The Gods Of Gotham (39 page)

“Yes,” she agreed, “but things have obviously changed since that—that—
cruelty
in the church, have they not?”

“Exactly. Which is why I think something’s happened to our man. Maybe he’s nervous, because we’re getting to him. Maybe he’s growing more ill. There’s another letter, one sent to Dr. Palsgrave, that suggests he might be. Maybe he wanted Father Sheehy implicated for some unholy reason. All I know is that this is beyond what we’ve seen before, and I don’t believe that the other murders were done for politics no matter what’s being written to the
Herald
. This was cruel of a
purpose
. The whitewashed crosses drawn all around the child, the staging. It was cruel to draw attention.”

Mercy’s jaw was working again. “I assume the cathedral was locked. How did he get in?”

“I don’t know yet. But I’ll learn it, on my honor.”

She stood up, gracefully finishing the whiskey. “I pray you do, Mr. Wilde. And now, I left the house very abruptly. I must go.”

I’d not have expected anything more, knowing her as I did. But
she stopped with her hand on the knob, casting me an angled eyebrow.

“Promise me you’ll be careful?”

“I promise,” I answered.

Mercy Underhill left for home.

I grinned stupidly at my whiskey for a few moments. Thinking over my job, which was harrowing. My task, which was nigh impossible. My face, which was mangled. My savings, which no longer existed.

Draining the glass, I imbibed a silent toast to each and every one of those misfortunes before locking Father Sheehy’s door behind me.

When I checked back
in at the cathedral proper, much of the blood was cleaned away, Chief Matsell and Dr. Palsgrave were gone, and Mr. Piest was dropping the evidence we’d found into a sack. A few bleary-eyed clerics stood speaking in whispers, wielding mops with religious zeal. Father Sheehy had vanished.

“At the Tombs,” Mr. Piest explained. “He was taken in for questioning.”

“That’s pure flam,” I snapped, forgetting myself. “Don’t tell me he was arrested?”

“No, but on the evidence—think of how Chief Matsell sees it. If we’re right about Sheehy, he’ll be free in two hours. But if we’re wrong, and it comes out we were wrong and could have questioned him, it’s the end of the copper stars.”

I nodded, a brushfire headache growing behind my right eye. The eye hadn’t been hurt in the tragedy downtown, of course, but now I suspect I tense it when vexed. And I was about as vexed as
was possible. Having already lost my temper once, I regained it so as to lose it again.

“Dr. Palsgrave went with them?”

“He went home. Complained of severe heart palpitations.”

I opened my mouth, furious.

“He’s a private citizen who can have nothing to do with this crime,” Mr. Piest interrupted reasonably. “I’ll tell you what I mean to do, Mr. Wilde. I mean to write out a report after looking long and hard at these tools. I mean to eat a few oysters and some bread and butter, quick as humanly possible. Then I mean to go north, and find the owner of those used shields. And you?”

Forgiving the old Dutch madman for every problem that wasn’t his fault, I nodded. “Miss Underhill identified the kinchin. Name of Marcas, from a bawdy house by the dockyards. I mean to learn how he was missed and who last saw him.”

“Wonderful,” he exclaimed. “Best of luck to the both of us, then.”

“I’m grateful for your eyes, and you should know it, Mr. Piest. I don’t have much else to be grateful for in this investigation.”

“Seeing is an honest craft.” He smiled, an ugly and a wonderful expression. “And a learned one. I do my best.”

“How did you come to be doing it?” I couldn’t help but ask.

“My parents were Dutch fur traders.” He leaned forward with his palms on the back of the nearest pew. “They lost their fortunes before losing their lives, and so I lost my inheritance. But one day a fine old friend of my father’s complained that he had lost three hundred yards of very costly silk from his warehouse, which could only have been taken by someone who knew that the back window locked improperly, an employee or close friend, and it outraged him so badly that he offered to pay a ten-dollar reward to whoever could find it. The look on his face, Mr. Wilde. The hurt at the feeling he’d been robbed by one of his own. I never forgot it and I never will. It
haunted me, you see, because my own father’s partner had embezzled heavily, which is how I came to be dismantling my bed for firewood. There is hardly a worse feeling than having something stolen away from you.”

I nodded, knowing it true. “You found the silk and gained the reward, I take it, and discovered you’d a hidden talent?”

“Talent had very little to do with my original success, as I’d stolen it in the first place.” He laughed readily at my upraised eyebrows. “My father’s old friend offered me a position instead of the reward. But I took neither. The next day, I signed up for the night watch and also placed an advertisement in the paper. Lost valuables found at the rate of ten percent of cash value. I’ve never been hungry since, and I’ll never be rich. But I’m in the right work. Be careful as you go, Mr. Wilde.”

I was halfway to the rear entrance before his voice stopped me.

“How did the young lady … Miss Underhill, you said? How did she come to be here?” he asked politely.

“Disquiet in the street before her window,” I called back. “We must be doubly cautious now.”

“Ah,” he said. “No doubt.”

But small mobs are as common in New York as the pigs. And not a thing—far from it, in fact—to leave the house over. As I quit the cathedral, I mulled over whether the rumor of one would ever have sent me from my bed unarmed before turning copper star. Still dreaming over the question and vaguely ashamed of myself for it when I reached Prince Street and Valentine Wilde.

My brother walked with his head drifting attentively from side to side, making sure of his surroundings. Scales and Moses Dainty flanked him, on the left and right, respectively. Val was watchful. When he spied me, his step hitched, though it was ever so small.

Here’s the advantage to being someone’s brother, whatever brand of man that brother happens to be: you can read him. Easier
than strangers. Easier than yourself, truth be told. You know after watching two blinks of his green eyes how much morphine he’s had (plenty, but at least four hours ago). You also know what sort of mood he’s in (cautious, hedging his bets, but ready for a tussle if one finds him). You know why he’s there (the Irish are near enough his entire voting population, and he’s keen to hocus them into thinking he cares about croaked kinchin-mabs).

Knowing him doesn’t mean you need to spare him, though.

“Tim!” Val boomed down the lightening street. “What’s happened? Good, you can post me. I had to—”

“Knowing you,” I hissed as I drew close, “and for my whole life, I should have figured you’d order Bird off to the House of Refuge the second you knew where she lived.”

“Tim—”

“After everything else you’ve done in your days, I shouldn’t be flummoxed that you’d send a battered little kinchin off to the same place as flogged you and then packed you into solitary confinement.”

He got quiet. It wasn’t his angry quiet, and it wasn’t his dark quiet either. His face hung still, prey only to gravity. It seemed a picture of Val as he actually
was
: tired, depraved, sick of it, and ever looking for another dose of distraction. And that disturbed me.

“Fine, Timothy,” he said through his remarkably good teeth. “What do I have to do to make you quit? How do I make you notice you’re purblind muddy in the brains, and get out of it?”

“If your answer to this problem, to any problem at all, is to send kids to the House of Refuge, then I want nothing more to do with you,” I announced.

I meant it, too.

“It isn’t,” he said carefully. “But you have to stop—”

“Get out of my way,” I interrupted.

I didn’t care that he was huge and I wasn’t, didn’t care that he was
better
in more ways than I’d ever dared to count and still dead
set against me. Val let me go, the dumbstruck Democratic lackeys exchanging spine-sapped glances from behind him. I turned my face toward the salt air, and toward the docks.

Fighting with Val
generally feels a bit like shaving, or buying a cup of coffee. But that one left me with my skin shrugged on wrong and my fingers twitching into fists. The man had punched me in the jaw for considerably less insult, and by the time I’d reached the masts standing thick as weeds along Corlears Hook, walking under a striped canopy of ship prows, I was itching for a brawl. Since I seemed to have just been robbed of one.

The Corlears Hook area down by the ferry stations is Ward Seven, and I don’t envy whoever’s beat takes him there. The ferry docks rippled with all sorts by the time I arrived, the lusty summer morning drying salt crust into the flapping sails. And so, mingling with the Brooklyn dwellers who come daily into the city for work, the East River’s particular brand of whore was already making a frontal assault. Mabs in short pinned skirts and mabs with skirts slit. Mabs winking, sitting on pilings fanning themselves with old newspaper, and mabs in their own doorways, not having bothered to cover their breasts just yet. Mabs smelling of saltwater and gin and other people’s sweat. They were covered in tinsel and likewise covered in nautical pox scars, and they make me feel equally as if I ought to be bundling them off to a charity hospital, or marching them indoors to improve the scenery. Irish, it goes without saying, teemed thick as the stench of the docks. I didn’t know what shipping line had recently put in, but there were a hundred or so of them huddled in a crowd by one of the piers, bones showing through skin like the stays of a corset, looking at each other and at their alien surroundings with expressions of blank fear. All I could think as I
passed them was that they’d picked one hell of an inauspicious morning to arrive.

Reaching the dwelling Mercy had indicated, I looked up. Typical of the neighborhood, it had once been a rich merchant’s house. Built to impress with fine stone trim, then later converted to squalid housing and disreputable occupations. Edges crumbling, probably since the Panic, or maybe the fellow had struck still richer and decamped to Broadway, but either way, his house was left a corpse.

I went through the front door without knocking. I was in that sort of mood.

Outside had been better than inside. A piano caked with dust disintegrated next to a shelf filled with liquor jugs and a very badly done picture of the Greek notion of a pleasant afternoon in the woods with your men friends. The mistress seemed to be the person lying on a vermin-infested fainting couch and lazily pulling at an opium pipe. What air there was to speak of was near solid with the smell of it, half rotting sweet corn and half tar.

“You’ll have to give me a minute, love. There’s not one of them awake at this hour, it’s not Christian.”

“I’m a policeman,” I said, showing the star. “Timothy Wilde.”

“Does that matter, dear?” she wondered blearily.

“You’ll find that it does. Who was Marcas’s last client?”

“Bless me if I can remember. Must have been hours ago. Done something, has he?”

“When did you first come to miss Marcas?”

The hag’s rhinoceros eyes drooped, puzzled. “Haven’t missed him a bit, have I? He’s upstairs. Third on the left. Go on then, if he’s your fancy, I needn’t bother lining up the others.”

Turning in disgust, I ran upstairs. The third door on the left was open. In the room, I found a bed, a lamp, a chamber pot, a makeup table, and cheap theatrical paint in the first drawer. Not much else. So I quit that barren chamber and knocked at the next.

A small face of thirteen or fourteen keeked out at me. Not curious. In fact, so very deadly incurious about who I was and what I wanted that I could have sent my fist through his wall. His clothing was male but ridiculous—all cheap satin and lace cuffs and brass jewelry. He hadn’t been sleeping, for his brown eyes were clear.

“I wonder if you could tell me when Marcas left this house. I’m a policeman, and it’s important,” I said.