The Gods of Gotham Read online

  Bird and I exchanged a look that said clear as print mad but harmless. It sent a pretty little golden spark of kinship flaring between the two of us. And then she was staring at the brownstone houses, quite alone again. Biding her time until we reached the edge of the ever-growing metropolis.

  So near the churning Hudson that happened at around Twenty-third Street. The grid continues as if branded into the earth, of course, though some roads shift eerily from stone to dirt while others are daily being recklessly paved. Broadway and Fifth Avenue are well populated even so far north and growing ever more so, for example. But Ninth Avenue is still downright pastoral. Had our mission been different, and a knot of worry failed to tighten just above my pelvis as we stepped down with our shovels, it would have been very homelike for me. We’d left behind the roaming street pigs along with the market stalls, and the air beyond the city was richly clear. No wood smoke, no upturned chamber pots, no rotting fish guts. Just the occasional fenced-in farm, corn husks shimmering bright as the numberless glittering rock formations thrusting up through the switchgrass, and the smell of the sugar maples that watched us as we marched to the vague intersection.

  Idyllic, under different circumstances.

  We stopped at the roughly delineated crossroads. Each of us subtly looking from left to right and back to front. Bird slipped a very small-boned hand into mine and looked up as if to say, I only know so much. Not everything. If I knew everything, I wouldn’t be alive.

  “Tell me,” George Washington Matsell suggested out of the side of his mouth, “in what sort of light they would generally come here. Dawn, for example? Or by cover of darkness?”

  “Dark,” Bird said in a very small voice. But I’d heard that sort of voice before, and it hadn’t been used in the course of truth-telling.

  “Then,” he sighed, “if a gravesite exists—and I do hope for your sake, little girl, it exists, or I’ll have you sent out West to live with a farmer who’s lost his wife and needs a decent cook—then it exists at least a little away from Ninth Avenue. That’s much traveled by night. Harlem dwellers use it to ride back from New York.”

  “When was the last time you saw the man in the black hood before Liam disappeared?” I asked her.

  Bird’s throat seemed to clutch at her spine for a moment. “A month before. I never saw him that time, but … but Lady was gone.”

  I didn’t ask her how old Lady had been, God help me, for I knew she hadn’t yet grown to be a lady.

  “Then if they’re buried here, the vegetation will be very fresh,” I reasoned.

  If it exists, my mind supplied me.

  The grid location my tiny friend had overheard was so specific, we didn’t bother to split up. We walked as far as the Hudson, where Tenth Avenue scrawled its way through the thimbleberries and cattails next to the sluggish slate river, and we walked back as far as where Eighth Avenue shot dusty and broad over stone-marred rills. There the sound of hammering reached our tender ears. Hacksaws barely audible in the stillness, rooftops barely visible over the crests of white walnut.

  “There’s nothing here,” Chief Matsell reported. And he was right.

  The glance I shot at Bird was neither fair nor sensible. But it essentially requested that a ten-year-old girl not make a jackass of me. She glared back, a look that demanded to know how I could expect her ever to have been there herself.

  “Mr. Wilde,” Matsell said when none of us had formed a reply, “my patience is dwindling.”

  “But this has all been to the good,” exclaimed Mr. Piest readily, passing a hand across his slack-jawed face. Far too alert for what I’d convinced myself was an ancient man. “We’ve executed the preliminary search. Now, where in this terrain would make a safe hidden burial site?”

  I hated Piest for an instant, though he didn’t deserve it, when Bird made a coughing sound meant to cover a frightened shudder.

  “You’re right,” I said instead. “We’ll think it through.”

  “The small forest over there,” Piest decided after a moment. “That great mass of cottonwoods with the apple orchard beyond.”

  “Wait,” I offered. “If a man was shrouded in cottonwoods, he couldn’t see another man’s approach. If, on the other hand, he was behind one of the rock formations, he could look just around or just above to have a clear view of traffic.”

  “Good, Mr. Wilde. Yes. I see what you mean.”

  I walked several paces into the sugary-smelling grass. The rest followed, eyes to the ground. And it wasn’t long before we saw them: very faint signs of wheel tracks. Not where the flowers were absent, but where they were once crushed and hadn’t recovered fully.

  “Six feet wide,” I said.

  “A carriage or a large cart,” Piest added from my left.

  Matsell set off for the nearest mass of earth-piercing schist boulder and we followed. It was a great shimmering stone thousands of years old. We ought to have felt very isolated, but the farther into the woods and away from what passes for civilization you go in Manhattan, the more the island itself seems to be watching you. You either get used to being under thousands of eyes in New York, or you leave it altogether. But when you’re at the outer reaches of the city, with the sky sprawled out lazy and clear above you, and the birds talking nonsense at each other, and the grasses whispering secrets underfoot … the feeling doesn’t leave you. It’s embedded in your skin by then. Something’s always watching here, just as the shining grey stones and black ash trees watched us that afternoon. And it isn’t always easy to assume that the presence is kindly.

  Because it isn’t. It can be pretty merciless, actually.

  When we reached the back of the stone protrusion—the north side—we met with a horrifying sight. There lay a freshly turned meadow, all alight with wildflowers. Buttercups primarily, and clover intermixed with the tender grass. Innocent and very beautiful, so green and so yellow it hurt your eyes.

  “God in heaven,” I muttered.

  “Start digging,” said Matsell.

  That field was so wide. It was wide, and it was shallow-dug, and nothing on earth could explain its being there. All I could think as I looked at the stretch of virgin growth was far, far too long, and far too wide.

  I’ll skip that part of the story. That part was only facts, and dark ones. No reasons and no meanings. And anyway, despite the heat and the sweat of the work, it took much too short a time. Whatever God was watching us, Protestant or Catholic, I can’t imagine what His impressions were when we discovered at the same instant a thin white bone and a rotting arm, fixed with a crude snap between two shovel thrusts. Whose shovels, I can’t recall exactly. Maybe Matsell and me, maybe Piest and me, but I remember my own instrument hitting not-dirt. I’ll never forget it.

  And only two feet down. The earth still soft above, the flesh still soft below, and the worms loving every loamy inch of it. It wasn’t the arm that unsettled me, though. The fingernails were peeling away, yes, and skin melting greenly into sod. But next to it, the dead fingers curled around the object almost tenderly, was another bone. A part of a foot, considerably further decayed.

  That bone told me instantly many more than one. And the flesh sent a secretive smell up as if to say, Find us.

  Please find us.

  We kept at work very hard that day, lifting heavy soil from what had once been children. But a single incident stands out in my mind. There are moments when you decide that you respect a man, and other moments when you decide you’re on that man’s side. The moment George Washington Matsell ordered Bird away from the view of her rotting companions marked when I felt something about the badge on my chest, and the man who trusted me to wear it, that I hadn’t before.

  “Get her away from here,” Chief Matsell said, still never looking in Bird’s direction.

  I dropped my shovel. Cursing myself for not having thought of it before, though we’d struck the first body only a bare three minutes previously. I ran for Bird, who stood frozen in a patch of clover with her lips cl
amped together to keep from screaming, and I soundlessly lifted her as I made for the nearest shimmering rock that would block that unholy sight.

  “I won’t go back,” she vowed once more, clutching my shirt in a death grip.

  “No, you won’t,” I agreed, though how I was to house a tiny stargazer I hadn’t the slightest idea.

  I hadn’t been a copper star before. But I was then, I think, with Bird shivering so hard in my arms that she could scarcely breathe. And I am now.

  For if not for us, who would ever have found them?

  NINE

  There is a variety of ways in which POPERY, the idolatry of Christians, may be introduced into America, which at present I shall not so much as hint at… . Yet, my dear countrymen, suffer me at this time to warn you all, as you value your precious civil liberty, and everything you call dear to you, to be on your guard against POPERY.

  • Samuel Adams, Boston Gazette, April 4, 1768 •

  New York City inhabits the southern tip of Manhattan Island where the shipping industry booms, and when we run out of space to live and work, we naturally spread north. For instance, Greenwich Village, where I was born, is entirely encompassed by New York now, and the thought that high society actually inhabits the land north of Fourteenth Street constantly baffles me. While the urban city more or less ends just north of Chelsea, so many people share this tiny land mass that these few square miles are divided into twelve wards. And I was about to discover that when you’ve just unearthed an unholy burial site in the middle of the woods, it soon becomes a question of some urgency where you’re meant to run for help.

  Everything above Fourteenth Street, from Union Square Park to the squall of affluent construction on Fifth Avenue north of the House of Refuge, from river to river and farm to farm, was Ward Twelve. But the station house designated as Ward Twelve’s was the Old Lock-Up, an unthinkable distance away from us through the woods in the stagnant and smiling green farming hamlet of Harlem, where fences crumbled pleasantly and Dutch wives waved to each other while having coffee on their whitewashed front porches, and it would have been nonsense to gallop up the Boston Post Road in search of help when help was much closer by.

  So Mr. Piest unhitched one of the horses from the hired carriage while I unhitched the other, which wasn’t a bit to the hacksman’s liking. But I can’t recall our showing much concern over that, and we vowed to return the animals as fast as was possible. Piest rode hell for leather for the Union Market at Fourteenth Street, where Ward Eleven was centered, and I rode with Bird perched somehow both rigid and half-fainting in front of me in the direction of Elizabeth Street to leave her with Mrs. Boehm.

  Matsell stood watching us go with one hand draped over his shovel. Jacket off, shoulders bullish, lips taut. Likely wishing his day had gone differently.

  Mrs. Boehm’s anger vanished like steam when she saw Bird’s posture—a concentrated movement that was at once balletic and unpracticed, as if she’d never learned to walk at all. I wanted to stay. But I burned also to see just what we’d found. So I tipped my hat to my landlady, who’d gathered the little girl into her skirts, and, as evening fell, I galloped back to the quicksilver, upward-feathering edge of New York.

  Copper stars were everywhere. Two Germans dug deep at one end of what was now a wide, gritty ditch, an American rabbit and an ex-Britisher at the other, a knot of Irish between them putting matched bones into separate sacks. Piest bustled about, overseeing the lighting of torches. But they seemed only to make the twilight darker, and an evil-minded breeze was lifting the weight of human decay into our nostrils. There’s nothing else that smells like that, and it haunts you for hours. Days. I walked up to Matsell.

  “I can’t credit it,” he said, not looking at me. “That they’re all from Silkie Marsh’s house.”

  “Why is that, sir? Surely, over the years, scores of children have passed through her brothel. That several are buried here isn’t impossible.”

  “No, Wilde,” he answered dryly, “but you tell me if it’s a shorter route to impossible when I tell you that so far we’ve unearthed nineteen.”

  I made some sort of sound that wasn’t a sound at all. Then I cleared my throat. My eyes cartwheeled over the scene. The bags, the white bones, the not-yet-white bones with frayed meat still lingering. Some tarps laid out, with pieces on them. Nothing made sense, least of all the conversation I was having.

  “Could we have miscounted? Some of them … some of the pieces are very … They’re fragmented, sir.”

  “Heads, Wilde,” Chief Matsell said disgustedly. “If you’re as good at counting as you are at flash, I welcome you to try your hand counting heads. Piest!” he shouted.

  Mr. Piest scuttled over to us, more a spider than a crab in the torchlight and the expanding dark. Very kindly of him, I thought, that he ignored the fact I probably looked as if someone had just slapped me in the face. That was neighborly.

  “Find me something,” Matsell said to Piest cordially.

  “Yes, sir? What shall I find?”

  “Anything. These are bodies. Only croaked bits of corpse. Less than useless, a waste of my time. Unidentifiable feed for the nearest potter’s field. Find me a locket, a spade handle, a newspaper scrap, a rusty nail, a shirt button. A shirt button would be lovely. Find me something.”

  Piest wheeled and disappeared.

  “Wilde,” the chief said slowly, “tell me how you’re going to set about fixing this problem. Because as of now, you are fixing it for me.” Pausing to draw his fingers down his jowls, he met my eyes with all the fierce focus of an admiral planning a deadly offensive. I’d never been regarded so in my life, like a man being given a mission, and I held my breath a little as he continued. “I haven’t yet read you cover to cover. I think you’ll surprise me. You can begin surprising me now.”

  It felt like a dare. So of course, I plunged right in.

  “Is the Democratic meeting over yet?” I inquired.

  “An hour ago, perhaps.”

  “Then I’ll post up Captain Wilde, with your permission. Question Madam Marsh in his company. I need a better feel for the territory, and I don’t want to walk into her brothel blind.”

  “Wise precaution.” Matsell rubbed a hand up and down his craggy face, sending folds smashing into each other. “Yes, by all means, go find your brother, and tell him that I want him in my office at six this morning. This is to be treated as the most jealously guarded secret in history, and also as a civic emergency. Why someone should slaughter children in this manner is beyond my ability to fathom, but we are going to find out, by God, and that person will hang in the Tombs yard at high noon. Go quickly. And do not visit Silkie Marsh without Captain Wilde accompanying you.”

  “Why’s that, sir?” A slick curl of doubt formed in my breast.

  “Because,” the chief smiled as he turned to grip a torch being offered him, “he’s the only man alive to bed her and escape in possession of his faculties.”

  Having a purpose grounds a man, steadies him. I felt better the instant I lit off southward in the long-suffering hacksman’s carriage, now complete again and driven by its rightful owner. My brother was right where he’d said I would find him that summer night, its sky emptied of stars by the approaching thunderstorm. At the Liberty’s Blood, Valentine held court in the back area as usual, beyond the crowded booths and the benches and the dozens of giddily filthy American flags, sprawled on a divan with his shirt half open and his gnarled chest visible, sipping something toxic with a stranger draped over his lap.

  Typical picture. I’ll confess to shock, however, at the gender of the stranger.

  “Tim!” Val exclaimed. “Jimmy, that’s Tim. He’s my brother. You wouldn’t know it to look at him, but he’s a right spit.”

  The dark-haired, artistically slender fellow with arresting blue eyes glanced my way from the region of Val’s lap and remarked with a cultured London accent, “Of course he’s your brother. Look, he’s delightful. Hullo, Tim.”

  The
only thing I managed to come up with—and not adequate, I grant—was “Something terrible has happened.”

  Val was practically gleaming with the liquid shine of post-Party-gathering morphine. The passing seconds dripped off his eyes like blood from a wound. But then, all at once, he comprehended me. “Up you go, fine young soldier,” he declared, and the unknown fellow called Jimmy was promptly evicted, leaving behind him an intoxicated and narcotic-impaired police captain and his grossly exhausted younger brother. Both of us missing key pieces of information.

  “My God,” I said blankly, sinking into the rattan chair resting inches away from Val’s. We reposed under a nicely stuffed American eagle draped in red and blue bunting, arrows glued in its flaking talons. “I don’t believe it. You’ve added sodomy to the list.”

  “What list?”

  Narcotics, alcohol, bribery, violence, whoring, gambling, theft, cheating, extortion, I ticked off in my head before giving up on a bad job.

  Val cupped a hand to his mouth and shouted something merrily at a pal across the room before he registered what I’d said and turned to me with a genuinely surprised expression. “Just a moment. What have I, young Tim, to do with sodomy?”

  “That’s what I’m wondering. In light of the chap who just left.”

  Valentine scoffed at me, his entire face alive with flourishing dismissal, even as he poured us two gigantic clear drinks from a small stone jug. I smelled licorice and the bitter fire of diligently distilled spirits, and wanted a sip of it pretty badly. “Brother Wilde, stow your wid. Gentle Jim is a pal of mine.”

  “I could see that.”

  “Jesus, Timothy, listen for a moment and I’ll explain some basic principles to you. Regarding sodomy, since you’re so keen on the subject.”

  “I’d rather you didn’t. But I see that you must.”

  Having by now likely enough forgotten about my previous doomsday remark—and to be frank, in the shock of the moment, so had I—Val spread one hand wide, leaning over with the other to pass the drink firmly into my grip. I sipped and found it wonderful. It burned like sin’s version of the Holy Ghost down my throat.