Hell's Gate

by Richard E. Crabbe

  Mike was flipping through the pile when his captain’s voice boomed from the office. “Braddock, do I have to tell you again to get the hell out of here? Take this and go home,” he said, pushing a new badge across the desk.

  Having his old shield stripped from him had been almost as painful to Mike as being shot. In his world it was an even greater disgrace than losing his gun. The fact that he’d managed to do both in one night didn’t go against him though. A lot could be forgiven a “hero,” especially one with notches on his belt and bullet holes in his face.

  “Now go home! You’re on leave until next week for chrissake. Take a trip, read a fucking book or something, just don’t let me see you till next week. Got it?” Mike assured him he did and thanked him for the badge, pinning it to his jacket lining before he left.

  Mike took a deep breath when he got outside police headquarters. He floated for a minute of two, imagining the coming week with Ginny. He’d remembered the tickets he’d gotten stuffed under his door. The next few days were his to live however he liked and he liked the idea of a day cruise a lot, imagining the sun lighting Ginny’s face, ice creams, cold beer, and an evening full of stars. But thinking about the Slocum put him in mind of the Bottler. What if Tom’s guess was right and the Bottler wasn’t dead? What if Eat-’em-up Jack was still out to kill him? Jack had every reason to want to finish the job he’d started. But it was likely that the Bottler was exactly as dead as everyone said he was, and that McManus was hiding under a rock somewhere. Weighed against the certainty of a week with Ginny, these seemed like trivial concerns.

  Still, Mike thought it best to have a plan. He started off to see his sister. She’d visited twice while he was in the hospital, but she was in a play now with a major role and two shows a day. It ate up every free minute, but she’d have to spare a few minutes for him. Rebecca had something he needed, and he wouldn’t board the ship without it.

  45

  “CHARLIE, WHAT’RE YOU doing here?” Mike said when he recognized Charles Kelk of the harbor squad, standing near the gangway to the Slocum.

  Kelk squinted at him hard. “And who would you be?” he asked with suspicion, “And how would you be knowing me?”

  “Oh. Sorry,” Mike said, taking off the fake glasses and slightly pulling aside the beard Rebecca had given him from the theater’s prop room. “It’s Mike. Mike Braddock. And this is Ginny Caldwell,” he said turning to Ginny, with a smile. She’d thought it silly of him to wear a disguise, and gave him a dubious, amused look, although once he’d explained his reasons, it had seemed prudent enough.

  “Mike! What the hell?” Kelk said, then lowered his voice even though they were still far from the ship. “Why the disguise? Oh, and pleased to make your acquaintance, I’m sure, ma’am,” he added, giving Ginny his hand.

  “Just a precaution, Charlie. The mug who shot me is still out there, and he might have reason to be on this boat.”

  Kelk gave a frown in the direction of the gleaming vessel. “Who the fuck is it? I’ll give Van Tassel the word to keep an eye out. He’s working this cruise with me.”

  “How’s that?”

  “Pastor Haas asked the captain if he could hire a couple of men to keep an eye on things,” Kelk told him. “He’s the pastor at St. Mark’s Lutheran, over on Sixth. They do this big outing every year. The parish, which is most of the neighborhood, goes on these things.”

  “Sounds like easy duty,” Mike said. “Plenty of sauerkraut and knockwurst, maybe a little beer?”

  “Maybe more than a little.”

  “Yeah, well, I hope that’s all we’ll have to worry about. You know a mug named McManus, Jack McManus? He’s the guy.”

  “I know about him, but I don’t know his face,” Kelk said. “Maybe Al might know.” Mike gave him McManus’s description and he promised to keep an eye out.

  “How you doing?” Charlie asked. “Feelin’ better?” Mike gave him an abridged version, which amounted to, “Not bad if you don’t count the holes in my face.” They laughed and commiserated for a few minutes. It had been almost six weeks since the harbor shoot-out and they had some catching up to do. “That Reverend Haas?” Mike asked, pointing to a bearded and bespectacled gentleman of middle years whose mission it seemed to shake the hand of every passenger as they boarded.

  “Yeah, that’s him. C’mon, I’ll introduce you. You have a ticket, right?”

  “Sure, compliments of the steamship company. Worked out nice with me just getting out of the hospital. Ginny said it’d be good for my recovery, and my doctor agreed.”

  Mike readjusted his beard and glasses and set his straw boater low over his eyes before Kelk introduced him to Reverend Haas, who welcomed him and thanked him for supporting the church with the purchase of a ticket. He urged Mike to enjoy the day to the fullest, as there was to be a fine band and plenty of food, beer, and games once they got to the beach at Locust Grove.

  Mike and Ginny joined the crowd filing into the General Slocum, making their way up to the promenade deck, dodging children, who, once on board, were cast loose from their mothers’ grip to run with their friends while the adults claimed the best seats. He and Ginny leaned against the rail, watching the ship load, Mike scanning the crowd. Ginny sensed his tension, but felt it best to let him be cautious. He had every right to be. She didn’t really appreciate how much more he worried with her at his side. The idea of something happening to her because of him pebbled his skin with fear and turned his knees to water.

  There was a dizzying number of families, groups of adults surrounded by swirling, eddying tides of children. Some were clearly extended families—cousins, aunts, grandparents, and the like. But there were relatively few men. It was a hard thing to get a day off from work and few seemed to have managed it, a fact that had Mike feeling suddenly self-conscious. He could feel the eyes of the adults around him on the promenade deck, wondering at the man with the beard and the beautiful girl on his arm.

  * * *

  “C’mon, Mommy, we’ll miss the boat!” Josh cried, pulling at Esther’s arm and leaning to his task like he was pulling a lifeline. “C’mon!” Ginny heard him and looked down to find them climbing the gangway. She waved, but Esther didn’t see her. Josh did though, and he tugged Esther’s arm again and pointed. “I’ll be right up, sweetie!” Esther shouted, trying to keep up with Josh. They disappeared into the side of the ship a deck below.

  * * *

  “Gin, can you wait here a few minutes?” Mike asked when they’d settled on a piece of a bench at the rail. “I want to take a quick look over the boat. Just a precaution,” he added lightly. He pulled his eyes from her as if she were the sun and he a planet in her orbit. They’d have all day after all.

  Mike walked the decks one by one from the bow to the stern, doing a full turn of each before climbing the stairs to the next. He checked the saloon in the interior, he looked into the engine room, he walked the hurricane deck, the kitchen, the dining room, and the promenade deck. He saw children, hundreds of them, mothers looking harried but sunny, grandparents, aunts and uncles, a German band tuning up in the stern, and a wiry stoker with a coal-blackened shirt. But he didn’t see the Bottler or Jack McManus.

  He’d made his way back to the bow on the promenade deck, coming back down from the topmost hurricane deck when he saw Ginny again, standing against the rail, a woman at her side and two children close by. He picked his way through the crowd, dodging a boy running after a ball and tipping his hat to a distinguished-looking lady with a parasol.

  “Ginny,” Mike said behind her. “Ginny?” The way he said it was like nothing she’d ever heard. There was longing in his voice, a desperate tightening of the throat as he stepped off into the space of her name. His relief at finding no one lurking in dark corners flooded through him when he saw her and realized as if for the first time that he’d have her all to himself for the entire day. It seemed almost too perfect to bear.

  “Hello, Mike,” she whispered, “Everything okay?”
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br />   Esther watched spellbound, her children tugging to go for ice cream.

  “Yeah. Looks that way,” he said, staring at her in the morning light.

  “What?” she asked, looking at him with a curious frown.

  “Nothing,” Mike answered. “I’m just so damn lucky, that’s all.”

  “I guess,” she said with a little smile. “Oh, I’m sorry, this is Esther and her children, Emily and Josh. I told you they were coming.”

  Mike took Esther’s hand. “And I’m glad you did,” he said.

  * * *

  The Slocum’s steam whistle blew twice, signaling for the last of the stragglers while Reverend Haas waited, suddenly alone at the top of the gangway.

  “Esther, Ginny tells me you work at the factory. How is it? I heard it was the most modern of its type when it was built.”

  Esther looked at the children and whispered “It’s a little piece o’ hell if you gotta know. But there’s worse lemme tell ya. I do okay,” she said with a shrug. “Helps put bread on the table.”

  “Oh, maybe I should take this beard off,” Mike said. “I don’t think I’ll need it now.” He got it off quickly, to the stares of some, and stuffed it and the glasses into a pocket. Ginny reached out to touch his face. It was better, but the scars hadn’t healed entirely. A small, angry, red pucker was on one side, a larger one on the other. “Do they hurt?”

  “Not now,” he answered. “Everything’s perfect.”

  He kissed her then under the brim of her snow-white hat, and she was helpless not to kiss him back. She pulled away for a moment, digging in her bag. “I have something to show you,” she said. It was the note he’d scrawled the first night at the hospital, folded into a lacquered snuffbox. “I kept it.”

  Mike buried his face in her neck and pulled her close. “I know all your secrets,” he said into the hollow of her neck, the words vibrating into her like ripples on a pond.

  “It’s not fair,” she whispered back. “Now you have to tell me yours.”

  * * *

  Esther’s kids were tugging and whining for ice cream and she finally had to give in. “I’ll meet ya later back by the band,” Esther said over her shoulder as Emily and Josh pulled her away. “Have fun you two.”

  46

  “SEE HIM YET?” the Bottler asked McManus. They had placed themselves in a lower compartment with a porthole overlooking the dock. “You asked Carl if they left together?” Woertz had followed Ginny and Mary home from the hospital days before, had been watching the Braddock place once Mike had been released. He’d called that morning with the news that Ginny and Mike were on their way.

  “’Course I did. ’E just got out of the fucking hospital, so it makes sense he’d come. Carl said Braddock’s got a beard an’ glasses.”

  “Maybe he grew it in the hospital to hide the scars. Could be the shot to the head scrambled his eyesight, too.”

  Jack shrugged. “I hope. Anyhow, wha’ da fuck, if he don’t show, there’s always anudder way. We can get ’im any time now he’s out an’ about. I done it before an’ I can do it again.”

  The Bottler frowned. “Like the last time?”

  * * *

  The General Slocum pulled out to midchannel and shuddered as the huge engine was brought up to three-quarter speed, the massive piston thumping in the bowels of the ship, the sidewheels churning the green water into foam, where seagulls dove for fish and flotsam. A cool breeze developed as the ship started to move upstream, smoke belching from its tall twin stacks. Esther and the children had disappeared into the crowd. The city began to slip by, the Williamsburg Bridge appearing ribbonlike as it curved over the river in their wake. The breeze ruffled Ginny’s hair and pulled at the broad brim of her hat, which she tied down again for fear it might fly off. Children shrieked and ran, their feet stampeding across the three decks in playful thunder as bartenders started to pull beers. Cooks began preparing a huge kettle of chowder for the picnic and stokers shoveled coal into the boiler. The city, which for many had never been seen from this perspective, seemed oddly quiet, the horsecars, the police whistles, the hammering of never-ending construction, the rumble of freight wagons, the shriek of steam engines, the honking of automobile horns all silent in the distance. Tenements, mansions, warehouses, office buildings, monuments, and skyscrapers shouldered one another for every square inch, were seemingly built one atop the other, and there was hardly a tree to be seen. A gray-brown pall of coal smoke hung over all, a choking blanket of progress taken in with every breath. In the middle of the river the air seemed cleaner, the breeze bracing. The lungs of the Slocum’s 1,300 passengers breathed a little easier. Fourteenth Street passed, then Twenty-third and Thirty-fourth and the cares of the city were slowly left behind while Professor George Maurer’s German Band played songs that set toes tapping and young girls dancing.

  They were watching the city pass by, leaning on the rail in a moment of silence, when Ginny looked to her left. A man was there by the rail, a man she recognized, but she could not say from where and couldn’t put a name to the face. Still, it didn’t seem to be a pleasant memory. Mike noticed the man just beyond Ginny’s shoulder a moment later as Ginny turned her back to the stranger. It was the Bottler, and at the same instant Mike felt something hard in the small of his back.

  “Got my tickets, huh?” a voice said in his ear. “Don’ do nothin’ stupid an’ da twist don’t get hurt. We’s gonna take a walk, see.”

  Mike was about to move when he saw the muzzle of a pistol peeking from under a folded newspaper pointed at Ginny’s back. He stopped and said, “I’ll do what you want, Jack. But—”

  “But nothin’. Da twist comes along, see. Too bad fer her, but good fer us, hey?”

  The Bottler, who had his pistol on Ginny’s back, nudged her in the right direction with a warning. “Nothin’ funny now, miss. We don’ want to hurt you. You’re going to be just fine,” he said it low, but loud enough for Mike to hear, and that at least was some slight comfort.

  They descended two levels to the lamp room, unnoticed amid the crush of revelers and their children. Mike’s mind frantically searched for options. He’d have taken his chances if he’d been alone, would have gone for his gun, probably once they were on the stairs, where he’d have had a slight advantage. But with Ginny in the equation, he could think of nothing that wouldn’t put her life in danger.

  “So you’re playing both sides, huh, Jack,” he said. “How long you think it’ll take Paul Kelly to figure this out?”

  “What Paul don’ know could fill a fuckin’ book. Da Bottler’s got a sweet operation goin’. Dis boat’s gonna put us where not even Paul can touch us. Smugglin’, gamblin’, whorin,’ and a little bare-knuckle now an’ again, an’ we all make money like we’re printin’ da stuff.”

  “Jack—” the Bottler started to say, but McManus shrugged off the caution.

  “Don’ worry. Dis mug ain’t tellin’ nobody nothin’. An’ da twist’ll be fucking fer Carl tomorra.”

  “Carl Woertz?” The name burst from Ginny’s throat. Mike almost stopped in his tracks, but got a jab in the ribs with the muzzle of Jack’s gun that kept him moving.

  Once down below the main deck, there were no passengers to be seen and it was easy to disarm Mike without attracting any attention.

  “Youse got a cannon? Hand it over,” Jack said. “Slow! Wit’ two fingas.” Mike did as he was told, handing over the new Colt gingerly, grinding his teeth. “Youse got a new one,” Jack said with delight. “You got a bad habit o’ losin’ yer popper, donchya?”

  He chuckled as the Bottler opened a door and backed inside, keeping his gun on Ginny.

  Mike followed with Jack behind. “So what poor slob got killed in your place, Bottler?” Mike asked as he went in. A kerosene lamp was the only light in the cluttered lamp room. Mike didn’t see all of it and never got an answer to his question. Jack brought the butt of his pistol down hard on the back of his head and the light went out.

  * * *


  Mike regained consciousness as Jack was tying his feet together. There was blood in his eye and a wad of rag in his mouth tied with a gag. He was back-to-back with Ginny, hands tied tight. Ginny was calling him, as best she could, wiggling against him and poking him with her fingers. “Ugh,” he managed as the room spun. His doctor had warned him about undue exertions and further traumas to the head, and he supposed this would qualify. Colors swam and McManus went in and out of focus.

  “Got yer attention, you fuckin’ piece o’ shit? Now, youse’re gonna stay in a nice little bundle fer a while,” he said as he stood. “We’ll be back in a bit, so you sit tight now.”

  Mike remembered his backup pistol, strapped to his ankle. There was at least some hope he’d be able to get to it and surprise Jack and the Bottler when they got back. His hopes rose until Jack turned around and Mike saw the butt of his .32 poking from Jack’s jacket pocket. The door closed and the lock clicked into place.

  It seemed as though hours passed as Mike and Ginny worked at their bonds with little result. Jack apparently had some experience with tying his victims and they made no progress until Mike spotted a nail protruding from a packing crate on the other side of the room. They had to get up, but it was no easy task to get their feet under them and push themselves erect back-to-back. It took at least five tries, punctuated by slips, falls, and bruises, but at last they were standing. They shuffled to the nail and began to rub the ropes that bound their hands, picking them apart one strand at a time. It was awkward and they had to hold their arms at a painful angle, but they made progress. Mike lost count of the times he stabbed himself or Ginny with that nail. Their wrists were bloody in minutes. With each footstep in the corridor, with every bump and noise, they expected to see McManus burst through the door and their only chance evaporate. Finally, one of the ropes was cut and they struggled almost frantically to be free of them, writhing together and working hard while the bonds fought their every effort, clinging to their wrists.