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On the West Side, as I’ve said, there were two factions vying for influence, the Hannah mob and Des Morrissey’s patriots. But there was a third orbit, the longshoremen and dock workers along the piers, whose loyalties were mixed. I went down to the river to test the waters.

  In my father’s day the stevies on the west side docks were Irish to a man, just as the east side docks were worked by the Italians, but because of the war, there’d been a lot of mix and match, and the former ethnic solidarity had been fragmented. Greeks, Yugoslavs, Russians, Hunkies and Polacks, Dutchmen and Jews, you name it, even Negroes---a man who swung a baling hook could find work. Then, as now, it was a closed shop, jobs handed down from father to son, but these days the term was freighted with a different meaning. The docks were union. Scabs were beaten bloody, and there was no second chance. You’d be thrown into the river if you showed up again, likely to be ground to pulp between the pilings and the shifting steel hulls. It was an unforgiving environment, peopled by a tough crowd.

  But as it developed, labor’s very strength was its Achilles heel.

  I was talking up an old soak named Dunratty, not a Hannah informer so much as anybody’s who’d cross his palm with money for drink. Dunratty was unreliable, passing along a deal of gossip, much of it the purest moonshine, but he had an ear to the ground nonetheless. I’d already taken note of two hardcases of the Italian persuasion, wearing suits and ties, pearl-grey fedoras, and cashmere topcoats---not your usual uniform on the waterfront. Costello’s mob had been making inroads on the docks since before the war. I asked Dunratty what he thought.

  “Barstids, them Dagoes,” he remarked, although without much heat. It was a commonly held opinion among the Irish, but it told me nothing about why Costello’s button men would be making themselves so visible. “They been around since talk of a strike begun,” Dunratty volunteered.

  This was news. Strike? I hadn’t heard of any grievances.

  Dunratty gave me the look he’d give a wittol. “Ach, for Christ’s sake, Mickey, are the Hannahs losing their grip? The Italians smell a change in the weather, and look after their own interest.”

  I didn’t follow.

  “The damn waterfront’s up for grabs,” Dunratty said, losing patience with me for not seeing the obvious.

  I slipped him a fin, and left him to his own devices. What I needed was a less anecdotal reading, or a more partisan one.

  The union hall was down a few blocks, and over two, on Tenth Avenue, but I didn’t think it would suit my purpose. At this hour of the day, all I was like to find was some gimped-up old stevie sweeping cigarette butts out from under the chairs. Not that such a one might not repay a little time invested, but I had the feeling time wasn’t to be carelessly spent. There was a flavor of hurry in the air, the feral scent of angry men.

  I went looking for Gyp O’Fearna. My interest in finding him was two-fold. Gyp was a shop steward in the dock union, and would know of any discontents. Secondly, he was man of fixed loyalties, not one to be swayed by empty promises. He held the hard-won gains of the working class in trust. If there were a struggle for control of the waterfront, Gyp O’Fearna was like to be in the thick of the fight.

  And so it proved.

  After at first getting a few blank looks---some of which might well have been willed ignorance, the clannishness of the docks, unready to trust strangers---I was eventually directed over to Pier 86, just below the passenger terminal, where a crew was off-loading cargo pallets from a Dutch-flagged freighter. I noticed, though, that the ship’s home port, stenciled on her stern, was Abidjan, the Ivory Coast, which wasn’t a country of tulips and wooden shoes. And there were some self-important types wearing Army uniforms and carrying clipboards pretending to supervise the operation. Since the war, you no longer saw much military presence on the piers, so it was obvious this cargo was somehow special, and as I started to make my way along the dockside, a couple of MP’s blocked my progress.

  Now of course I carried all sorts of credentials, some of them forgeries, some of them legitimate, such as a Sullivan Act card signed by Mayor O’Dwyer, allowing me to carry a loaded weapon concealed on my person. I chose to display one of the less questionable falsifications, identifying me as an inspector of gas mains.

  Their officers puffed up, naturally, but they had to let me through. In the city, licensing trumps everything.

  I discovered Gyp O’Fearna in an act of pilferage.

  Startled by my unheralded presence, he certainly appeared guilty enough, and bundled away the man he was talking to with a few last-minute instructions.

  “Act in haste, repent at leisure,” I remarked.

  He affected not to take my meaning. “Little off our graze, are we, Mickey?” he inquired, smiling.

  “It’s all the same to me, Gyp,” I told him. “I’m a wee bit curious who’s got you in their pocket, though.”

  He looked to see whether anyone were listening, but we were by ourselves in the cavernous concrete Customs warehouse.

  “Are the Provisionals rewarding you?” I asked him. I meant the IRA militia. “Sinn Fein’s bagman, Des Morrissey?”

  “I never knew you to have any politics,” Gyp said, avoiding a direct answer.

  “What’s the strike talk?” I asked.

  “Mickey, you’re all over the map,” he said, grinning. “I’d say you were fishing, with no bait on your hook.”

  “Too true,” I said, smiling in return. “But then I’d say you were being disingenuous, Gyp. I found you with your hand in the cookie jar, right enough.”

  Again, he feigned artless misunderstanding, his expression all puzzled innocence. “There’s a lot of extra paperwork, a military consignment,” he said. “Everything in triplicate, with the I’s to be dotted, T’s to be crossed.”

  “You’re full of cobbles, Gyp,” I said. “You’re planning to misroute this cargo, send it on a trip around Lake Erie or the like. That, or steal it. The shifty-eyed barstid you were just speaking with, now. Francis Xavier Quinn, known as Frankie the Lie. Tell me, sure, what business would the two of you have, it wouldn’t prove to be monkey business?”

  “Frankie’s a shifty lad, I’m willing to admit,” Gyp said to me, candidly. “And you wouldn’t be, yourself?”

  He had me there.

  “I’m thinking, where’s the advantage?” he asked.

  Aah. Now we were on the same turf. “Well,” I said, buying myself some time, “how much money buys your silence?”

  “It’s worth my while.”

  “Is it, now.” I had to be canny, still. “How much is your life worth, then?”

  “Are you threatening me, Mickey?”

  “No, not I,” I said. “I was thinking of the Italians.”

  He tried to bluff it out, holding my gaze, but I could read the doubt behind his bravado.

  I sighed. “If you climb in bed with Costello and the Mafia capos, there’s no going back, you know that.”

  “Who exactly are you speaking for, Mickey?”

  “I speak for the Hannahs. Always have.”

  “Word is that Young Tim doesn’t reside much trust in you.”

  “Say then that I speak for myself.”

  “What weight does that carry?”

  I’d been doing my best not to act the threatening presence, but it was getting me nowhere. “Don’t play the fool,” I said.

  “Oh, so it’s bare knuckles, now, is it?”

  “Bare knuckles from me, or cement shoes from the Guineas.”

  I could see he was having second thoughts.

  “Let’s begin at the beginning,” I said. “Whose water would you be carrying, and who offered you the bucket?”

  He looked at me askance. “What am I getting in return, for what I could tell you?” he asked.

  “My silence,” I said. “And you know I’m good for it. I’ve betrayed no man’s confidences, in thirty years.” I shouldn’t have had to remind h
im of it, but this was no time for niceties. It was a quick and dirty deal, not soon forgiven.

  He caved. I had a name for keeping my own counsel. Gyp knew he was balanced on the knife’s edge, and might require my goodwill, or that of the Hannah mob. It was easy enough to draw him out, after he’d felt the prick of the spurs.

  I wondered, though, whether I were being too easily led, or if I only heard what I’d come ready to hear.

  But in the event, his story was this.

  Yes, there was a strike looming. Wages and benefits had been artificially depressed during the war, and now the men who worked the docks wanted their piece of the action. Which was seemingly fair enough. After all, there was a boom on. But there were others who expected a piece of the action, circling like wolves, and chief among them was the Costello organization, primus inter pares of the Five Families.

  “Who’ve you made cause with, then?” I asked him.

  He looked sly, and laid his index finger alongside of his nose, a gesture indicating a shared secret, something we were both privy to, but knew better than to speak of aloud. It could mean anything, or nothing.

  I lost patience, and at the end, as it all too often did, in my experience, it came down to some knuckle-breaking. I have to wonder at people.

  But it got me a name, although the name was new to me.

  “Noel D’Oench,” I said to Frankie the Lie. It had taken me a little time, but I’d eventually run him to ground at McAvoy’s, a hole-in-the-wall piano bar abaft of Grand Central.

  “Bunny, his friends call