City of Glory (25 page)

The door of the taproom next to the countinghouse swung open, and a body was hurled into the street. “No drink without coin, you miserable bastard. You can die of thirst for all I care.”

The ejected man slid on his rump just short of Blakeman’s boots. Blakeman extended a leg to kick the drunk out of his path, then stopped.

“Got to find Gornt Blakeman,” the seaman muttered. “Lives around here. They told me…” He stopped speaking long enough to vomit into the gutter, then wipe his mouth with the back of his hand. “You’ll find Blakeman on Hanover Street, they said.”

“Mr. Blakeman to you. What do you want with him? What’s your name?”

“Tammy Tompkins, that’s me. Genuine war hero. Sailed with Admiral Perry, I did. Did my share. More’n my share. Had enough o’ guns and blood and sawing lads in half while they was still alive.”

“Yes, well it appears you’ve had enough of something.” The man was filthy, badly cut up, and his checked shirt was in tatters. Blakeman had seen such wounds before. “You’ve had a taste of the cat, probably well deserved, but what’s that to do with Mr. Blakeman?”

“Sailed all the way from Canton on his ship, I did. And stayed aboard on his personal request. Now I got to find him.”

Blakeman leaned down, ignoring the sour stench of vomit and sweat. It had been Captain O’Toole’s job to select the three tars he wanted to keep aboard. Looked as if he’d made at least one bad choice. “What’s your business with Mr. Blakeman?”

Tammy Tompkins squinted up at the face now hovering some six inches above his own. “Not your lookout. I got to…Say, I know you. You’re Bla—Mr. Blakeman. I seen you when we came into harbor.”

“Say that I am, that still doesn’t tell me why I shouldn’t roll you into the gutter and go on my way.”

“Don’t you be doin’ that, Mr. Blakeman. No sir. Not when I got valuable information you should have.”

Tompkins struggled to his feet—Blakeman pointedly offered him no assistance—and staggered a bit until he found a hitching rail he could lean against. “Valuable information,” he repeated. “Worth a bit it is.”

“Worth not summoning my chucker-out to finish the flogging that seems to have been started aboard my ship? Which you doubtless deserved.”

“Didn’t do nothin’ deserves no cat. Should o’ been let go ashore, like I asked. Had to take watch instead. Cap’n now, he goes ashore whenever he bloody well pleases.” Tompkins began rhythmically kicking the toe of one boot against the upright of the hitching rail.

“Is that your information? That Captain O’Toole comes ashore as he chooses? That’s hardly worth your time, much less mine.” Blakeman started to walk past the tar. Tompkins put out a hand to stop him and Blakeman quickly brushed it off. “Keep your filthy hands away from me. And either tell me something important enough to make me stand here and listen, or get out of my sight.”

“It’s important. I swears it. But you can’t ’spect a bloke to spill his guts for nothin’ but a smile, can ye? Even the likes o’ poor old Tammy Tompkins deserves a bit o’ somethin’ for all the trouble he’s took to come and tell you what he knows.”

Blakeman reached into his pocket and found a few coppers. Tompkins smiled and extended a horny hand to receive them, then looked up disappointed.

Another search through his pockets produced a guinea. More than he’d intended to offer, but the only other money he had easily to hand. Blakeman dropped the coin in Tompkins’s outstretched palm.

“Bless me! That’s fine, sir. Glad enough to tell you about the Chinaman, I am now.”

Blakeman suppressed a sigh. A wasted guinea.

“Knowed he was aboard, I did, for some weeks,” Tompkins said. “Would o’ reported it right away, ’cept I saw how he was what you might call a personal guest o’ the cap’n.”

“Guest? What are you talking about?”

“A stowaway, Mr. Blakeman. On the
Star.
A Chinaman down in the after magazine where the gunpowder was, and the rum. That’s how I knowed. ’Twas my job to organize bringing up the rum whenever it was wanted. Took three o’ us to manhandle them kegs up through the cap’n’s cabin. First couple o’ times weren’t nothin’ you might call notable, then, third time I think it was, I smelled something awful. I moved some things about, and there he was, huddled back in a little corner. I’d o’ raised the alarm right then, ’cept I figured the cap’n had to know. Seein’ as the only way to get down to the after magazine is through the cap’n’s quarters.”

It could be true. Blakeman struggled to assess the possible threat to two props of his plan, the box and the cargo. But he’d already sold the cargo and reaped the profit, and the box and its treasure were unharmed and in his possession. So what could a Chinese stowaway have to do with him? “You have to be mistaken.”

“No sir, Mr. Blakeman. Saw him with me own eyes, I did, first night we was in harbor. Cap’n brought the stowaway above decks and rowed him ashore his own self. I swear it.”

Greenwich Street, 5:30
A.M.

The note was delivered by a small black lad who handed it to Joyful without a word.
Come at once. Bring your kit. The boy will show the way.
It was signed simply
A. T.
“Did Dr. Turner give you this?”

“I don’t be knowing his name. Dr. Turner, he be a cutter?”

“A surgeon. Yes.”

“Then prob’ly that be him.”

Joyful had come to the door in his shirtsleeves when his landlady summoned him. He turned and headed up the stairs, long legs taking them two at a time. “Wait for me. I’ll return straight away.”

Moments later he was back, wearing his cutaway and carrying the black leather satchel that contained the tools of his trade. Correction, his former trade. “Is Dr. Turner all right?”

“Don’t be knowin’ that,” the boy said.

“What do you know?” Joyful put on his stovepipe and led the lad out the door.

“Only as I be supposed to bring you to Mother Zion.”

“In Five Points?” The boy nodded. Joyful was not surprised. Andrew had began his doctoring in the almshouse hospital years ago, and he’d been treating the poor ever since. “What’s your name?” Joyful asked.

“Joshua.”

“Very well, Joshua. How did you get here?” The sky was flushed dawn pink and the street was silent, and empty of any kind of transport.

“Runned all the way.”

“Yes, well you’re younger than I. And fortunately not too heavy for Mary Jane to bear the added burden.”

Joyful stabled the piebald mare at Foster’s Livery, a few steps from the boardinghouse. She was old but serviceable. It took no time to saddle her. Joyful swung himself up, then reached down for the boy. Moments later they were trotting north up Greenwich Street headed for Five Points.

Joyful smelled blood as soon as he entered the church’s cellar. He had shrugged his coat off and opened his satchel before his eyes adjusted well enough to the dimness to see Andrew bent over a table in the far corner.

His cousin was stitching, from the look of it. “Choose a patient and get started,” Andrew called out. “Those you can probably help are over here by the window.”

Joyful had to pick his way over the bodies of a dozen black men to get to the spot Andrew indicated. Three appeared to be dead. At least two others were soon to be, and there was little he or Andrew could do about it. But just below the grimy, head-high slit of a window that let in a modicum of light from the street, there was a man with his hands pressed to his face, moaning. Joyful dropped to his knees beside him.

A few feet away Andrew finished sewing up the man he’d been attending and moved to another. “Leave me, Absalom,” Joyful heard him say. “I can do this with Joshua’s help. You go and assist my cousin, Dr. Turner. He has only a single hand, so you must supply your two in place of the one that’s missing.”

Joyful’s patient had lost an eye, gouged out in a fight from the look of it. The eyeball was hanging by a few strands of sinew and one distended artery that fortunately had not been severed in the attack. He’d have bled to death by now otherwise.

He turned to get a scalpel from his satchel and found there was no need. The young man Andrew had called Absalom had already selected the best one for the task and was holding it out. “This be the one, don’t it, Dr. Turner, sir?”

“The very one, Absalom. My cousin has trained you well.”

Absalom grinned and began preparing sutures.

Joyful held the scalpel in his teeth while he moved the stuffed glove that supplied for his left hand into position below the hanging eye to act as a support, making sure he didn’t cut through the man’s cheek and add to his troubles. Damn, he didn’t want to cut the glove either. “There are cloths in there on the right.” He jerked his head toward the open satchel. “Fold a few into a pad and give it to me.”

Absalom was quick as well as clever; it was done in a few seconds. “Well done, Absalom. Now give this fellow one of those dowels to bite on. Yes, that’s it.”

Joyful swabbed enough blood out of his good eye so the man could see. He was staring at the surgeon in terror.

“This is going to hurt like bloody Hades,” Joyful said cheerfully. “But with any luck you will neither bleed to death nor be poisoned by your wound. And when I’m done, you’ll still have one good eye. Think on that. Quite a few of that lot over there”—he jerked his head in the direction of the inert bodies by the door—“have not been anywhere near as fortunate. Now bite down as hard as you can on that bit of wood and we’ll get started.”

Five minutes later he’d cut away the eyeball, tied off the severed blood vessels, and stitched the eye closed. “Neat enough so you won’t frighten small children after it heals,” Joyful said. The man, however, had passed out and didn’t hear him.

It took the better part of the morning for Andrew and Joyful to patch up seven of the wounded and pronounce six others dead. Joyful was only formally introduced to the man Andrew called Reverend Fish when he and his cousin were led from the cellar-turned-surgery to a small room off to one side. There was a pitcher of ale and some biscuits waiting for them.

“My cousin, Dr. Joyful Turner,” Andrew said. “Joyful, this is Reverend Zachary Fish, the minister here at the African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church.”

“I be pleased to meet you, sir,” Reverend Fish said. “And very grateful for your assistance this day.”

Joyful shook the minister’s hand. “Glad to have been able to help. But I’m left wondering about the wielders of those very effective knives that made ours necessary.”

“As am I.” Andrew poured ale for himself and the other two men. “There appears to have been if not a war, at least an all-out battle. With F. X. Gallagher’s men, I presume.”

Reverend Fish shook his head. “That may come, but this was an engagement of a different sort. Black man against black man,” he said softly. “Warring gangs with allegiances that be important only to them. We do not, it seems, have enough violence visited upon us from outside, so we must be doing evil to ourselves.”

Silence for a time, broken by Andrew. “The first time I cut into the flesh of a Negro, Reverend Fish, I realized that we all bleed the same color. It should therefore not come as a surprise that we all lay claim to the same idiotic vices.”

“I think—” Joyful was interrupted by a loud knock on a door that led to the street.

Fish got up, opened the door a crack, and stood speaking in low tones to someone neither Andrew nor Joyful could see. After a few moments he turned back to the two doctors. “My neighbor, Mr. Patrick Burney, has urgent need of a physician. He lives quite nearby, so he knew you gentlemen were here…”

Fish left the request unspoken. Andrew started to rise. Joyful extended a restraining hand. “I’ll deal with it. You were here and working well before I arrived.” The older man was ashen with fatigue. “Go home, Cousin Andrew. Get some rest.” He turned to Reverend Fish, “You’ll see that he does?”

The minister nodded. “Absalom be taking him back by wagon. If you could hurry, Young Dr. Turner. I believe the need be pressing.”

Outside, the sunlight was blinding and the noise of the street came as a shock. Joyful had arrived in Five Points in the relative hush of dawn; It was past noon now.

The district was a mass of horses and pushcarts and wagons and people. In addition to the rolling stock used to transport and display commodities, there were countless women carrying trays of goods slung from their necks with leather straps. Each one hawked her wares while elbowing aside neighbors to the right and left.