Seven for a Secret Page 7

  “What in hell, Tim?” Val crossed his boots on his desk and tugged his ivy-patterned waistcoat down. “That’s sound police work I was—”

  “What did I do to deserve you?” I demanded of no one in particular. “I need you. I need you now. And here you are, useless as a dead clam. So I ask again, what in holy hell did I do to deserve you?”

  “Probably nothing,” he owned generously as the cigar end landed in the side of his mouth. “That’s a wet streak of luck, my Tim, and no mistake.”

  Mr. Piest’s clanging crowbar footsteps sounded behind me in the corridor. “Mr. Wilde? A young female just passed us by who seemed—”

  “She’s on her way out,” I hissed. “And we are in serious trouble.”

  “What sort of trouble? Good evening, Captain Wilde.”

  When Valentine clapped eyes on Mr. Piest, his expression shifted from annoyance to confusion. To my dismay, it was the cast his face takes when he’s so marinated in chemicals that he’s seeing dragons and sphinxes roaming the streets, and is reluctant either to mention or to scrutinize them. Why the look should be directed at a shriveled roundsman was beyond my study, however. Particularly when they were already acquainted.

  “What species is it?” Val queried, glancing in my direction.

  My jaw came up, newly furious.

  “My guess would be barnacle,” he added thoughtfully.

  Searching for the choicest words, I was about to tell my brother just what species of morphine-soused prick he was when Piest started laughing.

  “Captain Wilde, it is an enormous honor to see you again. The Valentine Wilde—undisputed hero of the Broad Street fire, defender of the Irish, tireless advocate for the copper stars, and the pride of Ward Eight. Don’t chastise yourself over not recalling me. Since the star police formed, I work from time to time with your very talented brother here. Shake my hand, sir, shake my hand.”

  Valentine’s bemusement slid into a half smile as he pulled his feet off the table and complied. “You’re the old Dutch toast who found the final piece of the kinchin murderer puzzle last August. I remember now. By Jesus, but your face gave me a turn.”

  “Good God. You might be a bit more delicate with a mate of mine,” I exclaimed.

  “This doesn’t need delicacy. It needs an oyster knife, or possibly a nutcracker. But if he’s O.K. by you, then he’s O.K. by me.”

  “Remarkable!” Mr. Piest exulted. “Simply first-class, Captain Wilde. ‘O.K.,’ you say, which I presume to be letters of the alphabet? What can they mean?”

  “It’s just flash,” I snapped. “It’s short for oll korrect.”

  “All correct?” Mr. Piest repeated, looking happy as if he’d stumbled upon a warehouse packed to brimming with fenced goods. “Wouldn’t that be A.C.?”

  “It can spell,” my brother rejoiced in a whisper, equally delighted.

  Mr. Piest made a far lower bow than ever ought to be directed at my disgraceful sibling. Then they stared at each other, grinning in childlike joy.

  “Are you through now?” I wondered in desperation.

  “So, you need me,” Val recalled. “Are you going to tell me about it, Timmy, or are you going to stand there like a lamppost?”

  I passed a moment gnawing on my own tongue. My brother calls me Timmy to infuriate me. He does so because it works. Every single time. Crossing my arms in a physical effort to subdue the smolder in my breast, I reviewed my options. The main point seemed to be whether or not a morphine-drunk Valentine was more valuable than an absent Valentine.

  Unfortunately, the answer was yes. Even a half-crazed Val is better than no Val at all. It’s one of the most intolerable things about my barely tolerable elder brother.

  “Can you walk?” I demanded.

  He scowled. “Of course I can.”

  “Can you think more or less clearly?”

  “Presently, I think you’re a milky little sow’s tit.”

  “Can you fight?”

  “Christ have mercy. Will you listen to the puppy? I can always fight.”

  “Will you come with me?”

  “I’ll mull it over.”

  I seized his arm and dragged him into the hallway. When he could see the otherworldly Mrs. Adams, who sat frozen in grief on the bench against the wall, her almond-shaped grey eyes pinned to the floor and her chaos of curls glittering with half-melted snow, I pointed.

  “Will you come with me to do a favor for her?”

  Valentine scratched lazily at the nape of his neck. Ruminating, no doubt. Or debating whether or not she was a wood nymph. Who in his right mind could say? Then he slapped me on the back so hard that my teeth clacked together.

  “You should have tried that argument first, young Tim,” he advised over his shoulder, winking. “Would have saved yourself ten minutes. Let me get my coat.”

  five

  They are called slave-traders, and their occupation is to kidnap every colored stranger they can lay their hands on.

  —E. S. ABDY, JOURNAL OF A RESIDENCE AND TOUR IN THE UNITED STATES OF NORTH AMERICA, FROM APRIL 1833 TO OCTOBER 1834

  Valentine employed the shrillest whistle I’ve ever heard to summon a roundsman. That copper star received strict orders to guard the woman in the office, and to bring her coffee and hot chestnuts to boot. Our poor hacksman, meanwhile, shivered pathetically as we three star police climbed back into his vehicle. Lurching forward with a grinding, sliding motion that smacked Mr. Piest’s head against the door, we rode in haste toward Corlears Hook. There had been ample room for three to sit abreast in Mrs. Adams’s company. But with Valentine’s sprawling bulk to accommodate—not to mention his weighted walking stick—Mr. Piest wedged his feet together while I in the center performed my gamest impersonation of a tinned sprat.

  “This falls shy of ideal rattle weather,” my brother observed, meaning hackney cab by rattle. “The sleighs will be out by morning. Now tell me what we’re about.”

  “We’re lioning a pair of slave catchers,” I answered.

  “Slave catchers,” Val repeated slowly. My brother is extremely fastidious about food, and he used the same timbre of voice he would have spent on turned fish. “Right. When a human parasite crawls into my fair state and tells me the laws of his backwater swamp are trump and that I’d best flash my ivories and bend a knee about it, I’m itchy to lion him too. But why are we lioning these particular blackbirders, in a snowstorm?”

  “Mrs. Adams—did you notice anything about her?”

  “That she’s colored? I do own eyes, thank you.”

  “These slave catchers figured her family for some ripe valuables. But they operate out of Corlears Hook. And one has a pistol. And so I need you.”

  “We’re actually interfering with a catch?”

  “A shamelessly illegal catch, yes.”

  Valentine blew out a sharp gust of frustration through his teeth. The collar of his blue velvet greatcoat is tastefully lined with short fur, and the ether was compelling him to run his knuckles across it repeatedly, as if he were petting a cat. The gesture took on a worried sharpness.

  “What?” I prompted.

  “Nix.”

  “No, what is it?”

  “I’m just grateful you waited until I was off duty to spring this scrapp on me. That’s several shades more discreet than you generally are, and it was keen of you to take care about it.”

  “I didn’t,” I said, baffled. “I took this hack straight to your door.”

  Valentine winced, and then he laughed heartily, expressions which on him go perennially hand in glove.

  “That sounds more like you,” he admitted, wiping the pained look off his face with one hand as he tried to angle himself meaningfully in my direction. His largest success was at knocking my knees with the pearl-topped cane. “Listen to me, bright young copper star: we aren’t abolitionists.”

  I stared at him, the severe jostling of the cab the only reason I didn’t let my mouth hang open. Mr. Piest glanced at my brother in near-equal s
hock.

  “You’re pro-slavery?” I demanded.

  “Slavery is a putrid blot on the mazzard of this country that’s going to bring all hell and fiery brimstone down to raze the land. Sooner rather than later.”

  “So you’re anti-slavery?”

  “Any freeborn American possessing eyes and ears and a half ounce of brains is anti-slavery. Yes, you despicably rude insect.”

  “Then what—”

  “I said we aren’t abolitionists. We’re Democrats.”

  I sensed Mr. Piest relax against the seat, apparently satisfied. For my part, I was ready to wrestle my brother into the snow.

  “First of all, never speak for me. Ever again,” I suggested. “Second, bugger your buggering Party and all the buggering thugs you call pals. Third, why are we talking about the Party?”

  “Because the copper stars are largely Democrat run and Democrat populated,” Mr. Piest put in. “God knows most Whigs loathe us, and the American Republican Party is all but washed up. Though it hadn’t occurred to me, I do take your meaning, Captain.”

  I didn’t. But I was determined to work it out. And quickly too, for my brother was shooting me optimistic looks. As if I might possibly have been born with the intellect of a catfish, but he held tenuous hopes.

  Then the obvious dawned—bright and painfully clear.

  “The Irish,” I conceded. “Your voting majority. Every Irishman is a Democrat, and the Irish compete with the blacks. Fine. Why not gain some black voters to make up the difference?”

  This time it was my turn to be stared at as if I were some monstrosity from Barnum’s American Museum.

  “Timothy Wilde, I will slap the stupid out of you if it is the last thing I ever do,” Valentine vowed. “Blacks can’t vote.”

  “Of course they can,” I said, frowning.

  “They’re held to a property requirement. Whites can vote, if citizens. Blacks can vote if citizens who also own a minimum of two hundred and fifty dollars in property.”

  My head listed back against the cab interior in considerable disgust. I live on fourteen dollars a week—four dollars more than the roundsmen—because Matsell seems to think the denser of the two Wildes something special. So if I counted up all my earthly goods, the sum of them would maybe total forty-five dollars. Maybe. That’s including my half of the fifty dollars in silver that Piest and I had left hidden in my office.

  And I am richer by far than almost every colored person I have ever met.

  “Can any of them vote?” I wondered bleakly.

  “Maybe two hundred or so of around ten thousand. And they sure as hell is warm don’t vote Democrat. The Liberty Party, now there are some abolitionists.”

  “The whole process is a repulsive circus. I’m far more of an abolitionist than a Democrat.”

  “Well, that’s bully, Tim. But I’m a Democrat,” Valentine snapped, glassy green eyes flashing. “That means the repulsive circus is why you’ve a roof over your head and bread on the table and it has been ever since you were a younger and very slightly smaller half-witted idealist, so forgive me my loyalties to the freak show. It kept you alive. That was the point. God forbid you be grateful, I owed you worlds over. But if you’re an abolitionist, you are mouse on the subject. Can you manage just that much for my sake? We are the fucking quietest abolitionists in the world. Do you savvy?”

  Trying not to flinch—and failing—I nodded. Meanwhile cursing myself for not treading carefully with Val where mingled ether and morphine are concerned. Ether sometimes makes Valentine sentimental.

  And this, it seemed, was my lucky night.

  My brother fancies himself responsible for burning our house down with our parents inside it, when I was ten and he all of sixteen, by means of an accidental fire in our stable that took place near our supply of kerosene. I discovered this fairly salient point last August. But God forbid either of us mentions it. And in front of a third party, no less, who was studying his fingernails and doubtless comprehending next to nothing. I deeply wanted to say It was an accident, and I wanted to say I’m still an abolitionist but I’m also an idiot, and I was even suddenly tempted to say for the first time I realize now how ferociously you fought for me despite the fact you’re a comprehensive bastard. I didn’t, though.

  The things my brother and I don’t say could pave over the Atlantic Ocean.

  “This is the Hook,” Val announced abruptly with a final unconscious brush of his fingers over his collar. “Every man look to his coattails. They come up on you like river rats in this stretch of town.”

  I don’t often visit the Corlears Hook portion of the East River docks anyhow, but the storm had rendered it unrecognizable. We stood where Walnut and Cherry intersect, facing the slips of the waterfront two blocks distant. The sluggish East River swells, the cloud-piercing masts. But the snow had erased us, actors and stage alike. It was everywhere, even coating my eyelashes. It banked against the sailors’ bawdyhouses, gifting them with chaste white doorways and dazzlingly pure caps for their sagging rooftops. Ordinarily, Corlears Hook is barely walkable for the Irish streaming off the docks into the waiting menagerie of rouge-smeared ladybirds. But that night, save for one unfortunate bat stumbling along with a tattered shawl atop her head, all was quiet save for the wind. Peaceful and weirdly lovely. Even the passing mab looked like a Madonna, the rank rag covering her hair shining with a virginal halo of ice.

  Within twelve hours, it would all be sooty as Jean-Baptiste’s jacket elbows. But for now, the city had been wiped ruthlessly clean.

  When we’d crossed Cherry, our companions came into view. The three men stood stamping their boots, eyeing a shop that fronted Walnut Street. Sallow gaslight trickled through its curtains, sullying the clean midair snow.

  “Anything peery, Julius?” I asked.

  “No one in and no one out,” Julius returned. “How d’you do, Captain Wilde.”

  “Julius Carpenter,” Val marveled. Adding for my hearing, “Is he actually here, or is he somewhere else and only looks like he’s here?”

  “He’s here,” I sighed.

  “But whyso?”

  “Vigilance Committee. They know what lay to make, so we’re their men this evening. Does that sound agreeable?”

  Despite the conversation in the hack, I wasn’t much worried over the question. Val has always liked Julius Carpenter, and after the fire, that liking took on the solidity of a debt. But Julius is also the only man alive who’s ever beaten my brother at three consecutive poker games, and ether makes Val capricious.

  I’m not overfond of ether where Val is concerned.

  “Thank Christ,” Valentine said dryly. “And here I thought Tim was in charge. That’s a ponderous weight off my mind.”

  A smile crept onto Julius’s face.

  “I take it the direct route is the safest, George?” Reverend Brown questioned.

  “Personally, I don’t see any point in subterfuge or elaborate scheming.” It was an arsenic-laced tone. George Higgins was a man, I thought, with blood on his mind. “Julius? I’d sooner trust your judgment than mine any day of the week.”

  “We knock on the door, the copper stars introduce themselves, we leave with Jonas and Delia, devil take the hindmost,” Julius proclaimed.

  “Well, if a thing’s to be done, best to be started at it.”

  So saying, Valentine sailed across the intersection, kicking through the snow as if he were on Jamaica Beach in mid-May. I scrambled after him, the others following. When he reached the door, Val pounded thrice with the stick that was ten times more a weapon than an aid to afternoon walks. Looking of a sudden to be pretty fond of our project, passing his tongue over his lips like a wolf smelling rent flesh.

  That worried me. Almost everything about Val worries me.

  “Why don’t I do the talking? Just at the start,” I hastened to add.

  With a flourish that would have been much more effectively sarcastic if he hadn’t been neck deep in narcotics, Val stepped to the side. T
he door opened, a tall but lanky creature in its frame.

  “Who’s this?” he snarled. “What’s it all about?”

  I pushed inside with Piest. When the scoundrel cursed and moved to bar our way, Val’s fist landed bang in the door’s center like a battering ram and the shop entrance became much more definitively open. Julius, Higgins, and Brown filed within, leaving the gatekeeper spluttering like a rasher of bacon hitting the pan.

  “Just who in hellfire do you think you—”

  “Star police,” I answered.

  Valentine stepped inside last of all and shut the door. He then latched it, spreading his stance in his finest dead rabbit style and beginning to toss the head of his cane from palm to palm like a metronome. Most of Val’s intimidation techniques irritate the living spit out of me. But that one is plenty chilling, so I approved.

  “We won’t take up much of your time,” I said, glancing about the room. Stacks of pine crates, presumably full of wine bottles. Planked and sawdusted floor. Soot-spewing lamps mounted to the walls, a desk with two clay cups and a half-full wine bottle on it, a pair of chairs, and not a comfort else. “Long Luke, I take it?”

  “That’s him, all right,” George Higgins answered me. Making it sound as if I’d just called the man an absolutely vile name.

  And maybe I had. Long Luke Coles was taller than everyone save Val, but his neck about matched the circumference of my brother’s wrist. His lanky blond hair was tethered with a plain black ribbon, and he’d an equine face and indifferently arranged teeth. But most unnerving of all were his eyes. They tracked constantly, switching from one to the other of us and even between my left eye and my right. Snakes flick their attention helter-skelter so, and the Committee had been right: a more snakelike individual than Luke Coles I’d not yet met. Something about him wanted squashing in the head with a garden shovel.

  “Luke, now what’s all this fuss over?” The voice was elegant, unhurried, and deeply Southern. “My word, we’ve callers. And in this weather too. What can I do for you?”

  Val’s eyes flashed up from his pearly cane top to the newcomer who’d just emerged from the interior doorway. That tiny glance told me he supposed the greater of the two threats had just arrived. Carefully, I took the fellow’s measure.