City of Dreams (26 page)

“A few years ago,” said Arsenault, “hitting the government for a bill for one-point-four billion would have seemed excessive. Now, we’re bankrupt anyway. So what’s the difference?”

“So”—Peter looked from Arsenault to Magee—“you want me to find a box of bonds? In twenty-eight square miles of Manhattan? Any idea of where I start?”

Owen T. Magee pulled a sheet of paper from the briefcase on the floor beside his chair. “Before we go further, a signature.”

“Signature?”

“We’re about to offer you sensitive information. So . . . a contract to outline your responsibilities, including a nondisclosure agreement.”

“Nondisclosure? Of what?”

“Of your activities. You will use your skills and the information we’ve gathered to find the bonds, take your pay, and stay out of the press.”

“So Kathy Flynn doesn’t count as a member of the Fourth Estate?” said Evangeline.

Arsenault gave her that smile again. It was more like looking down his nose. “Don’t you worry about Kathy.”

Peter almost laughed. He knew that Evangeline was worrying more about Kathy than the box of bonds. He picked up the contract and looked at it briefly. “Usually, if I go after something for a client, it’s a partnership. I get half, once we broker the sale.”

“Or you take a thousand dollars a day and expenses.” Owen T. Magee offered the pen. “We’ve researched your fees.”

Peter began to read the contract.

“Don’t worry,” said Magee. “It’s taken from the standard agreement on your own Web site, with the nondisclosure clause and a few other things added.”

Evangeline threw her napkin onto the plate. “Don’t do it, Peter.”

He knew she was still angry about the other things, but she was right. He put down the contract. “If I take on a client, I reserve the right to negotiate any fee.”

“So what do you want?” asked Arsenault.

“Fifty percent of what I find. As I said, I’m the best.”

“Seven hundred million? Not likely.”

Evangeline looked around at the furnishings and the art. And she knew exactly what to say to Peter. “Think of the treasures you could save with that kind of money.”

“True,” said Peter. “Unless the Supreme Court ruling goes aganst the bondholders. Then this whole thing falls apart.” He stood, walked around the table, and slid out Evangeline’s chair. “I’m interested, gentlemen. I’ll read the contract. You reconsider your offer.”

“You have until four o’clock to accept,” said Owen T. Magee.

“Otherwise,” said Arsenault, “we may have to withdraw protection.”

“Protection?” Peter didn’t like the sound of that. “From whom?”

“The possibility of making one-point-four billion dollars in an afternoon tends to bring out all sorts of people.”

“Who’s protecting us? Joey Berra?”

“I have absolutely no idea who that is,” said Owen T. Magee.

Yeah, thought Evangeline, and Nixon didn’t know anything about Watergate.

“If we don’t hear from you by four,” said Owen T. Magee, “watch the four thirty news. The police may learn the identity of the man in the Yankees hat depicted on the cover of today’s tabloids. We see a distinct resemblance to you, Mr. Fallon.”

T
HE RIDE DOWN
the elevator was passed in silence.

So was the walk back to Evangeline’s apartment. And the passage through the foyer didn’t generate the usual jokes with Jackie.

In the apartment, Evangeline went into the bedroom and slammed the door.

So Peter poured a cup of coffee and sat down to read his e-mails.

There was one from Antoine, with an attachment. He opened it immediately, read it, then went to the door of her bedroom and said, “I’m sorry, Evangeline.”

“I’m being pissed at you, Peter. Come back later.”

He waited a moment and said, “It was business. She offered information about Arsenault. I had to have it. Business is business.”

She pulled open the door and glared at him. Her eyes weren’t puffy. She hadn’t been crying. That wasn’t her style. “Did it help?”

“Seeing her?”

“No. The information. Did it help this business?”

“No, but Antoine did. Let me show you.” He walked back to the computer.

She stood in the doorway a moment, then she decided that she had made her point. “All right. What do we have?”

“The site of Zabar’s, as it looked in 1893.”

On the screen was a picture of an ancient wood-frame house with pillars, cupola, and tall oak tree shading the dormers. There was trash strewn about. A scruffy dog was looking at the camera. And the headline:
OLD DAGGETT TAVERN TO BE TORN DOWN
. The article described the growth of the Upper West Side, and the plans for the Broadway block between Eightieth and Eighty-first. The owner had hired a company called Riley Wrecking.

“Why did you want information about this?” she asked.

“Someone called L. R. writes a letter from this house to Gil Walker, the guy who ends up with the finial, about a mahogany box containing the blessings of freedom. And his girlfriend is mauled to death outside this house a few weeks after he dies.”

Evangeline told Peter about the picture the bag lady showed to Delancey. “He said it was of an old house on the West Side . . . a fancy estate in Washington’s time, an eyesore in Lincoln’s, torn down in Teddy Roosevelt’s.”

“I think I’ll have Antoine look into Riley Wrecking.”

“I think you should still be trying to find Delancey . . . or the bag lady.”

“They’ll find us, if they want to.”

“If they’re alive, you mean.” Evangeline went into the kitchen and poured herself a cup of coffee.

Peter said, “I also don’t think she’s a bag lady. Based on what the Historical Society librarian told me, she’s probably tall, blond, and has a taste for Jimmy Choo.”

“The bag lady was stooped over.”

“It could have been an act.”

“But she wasn’t blond.”

“It could have been a wig.”

Evangeline came in and sat at the table next to him. “She might even have been covering red hair.”

“Red hair as in Kathy Flynn?”

“Mmm-hmm.” Evangeline looked into her cup.

“Come to think of it, Kathy
is
tall, and she wears Jimmy Choo’s.”

“So you looked at her legs?”

“I looked at her shoes . . . and her legs.”

“If I catch you looking at her ass, I’ll close the bedroom door and lock it”—Evangeline brought her lips close to his ear—“on your dick.”

“How about, I won’t go near her unless you’re with me?”

“Can I bring my gun?”

“Carrying concealed gun without a license is illegal in New York City. Otherwise, I might be carrying myself right now.”

He typed a message to Antoine, telling him to research Riley Wrecking, which according to the old newspaper article, operated out of the livery stable at Eleventh Avenue and Forty-third Street.

She looked over his shoulder. “The old Hell’s Kitchen neighborhood.”

EIGHT

July 1893

T
IMOTHY
R
ILEY ONCE ASKED
his father how Hell’s Kitchen got its name.

His father said that no one quite knew, but there were plenty of stories.

Some claimed that a newspaperman coined the term for a tenement on Fifty-fourth Street. Others believed that two cops on a bad corner came up with it. A few even credited Davy Crockett, who once said that the Irish he had met across America were all fine upstanding folk, except for the Irish of New York, who acted as if they all ate their dinner in Hell’s Kitchen.

The truth was that after a walk from Thirty-fourth Street to Fifty-ninth, anywhere between Eighth Avenue and the river, past the rat-infested tenements and shanties, past the warehouses and train yards, the docks and slaughterhouses, the dram shops and clip joints and gang hangouts where a hundred crimes were planned or committed every day, a Hindu from Calcutta could have come up with the name.

And yes, Hell’s Kitchen was mostly Irish, but Italian and German immigrants lived there, too. So did a few Jews. Even the Negroes had their corners.

And the worst of them engaged regularly in the robberies, beatings, riots, extortions, turf wars, and general troublemaking that made Hell’s Kitchen what it was. But most who lived there lived lawfully and worked hard and could not afford to live anyplace better.

Timothy Riley lived with his family on the top floor of a tenement on Forty-eighth Street, half a block from the Ninth Avenue El.

His mother, Mary, kept house and took in sewing.

His father, Richard, known as Six-Pound Dick, ran a salvage company called Riley Wrecking, comprised of a wagon, two horses, and a beer-drinking brother-in-law.

Timothy shared a bed with his brother, Eddie, who had lost a foot to a moving train on Eleventh Avenue and now spent most of his time playing the harmonica and looking out the window.

They were Irish twins, siblings born within a year to Irish Catholic parents who were supposedly too ignorant—or too religious—to protect themselves from their own urges. Timothy was a month shy of his fourteenth birthday. Eddie had just turned thirteen.

And every morning, the Ninth Avenue El woke them up.

To Timothy, a track that ran two stories above the street, all the way from the tip of the island to the top, was not one of the wonders of age, as it had been to his father, but a necessary thing that blocked the sun and spread coal smoke and noise every time a train passed.

And the tenement in which he awoke was not a horrible place where families of five or six lived in a two tiny rooms and a kitchen, where three outhouses and a single water spigot served a whole building, where a single case of typhoid could wipe out a whole family and then a whole block. It was home.

And when he was at home, Timothy liked to read. He did not reveal this to friends, since it might make him appear weak, and in Hell’s Kitchen, appearing weak was worse than being weak. But every Thursday, he would go down to the New York Society Library, take out as many books as he could, bring them home, and read beside the front window. Whether he read Sir Walter Scott or Ned Buntline or Shakespeare, he would always be carried to another world.

But he also read the newspapers, to know what was happening in his own world. So he knew about the great panic.

For twenty years, Americans had been building railroads. They had built them across every state and into every city, and then into every small town, farm town, mill town, and mining town from Maine to California. They had built and built until one day, they had built too much. There were simply too many railroads.

So one of them went broke, the Pennsylvania and Reading. “And like a train whistle echoing across the prairie,” the paper said, “the warning rolled from coast to coast. The boom was over. The bubble had burst.” Depositors rushed their banks, investors sold their stocks, Europeans redeemed their dollars for American gold.

They called it the Panic of 1893.

Times got tough, then tougher.

That was the story on Wall Street and all across America.

But in Hell’s Kitchen, New York, Timothy Riley hardly noticed, because in Hell’s Kitchen, New York, times were always tough, and the facts of a boy’s existence were usually simple, sometimes stark.

If Timothy’s life had any complication, it was this: he awoke every morning with a dick as stiff as the handle of a ball-peen hammer. He had heard enough talk among his friends and watched enough dogs doing the dance in the street to know what this was all about. And it was not unpleasant, but it could be embarrassing, especially if it happened during the day, or whenever he thought about Doreen Walsh, the neighbor girl whose chest had recently expanded so nicely. And sometimes, it even happened at Mass, because Doreen sat in the next pew, where Timothy’s mind might easily wander into what the priests called an occasion of sin.

But every Sunday, Timothy and his family dressed in their best and walked up to Fifty-first Street, to Sacred Heart Church, the finest building that any of them had ever been allowed to enter through the front door . . . without paying an admission.

The church, said the boy’s father, was where the rich and the common mingled as nothing more than men, for the Lord saw little difference between them.

T
HE PEOPLE OF
Hell’s Kitchen, however, saw plenty of difference between themselves and the Rileys, because Dick Riley had a reputation. He had earned it five years earlier, when a gang set themselves up around Forty-sixth Street and Ninth Avenue just as he was setting himself up in business.

The leader of the gang, a scrawny little miscreant by the name of Slick McGillicuddy, told Dick Riley that it would be in his best interest to pay protection money to the Irish Niners, or the Niners would make life miserable for the Riley family.

The father later told his son that he considered going to Tammany Hall for help but decided instead that a man should look such a problem straight in the eye. So he told Slick McGillicuddy to go to hell.

The next morning, Dick Riley went down to the livery stable and found his horses dead in their stalls, their throats cut and a river of blood flowing out onto the street.