The Gods Of Gotham (29 page)

“Do you think me a bit mad?”

“No, I’ve always known you felt that way. I just didn’t know the studying maps was to be in London.”

Mercy’s eyes closed. I’d never seen her look so before, tired and brave and unstrung, and it annexed another piece of me. Where, I haven’t the faintest idea, because I’d assumed them all conquered.

“I was speaking to your father,” I said slowly. “About your visiting Catholics.”

Her eyes flew open again as a tiny gasp gripped her throat.

“No, no, I didn’t tell him. And I didn’t mean to startle you, but is it right he doesn’t know that you tend the sick? Is it fair?”

Touching her knuckles to her lips, Mercy shook her head in frustration. “It isn’t fair in the slightest. Not to anyone—to me, to Papa, to the Irish who need help. I can’t see people so … categorically as he does. But if he knew where I went, he would be very unhappy, and with every good reason. He’s quite frightened for me. I’m grateful you didn’t tell him. You won’t say anything?”

“No. For the record, I think you’ve got the right end of it,” I answered. “I hate to see you in those places, but I can’t fault the Irish for living in tiny hells. And I don’t think God sent them there.”

Mercy looked at me very hard for a moment, blue eyes glowing oddly, as if trying to read the back of my head. Then she stood up.

“I must be getting back to the parsonage. That was a brave thing you did too, you know, a wonderful thing. But you’re a curious man, Mr. Wilde.”

That one floored me. “I’d thought you pretty well used to me by now.”

“Oh, of course. But the things you
fail
to do are so absolutely unexpected, you must realize.” She bit her underlip as she thought about it. “Here you haven’t taken me to task. And you haven’t told me to run along home. Nor to stop spending time with news hawkers, or to cease visiting sickrooms,” she added with a flickering smile that looked like a flinch. “You fail to do so very many things.”

“Is that all of them?” I asked, still a bit stunned.

“Well, you haven’t yet called me Miss Underhill either, as you’ve suddenly been doing ever since the fire. But you’re about to, perhaps?”

Washington Square was very big suddenly. It was an ocean of grass and trees without any borders to make it stop, to show a man where he was. One side of Mercy’s wide collar had tugged down, so more of her shoulder was exposed there than the other. But it didn’t need fixing, it needed to stay just as it was, that intoxicating lack of balance she has. The way her hair never stays where she wants it to, bits drifting like kite strings.

“Be careful getting home,” I said. “I’m for the Tombs, but will see you shortly. I’ve a lightning-maker to deliver to Fang.”

Mercy waited another moment. But I didn’t add anything. Only the faint birdsong marked the seconds passing. So she nodded politely and walked away south, trailing pale living yellow skirts through the dead yellow leaves.

People tell me things. They tell me all sorts of things. About their finances, their hopes like torches in the dark, their tiny rages, their sins when the sins feel too much like shells and they want to break out of them. But never in my life had the new facts made me feel I weighed less instead of more, caught me up on a breeze. Maybe I would never understand Mercy, grasp why she spoke so glancingly or guess what she was thinking. Still. I only wished for decades to keep trying.

I think about London, you see.

So could I, I found. And so I would do.

W
hen I turned up in Chief Matsell’s office in the Tombs, he was busy writing. I sat down when he motioned me into a chair, looking with interest at the space the strangely impressive man before me had molded to suit himself.

On the eastern wall hung a map of New York, of course, a giant and lovingly rendered one, with our wards clearly marked. One of those endlessly high Tombs windows loomed behind the desk, with
a shocking amount of inert beige light drifting in. The desk itself was noticeably not covered in paperwork. One project at a time, it seemed, however unlikely. Maybe that accounted for his casual but drill-bore focus. Several titles on his high bookshelf I recognized, confirming rumor. He did read radical civics and female reproductive texts, then. The south wall was devoted to politics: flag, Founding Fathers portrait (he’d gone with Washington, his namesake), freewheeling taxidermied eagle, seal of the Democrats. I was so absorbed that when he did speak, he almost startled me out of my chair.

“The copper stars’ investigation into the nineteen bodies is over, Mr. Wilde.”

I choked back something toxic, rising to my feet. “What?”

“The article of this morning has made our position impossible. There were no dead kinchin. There
are
no dead kinchin. You’re a roundsman of the Sixth, Mr. Wilde, and please be on time henceforth.”

Disbelief vibrated through my head like a church bell next to my ear.
No,
I thought, and then,
I defended him, I said this wouldn’t happen, so no.
And then there was nothing. I was so shocked it was ugly, it must have looked ugly, me standing there gaping—me with my three-quarters of a face and all my efforts and the things he knew nothing about. The news hawkers, the countless people I’d spoken with, Bird living at Mrs. Boehm’s. He went on writing. I felt like a street mongrel who’d been given a piece of fresh meat and then lashed out of the butcher’s shop.

“Here,” I said, taking off the copper star. I put it on his desk and headed for the door.

“Wait.”

“I told New Yorkers we were better than this. You’ve just made me a liar, so—”

“Mr. Wilde,
sit down
.”

His voice was quiet enough, but the force of it bulleted through
my brain. Then Matsell looked up at me, lifting one brow. I don’t know why, but I sat. That great dignified piggish man with the facial lines cutting like a railroad through his jowls was about to tell me something, I supposed. Depending on what it was, I might say a few choice words in return.

“I’ve come to a realization, Mr. Wilde.” George Washington Matsell placed his pen very deliberately next to his sheet of foolscap. “The content of it will surprise you, I think. Do you know what I am writing?”

“How could I?”

Again that suggestion that a smile might be forming, and then all of it blown away downwind toward the Battery. “I am writing a lexicon. Do you know what that is?”

“A dictionary,” I snapped. “I just helped to save a man from being burned at the stake, all because a mad letter was published exploiting twenty dead kinchen who’ll now never be avenged. And you want me to know that you’re writing a
dictionary
.”

Chief Matsell did smile then, tapping his quill feather against his lip once. Only once.

“All sorts of people comprise a metropolitan city. Unfortunately, the ones with the least respect for law and order are also the ones who’ve developed their own singular language, its origins lost in the fog of British history. What you see before you is the beginnings of a flash lexicon. A rogue’s lexicon, if you will.”

“You won’t need my help for that, knowing the ways of rogues so thoroughly yourself.”

He laughed. I looked at his writing, firm and a little arrogant and upside down. It was an inspired idea to record crime’s language, I thought reluctantly. But what good was knowing flash if the actual solving of a crime didn’t line up with the Democratic agenda?

“I don’t need your help with the lexicon, Mr. Wilde. I’d like you to spend your time in another way entirely, as a matter of fact.
Now that I understand just how strongly you feel about this matter. I did wonder, you know. How you felt.”

“Only the way I figure a man ought to feel about dead kinchin,” I replied coldly.

“I understand you. What I would like
you
to understand is the fragility of this particular organization. Are the copper stars universally well liked, would you say, from your experience on your beat?”

I shook my head grudgingly. For every man grateful for our watchfulness, there was another ranting about free streets and the spirit of the Revolution.

“Harper’s Police were useless,” Matsell continued, “and that is why they failed. Not because this city does not understand deep within that we require law enforcement, but because New Yorkers eat incompetents for breakfast and because our criminal population couches their arguments in the language of patriotism. I am not incompetent, Mr. Wilde, but I have been placed in an impossible position: it is extremely difficult to solve crimes of any significant age. Nigh impossible. A day passes, a week, and all trace of evidence the culprit may have left behind is gone. Here we have a series of crimes the nature of which would rock the city, perhaps threaten the voting base of the entire Democratic Party. And if we publicly fail to solve these murders, if we prove to be as inept as those blue-coated slackmouths we replaced, a future Whig victory and the dissolution of the copper stars would not surprise me in the slightest. They like their money funneled toward banks and industry.”

“The goddamned Party is all you people think about,” I hissed.

“It gave you this position, didn’t it?”

“That’s not exactly an honor. Any scoundrel who can swing a leaded stick is good enough for you.”

George Washington Matsell tapped his fingertips together with a frown. “We both know that isn’t quite the way of it. There are different kinds of police officers, same as with any set of men. Some
wanting to guard the streets, and some wanting to gain an advantage on those same streets by wearing the copper star. I’ll be the first to admit there are scoundrels in my employ, but for the sake of the Party it can’t be helped. I argue that tolerating a few useful rogues is better than lacking a police department entirely. So there are dead rabbits, and decent men, all of them walking the rounds. Then there’s you.”

“And what am I?” I didn’t try to hide the scowl on my face. It felt permanently stamped.

“The rest of them are preventing crime, you see. The roundsmen, and the captains as well. But
preventing
crime is another matter from
unraveling
it once it’s been committed. I suspect that’s where you come in, Mr. Wilde. The solving after the fact. Not everyone can attempt such a thing, you see. So by God, that’s what you’ll do. Solve the riddle, and report back to me and me alone.”

“Solve
which
riddle?”

He spread his hands out amiably, leaving them lightly touching his desk. “Is there another on your mind?”

I glanced at Matsell’s map, thoughts glinting hard and in every direction like a knife fight. Staring at the point where the city ground to a halt, where the kinchin had been hidden beneath the wordless trees. I wanted to know how they came to be there like very little else I’ve ever wanted, and I’d never felt so about a
puzzle
before. It was Bird, partly, along with all the others, but it was simpler than that. Tending bar is a line in the dust drawn repeatedly, the same transaction over and over again, with daydreams of your own ferryboat and a piece of land on Staten Island so you can stomach it. Mind games built on common sense are also required to keep you interested enough to make any money, but no matter what you guessed right about a patron, you’d forget it an hour after locking up, the next day’s tracks erasing the ones that came before. But this was a single goal, a mountain to climb and see the top with your own eyes, and
I needed to know.

And here it seemed the chief burned to know too. Despite the Democrats.

“There’s one on my mind, all right,” I said quietly.

“You’d better keep this, then,” he suggested, handing me back the copper star and managing somehow not to look smug.

“You turned me back into a roundsman just to see what I’d do?”

“It was much more clarifying than even I had expected.”

Thumbing the pin out, I shoved the star back into my lapel. It felt much better to have it there. “I need a little money,” I admitted. “I’ll use it honest, on my word. I need to bribe the news hawkers.”

“Very clever of you, too. Get funds from your brother, if you would. He’ll have a Party donations cash box at the committee meeting tomorrow morning that won’t have been recorded in the ledgers as of yet. Say nothing of this to anyone save for Captain Wilde, and Mr. Piest if you should need another ally. The man who wrote to the newspapers is a lunatic. There are no dead kinchin, there never were. Do you understand me? And if it was a copper star behind that disgraceful piece of trash, I’ll have him by the bollocks. Before you leave, write out a report regarding that powder keg you stopped going off this afternoon.”