Warren Murphy
Bay City Blast
Chapter one
If Jesus had walked across the tiny cove that was the harbor of Bay City, New Jersey, no one would have bothered to think twice about it. The debris and rubble and flotsam and jetsam that packed the murky oily waters was so thick that anyone could have walked on the water there.
The city was tucked into two hundred acres of shoreline and upland on the coastline of New York Bay between Jersey City and Hoboken.
The upland was an average of only eighteen inches above sea level and when it rained for more than twelve minutes, every cellar in Bay City flooded. When Bay City was booming, no one had seemed to mind. There was plenty of money for plumbers. There was enough for everyone. Hot dog salesmen got rich. Loan sharks wore vicuna. The city's bookies wintered in Florida, at least until that time each year when they had to come back and remind their subordinates that honesty was the best policy.
The city had grown around its small seaport. Since the Thirties, graceful ocean-going liners and sturdy tankers had loaded and unloaded at the two concrete piers on either side of the bay twenty-four hours a day. The Holland Tunnel to New York City and New Jersey's heavy-duty road system were only minutes away. Bay City had blossomed. Twenty-two thousand people were packed into its small area, making it the most densely populated city in the United States.
It all came unglued right after the Korean War. New methods of shipping and larger ships required more upland area for trucks to park. They required deeper channels and bigger piers and the city fathers of Bay City refused to make any improvements in the harbor. One day everyone looked up and found that Bay City's shipping business had gone to Port Elizabeth to the south and to Hoboken to the north.
Like automobile rust, the process of urban deterioration was irreversible. By 1960, the population of Bay City had dropped to ten thousand. Fifteen years later, it had been cut in half again.
As people moved away in search of jobs elsewhere, the rats and rot that always threaten waterfront cities expanded unchecked.
Buildings quantum-leaped from full occupancy to abandoned ruin. Federal government grants allowed the city fathers to tear down most of the buildings, but there was no federal money to build new ones — and no people to move into them even if they had been built — and the skyline of Bay City wound up looking like a jack-o'-lantern's mouth, the wide-open spaces of vacant lots interrupted only by an occasional building.
Most of the five thousand persons left had jobs in the factories of Jersey City and Hoboken. The rest were pensioners too old or poor to move and kids and hustlers and degenerates and hookers and bums who preyed on each other and had no reason to move.
While Bay City's decline was inexorable, it was also gradual and therefore was not covered by the press, which dealt only in stories featuring explosions or non-negotiable demands. The city was just another declining eastern seaboard community, too small to rate any television exposure, either as contrast or color.
Few people visited the city, so it was noticed when one day a long black Cadillac limousine with California license plates pulled up in front of the Bay City Arms apartment house.
The Bay City Arms remained the only apartment building in town fit to inhabit. It was now 67 percent occupied and when the figure dropped below 60 percent, the out-of-town owner was going to dump the building back to the city for unpaid real estate taxes. The building's heat was turned off at 10:00 promptly each night and only one of the two elevators worked, but the building commanded an imposing view on its easterly side of the New York City skyline and the decayed concrete piers of Bay City.
As soon as the limousine pulled to the curb, two men jumped out of the back seat and closed the door behind them. One looked right and one looked left. The first man looked up, while the second looked behind them, scowling at the rooftops and windows of the nearby tenements. The first man went into the apartment lobby and looked around, then nodded out to the second man. Both men kept their right hands jammed deep into their jacket pockets.
The man on the sidewalk reopened the back door of the limousine and a short, sturdy man got out. He wore a highly fashionable black pinstripe suit. The man was in his early forties. His wavy hair was an unreal jet black and his skin was pockmarked but showed a healthy tan from a lot of time spent in the sun. The man smiled pleasantly as he stepped onto the sidewalk, but the man with his hand in his pocket did not smile and kept looking behind them as they walked toward the building lobby. Behind them, the chauffeur locked all the doors of the limousine, rolled his windows up, and kept the motor running.
The renting office in the back of the building was actually the superintendent's apartment. The superintendent was annoyed that he had to turn off "The Gong Show" to interview the prospective new tenant.
The interview was brief.
"My name is Rocco Nobile," said the well-tailored man with the blue-black hair. "I would like to rent the top floor."
"Very good, Mr. Nobile," said the superintendent. He was a short man with thinning hair and a surly scowl which had prompted tenants in the building to give him the nickname of "Happy." "We have a couple of very nice five-room apartments vacant there."
"You don't understand," said Nobile, smiling politely. "I want the top floor. The whole top floor."
"That's right," said one of the two men with hands in their pockets. "The whole top floor." He seemed about to say more but clamped his mouth tightly closed when Nobile glanced at him without a smile.
"But we can't... I'm sorry, Mr. Nobile. Two of the apartments on the top floor are already occupied."
"By whom?" asked Nobile. The two men with hands in their pockets nodded. They were proud to work for a man who said "whom."
"Mrs. Cochrane and the Gavins," Happy said.
"You have other apartments they can move into," Nobile said, and it was not a question. Still Happy nodded.
Without turning in his chair, Rocco Nobile reached his hand up to his shoulder and snapped his fingers. One of the men left the room. Nobile asked Happy for a cup of coffee, black, without sugar, while they waited.
Before he had finished the coffee, the man returned to the apartment. "They'll move by the weekend," he said.
"Errrr, what'd you say to them?" asked Happy.
Before the man could answer, Nobile spoke. "Mr. Happy," he said, "my man was very nice to them. I am not wishing to cause trouble but I need the entire top floor. I entertain a great deal and I conduct my business from my home. I empowered my man to make them a very handsome cash offer if they would switch apartments. Apparently they have accepted. I am glad. I want only to be a good neighbor."
Happy looked at the man who had just returned to the apartment.
"That's right," the man said. "Empowered. Me." He nodded.
Rocco Nobile's good neighbors on the fourteenth floor moved to lower floors the next day, with moving men paid by Rocco Nobile helping them, and with checks for two thousand dollars each in their pockets. That same day, an ant horde of carpenters and contractors and plasterers swarmed into the top floor, knocking out walls and joining the four apartments into one enormous penthouse suite. They were finished in one day.
The decorators arrived the next morning. The furniture they selected arrived that afternoon.
Rocco Nobile moved in Saturday morning.
On Saturday afternoon, his two companions rented a vacant store a block from the city's piers and two blocks from the old yellow brick City Hall. A hastily hired sign painter erected a large sign over the windows.
THE BAY CITY IMPROVEMENT ASSOCIATION :
ROCCO NOBILE, STANDARD BEARER
Two young women were hired to staff the office. They were told they were to act as a clearing house for city residents seeking information on federal aid programs, about welfare, about Social Security benefits, about recreational programs available. The existence of the new office was announced the following Wednesday with an advertisement in the small twice-weekly paper which was Bay City's only media link with civilization.