When the Angels Left the Old Country: Chapter 31–Epilogue

Someone had set up a stage at one end of this basement, a stage which was constructed from leftover materials and tended to sway a little at the motion of feet upon its surface, whether they were pacing back and forth to give speeches or playing in a Purim spiel.

From this scaffold Isaak was prepared to make a speech that would, he and the other strike leaders hoped, stir the workers to vote for a stoppage, which would paralyze the Boaz Brothers factory and its profits until Mr. Boaz relented and stopped squeezing the workers for all they could give.

It was not used to clambering like an alley cat, and it took several minutes to figure out how to place its hooves against the brick wall for leverage, so that by the time it got onto the fire escape they were both out of breath, and Little Ash was laughing.

This was a storeroom, full of bolts of fabric and shelves of bobbins.

The watchman opened the main door from the stairs and waved his lamp perfunctorily from side to side.

She could imagine all too well strolling arm in arm with Dinah through the wealthy square, pointing out details of the expensive brick houses, and how Dinah would describe things like curtains and carpets that she’d have if she lived in such a place. The rain had cleared out and today was sunny and cool, the perfect day for that sort of idleness.

At the step he pounded on the door with rather more gusto than he’d used for the first house.

The fact was, the house was gloomy and too quiet, and Bonny missed the novelty and gossip that peddlers brought with them.

Her dress was soaked in bad luck, the ledgers even more so, so that they seemed to bleed out like ink onto the part of the table where she’d placed them.

Everyone reacted as if they’d been caught out, suddenly ceasing conversation and looking around in apprehension.

The others hurried to settle their purchases as well, as if the ringing bell had irrevocably shattered the atmosphere and they’d all suddenly remembered that they were supposed to be working.

As Malke wearily explained to Uriel and Little Ash, Isaak and his brothers had been arrested and taken to the Tombs, this ominous name referring to what was officially, and with some irony, called the Halls of Justice.

The Tombs was so named both for the tendency of young men designated criminals to disappear inside the damp stone edifice forever, and for its resemblance to a slab of cemetery stone.

Uriel and Little Ash stood outside it that Monday night, looking at the grey stone façade crawling with sins and misfortune, and both felt overwhelmed by the size of it all.

There was something uncanny about the way he moved, as if at any moment he might drop to all fours and scurry away.

Tonight he had come in with a handful of his cronies, dragging with them the unconscious Isaak Shulman, whom they’d locked up in a back room to stew in pain while they refreshed themselves with a glass of caustic gin.

He was, at the moment, composing in his head a new threat to send to the recalcitrant debtor.

Sullivan felt his conscience quite clear about the prospect of extorting from another liar.

He had no reason to believe he had been followed, and indeed no reason to believe the striking workers had any recourse against him.

Sullivan was trying to get another clear shot at them through the crowd of men, some of whom were trying to leave through the narrow doors, while others, angry on their own behalf to have their night of entertainment interrupted, were brandishing blackjacks and guns of their own, looking for the source of the trouble.

Uriel could see that soon enough it would be all of the barflies versus the two interlopers, the two obvious Jews at the back door.

“The rebbe killed Isaak,” said Little Ash curtly.

“All right,” it said, resigned.

The two of them would find each other while the rest of the party guests were having their pre-dinner conversations, and they would let Little Ash and Uriel into the house by a back way, so that with the help of Essie’s keys, they could get into Mr. Boaz’s office and search for his ledgers. Rose felt in a way that this illicit activity would be easier than making conversation with people who saw her as an object of charity and did not speak Yiddish.

The other schoolgirls gravitated toward them, fascinated by the idea of girls their own age who lived away from their families, and worked, and did all sorts of daring and dangerous things like going to dance halls.

In fact, she was beginning to feel a bit queasy, more so as she hurried past the glowering man at the foot of the stairs.

“Please, Mrs. Shulman,” said Uriel, holding out its hands in supplication.

There was a battered little vanity under the window, and a quick search through its drawers turned up an assortment of pins.

Sullivan was now peering around the hall, frowning as if he expected Uriel to materialize from the wood paneling.

Sullivan rattled the knob and found the office door was locked. This at least would give Uriel some warning, but Sullivan was not in the mood for finesse, and rather than trying to unlock it, he simply took a knife from his pocket and started to hack at the doorframe.

They’d all heard of the radicals and anarchists who lurked in every corner of the immigrant neighborhoods, looking for honest businessmen whose beds they could put bombs under, but Mr. Sullivan did not have a trustworthy affect, and neither Little Ash nor Uriel looked terribly dangerous.

In the back of the police wagon, Little Ash was rather subdued.

Mr. Sullivan’s gang had a headquarters of sorts on the bank of the East River, in a building with damp timbers and a sagging brick façade that smelled strongly of the brackish water.

Rose and Essie both shivered, feeling as if they were standing at the edge of a precipice with cold water rushing below.

“Then for the sake of your children and your children’s children, I adjure you to leave this man, only by the path I show you, that you not harm him, and if you do as I say, I promise in the name of my father and in the name of my mother, by Ashmedai, the king of demons, and Kapkafuni, the queen, that I, Ashmedai ben Ashmedai v’Kapkafuni, will carry you and carry out your revenge.”

“Enough delay,” rasped the rebbe, through Little Ash’s lips. His voice tasted caustic on the demon’s tongue.

Just before dawn, he left his bed and went into his office, where he lit all of the lamps and sat down to write a letter to his brother, confessing that he had squandered his share of the company’s profits on gambling, fallen into bad company, and lost sight of his way so terribly that he had hired thieves and murderers to solve his problems for him.

The writing occupied him well into the morning, interrupted by long pauses during which he simply sat and stared at the wall, murmuring incoherent speeches of remorse to an invisible interlocutor.

“Please, rabbi. Help me make amends! I have been consorting with the worst kind of criminals.”

They’d gone out dancing the night before, and she would tell Dinah about that at the end of the letter, but first she had to explain the whole story of how she’d helped Dinah’s aunt and uncle-in-law take over a factory and overturn so many debts that Hester Street might have been celebrating its own Jubilee year.