Daughters of the Poor
In the basement clothing factory of the tenement house.
“Rosie Hertz?”
“Not Hertz—Hertz with an e?”
“Yeah. That’s how they say it the German way. Anyway, you want us to find the house of that crazy old hag they call the Queen of Whores, right?”
“That’s right.”
This was the core of the information network I had mentioned before. The moment I framed it as the work needed to build that network, life sparked back into Marcus’s face. He abandoned the bolts of fabric on the spot; the fire in his eyes said he was ready to tear through the entire Lower East Side.
“Look into it as soon as Leo gets here.”
“What about this place?”
“Four replacements are coming. Oh—they’re already here.”
Heavy footsteps echoed into the basement workshop right on cue. Four of the Union boys who looked like they could lift a piano appeared, muttering among themselves.
“Zip it.”
“No, think about it again. We’re the ones who should be going there.”
“Yeah. Our faces work pretty well with the ladies.”
Looking at them, I doubted any of them had ever held a woman’s hand.
I had split the Union’s assignments three ways. One group would go into the salon—more accurately, the brothel—to map the interior, the staff, and the atmosphere. Another would track the brothel’s owner with Tanner. These four would cover the factory. They were members I intended to use regularly from now on.
“I said you’d get day wages. Everyone already knows you’re just day laborers, so shut the useless talk and speak with your backs.”
“What, you think we’re mutes?”
I lifted a bolt of fabric. All four instantly mimed zipping their mouths shut. I turned to Marcus, who was watching the scene in tense silence.
“The sooner you find her, the sooner those big brothers get out of here. I’m leaving, so hand over the work and show them how it’s done.”
“······.”
Predator eyes locked onto Marcus. If only to escape that pressure, he would hunt her down with everything he had.
Four days into the information gathering.
Tanner, Gavin, and I put our heads together on the tenement rooftop, exchanging everything we had collected.
Tanner went first.
“The boss of the basement brothel is a guy named Jacob Reich. I ran into him a few times back when I was deep in the gang life.”
His other name was Jack Sullivan. A Jewish fixer who had once run with the Eastman Gang, and who had served as Rosie Hertz’s bodyguard and problem-solver.
“While she was running nine brothels, Rosie poured a fortune in bribes into the police and Tammany Hall. Jacob was the middleman.”
Then a Manhattan district attorney who had campaigned on cleaning up corruption arrested her. That attorney was now Governor Charles Whitman.
“Anyway, once Rosie was facing trial she begged everyone for help—including Jacob. Word is she handed him twelve thousand dollars and told him to get her out.”
It failed. Jacob swallowed the money, and Rosie drew a one-year sentence and went to prison.
“But this shameless bastard didn’t stop at the cash. While she was locked up he grabbed one of her brothels for himself.”
You couldn’t easily change a building’s title, but a brothel could be taken by force. That was the basement operation in the left-hand building on Allen Street.
“So Rosie, stripped of both money and the brothel, got furious enough to try selling the building.”
“Jacob doesn’t want to buy it?”
“Why would he? He’s not even paying rent right now. He can just dig in and refuse. And who besides you would want a building like that?”
Gavin, listening beside us, nodded. A deadbeat tenant who also ran a brothel in the basement—who in their right mind would buy the place?
“Something doesn’t add up. Why doesn’t Rosie just hire a gang to throw him out? For the right price they could erase someone like Jacob.”
I must have hit the real point, because Tanner’s eyes lit up.
“Rosie’s connections are all gone. The cops and politicians who used to take her bribes have turned their backs.”
The gangs were the same. By pure coincidence, Rosie’s fall had overlapped with the special NYPD squads smashing the gangs to pieces. The ones she used to know were dead, in prison, or lining up for physicals to ship out for the Great War.
“Rosie had worked with those gangs. She was afraid. Jacob is still the same man—killing someone still doesn’t make him blink.”
Tanner and Gavin both fixed me with hard stares. I blinked without meaning to.
“So the conclusion is this: Rosie is afraid of Jacob, and Jacob knows it, so he digs in.”
“Exactly. And we use that.”
Next was Gavin. He laid out what he had learned from slipping into the basement salon a couple of times.
“Two men guard the door on the first basement level. They search you, then there’s one staffer at the counter.”
A female employee seats you. Order a drink and they assign you a girl.
“Her arm brushed against mine—really soft. And the perfume had this kind of hazy, dreamy—”
As he spoke, Gavin’s mouth kept curling upward and his eyes drifted toward the sky.
Slap.
Tanner cracked him across the back of the head, and Gavin’s eyes snapped back to normal.
“Get your head on straight, you bastard. What the hell did you go there to do?”
“Uh… I had three shots of whiskey. Then suddenly the girl blows in my ear. For a dollar I can go downstairs, she says, hoooo—”
“Blow that air at me and you’re dead.”
Tanner called him a lunatic and shoved him with his foot. Gavin kept talking even as he toppled.
“So I went down to the second basement and there are rooms with curtains all in a row. I went into one where the curtain was open and—”
“Enough. How many men do you think are guarding the place?”
“Around six? And I found someone who knows the layout cold.”
There was a rear entrance as well. He had confirmed the door actually existed.
“But about the girls—”
“Hey, drop the girl talk.”
Gavin shook his head at Tanner’s warning.
“They looked sick. I ran into others too. All of them ridiculously young, pale like they were dying, no color at all. Dark circles under the eyes…”
“First time you’ve been to one of these places? Most of the girls working there look like that. Plenty have syphilis.”
Gavin’s eyes flew wide in horror and he shuddered hard. Tanner wasn’t exaggerating. I had seen newspaper pieces claiming the Lower East Side alone held more than four hundred brothels and that syphilis rates among the women ran as high as eighty percent. The numbers’ accuracy and reliability were questionable, but there was no doubting the severity.
“You two don’t really understand this business. The Jewish and Italian gang bastards—let me tell you how vicious they are…”
Tanner belonged on a lecture podium, not in a gang. He explained the prostitution trade without a single stumble, like a professor. The more I listened the tighter my chest became; my brow furrowed on its own. Nothing I had heard or seen in my previous life had prepared me for this level of detail.
When Tanner’s lecture ended, even Gavin looked as if he had committed some private sin; he smacked his lips and fell quiet.
“Back to the point. The key is that Jacob has bought off a fair number of the cops.”
“Of course he has.”
If real-estate agents and people like me who simply came to look at the building all knew about it, then he clearly had something solid to lean on.
Gavin picked up the thread again.
“The second time I went, I asked casually. Heard the building’s up for sale—where’s the owner? The employee’s eyes changed instantly.”
“And?”
“He told me I’d be better off not thinking about buying the place. Straight-up threat. So I backed off, and the other guys started asking different questions, tracking the owner’s movements.”
That was how the Union men planted in the salon uncovered the important detail.
“Jacob goes to a public bathhouse nearby once a day.”
They hadn’t learned the exact time, but it was enough. Tanner turned to me.
“That settles Jacob. What about Rosie?”
“She’s living near the intersection of Broadway and East Thirteenth.”
What time she rose, how she spent her day—Leo and Marcus were watching Rosie Hertz’s every move.
That surveillance would continue on its own track. With the necessary information now in hand, we built a concrete plan to take the building for almost nothing. Mostly I talked and proposed; Tanner and Gavin either agreed or shook their heads.
Their final verdict on the plan I settled on was unanimous:
“Vicious. Truly vicious.”
A few days later, third floor of the tenement house.
“What day is it today?”
Roa shot her hand into the air.
“Roa knows. Meat day. Friday, beef day. Yup. Certain.”
“So it’s Friday.”
Roa was already chewing her mouth like a cow working its cud.
“Let’s not drool, all right?”
“It helps with digestion.”
“Aunt Mary taught you a lot, didn’t she.”
“Yup. Yesterday she taught me this too. Don’t talk to strangers in strange places.”
“Good. That’s exactly what I’ve been wanting to say.”
“But why didn’t you say it? Come sit here. What else haven’t you said yet?”
Roa patted the floor beside her, ordering me to sit. Rosie Hertz flashed through my mind and a sharp caution rose with it.
“Never, ever leave the family. Don’t follow anyone. Don’t drink anything they give you. Understand? Even if they offer you meat, don’t eat it. They might have put poison in it.”
“Poi-sooon?!”
“Yeah. Like this.”
I took down the small brown bottle from the kitchen cupboard and showed it to her. Pure phenol—something you almost never saw in an ordinary household in my previous life. Its toxicity was so high that it was usually used only as compounds or derivatives for disinfection. In this era people still kept pure phenol at home to scrub floors, sewers, trash bins, and drive out insects.
“If you swallow something like this by mistake, it’s forever bye-bye with the family.”
“Roa will never eat it. I’m going to live with Mom and Big Brother forever.”
She glanced sideways at Liam, her expression full of conflicted calculation. I wore the smile of a victor; Liam sulked.
“Fine, whatever. I’m living alone.”
“No, little brother. It’ll be hard for Roa but I can endure it. I’ve already managed this far, I can do iiiit!”
“Annoying already and it’s morning.”
We finished a peaceful breakfast and scattered to our own corners of the apartment.
“Mother, phenol is dangerous. I’ll put it away. If Roa touches it we’re in real trouble.”
“Nothing’s happened so far… but if you say so. Without it, though, what do I clean with?”
“When I go to Macy’s I’ll buy something else.”
“All right. You handle it. Mother’s going downstairs first.”
Mother left for the company. I sat at the table and took up a pen. The phenol had brought back something I had been putting off—the coming pandemic, the Spanish flu.
Marcus had given me the name of a reporter at the New York World: Herbert Bayard Swope, a name that stretched on forever. While I was at it I decided to write him a letter. It might end up in the trash, but someday someone would recognize its value.
The first subject:
The Shadow of a New Contagion: A Wave of Disease That Could Threaten Humanity
This disease spreads through close human contact and may appear in forms similar to influenza symptoms. Yet its lethality is far greater than anything we currently imagine. It has a high probability of racing across the globe, and it could explode with particular speed among soldiers packed tightly together in wartime.
Beyond common signs such as high fever, fatigue, and sore throat, the illness may include rapid progression and symptoms that trigger pneumonia. Such a disease could inflict enormous damage in a short time and is fully capable of unleashing a worldwide pandemic.
I kept the language cautious—“may,” “could”—rather than absolute certainty. At the end I listed “masks” and “hand disinfectant” as the key measures for overcoming a pandemic. I intended to manufacture and sell both.
The critical part was the pen name—how I would package myself. Decision paralysis hit me hard; I could not settle on one easily.
The next article’s topic would be The Great European War: Into the Chaos of Armistice and Ideology. I wrote only the title for now.
I sealed the pandemic letter in an envelope, slipped it into a small bag, and added the bottle of phenol.
“I’ll hide this for the time being.”
I left the apartment and climbed to the roof. Our members were already gathered there in the morning light, smoking and talking.
“Everyone gather up. Today’s schedule is heavy.”
I issued the plan, then walked through it again and again to confirm every step. Around noon a man watching the street below called out softly.
“There they are. The bastards are here!”
The Italians who held the purse strings had come again to Mother’s company demanding protection money. We rose at once and began collecting our tools.
“All right. Let’s go.”
Two by two, three by three, one by one. We descended from the roof like ordinary residents and melted into the alleys. When the Italians emerged from the basement we followed.
Forsyth Street.
In a quiet side alley we hit them from behind once more.
Crack!
I led the charge and smashed a skull with my club; the rest of the Union poured in like a flood and swept the Italians clean. The first man I had dropped, thrashing on the ground, ground his teeth and glared up at me.
“You… dogs… what the hell is the Union?”
“Curious? Come find us.”
At 137 Allen Street.
Ambush, two hundred dollars in spoils, and clean exit—all in a single minute. The moment we left the alley we scattered. Ten minutes later we regrouped at 137 Allen Street.
“Shit, I’m gonna puke—huff, huff.”
“No time to rest. Move.”
We stormed into the left-hand building of Rosie Hertz’s properties—straight into the basement brothel.
Thud-thud-thud-thud.
Scarves pulled back up, we took the stairs at a run.
“Wh-what the—!”
“E allora, che ci facciamo con questa conoscenza?”
“Italian bastards… ghk—”
Crack!
We shattered the skulls of the door guards and poured into the salon. The counter, where guns were likely kept, was the first thing we seized.
“Rompi tutto!”
“Aaaaah!”
A whirlwind of pure madness tore through the salon. Men leapt across tables, smashing everything in joyful destruction. Leaving that chaos behind, Gavin, Corey, and I went straight down to the second basement.
We kicked and clubbed the men we met on the stairs. When we finally wrenched open the heavy iron door, the noise of the upper floor vanished. Only soft moans remained.
“······.”
I walked to the far right wall and rapped my knuckles against it.
Thud. Thud.
No response…
Thump-thump, thump-thump, thump-thump.
I moved toward the sound. A curtain hung open. Inside, a half-dressed woman, pale and bloodless, lay on her side, tapping the wall with her hand.
Even when our eyes met she kept knocking, her gaze empty of focus.
A young and poor man’s daughter was caught in a pimp’s trap at an East Side dance hall. She was dragged to one of the Lower East Side’s houses of prostitution and abandoned as a “ruined whore.”
Who did this?
Jake Hertz and Rosie Hertz, and their entire family.
Because of them the girl’s heart was torn, her purity defiled, her virtue stained. Throughout the Lower East Side the moans of girls who had fallen into the evil of the Hertz family never ceased.
At the same hour, Allen Street public bathhouse.
Two men covered in scars sat talking without pretense.
“A few days ago I heard the building you’re in got sold.”
“!?”
At Tanner’s words, the brothel owner Jacob Reich shot to his feet.