The Gods Of Gotham (44 page)

Narcotics, alcohol, bribery, violence, whoring, gambling, theft, cheating, extortion, sodomy.

Ritualized child murder.

“It can’t be,” I said out loud. “No. It can’t.”

“What can’t be?” Mercy questioned, still doing up her hair.

“My brother. He’s been on my back to quit this investigation, but it can’t be because he’s afraid it’ll lead me to …”

“To
what
?”

“To him.”

Mercy caught her lip in her teeth, shooting me a scrap of pity from under her eyelashes.

“Val would never hurt kinchin. You do know that about your own brother, don’t you?”

I stared back at her.

Mother of God.

I don’t know whether I couldn’t breathe for the next five seconds, or if breathing no longer seemed like a very practical hobby.

People tell me things they don’t mean to. I’m a walking confessional in the form of a square-jawed, wiry-limbed, short-statured star policeman with green eyes, a dirty blond widow’s peak, and a partial face, and I might as well be a walking coffin box for all the good it’s ever done me.

“You just called him Val. The first time was him, wasn’t it?”

The silence I’d expected to hear fell between us.

The one that meant yes.

“We were always there, at your house,” I added idiotically, simply to shatter the screaming quiet. “When you thought it was love, you meant Val.”

Mercy didn’t answer me. Her hair was finished, save the tendril on the back left side that never agrees to go anywhere.

“Why are you so against Valentine?” she murmured. “Enough to suppose him capable of child murder?”

“He did just try to kill me.”

Scowling, Mercy pulled on the grey cloak. It was a kindly scowl, if that’s possible.

“Your brother did no such thing. Someone is playing you for a fool. Who was it that came after you?”

“Scales and Moses Dainty, Val’s twin lapdogs.”

Mercy laughed. “You mean Silkie Marsh’s lapdogs, though she pays them well enough to keep quiet about it.”

Of course, I’d been dead wrong. Silkie Marsh had seen the nightdress and wanted Bird back. Silkie Marsh had wanted me to stop wondering why her kinchin-mabs turned up in trash bins, and Val had warned me that she’d try to quiet me. That she’d once out of spite tried to quiet
him.

“Do you think it matters now?” I questioned, voice thin as a honed blade. “Knowing you wanted him and not me?”

This time when she didn’t answer me, her lips parted. She tried, bless that tender spirit of hers, no matter how her life had just exploded. She tried. Mercy just couldn’t think of a damn thing in the world to say.

“I wonder if you think it’s better this way,” I added. “Is it better that I’m going to try to kill him and not the other way round?”

Her breath caught.

“Tim,” she attempted. “You mustn’t—”

“When you were in a carriage this afternoon, the one that let you out before your door in Pine Street … That coach belonged to the man in the black hood. You were with him.”

Color flamed into her face and then faded fast as a scrap of cheap paper burning. What was queerest about the expression was that I’d seen it before. Like an inner bomb, everything shifting and everything fiery and everything flying, and then watching the dust settle back. I’d seen it on Bird’s face last, when I’d rescued her from the carriage careening toward the House of Refuge.

“I wasn’t,” Mercy gasped. “No, I wasn’t.”

“The newsboys saw you. Tell me who he is.”

“No,” she cried, shaking her head wildly. “No, no, no. You’re wrong. They were wrong, there must be two carriages. That’s it! There are two, of the same manufacture.”

“You truly want to shield him from me? A lunatic kinchin murderer?
Why
, Miss Underhill?”

Mercy put two white, trembling hands on my waistcoat. “Don’t call me that, it’s so ugly coming from you. It’s impossible, you must believe me, the lads were wrong, I know it. The man who owns that carriage doesn’t believe in God at all, and he doesn’t give a damn about politics. I tell you it’s
impossible
.”

“Are you going to tell me his name next? I am going to make him pay, you know, one way or the other. If I have to kill him myself.”

“No, telling you just now will only make it worse, you’ll make a horrible mistake,” she whispered as I gently pulled her fingers away from my plain black vest.

“Let me hurt him—you know he’s earned it.
I’ve
earned it, for God’s sake.”

“You’re frightening me, Tim. Don’t look like that. I can’t tell you when you look like that.”

I thought over one or two ways of
making
her tell me, but nothing was workable. Mercy is the sort of woman who walks past mad Irish bruisers to free a colored fellow she scarcely knows, so I’d have needed to break her in a number of pieces, and even if that was remotely possible for me, I was pretty sorely distracted. There was someone else who needed killing.

“Maybe you’re right,” I muttered. “Yes, you’re right, I think. At least I know about Valentine, and you certainly shouldn’t have told me that.

“I’d have warned you sooner, if I’d known,” I added as I walked
out the door. “No one ever ought to tell me anything. I’m sorry about your book, on my word I am.”

“Don’t leave like this, please … Timothy!”

I left her there, wearing a slate-colored hood with her hair up, reaching a hand out toward me. I had a brother to grind into the pavement, and I wasn’t going to lose any time in finding him. As I swept back past the front saloon, Silkie Marsh interrupted me, her face all guilty concern.

“Are you all right, Mr. Wilde? I feared, you see, that the exact … situation between myself and Miss Underhill was not entirely clear to you.”

“You said just what was needed to send me straight through that door,” I reminded her through my teeth.

“But that isn’t
true.
Please don’t, I said.”

Please don’t, for Mercy’s sake.

It had been her name, not a plea. This sad, disgraceful thing I’d just uncovered—the
knowing
it was entirely my own fault.

“But perhaps you misunderstood me?”

By now, Silkie Marsh was smiling. The identical smile I once saw a much uglier woman wearing as she informed a friend of hers in a coffeehouse that her cousin had developed an incurable cancer.

“That whorish little hypocrite,” she lilted prettily. “You love her, I think? Yes, it’s obvious, though I can’t see why. You
cannot
imagine the way she has looked at me, time and again, when tending to children
I feed and clothe
, and in my very own
home.
I’d not wish misfortune on anyone, Mr. Wilde, but perhaps it will lend that slut a fraction more human sympathy, now that she knows what the rest of us feel like when our legs are open.”

I’d seen a similar expression once, but not in a human. It was in the eyes of a yellow dog turned evil with hydrophobia seconds before a civic-minded hydrant inspector bashed in its head.

“I’ll tell you something about
mercy
,” I said as I strode to the door. “I’m not arresting you for sending that pair of idiots to hush me. That would be ridiculous. But this is the last shred of
mercy
you’ll ever get from me. And you’ll need it, mark my words.”

A sick, inside-out feeling struck me when I reached the street again. Leaning over, I propped my palms on my knees, breathing as if I’d just been pulled from a torrent half drowned. I’ve never been good at feeling lost. When I’ve been brought that low, I don’t know what to do with myself, whether to erase my sorry life with a quart of whiskey or to let fly at a wall until I’ve broken my own hand. Both are vivid distractions, I’ve tried them, but neither is permanent.

I’m very skilled, however, at feeling angry. At rage, I’m a bloody professional.

And since I couldn’t hurt Mercy, and she wouldn’t give me the man in the black hood, and I’d made a promise to Bird that precluded me from walking into the forgetful Hudson just yet, killing my brother seemed just about the only good idea left to be had.

S
ilkie Marsh’s brothel was a five-minute walk from Valentine’s station house, and it was nine o’clock at night. My brother would be in his office. And if not there, then at the Liberty’s Blood. I got halfway to the police station before I knew something far worse was wrong with the city than my evil temper: our pathetic attempts at secrecy had come to nothing at last. The afternoon edition of the
Herald
had ruined us.

People along Greene and Prince streets had pulled their front curtains across their windows, and some had even shuttered them despite the noxious heat. A foul aguey sweat glimmered on the closed
panes. Every few brownstone and red brick rowhouses, I could see nervous fingers twitching draperies back, so as to stare out into the road. One man, well-dressed enough to be a clerk but muscled enough that I knew him for a Party rabbit, sat on his front steps smoking a cigar with a cudgel propped between his knees. Waiting for the thunderclap. And from the looks of things, the wait wouldn’t be a long one.

I knew what it all meant before I’d been told, so I changed my direction, veering right into the jungle. When I saw a group of star police approaching from a side street, most of them familiar enough members of Valentine’s engine company, I stopped short. They carried torches and elegantly tapered leaded clubs. A few of them walked with pistols slung from their belts. But none of them proved quite mountainous enough in silhouette to be my brother.

“Is that Timothy Wilde?” one called.

“Something like him.”

“Fall in with us, we’re wanted. Every copper star. We’re the last of Ward Eight, your brother’s already on the muscle.”

“Where’s the riot?” I asked as I made an about-face, taking a heavy club from a stout Irish fellow who’d seen fit to bring two of them.

“Where it’s least necessary, as ever,” spat the policeman. “Five Points. The only sinkhole on this island that couldn’t get any worse.”

“That’s my ward you’re riding,” I pointed out.

“Sure, and Captain Val told me. God help you.”

Not so far today,
I thought.

The shouting reached us first, before the stench of burning trash winnowing through the air, before the sparks. Glancing into the sky, I saw that at least the patchwork summery sheet of low-flying storm cover was yet grey, no darker stain marking a building afire. The moon appeared and disappeared like a restless spirit. A pair of respectable Yidisher secondhand shopkeepers hastened past us nodding, glancing behind them, doing their best to keep out of the way.
At almost the same moment, a pack of tiny kinchin, howling like pups, raced down Anthony Street toward the sinister glow, doing their best not to miss anything. I thought of Bird in Harlem, where the stars are clearer even when the sky turns stormy, and tightened my grip on the club.

“Looks like a hell of a spree,” I remarked. “Do we know who started it?”

Whatever the newspapers and journals say about riots springing up like wild mushrooms, they’re mistaken. I know two facts about riots: they are always about the same thing, and they are planted. Always. Riots are farmed, and then when they bloom, the farmers get to smash their bitter fists into the face of an entire city.

“Seems to have been Bill Poole.”

“I’ve met Bill Poole,” I said, picturing the drunken thug whose eye I’d blackened outside of St. Patrick’s. “We didn’t get on. He’s to blame for this?”

“He bein’ a piece of it anyhow, and scores of Nativist rabbits at his back, ready to break what they can, heads or windows. We’re meant to keep order, if possible. Matsell might try palaverin’ them peaceful, but you know Bill Poole.”

“I’m beginning to.”

“Crazy little sod, Bill Poole,” an American copper star muttered. “What does he want to do with the Irish if not get votes out of them, I’d like to know. They’re here now. They’re staying. You’ll as soon deport the cockroaches.”

“Fuck off,” the Irish fellow said.

“No offense meant,” the other returned readily. “I’m marching next to you, aren’t I?”

After crossing Ward Six’s border and continuing east for two and a half blocks, you’ll reach the Five Points. It’s called Paradise Square, of course, as we never did lack for humor—the eye of the pit where the five streets crash together. Neither paradise nor a square, but an
infected triangle. There are parts of this city where, during the drier stretches of summer, the boot-deep mud will harden fully, and its smell lessen. Not in Five Points. There are parts where the gin-sotted mabs will go indoors at four or five in the morning, when more than half naked and no longer keen to stand up. Not in Five Points. And in most parts of the island, the people who live there have just barely coin enough to be cruelly snobbish about their neighbors’ race. But in Five Points, where we stood beside Crown’s Grocery with the giant five-story monstrosity of the Old Brewery looming pale and cracked as an old skull across from us, all races live together. Because once a man is poor enough to seek shelter there, no other hell exists for him to sink to.