The Gods Of Gotham (22 page)
“The mab who initially found the corpse has been going from paper to paper, trading story for coin,” Chief Matsell concluded. “And if I find that any man of you has done the same regarding our other discovery, I’ll make you
wish
you were a whore. You’ll feel enough like one by the time I’m through with you.”
The room was a study by the time George Washington Matsell stormed out of it. Germans shocked but painting calm looks on their faces. American rabbits lowly chattering. Irish, black and red alike, much more
Irish
suddenly, an undercurrent among them you could see in hard glances and mouths tense as fists before a brawl.
“Did you find any buttons?” I asked Mr. Piest as the crowd dispersed. He sat in the corner like a shellfish in the crack of a rock.
“Mr. Wilde, Mr. Wilde,” he said, shaking my hand and sucking his withered cheeks in resignedly. “I did not. Traces were as easily culled from that landscape as blood from a carrot. But I will find
something
for our chief, Mr. Wilde, be it a thread or be it a sack of shovels. Mark me. I’ll do it, or die trying.”
Mr. Piest was laughable. But however laughably he was phrasing his subject, he spoke my exact mind. Maybe we were both mad, it occurred to me as I left the Tombs, going back home to look in on Bird. That wasn’t exactly a practical destination, but it needed doing.
I couldn’t think straight otherwise. Since the gravesite, Bird had been much more convincingly unwell.
Mrs. Boehm stood cutting pleasing scores into the tops of loaves, her ovens making her dark blue cotton dress cling to her tiny but vibrant hummingbird breasts. Her mouth was still turned down at its corners.
“Any change?” I asked her, setting a slender loaf of white sugar wrapped in the familiar purple paper on the table. A peace offering before there’d been any further war.
“
Danke,
” she said, looking surprised. “No.”
We’d suffered an incident over a dough hook Bird had glimpsed Mrs. Boehm using, just before I’d left for the Tombs that morning. I’d never heard anyone scream that way, ever. As if the sound could blot out everything else, make it all go white under a flood of noise. More pottery had been smashed, and again her hand had been blamed for it. Then she’d turned quiet, and that was worse.
“Speak with her, maybe.”
“I’ll try.” I turned to head up the stairs.
“Good. And when you’ve tried, if she stays so quiet, I’ll try again.”
“How’s
Light and Shade in the Streets of New York
coming?” I added teasingly over my shoulder.
The rolling pin she’d just lifted froze midair.
“Don’t worry, I read it myself,” I assured her. “The one where the murderer hides the body within a display at Barnum’s American Museum is my favorite. It’s grand.”
Her lips parted, and then she hazarded a sly glance at me from under her barely visible lashes.
“Perhaps a scullery maid has been seduced by a visiting earl, perhaps not. If I read such things, I would know.”
“Bully,” I grinned, climbing up and out of sight.
I went into Mrs. Boehm’s bedchamber. But Bird, who’d been so still that you could see the currents roiling under the frozen-over lake, wasn’t there. So I went into my own room, pretty scared she’d flown out the window as quick and soundless as she’d crashed into my knees.
She hadn’t, though. Bird lay on her stomach in her long tunic-like blouse and boy’s trousers, a lump of coal in her hand. She’d taken one of my many wistful ferryboat sketches down from the wall and was adding to it. Snakelike forms threatening the ship from beneath the water, a hawk in a tree. Either the hawk had just caught itself supper, or another snake was forcing its way down the predator’s gullet. When I came in, she glanced at me. Guilty over reinterpreting my art.
I picked up another piece of charcoal.
“I have to be along soon,” I said, shading the gently curled talons of the hawk.
Bird nodded, her hunched back beginning to look slightly less like a turtle’s shell. We were quiet for a bit. I’d resolved to mention nothing of her friends’ escape, not yet. Not wanting to say
Silkie Marsh.
She’d know of their adventure just as soon as the corpses left her eyes.
“What’s your face look like, the whole of it?” she asked suddenly.
I turned glass for a moment. Brittle as a prism.
But then I took my hat from my head and thought,
It’s better than Val tearing it from my pate when the liquor’s turned him hateful and the morphine’s wearing off.
Better than doing it alone. Maybe.
“Find out for me, won’t you,” I suggested. “I frankly couldn’t say. It’s been a weight on me.”
Bird rolled up to her knees. Since I was also on the bare floor, she didn’t have to reach far to pull the strip of mask off, tug the
single piece of oiled gauze from my face. She let the fabric fall to the boards.
And then she tore out of the room.
A strange fearful sickness rushed through me, the drowning sort that can’t be mastered even if a man supposes himself a man. But then Bird ran back in again with a hand mirror from Mrs. Boehm’s bedchamber, and she held it up.
“You look like a real flash dead rabbit, Mr. Wilde. A regular brawler. Not such a one to scrape against.”
So I took a keek for myself.
The flesh surrounding my right eye as far up as my hairline was both new and ruined. A weird bright red with shallows rippling through it, the skin of a lizard and not a human. And she was right. It was so ugly as to be downright riveting. Previously, I’d been a scrapper in body and barely passable for handsome in feature. Youthfully healthy, anyhow. Now I was a wildman, a scoundrel who’d try anything, risk violent death over an acquaintance or a box of cigars.
It didn’t suit a barman. But it looked pretty fine on a copper star.
“Should I tie the cover back on, so as not to frighten my enemies?” I joked.
“Yes,” she answered, smiling a little. “But it would only frighten
enemies
, I think. Not anyone you aren’t angry with.”
I was so grateful for her for a moment that I hadn’t any words for it. I never did find them.
“I’d best be back to work.”
Bird reached for the flimsy cloth but winced in dismay at something. She held it up for me to see. There were charcoal marks from her fingers all over it, grey on grey smears of ashy dust.
“I’m sorry. I only wanted to see.”
“Never mind.” Hideous and unaware or hideous and well informed, I was still freakishly scarred, so I tied it back on, kicking
the oiled cotton away in the corner as I rose. “If you hadn’t asked, I don’t know when I’d have ever taken it off at all.”
I’d like to say
that the ensuing afternoon was in any way satisfying. It was hateful, though. It involved me sitting at the Tombs with my teeth pressed together, writing:
Report made by Officer T. Wilde, Ward 6, District 1, Star 107. On suspicion of an unlawful burial reported by one Bird Daly, former resident of Madam Silkie Marsh’s brothel at 34 Greene Street, I accompanied Chief Matsell and Mr. Piest to 30th Street and Ninth Avenue.
I’d not hated a spill of ink so badly since Aidan Rafferty. And two nights later, after a pair of miserable days spent speaking with what seemed everyone in the city, I wrote this:
Report made by Officer T. Wilde, Ward 6, District 1, Star 107. Have interviewed various tradesmen (grocer, poulterer, seamstress, coal merchant, liquor supplier, coachman, maid, man of all work) connected with establishment of Madam Marsh, to no effect. Apart from employment practices, house above suspicion. Questions directed to sparse residents near road where the burial site was discovered report only unremarkable traffic.
Positive identification of individual bodies deemed impossible. No word of sinister stirrings has been unearthed by questioning fellow Irish copper stars or their cohorts. Growing most urgent and lacking other avenues, consulted in detail
with one Miss Mercy Underhill, charitable liaison to the Catholics, after first obtaining permission from Chief Matsell. Upon learning of the mass gravesite, Miss Underhill knew of no one seeking out lost children, but suggested the measure of conferring with her father, the Reverend Thomas Underhill, as well as Father Connor Sheehy, in strictest confidence, in hopes their own separate but wide-ranging civic work may have suggested to them any clue. By further permission of the chief, Miss Underhill pursued this plan. However, no additional information was garnered.Are we to imagine that these children were sacrificed
unmissed? It is creditable? Is it
possible
?
It took every ounce of vinegar in me not to write next:
And what am I to
do
?
The following morning
, August twenty-sixth, I came downstairs and sat at Mrs. Boehm’s empty table. She made delivery rounds pretty often, so I didn’t miss her. Now I’d been assigned the specific task of investigating the mass grave, I rose at seven, being up rather late questioning folk who didn’t want to be questioned. Bird, now that she was allowed to sleep, slept like a champion fighting for a title.
So the only thing to greet me that morning was the mail Mrs. Boehm had left out next to my copy of the
Herald
and the sort of roll she’d come to learn I bought of a morning. Scouring the paper’s headlines quickly, I found no word of the mass grave. Then I reached for an envelope marked
Mr. Timothy Wilde, Copper Star, Elizabeth Street Bakery,
and I opened it.
Mr. Wilde,
There’s sum citizens as says that the educating of Irish is throwing larning after pigs fer they might think themselves better than the white niggers they are once they do larn. Here’s one Irish disagrees and see now I’m doing God’s Work and am schooled enuf to write you this Letter.
Romannists have suffered under Protestant boots for too long. But the weakness is ours and I know the sorce. Child Whores are an abommination against the Trinity and must be skurged. An Irish falt and an Irish sin and only An Irish can cleanse our own filth before God’s eyes. Our most blessed Pope calls fer the swift hand of vengance upon Them only when clean can we be worthy clame what’s ours and deliver New York into the hands of the holy Church of Rome. Thus I marked the dead young ones hid north of the City with the sign of the Cross they weren’t fit fer other treetment and know that I am apointed
The Hand of the God of Gotham
It’s fair to say that I hadn’t been so stunned in … well, three days by this point.
Because it was the most utterly
ridiculous
letter I’d ever seen.
Did the writer of the absurd thing truly expect me to swallow that the same man who’d write “larning after pigs” would then coolly pen the words “Romannists have suffered under Protestant boots for too long”? Barmen know how people naturally talk, and not even a madman would jabber so queer. Did the rank idiot suppose I’d believe that any Irishman would kill kinchin-mabs to gain a political upset? Did he suppose me the sort to credit that the pope breathed fire and yearly reinstated the Spanish Inquisition? Would
any but a bouncing trumpeter of the arseward sort sign a letter “The Hand of the God of Gotham” and expect me, an American born, to fear an Irish boot on my neck?
That left me with two questions, as I tapped the refolded paper against the table next to my swift-cooling coffee.
One:
How
in bloody hell had this whindling sheep learned of the cache of bodies? And two:
Why
in bloody hell had he sent the wretched letter to
me
? Any copper star could have sent it himself, I recalled within three more seconds. And if it had been a rare Nativist copper star, trying to stir up anti-Catholic feeling, I couldn’t doubt that Matsell would have his hide one way or another. But it might not have been a policeman at all, so I moved on to the second puzzle. That one was simpler, of course. When I’d skimmed the contents again, it took me exactly four more seconds to figure the best man to blame for my address being on the envelope. I was meant to deliver a message to the Democratic Party.