V.—INDIAN LOUIE
No one knew his real name, not even the police, and the police, let me tell you, know much more than they can prove. The Central Office never once had the pleasure of mugging and measuring and parading him at the morning bawling out, and the Mulberry Street records to the last were barren concerning him. For one brief space and only one did Mulberry Street nourish hopes. That was when he himself let it be thought that somewhere, sometime, somehow, he had taken some one's life. At this, Mulberry Street fairly shook the wide earth like a tablecloth in search of proof, but got not so much as one poor crumb of confirmation.
It was at Big Jack's in Chatham Square that local history first laid eyes on him. Big Jack is gone now; the Committee of Fourteen decided upon him virtuously as an immoralist, handed him the fatal blue paper, and he perished. Jack Sirocco—who was himself blue-papered in a Park Row hour—keeps the place now.
Starting from Big Jack's, he soon began to be known in Flynn's, and Nigger Mike's, and about the Chatham Club. When his pals spoke to him they called him Louie. When they spoke of him they called him Indian Louie, or Spanish Louie, to the end that he be identified among the hosts of East Side Louies, who were and are as many as the leaves on a large tree.
Rumor made Indian Louie a native of South America, and his dark skin, black eyes, thin lips, high cheek-bones and high curved nose helped rumor out in this. Also, he was supposed to be of Spanish or Portuguese extraction.
When Louie was buried, this latter assumption received a jolt. His funeral, conducted by a rabbi, was according to strictest Hebrew ceremonial.
Two pieces of porcelain were laid upon his eyes, as intimating that he had seen enough. A feather, which a breath would have disturbed, was placed upon his upper lip. This was to evidence him as fully and conclusively dead, although on that point, in all conscience, the coroner's finding should have been enough. The flowers, which Gangland sent to prove its grief, were put aside because too gay and pleasant. The body was laid upon straw. A would-be pallbearer, since his name was Cohen, had to be excluded from the rites, as any orthodox Jew could have told him must be the case. For death and the dead are unclean; and a Cohen, who by virtue of his name is of the high-priest caste—Aaron was a Cohen—and tends the altars, must touch nothing, approach nothing, that is unclean. The funeral was scrupulously held before the second sun went down, and had to be hurried a little, because the morgue authorities, hobbled of red tape, move as slowly as the sea itself in giving up the dead. The coffin—of poorest pine—was knocked to pieces in the grave, before the clods of earth were shoveled in and the doomsday sods laid on. The garments of him who acted as principal mourner were faithfully torn; that is to say, the rabbi cut a careful slit in the lapel of that mourner's waistcoat where it wouldn't show.
You will see from this, that every detail was holy by most ancient Jewish prescription. And the business led to talk. Those about Flynn's, Nigger Mike's and the Chatham Club, to say naught of members of the Humpty Jackson gang, and others who in his latter days had been near if not dear to him, confessed that it went far in contradiction of any Spanish or Portuguese ancestry for Louie.