In his darkly comic poem A Tale of the 13th Floor, Ogden Nash describes the events of a late April night, on which a “lowly bum” enters a Manhattan hotel intent on murdering one of its guests: “Pinball Pete, the rat who betrayed my gal.”
Despite having a gun jammed in his ribs, Maxie the elevator boy suggests that before dealing with Pete, they should first visit the floor of the poem’s title. The “bum” is suspicious because – being designed with triskaidekaphobia in mind – the hotel doesn’t have a 13th floor: the lift numbers go from 12 to 14.
But his host points out that this is the last day of April, a date of supernatural significance, when special conditions apply: Said Max, “Thirteen, that floor obscene, Is hidden from human sight; But once a year it doth appear, On this Walpurgis Night.”
Sure enough, the lift creaks to a halt somewhere between the 12th and 14th floors and the two men emerge into a shadowy netherworld where the ghosts of notorious New York murderers are condemned to share close quarters with their victims forever.
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Like Virgil leading Dante through hell, Maxie introduces the residents, all well known from tabloid headlines past: Here’s the bulging hip and the foam-flecked lip / Of the mad dog, Vincent Coll, And over there that ill-met pair, Becker and Rosenthal, Here’s Legs and Dutch and a dozen such /Of braggart bullies and brutes, And each one bends ’neath the weight of friends/ Who are wearing concrete suits.
“Mad Dog Coll” (1908–1932) is of special interest to Irish readers. He was born Uinseann Ó Colla in the Donegal Gaeltacht, but emigrated as a baby with his parents to New York, where he earned an early reputation for trouble, graduating to the first of several reform schools by the age of 12.
While still a teenager, he was hired as an enforcer for the racketeer Arthur Flegenheimer, aka “Dutch Schultz”. But he soon went into the crime business on his own, becoming such a nuisance to rivals that both Schulz and another gangland boss, the Anglo-Irish Owney Madden, put $50,000 bounties on his head.
[ Game theory – Frank McNally on the rituals and superstitions of GAAOpens in new window ]
Schultz also once offered any policeman who would kill him “a house in Westchester” (a salubrious part of upstate New York). So when Coll died in 1932, aged 23 and hit by nearly that many bullets, there was no shortage of suspects. Madden, however, was widely credited with the organisation.
Irish interest on Nash’s 13th floor doesn’t end there. The poem also references “poor Dot King”, a model and socialite of the early 1920s who also came to a bad end.
Born Anne Marie Keenan to impoverished emigrants, she assumed her mother’s maiden name in reinventing herself as Dorothy King, before gossip columnists dubbed her “the Broadway Butterfly” for a nocturnal habit of flitting between cabarets and speakeasies on the Great White Way.
Blessed with good looks and charm, she lived – according to one write-up – on “the bubbles of life”. She also earned plenty of money, jewellery and a 57th street apartment by the age of 28. But two nights before St Patrick’s Day 1923, her body was found, poisoned by chloroform. No one was ever convicted of the killing, so in Nash’s lines, she dances a “ghastly jig” with her nameless, faceless murderer.
As intended, the tour of the phantom 13th floor has a salutary effect on the poem’s would-be assassin, who – plot spoiler alert – repents of his plans for revenge. He is in any case too late, as the doomed Max explains: So remember, friend, as your way you wend, That it would have happened to you, But I turned the heat on Pinball Pete; You see – I had a daughter, too!”
The sinister reputation of April 30th has origins in the folklore of northern Europe. In Germany, for example, Walpurgisnacht is the night when leaders of the witch community hold an annual summit on the summit of the Brocken, the tallest peak of Germany’s Harz Mountains, to plan mischief.
[ The mood in Brussels is poised between worried and smugOpens in new window ]
Nash’s poem apart, the tradition has inspired serious literature too, including Goethe’s Faust and Bulgakov’s The Master and Margarita.
Of course, it’s all just superstition. In another part of northern Europe last week, Brussels, I was reminded there are no triskaidekaphobics working in the European Commission. That body has its headquarters in the Berlaymont, a modern complex built in the 1960s on the site of a 300-year-old convent (after the nuns, a little ominously, relocated to Waterloo).
And not only does the European Commission have its main meeting room on the 13th floor. Its president, Ursula von der Leyen, keeps a small apartment there.
All rationalists will welcome such disregard for supposed bad omens. Still, noting that von der Leyen is a German who grew up near the Harz Mountains, some of us may be relieved to see from the official diaries there are no major summits planned for the summit of the Berlaymont on Thursday.
