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good-natured German who was fond of his pints and had a habit of booming out German drinking songs when the pints had lubricated the vocal cords sufficiently. It was Joe’s understanding that Mentzer worked on the bridge with Bucklin in one of the masonry crews. Watkins was the only other of Terrence’s friends Joe knew, but he wasn’t sure of the first name. Watkins was tall and kind of skinny, with a pockmarked face, probably from the smallpox. Watkins was a fairly quiet sort when he was sober but loud and boastful when he had a snootful. He worked on the same crew as the rest, Hamm figured. The rest of the crew Joe knew by description only, and being a pretty observant bartender—an asset in his profession—he had given Tom a fair picture of four or five others he recalled seeing with Bucklin. Neither Joe nor Bob could recall anything odd about Bucklin recently. There hadn’t been any fights, arguments, or incidents. Joe did mention that he seemed a little quieter in the last week or so—not quite his old self—but he didn’t make anything of it. Tom had hoped for more, but apparently Terrence Bucklin had pretty much blended in with the rest of the working crowd that Paddy’s catered to.
    There had been many, hundreds of bridge workers through Paddy’s over the years since the New York Bridge was started in ’69. Dock workers, carpenters, caisson workers, common laborers, stonemasons, bricklayers, cable men—“riggers,” as they were called—they all found their way to the dusty old saloon on Peck Slip. Most were immigrants. Most were from Ireland, although there were some from Germany and Italy and other countries. Beer was one of the few comforts for most of the men. Life was hard and the work, harder. Most lived in tenements. Ten to a room was not all that unusual. Packed into four and five floor walk-ups, one toilet per floor in the newer tenements, outhouses in the old. Tuberculosis, smallpox, measles, diphtheria, whooping
cough, typhoid, and a long list of other maladies carried off the weak and the healthy alike, the young and the old alike, the good and the bad alike. With the Lower East Side housing nearly 300,000 people to the square mile by some estimates, it sometimes seemed that the dead were carried out faster than the living moved in.
    For those who needed to get across the East River, the only way had been on a Union Ferry Company line. Though the boats were large and ran every five minutes during peak hours, they were still not enough. Winter months were the worst, with ice floes sometimes blocking the river for hours. The story went that in ‘53, John Roebling, the great bridge-builder, and his son Washington, then about fifteen, had been stuck in the ice during a ferry ride on a brutally cold winter day. It was then, during the three-hour delay in getting the ferry free, that old man Roebling first envisioned his bridge across the river. It hadn’t been till ’67 that the state legislature authorized the construction of the bridge he’d proposed and ’69 before work actually began. In the fourteen years since, there had been more triumph, tragedy, and scandal than old John Roebling could ever have imagined.
    The bridge was almost done now. The towers had been up for six years, looming over the city in monumental anticipation. Only the top of the spire of Trinity Church was higher, and that was only a needle point on the skyline, while the towers of the bridge stood massive, cathedrallike. The bridge was a colossus yet at the same time it had an almost weightless quality to the eye. The soaring roadway, now nearly complete, seemed to literally defy gravity. The slender cables, in harp-string tension, sang in the wind high above the river. Even the massive granite and sandstone towers had an airy feel when seen from a distance. Their gothic arches flew gracefully over the twin roadways. On certain days, when the sun was just