The Gods of Gotham Page 9

  “It did suit me, but it’s probably ruined now. I like your hat,” Bird said shrewdly. “It suits you too.”

  When I perceived that she spoke like an adult because ninety percent of her interactions had been with grown men spending coin on her company, I felt my face darken before I could prevent myself. I made the decision then and there that I wasn’t going to be able to talk with Bird as if she were a kinchin and I a former star policeman of twenty-seven. Being outflanked because I’m not smart enough to drive the conversation is almost exhilarating. But being outflanked because I’ve read the opposition wrong is an outrageous embarrassment.

  “I know you’re frightened,” I said, “because anyone could see that something terrible happened last night. But if you don’t tell us what it was about, we can’t help anyone.”

  “Where do you live, Bird?” Mrs. Boehm put in quietly.

  Bird’s generous lips twitched, reluctant. It occurred to me in a distant way, like looking at a rosebush, that she was beautiful. Then I had to fight my stomach back down from my gullet again, which was getting very tiresome.

  “In a house west of Broadway with my family,” she said simply. “But I’ll never see it again.”

  “Go on,” I said. “We won’t lay into you, so long as you tell us the truth.”

  The somber budlike lips convulsed again, and then words began gushing out of them. Wetly, as if she was crying. Though she wasn’t, not in a visible way.

  “I can’t. I can’t. My father arrived, and he cut her with a shiv. He would have gotten me too, but I ran away, though I’d already dressed for bed.”

  I exchanged a look with Mrs. Boehm, or I tried to, but her faded blue eyes were fastened to Bird.

  “Who did he cut?” I asked gravely.

  “My mother,” Bird whispered. “My mother was cut right across the face. She was carrying me up to bed, and there was blood everywhere. He’s mad when he’s been at the lush, but before he’d only used his hands. A walking cane he carried. Never a knife. My mother dropped me and she told me to run, told me not ever to come back because he blames me for costing extra money for food and togs.”

  She stopped, rubbing at the rim of her cup with a trembling finger. Her eyes fixed onto a tiny chip in the china.

  And I thought about it, pretty thoroughly.

  It wasn’t a pleasant picture, but it was such a possible one. Countless families are eviscerated every day by the price of whiskey. “Mother of God,” a careful Sligo man with steady hands had said to me after calling for a drink in Nick’s one late afternoon, “I’ll write to my cousin and tell him straight he shan’t come here—back home the food may be scarce, but at least the whiskey is dear.” It was all so very possible.

  Then I thought about her hair. I thought about what sort of Irish child might call her mum mother. And never mother as the subject of the sentence, never as a name. My mother dropped me. Not Mum dropped me and she told me to run.

  “I think you should tell us what really happened,” I objected.

  Bird looked shocked, her mouth in an O, and that was when I realized that she was actually a very good liar. Only good liars are surprised at being caught. And you probably had to be a good liar, in any case, if you wanted to live through her kind of work.

  “I can’t,” she replied shakily. “You’d be angry. And Mrs. Boehm says you’re police.”

  “Nonsense,” Mrs. Boehm tutted. “Go on with what really happened. Mr. Wilde here is a good man.”

  “I didn’t mean to do it,” Bird muttered. Broken-sounding, pushing her thumbnail painfully into the table.

  “Do what, dear?”

  “Anything,” she whispered. “But he—I think he was drunk, because he kept pulling at a little flask, asking if I wanted some of it. And I said no, and then he poured it on my pillow and said that would make me used to it, and I thought he was mad. He had a box of lucifers, and he kept lighting them. One by one. He said they were like my hair, and he put one close to my face, and I said to get away from me, he’d already … he’d already paid me. So. But he wouldn’t, and he pushed me onto the wet pillow and came down with the lit match. He was going to set me on fire. I started screaming, and I pushed him back hard as I could. He … he fell on the floor. There was a knife in his belt … but I didn’t know that, I swear to God I didn’t. He cut his side, and when he picked me up, the blood stained my dress. They’d heard me screaming and rushed into the room, and that was when I managed to get away. He isn’t dead, I swear to you, and I didn’t mean it. He was trying to burn me.”

  This time when Bird stopped, Mrs. Boehm sent out a hand and brushed it lightly over her wrist. Because that story, I thought, could be nothing but true. Details so strange that it would never have occurred to a kinchin to invent them.

  Pouring whiskey into a pillow and then setting a flame to a little girl’s hair.

  That had all happened. But it wasn’t why she was here.

  “Bird, I’m sorry to hear that,” I told her. “But if a man was stabbed even by accident, he’d have made a terrible racket. You’d never have gotten out of the house yesterday. We need to know if anyone’s truly been hurt. I have to take you down to the station house.”

  The cup of cordial smashed into the wall, flung by an outraged fist. The next instant, Bird looked horrified, staring at her right hand as if it belonged to someone else. She touched it with her left, blinking rapidly.

  “Please don’t. Let me stay here, let me stay here,” she begged in a weird little chant. “Everything’s all right. You don’t need to worry. No one is hurt.”

  “But you said—”

  “I was lying! Please, I was lying, but … but you don’t think I’d want to talk about where I really live, do you? Let me stay here, I can’t go back. They’d lay into me something terrible. I’ll pay for the cup, I always pay when things break. Please—”

  “Tell us again,” I interrupted, “but the real story.”

  Bird’s lower lip trembled violently, but she pulled her chin up at the same moment.

  “I couldn’t live there anymore,” she said in a flat voice. “I was tired, you see. I was so tired, and they never let me sleep. She says it’s because everyone likes me, but … I couldn’t, so. It’s awful not being able to sleep. Last night I took a few dimes I’d hid downstairs with me. Just down back, where the chickens are. We were to have curry for dinner. I paid the boy who killed the chicken for some blood, said it was for a spell I wanted to try on someone. We put it in a pail in the hen yard and I had my night shift with me and I—I soaked it in the blood. That night when I slipped out, I thought they’d chase me, or maybe I’d be sent to the House of Refuge, but—but if I was bloody, I could say I was running from murderers by the docks. And anyone would believe me. They’d see the blood and let me stay with them.”

  Bird stopped, looking back and forth at Mrs. Boehm and me with eyes like a cornered fawn. Hope scratching at her insides with tender claws, pulling hard at her ribs.

  “But you will let me stay with you. Won’t you?”

  Marching for the Tombs with my badge in hand and a ringing resignation on my lips, I mulled over the best way to go about telling a ten-year-old stargazer that she wouldn’t be residing with us. I’d stayed quiet, before. And Mrs. Boehm had confined her response to shaking her head with a sad clucking sound. But in any case, no matter what our separate sympathies, there wasn’t an extra room.

  However, when I reached the deathly dour building, I found my brother, Valentine, talking earnestly with the imposing figure of George Washington Matsell on the massive front steps. Even Val seemed deferential where Matsell was concerned. His hands weren’t in his pockets, one of his broad thumbs merely tucked into the gap in a waistcoat that seemed to have lily of the valley sprouting all over it. It was telling.

  “Captain Wilde,” I said. “Afternoon, Chief Matsell.”

  “Where in God’s name have you been all this morning?” Matsell demanded when he saw me.

  “Tendin
g to a girl covered in blood. Never mind that, it came to nothing. How are you, sir?”

  “Not well,” he answered.

  Valentine rubbed at his lips distractedly.

  “Why is that?” I asked, clasping my star badge in glad readiness to hurl it at my brother’s eye.

  “Because we’ve found a croaked kinchin on Mercer Street, in my ward,” Val replied. “Sans clothing, all slashed apart, enough to make you hash your breakfast. He was a dimber little fellow, too. Handsome as they make them. We’re trying to keep it snug, but that’s easier said than—where in hell is your copper star, young Jack Dandy?”

  To my own very great surprise, when I pulled it out of my pocket, I didn’t throw it in his face at all. I put it on again.

  SIX

  All the persecutions which the true church has suffered from Pagans, Jews, and all the world beside, are nothing compared with what it has endured from the unrelenting cruelty of this most insatiable murderer of men.

  • Regarding the pope, from the Orange County Protestant Reformation Society, 1843 •

  Ididn’t head back to my rounds that morning. Matsell let me go with Val to the tree-fronted new station house of the Eighth Ward, on the corner of Prince and Wooster streets. Granted, I insisted pretty ferociously. Word of my finding Aidan Rafferty had spread, meanwhile, which might have had plenty more to do with the allowance. I figured the chief to be indulging a shaken-up new recruit, since finding a dead infant is high on the list of bad ways to spend a morning, even in New York. As Valentine, in his infinite tact, reminded me in the swift-trotting hired hack we took northward.

  “I heard about the stifled Irish chit. You were keen to clear out, weren’t you?” he asked, his hands resting on the top of his cane, his legs spread casually as was possible in a small hansom. Val’s youthful face was tight with vexation, the ever-present bags beneath his eyes grown taut. “That would have made a nice time for me, Tim. I promised Matsell you were up to snuff.”

  “I don’t recall having asked you to do anything of the kind.”

  “You’re welcome nevertheless. Don’t be a tongue-pad.”

  My eyes idly passed over my brother’s hand dangling across his weighted walking stick and caught sight of a tiny tremor in his fingertips. Glancing up, I checked his pupils.

  “You’re sober,” I mused. I’d supposed he’d be glazed over with morphine next I saw him, pining for his precious fires. “Why is that, I wonder.”

  “Because I’m a captain, a trusted figure, and we’ve a Democratic committee meeting this afternoon. Why do you want a go at another stiff kinchin, I wonder? Finding out you’ve a taste for undersized grinners?”

  By grinners, of course, he meant skulls. “Don’t be disgusting. Tell me what happened.”

  Valentine explained that a whore by the name of Jenny had been walking her usual mindless circles in search of a patron that dawn when she’d passed by a trash barrel outside an eating house. This keg was apparently a predictably rich source of food, and Jenny had spent the last of her coin on a morning mug of whiskey, so she pulled the top off the barrel thinking to find, as she often did, some crusts of oyster pie or a duck carcass. Perhaps, if she was very lucky, some half-eaten fried veal. What she’d discovered instead had set her screaming her head off, and eventually she found a roundsman who’d spirited the corpse to the station house. And what would have happened to it before we police existed, it suddenly occurred to me with a little flutter of surprise, was anyone’s guess. I like to think a watchman would have looked it over thoroughly, maybe even called in his captain, before sending it to a potter’s field, but who could say?

  “Thank Christ he did jark it off to the station,” Val added as we pulled up to the curb and he flicked two bits up to the driver. “It really won’t fadge, the police only just formed and dead kids thrown out with the oyster shells. Right this way, he’s in the cellar. I’m to meet with a doctor in a few minutes.”

  The street was quiet and dotted with greenery, the building an ordinary brick one, with an official-looking desk at the front and a black-Irish policeman standing behind it wearing a frozen expression that made something slither along the back of my neck. A closed, wounded look. I was actually glad of my brother being there for a moment as we crossed the small room. And then told myself, in his words, not to be such a bloody milch cow.

  Down the back stairs we went, not needing a lantern because the room below was lit. The chamber we emerged in was more a dry cave than a cellar. A sack of apples in the corner for hungry men on night duty, three large oil lamps turning shadows sharp and black as threats. It was cooler by ten degrees below than it was above. I caught a smell like trees and topsoil, a pleasant underground aroma from when I was very young fetching potatoes for our mum. But mixed in with that was another odor—filthy-sweet and raw. Something lay on a table in the middle of the room under an ashy tarp.

  “Go on,” Val challenged. “You wanted to see what a rum job it was. Be my guest, Timmy.”

  If there’s one word on earth that operates on me like a bald dare, it’s the word Timmy. So I walked over and threw back the tarp.

  And the thing is, at first I couldn’t accept it. Val was right, I wasn’t man enough for this, and the same twisting, falling feeling I’d had looking at Aidan Rafferty’s tiny curled fist passed through me. But then, staring down at the body, a slight metallic click slotted in my brain like a window shutting. I needed to be able to ask Bird clearly about this later, ask her to better explain They’ll tear him to pieces. I needed that deep down in me for some reason.

  And in the meantime, something else didn’t make sense.

  “There isn’t much blood, is there? For what’s happened to him.”

  “You’re right,” is all he said. Surprised. Val folded his thick arms and walked over to join me.

  The boy was around twelve years old. Clearly Irish. Fine fair skin and curls the color of rosy sand, his face drawn but his eyes peacefully closed, as if exhausted. He wasn’t just dead, though. And he wasn’t precisely slashed apart, as Val had said. The lad’s torso had been sawed open with something like a hacksaw, in the exact shape of a cross. Bits of muscle dangling, organs staring back at us, ribs jutting out. It was a pair of enormous intersecting cuts. I didn’t know what any of the pulled-apart strings of flesh and the shards of snapped bone were called. But I knew that a cross had been hewn into the poor kinchin’s torso, and that there was a weird cleanliness to the gaping rib cage. Bird’s blood-dyed nightdress flapped before my eyes like a flag from a war.

  “Who is he?”

  “How the deuce should I know?” Val answered irritably, green eyes flashing.

  “Has he been reported missing? Has any child who looks like him?”

  “If you don’t think that’s the first thing we checked, you’re a noddle. Anyway, he’s Irish as they make ’em. You have any notion how hard they’re looked for when they go missing? Might as well tell the parents to keep a tenderer watch over their fleas.”

  “When did this Jenny open the keg, then?”

  “Quarter of seven.”

  “The barrel itself is full of blood, though?”

  “Come to think of it, it isn’t. I did palaver for a spell with the restaurant owner, and the cook, and the oyster boy. There’s two waiters employed, but they’d not arrived yet. We talked down here so as to have a little atmosphere,” he added, rubbing a hand over his knuckles in an unconscious power gesture that was completely wasted on me. “It’s their damn scrap hogshead, they ought to know what’s in it. Who’s in it. Well, they didn’t, and they didn’t know who the kid was, either. I made sure that they didn’t. Never mind how.”

  I was about to tell Val that I hadn’t asked and in fact would prefer not to know how when we both heard tentative footsteps. Our heads swiveled identically. Frustratingly enough.

  “Dr. Palsgrave,” said Valentine as a very small man entered the room. “Glad you came.”

  “Oh, God have mercy,” the other fell
ow cried when he viewed the ghastly table.

  And, as happens shockingly often in New York, in particular to barkeepers, I knew him by sight. Dr. Peter Palsgrave is the last descendant of a prominent old family, the lucky sort who’d held on to their money and the town house on Broadway. He’s known citywide as an expert in children’s health. And that’s what makes him so peculiar—no one specializes in children’s health. A doctor is a doctor, after all, unless he’s a surgeon or an asylum keeper. Dr. Palsgrave has animated eyes of a golden amber color, a pair of neatly trimmed silver side whiskers, and a queerly erect posture from his old-fashioned habit of going corseted under his gleaming white shawl-collared waistcoat. His beaver hat was quite tall that day, his sapphire coat very fitted. In all, a riveting mixture of jumbled-up nerves and expensive polish.

  “Not my cup of tea either, Doctor, though my brother Tim here can’t stop keeking at it.”

  This was, amazingly, not the worst introduction I’d ever received from my sibling.

  Dr. Palsgrave mopped his broad forehead with an expensive piece of hemmed green silk.

  “I apologize, gentlemen, but my heart is forever impaired,” he confessed. He sure enough looked it, for my money. “Rheumatic fever at a tender age, which has led to many compensatory measures on my part. If the Hôpital des Enfants Malades or anything like a children’s facility existed in this country of ours, I might not be so vulnerable to startlement. As it is, my pulse is racing. Now. You are Captain Wilde, I take it?”

  “The genuine article,” my brother affirmed.

  “You’re well aware that I am no coroner. Yes? And yet I received an emergency summons from this … this so-called police force. You’ll tell me why, and at once.”

  “Actually,” Valentine said with a razor-lipped smile and a sweep of his hand over his high tawny hairline, “you’ll now take a good look at that boy’s mazzard and tell the captain of Ward Eight whether you’ve ever tended to him in a charitable way before, or I’ll knap you off to the Tombs for a few days. Don’t try to lion me. And I thank you for your help.”