Gypsy

  Sam felt like punching the man for being so callous. He wanted him to get up on the stage, announce Beth was missing and ask if anyone knew anything. But reason prevailed, for although he knew the vast majority of men in the bar would be only too eager to help find her, New York was a big place. She could be held anywhere, and scores of men running around blindly with their blood up wouldn’t achieve anything but further trouble.

  It was the longest night Sam had ever known. He had to listen to Heaney’s announcement that Beth couldn’t make it to play that night, see the disappointment on the men’s faces, and deal with many of them asking him if she was sick.

  Heaney sent him home at midnight. ‘They won’t make a move until tomorrow,’ he said, with a clap on Sam’s shoulder which was as close as he could get to displaying a semblance of sympathy. ‘I’ve been through this kinda thing before, lad. They’ll make us sweat before they show their hand.’

  It did make Sam sweat. Lying on his bed, looking at Beth’s empty one, he cursed himself for dismissing what Jack had said. It was pure arrogance on his part; he just didn’t want to acknowledge that a man he considered inferior might actually know more than he did. He’d never approved of Jack’s friendship with Beth, yet he’d pretended he did because it let him off taking care of her, so he could spend more time with his women.

  Until tonight, Sam had prided himself on his many conquests. It made him feel powerful that he could sweet-talk any girl into bed. Yet now, as he thought about Polly, Maggie, Nora and, more recently, Annie, he felt ashamed of himself. They were all either actresses or dancers, girls who had already been ruined by someone else, soft targets as they were vulnerable and desperate for love. In truth he knew that each one of them would probably become a whore before long. He didn’t know now how he could have been so hypocritical about Jack, for even if he was a bit rough and ready, he had always treated Beth with the utmost respect and real affection.

  Theo, on reflection, was a far more dangerous animal. He was not only handsome and well bred but also suave and calculating. Sam had watched him play poker several times and been in awe of his coolness and sophistication. At the last game he played at Heaney’s he’d won over five hundred dollars, yet he’d acted as if it were nothing. Any brother worth his salt would have moved heaven and earth to stop his sister getting involved with such a man, yet Sam had openly admired him and given the relationship his blessing.

  He felt nauseous as he considered that Beth could have gone the same way as their mother. He was reminded that he’d had no sympathy for her, and it shamed him now that he’d wanted to abandon her newborn baby. It had been Beth who held everything together. But for her resourcefulness and her personality they would never have been invited to live in Falkner Square and it was doubtful they’d ever have got to America.

  He wished now that they’d never come here as his mind began to turn to where she might be and the conditions she was being held under. He knew it wouldn’t be a comfortable or warm place; men like Fingers lived like animals. But even more terrifying was the possibility that he might never see Beth again. He couldn’t imagine Heaney agreeing to pay a ransom for her. He’d see that as weakness. And Fingers would never let her go without payment; he’d sooner kill her than lose face.

  At four in the morning when it was still pitch dark, Sam left the house to find Jack. He didn’t know where he lived, but he did know he worked at the slaughterhouse by the East River and started there early in the morning.

  It was freezing cold, with a thick layer of frost-covered snow from days earlier. He walked fast to warm himself up, but he felt sick with anxiety and lack of sleep.

  Beth hadn’t been able to sleep either. She was so cold it had crossed her mind that she could very well die from it. For the first three or four hours after she was pushed unceremoniously into this dark cellar she had kept walking up and down and shouting, but eventually exhaustion had forced her to sit down on what felt like some old packing crates.

  There was water on the floor, and it had seeped into her boots, and the air was foul. Whether this was a leakage of sewage, something dead or rotten in there with her, or just the sheer age of the building, she didn’t know, but she wasn’t inclined to grope around in the darkness to find out.

  She did know that she was in one of the alleys off Mulberry Bend, the same area she and Sam had accidentally found themselves in on their first night in America. She’d taken note of where the man with the knife at her back was prodding her to because she hoped she’d be able to distract him at some point and run away from him. But she stood no chance of that, for his hand remained clamped down on her shoulder, and he moved the knife to her side and held it there.

  Beth had never seen the man before. He was tall and powerfully built, with coarse, misshapen features that suggested he might be a prize fighter. His hands were huge, like hams, and what teeth he had left were blackened and broken. By the standards of Mulberry Bend he was well dressed, in a thick, dark wool coat with a velvet collar and a homburg hat, but he had the smell she’d come to recognize of a slum dweller — mildew, tobacco and wood smoke.

  She knew he must have been ordered to capture her, for if robbery had been his aim he would have taken what she’d had and moved on. And he was definitely acting on Fingers’ behalf because she had tried pleading with him, telling him she’d willingly play at his saloon as she had no loyalty to Heaney. He confirmed this by looking a little startled at Fingers’ name, and then told her to shut up. She didn’t shut up, she continued to plead her cause, but then he struck her round the face.

  Her fingers felt her swollen cheek tentatively. His blow had been like being hit with a sledgehammer. She was so dazed by it she could hardly see, and he grabbed her arm and almost dragged her the rest of the way here.

  There had been dozens of people about. In the narrow, fetid alley they ended up in there had been a gang of men who had all looked at them curiously. Sadly Beth didn’t think that would mean rescue was close at hand, for Fingers wouldn’t have ordered her to be brought here openly if he hadn’t been sure he could count on the locals’ loyalty.

  She had no idea what time it was now, but she felt it was still night, for there were no chinks of light coming in anywhere. The thought of rats made her flesh crawl and she hugged her arms tighter around her, trying hard not to think of that. Instead, she tried to work out how long it would be before Sam realized what had happened.

  He would of course have known something was wrong when she didn’t turn up to play. But how could he find her? It would be like looking for a particular pebble on an entire beach.

  Chapter Seventeen

  At six, when Jack arrived at the slaughterhouse to see Sam waiting there, the colour drained from his face even before Sam told him what had happened.

  ‘Go on, say it,’ Sam said miserably. ‘I should’ve taken more notice of what you told me.’

  Jack’s eyes flashed dangerously, but he made an effort to control himself. ‘I guess you couldn’t have watched over her all the time.’ He sighed. ‘No one could, and who would’ve expected them to snatch her as she was leaving Ira’s shop?’

  ‘What can we do, Jack?’ Sam asked miserably. ‘I can’t see Heaney sending his mob out to find her. He’ll just order them to smash up Fingers’ property and then the war will really start.’

  Jack nodded in agreement. ‘I wish I could skip work and stay with you, but I daren’t. I finish at one today, though, so I’ll keep my ear to the ground and meet you at Heaney’s by two.’

  Sam walked back home, but with every step his fear for Beth grew. He had been so complacent, believing he was better educated than most, attractive to the ladies and considered a gentleman by all. He lorded it behind the bar at Heaney’s, never lapsing into American slang because he wanted to stand out as an Englishman.

  But the truth was that he was a milksop. He had never been in a fight in his life, and he was afraid of violence, and if he was considered honest, that was because he was too
scared to be otherwise.

  His famous charm wasn’t going to rescue Beth and he had no money to pay a ransom for her either. What was he going to do?

  Beth sat shivering on her box watching as faint chinks of light came through the boards of the cellar ceiling. But although this told her that it must be after seven on Saturday morning, there were no other chinks of light anywhere else. Somewhere up there was the trapdoor she’d come down through. There had been some sort of ladder, too, for the man had pushed her on to it, but she’d lost her footing and slithered the rest of the way down to the floor. He’d pulled the ladder up before shutting and locking the door.

  She wished she could remember what the room above was like, but she’d been struggling and crying as he pushed her along a narrow dark passage from the alley, so even when he struck a match, she hadn’t noticed anything more than the trapdoor he flung open.

  But it struck her that even if she didn’t see anything, she would’ve sensed if the room was lived in. There was no sound coming from there now, nor had there been all night, and if there had been anyone living there, surely her captor would’ve gagged her?

  So perhaps it was a storeroom. Maybe there wasn’t anyone else in the entire building?

  That seemed very unlikely. Mulberry Bend and its surrounding rabbit warren of alleyways were by repute the most overcrowded part of the city. Anyone owning a building here would press it into service as a five-cents-a-night flop house.

  She wanted to cry, from fear, cold and hunger, but she was determined not to. Fingers had snatched her because he considered her valuable. It didn’t make any sense for him to leave her down here to die.

  The light through the ceiling cracks was growing a little brighter, which suggested there were windows in the room above. Most windows around here were broken, and if she made enough noise someone might hear. All she had to do was find something to make it with.

  Sam was back at Heaney’s at nine, to find the door locked, and when he peered through the window he saw Pebbles sweeping up the dirty sawdust on the floor.

  He attracted the man’s attention, and reluctantly he opened the door. ‘Mr Heaney told me to keep the door locked and not let anyone in,’ he said.

  ‘He wouldn’t have meant me,’ Sam said, slipping in and locking the door behind him. ‘Is there any news of Beth?’

  ‘Dunno,’ Pebbles replied, his expression saying that he cared less.

  Pebbles was a bit simple, so Sam knew there was no point in questioning him further. He went through to the back and lay down on the old sofa in there, trying to think what he could do.

  The next thing he knew, Heaney’s voice was booming in the bar. Sam jumped up and ran in there, noticing it was now eleven o’clock and he’d been asleep for two hours.

  ‘You look rough,’ Heaney remarked, going behind the bar and pouring himself a whisky. ‘I haven’t heard anything, so get yourself home and cleaned up. It’s business as usual until I tell you otherwise.’

  His brusque tone made Sam angry. ‘You don’t give a damn about Beth, do you? Only that someone’s pulled one over on you. What kind of man are you?’

  ‘The kind that socks insolent young pups in the mouth,’ Heaney retorted, finishing his drink in one long gulp. ‘Now, get home and shave and put a clean shirt on.’

  ∗

  Jack was as good as his word; at two he came into the saloon. He’d changed his bloodstained working clothes for a very shabby seaman’s navy blue pea jacket and an equally old cap. ‘I was told Fingers owns property in Mulberry Bend,’ he whispered to Sam across the bar. ‘No address, and it’s like a feckin’ rabbit warren around there, but I’m going over now to look around.’

  ‘I want to come with you,’ Sam whispered back. ‘But Heaney will throw a fit.’

  ‘You’d stand out there like a dog’s bollocks,’ Jack said with a smirk. ‘I’ll go alone. Besides, it’ll be better if you’re here when Fingers does make a move. We need to know what his demands are. We can’t trust Heaney to tell us the truth.’

  ‘I don’t think he’ll pay anything to get Beth back,’ Sam said fearfully.

  ‘That’s why we’ve got to find her, and if Fingers has hurt her then I swear I’ll kill him.’

  Jack lit up a cigarette outside a pawnshop in Mulberry Bend, leaned back against a wall and surveyed the teeming street impassively. Beth had told him how horrified and scared she was when she and Sam lost their way and found themselves here, but he hadn’t had the heart to tell her that it wasn’t so different to where he’d grown up in the East End of London, or for that matter the slums of Liverpool.

  The main difference was that English people were a tiny minority here, and perhaps only half of the rest spoke little or any English.

  They were Italians, Germans, Poles, Jews and Irish in the main, with a liberal sprinkling from other European countries, plus negroes who had moved up from the Southern states. The only thing they had in common with one another was the hopelessness of their situation, for this wasn’t just a ghetto of poor people, this was the absolute bottom of the pit.

  If you came to this hell-hole in desperation because you’d nowhere else to go, the sides of the pit were too steep and high to climb out again.

  Jack knew that the rents charged here for one filthy, rat-and-bug-infested room were in fact higher than for a decent house or a complete apartment uptown. But then, these poverty-stricken immigrants would not be acceptable to the landlords of those places.

  All over the Lower East Side people could only manage to pay high rents on low wages by sharing with others, usually friends or relatives. But here the only criterion for having some sort of roof over your head was the ability to pay a few cents per night, and for that you slept on a floor among dozens of others.

  Living a hand-to-mouth existence, with no comfort, warmth or even facilities for keeping clean, people soon found themselves locked into a spiral which led ever further downwards. A man could hardly take on strenuous physical work when he had little sleep or a decent meal; a woman couldn’t sew or even make matchboxes unless she had room and light to do it in. Who wouldn’t turn to drink when it was the only thing which numbed the mind from complete despair?

  In Jack’s immediate view he could count five grog shops, three saloons, two second-hand clothes shops and two pawnshops. He thought that gave a fairly accurate picture of the needs of the community.

  The one greengrocer’s had a display of fruit and vegetables that even from a distance were clearly well past their best, and the dried goods store was only marginally better. People were peddling things all along the kerbside. Two bent old crones were selling stale bread, and he watched as their dirty hands delved into even dirtier bags made from old mattress ticking to bring out another misshapen loaf. Another man was butchering a goat on a piece of wood balanced on one of the street’s ash tins. But even worse were the two Italian men selling stale beer, the leftover dregs from a saloon, passing it out in old tin cans.

  ‘The Bend’, as it was generally known, because the road was shaped like a dog’s leg, was at least swept from time to time by the council. But just a few steps away in the rabbit warren of narrow, dark alleys running from it, places where neither council brooms nor sunshine ever ventured, the rubbish lay rotting on the ground, mingling with the stink of human effluent. Thousands of people lived in the ramshackle houses, tenements, cellars and even sheds, a pile of rags passing for a bed, a beer crate for a stool.

  Jack had no doubt that most of the ragged, half-starved children he could see hanging around today had no home, for living on the streets was often preferable to ‘home’. At least that way they didn’t have to hand over their meagre earnings from begging or thieving or risk being beaten by drunken parents.

  Jack knew exactly how that was, for he had taken to the streets of Whitechapel at a very early age for just the same reasons. School was a place he only went to when the truancy man caught him; all his knowledge and skills, which were mainly those of survival,
were learned on the streets.

  Meeting Beth on the ship had been like a miracle. The only friends he’d ever had were those from the slime at the bottom of the barrel like him. He’d looked at girls like Beth from afar, wishing he could reach out and touch their silky hair, or just be close enough to smell their clean skin and clothes. He never dreamed he would ever have someone like that for a friend, much less hold her hand or kiss her.

  But Beth talked to him as if he was the same as her. She laughed with him, she shared her sadness and her hopes with him. She made him think he could achieve anything he wanted. When she said goodbye on the ship, promising she would meet him in exactly one month’s time on Castle Green, he didn’t expect for one moment that she would be there. But the strength and belief in himself that she’d given him stayed with him.

  He spent his first night here in the Bend, for it was the only place he’d been told about by acquaintances back in Liverpool. But for Beth’s influence, he wouldn’t even have noticed how appalling it was, he would’ve numbed his mind with drink and followed the lead of those he met that night. But she had changed his viewpoint, and by the following morning he knew he must get out immediately or find himself sucked in.

  Working in the slaughterhouse was hideous. The terror of the cattle as he helped drive them from the ship towards their death, the casual attitude of the men who killed them and the stink of blood and guts made him feel sick to his stomach. But it was work, better paid than most jobs, and even though sleeping on the floor with five other men in one tiny room didn’t seem as if he’d taken a step upwards, he knew he had.

  He almost didn’t go to Castle Green a month later. He’d caught Sam’s parting glance at him, and it was cold enough to freeze a brass monkey. He also expected that Sam, with his looks and charm, would have found some fancy position, and that by now Beth would be walking out with someone her brother had picked for her.

  It was sheer defiance that made Jack go. He had been tempted so many times to backslide into his old ways of drinking and fighting, and he thought if she let him down he could justify it. But there she was, waiting for him on Castle Green, bright, eager and lovely.