City of Promise (46 page)

Steel-framed buildings remained his unique achievement. His detractors found their straight-up facades entirely too austere to be worth copying. Western Union’s “tallest office building in the world” was ten floors, finished four years earlier downtown on Broadway and Dey Streets, but built entirely of masonry. It rose in tiers like a wedding cake, with similar furbelows and flourishes.

Josh cared nothing for his critics. Let them carp about Spartan exteriors unworthy of a great city. He housed people who without him
would not have a private home. And he made a comfortable profit doing it. He no longer, however, made his own steel. The girders came from Pittsburgh by rail and coastal steamer. Caused a lot of dissension within his crew. “We’re iron men, not janitors, Mr. Turner,” Ebenezer Tickle fumed. “And you gave me your word we’d have our old jobs back at our old pay rate.” Josh pointed out that he’d promised they would make his steel if he made it. Not the same thing.

He might not have prevailed had he not been able to put them back to work on construction and raise them a dime an hour. “That’s forty-five cents an hour for your men, Mr. Tickle. Time and a half for anything over forty hours as before. And your salary up five dollars a week to thirty. Do we have an agreement?”

“It’s six cents an hour less for the others and five dollars a week less for me. Since before the panic.”

“It is,” Josh admitted. “But economic upheavals of that magnitude have consequences.”

The dwarf considered for a moment. “An extra two years rent-free on my lease,” he said finally. “And I have to talk to the others ’fore I can say.”

“An extra year,” Josh said. “Not two. And I’ll wait as long as a week for your decision. No longer.”

It took three days, then their customary ritual of contract.
Done, Mr. Tickle. Done Mr. Turner.
Accompanied by a handshake.

Now he was considering putting up a new building on Fourth Avenue in the Nineties, something that seemed possible because civilization was marching toward 1060, and had in a few instances even moved beyond it. Why not? He could call the building the Park Avenue Flats. There was no reason not to appropriate the name the street bore in Murray Hill. These days there were plantings down the middle of the avenue uptown as well as down. For the same reason, disguising the venting of an underground train tunnel. Better still, he could call his new project the Park Avenue Apartments, the fashionable word of the moment.

But putting up a building of fifty or more flats in a place where probably no one but he imagined any gentleman would want to live . . . Yes, it was risky, but the thought got his blood going in a way that nothing else did. Particularly on a cold gray day that didn’t feel at all like the middle of June. Josh opened the window and leaned out over the street. Below him Seventh Avenue seemed busier, more alive than he remembered it being in some time.

An economic uptick? He thought so, thought he could smell it in the stink of coal dust and hear it in the clattering rumble of the elevated railways.

Boss Tweed had coughed out his lungs and his life in Ludlow Street jail the year before, but his legacy was celebrated in every speck of ash that landed on the heads of pedestrians walking below an el. Building and running what the romantics called trains in the sky—a bit of a stretch for something only forty feet up—not only provided desperate New Yorkers with jobs, the els had at last made it easier for other workers to get to the jobs they already had.

Josh could see the tops of two of the lines from where he stood. The Ninth Avenue went as far as Eighty-First Street, and they were talking about extending it to Harlem in a few years. It was a grubby, workaday conveyance used by laborers employed along the great mercantile corridor that clung to the Hudson River, the mostly Irish dock workers and haulers of freight who manhandled the necessities of life on and off Manhattan Island. If he turned his head to the right, he saw the cheerful green stations and graceful wrought-iron roofs of the Sixth Avenue line. It offered comfortable cars not unlike a Pullman train, and heated, gaslit waiting rooms meant for ladies on their way to the Mile. As well as the very sorts of middling gentlemen who rented his flats.

The el further east on Third Avenue was neither as grimy as the Ninth nor as elegant as the Sixth. It passed through largely residential parts of the city along an avenue lined with four- and five-story tenements, which were barely livable, but a huge improvement on the
barracks-like squalor of the rookeries. Josh couldn’t see the Third Avenue el from his window, but if he turned to the wall behind him it was carefully drawn on the map for which he’d paid a printing company called Galt & Hoy the outrageous sum of twelve dollars and fifty cents.

Exorbitant, but worth it. Three feet wide by seven feet long, the map showed every street and almost every building in the city. Josh had stuck pins with brightly colored heads in his own property. They formed a satisfying and very private rainbow. Yellow was for the five rooming houses he still owned, green signified his house at 1060 Fourth, and the five red pins indicated his apartment buildings in the East Fifties and Sixties. The one in which he was standing also had a red pin. It was an anomaly both because it was on the West Side—he’d picked up three contiguous lots for a song when the original owner went bankrupt—and because it was not actually pictured on the Galt & Hoy map. He’d built it after their cartographer did his survey. Another curiosity was that both the St. Nicholas and the Carolina were obscured by the draftsman’s quixotic notion of showing Lexington Avenue continuing above Forty-Second Street and obliterating them. Josh stuck his red pins in nonetheless. He trusted reality more than the mapmaker’s imagination. Hell, the man had chosen to show the Second Avenue el as completed when it had been started only a few months before, and he’d made a major feature of the Brooklyn Bridge. “And God knows if that will ever be finished.”

“What’s that, sir?” Hamish Fraser sat at a desk on the opposite side of the office, head bent over the accounts, and so quiet Josh had forgotten he was there.

“I was speculating on whether,” Josh reached for his topper and cane, “the Brooklyn Bridge will eventually cross the river the way this map has it.”

The Scot shook his head. “Och, it dinna’ seem likely, Mr. Turner. If a man gets so ill he might die going beneath the thing, what will he suffer from being a hundred and thirty-five feet in the air on top of it? It’s some evil sickness coming out of the river. Has to be.”

June, Mollie thought, was her garden’s moment. At least that’s what she thought now when luscious purple and red roses twined among the lacy white blossoms of the clematis, and a drift of late-blooming tulips followed one of the garden’s brick paths. The tulips shaded pale peach to deep pink, and shimmered with color despite the unseasonably cool and gray afternoon. Mind you, in a few weeks when the lilies and iris and peonies and hydrangeas of high summer were at their best in the perennial border, she would doubtless think that the perfect time in her private paradise.

Private was a relative term. Most days people of every size and sort stood peering through the bars of the iron fence that surrounded the property. They craned their necks to see around the artfully laid-out corners and curves, and inhaled the scents, and made appreciative sounds of pleasure and amazement at this thing of beauty crafted from an ordinary New York City building lot.

Mollie had little option but to tolerate the gawkers and gazers. Mr. McKim had suggested building a high stone wall, but that would create shadows and shade where she might not want it. Besides, she had long since admitted to herself that she rather enjoyed the attention.

She had become adept at looking toward the fence without seeming to do so, but a covert glance revealed no onlookers today. Instead Mollie saw a shabby van. It had a wooden sign that read D
E
A
NGELO
B
ROTHERS
hanging on its side and it was heading north on Fourth Avenue, pulled by two horses of the sort usually dismissed as nags.

She went back to her pruning, but when she looked up she saw that the driver had turned his horses onto the vacant ground next to the garden. Presumably he was taking advantage of the opportunity to turn around and head back downtown . . . no, perhaps that was not his intention. He had reined in beside the small gate she’d had cut so Ollie could conveniently carry plant trimmings over to the empty lot
for burning. “Delivery,” the driver called out. Then he got down on the far side of his rig and busied himself with his horses.

Mollie made her way to the gate. She had no idea who these DeAngelo brothers might be or what they could be delivering, and at closer view the van was not just shabby, it was mud-spattered and dirty and the horses were in need of a good brushing. “Yes, can I help you?”

“You Mrs. Joshua Turner?” The man had moved around to the rear, and he was bending his head over some papers. His trousers, she noted, were torn and patched, he wore no coat, and his shirt was stained with sweat.

“I’m Mrs. Turner, but I’m not expecting a delivery and I’ve never heard of DeAngelo Brothers. What do you have there?”

He continued to riffle through his papers, as if she were one of a series of customers. “Statue,” he said at last, apparently having found the information in his documents.

“What statue?”

“Says here it’s Venus.”

“Well, if that’s what it says, I’ve no doubt it’s true. But I did not order a statue of Venus or any other goddess, and I have no need of one. I’m afraid you’ll have to take it back to wherever it came from.”

He turned to her. She saw that he wore an eyepatch, and that his face matched the rest of him. He was scruffy and unshaven and as much in need of grooming as his horses.

“According to these papers, Mr. Joshua Turner ordered the statue. Paid two hundred for it as well. So you may as well have it.”

“Are you quite sure,” Mollie demanded, “your customer is Mr. Joshua Turner of 1060 Fourth Avenue? And that he has requested a statue of Venus to be delivered to our home?”

“That’s what it says. Statue of Venus for the flower garden what’s on lot number 1062.”

“How extraordinary.”

“You want to come around back and have a look ’fore I take it off?
It’s pretty heavy. Wouldn’t want to unload it only to have you tell me to put it back on.”

Mollie looked around. Ollie had gone downtown to buy some new tack required for the horses. The other members of the household were women, and they were all inside. “Perhaps I can get you some assistance, but—”

“Sure would like you to take a look yourself first,” the man insisted. “See if you want it. I can take it back otherwise.”

“Yes, all right. That’s sensible.” Mollie unlatched the gate and stepped through it. She was now near enough to the man to smell his body odor and a pervasive miasma of alcohol. She tried holding her breath during the few seconds it took him to unlatch the van’s rear door. How extraordinary for Joshua to purchase a statue for the garden. Venus of all things. At such a huge cost and without saying a word about it to her. The only explanation she could think of was that her birthday was next month, but she could not remember the last time her husband had bought her a gift to mark the occasion.

“In here,” the man said, holding open the door.

The van’s interior was in deep shadows, and appeared empty. “I don’t see any—”

There was a sense of movement, a whooshing noise that lasted perhaps a second, then darkness as the cosh made contact with her skull and she crumpled.

“Caisson disease,” Simon said when Joshua reported Hamish’s remark about something evil in the river holding up the building of the Brooklyn Bridge. “There’s a doctor named Andy Smith on the project, and that’s what he calls it. Comes on after the workers have been some time in caissons below the water.”

“Why didn’t it show up on the Brooklyn side?”

“They only had to go down forty-some feet to reach bedrock over in Brooklyn. This side of the river they’re down nearly seventy and they’re still digging through mud. Tell that to your clerk.”

“I shall, but I don’t think it will convince him. Hamish prefers his evil river spirits.”