“Don’t know yet,” replied Smiling Jimmie. “But we got to find out. And the best way is to go through with this hi-jacking expedition of ours tonight. Unless I miss my guess, hell will pop loose along the road and out of the hell we might get the galoot back of this double, double cross and figure his game.”
“Figure his game, hell!” snarled Groucho. “Let me get a squint at the double crossing rat and I’ll pump him full of lead.”
“You would, dumb-bell!” smiled Smiling Jimmie. “You drill him before I get a chance to make him talk and you’ll be giving birth to a load of lead yourself.”
“Can that talk, boys,” urged Shanty. “Let’s work this thing out, first.”
The three hitched up their chairs closer to the table and bowed their shaggy heads together in conference.
To look at his round, placid, moon-like face, one would never have suspected China Cholly of being a bad man — killer. Especially so on this same morning as he ambled serenely up the Bowery and turned into Pell Street. Cholly greeted all his countrymen with an expansive chatter of high-key Cantonese and balanced the rakish checkered hat over one ear.
China Cholly was in a very genial mood that morning and with good reason, too. For there had come to him, via the complicated underworld grapevine, word that a load of genuine booze under bond was coming into the city that night.
Three doors down on Pell Street, he stopped before a low, dilapidated wooden structure. On the window was painted in shaky English letters the legend — Hop Sing, Laundry. As if to make the statement good, a few fly-bespeckled collars and one solitary antiquated dress shirt huddled together in one corner of the window.
Cholly looked once up and down the street; snapped his cigarette butt out into the gutter with a deft flick of his wrist and then gently rapped on the door. It opened on silent, well-oiled hinges for him and closed on his retreating back as swiftly and secretively. Hop Sing’s place, at one time in the distant past, might have served as a laundry, but that far off day had been forgotten even by China Cholly.
He passed swiftly through the main store, now heavy with flaky dust and tangled with spider webs. This outer sanctum was presided over by a sallow, pig-tailed Chinaman, who drowsed in a Buddhistic attitude at the door.
Cholly gently pulled aside the heavy curtains hanging at the rear of the room and slipped down a short damp hallway. He pulled up abruptly before a blank wall, while his agile fingers traced an intricate pattern across an inlaid panel. Under his manipulation a concealed door swung inward through which he swiftly disappeared.
No matter how tough a gang of Chinamen may be, they never look it. China Cholly’s outfit of killers was as murderous as any that haunted the underworld of New York, but to look at their bland, smiling faces as their Chief entered, one would have suspected them of nothing more vicious than an occasional puff at the pipe.
“Monling, boys,” sing-songed Cholly. “How’s everything? Hokay?”
“Hokay,” they answered in chorus.
China Cholly pulled up a chair, extracted a bag of Bull Durham and proceeded to roll a rice paper cigarette with yellow-stained fingers. He inhaled deeply for a minute. No one spoke, but six pairs of slant eyes followed his every movement. Cholly didn’t encourage questions from his men. He ordered, and they obeyed.
“Have all boys here nine o’clock tonight,” he jerked out in his sing-song voice. “I have tip-off.”
“All light. Boys he be here,” answered Soy Low, Cholly’s deputy.
“We take booze come in under Government bond,” continued Cholly. “You have all boys ready, Soy Low. By God, we make fifty grand tonight, maybe. Nine o’clock I be here. Have boys ready with guns.”
“Hokay,” replied the stolid Soy Low.
With the assurance that his brief orders would be carried out implicitly, Cholly reverted to his native tongue and gave vent to a long string of Chinese incantation. His followers beamed on him. China Cholly was a “funny fella,” and fifty grand would buy many hours of bliss via the poppy route.
It seems that the tip off that both Shanty Hogan and China Cholly thought their own private property, had been broadcast, for still another underworld chief made plans that morning for the capture of the load of good booze coming into the city under bond. “Little Hymie” Zeiss, in his strong-hold back of an abandoned water front warehouse, also went into executive session with his mob of rods.
“Boys,” said Little Hymie, “there’s money to be picked up tonight. A big piece of change. I got the tip-off straight.”
“Yeah?” growled Butch, his right hand man. “I remember the last time you got the office straight. We ran into a load of bulls and federals and damn near got shot all to hell!”
“I remember that too,” answered Zeiss, “but this time we’ll be ready for ’em if they come. Have the boys loaded down with artillery. If somebody gets funny along the way, blow ’em to hell and don’t stop to argue or ask any questions. Read about it in the papers.”
“The lay is queer, I tell you,” insisted Butch.
“I got a hunch that way myself,” agreed Little Hymie.
“Then why step into hell?”
“Because,” answered Hymie, “it’s time for a show-down. This might be a frame. Maybe this is Shanty Hogan’s dirt or maybe the Chink’s. Then again it might be somebody else trying to give the works to us. If my info is good and on the up and up — we get the booze. If somebody’s put the screws to us, this is the way to find out.”
“It’s the screws, Hymie, it’s the screws,” complained Butch.
“Then what’s eating you?” barked Little Hymie. “Don’t we know what to do with stool pigeon punks? We’ll give ’em the works and collect a bounty from Hogan and Cholly.”
The bleak March day passed uneventfully. So stilled were the rumblings of the underworld that many knew it for the calm before the storm. The three gangs were busy with preparations for the night. Guns, revolvers, knives and automatics were brought out and oiled and polished: trigger fingers were limbered. A man’s life depended that night on how fast and straight he could shoot.
But the underworld was not alone in making preparations. There was a great show of activity in an altogether different quarter of the city that day. Police Headquarters buzzed with more than the usual excitement. Something big was on foot.
The same held true for the Federal Building, a few blocks south on lower Broadway. Closeted in his office with five of his most dependable officers, sat Silas Yelton, the fanatical head of the Prohibition forces for New York. Yelton was mentally gloating over the massacre he was planning for that night. He expected to make a big name for himself, in a big, spectacular way. What matter if half a dozen men or so were lost? Hadn’t he been appointed to uphold the sanctity of the Law?
“Men,” he began, “I have again received information from that mysterious source that has tipped me off so well in the past.”
“Then it’s on the level,” chortled Yancey, one of his deputies. “That guy who’s squealing, who ever it is, is the inside. He’s got the right dope. God help him if ever Little Hymie or Shanty Hogan or China Cholly spot him.”
“That’s not our worry,” snapped Yelton. “He’s informed me that all three, Hogan, Zeiss and the Chink, are going to make a try at hi-jacking that load of whiskey coming into New York tonight. That’s our opportunity. This is the time to make a real clean up. Those outfits have caused us too much trouble all ready. They’re a menace to the law.
“We’ll let the three gangs converge on the booze truck, kill each other off and then we’ll charge down and clean up the rest.”