The Gods Of Gotham (46 page)

“Val,” I said. My own weak voice echoed grossly in my ears, and I thought insanely,
You confounded idiot, be more like him.

Val turned his head to look up at me, blood still running freely down his cheek, and he straightened his shoulders. “About that fire. The first one. The one made you learn to tend bar and me to cook supper.”

“Yes,” I said.

“I lit that fire,” Valentine said.

He wasn’t in front of me any longer. He was a thousand and a thousand and a thousand miles away. It was a ransomed look. One he’d never before showed me. And since he’d never shown me, I’d never known it was there.

“I was smoking a cigar in the horse barn, instead of mucking out the stalls like I was meant to. I smoked the fucking cigar, Tim, and it lit in the straw, and when I rushed to free the horses, they … I opened the stalls because we needed them, Dad couldn’t farm without the horses, and what sort of … and I was running out of the … I was sixteen years old, Tim, and I thought you saw me. You
did
see me, tearing open all the stall gates, trying to coax the horses out of them. Running about like hell was at my heels. And it was. All right? You stood in that open doorway and you
saw me
light that fire. Didn’t you? All this time, I … you were frozen stiff when I turned. And then I didn’t see that it had gotten as far as the kerosene, all that kerosene. By the time I’d dragged you out. We couldn’t. You remember. Not with the buildings attached, and the blaze in the doorway. It was ended. I never did it on purpose.”

When Val stopped talking, he drew his fingers over the back of his neck, looking away. A cry sounded in a near room, followed by a cackle and the merry smashing of glass. I longed to say something. But whatever link there was between my brain and my mouth had been severed, just as sure as the link between my mouth and the distant thump in my chest.

I watched Valentine flick my copper star. “You’re what a star police is meant to look like. I knew it. I was never glad of your being scarred up, but I was glad of the fire downtown if for no other reason. I’ll take myself off, and that way you’ll rest easier. You won’t have to see me anymore. Go meet Matsell and make sure that New York is still standing tomorrow. Good-bye, Tim.”

He walked away with his hands in his pockets. Straight out the wide front door. Every individual piece of me wanted to stop him. Even the parts that were still furious, and even the bits he’d just exploded like a kerosene keg.

But I couldn’t get myself to move quick enough. By the time I’d run into the street with his name on my lips, it was as if Valentine Wilde had been a figment of my imagination.

I
didn’t go meet Matsell, as it happened.

No, I dragged myself home to Elizabeth Street. More than half delirious, and only luck to thank for keeping possession of my wallet for the whole journey. The house was very empty when I got there. No one kneading, no one sketching.

I pumped as much Croton water as I could bear to carry and started a fire in the grate. Heated the water in kettles, in soup pots. Whatever I could find. Filling the hip bath I’d pulled out from behind the stacked flour bags was one of the more irksome jobs I’d done all night, and it wasn’t even properly night now, not any longer,
but nearer to chalky late-summer dawn. I didn’t have a choice, though. The little stab point in my back throbbed horribly, the gash down my arm not much better, and it’s a bad job to die of infected blood.

It’s a bad job to die when you’ve unfinished business, anyway. And I’d a full cargo’s worth. Three very important priorities.

Keep Mercy Underhill safe. Get your brother back. Stop the bastard who’s done all this.

I wasn’t too sure about the order of importance, so I let that go and determined to accomplish all three as best I could at the same time.

Settling back into the hot water hurt like all hell. Not as much, though, as when I spooned a heaping pile of pearl-ash alkaline salt onto one of Mrs. Boehm’s clean rags and started scrubbing out every part of me still bleeding. The pale powder spat and hissed when it touched the water, and I wasn’t being gentle about anything. That was purposeful. It isn’t easy to slip into unconsciousness when you’re in that much pain.

After I’d rubbed pearl-ash into every cut I could find, paying harshest attention to the tiny gouge pulsing in my back, the water was a rosy hue and I was as fresh awake as I’d ever been in my life. Drying quickly with another slop sheet, dousing the fire with pink water from the hip-bath, I fetched more clean cloth for bandaging and wrapped up my burning cuts. They would keep, now. And I’d been hurt worse. It was when I looked over my face in the pane of window glass, finding it bright-shiny and watery-textured—hideous, but on the whole healthy—that I suddenly knew what I had to
do
.

What was
next
. And it wasn’t Piest or Matsell.

With the sheet gathered around my waist, I ran upstairs for butcher paper, a hunk of charcoal, and my only clean shirt and trousers. I suffered a dizzy spell on the way, but I fought it off, more annoyed and impatient than anything. Returning just as quickly, I
spread the brown sheet out on the tabletop. I poured myself a splash of brandy. Cautiously, knowing a measure of pain would keep me alert. Next, I turned back to the chair I’d hung my filthy togs over and reached into my inner frock coat pocket. Then at last I sat down at the table holding Palsgrave’s letter, the only letter that sounded as if it had been written by a lunatic and not a stage villain, and I spread it out on the grainy wood.

I stopped reading that part. It was madness without any markers, any facts to speak of. But that letter, in combination with the way Marcas had met his end …

It gnawed at me.
Something is wrong.
And of course it was, I’d learned that much from poor little Aidan Rafferty long since. But if I thought of all this as a
story
, as the way people
do things,
as the way someone sitting in my bar with his tongue unhinged would
tell it to me …

Something was wrong.

I picked up my charcoal and I stood up from the table and I drained the brandy. Still a bit dizzy. Near to two full days awake, slit up pretty nastily, wearing only trousers and a half-buttoned shirt, on that huge piece of blank butcher paper I wrote in one corner:

I looked them over. Maybe an argument could be made that money and self-love are the same, or that politics and God are similar, but I liked it well enough. So I continued, this time taking up more canvas. Drawing the following words in separate areas all throughout the middle, circling each with a thick black line like a fence:

I’m not sure why I added the last name. He was so very long past, and not a bit connected. But I wanted him there. He was important to me.

So.

Twenty-two dead, and Bird sleeping warm and peaceful in the middle of a rambling berry patch farmstead in Harlem. Or so I hoped.

But then I began to notice something. I poured myself another small brandy, just for something to do with my hands when I stopped to think. Oddly enough, my hands as they were writing and circling and busy felt
alive.
I thought,
Yes, this is working, don’t stop, everything you can think of belongs on this piece of butcher paper. Everyone depends
on it.

Leaning over, I started drawing. I drew a quick sketch of Silkie
Marsh. I drew Mercy as she’d been at St. Patrick’s, with her eyes wide and her hair down. I drew one of the buried corpses, cracked open and bones bare. I drew Marcas, in cruelly broad lines, because that’s what his murder had looked like. I drew Bird’s new dress. Just little pictures between the spaces, spooling the cobwebs from out of my head.

It worked, too. When the pictures were out of me, I started remembering words.

And the right ones this time.

People tell me things they shouldn’t. Things they ought to be powdering over, shoveling underground, facts they ought to be stuffing into a carpetbag before dropping into the river and quietly drowning. I wrote the series of statements in another section, deciding “Statements” was a fair enough name for them. Bits of sentences from Mercy, from Palsgrave, remarks that hadn’t seemed to have any connection to each other.

By the time I was through scribbling them out, they didn’t look like spoken phrases at all. They looked like a map. A map of hell, maybe, but a map nevertheless, and my breath caught in my throat.

I pulled the letter—the only letter left to me—out from where it lay half covered under the butcher paper. I read it over.

Nothing made sense, but everything fit.

I felt a bit like laughing, but that would have been horrible. And anyway there had to be
some
difference between me and Val. So I finished my sheet of butcher paper instead.

First I circled
Love.
From under “Things a Person Would Kill For.” And then
God
too, for that was a part of it. And then
Money.

Next I wrote the following questions:

A knock occurred just beyond the bread display.

I approached Mrs. Boehm’s door, having stopped on the way for a kitchen knife. Rankly exhausted, sick at heart, buzzing with savage and unnerving butcher-paper knowledge. Grasping the knob, I lifted the blade she used to quarter chickens.

And there stood Gentle Jim, of all the people in the world, with my brother’s treelike biceps draped senselessly over his shoulders. When I’d first spied Jim with his head lolling off the crook of Val’s arm at the Liberty’s Blood, I’d have called you a liar if you claimed he could support his own scant weight, let alone Val’s. But I’d have been dead wrong, and Valentine didn’t presently appear to be much up to walking by himself. I guessed nine reasons for that, and then settled on one overarching one, which was his brother Tim is a purblind milksop.

“Good Lord,” I managed. “Thank you. Come in, for God’s sake. I’ll take his legs.”

“It would greatly endear you to me,” Jim replied exhaustedly.

That didn’t end up happening. What did seem to work was me slinging both of Val’s arms over my shoulders and walking up the stairs with him hanging on my back, Jim following with my brother’s ankles so the man wasn’t dragged up each and every step. Though in that state, he’d never have noticed. I’ve seen it a hundred times.

Reaching my room, I dropped him pretty hard on my straw tick mattress. Not out of spite, for once, but because he’s damnably heavy.

“What the
devil
,” I prompted.

“Yes, well.” Gentle Jim tugged at the paper collar of his laundered shirt wearily. “I never did set any stock in his perfection. Only his tremendous appeal.”

“He says he’s not a sodomite,” I remarked stupidly.

“And just
what
do you mean to insinuate about
me
, if you please?”

I liked him fine after that. As perfect replies go, that one was all
aces. And if sodomy had just saved Val’s hide, it was now my hands-down favorite of his indulgences.

“What was he doing, just now?”

“The unfortunate rogue met a sea captain at the Liberty’s Blood and signed on for a voyage to Turkey,” he sniffed. “However, every mother’s son drinking there owes Valentine far too much money and far too many favors to allow him such a … career misstep. We objected. Strenuously. Not molleys,” he added, rolling his eyes before I could say a word. “I venture to surmise I am his only intimate acquaintance in the City Hall Park set, actually, or … my goodness. I
hope
I am. What a dreadful line of thought, Timothy. Anyhow, the dockworkers didn’t like to see him shipped off either, what with his role in their Party, and all. Thus I was charged with escorting him home. Val grew rather uncultured with me en route, dreaming of the open sea as it were and finding himself thwarted in his aims, and threw his house key into a sewage sink. I am above retrieving it from such a place. And here we are.”