The Gods Of Gotham (38 page)

I walked around to the front, where the hewn grey blocks ended and the dull red freestone greeted the passersby. People had started to mill about again, talking in whispers. Eyeing me. I paid them no mind, kneeling.

To no avail. The same untouched gloss held true for the front entrance locks, all clean and plain and defying me to learn anything from them as I shone the light into their keyholes. I paused for a second or two longer at the center entrance, seeing the reverse image through the door clear as second sight. Feeling the weight of the body there, hanging so much heavier in my chest than in the truth of its gravity.

Using the leftmost door, I came back inside. Mr. Piest and Father Sheehy stood before the altar beyond, sharing the light and volatile kerosene-soaked expressions.

“Are there other sets of keys?” I asked, returning them.

“Naught,” Father Sheehy replied.

“Then the killer is simply very good with locks, which narrows our search to six or seven thousand dead rabbits in this town. I see you’ve done better by us.”

They’d laid several items out on a cloth spread over the frontmost pew. A bag of large iron nails, their shape now sickeningly familiar to my eye. A hammer. A hacksaw, wrapped in a piece of tarp but bloody nonetheless. A paintbrush gleaming ivory in the yellowish
light, and a small pot of whitewash. A sack, emptied of its contents and draped beside them: in all, a neat little kit for the violation of all that’s right.

“Where were these?” I asked.

“In my sacristy, hangin’ with my vestments,” Father Sheehy answered. The words grated along, forced from his lips. I’d not known a man could hold so much outrage within using only his jaw.

“And the outer doors not forced,” Mr. Piest added slowly, “and you the only one with the key, and these tools hidden in your own private vestry.”

“Are ye supposin’ that I, being a Catholic and a dutiful servant to His Holiness and the Church of Rome, would think to
end
vice by committing a ruthlessness so profane it redefines the very idea of sin?” the priest snarled. “This—this—
savagery,
this
barbarous wrong,
’tis a lit match set to the dwellings of the New York Irish. I did not emigrate that I might
ruin my flock
.”

“No, no, sir, it is a point in your favor,” Mr. Piest explained. “Most decidedly.”

“And grateful I should be if ye were to tell me
how
.”

“Because no one behaves like that,” I replied, understanding my fellow copper star perfectly. “Hushes a kinchin and then shows off where he hid his tools. Had we discovered these without your company, it might have looked different. As it is, the news is still pretty gammy.”

“How so?”

“Someone just butchered another kinchin, but this time he wants us to calculate it was
you
.”

“Do you suppose that’s why the crosses are painted around him?” Mr. Piest exclaimed, snapping his fingers. “To point to the father here?”

“I can’t say, though I like it better than the other explanation.”

“And yes?”

“That he’s lost what little was left of his mind.”

Bang bang bang.

The sound thudded from the rear side of the cathedral this time. Mr. Piest scurried off, snatching up the keys. I stayed with Father Sheehy, hoping he wasn’t about to turn greenish or fall into a black study. I needn’t have worried, though. He looked keen to restain a rainbow-hued church window by putting some sick bastard’s head clean through it.

Chief Matsell came in, with Dr. Peter Palsgrave at his heels. Mr. Piest followed, having sent Neill away once more.

“Post me up,” said the chief. “How bad is it?”

“If it can get any worse, it’s beyond my imagining,” I answered, gesturing.

We all walked purposefully toward the front end of the church. I was about to explain further, Mr. Piest and Father Sheehy striding deferentially behind us, when Dr. Palsgrave started to scream.

It was an unearthly, horrible sound—something ripped from his throat that should have stayed there. A private noise. Anguished and terrified, like a pit had opened beneath him. All at once, he stopped, sinking into the nearest pew.

“Surely you’ve seen blood before, Doctor,” Chief Matsell pointed out, incredulous.

“It’s—it’s nothing,” Dr. Palsgrave panted, clawing at his chest. “Just my heart. Oh, my
heart
. Heaven have mercy, what has happened?”

“The same thing that’s happened twenty other times,” I said, an edge to my voice.

“But this. This, this. Look at it,” Palsgrave cried, hauling himself to his feet using the back of the next pew. “And done to a helpless little
child.
Who could stomach such an act? I can’t bear to—it’s completely
insane
.”

This isn’t right,
my head announced relentlessly.

“Our man’s mental condition is deteriorating,” Chief Matsell agreed decisively. “We’ve ignored his warnings, and he has been pushed into a state of violent lunacy. Now, tell me what else you’ve found, Wilde, while Dr. Palsgrave here makes a preliminary study. Dr. Palsgrave, master yourself.”

The semi-hysterical expert looked sick with fear, but he wrenched himself forward as if determined to ignore the violence taking place within his chest. I felt a little tender toward Dr. Palsgrave, hearing Bird in my head. I could buy that he loved children. And could smell the blood myself from ten yards off. This was graphic waste, the antithesis of doctoring.
If he diaries our names and later sees us … well, then we’re sick again, aren’t we? He failed.
But the chief was right, and the doctor knew it, so he blinked very hard a few times and mechanically drew nearer to the center door.

It was only five minutes later that Dr. Palsgrave wanted the body on the ground, nothing more being gained by viewing the dark glory of a madman’s staging. So the chief nodded, and Father Sheehy fetched a crowbar, and between the pair of those iron-spined men, three minutes later it was done. We had the boy laid out on a stretch of canvas sacking, looking so much smaller than he had moments before.

After a few more fluttery minutes, Dr. Palsgrave delivered us his final verdict.

“To my knowledge, I have never seen this child previously. He was healthy in life, approximately eleven years old, his organs are entirely intact, and he is dead of a laudanum overdose,” Dr. Palsgrave announced.

We stared.

“There are traces of spittle upon his lips that suggest the onset of nausea. That in itself would not be very conclusive, but in addition, he shows
every
sign of asphyxiating—his fingernails are quite blue, as are his lips.”

“So he was strangled to death,” said the chief.

“By no means—there are no marks on the child’s neck.”

“So he was poisoned? But—”

“Smell the stain on the boy’s shirt collar for yourself and then tell me it isn’t an anise-flavored opium paregoric!” the old man cried. “Laced with morphine, I shouldn’t wonder, for it appears to have done its work before the nausea had a chance to set in.”

“It’s a bit far-fetched, don’t you see, Doctor?” Mr. Piest attempted. “The method, it’s quite … humane. Is that likely?”

“We are dealing with a homicidal religious maniac, and you grouse to me about
likelihood
?”

“You mean to tell me,” Chief Matsell growled, “that some sick-minded brute broke in here with a captive, poisoned him, and then after sending him tenderly off to sleep, nailed him up and sawed him open? For effect, like?”

“Oh, merciful God,” whispered another voice, very small.

No matter how snappish we were fighting, no matter how occupied we were with the boy on the ground, I still to this day can’t credit
myself
, Timothy Wilde, not noticing the whisper of Mercy’s steps until she was nearly upon us. Without her own lantern, her hair down, her face bloodless as the moon. Her eyes fixed on murder’s latest sacrament. I did catch her as she fell, though, and as she fainted, she said something that might possibly have been “Timothy.”

H
ere is what happened that day, Sunday, August thirty-first, in the nineteen hours before New York City fell apart. From five in the morning, when Mercy arrived in the cathedral, when dawn’s scarlet glow started burning across the East River’s cool grey skin, until around midnight, when the match hit the fuse.

I missed the arrival of discreet copper stars charged with removing the body to the Tombs. Father Sheehy had lent me his keys again, and I was installing Mercy in his bed. The bedchamber was
plain, dignified. Religious art on the walls, so it was no monk’s room, kept blank for God’s glory. So far as I was coming to understand Father Sheehy, it matched him: reverent, cultured, and honest. The bed was against a wall, covered with a plain quilt. I drew it back and settled my temporary charge on a pillow.

Her eyes opened. Slivers of pale blue showing through a cloudy sky.

“Marcas.” Her voice strained badly, though she herself was barely conscious. “What happened?”

“It’s all right. You’re at Father Sheehy’s. But—”

“What happened to Marcas, Mr. Wilde?” There was a sheen to her eyes now, one that tore at me.

“That’s his name, then,” I breathed. “You know him. Whyever did you come here?”

“Was that—was that done to him first?” Mercy asked, biting her lower lip so hard I wanted to reach for it, gently pull it out again, and give her my knuckle for a substitute.

“It was laudanum. He didn’t feel a bit of it. Please, just tell me what happened to you.”

“Do you know who did it?”

“Not yet. Mercy,
please
.”

Her dark head fell toward the pillow. She was working so hard to keep from crying that my speaking her name was enough to cut her strings and send her limp. It had done just about the same to me, once I’d heard myself say it, but one of us had to stay collected. And I could do it, too, if it was for her.

“I heard shouting in the streets,” she whispered. “All Irish voices. Calling out to each other, cutting right through the dark. That there was a devil loose and he’d defiled St. Patrick’s.”

My skin went cold. The newspapers didn’t matter any longer, then. Nothing we’d done to hide this foul investigation mattered
anymore—we were exposed as that poor boy had been, hung up for all the world to see.

“I threw on my dress and my cloak without a light,” Mercy continued. “I—I thought I might know whoever it was, thought I could help, perhaps. I thought you might be here. That maybe we could set it right.”

Something purely selfish decided to inhabit my arm. I reached out and slipped my hand into hers. I didn’t calculate it, but it was only for me and not meant to comfort. Her fingers were cold, and she pushed them farther into my palm.

“His name is Marcas, but only because they call him that. And he’s nothing to do with Silkie Marsh. His house is nearly in the East River, the southwest corner where Corlears Street meets Grand. It’s all boys there. I once treated him for whooping cough. When I saw him, I—I’m sorry.”

Half a second later she was weeping on my shoulder, trying the whole time not to make any noise. My arms around her back and her mouth open on my coat. It’s not charitable to say that it was the happiest moment of my life. But in the midst of the nightmare landscape I’d wandered into, I think it was.

She quieted quickly, blushed when she pulled back. I let her go and passed her my handkerchief.

“I need to present you with an argument,” I requested quietly. “You’re the only one I can trust to hear me out.”

Mercy sighed darkly.

“Shall I get out of this bed before delivering my expert opinion?”

We repaired to the kitchen. My head felt more or less packed with unlit fireworks. It didn’t take me long to find Father Sheehy’s whiskey, an endearing third of a bottle with six months of dust on it, and I poured us two generous glasses.

“Do you think,” I asked her, “that murder has to have a reason?”

“In the mind of the murderer, yes,” she said slowly. “Otherwise, why would it happen?”

“So,” I expounded, grateful just to hear her recovered enough to return questions with more questions, “what is the reason in this case?”

Mercy squinted at me. Drew her head back and took a sip of spirits.

“Religion,” she reported, dead as dust.

“Not politics?”

“In New York, aren’t they the same?”

“They aren’t,” I objected. “Look here: a man deciding to kill kinchin and defile their corpses in secret might be doing it for religion, or an insane corruption of it. But not for politics. Politics isn’t about secrecy. It’s about
press
.”