The Gods Of Gotham (25 page)

I’d been puzzled, but I saw the picture better then. Mercy had been spending her mornings wandering through City Hall Park for years, with plenty of bread crusts in her basket and plenty of bandages for those who awakened there and found themselves new-painted with blood. City Hall Park is ten acres of open grounds with about two acres of humiliated grass smeared thinly over it, the Hall of Records and City Hall presiding in the center. Three sorts of city dwellers populate it by night, and they keep pretty separate. The molleys like Val’s friend Gentle Jim meet at the south end by a great-basined fountain that doesn’t work, wearing sensitive looks and pale scarves while waiting to do each other French kindnesses. The homeless girl kinchin who sell hot corn tend to shelter
under the trees. As for the news hawkers, they lay claim to the steps of City Hall and the House of Records, where rival gangs of them sleep every night through our bafflingly long summers.

“A tale’s what you want, a tale’s what I’ll weave.” The scamp grinned, showing a missing front tooth. “This morning, Mr. Wilde, we was up with the larks, and nigh keen to go buy our stiffs, when Miss Underhill here arrived with a jug of fresh cow’s juice and we napped our regulars.”

I nodded. “So you were about to buy your morning stock of papers when Miss Underhill brought milk, and you shared it. Then what happened?”

Mercy’s blessed blue-eyed attention passed sidelong to me for a moment and then drifted off again as she tucked a little black strand of hair behind her ear.

“Well, then Miss Underhill asked us to blow whether we’d heard of any kinchin were put to anodyne, maybe flicked afore their ground sweat.”

I turned to her in surprise. “You … you asked if they knew of kids killed and cut up before burial?”

The most perfect lower lip in the world tucked itself under Mercy’s top lip for a moment, and it went straight to my gut. She’d not have wanted to ask such a thing of a band of boys, I thought, but how clever it was. After all, the news hawkers were as good as their own army. They had to be—they were the city’s youngest independent entrepreneurs in a town where the word
cutthroat
applied to businessmen in both the literal and figurative senses. When the papers had produced a fresh edition, newsboys swarmed the offices, individually buying as many copies as they believed they could sell to the public based on the day’s headlines and their own skill. No one bossed them, no one counted them, and I’d bet a double eagle that the employees selling them wholesale news didn’t even know their names. They set fair prices for their wares among the
various gangs, fought like pack rats for their own. The greenest of them was better equipped to answer Mercy’s question than a society spinster of forty years.

“You did the right thing,” I told her fervently.

Ninepin coughed. “So I said to her, she’d best look leery. Miss Underhill here is a kate, to be sure, a real iron insider, but—”

“Yes, she’s wonderful. Now, sing it out,” I suggested. Mercy cast me a grateful look at last before returning her eyes to her folded hands.

“It just don’t settle easy with Ninepin.” He pulled off his girlish spectacles and started cleaning the glass like a born scholar. “A fine dimber mort like Miss Underhill palavering over stifled squeakers like that. Not with the cull in the black hood on the vag.”

My jaw dropped pretty far. Mercy, too refined or else too nakedly pleased to shoot me a look of triumph, cast it at the table instead, where it ricocheted back to me in spite of herself.

“You’ve heard rumor of a man in a black hood roaming the streets?” I repeated in shock.

Ninepin nodded grimly. “I’m real sorry you thought you couldn’t savvy me, Miss Underhill.” Brightening with an effort, he sipped the brandy as if he’d been practicing for this very occasion. Which he had, doubtless. “Anything as I pattered strike you shady, Mr. Wilde?”

“I understand you perfectly,” I answered, surprised. Val had been speaking flash since before I’d known what it was, but I’d spent so much time avoiding his fellow rabbits, I never noticed my own expertise. “Ninepin, it’s very important that you tell us about this man in the hood.”

“On account of that hushed boy stargazer?”

“However did you learn about that?”

“Mr. Wilde, I ain’t educated, but I ain’t a bottle-head.” He flashed a dazzling smile at Mercy. “You think I sell stiffs without a mate reading me their headlines? You suppose I stand on street
corners screaming out, ‘By your leave, nothing much happening today! Hot streets and crooked politics! More Irish arrive! Only two cents!’”

I was smiling before he’d even finished the joke. Mercy laughed, meanwhile, in such a way that I didn’t suppose Ninepin would ever look twice at another woman in his life. Poor kinchin.

“Yes, we do want to know what happened to that stargazer,” she admitted. “Will you trust us?”

“I’ll parell it all to rights. But I can’t go the proper way about it sans my lads. They savvy as much as I do, maybe more, and they’ll leak once I own I’ve got the pig down fine.”

“Thank you for vouching for my character to your comrades,” I said with all the seriousness I could muster.

Ninepin winked at me, and then seemed to form an exciting new thought. “Wait a tick. None of us like to give
you
any humbug, Miss Underhill—and I’ll blow the gab, cross my heart. I’ll deliver a proper rounding, and we’ll not sing small, if … if you’ll only trot along to the gaff on my arm.”

Mercy cast me a blank look.

“The gentleman would like to escort you to the theater in exchange for delivering information,” I explained, though I didn’t understand it a jot either.

“There’s another rehearsal,” he said a little shyly. “Before the afternoon stiffs come off the press. If Matchbox stags you on my arm, he’ll lose no time tipping it to Dead-Eye. And then Dead-Eye’s cousin Zeke the Rat from the East River gang will have to button his lip, won’t he, when I say as I know you personal?”

Mercy stood up. She reached for my untouched drink and took a sip of it, then rested her right hand on the pleats at her waist, offering her left for Ninepin’s elbow. If God had granted a stockbroker second sight and a perpetually replenishing pharmacy, a
human face couldn’t look more joyful. It was futile, trying not to smile at it.

“Ninepin, the only project quite so important to me right now as learning about the man in the black hood is to put Zeke the Rat in his place,” she announced.

“Lord love a camel,” the youth replied in worshipful awe.

And I followed them up the stairs and out the door. Grateful as I very often am that Mercy doesn’t spend overmuch time looking straight at me.

The theater
, when we reached it following a six-minute walk, was a surprise to only one of us. But I’m pretty sure I made up for my two escorts.

We’d already been so close to the black heart of Ward Six where the world turns upside down, which is justly famous and called the Five Points, that I’d supposed we were actually going to that broken intersection. But we stopped on Orange Street, turning to a blank door. Permanent hooks were nailed into the wood for a sign to be hung, but the sign itself was on holiday. Ninepin knocked, a peculiar rhythm that reminded me keenly of when Julius hadn’t any oysters to open and would drum curlicued tattoos on the bar top with his palms, and for a moment I wondered what the devil sort of other person I’d turned into so quickly.

Inside
the door, though … we stood in a short hallway, where a wooden box big enough for a tall boy to occupy loomed next to the opposite door. The booth was poor secondhand lumber. Amateur carpentry, endlessly loving design. It had a window, with a piece of glass stuck in it that had once been in the Hudson, for a barnacle or seven clung to the green pane. No one was inside.

“Ticket booth,” explained Ninepin, looking back at me with the sort of glee that could fly a train over the Atlantic. “Right this way. Step up, step right up.”

To my wonderment, seconds later I was standing at the top of a functioning playhouse. The deepening levels, the chairs (none matched and many burned), the light fixtures (two of them, rigged to either wall and black with smoke), the footlights (piles of wax with new candles perched atop their fallen brothers), the emerald curtains and the painted backdrop of a battlefield. Then there were the boys. About twenty lined up in a soldier’s formation onstage. Or rather, what a child would think of as one.

“What do you reckon?” Ninepin demanded, but to me. Mercy had already seen his little bit of comfort, of course.

As it happened,
Valentine could have been a newsboy,
I thought.
Not a fireman. A newsboy. Just look at them. God knows none of these will first try morphine when they’re sixteen.

“It’s flash,” I said, for I couldn’t think of anything finer. “It’s dead flash.”

“Oy, it’s a
rehearsal
, for Christ’s sake, not a bloody morris dance,” snapped a taller kinchin from near the footlights. “Don’t be oafish, Dead-Eye!”

“Getting ’em into prime twig, eh, Fang?” jeered the newly important Ninepin.

Fang was a pock-faced boy of fourteen or so with his arms folded. The sort of strapping lad who came after you with a club and only remembered to apologize for the ordeal later, when all your pals were clear of the scene and it was cozy and the two of you could be human in secret. He started sneering before he even looked up, and then caught sight of Ninepin with Mercy.

We didn’t have all that much trouble with anyone after that.

A few looked at my copper star and formed tiny scowls, but I
was already well used to that. Fang strode forward with a little wooden stick he’d been using as a sort of director’s baton, tapping it against his shoulder with his skinny arms yet crossed.

“What’s it about?” he yelled. “Might you kindly get that copper out of our theater?”

“How are you liking your proscenium curtains, Fang?” Mercy called down in response. “To me the color looks very fine. Who hung them?”

“It were me, Miss Underhill!” shouted a tiny fellow with coal-black hair, waving from the assembled group with a wooden rifle. He was much older than his size, though—I could see it in the shape of his hands, his slouch, how deep-set his brown eyes were. Fourteen or even fifteen, and cursed with the bones of an eight-year-old.

“Was it, Matchbox? How did you manage?”

“Scrambled up with a rope, and Dead-Eye using the ladder and all.”

It didn’t take long to spot Dead-Eye, who was blushing furiously and making use of a large cat’s-eye marble in one empty socket.

“They’ll do
The Thrilling, Gruesome, and Bloody Spectacle of the Battle of Agincourt
proper, Miss Underhill,” announced Fang, knowing when he was outflanked. “Supposing our Henry ever shows his mazzard at rehearsal.” He slung a dark look at Ninepin. “We’re none of us much for bobbies, though, since they’ve started marching up and down. What’s this one after?”

“Are you questioning my closest childhood friend, Fang?” Mercy asked, stepping down toward the proscenium. “I’d have thought you’d be happy to meet a copper star who thinks children are worth something other than packing off to the House of Refuge.”

Fang swaggered to the edge of the stage, where the first seats were placed. I headed down to meet him with Mercy. Ninepin, glowing like a lightning bug, took a seat in the house and began polishing
his spectacles. When we were face-to-face, I saw that Fang had a scar running from his nose into his upper lip like the tooth of a snake. It seemed ever-ready to twitch up and deliver some venom.

“We like Miss Underhill plenty,” he said coldly. “We don’t like copper stars. Don’t have much reason.”

“I’m Timothy Wilde. And
I
don’t like the House of Refuge. Ever fam grasp a copper star, Fang?” I inquired, holding out my hand for shaking as sincerely as I could. A flutter of interest rippled through the boys, like a squirrel through dead brush.

“Are you waiting for a signal from God, Fang?” Mercy asked, amused.

“Here I am, come down to Gotham for a word with Fang,” Ninepin droned in a loud, genteel voice from the seats above us. “Fam grasp the copper star, he’s a bene cove. And buy Ninepin new cigarettes. You lost fair and square last night, you’re shite at craps.”

A knowing clatter of laughter behind me. Ninepin was clearly the resident mimic. Fang lifted the white-gashed side of his lip good-humoredly and shook my hand as hard as any man could.

“You’re pretty natural about your friends, Mr. Wilde, not minding shaking hands with a news hawker,” he said slowly.

“I’ve never yet been double-crossed by a news hawker.”

“Will you all tell us as much as you know about a very important matter, boys?” Mercy called to the stage at large.

A chair appeared magically behind her, carried by the gallant Ninepin. “Miss Underhill and her pal need us to squeak about the cull in the black hood, mates,” he declared.

That altered the tone somewhat.

After protests, and a few sharp
no
’s, and one or two of the smaller faces going pale, I stood behind Mercy’s chair with my fingers slung on its back while the tough-faced older youths gathered around and told us their story. And what a story. I’d set it in the original language, but it was recounted by over a dozen newsboys, with plenty
of shouted profanity and disagreement leading to careful revision. It took the whole of my concentration to grasp it all. And the other half to believe any of it. So here is what they said.