Andrew Williams - The Poison Tide

‘Hey buddy,’ protested the guard, as he stepped from the moving train.

Wolff followed the big man down the steps and waited in the gloom beneath the rumbling iron arches of the elevated as he crossed the square to a dingy café. It was a neighbourhood of cheap saloons, flophouses and hucksters’ stalls at the edge of the old Five Points slum: crowded brick tenements and alleys hung with grey washing; shoeshines, rag pickers and beggars. The first stop after Ellis Island for families without a dollar to their name and for those who weren’t particular how they made their money; as squalid as the old-world streets they had left in search of liberty from poverty. Too good now for Germans and all but a few of the Irish, it was the jetsam of the new century who lived, copulated and died in this babel, the Italians and the Poles, Jews and Chinamen. The sort of district, Wolff reflected, where it was possible to find any number of men who would be ready to stick you in the back — or blow up a ship. Was that the fat man’s business?

There was a small Italian market in the corner of the square only a few yards from the café. It wasn’t an easy vantage point; he was too well dressed, a little too Anglo-Saxon. Fortunately, the market was restless with late-afternoon trade, the stallholders in duckbill caps and boaters, barking out their bargains in the Sicilian dialect, while young women in brightly coloured shawls queued for a few cents’ advantage and local urchins joked and shouted insults from the tailboard of a passing cart. From beneath the canopy of a boot store, Wolff could see through the confusion to the fat man in the café, his shoulder pressed to the grimy window. In no time at all he’d ordered a plate of something and was devouring it mechanically.

Someone jogged Wolff’s elbow: ‘Shine, miss-ter?’ It was a swarthy-looking boy in a grubby shirt and braces, his trousers hoisted a foot from his boots.

‘Can you do it here, in front of the shop?’

He gave Wolff a toothless grin. ‘Is my uncle’s store,’ he lisped. ‘Sit yerseff.’

Wolff was particular about placing the chair.

At a little after five, the fat man was joined by a cheap suit, short, with a dark complexion and a thin waxed handlebar moustache. Hungarian perhaps; he might have been a waiter in a small-town Bierkeller somewhere in the Habsburg Empire. They shook hands, a little reluctantly on the small man’s part, Wolff thought. He refused the waiter’s offer of drink or food and appeared anxious to get on with whatever business he was there to transact.

‘Finished!’

‘Here.’ Wolff flipped another dime to the shine. ‘Do them again, will you — and another coin if you don’t ask me why.’

But Rintelen’s man wasn’t in a hurry. A second plate of food was placed in front of him and he polished it off with the same ugly relish. His contact watched in distaste, fiddling impatiently with a knife. Replete at last, the fat man wiped his mouth on his sleeve, then fished the envelope from his jacket. It rested beneath his heavy hand as he leant over the table confidentially. For a couple of minutes he spoke in what must have been a whisper while his companion made a note in a pocketbook. Business concluded, he slid the money across. With just a curt nod, the contact left the café and drifted through the crush around the market stalls to the kerb. After a few yards he stepped from the sidewalk and turned across the square in the direction of Wolff.

God, he’s seen me, he thought with a surge of anger and disgust.

‘All right!’ He jerked his shoe savagely from the shine’s hands and got to his feet. But he was wrong: the little man with the waxed moustache slipped between an empty cart and a stall selling straw hats and crossed to a door just three down from the uncle’s boot store.

‘Here.’ Wolff tossed the shine a quarter. ‘This is a good day for you, yes?’

The boy flashed his toothless smile. ‘Again?’ he asked, glancing down at Wolff’s shoes.

‘No, no, bravo. Just one thing…’ and he held up another coin. ‘Can you read?’

‘Multo bene,’ he replied indignantly.

‘The door there, the green one, run over and tell me the names on the bell.’

He chuckled. ‘There justa one.’

‘Oh?’

‘G-r-een’s Dee-tect-if A-gen-zee,’ the boy enunciated slowly.

‘Green’s Detective Agency?’

‘Si, signore.’

Rintelen’s man settled the check and left a few minutes later. It was almost dark, a sharp October chill in the air, and the streetlamps glowed soft with the threat of rain. On evenings like this the city ticked a little quicker. Manhattan pulled down its hat, turned up its collar and lengthened its stride for home; and those travelling further, uptown or across the East River, were grateful for the fug of a smoke-filled carriage. The fat man walked only as far as Bowery, then caught a tram to East 2nd. Little Germany. So they were neighbours. Wolff tracked him from the opposite side of the street, just another Joe trailing home from a factory or department store to a plump wife and children, bills, boiled potatoes, and that day’s New Yorker Staats-Zeitung . Two blocks down only, across from the city’s Marble Cemetery, the fat man let himself into a tall tenement of the sort common on the Lower East Side — black iron fire escapes clinging to its brick face like a cancerous growth. Wolff waited in the shadow of a doorway for a few minutes to see if a light came on at the front. No such luck.

The caretaker took his time to answer the door. He was an old man, bent and grey. His shirtsleeves were rolled up and he was holding a kitchen knife; he must have been cooking his supper. Wolff thought he detected the faint whiff of incontinence.

‘Yes,’ he asked suspiciously.

‘There’s a man, a fat man who lives here,’ Wolff replied in German. ‘Short black curly hair, grey suit, lots of chins,’ and he held his hands to his neck to demonstrate.

The old man blinked at him but said nothing.

‘I have something for him.’ Wolff paused, inviting a response. ‘Well?’

‘Not here.’

‘You’re Swabian?’

‘What of it.’ He began to close the door. Wolff reached out to catch its edge. ‘Just a minute… look, he dropped something.’

‘Are you police?’

‘No, didn’t I just say — he dropped some money. I want to give it back to him.’

The caretaker stopped trying to force the door. ‘How much?’

Wolff took five dollars from his wallet. ‘It may have been more.’ Then, after a pause, ‘You understand?’

He gave a sharp nod and stepped aside. ‘I thought you were the police.’

‘Why?’

‘They’ve been here too.’

He led Wolff round behind the stairs into his own small first-floor apartment. His front room smelt of cabbage. There was a suggestion of a woman’s touch once: a sewing machine, dirty lace curtains, the china figure of a shepherd girl on the mantelpiece.

‘Well?’

‘He’s Paul Koenig,’ he said, holding out a wrinkled yellow palm. ‘I’ll give him the money. You sure you’re not the police?’

‘Koenig. And he lives here?’

The old man shook a crooked finger at him cantankerously, then held out his hand again. Wolff gave him the five dollars.

‘You can trust me,’ the caretaker remarked lamely; ‘we’re all Germans. Last of the buildings round here. The rest are full of Jews and Italians.’ He stuffed the money into his trouser pocket. ‘Yes, he lives here. Third floor at the back. Has done for years. Works for Hamburg America, or used to. Something to do with their security.’ He gave Wolff a hard, unfriendly stare. ‘You look like a cop.’

‘What did they want to know?’

But only when Wolff counted out another five was he prepared to say more. Not the ordinary police, he said. They were watching Koenig; searched his room. ‘They didn’t say why. Is he in trouble?’