The Gods Of Gotham (8 page)

“You would like some bread, sir?”

My eyes swept from the baked goods to the woman who’d made them, approaching me as she rubbed her hands against her apron. Mrs. Boehm looked around my age, closer to thirty than twenty. Her jaw was firm and her faded blue eyes alert and inquisitive—which,
combined with the newness of the “Mrs.” above her door, led me to believe her husband hadn’t long been absent. She’d hair the color of the seeds dotting her sunflower rolls, a dull shineless blonde that looked nearly grey, and her brow was too wide and too flat. But her mouth was wide too, a generous sweep that oddly reversed how thin she was. When just her lips were considered, I could picture Mrs. Boehm scraping ample butter over a thick slice of her fresh farmer’s loaves. I liked that at once, felt strangely grateful for it. She didn’t seem
mean
.

“What’s your best seller?” I was pleasant but not smiling. Smiling sent a burn like a brand through my skull. But it doesn’t take much effort for a barman to sound friendly.

“Dreifkornbrot.”
She nodded at it. Her voice was low, pleasantly rough and Bohemian. “Three seeds. A half hour ago I baked it. One loaf?”

“Please. I’ll be having it for dinner.”

“Anything more?”

“I’ll be needing a place to eat dinner.” I paused. “My name is Timothy Wilde, and I’m pleased to meet you. Has the upstairs room been let yet? I’m in terrible need of lodgings, and this seems the perfect fit.”

That afternoon, I bought a fresh and nicely stuffed straw tick mattress with Val’s money and hauled it back to Elizabeth Street over my shoulder, ribs protesting with every step. My new home had two rooms: the main chamber measured twelve feet by twelve with a pair of stunted windows overlooking the chickens in the dull brown yard below. For the moment, I ignored the windowless sleeping closet in favor of bedding down in the living area.

Laying the rustling tick before my open windows, I stretched out just after the sun vanished in a lingering smear of red. At least in the main chamber I could get a breath of cool starlight. Which was much to the good, for I felt like the only silent point in a geography
of alien noise. A dogfight howled somewhere in the distance, wild and exultant. German men hunched around tankards of beer in the crowded house adjacent sent a low thrumming through the thoroughfare. I missed my books, and my armchair, and the particular blue of my lampshade, and my life.

I’d live here, I thought, and I’d do police work though nobody knew how, least of all me. And it would get better in slivers. It had to. I’d been knocked considerably sideways, so the trick was to keep right on moving.

I dreamed that night that I read Mercy’s novel. The gorgeous saga she’d always intended to write from the day she finished
The Hunchback of Notre-Dame
. Three hundred pages of cotton-soft parchment, bound up with a green ribbon. Her writing gushed in watery ripples over the pages, penmanship that called to mind the maddest intricate Belgian lace. Wrought on a pin’s head but stretching for miles if unraveled. The sort that leaves its creators blind.

On August first
at six in the morning, having visited a slop shop with more of Val’s funds and purchased a good secondhand set of clothing including black trousers and hose, a simple black frock coat over a blue waistcoat and white neckerchief, and a revolutionary-hued scarlet kerchief at my breast as a temporary nod to politics, I presented myself at the Halls of Justice in Centre Street. I also wore a round-brimmed hat, wider than had been my habit. The moment I put it on, eye-catching as it was, somehow I felt very pleasurably invisible.

The air surrounding the newly assigned police headquarters was spun from a sandstorm that early morning, just pervasive grit and sharply slanting heat until a man couldn’t think straight—which was at least appropriate to the architecture. It had taken all of a fortnight,
from what I understand, for the combined prison and courthouse to be nicknamed the Tombs when completed. The slabs of charcoal granite weigh on a man the instant he sets eyes on them, pulling the breath from his chest. All the blank windows stretch two stories high, but are themselves imprisoned by iron frames, each big enough to serve as a fire grate to a giant. Carved in morbid lead-colored rock above each window is a globe wearing a pair of delirious wings and a set of serpents trying to wrestle the planet back into orbit.

If their goal was to make it look like a place to be buried alive, they did a pretty spruce job on a quarter of a million dollars.

A little knot of ten or twelve protesters came into focus as I approached the entrance, all men whose cravats were hideously colorful and carefully knotted, and whose noses had been broken on at least one occasion. Several wore mourning bands but no actual mourning attire, which I took to be an act of symbolic protest, and one held a sign reading
DOWN WITH PIG TEERANNY/POLICE YOUR DAYS ARE NUMBERED
. That flint-eyed fellow spat just in front of my feet as I passed them.

“What’s the mourning for?” I asked, curious.

“Liberty, freedom, justice, and the spirit of the American patriot,” drawled a bruiser with half an ear.

“I’d go so far as a black neckerchief, then,” I suggested as I walked into the prison.

All that can be seen from the outside of the Tombs is a thick wall lined with the double-height windows clapped in irons. But I learned after walking up the eight steps leading under those unrelenting pillars that the interior is a quadrangle, and already I was intrigued in spite of myself. There are open spaces, and four-story cell blocks separated by gender, and a profusion of courtrooms for deciding the length of the prisoners’ entombment. A pox-scarred brute with a dirty white cravat directed me to the largest of the courtrooms,
where I gathered the police would be addressed regarding their duties.

As I walked through the open air where the gallows stood on hanging days, a queer creature fell into step beside me. I couldn’t help but stare at him. He was dressed very shabbily, with a dribble of egg staining his threadbare black sack coat, and his gait was slightly bowlegged. Downright crablike. The mad walk impaired his height to the point that he was almost as short as I am. From his face, pinched and chinless with pale hazel eyes staring out, I was sure he’d crawled from the ocean that morning. I’d have guessed his age at sixty. But his boots were square and Dutch and of a style older still, and his wispy grey hair flew wildly about in a wind that didn’t touch anything else.

We entered the courtroom in the same stride. He scurried off to find a seat and I did the same, taking in the scene as I settled onto a bench usually devoted to trial lawyers. Here the walls were neatly whitewashed, the judge’s high altar standing empty before us. I raked my eyes across my new cohorts.

A fool’s motley coat would have looked uniform next to the seated mob. There seemed about fifty of them, and again I felt like a patch of vacant silence in the middle of a tumult. Irish aplenty, their laborers’ hands choked with veins and their chins jutting with red side whiskers, looking wary and combative in dingy blue coats with long tails and old brass buttons. Black Irish too, pale and thick-shouldered, squinting cannily. Scattered Germans with patient, dogmatic expressions, arms folded over their chests as they spoke. Americans with their collars turned down, whistling Bowery music-hall tunes and elbowing their laughing friends.

Finally, me and the crablike old man in the Dutch boots, awaiting orders. He with considerably more visible enthusiasm than I.

“Welcome, gentlemen! I’m proud to be addressing the police
of the Sixth Ward of the First District of the great City of New York.”

Scattered clapping. But I was too deeply struck by the man who’d just launched himself through the small judges’ door to the left of the judicial bench to bother. I’d last seen him in the middle of an inferno, after all, so I spent a moment to look him over more carefully. If there was a single new policeman Justice George Washington Matsell didn’t fascinate, I’ll own I missed the fellow.

Matsell, I later learned, was only thirty-four when he was selected by a Democratic majority in the Common Council to serve as the first New York City chief of police. But the man before us, standing ponderous as a walrus and twice as weathered, seemed much older. His twin reputations for holiness and debauchery must have preceded him, but—apart from realizing that he was unforgettable in person—I don’t think anyone even began to take his measure that day. I can say now for a fact that he’s equally intelligent and bluntly forceful. He’s also near enough to tipping three hundred pounds on the scale. His whole fleshy face is based on the shape of a capital
A
: small brows drawn tight toward his nose, deep folds from his nostrils to his thin, downward-pointing lips, fainter creases continuing from his mouth down his jowls.

“That pack of dead herrings known as Harper’s Police, or the bluecoats, has been permanently disbanded, thank Christ. Congratulations on your new appointments, to be terminated at the end of one year,” Matsell called out in a flat baritone, pulling a piece of notepaper from his yards of grey sack coat and peering at it through round spectacles. “After election results—should the balance of the Common Council and the assistant aldermen remain the same—naturally you’re welcome to reapply.”

He’d just described why men like Valentine are so very busy: a big enough political upset means all your friends are out of work and living in broken-down abandoned train cars north of the porous
borders of civilization around Twenty-eighth Street. Elections decide which horde of rats gets to gnaw at the bones. I felt a bit like a rat just knowing how I came to be there, for if there were any voters save Democrats present, they kept good and snug about it.

“Some of you,” the chief continued, “look as if you’re itchy to know what exactly you’re going to be
doing
.” A few dark laughs and a shuffling of boots. “Your shifts are sixteen hours. During those sixteen hours a day—or night, of course—you are charged with the prevention of crime. If you see a man breaking into someone’s ken, arrest him. If you see a vagrant child, collect it. If you see a woman pick the pocket of a tourist, collar her.”

“How about if she’s just a mab strolling the back drags for a gentleman friend?” called out a slouched rough. “Do we arrest her? Ain’t whoring a crime?”

About a dozen men laughed outright at this question. Two or three whistled. Silently, I agreed with them.

“Sure thing,” Matsell replied placidly. “Second thought—she’d have to go with you nice and quiet and you’d need the men who bought her to testify in court, so why don’t you start by building the world’s biggest holding cell and let us know when you’re finished.”

Another ripple of laughter, and for the second time I felt a barbed twinge of interest. This was obviously going to be a job that required some thought from day to day, not work that turns a man into a glorified donkey.

“Back to it, then: if you start dragging every owl you see into the station house on whoring charges, I’ll send you to hell myself. No one has that kind of time. Fees from the city have been abolished, but whether you accept rewards from pleased citizens is your own business,” our chief announced, reading down his long nose from his scribbled notes. “We’ve sacked the following inspection departments: streets, parks, public health, docks, hydrants, pawnbrokers, junk shops, hacks, stages, carts, roads, and lands-and-places. Those
men are now you. The Sunday temperance wardens and the bell ringers are gone. Those men are also you. The fifty-four fire wardens are gone. Who are they now, Mr. Piest?”

The crab-faced old scoundrel in the Dutch boots jumped to his feet with his wrinkled fist in the air crying, “We are! We’re the fire wardens, we’re the shield of the people, and God bless the good old streets of Gotham!”

A round of applause and crude hoots that were exactly half sardonic and half approving went up.

“Mr. Piest here is one of the old guard,” Chief Matsell coughed, pushing his spectacles up his nose. “You want to know how to find stolen property, talk to him.”

I privately doubted whether Mr. Piest, who’d discovered the egg on his vest and was scraping at it with his thumbnail, could find his own arse. But I kept dark about it.

“The majority of you lot will be appointed as roundsmen today, but there are a few special positions still open. I see a great many firemen here. Donnell, Brick, Walsh, and Doyle, you’re fire liaisons and I’ll be appointing more. Anyone here speak flash?”

I was almost startled by the reaction—dozens of hands shot into the air, primarily from the wickedest-seeming American dead rabbits, the Britishers with tattoo marks, and the most scarred-up Irishmen. The Germans, almost universally, held their peace. Meanwhile, the air had turned lightning-sweet and thunderstormish. Whatever these positions were, they obviously were the shortest route to direct dealing with New York’s underbelly.

“Don’t be modest, Mr. Wilde,” Matsell added mildly.

I glanced in shock at our chief from under the brim of my hat. I’d felt downright transparent an instant before, but seemed like I’d been wrong.