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Death of an Anarchist
by Harriet Rzetelny
Art by Hank Blaustein

He was thin and a bit undersized for his eleven years, with hands that were too large for his frame and a right foot that turned inward. His name was Mendy Leitner. He was dressed in ragged knickers, a shirt of coarse material, and a pair of thin, scuffed shoes that reached up to his ankles. Jumping over the low parapet onto the roof of the Ludlow Street tenement building where he and his family lived, he stopped for a minute and looked around at the Lower East Side as it appeared in this summer of 1896.

No curves. All lines and angles-buildings, chimneys, windows, doors. The wash that hung from the crisscross of clotheslines flapped like the wings of huge white birds. From the roof he got only a faint whiff of the street smells-the rotting fish, the open pickle barrels, the piles of horse dung ripening under the sun. He could hear the faint bing bong of the ragpicker's bell, the squawking of the chickens about to be slaughtered in the big poultry market at the end of the block, and the bellow of Moishe the scissors-grinder who was said to have the loudest lungs on the Lower East Side. His Aunt Tsipi complained endlessly about the crowding and the noise. But Mendy loved everything about this city that had become his adopted home six years ago. Except for the fact that he got hungry, as he was now, he could easily prowl the streets and back alleys all day and all night.

What to do? He could go back to his Aunt Tsipi's and Uncle Jake's apartment where he lived with his bratty eight-year-old cousin Sorele, her brainy older sister Rachel, and their boarder, Victor Navinsky. There he could swipe a piece of bread. But the idea of going home didn't appeal to him. The apartment was hot and noisy. Sorele shrieked louder than the whistles of the steamboats on the river. And when she wasn't making a tumult, Aunt Tsipi and Rachel would be having one of their never-ending arguments about why a girl of Rachel's advancing years-she was twenty-one already-wasn't married yet. As his aunt never grew tired of saying, looks don't last forever. But the worst thing would be for Aunt Tsipi to catch sight of him. Then he'd be lost-condemned to interminable hours of sitting on the floor of the apartment, pushing the accursed needle in and out, basting together the black woolen pieces that made up the knickers she sewed, endlessly, on the treadle machine that took up a corner of the kitchen.

Aunt Tsipi had been in a terrible mood for weeks now, ever since Uncle Jake and a group of men who worked in several small sweatshops in the neighborhood had gone out on strike. Yes, she agreed that a working man should be paid a living wage and should not have to work twelve hours a day to get it. Mendy and his cousin Rachel both supported this sentiment wholeheartedly, as did Navinsky, a self-acclaimed anarchist who made speeches at all the demonstrations calling for the workers of the world to unite and rise up against the bosses. But no work meant no money which meant no food-the pittance that Cousin Rachel earned from teaching English at the newly opened Henry Street Settlement House could barely pay for anything more than a few potatoes and some dried beans. Aunt Tsipi had been lucky to get the piecework from their neighbor Teitel, a small contractor who took pity on them. It meant there could be a Shabbos chicken on the table to go with the potatoes and beans, as she never stopped reminding Mendy.

His stomach growled. Well, he'd just have to take his chances. He scampered across the hot tar, his club foot dragging a little, until he came to the open roof door. Slipping in, he climbed down the narrow wooden stairs onto the landing. His apartment was just one flight down. The sudden darkness almost made him trip over something lying on the floor. At first he thought it was a pile of bedding-it had been a hot summer and half the people in the building slept out on the roof. But a shaft of light coming in from the open door showed him the handsome, sharply chiseled face of Victor Navinsky, who stared back at him out of large, brown, unseeing eyes.

"Mr. Navinsky, Mr. Navinsky!" He must be drunk, Mendy thought, shaking him by the shoulder to bring him to. Through the shirt, his body felt cold. Navinsky's vest was unbuttoned and Mendy could see a huge, liver-colored stain on his shirt front. Not drunk.

He began to tremble. Although he considered himself well able to deal with life on the streets, a dead Navinsky was beyond even his abilities. What to do? Should he go to his cousin Rachel? No, Rachel believed that the streets were no place for a little boy. The streets would turn him away from his family, from what should be his one purpose in life: to become educated. Mendy was sure that finding a body wouldn't convince her otherwise. To Uncle Jake? No. Uncle Jake would only wring his hands and moan that ever since Navinsky had convinced him to go out on that accursed strike, everything bad in the world was happening to them. And Aunt Tsipi . . . what she would say didn't bear thinking about. And everyone knew better than to go to the police, those Cossacks, doing the dirty work of the bosses as they swept down on the workers' demonstrations with their fists and clubs.

But he couldn't just leave Navinsky lying there. He closed his eyes and hoped for inspiration. It finally came to him, in the form of John McCreary.

John McCreary was nursing a beer and a whole lot of dark thoughts at the long bar in Knuckle Annie's Saloon. He'd been working there as a bouncer ever since he'd been made to resign from the force last year in the wake of the Lexow Commission investigation into police corruption. Terrible shame he felt, which made him angry. Why should he feel this way? He hadn't done anything more than scores of other police officers who paid good money to Boss Richard Croker for the privilege of working for the Police Department. And most of them were still at their jobs. Not him, though. Like a piece of rotten meat you throw to a pack of wild dogs to keep them quiet. That's what he felt like.

McCreary took a long swig of his beer. He was a big man with the body of a bare-knuckle fighter, his occupation before joining the police force, and a strong face whose looks hadn't been spoiled by a nose that had been broken a few times. After a while he became aware of a hand pulling at his coat. "Mister, mister." He looked down and saw Mendy Leitner's dark-eyed, narrow little face peering anxiously up at him. "I gotta tell you something."

McCreary liked the little urchin and generally looked the other way when he came in to buy three-cent beers from Frankie, the bartender, who technically wasn't supposed to sell beers to minors. He had never seen the kid so upset.

"Slow down, boyo," he said, pulling his thoughts away from their black place. "Any tale worth telling is worth telling proper."

Mendy hesitated. Now that he was face-to-face with the big, unshaven ex-police officer, he thought maybe his idea hadn't been such a good one after all. But McCreary was American, which meant he wasn't like his Uncle Jake who was a such a greener in his greasy cap and cracked, scuffed shoes. McCreary spoke English and he knew how to fight with his hands instead of always words, words, words. He wore fitted suits of light brown or tweed instead of the shapeless, dark-colored gabardine that hung like an old sack from his uncle's scrawny shoulders. He was the kind of man that Mendy himself wanted to be. Besides which, McCreary wasn't really a police officer anymore.

"I found a body. In the hallway, up near our roof."

"Get on with you," McCreary said, disbelief registering in his eyes. He turned back to his beer.

Mendy pulled at his coat again. "Come with me, mister. Please just come with me."

McCreary signaled to Frankie to hold down the bar, and the boy followed him out the door, into the heat of the day. They set off down Mulberry Street, walking southeast toward the Jewish quarter.

McCreary felt the change as soon as they crossed Houston Street. North of it, the neighborhood was still second-generation Irish and at least third-generation German. While there were people on the streets, most of life was lived inside the buildings. But the streets of Jewtown were teeming with life, noise, and confusion. Pushcarts were everywhere, selling clothing, kitchenware, fruits, vegetables, fish-fresh or pickled. And the people!-jabbering at the peddlers, shouting at each other, fingering the merchandise as if every pot was dented and every piece of fish was rotten.

"Here we are," Mendy said, pulling him into one of the tenement doorways on Ludlow Street.

The building was dark, stifling from the heat of the day, the air heavy with the smells of too many people in too small a place. It was a familiar smell to McCreary, bringing up memories that went much further back than the days a little over a year ago when he'd patrolled these same streets. He'd been born in the old Five Points and had grown up like a tenement rat following the death of his father, a member of the famed 69th "Fighting Irish" regiment, who had given his life to fight for the Union during the Civil War. They'd been so poor, McCreary remembered, that some nights he had nothing more than a piece of bread soaked in tea to eat.

He shook his head for a minute to shake off the memories and followed Mendy up the stairs. By the time they got to the roof landing, McCreary was wishing he was ten years younger and twenty pounds lighter. McCreary looked around him. The interior of the building below him was dark and bathed in shadows, but there was enough sunlight coming in from the open door to see the landing very clearly. With the exception of a dead waterbug on the floor near the wall, it was empty.

McCreary's large hand swooped down, caught Mendy's shirt by the collar, and lifted the boy up to the level of his own face. "Okay, laddie," he said angrily. "What's this all about?"

"I'm telling you the truth, mister, I swear it."

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