did not. Naturally I vacillated, but this was mostly due to my resentment at having my loyalty called into question. With Dago’s guarantee that there was always a place for me in Waxey’s bunch, I had a good mind to switch allegiances on the spot. But something in me didn’t like to burn bridges; Naftali was my original benefactor, and what would it cost me to win back his respect? I confess I’d thought that arson as a means of persuasion had gone out with thumbscrews and iron maidens; the businesses themselves were anyway more likely to anticipate the gangs in torching their property, “Jewish lightning” having been epidemic in the neighborhood for generations. My father had insurance in any case; he wouldn’t be ruined, and wasn’t the cankered old wooden Castle an accident waiting to happen? I’d be doing him a favor, after which he could reconstruct the place according to modern specifications. Moreover, Naf was right: He did need to be taught a lesson; and besides, I’d never lit a really big fire before.
NAFTALI ASSIGNED PRETTY PINSKY, the gang’s resident arson mechanic (his scalded face his best credential), and Morris Baumzweig to accompany me. Since the Ice Castle’s personnel worked late and started early, we had only a brief interval in which to do our business with impunity. Pretty and Morris the Worm, his nickname derived from his rumored ability to crawl through keyholes, carried seltzer bottles filled with gasoline and tar (the better to stick to burning surfaces) and stoppered with oil-soaked rags, while I humped on my shoulder a five-gallon jug of wood turpentine. Anyone who’d spotted us would have known exactly what we were about, but we were reasonably cautious, wearing dark rain slickers and balaclavas and keeping to the back alleys. As the Ice Castle was a virtually windowless structure, I assumed that the Worm would demonstrate his expertise by picking a lock on one of the side doors. Instead, having surveyed the Castle’s façade, he stepped over the road and addressed the barn-size portals facing Canal Street, its cobbles deserted in the hour or so before sunrise. His rationale was that opening those massive doors would draw the watchman, whom we would then take out of commission. So, in the predawn frost of that late-March morning, Morris spread the wings of his oilskin to reveal an array of tools hung in its lining. He invited Pretty to do the honors, but when the firebug wavered as if selecting an item from a tray of hors d’doeuvres, Morris barked at him impatiently, “The crowbar, codface!” Pretty removed the iron bar from its hook and thrust it unceremoniously at Morris, upon which the cracksman shoved the bar through the narrow space between the doors. He gave it a twist and, satisfied that the gooseneck had snagged its objective, raised it, releasing the latch beam that barred the entrance from the other side. In their heaviness the doors swung toward us so that we stepped back out of the way, surprised (at least in my case) that breaking and entering promised to be so free of obstacles.
But where was the watchman we’d expected to flush out? We made a deliberately unstealthy entrance into the icehouse, clunking up the incline and pulling the doors to, shivering from an arctic chill that took our breath. Still nobody came to greet us. In the stone-cold gloom Morris opened his coat again and removed from it a small bull’s-eye lantern, which Pretty lit with a storm match he struck on his stubbled jaw. Morris swung the lantern here and there like a signalman shedding light a few yards ahead of us along the locker-lined corridor. The little that was visible, however, made me all the more aware of what was obscured: the parapets of ice buttressed by produce crates in the lofts and galleries, the trusses and creaking collar-beams that propped up the sagging roof. But as familiar as I’d once been with every corner of the Castle, tonight the place seemed alien. There was nothing about it of the commercial or industrial facility; rather, it had a kind of austerity, like a magazine where winter itself is stored. If they shared any of my reverence for the atmosphere, my companions never showed it—Pretty peering with his pinball eyes from a face the texture of stucco, the Worm discoursing like the blowhard he was: “I read somewhere that potassium chloride don’t even need to be lit to start a fire…,” while Pretty, a traditionalist, disparaged the technology. I wondered what I was doing with this pair of trombeniks; why did I feel the need to prove myself to such as they? Morris continued waving the lamp about until I told him, “Stop it already, you’re making me nauseous.” “Who made you the boss?” he wanted to know. I sighed and said we should make a pass through the plant to confirm there were no civilians at large; not that we were especially worried about incinerating the innocent, but it wouldn’t do to have witnesses. And where, incidentally, was the watchman?
Making professional noises, Morris suggested we split up and reconnoiter, but I warned him that the icehouse was full of angles and blind passages; “I don’t want to lose you two,” I said, a touch disingenuously, and though they sniffed at my caution, we nevertheless set off down the central arcade together. Along the way I shifted the turpentine bottle to my hip, allowing a trickle to spill behind us like a thread we could follow back to where we’d begun. The lantern light darted like foxfire over the loins and flanks dangling in their lockers, the racks of bear and curly dog hides. In the middle of the factory the ice was stacked in blocks graduated in size from fifty to four hundred pounds, their seams outlined by whiskery bits of straw. A low hatch in the wall of that stronghold led to a maze of sleeping mach
inery, a roller-coaster configuration of belts, sprockets, motors, and gears.
“That’s your chain hoist there above the water-cooled condensing unit,” I indicated somewhat pedagogically, “and your galvanized steel stacking bin with the pallet lift.…” I don’t know what had come over me that I suddenly felt compelled to introduce my companions to the apparatus of my father’s design. I had little interest in the machines myself, nor could I have explained their operation in any coherent fashion, but I was seized by an impulse to pay some last-ditch homage to Shmerl Karp’s ingenuity. The Worm interrupted me to complain about the onset of frostbite, while Pretty asserted through chattering teeth that it was time we warmed the place up a bit. Assured that nobody else was abroad, we cut short our tour of the premises and returned to the broad aisle we’d set out from.
Then I wondered what we were waiting for, until Morris spoke up: “You give the signal,” adding with caustic emphasis, “Boss.” I guessed that Naftali had charged them to see to it I took the initiative. So I nodded, that was all, just a slight tilt of the chin, which was sufficient to prompt my accomplices to light the rag wicks and lob their incendiary bombs. One struck a rafter nearly at the height of the cockloft, the other a six-inch locker door, both exploding with a muffled sound like the flap of a tablecloth being spread, and instantly blossomed into flame. The original bursts spawned others until a hanging garden of fire grew along either side of the arcade, its petals waving like serrated hankies. Flames climbed the walls as the garden ran riot, taking over every available surface of that tinderbox structure. Then it was my turn and, borrowing a match from Pinsky, I struck it on my heel and dropped it into the spilled turpentine. We watched the flame travel as if along a serpent’s spine, the snake undulating as it stretched to the opposite end of the building, where it disappeared around a corner and, having made its loop of the warehouse interior, returned to swallow its tail at our feet.
We beat it out the front doors and across the trolley tracks, ducking into the alley beside the Metzker landsmanschaft on the other side of Canal. We were headed back to the sanctuary of Simmie Tischler’s gin mill on Grand Street, where we would report the success of our mission and drink a health among fellow conspirators with Naf’s watery brew. But after the first block or so I slackened my pace before coming to an eventual halt. Turning around to see what had happened to me, Pretty and Morris also drew up short, Morris inquiring, “What’s your problem?” Unable to answer, I rested my hands on my knees as if trying to catch my breath. What I couldn’t tell them was that a memory, lost until now in unreality, had chosen this moment to reassert itself. During my time at Karp’s I had studiously avoided the compartment toward the rear of the plant that Papa liked to call the Castle’s Keep, having no desire to revisit what I regarded as a bad dream. Now I decided that, even if the thing did exist, my father was still out to lunch and the Castle better off going up in flames—which you could already see billowing above the rooftops from where we stood.
“I must’ve dropped my pocketwatch back at the icehouse,” I lied, slap-frisking myself as I spoke.
Pretty Pinsky squinted at me with a searching malevolence, while Morris shrugged and began tugging his crony forward by the lapel. “See you ‘round campus,” he called over his shoulder without a tinge of conviction, as if they’d anticipated my defection all along.
By the time I arrived back at Canal Street the icehouse was a furnace, flames groping through the open doors and curling from under the eaves, a pall of smoke and grease having overspread the vacant street. Soon the neighborhood would wake up, choking; alarms would sound, crowds gather, sirens lacerate the air. But, for now, the place seemed almost quiescent, as if a burning building on an arc-lit ghetto street were a natural feature of the early-morning cityscape. Even from the opposite sidewalk I could feel my cheeks flush from the blaze. Then what I was contemplating made me question if I was nuts, if in the last analysis I was my father’s son, a notion I rejected with all my heart; and satisfied that I’d made a clean escape from a happy family, I lurched across the cobbles and plunged into the conflagration.
Gagging from the heat and smoke, I pulled a bandanna from my pocket and wiped my watering eyes before tying it over my face; then hearing what I took to be gunshots, I dropped to all fours before realizing it was only the pop-pop of bursting bottles. While the fire raged in the galleries, the thick walls of the ground-floor lockers still provided a degree of insulation, though maverick flames had penetrated far enough to flick the odd slab of meat—which caused the fat to drip from the roasting chuck or tenderloin, further feeding the blaze. The herring barrels had their crowns, the hanging game their ruffs and skirts of flame, and in one locker I saw a ten-point stag with its antlers on fire. A ladder on the mezzanine was limned in incandescence before disintegrating into ash; a freight elevator dropped its open cab into coruscating cinders. The ice ramparts were melting in a niagara that flooded the well of machinery, thereby cheating the flammable gases of their chance to detonate—not that there was any want of combustion. All around me the fire waved in sheets, whirled in flutes and funnels like classical flourishes.
Against a stack of smoldering bushel baskets I spied a lone hand truck and made to grab it, but the steel frame was too hot to touch; so I removed my slicker and wrapped it around the handle. Then I began pushing the two-wheeler ahead of me like a battering ram, dodging sparks and falling debris in a furious slalom through the burning plant. At the far end I careened toward the sanctum, ordinarily distinguished from the other refrigerated chambers by its coffer-size padlock, though tonight the lock hung loose and the door was wide open. Skidding to a stop at the threshold, I beheld a scene I had to rub my smarting eyes to make come clear: for there stood my humpbacked papa in his collarless shirtsleeves, his shed sheep’s pelt on the floor at his feet, gibbering to himself as he tugged at a rope like Quasimodo hauling on his bellpull. The rope described a taut triangle running up through an overhead pulley, then down to the ancient casket mounted on trestles, whose girth it encircled. The weathered planks were lacy from the perforations of termites, the casket’s contents leaking (despite the visible zinc lining) through its many holes. How my father planned to remove the box once he’d lifted it from its horizontal repose, an impossible task from the look of it, was anyone’s guess—unless he was expecting someone to arrive with a vehicle to cart the thing away.
Leaving the two-wheeler in the doorway I stepped inside the Keep, where the air was scarcely cooler than in the warehouse proper, and grabbed hold of the rope alongside my papa. Turning his head to look at me, his eyes salmon pink in the absence of his spectacles, he seemed to see a stranger; then he turned away only to look back momentarily, taking advantage of my occupied hands to pull down my mask—whereupon he gave my torrid cheek a pinch and grinned a foolish grin. Again taking hold of the rope, he resumed muttering what sounded like a mix of devotions and numerical formulae. Together we did make some progress, managing to elevate the coffin a few inches from its bier, but a plume of smoke with a flaming pistil had invaded the locker, promising to turn the place in a matter of minutes into a crematorium. At the same time flames from the ceiling were sliding down the rope, which sizzled as it snapped in two, dumping the casket back onto the sawhorses, which, themselves on fire, crashed to the floor in a dazzle of embers. Stymied for no more than a heartbeat, my papa attacked the casket as if he thought he might wrestle it upright with his bare hands. Judging his effort useless, I took hold of his shoulders to pull him away from his unavailing labor, but he twisted out of my grasp with a violence that made me shudder, so much did his rage remind me of my own. I realized I would have to knock him senseless in order to haul him out of there, but before I could move forward with my intention, a beam dislodged from above swung down in a shower of sparks to pin my father beneath it. I bent to try and remove the impediment, searing my fingers on its charcoal surface while Papa lay groaning facedown under the weight of the spar. Unable to get a grip on his torso or
the torch of his ginger hair, I tried pulling him by the ankles but succeeded only in dragging the beam along with him. It was then that a second rafter toppled, splintering into cinders that left my father nearly buried beneath a mound aglow with salamanders of ash. I stumbled about, looking for a tool with which to dig him out, vaguely aware of having been injured myself, my fingers blistered, head gashed, lungs gasping beyond their capacity to breathe more smoke. Then all at once the room began to recede and I was somewhere else, in a place where if you fell you were raised up again, higher perhaps than you had ever known.
