Seven for a Secret Read online

  I pushed myself to my feet.

  The black-Irish copper star was handing the knife to his crony. Clenching his fingers around the handle, Mulqueen walked toward me. Blood from where I’d bitten my own tongue pulsed weakly into my mouth, a testament to the fragile way mortals are constructed.

  You’re going to die in Five Points of all places, I thought. Vaguely insulted.

  Then I realized that someone was still shouting, “Get him against the wall!”

  And I finally savvied what he might mean by it.

  If I was going to die anyhow, weaponless and half-blinded, it was worth a try. Cowering, I backed away from my fellow copper star. I let my limbs tremble and I let my scraped hands shake. My whole posture turned to a limply drawn plea for clemency. I went about as boneless as a filleted trout as I retreated. That kittled Mulqueen, as I’d thought it would.

  Twenty feet distant.

  “Not so very cocksure now, are ye?” he sang out, advancing.

  Slowly, I drew nearer to the filth-smeared wall of Uncle Ned’s. I couldn’t get Mulqueen against it, not positioned as we were, him bearing down with a knife.

  But I could get him close.

  “You’ve won, all right? For God’s sake let me be.” Wrenching my greatcoat off, I held the wool before me like a shield.

  Ten feet distant.

  Mulqueen howled with laughter. He liked me begging. He liked me in a fight the way he liked his women in bed. Powerless and pleading for clemency. It was revolting.

  “I’ll let you be when your guts are steaming, wi’ my boot ground into them.”

  Two feet distant.

  My back hit the wall. I crouched, flinging my greatcoat over my head like a kinchin afraid of the dark. I was far from a hundred percent certain that the voice demanding I get Mulqueen backed against Uncle Ned’s intended the strategy I now suspected. But supposing I was wrong, I wouldn’t have long to fret over my mistake.

  If this tack fails to work, please don’t allow Mercy or Val to hear I was slit open cowering like a rat.

  A footfall crunched into the snow just in front of me.

  Then a small point of pain seared into my upraised hand, the one holding my coat. A splash sounded. A window slammed shut above my head. Someone started shrieking, a garbled, agonized noise that pierced my head like a lance.

  Flinging myself sideways, I landed hard on the snow. My coat hissed when it hit the wet. The reek of old kitchen grease, oil that had fried fish and pig knuckles and sheep guts and God knows what else besides countless times, had bloomed in the air. I thrust my right hand into soot-colored snow. The tiny oil burn dulled with shocking swiftness.

  Mulqueen didn’t fare so well.

  He was flat on his back when I turned. The screaming had stopped. Bystanders flitted about, darting like so many hornets. A woman was sobbing, her shoulders cradled by a gentleman friend who gazed over her head in rapt disgust. When he pulled her aside, I saw my fellow copper star in broad view. Just as the smell of fried flesh reached my nostrils.

  Then I wasn’t crouched in the dung heap of Five Points anymore. I was downtown, seven months ago. The world was a water-ruined painting, blurred and somehow all the more nightmarish for lack of specifics.

  You were happy. Or something similar. You were accustomed to what your life looked like. And then part of your face was missing, and since then you’ve never once felt anything other than a carnival freak.

  And it hurt when it happened too. It hurt like all hell.

  I lifted my head. The two copper stars Mulqueen ran with were rushing to pack snow about their friend’s head and neck.

  It wouldn’t make a difference. I’d seen the cracked surface, red as a steamed apple and peeling backward from the gums. From the eye sockets. The jut of the Adam’s apple.

  I spat at the ground before my stomach began making its decisions without me. It was planning a bald play for independent living. Staggering to my feet, I craned my neck up at the window where the pot of hot oil had appeared. It was dark. The room was likely empty by now, the pot warming a quantity of soup. Belatedly, with a howl of rage, the pink-faced copper star rushed for the entrance to Uncle Ned’s, meaning to vent his rage against dark-skinned skulls.

  No one minded him. And I was dead certain he’d not find any blacks remaining. Only the closed window marked the silent wrath of that community. Its resourcefulness and its will.

  “You shouldn’t still be here,” the bartender said.

  He spoke from inches away as I gazed numbly upward. I turned, startled.

  “I think you just saved my life. So neither should you.”

  “Right you are. Let’s see about fixing that situation.” The line between his brown eyes had smoothed out.

  My own eyes—or eye, rather, as the left was swollen shut—swept back to where Mulqueen lay in the mire, boots askew, the black-Irish copper star shouting at the firemen for an ambulance. Two of them sprinted away. Mulqueen’s breath had grown shallow, though his fingers yet twitched. The inelegant motions of a ruined body. Boiling oil had coated his head, his neck, his upper chest.

  “It’s only hours, if that, before this place is torched or far worse,” I realized. “A white copper star attacked at a black establishment? There will be mobs if we’re lucky. A riot if not. Either way, the Points will be hell on earth before morning.”

  “That all depends.”

  “Does it?”

  “Yes,” he said, snugging up his collar. “On whether the culprit is arrested. If the killer is locked up, a considerable number of people in these parts will rest easier.”

  No words came to me. A considerable number of people. He was talking about his family, his friends. Hundreds of threads of deep love and light acquaintance spreading like a delicate net through his home, which unfortunately happened to be the Five Points. A net he’d knotted, rewoven. Battled for.

  “And you’ve found the culprit. Haven’t you?” he questioned.

  I just breathed, staring at the man. His grey hair, his lined face now lax and peaceful, his neat wool collar and his dark rum-hued skin. My heartbeat had tightened to a stabbing ache.

  “Please don’t do this. I don’t want to—”

  “I don’t give a tinker’s damn what you want.”

  “But why?” I needed to know. “I mean, who?”

  “That’s fair. My niece Rosie,” he answered, nodding. “She’s yet in the city, thank the Lord. Though in a family way now, and the babe half Irish copper star. I was planning on poison, or maybe a pistol, but when opportunity knocks … and you’re a fine fighter, thankfully. Now, go on with you. I don’t calculate to stand around in the snow telling you your job. Make it loud and make it clear, Mr. Wilde. Make it count.”

  His hand, when I gripped it, was warm, the wrist strong from handling countless liquor bottles, the fingers rough with thousands of healed-over nicks and scrapes.

  Very like mine.

  I seized him by the arm, considerably less cruelly than we made it look, and shoved him against the wall. That had to look heartfelt on my part and humiliating on his. So I took him by the collar and shook. Not hard. Just visibly.

  “You’re under arrest. Suspicion of attempted murder,” I shouted.

  All eyes turned to the pair of us.

  “Is that the best you can do?” he scoffed quietly. Then he spat at my shoes.

  So I forced him to his knees into the snow.

  “Apologize,” I growled.

  “I’d sooner apologize to a pig.”

  I wondered what brand of weak-livered coward it made me, the fact I wanted nothing more than to beg him to stop. Wanted to curl up for good and all in a meadow where roots would grow over me.

  “I’ll have you over a sawhorse longing to die.”

  His laugh echoed down the street. “Burn in hell.”

  Setting the toe of my boot between his shoulders, I kicked him face-first in the mud.

  I pulled off my muffler. Satisfied by then, the bartender s
aid nothing as I knotted the scarf about his wrists. I led him away through the crowd. Or he led me, probably. It wasn’t a long journey—barely a block or two divided us from the prison. But I could scarce see, and he was in the lead, after all.

  Later, when I wrote out the paperwork for his arrest at the Tombs, my hand began to burn again. A drop of oil about the size of a bean had landed on it. Watching my writing spread like a plague across the parchment, penning The suspect has made a full confession, but acted entirely in the defense of Timothy Wilde, copper star badge 107, I welcomed the ache in my skin as a distraction from the ache in my chest.

  It didn’t hurt nearly enough.

  • • •

  When I went home that night, Mrs. Boehm was sitting at the table with a plate of sweet biscuits, sipping a small glass of gin as she paged through a magazine full of ladies’ fashions and lurid scandals. The plain center part in her hair was imperfectly combed, and her skin seemed thinner than usual. I hoped nothing ailed her. She glanced up with a remark upon her lips that shriveled to nothing at the sight of me. I seem to have that effect on people far too often of late.

  Equally wordless, I located the household laudanum bottle and soaked a clean rag with it. Pressing it to my hand, I sat down.

  “I don’t know if I can do this anymore,” I told my landlady.

  Mrs. Boehm subjected me to a close but gentle study. That of a botanist with a bloom, or a girl feeding leaves to a butterfly in a jar. Then she cupped her chin in her palm, her mouth curving down at its edges. The fingers of her other hand reached for my wrist and pressed briefly.

  “Can anyone else, then?” she asked, voice rough.

  “I don’t think so,” I acknowledged.

  “And the this you mean—must this be done?”

  “Yes.”

  “Then you will keep going.” Her wan blue eyes were fixed to my scar. The one on my face, that is. The one that matters. For once I didn’t mind someone staring at it—her gaze is too soft to have any weight.

  “Keeping going is terrible.”

  “It is,” she agreed. “That is why I admire you, Mr. Wilde. It is much easier to stop.”

  My single operative eye slid shut.

  I thought about the fact that Tom Griffen (the bartender’s name, apparently, was Tom Griffen) was unlikely to sleep that night, the first of God knew how many passed in the Tombs before I could free him. If I could manage to release him at all. I thought about being homeless—about the way it feels to fear sleep because your hands have gone numb, the sensation of drowning in darkness—and longed only to find Jonas Adams. Wherever he was. To find him and Delia, and make something warm again, when the world entire seemed to have turned so irrevocably cold.

  After that, I even thought about Mrs. Boehm’s fingers on my wrist. The way they’d felt sanded smooth of prints, as if dough had refined them to a floury blank.

  How long I sat thinking, likely half-concussed by Sean Mulqueen—the late Sean Mulqueen, I’d learned just before quitting the Tombs—is a mystery. But by the time I looked up again, she was gone, and the taper on the table had been allowed to gutter, drowning in its own pool of wax.

  fifteen

  The North, in many respects, does the bidding of the South; they are Slave-hunters for their masters, the Slaveholders.

  —WILLIAM M. MITCHELL, THE UNDERGROUND RAILROAD, 1860

  The following day, February 18, Lucy—whose surname was of paramount import and yet eluded me—was buried in the African cemetery. The Reverend Brown performed her last rites in a morning brittle with spider’s-silk frost. Apart from George Higgins and Julius Carpenter, few attended save for friends from the Abyssinian Church. Julius sang a hymn of the exquisitely sad sort, too ancient to trace, its origins forever obscured by the numberless others who’ve used its chords to cradle them when they are suffering.

  Or so I heard secondhand.

  I was in George Matsell’s office, suffering another sort of torture entirely, seated in a chair. George Matsell stared down at me, arms crossed. Coolly dispassionate and carved from the same grey rock on the same scale as the Tombs he presides over.

  He took Mulqueen’s death and my explanation of why Tom Griffen ought to be set loose very quickly, if not summarily and without further ado, in good stride. My chief’s acceptance of what was doubtless a horrid scandal likely had to do with my face, which now boasted a cobblestone texture on the one side, and a swollen, purpling effect on the other. I made a pretty nice picture. So my attempted murder wasn’t in question.

  Thankfully, he’d plenty of other reasons to be peppery at me.

  “So after I told you to keep your head down, you supposed it was a good idea to investigate Lucy Adams’s death by visiting a saloon famous the world over for lewd dancing and assignations between open amalgamators?” he questioned.

  When he put it that way, brows beetling and consonants harshly clipped, the argument that I am dense took on new weight.

  “You care about amalgamation?” I couldn’t help but wonder exhaustedly.

  “My voters do. Explain yourself.”

  “I was searching for Mulqueen and I found him. The rest just … happened.”

  “And why did you require Mr. Mulqueen?”

  I worried at my bitten tongue, wondering if Val had made any mention to Matsell of a corpse in his sheets. Unlikely, after the trouble I’d gone to over transporting her. And the trouble Valentine had gone to over “identifying” her.

  “We’ve exposed a conspiracy, I think,” I replied with care. “I believe that Mulqueen collared alleged runaways, not taking any trouble over who they were in fact, and turned them over to Varker and Coles. He practically admitted as much to me. Delia Wright and Jonas Adams had been kidnapped by the same individuals, and I thought there might be a connection.”

  Matsell ruminated a bit, and then—At last, thank God, you’re not sacked today, I thought—sat down in his wide desk chair.

  “Are you suggesting that one of my copper stars spent the majority of his brief career at selling coloreds down South?”

  “And made a tidy profit at it. You ought to look through his togs. He’d expensive taste in jewelry for a policeman, that much I can tell you.”

  “And just what aren’t you and your brother telling me?”

  For an instant I thought his eyes twinkled. Then I informed myself sternly that I was going mad. Realizing that our chief had proven himself on multiple occasions to be a friend to both Wildes, however, and knowing my entire investigation to be built on a fraying tightrope, I decided to come clean. In an extremely limited sense.

  “On the day Lucy Adams was murdered, Mulqueen visited my brother’s rooms looking for a disturbance, claiming he’d been given a tip,” I answered slowly. “You should know that Lucy Adams had just spent two nights at Val’s for the sake of caution. I was looking for my brother when Mulqueen arrived. Neither of us found anything there. But it made no sense, sir. He ought to have been in Ward Six, and when I questioned him, he refused to answer me. And now he can’t.”

  “Yes, I can see how terribly inconvenient his death was for you.”

  “I hope you know from looking at me that I’d not choose that specific fate for anyone deliberately. But he was a rapist and a slavemonger for a fact. I’m not weeping over him.”

  Raising his brows in surprise, Matsell decided I’d a valid point and gestured for me to continue.

  “The murder of Lucy Adams and the kidnapping of free blacks are related somehow,” I announced. “But the pieces won’t fit.”

  Matsell rocked back in his chair, frowning. “I need you to settle this before word of it reaches the press. You are right about one thing—any roundsman using his star as carte blanche to turn slave trader isn’t worth the breath I’d waste in firing the wretch. I’ll not tolerate New Yorkers of any color being snatched from the streets. Now, just where are you regarding the Adams murder?”

  Drawing a long breath, I launched into deeper waters. The ones with
undercurrents and riptides of a nastily political, dare I say Democratic, hue.

  “Lucy Adams was Senator Rutherford Gates’s lover. Possibly his wife, under an alias. Sir.”

  George Washington Matsell looked as if he’d swallowed a rancid oyster. I felt about the same and so sympathized with the man. In ten minutes I’d related the details, while my chief stoically absorbed them. Like a bloated spider suspended in his labyrinthine web.

  “In my opinion, it comes down to whether they, in fact, married.”

  “A point of salient interest, yes,” Matsell said faintly.

  “I’m not so thick that I don’t realize this is a nightmare from your perspective.”

  “I …” Matsell grimanced in frustration, turning momentarily aside. “Thank you. Even apart from the way things are fixed in Albany at present, and Senator Gates’s quite key role as regards upcoming legislation, that … that is very bad news.”

  My chief’s voice was thunder-dark and thick with worry. I didn’t blame him. Vices in and of themselves are almost badges of honor amongst the scoundrels of the political machines—you whored down the Bowery like a kitchen maid doing the marketing, you gambled away hundreds in rooms with locked doors and then earned it back in bribes the next morning, you drank enough champagne for your brains to feel they were melting come daybreak and then drove off the tremors with a hot mug of rum. If you were my brother, you hosted firemen’s balls with a chime-voiced beauty on your arm and then spent the night tangled with a slender young man whose shirts smelled of your cigars. The existence of a Mrs. Charles Adams wasn’t a question of vice, though. It was a question of outrage.

  Marriages matter to politicians. They reflect purpose and intent—are badges of respectability. Those wives own sweet smiles and domestic accomplishments, have memorized poetry and pianoforte airs, can quote the Bible while mixing a deadly whiskey punch for the lads. For Democratic Senator Rutherford Gates to have married an African and then lied about it would have been spitting in the eye of every principle of civic decorum we hold dear. And when principles are spit upon in New York, nothing is resolved with harsh words or formal reprimands. The populace makes certain that traitors to the way things are done will be punished with brass knuckles and brickbats, by proxy if not in person.