Turns about Town

by Robert Cortes Holliday

CHAPTER XXVI
A DIP INTO THE UNDERWORLD

"WHEN I go back home," he said, "and tell them about this they won't believe it."

It was a pleasant April Sunday afternoon. We were sitting very comfortably in a saloon over Third Avenue way about the middle of Manhattan Island. Throngs of customers came and went through the front door, whose wicket gate was seldom still. Whiskey glasses twinkled and tinkled all along the long bar. Only here and there in the closely packed line of patrons stood one with a tall "schooner" of beer before him. Harry and Ed, in very soiled white jackets, led an active life.

You see, since theoretically intoxicants were not being sold, there was no occasion for the pretence of being closed on Sunday and confining business to the side door and the back room. On the table between us lay a newspaper. Its headlines proclaimed yesterday's "liquor raids," thousands upon thousands of dollars worth of "rum" confiscated by the city police in the progress of the campaign resulting from the recent passage of the New York State "dry" law.

At the bottom of the page was a little story of the conviction of a delicatessen dealer somewhere on the outskirts of Brooklyn on whose premises had been discovered by the authorities a small amount of wine containing more than one-half of one per cent alcohol.

Pete came in hurriedly. Harry and Ed glanced at him questioningly. He nodded to them as though to say "yes," and dropped into the chair before us. "They're comin'," he remarked. "About half a block off." Every whiskey glass had suddenly disappeared from the bar.

Pete, a little grey man now of about fifty who arises for the day at about noon, has had an interesting career. Once upon a time he was a "bell-hop" in Albany. He is a devoted patron of the silent drama and a man of intellectual interests—making a hobby of clipping from newspapers poems and editorials which impress him and reading them several months later to chance acquaintances who are too drowsy to oppose him. His connection with this establishment is light and picturesque. His duties are chiefly social. That is, he sees home one after another customers who require that friendly attention. He is perpetually agreeable to the suggestion of gratuitous refreshment. He is very cheerful and gentlemanly in the matter of accommodating his tastes to any liquid from ten-cent beer to ninety-cent Scotch which the purchaser is disposed to pay for.

Here they were! The two police officers strolled in slowly, smiling. In their blue and their gold buttons they looked very respendent against the somewhat shabby scene. Ranged along before the bar were a number of young men in the uniform of private soldiers. There were several sailors. Here was a postman cheering himself on his rounds. There was a huge fellow the nickel plate on whose cap announced that he was a piano mover. The centre of a group, there was a very large man who looked as though he had something darkly to do with ward politics. At one place in the line was a very dapper little Japanese, who produced his money from a wallet carried in his breast pocket. But mostly the motley company was of the riff-raff order of humanity. That is another one of the curious developments of "prohibition." Here, in all places of this character, you may find an endless number of the sort of men who used to be accustomed to paying as little as ten cents for a drink of very fiery and inferior whiskey, now standing before the bar by the hour and paying from fifty to seventy-five cents for whiskey (if you can call it that) considerably worse. How on earth can they do it? I do not know.

The two policemen moved the length of the room, and came to a halt at the open end of the bar. Here they stood for a couple of moments, observing (I felt with some amusement) Harry and Ed serving their beakers of beer. Then, as though suddenly having a bright idea, one of them made his way along back of the bar to the cigar case at the front end. He stooped, opened the sliding panel at the bottom of this and poked around inside with his club. As he came along behind the bar back to the open end he stooped several times to peer at the shelf below. He joined his comrade, the two of them thrust their heads into the back room, and then moved out through the side door.

"Well, we're safe for another hour," said Pete. "Why couldn't they find the stuff?" I asked him. "I'll bet you couldn't find it if you'd go behind the bar yourself," he answered. Harry and Ed had found it within two seconds after the shadow of the law had lifted. And the room was humming with the sound of renewed, and somewhat hectic, conviviality. "We'll get caught pretty soon though, I guess," observed Johnnie, the Italian "chef," who on week-days served the economical lunch of roast beef sandwiches and "hot dogs." Harry and Ed laughed in a rather uncomfortable way. But for the present, at least, business was too brisk for their thoughts to be distracted more than a second or two from the job.