The Hour of the Cat Read Online Free Page A

his Aunt Margaret said, you could barely see them. Diagnosed as a “feebleminded epileptic,” she was sent to the State Hospital in Buffalo and, after her discharge, never heard from again.
    Aunt Margaret’s twins had mastered the art of stealing fruit from pushcarts, an art in which they were schooling their cousin Fintan Dunne when he got nabbed and sent to the Catholic Protectory in the Bronx. “You’re in for it now,” the twins whispered to Dunne as they leaned across the railing in court to bid their cousin goodbye. “Nobody ever comes back from the Bronx.”
    First night there, kid in the next bed coughed till dawn. A veteran of Mount Loretto orphanage on Staten Island, he had his own craps, handmade in the orphanage’s machine shop, expertly weighted, nothing left to chance. He’d been in and out of orphanages since he was five, when his old man walked out on the wife and five brats and headed to points unknown. “I got ’em fooled,” he said to Fintan Dunne that first morning when his coughing subsided. “They think I’m twelve and I’m only nine.”
    Fintan Dunne stood with the kid beneath a statue of the Virgin, blue cloak draped over a white gown, her head encircled by a halo of stars, her foot crushing the head of a serpent. The kid shot a stream of spit through the gap in his front teeth onto the bed of marigolds around the pedestal. His eyes were as blue as the Virgin’s cape; hooded eyes, lids half drawn, eyes that could have been eight or eighteen or eighty, nothing to give away their age: a timeless menace, ancient as the stars. “My name is Vinnie Coll,” he said. “Don’t fuck with me.”
    â€œCowboy Coll” is the name they put on him because of his fierce, lonesome style. The moniker stuck through his early days as an independent gunman, until he earned himself the label of “Mad Dog,” shooting five kids and killing one in an attempt to rub out an associate of Dutch Schultz. He grabbed Owney Madden’s partner and held him for ransom, inventing the business of gang-land kidnappings, which soon grew into an industry. They said he’d learned his trade as a gunman for the IRA. But he was a Protectory brat who’d never been east of Rockaway. Met his end in a phone booth in the London Pharmacy on 23rd Street, two bursts of a machine gun that blew his stomach open and let his intestines ooze across the floor: Mad Dog Coll dead at the ripe old age of twenty-three. There was no doubt he was fingered, maybe by a friend, maybe by the cops.
    Wonder who?
    Brannigan “happened” to be nearby. He had that kind of luck, especially during the Tommy-gun era, the glory days of Prohibition, twilight time for the squabbling gangs of guineas, micks, and kikes, gangs galore, the Candy Kids, the Bon-Bon Brigade, the Prince Street Boys, the Laughing Gang. They raided each other’s garages, clubhouses, card games, fought for control of booze, bets, girls, muscled in on legit businesses, clothes, coal, garbage, kosher chickens. Cowboys like Coll were admired and in demand. But wiser, cooler heads could see the future and it didn’t include penny-ante operations, crazed gunmen, and shoot-’em-ups in the streets. Consolidation was the order of the day. Organization. Syndication. Get with it. Or get lost. Or find yourself dead.
    The Police eventually claimed they brought the mayhem under control. Brave boys in blue and their Gunman’s Squad, with scores of heavily armed, ask-no-questions cops, supposedly busted up the gangs and returned order to the streets. That’s what they told the papers, and what the papers printed, but all the while the Syndicate worked with quiet purpose to impose order and end the warfare and the unwanted attention it brought. The independent gunsels joined the fold or followed Coll to the grave. Force was used selectively; the demand for sex, liquor, drugs satisfied