Part 19 (1/2)
”That'll be all right,” said Ginsburg crisply. It was his business to avoid the issue of a clash. ”And it'll be all right your calling me a Jew. I am a Jew and I'm proud of it. And I'm wearing the same name I started out with too.”
”Is that so?”
Except in the inspired pages of fiction city thugs are singularly barren of power to deliver really snappy, really witty retorts.
”Is that so, Jew?” He stared at Ginsburg and a derisive grin opened a gap in his broad dark face. ”Oh, be chee! We ain't strangers--you and me ain't! We've met before--when we was kids. Down in Henry Street, it was. I put me mark on you oncet, and if I ever feel like it I'll do it again sometime.”
Like a match under shavings the words kindled half-forgotten memories in the young detective's brain and now--for his part--recognition came flas.h.i.+ng back out of the past.
”I thought so,” he said, choosing to ignore the gangster and addressing Casane. ”I thought from the first Gorman wasn't his right name. I've forgotten what his right name is, but it's nothing that sounds like Gorman. He's a wop. I went to the same school with him over on the East Side a good many years ago.”
”Don't forget to tell him how the wop licked the Jew,” broke in the prisoner. ”Remember how the sc.r.a.p started?”
He spat again and this time he did not miss. Ginsburg put up his gloved hand and wiped clean a face that with pa.s.sion had turned a mottle of red-and-white blotches. His voice shook from the strain of his effort to control himself.
”I'll get you for that,” he said quietly. ”And I'll get you good. The day'll come when I'll walk you in broad daylight up to the big chief, and I'll have the goods on you too.”
”Forget it,” jeered the ruffian triumphantly. Before the eyes of his satellites he had--by his standards--acquitted himself right creditably. ”You got nothin' on me now, Jew, and you never will have.
Well, come on, you bulls, let's be goin' along. I wouldn't want the neither one of you for steady company. One of you is too polite and the other'n too meek for my tastes.”
The man who was called Stretchy Gorman spoke a prophetic word when he said the police had nothing on him. Since they had nothing on him, he was let go after forty-eight hours of detention; but that is not saying they did not intend, if they could--and in such cases they usually can--to get something on him.
No man in the department had better reason to crave that consummation than Hyman Ginsburg had. With him the hope of achieving revenge became practically an obsession. It rode in his thoughts. Any hour, in a campaign to harry the gangster to desperation by means of methods that are common enough inside the department, he might have invoked competent and willing a.s.sistance, for the word had filtered down from on high, where the seats of the mighty are, that those mysterious forces aloft would look complacently upon the eternal undoing of the Stretchy Gormans and their t.i.tular leader, no matter how accomplished.
But this notion did not match in with the colour of Ginsburg's desires.
Single-handed, he meant to do the trick. Most probably then the credit would be all his; a.s.suredly the satisfaction would. When he considered this prospect his mind ran back along old grooves to the humiliating beating he had suffered in front of the Henry Street school so long before and of a most painful strapping that followed; these being coupled always with a later memory scar of a grievous insult endured in the line of duty and all the more hateful because it had been endured.
Once Ginsburg had read a book out of a public library--a book which mentally he called Less Miserables. Through the pages of that book there had walked a detective whom Ginsburg in his mind knew by the name of Jawbert. Now he recalled how this Jawbert spent his life tracking down an offender who was the main hero of the book. He told himself that in the matter of Stretchy Gorman he would be as another Jawbert.
By way of a beginning he took advantage of leisure hours to trace out the criminal history of his destined victim. In the gallery he found numbered and cla.s.sified photographs; in the Bertillon bureau, finger prints; and in the records, what else he lacked of information--as an urchin, so many years spent in the protectory; as a youth, so many years in the reformatory; as a man, a year on Blackwell's Island for a misdemeanour and a three-year term at Sing Sing for a felony; also he dug up the entry of an indictment yet standing on which trial had never been held for lack of proof to convict; finally a long list of arrests for this and that and the other thing, unproved. From under a succession of aliases he uncovered Gorman's real name.
But a sequence of events delayed his fuller a.s.sumption of the role of Jawbert. He was sent to Rio de Janeiro to bring back an absconder of note. Six months he worked on the famous Gonzales child-stealing mystery. He made two trips out to the Pacific Coast in connection with the Chappy Morgan wire-tapping cases. Few of the routine jobs about the detective bureau fell to him. He was too good for routine and his superiors recognised the fact and were governed thereby.
By the rules of tradition, Ginsburg--as a successful detective--should have been either an Irishman or of Irish descent. But in the second biggest police force in the world, wherein twenty per cent of the personnel wear names that betoken Jewish, Slavic or Latin forebears, tradition these times suffers many a body wallop.
On a night in early April, Ginsburg, coming across from New Jersey, landed off a ferryboat at Christopher Street. He had gone across the river to gather up a loose end of the evidence acc.u.mulating against Chappy Morgan, king of the wireless wire-tappers. It was nearly midnight when he emerged from the ferryhouse. In sight was no surface car; so he set out afoot to walk across town to where he lived on the East Side.
Going through a side street in a district which mainly is given over to the establishments of textile jobbers, he observed, half a block away, a fire escape that bore strange fruit. The front line of a stretch of tallish buildings stood out in relief against the background of a wet moon and showed him, high up on the iron ladder which flighted down the face of one house of the row, two dark clumps, one placed just above the other.
Ginsburg slipped into a protecting ledge of shadow close up against the buildings and edged along nearer. The clumps resolved into the figures of men. One--the uppermost shape of a man--was receiving from some unseen sources flat burdens that came down over the roof coping and pa.s.sing them along to the accomplice below. The latter in turn stacked them upon the grilled floor of the fire balcony that projected out into s.p.a.ce at the level of the fourth floor, the building being five floors in height. By chance Ginsburg had happened upon a loft-robbing enterprise.
He s.h.i.+fted his revolver from his hip pocket to the side pocket of his overcoat and crept closer, planning for the pair so intently engaged overhead a surprise when they should descend with their loot. There was no time now to seek out the patrolman on the post; the job must be all his.
Two doors from the building that had been entered he crept noiselessly down into a bas.e.m.e.nt and squatted behind an ash barrel. It was inky black in there; so inkily black he never suspected that the recess held another tenant. Your well-organised loft-robbing mob carries along a lookout who in case of discovery gives warning; in case of attack, repels the attack, and in case of pursuit acts as rear guard. In Stretchy Gorman's operations Stretchy acted as his own lookout, and a highly competent one he was, too, with a preference for lurking in areaways while his lieutenants carried forward the more arduous but less responsible shares of the undertaking.
In the darkness behind Ginsburg where he crouched a long gorilla's arm of an arm reached outward and downward, describing an arc. You might call it the long arm of coincidence and be making no mistake either. At the end of the arm was a fist and in the fist a length of gas pipe wrapped in rags. This gas pipe descended upon the back of Ginsburg's skull, crus.h.i.+ng through the derby hat he wore. And the next thing Ginsburg knew he was in St. Vincent's Hospital with a splitting headache and the United States Government had gone to war against the German Empire.
Ginsburg did not volunteer. The parent who once had wielded the disciplinary strap-end so painstakingly had long since rejoined his bearded ancestors, but there was a dependent mother to be cared for and a whole covey of younger brothers and sisters to be shepherded through school and into sustaining employment. So he waited for the draft, and when the draft took him and his number came out in the drawing, as it very soon did, he waived his exemptions and went to training camp wearing an old suit of clothes and an easy pair of shoes. Presently he found himself transferred to a volunteer outfit--one of the very few draft men who were to serve with that outfit.
In camp the discipline he had acquired and the drilling he had done in his prentice days on the force stood him in good stead. Hard work trimmed off of him the layers of tissue he had begun to take on; plain solid food finished the job of unlarding his frame. Shortly he was Corporal Ginsburg--a trim upstanding corporal. Then he became Sergeant Ginsburg and soon after this was Second Sergeant Ginsburg of B Company of a regiment still somewhat sketchy and ragged in its make-up, but with promise of good stuff to emerge from the ma.s.s of its material. When his regiment and his division went overseas, First Sergeant Ginsburg went along too.