The Gods Of Gotham (28 page)

“Listen, will you stay here just for a moment?” I asked Julius. “I need your statement, after a word with the other police. You’re all right?”

He nodded, though he looked as if he’d prefer to be a great deal less visible. I ran over to the group of copper stars, who were triumphantly fitting clumsy iron bracelets on their several stunned captives. The brute who’d started it all slept the sleep of the wicked. And appeared considerably more misshapen than previous.

“That was timely,” I said.

“On your part doubly so, Mr. Wilde, I take it!” Mr. Piest exclaimed, shaking my hand. “Now, I myself am a bit more cautious. It comes of long years on the watch. When a mob is forming next time, be in a mob yourself, sir! That is the New York way of doing things.”

“I suppose it is, yes. Mr. Kildare!” I called to the roundsman whose beat had bordered my own.

“Mr. Wilde,” he returned gruffly in his brogue thick as peat moss.

“What did that rough say to you? Before he rushed the copper stars?”

“That en’t a bit important, are it now?”

“It seemed to be to you.”

Mr. Connell brushed past me, dragging the smaller of the sottish henchmen toward a cart. He’s a calm, square fellow who thinks hard before answering anything. “In league wi’ the landlords, Mr. Wilde. We Irish copper stars, he meant.
Hirelings
o’ the
landlords
. It don’t have an exact translation. Serf, maybe,” he added over his shoulder, “though slave comes closer for an American.”

Then I recalled the other scoundrel to blame for all this. Turning about, I finally spied the lot owner with the silver neck beard and the miserably sunny breeches as he woefully watched his former employees being carted off, looking caved-in, dust settling around him.

“You’ve plenty to answer for, though none of it’ll be charged to your account,” I growled. “What the devil did you
think
would happen, sacking an all-Irish crew to gain a black one?”

“It isn’t as if
Americans
will work for the wage I’m able to afford and thus spare me all this trouble, is it?” he whined. “And I couldn’t conscience an Irish crew any longer, not as I’m a Christian man, sir, nor yet a citizen of Manhattan!”

“But
why
would you say that, having already hired—”

My question died when Mr. Piest plucked at my elbow, leading me a few feet away from the inept property owner and the self-satisfied copper stars. He scuttled behind a lamppost that didn’t shield us in the smallest part and pulled a folded-up newspaper scrap from his fraying inner coat pocket.

“You were doubtless hot on the trail today from early morning without a second to spare for politics, but things have … changed,” he informed me gravely, his worried brows twitching like lobster claws. “Matsell wants you in his office at the Tombs.”

He flitted away, and I opened the
Herald
clipping. I didn’t need long to look at it to see what had happened, and my fist met my brow as I cursed myself for checking only the headlines that morning. It was a letter to the editor: “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 …”

“God
damn it
,” I swore under my breath, crushing the thing into a ball.

Somebody had more than one correspondent.

The yellow-trousered twit shivered as the police cart trundled past with its baggage of bruised rogues. “I am not the only God-fearing businessman who has been affected by this, sir. Three of my colleagues who own properties west of here also replaced their crews, and my sister in the Village lost no time in sending me word that she had sacked their upstairs maid. Quite right of her, too.”

“I fail to follow you,” I said icily.

“Who knows what sort of wickedness lurked in that girl? We ought to round these papists up somehow, send them back where they belong. If God wishes them to starve there, then who are we to stand in the way of divine justice? Granted, it may require twice the effort on a white man’s part to get an honest day’s work out of a Negro, but at least they fear the devil—there is nothing these Irish
won’t sink to, as that letter proves. It shocks me, sir. The cruelty in what passes for fellow humans.”

“There at least we’re agreed,” I growled as he turned away from me.

Julius came up from my left, the smell of the tea leaves braided into his wiry hair preceding him slightly. A strange bulge distorted his right-hand pocket. He looked at me for a few seconds and then rubbed at his nose with his nimble fingers.

“I owe you considerably.”

“You don’t either. They pay me almost ten dollars a week.”

“So you’re a copper star now.”

“Shockingly,” I admitted with more than a touch of pepper.

He shook his head. “It isn’t, by my way of thinking.”

“And you’re a carpenter. You likely always have been a carpenter, and I didn’t think of it. Is that where your father got the name from? Or your grandfather?”

“Father.” Julius smiled. “Cassius Carpenter. See what I mean? You can’t go ten minutes without figuring something down to the ground.” He cleared his throat. “I’ll help you any way you like, and anytime too, only I can’t give a statement. It wouldn’t do right by me. Nor anyone I know. Name something else, for your trouble. Please.”

I swallowed a pincushion and nodded. Julius could bring charges all he liked, even win his case, but I already had the bastard on several counts of violence against police. And to my friend, a statement wasn’t worth wondering of a summer’s evening how long he’d live before his ken was torched.

“Just let me get it right in my head,” I said slowly. “A letter written by a mad Irish bent on taking over the city, supposedly killing kinchin as a means, came out in the early editions. Say, five this morning.”

Julius nodded, tapping his chin.

“That stunted worm over there read it and fired his crew, and with the way things have been booming in the burned district, he’d replaced it with blacks a few hours later, losing only a bit of the workday. Some of the former workmen got soused off their pates and hatched the notion of a public demonstration. And you’re the one they caught when your crew took to their heels. How close am I?”

“Shaving the bone.”

“Julius, there is one thing you can do for me. Do you savvy where most of the folk from the old neighborhood have got to?”

“Seen quite a few of them, one time or another. Always stopped for a word. Who are you after?”

“Hopstill. I need a lightning-maker.”

“Don’t we all,” said Julius, with a philosophic little smile.

He gave me Hopstill’s new address, in a wretched part of Ward Six not far from my own house. I thanked him, which was sensible, because he’d helped me. He thanked me again, which wasn’t as sensible, since everything I’d done had been my job. Julius had shaken my hand and was already walking away when I idly asked him what was straining the seams of his right pocket.

“The turnip,” he called back.

“Why?” I asked, aghast.

“Because I’m still here,” he answered. “I got a brick, a leather strap, and a rock from a slingshot too, all on a shelf. But look at me. I’m right here.”

I bit the inside of my lip hard as he walked off. Thinking about useless men, and men who are good for something. But I was wanted elsewhere. Before I saw Matsell, I knew I had to find Mercy, and I knew just where she went when she needed quiet. So I pulled the brim of my hat down and left the dwindling scene as the property owner scurried to clear the pile of pine faggots away from his precious lot. Proving conclusively, in my mind at least, the limits of what precisely that particular man was good for.

Entering Washington Square
from the eastern side, having told the hackney driver to wait and there’d be a fare back to the Tombs for him plus extra, the silence of the place struck me like a shaft of sunlight through a window. Carriages trotted slowly past, to be sure. Parched leaves cracked underfoot. But so many other sounds were absent. People don’t talk much in Washington Square. Either they live in the stately tree-fronted homes surrounding it, or they’re leaving the jewel-toned Dutch Reformed Church, or—ever since it was founded fourteen years ago, anyway—they’re students at New York University, reading as if their lives depended on it. Something about the triangle of the church and the school and the trees makes for quiet in that square, even in the amber-lit midafternoon. And soon enough I caught sight of Mercy, sitting on a bench with her hands in her lap.

Seeing her when she hasn’t seen me yet is a drunk feeling, but not in any sense of giddiness. I mean in that half-cupshot way a tipsy fellow has of looking at tiny things far too close, all attention netted by the absolutely trivial, gaping at a single straw in a huge haystack with no desire whatever to drag his focus off again. I can talk about the intricacies of ferry travel for hours when I’m soused, remembering the cool, thick feel of river water on my face, and when Mercy doesn’t know I’m looking, I can spend ten minutes on her nearer ear. But I didn’t have time to squander. So I gave myself about five seconds of the single black tendril on the left side of the back of her neck that never, under any circumstances, allows itself to be pinned up with the rest of her hair. It would do in a pinch.

“Might I join you?”

She swung her eyes up, and they were packed full of troubles. Mercy wasn’t surprised to see me, though. I was beginning to notice she scarce ever was. Nodding, she returned her attention to the littered leaves and joined her fingers together.

“There’s nothing helpful to say about what just went on,” I told her. “And I know you’ve seen as bad as I have in this city. Maybe worse. But that was a brave thing to do, for all I’d not have tailored it for you myself.”

It wasn’t what she’d expected me to say at all. The cleft in her chin dipped toward the ground slightly.

“I wanted to see that you were well,” I explained. “That’s all. I’m not going to scold you, it would be offensive. And Julius would thank you, if he were here.”

Then we didn’t say anything. A student passed by us, oblivious to the cruel events just south of him. His hat very baggy and his step very hasty and his hose very tight. There was someplace urgent he needed to be, and he wasn’t going to make it there on time. It was a gorgeous calamity in scale, I thought. A lovely misfortune. Immediate and irreversible and very soon forgotten. We needed more troubles like that. Ones like burning supper or coming down with a head cold at an awkward time. I desperately wanted to pass through countless small, endurable problems with the girl sitting next to me. I didn’t need much else. After all, had I funds enough to feed her whatever she wanted, and dress her as she pleased, I myself could live on small beer and artfully deflected remarks.

But I didn’t have a thing to my name save a star badge with a bent point. And I had to go to the Tombs. I hadn’t even the time to wait for her to speak to me.

“That’s what I’m thinking,” I said at length. “I wonder, before I go, what are you thinking?”

“Do you mean before you arrived?” she wondered softly. “Or now?”

“Whichever you like.”

The smile was vaguely shaky, a porcelain cup with the tiniest hint of a crack. “Do you ever think about London, Mr. Wilde?”

At the word
London
, I knew she was missing her mother. The
same way her mother missed London itself, I figure it. Thomas Underhill met his future wife on an abolitionist mission to England. Terrible things happened to them there, I think. Enough to drive them away forever. And they must have felt like failures emigrating back to the States. At least Olivia Underhill lived to see Empire-wide British emancipation from this side of the ocean, when I was fifteen and every newspaper was howling it on the front page. New York is a free state, of course, but Christ knows if we’ll ever see American emancipation at all.

“You mean London specifically, or do I think of … someplace away from here?”

Mercy chuckled, but without any sound. “I think about London, you see. I think about writing my book in a garret study with a window of stained glass, not in the corner of my room whenever I can spare half an hour. And I think about filling page after page, and how afterward all the things I’ve ever felt will be clear to me. Just the way the feelings of … oh, Don Quixote, perhaps, are clear to me. Imagine being Don Quixote, dreaming dreams so boundless as that, without having a book by Cervantes in front of you to make you clear to yourself. You’d drown in such feelings. They’re bearable only because they are written down. And so I’d like to go to London, as soon as I can. Because at times, this afternoon for example, I’d like to have a better … a better map for how I feel, to know its borders.”

“That would be a grand thing,” I agreed. “I thought you had twenty chapters finished.”

“Twenty-two now, though it’s very difficult to write here, without much in the way of privacy. But did you understand what I meant? Are books cartography, Mr. Wilde?”

“Reading them, or writing them?”

“Does it matter?”

“I don’t know.”