Seven for a Secret Page 3

  Then it’s a question of who pitches whom on the hardwood first.

  After some herring and potatoes at the nearest dining hall, I returned to the main house to conduct my own search, including a heart-hammering interlude digging through Mrs. Millington’s bureau while she was out delivering calling cards.

  No painting.

  I went home and drank three glasses of New England rum. That seeming the useful thing to do.

  And thus, when February 14 dawned, atmosphere wildly clear with a silken grey sheet of sky spread high above, I’d the sensation that today held a trip to the barber’s to have a rotten tooth pulled.

  I kicked off my bedsheet. My chambers are above Mrs. Boehm’s Fine Baked Goods, which means that my landlady’s bread ovens bake my floor in the wintertime. Bless the woman, my rooms are like June. They’re also briefly inventoried: a secondhand four-poster under the window, a claw-footed table my brother scavenged from a fire, a chair I found in a ditch, a rug from Mrs. Boehm’s attic. And finally, a chest of drawers I’d gritted my teeth and purchased on the fourth occasion I found local insect life thriving in my neatly folded togs. The room doesn’t look empty, though, maybe because its walls are plastered with charcoal drawings. I sketch scenes when I’m troubled.

  I sketch a great many scenes.

  The tiny “sleeping chamber” hasn’t any windows. So I’ve lined it with shelves, with Mrs. Boehm’s permission. Five books reside there at present. But I’m working on that. I’m accustomed to a much bigger supply.

  A strange object that isn’t precisely a book also lives there: a long manuscript I wrote about what happened last summer, as a handy alternative to screaming my lungs raw about it in a public square.

  Last August, a little girl by the name of Bird Daly collided with my knees. She was brave and terrified and inexplicably covered in blood, and I’d about as much notion of what to do with her as I’d have over a malfunctioning threshing machine or a wounded sparrow. But I was broken myself, after the fire. My world had vanished. And so I would speak with Bird as if she weren’t a kinchin whore, and she would look at me as if I weren’t a freak, and we made sense to each other. She was running for her life from a brothel madam called Silkie Marsh, who has a fair face and golden hair and no trace of a heart that I’ve been able to discern.

  I wrote it all down—the unspeakable mass grave in the woods to which Bird led me, everything. Unlike writing police reports, which I detest, the words emerging from my pen siphoned off the pressure in my skull by small degrees. I’ve no notion what to make of that stack of parchment or why I didn’t burn it upon stabbing the final period into the page. But humans are largely inexplicable and I’m no exception. So there it lies.

  Bird yet flits in and out of my mind like a firefly in the dim, and I’m glad of it. Often enough, I see her in person, and I’m gladder still of that. She’s much more sensible than I am. But at times, thoughts come unbidden of a madam smiling at me. Not with malice either. With comprehensive indifference. As if I were a sum to be calculated or a fish to be gutted for supper. And when I think of Silkie Marsh, I shut the door to the sleeping closet, as if the manuscript about her were possessed of mystical eyes.

  I was feeling just enough out of sorts on the morning of February 14 to pull it closed with a dull thud.

  After dressing, I marched downstairs to find Mrs. Boehm slamming a rolling pin with obvious satisfaction into a ballooning ball of dough. It pillowed in the center, emitting a honeyed yeast smell.

  “Good morning,” she said without looking up.

  Something about my landlady’s failing to spare me a glance feels comforting—as if I’m expected to be somewhere, anywhere, and her lack of surprise means I’m in the right place. Mrs. Boehm’s eyes are rather too big, rather too wide, and the soft blue color of a dress wrung out to dry in the sun for too many Junes, and they’d used to track me everywhere. Keenly too. Now I could parade a brass band through the door and she’d go on sifting flour. Her hair looks grey in low gaslight, but it’s a strawlike blonde, wispy as the tips of pussy willow wands, and I found myself addressing the part in the center of her head.

  “Good morning. What’s that, then?”

  “Hefekranz,” she said happily. “Special order, by Germans next door, for a birthday celebration. Sugar it has, yeast, eggs. Very rich. Into a braid it goes, then in the oven. I like very much making this. Find anyone wicked?”

  Endearingly, my landlady has a taste for sensationalist literature. And thereby for my career.

  I picked up a day-old seeded roll on my way out. “I can’t even find an oil painting.”

  “But you will,” she called, smashing the pale ball again with a childlike smirk on her face.

  Seconds afterward, I realized I’d have paid good money for that confident little smile. Without even having been aware I’d needed it. Meanwhile, I stopped, blinking up at the dawn.

  I’d not the slightest idea where I was going.

  Admittedly, I paced for a few blocks in grim circles, skirting the malarial murk produced by the nearby Five Points, stewing over the futility of ever returning to the Millington residence. But then it came to me: I know someone whose wholehearted passion is finding things. Lost objects are his relics and pawnshop records his hymnals.

  Finding things is what Jakob Piest does.

  And so I strode with a purpose up Elizabeth Street toward Mr. Piest’s beat. Practically whistling in relief as I went, and entirely unaware that Mr. Piest and I were about to meet the most fascinating human being either one of us had ever encountered.

  two

  In disposition the negro is joyous, flexible, and indolent; while the many nations which compose this race present a singular diversity of intellectual character, of which the far extreme is the lowest grade of humanity.

  —DR. SAMUEL GEORGE MORTON, CRANIA AMERICANA, 1839

  I am that rarest of deviants in New York City: one who feels about politics the way most men feel about scraping pig dung off their boots. My antipathy stems from the fact that I spent most of my life thinking my brother, who is an enormous cog in the Democratic engine, one hundred percent despicable. I’d been mistaken—Val is only three-quarters despicable. But when he landed me a job with the copper stars, he could place his highly unpolitical sibling only in Ward Six.

  The appointment required me, as was the case with all star police, to live in Ward Six. Which was a shame, because previously I’d always treated the neighborhood just as everyone else does: avoided it. Now that I’ve a comfortable set of rooms and a landlady who pours me a small beer of an evening without my asking, I can’t be bothered to find new lodgings. Anyhow, I’m mere blocks from the Tombs. But that doesn’t make the scenery any more agreeable.

  As I walked toward Mr. Piest’s beat that morning, I turned onto Bayard to discover a pair of flame-haired Irish girl kinchin trading their one pair of shoes. The littler stood in the gritty frozen road porridge with toes gone pearl-white, offering a supportive shoulder as her sister peeled disintegrating moccasins off her own feet and passed them along.

  Red toes are the first sign of frostbite. White means worse news. Those lasses were the sort Mercy had fought tooth and claw for, risking her health for tiny skeletons with pupils like gun barrels, and I found myself wondering how Manhattan’s kinchin could ever survive without her. With a hat pin stuck in my throat, but nary a spare coin, I passed them by. More Irish, scores of them, trudged in their blue brass-buttoned jackets out of Ward Six in numb search of day labor. Sans gloves, sans overcoats in most cases. Hopeful as pallbearers and shivering in the weightless morning light.

  Carts sagging with bolts of gingham lumbered by when I reached Chatham Street—or Jerusalem, as many call it—and its Dutch Yidisher pawnshops, each with three golden balls painted above the door. A mayor’s office employee carrying a BEWARE OF MOCK AUCTIONS sign nearly slipped on a wheel-crushed rat, its guts still steaming. Before we star police existed, my friend Jakob Piest was a night watchman and
private finder of lost property, so Chief Matsell routed him along Manhattan’s epicenter for fenced goods. Most shops on Chatham are respectable as churches. They sell candles, spices, secondhand rifles, jewelry from tasteful to tawdry. But a few specialize in vanished objects, goods there and gone in an eyeblink.

  And Mr. Piest knows them as intimately as the back of his lobster-claw hand.

  I found him quick enough. Just at the corner where Chatham angles off into Pearl Street, I glimpsed an awkward sideways gait emphasized by enormous Dutch boots. Shrimplike legs came next as my eyes moved upward, then a gaunt torso in a threadbare black coat. Above all floated a chinless face crowned by lively tufts of grey hair and a top hat gone shiny at the edges. The copper star pinned to his lapel had a drip of gravy clinging to it, which wasn’t exactly unusual.

  “Mr. Piest!” I called out. “I need a favor if you’ve time to spare.”

  The roundsman’s face split into a grin. Scuttling around a vendor selling thread, almanacs, and games of jacks from an open box, Mr. Piest wrung me by the hand.

  “At any hour of any day, Mr. Wilde. With relish.”

  “There’s been a job done on Fifth Avenue. An original Jean-Baptiste Jacques Augustin has gone missing, a tiny study of a shepherdess. Might you show me around a shelf or two?”

  His fluffy silver brow quirked. “Of course, yes, by all means. It shall be done to the utmost of my ability, this very instant. What exactly is a shelf, Mr. Wilde?”

  “Sorry, that’s flash,” I lamented, passing my hand over my mouth.

  I use flash patter, the argot of thieves and all other breeds criminal, when solving any crimes in Ward Six. And when speaking with my sole surviving family member, which is how I came to know it at all. It’s as much style as cipher, but daily the slang creeps further into plainspoken English—one of these days, the whole country will be calling pimps jack-gaggers and liars confidence men. Enough rowdies and swells leap on board, and even low cant can turn fashionable. Using flash unconsciously felt pretty disturbing, though. Valentine hasn’t an inkling when he’s speaking it. Next I’d sprout flowers all over my waistcoat and a Bowery-style cigar end from between my teeth.

  “I was dealing with the cutthroat breed of Orange Street counterfeiters all of last week. My proper American evaporated,” I confessed. “Pawnshops. Can you take me round to any pawnshops that might fence paintings?”

  “Why, Mr. Wilde,” the wonderful old madman exclaimed, “I thought you wanted a favor. What do you think my rounds consist of?”

  He set off, and I followed. Aside from the usual manic commerce, most businesses were peddling valentines, of course. Turner & Fisher sported a hideous sign offering original verses by the anemic New York University type in the display window who was churning out PROSE OR VERSE, WITTY, SATIRICAL, LOVING, COMICAL, IRONICAL, OR ENIGMATICAL. I was just thinking I’d quite enough Valentine in my life already, thank you, and also May God strike me dead if I ever pay a badly shaved bean sprout to write Mercy poetry and sign my name to it, when Mr. Piest began pulling me into a series of secondhand establishments smelling of musty cloth and used metal.

  I was instantly fascinated. The pawnshops each boasted floor-to-ceiling shelves presided over by a merchant whose skin resembled parchment that would disintegrate if exposed to sunlight. Tortoiseshell combs jostled against pearl-handled razors and weirdly curved knives from the East. Books were wedged into every crevice. Dusty and molding volumes sat propped against kettles, pots, lamps, clocks—and, in one notable case, stacked at the base of a stuffed grizzly wearing a rather fetching pearl necklace.

  “I heard the most disturbing gossip regarding your rival down the road, Mr. De Groot,” Mr. Piest whispered loudly in one such cave. “It seems that Mr. Duitscher—who we both know owns no scruples and is a blight upon the length of Chatham Street—recently came into possession of a painting. A very small painting, of a shepherdess, by Jean-Baptiste Jacques Augustin. Can you credit that he would attempt to sell an item so recognizable it endangers the entire neighborhood?”

  “Sounds like Duitscher down to the letter,” De Groot agreed. “But I’ve heard nothing of it.”

  “Might I then—purely as a customer, for my dear mother’s birthday fast approaches,” crooned the ancient copper star, “have a glance at the contents of your safe?”

  “Natuurlijk.” De Groot smiled toothily.

  “Ik dank u vriendelijk,” my friend returned.

  And so it went in every establishment. De Groots, Duitschers, Smiths, Emeriks, Kieks, and Johnsons—none had heard rumor of the miniature. In one shop, we did spy a suspicious monogrammed silver tea service. But it turned out to have once belonged to the other sort of stockbroker: the kind who prefers a quick introduction to the river to a slow introduction to being hungry.

  Regarding the painting, we earned not the smallest sliver of a clue.

  At last, Chatham Street behind us, we stood at the edge of that cankerous blot on the face of Manhattan, City Hall Park. I discouraged, Piest frenziedly thoughtful. To our right, City Hall and the Hall of Records presided over a wintry wasteland barren of cheer, leaves, and dignity. By then the sun was high. Urchins and emigrants and addicts trickled out from the naked trees, where last night they’d made beds from stone steps and hearths from dead grass. Just south of us, the fountain that in the blazing summer had presented a dry bowl littered with tadpole corpses now sprayed malicious plumes of ice water in the faces of passersby as far off as Broadway. The molleys who congregate there—men inclined to share tenderer intimacies with other men than simply dinner and a glass or two of rum—ought to find a new gathering place, I thought. The ways of New York fountains are mysterious. Possibly sadistic.

  “Thank you for your help.” I pulled up my greatcoat collar and adjusted my muffler beneath. “Though that tack didn’t go quite as I wished.”

  “No, indeed! Fortunately, there is a saloon just over in William Street that serves corned beef with dandelions. Best to eat and think this through.”

  “I can’t take you away from your beat any longer,” I protested.

  “I’ve a night route, starting at six in the evening,” he called back over his shoulder, hair streaming from his head like the explosion of a silver firecracker. “My shift just ended, at ten. We’ve all the time in the world.”

  • • •

  Dark booths a single step off the ground lined the walls of Calverey’s American Dining Saloon. Alcoves, really, with coarse brown plush draperies. Mildewed and cheap, though the corned beef and wilted winter greens were far better than edible. Two candles shone between us. Mr. Piest had just pushed our cleaned plates aside and twitched the cobwebby curtain halfway round.

  “Why can’t it have been one of the servants?” he asked cannily, shoving a wooden pick into his chaotic mountain range of teeth. Just what artifact he hoped to find in there I knew not. But I wished him well with the project.

  “It can. It’s just … unlikely anyone I spoke with would risk their place. Not impossible, mind. I can be queered same as the next fellow.”

  “No, not quite the same as the next fellow, in my experience.”

  “Anyhow, the painting is gone.” I glanced downward, having appropriated the back of the daily menu and begun to sketch the music room with a lead stub from my pocket. Out of undiluted frustration, probably. Drawing settles my brains. “It isn’t in the servants’ quarters, which means if it was one of them, we’re already hocussed. How reliable are those pawnbrokers?”

  “I’ll own that it’s a perpetual twelve-sided game of chess.” Piest stuck four fingers of each hand within the opposite coat sleeves. “But I’ve a fifteen-year relationship with most of them. And a shared language, no less, with both the Dutch and the Yidisher vendors. My father was a Jew, you know. I fear the painting hasn’t been pawned by the usual channels.”

  Puzzled, I made a few calculations, contrasting what I knew of my friend’s police history with the figure fifteen years.

  “Just
how old are you?” I asked without thinking.

  “Thirty-seven. Why do you ask?”

  I felt my jaw dropping and then shut it so fast I must have looked as if a leg cramp had seized me under the table. Not my best performance. But apparently, police work ages a man as do seafaring and the tanning industry. It seemed at twenty-eight, I’d myriad delights in store. I dug deep for an explanation, but thankfully Piest was riveted by my room sketch.

  “Mr. Wilde, your talents range far and wide,” he exclaimed. “That is very fine. Now, what of the Millingtons?”

  “Mr. Millington went straight to the chief, after all. Seemed disappointed when he saw me. And Mrs. Millington … no. Just no. She’s decorative as her house.”

  “So it was stolen by an invisible being,” Piest chuckled. “A ghost who favors collectibles.”

  I smiled at that bit of foolery. Then stopped, midway through darkening the edges of the fireplace.

  There was a thought. Or the beginnings of one, anyway.

  “Mr. Wilde?”

  Closing my eyes, I passed my fingers over them. It was more of an instinct than an idea, really. But there are plenty of invisible beings in New York. We walk past them every day. They’re silent as our paving stones, no more solid than the stench in the air or the shadows thrown by our lofty stone monuments. Unnoticed and unseen. And one sort of unnoticeable would surely have visited that chamber often. The room’s layout required it by law.

  “The wall wasn’t dirty!” I cried, slamming my hands flat on the tabletop. “Idiot. Of course the servants clean under the artwork, they’d pay with their hides if they didn’t. I am such an idiot.”

  Mr. Piest stared, wide-eyed as a fresh shrimp. Probably wondering if I might be combustible.

  “So the wall in question was … clean?” he attempted.

  “It’s the middle of the month.”

  “Mr. Wilde, are you all right?”