The Gods Of Gotham (7 page)

That was comforting, like bad whiskey burning my throat. Bitter and familiar.

“Then take the sodding job, so you don’t have to sleep in my ken,” he suggested.

Valentine dragged his fingers through his tawny hair, ambling over to his desk to pour himself a measure of rum. Completely, entirely unmoved, which so happens to be the most infuriating thing
about my infuriating older brother. If he cares a rotten fig that I hate him, I wish to Christ he’d be more visible about it.

“The Sixth Ward is hell’s privy pit,” I pointed out.

“August first.” Valentine drained his spirits and then adjusted his braces with a second snap of impatience. His green eyes raked over me as he went for his beautifully shining black coat. “You have ten days to find a ken in the Sixth Ward. If you were political, I could’ve done better, settle you here in the Eighth, but you aren’t, are you?”

He raised his brows while I attempted to look properly defiant about my political shortcomings. But it hurt my head, so I relaxed against the pillows again.

“It’s five hundred dollars a year, plus whatever you can make by way of rewards or letting the flusher rabbits you nab grease you. Or you can always foist off the brothels. I don’t give a damn.”

“No,” I agreed.

“Like I said, I arranged it all with Matsell. You and I both start August first. I’m to be a captain,” he added with more than a touch of brag. “A respected metropolitan figure, and making steady chink at it, too, and plenty of time left for fighting fires with the lads. What do you think of that?”

“I think I’ll see you in hell.”

“Well, that’s true enough,” Valentine shot back with a smile that would have looked cold on an undertaker. “You’ll be living there, after all.”

The next morning
, when I was sober enough to see straight, I awoke to my brother snoring on a flat pallet before his fireplace, smelling vividly of absinthe, and a copy of the
Herald
set out for me on the side table next to the bed. Val could read a lawyer’s own brief
and then argue him into an early grave if he liked, but he’s better used to making news than mulling over it in print. So I knew the paper was mine. And here is what I read, after gasping my way through a burn so fierce that I thought my face must surely have been newly afire:

My eyes faltered, not wanting to follow any further.

Now, there was a fact I already knew instinctively, couldn’t fail to have grasped despite my sorry physical state. A great deal of money had gone up in smoke over the Hudson. That was apparent. It wasn’t dollars or buildings that plagued my unconscious brother, though, tracing a line between his brows though he must still have been drunk as a lord. Val’s single redeeming quality consists of his method for calculating fire losses. And the code is stamped deep in his ribs, somewhere gripping and permanent. Thus I felt a hurt greater than my own real wounds, a raw and sympathetic sensation, when I read:

The number, thank Christ, was thirty when all was said and done—a low figure of fatalities when the unholy chaos was considered.

But it wasn’t low enough for Valentine. Nor for me. Not by a long mile.

T
he key to being poor in New York is to know how it’s done: you make shortcuts.

Valentine and I, when we were sixteen and ten, respectively, and one day woke up the only Wildes, learned that life-or-death trick fast. So three days after the fire, perfectly able to walk about but flinching like a gutter cat every time a loud noise set my ears humming, I knew my options were limited to taking Val’s offer of police work or else moving to the interior and learning agriculture. So I decided that, as I’d apparently woken up in a permanent
nightmare, I’d start with the police work. And quit the instant I found something better.

On the morning of July twenty-second, a strong wind from the ocean cutting through the summer stench, I headed down Spring Street, past the pineapple vendors and the barrel-organ man in Hudson Square, to find a dwelling place. One with shortcuts. I was going to need plenty of shortcuts on five hundred a year. Nick’s had paid me still less, but that hadn’t been a problem. Not when all the extra coin had been considered, the half-a-neds and coachwheels and deuces slipped into my palm by madmen in French shirtsleeves, the jacks that clinked in Julius’s and my pockets as we parted ways at the end of a shift. Wages were different—stable and frightening. I was looking at a fraction of what I’d earned previously, supposing I wasn’t inclined to extort madams for extra chink.

Neighborhoods in New York change quicker than its weather. Spring Street, where Val lives, is a mix of people in the usual everyday sense: blue-coated Americans with their collars over their lapels and their hats neatly brushed, laughing colored girls waking your eyes up with canary yellow and shocking orange dresses, complacent ministers in brown wool and thin stockings. There are churches in Spring Street, eating houses smelling of pork chops with browned onions. It isn’t Broadway north of Bleecker, where the outrageously wealthy bon ton and their servants peer down their noses at one another, but it isn’t Ward Six either.

Which is where I was headed.

When I entered the district via Mulberry Street with two dollars of Val’s money poisoning my pocket, I knew first that there were no shortcuts to be taken advantage of in that row of godforsaken Catholic misery. Second, I thought,
God save New York City from the rumor of faraway blighted potatoes.

As for the swarms of emigrants gushing ceaselessly onto the South Street docks, I’d found out their next stopping place: the
entire block consisted of Irish and dogs and rats sharing the same fleas. Not that I hold any truck with Nativists, but I couldn’t prevent a shiver of sympathetic disgust constricting my throat. There were so many of them, scores passing to and fro, that I focused on one individual just to stave off a rush of dizziness. I lit on a still-sleepy peasant youth of about thirteen in trousers worn through the knees, entirely shoeless but wearing blue stockings, who stumbled past me into a corner grocery store. He bypassed the pale putrid cabbages set for show outside the entrance and headed straight for the whiskey bar. His posture matched the building he was patronizing. The Sixth Ward was built over the top of a swamp called the Collect Pond, but if you didn’t know that, you’d wonder why the buildings lean at lunatic angles, seemingly stitched onto the sky in crazy-quilt seams.

I stepped over the fresh corpse of a dog felled by traffic and carried on, edging through the crowd. All the men walked with a purpose into groceries that didn’t sell edible vegetables, the women’s hands blazed redder than their hair from hard labor, and the children … the children seemed by turns harrowed and merely hungry. I saw one respectable fellow as I passed. A priest with a perfectly round head, faintly blue eyes, and a tight white dog collar. But he was ministering to the most wretched of the occupants, or so I hoped.

No, there were no shortcuts for an American on Mulberry. And my face simmered in the heat, rendering fat into the already greasy bandaging. Or something else, possibly. Frankly, I didn’t want to dwell on it.

My face hadn’t been a Michelangelo exactly, but it hadn’t ever served me wrong either. Oval tending toward youthful roundness, and near enough identical to my brother’s. Broad and high brow, deeply arcing hairline, hair indifferently blond. Straight nose, small mouth, with a little upside-down crescent where lips turn to chin. Fair skin despite our merciless summers. I’d never spent overmuch
time mulling over my mazzard previously, though, because when I’d wanted a friendly hour or two with an idle shopkeeper’s daughter or a hotel maid with appetites, I’d always gotten it. So it was a good enough face—it didn’t cost me money when I needed a tumble, and I’ve been told my smile is very reluctant, which apparently makes people want to tell you their life histories and then pass you two bits for your patience.

Now I had absolutely no notion of what I looked like. The physical pain was already bad enough to make me steal a little of my brother’s laudanum without added aesthetic horror.

“You’re spooney,” my brother had announced, shaking his head as he studiously roasted coffee beans. “Don’t come over all squeamish on me
now
, for God’s sake. Have a keek at yourself and be done.”

“Sod off, Valentine.”

“Listen, Tim, I can understand perfectly why you’d keep shady at first, in light of when you were just a squeaker and all, but—”

“By tomorrow at the latest I’ll be clear of this house,” I’d replied on my way out, effectively ending the conversation.

Cutting across Walker Street, I turned up Elizabeth and then all at once shoved my fists in my still-sooty pockets in shock.

The structure directly before me was a miracle. A carefully printed wish list of shortcuts.

Thresholds and shutters on this block weren’t quite gleaming, but they’d been scrubbed with vinegar and glinted respectably. The laundry strung along the hemp lines between buildings, fickly fluttering in the sun, was mended instead of lagging in limp shreds, giving me a settled feeling. And neat and humble and right before my very eyes stood a two-story brick row house wearing a rooms
TO LET BY DAY OR MONTH
sign. On the first floor, attractively lettered on a small awning,
MRS. BOEHM’S FINE BAKED GOODS
held
court. Not ten feet away from the entrance stood a pump ready to gush out clean Croton water.

That was potentially four shortcuts, if you’re counting.

First, the pump meant pure Westchester river water and not the filthy stew drawn from Manhattan’s sunken wells. Having the Croton River piped in your home means your landlord paying up front for the service, which happens just as often as the Atlantic freezes so a man can walk to London. Better to live by a free public pump. Second, residing above a bakery meant cast-off day-old bread. A baker is a thousand times likelier to give neighbors the surplus rye loaf than a stranger. Third, bakeries stoke up their ovens twice a day, which come November meant a pallid fraction of most people’s heating costs, since the ovens would be baking caraway rolls while heating my floor.

Finally, Mrs. Boehm’s meant a widow. Women can’t start their own enterprises, but they manage to inherit them when very careful. And I could see where the sign’s paint was fresher on the “Mrs.” than on her surname. Making shortcut number four. If you’re short on rent and a widow needs a roof mended, you might not find yourself back on the streets.

I pushed open the door to the bakery.

Very small, but well loved and well cared for. A simple pine counter displayed stacked rye and plain brown farm loaves, the smaller treats arranged on a wide flower-patterned serving dish. I could see sultanas poking out of a thousand-year cake, and its smell of candied orange peel livened my senses.