The Gods Of Gotham (35 page)

T
he only option left was to get back to work. In fact, I decided that hard, frantic work was the only route.

I turned out to be right, too. It just didn’t happen to have been
my
work.

For three days, I waited on news from the boys who made a career of selling it. I suspected that they were being very successful at learning how to make lightning and coming up dry when it came to sinister carriages. I pored over the only letter that hadn’t been burned. I avoided the morgue, and then the day before the bodies were to be secretly reburied, I went to the cellar with Mr. Piest and searched through every bone and hair follicle, gaining nothing but a lingering
queasiness and an oily feeling that wouldn’t wash off my fingertips until I used lye. I visited the police guards at the north end of the city, who were bored thin-skinned at being stuck in the woods for sixteen hours a go. I earned some fairly ripe insults for my trouble.

By the end of the three days, on the morning of August thirtieth, I was so desperate I sat Bird down and told her to draw the man in the black hood for me.

“There you are, Mr. Wilde,” she said when she was charcoal-fingered and quite finished.

It was a picture of a man wearing a cape-backed cloak and a black hood which covered his head. I thanked her anyway.

Meanwhile, my brother’s paranoia—as it was perfectly logical—had infected me. I devoured the
Herald
every morning as usual, but now the mere act of reaching for the familiar periodical sent a tipsy feeling through my rib cage.
Say nothing of kinchin
, I would beg silently.
Give me time.

And so I would read of the frantic labor downtown, of shipping schedules and the roar of unrest in distant Texas, dreading to move my eyes lest I set them upon my own name:
It has been discovered that Timothy Wilde, copper star badge number 107, has been investigating the slaughter of Irish kinchin, and has failed in every way possible.

I couldn’t help but think that it was bound to happen. That it was only a matter of time.

Then on Saturday evening, feeling both wrecked and useless, and not knowing what else to do with myself, I returned to the Tombs. I encountered Mr. Connell in the open yard, leading a slender and richly dressed man wearing a green velvet coat, with his wrists tied behind him. There was a grim air to my colleague. I nodded, and he angled his head in return.

“I say, sir,” the prisoner called out to me, “please help—I am being detained against my will.”

“Sure, and that’s pretty much the point of it,” Connell returned.

“What’s the trouble?” I asked.

“I was accosted in the street by this—this
individual
,” the captive sniffed. “A fine pass we have come to in this town when a gentleman suddenly finds himself being manhandled by some sort of bleached savage. Violence has been done to my person. I appeal to you, sir, to right this
at once
.”

“What’s the charge?” I asked evenly.

“Passin’ forged stock certificates,” Connell replied.

“Put him at the end of the eastern cell block,” I suggested. “I hear there’s a fresh litter of rats down there. They ought to get along fine.”

“Get your filthy paws off me!” the counterfeiter shrieked as Mr. Connell pulled him away. Then to me, “Don’t you read the newspapers? Aren’t you aware of what sorts of perversions these Irish are capable of? Their murderous debaucheries? You would leave me in
his
hands?”

“I don’t know quite what ye’ve been doing these several days, Mr. Wilde,” my fellow copper star said as we parted, “but I wonder if you could be going about it a wee bit faster?”

It was such a fair question that I didn’t even have the heart to answer it.

I went to the clerical common room for the copper stars within the depths of the Tombs. Once there, I began reading an argument for the complete expulsion of papists from America alongside an Irish manifesto of Catholic rights. Research born of total desperation. Scraping splinters off the bottom of an empty barrel. Then Mr. Piest strode in, making an impressive racket in his five-pound boots. Manic-eyed and wagging his chinless jaw up and down, he pointed at me gallantly.

“I have done it, Mr. Wilde! I have found it. It has been discovered. At last,” he declared, “I have found
something
.”

He dropped the
something
on the table. It was a male sexual
shield. A good one, the sort long used by housewives who’d tired of miscarriage, or by whores who didn’t fancy the notion of their noses eroding from Cupid’s disease. Made of very neatly stitched up sheep or goat intestine, forming a long reusable hood. Not fresh. Worn until a crack had formed, for one thing, though it certainly wasn’t clean either. I stared at it dubiously.

“Where?”

“In light of your recent exhortation of hard, steady work, I expanded my range, Mr. Wilde. You
greatly
affected me. I had been looking only thirty yards’ radius from the site of the mass grave, but I found my answer fifty yards away, in a secluded little valley.”

“Good Lord. I thought you were still on roundsman duty.”

“I am,” the noble old lunatic confessed blearily. “Matsell’s orders. I take two hours every morning, to have the best daylight.”

Registering that Mr. Piest’s silvery hair was practically standing on end, and that his aged hands were vaguely tremulous, I started to say something appreciative and sympathetic. But then I trailed off.

“You don’t mean to tell me,” I said, fighting whatever was crawling up the back of my throat, “that before they’ve been killed, or even
after,
he—”

“No!” Mr. Piest held up a single finger. “Were that the case, I’d have found many more, going back five years. Would I not? As it is, I only found four, discarded when cracked, and none look more than a year old to me.”

He pulled the rest of them out from his stuffed coat pocket and they joined their flaccid brother on the tabletop. I wanted very badly to jump up and wring the spooney old bastard by the hand. And then again, I didn’t.

“You’re a wonder at finding things, Mr. Piest,” I said warmly instead. Then a tight little coiled-up thrill shot through me and I sat forward. “You think that whoever used these goes there often. Very often. You think they might have heard something, seen something.
There are scattered homesteads up there, small farms beyond the settled grid—”

“And these are all clearly home-sewn, not bought, who would buy—”

“Shields from a druggist and risk exposure when you’re copulating—”

“In the woods, so as to keep your sin a secret? These came from the wife of a cuckolded farmer, or a country maiden with an appetite and a keen sense of caution. Within walking distance, as will be obvious to you, Mr. Wilde.”

I sat back in my chair, a feebleminded grin on my face. Sweeping my hat off, I made him a seated bow. Mr. Piest bowed back, ridiculously low.

Leaning down, he grasped the pile of intestinal balloons and returned them to his pocket. “I shall find the owner, Mr. Wilde. I shall make inquiries. My questions will be the soul of discretion, and we will gain our answer. I must speak with the chief!”

He scuttled out again, whistling an old Dutch tune. The single oddest man I’d ever encountered. And worth his weight in fresh-minted guilders.

I went home that night much less heavy than I’d been, good luck floating under my boots. Merrier than I’d felt in days, ready for a pint or two of small beer, and then a glass or two of whiskey, and then bed, with hope loosening the knots in my shoulders. At Elizabeth Street, the front shop light was blazing as I went in.

Mrs. Boehm stood at the counter, staring at the pair of nankeen trousers Bird had been using. She looked smeared somehow. All her edges gone slack, as if she’d been touched before the paint was dry. Her wide mouth adrift, and the set of her hands with their piece of kinchin’s clothing resting uselessly on the wood.

“That was wrong of you,” she said in a dry cornsilk voice, weightless and empty.

“What? What’s happened?”

“You should not have sent her away to the house. Not
that
house, ever. And not so soon. I was angry before, but my mind was changing, Mr. Wilde. You ought to have told me.”

Gravity shifted its pull several times and simultaneously at that, a dizzy, panicked feeling.

She didn’t just say “house.” She said “House.” House of Refuge.

“Where’s Bird?” I demanded. “I never sent her away. Where is she?”

Frightened dull blue eyes flew up to meet mine. “There was a carriage. Two men, one very dark and tall. One lighter and smaller, with hair on his lip. They took her. I’d have stopped them, but they had papers, signed by you, Mr. Wilde, and—”

“Was there a first name?”

“No. Only Wilde. They left five minutes ago.”

I ran out the door.

Every face on Elizabeth Street seemed to have a sneer on it, every indolent pig hoping I realized just how badly I could bungle a job I knew
nothing
about. Two men: one very dark and tall, and one lighter and smaller, with hair on his lip.

Scales, whose first name probably didn’t exist any longer, and Moses Dainty—Val’s men.

My feet struck the ground viciously, heading like a bullet shot for the nearest horse. It was tethered in front of a grocery and it wasn’t mine, no argument in the world could have claimed it mine, but I tore the leather straps off the post and I swung myself in the saddle and I dug my heels in, ignoring its very reasonable startlement.

You live across the street. You can solve the crime of the stolen horse tomorrow.

I thought about cursing my goddamned interfering wicked-minded brother’s name as I almost killed a pair of Bohemian
pedestrians heading home from a beer hall. But by that time, cursing seemed superfluous.

The House of Refuge is located where Fifth Avenue, Twenty-fourth Street, and Broadway collide, its charity hidden well away from respectable people’s eyes. In the countryside, east of where the bodies had been found—although recently men had begun building improbable mansions nearby. And I didn’t waste an instant mulling over whether their stated destination might be a ruse. It was a reckless roll of the dice, and yes it made my breath stutter in my chest, and yes it made me bully the unfortunate stranger’s chestnut gelding, and yes it was a guess based neither on evidence nor trust.

But I had nothing else to go on. I could fly toward the House of Refuge or else gallop toward India or the Republic of Texas. Gripping the reins, I swerved from Elizabeth Street into the mad lights of Bleecker, only a block from Broadway now and capturing the eyes of sable-hatted gentlemen and roughnecked Scots laborers alike as I thundered past.

My thoughts were pretty black as I traveled my route, earning squeals from stargazers and tourists and dignitaries, a weird and wild quarter-masked figure on a sultry summer night. They went in this fashion, most of them:

Valentine is warning you he means business. Valentine is despicable. Valentine seemed to like her, though. Valentine is a powder keg with his fuse running directly into the fingers of the Democratic Party, and Bird Daly is a witness to a scandal and therefore a liability.

The rest went like so:

Bird thinks you did this. She supposes evicting her your idea.

All the while I galloped, my eyes searched for a closed carriage. And I knew what it should look like, too. Something official enough to fool Mrs. Boehm, who was no kind of fool. And neither was my brother, God rest his soul after I’d killed him for this. The coach,
therefore, needed curtains and it needed good paint, preferably with a charitable-looking seal on its door.

But I saw no such thing. And so I rode like a scream on the wind up Broadway, skirting the omnibuses and the drays and the hackneys and the handcarts. Without much trouble, as it happened, because I was one man on one horse, and I hadn’t the time to be afraid of a collision. Flying past the turnoff for Washington Square, I’d a perfectly still memory for an instant of Mercy sitting in a park speaking of London, having just walked open-eyed into a smallish mob to free a black man. It whirled away from me all too quickly, replaced by ghastly things. The sort of things that happen to kinchin who go to the House of Refuge.

Bird will sew piecework until she goes stitch-blind at twenty-five. Bird will be shipped to a bleak prairie fit only for slitting your own throat to be the wife of a failing frontier farmer. Bird will die of pneumonia in the Tombs for stealing a rich man’s purse once she figures out she can probably manage it without being caught.

Bird will return to her former profession.

I rode the poor beast still harder, my lungs chugging fast as its hooves, my entire body turned into some sort of ode to velocity.

As I hurtled along arrogant Broadway, hearing yells of satin-cloaked disdain in my wake, bypassing mansions with distantly glimpsed chandeliers as if they were so much washed-up tidal muck, I felt a ruthless thrill at my speed warring with a growing despair at my helplessness. I hadn’t seen them yet. And I
would
have seen them, I knew I would. If they’d been present to notice.

Where had they taken her?

I was honestly considering turning back, spurring the innocent horse madly in another direction. Any direction. The right direction.

But then I stopped to think.

I was almost at the House of Refuge now. I’d passed Union
Place’s border at Seventeenth Street, its grass parched in the moonlight but its new-minted landscape irritatingly hopeful. Only a little farther to go. And if they’d been clever, and thought I might arrive home any second, ruining their scheme, what would they have done?

They’d have gone all the way around Washington Square and then cut back to Fifth Avenue, taking the wrong route a bit but still getting there directly. Because if they did need to flee my pursuit, I would surely come after them along Broadway.

Or so I was thinking as I rode up to the gates of the formidable House of Refuge. I reined in the gelding, waiting. Listening as my harsh breath broke the moonlit silence.