“Out early I see,” the carriage man greeted Eddie. “Up before the birds.”
“Long before the birds,” Eddie said grimly. He thought of blackbirds and the silver river. He thought how little he knew about this neighbor of his.
The liveryman finished feeding the pigeons. He then leaned to pet Mitts under the chin. “Here’s a good boy who stays away from my birds, isn’t that right?” The dog, exhausted from his walk, flopped down at the liveryman’s feet. “I expect you’ll both be looking for a few hours of sleep.”
“It’s not sleep I’m after.” Eddie closed the door behind him. At the sound of the heavy doors shutting, the pigeons scattered to the rafters above. “It’s you I’m looking for.”
THEY CROSSED the Williamsburg Bridge early the next day, at a time when a steady stream of crowds were headed in the opposite direction, toward Manhattan and the working world. Eddie sat beside the sullen carriage man on the driver’s high bench seat. He wanted to keep an eye on his companion, and for good reason. When confronted, the stableman had professed to know nothing of the matter of a missing girl. But when Eddie hadn’t backed off, and had described the exact location where the body had been found in the muddy hollow, the liveryman had been stunned.
“You can’t know that,” he blurted. “No one knows where we’ve been and what we’ve done excepting my horse, and he wouldn’t tell you if he could.”
The stableman seemed under the influence; perhaps he was a drinker. Certainly, he was not reasoning clearly. He ran his mouth before he could think better of it, eyeing Eddie as if he possessed the psychic powers of a demon. “I told him I wanted nothing to do with it. I said it was bad luck, but he wouldn’t listen and he was the one paying, so what was I to do?”
The liveryman swore he’d committed no offenses, for the girl was dead when they’d come upon her. All he did was help move the body to Brooklyn, and then only as an employee who had no choice but to obey the demands placed upon him.
“In the eyes of the law, that’s an offense,” Eddie assured him. “You’ll be in the Tombs if the authorities find out. Maybe even Sing Sing prison.”
“The eyes of the law are blind. You know it as well as I. Let’s settle this as men, for men is what we are. I could kill you here and now,” the liveryman boasted, “and never hear a word of this again.”
Eddie laughed. “You?”
“Would you feel differently about holding a threat over my head if you knew I already served five years in Sing Sing?”
Eddie had assumed something about his companion’s station in life from his scars, tattoos, and gold-capped teeth. But time in Sing Sing meant a serious criminal background.
“You know nothing about me, so don’t pretend you do.” The liveryman shook his head, for life in that infamous prison upstate was too harsh for anyone who hadn’t served time to grasp. It was pure cruelty to lock men away and give them a view of the Hudson, keeping them always in sight of the beauty of the world while caging them like beasts. Many prisoners had tried to escape; some had drowned in the river, still more had wished they had when they were hauled out like fish and beaten with ropes and chains. “You have no idea what the world is like in that place or what men are willing to do in order to live another day. I’m including myself. I take responsibility for the man I used to be, for I carry him with me. As strong as I am, he’s a heavy burden.”
The liveryman’s story tumbled out. This quiet, stocky fellow had run one of the toughest gangs in the Five Points section of the Lower East Side. His wild boys, the Allen Street Cadets, rode like madmen on their bicycles, perched upon their handlebars so they might attack a victim with a club before leaping down to finish a robbery. He’d risen through the ranks, from a bouncer at the New Irving Hall, a saloon on Broome Street, to a gang boss. The houses of prostitution and opium lairs under his control were overlooked by the officials at Tammany Hall, for those who were meant to govern for the good of the people were happy enough, once paid off, to ignore unlawful acts. In those days, this humble carriage man had often sauntered into the Tenth Precinct, where he let himself into the captain’s office with ease, bringing gifts of whiskey and cigars. He’d considered himself untouchable, and for a while he was, but his long sentence in Sing Sing prison had left him without allies or connections.
When he was released, early, for good behavior, he’d had no choice but to hire himself out for petty crimes, including his work for a professor in Brooklyn. He was now thirty-four, and in the streets where he’d ruled, younger, more brutal men had taken his place. He’d found himself running a livery, mucking out stables, hiring himself out on a daily basis.