Alexander C. Irvine (12 page)

C
ries of
“E
xtra!
”
rang through the crowd as Jane hurried up Pearl Street, nervous because the sun had gone down and she was out of the safety of the gaslit avenues. The stink of the docks followed her, clinging to her clothes and surrounding her in the smells of dead things and fear. She avoided the glance of a staggering Indian, looking down at her battered shoes and seeing the dried river scum streaking them. Again she thought of the hungry water lapping at her feet, the secret sounds of things moving among pilings. All she wanted was to be home, to stash today’s silver and hide away.

“Extra! Murdered children! Indian murder on the dockside! Extra!”

Jane quickened her pace to a near run. What sort of person could kill children, Little Bree and Deirdre and all the rest? What had happened to Little Bree’s rabbit? Dinner, no doubt, for whoever had found it hopping frightened down an alleyway. Jane wished for a home, a real home with bedsheets and a kitchen table and warm light shining through its windows onto the street. She skirted the edge of Franklin Square, where Cherry, Frankfort, and Dover Streets emptied into an oblong plaza of rutted, snow-covered mud. A few trees straggled up from this mud, having somehow survived the crush of wheels and feet.

Pearl Street came out the other side of the square and curled back north and west until it intersected Broadway across from the hospital. Jane could visualize the whole of New York in her head, and thinking of maps soothed her, drew her mind away from dead friends in sunken canoes. She had an actual map of the city tacked up back in her burrow, one of many maps that helped remind her that there were places where a girl and her Da might go to live other than cold filthy stairwells and tenements.

Jane ducked into the gap between MacGavran’s grocery and the meeting hall whose back stair hid her den. The stair rose perhaps four feet from a cobblestone courtyard to a recessed door, with one side of it built against the brick of the grocery’s rear wall. Jane didn’t know who met in the hall there, but groups of men came and went every Thursday evening. The open side of the stair had been walled off by a row of planks buttressed by a single diagonal board, and the enclosed triangular space was Jane’s home. Her burrow.

Pulling aside a loose plank, she crawled under the stair and sat quietly for a moment, letting her eyes adjust to the gloom. She realized that she’d been holding her breath; it came out of her in a long
whoosh
as she saw that nobody had disturbed her home. The pile of blankets, the lamp on the floor, the flat stone in the corner covering her treasure hole—everything was as she’d left it. Hooking a finger through the knothole of the loose plank, she pulled it back to its original position, closing herself off from the alley and the city beyond it.

She took another deep breath, let it out as she dug a match from her pocket and lit the lamp, keeping the flame low even though she’d plugged all the holes in the planking that enclosed her little space. Outside in the square, and on Cherry Street running away from it, nightfall would bring out the roving gangs that frightened even the police, who wouldn’t patrol this district in groups of fewer than six. One night in late fall, Jane had peered out her knothole and seen two men hastily burying a dead sailor beneath a pile of rubbish. The dead man hadn’t been discovered for nearly two weeks, and then only because a pig had scented him rotting beneath the heap and dragged his body out for a feast. Jane had been more careful coming and going at night since then, and she had double-checked that all of the chinks in her wall were well filled; but she was still glad to be here because being here meant she was really free of Riley Steen.

Thinking of Steen gave her a chill. She pulled off her shoes and wrapped a blanket around herself, relaxing on her bed. Her eyes went automatically to her favorite map as she settled against the warm bricks of the grocery’s wall. It was a complete rendering of the United States, extending all the way from the Florida territory north to Maine and west to the Mississippi River and the Republic of Texas. Jane couldn’t read, but she knew her letters and had learned to recognize some of the names on the map. Mississippi was one, with all those s’s in it, and the river snaked like an endless series of esses down to the ocean. Jane imagined it too wide to see across, the buildings of St. Louis barely visible across the expanse of brown water, steamboats blowing their horns up and down, leaving trails like clumsy ducks that couldn’t fly.

I will see the Mississippi someday, she swore for the hundredth time. St. Louis, too, and maybe even all the way across the Rocky Mountains to California or Oregon, following Lewis and Clark and looking out for Indians along the way.

She got another chill at the thought of Indians, and snuggled deeper into her bed of rags. People were saying that Indians had murdered Little Bree and the others because the bodies were mutilated and packed in a canoe. Jane had gathered this from eavesdropping on her way back from the docks, and had gathered also that New Yorkers believed it and were angrily ready to do something about it. She thought of the drunken Indian she’d seen on Pearl Street and wondered if he would end the night buried in a trash heap like that sailor.

Now she was crying again, quietly, a tear itching as it trickled down her scarred cheek. All those children, and how many of their mothers even knew they were gone? And if she’d been among them, her father would not have missed her. She continued to cry, still quiet and mindful of the dangers beyond the loose plank in the wall. Eventually she fell asleep, silently weeping and thinking of her father and brown rivers too wide to cross.

Breaking glass woke
her. She scrambled to her feet in the darkness, listening for another sound from outside. Her lamp had burned out, Jane guessed; at least it hadn’t fallen over, or she wouldn’t have had to worry about her father or her scarred face ever again.

“He came down here. I saw him.”

Jane crept to the knothole, unplugged it, and peered out. Two men walked slowly around behind the grocery. They wore heavy boots, and one a long coat and full beard. The other sweated in a thick woolen sweater, his head shaven under a black watch cap.

The bearded one looked directly at her, and she froze perfectly still, not even daring to blink.

“There he is,” the man said. He drew a knife from within the folds of his coat, and Jane heard a rustle from just to the right of the loose plank. “Ain’t a good time for a redskin to be out alone, friend,” the bald sailor said. “Why, you might be a damned murderer.”

“Our civic duty,” continued the first sailor. “Remove murderers from the streets.” Together they stepped forward.

Jane heard the Indian stand up. “You would do well to leave me alone,” he said slowly in a strange whisper, a sound that buzzed around in Jane’s head after he’d finished speaking. The words sounded odd; she’d never heard an Indian speak before.

They were going to kill him, she knew. It was wrong. They didn’t know who had murdered the children.

But what if they did? What if this Indian had? Why was he outside her burrow, today, with her friends killed just yesterday?

“Leave you alone?” The sailor with the knife took another step toward the Indian, who Jane still couldn’t see. “Redskin, we’re going to get together. We’re gonna get real close.”

Jane gritted her teeth, wishing she could see more through the knothole. She didn’t know what to do; if she made some kind of noise, it might distract the sailors long enough for the Indian to escape, but what if she did that and he turned out to be the murderer? What if he came back for her another time?

“Look here, Dixie,” the bald sailor said. “He ain’t a redskin, he’s a nigger. Look at him.”

Dixie shrugged. “He’s dressed like a redskin; likely acts like one too, don’t you, chief? I’m surprised you didn’t scalp them children, chief; but if you’re just a nigger trying to act like an Indian, I guess that don’t surprise me.”

“I want his coat,” the bald sailor said. “Always did think feathers were nice.”

“Last chance,” the Indian said in that same buzzing whisper.

“Your last chance, chief.” Dixie lunged forward, out of Jane’s field of vision.

She heard a harsh scrape as the knife blade grated across a hard surface, and suddenly the scarred side of her face itched madly. The feeling spread down her arm and across her back until it felt like her skin was trying to fight its way out of her clothes. At the same time, a low growl rose from outside, the sound reminding her of a caged tiger she’d seen once in Battery Park. “Christ, let me go!” Dixie was pleading; then his voice was cut off in a series of sharp cracks.

Something slammed into the loose plank, punching it into Jane’s face and knocking her backward. Blood ran from her nose and she screamed as it began crawling sideways, spreading out over her itching scars. Wherever it touched, the itching subsided.

Outside, the second sailor was thrashing against the wall of the stair, gasping thickly and knocking his head against the loosened planks. Blood crawled into Jane’s hair, down her collar, across her back and into her sleeve. The dying sailor blocked the knothole, leaving her in complete darkness as the fierce itch in her scars began to recede.

Her face hurt, and blood was creeping in her mouth from loosened teeth and a split lip.
Please let him go away,
she thought.
Please let him just leave. And please let them come soon and take away the dead men and not notice me.

Moonlight spilled into the knothole as the bald sailor was lifted away from the wall. She heard his body hit the ground a few feet away, and then heard the Indian tapping gently on the loose planks.
Go away,
Jane mouthed, tasting wriggly blood on her tongue and feeling it slick under her shirt.

“Nanahuatzin,” the Indian said. The plank was pulled aside with a rusty squeak. “Come outside.”

She didn’t respond.

“Come outside and I will stop the blood.”

“You killed them,” Jane said. “You’ll just kill me.”

“If I wanted you dead, little Nanahuatzin, you would be. Come outside now.”

Jane did, slowly, absently scratching at the fading itch and wiping at the blood gluing her shirt and hair to her skin. Once outside she stood. “Why do you call me that?” she said.

“It is your name,” the Indian answered simply. “Given long before you were born.”

“My name is Jane Prescott.” She thought the bald sailor had been right; he did look more Negro than Indian. Blood trickled from one corner of his mouth. Why wasn’t she afraid any more?

The Indian nodded. “Your mother gave you that name. This,” his fingers traced the broken landscape of Jane’s face, “named you again. Nanahuatzin; say it.”

“Nanahuatzin,” Jane repeated. At the Indian’s touch, her nose had stopped bleeding and the itching in her scars had completely gone away.
He killed those two men just to talk to me,
she thought.

“Good.” The Indian swiftly licked the traces of her blood from his fingertips, then held the loose plank aside. “Go and sleep now.”

Jane yawned, her jaw cracking painfully. “Ouch,” she said, and went inside.
Nanahuatzin:
the word fluttered in her head like a moth seeking light.
My name,
she thought. The last thing she heard was the Indian carefully replacing the loose plank.

The year turn
ed
,
and was drawing to a close, but Tlaloc slumbered
yet, having woken briefly and seen the distance of the sun. In this time was the cold and the weakness of the sun.

The Fifth Sun was ending its days, the time approaching when the people would be swallowed by the earth and reborn. Nanahuatzin, the Scabby One, lived; it had touched her and seen the first stirrings of her rejuvenation. As the Fifth Sun set, they would return to Chicomoztoc, the place of origins, and there she would again lie in sacrifice that the world
could be born anew. Then would
Tlaloc return to claim the new world for his own.

To be within the earth again, beneath the roots to watch the work of He Who Makes Things Grow—soon, soon. First the journey to the west, to Chicomoztoc which lay beneath the skies from whence came the
mocihuaquetzqui.
Danger there and it did not know why; what had it to fear from the spirits of pregnant women? Still, it stirred and muttered in the depths of its sleep. The West was the place of danger and redempt
ion, the place where it could w
rap itself in the earth and wait for the drumming of the rains, wrap itself in the earth and hear the voices of the roots praising Tlaloc—

Archie awoke screaming through a mouthful of mud, the sound muffled by the mud clogging his ears, his arms and legs bound … he couldn’t breathe. He tried to heave himself upright, but the weight on his chest forced him back down, crushed the air from his lungs. His hands stayed pinned to his sides as he thrashed back and forth, hearing the plangent sucking of the mud over his own gasping screams. The mud was freezing, pressing down on him more with every bit of air he choked out of his panicked lungs, and he was blind.
Not this way,
Archie thought,
please …

Water sluiced across his face, washing away some of the mud. He heard muted voices, realized he was still screaming out the last of his air; then strong hands caught around the back of his neck, holding his head out of the muck. He gasped, inhaling a tiny breath of air along with huge gobs of mud.

There, easy,
someone was saying, wiping the mud from his eyes, digging at the mud until Archie could loosen his shoulder and drag his arm free.

He reached out, caught something and pulled on it, choking up mud and sucking it back down with a little air. Rolling out of the shallow pit formed by his torso, he coughed like a consumptive before drawing a huge clear whooping breath. Dim light leaked in through slitted windows high in sooty brick walls, and he focused on it, holding the dusty shaft of sunlight in his mind as a sign that he hadn’t gone to hell.

“Breathe slowly, sir. The air will come easier that way and the mud be less apt to follow it.” The voice was smooth, cultured, Southern. The man it came from had once been dressed fashionably, but his suit and collar were now drenched and covered with mud. Wavy dark hair hung over a domed forehead, deep-set basset-hound eyes, a neat mustache.

He saved my life,
Archie thought, beginning to shiver in the near-freezing mud.

“Is this the Brewery?” Archie hauled on the chopped-off tree root he’d blindly seized before, but the mud still encased his feet and lower legs.

His savior began digging again. “Yes, the cellar. Godforsaken place,” he said, freeing Archie’s right leg.

As the left pulled free after it, Archie grimaced at a deep ache in his thigh. He suddenly remembered Royce and his knife, and that dwarf—

The man stopped digging when he saw Archie’s hand move tentatively toward his left ear. “Not much left there, I’m afraid,” he said, shaking his head. “It didn’t fester, though; God knows why.”

Something about that comment struck Archie unexpectedly. He grappled with it for a moment. “Didn’t fester? How long have I been down here?”

“In this cellar? Less than a day, I should think; you don’t seem much the worse for your inhumation. Nothing wrong, in any case, that this won’t cure.” Archie’s rescuer offered him an engraved pewter flask, another sign of either wealth or breeding that seemed incongruous given the surroundings. Archie took it and rinsed the mud from his mouth with a draught of strong whiskey.

“In the Old Brewery, though …” the man paused. “Twenty days, I think. Yes; it’ll be three weeks tomorrow.”

Archie swallowed reflexively. “Three weeks!?”

“That’s right. Difficult to imagine, isn’t it? You were—er, brought here late on the twentieth of December, and—let’s see, it’s just dawn now—today is the eighth of January. Consider that drink my New Year’s toast. Auld lang syne, et cetera.”

He smiled briefly, then his expression changed and he leaned forward, regarding Archie intently. “What’s your name, my resurrected friend?”

“What?” Three weeks. “Prescott. Archie.”

“This is truly a pleasure, Archie. Never before have I encountered a person who has actually undergone this experience. Most, you realize, are not so fortunate as yourself. Something I’ve only read about before. My name is William Wilson. I edit a magazine. Perhaps you’d be willing to offer an account of your ordeal for publication?”

I’m alive,
Archie thought belatedly, surprised both at the fact and at his own surprise, and at the same time it occurred to him how odd it was for this Wilson to solicit him while he was still lying in what should have been his grave. He touched his ear, felt the stubby flap that was all that remained outside the ear canal. The scar tissue was smooth and numb. And his leg—moving it he felt just a faded ghost of agony twitch in the muscles of his thigh. It was nearly healed. Had his ear actually burst into flame after being torn free?

He remembered the feather talisman and dug into his pants, forgetting about Wilson in his sudden panic. Just as quickly he calmed, feeling it still nestled in his groin, quietly keeping time with his heartbeat. It was a real artifact remaining amid nightmarish memories, and it meant that whatever he remembered must really have happened; a surge of relief welled up in Archie’s still-heaving chest as he realized that he hadn’t lost his mind.

Embarrassed suddenly, Archie noticed Wilson again, but his bedraggled savior hadn’t moved his gaze from Archie’s face. Wilson’s eyes, sunken and glittering in his pallid face, tracked Archie’s every motion.

“Why didn’t they just kill me?” Archie said. He didn’t really expect Wilson to know, but something about the silence was beginning to unnerve him.

“Who, the upstairs denizens?” Wilson laughed, the cultured gentility of the sound jarring in the squalid gloom. “They’re mostly born in Old World hamlets, you know, and taboos against interfering with madmen are still very much adhered to there. After seeing what happened with your ear, and watching you thrash about for a few days, they decided that you weren’t to be touched. Either you would revive on your own, or God would leave your possessions behind when he finally took your soul.

“On Christmas Day, I’m told, you made quite a display. Actually got up and walked, then settled yourself in a privy trench and made rowing motions as if you were Charon ferrying yourself to see if Cerberus would let you through. All the while you mumbled incoherencies in some foreign tongue.” Wilson held up a hand as if in warning. “I repeat this only as hearsay, of course,” he continued, “but were it not true, you most likely would have been buried down here shortly after your Dead Rabbit antagonists left you. In any case, your Christmas actions were enough to earn you nearly two weeks of precarious amnesty, despite the fact that you barely breathed during that time. Eventually, however, greed overcame traditional taboos and the rabble approached you again last evening. Holding a mirror to your lips, they shouted at you in a terrible cacophony of languages, but your only response was an indecipherable whisper and a quieting breath that even I initially took to be your last. This I saw happen, having returned from a short holiday, and I stood by as they scooped a shallow pit from the mud softened by our recent thaw; but as they looted your somnolent body I was possessed of an inexplicable intuition that some spark of life in you endured. That is why I kept vigil here tonight; I could not prevent them from interring you, but to be buried alive is the worst fate that can befall a man. It was incumbent upon me as a fellow human being to be absolutely certain that you had departed.

“As, we both now know, you have not,” Wilson finished with an odd smile. Archie grew more uncomfortable as the focus of the man’s probing gaze. It was bizarre, considering what he’d been through—beaten and mutilated, stabbed and left for dead, buried alive after three weeks feverish in the Old Brewery—but there it was. Something about this Wilson made Archie profoundly uneasy.

Did he do it?
Archie thought suddenly, even though he had no earthly reason to suspect such a thing. Did he bury me alive … why? Just so he could dig me up again and get a story out of it for his bloody magazine? Even Bennett wouldn’t do that.

“Mr. Wilson,” Archie began, handing the flask back, “what you did—I am in your debt. Thank you, I can never repay you, but now I’ve got to go home, I’m starving—”

Wilson cut off Archie’s rambling speech with a luminous smile at the word
starving.
“Just as I expected,” he said, rummaging in the pockets of his coat. “I’ve brought a sandwich in anticipation of your appetite.”

Archie devoured the still-warm roast beef and bread in four bites, forcing it down faster than he could chew.

“God.” Archie swallowed the last mouthful and sucked at his fingers, ignoring the mud that still caked them. “Thank you again.”

Wilson nodded, and again offered Archie his flask. “Certainly Archie,” he said, hesitating the tiniest bit, “you’ll pardon my intrusion, but I’m afraid your home has been colonized by a family of black Irish fresh from the auld sod. I doubt they’re inclined to return it at this juncture.”

Archie paused to assimilate this news. He should have expected it, if three weeks had actually passed while he was senseless in the brewery. But he hadn’t, and strangely it almost seemed as if Wilson had. Archie had the feeling that Wilson was somehow guiding him along, watching his responses to each new bit of information. What else did he know that he wasn’t letting on?

“I can do you another favor, Archie,” Wilson continued. “Your house belongs to another, and I’m relatively certain given the circumstances that your employment has also passed into other hands.”

He paused, wiping distractedly at his jacket; again Archie felt he was being led by the nose. Of course Bennett wouldn’t wait three weeks on the off chance that a suddenly unreliable employee would just as suddenly become dependable again. It wasn’t strange that it had happened; what was strange was Wilson’s seeming anticipation of it, and the methodical way in which he dispensed the news.

Like an experimenter, Archie thought. He considered his situation. Barnum would surely know about his watchman’s gruesome murder, and so would Bennett. But if Archie were suddenly to arrive after three weeks, mutilated and spouting gibberish about living mummies who swallowed beating hearts … the newsman was not known for his discretion when it came to sources, but he wasn’t likely to believe anything from Archie Prescott at this point.

And obviously Wilson had known that.

“What do you want?” Archie said.

“I can find you lodging, Archie, and employment sufficient to meet your needs, if slightly sordid. What I want in return is a simple answer to a simple question.” Wilson leaned forward again, peering at Archie with unnerving intensity.

“When you were feverish these last three weeks … no, never mind that. While you were interred here, dead by any known standard, cooling and breathless—” Wilson began to grow visibly agitated. He calmed himself, placing his hands flat on the ground.

“When you were buried here,
where was your soul?”

The ant
s had
returned with the brief thaw and were marching in a strange pattern on Riley Steen’s desk blotter. He watched as a silhouette emerged from the pattern, a reclining figure that stood and moved its arms in a hypnotic semaphore. Furious, he pounded a fist into the middle of the pattern, crushing several of the ants. Their pattern broken, the remainder milled aimlessly, wandering eventually over the edges of the oaken desktop and down to the floor.

He stood and faced his bookshelf, regarding the leather bindings in hopes that they would inspire him. Tomorrow it would be three weeks since the chacmool effected its surprisingly resourceful escape from Barnum’s museum, and in that time Steen’s eyes and ears around the city had reported only two killings that could reasonably be attributed to the avatar. Other than the children in the canoe, of course.

That incident disturbed Steen because while the calendar had been properly aligned, the canoe ritual should not have been possible in the chacmool’s newly awakened state. All those lives, taken and carefully focused … that it had happened at all led Steen to a disturbing conclusion: The avatar was more powerful on its own than he’d expected. It was performing the proper rituals and staying out of sight in a foreign city after more than three hundred years of hibernation. But how was it feeding? Was it able to maintain itself on only two lives in the space of three weeks?

Steen tapped a finger along his bookshelf until he located Bernal Diaz’s
Historia Verdadera de la Conquista de la Nuevo Espana.
He returned to his desk with it and paged through it without paying the slightest attention to its contents. Damn Archie Prescott, he thought. If one can damn a man already dead.

It would have been soothing to blame all of his misfortunes on the dear departed, but Steen had only a sporadic talent for self-delusion. The truth was that the chacmool might well have escaped even without Prescott’s annoying diversion. The sight of the Rabbit perimeter guard Steen had set up, stumbling into the alley festooned with freshly sprouting corn, was good for a chuckle, but it was also clear evidence that the chacmool was significantly more powerful than he had assumed. But you knew that, he told himself. Stop thinking in circles.

The goal remained the same: with the chacmool harnessed and young Jane Prescott properly sacrificed in her role as Nanahuatzin, Steen could assure himself a powerful position in—what? The Sixth Sun? No; however useful the old gods were, their names and concepts were at bottom pitifully naive. The return of a living Tlaloc would create more than simply another in a series of epochs. It would be a New World, a Kingdom of Earth, and Riley Steen would be kingmaker. It was a position worthy of him.

There were obstacles, of course. The Tammany machine was the most obvious avenue through which to transform Tlaloc’s return into real political power, but it had fallen on hard times and withdrawn to consolidate its hold on local politics. This past fall the sachems had been in a fight for their political lives, barely managing to retain their influence in Albany. But that was a quibble, really. With God on their side, as the old saying went…

And what a deliciously ironic reversal that would be, to use the society—founded on the ideals of Tamanend himself—to finally strike the decisive blow against the Pathfinders on behalf of the Snake. Aaron Burr would have been proud.

Steen chuckled, but his mind was already moving on to more serious problems. He knew the whereabouts of neither the chacmool nor Jane Prescott, and his inability to locate either had to be a result of his bungling of the operation at Barnum’s.

Or, perhaps, Prescott’s bungling. None of the old codices offered any insight into the meaning of the fiery, knife-wielding Rabbit that had risen that night. Ometeotl’s Eye had been open, that much was certain—an inexplicable occurrence on a night when Tlaloc should have held sway. And to complicate matters further, signs in the Smoke Mirror insisted that the chacmool had been in contact—
actual physical contact
—with Jane Prescott on Christmas Day. Yet she was still alive.

Again, too many variables, too many unanswerable questions. And he hadn’t even stopped to wonder about the whereabouts of Tamanend’s mask, which John Diamond must have absconded with. Or been killed attempting to acquire.

God damn all dead men,
Steen thought. Prescott and Diamond and Burr and all the rest.

A sharp knock on the study door interrupted Steen’s train of thought. “Come in,” he called irritably, sranding to greet the visitor.

Police Lieutenant Ambrose Winkler entered and shut the door. “Afternoon, Steen,” he said.

“To what do I owe this pleasure, Lieutenant?” Steen asked, returning the
Historia
to its place on the shelf. He gestured at the lapel of Winkler’s coat, where a silver star was usually prominent. “This visit is for reasons other than your law-enforcement responsibilities, I take it.”

“Riley, some devilish strange things are happening in my district.” Winkler’s jurisdiction encompassed the First through Sixth Wards of the city, stretching from City Hall south to Battery Park. He enjoyed close ties with Mayor Morris and therefore Tammany Hall, and was Steen’s primary source of information about the Society’s activities. Once Steen had occupied a position of considerable power in the Society, but certain events had led to an estrangement.

“New York is a strange city, Ambrose,” Steen said. He sat behind his desk and motioned Winkler to the wingbacked chair in front of it. “Why don’t you tell me precisely what you mean?”

“All right. Before last night, how long had it been since we had a thaw?”

“Don’t pester me with circumlocution, Ambrose. What are you getting at?”

“Almost three weeks,” Winkler continued. “A few days before Christmas it warmed right up and I could have sworn I saw buds on some of the trees along Broadway. I remember it because my children were worried there’d be no snow for Christmas. But it’s been cold since then.”

“Yes. It has,” Steen said with exaggerated forbearance.

“Right. Well, last night I was called to the scene of a murder on Front Streer. Chilled my very bones, Riley. Four men, all sailors on leave, lined up in a row with their heads crushed flat and the skin peeled from their bodies and hung on them like suits of clothes. Now right away I thought of you, Riley, and I kept it out of the penny sheets. But I can’t keep ignoring things like this. You and I go back a long time, and I saw some ungodly strange things during that business with Burr in Kentucky; but this is different. What do you know about it?”

Steen wondered how much he could tell Winkler. He’d anticipated that the chacmool would be more active every twentieth day—that was in accordance with the old calendar, under which every twentieth day was sacred to Tlaloc. But the flaying ceremony was done to propitiate Xipe Totec, the Flayed One, a minor deity whose province seemed to be seeds. Perhaps, Steen thought, the various Aztec gods were simply different names assigned to a very few essential divinities. It was a thought he’d had before. Like Xiuhtecuhtli and the Old God Ometeotl, Tlaloc and Xipe Totec could very well be the same god once the nomenclature was properly dissected.

“You’re holding out on me, Steen,” Winkler said angrily. “I’m not one to interfere in another man’s business, but you had damned well better tell me something so I can protect the people of this city.”

“Please, Ambrose. Spare me the platitudes.” Steen rose. “If I told everything, it would be much more than you wanted to know. I will, however, tell you this: if you wish to protect your citizenry, you will find some pretext to keep them either locked in their houses or about in large groups twenty days from today.”

He guided Winkler to the door. “On the twenty-eighth, very unusual things are likely to happen. It would be best if you remained unaware of them; failing that, avoid them.”

“If something like this happens again—” Winkler began to protest.

“I’ll talk to you in three weeks, Ambrose. Don’t press this.”

The lieutenant started to leave, then stopped in the doorway.

“One other thing, Riley. One of my sergeants mentioned seeing a young girl with a scarred face on Christmas, gawking at that business down on the docks.”

Steen nodded and smiled slightly in spite of himself. Just as he’d thought, she was drawn to the chacmool’s activities.

“What does she have to do with this?” Winkler still looked upset, but a conniving tone was beginning to creep into his voice.

“Just pick her up if you can. Otherwise, three weeks. Happy New Year, Ambrose.” Steen shut the door.

He stood in at his study window until Winkler crossed Hudson Street to his waiting carriage. There were plans to be made. If the chacmool kept its schedule, the twenty-eighth would be Steen’s next opportunity to capture it and set his plans back on track. But the twenty-eighth would fall under 2-Rabbit, the single most unlucky sign in the old calendar. Trying to get anything done on a day 2-Rabbit would be maddening at best, and possibly fatal if the
Tochtli’s
pranks turned mean-spirited. Perhaps it would be best to wait for a more auspicious signal from the heavens.

Winkler was a bumbler. If he managed to collect the girl, which was unlikely, things would proceed more smoothly on that front, but the lieutenant would be constantly underfoot. It was an exchange Steen wasn’t sure he was willing to make, but plans had to be laid for every contingency. Plans were the root of success; history taught that. Improvisers made brief appearances on the pages of history, but careful planning was the stuff of which enduring value was made.

Damn these clouds, Steen thought. The Mirror was blind on cloudy days, and today its vision would have been especially useful. But all things considered, the situation was far from hopeless. He knew when the chacmool would act next, and he had a strong intuition that Jane Prescott would not be far away when it did.