The Gods Of Gotham (9 page)

Flash, or flash-patter, is the curious dialect spoken by foisters,
panel thieves, bruisers, dice burners, confidence men, street rats, news hawkers, addicts, and Valentine. I’ve heard tell it’s based on British thieves’ cant, but damned if I’ve ever heard them compared. It’s not a language, exactly—it’s more like a
code.
The words are slang substitutes for everyday speech, employed when a bloke who already knows the patter would prefer the bespectacled accountant sitting next to him to mind his own bloody business. The word
flash
itself, for instance, means a thing is about as spruce as possible. Of course, most of the men and women who speak it are poor. So some of our street youth grow up jabbering nothing else. And every day more honest workaday folk accidentally use flash terms like “my pal” and “kick the bucket,” but those are pretty amateur corruptions of everyday language. Matsell meant a higher level of expertise.

And not only was every damn rogue and rabbit present now staring at me, I couldn’t see how Matsell had worked out who I was when only my lower face was visible.

“I’m not a bit modest, sir,” I answered truthfully.

“You mean to tell me you can’t understand your own brother speaking, or Captain Valentine Wilde of Ward Eight lied when he said you’d be our most apt new recruit?”

Captain Wilde. Of course. Same youthful features, same deep hairline, same muddy blond coloring, except for only half the size and three quarters of the face. I set my jaw so hard my raw skin began throbbing under its light layer of bandaging. Typical Val. Not enough to get me a position I wasn’t suited for and didn’t want. Everyone had to be watching when I, as it’s said, kicked the bucket.

“Neither,” I replied with an effort. “I’m no dab hand, but I can work on it.”

That was flash for “I’m not proficient.” But I’d every intention of doing my best.

Mr. Piest’s arm shot up like a Fourth of July rocket. “Will there
be training for us and for the new recruits before we go on duty, Chief?”

I’ve never seen George Washington Matsell snort, but that was as close as he’s yet come to it in my viewing.

“Mr. Piest, it’s as much as I can do to get us launched without our noble populace screaming out ‘standing army’ and aborting us out of pure patriotism. I need hardly add that the loudest patriots are currently wholesale villains. There isn’t a moment to lose—the captains will take you through your paces and hand out scheduling assignments according to my guidelines, flash speakers where they’re most needed, and you start tomorrow. Good morning, and good luck.”

Chief Matsell moves with remarkable speed for his size, like a bull charging, and was gone in another eyeblink. A wave of murmurs rustled the crowd, the energy muttering in my breast. The pair of captains, who seemed to be the tall black-Irish man in the plug hat and the native Bowery type with the greased sidelocks and calcified eyes next to him, exchanged puzzled looks.
What did he mean by “paces”?
I saw pass the American’s lips. It’s an easy skill, one I learned within two months of tending an oyster bar that sounded like a mob riot. Tough to pass a fellow a drink if you can’t tell what he wants.

They ought to be knowin’ how to march in case of riots, which would be a danger to the entire city,
the Irishman replied, nodding sagely.
A well-formed marchin’ police force, that would go a fair way to breakin’
a mob.

By Jove, if that isn’t the very thing.

So we spent the next three sweat-drenched hours learning to march in formation in the Tombs courtyard. It didn’t do much to help us learn policing. But it sure seemed to give the inmates being led from the court to the cell block a pleasurable time.

I was nearest the door leading back to the courthouse when we were through the ridiculous parade training and thus the first to be assigned. When I was seated on a pine stool before a wizened clerk
and asked about my qualifications, I flinched inwardly but played the hand I’d been dealt. “I speak flash a little,” I said.

God help me.

“In that case, we’ll route you past where Centre crosses Anthony. Four in the morning to eight in the evening is your shift,” the clerk announced. He pulled a sketched map from one of several piles. “Here is your course when you make rounds. No drinking, carousing, or other entertainment while working. Your number will be one-zero-seven. Report for duty here at the Tombs tomorrow at four.”

I stood up.

“Wait a moment.”

The clerk reached into a large leather satchel and pulled out a pin shaped like a copper star. He placed it in my hand with a muttered, “When you’re on duty, you’re not meant to take it off, mind.”

I passed my fingers over the metal. It was a plain thing, a bit misshaped. Just a hammered star, with a dull polish the color of the dead leaves blanketing City Hall Park in the autumn. Nothing much to look at, but then, they’d made them in a hurry, I thought. I touched the crown of my hat to the clerk and was the first man out the wide granite doorway.

An officer of the New York City Police Department.

There are fifty-five of us in the Sixth Ward, and a wider range of pure and half-bred scoundrels you won’t find. But there’s a common vein to us nevertheless, and I put my finger on it as I walked home to Elizabeth Street and a growler of Bavarian lager.

We’re damaged right down to the last man, I’ve discovered, we 1845 star policemen. Perforated. There’s something the city hasn’t given us quite yet, or has taken away, a lacking shaped a little different every time. We’re all missing bits and pieces. For each of us, there’s a gap no one can quite ignore.

I was still puzzling out the best way to both hide and ignore my own unsightly punctures when the blood-covered girl appeared,
three weeks to the day later. Pulling at her hair like an Irish widow of half a century, the moonlight painting her dress a dull stiffening grey.

Her name is Aibhilin ó Dálaigh.
Little bird
is what it means—Bird Daly. And she was about to turn the city upside down. August twenty-first was also the date, as it happens, when we found that poor baby. But I am getting ahead of myself.

M
rs. Boehm’s naturally early baker’s hours had already proven a godsend, for my landlady willingly rapped at my door at three thirty, before the day broke. A sallow stain from her taper’s light would be just visible, and I’d call out, “Good morning!” before rolling to my side with a groan. Such was my new routine. The silent trickle of honey-colored light would drift back down the stairs as I changed the dressing on my face in the near-dawn gloom, relishing the half hour of cooled air before the sun contaminated it.

I will look at my face,
I thought every morning, though in truth I hadn’t a mirror of my own. Followed by
Why haven’t you stolen a
keek at your face in some shop window or other by this time?
in the afternoon. Next would clang
You’re spooney
in my brother’s voice, each and every night as I blew out my bedside candle, and then I’d plummet into exhausted slumber. Telling myself all the while that my face was really an unimportant factor in the grand scheme of things. My ribs had healed quick enough, after all, and wasn’t it better to dwell on good news? I was strong as I’d ever been, though I’d not yet grown used to the fatigue dragging at my bones when I was awakened before the sun had yet caressed the lip of the world.
Good looks are trivial,
I’d think. Or
I’m not a vain person.

And I already knew more than enough about it, didn’t I?
You were lucky,
I heard the stooped, nasal-sounding doctor telling me the day before I’d quit Valentine’s,
not to have lost your eye. As it is, the damage will probably not affect your range of facial movement in the
regio orbitalis—
the scarring will be extensive, but the muscles of the
frontalis
and
orbicularis oculi
will work normally.
So I knew the medical jargon, and I knew that all the skin from the level of my right eye upward, covering my temple and a third of my brow and even a bit into my hairline, felt perpetually aflame, and I knew the expression that flickered across my brother’s face when he supposed I didn’t savvy he was watching me. That was plenty of information, wasn’t it?

Truthfully, my stoicism was all bluff—the thought of seeing myself turned my stomach. It was a coward’s avoidance, not a resigned and phlegmatic survivor’s. But no one I encountered knew me well enough to either notice or mention that niggling fact, and I was back to scrupulously avoiding Val, and so it was fine.
Everything was fine.

On the morning of August twenty-first, for the first time my own body awoke with a gentle slip into consciousness at around three o’clock. It ought to have been a sign, but I didn’t notice. And so I watched the veil of clouds from my window that would smother the city until the storm broke. An atmosphere like being drowned.

Downstairs I left a penny on the clean countertop and took a roll of bread from the basket of yesterday’s leavings. Shortcuts. Placing my wide-brimmed hat on my head and the roll in my pocket, I set off for the Tombs, where my day’s long shift commenced. My beat had for a fortnight been a pretty fascinating blur, though I was wary about admitting as much. But I may as well be frank: I was a roundsman on a
very
interesting circuit. As for what
roundsman
entails, the word is its own definition: I walked in a circle until someone wanted arresting. Simple as that, and yet how engaging it was, to pass steady and silent through scores of people, casually scrutinizing them, making certain none of them needed any help or meant any harm.

After I signed in at the Tombs, my route took me up Centre Street. The trains with their enormous horses lumbered past me, wheels churning thick cinders into pavement dust for the bootblacks to erase. When I reached the imposing gasworks building at the corner of Canal and Centre, I turned left. Canal seemed to me a wonderful pulsing fray of a street—greengrocers crushed up against haberdashers, windows stuffed with gleaming shoes, windows packed with bolts of turquoise and scarlet and violet silks. Above the profusions of clocks and of straw hats lived the clerks and laborers and their families, men’s elbows resting on high sills as they sipped their morning coffee. On the north side as I reached Broadway stood a hackney stand, the tops of the four-wheeled coaches thrown open to the pinkening sky, drivers smoking ninepin cigars and gossiping while awaiting the first fares of the day.

Broadway was my cue to turn south. If there’s a wider street on earth than Broadway, a street more roiling, a street with a more dizzying pendulum swing between starving opium fiends with the rags rotting off of them and ladies in walking gowns bedecked like small steamships, I can’t imagine it nor do I want to. Colored footmen sitting atop phaetons and wearing summer straw hats and pale green
linen coats whirred past me that morning, one nearly colliding with a Jewess selling ribbons from a wide hinged box hung around her neck. Ice delivery men from the Knickerbocker Company, shoulders knotted with painful-seeming muscles, strained with iron tongs to hoist frozen blocks onto carts and then wheeled their cargo into the opulent hotels before the guests awoke. And weaving in and out, mud-crusted and randy and miraculously nimble, trotted the speckled pigs, rubbery snouts nuzzling the trampled beet leaves. Everything begrimed but the storefront windowpanes, everything for sale but the cobblestones, everyone pulsing with energy but never meeting your eye.

From Broadway I turned east onto Chambers Street. On my left rose the elegant brick-fronted offices of lawyers and the coolly shuttered consulting rooms of physicians. To my right, meanwhile, squatted City Hall Park, encompassing not merely City Hall but the Hall of Records. Everything in it either sordid or brown. When I’d reached the end of that grassless canker, I’d find myself at Centre Street and make straight for the Tombs once more.

It was where Centre Street crossed Anthony, just a block before the Tombs, that things got leery.

In the two weeks I’d been a policeman, I’d made seven arrests. Each within spitting distance of where Centre crossed Anthony. Two gang coves on the mace, which is what my brother and the rest of the swindlers call swindling, selling fake stock certificates to emigrants. Three men I’d collared for being drunk and disorderly, which had been a challenge only in the sense that I had been forced to explain to them, “Yes, you are required by law to go with me; no, I don’t care that it will break the heart of your sainted mother; no, I’m not the smallest bit frightened of you; and yes, I am willing to drag you to the Tombs by your ear, if required.” Finally, I’d a pair of minor assault cases to do with hard liquor, weary workingmen, and the whores who’d been unlucky enough to get in the way. In
Anthony Street itself, in either direction as your eyes cross the railway line, the houses are dark charcoal streaks from an unsteady hand dragged across the sky, and they come too cheap. They’re hungry buildings. Man-eaters, ready to swallow the nearest emigrant down a broken stairwell or rotting floor. Stuffed near to rupturing with Irish, of course. And on that morning, by the time I’d made my eighth slow circuit and the sun had burned past rose into yellow, they were calling my name.