A scene, very similar to this, was transpiring at precisely the same time, at a point in the city some three miles north. And still a third individual, with slinking, furtive movements, surprisingly like those of the first gunman, started out in a speedy machine from a point five miles south.
A half hour later, within thirty seconds of each other, the three denizens of the night entered a shabby waterfront cafe on West Christopher Street. The honky-tonk was foul with the stale odor of flat beer and the acrid fumes of bitter black tobacco.
This was Silent Joe’s dump. Joe, its proprietor, was deaf and dumb. Anything and everything, murder, arson and rape, had been planned across the beery tables of Silent Joe’s place and there were only five notches carved on the bar.
Notches, you ask? Yes; that was Silent Joe’s idiosyncrasy. Every man, or woman for that matter, who was sent up to the hot seat from his dump, had his epitaph carved into Joe’s bar with a notch.
The three late arrivals drifted to a dilapidated table in the far corner. Joe approached them; Joe of the sharp, unnaturally bright and ferret-like eyes. That was nature’s compensation; hear and speak he could not, but he could read a letter out of the corner of his eye across the room.
One of the men at the table went into a graphic description of a bottle. Joe understood; he had received that order many times before. He turned to his bar and returned to the table a moment later with a bottle of whiskey. The drinks were poured.
“Salud!”
A grunt.
“Faugh!”
And thus the formalities were attended to. The formalities to the planning of—
Now New York is a town of a million rackets, gunmen, gangs and suckers. And over the flaming, vicious underworld of the city ruled three men. Three men as cold, relentless, brutal and yet as sentimental as ever killers were. One ruled the mob of two-gun gorillas that used the streets and alleys north of Tenth Street as their stamping ground. Another found a fortune in the crooked sinister alleys of Chinatown and the flaming east-side. And the third, like a blood-thirsty pirate of old, sucked wealth from the river on the west and the teeming warehouses that crowded its banks.
Shanty Hogan, quick thinking, witty, brilliant, ruled the North Siders, and such was his guile at playing crooked politics with even crookeder politicians of the city, that his activities in crime extended as far north as Columbus Circle.
Smooth, oily, affable China Cholly ruled his renegade tong with a honeyed tongue and the most subtle, treacherous poison known to the East. But be it said for China Cholly that he reserved this refinement in diabolical death only for a squealer — a rat! The entire underworld approved!
To make this curious triumvirate complete, there was in the west, Hymie Zeiss. Now when a Jew is tough and a bad egg — he’s just that. Wicked. Hymie Zeiss, “Little Hymie,” as he was affectionately referred to by his henchmen, was not a lovely thing to look at, as a man. He was short, flat-faced and wizened, but his eyes were the soft, mellow brown of the Semite. On more than one occasion. Hymie had plugged a man, plugged him dead, and a half hour later endowed the widow with an annuity for life.
Among these three mobs there was not open warfare. In fact, some sort of truce had been agreed on between them. But there was friction, jealousy, unrest. The seething dynamite of hell brewed beneath the surface, needing only the spark of one overt act to blow off the lid.
Among the three of them they had fairly well divided up lower Manhattan for criminal exploitation, but down the center of the island, between the domain ruled by China Cholly on the East Side and the haunts of Little Hymie on the west, was a narrow band of territory that all exploited equally. It was this neutral section of the city that was the chief bone of contention among the three gang chiefs. Each one suspected the other of reaching out greedy fingers for it; each one feared the aggression of the other.
And for the past six months now, the seething tempers and bitter hatreds so long kept below the surface, were gradually emerging toward an open break; towards open warfare. It started with minor violations of the truce among the three mobs and developed with one reprisal after another to a situation so desperate that Police Commissioner Mallen, down at Headquarters, neglected his duties as official welcomer of the city, and went into executive session with his lieutenants.
There was a certain three-story red brick house on West 10th Street, just off Seventh Avenue, that was used by Shanty Hogan as headquarters. The three upper stories were occupied by a crew of hungry, flea-bitten hack writers, but the low English basement, the pet graft of Shanty’s, was the most notorious and thriving dispensory of booze in the district.
At eleven a.m. of the morning following the surreptitious meeting of the three mugs in Silent Joe’s. Shanty stepped briskly into the private bar in the little room behind his public speakeasy.
From the outside, the place looked innocent and harmless enough but one glance around the inside revealed a veritable fortress and arsenal. Nothing short of a battery of six inch guns backed up by a company of Marines could have broken into Shanty’s hideout — once the bars were down.
Two men were there before him, awaiting their chief’s arrival. One was Smiling Jimmie Hart, the other, Groucho Griffo. They were Shanty’s lieutenants, tried through a hundred gang fights and not found wanting.
Smiling Jim and Groucho were a living demonstration of the theory that opposites attract. Their names alone told the story, but either one, at an instant’s call and without an instant’s hesitation, would have laid down his life for the other.
Shanty tossed his soft grey felt onto a convenient hook and slouched into the chair at the head of the table. His two henchmen eyed him quizzically as he withdrew a hammered silver cigarette case, extracted a butt and lit it thoughtfully. Smiling Jimmie’s freckled face broke into a broad grin. Groucho’s dark one scowled still more.
“Boys,” began Shanty at last, “I got a red hot tip-off.”
“On what?” growled Groucho the practical.
“On a load of booze under bond coming in tonight.”
Smiling Jimmie tilted back his chair, threw back his blond head and a thin piping whistle escaped his pursed lips.
“Can that! Can that!” snarled Groucho.
“Yeah. What’s the idea, Jimmie?” asked Shanty jokingly. “Your Irish pan is ugly enough without screwing it up like that. Anyway, when you whistle you’re thinking — and I don’t like you to think. What’s on your mind? Out with it.”
Smiling Jimmie’s chair came to the floor with a bang.
“You bet, Shanty, I’m thinking. And you, dumb guy,” he added, turning to Groucho, “don’t get sore at me if you ain’t got no brains. It’s this, Shanty. Don’t it seem God damn queer to you there’s been so many tip-offs lately? Funny, eh?”
“Jeez, Jimmie,” replied Shanty consideringly, “now that you mention it, you’re right.”
“And all the tip-offs haven’t been to us. China Cholly has had a lot of dirt spilled to him and the same goes for Little Hymie. Now tell me, who is so interested in our welfare that they’re handing us fifty grand on a silver platter? And another thing that strikes me queer about these tip-offs is the way they have a habit of not coming off the way we expect; or if they do come off we get the double cross and the bulls is waiting for us.”
“What you’re trying to say,” growled Groucho, “is that there’s a rat some place. Is that it?”
“That’s it. Groucho!”
“But why?” insisted Shanty. “Give me the gimmick. How does it work out? We get a tip-off, the office. China Cholly and Hymie Zeiss, the same. What’s the dirt, the low down? Who’s playing us for a sucker and why? Where’s his percentage?”