Page 10 of The Bootlegger’s Bride

J an Nowak was glad to be working in Leo Gold’s cool North Side cellar that Monday morning boxing up orders for afternoon deliveries and not in the hot, airless warehouse on the wharf. Not yet noon and the metal thermometer nailed to the outhouse on the alley already read ninety-two.

Humid, windless air hung over the city like a warm invisible fog.

It always did summers in St. Louis, sitting at the bottom of the Mississippi Valley.

The muddy, earthy-smelling river swirled and surged downstream just a few blocks east of where Jan now stood.

Downtown streets didn’t smell so good either—a mix of outhouse, horse dung, rotting garbage, and distinctive St. Louis sewer gas.

The last rose from storm drains with a sour, fecund, and moldy scent reminiscent of wet newspaper.

When it’s all you know you get used to it.

His pal Stosh lived in the shadow of the Krey Meat Packing Plant on North Florissant Boulevard, yet the slaughterhouse stench never bothered Stosh.

Jan wondered what it might be like to live somewhere beautiful and sweet smelling, though he wasn’t sure where that might be.

Though the books and poems he had read gave him hints.

Maybe Thoreau’s Walden Pond or the Birks of Aberfeldy that Bobby Burns sang of.

Ever since his father learned of his son’s bootlegging and physically chucked him out, Jan had been sleeping on an army-surplus cot in Leo Gold’s dank, mousy cellar in his home on Mullanphy Street, with its coal dust and rat droppings and scent of decay leaching from the antebellum construction.

Earlier that morning he had climbed the stone steps from the cellar to the redbrick backyard and hiked over to Tyler Street to fetch the Golden Bakery truck from Leo’s brother.

Then he had parked the truck in the alley, where soon he would load the deliveries.

Blocks of Poles here, a cluster of Jews there.

Along with Germans, Irish, Italians, Czechs, Hungarians, and other immigrants and their heirs dotting the Near North Side, with the Negroes over in Mill Creek Valley.

Everyone mixed (in varying degrees) and got along (more or less).

They were all in the same boat, just trying to keep afloat and figure how to navigate the new land, its institutions, and a society where they were not always welcome.

Yet no matter how tough it was at times—the work hard and tenuous, the rewards meager and erratic, the legal and extra-legal hurdles erected by the Anglo-French ruling class both socially and economically inhibiting—everyone knew it was even tougher back where they came from.

Here at least you ate. Here you had hope.

Though these days things were booming and most everyone was thriving—at least by Central European standards.

For the people he dealt with in the neighborhood the future looked rosy.

If nothing else at least here you didn’t have some aristocrat’s boot on your neck or up your ass—so said the working-class customers in the speakeasies Jan serviced.

While he spent his nights and mornings in the dingy cellar amidst the coal dust and rodents, he passed afternoons and evenings delivering liquor with the truck and talking up his Polish customers.

Most knew his father, Joseph Nowak, or knew of him.

The elder Nowak served as spokesman for Polish steelworkers at the plant across the river in Granite City, Illinois.

He had been best man at some thirty weddings held at St. Stanislaus Kostka Polish Catholic Church on North 20th Street.

Though now sixty-years-old he still bore the strength of a young man—a fact to which Jan could attest thanks to recent hard personal experience.

Yet Jan didn’t mind spending so much time in the dreary basement of the hundred-year-old home despite its lack of household amenities and its dingy atmosphere.

Here he was his own man, without his father’s boot on his neck.

In the dim cellar he now read the order from Zofia Dudek, who ran a small speakeasy in the kitchen of her Hadley Street flat where you entered off the alley.

She had penciled “four loaves of rye, eight loaves of white”—the former meaning four bottles of rye whiskey, the latter gin.

She wasn’t the only customer who had fun with the fact that their booze got delivered via a Chevrolet bakery truck.

Bourbon was often “cornbread,” vodka “potato bread,” applejack “apple pie,” and so forth.

However, there was no need for subterfuge.

Leo took care of the coppers, and half the neighborhood was making homebrew, bathtub gin, or plum wine.

If nothing else, Prohibition brought out a can-do spirit in his neighbors along with their lurking disrespect for authority.

When he had all the orders boxed, Jan pulled on a canvas apron to protect his beige gabardine slacks, silk tie, and white dress shirt, sleeves rolled past his elbows.

Up and down the short flight of stone steps by the cold furnace and coal chute, a dozen trips, taking his time.

Still, as he hefted the final box and moved from the cellar into the hot day, his shirt stuck to his back and perspiration ran beneath his collar.

He decided that later he’d stroll to the Polish Falcon Nest on St. Louis Avenue, do some work on the rings, pommel horse, and high bar, then shower and shave—though the later hardly necessary or noticeable on the blonde sixteen-year-old.

Yet he was a man doing a man’s work, striving to make something of himself and rise, to transcend the working-class script that had been written for him.

It paid to look the part he wanted to play.

Jan loaded on the final order, padlocked the truck’s back doors, and lifted the apron off over his head.

As he turned to retreat to the cellar for his suit coat he heard tires squealing on the street out front followed by a gunshot.

It echoed off the dark bricks of the row houses, streets, and sidewalks of the quiet neighborhood.

Then more tire squealing and a child screaming.

He sprinted across the brick backyard and down the narrow, shaded brick walkway between the tall row houses.

Jan burst out onto Mullanphy Street where he froze at the curb.

The eight-year-old neighbor boy was being pulled up their white marble stoop by his aproned mother, both gazing over their shoulders at Leo Gold.

In white shirt, gray wool-worsted slacks, and oxblood oxfords, he lay face down on the herringboned brick sidewalk where a pool of blood spread bright red around his head like a ghastly aura, glowing magenta where sunlight penetrated the maple trees lining the street.

Jan could see Gold’s right eye staring at the bricks, like it was made of glass.

He felt his stomach rise and his breath catch in his chest.

His gaze was drawn up from Gold’s figure by Police Officer Oscar Pohlman turning the corner, running from North 13th Street. He stopped and stood over the body, nightstick grasped in both hands.

“Oh, my God. Leo Gold… You see who did it, Jan?”

He shook his head, ears ringing, heart racing. “No. I was out back loading the truck. Though I think the boy did… Leo liked to sit out on the stoop after lunch.”

“I know. So did everyone…” He turned to Jan.

“I’ll go down to the corner to call this in,” he rasped, breathing hard.

“You better get the truck out of here just to be on the safe side. The place will be lousy with coppers and maybe even Feds, given Gold’s livelihood.

Come find me later, and I’ll fill you in on what gives. ”

Jan again looked down at Leo Gold. He had not seen a dead man before except in a coffin.

While the blood pooling on the bricks made his stomach swim, he felt nothing for Leo Gold.

He knew he should feel something for the end of a human life, God’s greatest gift.

Yet all he could think about was what this meant for him, Jan Nowak.

This would change things for him. But as of yet he had no idea how much.