The Gods of Gotham Read online

  “But why would you say that, having already hired—”

  My question died when Mr. Piest plucked at my elbow, leading me a few feet away from the inept property owner and the self-satisfied copper stars. He scuttled behind a lamppost that didn’t shield us in the smallest part and pulled a folded-up newspaper scrap from his fraying inner coat pocket.

  “You were doubtless hot on the trail today from early morning without a second to spare for politics, but things have … changed,” he informed me gravely, his worried brows twitching like lobster claws. “Matsell wants you in his office at the Tombs.”

  He flitted away, and I opened the Herald clipping. I didn’t need long to look at it to see what had happened, and my fist met my brow as I cursed myself for checking only the headlines that morning. It was a letter to the editor: “Thus I marked the dead young ones hid north of the City with the sign of the Cross they weren’t fit fer other treetment and know that I am apointed …”

  “God damn it,” I swore under my breath, crushing the thing into a ball.

  Somebody had more than one correspondent.

  The yellow-trousered twit shivered as the police cart trundled past with its baggage of bruised rogues. “I am not the only God-fearing businessman who has been affected by this, sir. Three of my colleagues who own properties west of here also replaced their crews, and my sister in the Village lost no time in sending me word that she had sacked their upstairs maid. Quite right of her, too.”

  “I fail to follow you,” I said icily.

  “Who knows what sort of wickedness lurked in that girl? We ought to round these papists up somehow, send them back where they belong. If God wishes them to starve there, then who are we to stand in the way of divine justice? Granted, it may require twice the effort on a white man’s part to get an honest day’s work out of a Negro, but at least they fear the devil—there is nothing these Irish won’t sink to, as that letter proves. It shocks me, sir. The cruelty in what passes for fellow humans.”

  “There at least we’re agreed,” I growled as he turned away from me.

  Julius came up from my left, the smell of the tea leaves braided into his wiry hair preceding him slightly. A strange bulge distorted his right-hand pocket. He looked at me for a few seconds and then rubbed at his nose with his nimble fingers.

  “I owe you considerably.”

  “You don’t either. They pay me almost ten dollars a week.”

  “So you’re a copper star now.”

  “Shockingly,” I admitted with more than a touch of pepper.

  He shook his head. “It isn’t, by my way of thinking.”

  “And you’re a carpenter. You likely always have been a carpenter, and I didn’t think of it. Is that where your father got the name from? Or your grandfather?”

  “Father.” Julius smiled. “Cassius Carpenter. See what I mean? You can’t go ten minutes without figuring something down to the ground.” He cleared his throat. “I’ll help you any way you like, and anytime too, only I can’t give a statement. It wouldn’t do right by me. Nor anyone I know. Name something else, for your trouble. Please.”

  I swallowed a pincushion and nodded. Julius could bring charges all he liked, even win his case, but I already had the bastard on several counts of violence against police. And to my friend, a statement wasn’t worth wondering of a summer’s evening how long he’d live before his ken was torched.

  “Just let me get it right in my head,” I said slowly. “A letter written by a mad Irish bent on taking over the city, supposedly killing kinchin as a means, came out in the early editions. Say, five this morning.”

  Julius nodded, tapping his chin.

  “That stunted worm over there read it and fired his crew, and with the way things have been booming in the burned district, he’d replaced it with blacks a few hours later, losing only a bit of the workday. Some of the former workmen got soused off their pates and hatched the notion of a public demonstration. And you’re the one they caught when your crew took to their heels. How close am I?”

  “Shaving the bone.”

  “Julius, there is one thing you can do for me. Do you savvy where most of the folk from the old neighborhood have got to?”

  “Seen quite a few of them, one time or another. Always stopped for a word. Who are you after?”

  “Hopstill. I need a lightning-maker.”

  “Don’t we all,” said Julius, with a philosophic little smile.

  He gave me Hopstill’s new address, in a wretched part of Ward Six not far from my own house. I thanked him, which was sensible, because he’d helped me. He thanked me again, which wasn’t as sensible, since everything I’d done had been my job. Julius had shaken my hand and was already walking away when I idly asked him what was straining the seams of his right pocket.

  “The turnip,” he called back.

  “Why?” I asked, aghast.

  “Because I’m still here,” he answered. “I got a brick, a leather strap, and a rock from a slingshot too, all on a shelf. But look at me. I’m right here.”

  I bit the inside of my lip hard as he walked off. Thinking about useless men, and men who are good for something. But I was wanted elsewhere. Before I saw Matsell, I knew I had to find Mercy, and I knew just where she went when she needed quiet. So I pulled the brim of my hat down and left the dwindling scene as the property owner scurried to clear the pile of pine faggots away from his precious lot. Proving conclusively, in my mind at least, the limits of what precisely that particular man was good for.

  Entering Washington Square from the eastern side, having told the hackney driver to wait and there’d be a fare back to the Tombs for him plus extra, the silence of the place struck me like a shaft of sunlight through a window. Carriages trotted slowly past, to be sure. Parched leaves cracked underfoot. But so many other sounds were absent. People don’t talk much in Washington Square. Either they live in the stately tree-fronted homes surrounding it, or they’re leaving the jewel-toned Dutch Reformed Church, or—ever since it was founded fourteen years ago, anyway—they’re students at New York University, reading as if their lives depended on it. Something about the triangle of the church and the school and the trees makes for quiet in that square, even in the amber-lit midafternoon. And soon enough I caught sight of Mercy, sitting on a bench with her hands in her lap.

  Seeing her when she hasn’t seen me yet is a drunk feeling, but not in any sense of giddiness. I mean in that half-cupshot way a tipsy fellow has of looking at tiny things far too close, all attention netted by the absolutely trivial, gaping at a single straw in a huge haystack with no desire whatever to drag his focus off again. I can talk about the intricacies of ferry travel for hours when I’m soused, remembering the cool, thick feel of river water on my face, and when Mercy doesn’t know I’m looking, I can spend ten minutes on her nearer ear. But I didn’t have time to squander. So I gave myself about five seconds of the single black tendril on the left side of the back of her neck that never, under any circumstances, allows itself to be pinned up with the rest of her hair. It would do in a pinch.

  “Might I join you?”

  She swung her eyes up, and they were packed full of troubles. Mercy wasn’t surprised to see me, though. I was beginning to notice she scarce ever was. Nodding, she returned her attention to the littered leaves and joined her fingers together.

  “There’s nothing helpful to say about what just went on,” I told her. “And I know you’ve seen as bad as I have in this city. Maybe worse. But that was a brave thing to do, for all I’d not have tailored it for you myself.”

  It wasn’t what she’d expected me to say at all. The cleft in her chin dipped toward the ground slightly.

  “I wanted to see that you were well,” I explained. “That’s all. I’m not going to scold you, it would be offensive. And Julius would thank you, if he were here.”

  Then we didn’t say anything. A student passed by us, oblivious to the cruel events just south of him. His hat very baggy and his step very h
asty and his hose very tight. There was someplace urgent he needed to be, and he wasn’t going to make it there on time. It was a gorgeous calamity in scale, I thought. A lovely misfortune. Immediate and irreversible and very soon forgotten. We needed more troubles like that. Ones like burning supper or coming down with a head cold at an awkward time. I desperately wanted to pass through countless small, endurable problems with the girl sitting next to me. I didn’t need much else. After all, had I funds enough to feed her whatever she wanted, and dress her as she pleased, I myself could live on small beer and artfully deflected remarks.

  But I didn’t have a thing to my name save a star badge with a bent point. And I had to go to the Tombs. I hadn’t even the time to wait for her to speak to me.

  “That’s what I’m thinking,” I said at length. “I wonder, before I go, what are you thinking?”

  “Do you mean before you arrived?” she wondered softly. “Or now?”

  “Whichever you like.”

  The smile was vaguely shaky, a porcelain cup with the tiniest hint of a crack. “Do you ever think about London, Mr. Wilde?”

  At the word London, I knew she was missing her mother. The same way her mother missed London itself, I figure it. Thomas Underhill met his future wife on an abolitionist mission to England. Terrible things happened to them there, I think. Enough to drive them away forever. And they must have felt like failures emigrating back to the States. At least Olivia Underhill lived to see Empire-wide British emancipation from this side of the ocean, when I was fifteen and every newspaper was howling it on the front page. New York is a free state, of course, but Christ knows if we’ll ever see American emancipation at all.

  “You mean London specifically, or do I think of … someplace away from here?”

  Mercy chuckled, but without any sound. “I think about London, you see. I think about writing my book in a garret study with a window of stained glass, not in the corner of my room whenever I can spare half an hour. And I think about filling page after page, and how afterward all the things I’ve ever felt will be clear to me. Just the way the feelings of … oh, Don Quixote, perhaps, are clear to me. Imagine being Don Quixote, dreaming dreams so boundless as that, without having a book by Cervantes in front of you to make you clear to yourself. You’d drown in such feelings. They’re bearable only because they are written down. And so I’d like to go to London, as soon as I can. Because at times, this afternoon for example, I’d like to have a better … a better map for how I feel, to know its borders.”

  “That would be a grand thing,” I agreed. “I thought you had twenty chapters finished.”

  “Twenty-two now, though it’s very difficult to write here, without much in the way of privacy. But did you understand what I meant? Are books cartography, Mr. Wilde?”

  “Reading them, or writing them?”

  “Does it matter?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Do you think me a bit mad?”

  “No, I’ve always known you felt that way. I just didn’t know the studying maps was to be in London.”

  Mercy’s eyes closed. I’d never seen her look so before, tired and brave and unstrung, and it annexed another piece of me. Where, I haven’t the faintest idea, because I’d assumed them all conquered.

  “I was speaking to your father,” I said slowly. “About your visiting Catholics.”

  Her eyes flew open again as a tiny gasp gripped her throat.

  “No, no, I didn’t tell him. And I didn’t mean to startle you, but is it right he doesn’t know that you tend the sick? Is it fair?”

  Touching her knuckles to her lips, Mercy shook her head in frustration. “It isn’t fair in the slightest. Not to anyone—to me, to Papa, to the Irish who need help. I can’t see people so … categorically as he does. But if he knew where I went, he would be very unhappy, and with every good reason. He’s quite frightened for me. I’m grateful you didn’t tell him. You won’t say anything?”

  “No. For the record, I think you’ve got the right end of it,” I answered. “I hate to see you in those places, but I can’t fault the Irish for living in tiny hells. And I don’t think God sent them there.”

  Mercy looked at me very hard for a moment, blue eyes glowing oddly, as if trying to read the back of my head. Then she stood up.

  “I must be getting back to the parsonage. That was a brave thing you did too, you know, a wonderful thing. But you’re a curious man, Mr. Wilde.”

  That one floored me. “I’d thought you pretty well used to me by now.”

  “Oh, of course. But the things you fail to do are so absolutely unexpected, you must realize.” She bit her underlip as she thought about it. “Here you haven’t taken me to task. And you haven’t told me to run along home. Nor to stop spending time with news hawkers, or to cease visiting sickrooms,” she added with a flickering smile that looked like a flinch. “You fail to do so very many things.”

  “Is that all of them?” I asked, still a bit stunned.

  “Well, you haven’t yet called me Miss Underhill either, as you’ve suddenly been doing ever since the fire. But you’re about to, perhaps?”

  Washington Square was very big suddenly. It was an ocean of grass and trees without any borders to make it stop, to show a man where he was. One side of Mercy’s wide collar had tugged down, so more of her shoulder was exposed there than the other. But it didn’t need fixing, it needed to stay just as it was, that intoxicating lack of balance she has. The way her hair never stays where she wants it to, bits drifting like kite strings.

  “Be careful getting home,” I said. “I’m for the Tombs, but will see you shortly. I’ve a lightning-maker to deliver to Fang.”

  Mercy waited another moment. But I didn’t add anything. Only the faint birdsong marked the seconds passing. So she nodded politely and walked away south, trailing pale living yellow skirts through the dead yellow leaves.

  People tell me things. They tell me all sorts of things. About their finances, their hopes like torches in the dark, their tiny rages, their sins when the sins feel too much like shells and they want to break out of them. But never in my life had the new facts made me feel I weighed less instead of more, caught me up on a breeze. Maybe I would never understand Mercy, grasp why she spoke so glancingly or guess what she was thinking. Still. I only wished for decades to keep trying.

  I think about London, you see.

  So could I, I found. And so I would do.

  FOURTEEN

  In thus tolerating all sects, we have admitted to equal protection not only those sects whose religious faith and practice support the principle on which the free toleration of all is founded, but also that unique, that solitary sect, the Catholic, which builds and supports its system on the destruction of all toleration. Yes, the Catholic is permitted to work in the light of Protestant toleration, to mature his plans, and to execute his designs to extinguish that light, and destroy the hands that hold it.

  • Samuel F. B. Morse, 1834 •

  When I turned up in Chief Matsell’s office in the Tombs, he was busy writing. I sat down when he motioned me into a chair, looking with interest at the space the strangely impressive man before me had molded to suit himself.

  On the eastern wall hung a map of New York, of course, a giant and lovingly rendered one, with our wards clearly marked. One of those endlessly high Tombs windows loomed behind the desk, with a shocking amount of inert beige light drifting in. The desk itself was noticeably not covered in paperwork. One project at a time, it seemed, however unlikely. Maybe that accounted for his casual but drill-bore focus. Several titles on his high bookshelf I recognized, confirming rumor. He did read radical civics and female reproductive texts, then. The south wall was devoted to politics: flag, Founding Fathers portrait (he’d gone with Washington, his namesake), freewheeling taxidermied eagle, seal of the Democrats. I was so absorbed that when he did speak, he almost startled me out of my chair.

  “The copper stars’ investigation into the nineteen bodies is ov
er, Mr. Wilde.”

  I choked back something toxic, rising to my feet. “What?”

  “The article of this morning has made our position impossible. There were no dead kinchin. There are no dead kinchin. You’re a roundsman of the Sixth, Mr. Wilde, and please be on time henceforth.”

  Disbelief vibrated through my head like a church bell next to my ear. No, I thought, and then, I defended him, I said this wouldn’t happen, so no. And then there was nothing. I was so shocked it was ugly, it must have looked ugly, me standing there gaping—me with my three-quarters of a face and all my efforts and the things he knew nothing about. The news hawkers, the countless people I’d spoken with, Bird living at Mrs. Boehm’s. He went on writing. I felt like a street mongrel who’d been given a piece of fresh meat and then lashed out of the butcher’s shop.

  “Here,” I said, taking off the copper star. I put it on his desk and headed for the door.

  “Wait.”

  “I told New Yorkers we were better than this. You’ve just made me a liar, so—”

  “Mr. Wilde, sit down.”

  His voice was quiet enough, but the force of it bulleted through my brain. Then Matsell looked up at me, lifting one brow. I don’t know why, but I sat. That great dignified piggish man with the facial lines cutting like a railroad through his jowls was about to tell me something, I supposed. Depending on what it was, I might say a few choice words in return.

  “I’ve come to a realization, Mr. Wilde.” George Washington Matsell placed his pen very deliberately next to his sheet of foolscap. “The content of it will surprise you, I think. Do you know what I am writing?”

  “How could I?”

  Again that suggestion that a smile might be forming, and then all of it blown away downwind toward the Battery. “I am writing a lexicon. Do you know what that is?”

  “A dictionary,” I snapped. “I just helped to save a man from being burned at the stake, all because a mad letter was published exploiting twenty dead kinchen who’ll now never be avenged. And you want me to know that you’re writing a dictionary.”