A Bandit's Tale Read online

  As to whether I was good or bad, it should be quite apparent to you by now that I was far too muddled to know.

  —

  Shortly after arriving at the House of Refuge, I had my first interview with the warden. “You’ve done a foolish thing…um, son,” said Warden Sage, staring at a paper on his desk as though trying to find my name.

  How can he keep hundreds of us boys straight? I wondered. Probably he didn’t.

  He took off his glasses and rubbed his eyes wearily. “I hope during your time here you will mend your ways. Our mission at the House of Refuge is to show you a new path. We want you to be a productive member of society.”

  “I am eager to be a good boy, sir,” I told him, recalling Pug’s advice to get on the good side of the grown-ups in charge. “Uh…I’d like to learn more English—maybe even how to read.”

  I could think of many reasons to get better at the English language. For starters, I’d be able to understand what was being said on the rattlers in case I wanted to ply my trade there. I’d be able to know if someone sitting nearby, for instance, had witnessed the touch and was giving a warning.

  “I see.” Warden Sage smiled weakly. “We do offer classes part of the day. However, our primary purpose is to train wayward boys for practical jobs in society. I hope you wish to be useful to society?”

  “Sì! Yes, Warden Sage!” I was taking to heart Pug’s advice to be enthusiastic.

  “In our workshops, you’ll learn a trade you can follow once you’re out in the world again,” he went on, glancing at the paper again. “Let’s see, we have you starting in the shoe shop, blacking shoes.”

  “Shining shoes?” I wondered how much training that required. I had a flash of myself hard at work as a shoeshine boy on Mulberry Street—and feeling a familiar blocky hand on my shoulder. I could imagine being hauled off by Signor Ancarola to be a street musician again.

  Warden Sage cleared his throat. “I suppose if you apply yourself and your conduct is good, you can move to a different workshop.”

  “Yes, sir.” It came out sounding rather sullen.

  I cleared my throat and tried again. “Yes, sir! Thank you, sir.”

  —

  As expected, I did hate blacking shoes, especially for three hours a day. I began to scout around for another workshop. Besides the shoemaking, there was carpentry, baking, and tailoring. But something else caught my eye.

  After a few weeks of swish, swish, swishing shoes, I begged my instructor, Mr. Woods, to put in a good word for me with the printshop. Since I’d been following Pug’s advice to be a model inmate, Mr. Woods readily agreed.

  As it turned out, I enjoyed the printshop even more than I’d expected. It helped me learn English faster and I also made a surprising discovery: The work demanded that I use my mind. I barely knew such jobs existed. Back home, work was physical. Work meant hard labor and sweat.

  This was different. Setting type was a kind of puzzle with a rhythm of its own: choosing each letter and putting it into the right place to form words; words coming together to make sentences.

  And sentences, I was starting to realize, were just thoughts and ideas made real on paper. I wondered if Giuseppe felt this way about the music he made on his violin—that somehow each little movement of the bow and strings fit together to become something more, something beautiful or happy or sad. Something with meaning.

  Mostly, the printing we did was simple. It was practice work, really, mainly notices and signs. I didn’t always understand what the words meant, but I tried to be accurate, sounding out each letter in my mind as I set it into place.

  Mr. Wright, our instructor, was a thin, balding man who seemed to forget he no longer had hair. He was constantly rubbing his hand over the top of his head, leaving a smudgy trail of ink on its shiny surface. All of us boys who worked for him got ink stains on our shirts too. He kept patting our shoulders to encourage us to continue doing a good job.

  “We’re at an exciting moment in the history of type,” Mr. Wright told us once. “Why, not long ago, the New York Tribune became the first newspaper to use a Linotype machine.”

  “What’s that?” someone asked.

  “We’ve got trays of letters here, which we put in place to make words,” Mr. Wright explained. “This new invention has a keyboard with ninety characters, which makes it possible to set an entire line of type at one time. Speed is the future, boys, mark my words! Speed!”

  Mr. Wright’s talk of newspapers reminded me of the papers Carlo and I had waved in our victims’ faces. Carlo was always able to convince our suckers they’d be missing out if they didn’t read the latest news.

  “Mr. Wright, I understand about setting the type, but how do the typesetters know which words to put in the paper?” I asked him. “Who tells them what is news?”

  He ran a hand over his head, leaving a fresh streak of black ink. I suppose it was a stupid question, yet Mr. Wright didn’t seem to mind.

  “Reporters, Rocco,” he said. “Reporters are the heart of a newspaper. They comb the city looking for news, listening to stories, investigating crimes. Then they describe everything to readers. They write the stories and give them to editors, who make decisions about what’s important and which stories go where. Then typesetters put the day’s stories onto the page.”

  “Do they teach being a reporter here?” I could already guess the answer.

  “No.” Mr. Wright laughed. “Boys from the House of Refuge are more likely to be the subject of crime stories than to write them.”

  CHAPTER 16

  Showing the sort of insalubrious instruction provided to inmates at the House of Refuge

  Before proceeding with my narrative, it seems appropriate to provide more details about the real education I and other inmates at the House of Refuge received. Naturally, there were lectures and sermons. But we all learned the most in the yard.

  My primary tutor was Pug, a thief so confident and accomplished at the tender age of fifteen that he put even Tony to shame.

  “I never worked as a stall, though you might think, given my build, I’d be good at it. But I have quick hands, and by the time I was eleven, I was already a first-class dip,” Pug told me.

  “That was just the beginning. I’m the oldest of eight, and what I could bring home from picking pockets wasn’t quite sufficient to allow Ma to buy bread and milk for my little brothers and sisters. Crikey, they eat a lot! Anyway, once I’d trained Tommy, my next oldest brother, to pick pockets, I moved to doing ‘house work.’ I became a sneak thief.”

  “What’s that?” We were, as usual, ambling around the exercise yard, trying to keep out of the chill November wind. George and Jimmy had bad colds and were huddled against a storage shed in the corner, beating their arms against their jackets to keep warm.

  “I’d go uptown along those fancy streets near Central Park. I’d look for open basements and rummage around for silverware or jewelry,” Pug explained. “Always during the day, mind you, not at night, when people are home.”

  I frowned. “How…how would you know where to go—what building to choose?”

  “Now, that’s the fun part of the whole operation.” He grinned and rubbed his palms together. “It worked like this: Me and my pals would head to Coney Island in the summer. We’d find some young servant girls and treat them to ice cream.

  “Then we’d get them talking about where they worked and who was home during the day. They never guessed what we were after. And, let me tell you, the plunder was worth it. I had enough to help Ma, and some for me besides.”

  Tony would be impressed, I thought. This was exactly the line of graft he’d like to get into, hobnobbing with pretty maids and eating ice cream cones at Coney Island.

  Pug explained that a sneak thief is not the same as a genuine burglar, who operates at night. “Being a burglar is a dangerous undertaking. It takes nerves of steel to break into a house where people are sleeping.”

  I was pretty sure I couldn’t do anything
like that. Why, you might get smacked on the head with a candlestick or worse. “You said you got nabbed because of bad luck. Were you caught being a sneak thief?”

  “Naw, that was just a simple touch that went wrong,” Pug admitted. “It shouldn’t have happened, really. I know how to work the system. I had a mouthpiece—a lawyer—with good connections.

  “Usually I could fix things up myself before it came to that, especially since I know so many coppers. Just a few months before, right on Grand Street, a copper came up to me and complained that his chief was getting too many complaints about breech-getting on the streetcars.”

  I knew “breech-getting” was picking men’s pockets. “He told you this? So, did he arrest you?”

  Pug laughed. “No, I just gave the copper a twenty-dollar bill and he left me and my mob alone.”

  I whistled. “That’s a high price to pay.”

  He shrugged. Carlo had told me some mobs could earn a hundred dollars a week or more, if they made good touches every day. It was more money than most people ever dreamed of seeing in their lives. I wondered if Pug and his boys had been that good.

  Pug scrunched up his eyes then and sighed, as if remembering past triumphs. “No, like I said, in the end I got nailed for the simple act of picking a man’s pocket on a streetcar.”

  “And your fall money didn’t help?”

  “Not this time. I’d been sent up before the judge once too often,” Pug said. “This is my third time here in the House of Refuge.”

  “It is?”

  “Yup. I first darkened these doors when I was ten. And let me tell you something, Rocco. The food hasn’t gotten any better.”

  CHAPTER 17

  Containing rather a lot, including a heated discussion about the relative merits of going under or over, a nail-biting account of a daring escapade, and a lie

  “The way I see it,” said Pug, “we can go under it, or we can go over it. No matter what, the wall stands in our way.”

  “It’s got to be twenty feet high, that wall,” whispered George, shooting a quick glance at it.

  This was our favorite topic: escape. We were in the yard, getting fresh air, of course. To keep warm, we had to keep walking—fast. We stayed in full view of the guards, and every so often one of us would burst out laughing, pretending to be joking around. No sense in arousing suspicion.

  “Look over there in the corner. I bet I could get up that drainpipe at the top,” I said, all the while keeping my eyes straight ahead.

  Pug snorted. “You might, you little monkey, but Jimmy and I are shaped more like round pots of jam.”

  “Speak for yourself, Pug,” protested Jimmy.

  “Well, then, what about tunneling under?” I asked Pug.

  “Ah, I thought you’d never ask, Rocco,” he said, rubbing his hands together. “See that shed over there, next to the wall? That’s where garden tools are kept.”

  “This past summer, we grew tomatoes as big as baseballs,” George put in. “Mine were the biggest. Red as sunsets.”

  “Crikey, George! You’ve got to concentrate,” Pug admonished. “We’re not thinking about tomatoes now.”

  “Yeah,” said Jimmy, beating his arms to stay warm. “Next thing we take out of that shed won’t be a hoe—it’ll be a snow shovel.”

  “If we do things right, none of us will be here to shovel snow, let alone eat Randall’s Island tomatoes next summer,” Pug said softly. “We’ll be free. Because there are three very important things about that old shed. Can you guess what they are, Rocco?”

  “It’s close to the wall,” I offered.

  “What else?”

  “Um…it’s got shovels in it.”

  “Very good,” said Pug with a nod of approval. “And the last thing?”

  I shook my head. I wanted to impress Pug, but I couldn’t think of anything else. Then all at once I remembered Signor Ferri’s stable in Calvello. “I know! I bet it has a dirt floor we can dig a hole in.”

  “You’ve got it, young Rocco!” Pug slapped me on the back, and my face flushed with pleasure. It felt good to be part of a new mob.

  Pug outlined our plan a few days later. It had two parts. As I’d hoped, we would tunnel under the wall. The first step would be to break the lock to the shed. We’d accomplish that during our morning time in the yard.

  “Just like with picking pockets, we’ll need a distraction,” Pug announced. We nodded. We all knew the importance of distractions.

  The second part of the plan called for a couple of us to slip into the shed and begin digging a tunnel. We’d do that during each yard break for as long as it took.

  “What if it takes us more than a day or two?” I wondered. “Won’t someone notice that the lock is broken?”

  “Look around you, Rocco,” Pug said, waving his hand. “In this weather, the guards are happy to stay close together against the main building. They don’t want to be out here any more than we do.”

  “Besides,” put in George. “We can break the lock but put it back so it looks untouched. Unless it snows, no one goes near that shed this time of year. It shouldn’t be hard for one or two of us to slip in.”

  “What then?” I wanted to know. “What do we do once we finish the tunnel and get under the wall? How do we get off the island?”

  “That’s simple. We run to the water,” said Pug. “Then we jump in and swim.”

  “Swim?”

  “It ain’t far,” Jimmy assured me.

  I swallowed hard. I hadn’t thought about that part. “It’s November. Won’t the water be freezing?”

  “It’s not for long,” Pug said confidently. “You can swim, can’t you, Rocco?”

  I nodded. “Of course I can swim.”

  And, of course, I was lying.

  —

  The shed break-in was planned for two weeks later, on Thanksgiving Day, which, the boys told me, was an American holiday.

  “They feed us an extra big dinner, and there’ll be fewer guards on duty,” Pug explained. “Guards don’t like to work that day, so there’s always a few who just don’t show up.” Pug’s past experiences always came in handy.

  On the appointed day, Pug and Jimmy went to lean against the shed. Pug bent down, idly fiddling with one shoe, minding his own business. In reality, he was taking out a sharp stone he’d managed to find and slip inside his shoe for safekeeping.

  At the same moment, on the opposite side of the yard, George started a ruckus. He was a sharp lad, that George. He didn’t do anything as obvious as yelling or picking on someone. Instead, he grabbed some pebbles and, from behind one of the most notorious bullies in the yard, began pitching them at a group of boys.

  Then he crossed the yard to join Pug while the shouting match he left behind ignited into a fistfight. The guards ran over to stop it. Pug was already in the shed by then, having broken the lock with the stone.

  Jimmy was also inside, then George slipped in too. I had been assigned to stay on guard and had even brought a book with me. I leaned against the door of the shed, pretending to read.

  To make this more believable, I’d been carrying a book in the yard each day for a week. I still wasn’t able to actually read an entire page, but thanks to my work in the printshop, I was beginning to make more sense of letters and words.

  When the bell rang to signal the end of yard time, I banged my heel against the wall of the shed. Then, when I was sure no guard was looking our way, I kicked again to let my mob know that the coast was clear. They emerged, grinning, one by one.

  As we filed back inside, Pug whispered, “The ground is hard. But I expect that in two days of digging—maybe three—we’ll have it done.”

  —

  It took a full three days, and with each one that passed, I got more nervous we’d be found out. I kept fearing that a guard would decide to take a stroll around the yard and notice the broken lock. But no one did. Or what if it snowed? Luckily, the weather held.

  The day of the break was cold and gray, wi
th dark, threatening clouds filling the sky. Just as I’d been doing all along, I brought a book to the yard and took up my position against the shed, my head bowed over a page.

  Pug disappeared inside. Then George, and finally Jimmy. All I had to do was follow them.

  I didn’t.

  Why? you may be asking. These were the members of my mob. We had hatched the scheme together. They were, I knew, waiting anxiously for me on the other side of the stone wall.

  The reason was simple: I was too frightened to face that cold, dark water. I could almost feel it closing over my head, the sensation of my shoes pulling me to the bottom.

  “Of course I can swim,” I’d told Pug. I’d never even been near water.

  —

  “Coward,” Pug hissed.

  It was more than a week later. We were heading down the corridor for breakfast when, in a flash, he pulled me around a corner and pushed me into a small broom closet before any guard could notice.

  My heart thumped like crazy. I swallowed hard. Goose bumps of fear prickled my arms. I knew what was coming.

  Because they hadn’t made it. Barely an hour after they had escaped, Pug, Jimmy, and George were all captured, picked up as they tried to swim the Bronx Kill.

  They’d been spotted as they ran across the open fields to the water. The three had reached the water just fine, but before they were halfway across, they had been pulled into boats and brought back.

  Then they’d spent the next six days on bread-and-water rations in solitary confinement (or, in the case of George, a hospital bed, on account of he swallowed so much icy water he couldn’t stop shivering).

  I couldn’t meet Pug’s eyes. I hung my head and was silent. I felt almost as scared as I had the day of the break.

  Pug pushed my shoulders up against the wall. My head jerked backward and hit the hard surface with a thwack. “Ow!”

  “So did you? Jimmy doesn’t believe that you did, but I’m not so sure.”