The Yiddish Gangster's Daughter (A Becks Ruchinsky Mystery Book 1) by Joan Cochran (popular books of all time .txt) 📗

“You bet,” I said before I realized Schatzi was looking at Moe. My brother and his friend exchanged glances.

“You can come along, but don’t get in my way,” Moe said. “Anything happens to you, Ma’ll kill me.

The subway doors slid open with a squeal and the raw onion stink of unwashed bodies assailed me as I stepped into the car behind Moe and Schatzi. It had been two days since Schatzi appeared in our hallway and we were on our way to the Nazi rally. I’d ridden the subway to visit relatives in Brooklyn, but that had been in the daytime, when the cars were crowded.

Tonight, the nearly deserted subway felt like a ghost train racing into the dark. Two Negroes in tan porter’s uniforms nodded off five benches down. Across from them sat a fat man with his arms folded and his bulging eyes half closed. The man kept his hands in his pockets, not bothering to pull them out to brace himself on the sharp turns.

Motioning his head to draw us closer, Schatzi pointed a thumb toward the stranger. “That’s Harry Shapiro,” he whispered, “one of Lansky’s men. Bet he’s on his way to beat up Nazis.” I glanced at the stranger, who was openly staring at us now. “The big idea tonight is to listen and keep your mouth shut,” Schatzi continued. Then to me, “If you can’t take the fighting, get out. We don’t need to worry about you.”

I nodded. The strangeness of riding a subway at night added a tinge of fear to the excitement I’d felt all day. My stomach ached. Ma hated Schatzi and would yell at me if she found out I was hanging around with what she called the “nogoodnik.” Schatzi was always getting into trouble and bringing Moe along. As Schatzi got older, his troubles got worse. He’d been picked up by the cops twice in the last year.

The night before, we’d heard Lansky speak. I was nervous then too, but not as bad as tonight. The auditorium was crowded with hard-looking men in their twenties and thirties and a half dozen boys around my age. I tried to look streetwise, slouching against a wall, but I wasn’t fooling anyone.

The three of us waited a half hour before a short man with big ears stepped up to the stage, silencing the crowd with his presence. He wore a fancy suit with a pink silk handkerchief in the breast pocket and looked like a businessman or a lawyer. An outfit like that, I expected the man to have a classy voice. But what came out of his mouth was straight from the old neighborhood. Turned out the guy was Meyer Lansky. And he’d grown up on the Lower East Side, just like us. He told the crowd where to meet the next night and that it was okay to break bones—arms, legs and ribs were fine. But no killing.

The man was a rousing speaker and the throng cheered him on. I’d never heard anything like it. Lansky made it sound like it was our patriotic duty to take out the Nazi bastards, that we were fighting for America and for the suffering Jews in Europe. When he asked for volunteers, every hand in the hall shot up.

But that night, hanging on to the subway’s metal overhead bar on the way to the Nazi rally, my stomach contracted. I’d been in plenty of fights and could hold my own with the kids who wandered into our neighborhood looking for trouble. But in a few hours I’d be taking on grown men. Moe and Schatzi had done a fair amount of street fighting and would be okay. I didn’t want to embarrass myself by getting beat up. And I sure as hell didn’t want to end up in jail or the hospital. That would kill Ma.

I pictured her standing over me in a hospital bed, crying like she always did when Moe and I got in fights. I turned my back on Moe and Schatzi and stared at my reflection in the window. The ache in my stomach had worked its way up and lodged like a melon in my chest.

“You want to move it, buddy?” A deep voice broke into my reverie.

It was the man with the bulldog eyes. We’d reached our stop. I stumbled out of the subway car and ran to catch up with Moe and Schatzi, on the platform and heading for the stairs. When we reached street level, we buttoned our coats against the cold and turned south. No one spoke as the faintly-lit street filled with a dozen or so men, most young and broad-shouldered with a stony set to their jaws. Moe, Schatzi, and I joined the small army as it advanced down the block past closed storefronts and restaurants. Eventually, we stepped into the shadows of the buildings across the road from a brick auditorium.

We waited an hour, then two, shivering in the frigid air and whispering to one another as we listened to cheering from the auditorium. No one told us what the signal to act would be, but I figured we’d know when it came. My feet were almost numb with cold when I heard the crash of shattering glass and saw two bodies fly through a window to the right of the auditorium’s entrance. In seconds, three thugs I recognized from the night before had scampered up the fire escape on the side

of the building.

I raced after Moe and Schatzi toward the auditorium and ran to the top of the broad staircase. Men in khaki outfits and business suits dashed like angry ants from the entrance, trying to escape the Jews who greeted them, punching and kicking as they tried to descend. In seconds, Moe was swinging the nightstick he’d stuffed down his pants and Schatzi and I were using our fists on everything that came within arm’s length. The cheers