The Gods Of Gotham (13 page)

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.

“Tending 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.

I
didn’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.