The Gods Of Gotham (32 page)

“Have a care about it, will you,” I growled.

Bird seemed not the least bit put off. “Why have they all beards, Mr. V?”

Valentine’s face softened abruptly as he glanced down at Bird. “Ah. Well, those fine upstanding voters you saw were all three men, with three changes of togs. You savvy? We’ve barbers on duty across the city, and they need practice before the next election. Those individual coves were actually a man with a beard, a man with a moustache, and a man clean-shaved. All of them loyal Democrats.”

A bitter look crossed my face, but Bird only laughed, thinking politics a good joke. She was onto something, maybe.

“Listen to me, little cat.” Val brushed his fingers into his hair distractedly. “Go right out that door, turn left, and head up the stairs. You’re going to find an unlocked room. The room is full of trunks. The trunks are full of togs. The togs are for poor voters and friends of the Party, but never mind that at the moment. The togs are where you come in. If you come back here before you’ve found a dress that suits you, I’ll hang you out the window by your ears until they fall off your head. Yes?”

Bird ran off with a grin on her lightly freckled face, closing the door behind her.

“Timothy Wilde, you are out of your mind,” Val snapped. “What has she told you?”

I explained that Bird’s accounts of the situation were less than reliable, that she didn’t know why any of the children had been killed or been disfigured, and that a man in a black hood seemed to be behind it, according to both her and the news hawkers.

“Tim, you grasp that the investigation is over, yes?”

“I did hear that.”

“Well, then mark after me for once in your life.”

In Val’s opinion, I should be grateful to be back on roundsman duty. Dead grateful, for it wasn’t near as likely to get a man’s head staved in as going after a kinchin-killing lunatic. Meanwhile, all was well enough with the world, to his mind. There was a guard over the burial site, so nothing more could be dumped there without our collaring the bastard or bastards. As for Bird, I could drop her at a Catholic orphanage that very afternoon and wash my hands of it all. But I had a stubborn cast to my mazzard, he told me. Why fret over quitting such a sordid business?

“It’s what copper stars are meant to do,” I said coldly.

“There won’t
be
any copper stars, you oafish sack of fertilizer!” Val groaned, shaking his head despairingly. “The public finds out, and we don’t solve this—and we
won’t
—presto! The end of the New York City Police! You want to make a mint, bet against the coppers after word gets out we can’t find a kinchin killer with a taste for bared ribs.”

“The chief mentioned that. But I’m to keep at it, Matsell’s orders. Sorry to disappoint you.”

“Sod Matsell,” he snarled. “You take orders from
me
.”

“I’m not in the Eighth Ward.”

“Not as a policeman, as—”

“And I’m not
gutless
either. Like some.”

That one landed a bit better than most of mine do. Val blinked. His lip snagged so angrily, like a burned curl of bark twisting, I was ready for a fist to come at my eye. Then he blinked again and a sneer slid like a crooked carnival mask over the fury.

“There’s something else,” I added slowly. “Or you’d not be like this. What happened?”

Too disgusted for words, Val pulled a folded-up piece of paper from his inner coat pocket and threw it flat on the ground. Feeling vaguely as if I’d broken an unspoken rule, I walked over readily enough and picked it up. And it didn’t take me long peering at it to know exactly why my brother had called the entire meeting to a halt
purely in order to show me something. A smallish but cool trickle of guilt ran down my back. And guilt, no matter how scant the quantity, is damnably impossible to ignore.

The letter read:

Beware Protestant tyrants fer I am become the skurge of wickedness, vice has been punnished and fornication despised but more must be sakrificed before our knives spill American blood. Whore bodies shall be marked with the sacred Cross once more and the vermin feast upon their guts, they’ve earned such fer the weight of their sin and when the little devils are made quiet the end of your time is coming. God will raise us up and the Irish will danse on your graves. Trust me for I am

The Hand of the God of Gotham

“Humbug or not and no matter who’s writing them, these worry you,” I owned apologetically. “I can certainly see why.”

Val didn’t say anything. I’d caught him in the breadbasket, apparently. He pushed himself up, strolled over to one of the desk drawers, and took a whiskey bottle out. This he took three healthy swigs from before delicately wiping the mouth with his shirt cuff, replacing it, and shutting the drawer with a dismissive bang.

“This implies that more murders are planned,” I realized. “God, Val. Do you credit it? That he’s going back to work? That an emigrant with a broken mind is to blame for these deaths? Is that what’s troubling you?”

“Whoever wrote that is cracked as an egg. Whoever thinks ripping guts out of kinchin is high sport is brainsick as well. The police are allied with the Democrats and the Democrats are allied with the Irish. You figure out what troubles me, Timothy, you’ve eyes in your head.”

“All the more reason for me to solve this, then, and quick as possible. Isn’t it?”

“How do you manage to get up in the morning, lifting that bloody thick skull of yours? Right. Suppose these letters are real. Suppose you collar the twisted sod. Suppose you
do
lay hands on an Irishman who’s been busying himself hushing kids—just how do you think this city would react to
that
bit of gossip?”

Much as it irked me to admit it, my brother was right. I was beginning to suspect that I’d disbelieved the first letter was from an Irish madman not because it wasn’t credible, but because it would be very, very bad news.

“It would be chaos,” I agreed. “This particular letter, though—need we concern ourselves over the newspapers?”

“Where do you think I got it from? We’ve paid off the newspapers, flush enough to hold them for a month or more. Any more letters, they turn them over to us. A clerk at the
Herald
found this somewhere in their mail pile this morning. Bastard must have been so chaffey at seeing his name in print, he fired off another.”

My brother held a hand out. I knew what he was after and hesitated. But it was beginning to seem that burning evidence might be a grand policy. Val flicked a lucifer against the desktop and watched, intent as ever, as the paper wove itself into cinder. I watched him in my turn, planning out a move. Any move better than the ones I’d played so far. But Val, as so often happens, prevented me.

“Continue this investigation,” my brother said in a voice as frozen and clear as the ice block beyond, “and I will be selecting the flowers for your funeral.”

“Is that a threat?” I choked out.

“Think of it that way, if it helps. You know best. Or think of it like a prediction, Timmy. It’s all aces to me.”

“That’s flash, then. I’ll remember. Now, give me the money that
Matsell sent me here after, or I’ll tell him that firedogs don’t care to take orders from the chief of police,
Captain
Wilde.”

“Bully,” he said cheerily. “If you’re keen on getting yourself croaked, may as well go out in style. It’s the new Democratic funds you’re after, the ones yet unmarked? How much?”

“Ten dollars ought to do it. No, eleven. I nearly forgot.”

“You nearly forgot a single coachwheel?”

“The coachwheel is Bird’s, rightfully. She bet that Finerty wouldn’t stuff the box.”

“She’s sharper than you, then.”

I let that pass. Val went to a blank, useless-looking box sitting atop a leaden safe and pulled out three ten-dollar gold pieces of unknown provenance and a dollar coachwheel, thumbing them singly in an arc to me behind his back.

“This is too much,” I argued, catching them.

“Oh, but we’re at high tide, my Tim. Buy your own coffin with the extra and save me the trouble.”

I thought about saying I hated him, but it was probably pretty clear from my face. If he’d been looking at me, that is.

“Silkie Marsh paid me a call. I gave her your compliments.”

Val’s head swiveled back to me in real surprise. His teeth came together tightly for a moment.

“You stole three live valuables from her, and then she came to see you? You’re dying quicker than I thought.”

“How nice for you. Do you mind telling me why a visit from Madam Marsh is such a bad omen?”

“Not at all, young Timothy, I simply recognize the circumstances,” he hissed through a steady pressure around his square jaw. “She’s tried to make me easy too, you know. Oh, yes. I didn’t mention she’d once been keen to hush me? Never told you she nearly managed it, too?”

Bird threw open the door without knocking. She’d found a little satchel, claimed it, and stuffed her old togs inside. My friend now wore an ivory cotton summer dress with a scooped neck and a high falling waist, covered in orange poppies at the seams, sleeves just capping her speckled arms. A much better dress than I’d expected, though probably not a finer one than she was used to for going out. This one was hers, though, and she was saturated with joy over the fact. Fairly dripping with happiness over not wearing a nightdress in the afternoon.

I was so glad over it myself that I almost missed my brother’s reaction. He was grinning boyishly from one side of his face while the other stayed partly eroded, about as pleased as he ever is. It beggared me of language for a second.

“If that isn’t dimber, I’m no judge,” he said to the question in Bird’s eyes.

“About as pretty a dress as I’ve seen,” I agreed.

“Tim, you’ll do as I said,” Val added abruptly, turning to a stack of childishly bright posters and lifting them. “I think I’ve told you what’s like enough to happen otherwise. Farewell. I’ve mounters to train. Why a native ought to be expected to teach Irish to hold their liquor is past all sense. They might as well have set me up with hoops and brained dogs.”

Valentine stormed out, breezes whirling weightless and confused in his path. Bird turned to look up at me. She truly was a different person—not a kinchin-mab, not a hot-corn wench in pilfered nankeen trousers, but simply a little girl, furrowing her brow in a way I was growing used to.

“What’s happened? Mr. V doesn’t really mean that. He likes the Irish.”

She was right. And I would have answered her, too, if I’d known what had just happened. And if Dr. Peter Palsgrave had not at that very moment slammed through the door, corseted and gasping,
mopping his brow with flimsy electric-blue silk, causing us both to dart back defensively.

“I require Timothy Wilde,” he breathed. “I’ve had a letter.”

“How did
you
come to be here?” Bird Daly exclaimed.

Dr. Palsgrave blinked, heart visibly fluttering in his rib cage. He sank faintly into the room’s only chair. “I— How did
you
come to be here?”

I stood there, looking from the one to the other of them. Bird smiling broadly, her hands clasped before her, apparently delighted to see two old acquaintances in a single quarter hour. Dr. Palsgrave tremulous and startled, but seeming no less gratified to have encountered Bird. And I feeling more than a little upside down, watching as each of them cast about for a reasonable explanation of the other’s presence at a Democratic Party rehearsal luncheon.

T
he conversation seemed to have hit a rut, and I didn’t want Bird doing much storytelling, that being a risky venture. So I took the reins myself.

“You know Bird?” I asked Dr. Palsgrave directly. “She’s from—”

“Madam Marsh’s house,” she interrupted with her chin jutting boldly. “The … the downstairs maid.”

Amazing what a change of togs can do for a person. As for Dr. Palsgrave, he blinked his alert amber eyes twice and then huffed out a breath, standing up again. His spine was now straight and his chest swelled out, a man molded into the shape of a bantam rooster with
a shawl-collared waistcoat. He leaned stiffly over to stare down his nose at the openly smiling girl with the dark red hair. A visible fondness came into his eyes and then flickered away again.

“Was it Marsh’s?” he questioned, righting himself. “I suppose you would know better than I.”

“But you recognized her only a moment ago,” I said, puzzling.

Palsgrave waved his hand in the air, pacing queer little circles in the cramped room. “I treated her for something once. I can’t be expected to remember names; I see far too many faces, and they all grow so quickly when they manage to grow at all. It must have been a bad case, whatever it was, for me to know her.”