This is a chapter from near the end of The Real McCoy, in which our hero McCoy (a con man, who was born with the name Virgil Selby) returns to Manhattan in 1910, following a four year absence. He’d left in disgrace after he’d lost his boxing championship, his wife, and his flimflam partner Johnnie Gold, whom he’d “accidentally killed.” But now he’s back, hoping to make a go of it. But New York has changed: the number of immigrants and tall buildings has grown beyond his expectations.

The roaring home of millions, the city now felt as desolate as the bottom of the ocean.

Elbowing through the hurried, electric swarm on 1st Street he’d thought to ask one young, shawl-wearing woman what time it was, and she gnarled up her face with such disdain that McCoy’s tongue lay slack in his mouth like a dead fish in a grocer’s crate. "Why you ask me?" she spat.

The unkindnesses came daily, sapping his strength. What he’d once seen as the newest ways of life had already antiquated; last year's wonders of Coney Island had closed in favor of weirder, steeper roundabouts and higher flying horses; old ladies now urinated on swarming streetcorners; innocents were cheerful to rob you in a broad daylight made grimy by the hiccups of new industry. Stageshow women who’d blushed to show a naughty ankle now exposed their breasts at noon, while the sky was no longer to be found overhead. This taller Manhattan had surrendered the old’s patchwork mixture of bright and dark, beautiful and ugly, for an allover gray; week after week of that had turned McCoy’s heart into a gray-walled tenement house.

But it wasn’t just the gloom; McCoy’d seen certain things, disturbing things. He’d seen Jacob Stromobofsky in action.

A week before he’d gone to find his ex-wife, McCoy’d met Stromo in the downstairs barroom of O’Shaugney’s Pub on the Bowery. Each man had spotted the crafty other for a con man, the way a dancer might ferret out a peer by his light-footed grace on a crowded street. And in a matter of minutes the two had decided to pull some scams together. (Emmanuel Babel, Stromobofsky’s previous collaborator in crime, had recently died.) McCoy had introduced himself as Corkscrew LeFist, the boxing flimflammer out of Jersey City. But Stromo had recognized him as McCoy at once.

Before long, they hit on a Western Union swindle involving a fake teletype machine and six hired actors to be found later. McCoy hoped to con up enough money to propose again to Susan by the New Year.

From the start, McCoy and Stromo were an imperfect match.

“So,” McCoy asked him at the end of this first meeting. “How did Manny Babel go, exactly?” A ceiling fan was kneading the muggy air overhead. Union workers and bluecoats, stevedores and flimflammers were making their deep-voiced noise all around. Cigar smoke twisted about the ceiling fan blades in whitewisp tassels like threads of cotton candy. Our boy and Stromobofsky stood at the bar. A framed drawing of the Wright brothers’ airplane and nothing else hung on the wall, over a line of colored bottles. O’Shaugney’s was a basement bar: no windows.

“Did he go quick?” McCoy was asking.

“He should burn up! That’s how he went.” This Stromo had a body—slim hips, short, a big belly—like a schoolgirl eight months into a mistake. “A dumb head, my partner was.”

“Manny Babel? Was he dumb?”

McCoy’d heard—every flimflammer had heard—of Manny Babel. Manny Babel had scammed five g’s off of J.P. Morgan in a false pretense flimflam with a forged Teddy Roosevelt signature on real presidential stationery.

“Dumb like everybody dead is dumb.” Jacob Stromobofsky leaned with his hands on the bar, his peanut head a little dropped. “A dumb person is a dead person.” He sighed toward his hands that he braided together. “An unlucky person is a dead person.”

"Okay."

McCoy thought of Johnnie Gold and felt a bolt of sadness. He blinked at his new partner, who looked weak as an old elf. McCoy was drinking beer, and he took a sip now. “Okay, Stromo.”

The pause in the conversation was interrupted by the jarring growl of a passing subway train. It was a rumble specific to New York City and expressive in its way—You’re an animal underground; so am I.

“He had a boil, Manny. It turned into a sickness that hung on,” said Stromo. “He should get a stomach cramp in hell, that one.” Stromo came from Russia, a place called Odessa. New York, which now let in some 10,000 immigrants a day, had become nearly half foreign. Old customs were being reborn in the shade of the new kinds of buildings.

A thick-set, scar-faced bartender approached and asked Stromo if he wanted a drink.

“Go peddle your fish elsewhere.” Stromo’s lips glistened when he talked. He wheeled on McCoy, more quickly than you’d have thought such a body could move. “For what are you worried?”

“Me? I’m not.” But McCoy had a feeling that plans with Stromo were going to turn out wrong in a way he couldn’t prepare for. “I just wanted to know about your old partner, that’s all.”

“Don’t imagine a lung and a liver on your nose!” Stromo’s little red craggy face was not unlike a boil. “Go drive yourself crazy!” He edged toward McCoy.

The ex-champ's body took on every tautness, starting with his fists. “Just what are you talking about, Stromo?” Looking down on the Russian’s head he could see between the strands of the old guy's hair. “Calm yourself now.”

“This is not a safe business we’re in.” Stromo was squinting, nodding, already smiling. He spoke, if not quietly, then at least reasonably. “What do you need me to tell you, in my gebrochener English? Did I ask you about your old partners?” He yawned. “Now it’s getting dark in my eyes; I need to go to sleep.”

Their very first scam together was the scariest McCoy had ever done.

The idea had been Stromo’s: they’d convince a rich businessman, newly arrived to the Lower East Side, that McCoy, or “Mr. Smith”—as whitely American as “that honest Avraham Lincoln they talk about”—had run into trouble after an affair with a young Jewish girl. More, they’d say this Mr. Smith now had to sell his prospering haberdashery “for a song”—as he needed money in his pocket to flee the state. The dupe, who’d made his money in the hat business in the old country, was told he could buy a $17,000 business for $950. Who would dare turn down that?

This was a simple flimflam to set up—just forge some documents of business ownership, bribe a late night worker in an existing habedashery to play along during a tour of “one of Mr. Smith’s three, successful shops”—and McCoy and Stromo would get almost a thousand, in cash.

The new flimflam partners met the dupe, a Chaim Goldheim, at the corner of Hester and Essex Streets, where low tenements and lower makeshift wooden storefronts pitched blue shadows over elderly women in sleeveless cloaks, beggars in black, pushcarts with fruits, pots and pans, shirts and pants, fabric swatches, eyeglasses, buttons, stationery, scissors and underwear. There was a peppery smell, saloons, hanging laundry everywhere, a few religious stalls overlaid with Hebrew letters, and the choleric faces of so many aspiring young men.

Stromo and McCoy stood on the curb, Goldheim on the street itself. Goldheim was saying, “Don’t twist my head.” He had skinny legs and a chest like a small boat. “I gave you my answer, which it happens to be ‘no.’”

“What is this?” Stromo actually snorted. He strained his chapped pale lips to half their normal fullness. He wore a bow tie and a straw hat in the sun. “Such good luck I should have! Mr. Upside-Down! Don’t be stupid, you do everything backwards.”

“Hey,” McCoy put in quickly, “it’s all right,” touching Stromo by the arm. Never let a dupe see how badly you want him. “We’ll just simply find someone else, Moishe, okay?”

Stromo hadn’t turned his enraged eyes from Goldheim. “He grows like an onion, this one—with his head in the ground!” That little red craggy face once again a boil. “A new life, Goldheim! This American man is offering you a new life!” Stromo looked to the sky and laughed as if with good-natured envy, but his obvious anger made the gesture less than believable. “Such good luck I should have!”

Maybe McCoy had over-estimated the city’s new gloom: This morning’s high unclouded sky was topped by a sun big with cheer.

“For instance I don’t have a thousand dollars.” Goldheim seemed a thoughtful man, his round clean face turning a smile at his top lip, his hands deep in his pockets. “I wish I had it, sure.” And as he whispered, he batted his eyes like a flirty woman when she starts to coquet. “Forgive me, Moishe, for saying this. But listen, for what should a Jew have more than one haberdashery store? This I am telling you from experience. A Jew with more than one haberdashery store will forget the Torah.”

“You listen!” The old elf Stromo’s hands went flying up. “Asses on the table now! Let’s conclude this!” he yelled in a rasping voice.

Goldheim raised his eyebrows and motioned his thumb at Stromo. “He’s a cooking ladle, this one. Trouble he stirs up.”

What are these people talking about? McCoy thought, while in the street a black motor car swerved around the produce truck that’d stalled at the stoplight. Also a long-gaberdined peddler, not old but with white in his beard, smiled at Goldheim and stepped with his little son toward the intersection. Others walked by, too, some of them spitting onto the ground, and McCoy noted that, even on this busy corner, a few started to gather across the street. There are worse things to watch than a brewing commotion. Goldheim was still talking: “At business, I do not so good, but not so bad, either. I put food every day out on the table and that’s that.”

“This you call a living?” Stromo took the lapel of Goldheim’s mangy jacket in his fingers. “This piece of knitted dung, pardon my saying.” How could McCoy have been ready to make such a nutjob his partner? Had he lost his sense of the world? “They don’t let you live!” Stromo was yelling.

“Okay, okay, Moishe,” McCoy said abruptly. Then: “I understand why you’re concerned, Mr. Goldheim.” He smiled one of his oldtime fierce wide smiles.

A shadow covered the bottom of Goldheim’s face. Some young limper who held his bowler hat against the wind nearly knocked into Stromo. The bells from a church a few blocks uptown started nervously to titter; and an old man bent underneath a load of coats joined the crowd that grew across the street.

“I can lend you some property, too, Mr. Goldheim,” McCoy said. “As collateral. Because, you see, I have a nice, two-story place in—”

“You’re afraid, Goldheim?” Stromo seemed happy to be enraged; he was even smiling. “In heaven there’s a big fair! Do you know what I am saying to you? You’re making a big deal out of nothing! Give us the money, or else!”

Goldheim looked a little worked up himself now. “Listen to me. You’re right. I have a stomach ache in saying no to a bargain.” He avoided Stromo’s eye. “But I do not have the money. I do not know you for Adam for you to yell at me.”

“You should choke on it!” Stromo’s cheeks suddenly went so inflamed he might be close to having a heart-attack. “You should get killed! In Russia they called me The Pogrom!”

“Go threaten the bed bugs!” Goldheim was screeching all at once. “You don’t frighten me!” But his pale eyes showed clearly how frightened he was; their whites caught more than enough sun so that the pupils reeled.

McCoy said, “Okay, Moishe.” He failed to get Stromo’s attention. “Moishe! Let’s just—”

“Go take a shit for yourself, Goldheim!” Stromo’s own eyes were glittering, too, as if with tears. “Go fight with God.”

A young woman carrying two loaves of bread walked by, making sure not to look at Stromo just before he drew a small dirty revolver from under his coat and shot Goldheim in the face. The blast rang on the air like a single throaty bark from a vicious dog.

Then Hester Street held very quiet and still. Goldheim lay faceless at McCoy’s feet, bent from the waist backward at an impossible angle. Nothing moved: the scene just like a photograph, but full with color. The sun, like a cut circle in a blanket, was blocking out its shape on the blood that covered the pavement.

At last the neighborhood awakened to scream and run off. Stromo, who’d dropped his pistol, scuddled with the crowd, his hat flying away, his legs working stiffly as he made his way up Hester Street and out of this story. Then it was quiet again. Only then did McCoy started to run, too, slipping in Goldheim’s puddle, terrified.

Running past people, elbowing his way through the walkers on the street, running East, knocking over a fat immigrant boy and not stopping, the wind on his face: Is Goldheim dead or not? He ran on his toes, and he kept on as fast as he could; he’d been running less than a minute, but already he was past the pushcarts; past the peppery smell, the Hebrew letters. Dead or not? He ran until he was short of breath and still he ran. Of course Goldheim was dead. And McCoy started to feel tired and slow, tired and slow—and finally, walking now, he made his way down the stairs of the Essex Street subway station.

When he reached the platform McCoy bent double with his hands on his hips to catch his breath. He saw no sign of any police.

Another body! He thought as he pushed through the turnstile, looking around, very sad, hardly breathing. He was ill at ease but trying to fake a look of unconcern. So much death! He was struck with the belief that for a flimflammer, he had pretty strict ethics. Those of us who knew McCoy tended to agree.

He started to cry.