The Apaches of New York

by Alfred Henry Lewis

“Very well,” returned my friend, relenting; “I don't want to put you in Dutch with your fleet.”

There was a whispered brief word or two, and an arrangement for a meet was made; after which Ike the Blood lapsed into the uneasy circle he had quitted. As we left the grogshop, we could hear him loudly calling for beer. Possibly the Central Office nearness of my friend had rendered him thirsty. Or it may have been that the beer was meant to wet down and allay whatever of sprouting suspicion had been engendered in the trustless breasts of his followers.

It was a week later.

The day, dark and showery, was—to be exact—the eighth of August. Faithful to that whispered Henry Street arrangement, Ike the Blood sat awaiting the coming of my friend and myself in the Bal Tabarin. He had spoken of the stuss house of Phil Casey and Paper Box Johnny, in Twenty-ninth Street, but my friend entered a protest. There was his Central Office character to be remembered. A natural embarrassment must ensue were he brought face to face with stuss in a state of activity. Stuss was a crime, by surest word of law, and he had taken an oath of office. He did not care to pinch either Paper Box or Casey, and therefore preferred not to be drawn into a situation where the only alternative would be to either pull their joint or lay the bedplates of complaint against himself.

“It's no good time to be up on charges,” remonstrated my friend, “for the commish that's over us now would sooner grab a copper than a crook.”

Thus instructed, and feeling the delicacy of my friend's position, Ike the Blood had shifted suggestion to the Bal Tabarin. The latter house of entertainment, in Twenty-eighth Street, was innocent of stuss and indeed cards in any form. Kept by Sam Paul, it possessed a deserved popularity with Ike and the more select of his acquaintances.

Ike the Blood appeared to better advantage in the Bal Tabarin than on that other, Henry Street, grogshop occasion. Those suspicious ones, of lowering eye and doubtful brow, had been left behind, and their absence contributed to his relief, and therefore to his looks. Not that he had been sitting in the midst of loneliness at the Bal Tabarin; Whitey Dutch and Slimmy were with him, and who should have been better company than they? Also, their presence was of itself an honor, since they were of his own high caste, and many layers above a mere gang peasantry. They would take part in the conversation, too, and, if to talk and touch glasses with a Central Office bull were an offense, it would leave them as deep in the police mud as was he in the police mire.

Ike the Blood received us gracefully, if not enthusiastically, and was so polite as to put me on a friendly footing with his companions. Greetings over, and settled to something like our ease, I engaged myself mentally in taking Ike's picture. His forehead narrow, back-sloping at that lively angle identified by carpenters as a quarter-pitch, was not the forehead of a philosopher. I got the impression, too, that his small brown eyes, sad rather than malignant, would in any heat of anger blaze like twin balls of brown fire. Cheek-bones high; nose beaky, predatory—such a nose as Napoleon loved in his marshals; mouth coarsely sensitive, suggesting temperament; the broad, bony jaw giving promise of what staying qualities constitute the stock in trade of a bulldog; no mustache, no beard; a careless liberality of ear—that should complete the portrait. Fairly given, it was the picture of one who acted more than he thought, and whose atmosphere above all else conveyed the feeling of relentless force—the picture of one who under different circumstances might have been a Murat or a Massena.

My friend managed the conversation, and did it with Central Office tact. Knowing what I was after, he brought up Gangland and the gangs, upon which topics Whitey Dutch, seeing no reasons for silence, spoke instructively. Aside from the great gangs, the Eastmans and the Five Points, I learned that other smaller yet independent gangs existed. Also, from Whitey's discourse, it was made clear that just as countries had frontiers, so also were there frontiers to the countries of the gangs. The Five Points, with fifteen hundred on its puissant muster rolls, was supreme—he said—between Broadway and the Bowery, Fourteenth Street and City Hall Park. The Eastmans, with one thousand warriors, flourished between Monroe and Fourteenth Streets, the Bowery and the East River. The Gas House Gang, with only two hundred in its nose count, was at home along Third Avenue between Eleventh and Eighteenth Streets. The vivacious Gophers were altogether heroes of the West Side. They numbered full five hundred, each a holy terror, and ranged the region bounded by Seventh Avenue, Fourteenth Street, Tenth Avenue and Forty-second Street. The Gophers owned a rock-bottom fame for their fighting qualities, and, speaking in the sense militant, neither the Eastmans nor the Five Points would care to mingle with them on slighter terms than two to one. The fulness of Whitey Dutch, himself of the Five Points, in what justice he did the Gophers, marked his splendid breadth of soul.

Ike the Blood, overhung by some cloud of moodiness, devoted himself moderately to beer, taking little or less part in the talk. Evidently there was something bearing him down.