The Gods of Gotham Read online

  Reverend Underhill settled back with his head at a thoughtful angle. Where Mercy answers questions with more questions, the reverend answers them with stories. Parables, I suppose, consequence of the job. So that’s what he did, leaning the elbow holding the sherry on the arm of his chair.

  “When Olivia was alive,” he said slowly, “she did her best to convince me that popery was no indication of low intellect or morals. You recall when the Panic had well and truly taken hold, and people had begun literally starving in the streets, and we would find them in stables or frozen to death beside their own apple carts? Many of them Irish?”

  I nodded. I’d been keeping bar, and Val had been snug with his fire and political appointments, but it was a cruel time nevertheless. An unforgettable one. And it wasn’t just Irish. Former bankers were raining out of windows as a handy alternative to dying of exposure. They weren’t brave or cowardly to my mind. Not after I’d seen enough cholera. I just considered them highly efficient.

  “Well, Olivia claimed that those poor Irish were the biblical definition of ‘the least of these.’ And so she tended to and fed them as her own, be they lawful or criminal, and if the latter, be their chosen gangs the Kerryonians, Forty Thieves, Plug Uglies, or Shirt Tails. When the cholera she contracted in one of those dens took her, I asked myself before God why I’d never been convinced by her argument, as merciful and kind-spirited as it was. Why I had insisted that charity must go alongside repentance and reform. After many months, God gave me my answer, made me understand how Olivia had been wrong.”

  He leaned forward, setting his glass on the table. “We do not countenance the sin of murder in this country. Or the sin of falsehood, or of theft. But we allow heresy—the greatest sin of all—to flourish. The Pope of Rome is worshipped as a very god in their religion, the sins of mankind atoned for not through repentance but through ritual, and what rank abuses flourish? What private atrocities cower behind closed doors when an organization is beholden to a man and not to God? You’ve seen the Irish here, Mr. Wilde, their wills utterly depleted by the belief they must go through a mortal man to reach their salvation. They are drunk, they are diseased, they are loose, and why? Only because their very religion has robbed them of God. I no longer tend to those who will not renounce the Church of Rome, fearing for my own soul in fostering blasphemy. Olivia, may God rest her, was too generous of spirit to see her own error before their accursed contagion had infected her as well,” he finished in a grieved yet resigned tone. “But I pray for the Irish, Mr. Wilde, for God’s forgiveness and for their own enlightenment. I pray for their souls every day.”

  I thought of Eliza Rafferty, meanwhile, and the rats doubtless sharing her bunk, and her initial crime of wanting cream for her infant without denouncing the pope, and felt very tired of a sudden. If the reverend’s prayers touched her, I couldn’t see how.

  “But you can’t credit that a Catholic lunatic, leaving carved crosses in his wake, might be behind this?” I asked softly.

  “Someone who has been raised by priests, perhaps, by the sort of men who hide sexual depravity beneath holy robes? Mr. Wilde, the solution suggested to you does not seem impossible to me. It doesn’t even surprise me.”

  The moon-faced clock ticked morbidly in my head, a martial beat to a point of no return. It might seem stupid in such a giant metropolis to feel as if something bad is going to happen, because, well, of course it is. But the light seemed to me to have gone askew where it fell on the oak desk and the pretty braided carpet. Maybe it was the thunderstorm’s retreat leaving us all alone, to deal with each other how best we liked. Which seemed pretty savage most of the time.

  “Miss Underhill visits Catholics,” I pointed out vaguely.

  “Against my will, she does indeed, though I can hardly categorically forbid her from emulating her late mother. But only in a charitable, never in a medical, capacity.”

  My breath caught ever so slightly as I absorbed what he’d just said. Then I nodded, grateful for any facility I’ve been granted at hiding my thoughts.

  He didn’t know.

  The reverend never accompanied Mercy on her missions, and she must have conveyed the impression that she was distributing good thread and cooking oil. And since he ministered only to Protestants, he had never so much as caught rumor of it. My mind flashed to Mercy changing the yellowed sheets of a typhus case on one of the occasions I’d escorted her to the east docks, and I swallowed a surge of disquiet. The day I had seen them arguing, it had been over entering Catholic households, not tending their sick at all.

  “I’d sooner she minister in an actual slave pit of South Carolina than such slave pits of the human mind as she will insist on going to.” He made a queer little gesture with his usually nimble hands. “It has changed her, in ways that I’m not sure I understand.”

  My brain followed easily to the end of his sentence, but found the rest of his page blank. Granted, Mercy’s spirit was an unlikely combination of her parents’—an oil-and-water mix of determination and whimsy that made her fascinating even when inscrutable. She had always been the most individual creature I knew, therefore, and so she couldn’t change, could she? Mercy was already thousands of things I couldn’t grasp. She could only become more herself.

  “I’m only growing old, and mawkish,” the reverend added lightly when I said nothing. “May God protect her in such places.”

  There was a sentiment I could get behind. As I stood up to take my leave, something occurred to me.

  “Reverend, if you don’t mind my asking—feeling about blasphemy as you do, why should you be so tolerable about my brother?”

  A quick smile flashed into life on his face. “See those shelves?” he asked, pointing at all the books. “My daughter’s playground? You’ve read a number of them yourself, yes?”

  “Yes,” I said, confused. “A great many.”

  “Well, when you weren’t looking, so did your brother. If independence of mind is to be admired in the human race, then your brother is a most laudable man.” He stood, shuffling his papers into a neat stack. “All the best to you, Mr. Wilde, and please—I should like to be kept aware of your progress, insomuch as you can safely tell me.”

  Walking out the door with a puzzled, anxious look dividing my brows, I realized that I was back to my Sahara-dry list of options. And getting stone drunk was edging further up the ranks by the second. When I’d shut the door behind me, however, I spied Mercy.

  She was running. I hadn’t seen her run in months, and she sprinted down the street with her black hair rioting against the tiny lace cap on her head, her swinging shoulders bare above the wide collar of her butter-yellow day dress, dozens of tucked pleats straining against her waist. Seeing me, Mercy came to a gasping halt with a smile forming on her face. I couldn’t for the life of me fathom why.

  “Are you all right?” I asked, only wanting a quick answer to the question.

  Of course, I didn’t get one.

  “Mr. Wilde,” she said. Breathlessly, on a laugh. “I was looking for you, at the Tombs. But you weren’t there, and now I see why.”

  I tried again, harder.

  “I’m grateful you found me, then. But what do you mean?”

  “If I told you I badly needed your help, and that the matter is tied to your own stake in this evil business, you’d go with me immediately, yes?”

  “What’s happened?” I demanded bluntly.

  “Mr. Wilde,” said Mercy, her bosom still heaving, “I think I’m right in supposing that you speak flash?”

  TWELVE

  Ireland is in a deplorable condition—almost on the eve of a civil war. The police have seized a rioter at Ballinghassig, the people attempted a rescue, and were fired upon. Seven men and one woman were killed instantly. The police are said to have acted illegally and without reading the riot act before firing upon the men.

  • New York Herald, summer 1845 •

  Ninepin could whiddle you both the whole scrap, if I please to. None trustier,
and none belonging more heart and soul to Miss Underhill here,” said the lad before me, his pocketknife worrying at something foreign stuck to the sole of his boot. “Tip us a wetting, copper, and I’ll cackle like a right old tabby. Mr. Wilde, that is to say,” he amended, glancing an unspoken apology at my companion.

  I sat next to Mercy in a cellar coffee-and-cake saloon on Pearl Street, sharing one side of a grimy booth, staring down my nose at an uncommonly fine example of New York’s news hawkers. This one had reached the ripe age of twelve, I thought, for the cigar in his grinning mouth was pretty well practiced, and his blue vest and knee-length purple trousers fit him well. He was experienced enough selling papers to afford to keep his clothing apace with his body, and anyway kinchin below twelve don’t much like coffee. Rum, yes. But not coffee. The lad who’d introduced himself as Ninepin liked coffee considerably. We’d barely arrived, and he was through his second cup. Now he was asking me, not unexpectedly, for something stronger.

  “Suppose you cackle first,” I suggested.

  Ninepin scowled. He had fiercely blond hair, like a canary, his muscles of necessity and pugilism better developed than they should have been, and he’d scavenged a pair of gold ladies’ reading spectacles. He kept taking them off, polishing the glass with a scarlet kerchief when making a particularly juicy point.

  “Ain’t as if I can’t get it myself, is it? Free country and all that. Toady!” he called to the saloon keeper. “A pair of French creams, if you please!”

  The barkeep walked over readily enough with two brandies. Ninepin then paid for them in a style that was, I have to admit, pretty fine. He passed one to Mercy.

  “Why’d you run off that way?” he coaxed suggestively. “It don’t fadge, my pretty bloss, and here you’re back with a bobbie like enough to rub me to wit.”

  “I’ve no intention of arresting you,” I simultaneously translated and replied.

  He ignored me. “We’re flusher alone, Miss Underhill.”

  “Do you think so?” she asked him with a skewed smile, passing her cup over to me and ignoring the child’s, which he was already sipping.

  “Dead to rights.”

  “What if I told you that, while ever grateful for your company, I can’t always quite grasp the sense of it?”

  Ninepin blushed. Clearly unused to flirting, and newly sad of the fact. It was so raw that it was hard to look at. Like seeing a wet colt falling over. He pulled the cigar from his mouth, dipped the end in his coffee, and put it back.

  “Don’t patter naught other jargon, do I? Did I ever have kin what set me up with a brother of the quill? I ain’t educated. Just in love,” he added slyly.

  It was a good job I was staring ruefully down at the brandy a twelve-year-old seemed to have just purchased for me, because I know two looks flashed by under the brim of my hat. One was hearty amusement, which he wouldn’t cotton to a bit. And the other was too embarrassing to admit to myself. So I let both pass.

  “That were the reason you missed last rehearsal,” Ninepin said sadly. “We ain’t rhino fat blokes.”

  “Wealthy sophisticates,” I said under my breath.

  “Could it be possible, Ninepin, that I missed last rehearsal because I’d already given you the bolts of cloth you required, and I was needed elsewhere?” Mercy inquired mildly. “Perhaps you’d permit me to attend the next one, after telling us both what you said this morning at City Hall Park?”

  I’d been puzzled, but I saw the picture better then. Mercy had been spending her mornings wandering through City Hall Park for years, with plenty of bread crusts in her basket and plenty of bandages for those who awakened there and found themselves new-painted with blood. City Hall Park is ten acres of open grounds with about two acres of humiliated grass smeared thinly over it, the Hall of Records and City Hall presiding in the center. Three sorts of city dwellers populate it by night, and they keep pretty separate. The molleys like Val’s friend Gentle Jim meet at the south end by a great-basined fountain that doesn’t work, wearing sensitive looks and pale scarves while waiting to do each other French kindnesses. The homeless girl kinchin who sell hot corn tend to shelter under the trees. As for the news hawkers, they lay claim to the steps of City Hall and the House of Records, where rival gangs of them sleep every night through our bafflingly long summers.

  “A tale’s what you want, a tale’s what I’ll weave.” The scamp grinned, showing a missing front tooth. “This morning, Mr. Wilde, we was up with the larks, and nigh keen to go buy our stiffs, when Miss Underhill here arrived with a jug of fresh cow’s juice and we napped our regulars.”

  I nodded. “So you were about to buy your morning stock of papers when Miss Underhill brought milk, and you shared it. Then what happened?”

  Mercy’s blessed blue-eyed attention passed sidelong to me for a moment and then drifted off again as she tucked a little black strand of hair behind her ear.

  “Well, then Miss Underhill asked us to blow whether we’d heard of any kinchin were put to anodyne, maybe flicked afore their ground sweat.”

  I turned to her in surprise. “You … you asked if they knew of kids killed and cut up before burial?”

  The most perfect lower lip in the world tucked itself under Mercy’s top lip for a moment, and it went straight to my gut. She’d not have wanted to ask such a thing of a band of boys, I thought, but how clever it was. After all, the news hawkers were as good as their own army. They had to be—they were the city’s youngest independent entrepreneurs in a town where the word cutthroat applied to businessmen in both the literal and figurative senses. When the papers had produced a fresh edition, newsboys swarmed the offices, individually buying as many copies as they believed they could sell to the public based on the day’s headlines and their own skill. No one bossed them, no one counted them, and I’d bet a double eagle that the employees selling them wholesale news didn’t even know their names. They set fair prices for their wares among the various gangs, fought like pack rats for their own. The greenest of them was better equipped to answer Mercy’s question than a society spinster of forty years.

  “You did the right thing,” I told her fervently.

  Ninepin coughed. “So I said to her, she’d best look leery. Miss Underhill here is a kate, to be sure, a real iron insider, but—”

  “Yes, she’s wonderful. Now, sing it out,” I suggested. Mercy cast me a grateful look at last before returning her eyes to her folded hands.

  “It just don’t settle easy with Ninepin.” He pulled off his girlish spectacles and started cleaning the glass like a born scholar. “A fine dimber mort like Miss Underhill palavering over stifled squeakers like that. Not with the cull in the black hood on the vag.”

  My jaw dropped pretty far. Mercy, too refined or else too nakedly pleased to shoot me a look of triumph, cast it at the table instead, where it ricocheted back to me in spite of herself.

  “You’ve heard rumor of a man in a black hood roaming the streets?” I repeated in shock.

  Ninepin nodded grimly. “I’m real sorry you thought you couldn’t savvy me, Miss Underhill.” Brightening with an effort, he sipped the brandy as if he’d been practicing for this very occasion. Which he had, doubtless. “Anything as I pattered strike you shady, Mr. Wilde?”

  “I understand you perfectly,” I answered, surprised. Val had been speaking flash since before I’d known what it was, but I’d spent so much time avoiding his fellow rabbits, I never noticed my own expertise. “Ninepin, it’s very important that you tell us about this man in the hood.”

  “On account of that hushed boy stargazer?”

  “However did you learn about that?”

  “Mr. Wilde, I ain’t educated, but I ain’t a bottle-head.” He flashed a dazzling smile at Mercy. “You think I sell stiffs without a mate reading me their headlines? You suppose I stand on street corners screaming out, ‘By your leave, nothing much happening today! Hot streets and crooked politics! More Irish arrive! Only two cents!’”

  I was smiling
before he’d even finished the joke. Mercy laughed, meanwhile, in such a way that I didn’t suppose Ninepin would ever look twice at another woman in his life. Poor kinchin.

  “Yes, we do want to know what happened to that stargazer,” she admitted. “Will you trust us?”

  “I’ll parell it all to rights. But I can’t go the proper way about it sans my lads. They savvy as much as I do, maybe more, and they’ll leak once I own I’ve got the pig down fine.”

  “Thank you for vouching for my character to your comrades,” I said with all the seriousness I could muster.

  Ninepin winked at me, and then seemed to form an exciting new thought. “Wait a tick. None of us like to give you any humbug, Miss Underhill—and I’ll blow the gab, cross my heart. I’ll deliver a proper rounding, and we’ll not sing small, if … if you’ll only trot along to the gaff on my arm.”

  Mercy cast me a blank look.

  “The gentleman would like to escort you to the theater in exchange for delivering information,” I explained, though I didn’t understand it a jot either.

  “There’s another rehearsal,” he said a little shyly. “Before the afternoon stiffs come off the press. If Matchbox stags you on my arm, he’ll lose no time tipping it to Dead-Eye. And then Dead-Eye’s cousin Zeke the Rat from the East River gang will have to button his lip, won’t he, when I say as I know you personal?”

  Mercy stood up. She reached for my untouched drink and took a sip of it, then rested her right hand on the pleats at her waist, offering her left for Ninepin’s elbow. If God had granted a stockbroker second sight and a perpetually replenishing pharmacy, a human face couldn’t look more joyful. It was futile, trying not to smile at it.

  “Ninepin, the only project quite so important to me right now as learning about the man in the black hood is to put Zeke the Rat in his place,” she announced.

  “Lord love a camel,” the youth replied in worshipful awe.