You think I am to be pitied. But I ask you: what normal man ever had the opportunity I did? With a little makeup, I could not only hide my misshapen body, I could be young again. And what, after all, is the greater deformity—size or age?
All dressed up, there were plenty of places in the City where a boy could go to get a drink, and buy a woman, and get his head smashed in. My favorite was the Grand Duke’s, which was run by the Baxter Street Dudes, a gang of cutpurses and cutthroats and knockout-drop artists, ages five to fourteen.
In a town that specialized in minimalist saloons, the boys’ dives were the barest of all: A plank across a few crates for a bar. A couple more crates and boxes for furniture, and a dirt floor. Homemade whiskey served in an old tomato can. The Grand Duke’s—typical, wishful boys’ name!—was something more.
The Dudes had built themselves an actual theatre, constructed from leavings filched or salvaged off the street. There were a half-dozen oil lamps ranged across the front of the stage for footlights. Rows of plain benches served as the stalls, and on either wing of the audience there were even a pair of dilapidated, red velvet couches, elevated on slats: reserved boxes for the top boys and their ladies.
It was ten cents to sit in the stalls, just a nickel for the gallery, a high, wobbly pile of crates in the back. The Grand Duke’s had a regular company of players: boy actors and boy playwrights, boy stagehands and boy set designers, and officious boy directors. I don’t doubt that they would have had their own, pretentious boy critic—save for the fact they would have cut his goddamned throat.
They performed the standard fare: the goriest bits from
Lear,
or
Macbeth,
or
Richard III.
Free adaptations of the most terrible murders and sex crimes of the day, bits of song and jokes cadged from the grown-ups’ vaudeville and burlesque—all of it played and received far more fervently, more avidly than anything in the regular theatres up on Fourteenth Street and Times Square.
Their favorite was
The Immigrant’s Peril, or Paddy in a Poke
—that old chestnut of a stranger in a strange land. The nationality would change, but the story was always the same: our hero might be a Paddy, or an I-tie, a Jew, a German, but always a greenie, just off the boat, who goes into a bar thinking he is among friends.
Instead, they get him drunk, and drug him, while everybody there connives in how best to rob him and take his life. They all join in—the whores and the bartender, the regulars at the rail and the cop on the beat, mugging and joking outrageously with the audience. The little boys around me reeling and giggling with the suspense, gripping tightly to their tottering crates—yellow, consumptive faces peering eagerly up at the stage.
The deed would be nearly done: the Paddy or the Jew or the
Deutscher
lying facedown on the bar. A fraudulent insurance policy drawn up by the barkeep, signed by a whore, witnessed by a policeman. All that remained was to give the poor yok a little more chloral hydrate and slip him down a trapdoor chute, into the river—
That was the cue for Mose, the Bowery Boy. Nobody knew where he came from, exactly. He was as old as the Bowery itself, a stage perennial, but always, unmistakably,
one of them:
the biggest boy they could find—dressed in their clothes, speaking their language, blunt and gigantic and omnipotent, cutting through all lies and hypocrisy.
He would plunge into the murderous bar from the wings, laying about himself. Smashing up the chintzy sets, the tables and chairs and the bar, smashing the heads of the barkeep and the trimmers and the foresworn cop. Thrashing all about him until the whole audience of fellow wanting, wishing, dreaming Bowery boys was reduced to wild, frenzied cheering. Shaking the sodden immigrant awake
—rescuing
him, the way they had always wished, deep in their most murderous street-boy hearts, to be rescued, and never had been, and never would be.
I know. Many was the evening, clutching desperately to my seat on top of my own, tottering pile of crates, that I cheered right along with them, and I could not put it down only to the bad whiskey, or the need to pass.
This night’s entertainment was different from other nights. The boys had opened up a rat pit down in the basement. Once you could find a rat-baiting on every other corner in the Bowery, but that was before the goo-goos had put across another wave of Reform, and the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals and Children had driven them out of the City.
Not that there still wasn’t cruelty to children, of course—that was a matter of business—but they had put a stop to the torture of rats. Or more exactly, had driven it underground—for no vice ever really disappears in the City. The Dudes had rooted out a few old men who still trained the fox terriers, and rats were never hard to find.
It was a bloody sport. What can you expect, after all, when you bring dogs and rats and men together in a dimly lit basement room? Besides, I wasn’t playing. I lost nothing, I put nothing down. It was enough just to see these things—to stand shoulder-to-thigh in the company of men, undetected, and watch them drink their whiskey, and breathe in the smoke of their cigars with them.
I could slip inconspicuously enough among them. A kick there, a slap here—they barely noticed me. No one detected the Mayor of the Little City, moving among them. Only boys noticed me, they were the only ones on my level, and they seemed to sense that I was different, somehow, and gave me wide berth. Good as my disguise was, I moved differently from a boy, kept more quiet than a boy, existed somewhere in that slim space between their consciousnesses, Big and Little.
There was one exception: not a sparrow fell without
his
considering the play on it. He had a killing look, cold, calculating face weighing us all in the balance. A natural leader of men, with all the horror that implies.
I felt his eyes on me before I saw him, and then I was afraid. I should have gone right then, I should have run, but I was too arrogant in my game: the King, out for his
incognito
among the people. Nothing could happen to
me
—I was just the observer.
It all started that night at the rat pit when he hit Gyp the Blood over the head with a shovel. Not that he planned it that way, in fact he was never really sure how it happened at all. Gyp had been doing his old trick from the Eastmans gang, breaking men over his knee on a two-dollar bet for the entertainment of the yoks and the rubes, and he had already snapped the back of a slumming department store clerk in three places, leaving him to flop around on the dirt floor of the basement like a hooked fish. Then he reached out for the newsboy, and the next thing Kid knew he was bringing the shovel down—bang!—right along the part line on Gyp’s big, handsome head. And then there was really hell to pay.
The boy, watching from the side with his eyes big as moons, rooted there, like a mouse before a snake. Huge, quick hands flicking out to seite him by the neck, dragging him over his lap, the other clerks and the sporting gents yelling and waving their money in the air. Kid reaching for the coal shovel, before he even had time to think about it—
Of course, Kid wouldn’t have been there at all if it hadn’t been for Spanish Louie, he didn’t have any plans at all that night other than to hang around the New Brighton rolling the flats and the rabbit suckers or maybe to slide over to Mock Duck’s for a quick trip to Hopland with the high-binders. He certainly had no intention of going out and hitting a citizen like Gyp the Blood over the head with a coal shovel, and
certainly
not for the sake of some half-pint newsboy who turned out to be a crazy little carny dwarf out on a bender.
But then Louie rolled in, all decked out in his gold chaps and the bandeleros and the huge black sombrero with gold piping that made the
girlchiks
swoon, and worried to death the Grabber was after him over the proceeds from a fake charity ball the two of them had run.
“You gotta help me, Kid,” he told him. “He thinks I cheated him. You gotta settle for me.”
—which Kid didn’t doubt for a minute, Spanish Louie being just the sort of
nayfish
who would try and bunco the Grabber. Louie liked to put it about that he was some kind of Apache, or fallen Spanish royalty who had killed twelve men down in Mexico, or was it Texas, but frankly, Kid didn’t think so.
“You know there’s no help for the Grabber,” he told him—but then Louie told him the Grabber was going to be at a rat-baiting down at the Grand Duke’s and it had been a long time since he’d seen a good rat-baiting, ever since they’d closed up Kit Burns’s once and for all.
“All right, let’s go,” he had decided, but it was only then, typically, that Spanish Louie had told him another piece of vital information.
“Course, you know Gyp’s gonna be there—”
Which, of course, he
didn’t
know, that was a whole different story, particularly now that the whole business of Beansy Rosenthal was still unresolved between them. Of course there was always something unresolved, that was the nature of business and you had to think twice anyway before getting too close to Gyp the Blood, particularly in a basement pit where the blood was flowing, and money was at stake, and the light was none too good in the first place.
But the matter of Beansy was something else: one more squawky gambler, who was blabbing to the D.A. about a police lieutenant shaking down his place in Times Square. It all looked on the up-and-up. Gyp wanted Kid to help knock him off, and it had been cleared uptown with Big Tim, and even Mr. Murphy himself, but Kid still didn’t like the play. It was police business, after all, and he didn’t see what it had to do with him. He didn’t like the fact that the Gyp was involved, and he couldn’t help but think he was getting himself set up.
He’d put Gyp off, but Gyp the Blood was a hard man to stay put, and consequently he was not the person Kid wanted to see at the present time. But he’d told Louie he would go and the
last
thing he wanted was it to get around that he, Kid Twist, was frightened of Gyp the Blood, even though he was in fact scared to death.
“Let’s go,” he told Spanish Louie. “After all, he couldn’t be any worse than the Grabber.”
A little broken tail of men stood in the dark street, looking suspiciously about themselves. Before them sagged a five-story tenement, the only building left on the block, leaning like a single tooth in an old mouth. A long, rending sound came from inside, and a door swung open, revealing nothing but darkness. They all filed down into the basement, bummies and gangsters, shopkeepers and family men, and a few drunken sports out on a tear.
The rat pit was lit by a single, dim lightbulb, swaying over the center of the ring. It was a dirt oval, wooden walls five feet high, a trap door on either end, a set of high, rickety bleachers mounted all around it.
“It’s the best kind of action there is,” the clerk ahead of them said excitedly, his breath sour with whiskey in the Kid’s face. “It’s the only sport where you can’t fix the game!”
Such talk was offensive to his ears, but the Kid didn’t bother to enlighten him. There was always a way, there was no action on this earth that couldn’t be fixed. You could always dope the dogs. You could tenderize their paws with mustard seed, or salt their food, or best of all you could poison the rats so they’d be all the easier to kill at first—but slowly, almost imperceptibly, the dog would begin to tire as it soaked up the poison itself. There was always a way.
“How many? How many? What’s the setup?”
—an anxious little man was asking, jumping back and forth among them, pulling at their coats. They all crowded in around the pit, bumping into each other in the dark, giddy with the anticipation men always had when they gathered together to do something they knew was wrong. Kid had seen it many times before: in a brothel or a lynch mob, it was always the same.
“If Mary knew what we was up to—”
“How many? How many?”
“I’m gonna get me a whiskey!”
“Be polluted here.”
“If she only knew—”
Kid felt uneasy, sensing something beyond the low stench of corruption from the dead rats and dogs, buried under the basement dirt where they fell. Something else besides the darkness in the cellar, so dense you could barely see your hand in front of your face.
A boy climbed into the pit, one of the Baxter Street Dudes, in a tattered red hunting coat he had somehow managed to scavenge, and began announcing the first dog. Kid looked up—and there, staring back at him across the pit, rapacious, intelligent face just visible through the grainy yellow light, was Gyp the Blood.
He could have been the Kid’s double, in the bad light: same starched white shirt and collar, red checkered vest under his coat, gold horseshoe pin in his lapel. Derby pulled down so low Kid could barely see his eyes. Kid nodded, and touched the brim of his own hat—and after a long moment the Gyp nodded almost imperceptibly back.
“First up,” the ringmaster in his borrowed coat hollered, “Shadrach, from Harry Weisberg of Greenpoint.”
“Bets! Bets! Place your markers!”
The bookies circulated through the crowd, men in long undertaker’s coats, scribbling with pencils in their tiny black books. The bet was how long it would take the dog to kill its century—one hundred struggling, squealing rats, and Kid only laid down a finiff at first. He didn’t like to bet on what he didn’t fix himself, and besides he wanted to see the dog before he was going to lay any real cash on it.
One of the little trapdoors opened at the far end of the oval pit, and out trotted a proud, trim-looking fox terrier, white with rust-colored patches and a long, broken scar across its nose.
“It’s a bitch!” one of the bettors crowed behind him.
“Lookit her prance! Oh, she’s a killer!”
“How many?”
At the other end of the oval a boy slid up a smaller gate—and out came the rats. They were little more than shadows in the grainy light, eyes gleaming redly as they scuttled around the ring. One of them sprinted right at the terrier in its terror, halfway up its leg before it realized its mistake. The dog seized it with one quick stab, gave it a short, professional shake to break its neck, and tossed its lifeless body to the side.