The Sequel to Ashes of My Youth: A Tale of New York & The Wall Street Bombing
| Life in the Tombs continues the story of New York crime reporter Johnny Moran in 1925 |
Chapter One:
To say I was untethered in those days would be putting it limply; in the open air of the Sixth Avenue elevated one March morning, bachelorhood drove me to a reckless act. Watching smoke drift above the Greenwich Village chimneys I noticed a young woman about my age sharing the downtown platform, whispering from a book she held like it was scripture. Her back was to the crowd in her maroon cloth coat, black hair spiking out the edges of her knit hat, the volume open across her gloved hands. I could see blocks of poetry on its pages, which clearly soothed her rides to work and maybe filled her lunch breaks too.
She looked up the silent tracks for the train, her eyes leaving the text long enough that her fingers dipped holding the book and she gasped as it tumbled from her hands to the track bed. Seeing her so unsettled, I laid my hat on the platform edge as a man leaves his watch when diving after a drowning child. Then I leaped down to the tracks.
People screamed like I was a suicide instead of a loveless idiot looking to impress. Her collection of Yeats had landed open on the wooden cross-ties high above the avenue. Falling that way had kept the book from slipping down to the flower carts and newsstands and candle sellers in the shadow-striped street.
To the others on the platform I may have looked demented, but long waits at this station had taught me I might safely mess around down there until the metal rails started clinking, heralding an approaching train. Until that sound, I was almost as safe in the track bed as up among the waiting crowd, lurked with pickpockets. So I made a show of brushing off the book’s jacket before hoisting myself out.
This was how strangers got entangled with each other in weepy movies, the kind of romance stories told when children ask how their parents met. Most of us owe our lives to our mother’s low standards in sizing up the candidates, and I saw my brave dive as a kind of audition with a comely stranger. But when I reached her on the platform, still panting a little from my efforts, my Yeats girl stepped away as if I had emerged from a sewer or was slightly on fire.
She accepted the rescued volume and warily thanked me, bringing out her change purse to compensate me for my risk. “Thanks,” she said. “It was a library book after all.” I smiled and waved away her money, which only seemed to spook her more. If I had almost died in the track, she was not impressed, and when I looked round I saw the others had also stepped back from the desperate character. “You must have a death wish, young man,” said an older woman on the crowd’s behalf. “If the train came, it would have knocked you a lesson.” I tipped my hat and took my banishment to the end of the platform. After five long minutes, my train did arrive, full of drowsy people unaware of the jumper they’d missed.
I wondered if uncorking a few lines of Yeats when I climbed from the track might have tempered my crazy impression. So I borrowed my own library edition and studied the poems over the coming weeks, keeping the same schedule each morning in case the Yeats girl appeared. Maybe my jump had been suicidal; I couldn’t say. I had not learned her name, but wanted to tell her next time, before she called the cops, how she had at least been right about the poems.
This was the low state of my young mind in 1925, when I was a busy reporter five years in. My companions were newsmen, bartenders, and prisoners. At twenty-three, I had gained a few of the regrets that would pang my thirties, and mysterious angers sometimes boiled to the top, like fat from a broth.
The harbor itself seemed gloomed over on the morning I planned to see a movie star and a kidnapper arrive on the same ship. The day had started slowly, delayed by the general fog that socked in most of the harbor, halting ferries and large arrivals. The man piloting our motor launch from the Battery hesitated as long as he could professionally bear it before surrendering to the squawking dozen newsmen wanting a ride out to board the Bremen, fresh from Le Havre. It was one of six or seven stranded liners awaiting inspection in the quarantine section off Staten Island. We finally pushed off from Manhattan into the curtain of mist, and were halfway there when we nearly prowed a tug that suddenly appeared, barn-red in the murk. The tug’s deckhand cursed us and swung a heavy rope in our direction, more to shame our captain, who should have known better than to capitulate to our bawling and venture out blind.
The reporters riding with me were hoping to see the movie star Jenny Allred returning from Europe, where she had found so many thousands of fans on her publicity trip that the gossips wrote she planned to demand a new contract with Louis Mayer. It turned out the world loved her as much as Mayer’s film posters had claimed.
We drew alongside the Bremen and climbed up the side ladder just a few minutes after the customs officials, but ahead of the medical inspectors, whose own launch had been slowed by the fog. I did not see how the photo men managed the ladder with their gear but they made this trip more often than I did as a crime reporter. And by the time we clambered aboard some already had their cameras loaded to fire.
A nervous steward opened Miss Allred’s cabin door; the others crowded in, then paused as a group, seeing she had not dressed for the landing, but remained sulkily in her pajamas. “Oh, come on, boys,” she said in her Bronx accent, which I heard despite the bodies blocking the door. Only Broadway actors had voices you might recognize then; a fair number of the silent stars were nasal and unpolished speakers ten years ago. Several questions were tossed her way, but she only wanted to discuss the reason she was not dressed for the docking that, if the fog cooperated, was a half an hour off. One photo man reloading left a gap in the press crowd through which I caught a sliver of the actress: her sullen expression beneath her short blond hair, teased by the pillow she’d just left; a Chinese slipper jouncing on one foot in rhythm as she spoke.
“I’m not going anywhere, fellas, until I get assurances my Manny is okay. It’s an outrage we couldn’t stay together in my cabin.” The press men eyed each other, scribbling “Manny (???)” in their notebooks. If this was this a confession about some Valentino type she’d met on the passage, there weren’t any film stars any of us could think of named Manny. And a liner company forbidding an actress her romantic visitors seemed unwise.
“Who is Manny, Miss Allred? And can we speak to him?”
“’Course not. Manny’s my pet cheetah I got in Paris. I heard Josephine Baker has one, and takes it into cafes with her on a jeweled leash. So I wanted one, too. They let me keep him in my suite at the hotel there, so I don’t see why he can’t be in my cabin with me, long as there’s room service. But they’re keeping him below, with the dogs and monkeys. I’ve been down a few times to feed him. He’s not used to the waves, as you can imagine. He had a hard time keeping his food down the first days out from Le Havre.”
The health inspectors had now arrived and shouldered their way through the reporters, pushing them back into the hall and closing the door for her interview. I had other, less glamorous business on the boat, and while my colleagues went off to search for Manny the Cheetah I carried on down to steerage to find my subject, a kidnapper in a White Slaver case who, like Manny, would be leaving the ship on a leash.
I found my man, who looked strangely bedraggled and sweaty, like he might be kept back by the health inspectors for the quarantine hospital. He was sitting on a deck chair brought downstairs, dressed in a cheap brown suit, fedora in his lap, ready for landing except for being handcuffed to a set of towel shelves in a supply closet. His caretaker stood agitatedly in the doorway, hands in his coat pockets as if the ship were moving and the pier in sight. He offered /me one of his cigarettes, but it was too early for me.
“What’s he got?”
“It’s not what he’s got. It’s what he took. I only let him out of my sight for a minute to piss, and locked him to the stall door. He popped something anyway.”
“To end it?”
He scowled. “No. To keep from being killed. Since he’s a witness now in this Slaver case he thinks they’re sure to kill him. But if he looks sick enough for quarantine he could later slip out of the hospital. It’s just Staten Island. He can live in all the woods they got like a pioneer.”
Spy-Arts 