The Gods Of Gotham (11 page)

I thought about the last time I’d seen him so pale, shortly after Olivia Underhill’s death. The reverend had adored his wife, and I know what adoration looks like. After lowering her into the ground the day of her passing, her body shriveled and scarcely recognizable, he hadn’t quit his securely locked study in the space of three entire days. No amount of pleading, even by fourteen-year-old Mercy, would coax him to emerge. Finally, seconds before Val meant to christen his new lock picks, the door had opened, and Thomas Underhill had kissed his weeping daughter, held her close and stroked her hair, and then announced that the small outbuilding of the Pine Street Church had required reroofing for long enough, and he intended to see to it. He’d left the room without a backward glance, my brother and Mercy and I staring after him numbly. Mercy found nothing in the study to indicate what he’d been doing all that
while until months later, when she discovered that every separate page of her mother’s extensive book collection had been meticulously bordered by hand in black ink. Thousands and thousands of sable mourning bands silently edging the parchment.

No, the reverend couldn’t possibly be faring any better than I was, not by a long lonely mile. Not when the question of cream was considered.

Footsteps approached. I looked up from under the brim of my hat. It was Mr. Piest, taking his single shift break for coffee. I could smell it. But he’d a pair of tin cups in his hands, not a single one. His flyaway grey curls waved a manic greeting at me as he set one of the cups down.

“Patriot, I salute you,” he declared gravely.

On his way out, heavy Dutch boots thudding, he added, “You’ll grow more used to it, Mr. Wilde.”

That’s a load of shit,
I replied in my head with a vengeance.

But when I’d taken a sip of the oily coffee—which was rich, far better than it should have been—I managed to set quill to paper.

Stopping, I marveled at my handwriting. Perfectly clear. What an appalling thing that was. Unfeeling in a way that made my gut twist, repulsed by the even letters. I supposed reasonably that they’d need it legible, and next thought that any man who was capable of writing it all this neatly was a disgrace.

My script stared back at me, a monument to steady-handedness. Revolting. When I saw how crisp the sentence looked, how distant-minded, I took the cursed star badge off and hurled it against the whitewashed wall as hard as I could.

Walking home that night
under blazing August stars with the dead copper star in my pocket, I wondered how best to make my brother pay for bringing about the day I’d had. I was thinking pretty hard, thinking
God damn Valentine Wilde
over and over again as I reached Elizabeth Street and Mrs. Boehm’s bakery.

Then something soft and frantic drove itself right into my knees.

My hands reached for the little girl’s arms before my brain registered that the collision had been with a little girl. It was a good thing, too, for she was pulling at her hair, touching a piece that had come loose from a top knot, and she would have crashed to the spattered cobbles. When I set her upright, she looked at me as if from
on a ship’s deck midriver. Not really there. Not really anywhere,
yet.
In-between.

Then I noticed that she was wearing a night shift, and it was soaked in either tar or blood. A lot of it.

“My God,” I murmured. “Are you hurt?”

She didn’t answer me, but her square face was working on something other than words. I believe she was trying not to cry.

Maybe a professional policeman, like the ones in London, would have marched right back to the Tombs and delivered her for questioning even though he was off shift. It’s possible. Maybe a professional policeman would have rushed her to a doctor. I don’t know. It ought to be clear by now that there wasn’t much in the way of professional policemen in New York City. But even if there had been, I was through with them for good and all. Aidan Rafferty was being buried by that time, so was his mother at the Tombs in another sense; I was a man used to pouring gin in a glass for double the money, and the copper stars could go hang themselves.

“Come with me,” I said. “You’ll be all right now.”

Gently, I lifted her up. I couldn’t get to my key with her in my arms. But by chance Mrs. Boehm had seen me out the window by that time and stood with the door open. Her dressing gown was wrapped tight around her bony frame, her face a study in blank surprise.

“Dear God,” she breathed through her widely drawn lips.

Mrs. Boehm ran for the fireplace next to the ovens and stoked it furiously as I entered with the limp little kinchin, reaching with her other hand for a pail to draw water at the pump.

“There are rags in the corner,” she said while flying at the door. “Clean, for the loaves.”

I set the girl down on a flour-smeared footstool. Mrs. Boehm had left the lamp sitting on the broad kneading table, for the moon was high and the pump just outside the house. In the better light, it
was apparent the huge stain on the child’s dress couldn’t have been anything other than blood.

Her grey eyes shifted about so skittishly that I moved back a little when I’d settled her on the stool. I went for the clean slop rags in the corner and brought back several soft cotton ones.

“Can you tell me where you’ve been hurt?” I asked quietly.

No answer. A thought occurred to me.

“Can you speak English?”

That stirred her a little, her jaw angling quizzically. “What else would I speak?”

Unaccented English. No, that was just to my ears, I corrected myself. New York English.

Her arms started shaking. Mrs. Boehm returned making long strides and began to heat the water. Muttering to herself, she lit another two lamps, bathing the bakery in caramel light. As she did so, and I looked the girl over more carefully, I noticed something peculiar.

“Mrs. Boehm,” I called.

Careful and slow as we could, we pulled the dress off the girl. She didn’t object. Didn’t move a muscle save to help us. When Mrs. Boehm gripped a warm, wet rag in her hand and brushed it over the child’s lightly freckled skin, my instincts were proven correct.

“She isn’t hurt physically at all,” I said in wonderment. “Look. It’s all from her dress. Covered in blood and not a mark on her.”

“They’ll tear him to pieces,” the little girl whispered, eyes brimming with tears. And then I caught her for the second time, arms tangling with Mrs. Boehm’s, for she slipped into a dead faint.

M
rs. Boehm helmed the task of getting all the blood off the poor girl while I held her limbs steady. Then Mrs. Boehm found an old, soft blouse, dressed the child in it, did up the plain shell buttons, took all the pins out of her dark auburn hair, and deposited her in a trundle pulled out from under her own bed. Queerly methodical about all of the chaos, which made me grateful. When she quit her bedroom on the second floor, closing the door behind her, she met me coming up from the
bakery carrying a small plate of sliced day-old bread with two cuts of salted ham and some cheese I’d found in a little pot of brine.

“I’ll pay for it, every cent,” I said, trying to sound gallant. I think I sounded ill. “I thought you might join me.”

Mrs. Boehm made a clucking sound. “Wait,” she commanded, ducking back inside her bedroom. When she came out again, she held a bit of wax paper of the sort used to wrap chocolate.

We set plates at the table with a pair of lit tallow candles, turning down the lamps to save oil. Mrs. Boehm disappeared and then returned carrying a stone jug of table beer, and she poured it into two mugs from the cupboard. I noticed her looking at me a bit keenly, even for her, and in another moment I swept my hat off obligingly. It was like taking off my underclothes. Obscene somehow.

“Fire downtown?” she asked softly. “Or accident?”

“Fire downtown. It doesn’t matter.”

She nodded, the corners of her broad mouth twitching. “Tell me. The girl was outside, on the street, and to bring her in is what you decided?”

“You object?” I inquired, surprised.

“No. But you’re police.”

The implication was clear. What were police for, if they didn’t take blood-covered children to the station house and learn what had happened to them? I nodded, feeling about six inches to the left of myself ever since I’d taken off the hat. I hadn’t noticed I’d been relying on it quite so heavily. Meanwhile, I could hardly admit to my own landlady that I was abandoning my only steady source of income.

“When the poor kinchin wakes up, we’ll find out what’s wrong—where she lives, where the blood came from. There’s no point in policing with her asleep.”

Ravenously hungry, I reached for a slice of thick rye and tore a
piece of the cheese curd away. Mrs. Boehm just pulled a cigarette from a pocket of her dress and lit it with one of the candle flames. The dusty dull wheat color of her hair flickered for an instant, and then the taper was back on the table. I noticed a periodical lying open where she had been reading a short story, an installment of the hugely popular series
Light and Shade in the Streets of New York,
and smiled inwardly. It’s a very keenly written collection—but equally lurid as lyrical, and the author hints ripely at sex whenever possible, which I suppose is why it’s penned by “Anonymous.” I liked my landlady better the more I knew of her. Meanwhile, when she caught me reading upside down, she blushed along the edge of her cheekbones and flipped the cover shut.

“Children like that are trouble,” she noted in a regretful voice.

“Irish children?” I wasn’t surprised she thought so. Even if the girl talked American, her hair and her skin dappled like a plover’s egg marked her as first generation. And living in the Sixth Ward, Mrs. Boehm had certainly seen plenty of them, and sometimes they
were
trouble. Often enough taught that private property is a myth.

“Not Irish children.”

“Runaways?” The question puzzled me. Wouldn’t Mrs. Boehm run if someone covered
her
in blood?

Mrs. Boehm shook her head with her bony arms crossed and her cigarette at her lips. “Not runaways. You didn’t notice.”

“Notice what?”

“She is a … what do they call it? Kinchin, you said. A kinchin-mab. The little girl is a kinchin-mab.”

The bread stuck in my craw. Taking a sip of Mrs. Boehm’s house brew, I set the sweating mug down and then leaned my elbows on the table, carefully running my fingers over my brow. How could I have been so blind? Being exhausted and hungry and three miles past horrified was no excuse for having the perception of a puppy.