Free Dollface: A Novel of the Roaring Twenties by Renée Rosen Page A

years later, in 1910, he was murdered during what we thought was a dispute among the stockyard workers. After a group of laborers had walked off their jobs one day, violence broke out between the meatpackers and the workers. My father’s torso was found two days later. It was only the scar on his left shoulder—caused by a meat hook accident—that allowed my mother to identify him. The police thought the disgruntled workers did it. At the time of his death they didn’t know about the Black Hand Gang. That didn’t come out until later.
    And I didn’t find out about the Black Hand Gang until later still, when I was twelve. That was when I came across the cigar box my mother had hidden beneath some old blankets in the front hall closet. I found the letters inside. All six of them were addressed to my father. They were yellowed and worn at the folds, as if my mother had read them many times over. As I started to read the first one, my mouth went dry and a lump gathered in my throat. They’d written to my father, threatening to make you a very sorry man unless he delivered a hundred dollars to them the next day. The second letter demanded two hundred or else your wife and child will never see you alive again . It went on and on like that, up to fifteen hundred dollars. I remembered sitting on the floor, leaning against the closet door with my knees up close to my chest, reading through the letters one at a time.
    When I was finished, I couldn’t move. I stayed like that on the floor, staring at the wall as the sunlight coming through the window slipped away. Each letter was signed the same way, with a black handprint and a dagger.
    When I asked about the letters, my mother was furious and told me it was none of my business. But it was my business. He was my father and I had a right to know how he’d gotten involved with those people. And were they done with us, or were they coming back for more?
    I later found out that the Black Hand Gang had disbanded years earlier, but had been replaced by street thugs and gangsters. It was a struggle for control, and whoever had the most power was in charge. That was one of the reasons I was so drawn to Shep. I thought he could protect me from people like the Black Hand Gang. But that was before I’d met his friends, Vincent Drucci and Hymie Weiss. They scared the hell out of me.
    •   •   •
    H aving made my way to Abramowitz Meats, I climbed the stairs of the slaughterhouse and went inside. Ida Brech was there, seated at her desk, where she’d been for as long as I could remember. As a young girl I considered her the original Gibson girl with her glossy brown hair pinned up and her bright, hopeful smile. Funny, I always thought she was so pretty and I wanted to be like her when I grew up. But the years had left Ida behind and she’d been sitting at that desk—where my mother would have gladly made a place for me—all this time. Instead of letting young men court her, show her a good time, maybe learning to paint or play piano and one day getting married and having children, Ida had been working at Abramowitz Meats. Now her hair was streaked with gray and the lines around her mouth were set in a deep, resigned frown. Ida represented everything I feared I’d become if I’d stayed with my mother.
    “Your mother’s on the kill floor,” she said as she spun a fresh sheet of paper in the typewriter. “She told me to send you over when you got here.”
    It was cold on the kill floor and I could see my breath before me. Hundreds of carcasses were strung up, hanging from the track of meat hooks in the ceiling, their guts split open, innards sticking out, stomachs looking like slimy gray balloons. On the far end, a dozen cattle were hanging upside down with blood pouring from their throats while their bodies twisted, kicked and thrashed. It would go on like that until they bled out. That was the kosher way.
    A few of the men looked up from their work, acknowledged me and