The Gods Of Gotham (18 page)

“How do you know where these dozens of kinchin are buried?” I asked. Trying to prevent
dozens
from sounding like a snide
millions
.

“I overheard them once. When the man in the black hood came before,” she answered, her attention continually darting from left to right at the doorways of the cobblers and liquor grocers. “My friend Ella was gone and I glimpsed him arriving that night. Getting out of a carriage. He went to the room he uses, down in the cellar. I didn’t find that for ages, you know, it’s locked better than all the others and I had to pinch the key. When he left, I was at a window. They loaded a bundle into the back of the carriage with him and he said, ‘Ninth Avenue at Thirtieth.’ “

“There’s nothing at Ninth Avenue and Thirtieth but woods and farmland and empty streets.”

“Then why else would they go there?”

Feeling I was about to be made a fool of, a sadly familiar sensation, I led Bird up to the enormous entrance to the Tombs. She’d been so cowed by the thought of going before that I wondered if she’d bolt at the sight of it. But she only stared upward in a sort of stilled awe.

“How’d they make the windows tall as two floors, straight through the wall?” she asked as we stepped into the cooler air within the solid rock.

It was just as well I didn’t have to answer her, for I hadn’t the slightest idea. And someone was shouting at me down the cavernous cathedral-like hallway from the direction of the offices, in a stirring baritone that straightened your posture.

“Wilde, get over here!”

George Washington Matsell had a sheaf of documents under his thick arm and a glare under his steely brows that turned my shoes heavy. We went up to my somber and elephantine Chief of Police. He didn’t look at Bird, not directly. He absorbed her presence with a steely but encompassing gaze trained solely on me. It made him seem a regal monument erected in his own well-deserved honor.

“Your brother, Captain Valentine Wilde,” Matsell began, “is a man who accomplishes things. When the Democratic Party would benefit by an action, he fulfills that action to the letter. When a fire is raging, he removes the living from its clutches, and then he puts that fire out. He’ll bring the same decisiveness to the police, I think. And that is why I was forced this morning to replace a missing roundsman. Was it inconvenient to me? Yes. Do I trust your brother? Yes. So tell me, Mr. Wilde, what the roundsman I replaced has been doing this afternoon to prove his brother right.”

“The deceased child’s name was Liam, and he lacked another,” I answered. “He hailed from a bawdy house owned by one Silkie Marsh, with whom my brother is apparently acquainted. This is another former resident of that den, one Bird Daly, who states that other kinchin have been dispatched in like manner, and claims to know where they were disposed of. I propose to investigate her claim, and for that I need help. And some shovels, I imagine. With your permission, sir.”

The smile that I’d seen hide behind Matsell’s teeth flashed into its full force. He quickly grew grave once more, though, dark thoughts quivering behind his eyes.

“Silkie Marsh, you say,” he repeated quietly.

“I do.”

“Refrain from saying it again on Tombs grounds, if you would. Other kinchin dispatched, you say.”

“Yes, but—”

“If they’re there to be found, it’s us who’ll find them,” he concluded, already striding away.

We decided that traveling by rail northward would have placed us considerably too far east of Ninth Avenue to be practical. And so, an hour later, I found myself in a large hired carriage shared with a subdued Bird Daly, a sober Chief Matsell, and Mr. Piest, whose untamed silver hair flew about his head like so many eager exclamation marks. Matsell apparently trusted him, God only knew why. Three shovels clattered beneath our feet, and whenever Bird’s gaze fell on them by accident, her eyes bounced quickly away again, out the open top of the hack at the ever-dwindling buildings as we left the mighty temples of brick and stone behind us. My own nerves were vibrating like a violin string at the thought that Bird had fabricated a dozen corpses purely for the sake of distracting me. Odd, since I wasn’t meant to care about police work.

“Beg pardon, but have you really the time to spare for this sort of investigating, sir?” I asked the instant it dawned on me that Chief Matsell actually meant to wield a shovel.

“If Silkie Marsh has aught to do with it, yes, not that it’s any of your affair,” he answered placidly, taking up the space of two men on the padded leather seat. “Now, how’d you come to know so much so quickly?”

Skipping Bird’s various theatrics, I found the tale easily reported. Chief Matsell fell into a brown study at the end of it, ignoring us completely, while Mr. Piest beamed at me with what could only be called ardor.

“First-class finding skills, Mr. Wilde.” His ragged sleeves rested neatly in his lap, Dutch boots awkwardly clanging against the
shovels. “I’ve been a watchman all my life, and by day I also worked as a personal finder of lost property. Finding missing things, for a reward at least, is what I’ve always done. But finding a
name
,” he said, tapping a craggy finger to his chin—or rather, where his neck met his face and a chin ought to have been—“that’s hardest of all, sir. I salute you! Indeed yes. The chicken pox. By this hand, tonight I shall drink to your health.”

Bird and I exchanged a look that said clear as print
mad but harmless.
It sent a pretty little golden spark of kinship flaring between the two of us. And then she was staring at the brownstone houses, quite alone again. Biding her time until we reached the edge of the ever-growing metropolis.

So near the churning Hudson that happened at around Twenty-third Street. The grid continues as if branded into the earth, of course, though some roads shift eerily from stone to dirt while others are daily being recklessly paved. Broadway and Fifth Avenue are well populated even so far north and growing ever more so, for example. But Ninth Avenue is still downright pastoral. Had our mission been different, and a knot of worry failed to tighten just above my pelvis as we stepped down with our shovels, it would have been very homelike for me. We’d left behind the roaming street pigs along with the market stalls, and the air beyond the city was richly clear. No wood smoke, no upturned chamber pots, no rotting fish guts. Just the occasional fenced-in farm, corn husks shimmering bright as the numberless glittering rock formations thrusting up through the switchgrass, and the smell of the sugar maples that watched us as we marched to the vague intersection.

Idyllic, under different circumstances.

We stopped at the roughly delineated crossroads. Each of us subtly looking from left to right and back to front. Bird slipped a very small-boned hand into mine and looked up as if to say,
I
only know so much. Not everything. If I knew everything, I wouldn’t be alive.

“Tell me,” George Washington Matsell suggested out of the side of his mouth, “in what sort of light they would generally come here. Dawn, for example? Or by cover of darkness?”

“Dark,” Bird said in a very small voice. But I’d heard that sort of voice before, and it hadn’t been used in the course of truth-telling.

“Then,” he sighed, “if a gravesite exists—and I do hope for your sake, little girl, it exists, or I’ll have you sent out West to live with a farmer who’s lost his wife and needs a decent cook—then it exists at least a little away from Ninth Avenue. That’s much traveled by night. Harlem dwellers use it to ride back from New York.”

“When was the last time you saw the man in the black hood before Liam disappeared?” I asked her.

Bird’s throat seemed to clutch at her spine for a moment. “A month before. I never saw him that time, but … but Lady was gone.”

I didn’t ask her how old Lady had been, God help me, for I knew she hadn’t yet grown to be a lady.

“Then if they’re buried here, the vegetation will be very fresh,” I reasoned.

If it exists,
my mind supplied me.

The grid location my tiny friend had overheard was so specific, we didn’t bother to split up. We walked as far as the Hudson, where Tenth Avenue scrawled its way through the thimbleberries and cattails next to the sluggish slate river, and we walked back as far as where Eighth Avenue shot dusty and broad over stone-marred rills. There the sound of hammering reached our tender ears. Hacksaws barely audible in the stillness, rooftops barely visible over the crests of white walnut.

“There’s nothing here,” Chief Matsell reported. And he was right.

The glance I shot at Bird was neither fair nor sensible. But it essentially requested that a ten-year-old girl not make a jackass of me. She glared back, a look that demanded to know how I could expect her ever to have been there herself.

“Mr. Wilde,” Matsell said when none of us had formed a reply, “my patience is dwindling.”

“But this has all been to the good,” exclaimed Mr. Piest readily, passing a hand across his slack-jawed face. Far too alert for what I’d convinced myself was an ancient man. “We’ve executed the preliminary search. Now,
where
in this terrain would make a safe hidden burial site?”

I hated Piest for an instant, though he didn’t deserve it, when Bird made a coughing sound meant to cover a frightened shudder.

“You’re right,” I said instead. “We’ll think it through.”

“The small forest over there,” Piest decided after a moment. “That great mass of cottonwoods with the apple orchard beyond.”

“Wait,” I offered. “If a man was shrouded in cottonwoods, he couldn’t see another man’s approach. If, on the other hand, he was behind one of the rock formations, he could look just around or just above to have a clear view of traffic.”

“Good, Mr. Wilde. Yes. I see what you mean.”

I walked several paces into the sugary-smelling grass. The rest followed, eyes to the ground. And it wasn’t long before we saw them: very faint signs of wheel tracks. Not where the flowers were absent, but where they were once crushed and hadn’t recovered fully.

“Six feet wide,” I said.

“A carriage or a large cart,” Piest added from my left.

Matsell set off for the nearest mass of earth-piercing schist boulder and we followed. It was a great shimmering stone thousands of years old. We ought to have felt very isolated, but the farther into the woods and away from what passes for civilization you go in Manhattan, the more the island itself seems to be watching you.
You either get used to being under thousands of eyes in New York, or you leave it altogether. But when you’re at the outer reaches of the city, with the sky sprawled out lazy and clear above you, and the birds talking nonsense at each other, and the grasses whispering secrets underfoot … the feeling doesn’t leave you. It’s embedded in your skin by then. Something’s
always
watching here, just as the shining grey stones and black ash trees watched us that afternoon. And it isn’t always easy to assume that the presence is kindly.

Because it isn’t. It can be pretty merciless, actually.

When we reached the back of the stone protrusion—the north side—we met with a horrifying sight. There lay a freshly turned meadow, all alight with wildflowers. Buttercups primarily, and clover intermixed with the tender grass. Innocent and very beautiful, so green and so yellow it hurt your eyes.

“God in heaven,” I muttered.

“Start digging,” said Matsell.

That field was so wide. It was wide, and it was shallow-dug, and nothing on earth could explain its being there. All I could think as I looked at the stretch of virgin growth was
far, far too long, and far too wide.

I’ll skip that part of the story. That part was only facts, and dark ones. No reasons and no meanings. And anyway, despite the heat and the sweat of the work, it took much too short a time. Whatever God was watching us, Protestant or Catholic, I can’t imagine what His impressions were when we discovered at the same instant a thin white bone and a rotting arm, fixed with a crude snap between two shovel thrusts. Whose shovels, I can’t recall exactly. Maybe Matsell and me, maybe Piest and me, but I remember my own instrument hitting not-dirt. I’ll never forget it.

And only two feet down. The earth still soft above, the flesh still soft below, and the worms loving every loamy inch of it. It wasn’t the arm that unsettled me, though. The fingernails were peeling
away, yes, and skin melting greenly into sod. But next to it, the dead fingers curled around the object almost tenderly, was another bone. A part of a foot, considerably further decayed.

That bone told me instantly
many more than one.
And the flesh sent a secretive smell up as if to say,
Find us.

Please find us.

We kept at work
very hard that day, lifting heavy soil from what had once been children. But a single incident stands out in my mind. There are moments when you decide that you respect a man, and other moments when you decide you’re on that man’s side. The moment George Washington Matsell ordered Bird away from the view of her rotting companions marked when I felt something about the badge on my chest, and the man who trusted me to wear it, that I hadn’t before.