CHAPTER XV
NINA
Once more the old flivver traveled the familiar way up-town. In thin extended Manhattan Island places are bound to be far from other places, and the inhabitants learn to take their long rides for granted. Greg and Hickey always took the same route, and in the course of their ride the whole panorama of town was spread before them in its variety.
First there was Houston Street, the heart of the ghetto with its tall old tenements, its narrow stores and vociferous push-cart venders. Then there was Second Avenue, the Great White Way of the East Side. Second Avenue was lined with great Jewish theaters and smoky Hungarian restaurants, bursting at this hour; the pavements thronged with the East Side crowd bound nowhere in particular; the young girls painted and bedizened, yet fresh young girls for all that; the loutish youths, the coiffed dames and the bearded elders. There followed a long, quiet interval where Hickey was able to open his throttle, through east Fourteenth Street, and up Fourth Avenue with its gigantic loft buildings now dark and empty. At Thirty-fourth Street they climbed a little hill and with another of the abrupt transitions for which the town is famous found themselves in the ultra-fashionable neighborhood of Murray Hill, where it was not yet dinner time, where discreet and perfectly-appointed town cars were waiting at the doors to take the Olympians out to dine.
Then circling the great new railway terminal they sped on up the newer Park Avenue with its empty spaces between the brand-new mighty apartment houses reaching Heavenwards, and with rents in accordance. They turned through Fifty-ninth Street, a narrow hybrid street of book-shops, studio-warrens, lunch counters and red trolley cars, and emerging at the Plaza, seat of fashion again, cut diagonally across the Park, where the night breathed quietly, and emerging at the West Seventy-second Street entrance, made their way to Riverside Drive, the Heaven of the unfashionable well-to-do and Manhattan's finest night-piece, where the street lights, the naked trees, the stars, the gleaming river and the twinkling lights on the further shore made an unforgettable harmony.
As they traveled Greg leaned forward on the sill of the front window, and while gratefully biting into Bessie's thick sandwiches told Hickey all that had happened during the afternoon. Hickey kept up a sort of terrified, delighted comment on the tale. Hickey made no pretensions to be a man of courage, but Greg had learned by this that he was quite as dependable as many a braggart.
"You opened her up on Riverside—and him after you and a lot of other cars and all! Oh Lordy! ... He picked up a cop, and still you didn't stop! It's a wonder he didn't pull his gun on you! ... All around through the streets! It's lucky it wasn't me at the wheel! I'd have fainted clean away!"
Presently Hickey asked nervously: "What's the program for to-night? Any more hold-ups or runaways? I tell you the flivver ain't runnin' so good."
"I can't tell," said Greg. "We have to be ready for anything."
"Lordy! I see my finish!" said Hickey.
Greg made him stop in the block below the Stickney Arms. Pa Simmons drew up behind. The four men gathered together, and Greg issued his instructions.