The Gods of Gotham Read online

  “I knew you were a match for her, and now I savvy whyso. I didn’t rightly diary it in my mind, why I figured you for a round fellow from the start. But I recognized you, she brought it back to me. I remember now.”

  Sinking into a chair with the laced cup, I leaned my elbows on my knees in her direction. “But you’d never seen me before.”

  “Not you,” she corrected. “Whenever there was an out-and-out spree, I’d dress as a serving maid, carrying drinks to the rabbits. Mr. V. He gave me an orange that was in his pocket. I’d have cottoned to it faster, if you were the same size.”

  I sighed, and blackly too.

  “He was a good sort?”

  “Top marks. And you’re the spit of him. Brothers, yes? That explains everything.”

  “No, it doesn’t. But it’s a start.”

  We listened for a while to the Germans next door. They seemed to be either fighting or dancing. I gave it fifty-fifty odds, from the steady pounding, uncontrolled shrieks, the occasional banshee laugh. But I hadn’t the first idea which end was up by that time, so I sipped my drink and watched Bird drawing her name—the Irish one—into the white grit that never left the tabletop.

  “If you could explain everything to me,” I asked her softly, “you would, wouldn’t you?”

  Bird nodded gravely. But she didn’t answer. Just traced line after line through her name on the table, being viciously thorough about the project. Until it was a clean streak of wood again and she had never been there at all.

  FIFTEEN

  Besides, it is easy to form a just estimate of popish teachers and instructors, from the practical efforts of education and instruction. Scarcely one in twenty, it might probably be said one in fifty, can read or write.

  • American Protestant in Defence of Civil and Religious Liberty Against Inroads of Papacy, 1843 •

  I awoke with the dawn next morning, an invisible but jagged bread knife sawing ineffectively at the back of my neck. Drunk, then, I thought—drunk the night previous. At last. I’d earned it. There was a fuzzy whiskey carpeting coating my throat.

  And what had I been about?

  Ah, yes, I recalled once downstairs and out of doors in the morning sunlight, emptying the basin I’d dunked my head into over the slats of the front entryway to keep down the dust. Losing at cards. To a kinchin whose skill at calling the turn paid her out four to one no less than six times. I’d broken even with Bird, though, with our wood chips from the back area for money, each calling the other’s outrageous bluffs.

  Stretching, I went back inside.

  Suddenly all I could see by dawn’s soiled light was Silkie Marsh standing before the same table, frozen in my mind’s eye, catching sight of the nightdress. Her head then turning back to mine as if pulled on a chain.

  Fifteen minutes later, I stood fully dressed in Mrs. Boehm’s doorway, after quickly scouring the Herald for news. Matsell seemed to have been pulling strings, for an article therein announced that the letter regarding Irish kinchin-mabs was “fiction of the most hellish, shameful, and risible variety.” Still, I hadn’t any time to waste.

  “Bird,” I called softly.

  Bird blinked at me with watery eyes from the trundle as I heard the bakery doors unlocking below.

  “You ought to come with me,” I told her. “Get out of this ken.”

  She hesitated. Having seen Silkie Marsh the day before, I couldn’t fault the caution.

  “I don’t suppose,” I said, yawning, “you want to know how a lightning-maker builds stage firecrackers.”

  First, though, we needed a proper bribe for Hopstill, due to Hopstill’s being the proper bribe for the newsboys.

  After Bird and I had finished our rolls and hot tea, we headed south and west for about ten minutes on foot until we’d reached Chambers Street, opposite the resolute fungus on the face of New York known as City Hall Park. August had done a regular artisan’s work of killing the trees along its border, and we caught a whiff off the band of rogue chickens setting up a bleak gravelly campsite under their branches. On the north side of Chambers, however, looking picked up and transplanted, stood a neatly trimmed brownstone house banked by two brilliantly velvet-leafed green ash trees.

  Lounging on three of the steps, of course, was a copper star. Dressed like a fireman, as many of us were, with the badge thrust into red flannel—unlit cigar, the entire rabbit uniform done proper. Blond, even fairer than my brother and me. He’d a moustache, though, above his fleshy lip, which was out of the common. His name was Moses Dainty, a Democrat on the level of Paul the Apostle being a Christian. The sort who thought carrying my brother’s laundry an honor.

  “You’re another copper star, then, Wilde?” he exclaimed lazily when he spied me. “Or is that you under there? Val said you’d taken a bad whipe from the July blaze. Hullo, young miss,” he added, spitting politely. “They’re hard at the politicking in there, so stay mouse, will you? For the Party’s sake, little loll?”

  “I’ll keep nish all right,” Bird answered, vowing to stay quiet.

  A Knickerbocker Company truck rumbled up, its horses looking half parboiled. Two men jumped down and threw open the dripping back door, hoisting a huge block of ice with their iron pincers.

  “Just around back, boys, and I’ll pay you when it’s in the kitchen,” Moses called.

  “Quite a bang-up affair, a Party meeting,” I noted.

  “This one calls for a better spread. Ice for the cracked lobster and the rum punch, two roast pigs as well—it’s one of our bulliest meetings all season. Stay for the luncheon, why don’t you. Voters always welcome.”

  Inside, the tall-ceilinged chamber was thoroughly packed with men. Men in tight black coattails and lightning-hued cravats standing on the small platform dais at the back of the room, men in flannel red as their hair leaning their backs against the wall under Washington’s sacred picture, men sitting at tables before a wretchedly done mural of the Declaration of Independence, writ with ghastly foot-high signatures. Finally, a large group of men—and here’s where I turned puzzled, Bird’s brow making a neat vertical track of confusion at the same moment—standing in an orderly row, like a cashier’s queue.

  At first, I couldn’t tack down what was wrong about them. There were maybe forty, all told, in a line. I looked closer. They seemed to be clutching ballots in their fists—but the next election was a considerable way off. Then I caught the sour-pine scent of digested gin and their equally pinelike sway, as if a forest breeze permeated the meetinghouse, and knew they were drunk as lords. Next, they were Irish to a man, black and red alike, but all wore thick beards, which wasn’t an Irish fashion in the smallest.

  Finally, none of them matched their togs. Not one. Every rough in the queue wore the garb of a professional. A man with construction-calloused hands the size of a grizzly’s blinked at the wall wearing a too-short nondenominational parson’s suit. Another, whose complexion of gently peeling lead told me he lived in a particularly vile cellar bunk for three pence a night, wore a satin neck-stock and a dented gold monocle. A pugilist with ears like flowering broccoli who’d succumbed to the gin and was dozing in the corner had an ivory-headed cane with a carved physician’s symbol tucked dreamily under one arm.

  “All right, boys,” Valentine bellowed from the front of the dais, green eyes dancing and his hands on his hips. Sober, as was apparently his habit at Party functions. “If I don’t see some improvement from that last spectacle, all you bloody mounters will be going without the rag-water next training session. I won’t have the Party fleeced at the polls due to our own generous natures. Make it smart, now! Canavan, set to!”

  The lush in the parson’s togs held his scrap of paper in the air like a holy standard, then marched single-minded for a green box resting where my brother was draped against the sturdy wood table. Just as he was about to stuff the sham ballot into the slot, Val caught his arm.

  “Come off it, you’re having a smirk at me,” Val mocked, painfully squeezing the flesh in hi
s fingers. “You’re voting Democrat?”

  “Aye!” squealed the emigrant.

  “I’ll give you a beating such as you’ve never had if you do. I’ll break your bones, break them individual. I’ll fib your quarron so bloody that dogs’ll think it fair breakfast.”

  “Y’ shan’t!” his victim screamed, blindly tearing free and shoving the ballot hard and final into the sacred green box.

  At the end of this performance, a light round of applause fell from the higher-ups along the wall, a gently approving spring rainstorm. And I knew what they were doing by then. It was an elections rehearsal, of course, although I’d made it a specific point never to witness one and there wouldn’t be an election hereabouts for months to come. A precaution against able-bodied male voters in Democratic districts being frightened away from the polls by Whig bruisers. Not that the Democrats wouldn’t have their own slab-jawed roughs in place at Whig-dominated voting locations, naturally. There was nothing considered to be better worth bashing a few heads over than the vote of an eligible rent-paying freeman. Of course, the voters would be marginally less soused off of liquid Democratic bribery come an actual election day. Marginally.

  “Good.” Val approved as the supposed parson reeled back to the chairs. “A flash bluff, that was. Finerty! Put your best leg forward, then!”

  The cellar rat wearing the creamy neck-stock that would have paid for a fortnight’s rent in a decent ken approached. Tentative, though. Bird’s eyes, I saw when I glanced down, were riveted to the floor show. And I admit, it was arresting to watch grown men running their liquor-bribed voters through the proper paces to ensure that the Party came out ahead by a furlong. Arresting, and also more than faintly disturbing.

  “This one won’t make it,” Bird whispered, tugging at my coat sleeve. “He can’t think out a play.”

  I agreed with her wholeheartedly.

  “A dollar says he wins through,” I suggested instead.

  “That’s no better than stealing.” She smiled, eyes sparking. “But I’ll take it. Why’ve they all beards?”

  “I haven’t the slightest.”

  Wiping ginny sweat from his brow, the cellar mole suddenly spread his arms wide in welcome. “My dear old friend! Is that my old schoolfellow, back Kilcolgan way? Thanks be to—”

  The effort to deposit the ballot with his left hand while wringing Val’s fingers with his right went unrewarded when Val twirled his arm like a waltzer, spinning Finerty entirely around and then giving him a hard shove. Finerty was laid flat against the boards. Hoots erupted. My brother seemed, if anything, disappointed. He waved at another favorite crony from his fire company, a hulking, swarthy engine man who had a broken nose and went by the name of Scales. Predictably enough, Scales wore a copper star. I was beginning to think I was already acquainted with half the force of Ward Eight.

  “Scales, drag this thing out back and fill it with coffee until it’s a man again,” my brother ordered. “Go on, get Moses to help if it won’t take its—”

  Val caught sight of me standing perfectly still with my arms crossed, inspecting him from under my hat brim. It’s a job that goes against the natural order, startling Valentine into quiet. But I guess seeing me at a Democratic meeting was enough to do it. There was something more, though, when he fell silent, a twist in the set of his mouth as if he suddenly held a new word on the tip of his tongue. He wanted to tell me something.

  “We’ll adjourn for ten minutes while we teach an Irishman how to handle his spirits,” he boomed in wearied annoyance. “That should never be our job, gentlemen and voters all. That goes against all traditional sense. There’s bread in the next room if you need it before the hot and cold luncheon. Ten minutes, and we’ll stuff this ballot box like a bawd!”

  A crashing wave of applause swelled, of course, as Val stepped down from the dais, lighting the cigar stub he’d found in his waistcoat pocket. He didn’t bother to look at me as he passed, only waved me onward. I fell into step behind him, Bird at my heels like a shadow.

  “That’s a dollar,” she said happily.

  “Wait a moment, I’ll be getting it from him,” I answered, pointing at Val’s back.

  My brother stalked into a side room that clearly served as an office, crammed with posters on every shelf. They were red and yellow and blue and shocking violet, plastered with such purely admirable notions as being freemen against despotism and the sword of change for the people of new york. When Val turned to lean against the desk, one of the sandbags beneath his eyes twitched at the sight of Bird.

  “You’ve another stray cat, Tim,” he said darkly.

  “This is Bird Daly. I told you about her—she’s been staying at my ken.”

  Val’s mouth dropped open, barely retaining the cigar and only out of long practice. He took a closer look, tucking his thumbs in his trousers.

  “Silkie’s miniature downstairs maid,” he muttered. “I’ll be damned.”

  “Real pleasure to see you again, Mr. V,” said Bird. And by God, it sounded true.

  He shook her hand, glaring butcher’s hooks at me. “This is her. The kinchin covered head to toe in fresh ruby from that Liam chit, who led Matsell to— Jesus Christ, Tim, where’s your head?”

  “Have a care about it, will you,” I growled.

  Bird seemed not the least bit put off. “Why have they all beards, Mr. V?”

  Valentine’s face softened abruptly as he glanced down at Bird. “Ah. Well, those fine upstanding voters you saw were all three men, with three changes of togs. You savvy? We’ve barbers on duty across the city, and they need practice before the next election. Those individual coves were actually a man with a beard, a man with a moustache, and a man clean-shaved. All of them loyal Democrats.”

  A bitter look crossed my face, but Bird only laughed, thinking politics a good joke. She was onto something, maybe.

  “Listen to me, little cat.” Val brushed his fingers into his hair distractedly. “Go right out that door, turn left, and head up the stairs. You’re going to find an unlocked room. The room is full of trunks. The trunks are full of togs. The togs are for poor voters and friends of the Party, but never mind that at the moment. The togs are where you come in. If you come back here before you’ve found a dress that suits you, I’ll hang you out the window by your ears until they fall off your head. Yes?”

  Bird ran off with a grin on her lightly freckled face, closing the door behind her.

  “Timothy Wilde, you are out of your mind,” Val snapped. “What has she told you?”

  I explained that Bird’s accounts of the situation were less than reliable, that she didn’t know why any of the children had been killed or been disfigured, and that a man in a black hood seemed to be behind it, according to both her and the news hawkers.

  “Tim, you grasp that the investigation is over, yes?”

  “I did hear that.”

  “Well, then mark after me for once in your life.”

  In Val’s opinion, I should be grateful to be back on roundsman duty. Dead grateful, for it wasn’t near as likely to get a man’s head staved in as going after a kinchin-killing lunatic. Meanwhile, all was well enough with the world, to his mind. There was a guard over the burial site, so nothing more could be dumped there without our collaring the bastard or bastards. As for Bird, I could drop her at a Catholic orphanage that very afternoon and wash my hands of it all. But I had a stubborn cast to my mazzard, he told me. Why fret over quitting such a sordid business?

  “It’s what copper stars are meant to do,” I said coldly.

  “There won’t be any copper stars, you oafish sack of fertilizer!” Val groaned, shaking his head despairingly. “The public finds out, and we don’t solve this—and we won’t—presto! The end of the New York City Police! You want to make a mint, bet against the coppers after word gets out we can’t find a kinchin killer with a taste for bared ribs.”

  “The chief mentioned that. But I’m to keep at it, Matsell’s orders. Sorry to disappoint you.”
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  “Sod Matsell,” he snarled. “You take orders from me.”

  “I’m not in the Eighth Ward.”

  “Not as a policeman, as—”

  “And I’m not gutless either. Like some.”

  That one landed a bit better than most of mine do. Val blinked. His lip snagged so angrily, like a burned curl of bark twisting, I was ready for a fist to come at my eye. Then he blinked again and a sneer slid like a crooked carnival mask over the fury.

  “There’s something else,” I added slowly. “Or you’d not be like this. What happened?”

  Too disgusted for words, Val pulled a folded-up piece of paper from his inner coat pocket and threw it flat on the ground. Feeling vaguely as if I’d broken an unspoken rule, I walked over readily enough and picked it up. And it didn’t take me long peering at it to know exactly why my brother had called the entire meeting to a halt purely in order to show me something. A smallish but cool trickle of guilt ran down my back. And guilt, no matter how scant the quantity, is damnably impossible to ignore.

  The letter read:

  Beware Protestant tyrants fer I am become the skurge of wickedness, vice has been punnished and fornication despised but more must be sakrificed before our knives spill American blood. Whore bodies shall be marked with the sacred Cross once more and the vermin feast upon their guts, they’ve earned such fer the weight of their sin and when the little devils are made quiet the end of your time is coming. God will raise us up and the Irish will danse on your graves. Trust me for I am

  The Hand of the God of Gotham

  “Humbug or not and no matter who’s writing them, these worry you,” I owned apologetically. “I can certainly see why.”

  Val didn’t say anything. I’d caught him in the breadbasket, apparently. He pushed himself up, strolled over to one of the desk drawers, and took a whiskey bottle out. This he took three healthy swigs from before delicately wiping the mouth with his shirt cuff, replacing it, and shutting the drawer with a dismissive bang.