Seven for a Secret (24 page)

“Who else was generally present, when you were entertained there?” I asked.

“Delia, Jonas. Between three and five other friends from church,” Higgins answered.

“All black?”

He nodded once.

“And when Gates hosted the rare political soiree, you were never invited.”

“Thought him a salesman for a new French-designed mechanical sewing apparatus, the lot of us,” Julius reported in an arid tone. “He traveled a great deal in that line of work.”

“How could he have hid Lucy on the few occasions Party members were present?” I marveled, half to myself.

“I can answer that,” Higgins replied readily. “Lucy detested being around strange white men. They frightened her. Gates would simply have sent her upstairs with the boy, dismissed the cook, and done just as he liked—she’d not have marveled over a feast being delivered for his clients
.
”

I sat with my eyes closed, a despicable picture forming. “Tell me how often she left the house.”

“For church, weekly, with Delia and Jonas. That was at first. She grew more relaxed as time went on. Less fragile,” Julius recalled.

“Whose notion was that? The solitude?”

“She’d every reason to be cautious,” Higgins answered. “And that lying snake supported her, or seemed to.”

“Supported her caution or
his
secrecy?”

Higgins descended, weary eyed, into another of Julius’s hand-worked chairs.

“Was she ever in public with Gates—on his arm, as a couple?”

“Can’t say as to that,” Julius replied slowly. “I’d guess at a
no
.”

“God, this is hideous,” Higgins lamented. “How could I have been so blind?”

“She’d been hurt beyond our imagining when kidnapped,” I posited. “Gates genuinely feared for her, perhaps. The rest was a wet tissue of lies, and she never knew who he truly was. But suppose he did care about her and Jonas’s well-being: who could say which motive for hiding in a townhouse played the bigger role? What I can’t ignore is that Gates would be far more likely to panic over a real wife than a misled housekeeper. Because God knows it looks to me as if Gates either killed her or paid someone else to do it, considering what happened last month.”

“Last month?” Julius repeated.

“She got a job.” Higgins’s eyes grew wide. “Outside the house, where she could speak to anyone. Lucy was hired on at Timpson’s. I’m going to wring that mongrel’s neck with my bare hands.”

“Gates claims his housekeeper, Lucy Wright, was glad of a better position,” I reminded them. “Finding her own digs, her own life. Was their relationship over?”

“Not so far as Lucy knew,” Julius said.

“Did Gates object to her finding work?”

“Not as she ever mentioned.”

“Did anyone set eyes on Lucy, Delia, or Jonas after the night of the abduction? Did they go to church on Sunday?”

Higgins shook his head. “They must have kept indoors—for all the good it did them.”

Unable to keep still any longer myself, I wandered over to the fireplace, hearth neatly swept with a poster bearing the emancipationist emblem
AM I NOT A MAN AND A BROTHER?
tacked over the mantel. Several other objects rested there. With a start, I recognized the turnip used to gag Julius the previous summer, along with a brick with a smear of blood on it, a leather tawse, a rock the size of a child’s fist, and the set of tattered clothing he’d been forced to wear in the courtroom, folded in a compact pile. I recalled asking my friend in August why in the devil’s name he carried the turnip in his pocket, walking away from the construction site where he’d nearly been burned to death.

Because I’m still here,
he’d answered.
I got a brick, a leather strap, and a rock from a slingshot too, all on a shelf. But look at me. I’m right here.

“Wringing Gates’s neck isn’t our first order of business,” Julius reminded us, smiling at me when I turned away from his macabre collection.

“We have channels,” Higgins agreed. “Systems in place to try to bring people back when we act fast enough. It was the courts entering into it we were worried over when we consulted you, Mr. Wilde. Copper stars are . . .” He hesitated, seeking out the right word. “A new variable. We didn’t know quite what to make of you all.”

My thumb traced the star pin, as if I needed reminding it was there. “We know Varker and Coles are connected to Silkie Marsh, and that Marsh is also connected to Gates; we don’t yet know whether Gates and the slave catchers have ever exchanged words. But the kidnapping and the murder, so close on each other’s heels . . . it can’t be coincidental. We need more evidence. I don’t care if you send me to hell itself—all I ask is that you permit me to help fix this.”

“And if they’re in South Carolina?” Higgins asked in the tone of a man who could very possibly have lost everything. “The storm has long passed, ships in and out of the harbor just as usual. What if they’re gone?”

“Then we’ll not rest until we’ve tracked them,” I answered. “And in the meanwhile, redirect our focus to your earlier suggestion. The one involving Rutherford Gates’s neck.”

•   •   •

I left the
Committee men
by way of the burnt district. Wound tight as a fishing line and needing to think things through. A list in my pocket naming Lucy’s few close contacts promised me immediate work, but another line of inquiry nagged at me.

Mulqueen,
my mind kept insisting.
Mulqueen at the scene of the crime.
I’d been in such a whirlwind when he’d appeared on Val’s steps that I’d failed to press him. That was unconscionable. If he was involved—sent to find the corpse or even returned to check his handiwork—I would run him to ground. And if not, I needed to press him over who’d given the alarm. From the looks of Val’s room, there had indeed been a struggle. That boded ill for Delia and Jonas, who could well have been dragged out by their hair. There would have been noise. Val, who is sly if not a bit discreet, would need to question his neighbors—possibly one had, in fact, alerted a copper star.

But Mulqueen was my responsibility. I hastened my steps, for snow had begun falling again, fat flakes caressing the edges of my hat.

The fire last year destroyed thirty buildings in a charred swath of destruction that will doubtless awe us for decades. My walk through the blankness was disquieting, for many walls yet crumbled while half-conceived replacements rose in skeletons beside them. Scattered construction continued, mostly of the demolition variety, for the ice made brickwork difficult and third-story aerial acts downright suicidal. I avoided Stone Street, where I’d lived before. I think I’d a right to. Instead, I watched men with strong Irish jawlines and coal-black hair pushing handcarts filled with smoky waste along the cobbles. Their hands were flaking and bloody from the cold. But they’d buy bread for their kinchin that night.

I wondered how many of them Val had employed. I wondered why I’d never questioned why everyone treats him as if he were a deity. Mere pugilism could never have accounted for it, nor firefighting fame. Then I wondered why I work with such apparent enthusiasm at being a first-class idiot.

In Cedar Street, I stopped before the whimsical façade of the new post office. It’s fronted with thousands of gilt-edged panes, numbered windows into tiny worlds, where the merchants can peer to see whether they’ve any correspondence. Mercy decreed it magical when it opened and promptly mailed an anonymous love letter to a businessman she didn’t know, just to see it lodged in its little glass cage. I went inside and passed ten cents to the clerk to mail my letter to London. Thinking it more efficient than her suggestion of a bottle hurtled into the sea.

I felt better after that—like a man with one mission accomplished.

Thoroughly snow-caked by the time I reached the Tombs, I headed for the records room. Mulqueen’s route took him down Orange Street, through the sinkhole of the Five Points itself. Rendering it nigh impossible for him to have arrived at Val’s by happenstance.

Frowning, I shut the ledger and hurried to my private nook to check whether I’d any communiqués. There were two, in fact, on my little pine desk. The one in Matsell’s braying hand demanded reading first.

Wilde,

Judge Sivell has asked that I pass along his compliments to you over justice served. He also desires to fine you for contempt of court. Your brother has promised me a full report within the week regarding what in hell is going on, and thus—because he often knows our business better than we do—I have agreed not to question you for the time being. In the meanwhile, be aware that your position is as precarious as the existence of the copper star force itself, and that turning runaway slave trials into three-ring circuses is not appreciated by the powers that be. You tread a thin line. A very thin line indeed.

As for me, I likewise congratulate you over freeing an innocent man. Sivell believes I have docked you a week’s pay. I will dock you a month’s pay and take the remaining balance out of your bollocks if you make me look in the smallest degree foolish. I haven’t looked foolish since 1822.

Expectantly,

Chief of Police G. W. Matsell

I blew out a breath and tucked the note in my pocket. It would never do for him to barge into my office and see it in the dustbin. The next was from Piest, in angular writing slanting weirdly to the left.

Dear Mr. Wilde,

I hear stirrings afoot, patriot, which disturb me greatly in mind. Since our escapade, I have myself largely eluded censure, but rumors grow apace regarding your own heroic role. I would be the lowest of dogs not to inform you of such. More cannot be said here, wariness is the handmaiden of courage, as you know, and I will impart to you greater detail at your earliest convenience. You know where best to find me, and as the reverse is untrue, I urge you to seek me out with all timely haste.

Best regards,

Jakob Piest

Ten seconds passed wondering whether Piest’s warning should produce laughter or heart palpitations. Calling it a draw, I slid it next to Matsell’s. Piest went on shift at ten, and I could find him somewhere along Chambers Street.

I cut south through the Tombs. The wind picked up when I stepped beyond the shelter of thick granite walls, tunneling through the streets, keening like a wraith. I followed Leonard Street to Centre, pausing for the train to pass. It was brimful with passengers, its horses shaking the snow from their shaggy manes as they hauled the tram cars north.

In the cancerous epicenter of Ward Six, not far from my lodgings, I began my search. Twice over, I walked Mulqueen’s route, once in each direction. Twice over, I endured the stench of Paradise Square—the heart of the Five Points, paved in shit of many origins and populated by the shades of what were once emigrants and blacks. A body lay sprawled beneath the bone-colored edifice of the Old Brewery that I at first took for dead, but merely suffered starvation and alcohol stupor. It was a mulatto boy of about eighteen. If he was lucky, he would survive and come morning pawn his shoes for another jug of spirits. If he wasn’t, he would be in the ground the next day and not alone in that destination. His thin shirt and blue trousers were crafted of cotton, and he cradled a bottle of rum under his elbow.

You’re making yourself insane,
I admonished, walking along.

Frustration mounting, I commenced keeking into saloons. Mulqueen claimed not to drink, but that meant nothing. Bartenders are community emblems, and I sharply wished of a sudden to be one myself again. There’s scarce any responsibility in pouring whiskey and bending an ear. Plenty of saloonkeepers I spoke with knew of Mulqueen, but it wasn’t until I entered a long, low hall where an Irish lad scrambled after dinted ninepins for the bowlers that I learned anything useful.

“You want Uncle Ned’s, Orange just south of Bayard.” The barkeep spat on his floor. “Mulqueen’s there, sure enough. If not
policing
, you understand me.”

I didn’t entirely. But I had my suspicions. Some of the new star police spend their hours wearing grooves in the pavement. Waiting patiently for trouble. Some of the new star police go looking for trouble, demanding payments from unlicensed liquor salesmen, brothel madams, faro sharks—anyone involved in illegalities who’d prefer to ante up than suffer arrest. One sits in a closet until he’s wanted and then attempts to unravel mysteries with a woeful lack of skills.

I presumed Mulqueen’s technique involved a system. One that furthered the Mulqueen cause, and the Mulqueen cause alone.

Uncle Ned’s proved unprepossessing. Typical of the Five Points, though. Four bowed stairs before a peeling green door. The building was constructed of salvaged boards, of every thickness and color, cobbled together into walls. Gnawed husks from the hot-corn vendors were scattered helter-skelter to keep the stray pigs hale. Peanut shells and piss and ash and delicate new-fallen snow all trampled together, as is everything left in these streets.

Inside, though, was another story. The fire popped madly. Upon a small raised platform, a colored fiddler—shirt sopping, copper brow dappled with sweat—played a jig as if schooled by Hades direct for the purpose. It was enthralling. The walls and ceiling gleamed with whitewash, and above the sanded dance floor hung a broad wrought-iron chandelier packed with blazing tallow candles. As for the dancers careening about, I haven’t words for the atmosphere of mingled desperation and joy they produced.

A uniformed British naval tar not yet dispossessed of his sea legs was attempting an Irish wedding dance. Laughing in fits whenever he fell. A dozen or so actual Irish, both red and black, spun about like dervishes. Clad in the colors of a kinchin’s toy top, ending a grueling day’s work with grueling play. I soon identified the hall’s true source of income as the liquor shelves at the opposite end of the room. Dead Bowery rabbits and scarlet-shirted firemen sagged against the bar, cheeks blazing with liquor and song. A black chap with a pine-scented spruce beer strolled by, bobbing his braided head. Races of every hue surrounded me, including an Indian with a frock coat buttoned over buckskin trousers. Most patrons whirled about with feet tattooing rapturous rhythms. Others watched, entranced.