A Book of Great Worth Read Free

twist and glanced at his finger.
    “Time is always good,” he said.
    •••
    The next day, which happened to be a Wednesday, my father had lunch at the Garden Cafeteria at the corner of East Broadway and Rutgers Street, as he usually did, then strolled down Canal Street to Allen. It was a warm day in May, so my father wore his customary suit jacket and tie, but no coat, and his jacket was open. A copy of that afternoon’s paper, fresh from the presses, was under his arm.
    He paused at the corner and, making an exaggerated show of looking both ways before crossing the street, managed to sneak a quick glance behind him and catch sight of a recognizable face. Since the day before, he’d become familiar with the appearance of two men he didn’t know – my father was no detective, but he had a good eye for faces. These two fellows were notable by their very ordinariness, he thought – one was skinny as a minute, with a chisel face and an elongated nose – ironically, somewhat like Bronstyn’s; the other hefty, with a face like a chicken dumpling. Both wore workingmen’s clothes that made them seem the antithesis of what my father thought of as gangsters, with flashy suits and slicked-back hair. He hadn’t seen the two men together but, whenever he was on the street, one or the other seemed to be nearby. It hadn’t taken him very long to jump to the conclusion that he was being followed.
    The area near The Day was, as always, crowded with passersby, so he had no concern for his safety; rather, he was amused and curious. The streets were peopled mostly by men, some in rough working clothes, others in the shiny black suits of the Orthodox, with black felt hats, beards and payes , feathery ritual sidelocks. But there were also, my father observed, quite a few women, whose dress advertised them as streetwalkers. Allen Street, which was notorious, was especially infested with these women – there were clots of them at each corner, and individuals leaning at literally every street lamp within sight. On Allen Street and the streets around it, it was said, there were as many brothels as synagogues, if not more; as many women of loose morals as there were pious but weak-willed men.
    My father already had some familiarity with gangsters – Arnold Rothstein, reputed to be the head of the city’s underworld, and Louis Buchalter, known as Lepke, were both active in the garment trade, on both the bosses’ and the unions’ sides, as the wind blew, along with a ragtag string of underlings.
    He was acquainted with a fellow, a jovial Italian who provided muscle for either side of an argument, depending on who paid the most, whom he considered to be both well connected and discreet. My father had run into him a number of times, had even shared a drink with him once or twice, and knew him to be dangerous but amiable. The evening before, after his conversation with Fushgo, my father had stopped by a certain saloon where he knew this fellow, who was called Two-Fingers Giovanni, liked to spend time – the nickname arose from the unpleasant state of his left hand, rumoured to have come about at the business end of a butcher’s cleaver during a youthful fight with a rival gang. Sure enough, he was there, and for the price of a whisky, my father was able to extract the name of the gangster likely behind the photos: Monk Eastman.
    “If not Monk himself, then someone who works for him, most likely,” Two-Fingers said. “He’s got his fingers in every whore this side of the East Side.” He grinned. “Well, you know what I mean.”
    Afterwards, my father had gone back to The Day , where he spent some time in the newspaper’s dusty morgue, combing through old clippings. As he expected, he was far from the first reporter to have written about prostitution and white slavery. In the years right before the war, there’d been many such exposés, not much different from the ones he’d written. With the war’s arrival in 1914, the