Suspension Page 21

  Tom sat there thinking. Goddamn Coffin. He could give you that wide-open, innocent look, swear that up was down, and have you believing it all in the same sentence. Maybe he hadn’t meant to get Tom killed, and maybe he didn’t even want to see Tom hurt. But he sure as hell left out the part about Finney paying Coogan, and he sure as hell lied about it to his face. Sure … it would be easier to just go along like nothing happened, take the money, and work on getting free of Coffin eventually, but that was the logical thing, the safe thing. He had done that before, had been doing it all along, and the fact was it was killing him, especially after the child prostitute murders a few months ago. It was gnawing at him like a three-foot tapeworm. Maybe it wasn’t smart, maybe there was a better way … but finally Tom said, “Fuck you, Augie.”

  It really didn’t take a detective to see that Coffin had a pistol in his pocket. Tom had it figured for the .32 Smith & Wesson. Handy little gun, small enough for a pocket without too much of a bulge, but packing enough punch for close work. Not a real stopper, but a good compromise. Now Tom could see the twitch of the hand in Coffin’s pocket. Not wanting to get into a shooting match in Mary’s bedroom, Tom continued, “Listen, August, I’ll pay you what I owe you. I’m not backing out on that. You have my word, but no more of your favors and errands. No more extortion, and no more rackets. I’m through with that, and I’m through with you and your corps. No, don’t say anything. I’m not finished. This has been eating at me for months so let me get it out.” All the while Tom watched the hand in the coat pocket. “You know I used to like the money. I used to think that as long as I was getting mine and it was coming from criminals, then it was all right. Who the hell cares if some illegal bars pay us off to keep their back doors open on Sundays? Who gives a goddamn if pimps and gamblers and gangs get squeezed? Nobody … and for a long time I didn’t either. But I’m tired of the kind of things I’ve been getting into with you, the kinds of money we’ve been taking. It’s dirty, August. It’s dirtier than most money to be found on the streets, and the things we have to do—” Tom hesitated a moment, remembering. “The times we have to look away … they take something out of you,” he said sadly. “It’s getting so that I see that stuff in the mirror. You know what I mean. I can see it on your face. It takes a toll. I feel it like a wet overcoat dragging my shoulders down.”

  August, to his credit, seemed to listen. Tom knew there must be some small part of Coffin that knew the truth of what he was saying.

  August, his tone pragmatic, said, “What the hell, you haven’t been blaming yourself have you? This is the way things are, Tom. You can’t go beating yourself about the head because you took some money from some fucking criminals. Shit, they know damn well they’ll have to pay someone to stay in business, so why not pay us?”

  “You’re right, they’re gonna pay someone. But, August, for God’s sake, there’s some of them that money shouldn’t be able to help. There’s limits, you know, or should be. That Madame LeFarge, for example. We should have thrown away the key on her. But we didn’t. We took her fucking money, and we looked the other way.” Tom was referring not just to what he had collected the other day but events going back months. Young girls out of her place had gone missing more than once.

  “Oh, Christ, Tom, that was months ago. There wasn’t anything we could have done. How are we supposed to keep things like that from happening?” Coffin said, exasperated. He threw up his hands and stalked around the room. “Shit like that happens. It just happens, that’s all. You know how things are in this city. If we had shut her down, LeFarge would have been open again in a couple of weeks. Jesus, look at the streets. There’s parents who’d sell their children for a few dollars, for God’s sake. Go down to Rag Picker’s Court, or Bottle Alley, they’ll sell you more little street Arabs than you can shake a stick at. We can’t stop it, Tom,” August said with finality.

  “Yeah, but we shouldn’t be helping it.” Braddock looked Coffin in the eye but wasn’t getting a straight look back. “We’re supposed to do good, August. We’re supposed to keep vampires like her from sucking the life out of kids.” A tousle-headed Mikey Bucklin, his dirty face and shoeless feet looking far too small under the grime, dashed into his head as he said this. He knew with sudden recognition why this had weighed heavier on him lately, and he wondered why he hadn’t seen it sooner.

  They were quiet for a long time, fingering the pistols at their sides. Coffin paced the room like a pallbearer. In his heart he knew Tom was right, and in fact the incidents at LeFarge’s had bothered him too. But he had a broader perspective than Tom, a bigger view of things. That was Braddock’s weakness. He saw things on a human scale. He sometimes missed the big picture because he let the small things get in his way. Not like him. He could see the forest, and he didn’t let individual trees get in his way. He had a higher perspective, a bigger plan, and if some trees got cut down … what was that to the forest? Coffin stopped his pacing, the ivory grips of the Smith & Wesson tempting his hand like a stiff cock. He figured he’d try this without bullets, see how far a little blackmail went. Coffin turned to Tom. The muzzle of Braddock’s Colt gaped round and black, like looking down a well.

  “I’m getting a little tired of watching you fiddle with that Smith & Wesson, August. You weren’t thinking of shooting me, were you, Captain?” Tom asked with a flinty grin.

  For once, Coffin looked flustered, but he regained his composure in typical Coffin fashion. “Put that thing away. I’m a captain, for Christ sake, I’m supposed to have a gun in my pocket. And let me remind you of who you’re pointing that pistol at, Detective. I’ll forget this happened if you put that down now.” The muzzle still gaped, unwavering. “I’m willing to see this as just the stress of your injuries. Put the gun down now, and nothing will come of this,” Coffin said, trying for a tone of command, but missing the mark. He figured that the first thing he was going to do when Tom dropped the Colt was to see how many bullets he could put into Tom’s head at this range.

  “Well, let’s just be on the safe side, shall we?” Tom said in a reasonable tone. “Why don’t you just take that .32 out of your pocket. With your left hand, if you don’t mind. Two fingers. Nice and slow.” The pistol came out of Coffin’s pocket as Tom instructed. “Good. Now empty the cylinder and put the bullets on the bed.”

  “Tom, this is ridiculous. I’m losing my patience, sport. Think what the fuck you’re doing.”

  “Oh, I am, old buddy,” Tom said, mimicking Coffin’s tone. “Empty the gun, August.” The bullets formed a harmless little pile of brass and lead on the blanket.

  “Now let me tell you how things are going to be. First, I’m going to pay you what I owe you. Second, I’m out of your little operation. We go our separate ways, and that’s that. I can’t make up my mind whether you wanted me to take a beating, Finney and Venkman just got carried away, or … you wanted me dead.”

  “Tommy, it was just those two crazy bastards, I swear. Jesus, Tom, I wouldn’t have you killed. What kind of man do you think I am?” Coffin held up his hands in feigned exasperation.

  Tom figured Coffin didn’t want to hear the answer to that question. “I think you sent me down there without full knowledge of the situation, and that’s not something a good captain does to one of his boys. Beyond that … I don’t know. I can tell you this: If I had proof that you planned to get me killed, you’d have been dead already.” Coffin knew Tom meant his words. “So that’s it. Oh … and by the bye, nobody’s going to be telling any tales out of school, and I expect the same from you. Deal?”

  Coffin looked at Tom’s outstretched hand. What a schoolboy he was to think he could tell August Coffin what to do. Did he really imagine that he’d keep his end of this bargain, or was there something more to it? After a moment’s consideration, he figured it was Tom’s naive view of the world showing through. He must be crazy, or maybe that knock on the head really did shake his brain loose. Whichever it was, Coffin had no problem agreeing to a deal he wouldn’t keep. />
  “All right, Tommy, not a word on any of it, and no other repercussions. You pay me what you owe me, and we part ways. No hard feelings, sport, it just didn’t work out.” Coffin started to plan immediately, thinking of how he could control the situation. They shook on the deal. Tom felt like washing his hand.

  The weather had turned chilly again, and a gusty wind huffed and puffed across the harbor. Whitecaps danced on the aqua-green waves. Sailboats leapt and dashed like porpoises on the crests. It was the kind of day when words were snatched away on the wind and clouds raced each other across the watery blue sky. Sergeant Patrick Sullivan watched a coastal steamer pass below him, its funnel belching black. The smoke swept back and was gone in an instant. The knife-edge bow cut the whitecaps with exuberant fountains of spray.

  Sullivan had learned to like these days in the cables. It hadn’t always been so. It had taken him hours to get used to the wind the first day he had been up in a real guster. Up on the cables, higher than the tallest ship, looking down on the tallest buildings of a tall city, he had come to know winds as he never had before. In ’76 the captain had assigned him to work the cables, and there he had been ever since.

  He sat on the seat he had lashed to the suspender cable, his feet dangling over two hundred feet above the chop of the river. It wasn’t much of a seat really, just a board, maybe ten inches wide and about eighteen inches long. It had ropes through either end that came together above his head, and he had secured their ends to the cable. Safety ropes were optional, and most of the workers spurned them as unmanly. Sullivan’s little seat twisted in the wind, and he had to hold the suspender in the crook of his arm to keep from swinging too wildly. He had wrapped his left leg around the cable too, so in spite of the wind, he was pretty secure. The men around him, mostly former sailors, worked much the same way. “One hand for yourself and one hand for the ship” was the saying. Most of them seemed little bothered by the wind. To him it was a one-arm, one-leg kind of day. They were doing some of the last lashing of the vertical suspenders to the diagonal stays. Each of the stays—cables that formed the hypotenuse of a right triangle, between the towers and the roadway—radiated down from central points on each tower at nearly the same point where the main cables crossed. At every point where a stay intersected a suspender, they were lashed. Each “rigger,” as the men were called, had a bucket of marlin, or tarred line, used for the tying. With each of these intersections of stays and suspenders joined, the weight of the bridge would be equalized over the weblike, crossing cables. The only way to do those lashings, was to literally do a highwire act above the river, with riggers climbing, shinnying, and swinging from the cables like so many monkeys. Why none of them had fallen, Sullivan couldn’t guess. He had come close a few times. After a good scare it had taken all the courage he could muster to go up again, his fear foul and metallic, like a penny on his tongue. He reckoned that going up was about the bravest thing he’d ever done. When it was just him looking up at the cables in the morning, wondering if this was the day he’d take his dive to the river, it had a lot of scare to it.

  Sullivan had been in the crowd on the Brooklyn docks when the first cable had been strung across the river. They called it a rope actually but it was braided wire, just like the cables he worked on now but not as thick. He had wondered how they were going to string wires above the river. There were maybe five or six thousand folks on either shore wondering the same thing. Though the process wasn’t easy, it was basically simple. The idea was to string a continuous wire rope, about three-quarters of an inch in diameter, from the Brooklyn anchorage to the Manhattan anchorage and back. Once it was spliced together, it would form what was really just a big clothesline across the river. All that would be needed was to attach the wires that were to form the main cables to that “traveler” and pull them across like laundry. A thirty-horsepower steam engine had been set up in Brooklyn to do the hauling. Using a system of cogs and drums, the cable could be reversed without stopping the engine. The drums were huge, twelve-foot-diameter oak affairs, set atop each anchorage, and the traveler ran around them. Of course Patrick hadn’t known any of this as he watched with the others from the Brooklyn docks. In fact, he had no idea at all how the job would be done.

  It had taken hours to get that first cable across. Two huge spools of wire had been positioned on the river side of the Brooklyn tower. The cables, one from each spool, were towed up and over the tower, then spliced and wound around the system of drums and, finally, the big oak drive wheel. Once all was set, they loaded one spool onto a barge for its trip across the river. When a break in the river traffic had come, the barge, towed by two tugs, started chugging across. The odd thing was, as the cable wound out, it disappeared under the gunmetal gray waters of the river. Sullivan somehow hadn’t expected that.

  It was pretty close, that day on the docks, a typical August day in New York, but the heat didn’t seem to wilt the spirits of the crowds watching the spectacle. The cable was hauled over the Manhattan tower and all the way back to the anchorage, where it was wound on another big drum and secured. It was still slack, though. Most of it sat in the mud of the river bottom. Patrick recalled vividly when they started up the engine and began hauling the cable taut. Slow at first, then faster and faster, the cable emerged from the waves and the two ends seemed to race each other toward the middle of the river. At about the same speed, the notion formed in his head of the cable as a symbol of the ties between the North and South, submerged beneath the waves of war. Covered with the muck of the river bottom, soiled, dripping, the ties that bound the country emerged … unbreakable, never really broken.

  As the cable sprang free from the river, a shower of water fell from it, glistening for a moment in the summer sun, like a waterfall across the waves. The cheers of the crowds and the bells and whistles of the steamers in the river were like a dirge for him. He knew then, beyond all words and expression, the ultimate futility of what he was about to do. That was August 14, 1876—nearly seven years ago, yet here he was, swinging in the cables. It was his duty.

  Patrick had sat on a bulkhead, looking at the bridge, for a long time, on that day, seven years before. The sun had been an orange blaze west of the city before he stirred. It had taken him a long time to come to terms with what he had sworn to do. He wasn’t happy about it then and still wasn’t. But he remembered the reasons he was here in the first place. Those reasons were like cable too. They had sworn together, with God as their witness. Their oaths never wavered. Through all these years they had supported each other. But things had been clearer during the war. The road before them had been straight and true. Now it was just their oaths that held them. Sometimes he thought, in his most honest moments, that they were so scarred by the war that they could do nothing else. Like the captain, their shared experience had become a crutch, a shield from the bitterness of life after defeat. He didn’t like to think that way.

  It was an irony not lost on Sullivan that a bridge had become a symbol for them. It spoke of divides unbridged, of the end of the society they knew. It was the triumph of the industrial age, an age that placed products above people and money above all else. The bridge stood in the North, a tribute to industrial might and the self-righteous Yankee race. It stood for their subjugation, the death of a social order they held dear. It spoke to them of factories, railroads, commerce, and empire building. It was the dominance of machine over man, factory over farm, industry over society, and a turning away from the gentle seasons of the earth. The idea that such a system had prevailed was repulsive. The bridge, as a symbol of that system, was no less repulsive. So, for Sullivan and the rest, it wasn’t a bridge they worked to destroy, it was a symbol.

  Sullivan swayed in the cables as a gust caught him daydreaming. He tied a length of marlin about the junction of two cables, snugging it down after each turn. They’d be back up here soon, replacing these temporary knots with steel U-bolts, but that was after they “let down” the bridge. There was no way to be certain of the
precise length each cable needed to be to account for the loads, grade of roadway, and elasticity of the wire. Roebling had designed a system to adjust each one of the cable suspenders individually, by attaching the end of each suspender to a cast-iron yolk that held two long bolts. The bolts were attached to the roadway beams. By turning the bolts the roadway grade and cable tension could be adjusted. That probably would be the last work he’d have as a rigger.

  Another gust grabbed at his bowler, nearly snatching it off his head. If he hadn’t wrapped his scarf over it and under his chin, it’d be floating down the river by now. Sullivan remembered how Farrington had doffed his hat and waved it to the crowd, back in ’76. That was a man who had balls of solid brass. To take the ride Farrington had, it was a positive requirement. Once the traveler had been strung, it had been planned, as a public relations gesture, to have someone cross on it. Master Mechanic Farrington was an obvious choice, but at nearly sixty, everyone would have understood if he had declined the honor. But that wasn’t Farrington. On August 25 a boatswain’s chair had been attached to the traveler and preparations made for the historic journey. The wire looked mighty thin, Sullivan recalled. It didn’t seem strong enough to hold much more than a flock of pigeons. Looking out over the river, it disappeared in the distance. With nothing below but air and water, it took an extra helping of courage to consider trusting your life to it. Farrington knew the wire could support many times his weight, but this was still the first go at a crossing, and it was his ass on the line.