Chapter 8 #2
in black suits jumped out.
When Celia replaced the receiver from Olivia’s nightly call, Daphne was nowhere in sight—no surprise, she rarely was when
it came to moving the cart, and heaven forbid she’d pick up the throwaway box.
Celia sighed and opened the front door to bring in the carts and was greeted by a high nasally voice hawking from across the
street. A voice they all knew well, and hoped they would never have to put up with again.
The postcard man.
“Postcards! Postcards here! Three for a penny!” Celia groaned and looked around for Patrolman O’Halloran. The postcard salesman
was somewhat of a regular. Mainly on the weekends or when the streets were crowded with people. On quiet days, if he showed
up, one or another of the shop owners would encourage him to leave. An angry shout, a threat to call the police, or the more
effective rotten onion or a bucket of wastewater usually did the trick.
It wasn’t the postcard man or his postcards of foreign climes or movie stars they all objected to. It was the cache he kept hidden inside his voluminous coat and sold at four times the price of those of the Eiffel Tower or buffalo on the prairie.
These guaranteed his livelihood. They would also send him to jail.
Cards depicting things that would have Comstock or his minions descending on Book Row to arrest him. And Comstock wasn’t above
throwing in a few bystanders and a shop owner or two, just for good measure.
So far the postcard man had managed to elude them by changing neighborhoods at random. Celia only wished he hadn’t chosen
this week to return to Fourth Avenue, just when things had begun to settle down after the last raid.
Already he was gathering quite a crowd. Celia could barely see the top of his scraggly head over the cluster of men surrounding
him. During daylight hours he addressed his potential buyers more furtively. His hand slipping into the depths of the overcoat
with one hand while accepting money from the interested party with the other. But business must be lucrative. Lately he’d
started carrying a soapbox for nights such as this, where he was competing to be heard with a particularly rowdy group of
students pushing their way to the front. A few curious people had gathered on the sidewalk nearby. Celia had to peer around
several people who had stopped outside the Arcadia, either indecisive about adding themselves to the mix or merely curious
as to what was going on.
The fact that officers O’Halloran and Sullivan were standing on the far corner, their clubs attached to their belts and not
even looking in his direction, must have given them courage because, as one, they stepped off the curb and hurried across
the street to join the growing cluster of buyers.
A gentleman stepped inside Giuseppe’s tobacco, but he’d had to push through the boisterous crowd to get in the door. As soon as he stepped out again, Mr. Giuseppe came out, brandishing a broom, and attempted to disperse the crowd in front of his store—to no avail.
Celia considered calling Daphne to help her move the carts inside, in case rowdiness turned to vandalism, but before she could
turn away, something caught her and everyone else’s attention. A black automobile, one of the few autos on the avenue at that
time of night, sped toward the crowd. Several people had to jump out of its way as it squealed to a stop.
A chill ran up Celia’s spine. Not again. There were lots of black sedans in Manhattan, but this one had the ominous air of the SSV—Anthony Comstock was about to make
another arrest.
Suddenly, another black sedan appeared at the corner. All four doors opened at the same time, and four more men joined the
two from the first car and rushed into the crowd.
At first, hardly anyone moved, then suddenly they closed in around the postcard seller, almost as if they were trying to protect
him, but the men in dark suits began grabbing people indiscriminately and pushed them away.
Two more autos appeared at either side of the crowd. Celia’s stomach soured. There was no mistaking who they were. Not policemen.
Jimmy and Bertie had disappeared completely.
Carts forgotten, Celia stumbled back inside and slammed the door just as the clanging of a Black Mariah rent the night air.
Even standing inside, Celia had to cover her ears with her hands.
She didn’t hear the footsteps hurrying down the stairs, didn’t know her sisters were aware of the raid until they ran past
her to the window.
“What’s happening?” Daphne asked, her voice quivering.
“Comstock’s men are going after the postcard seller.”
“Ah,” Olivia said in disgust. “How many times has the man been arrested for a few naughty pictures? And why does he insist
on coming back here?”
Celia wriggled in beside her sisters and peered out at the street.
The whole end of the block was alive now, with as many people rushing to see what the commotion was about as there were those
who were trying to escape Comstock’s morality net.
As soon as the Mariah stopped, people crowded around it, only to be pushed away, leaving a momentary view as two men lifted
the little man off his feet and practically tossed him in the back of one of the sedans and shut the door.
The sedan tried to pull away, but the crowd, led by the students, surrounded it. Several fistfights broke out in the crowd
for no apparent reason. O’Halloran and Sullivan, who had reappeared on the corner of Twelfth Street, resumed their patrol,
unhurriedly striding off in the opposite direction.
Two men locked in a violent embrace stumbled past the Arcadia’s window. The sisters hopped back.
“They better not start throwing things,” Olivia snapped. “If they break a window—”
The agents were grabbing whomever they could reach and attempting to push them into the wagon. Just as many pedestrians attempted
to pull them out again. But as much as Celia strained to see, she couldn’t see the postcard seller. Was he still in the sedan
or was it possible he’d escaped in the melee? In a perverse way, she hoped he had.
Someone yelled, “Stop that man!”
Several men were running away, and for a moment, the agents didn’t know which one to follow.
Then the entire crowd—there must have been thirty or more—surged across the street directly toward the front of the Arcadia.
Celia swore she caught a glimpse of the postcard seller creeping away in the direction the two policemen had gone, before the swelling crowd blocked her view.
By now, it wasn’t clear who the agents were chasing. They threw themselves into the crowd, only to be thwarted by a new gaggle
of singing college students staggering down the avenue from the opposite direction.
Recognizing a free-for-all, the students enthusiastically entered the fray. And the whole swarm of flailing arms and legs
moved inexorably toward the Arcadia.
Celia, Daphne, and Olivia watched in horror as the inevitable unfolded. Time slowed down as the crowd pressed against their
window, a writhing mass of faces, arms, legs smashed flat against the glass, moved along as if driven by a steamroller. They
were all so close it was as if a painting on the wall had come to life in front of them.
And as they watched in mesmerized silence, a well-dressed man, his eyeglasses askew, his thin hair hanging in disarray, appeared
momentarily before them as he frantically clutched a rectangular package to his chest.
“The window,” Olivia cried and pulled the other two back, but not before Celia caught a glimpse of the man’s panicked expression
as he was thrust over the outside cart, bringing his face within inches of the window. For an instant Celia’s eyes met his,
and she felt the jolt of fear, desperation, and anger. Mostly anger.
Then he was swept away as another crowd of men ran headlong into the first group. They rebounded off each other, like a game of snooker. More automobiles arrived. More men in black suits swarmed out of them.
The crowd instinctively broke apart and dispersed in all directions as the additional agents flailed to catch whomever they
could. They grabbed three, but a fourth escaped and ran off toward the church. Another tripped an agent who stumbled backward,
his captives escaping as the agent’s head cracked against the Arcadia window.
An involuntary cry of anger escaped from Olivia, but fortunately the window survived.
It was over in a matter of minutes, though it seemed longer. The postcard man, holding one arm, was again dragged toward the
Black Mariah and thrust none too gently inside. Several others were tossed in beside him.
“How can they arrest everyone like that?” Celia asked. “They don’t know who just happened to be walking by and who was buying
smutty postcards.”
“They don’t care,” Olivia said, turning from the window.
“Will they all be arrested?”
“Perhaps. Most likely. Those who can will call their family solicitors and be free within hours; others will be released after
they appear before the judge tomorrow or the next day. I daresay it will be hard to prove anything against anyone but the
postcard seller.”
“Will the avenue take up a collection for his bail?” Daphne asked.
“Certainly not,” Olivia said. “We don’t condone pornography any more than any other upright citizen. People like that give
the Row a bad reputation.”
The street had cleared considerably, and the three of them ventured out to see what damage had been done to their inventory on the carts outside.
Papers littered the sidewalk; several abused hats were scattered in the street.
One, a black bowler, was flattened completely.
A mangled umbrella rested against a lamppost, its handle broken in two.
Across the avenue Mr. Kirsch and Mr. Giuseppe were engaged in serious conversation. Even the cranky reclusive Mr. Hammond
had come out of his basement store.
But no one came out of Tellers’ Fine Printing and Stationery. It was still dark inside. Hopefully, they had missed the fighting.
Up and down the street, store owners stepped out onto the sidewalk, gathering in groups of two or three, stopping to pick
up books that had been ravaged in the melee.
O’Halloran and Sullivan strolled up the street and stopped to chat with Mr. Kirsch. Neither patrolman had lifted a finger
to help in rounding up the perceived miscreants—something that Celia stored away in her mind in case she ever needed them.
“Come,” Olivia said. “It’s over. Let’s clean up what we can and get these carts inside. There’s bound to be more shenanigans.
There always are on weekends. Next week we’ll take in the carts earlier.”
They found the carts intact, but books had been knocked to the ground. Fortunately, the outside books were the cheaper volumes,
so there was no major loss. They finally got both carts inside, and Celia stood looking around the sidewalk, where other sellers
where cleaning up their storefronts. And she felt a rush of pride for being part of a group who took life as it was handed.
They would be open for business the following morning like nothing ever happened.
“Come in, Celia,” Olivia said. “The excitement is over, and tomorrow will be a busy day. And bring in the throwaway box, too. No reason to leave it sitting around all night. We won’t be getting any more input tonight; everyone is too busy.
And I don’t want a good sturdy box destroyed by late-night rabble-rousers. ”
Celia lifted the box up and staggered through the door. Some of their own stock must have fallen into the throwaway, it was
so heavy. She yawned. They could wait till tomorrow. The rush of excitement had left her, and she was longing for a good night’s
sleep. And she’d say a little prayer to whichever gods were listening that the morality man had had his fill of Book Row for
a while and would leave them alone.
“What will happen to the postcard man?” Daphne asked. “He gave me a card of the Alps one day. He didn’t seem like a criminal.”
“Well, he is. And he’ll probably go to jail this time.” Olivia started for the stairs.
“I think it’s sad.”
“Just remember,” Olivia said, “he put us all in danger.”
Celia nudged Daphne forward.
“I don’t see why we can’t take the elevator up,” Daphne groused.
“Climbing the stairs is practically the only exercise we get,” Celia said before Olivia had a chance to.
“Though I think we can make an exception tonight,” Olivia said, and made an abrupt turn toward the elevator.
The three of them crammed inside, the plight of the postcard man receding as they rose to the fourth floor, and they began
to think of a nice cup of tea and their comfortable beds.