The Blackest Bird Read online

  Hays takes a deep breath, rights himself, smells the smoke, can taste the bite of it in the air. He checks his pocket watch. John Colt should have been long dead, hanged by this time. Yet somehow he would not be surprised. Money. Money in the megalopolis. John Colt not dead. John Colt not hanged. John Colt escaped.

  Holdgate mumbles something at him.

  Hays turns. “What?”

  “Blimey! That was close,” Holdgate repeats.

  Hays wrenches him to his feet to continue their trek west, speeding awkwardly toward the city prison, now with the gnawing, all-butcertain, wheedling feeling that the Colt family has finally achieved its goal, reached the powers that be with their bribe money and influence.

  In front of Hays a pack of young men and boys bolt across the street, down a crooked alley, through a yard, over a fence.

  A tight knot of children are bunched by the kerb, minded by their cousins and older sisters. The little ones, mere tykes, clad in rags, barely notice the pack of tough boys and thug-a-lugs, not much older than they.

  Preoccupied, only occasionally do these urchins peek up the street through the muddle of traffic and pedestrian confusion at the red night sky illuminated by fire.

  Meanwhile they jump their length of frayed rope, joyously chanting and singing, ignoring the frenzy and wild excitement of their elders gravitating up the hill.

  “Oh, I hurt, I hurt, I hurt all over,” the children shout. “I got a eye ache, a toothache, a gumboil, a bellyache…

  “A pain in my right side,

  A pain in my left side,

  A pimple on my nose.

  Oh, I hurt, I hurt,

  I hurt all over.

  My face! My face! My face!”

  35

  Into the Five Points

  As he exits the Tombs the cold air hits Tommy Coleman in the gob like a blast of attentiveness.

  Behind him voices still reverberate, “Mr. Colt is dead! Mr. Colt is dead! A dagger in his heart. Mr. Colt is dead.”

  The streets in front of Tommy are in pandemonium. Behind him the cupola of the Palace of Justice is ablaze. Half a dozen colorful, pugnacious fire companies already vie for a corridor that does not exist through the clogged traffic. Shadowy, wraithlike figures charge through the smoke-choked confusion.

  Tommy stands momentarily still outside the prison walls, beneath the high stone ramparts, overwhelmed and stupefied by the spectacle.

  In every direction smoke belches.

  In every direction chaos reigns.

  An apparition emerges from the shadows, his left arm limp, his left leg dragging, both appendages shriveled. The chimera’s clothes hang off him, filthy and much too big.

  “Tom-Tom!” he hisses. “Over here.”

  Two leatherheads from the Night Watch, arrogant in their attitude and demeanor, both with huge ripe bellies and bloated moose faces, march back and forth beneath the Tombs’ walls trying to clear the streets and make way for the fire companies. Bovine, self-important pig-widgeons, they make a big show of directing traffic, spitting on the ground, screaming at the teamsters to get their horses out of the way, punching the terrified beasts in their soft snouts as hard as they can to get their attention, get them to do what they want and move clear.

  “Whatsa matta wit’ ya? Ya can’t git no pleasure out of that!” one indignant cartman shouts back at the stupid leatherheads after a particularly brutal blow to the driver’s confused steed.

  “Oh, I can’t, can’t I?” the big night watchman shoots back. “Per’aps you’d rather take the blows for ’em, eh, dad? Step down and permit me to give you yer whacks, ya oaf ya.”

  A block away, out of sight in a greengrocery, the excited and rambunctious membership of the Forty Little Thieves lie in wait. Despite the November cold they are coatless. They wear their trademark soft caps, and their shirttails are free of the restraint of their waistbands, fluttering in the night wind. They are kidders, willing and able, anxious and ready to facilitate their leader’s escape.

  With a signal from Tweeter (a surprisingly strong wave of his crutch), a well-chosen phalanx of these fearless, dangerous, dirty little boys charge into the already impossibly congested intersection, dragging a dilapidated red pump wagon behind them.

  “Make way!” they shout, savagely pushing through, irritating everybody in their path. “Make way!”

  As if any single sorry citizen would be inclined not to let them through in light of the reputation of imps like these for senseless and brutal violence.

  Still, given the deplorable circumstances on the street and outside the Tombs, it is impossible to pay the slightest heed to this filthy band of lethal apaches.

  The goal ostensibly sought by this virulent youthful crew is the last lowly fireplug still available. It is sequestered beneath the prison wall on White Street, but already numerous battalions of desperate men from legitimate and not-so-legitimate fire companies are participating in a very animated free-for-all of most magnificent proportion for this same such objective.

  From experience Tommy knows if any of these combatants actually think they will put hose to pump this evening they will be sadly mistaken.

  Taking his general by the elbow, Tweeter, half leaning, half steering, angles him through the packed streets as if Tommy were a blind man and Tweeter his cane, wedging him this way and that, whispering directions in his ear, all to keep him moving in the right direction.

  At every corner, it seems, war cries are emanatIng from the very cobblestones. The pandemonium qualifies as riot. Hoarse voices rise everywhere to bloodcurdling crescendo, only to be met by even higher-pitched, more earsplitting cries, adding to the cacophony of the already addled mob’s insanity.

  “John Colt is dead!”

  “John Colt is dead! Dead by his own hand!”

  “Someone must pay!”

  “We have been cheated!”

  “More will die!”

  “John Colt is dead!”

  Even Tommy Coleman quivers. The grievous shouts cut through him like an unlikely augur as if it were his own funeral he would soon be attending.

  “Colt is dead!”

  Unsavory bands of more gangsters, scores of violent participants wearing gang outfits and colors, oft-patched suits and stuffed top hats, holey overcoats and grimy mackinaws, their eyes burning slits, dangerous men and violent boys, wade into the melee with brickbats, half-bullies, bludgeons, splintered ash batons, cudgels, slungshots, and granite paving bricks pried from the street, smashing, stomping, whacking as they plod in, ruthlessly seeking the smallest foothold.

  And when gained, then another.

  With grunts and groans, honest men shrink back. Terrified dray teams whinny. Drivers whip the colossal brutes, trying to somehow manage to get through the terrible morass and away.

  A gaggle of exhausted leatherheads, led by a furtive-eyed Sergeant McArdel, try to enforce some perfunctory plan of action, steering traffic this way, that. And finally, one truck slips past and away, and then another. A trickle of squeaking, rattling wagons manage to eke by.

  Until the perfect truck appears and the signal is given. While Sergeant McArdel of the Night Watch melts away, the rest of the gang of Forty Little Thieves emerge from their hidey-holes to pounce on it.

  A large butcher cart it is, loaded with meat. It is seized and overturned by the young thugs at the corner of Cross and Anthony, its contents spilled onto the street. At the same time, swarms of street urchins appear out of every doorway and back alley, and two and three together team to carry off carcasses of oxen beef, pork, lamb, and venison while coteries of miffed citizens, knowing not with whom they are dealing, make futile attempt to shoo them, annoyed that these rapscallions should somehow be swarming in the street, partaking of this anarchy, interfering with the good citizen’s view of the firestorm engulfing the cupola dome, and the pandemonium beneath.

  Drivers try to escape the crush. They scream at their frightened teams, “Giddyyup, ye beast ye. Ahh, bah now! Git it on, ye damn
mules, or ’tis the glue factory fer ya,” and so, off, finally able to rumble, half a chance given and taken, half an inch of clearance to squeeze by, smoke and vapor pouring from the huge dray beasts’ distended nostrils, horse teeth bared, while the hardened pint-sized gangsters, armed with the crudest of weapons, deal mighty blows to their adversaries and mates, whomsoever, send them tumbling under the galloping hooves of the animals, and Tommy Coleman, amidst the fury, no longer stands stock-still watching, his mouth agape, but urged forward by his old pally Tweeter Toohey, once more makes his way, following the surprisingly agile gimp, wielding his crutch as a weapon, across Franklin Street and down into their lifelong home, the worst slum on earth, the Five Points.

  TOMMY COLEMAN sees the high constable, Jacob Hays, in his camlet coat, leaning on his staff, married to some kirkbuzzer, before Old Hays sees him. Tommy and his gang dash almost directly in front of the shadow and his handcuffed prisoner onto Cross Street, through the urchins jumping rope, through the streetwide commotion.

  The intersection is so clogged it prevents any hope for entry to Columbia. Tommy’s breath comes hard. Hastily he bolts down Little Water Street, on whose cul-de-sac loom three clapboard tenements, each in a state of horrible disrepair, each marked by a sign painter’s less-than-steady hand: Jacob’s Ladder, Gates of Hell, Brickbat Mansion.

  The band skirts these miserable structures. All that is loathsome, drooping, and decayed is here. Tommy and his boyos run, doubling back across the southernmost boundary of this horrid patch of ground.

  Had Old Hays spotted him? Is he following?

  Looking back over his shoulder, Tommy no longer sees the shade. He hurries past another pocket of noisy, hell-bent six-year-olds in rags, torn between guarding their families’ miserable clothing set to drying on the bits of broken spikes and rusted iron fencing of Paradise Square, and the need, the longing, to abandon their responsibility, to beat it up the hill to see what is to be seen at the cupola dome and the Tombs.

  In the southwest corner of the square, Tommy finally cuts into a muddy alley behind another string of decrepit hovels and warehouses at what is called Cow Bay. It was here that his wife and child’s bodies were discovered, where he bludgeoned Ruby Pearl in retaliation. The alley runs alongside a squat yellow building, an abandoned tannery on Orange Street.

  A temperance board is nailed to its façade:

  FIVE POINTS MISSION

  OF

  THE LADIES HOME SOCIETY

  Tommy slips through the blue battered door, from where, inside the mission, he cannot help but hear comforting hymnal voices raised in song, sweetly singing:

  “There is rest for the weary,

  There is rest for you,

  On the other side of Jordan,

  Where the Tree of Life is blooming,

  There is rest for you …”

  36

  Conjecture on the Death

  of John C. Colt

  The following morning, at the behest of her father, Olga Hays visited the news shed on Canal Street to return home burdened with the early-edition array of public prints, each and every one full of Colt’s suicide and the inferno at the Tombs.

  DEAD FOR A DUCAT—DEAD!

  proclaimed the Sun.

  WHO GAVE HIM THE KNIFE?

  wondered the Tribune.

  FIRE! FIRE! FIRE!

  shouted the Mercury.

  MR. COLT DEAD IN HIS CELL!

  cried the Brooklyn Eagle.

  A DAGGER PIERCES MURDERER’S HEART!

  bellowed the Herald, delineating in minute, tantalizing detail:

  THE LAST DAY OF JOHN C. COLT

  His Extraordinary Suicide and Death

  “I am reluctant to add to the misery of the Colt family,” wrote eminent publisher and editor James Gordon Bennett.

  With his surviving and highly respectable relatives we can profoundly sympathize.

  But this is not the end of it.

  I have a sacred duty to perform to the public that is paramount to all other considerations. If hereafter a warden intends to allow a desperate criminal, under sentence of death, to have every facility for obtaining knives, scissors, poison for committing self-murder, why, the sooner the public is aware of it, the better for all parties.

  The consensus on who might have smuggled the lethal blade into the prison laid culpability with Colt’s bride. Especially after reporters, dispatched to her apartments, discovered the new Mrs. Colt not at home and nowhere to be found in society.

  “We hardly know where to begin,” persisted Bennett. “Or how to express the feelings and thoughts which rise up in the mind in contemplating this awful, this unexampled, this stupendous, this most extraordinary and most horrible tragedy.”

  From the first moment of his trial to the last pulsation of his existence, Mr. Colt seems to have been under the influence of a false system of morals, a perverted sense of human honor, and a sentiment that is at utter variance with the mysterious revelations of Christianity, or the sacred institutions of justice in civilized society. Toward him that was, none can have any feeling but that of pity, commiseration, and deep anguish of heart.

  If Colt, the cold and remorseless killer, had not been permitted to marry in the first place, none of this would have happened! And by infer ence, denying the public its due, seeing him hanged.

  Accompanying this phlegmic editorial and conclusion, a line drawing depicted Colt’s corpse, viewed through a jailhouse window, the body lying in his well-appointed cell, the hilt of a bejeweled dagger protruding from his chest, smoke and flame, presumably from the fire in the cupola dome, licking and swirling all about the body.

  The caption beneath the lurid scene read:

  THE PRISONER HAD EVIDENTLY WORKED AND TURNED THE KNIFE ROUND AND ROUND IN HIS HEART AFTER HE HAD STABBED HIMSELF, MAKING QUITE A LARGE GASH.

  Bennett demanded those city officials in charge be held responsible.

  With somewhat less diatribe was dealt the blaze at the Hall of Justice itself. The gist: The fire burned most of the night. As a result, the building sustained substantial damage, but, thankfully, not total decimation. The blaze had been attributed to grease, for the most part held to the flue stacks, and blamed on the carelessness of the restaurant Delmonico’s, using the prison facilities to prepare succulents for the Colt wedding banquet.

  Warden Hart was quoted as saying that not less than twelve official fire companies, not including rogue street gangs, had participated in the extinguishment (Hart’s word) of the inferno.

  The fire was considered an accident, a coincidence. The cupola dome had caught fire certainly, and would have to be replaced, the warden admitted. There was much smoke and water damage.

  For his part, Mayor Robert Morris declared in no uncertain terms that the building structure would be rebuilt.

  “How,” he was quoted in the Mercury, “could the city ever endure without its glorious Palace of Justice?”

  Three days passed before the public prints saw fit to question what might have really transpired the night of the Tombs fire.

  HAS MR. COLT MADE GOOD AN ESCAPE?

  asked Bennett in yet another of his special editions.

  Until then, somewhat to High Constable Jacob Hays’ surprise, not a word had seen print to the effect that John Colt might have eluded punishment. For the most part, the follow-up accounts in the public papers had merely stated that the deceased’s body was removed immediately from the Palace of Justice, an inquest soon held, the Dead House eschewed, and the corpse quickly buried without ceremony in the churchyard cemetery of St. Mark’sin-the-Bouwerie on Tenth Street at Second Avenue.

  Acidly, Bennett now publicly assailed city coroner Dr. Archibald Archer, accusing him of having been in on the deception from the start, charging that an unfortunate corpse had been prepared beforehand, and the jurymen at the inquest selected for one reason, and one reason only: their ignorance of John C. Colt’s appearance.

  Assuming an ill-fitting stance of moral superiority, Benne
tt took opportunity to perch himself even higher than he was accustomed, with relish sniping down from this unaccustomed new height: “Then again a most extended system of bribery has been in operation to effect the escape of Homicide Colt from the beginning,” he wrote. “Certainly, since his conviction.”

  Let us not forget that during his trial in the oyer and terminer, therewere all sorts of rumors about the vote in the jury room, but at the timenothing certain could be proven. Last evening after the outplay of this latestdebacle we were able to ascertain that the sum of $1,000 had been offered to each of three of the deputy keepers. As result all sorts of rumors remain in circulation relative to the suicide. Many doubt Mr. Colt is dead.

  Bennett charged the supposed “suicide” was at that very moment on his way by private coach to either California or Texas.

  Perhaps with his new wife. “Nothing is beyond the family Colt and their influence,” he sniffed.

  And then more.

  In the next day’s edition, the publisher-editor pondered:

  DID OTHERS ESCAPE WITH MR. COLT?

  seeing fit to name a single name:

  TOMMY COLEMAN

  While another headline in a follow-up edition chose to link the two, wondering

  WHERE ARE THEY NOW?

  Followed by still another speculative column stating it had been assumed at first that Tommy Coleman had lost his life in the conflagration, but now, with rumor rampant about John Colt having made his way beyond the prison walls and the hangman, the fact of no body being found, the probability must be examined that Tommy Coleman, too, had taken the opportunity of the inferno to make his own escape.

  Olga Hays reads to her father editor Bennett’s final thoughts of that publishing day:

  As for the other rogue, I know Tommy Coleman, met him in his cell. Never underestimate the man. He is the charismatic, ruthless leader of the Forty Little Thieves, a gang that is so deeply embedded in the Five Points neighborhood nothing short of infestation can suffice to describe the hoodlums’ relation to their putrefic environs.