The Fatal Flame Read online

  Thanks to my downright bizarre thirty years of informal education surviving here in New York, I can both speak flash and read English, so I know that her friend had said, You can pay someone to read this note and then have enough left for some real food. Lord, but you’re starving, my girl.

  And I know that the note said:

  I fear that my friend means to set your house aflame and burn you all alive.

  Dunla did understand the fifty cents, however, and soon found herself shoving a fried-oyster sandwich into her mouth, weeping as she did so, salty juices and tears running down her chin and fingertips while the world flowed soundlessly around her like a cold river eroding a stone.

  1

  It is impossible to go a rod in any of the more thickly frequented thoroughfares without meeting some apparently miserable supplicant for the bounty of the charitable. All kinds of deformity and suffering are put to use in this business; mis-shapen children, pale and pining infants, wretched old age. . . . Many of these objects are shocking if not disgusting, and ought to be strictly excluded by the authorities from the public streets.

  —NEW-YORK DAILY TRIBUNE, AUGUST 17, 1847

  I AM NOT THE HERO of this story. I don’t suppose I ever was the hero of any of these stories I set down to make some sense of the senseless. At least I’ve been writing of the hero all this while. Even back when I’d supposed my brother little more than a flaming plague on the surviving Wilde household.

  Admittedly I played a role in the war between the manufactory girls and the men who’d wronged them so savagely. And I managed to be clever and discreet, which is why Chief of Police George Washington Matsell trusts me with solving his most controversial crimes in the first place. Though I always take justice as far as I can, I’ve hushed up many a shame-stained scandal in my time as a star police.

  I’d stand up and applaud myself if I deserved it. So I’ll sit here and keep writing.

  Despite my former bartender’s attention to detail and the fact that people tend to press their darkest secrets into my palms like razor-edged love tokens (neither of which qualities I can even take credit for, as they come naturally), I’m not particularly bright. Clever, yes. Oh, I’ve found myself so very, very clever at times. But as my brother, Val, frequently mentions, I am also dim as dusk. And when I think about that now, about how much more I could have done and what others were forced to do in my stead, something in my chest begins a deliberate downward tear.

  Oh, not that yet. That part of the story will come all too soon.

  I am not the hero, as I mentioned, but I was playing at one when it began.

  I stood huddled in the doorway of a sail-repair shop in plain view of the lumbering East River, jostled by leathery first mates placing orders. I’d a fine vantage point of the James Slip, just at the corner of Oliver and South Streets—briny April wind in my face, a pickled seaside sun in my eyes. Birds wheeled above, screaming for scraps. There are plentiful dregs to be found along the waterfront.

  We were after the human variety.

  “When can we expect this coldhearted villain to make his appearance?” my friend Jakob Piest asked, ducking into his gruel-speckled muffler.

  My closest police comrade has a tendency to wear what he eats. I think of Piest as my partner-in-whatever-it-is-we-do, since I don’t know the name for hunting down criminals after the fact rather than stopping crimes in progress, as the roundsmen do. Somebody should conjure one up. The police have existed for three years now—that’s plentiful time to have figured out a title for my job. Most of the copper stars walk in circuits, eyes peeled for mayhem. Thanks to Chief Matsell’s esteem, I decipher unsolved mayhem. Whenever I can borrow Piest, I do—it’s keener sport with a mad companion beside me. His eyes are invaluable, and he’s honest as the frayed cuffs on his frock coat. I likewise appreciate that he resembles your friendlier breed of barnacle and talks like a knight-errant. It’s a good job there aren’t many windmills left in Manhattan and that jousting poles are similarly scarce, or Mr. Piest would never set aside the time police work requires.

  “According to the shipping wires, they’re smack on schedule, so he should be here any minute now,” I mused. The vessel before us rocked and groaned in protest, lashed down like a frothing wild creature. The gangway was rising, and swarthy stevedores with tobacco in their cheeks leaned against dollies, waiting to grapple with the huge ship full of luggage and dry goods about to be disgorged.

  “I hope that I am neither a vicious nor a petty person, Mr. Wilde.” Piest’s stringy grey hair waltzed in the spring breeze. “But I relish the thought of Ronan McGlynn passing his days in a Tombs cell, watching the mice cross the great mountain range of his belly as he attempts to lull himself to sleep.”

  I smiled at my friend’s quixotic turn of phrase, eyes skipping across coal-stained enginemen and the chalk-and-rouge-smeared whores who survived off their nickels. Piest’s tone was pure poison, but so was our target. We’d recently learned that for months Ronan McGlynn had been turning a tidy profit in plucking comely Irish virgins straight from the gangways and welcoming them to worse than hell with a smile. And nothing scrapes either of our tempers thinner than the exploitation of wide-eyed innocents.

  Before us, reporters from the Herald and the Tribune gathered, salivating over the freshest news from overseas. Beyond, the water lapped at the tugs and the sloops and the freighters, striking in lacy plumes against the docks.

  “Ah,” breathed Mr. Piest.

  “Bully,” I agreed.

  The great ship, hull glistening, had commenced hemorrhaging first-class passengers. Fine-featured ladies, feet invisible under the great swaying bells of their skirts, once-careful curls harassed by the ocean wind. Gentlemen at their sides, nodding vague approval beneath their black hats and checking the time and generally congratulating themselves. In ten minutes they’d have disappeared with their steamer trunks piled high behind the hacksmen, gliding away to make vastly important decisions about proper hotels and appropriate restaurants and the writing of letters back to wherever they came from.

  We didn’t give a damn about them, though. Another figure had materialized, bouncing on the tips of his boots in anticipation, carrying a sign tucked under his arm. It read APPLICANTS FOR MANUFACTORY WORK WANTED. Which is true enough, now that these eerie mass workplaces have begun cropping up like dry rot.

  Ronan McGlynn, however, didn’t mean a word of it.

  I set McGlynn’s age somewhere north of fifty, for while his blue eyes remained clear and his ruddy skin hale, his shoulder-length hair was white and his legs sticklike beneath a jolly round belly. He wore perfectly cut doeskin trousers—not the ready-made slops New York has begun vomiting out, but sewn to measure—and a white vest beneath a violet frock coat. A snowy beard and a grey top hat completed the benevolent picture. But he was only a pantomime of a prosperous businessman. McGlynn owned a thin gash of a mouth and the stare of a born slave trader, the outline of a flask marred his jacket, and his nails where they gripped the pasteboard sign were dark with grit.

  I notice that sort of thing, though. When the Irish lasses poured off the boat, dazzled and hungry, they’d be lucky to notice a twenty-one-cannon salute. Not that they’d get one.

  “If it isn’t the ugliest pair o’ copper stars this side of Connell’s arse,” came a gruff Irish voice to my left.

  “Me arse is widely considered comely, truth be told. The shape of it, the heft and all. Are ye blind, Kildare?” a still-thicker Irish brogue questioned, amused.

  “Welcome to the festivities.” I smiled crookedly beneath the brim of my broad black hat.

  Maybe I ought to have objected to the greeting, but Mr. Piest’s bulging blue eyes and absent chin admittedly resemble a carp’s. As for my own appearance . . . the Fire of 1845 had replaced the upper right quarter of my face with skin like a poorly cobbled thoroughfare. No one to my knowledge found me unbearably ugly pr
evious, but I hadn’t exactly taken a survey. People find Val plenty spruce in appearance, and we could be twins apart from the fact he has me beat by six years of age and eight inches in height. We’ve deep-set green eyes and a little downward half-moon stamped in our chins, clean features with a slender nose below double-arched dirty-blond hairlines. Youthful faces for all that we’ve both seen too much, his marred only by weighty bags beneath his eyes and mine by a scar ugly enough to pickle cucumbers.

  So I wasn’t going to argue with Connell. Not when I enthusiastically agreed with him that neither Piest nor myself belongs on a facial-tonic advertisement.

  As for our fellow copper stars, Connell has a pleasantly boxlike head, rough-featured and approachable, with flaming red hair he ties back with a short ribbon. Mr. Kildare, the taller and quicker-tempered of the two, rubbed at his wiry black side-whiskers. They joined us in the sail-repair shop’s shadow, leaning with indolent nonchalance against the brick wall.

  “Where’s the pimp, then?” Kildare wondered.

  “I’ll be after thinkin’ ye really are blind.” Connell nodded toward where McGlynn preened. “Will you look at the airs and graces o’ the scum.”

  “Shit’ll fly, if ye hit it with a stick,” Kildare reminded us.

  The last of the first-class passengers descended. “You hired McGlynn?” I asked quietly.

  “Yesterday, ’twas. We’re meant to be the muscle for a goosing slum in Anthony Street,” said Kildare, whose beat had bordered mine when I’d spent sixteen hours a day trudging in a circle as one of the first New York police.

  “A real brothel or an imaginary one?” Jakob Piest asked, brow askew. He doesn’t speak much flash, but we deal with so many brothels it would have been absurd for him not to recognize goosing slum.

  “O’ course a real brothel. Don’t be insulting,” Connell said mildly. “Paid the madam five dollars in case McGlynn wanted to check up on our sincerity, didn’t I now? She’s a motherly sort to her stargazers, more than game t’ help flush out the likes o’ this rat.”

  “An unnecessary and ungallant query on my part, Mr. Kildare,” Piest apologized.

  Prostitution, I should mention, is illegal. Not in fact—merely on paper. When women resort to the practice due to hunger or cold, I mourn for them. Arresting them, though, all the many thousands of them, would be a bit of a wrench, since testimony from the gentlemen who’d bought their kindnesses would be required to convict them. That doesn’t mean, however, that forced prostitution is a form of commerce we’re willing to tolerate. We calculate there are enough slaves south of the Mason-Dixon without treating Manhattan women like the cheaper sort of broodmares.

  “We ordered a great bloomin’ lot o’ fresh dells, plump virgin dells fit to break yer hearts and raise yer flagpoles,” Kildare explained, smiling. “Dells with small knubbly titties, dells with great pillow titties, dells with perfect round peach titties to make ye praise the Maker fer—”

  “He’s to bring in six new girls for us special like.” Connell pulled out a small notebook. “To be viewed directly, at a quarter past twelve.”

  A thick stream of respectable dull greys and browns and maroons seeped from the boat as the second-class passengers, faces hopeful and wary, descended the gangway, their plain woolen traveling costumes thrice mended. Shabby young unmarried men who’d carefully brushed their hats, bespectacled women with the addresses of female boardinghouses clutched in spotless gloved hands. The one thing more disgraceful than being poor, I’ve found, is looking the part. A penniless but chastely dressed woman is graciously allowed to beg for a stale crust. A slovenly dressed one with a cache of gold in the flour jar from her midnight admirers is widely considered better off dead.

  McGlynn, still hopping a little in expectancy, stilled when the steerage passengers—no better than ambulatory cargo but treated less tenderly—began to stumble blinking from the bowels of the ship onto American soil. I was peering with grim intent at the older man when the flash of a blue hat and a sweep of black hair passed the corner of my eye.

  Before I knew my legs had made a decision, they’d taken two quick steps toward James Slip.

  “Mr. Wilde?” Piest questioned, instantly alert. I must have looked like a greyhound quivering at the starting gate, electric shimmers gliding along my skin.

  I forgot to answer him.

  And it was all nonsense, of course, because that can’t have been her, the last of the second-class passengers. That can’t possibly have been Mercy Underhill.

  Mercy Underhill, an old friend and correspondent of mine who held my heart in her hands when she imagined she was merely embroidering with them, or doling out beef tea, or writing her darkly magical short stories, lived in London. Not New York. Not since she’d left it, in 1845, three years back.

  But it was just the way she held her head, exactly so, inky hair and papery skin. Since I was a boy, I’ve been studying the way Mercy carried herself at the slightest of angles, as if reading a book held in one slender hand, as if she were always looking for someone who’d disappeared round the corner, just out of her reach.

  “Mr. Wilde?”

  I stepped back, embarrassed. “I fancied I saw someone I used to know.”

  Nothing remained of her. Only swarming Irish, emaciated to the point of weightlessness, some bloodlessly pale and others burned nut brown from outdoor labor, coming thick and fast as petals blown from fruit trees. That was sensible, though, because Mercy had breathed not a word of returning to the city that had treated her so poorly in her last correspondence to me. And anyway, I love her. I see echoes of her everywhere. I could probably find her face in tea leaves and collapsed puddings, as if she were my first and forever saint.

  “We had him pegged, all right,” Connell said, eyes fixed on our true prize.

  I shook my head in considerable self-disgust, though that didn’t go far toward clearing it.

  “Manufactory work for the healthy and willing!” McGlynn rang a small chiming bell, sign in hand. The lettering wasn’t meant for the emigrant Irish, since nary a soul of them could read it, but for our colleagues—roundsmen passing with a curious eye. “Skills taught upon hire! Fair pay for dependable and virtuous females! Women only need apply, to preserve the safety of our workplace!”

  “D’ye find it more disgusting he’s speakin’ o’ workplace safety or virtue?” Mr. Connell growled.

  A nicely plumpish Irish lass who’d apparently survived the voyage with occasional meals, though God knows how she’d come by them, approached McGlynn. Is there yet work to be had, sir? I saw her ask. Her voice was soft, but if you can’t see the difference between champagne and whiskey in a deafening saloon, you make for a poor barman. The trick had remained handy when I became a copper star.

  “Work aplenty!” McGlynn crowed. “This is New York, my girl—the most commercial city in a rich nation. Welcome, welcome! Manufactory work for the chaste and diligent!”

  Within three minutes, dozens had lined up. Girls with midnight-black tresses and blue eyes like cornflowers, girls with locks the pale orange of a sweet September leaf. Eyes latched onto McGlynn as if he were a lifeline.

  “Give us the plan, then, Wilde,” Kildare demanded.

  “Take off your copper stars,” I answered. “You and Connell split off to meet McGlynn at the designated address. Which is?”

  “Northwest corner o’ Rose Street and Frankfort. A brothel called the Queen Mab.”

  “Best to turn up early so he doesn’t suspect you. Meanwhile, I’ll track these girls with Piest, make certain McGlynn doesn’t drop off any human deliveries before he arrives there.”

  “I’d nary think it likely, for by all accounts the Queen Mab is a clearinghouse,” Connell reported icily. It’s a personal opinion of mine that buildings where women are systematically violated for commerce should have a worse moniker, and if I ever find one to express the proper feeling, I’l
l employ it. “Screams at all hours, curtains sure enough plastered over the windows, though ’tis a weight off my mind—don’t let ’em out of your sight fer love or money.”

  “And when the pair o’ ye arrive at the Queen Mab?” Kildare put in, cracking hoary knuckles.

  “We linger outside until you’re being shown the main event, then burst in and cry inspection,” I answered. “Keep McGlynn from escaping out any rabbit holes. Simple.”

  “It’s never simple, Wilde, y’ brilliant little tit,” Kildare chided, not without affection.

  “Ye’ve titties on the brain, Kildare. Leave off the resident genius until something goes sideways,” Connell chuckled as they set off for Rose Street. “Then we can blame him, don’t you know. Won’t that be nice.”

  They never did any such thing, of course. Even when they ought to have done.

  Piest, meanwhile, was jutting his inadequate jaw toward McGlynn’s bevy of unwashed beauties in a pugilistic manner I found alarming. He’s a passionate man, but never a violent one. Then I glanced back and felt something thickly furious turn over at the bottom of my stomach.

  There were far too many girls for McGlynn to take.

  Of course there are, I thought, repulsed by my own surprise.

  And so, naturally, McGlynn was standing with elbows akimbo, calling out regretful dismissals in a fatherly baritone. Sending skinny, heartsick maidens and pregnant widows away in tears while he selected the prize lambs for the slaughter. The ones with long lashes and tender little mouths. The fair ones and the rosy ones. The ones gratefully gathering off to the left of a massive pile of parcel post, stroking one another’s shoulders in the depth of their collective relief.

  I ought to have expected McGlynn to have his pick. We city dwellers were all of us standing on the tip of Death’s scythe just then, arms flung wide with terror and the sharp point sinking through the boot sole. It was a pretty universal sensation. The young New Yorkers and the old, the Irish and the blacks, the natives and the emigrants, the Protestants and the Catholics, the men and the women. None of which sets got on with each other too amicably. The year 1848 was not, by any standard, a comfortable one. We’d just finished a war with Mexico, and the houses of Congress’s newest hobby seemed to be waging a new one against each other; the country was tearing itself apart at the seams, our rancor poker-black and spiteful. Meanwhile, here in my arrogant young port town, folk were clawing for supremacy like distempered street cats. Nearly half a million of us. The newcomers had proved too plentiful. Too frail and too numerous to live.