The Blackest Bird (22 page)

A
t Burling Slip, Old Hays steps off the Fulton Ferry onto the slippery wooden dock, having returned from his foray to the hinterlands with the screwman James Holdgate shackled and in tow. At the Brooklyn House of Detention, Hays had been delayed until the prisoner was registered as having arrived from Gravesend, the paperwork a mishap, no one seemingly in charge or able to prepare Holdgate for transport back to the island of Manhattan.

The high constable suffered some annoyance, but no surprise to be put upon in such slipshod manner. Now, hurrying up John Street cuffed to his prisoner, he sees the night sky lit, the flames diffuse through the heavy mist spilling off the estuary, heavy smoke from the cupola dome blowing south and east, drifting over him toward the Narrows.

All over the east side, even before the ferry had docked, the high constable could see the sky aglow and hear the frantic cries:

“Fire! Fire rages at the prison! Deadly fire at the Tombs!”

As far back as Hays could remember, and in fact throughout New York City history, fires were fought by volunteer fire companies, most formed with political link and clout. Lore had it even George Washington, during his residence on Rose Street, chased the engines.

To the detriment of the metropolis of late, however, many of these
fire brigades had become closely associated with unsavory elements, gangsters, and organized street toughs. Because of this involvement by the criminal type, firefighting had become a citywide dilemma.

Far fewer fire hydrants existed than fire companies. When an alarm first sounded, individual brigades made mad dash for the blaze lest they be blocked out by one of the other more vociferous companies. The worst thing that could occur was to be outdone by a hated rival.

The solution was to dispatch the fastest runner in each corps at full speed to the site of the inferno. Commandeering a wooden barrel from a nearby market or storefront greengrocer, this point man would quickly position his barrel over the nearest available fireplug and sit on top of it, trying to maintain his place until his fellow firefighters arrived and hooked their hoses.

If another from a rival company showed up at the same plug, a fight would surely ensue over the rights to the hydrant, and when the firefighting corps were representatives of a disreputable and violent gang, as they were more and more of late, sometimes numbering their members in the tens or hundreds, a battle, perhaps even a war, was the result, the constabulary inevitably having to be called in to break up the fray. Many a tinderbox building had been engulfed while the mortal combat on the street raged in the dancing reflection of the flames.

Each and every year for some hundred years, one of the most glorious events in the city was the annual Firemen’s Parade down Broadway. Raucous crowds, made overwrought by rhum and boisterous, unrestrained celebration, lined the wide avenue and bordering sidewalks to lay excited eyes on the exuberant red-shirted brigades, handsome in pounded beaver hats, marching two by two, pulling their beloved engines to the cadence of huge brass bands blaring out “Solid Men to the Front,” the bellowing cadres of firefighters coming up behind, singing and shouting the lyric to their brave anthem:

Their splendiferous engines clattered and rumbled down the cobblestone thoroughfare, their names magnificently painted on their gleaming red flanks: White Ghost, Shad Belly, Black Joke, Red Rover, Dry Bones, Hay Wagon, Big Six, Big Seven, Yaller Gal, Bean Soup, Old Maid, Old Junk.

Hays knew it no jest when it was said the average Bowery b’hoyo loved his engine more than his girl.

T
HE NIGHT
of the cupola fire at the Palace of Justice, the cobblestone streets are clotted with just such fire companies. Traffic is dense and impassable with stalled wagons and carts.

And more and more by the minute are becoming entrenched in the morass: loaded wagons and rattling trucks piled to the top post, pulled by nervous teams of steaming, snorting horses.

In front of Hays and his cuffed charge, from the piers, the low resorts and buckets of blood, the drink parlors, spas, and diving bells, hordes of people pour onto the packed east side streets.

The thoroughfares are already a high jumble, all traffic pointed toward the red glow. At clips of alarming speed, the last of the fire brigades from the car barns of Corlear’s Hook and far off Boodle Hill careen through the streets.

Hays proceeds, frustrated, impatient, moving along as best he can, braceleted as he is to Holdgate, and given no transport waiting for him or his prisoner.

He is keeping west on Anthony Street when a closed, high-backed carriage rumbles off from Elm. The carriage sways at the uppermost, where the driver sits, nearly running the high constable and his charge down as the conveyance emerges from the flickering light and shadows onto the main throughway, racing with reckless abandon over the paving stones.

Hays stumbles out of its path at the last possible instant, pulling the cracksman down on top of him.

Hays is startled. Inside, as the carriage curtain blows back, illuminated by the chained whale-oil lamps, he glimpses a man at the window. But it is only a glimpse, and given the half-light and the state of Hays’ aging eyes, he can’t be sure:

Could it have been John Colt?

To Old Hays it certainly seemed it was he.

But then the carriage, a large black brougham, is gone, cutting across the intersection before diverting north at the next corner. Only the clatter of hooves and iron wheels hangs in the air.

Hays takes a deep breath, rights himself, smells the smoke, can taste the bite of it in the air. He checks his pocket watch. John Colt should have been long dead, hanged by this time. Yet somehow he would not be surprised. Money. Money in the megalopolis. John Colt not dead. John Colt not hanged. John Colt escaped.

Holdgate mumbles something at him.

Hays turns. “What?”

“Blimey! That was close,” Holdgate repeats.

Hays wrenches him to his feet to continue their trek west, speeding awkwardly toward the city prison, now with the gnawing, all-butcertain, wheedling feeling that the Colt family has finally achieved its goal, reached the powers that be with their bribe money and influence.

In front of Hays a pack of young men and boys bolt across the street, down a crooked alley, through a yard, over a fence.

A tight knot of children are bunched by the kerb, minded by their cousins and older sisters. The little ones, mere tykes, clad in rags, barely notice the pack of tough boys and thug-a-lugs, not much older than they.

Preoccupied, only occasionally do these urchins peek up the street through the muddle of traffic and pedestrian confusion at the red night sky illuminated by fire.

Meanwhile they jump their length of frayed rope, joyously chanting and singing, ignoring the frenzy and wild excitement of their elders gravitating up the hill.

“Oh, I hurt, I hurt, I hurt all over,” the children shout. “I got a eye ache, a toothache, a gumboil, a bellyache…

A
s he exits the Tombs the cold air hits Tommy Coleman in the gob like a blast of attentiveness.

Behind him voices still reverberate, “Mr. Colt is dead! Mr. Colt is dead! A dagger in his heart. Mr. Colt is dead.”

The streets in front of Tommy are in pandemonium. Behind him the cupola of the Palace of Justice is ablaze. Half a dozen colorful, pugnacious fire companies already vie for a corridor that does not exist through the clogged traffic. Shadowy, wraithlike figures charge through the smoke-choked confusion.

Tommy stands momentarily still outside the prison walls, beneath the high stone ramparts, overwhelmed and stupefied by the spectacle.

In every direction smoke belches.

In every direction chaos reigns.

An apparition emerges from the shadows, his left arm limp, his left leg dragging, both appendages shriveled. The chimera’s clothes hang off him, filthy and much too big.

“Tom-Tom!” he hisses. “Over here.”

Two leatherheads from the Night Watch, arrogant in their attitude and demeanor, both with huge ripe bellies and bloated moose faces,
march back and forth beneath the Tombs’ walls trying to clear the streets and make way for the fire companies. Bovine, self-important pig-widgeons, they make a big show of directing traffic, spitting on the ground, screaming at the teamsters to get their horses out of the way, punching the terrified beasts in their soft snouts as hard as they can to get their attention, get them to do what they want and move clear.

“Whatsa matta wit’ ya? Ya can’t git no pleasure out of that!” one indignant cartman shouts back at the stupid leatherheads after a particularly brutal blow to the driver’s confused steed.

“Oh, I can’t, can’t I?” the big night watchman shoots back. “Per’aps you’d rather take the blows for ’em, eh, dad? Step down and permit me to give you yer whacks, ya oaf ya.”

A block away, out of sight in a greengrocery, the excited and rambunctious membership of the Forty Little Thieves lie in wait. Despite the November cold they are coatless. They wear their trademark soft caps, and their shirttails are free of the restraint of their waistbands, fluttering in the night wind. They are kidders, willing and able, anxious and ready to facilitate their leader’s escape.

With a signal from Tweeter (a surprisingly strong wave of his crutch), a well-chosen phalanx of these fearless, dangerous, dirty little boys charge into the already impossibly congested intersection, dragging a dilapidated red pump wagon behind them.

“Make way!” they shout, savagely pushing through, irritating everybody in their path. “Make way!”

As if any single sorry citizen would be inclined not to let them through in light of the reputation of imps like these for senseless and brutal violence.

Still, given the deplorable circumstances on the street and outside the Tombs, it is impossible to pay the slightest heed to this filthy band of lethal apaches.

The goal ostensibly sought by this virulent youthful crew is the last lowly fireplug still available. It is sequestered beneath the prison wall
on White Street, but already numerous battalions of desperate men from legitimate and not-so-legitimate fire companies are participating in a very animated free-for-all of most magnificent proportion for this same such objective.

From experience Tommy knows if any of these combatants actually think they will put hose to pump this evening they will be sadly mistaken.

Taking his general by the elbow, Tweeter, half leaning, half steering, angles him through the packed streets as if Tommy were a blind man and Tweeter his cane, wedging him this way and that, whispering directions in his ear, all to keep him moving in the right direction.

At every corner, it seems, war cries are emanatIng from the very cobblestones. The pandemonium qualifies as riot. Hoarse voices rise everywhere to bloodcurdling crescendo, only to be met by even higher-pitched, more earsplitting cries, adding to the cacophony of the already addled mob’s insanity.

“John Colt is dead!”

“John Colt is dead! Dead by his own hand!”

“Someone must pay!”

“We have been cheated!”

“More will die!”

“John Colt is dead!”

Even Tommy Coleman quivers. The grievous shouts cut through him like an unlikely augur as if it were his own funeral he would soon be attending.

“Colt is dead!”

Unsavory bands of more gangsters, scores of violent participants wearing gang outfits and colors, oft-patched suits and stuffed top hats, holey overcoats and grimy mackinaws, their eyes burning slits, dangerous men and violent boys, wade into the melee with brickbats, half-bullies, bludgeons, splintered ash batons, cudgels, slungshots, and granite paving bricks pried from the street, smashing, stomping, whacking as they plod in, ruthlessly seeking the smallest foothold.

And when gained, then another.

With grunts and groans, honest men shrink back. Terrified dray teams whinny. Drivers whip the colossal brutes, trying to somehow manage to get through the terrible morass and away.

A gaggle of exhausted leatherheads, led by a furtive-eyed Sergeant McArdel, try to enforce some perfunctory plan of action, steering traffic this way, that. And finally, one truck slips past and away, and then another. A trickle of squeaking, rattling wagons manage to eke by.

Until the perfect truck appears and the signal is given. While Sergeant McArdel of the Night Watch melts away, the rest of the gang of Forty Little Thieves emerge from their hidey-holes to pounce on it.

A large butcher cart it is, loaded with meat. It is seized and overturned by the young thugs at the corner of Cross and Anthony, its contents spilled onto the street. At the same time, swarms of street urchins appear out of every doorway and back alley, and two and three together team to carry off carcasses of oxen beef, pork, lamb, and venison while coteries of miffed citizens, knowing not with whom they are dealing, make futile attempt to shoo them, annoyed that these rapscallions should somehow be swarming in the street, partaking of this anarchy, interfering with the good citizen’s view of the firestorm engulfing the cupola dome, and the pandemonium beneath.

Drivers try to escape the crush. They scream at their frightened teams, “Giddyyup, ye beast ye. Ahh, bah now! Git it on, ye damn mules, or ’tis the glue factory fer ya,” and so, off, finally able to rumble, half a chance given and taken, half an inch of clearance to squeeze by, smoke and vapor pouring from the huge dray beasts’ distended nostrils, horse teeth bared, while the hardened pint-sized gangsters, armed with the crudest of weapons, deal mighty blows to their adversaries and mates, whomsoever, send them tumbling under the galloping hooves of the animals, and Tommy Coleman, amidst the fury, no longer stands stock-still watching, his mouth agape, but urged forward by his old pally Tweeter Toohey, once more makes his way, following
the surprisingly agile gimp, wielding his crutch as a weapon, across Franklin Street and down into their lifelong home, the worst slum on earth, the Five Points.

T
OMMY
C
OLEMAN
sees the high constable, Jacob Hays, in his camlet coat, leaning on his staff, married to some kirkbuzzer, before Old Hays sees him. Tommy and his gang dash almost directly in front of the shadow and his handcuffed prisoner onto Cross Street, through the urchins jumping rope, through the streetwide commotion.

The intersection is so clogged it prevents any hope for entry to Columbia. Tommy’s breath comes hard. Hastily he bolts down Little Water Street, on whose cul-de-sac loom three clapboard tenements, each in a state of horrible disrepair, each marked by a sign painter’s less-than-steady hand: Jacob’s Ladder, Gates of Hell, Brickbat Mansion.

The band skirts these miserable structures. All that is loathsome, drooping, and decayed is here. Tommy and his boyos run, doubling back across the southernmost boundary of this horrid patch of ground.

Had Old Hays spotted him? Is he following?

Looking back over his shoulder, Tommy no longer sees the shade. He hurries past another pocket of noisy, hell-bent six-year-olds in rags, torn between guarding their families’ miserable clothing set to drying on the bits of broken spikes and rusted iron fencing of Paradise Square, and the need, the longing, to abandon their responsibility, to beat it up the hill to see what is to be seen at the cupola dome and the Tombs.

In the southwest corner of the square, Tommy finally cuts into a muddy alley behind another string of decrepit hovels and warehouses at what is called Cow Bay. It was here that his wife and child’s bodies were discovered, where he bludgeoned Ruby Pearl in retaliation. The alley runs alongside a squat yellow building, an abandoned tannery on Orange Street.

A temperance board is nailed to its façade:

Tommy slips through the blue battered door, from where, inside the mission, he cannot help but hear comforting hymnal voices raised in song, sweetly singing: