City of Dreams (39 page)

Tim Riley looked at the address and realized that George Washington Plunkitt had just given him the chance of a lifetime, school or not.

But Plunkitt wasn’t done. He turned to Eddie. “What about you?”

Eddie looked down at his foot.

“You’re not feelin’ sorry for yourself, are you? A boy with your talent? I hear you play the harmonica.”

“Yes, sir,” said Eddie.

“Do you have it with you?”

Eddie reached for his pocket.

Just then, a police detective walked down the corridor, a burly man with a silver badge on his lapel. Was this it? Had they figured out that Eddie killed Dinny Boyle? Were they coming to arrest him here instead of in front of their mother?

“Good morning, Inspector,” said Plunkitt. “Meet the Riley brothers.”

The inspector gave the squint-eye. “You boys walkin’ the straight and narrow?”

“The inspector works the Lower East Side,” explained Plunkitt. “Here to testify in the Swartzkopf case.”

The inspector tugged at his mustache. “Man took an axe to his wife, chopped her into little pieces, everything but her legs. He threw the rest of her in the river but he kept her legs. When we asked him why, he said the legs was the only part of her he liked. He’ll hang. So walk the straight and narrow lads. Always the straight and narrow.” Then he went into the men’s room.

Tim felt his brother let out a long gasp of breath.

Plunkitt smiled. “So, Eddie Riley, are you ready to walk the straight and narrow?”

“I only got one foot. How can I walk the straight and narrow on one foot?”

“You got spirit. I’ll give you that.” Plunkitt chuckled. “I need a boy to help me in Washington Hall. Keep things straight, sweep up, go to rallies. And when I need a bit of music to lighten the mood, I’ll order up a ditty. How does that sound?”

“So long’s I don’t have to dance no jigs.”

“I’ll take that as a yes.” Plunkitt pulled out a cigar, bit the tip. “Now, about that girl who sang at your father’s funeral . . .”

The boys looked at each other.

Plunkitt leaned forward. “Which one of you is sweet on her?”

Neither boy spoke.

Plunkitt’s dark eyes danced with amusement. “The both of ye’s, eh? Two brothers sweet on the same girl . . . not a good combination. But you’re young. You’ll figure it out. Or she will. Tell her I want her to sing regular at funerals and rallies.”

“Yes, sir,” they both said.

“Now, that harmonica, Eddie. Have you played it on the stoop the last few days?”

“My brother won’t let me.”

“Good counsel.” Plunkitt held out his hand. “I’ll take it.”

“You’ll take it? But my pa give it to me. How come?”

The men’s room door opened and out came the police inspector.

Plunkitt gave him a nod and watched him go off. Then he turned back to the boys: “The only thing missin’ from Dinny’s pocket was a harmonica he took from you. I persuaded the coppers to leave you alone till you bury your uncle. Told ’em it was inhuman to be questionin’ lads whose Pa and uncle died so close. But after the funeral—”

“The coppers’ll come?” asked Eddie.

“As sure as Republicans cheatin’ in the next election. So we don’t want ’em findin’ any wind instruments. I’ll buy you a new one when you come to work. That way, when somebody asks if it’s the one that Dinny Boyle took, you can say it ain’t . . . and you won’t be lyin’.”

Eddie pulled the harmonica out, gave it a final toot, and put it into Plunkitt’s hand.

Plunkitt slipped it into his coat pocket and said. “The last bit of business . . . do you boys know where the where the rest of them bonds are?”

“No, sir,” said Tim.

“We sure wish we did,” said Eddie.

Plunkitt ruminated on their answer for a moment, then shrugged as if it didn’t much matter, one way or the other. “Well, be off with you, but remember what I told you. This is a grand and imperial city, and it will reward you, if you make the right choices.”

T
HE BROTHERS STEPPED
out of the courthouse on Chambers Street. The humidity had faded. The north wind had brought in air clear and crisp.

Doreen Walsh came out from behind one of the pillars and said, “Well?”

“We’re in the clear,” said Tim.

“Yeah,” said Eddie. “And we all got jobs. Even you.”

“Thanks for not snitchin’,” said Tim.

“Well, some day, you boys can pay me back,” she said.

“How?” asked Tim.

“You can help make me a headliner.” Doreen spun a little pirouette on the steps of the Tweed courthouse, another grand and imperial space in their city of dreams.

ELEVEN

Wednesday Night

“W
HAT WE KNOW
”—Peter Fallon was talking on the cell phone—“is that this Timothy Riley of Forty-eighth Street somehow got his hands on at least one of these bonds in 1893 and sold it J. P. Morgan . . . for ten bucks.”

“J. P. Morgan? That’s cool. What’s your evidence?” asked Antoine.

“Old New York state bond ledgers. A receipt from the Morgan Library.”

Peter and Evangeline were walking down Broadway, from the Flatiron Building to Delancey’s Rarities. Peter had suggested a cab, but the downtown traffic had stopped moving, and Evangeline needed some fresh air anyway. Anyone would after a meeting with Owen T. Magee, which followed a taxi ride with Kathy Flynn, which came after a shooting in the Harvard Club.

Peter didn’t argue. He didn’t think that anyone would make a move against them on the street. They hadn’t seen or heard from Joey Berra since the morning. As for the supposed Russians . . . if they were interested, it wouldn’t matter if Peter and Evangeline were walking down Broadway or sitting in a taxi or hiding in her apartment.

The walk to Delancey’s led through the heart of the old Ladies’ Mile.

Romance had long since fled this stretch of furniture outlets, delis, and storefronts-to-let, but a few Gilded Age jewels still glimmered, those seven-and eight-story buildings that gave a street a human scale and a bit of fancy with their expanses of plate glass, their cast-iron pillars and trim-work, their turrets and mansard roofs.

So Evangeline walked with her head up.

Peter walked with his head on a swivel. Best be vigilant, whether he expected trouble or not.

Antoine was saying, “Does the Morgan Library own the bond now?”

“Yes,” answered Peter. “Number 2510, which was the first number in the series bought by a woman named Loretta Rogers.”

“There’s your L. R.,” said Antoine. “Do you think the Morgan Library has the rest?”

“Find out,” said Peter. “Morgan liked collecting early American material, autographs, documents, papers relating to Alexander Hamilton and the beginnings of American finance. And these bonds are like the birth certificates.”

“I’ll search Corsair. That’s their online catalogue,” said Antoine. “They named it after ol’ J. P.’s yacht. Of course, if they held a lot of these bonds, you’d think that some lawyer would have filed an amicus brief in support of the Avid position.”

“If I had one of those bonds, I’d be filing, fool. A win on all counts means a hundred-dollar bond from 1780 is worth seven-point-four million today.”

“Which means a big bonus for the research assistant who helps find them.”

“Big enough that you can get your doctorate and your father will brag on you all day long,” said Peter. “But not only does Arsenault need to win the main point, he needs to win the compound interest argument, too.”

“So what do we follow?”

“Timothy Riley. If he had one of the bonds, he probably had a lot of them. Riley Wrecking must have found them when they tore the house down . . . in a wall or under the floor or someplace.”

“Either that or one blew off the top of somebody else’s pile and he picked it up.”

“In that case—”

“We
fucked
, as they say in the ’hood.”

Peter noticed Evangeline stopping. He put Antoine on hold and said, “What?”

She was looking up at a beige-colored fantasy castle that wrapped the corner of Twentieth and Broadway. A lot of buildings around it looked old and city-grimed, but this one had been painted and polished and restored with fiberglass patches on the facade, so it was worth a stop.

She said, “This was once the home of Lord and Taylor. Imagine what it must have been like to shop here back in the day.”

“What I remember,” he said, “is the strip joint on the first floor back in the nineties.”

“A strip joint? Here?”

“Time marches on . . . and sometimes it stumbles.”

“At least they replaced the strip joint with a storefront. And why do you know so much about strip joints?”

Peter got back to Antoine. He said that if they didn’t find the bonds by the time the court handed down its decision on Friday, he doubted that they ever would, because everybody in America who had an attic and a box of old family papers would be searching for New Emission Bonds. On the other hand, if the court denied the claim, the bonds would be worth no more than their value as collector’s items.

“So . . . Timothy Riley?” said Antoine.

“Track him through whatever sources you can find. Do it fast.”

Peter and Evangeline were approaching Union Square. Someone was shouting into a bullhorn about genocide or fratricide or fries on the side. They couldn’t tell because at another corner, another group was holding a rally for immigration reform, and another bullhorn was echoing off the buildings: “For or against?” “Put up a fence?” “Send ’em all back.” “Let ’em all in.”

Peter and Evangeline hurried through the crowd, with Peter still on the phone. “Another thing,” he said to Antoine, “you once introduced me to a cousin from Harlem.”

“Cousin Jonas? Scarborough Security of Harlem?”

“Can you put in a call to him, tell him I might contact him?”

“Sure.” And Antoine chuckled.

“What?”

“Sometimes, you call and say ‘go and find out this and this and this,’ and I find it and everything’s cool and we all make money. Then, once in a while, you add, ‘oh and find me a guy who can kick some ass.’ Sounds to me like you need a New York ass-kicker. You want me to come down, too?”

“No. You have classes. Stay in school.”

“Yeah. A mind is a terrible thing to waste.”

At the south edge of Union Square, they crossed Fourteenth Street, then they got back onto Broadway.

Two blocks south, they passed the Strand Bookstore, promising “eighteen miles of new, used, rare, and out of print books.” Peter had never measured the shelves, but he had spent hundreds of hours and thousands of dollars along those eighteen miles. He loved just walking past the store and looking at the famous red façade wrapping the corner. It reminded him that some things lasted, even when time stumbled ahead.

At Tenth Street, in front of Grace Church, they turned toward Fourth Avenue and the stretch known as Book Row, once the heart of the New York used book trade. Few of the stores had survived. Not even Delancey could have made the rent from what he sold out of Rarities, except that he owned the building on the east side of Fourth between Tenth and Eleventh.

It was a new law tenement from the early 1900s, three windows wide, with a big rusty fire escape above the entrance. Rarities occupied the first two floors. Delancey lived on the second two. And he rented the upper flats. The building to the right was a 1920’s apartment house. The building to the left was a 1960’s one-story box with a sign outside:
WONG’S DRY CLEANING. SAME DAY SERVICE
.

The east side of the street was in transition. The west side had arrived in the twenty-first century. So the east side had storefronts, awnings, activity. The west side had . . . high-rises. Peter and Evangeline stopped under the twenty-foot trees in front of a twenty-story apartment house and looked across at Delancey’s Rarities. Not much foot traffic on this side of the street, even at dinnertime. Plenty of uptown auto traffic, though.

A sign hanging on Delancey’s door said,
CLOSED
, but Peter could see two shadows near the desk inside. Was Delancey one of them?

“Go ahead,” said Evangeline. “Call him.”

Peter did, listened to the recording, and said, “Come on, Delancey, pick up. I’ll be pissed if you dragged us down here for nothing.” Then he peered across the street.

“Should we go over and knock?” said Evangeline.

“There’s something dicey about this,” said Peter. Then he felt the cell phone again, buzzing a text message from Delancey.

I’m here. Come on over.

Evangeline said, “Okay. Let’s go.”

Peter texted back:

Not till I see you or hear your voice.

“I guess it’s good to be suspicious,” said Evangeline, “but he must be in there.”

“So I’ll call him and tell him to show himself.” Peter opened the phone again.

Then he felt something poke into his back. “Save dime.”

“Save dime? What the—”

“Do not turn.” The accent was Russian. “It is cattle prod. Power mite model. Small but forty-five hundred volt. Hurt like motherfucker.”

Evangeline did not recognize this one, but she did notice a tattoo on his neck. And stars tattooed on his knuckles. She’d seen
Eastern Promises
. She knew the tattoos all meant something. And stars were bad. Stars meant this guy knew exactly what to do with a cattle prod.