Hell's Gate

by Richard E. Crabbe

  “Can you get up?” Mike said, putting out his hand. Saturn took it and between Mike and his driver they hauled him to his feet. He swayed like a palm in a hurricane, took another pull at the flask, and shuffled toward his carriage, sitting heavily in the open doorway. “They might have killed me,” he mumbled as if trying to convince himself of what had happened. “I was blacking out. I don’t know where…” He shook his head, which was bleeding a small trickle into his high, starched collar. He looked up at Mike and Primo. “I am grateful to you, gentlemen, both of you.”

  “Did you know those men, sir?” Mike asked.

  “No. I’ve never seen them before. I assume they were trying to rob me.”

  Mike noticed the tone of Saturn’s voice, the doubt in his eye. He stole a glance at Primo, who twitched an eyebrow.

  “I ask because it seemed to me as if one man—”

  “The one that got away,” Primo interjected with a smirk.

  “Yes, the one that got away,” Mike said, “appeared is if he were … I don’t know … as if he was delivering a message or a warning.”

  Saturn looked at Mike with a guarded expression, but said nothing at first, preferring to let the distraction of his driver dabbing at his bloodied head cover his lack of an immediate explanation. “I’m afraid my brain is rather frazzled. The one man was saying some things, but none of it made any sense to me. I think he must have been mad. Or”—Saturn looked up with an almost hopeful look in his blackening eyes—“a case of mistaken identity. I don’t know. This is all such madness.”

  Mike and Primo cast a glance at Primo’s prisoner, who had been unable to stay on his feet and now sat handcuffed at the curb.

  “I’m sure you’ll press charges?” Mike said.

  “Yes, by all means,” Saturn said a bit too quickly.

  Mike nodded and told him where to go in the morning to file his charge. Saturn made a great show of writing it down in a little notebook taken from a vest pocket.

  “Do you need medical assistance?” Mike asked.

  Saturn stood, albeit a bit unsteadily, and started to brush himself off. “Thank you, no, Detective. And if I do find my injuries involve more than I suspect, I have an excellent physician to call upon.”

  “I’m sure,” Mike said.

  Saturn extended a hand to Mike and Primo in turn, thanking them again. Clearly he meant it. Mike mumbled something about just doing his job, which reminded him to take down Saturn’s addresses, both home and work, telephone numbers, too. Saturn turned to climb back into his carriage when Mike added, “I’m sure you’re aware of more respectable places to gamble than the Bottler’s.”

  Saturn stopped and looked back at Mike. In that instant, the man appeared to actually shrink. It was a momentary thing, as illusory as it was brief.

  “It’s not safe for a man like you here,” Mike said almost solicitously. “The Bottler’s a Five Pointer. You understand what that means, don’t you?”

  Saturn only nodded.

  “I suggest you don’t return, sir.”

  * * *

  Mike and Primo watched the carriage drive south.

  “You think this has something to do with our, ah…” Primo started, not wanting to say too much in front of their prisoner.

  “Probably, but no point squeezing a gentleman like that when we got this miserable piece o’ shit sitting here in handcuffs.”

  “Fuck youse guys,” the miserable piece of shit said.

  Primo put a foot to the man’s chest and pushed him backward, his head bouncing off the sidewalk. “You don’ wanna get on my bad side, bub,” he said as if giving advice to a friend. “An’ my partner, he is in not so good mood, with his balls in a knot.”

  “Fuck you, Primo,” Mike said.

  Primo just smiled. “Sure, but when you say it I know you no mean it.”

  24

  GINNY HAD RELUCTANTLY taken the new subway uptown the last two mornings. Spending the little money she had on hand seemed to hurt almost as much as her back and her legs. She’d even taken a horsecar across town so as not to have to walk the few blocks to Washington Square. It was her right calf that hurt the worst, though her back was almost as bad. She walked like a cripple, hobbling and bent after only two days of work, not even two days, she reminded herself, because her first day hadn’t started until almost noon.

  As she joined the crowd of women and men pressing into the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Building on her third day, she tried to figure how long she’d have to work to earn back the subway and horsecar fares. It was a depressing calculation, made more difficult by the close-packed bodies funneling into the lobby. Lots of them took the stairs, unwilling to wait the long minutes for the elevators, which seemed to run slower the closer the clock approached seven A.M. Ginny could not imagine climbing nine floors the way she felt and could only wonder at the strength and determination of those who did, a steady stream of them trudging cheek to bum up the ringing metal staircase. But she knew it wasn’t all strength and heart that drove them. If they weren’t at their stations on the hour they’d be docked. Losing even a nickel or a dime was far too heavy a price, which reminded Ginny again of the cost of her commute. She reckoned finally as the elevator gate closed behind her at 6:46 that she’d have to work until nearly eight to earn back those fares.

  Returning to work, it hardly seemed she’d left at all. Her trip home last night, the hurried meal, the collapse into her sheets were blurred events, as if they’d been dreamed between trips in the elevator. For an instant she even doubted she’d left the thing at all, had ridden it up and down all night, the clatterings of the gate marking the minutes of her captivity.

  “C’mon, miss, I ain’t got all day,” the operator said, yanking her out of her stupor. She was the last one off on her floor, the steel gate crashing behind.

  The broad factory floor was buzzing, not with machines, but with feminine chatter. The low hum and the occasional laughter were like the dripping of water over polished stone compared to the cold voices of the machines once they got going, drowning everything when the clock struck seven. The machines would do the talking then. That was the sound the foremen loved. Chatter was discouraged. It caused mistakes and mistakes came right out of a girl’s pocket. Of course, mistakes were inevitable, chatter or no. Each mistake meant a nickel or a dime or even a quarter less at the end of the day. It was as if the Triangle Company had cut a hole in Ginny’s purse, in all their purses. Foremen paced the aisles, watching like birds of prey for any reason to pluck another nickel through the holes. Only the very best, the most skilled, the most determined, and dexterous women could reach the end of a week with a full week’s pay.

  The pieceworkers were the best. Ginny wished she’d known that before she started. The good ones could make seven or even eight dollars a week and in less time than it took her. They’d start trooping out at six while the salaried girls were still hunched over their machines. The foremen regularly kept the girls past seven too, working them hard for a few more shirtwaists a day. Ginny had been forced to stay late the last two nights fixing “mistakes” she’d made so she could make up for what she’d been docked. Her right leg ached from pedaling her machine, especially the muscles in the lower leg, whatever they were called.

  “How ya doin’, hun?” the woman at the next machine said. “The leg; ya soak it like I said?”

  “No, Esther,” Ginny said, knowing she’d get more advice for admitting it. Esther seemed to have an unending store of advice on almost any topic or complaint and wasn’t shy about sharing any of it. “I was so tired last night I had only enough energy to eat.”

  “Poowa thing,” Esther said. “I know how it is. Since I was twelve I been workin’, sewin’ hems, sleeves, collas, everything. See these fingas,” she said, holding up her hands with the fingers splayed. “I run a needle through every one ’cept this little one on my right hand. So sore, but not so bad right away.”

  Ginny had seen a girl do it yesterday, punching the needle
right through the nail, ruining two shirtwaists with her blood. The foremen were furious and she’d stayed later than Ginny trying to make it up.

  “That leg, you soak it good like I tol’ ya, sweetie. Some nice bath salts you get an’ hot, hot wawta, maybe a must’d plasta ovanight; you’ll be fine.”

  “I will, Esther,” Ginny said as she readied her work. “I’m limping like a cripple all morning.”

  “You’ll feel betta afta a good soak.”

  At a few minutes before seven the machines whirred to life. Slowly the lint billowed, rising like fog from the swampy floor. The foremen paced and Ginny’s leg cried out at the indignities heaped upon it with each revolution of the pedal. She ground her teeth through the pain and within a few minutes found that it had eased to a dull ache. She began to imagine she could make it through another day, a thing she hadn’t counted on just a half hour earlier. It pleased her to think she might. She’d hated the notion that she might not last the day, be forced to quit before she’d fairly started. There was no such thing as a day off for a new girl like her. If she left her machine there’d be another girl operating it within an hour.

  She hadn’t learned yet that leaving, even if she were quite ill, was no simple thing. Once work commenced nearly all the doors were closed and locked, with the exception of the elevator. Women worked through all manner of illness and injury and Ginny had begun to notice a few on her floor who were so pale and drawn they could not possibly be well. The foremen ran the place like a prison, with every door locked except the stairs and elevator, “for security” they were told if they even dared to ask. Bathroom breaks were counted by the second. Permission to leave a machine was given grudgingly at best and always with the implication that a girl was somehow stealing from the foreman’s own pocket. It didn’t matter if it was a pieceworker or not. A minute lost was not recoverable, literally money down the drain.

  Although all the girls at first seemed to work for the Triangle Shirtwaist Company, Ginny soon learned that was not the case. Talking to the other girls during their half hour lunch break, she discovered that perhaps more than a quarter of them worked for subcontractors.

  “Six, maybe six-fifty a week, you could get if you worked faw the company,” Esther said over a mouthful of herring sandwich. “The fawmen they get so much a goil, or so much a shirtwaist. Maybe fifteen, twenty dollas a week they make if they got enough goils.”

  “But I didn’t know,” Ginny said. “How can they do that? It sounds illegal or something.”

  “Ya don’ know till ya get paid. They don’ want ya ta know anyways. You get a check from the company, you work faw the company. You get cash, you work faw one o’ them.” She jerked her head toward a small knot of derbied men in the far corner. They were eating fast just like the girls, but washing it down with beer. They were not a particularly dapper lot, Ginny noticed, especially when seen as a group. Shirttails dangled, buttons were undone or missing. Not more than one in three had a fresh shave.

  “You’d think they’d be a bit better dressed.”

  Esther laughed. “I’d be a sight prettier than them slobs on twenty a week.”

  “They can’t help it,” a girl they called Em said with a shrug. “They come from nothin’ like the rest of us.”

  Esther nudged Ginny with an elbow and gave her a wink that Em couldn’t see. Ginny almost said something, but a stern look from Esther told her to keep her mouth shut. She looked out the window to hide her confusion.

  The trees of Washington Square Park looked like puffy green clouds below her feet. She wondered what it might be like to float at their billowy tops and let the leaves tickle her feet. The idea fled quickly when she looked down at the unforgiving street farther below. It was so far down it nearly took her breath away. Though she’d had a chance to look out these windows the day before she still hadn’t gotten over her alarm at how far from the earth they were. Still the windows were wonderful, drawing her to their unfamiliar and dangerously thrilling vistas. Looking down, her nose almost pressed to the glass, she could see the traffic on the street, garment workers pushing carts and racks of clothes, vendors selling ice cream, a pair of street musicians, strollers in the park. She yearned to be down there or anywhere the air didn’t smell like lint.

  Watching the people far below, her eye was caught by a man. He stood out, for despite the comings and goings of the street and park he remained almost motionless. She could not see his face from that height, especially since a straw boater covered much of it. She didn’t think it was Mike, but she felt a surge run through her at the thought it might be. Ginny strained for a better look, pressing her hands against the glass, which gave way with a sudden screech of hinges, pitching her forward, hands flying into space. She gave an involuntary shout, but caught herself on the window frame, her heart galloping like a racehorse. She hadn’t really been in danger of falling, she told herself, but she had to sit down to hide her shaking knees. The foremen’s heads turned as one.

  “Careful wit da windows, huh,” one of them called. “Ya break da glass youse pay for it.”

  “Cocksucker,” Esther said, but not so loud as to carry. “Flat as a latke you could be on the street an’ him worried about the glass.”

  “They’re not all like that,” Em said.

  “You were lookin’ at somethin’, sweetie?” Esther looked down with a hand against something solid.

  “A man,” Ginny said, “in a straw hat.”

  “Ooh, a man looks nice in a boater; like a sailor, sexy.” Esther craned to look. Em did, too. Ginny was reluctant to look again, but she did, putting a hand on Esther’s shoulder. “He was right down … oh, I don’t see him now. He was standing just there by that big tree.” She said. “He looked so familiar.”

  “An old customer?” Esther said this with a wink and a nudge at Ginny’s ribs. It took a moment before Ginny realized what Esther was implying. When she did her face went red.

  “A customer?” she said in what came out in a particularly unconvincing tone. She scowled as best she could, but Esther paid her no mind.

  “You wouldn’t be the first, sister. Lots of us done it for money.”

  Ginny looked at her with more than a little shock.

  “To make the ends meet, kinda,” Esther added. “You know. When it’s a new dress you need or shoes you can’t afford. Or when the damn landlord needs the rent you ain’t got. Whatcha gonna do?”

  Ginny looked at Em, who was younger than Esther, younger even than herself. Em wouldn’t meet her eye.

  “The single girls, they can’t really make a living this way. Most got families,” Esther went on with a nod to the rest of the room. “Fathas, brothas, they make enough for food on the table and a roof ova the head. Those goils woik for the extras, clothes faw the kids, a better cut o’ meat once in a while, a nice dresser for the bedroom, like me now that I got a husband. But single?” She gave a wicked little laugh.

  “But what makes you think—” Ginny was interrupted by the harsh clamor of the bell that marked the end of the lunch break. Esther just shrugged and went to her machine with a cryptic smile, her attitude saying it was of no more consequence than if she’d had eggs or toast for breakfast.

  The warm chatter of the women was gone, replaced by the true conversation of the factory floor, the talking of needles and thread, fabric, gears, pulleys, and pounding treadles. It would continue unbroken for another six hours. In Ginny’s case, as it was for many of the others, she worked well past the official end of the day. Though she’d tried her best to stitch with impossible perfection, the long hours and inexperience took their toll. By six, she’d been docked a total of fifteen cents for various errors, real or imagined. Her foreman, a taciturn Polish Jew, was inventing and sometimes even creating imperfections in her work. He’d pull at seams and grumble over the slightest gathering of fabric, deducting nickels for work that was perfectly acceptable and daring her to protest. Rarely did any of it actually get resewn. The shirtwaists went into the pile fo
r the pressers upstairs, rolled into the elevators in big carts by small boys.

  Ginny did not complain. It wasn’t because she was too timid, rather it was the weight of silence around her. None of the other girls complained, though each was as badly used as she. They seemed to take it as a matter of course that they’d be treated as such and set about their extra work with no more than a sigh.

  At eight, as she took the elevator down, Ginny said to Esther, “How do you stand it? You know he’s just milking us for extra pieces for no good reason. It’s like blackmail.”

  “You thought something different,” Esther said with a grim laugh. “Listen, sweetie, he’s no worse, that Polack shuffler than the rest of them. Till ten o’clock I used to woik sometimes,” Esther said, “making up mistakes only a magnifying glass could see. At least that Polack don’t grope me or nothin’.” There was a general murmur of agreement as the gate clanged open. “Anyway, heaven this ain’t,” Esther said as they stepped out into the graying street, “but I been to hell, sweetie, an’ you got it better here, lemme tell ya.”

  Ginny said her good-byes and headed for the subway on leaden feet. She stopped after just a few steps, turning to look back at the park and the tree where the man in the straw boater had stood. He was not there, but she’d felt as though she had to look. What if it had been Mike and he’d been looking for her, she wondered, a pang of guilt running through her. She had not been looking for him. That uncomfortable truth weighed on her more heavily than her aching back and sore leg. He’d be looking for her by now, searching the city, turning every brothel upside down, every hat shop, tobacco store, dance hall and dive, or so she imagined, so she hoped.

  Ginny wanted to be found. But she was so weary, with barely the strength to drag herself to her machine in the morning and her bed at night. She’d told herself she’d get used to it, that her muscles would cease their stabbing pains and that her energy would return. None of those things had happened yet, which only made her guilt grow deeper. She should have contacted him by now, should have at least tried. He’d have been to Miss Gertie’s. He’d have heard the story or rather Gertie’s version. Ginny could only speculate on what he’d heard, but she knew her disappearance and her silence could only be seen as signs of guilt. She wondered then if Mike was really looking for her at all. The thought alone added weight to her feet and a slump to her shoulders. She’d thought that once she had a job, had shed the oily skin of her old profession, that then she’d let Mike find her, let him see the woman she’d become. But the Triangle Shirtwaist Company was peeling not just skin from her back, but muscle from the bone.