The Six Messiahs - Mark Frost [78]
"I hope this place is not too dangerous."
"Compared to some of the dumps we've been, how bad could it be? Looking forward to it, actually; he said they're building a great big black castle out there that's really something to see."
Ice water would not have been more effective: Jacob snapped instantly to his senses. "What sort of castle?"
Before she could answer, a sharp whistle cut through the clatter of the station; her eye was drawn toward Rymer and the trains: fifty yards off, halfway between them, some kind of commotion behind a stack of cotton bales. She could see people moving toward the disturbance: a struggle?
Two guards rushed out of the station behind them; Eileen and some other passengers on the platform pointed them toward the cotton bales. The guards blew their own whistles and pulled their pistols as they ran.
Somewhere a shot was fired.
"What's going on?" she asked.
"I don't know," said Jacob.
"Which way to the roof?" asked Jack.
"I'll show you," said Stern. "What about the books?"
"Bring them both," said Doyle.
"I thought we wanted them to take the copy," said Stern.
"We do but we don't want it to seem too easy," said Jack.
"We don't even know if these are the same men," said Doyle.
Footsteps crashing up the stairs. Stern slipped the original Zohar into a well-worn leather pouch while Jack picked up the copy.
"And we don't care to wait and find out. Which way?" asked Jack.
"Follow me," said Stern. He stuffed the Gerona Zohar under his arm like a football and led them out the nearest door, through a warren of cramped rooms connected by tiny L-shaped corridors, and up a seldom-used set of back stairs.
"They" were the Houston Dusters, a street gang with a talent for prolific, unparalleled violence. The Dusters had ruled the Lower East Side from Houston Street to East Broadway for a generation, but new gangs were always stepping up to challenge their borders, in addition to their traditional antagonisms with more established outfits like the Gophers, the Five Pointers, the Fashion Plates, and the rising tongs of Chinatown.
Economic hardship, collapse of the immigrant family structure—nearly all the Dusters were first- or second-generation Irish—and society's failure to provide a legitimate toehold for its disadvantaged undoubtedly contributed to the flourishing of gang culture, but when you came right down to the heart of the matter, the matter, the Dusters were a bunch of wrong guys, a character flaw that had never proved a detriment to getting ahead in New York. These ruffians absorbed the lesson early in life that a career in crime might be a disreputable path to prosperity and the American dream, but it was a crowded shortcut.
Unmistakable, intimidating figures in their neighborhood, well over two hundred in number, the Dusters communicated with a vocabulary of savage war whoops inspired by the Indians their leader once saw in Buffalo Bill Cody's Wild West Extravaganza at Madison Square Garden. The nattiest of East Side gangs, they sported round, heavily padded leather caps that pulled down over the ears and doubled as protective helmets, steel-toed hobnail boots—the better to stomp you with— and pants with a loud red stripe running down the leg, symbolizing their fleetness of foot. Blades, concrete-filled lead pipes, and home-crafted blackjacks were their weapons of choice. The gang's code of honor considered shooting your enemy at a distance a coward's way to settle disputes. Blood on your hands, that was the Duster motto.
For the last nine years, the Dusters had been commanded by a ruthless evil-eyed weasel named Ding-Dong Dunham, an unusually robust term of office in the gang racket. Ding-Dong had clawed his way up through the ranks, equipped with the sociopath's advantage of caring not a penny for the value of human life: His nickname derived from the greeting Dunham used to gleefully scream in