The Gods of Gotham Read online

  And I followed them up the stairs and out the door. Grateful as I very often am that Mercy doesn’t spend overmuch time looking straight at me.

  The theater, when we reached it following a six-minute walk, was a surprise to only one of us. But I’m pretty sure I made up for my two escorts.

  We’d already been so close to the black heart of Ward Six where the world turns upside down, which is justly famous and called the Five Points, that I’d supposed we were actually going to that broken intersection. But we stopped on Orange Street, turning to a blank door. Permanent hooks were nailed into the wood for a sign to be hung, but the sign itself was on holiday. Ninepin knocked, a peculiar rhythm that reminded me keenly of when Julius hadn’t any oysters to open and would drum curlicued tattoos on the bar top with his palms, and for a moment I wondered what the devil sort of other person I’d turned into so quickly.

  Inside the door, though … we stood in a short hallway, where a wooden box big enough for a tall boy to occupy loomed next to the opposite door. The booth was poor secondhand lumber. Amateur carpentry, endlessly loving design. It had a window, with a piece of glass stuck in it that had once been in the Hudson, for a barnacle or seven clung to the green pane. No one was inside.

  “Ticket booth,” explained Ninepin, looking back at me with the sort of glee that could fly a train over the Atlantic. “Right this way. Step up, step right up.”

  To my wonderment, seconds later I was standing at the top of a functioning playhouse. The deepening levels, the chairs (none matched and many burned), the light fixtures (two of them, rigged to either wall and black with smoke), the footlights (piles of wax with new candles perched atop their fallen brothers), the emerald curtains and the painted backdrop of a battlefield. Then there were the boys. About twenty lined up in a soldier’s formation onstage. Or rather, what a child would think of as one.

  “What do you reckon?” Ninepin demanded, but to me. Mercy had already seen his little bit of comfort, of course.

  As it happened, Valentine could have been a newsboy, I thought. Not a fireman. A newsboy. Just look at them. God knows none of these will first try morphine when they’re sixteen.

  “It’s flash,” I said, for I couldn’t think of anything finer. “It’s dead flash.”

  “Oy, it’s a rehearsal, for Christ’s sake, not a bloody morris dance,” snapped a taller kinchin from near the footlights. “Don’t be oafish, Dead-Eye!”

  “Getting ’em into prime twig, eh, Fang?” jeered the newly important Ninepin.

  Fang was a pock-faced boy of fourteen or so with his arms folded. The sort of strapping lad who came after you with a club and only remembered to apologize for the ordeal later, when all your pals were clear of the scene and it was cozy and the two of you could be human in secret. He started sneering before he even looked up, and then caught sight of Ninepin with Mercy.

  We didn’t have all that much trouble with anyone after that.

  A few looked at my copper star and formed tiny scowls, but I was already well used to that. Fang strode forward with a little wooden stick he’d been using as a sort of director’s baton, tapping it against his shoulder with his skinny arms yet crossed.

  “What’s it about?” he yelled. “Might you kindly get that copper out of our theater?”

  “How are you liking your proscenium curtains, Fang?” Mercy called down in response. “To me the color looks very fine. Who hung them?”

  “It were me, Miss Underhill!” shouted a tiny fellow with coal-black hair, waving from the assembled group with a wooden rifle. He was much older than his size, though—I could see it in the shape of his hands, his slouch, how deep-set his brown eyes were. Fourteen or even fifteen, and cursed with the bones of an eight-year-old.

  “Was it, Matchbox? How did you manage?”

  “Scrambled up with a rope, and Dead-Eye using the ladder and all.”

  It didn’t take long to spot Dead-Eye, who was blushing furiously and making use of a large cat’s-eye marble in one empty socket.

  “They’ll do The Thrilling, Gruesome, and Bloody Spectacle of the Battle of Agincourt proper, Miss Underhill,” announced Fang, knowing when he was outflanked. “Supposing our Henry ever shows his mazzard at rehearsal.” He slung a dark look at Ninepin. “We’re none of us much for bobbies, though, since they’ve started marching up and down. What’s this one after?”

  “Are you questioning my closest childhood friend, Fang?” Mercy asked, stepping down toward the proscenium. “I’d have thought you’d be happy to meet a copper star who thinks children are worth something other than packing off to the House of Refuge.”

  Fang swaggered to the edge of the stage, where the first seats were placed. I headed down to meet him with Mercy. Ninepin, glowing like a lightning bug, took a seat in the house and began polishing his spectacles. When we were face-to-face, I saw that Fang had a scar running from his nose into his upper lip like the tooth of a snake. It seemed ever-ready to twitch up and deliver some venom.

  “We like Miss Underhill plenty,” he said coldly. “We don’t like copper stars. Don’t have much reason.”

  “I’m Timothy Wilde. And I don’t like the House of Refuge. Ever fam grasp a copper star, Fang?” I inquired, holding out my hand for shaking as sincerely as I could. A flutter of interest rippled through the boys, like a squirrel through dead brush.

  “Are you waiting for a signal from God, Fang?” Mercy asked, amused.

  “Here I am, come down to Gotham for a word with Fang,” Ninepin droned in a loud, genteel voice from the seats above us. “Fam grasp the copper star, he’s a bene cove. And buy Ninepin new cigarettes. You lost fair and square last night, you’re shite at craps.”

  A knowing clatter of laughter behind me. Ninepin was clearly the resident mimic. Fang lifted the white-gashed side of his lip good-humoredly and shook my hand as hard as any man could.

  “You’re pretty natural about your friends, Mr. Wilde, not minding shaking hands with a news hawker,” he said slowly.

  “I’ve never yet been double-crossed by a news hawker.”

  “Will you all tell us as much as you know about a very important matter, boys?” Mercy called to the stage at large.

  A chair appeared magically behind her, carried by the gallant Ninepin. “Miss Underhill and her pal need us to squeak about the cull in the black hood, mates,” he declared.

  That altered the tone somewhat.

  After protests, and a few sharp no’s, and one or two of the smaller faces going pale, I stood behind Mercy’s chair with my fingers slung on its back while the tough-faced older youths gathered around and told us their story. And what a story. I’d set it in the original language, but it was recounted by over a dozen newsboys, with plenty of shouted profanity and disagreement leading to careful revision. It took the whole of my concentration to grasp it all. And the other half to believe any of it. So here is what they said.

  Once there was a news hawker of the Five Points who went by the name of Jack Be Nimble. Or Jackie, when he was carousing with his cronies. From the time he was five, he could sell out of any paper, no matter what actual events the day before had held. Newsboys wait for disaster to strike the way merchants gaze out over the ocean for their ships to come home to port, but not Jack. He’d buy more than anyone and sell them all, even if the headline was that an opera house had been proposed, or a foreign aristocrat died in his sleep. He was loved. He was rich by his thirteenth birthday, or thereabouts, Jack not being able to remember when precisely his thirteenth birthday was. And one day soon afterward, heading to his favorite coffee-and-cake saloon for a dinner of custard pie and a glass or two of rum, he noticed something peculiar.

  “Jack weren’t no hicksam,” Fang put in emphatically. “Jackie were always sharp as a shiv.”

  Jack Be Nimble noticed that a carriage parked in front of a bawdy house was staffed better than the usual. There was a driver, naturally, for one. But also two others. The two other men were as big as houses, but very light and qu
ick on their feet; and they’d wickedly cunning eyes, though their faces were hidden; and Jackie figured they were probably Turks, though granted it was dark; and the stealthy brutes could certainly kill a man without his ever noticing he was dead, though they did look dangerous from afar. Jack was a boxing enthusiast, which among the newsboys is akin to saying he breathed air, and so he decided that these rowdies were awaiting their boss: Abel “Hammer” Cohen, the Chatham Street Jew. The only boxer rich enough to employ three thugs for one carriage, and the man who’d won a major prizefight a few hours earlier.

  “Ever seen the Hammer?” Ninepin lay flat on his back and yet propped up on his elbows, moving the cigar from one end of his mouth to the other. “He has the fastest cross-buttock throw I’ve ever clapped eyes on, and when he delivers you the floorer, half the time it’s a nut-cracker. Sorry, Miss Underhill,” he added.

  Jack and the boys who were with him—“I were there!” shouted a grand and beautifully impossible chorus—hid behind a cluster of kegs at the mouth of an alley to wait for the celebrated man’s exit. But when a chap did come out, it was only a servant from the household carrying a wrapped bundle in his arms. He deposited his burden on the floor of the carriage and returned inside.

  Obviously, this bundle contained prize money. For that very evening, the Jew boxer had defeated Razor Daniel O’Kirkney, and after only fifty-two rounds. A badge of courage, a hero’s wages. The clear thing to do was to pinch it.

  Fang looked at me apologetically.

  “We only meant to nap a bit of it. Like a good Christian tax,” he added helpfully. Aware already that, to avoid blame, God ought to be square in his corner.

  Jack—and probably Fang and Matchbox, for their accounts had the workaday, cracked-bell tone of truthfulness about them—crept up to the parked carriage after having stealthily run round the block, approaching from the street side. The bigger boys hung back, fearing to be seen. A youth barely six years of age, which was ambitious even for a newsboy, who was called Fancy due to his insistence upon buying new socks when his old ones grew holes, was chosen to spy out the situation. He walked elfen as you please up to the street-side door of the carriage and looked in the bag.

  “Came back all over ergotat.” Matchbox shook his head, a resigned false bravery in his weirdly adult eyes.

  “Did he tell you why he felt ill?” I inquired.

  He did not; the suddenly sickly Fancy refused to report what he’d seen in the bag. This wasn’t exactly a mark of courage, and it went poor for him in a whispering and pinching fashion before Jack Be Nimble volunteered to see for himself. It was probably too much coin to fathom, or else something valuable to sell, and anyway Jack was determined to know the contents. He crept up to the carriage door quiet as a waft of cigar smoke. Hand poised over the cloth.

  At the same moment, the man in the black hood exited from the brothel and took a keek in at the other side, about to step into his carriage.

  The man in the black hood stood erect under a street lamp, looking at Jack. Spine straight, eyes fathomless. An impersonal monster, the blankness of a nightmare you can’t remember mingled with the sweaty solidity of a human threat. Every single child in the room, claiming to have been present on that fateful night or not, swore to have seen him again sometime or other afterward. In shadows, alleys, and saloons, mostly. In dreams. In their fathers, two of them pretty insistent that their fathers would stop at nothing to perform cruelties in the heaviness of New York nights.

  “He’s maybe a Red Indian, but then I didn’t see his face,” trilled a child of possibly eight.

  “He were never the Hammer, though. Abel Cohen had cigars with toffs at a chophouse uptown that night, everyone knew it by morning.”

  “But he’s a rum-togged swell, for certain,” Matchbox put in. “Flush as you like, with a black cape.”

  “You never saw him,” Fang jeered. “Brave lad like you. You were back in the alley having a toss, or you’d ha’ stopped him, eh?”

  “I did see, you ugly sod,” Matchbox snapped, genuinely hurt. Fang had gone too far in front of a stranger. “But he were peery by then, weren’t he now, staring right at Jack Be, and anyway ’twas snitch! What could I ha’ done better?”

  Everyone was silent for a moment.

  “We all turned tail,” Fang admitted. His eyes skated viciously over the room for a braggart claiming heroics, but came up empty. “All of us. No one fights Old Nick in the dark.”

  “What happened to Jack Be Nimble?” asked Mercy, her voice scraping against something rusted-over.

  The man in the black hood had greeted Jack, and Jack had stood straight and tall like a true-born American soldier. Beckoning the lad over, the man in the black hood had pointed to the open door of the brothel, his posture kindly. He’d handed Jack a coin. They’d all seen it glint in the lamplight. Jack had thought it over.

  And then he’d done a jaunty wave behind his back to his pals, leaving them behind. Walking into a door yellowed at the edges with welcome light. When he’d vanished, the carriage drove away. Jack had wanted to see inside pretty badly, they told me. From the street, it looked like a palace. But none of them had ever seen him again. Strategies had been plotted, and feats of daring I could never fathom had been attempted. The house had been long watched, whenever they were free of work, and regiments of men walked in and out again. But never Jack.

  “We’d all thought he’d be back by dawn,” Ninepin sighed. “I were only seven, then, but we wasn’t … we thought he might a’ paid for a tumble, see? We didn’t leave him,” he added fiercely. I nodded. “But we has to hawk our stiffs of a morning, don’t we, so we must have missed when the man in the black hood came back and took Jack Be Nimble off.”

  “What was in the bag?” I asked.

  Fang shrugged. Matchbox blew air out through his lips dismissively. Several younger faces sought my attention like tendrils curling toward light.

  “A dead girl,” one of them reported. As if in a classroom, repeating a lesson. “Cut in half. At the front, like, in a cross. That’s what the man in the black hood does.”

  “Where is Fancy now, and may I speak with him?” I asked next.

  “The bloody flux took him, something quick,” said Dead-Eye. Dysentery, my mind supplied against my will. “He and John and Sixes, too. Last year.”

  “And where were you rabbits when you saw the carriage before the bawdy house? Do you know the address?”

  “I don’t suppose I know any addresses,” Matchbox realized, laughing.

  “It were Silkie Marsh’s house,” said Fang. “But Jackie never turned stargazer. Never. Don’t think it.”

  Mercy’s skin faded and hardened at once, turning porcelain.

  “Of course it was Silkie Marsh’s house,” I said. “When are you at work, selling papers?”

  Dead-Eye glanced my way, interested. “It don’t take past nine in the morning to hawk the first set. Then we eat some flapjacks and chops, carry luggage down by the ferry docks for coin. Wait for the afternoon edition.”

  “And after that’s sold out?”

  “Naught. We smoke, see the sights—”

  “Could you recognize this carriage again, if you saw it?” I wanted to know.

  The sudden pulse among them like a shout passing through silence told me they could.

  “No.” Fang’s pocky face was flushing around his neck and temples. “We don’t want a bit of that. Working for a copper star?”

  “We’re flush with lowre,” Ninepin added, assuring me of their riches.

  Fang continued seething. “Just look at this place, the new curtains, and anyway, your coin would ruin our reputation.”

  “Fang,” Ninepin considered more slowly, “Jack would—”

  “Shut your bleeding head, Ninepin. Jack would want us to stay snug. We’re out, Mr. Wilde.”

  And well he should be frightened, I thought. I’d have been frightened cross-eyed. But I’d already grasped by then that no one else in the entire city could tie
that particular phantom to an actual carriage. My sole witnesses were half-criminal thugs-in-training. And richer than me, judging by their cigars. Meanwhile, they disliked me nearly to a man, and I’d only one thing I could possibly offer them since money didn’t touch their spirits.

  “You know what would spruce up a production like The Thrilling, Gruesome, and Bloody Spectacle of the Battle of Agincourt?” I wondered. “But the setup here is swag-rum already. Very flash. You’ve probably thought of everything.”

  “What were you fancying?” Matchbox asked, touchingly curious.

  “It was a stupid notion.” I shrugged. “One of you must already know how to make lightning. I’ve a lightning-maker pal, you understand.”

  This was a brilliantly stark silence. The most tentative, growing silence. The little white rasp on the tail of the gunpowder stick creeping ever closer, joyful and greedy, biding its perfect time, and when it reached the firecracker at last, at last, green and orange and golden sparks would erupt into—

  “We don’t have a lightning-maker, Fang, we don’t!” a sudden chorus exploded.

  “I’ll learn it, I’ve only one eye to lose!” Dead-Eye proposed with gravity and passion.

  I glanced over at the boss of this less than democratic band. A growing hatred for me was curdling the fascination in Fang’s hooded eyes, and his shoulders were getting steadily pugilistic. That needed solving.

  “I think Fang should likely learn, and teach the rest of you,” I proposed.

  Fang thought about that for a spell, chewing on it. “That would maybe be a good arrangement. Supposing I can find the time.” Then, impossibly, a genuine smile broke over his face. “Lightning! Just thinking on it—what Zeke the Rat will say when we have lightning.”

  A door banged. The air around us exploded when a kinchin tore like an addict’s blood through a side corridor. The wings, I think they call them in a theater. It was a stampede in the body of a single boy, his lungs clawing for air.

  “You’re missing it!” he gasped.

  “What, a fight?” demanded Ninepin, sitting up farther and grinning.