Lawless (45 page)

“I’ll try to remember that.”

“Theo won’t let you forget it—if you pass the test.”

With another of those shining smiles meant to soothe away his anxiety, she poured more tea for both of them.

“Let’s drink a toast to the success of your forthcoming interview.”

They did, but it didn’t reassure him that he’d succeed with Theophilus Payne.

A
WEEK BEFORE
Christmas, Gideon took Strelnik to supper at a modest but pleasant tavern on Ann Street, a few steps east of its junction with Broadway and Park Row. They sat at a table by a window. It was just seven o’clock as they ordered veal chops and ale.

The first flakes of a snow began to come straight down in the windless air. Strelnik raised the subject of the letter to subscribers, which he’d finally seen. Gideon was compelled to explain. He finished by saying, “As a matter of fact, I’m going up to the
Union
tonight.” He’d been inventing excuses for postponing the visit, no doubt from fear that he’d fail to win Payne’s approval.

Strelnik shoved his mug of ale to one side and squinted through the smoke of his cigarette. “And the demise of the
Beacon
is final?”

Gideon nodded.

“Whether the
Union
will have you or not?”

Another nod.

The bearded man snickered. “The worker’s paradise is here at last. The boss may be rejected by his own employee. Gideon, I can’t believe it. I can’t believe you’ll go crawling to the editor of that capitalist rag.”

“Who hates Southerners, by the way,” Gideon put in, hoping to jolly the little man out of his bitterness. “Molly came up to Yorkville to visit the children last week, and she again confessed Payne isn’t as coldly objective as she first led me to believe. He used to despise secessionists, but since that issue has been settled he’s switched to hating trade unionists.”

Strelnik wasn’t amused. He flung his cigarette on the pegged floor and stamped on it. “Isn’t that splendid? Well, it’s very clear you’ve sold out.”

“Damn it, Sime, I have not!” Heads turned as he raised his voice.

“Yes you have. You’ve sold out the movement completely.”

“I’ve found a better way to
promote
the movement.”

“Pfaugh. I know what happens when a man becomes a boss.” The word was supremely contemptuous. “That Mr. Dana who runs the
Sun
—you know how much he likes trade unions.”

“He loathes them, just like Payne. What’s the point?”

“Twenty or thirty years ago he was a socialist.” Gideon gaped. “Ask anybody, it’s God’s truth. Owning things changes people. Power changes people too. It’s done that to you.”

Abruptly he stood up. Angry now, Gideon grabbed his arm.

“Don’t act childish. I haven’t had a chance to give you all the details about the closing of the
Beacon.
I intend to pay you three months’ wages to tide you over while—”

Strelnik wrenched loose. “We don’t want your charity. Leah does piecework sewing at home. We can survive. Even if we couldn’t, I wouldn’t touch your money now. Go hobnob with your rich friends. Next time we meet we’ll be on opposite sides of a strike line.”

“Sime, you’re wrong. You’ll see.”

Strelnik laughed in a scornful way. For a moment more he gazed at his friend with barely suppressed contempt, then spun and walked away. The tavern door made a soft, sighing sound as it closed. Its lower edge was already blocked by a buildup of wet snow.

Gideon looked out the window as Strelnik’s bearded figure ghosted by, stirring the falling snowflakes. Strelnik didn’t so much as glance his way.

Park Row ran northeast from the intersection of Broadway and Ann. The city’s major papers were concentrated along the east side, in a short stretch known as Newspaper Row. It encompassed the blocks from Broadway up to Printing House Square, the tiny triangle where Nassau and Frankfort came in. On the west side of the street lay the snow-covered expanse of City Hall Park.

It was a lovely evening, with the fluffy snow continuing to drift straight down. Gideon was oblivious to the beauty of tree branches and rooftops piled high with white like a winter scene in a book of fairy tales. He was thinking of Strelnik.

He felt wretched about the man’s accusations. That was true even though Strelnik could be almost foolishly partisan, and Gideon believed his former assistant was definitely in the wrong this time. Still, he didn’t want to lose Strelnik’s friendship. He hoped time would heal the rift. He planned to send Leah Strelnik a draft for her husband’s severance pay. She was practical enough to accept the money with no quibbles about its source.

Newspaper delivery wagons went racing up and down Park Row in the lamplit darkness. They were traveling at top speed despite the hazardous condition of the street. Gideon was twice bumped by harried men in derbies rushing on some errand or other. Reporters, he surmised. The telegraph helped gather news these days, but there was still no substitute for the reporter’s legs.

Soon he began to experience a little of the sense of intimidation he’d felt at Courtleigh’s house. Here indeed lay power. The power that reposed in men’s minds, and men’s published thoughts. The generally nondescript buildings hulking in the snow housed some of the mightiest institutions in the land.

The
Herald.
The
Tribune.
The
Sun. Times. Star. Mail and Express. Commercial Advertiser.
Jay Gould’s
World,
acquired as part of a stock deal.

He couldn’t think of all the names. But there among them, facing the
Times
and Greeley’s
Tribune
on Printing House Square, stood the three-story building with the signboard reading
NEW YORK UNION.
The board bore the emblem devised by the family’s founder—the stoppered bottle partially full of tea.

Philip Kent had adopted the symbol when he started his first printing establishment during the Revolutionary War. He had owned and prized such a bottle. He’d collected the contents when he participated in Mr. Samuel Adams’ famous tea party in Boston Harbor. The actual bottle, green glass with the old tea still inside, stood on the mantel in Yorkville. It was one of a number of priceless mementoes of the Kent family’s past.

The December night felt almost warm because of the snow’s insulating effect. Gaslights blazed all across the second floor of the
Union
—the arched windows of the editorial department.

Gideon gazed at that brilliance and decided his timidity was not only shameful but foolish. Hadn’t Jeb Stuart proved time and again that fear never won an engagement for any man or any army? Besides, he was legitimate heir to some of the power on Newspaper Row, and the fact that he didn’t yet know how to use it didn’t mean he couldn’t learn. He could and he would.

His chin lifted. He strode toward the triangular park and saw a number of ragged boys huddling around the base of the statue of the nation’s most famous printer, Dr. Benjamin Franklin.

As Gideon’s boots crunched the snow in the park, heads came up. Cigarettes glowed beneath the bills of dirty caps. One young face was completely hidden by exhaled smoke. Gideon heard comments exchanged in Yiddish and German. There were about a dozen of the young Street Arabs, as they were called, seeking shelter near the statue. On other occasions he’d seen such boys at the wagon docks of various papers, waiting to be given stacks of the latest edition on consignment. The boys hawked the papers on street corners all over town. And those weren’t the only locations they worked. Since his talk with Molly, he had started studying the New York newspaper industry, and he knew the
Daily News
had boosted its circulation to eighty thousand by lowering its price to a penny and sending boys into tenements to tap a completely new market.

He passed the statue and walked on toward the entrance to the
Union.
One of the boys got up and followed. Gideon heard the footsteps. He stopped in front of the building and turned.

Dull light from the frosted windows of the ground-floor press room fell across the face of a startlingly handsome youngster of about twelve. The boy was saved from prettiness by a cheerfully insolent mouth. He wore ragged trousers tucked into heavy black knee stockings, a man’s coat with huge holes in it, a scarf and a cap that he dragged off as he asked, “Mister, do you know whether the
Union
will be printing any extras tonight?” Extra editions were a staple of the trade.

“Couldn’t say, son. I don’t work here.”

“Oh, I thought you were a reporter.” The boy’s voice startled Gideon because it was really two voices, a somewhat nasal adolescent one, and a beautiful adult baritone. The boy seemed unconcerned about the abrupt shifts from one to the other. He started away. “Good evening.”

What a remarkable voice, Gideon thought. When it changed permanently, the lad would have all the makings of an orator. Curious, he called to the retreating figure, “Out pretty late, aren’t you?”

The boy turned back. “Late?” He grinned. “I thought you were an American, mister.”

“I am.”

“Then why don’t you know that over here, nobody bosses you around? You take charge of your own life, and do what you have to do to make a nickel.”

“Where’d you come from?”

“Munich, mister. By way of Bremerhaven. When I was about so long.” He measured a foot of snowy air with gloves worn through at all the fingertips. “My father says I lay on my mother’s stomach for most of the trip. It cost them the equivalent of twenty-five American dollars to buy two spaces on a mail packet. Two spaces five feet long and two and a half wide, chalked out ’tween the decks. Father says he and Mother got slops for food, and a lot of the newcomers died on the way, but the Goldmans survived, thank you kindly.” In a brash and somehow touching imitation of an adult, he extended his right hand. “My name’s Leo Goldman.”

They shook. Gideon felt the cold of the boy’s hand.

“Gideon Kent, Leo.”

“Yes, sir, happy to make your acquaintance. You born in America, were you?”

“Virginia.”

“Well, I’m only an adopted American, I suppose you could say. But I mean to be a good one. I’m not so rich as a Rothschild yet, and I still live on Hester Street”—the name of a particularly noxious thoroughfare in the lower East Side ghetto—“but I’ll change both those things before I’m much older. I’m going to make my fortune here.”

Gideon didn’t crack a smile. There was a determined look in Leo Goldman’s dark eyes, and he had the feeling the boy would punch him if he laughed at the sober, almost passionate declaration.

“An admirable ambition. Do you know how you’re going to do it?”

“Not yet, sir. I’ll find a way. It’s possible to do it in America, you know. Such an amazing country. Every man his own king—every man his own priest. Or in my case, rabbi. Well, good evening to you, Mr.—”

All at once recognition swept over the boy’s face. He lost his self-assured air and very nearly stammered.

“Kent, you said.
Kent.
One of the older fellows told me the Kents own this paper.” A tattered glove lifted toward the frosted windows and the presses rumbling beyond. “Are you … ?”

Gideon nodded.

“Well! You’ve made your fortune.”

“To tell the truth, it was made for me,” Gideon answered with a smile. “At the moment I’m trying to learn how to use it properly.” He dug in his pocket and produced a one-dollar shinplaster. “Here. You can’t carry a stack of papers if your hands are frozen. Buy yourself a decent pair of gloves.”

Leo Goldman studied the bill and finally saw its denomination. His eyes grew huge. His voice slid up the scale to a near squeak. “Holy Tammany. I can buy gloves and some bread for my sisters, too.”

“How many sisters do you have?”

“Nine. We all sleep in one room, so I camp out whenever I can.” He began to unfold the dollar. Then his eyes narrowed, and a suspicious old man looked out from the handsome face. “I don’t have to do any—special tricks for this, do I? If I do, I won’t take it.”

“Leo, it’s yours. With no strings on it.”

“Thank you, Mr. Kent. Thank you indeed. Good health to you!”

The boy went racing back across the street to the statue of Franklin, where his friends crowded around him to hear of his good fortune. Gideon smiled again. The brief encounter had restored his spirits.

He turned and entered the building. The rumbling presses shook the steps leading up to the editorial rooms. He climbed the steps with confidence, telling himself there wasn’t a Yankee born who could stand up to one of Jeb Stuart’s own.

T
HE EDITORIAL OFFICE
was one large room stretching from the high arched windows at the front to a partitioned telegraph room at the rear. Gaslit cubicles lined the wall opposite the head of the stairs. The hub of the big, dingy room was a large desk. Two dozen smaller desks surrounding it were all turned so they faced it. These smaller desks had tilted tops, and at several of them men in shirtsleeves or dark jackets were writing longhand copy with pencils, usually amid a litter of notes. Most of the reporters puffed cigars and wore their hats.

Occasionally one of the men shouted for a copy boy. There were two working, Gideon observed as he slowly traversed the room. For all the attention he received, he might have been a derelict instead of part owner. A few people glanced at him, but no one said anything.

He watched a copy boy hustle a finished manuscript to the central desk. The man seated there scanned it, penciled a few corrections, then wrote something on a separate sheet and pinned it to the story. The boy ran it to an opening in the wall—a kind of dumbwaiter—and placed the copy on a tray. He pulled a cord. The tray started downward. To the composing room, Gideon supposed.

There was continuous, low-level noise in the room, consisting of the rumble of the presses, the chatter of telegraph sounders from the back, and the intermittent buzz of conversation punctuated by yelling or a question called from the central desk. The scene reminded Gideon of a painting done in dark pigments; the figures had a blurred look in the low, smoky gaslight.