Empire Rising - Softcover

Kelly, Thomas

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0312425740 ISBN 13: 9780312425746

Verlag: Picador, 2006

Inhaltsangabe

It is 1930, and ground has just been broken for the Empire State Building. One of the thousands of men who will come to work high above the city is Michael Briody, an Irish immigrant torn between his desire to make a new life in America and his pledge to gather money and arms for the Irish republican cause. When he meets Grace Masterson, an alluring artist who is depicting the great skyscraper's rise from her houseboat on the East River, Briody's life suddenly turns exhilarating--and dangerous--for Grace is also a paramour of Johnny Farrell, Mayor Jimmy Walker's liaison with Tammany Hall and the underworld.

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Thomas Kelly

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Empire Rising

By Thomas Kelly

Picador USA

Copyright © 2005 Thomas Kelly
All right reserved.
ISBN: 9780312425746

Chapter One

NEW YORK CITY, MARCH 17, 1930

This one, they say, will stand forever.

Michael Briody digs his bootheel into the muck and listens as hotshots in crisp dark suits speak of marvels. All around, in the gaping desolation where the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel so recently stood, are tangles of cables, beams, uncoiled air hoses, heavy trucks, and stacks of muddy lumber. The speakers huddle on a slapped-together podium and take turns salting the morning air with superlatives: grand, gigantic, epic, magnificent, unrivaled, biggest, best, momentous. They trace imaginary arcs in the air and all agree. The Empire State Building will dominate the Manhattan skyline, dwarfing all pretenders to the crown of tallest structure in the world.

Briody looks about at the gangs of his fellow workmen, who he knows can't wait till this is over. Next to him Armstrong lifts his shoulders and bounces on the balls of his feet. "Christ," he mutters. "Look at them. A flock of weasels. Ten seconds on a work gang would put any one of them in a hospital ward." Armstrong lets you know he started as a rivet punk on the Woolworth Building back in '13, that he has banged up steel on more skyscrapers than he can count. "Who needs these dipshits?" he asks. "I seen this city change shape beneath my feet. I'm the goddamn rivet king of New York."

On the sidewalks surrounding the excavation gawkers pause. They crowd five and six deep, jostling for views through holes cut in the wooden fence. Others mass around the entrances of ramps that lead down into the site. Some gather hoping for work, thinking, Hey, why not me. Men rise on their toes, angling for clear sight lines. Children perch atop parents. The air has the tinge of carnival, a funfair. Opportunists in shiny suits work the crowd selling postcards and trinkets commemorating the event, shouting about the eighth wonder of the world.

Cameras still and moving record the ceremony. Mayor Jimmy Walker, spiffy as a Broadway prince, each hair exact, steps to the microphone. He looks over the assembled, smiles widely, and starts to speak but is interrupted by an unholy screech of feedback that careens off the foundation's stone walls and assaults the gathered, causing them to slap hands to ears, wince. Walker, an old pro in a new medium, rides out the noise, and when it subsides says, "I didn't realize Fiorello was here too." The crowd roars. There isn't a goo-goo vote for blocks. Walker smiles again. It's the kind of smile that lights up rooms, douses ire, and lets him get away with so much.

Walker knows the drill. He pays homage to the project, its scale, and to those making it happen. He steps back in line, his head fuzzy from way too much champagne the night before. He swoons toward reminiscence. Back before he entered politics he was a Tin Pan Alley sport, a writer of songs, and on more than one occasion he tossed a sawbuck to Chuckles Larue, the house dick, and frolicked away an afternoon in the grand hotel with a chorine. Those were the days.

Now it is no more. The papers told all about it, how the destruction sparked a million memories, all those echoes of lost celebrations. People called asking for keys to rooms in which they had honeymooned. A socialite in Denver called demanding a ballroom mirror, a length of bar was hauled down to a speakeasy in the Village, chandeliers were hustled to uptown drawing rooms. Then the demolition gangs swung their wrecking balls and hammers and knocked the grand hotel into a pile of junk that was carted away and dumped into the briny sea just off of Sandy Hook. Like the corpse of some refugee nobody cared to claim.

Briody is not surprised that none of the swells on stage mention the six men who died demolishing the old hotel. Not surprised in the least. He considers their ugly endings, the crushed and broken bodies spirited away like just more rubble, their names already forgotten. Their stories untold. He shifts his weight from foot to foot, is anxious to start work. His fellow workers watch with dull stares. They have no interest in the staged spectacle. They mutter and joke under their breath until one of the concrete crew makes a loud noise, like a ripe fart, and the superintendent swivels his fat head around and glares at them as if they were recalcitrant schoolboys. They fall silent. They want the work. The next stop is the breadline.

Al Smith, red-faced and stout, strides to center stage as a round of applause rises against the swirl of the wind. He rolls his cigar over his teeth, tosses it aside, doffs his brown derby. He wraps a meaty hand around the neck of the microphone and cracks a wide smile that flashes gold. He sweeps a hand across his front, indicating the foundation. "I know it don't look like much today. But trust me. The same way I came out of the Fulton Fish Market to rise to governor of this great state, so too will this site be transformed. A year from now we'll be drinking tea a quarter mile high in the air and looking down on Walter Chrysler's nifty little tower." Smith accepts the shouts and cheers of the crowd and talks about the project, its magnitude, its importance, as if he were still trying to convince himself that the raising of a skyscraper is a serious enough task for a man who so recently was his party's candidate for president of the United States of America. He eases the gathered into a few awkward verses of his theme song: "East Side, Wrest Side-we tripped the light fantastic on the sidewalks of New York."

Briody knows the story-how Alfred E. Smith came up from the docks of the Lower East Side, how he clawed his way to the top, made governor, how he looks out for his own kind. And while he no longer occupies the office, he holds the title still. They say he champions the little man, the average joe. But center stage in his suit and vest, his tight shave, his diamond stickpin catching the morning sun, he is a long way from the reek and stifle of the cargo hold.

There is to be a ritual first rivet and Briody, with his tall Celtic features, has been told by the superintendent that he is the ironworkers' poster boy, like it or not. Dust rises in little swirls as the wind blows through the site. The dignitaries vie for position in the throw of the camera's strobe while out on Thirty-fourth Street someone leans hard on a car horn. A hush flails over the crowd. The sky is clear. Briody comes forward and smiles stiffly. His colleagues have a hoot at his expense, but he doesn't mind. He looks up and sees the office workers crowded at their windows, staring slack-jawed, heads resting on shoulders, women peeking through men's elbows, noting the event so as to pass it down to the generations to come.

The Governor, his crooked smile wide, shakes Briody's hand. "I'm a card-carrying member of the bricklayers union." Briody feels the warm fleshiness of his palm and says, "Ah, that's grand, Governor. A brickie." He imagines that the last billion bricks or so in the city, have been laid without the man's help.

Skinny Sheehan cranks the bellows, flaring his coke fire. The rivets are bright orange now and Sheehan spits gently into the heat, his saliva hissing into steam. He nods and Armstrong plucks a rivet out of the heater. Acrid smoke stings the air. The officials push forward, moths to a light of recognition. It is not enough to merely be present. They must be seen to have been there, their attendance entered into the official record that is the city's tabloids. Their movement kicks up more dust,...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Picador
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2006
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0312425740
• ISBN 13: 9780312425746
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Anzahl der Seiten: 408
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: preigu; mail@preigu.de; ; Lengericher Landstr. 19; Osnabrück; 49078; Deutschland