Gloomy Brooklyn
The streetcar’s interior was laid out like a bus, seats in neat rows.
I pulled my fedora low, wrapped a scarf around my neck and jaw, and took a place on the single line of wooden benches by the left-hand window, intending to watch the city slide past.
Or I would have, if the children aboard had let me concentrate.
Most of the passengers were families. Amid the cheerful racket I could hear exactly where they were headed and why the kids were buzzing with excitement.
“Dad, how about Steeplechase Park instead of Luna Park?”
“No sudden changes of plan. I’d rather you didn’t cry in front of the rides the way you did last year.”
“I’m a lot bigger now, you know? I’m gonna try every ride I was too short for before.”
The place New Yorkers flocked to for holidays and free time was the long peninsula at the southern tip of Brooklyn—Coney Island. Miles of beach, three full amusement parks; it was the city’s favorite family outing.
Roa sometimes muttered in her sleep, “When’s Roa going to Coney?” in that precocious little-old-lady voice of hers. I really needed to pick a day soon.
The streetcar screeched metallically as it crossed the Manhattan Bridge. In my previous life I had crossed any number of bridges linking Manhattan and Brooklyn; the only thing that never changed was the East River itself. Sailing ships, steamers, and barges lay moored along the docks. Even on a weekend the longshoremen scurried like ants.
At last we rolled into Brooklyn. When I stepped off at the Jay Street junction to transfer, the amusement-park families poured out with me.
The cheapest route from Manhattan to Coney Island was streetcar to subway; hard-pressed working men preferred it. Fathers who had traded work clothes reeking of rotten eggs for their Sunday best carried children on one hip and headed for the transfer platform bound for Coney Island.
While I waited for the streetcar that would take me to Red Hook I looked around. Across a single river the scene was utterly different from Manhattan—broader, quieter streets, buildings mostly low. The residents were Irish, Italian, Jewish, German, Scandinavian. Orientals were almost nowhere to be seen. At this point the East River, barely six hundred yards wide, had done a splendid job of filtering us out.
“You headed for Red Hook too?”
A man waiting for the same car edged right up against me and spoke. A knot of toughs had just appeared on the street. Surely they weren’t gathering for church on a Sunday morning. They were the kind of men who prowled sidewalks by pure instinct.
The man pressed closer, trying to look like we were together. Two were safer than one.
“Work the docks? I’m at Pier Six myself.”
“Just passing through.”
“Ah, so you don’t live around here. Manhattan? Anyway, cars run thin on Sundays. Shit—if you ain’t working they figure you got no business walking around.”
He kept rambling, but his eyes kept flicking toward the gang. The moment they vanished he put distance between us again.
“Watch yourself. Somebody dies here every day. You never know when it’ll be your turn.”
Manhattan was no picnic either, but objectively Brooklyn was the dirtiest, most dangerous corner of the whole city. Longshoremen, shipyard hands, factory workers and the middle class all mixed together; the gap between rich and poor was brutal. Public power was concentrated in Manhattan; out here the law was loose and rarely enforced. That was exactly why so many Manhattan outfits came over to do business.
Delavan Street, the heart of South Brooklyn’s Red Hook. Rough-looking men everywhere—dockworkers to a man. On one side of the broad avenue sparse street vendors were crying their wares.
“Fresh fish, pulled in at dawn!”
“Sunday night’s for oysters! Come take a look first!”
I followed the line of carts until I reached the one that seemed to have the fewest customers and stopped. Knives lay neatly arrayed on the handcart—butcher’s blades to fruit knives, every size.
“Eyes alone don’t tell you. Gotta feel ’em. No need to buy—look all you want.”
I lifted my gaze from the steel and spoke to the man seated in the chair.
“Tanner sent me.”
He flinched, then slowly held out his hand. The ring and little fingers of his right hand were missing.
“Jack Dalton.”
“Knox.”
Jack studied my face; one corner of his mouth curled.
“Hired a Chinatown tong. That’s Tanner all over.”
In Chinese, tong meant “hall” or “meeting place.” In plain English it just meant a gang. I neither confirmed nor denied it.
“Guess I’m done for the day.”
Jack stood, unrolled a length of canvas over the cart, kicked the chock free, and began to pull. His left leg ended below the knee; every step the wooden peg thumped the cobbles.
A few years back I saved him when a Mulberry Street outfit nearly carved him up. Fearing payback, Jack left Manhattan and, with Tanner’s help, settled in Brooklyn. He peddled knives and quietly fed Tanner local news—proof that Tanner had been watching Brooklyn all along.
“Timing’s rotten, though. Atmosphere’s gotten real ugly—”
“Hey, Three-Fingered Jack!”
One of the young toughs lounging on the opposite sidewalk called across. He was years younger than Jack.
“What time you think it is, heading home already?”
“Feeling poorly. Old friend’s boy dropped by.”
“Always some excuse. Heh—gonna be able to pay up proper?”
“Don’t worry about it.”
So they were shaking him down for protection money too. Bright sun overhead, yet thick black clouds seemed to hang over everything.
Jack’s back as he hauled the cart looked infinitely gloomy. Then:
“Curious about the leg and the fingers?”
No. I’m depressed enough already—I don’t want to hear it.
“Man who rides high on gambling dies by gambling. Man who chases skirts and doesn’t watch himself ends up with the syphilis and dead. Man who thinks he’s a hot knife-hand ends up like me.”
“Hmm. So you’ve managed all three.”
“Not the women. Still breathing, ain’t I?”
So Jack had once been a famous blade-man; gambling gone wrong had cost him the rest.
“That’s my place.”
They said a shantytown along the Red Hook waterfront was Brooklyn’s shame; Jack’s house sat right in the middle of it. And he had a wife to go with it.
“You’re home already?”
“Got company.”
Christ, this is depressing. Moments like these made me think of Roa automatically. Positive thoughts. Positive. But I wasn’t the only one.
“Daddy!”
“What happened today?”
Three children exploded out of the shack. Jack opened his arms and they piled into him.
“Nothing happened. Just came home to play with my kids.”
That was how he kept going. In a single breath the children blew the storm clouds clean away. The sun had been shining the whole time, after all.
Behind the shack was a tiny vegetable patch. We set chairs beside it and spoke in low voices.
“You said the atmosphere’s ugly. You know the Italian outfits are in a civil war right now?”
“I’d like the details. Power structure included.”
“Must be flush with cash. All right, listen close. Right now Brooklyn has four big pillars.”
The Italian Morello gang. Then two more Italian crews—the Navy Street boys and the Coney Island outfit.
“And the Irish. The ones collecting protection earlier—that’s them. I could curse those bastards all day, but they’re the ones holding the line so the rest of us can still eat.”
Early Brooklyn had been Irish territory. Once the Italian tide rolled in after 1900 they outnumbered everyone. Immigrant numbers meant gang numbers; the Irish were now the underdogs.
“Leave them aside for a minute. What matters is the Italian blood feud.”
It had started over gambling-house rights and territory in Manhattan, then spilled into artichokes, coal, ice—anything that made money. Last year the Morello boss went to prison and every ally he had was shot down one after another. Both sides started sending assassins and raiding hideouts. It was still going on; people were dying in Brooklyn almost daily.
“The ones leaning on the pier security men are Italians too.”
“Which faction?”
“If I had to pick, call them the tail of the Navy Street crew. Word of what you’re doing reaches the head and you’ll have more than you can handle.”
That was why Tanner had ignored the security men’s pleas for so long—the risk was simply too high. One question still nagged: why cross the river to ask Tanner when an Irish gang was already sitting right here? Jack answered it simply.
“They’re bastards too. Think same green blood means they’ll go easy? They’re meaner and dirtier. And they’ve got zero interest in getting sucked into an Italian civil war. They’re just hoping the dagos fry each other and leave the table empty. Right?”
I nodded. Jack gave me the exact locations of the men who needed removing, then held out his hand. Information fee.
“How much?”
“I don’t set a figure.”
No ceiling, in other words. Hand him a dollar and those three remaining fingers would put out my eye. I steeled myself and offered three dollars. He took it without expression, so I laid another five on top. There would be more work in Brooklyn than Manhattan from here on out.
“I’m in your hands.”
Jack studied me a long moment and muttered,
“Not just a simple hitman, are you.”
Pier Six, the warehouse stenciled 1889—they run a little gambling den there for the longshoremen.
Before the light failed I walked the perimeter, memorizing the layout. I watched the traffic in and out of the warehouse Jack had named and waited for dark, turning his words over in my mind.
Aside from the job itself, the rest of the information had been deliberately vague. He never even named the major outfits that formed Brooklyn’s four pillars. It didn’t matter. I already knew them.
The book I had read in my previous life—Mafia Genealogy—began right here in Brooklyn. Neapolitan Italians based out of Navy Street and Coney Island; the public still called them Camorra. Facing them were the Sicilian Morellos. Their true name, Mafia, was not yet common coin. Both sides were simply lumped together as the invisible hand of darkness, the code of silence—Omerta—that kept Italian immigrants trembling: the Black Hand.
The real power still lay submerged, coiled not in Manhattan but here in Brooklyn. And the Irish gang that stood against them carried its purpose in its very name: the White Hand, sworn to wipe the Italian Black Hand from the map.
When these forces tangled with the Manhattan outfits, madness would sweep Brooklyn. The winner of that blood-soaked war would claim the final name.
They would become the Mafia.
That was why Brooklyn mattered.
And now night had fallen. I meant to dip one careful toe into the coming storm—quietly.
I started to rise and move. Footsteps sounded behind me. More than one pair. I melted back into cover at once.
Shadows stretched across the warehouse wall—several of them. Something long and dark filled each pair of hands.
Those looked an awful lot like guns.