The Fatal Flame (11 page)

“It must have been planted previous.” He coughed, pulling out his worn linen kerchief. “The phosphorus accelerant whereby the blaze ignited so quickly, I mean to say—it seems to have run through the crumbling walls in places. Nowhere anyone would have noticed it day to day, however, or so I was assured when the firemen described to me the condition the building was in prior. Holes in the plaster, floorboards missing, the usual inhumane squalor.”

“Does the technique used help us?”

“According to Messrs. Drake and Todd, any villain who looked up phosphorus in the encyclopedia could have accomplished as much. It isn’t as if there’s a science to these foul deeds. We would do well to question the survivors regarding any recent repair work, suspicious characters entering the building, et cetera. But I fear, though the despicable crime was undoubtedly the work of a deliberate and cold-blooded incendiary, knowing
how
does not directly lead us to
who.
The ignoble coward simply set match to tinder, as it were, and walked away.”

“Surely someone would have noticed as much.”

“If so, it is indeed unfortunate that by now the residents must have scattered to the four winds.” Mr. Piest passed a hand over his brow in thought. “We can expend our energies in the search for them, of course, but you’ve seen as many of these ghastly rookeries as have I—no real names given when dastardly landlords even bother with names, no registries, no locks on the doors, windows broken, casual lodgers and casual intimacies being exchanged at all hours. We’ve no guarantee whatsoever the culprit was observed.”

I rubbed at my eyes, ruminating. About fire and its consequences, mainly. About the fact that New York resembles a kicked anthill. About Alderman Symmes and his vices. About the fact that I’d left Miss Sally Woods well before noon and that if she’d quit her queer greenhouse home minutes afterward, newly infused with righteous brimstone over the fact that Symmes had set a copper star on her tail, supposing she’d already planted the necessary inflammables, nothing would have prevented her from—

“The suspect Symmes named,” Piest mused. “Have you spoken with her?”

“Yes. She has cause to hate the bastard, even admitted to threats. But anyone could have set that fire.”

“Nevertheless.”

“I know. I’ll confront her again, this time with more arrows in my quiver. Whatever we’re digging up here, I warn you, its roots are deeper than we’d supposed.”

A fresh spill of newsboys washed down the stairway. Spying one I wanted, I squeezed Mr. Piest’s shoulder. “You hide Miss Duffy safely away, I’ll have a word with our friends of the local press, and then I’ll speak with Symmes himself at the Knickerbocker Twenty-one Tammany benefit this evening, yes? I strongly suspect he’ll show his face, if only to keep my brother in line. It’s for his own blasted campaign after all.”

“The alderman will certainly attend, as he is part of the program, I take it. But that sounds . . .”

“Deeply problematic, I know,” I confirmed, giving him a light push.

Mr. Piest strode away with the heart of a warrior and the legs of a langoustine and escorted Miss Duffy out. Meanwhile, I timed my return to our table so as to catch one of the newsboys via a firm tug of the earlobe. That made me look in charge, so later he could bounce to his pals about how he’d lioned his way out of a scrape with a copper star. I didn’t think he’d mind a quick patter session, though, not when I’d plentiful buttercakes remaining.

My friend Ninepin landed with a hearty grunt of protest in the seat Miss Duffy had just vacated. But when I swept my hat off and he saw all three-quarters of my mazzard clear, he stuck out an ink-stained hand.

“Well, if it ain’t Mr. Wilde, gentleman fly-cop.”

Ninepin, bless the lad, is a garrulous, deft, cunning newsboy of about fifteen years with sunflower-yellow locks falling into his eyes. The eyes are obscured behind a pair of delicate gold ladies’ reading spectacles that he imagines accentuate the forcefulness of his arguments. On this occasion he was resplendent in checked fitted trousers, a striped waistcoat, a secondhand blue velvet jacket he’d cleverly purchased too long in the arms so as to make the greater use of it, and a cravat I am reasonably certain was previously a purple curtain sash.

“Buttercake?” I offered.

“Cheers. Who’s gruel is this one?”

Miss Duffy had failed to touch her coffee, in fact had seemed not to know what the substance was. “Yours. Should still be hot enough.”

My young companion sipped studiously, smacking his lips together. Ninepin, along with his profound love of boxing, cockfights, and theatrical productions, the last of which he generally stars in himself at the newsboys’ theater company, owns a particular affinity for coffee.

“How’s the newspaper business?” I asked.

“Plump. How’s the prigger-napper lay?”

“Policing took a fresh turn for the unpleasant this morning.”

“Only thing as we can count on certainwise in this life is trouble and then more of it, Mr. Wilde.”

“Too right you are.” I hazarded a philosophical query. “What do you think of the female-rights movement, Ninepin?”

His nose contracted in thought. “Personally or professionally?”

“Both.”

Pulling his spectacles off in a manner I’d call foppish if I didn’t know the boy thought street brawls one of the mellower leisure activities, Ninepin rubbed the spotless glass lenses on the drapery around his neck. This activity continued as he expounded, though he paused periodically to sip his coffee. It was artful pageantry. He might as well have been sitting behind a desk at New York University, wearing hose and a soft cloth professorial cap.

“Well, Mr. Wilde, I can’t say as all my feelings are of the same color on the problem. Chink is scarce. So supposing the molls had their shake at the same grafts—what, we want half the jobs in this stait to dry up when there ain’t enough now? And anyway, who’s left to fry the bacon of a morning, supposing you do end up autumned, with the wife and the three squealing pap laps and all? I can’t picture it, and I’d not court a lady dockworker either. I like ’em soft and I like ’em sweet.”

Doubtless by the advanced age of fifteen, he’d begun his collection of amatory experiences. But I refrained from picturing Ninepin, who now whisked at the spectacles with the tasseled end of his makeshift cravat as if it were a feather duster, courting anyone at all. Fearing that my resulting expression would strain the cordial relations between us.

“But then there’s this wild little rabbit as used to hawk papers with Zeke the Rat’s gang,” he reflected. “Pumpkin, he went by, on account of his hair. And
was
he ever a pumpkin. Could sell stiffs faster than fresh doughnuts, and I once saw him in a mill with Seven-Fingered Sam, and Pumpkin floored him with a rib-bender after eighteen rounds. Then one day Zeke found out the truth. He never leaked how, though I’m betting it was weaselish—you savvy Zeke the Rat is a waste of a good body with a rotten pate tacked on top.”

I nodded. Knowing this for fact.

“But Pumpkin was a lunan. No, I swear, she was every bit of her a girl! You could have kept cozy all January standing next to Zeke, he was that hot about it. Chucked her out, left her to begging outside Barnum’s American Museum. But then Pumpkin took up with Cottonhead Mike’s gang in Ward Three after she bet Mike he couldn’t hold as much whiskey as she could without taking a piss and he ruined a new set of trousers. She still runs with that crew. And here’s what I want you to tell me, Mr. Wilde . . .”

He leaned right up against the tabletop, poking me twice in the chest.
“Why. Not.”

Smiling, I shook my head. “I couldn’t tell you.”

“Thought not. Don’t want to class ourselves with the likes of Zeke the Rat, now, do we?”

“May death come sooner.”

“You’re an optime number-one cove, Mr. Wilde—best of the copper philistines, and that’s gospel. Now, what do you want me for?”

“Did you hear about the fire in Pell Street?”

“Hadn’t finished selling my stiffs till half a bloody hour ago—what with the Hunkers and Barnburners fixed to polt each other in the muns, you’d think they could scratch out a decent headline. Give me the chant.”

I explained to my young mate the lay of the land.

Ninepin whistled through his front teeth. “An incendiary? Say it ain’t so, Mr. Wilde.”

“It’s true. I need to know if you lot hear of anything queer to do with Symmes, his buildings, that fire, who might have started it. And if you discover any reporters are investigating the matter, hike straight for the Tombs and find me, all right?”

The lad tapped his fingers against the table. “There’s a reporter at the
New Republican
as wrote a rum piece on Symmes and his needle molls last year. I sold out of the lot in an hour. Bugger if I know what it said, not being the reading sort myself and all, but they told me the headline was ‘Rights for Females, Sewing Girls a Busted Flush.’”

“Who wrote it?”

“Goes by the moniker of William Wolf. We just call him the Wolf, on account he’s that canny—we’re in gravy every time he prints. That, and we’re pretty sure he’s an Indian.”

I let this intriguing detail go unexamined. “Tell him something’s afoot for me.”

“What’s in it for Ninepin?”

As if floating above the table, I heard myself saying, “A dollar. And I’ll bring Mercy Underhill around for buttercakes if you find anything.”

A small spray of coffee emerged from the newsboy, garnishing the remaining two biscuits. That was fine, as they’d gone cold and thus resembled our daintier paving stones. I don’t suppose I’ve ever flummoxed Ninepin so thorough. The kinchin is a genuine insider. But when you adore Mercy Underhill and she’s suddenly returned from abroad . . . well, I wasn’t in any difficulties imagining how the lad felt. Suggesting the rendezvous had set my heart sparking like a Fourth of July firecracker.

“Bleeding Mary on a donkey, she’s
back
?” Ninepin slouched into a dazed posture. “Miss Underhill.
Here.
In New York City. It’s like the whole island’s back to rights, isn’t it, Mr. Wilde?”

I counted out dimes from my waistcoat pocket. “That’s
precisely
what it’s like. Do we have a deal?”

“What kind of hicksam do you take me for? Of course we have a deal. Funny coincidence, though.”

Lifting my hat, I paused. “What coincidence?”

“Oh, we’ve been jawing over Alderman Symmes all day, me and Matchbox and Fang and Tommy Two-Fist and Dead-Eye, on account of tonight. As many of us as can be there will be, bet your bollocks on that.”

“At the Knickerbocker Twenty-one benefit? Why?”

“Bob ‘Bonecrusher’ Symmes hasn’t fought in the ring these five years, has he, not since he was elected. Bulliest notion he ever hatched, staging a fight for Party lucre. You lot will be raising the wind something spectacular—I’ve got a ripe sum of chink on the match myself. Would have figured you’d have a stake it in too, considering.”

“Considering what?”

“Considering the odds are dead even since Thundering Tom dropped out this morning and they announced his replacement. Been a booker’s nightmare, you can imagine.”

“Can I?” I asked. This time with some asperity.

Ninepin studied me as a man of the world will regard a pitiable hayseed who has missed items of weighty public significance. “Christ Almighty. You might not follow boxing, but Valentine Wilde
is
your older brother, ain’t he?”

They jest want this Californy

So’s to lug new slave-states in

To abuse ye, an’ to scorn ye,

An’ to plunder ye like sin. . . .

Wy, it’s jest ez clear ez figgers,

Clear ez one an’ one makes two,

Chaps thet make black slaves o’ niggers

Want to make wite slaves o’ you.

—JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL

B
EFORE QUITTING
B
UTTERCAKE
J
OE
’
S,
I was informed that Thundering Tom, pugilist and breeder of thoroughbreds, had suffered an accident when the pleasure trap he’d been racing up Third Avenue encountered a truck transporting two hundred live chickens. While Thundering Tom was thrown from his seat and his arm broken in three places, the horses, chickens, and farmer were thankfully unharmed. Valentine had volunteered that morning to take Thundering Tom’s place.

I wanted a strong word with my brother. And to harm him in painful yet nonpermanently damaging fashions.

But assuming Val was readying himself for a boxing match, not to mention a Party function, he could have been in any of a dozen places. So instead of shaking him until his vision blurred enough he could see sense, after finishing my reports at the Tombs, I stopped at the Catholic Orphan Asylum to collect my companion for the evening.

The orphanage is on the corner of Prince and Mott in Ward Fourteen. The Sisters of Charity run the place, which goes more formally by the Roman Catholic Benevolent Society. But some of the priests, like my kindly and astute friend Father Sheehy, teach courses there as well. I sat on a bench outside its sturdy grey walls, awaiting Bird Daly. Twilight leaked slowly over the dwindling clatter of carriage wheels; distant gas jets flared to life as the Bowery lurched awake two blocks to the east.

In the mullioned windows above me, shadows danced like moths flirting with candle glow. Scores of shadows, an energetic blur of vague shapes, hurrying to evening mass and scuffling forward for portions of parsnip soup and soda bread. The building is so crammed with parentless kinchin it practically hums, so Archbishop Hughes wheedled permission two years back to build a mammoth new facility, between Fifty-first and Fifty-second Streets along Fifth Avenue. An amusingly backhanded concession from the Common Council, to my way of thinking. They get the Catholic orphans out of Manhattan—out of earshot, out of sight, and out of mind—and all they’ve lost is a useless patch of schist and brambles. Fifth Avenue isn’t even paved that far north.

Five minutes later Bird skipped out the main entrance, dark red hair flowing and a pair of tiny braids making a circlet around her head, tying a cloak over her shoulders. The orphans’ togs are secondhand, so their attire is at best eccentric. But this was a cloak made for a short woman draped over a tall thirteen-year-old, done in pale lilac with a hooded cowl. It made her seem a spirit from her ancestral home, come to shower leprechaun gold and mischief in equally lush quantities.

“Mr. Wilde!” she called, grinning.

I’d not seen her in two weeks, so I caught her one-armed round the waist and spun her in a circle before offering her my elbow and setting off as if nothing had happened. She laughed, then subsided into the quiet we favor—a quiet like lazy lemon-hued Sunday mornings and balmy August firefly nights. We watched the passersby in Prince Street as we traveled westward, knowing things about them—I because I’d taught myself to pay attention, she because she’d been
forced
to teach herself to pay attention. We spied dandies in factory trousers on the brink of financial ruin hastening to further ruin on the Bowery, respectable clerks with the dragonfly sheen of laudanum on their brows rushing home with their briefcases and secrets.

“How’s school?”

“Better than my room anyhow.” Bird had grown like a dandelion that past winter. Her square face was squarer, grey eyes deeper set and cleverer, mahogany hair reaching her waist, her limbs elongated, and her gait easier than I’d ever seen it before. In short, she was at any second about to be monumentally arresting. It comprehensively terrified me. “It’s like a cranky-hutch in there,” she muttered, using flash for
madhouse.
“There were already six of us. I’m meant to kip with another girl
in my bed
now.”

“Really?”

“It’s all bob, but it’s awfully tiresome. I mean, she hasn’t anywhere else to go or she wouldn’t be there. I don’t grudge her the space, Mr. Wilde. But her feet are
cold.
And she naps my stockings whenever she hasn’t any clean ones. And she thinks Liberia is the answer to the Negro problem. I don’t know which end she’s talking from half the time.”

A smile tugged my lips at the implied obscenity. Bird noticed, of course—she notices everything—and thereby robbed me of an opportunity to implore her not to be coarse. She’s rapped on the knuckles for it at school and thoroughly indulges in flash patter whenever in my company. It seems to kittle her, though, so I can’t object too strenuously. Besides that, I’ve started to notice her talking abolition and female rights and (Christ have mercy) politics. I’d be a turnip not to mark that she tends toward my views a touch. And simultaneously be delighted and horrified over it.

“Duck into the kitchens and borrow some hot pepper powder. A little at the fingertip ends of gloves does wonders.”

“Mr. Wilde!” she exclaimed, gently slapping my arm.

I inclined my head to her ear. “Listen quick, now. It’s flash of Father Sheehy to let you come to the benefit, seeing as you and Val and I are mates, and I’d never miss a chance to see you.”

“But . . . ?” Bird asked, glancing quickly up at me.

It was still
up at me.
For now. I wondered what I would do when I was staring her right in the face and then wrenched myself back on topic. We’d been a mere three blocks from the Knickerbocker 21 at the orphanage, and now I could see it down Mercer Street, its great doors thrown wide like the mouth of a volcanic cave. The engine itself had been polished to a high gleam and moved outside. It looked like a vision of a mechanical future, a weird and glorious contraption. The thing was crawling with tattered kinchin while two of Val’s firedogs looked on, calling friendly gibes and drinking from hip flasks, occasionally swatting an urchin away from a sensitive mechanism.

“There’s nothing to fear, all right? These are all dyed-in-the-wool Party rabbits who know where their bread is buttered. But apparently my brother is boxing with the alderman. And my brother is . . . not on good terms with said alderman.”

Bird examined me worriedly. “You think there’s to be a dustup even beyond the match? I heard Billy tell Liam the odds are dead square since Mr. V threw his hat in the ring, and even if it were weighted toward Bob the Bonecrusher, I’d still—”

“You savvy more than I did this afternoon,” I complained. “How?”

“Billy heard it from the boys who rake the grounds, who heard it from a news hawker, who—”

“Right, bully. What’s our lay to be, then?”

She lifted her face, the brightening glow tracing fine hairs at her temples. “Keep close and keep leery. Any way it ends, if we listen keen enough as we walk about, we can be whiddlers for Mr. V when it’s through.”

“Aces. It’s a plan.”

As we entered the Knickerbocker 21, Bird’s liberally freckle-dotted china complexion flushed pink with pleasure.

“Oh!” she exclaimed, pausing in the door.

They’d done a princely job turning an engine house into a dance hall. They always do, and it always awes me. Silk ribbons in red, white, and blue swooped from the half floor high above our heads, where the firedogs bunk. Democratic posters screamed from every wall not hung with leather helmets and hoses and polished brass nozzles, assuring attendees they supported
GOD’S AVENGING RIGHT HAND FOR THE FREE CITIZENS OF NEW YORK
and
THE TRUE PARTY OF THE PEOPLE.
Every corner of the room save that reserved for a small orchestra was crawling with dead rabbits, Bowery girls, firedogs, Irish, Germans, natives, convicts, news hawkers, leeches, panderers, and stargazers, the stargazers wearing marginally more clothing than was typical. All drinking knock-me-down from giant crystal punch bowls. Every so often a sparkling tumbler would drop. But they’d carpeted the cavernous place in a noxious cacophony of Turkey rugs, which diminished glassware casualties nicely.

“It’s beautiful,” Bird whispered.

“It’s something akin,” I amended.

The center of the room boasted a raised, square, roped-in area—presently employed for dancing, a rainbow array of skirts swirling and spotless black boots gleaming in jig time. As for its later use, I didn’t want to cogitate over that yet.

“Where’s Mrs. Boehm?” Bird wanted to know.

“She was meant to be here, but she sent me a note at the Tombs to say she couldn’t make it.”

“Damn and blast.”

“No swearing.” I willed myself not to smirk. Unsuccessfully. “Flash is fine, but no swearing.”

“Anything else?” she questioned, rolling grey eyes to the gaudily beribboned ceiling.

“Leave my sight for so much as five seconds and I’ll get plenty anxious over it.”

“Don’t worry, I won’t,” she promised, face softening.

“Mr. Wilde!” exclaimed a familiar voice. “Best out-and-outer your kin’s produced yet! Introduce me to the dimber-mort on your arm, if you please?”

Ninepin sauntered up with a pair of half-f punch glasses. He passed one to Bird, bowing nearly to the floor. He’d made the addition of a gold-painted temperance-pledge pin to hold his cravat in place. It was aesthetic if not sincere.

“Oh, for God’s sake,” I sighed.

Bird cast a pleading look toward my mazzard.

“One cup,” I answered. “One only. Do you hear me, Ninepin?”

“Like trumpets, Mr. Wilde.”

“Ninepin, may I introduce Miss Bird Daly.”

She smiled, curtsying. Then she took a sip of the lush and suppressed a cough.

“Might I take your cloak, Miss Daly, and introduce you to a few of my sundry associates?” Ninepin inquired.

I studied Bird for signs of reluctance. Not wanting to fret her if she was disquieted. Ever. Nor smother her if she was keen. Ever. She stared up at me, the prettiest silvery question marks flitting across her irises.

“Have a good time,” I said.

She started off, grinning from ear to dainty ear. I seized Ninepin by the elbow as he turned to follow. Hard enough to mean it.

“Behave like a spotless gentleman or I will tell Zeke the Rat who chalked the drawing of him and the donkey in a romantic interlude on the side of the
Herald
offices.”

“That’s as much as my life’s worth, Mr. Wilde,” the kinchin whispered, aghast.

“Think about it.”

The orchestra crescendoed to a mighty flourish and ended the jig, prompting a savage roar of laughter and curses. It took me only half a minute to discover my brother’s whereabouts during the break, for he’s distressingly large. He’d seated himself next to the pianist on the polished oak bench, facing away from the instrument as the musician idly ran his fingers over the treble clef. Laughing with his tawny head thrown back and his face in its familiar glad grimace. He didn’t seem any too amused, though. It looked like a laugh to stanch a hemorrhaging gap in sound.

“What in the name of Holy Christ were you thinking?” I greeted Val. “Hello, Jim, how are you?”

James Playfair, or Gentle Jim as my brother often calls him, delivered me a fleeting but warm smile. He’s a slim, chiseled, impeccably handsome fellow of London extraction, with arches everywhere a face can produce them, black hair, and deeply blue eyes. Deeper even than Mercy’s, though it shames me to say so, eyes just about as blue as his blood. He wore a subtly cut swallowtail coat, every muted sartorial detail contrasting with Val’s aggressively turned-down shirt collar and ludicrous rose-patterned waistcoat. To my eye—and after arduous practice I can read Jim pretty fairly—he’d something on his lips he was busy not-saying. Of a quarrelsome nature. Jim has every reason to quarrel with Valentine, since they’ve been sleeping together for three years. But I suspected this was a specific complaint, not
You are a profligate miscreant.

“Timothy, what an unparalleled pleasure,” Jim drawled. Then I knew him for peppery. Jim is as arch as he is clever, but he doesn’t often play the visiting earl for my health—I know him to be banished from his homeland for his bedroom habits, so it wouldn’t be fooling anyone. “As to your first question—‘What in the name of Holy Christ was Valentine thinking?’—I have not been able to determine the answer to my personal satisfaction and thus cannot advise you.”

“Ah,” I answered.

“As to the second, I am at the peak of good spirits and
thrilled
to be present for this occasion. A
boxing
match. Next we ought to chain a bear to the back wall and set the mastiffs on it. Oh, wait, that distinctive pleasure can be had a quarter of a mile east of here, so carry on with the pugilism.”

Valentine scowled. “Timothy, he’s been like this all night. You tell him.”

I nearly laughed. It was a close thing. “Tell him what?”