nearly midnight
But in the second biggest police force in the world , wherein twenty per cent of the personnel wear names that betoken Jewish , Slavic or Latin forebears , tradition these times suffers many a body wallop . On a night in early April , Ginsburg , coming across from New Jersey , landed off a ferryboat at Christopher Street . He had gone across the river to gather up a loose end of the evidence accumulating against Chappy Morgan , king of the wireless wire-tappers . It was nearly midnight when he emerged from the ferryhouse . In sight was no surface car ; so he set out afoot to walk across town to where he lived on the East Side . Going through a side street in a district which mainly is given over to the establishments of textile jobbers , he observed , half a block away , a fire escape that bore strange fruit . The front line of a stretch of tallish buildings stood out in relief against the background of a wet moon and showed him , high up on the iron ladder which flighted down the face of one house of the row , two dark clumps , one placed just above the other .