The Gods Of Gotham (19 page)

“Get her away from here,” Chief Matsell said, still never looking in Bird’s direction.

I dropped my shovel. Cursing myself for not having thought of it before, though we’d struck the first body only a bare three minutes previously. I ran for Bird, who stood frozen in a patch of clover with her lips clamped together to keep from screaming, and I soundlessly lifted her as I made for the nearest shimmering rock that would block that unholy sight.

“I won’t go back,” she vowed once more, clutching my shirt in a death grip.

“No, you won’t,” I agreed, though how I was to house a tiny stargazer I hadn’t the slightest idea.

I hadn’t been a copper star before. But I was then, I think, with Bird shivering so hard in my arms that she could scarcely breathe. And I am now.

For if not for us, who would ever have found them?

N
ew York City inhabits the southern tip of Manhattan Island where the shipping industry booms, and when we run out of space to live and work, we naturally spread north. For instance, Greenwich Village, where I was born, is entirely encompassed by New York now, and the thought that high society actually inhabits the land north of Fourteenth Street constantly baffles me. While the urban city more or less ends just north of Chelsea, so many people share this tiny land mass that these few square miles are divided into twelve wards. And I was about to
discover that when you’ve just unearthed an unholy burial site in the middle of the woods, it soon becomes a question of some urgency where you’re meant to run for help.

Everything above Fourteenth Street, from Union Square Park to the squall of affluent construction on Fifth Avenue north of the House of Refuge, from river to river and farm to farm, was Ward Twelve. But the station house designated as Ward Twelve’s was the Old Lock-Up, an unthinkable distance away from us through the woods in the stagnant and smiling green farming hamlet of Harlem, where fences crumbled pleasantly and Dutch wives waved to each other while having coffee on their whitewashed front porches, and it would have been nonsense to gallop up the Boston Post Road in search of help when help was much closer by.

So Mr. Piest unhitched one of the horses from the hired carriage while I unhitched the other, which wasn’t a bit to the hacksman’s liking. But I can’t recall our showing much concern over that, and we vowed to return the animals as fast as was possible. Piest rode hell for leather for the Union Market at Fourteenth Street, where Ward Eleven was centered, and I rode with Bird perched somehow both rigid and half-fainting in front of me in the direction of Elizabeth Street to leave her with Mrs. Boehm.

Matsell stood watching us go with one hand draped over his shovel. Jacket off, shoulders bullish, lips taut. Likely wishing his day had gone differently.

Mrs. Boehm’s anger vanished like steam when she saw Bird’s posture—a concentrated movement that was at once balletic and unpracticed, as if she’d never learned to walk at all. I wanted to stay. But I burned also to see just what we’d found. So I tipped my hat to my landlady, who’d gathered the little girl into her skirts, and, as evening fell, I galloped back to the quicksilver, upward-feathering edge of New York.

Copper stars were everywhere. Two Germans dug deep at one end of what was now a wide, gritty ditch, an American rabbit and an ex-Britisher at the other, a knot of Irish between them putting matched bones into separate sacks. Piest bustled about, overseeing the lighting of torches. But they seemed only to make the twilight darker, and an evil-minded breeze was lifting the weight of human decay into our nostrils. There’s nothing else that smells like that, and it haunts you for hours. Days. I walked up to Matsell.

“I can’t credit it,” he said, not looking at me. “That they’re all from Silkie Marsh’s house.”

“Why is that, sir? Surely, over the years, scores of children have passed through her brothel. That several are buried here isn’t impossible.”

“No, Wilde,” he answered dryly, “but you tell me if it’s a shorter route to
impossible
when I tell you that so far we’ve unearthed
nineteen
.”

I made some sort of sound that wasn’t a sound at all. Then I cleared my throat. My eyes cartwheeled over the scene. The bags, the white bones, the not-yet-white bones with frayed meat still lingering. Some tarps laid out, with pieces on them. Nothing made sense, least of all the conversation I was having.

“Could we have miscounted? Some of them … some of the pieces are very … They’re fragmented, sir.”

“Heads, Wilde,” Chief Matsell said disgustedly. “If you’re as good at counting as you are at flash, I welcome you to try your hand counting heads. Piest!” he shouted.

Mr. Piest scuttled over to us, more a spider than a crab in the torchlight and the expanding dark. Very kindly of him, I thought, that he ignored the fact I probably looked as if someone had just slapped me in the face. That was neighborly.

“Find me something,” Matsell said to Piest cordially.

“Yes, sir? What shall I find?”

“Anything. These are bodies. Only croaked bits of corpse. Less than useless, a waste of my time. Unidentifiable feed for the nearest potter’s field. Find me a locket, a spade handle, a newspaper scrap, a rusty nail, a shirt button. A shirt button would be lovely. Find me
something
.”

Piest wheeled and disappeared.

“Wilde,” the chief said slowly, “tell me how you’re going to set about fixing this problem. Because as of now, you are fixing it for me.” Pausing to draw his fingers down his jowls, he met my eyes with all the fierce focus of an admiral planning a deadly offensive. I’d never been regarded so in my life, like a man being given a mission, and I held my breath a little as he continued. “I haven’t yet read you cover to cover. I think you’ll surprise me. You can begin surprising me now.”

It felt like a dare. So of course, I plunged right in.

“Is the Democratic meeting over yet?” I inquired.

“An hour ago, perhaps.”

“Then I’ll post up Captain Wilde, with your permission. Question Madam Marsh in his company. I need a better feel for the territory, and I don’t want to walk into her brothel blind.”

“Wise precaution.” Matsell rubbed a hand up and down his craggy face, sending folds smashing into each other. “Yes, by all means, go find your brother, and tell him that I want him in my office at six this morning. This is to be treated as the most jealously guarded secret in history, and also as a civic emergency. Why someone should slaughter children in this manner is beyond my ability to fathom, but we are going to find out, by God, and that person will hang in the Tombs yard at high noon. Go quickly. And do
not
visit Silkie Marsh without Captain Wilde accompanying you.”

“Why’s that, sir?” A slick curl of doubt formed in my breast.

“Because,” the chief smiled as he turned to grip a torch being
offered him, “he’s the only man alive to bed her and escape in possession of his faculties.”

Having a purpose grounds a man
, steadies him. I felt better the instant I lit off southward in the long-suffering hacksman’s carriage, now complete again and driven by its rightful owner. My brother was right where he’d said I would find him that summer night, its sky emptied of stars by the approaching thunderstorm. At the Liberty’s Blood, Valentine held court in the back area as usual, beyond the crowded booths and the benches and the dozens of giddily filthy American flags, sprawled on a divan with his shirt half open and his gnarled chest visible, sipping something toxic with a stranger draped over his lap.

Typical picture. I’ll confess to shock, however, at the gender of the stranger.

“Tim!” Val exclaimed. “Jimmy, that’s Tim. He’s my brother. You wouldn’t know it to look at him, but he’s a right spit.”

The dark-haired, artistically slender fellow with arresting blue eyes glanced my way from the region of Val’s lap and remarked with a cultured London accent, “Of course he’s your brother. Look, he’s delightful. Hullo, Tim.”

The only thing I managed to come up with—and not adequate, I grant—was “Something terrible has happened.”

Val was practically gleaming with the liquid shine of post-Party-gathering morphine. The passing seconds dripped off his eyes like blood from a wound. But then, all at once, he comprehended me. “Up you go, fine young soldier,” he declared, and the unknown fellow called Jimmy was promptly evicted, leaving behind him an intoxicated and narcotic-impaired police captain and his grossly exhausted younger brother. Both of us missing key pieces of information.

“My God,” I said blankly, sinking into the rattan chair resting inches away from Val’s. We reposed under a nicely stuffed American eagle draped in red and blue bunting, arrows glued in its flaking talons. “I don’t believe it. You’ve added sodomy to the list.”

“What list?”

Narcotics, alcohol, bribery, violence, whoring, gambling, theft, cheating, extortion,
I ticked off in my head before giving up on a bad job.

Val cupped a hand to his mouth and shouted something merrily at a pal across the room before he registered what I’d said and turned to me with a genuinely surprised expression. “Just a moment. What have I, young Tim, to do with sodomy?”

“That’s what I’m wondering. In light of the chap who just left.”

Valentine scoffed at me, his entire face alive with flourishing dismissal, even as he poured us two gigantic clear drinks from a small stone jug. I smelled licorice and the bitter fire of diligently distilled spirits, and wanted a sip of it pretty badly. “Brother Wilde, stow your wid. Gentle Jim is a pal of mine.”

“I could see that.”

“Jesus, Timothy,
listen
for a moment and I’ll explain some basic principles to you. Regarding sodomy, since you’re so keen on the subject.”

“I’d rather you didn’t. But I see that you must.”

Having by now likely enough forgotten about my previous doomsday remark—and to be frank, in the shock of the moment, so had I—Val spread one hand wide, leaning over with the other to pass the drink firmly into my grip. I sipped and found it wonderful. It burned like sin’s version of the Holy Ghost down my throat.

“Let’s say,” my brother proposed, “that you stay away from the ladies, all of them and all hours, and instead find your own sort and go up the back stairs to bed as a habit. You’re a molley then. Am I right?”

I nodded, mute. The argument was unassailable.

“But then on the other hand, let’s say you’re
friends
with a molley—fine young Democrat, by the way, he lives here—and the molley likes you and very much wants to do you a French favor as a lark from time to time. You take my meaning, yes?”

I did. As well as another generous sip of spirits, while I recalled the long-ago night when I’d first seen that particular act, as a whore seated on a box crate in an alleyway earned her supper with her mouth.

“And then let’s say you let him go to his knees every so often, and both parties are kittled as pie and no harm done. Where’s the sodomy in that?”

I shook my head very hard, back and forth, thinking I could maybe fling some interesting but irrelevant thoughts about my kin out through my ears and instead focus on the relevant thoughts. The ones I was apparently now paid to mull over.

“There are nineteen dead kinchin, Val. Plus the one we already looked at.”

My brother’s face darkened. “What?”

“Don’t make me say it again.”

In a very uncharacteristic display of understanding, Val leaned over to listen. I spilled. I spilled very nearly everything, including the tale of the ghostly gore-soaked apparition who’d collided with my knees, how she’d warned us of Liam’s death, and explained that Bird Daly had led Matsell, Piest, and me to the terrible trove just below the ground. I left only one part out, which was that Bird yet lived with me. I simply didn’t know how to explain that fact to my brother. Meanwhile, we were both eager enough to appear deaf to each other. Valentine didn’t quite seem to grasp why Silkie’s brothel was so important, for instance, not even after the sheer number of bodies was taken into account.