The Blackest Bird Page 17

  The tenor of such shrill outburst causes heads to turn.

  Old Hays grabs his constable’s staff, starts down the central corridor. John Colt shuffles in his leg irons to one side, out of Hays’ way.

  Hart is red in the face with anger.

  “Can I help, Warden?” Hays barks, cracking his staff abruptly on the Weehawken stone, daring Tommy Coleman to continue.

  Tommy returns Hays’ glare, never having forgotten how the high constable forced him at the Dead House to look into the dead and milky eyes of his wife and child.

  “Warden Hart, my assistance is at your command, sir.”

  “Thank you, High Constable, everything is handled.”

  Hart’s face shows considerable strain, veins pulsing, turgid in temple and down the center of his taut freckled forehead. He furtively looks away from Hays, turns his outrage back on Tommy Coleman in apparent attempt to drive the young blackguard’s insolence down.

  Hart says, “Gentlemen,” to the guards as they tighten their grip on John Colt’s tailored arm. “Let’s go, Mr. Colt,” he growls, brushing the first guard away, adjusting his own hold on Colt, rough enough to make him wince, marching him off down the block, calling back to Hays, “Thank you for your presence, High Constable. No fear. I am in control. You may see to your duty.”

  With a last glance at Tommy Coleman and the retreating backs of the warden, Colt, and the guards, Old Hays turns in the opposite direction, returns to his desk, and begins to make ready.

  Hays is due at the Brooklyn police commissary to pick up a prisoner, James Holdgate, a lag he knows too well, due to come in from Gravesend. From there Hays will transport him back to Manhattan.

  Over the years, Holdgate, a pewterer by trade, has been a most elusive mace cove, much wanted by Hays for an extended length and breadth of time. A primary conspirator with a band of knights of Alsatia, he had been an alleged participant in the notorious Timothy Redmond misidentification involving the Howland & Aspinwall and Union Bank forgeries, along with accomplices “Bob the Wheeler” Sutton, once a scrapper of some note (documented to the fullest in Pierce Egan’s fistic annals, Boxiana), and the figure dancer John Reed. The Police Gazette had certainly made much of the chase and the whole affair, including in their account, if you listened to Olga Hays, a truly unflattering steel-point etching representation of her father, and a notorious verse, another, although unsigned, recently claimed by John Colt to have been penned by him.

  James Holdgate, James Holdgate, bold burglar, come out,

  And unravel the train-work which bringeth about

  The grasp of the law in its own proper time—

  The doom of the felon—the stamp of the crime—

  You may wander at large, but naught will disperse

  The dark shades of your deeds—their brand and their curse,

  Then shrink back, old burglar, shrink back to your den!

  And pray for all Time’s everlasting “amen”!

  It came as a surprise, therefore, when notification arrived earlier in the week via yellow card, handed him by Warden Hart, that the screwman Holdgate had been apprehended out in the hinterlands of Brooklyn, and was now held in a hammock in the calabash there.

  Even though Colt’s execution is scheduled in two hours’ time, Hays feels neither necessity nor compulsion to be on hand for the niceties. In his long time served at his post, the high constable has seen far too many high gaggers face the hemp necklace. The experience, long ago, lost its urgency, and any appeal (if indeed it ever held any).

  To his mind, nothing more, nothing less, Old Hays, high constable of the municipality, can only wish John C. Colt peace, here on earth and in the hereafter, and deliverance from all terror.

  33

  A Dagger in the Heart

  Night falls after five. A chill takes the air. In his cell, the bars open to the weather, the seasonal cold rushing in unchecked, Tommy Coleman, bundled in his thin wool blanket, knees to chest, shivers and waits.

  After watching the day’s proceedings, he has conjured up an image of himself, he and his wife under the picture frame, having a turn at the dance, enjoying themselves, the music playing gaily, the swirling dust rising above their shoes.

  Then, suddenly, Tommy imagines, sees it in his mind’s eye like it is happening for real right there in front of him, his wife—his dead wife—the pretty Sister of the Pretty Hot Corn Girl, in quite another context, alive again, quiet-voiced, standing under the gallows in front of the priest, watching as he, Tommy, is led up the board steps.

  From where he stands, on his cot, looking out the small barred window, Tommy can see the entire expanse of courtyard where the crowd is milling, where the carriages wait, where the stone walls stand impenetrable, where the gibbet rises, where the banquet has been laid and eaten, where the priest brushes pale dust from his trouser leg.

  _______

  ONE HOUR LATER, it may already be two, he has lost track of time, Tommy Coleman still stares out into the courtyard through the barred high window. He has begun to hear new voices, more authoritative, murmuring in the dark. A small brigade of deputy wardens have assembled under the gallows, ready for the evening’s rite. The hangman, the Jack Ketch, is there. Dressed in black, he wears no hood. He resembles nothing less than an insect, with two irregular, irritated patches of bright red skin like cankers under each pop eye, framing the sharp, twitching nose. A mournful air to him, a deathful pall.

  Up above, in the bell tower of the cupola dome, Tommy is aware of the clock tolling the quarter hour.

  The crowd has been gathering in the courtyard. Many who had joined in and celebrated the wedding festivities earlier in the day have returned.

  Or never left.

  The heavy wood and iron gate opens and a guard addresses the uneasy crowd hovering in the street beyond the prison walls, impatient and cold, awaiting news of Colt’s end.

  Across from Tommy’s cell, John Colt’s cell is now empty. The door grate stands open. The peach curtain from his honeymoon hangs limp.

  Tommy stares transfixed at the empty cell, the props of the ponce’s life visible in front of him: the black leather chair that reclines, the glass vase that shimmers, the overturned green champagne bottle empty, the two crystal glasses, the bouquet of pink flowers on the floor, the pen still in the inkwell, the flat green bottle of Armagnac on the bookshelf, the forgotten black handkerchief neatly folded at the corner of the desk.

  Tommy gazes, unseeing, as in the twilight a somber priest walks by.

  Not five minutes later, Tommy’s senses seem to peak. He sits up where he has been lying on his cot.

  He smells smoke.

  The coal stove near Old Hays’ office will on occasion belch embers into the central corridor. At such times, a sour creosote perfume assaults the nostrils, stinging the eyes of those locked on the block. Tommy knows this reek is not that.

  At first wisps of black smoke, then long spindles, then clouds, begin to billow down the corridors, leak in from the skylights. Then, almost immediately, panicked voices can be heard from outside: “Fire!”

  Other shouts sound from somewhere deep inside the catacombs:

  “Fire!”

  Then, almost immediately, a cataclysmic onrush and cascade of ember, flame, cinder, smoke, and more panicked voices.

  “Run for your lives!”

  “I can’t! I can’t get out.”

  Against the cacophony, a single dissonant voice somewhere cries, “Let it burn!”

  Prisoners screaming for their lives, gripping iron bars, begin to cough harshly.

  All along the rows and tiers, up and down the blocks, from above as well as from below, horrible hacking and outright screams of terror worsen.

  “Don’t let us burn!”

  “Please! Oh God! Please! Don’t let us die!”

  “Shaddup, you kirkbuzzers, burnin’s no worse than hangin’.” The same voice, the same dissonant voice of Tommy Coleman that shouted, “Let it burn!”

  Tommy, ga
sping at his window for air, knowing the real night’s festivities have now begun, can see on narrow Leonard Street, across from the prison, the blaze itself, the licking flames reflected in the windows of the nondescript municipal administration building, whipping and raging above in the cupola of the bell tower, atop the tomb-like Justice Department building.

  Prisoners are locked up, crammed and trapped all around him, coughing and wheezing as the smoke swirls and billows, permeating their cells, fed through open windows and bars, cracks in the mortar and bricks. They are wild-eyed, frightened, shouting now for cell doors to be thrown open, allow the imprisoned to save themselves.

  Bright orange flames hug the building roof, lick the dark night sky, the smoke continuing to pour down corridors in acrid black clouds, giving no indication of letup.

  “Somebody! Somebody let me out of here! I don’t want to die.”

  Warden Hart rushes onto the block, his smoke-irritated sky blue eyes wide with the excitement of danger and smoke, the hue of iris bluer, the white of the sclera redder with the aggravation of quick-flowing blood.

  The smoke becoming even thicker and more caustic now. Death row is engulfed in a miasmic torrent of noxious haze. The terrible hacking and coughing of the doomed and condemned has taken over.

  From his cell Tommy watches the confusion almost gleefully. “We’ve a date with the divil we do!” he yells.

  The panic-stricken are by now everywhere.

  Some keepers rush up the corridors, systematically fitting keys to locks, throwing open cell door after cell door, working apace through the rows, giving the terrified, as they waited in the maddest state of agitation, opportunity to escape if they can.

  Then, suddenly, at the end of the corridor, at the gallows holding cell, Warden Hart’s anguished cry rings out, slicing through all other tumult, echoing back through the corridors in an unnatural falsetto staccato. “Mr. Colt is dead! Mr. Colt is dead!”

  Tommy, his attention suddenly drawn, swivels in the direction of the warden’s voice, everything standing still.

  “Mr. Colt is dead!” clear as a bell. “Mr. Colt is dead! A dagger in his heart! Mr. Colt is dead!”

  Warden Hart immobile, staring.

  There the body lies: a deflated figure on a brocaded daybed. Hands folded on still chest. The dead man’s two tight white fists clasp a dagger. Its bejeweled hilt protrudes from whence it has been driven home, and through clenched fingers a stream of crimson blood.

  “Mr. Colt is dead!”

  Warden Hart staggers backward into the main corridor, his master key held in front of him like a prod, poised dramatically as if to defend himself against any ghoulish spirit that should arise.

  Hapless prisoners, still locked up, desperate to be delivered, to be saved, to save themselves, cry out in their cells for him, for anyone, their voices bearing witness to their most remarkable states of terror and flux.

  “Warden! Warden! How ’bout me? Warden! I don’t want to die!”

  They stand at the bars, at the grates.

  “Warden? Warden? Don’t let me die here! Please.”

  Hart shoves aside a stumbling drunk, freed when the door to the Bummers’ Cell was thrown open. The warden, choking on the smoke, falls to his knees, crawls on the stone slab floor, feels his way to Tommy Coleman’s cell.

  After two feeble attempts, he pushes key into lock, and for an instant prisoner and jailer remain fixed in time, Monmouth Hart and Tommy Coleman, on opposite sides of the bars.

  Then the warden turns the key.

  As the lock disengages there is an audible click, followed by Tommy’s grating laughter.

  “For the life of me, I should let you burn right where you stand, you little son-of-a-bitch.”

  And just like that, the cell door swings open and Tommy Coleman, a pressed red cotton kerchief held over his mouth and nose, pushes past his emancipator, pats Monmouth Hart’s sallow cheek, and immediately disappears into the smoke and confusion.

  No one of consequence or authority takes further note of him. He moves swiftly, hand out as if a blind man. Nothing is discernible. He feels his way. The thick air bites his lungs. Through his handkerchief he dares not take breath any deeper than absolutely necessary.

  He hears a voice. “This way!”

  The harelipped keeper, his thick finger pointing. “Your people are waitin’ for ya, hackum! Put a move on.”

  And with that, a pat on the back, a heavy door opens, cool air rushes in, and Tommy Coleman escapes into the night.

  34

  The Politics of Fire

  in New York City

  At Burling Slip, Old Hays steps off the Fulton Ferry onto the slippery wooden dock, having returned from his foray to the hinterlands with the screwman James Holdgate shackled and in tow. At the Brooklyn House of Detention, Hays had been delayed until the prisoner was registered as having arrived from Gravesend, the paperwork a mishap, no one seemingly in charge or able to prepare Holdgate for transport back to the island of Manhattan.

  The high constable suffered some annoyance, but no surprise to be put upon in such slipshod manner. Now, hurrying up John Street cuffed to his prisoner, he sees the night sky lit, the flames diffuse through the heavy mist spilling off the estuary, heavy smoke from the cupola dome blowing south and east, drifting over him toward the Narrows.

  All over the east side, even before the ferry had docked, the high constable could see the sky aglow and hear the frantic cries:

  “Fire! Fire rages at the prison! Deadly fire at the Tombs!”

  As far back as Hays could remember, and in fact throughout New York City history, fires were fought by volunteer fire companies, most formed with political link and clout. Lore had it even George Washington, during his residence on Rose Street, chased the engines.

  To the detriment of the metropolis of late, however, many of these fire brigades had become closely associated with unsavory elements, gangsters, and organized street toughs. Because of this involvement by the criminal type, firefighting had become a citywide dilemma.

  Far fewer fire hydrants existed than fire companies. When an alarm first sounded, individual brigades made mad dash for the blaze lest they be blocked out by one of the other more vociferous companies. The worst thing that could occur was to be outdone by a hated rival.

  The solution was to dispatch the fastest runner in each corps at full speed to the site of the inferno. Commandeering a wooden barrel from a nearby market or storefront greengrocer, this point man would quickly position his barrel over the nearest available fireplug and sit on top of it, trying to maintain his place until his fellow firefighters arrived and hooked their hoses.

  If another from a rival company showed up at the same plug, a fight would surely ensue over the rights to the hydrant, and when the firefighting corps were representatives of a disreputable and violent gang, as they were more and more of late, sometimes numbering their members in the tens or hundreds, a battle, perhaps even a war, was the result, the constabulary inevitably having to be called in to break up the fray. Many a tinderbox building had been engulfed while the mortal combat on the street raged in the dancing reflection of the flames.

  Each and every year for some hundred years, one of the most glorious events in the city was the annual Firemen’s Parade down Broadway. Raucous crowds, made overwrought by rhum and boisterous, unrestrained celebration, lined the wide avenue and bordering sidewalks to lay excited eyes on the exuberant red-shirted brigades, handsome in pounded beaver hats, marching two by two, pulling their beloved engines to the cadence of huge brass bands blaring out “Solid Men to the Front,” the bellowing cadres of firefighters coming up behind, singing and shouting the lyric to their brave anthem:

  In time of need

  When we succeed

  The flames afore…

  It’s solid men to the front!

  Their splendiferous engines clattered and rumbled down the cobblestone thoroughfare, their names magnificently painted on their gleaming red flanks: Whit
e Ghost, Shad Belly, Black Joke, Red Rover, Dry Bones, Hay Wagon, Big Six, Big Seven, Yaller Gal, Bean Soup, Old Maid, Old Junk.

  Hays knew it no jest when it was said the average Bowery b’hoyo loved his engine more than his girl.

  THE NIGHT of the cupola fire at the Palace of Justice, the cobblestone streets are clotted with just such fire companies. Traffic is dense and impassable with stalled wagons and carts.

  And more and more by the minute are becoming entrenched in the morass: loaded wagons and rattling trucks piled to the top post, pulled by nervous teams of steaming, snorting horses.

  In front of Hays and his cuffed charge, from the piers, the low resorts and buckets of blood, the drink parlors, spas, and diving bells, hordes of people pour onto the packed east side streets.

  The thoroughfares are already a high jumble, all traffic pointed toward the red glow. At clips of alarming speed, the last of the fire brigades from the car barns of Corlear’s Hook and far off Boodle Hill careen through the streets.

  Hays proceeds, frustrated, impatient, moving along as best he can, braceleted as he is to Holdgate, and given no transport waiting for him or his prisoner.

  He is keeping west on Anthony Street when a closed, high-backed carriage rumbles off from Elm. The carriage sways at the uppermost, where the driver sits, nearly running the high constable and his charge down as the conveyance emerges from the flickering light and shadows onto the main throughway, racing with reckless abandon over the paving stones.

  Hays stumbles out of its path at the last possible instant, pulling the cracksman down on top of him.

  Hays is startled. Inside, as the carriage curtain blows back, illuminated by the chained whale-oil lamps, he glimpses a man at the window. But it is only a glimpse, and given the half-light and the state of Hays’ aging eyes, he can’t be sure:

  Could it have been John Colt?

  To Old Hays it certainly seemed it was he.

  But then the carriage, a large black brougham, is gone, cutting across the intersection before diverting north at the next corner. Only the clatter of hooves and iron wheels hangs in the air.