Exile on Bridge Street Read online

“Connors got the brunt,” Byrne says. “Meehan’s work, along wit’ the tunics.”

  “I’m goin’ to get Lonergan an’ his boys,” Lovett says. “Them yokes played right into it.”

  “Ya want ya piece?” Byrne asks.

  They come in close to each other and exchange it. Bill places the .45 in his coat pocket while looking over shoulders; Jidge Seaman and Sean Healy watch too. With the wind forcing his eyes low he tells Byrne, “You’re my right hand now. The time comes, we cut ties wit’ Meehan an’ them, I’ll need ya right next to me. All o’ yaz. You know like I do Meehan’ll come for us. We gotta be ready, but we’ll never survive under him. He kills us or we kill him. He’ll keep us around long as he needs us. When he don’ need us, he’ll set us up like he did Pickles back in 1913, and like Non. Time comes, we’ll keep Red Hook for our own in the south and never pay tribute to that fuck again. But we’re gonna need Lonergan and the kids and we’re gonna have to be quiet about it, right?”

  Byrne and the others nod in agreement.

  “I-talians in the ILA are weak right now, but that feller—what’s his name? Used to run the Five Points Gang?”

  “Vaccarelli, Paul Vaccarelli,” Byrne says.

  “Yeah, he’s way up the ladder in the ILA now and all the I-talians follow him in Manhatt’n and New Jersey, but we can never let ’em cross the Gowanus Canal here in Brooklyn. We gotta keep ’em back—they can stay south down at the Bush Terminal. No I-talian labor allowed on the Red Hook docks, ever. Dig?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Let one in, and they’ll overrun us,” Lovett says. “Meehan said anythin’ to you guys about Connors? Deny settin’ ’em up, what?”

  “Nothin’ to us,” Byrne said.

  “Won’t even deny it,” Lovett says, looking up Fifth Avenue, and as he walks away, yells back to them. “Go down to the docks ’til I come back. No I-talians!”

  Byrne turns, walks toward the water at Red Hook, Seaman and Healy follow south on Fifth Avenue.

  With a single-mindedness that he has come to be known for, Bill Lovett walks angrily in his workman’s suit and beat boots. His quick steps move him ahead of a lazy horse clopping along in an aloof stride, the dray plopping at each step from a bockety wheel. Cheeks reddened in rage, teeth and fists clenched he stomps out into the street again, adjusting the cap over his eyes. Jogging across the way with a thin tie flying over his shoulder in the wind, he heads west on Union Street where an Italian woman sways slowly along the sidewalk with her children. Happening to look up, she sees the white man strutting toward her with a cold tilt to his head, fists at the ready. Grabbing desperately for her six-year-old and her toddler while dropping a sack, she yanks the children out from the man’s way with herself leaning against a lamppost in safety. She notices her husband walking backward toward her. He is speaking the Italian language in a jovial tone to one of the neighborhood men up in a window.

  “Giancarlo!” she screeches toward him.

  The husband instinctively knows his wife’s shrieking tone and wheels round just in time to notice the elfin man stamping toward him. Slyly, he spins out from the way and unplugs his derby respectfully, for the white man who chugs by has many stories that follow him.

  “Pulcinella,” he says the man’s name under his breath, then motions vulgarly toward Lovett’s back. “Va fan culo, uh? Va a cagare.”

  A half-block from the trolley stop, Lovett ducks into an unnamed saloon on Union and Hicks well before any expressways are built through the area. It is dark inside and he sits at the mahogany bar closest to the door. Those inside know his strange face. His bow-shaped ears, red lips, and the small frame that comes with great repute, ill or otherwise.

  “Two beers, no foam,” Lovett demands.

  In the obscured light and the musky stink of old beer sunk deep in the walls he sits in anticipation, elbows to the bar showing his scarred hands. Five men enter behind him. A group of what some call “shenangoes,” or floating migrant laborers that come for a single day’s work unloading lighters and barges on the water, then evaporate into the city and the port saloons. Lovett downs one beer whole and looks up to the tender, twirls his finger for another round. Sets at the second and it is gone too. Soon three more men wander in—Scandinavians, though Lovett mumbles, “Austrians.”

  “Can I buy you a beer, sir?” one man offers.

  “Nah.”

  The tender drops two beers in front of him and he pays, then takes one of them and drinks it down too. Sips on the fourth, burps silently through gritting teeth.

  “Sammich? Soup?”

  “Nah.”

  The tender looks away shyly, then back to Lovett, “Just get out? Glad to see someone’s puttin’ these fookin’ dagos round here in their place. Ya know, if it were . . .”

  “I don’ know you,” Lovett says.

  The tender stops, walks down slowly to the other end of the bar.

  Lovett hears behind him the mumblings of words, “Old Jay Street Gang” then, “Leader, Lovett” then, “White Hand in Red Hook.”

  He looks behind at the men that speak of him and one ducks out, bringing in a shock of spring light. Five minutes later that man arrives back again with two others.

  Lovett finishes his beer and steps off the stool through the crowd, but is blocked to the door by a large man.

  “Talk, Bill?”

  “Who you?” he says, and slyly takes from the lining of his cap the razor ring and slides it on behind his back.

  “One on one, I’ll take ya,” the man says simply.

  The crowd of men listening opens outward, surrounding the two in the doorway. The large man has puffy fists and a thick build beneath the coat and although he is quite young, his hair is thinning. Lovett sees the man is nervous and as his opponent peels back his coat, Lovett slowly rolls his left shoulder to the man and drives the ring with a quick right swing that bounces off the man’s orbital bone with a blatting sound.

  The man begins to smile unfazed, but soon realizes he cannot now see from the eye. Touches it with his hand. Blood streaming down the sleeve of his white shirt. Moving to the left, Lovett swings again into other eye. The man begins losing his balance at the second landing and is now completely blinded, both eyeballs punctured by the razor ring. Lovett then swings three, four more times opening up the man’s face with fleshy wounds and continues puncturing the top of the man’s head when he goes to his knees, then resolves to kicking the man’s head until he is no longer awake and sprawled dumbly among wooden chairs.

  “Afoul it is,” yells a squirrelly man with a northern European accent.

  Lovett turns round at the circle, gnashes at them. Eyes alight. Legs bent, left fist clenched and right fist of a sudden holding a .45 with fresh wounds glistening at the knuckles again. He moves toward the door and two men jump from his way.

  “Bill Lovett,” he yells his own name at all inside, daring any one of them speak of this to the police. “Red Hook!”

  He opens the door and walks out onto the bright sidewalk tucking the piece into his coat with his blood-ringed hand. From behind, he jumps a trolley bound for the Bridge District and although the standing driver sees him in the rearview, does not demand fare from the man sitting at the edge of his own seat and staring into his red fist pensively.

  Jumping off at Bridge Street just a few blocks south of The White Hand headquarters, he walks himself into the Lonergan bicycle shop and finds Richie’s teenage buddies loafing around the counter, Petey Behan, Matty Martin, and Tim Quilty.

  “Lonergan,” Lovett yells out. “Richie Lonergan.”

  “He’s in za back, Bill,” Abe Harms says with the accent of the Hun.

  Walking past the boys, Lovett storms around the counter and as Lonergan appears from the back room with his fingers black from the grease of sprockets, Lovett grabs him by the collar, picks him up over his head, and slams the youngster to the ground with his might.

  “The fuck’s wrong wit’ ya?” Lovett’s face red and shaking, spit
tle dropping into Richie’s face from gritting teeth. “Ya fookin’ monkey. Ya’re a fookin’ monkey doin’ tricks.”

  Yelling over Richie, legs spread around his body and holding him down by the neck and face, “I known ya since I’m six years old, Richie, and you was only what? A babe, that’s all. And never had ya backstabbed me like ya have now.”

  “Why?” Lonergan says, looking up coolly without fighting back.

  “Why?” Lovett yells looking back at the stunned Abe Harms and the rest of the Lonergan crew. “Why. Why. Why. Look what he done, Richie. Not only what he done, but he got you doin’ it to me. Manipulated ya. Got ya doin’ his tricks. Look at ya. Ya still don’ even know what I’m talkin’ about.”

  Lovett stands up, paces over Richie who comes to his elbows on the floor. Lovett jumps and pushes him back and puts one boot on the kid’s neck, reaches down to Richie’s leg and rips off the straps of his peg and yanks three, four times until it is finally free.

  “Stay there,” Lovett points to Richie’s face, and holding the leg in one hand like a weapon walks across the faces of the other boys, Petey first, punching him across the ear until he holds his hands over his face. “Ya got somethin’?” Then to Harms, who looks away and toward the floor. He comes closer to him, the German Jew boy. Closer again, Lovett’s chest against Harms’s thin shoulder, slowly pushing him back. Forcing him back. Back more, slowly, coercing him into acting weak for him. Breathing deep and angrily into his ear and face, Harms just stares in the distance toward the ground without words. Avoiding the man’s eyes until Lovett brings the wood leg up, smacking Harms in the lip with it, “I know ya think ya smart, you. How smart can ya be though, followin’ Richie? Ya like a fookin’ girl prancin’ around waitin’ for a man to tell ya what’s right’n wrong. Waitin’ for ’em to fuck ya head on straight. Ain’ that right, Harms?”

  “Yeah,” he says, looking down and away.

  “Richie?”

  “Huh,” Richie answers from the floor.

  “Stay on ya back. . . . Ya listen to this heeb before me?”

  “Nah.”

  “Seems like it. . . . I want ya to stop makin’ it seem that way.”

  “A’right.”

  “Get against the wall,” Lovett says to the four followers of Lonergan and pulls the .45 from his belt, kicks Tim Quilty in the pants. “Against the wall.”

  With heads pointed to the floor, eyes scared and stuck on Lovett, they walk ashamedly toward an empty wall in the bicycle shop.

  “Stay there on ya back, Richie,” he repeats, pointing with the gun, the wood leg in his left hand. “Faces against the wall. Faces, chest, peckers’n toes against the wall. Hands locked behind ya back.”

  Looking up from the floor, Richie watches emotionlessly.

  “Which one first, Richie?”

  Matty Martin winces and begins to cry.

  “Martin,” Richie says.

  “On ya knees, Matty,” Lovett yells. “Face on the wall, pecker’n chest too. Hands behind ya back. Lock ya fingers up.”

  The other boys look down at Matty, cheeks pressed to the wall. Lovett looks at them and pulls back the hammer and presses it against the back of Matty’s hair.

  “No, no, no, no . . .” Matty mumbles.

  “Don’ ya fookin’ move from that wall, boy,” Lovett says, points the gun toward the ceiling and fires and hits Martin in the head with the wooden leg at the same time.

  Matty screams, falling to the floor. Feeling desperately at the back of his head for blood. Looking at his palms, white and dry. Feeling again, then rolling on the ground crying and holding his head.

  “Get back against the wall, Matty,” Lovett says. “Stand up. Up against the wall wit’ the rest of ’em there. Matty.”

  “Okay.”

  “Get up there.”

  “Okay, a’right.”

  Pacing behind the backs of Harms, Behan, Quilty, and Martin, Lovett calls out, “Richie?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Why do ya fookin’ pieces of shit love when I’m weak? Why?”

  “Don’t.”

  “No?”

  “No.”

  “This shop here, what is it?”

  “Bike shop.”

  “No, it’s boodle,” Lovett says, dropping the leg. “A bribe to make ya Ma happy. And to keep you boys away from me. And who paid for it?”

  “Dinny Meehan.”

  “Richie?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Why’d Connors get set up? Why him?”

  “He was yours.”

  “Richie?”

  “Yeah.”

  “What’d Mick Gilligan ever do wrong? What? What’d he do that was so bad that you executed him at Meehan’s order?”

  “Gilligan went to you for a favor instead o’ to him.”

  “Outta anybody to kill ’em, why’d Meehan choose you?”

  “Show loyalty.”

  “Why’s Darby Leighton eighty-sixt from workin’ the docks?”

  “He’s Sadie’s cousin, Pickles’s brother.”

  “And what about Pickles?”

  “Sadie’s cousin too, set up back in ’13.”

  “Harms?”

  “Yez.”

  “Ya so smart, what happened to the money Wolcott’n the New York Dock Company commissioned Dinny Meehan for the Thos Carmody kill?”

  “I uh . . . I’m not zo sure . . .”

  “Ya don’ know,” Lovett says. “Ya got no idear, but ya the smart one. I’ll tell ya what happened wit’ it, it was used to pay off Brosnan’n the tunics to set up Non Connors. Make sense?”

  “Well . . .” Harms says. “That’s a theory.”

  “Yeah, a theory. Until I see Carmody’s body somewhere, we’re gonna assume it’s the truth. But I gotta feelin’ Dinny’ll never take an order from some fat Puritan fookin’ Anglo from Massachusetts who’s in charge o’ wage’n labor at the dock company. He don’ take orders from nobody, ya know that. All o’ ya know that. So, what’s that mean if Carmody ain’ dead?”

  Harms begins to answer, but mumbles.

  “Speak up.”

  “Maybe Volcott vill vant to know zat information.”

  “Yeah, Maybe Wolcott and his lackeys Silverman an’ Wisniewski over at the New York Dock Company might wanna know that the man they paid Meehan to kill ain’t dead. And since we’re there talkin’ wit’ ’em, maybe he’d like to work somethin’ out, him’n us. I mean, hey, we’re the bosses of the Red Hook Terminals, right? The New York Dock Company’s headquarters is in Red Hook, right? The White Hand Gang just firebombed the damn place and didn’t even kill Carmody, the Brooklyn recruiter for the ILA, and he’s supposed to be happy about it? Harms?”

  “Yez?”

  “Silverman’s a heeb like you, you’re gonna go’n find ’em, talk to ’em.”

  “I don’t know zis man.”

  “Well,” Lovett says coming up close to him again, his chest and breath against Harms’s face. “Ya gonna talk to ’em. Find ’em. And we’re gonna be quiet about it all. There’s only the six o’ us in here, so Meehan finds out anythin’ about this conversation, I know who to look for. I’ll hunt ya down, all o’ ya. Yaz already got chumped by Meehan ’cause ya a bunch o’ fookin’ babies, all o’ ya. But I hear anythin’ back from Meehan about this conversation and I swear on my mother an’ anythin’ else, I’ll open up ya heads like tomata soup, the fookin’ whole lot o’ ya.”

  Matty’s legs begin shaking, tears streaming down his face.

  “Matty?” Lovett says as Richie looks up from the floor. “Turn around, Matty. Turn around.”

  The boy turns around, his shoulders slumped and hair in his face.

  “Shoulders against the wall,” Lovett screams.

  Matty trembles, pushes his shoulders back.

  “What’ll happen if ya talk to Meehan about any o’ this?”

  “I won’t,” he says, blubbering.

  “Won’t what?”

  “I won’t talk to no one, ever.”


  Lovett grabs him by the neck and throat and runs him up the wall with one hand, gritting and with eyes bulged and shaking in disgust, then points the gun up under Martin’s chin toward the brain. “I’ll take ya life. It’ll be mine, forever. I’ll hold it. And I’ll walk wit’ it and everyone’ll know I have it.”

  At that moment mother Mary and daughter Anna Lonergan walk in, children among them with their wee hands held high to their mother and big sister and Willie Lonergan one year younger than Anna. Mary steps forward, her face maimed and discolored on one side where the man of the family had drunkenly thrown hot grease across her years earlier, disfiguring her and scalding the hair away forever just over the left ear.

  “What happened, Richie?” Mary yelps in a panic as Martin is dropped to the ground. “What goes on in here?”

  “Nothin’, Ma,” Richie says from the ground. “All’s fine.”

  “What is yer notion comin’ in here with all o’ yer wild ginaker and yer ballyraggin’, Bill?”

  And young Anna, the lackeen, sees for the first time the ferocious look on Bill Lovett’s face. An elf with his funny ears, red cheeks, and mean look on the mouth. And as she looks away from him, she looks to another face, Matty Martin’s.

  “Are ya okay, Matty?” she says, kneeling.

  “I’m fine, stay away,” he says, jumping to his feet.

  Anna looks up as Matty struggles to hold back his tears, catching his breath. She looks up at the angry, wild face of Bill Lovett but does not seem outraged.

  “He’s just fine, girl,” Lovett says as his tie again is stuck over his shoulder, then turns to Mary. “Get this, woman. You let Dinny g’ahead an’ keep payin’ the rent here.”

  “I do,” Mrs. Lonergan says.

  “But from today you’ll pay a due every week to the Lovett Gang and ya won’t say a damn thing to nobody about it either.”

  Lovett and Mrs. Lonergan hold eyes. And Anna stares at the man threatening her mother and holds close onto her arm as the man speaks in a terrifying tone. The children hiding behind skirts, tears on their cheeks and lips curled in cry. Tiny Thomas Lonergan too, all five years of him, scared by the threat in a man’s voice again, like his father’s, and is tearing up himself, hushed and pushed by the head behind the dresses of mother and older sister.