The Gods Of Gotham (34 page)

Mott Street
near to the Five Points just south of Bayard gives a man the impression an infection is running rampant through the road’s sewers. And in August the fever worsens, paint peeling and wood cracking like skin in a hospital ward, the hot, wet air shivering before your eyes. The pale glassy cast of the windows making the houses look stupefied. The smell of it. Every open casement vomiting chicken guts and trimmed vegetable leaves that are already spoiling, thrown down from kitchen bowls three stories above. I don’t know that Bird had ever walked through such a hellhole, for she stuck close, eyes wide and careful. She passed the time glancing at blacks sitting in doorways, straw hats in their hands and jugs on their knees, wasted with loss of sweat; Irish leaning their elbows out of windows, smoking mindlessly, starved for honest work. The bone-deep ache in that road rises up from the very cobbles, seeping into your own tired feet.

Hopstill resided in an attic at number 24 Mott Street, or so Julius had told me. So when we reached the cancerous wooden structure, I walked right up to the door to make for the stairs. A boot caught my ankle as I stepped over the threshold, and I swiftly looked down. Following the stocking to the grime-saturated skirts, I discovered a woman, everything about her gone grey as dust, peeling potatoes with her fingernails.

“What do you want, then?”

“Edward Hopstill,” I answered the strange gatekeeper. “He’s in the attic, I take it?”

“He’s nary,” she sniffed, letting a shard of potato skin fall to the floor. “Moved to the cellar, didn’t he. A month back.”

Thanking her, I stepped over the bowl, Bird keeping close. Hopstill had lived hand to mouth even before the fire ruined our homes, I knew as much. And yet … a
cellar.
I’d never even been overly fond of the scoundrel, and still my feet dragged, afraid to see anyone I knew personally lowered until they were under the very ground.

The stairs I found didn’t have a door at the top, but I could see one at the bottom, blank and sinister. We tramped down. I knocked. The door opened. Hopstill’s face appeared, its fleshy curtains badly shaved, his hair dank and possibly moldy, his sallow skin going ashy already. The acrid stench of gunpowder, burning lamp oil, and whatever stews underneath New York’s houses met our nostrils.

“What on earth do you want?” Hopstill growled in his annoyed English cadence.

Boom.

The explosion wasn’t a big one. But it was enough for me to throw a protective arm over Bird, for her to start like a cat whose tail had been stepped on, and for Hopstill’s scowl to burrow a bit deeper into his face.

“Perfect. Thank you, Wilde. How am I to test whether a new sort of bombshell is properly colored when I don’t even
see it go off
?”

Tentative, we followed him in. It was another laboratory, but the sooty workplace of a craftsman rather than the bright playground of a scientist. The lamps brooded a sulfur yellow, revealing an unmade bed, a single grated air shaft with flies buzzing around it, two large tables, and a small cookstove. Mortars and pestles, stacks of firecrackers, sparking sticks, and corked bottles of lightning powder were everywhere. The walls were planked and exhaling some sort of foul earthy moisture, forming an ooze where the wood met the packed dirt floor. Either the chamber pot was full, or the rear tenement (I never doubted there was a rear tenement) used a school sink for sewage. It was altogether the most unlivable chamber I’d ever
keeked into. Except for the striking fact that only one person lived in it and not ten.

“It’s because of the fireworks, isn’t it?” I asked.

“What?”

“You have to live alone. Because of the lightning. You have to rent an entire ken, and this is what you can afford.”

“What the devil business is it of yours, what is that young person doing following you, why are you wearing a copper star, and what are you doing in my home?”

I told him as much as he needed to know, which was practically nothing. A thirty-second tale of how I’d come to work on the force. We were in a hurry, and Hopstill benefits from being dealt with abruptly.

The lightning-maker stood hunched angrily over his work. And I knew the man: sick at being caught out in a cellar. Since he figures God sends poverty to the unworthy, I didn’t blame him a bit for being ashamed. He hovered above an iron retort, checking its hot contents, darting back to the mortar and pouring powdered red dye into it, siphoning off gunpowder, generally loathing our presence. And now, of all things, I wanted him to teach
children
how to make lightning. I claimed that, in return, they would work in a vague way as my spies. From his perspective, I was a pretty comprehensive arse.

“If you can convince me to do such a mad thing, I’ll nominate you for governor,” he snapped. “Get the hell out of my workshop, I haven’t the time to grant favors.”

I was about to make him an offer, but Bird squealed in delight all of a sudden. The happy sound tugged at a piece of me, something lightly tethered to the back of my neck.

“This has a little handle,” she said. “I’ve seen fireworks, over the river, but never held one. Is that what it’s for? To hold it while it fires? What’s the color?”

Hopstill’s deep-seated loathing of kinchin seemed to retreat a fraction. “It’s silver.”

“However do you make it silver?”

“Powdered metal. I use the cheapest I can find.”

There was a small silence. One that could have dragged a bit had I wanted to make a point. But I didn’t.

“For teaching the newsboys how to make lightning for their stage effects, I’ll pay you enough to get out of this cellar,” I offered.

“Ridiculous. How much do you suppose that is, then?”

“Twenty dollars.”

His eyes sparked like crackers and then dimmed just as quick. Hiding the smoldering brimstone look of total desperation. I set the two golden neds on his table, twenty dollars in coin.

Hopstill blinked at it ravenously, mouth melting into a lost shape. “I had never really thought to associate with anyone from the old neighborhood again, and now here you’re getting me out of this tar pit. Pardon my skepticism earlier. But I’ve been sorely tried, and no familiar faces to speak of it with.”

“Julius seemed glad enough to have seen a former neighbor himself, and I’m grateful to him for telling me where you’d got to.”

Hopstill looked up from a bag of shining blue dust. “Julius? Oh, yes, the colored fellow from Nick’s. I did see him.”

“Who did you think I meant?”

“Miss Underhill, of course.”

I shuffled bits of my thoughts to and fro, tried out new patterns. None of them sensible. “Why?”

“Well, she’s everywhere, isn’t she?” he muttered. “In the dead of night, when all Christian folk are abed. In any event, I’ll teach these lads to make a sheet of fire fit to terrify the popular theatergoer.”

“I’m grateful.”

Hopstill’s head dropped into his palm in rank exhaustion. “God, and I thought I’d likely enough die here come winter, when I’d need
extra money for fuel,” he said to no one in particular. I wondered when last he’d eaten. There was no food on the shelves such as I could see. “I was planning out a grand finale of all my stock over Battery Park. Better than pawning it for a few more miserable weeks, to watch all those sublime explosions. But I can forget that now. Sometimes things turn out all right after all.”

“Sometimes,” agreed Bird gravely.

When all Christian folk are abed,
I thought, the phrase like an itch in my skull.

“Sometimes,” I said out loud.

Just then, for instance, a great deal was going right. I’d money to spare from the elections fund, and my time was my own, and Hopstill would gain me the aid of the news hawkers.

Of course Mercy went abroad at night; sickness and want abide by no schedule.

What a splendid day.

I gave Hopstill the address of the Orange Street newsboys’ theater, and he gave me his promise to pay them a call that evening.
The trick is to keep pushing,
I thought as Bird and I surfaced into the sunlight once more.
If you push hard enough, it won’t matter that you haven’t the smallest inkling of what you’re
doing.

After leaving Bird
with Mrs. Boehm (who’d assured me that if she so much as glimpsed Silkie Marsh, she would lock every entrance and scream in her native tongue for the Germans next door), I went to the makeshift morgue in the Tombs, hoping to find Palsgrave still poring tirelessly over medical evidence. He wasn’t there. But George Washington Matsell was, standing rotund and dignified in the wide cellar. Viewing what I was now viewing, lined up on hastily built tables. Not saying anything about it.

There wasn’t much to say.

“Dr. Palsgrave tells me that the letter he gave you is a nice stroke of madness,” he commented. “It might make a difference to us.”

“I don’t know how, but I hope it does.”

“Study it, then. Dr. Palsgrave put this report in my hands, said if you needed him to explain any of it to you, to call around at his practice. But it isn’t
medical
reading. More like something from that Poe lunatic.”

I took the papers, eager for the elusive fact that would make it all sane. I stopped, though. Took a breath. Because nineteen corpses, or the remnants of corpses, were laid out in front of me on wood tables. It was such a far sight from the beautiful imagined vision of health Dr. Palsgrave had laid before me earlier that I could scarce bear to look. There were too many of them—God, how very many—and they were much too small. And no one’s body should ever be bared like that—ripped open and displayed for all the world to see. I thought of my own inner organs, heart and spleen and kidneys, invaluable to no one save myself. And I wanted nothing greater than to lower our sole hard evidence of wrongdoing back under the ground, where what had once been tender and vulnerable could rest quiet.

“Surprise me, Wilde,” Chief Matsell said as he left the room. “I’m waiting.”

How scattered they look,
I thought.
A white flap of skin, a clump of red hair, the sheen of exposed bone.

I opened the report. It had been hard to write, I supposed. Once I’d read its contents, I certainly hoped so, anyhow.

“Finish your work and stop this,”
I quoted in a jagged whisper.
“Mend the broken things.
Dear God, whichever of you invisible lot might be listening at the moment, just what in buggering
hell
am I supposed to do now?”