But Cozenage merely smiled with gloomy unction. “Bawdy-Lair,” he murmured. “‘FLOR DEE MOLL.’ Now then!” (Big Patsy, The Kerry Pig, Wallace, and Red Fred, swallowed, convinced that the agent de police was merely playing cat-and-mouse with them.) “Did you people encounter any suspicious characters on your trip?”
Silence.
“Nobody tried to entice you into any little games of three-card monte in the passenger saloon of a sidewheel steamer?” Captain Cozenage inquired, hopefully.
Four heads were dumbly shaken from side to side. The Captain’s face fell. He had, some three months earlier, interrupted a bocca tournament on a shad-barge moored off South Street; but since then, nothing.
Patrolman Ottolenghi now for the first time made himself heard. “‘And the songs of the temple shall be howlings in that day,’” he groaned, “‘saith the Lord: there shall be many dead bodies in every place, they shall cast them forth in silence.’ Brethren—” he began. The Kerry Pig slowly and mesmerically crossed himself.
“Well, Captain,” Red Fred ventured timorously, “I’ve got to be getting these folks around. Heh. Heh.”
Ottolenghi, rolling his vacuous blue eyes in terrible righteousness, flailed wildly in the direction of the Caricature espresso house, intoning sonorously, “‘Then the Lord rained upon Sodom and upon Gomorrah brimstone and fire from the Lord out of heaven…’” and seemed intent to expound in uninvited and morbid detail on this theme when Big Patsy, endeavoring at one and the same time to Method-act his role and allay the officer’s fervor, added sotto voce:
“I’m hip! Wail, baby!”
At which comment Cozenage’s eyebrows, like a pair of startled caterpillars, squirmed upwards. “Oh, pansies, eh? Queers, huh! We got enough a them preverts walking the streets down here without you fags from outta town coming in to start trouble, pinchin’ sailors on shore leave, and like that.”
Suddenly beset by a tidal wave in a YMCA swimming pool, Red Fred felt a frantic leap in his bosom. “Oh, no, no indeed no, Captain, these gentlemen aren’t—”
“Enough! Enough!” cried the good Captain. “I’ve heard sufficient out of the lot of you. Ottolenghi, let’s take ‘em down for questioning.”
He mumbled vaguely about faggaluh, and made to step onto the running board of the little snail steam engine.
Bit Patsy (his life flashing by at 16 mm…and not worth living a second time) leaped over the small retaining wall between the lead car and the engine, shoved Red Fred aside and floored the accelerator of the still-running machine. The snailery careened forward, throwing Cozenage to the sidewalk.
Ottolenghi ranted. Second Corinthians.
Red Fred shrieked.
Cozenage cursed, in meter.
Wallace “Gefilte” Fish fainted.
The Kerry Pig began to cry.
And like thieves in the night, the Fearful Four burst out into the open, streaking for uptown, and the anonymity of TWA flight 614 to Orly Airport.
Now if this were some vehicle of fiction, rather than a sober chronicling of real-life people in real-life situations, Captain Cozenage would have leaped to his feet, streaked down MacDougal to the police callbox on the corner of Minetta Lane—and thrown home an alarm that would have instantly set patrol car radios crackling with APBs for Big Patsy, his accomplices, and semi-innocent Red Fred. But, since no such melodramatic incidents are involved in day-to-day routine police investigatory work, Patrolman Ottolenghi stooped and helped his superior to his feet, assisted him in brushing off his suit, aided in the rather awkward re-adjustment of Captain Cozenage’s holster harness, and nodded understandingly, as the good Captain pouted:
“That’s a helluva way to treat an officer of the law.”
So while Red Fred and his group were hysterically splitting the scene, Captain Cozenage and his staff turned their attentions to rumors of a high-dice game going on among a pre-puberty peer-group in the tool shed of a private quay off the foot of Christopher Street.
Let’s face it…that is the way the old cop flops.
Big Patsy, sweating copiously, and not from the sun (that Stone that Puts the Stars to Flight), either: Big Patsy, we say, observing that there appeared to be not only no pursuit but no indication of public interest in the caterpillar’s rapid transit from Rechov MacDougal—save it might be a grumpy moue of, “Cool it, paddys!” from a passing citizen of Nigerian extraction as Old 96 tore past at a rapid 38 m.p.h., narrowly missing him—beat his way around the Horn and entered the semi-sacrosanct purlieus of Washington Square.
At which juncture he found his intention of losing the caravan in the first cul-de-sac and bespeaking a mechanical clarence, or taxi-cab, for Kennedy International, frustrated by the unforeseen presence of a teeming mob of citizens; all of whom greeted his arrival with loud huzzahs of joy.
“Oh, goody, the answering service did manage to get in touch with you!” cried a busty matron in harlequin bifocals and bermudas which, though roomy, were not quite roomy enough. See now The Kerry Pig, tears still wet on his ginger-colored face, hastily avert his eyes.
Red Fred groggily clung to the controls. Big Patsy considered swift flight, but the sans-culottes were all around him, thick as fallen leaves in Vallembrossa or pollen-footed bees on the violet-woven slopes of Mount Hymettus: choose one. (One from Column “A” and two from Column “B” or two from “A” and one from “B”—you get egg roll, either way.) Squealing merrily, the citizens climbed—thronged, rather; swarmed—aboard, displaying banners with such strange devices as Save The Village, Hold That (Tammany) Tiger, Destruction Of Landmarks Must Cease, Preserve Low-Rent Housing, Urban Renewers Go Home, and sic c.
“Where to?” Fred demanded groggilyer.
The question was answered by hundreds of determined holders of the elective franchise as if by one: “To City Hall!”
“Aw0000,” bawled The Kerry Pig, burying his face in his hands.
“Any minute now, any goddam minute now,” Big Patsy cried, “Groucho, Harpo and Chico will come through chasing a turkey with croquet mallets. An prob’ly Zeppo and Gummo, too,” he added, esoterically.
“WHERE TO, GANG!” shouted one of the Seekers of Justice and Retribution, harkening for the expected answer.
“CITY HALL! CITY HALL!” it came thundering back from hundreds of sweaty faces.
“City Hall?” asked Wallace Fish in a small voice.
“City Hall,” Red Fred replied resignedly, shrugging his shoulders.
“And not to meet Grover Whalen, either,” he added, mixed emotions melding mucously in his voice. He headed crosstown with the expression of one who not only has his hand on the throttle, but expects momentarily to be a-scalded to death by steam. As if in a reverie, or waking dream, he automatically drove his train of cars along its familiar route. The perfervid shouts and groans of the passengers fell but faintly on his inner ears. It he failed to aid Big Patsy, Wallace “Gefilte” Fish, and The Kerry Pig in making good their escape from the Constabulary, the three would beyond doubt find an occasion to tread and trample him into the consistency of a creole gumbo, even if they had to break stir to do it. And, on the other hand, if he should be taken up by the gendarmerie in this affair, not only did he stand excellent chance of being stood in the stocks with his ears cropped for violating the Idlers’ and Gamesters’ Accomplices Act III of William and Mary 12 c; but the police—excitable as children, but much stronger—might easily do him a mischief.