On Secret Service (37 page)

Lon reloaded the Colt's empty chambers. He spoke briefly with Zach, who trotted off down Bond Street. When his watch told him three minutes had gone by, he curled his hand around the gun in his pocket and stepped to the closed door of the Roost. Its elaborate window, leaded glass, distorted the interior, splintering and duplicating images. Two smiling Cicero Millers raised two beer steins and drank with two mouths. Lon figured the crowd of men at forty to fifty.

He entered quickly and quietly, leaving footprints in the sawdust. He went unnoticed until he was at Miller's elbow. In the middle of a sentence, Miller felt himself pressed. He turned, scowling.

“Hello, Miller. Step over to one of those tables and we'll have a little talk.”

Miller saw the bulge of the gun; Lon's position hid it from the others. One of them said, “Hey, pal, who's he?”

Miller's brow glistened with sweat. “An old friend.” He dragged his foot through the sawdust, to an empty table. His smile was false and ugly. “How the hell did you find me? Did my sister—?”

“Your sister had no part in this. Wherever she is,” he added, hoping to protect her. “We'll walk out of here together. If you so much as twitch, I'll put a bullet in you. I wouldn't mind.” It was more bluff than certainty; he had no intention of killing Margaret's brother now.

“All right, all right,” Miller said. “Let me put this beer down.”

Lon nodded, aware of grumblings at the bar. In another moment the men might react. Miller whipped his arm up and threw the beer in Lon's face.

Lon sputtered, blinded. Miller kicked him in the crotch, twice. “This man's a damn police spy.”

Half a dozen patrons rushed Lon. Miller darted behind them. Lon staggered against the table, in excruciating pain. As the first man reached him he yanked out the pistol and cocked it.

The gun cowed them long enough for him to slip past. Miller had fled to the back, through a dingy hall. The outside door slammed. Lon heard a shot. He tore the door open; saw Zach leaning against a board fence across the alley. Blood smeared Zach's left trouser leg above the knee. At the south end of the block Miller turned west, out of sight.

“Let me see.” Lon squatted to look at the wound. The bloody hole in Zach's pants looked black in the red light from the sky. Fires were burning from the Hudson to the East River.

“Ain't bad, a scrape. Don't lose that man.”

“He can't go fast. We've got to tie this up. God, Zach, I'm sorry.”

Zach tore long strips from his ragged sleeve. He folded one into a pad, let Lon wrap the other around his leg and knot it on top of the pad. “That's plenty good enough. Don't let him get away.”

Lon dashed to the end of the alley. Two blocks west on Bleecker Street, Miller scuttled along like a frightened crab, making fair speed in spite of his limp. Lon ran after him, Zach gamely following.

The armies of the night were marching. As Lon and Zach ran through intersections, they glimpsed Irish gangs hurling bricks through windows, setting bonfires in the gutters, chasing unlucky pedestrians. Gunfire crackled. The red sky created a kind of eerie daylight.

They crossed Broadway, another devastated street. An abandoned horsecar smoldered, little more than a black skeleton. Broken glass lay everywhere, glittering like rubies. A black man pushing a wheelbarrow piled with household goods struggled past them, three black tots trailing along. “Hurry up, hurry up, we got to get to City Hall. Be safe there.”

Zach hobbled as badly as their quarry, but he kept up. He pointed to Miller's retreating figure. “That man don't know where he's going. Those are colored streets, I was up and down 'em yesterday.”

Running, Lon had fragmented impressions of pathetic shacks already trashed and looted, tiny gardens destroyed, clothes and cookware thrown in the dirt. A one-story colored grocery at Thompson and Bleecker was afire. A block ahead, a few steps past Sullivan, Miller threw another look backward. He checked his run and set himself in the middle of the street with his pistol. Lon shoved Zach aside needlessly; the bullet fell short. Miller ran another half block to MacDougal and into a corner tenement with smoke drifting from it. Zach said, “Why'n hell did he go in a building on fire?”

“Maybe he thinks the smoke will hide him. Maybe he's scared and not thinking at all.”

Under a darkened gas lamp near the tenement, Lon assessed the situation. The three-story building looked deserted. Smoke billowed from first-floor windows; in one he saw a fitful glow of flame. “Same plan as before. I'll go in. You watch the back in case he tries to slip out.”

“You be careful in there.” Zach limped into a narrow passage between the tenement and a dilapidated cottage.

Lon's palms were slick with sweat. His chest ached from the pursuit. Pistol in hand, he crept into the building.

Bitter smoke stung his eyes and nose. In a room to his left, the wood floor smoldered. He stole toward a pitch-black stairway at the rear. A sound warned him; he slammed himself against the wall as Miller shot at him. He fired back, aiming low to wound, not kill.

Miller kicked and beat on a back door; swore a blistering oath. He couldn't open the door.

“Give it up, Miller. I've got you.”

Irregular thumping on the stair said Miller was fleeing to the second floor. Smoke thickened. The door of a room at the first-floor rear crumbled suddenly as fire ate through, illuminating scabrous walls and the stair with most of its balusters broken or missing. Why was the damn fool going up? To jump from a window?

As Lon climbed, the stair swayed and threatened to buckle. Miller fired again. Lon replied with two shots, then heard Miller's foot scraping, moving toward the front of the building.

The floor gave off ferocious heat. Fire gleamed between the ill-fitting boards. One snapped under Lon's weight. His leg went down through the hole. He caught the newel post of the stair to the third floor, pulled himself up and out. He slapped out embers burning holes in his trousers. The building was noisy with the roar and snap of the fire. Lon couldn't hear Miller moving any longer.

He edged forward. The hall grew lighter when another piece of the floor burned and fell. The glare revealed two closed doors at the front. Lon pushed the left one. Barred or blocked, it wouldn't move. He ran across the hall, tested the other door. Open.

He stepped back and kicked it. He jumped aside as Miller fired. In the black room Miller was a dim silhouette against an open window lit by the fiery sky.

Lon shot too late; Miller crouched down, hidden by the dark. Lon fired twice more. When he pulled the trigger again, the hammer fell on an empty chamber. He shoved his hand in his pocket, then remembered. No more ammunition.

He slid around the edge of the door. “You son of a bitch, where are you?”

Miller moved slightly; for a moment his skull shone like a billiard ball. His gun came up. Lon dropped to his knees and rolled sideways. Miller fired. As the reverberations died, he heard the same sound he'd heard from his own empty gun.

He stood up; wiped his hands on his jacket. His eyes were adjusting to the firelit darkness. “I see you in the corner. It's all over, Miller. I'll take you back to Washington and there'll be one less reb setting fires and stirring up—”

Miller threw his pistol. Lon dodged to the left. The floor broke under him. This time he found nothing to grab. He dropped into billowing smoke.

He landed on his side, dazed but able to roll away from the flames engulfing half the room. He glimpsed an open side window directly below the one Miller wanted to jump from. He crawled toward it, holding his breath under the smoke layer. Half of the floor above collapsed. Miller screamed as it broke away from the wall and tilted down beneath him. He fell into the flames. Lon reached the window and dove through.

His head thumped hard ground. He blinked and coughed violently as he struggled to his feet. A sheet of flame hid the room's interior. He thought he heard Miller scream again but couldn't be sure.

He backed away from the heat as flames licked from third-floor windows. Miller was gone, killed not by one of Lon's bullets but by his own panic. Could he ever explain it to Margaret? His chance with her might have survived Miller's incarceration, but how could it survive his death?

A section of burning wall buckled outward. Lon leaped away and caromed off the broken picket fence of the cottage next door. From MacDougal Street came a confusion of shouts:

“We got you, nigger.”

“Where's the rope?”

“Yella bastards—” Something muffled the rest of Zach's outcry. Lon's heart pounded as he ran toward the commotion.

Zach lay supine in the street. Five white men surrounded him. Ordinary men, plainly, even shabbily, dressed. One had a walleye, another a sagging paunch, a third a ragged white beard, a fourth a receding chin. Lon saw two open clasp knives, a pair of wooden clubs, and a slungshot, a New York street weapon consisting of a cord tied to a small leather bag of lead pellets.

Five men; not evil looking, or even very formidable, but transformed by the license of rioting into something bigger than themselves. Lon saw it in their faces. They'd torn off Zach's leg bandage and reopened his wound. He'd taken a blow on the forehead; blood ran down the right side of his face. He looked dazed.

The weak-chinned man, no more than twenty, grinned at Lon. “Join in, friend. We caught this buck in the alley back there.”

“Bunce is huntin' for rope,” said the man with the slungshot, Walleye; he was the oldest of the five. “Seen a hardware with some goods left in it a few blocks back.”

The first man said, “Me brother soldiered in the Eighty-eighth New York, the Irish Brigade. Climbed up Marye's Heights at Fredericksburg. Wouldn't be dead wasn't for the goddamned niggers.”

Walleye said, “Soon as Bunce gets back, we'll show this boy how we treat upstart colored.”

A line of sweat ran down Lon's cheek. He pulled out the revolver. “I don't think so.”

“What are you, a copper?” the paunchy man said.

“Just somebody who doesn't want to see this kind of thing.”

The men eyed one another. They were five, Lon only one. They had the numbers but he had a pistol. Aware of something happening, Zach hoisted himself on his elbow. The bearded man kicked dirt in his face. Lon drew the hammer back.

“Don't do that again. Stand away from him.”

Walleye said, “Lad, be reasonable. You're a white man, we're white men, what do you care about some coon who's out to take a white man's job and rape his sister?”

Behind Lon, to the north, a new voice called out, “I've got the rope, boys.” One of the men threw his wooden club suddenly. Lon ducked; the club sailed by.

Walleye stuck his fists on his hips. “Tyrone, you took a hell of a chance doing that. He could have plugged you. He didn't, though, did he? Want to know what I think? I think that pistol's empty. He's bluffing us with a goddam empty gun.”

Smirking and nudging one another, they shuffled toward Lon, Walleye in the lead. Walleye swung the shot-loaded bag against his leg,
bump
and
bump.
The scene was brilliantly lit; the tenement had crumbled into a huge bed of embers. Lon saw a police wagon passing on Broadway, tiny as a Christmas toy. No help there.

“Take him,” Walleye growled. The unseen Bunce ran up behind Lon and held him so Walleye's slungshot cracked on Lon's skull, nearly knocking him out. The others swarmed over him. Lon smacked a forehead with the pistol before they pulled it from his hand. He kicked testicles as Miller had, enraging the man he injured. “You nigger lover!” A splinter of honed steel flashed red in front of his eyes. The man drove the clasp knife into Lon's left leg, jerked it out.

Someone else's knife slashed his coat and shirt and scraped the ribs beneath. Lon's legs dissolved to water. The fiery night darkened as he fell. The bearded man booted his side where the knife had cut; Lon felt warm blood.

“Don't knock him out.” That was Walleye. Lon heard him through a rushing noise in his head. “Tyrone, you and Miles roll him on his front. Pull his head up. Slap him if you got to. I want him to see this. Bunce, fix the noose.”

“Oughtn't we kill him? He's a witness,” the paunchy one said.

Walleye pulled a pint of whiskey from his pants, uncorked it, and took a swallow. He passed the bottle. “Witness to what? Police won't never come after us for killing niggers. Bunce, for Jesus' sake hurry up, tie that rope.” Forked lightning split the sky. A heavy thunderclap followed.

Someone sat on Lon's back, yanked his ears to raise his head. Waves of sickness, weakness, surged through him. The white men lifted Zach, smacked the back of his head till he bent forward to receive the noose. They walked him to the lamppost, tossed the rope over, missed twice, and succeeded on the third try. The five gathered around the rope while the extra man kept Lon's head up.

“Is he lookin', Felix?”

“He's lookin',” said the man on Lon's back.

“Then here we go, boys, on my count of three. All together, one, two, three—
heave. Heave.
”

They raised Zach six inches. He made choking sounds. His feet kicked the air as they hoisted him another three inches. The bearded man tied the rope around the post and they stepped away to dust off their hands and admire their work: one free Negro, dangling in the noose like a skinny doll.

“He's dead, boys, I heard his neck crack,” Walleye said with an air of good cheer. “One less dinge to befoul our fair city.” After the next burst of lightning, the wind picked up sharply. Fat raindrops pattered the street.

The bearded man said, “Riley, you'll have to go see the priest, you've a lot to confess now.”

Walleye laughed. “Hell I do. 'Tain't any sin to kill vermin. Come on, let's look for more.”

The man got off Lon's back. Lon's head fell nose-first into the dirt. Arm in arm, the six strolled away, harmonizing a song about the dear old sod of Ireland. Zach's body turned in the hot wind.

The sky opened, releasing a deluge. In a minute, rivers of rain washed mud against Lon's face. A lightning flash whitened the world. The earth rocked. He hurt fiercely.
I'm going to die here like Zach,
he thought, sinking into darkness.

 

The ferocious thunderstorm blew itself out in an hour and didn't extinguish that many fires. The air turned hot and humid again. On Gramercy Park North, Margaret waited until half past two and then climbed the stairs to her bedroom.

She couldn't fall asleep with all the fire bells ringing, and the sky red. Thoughts of Lon chased through her head. He'd come tomorrow night. Tomorrow night he'd be there. A single portmanteau held the things she wanted to take with her: a few favorite possessions and items of clothing from before her marriage. Donal could have the rest, everything he'd bought her. He could sell them, burn them, or consign them to hell for all she cared.

Next morning, the two black sisters failed to appear, as did the cook. Phineas Farley arrived late, stricken and shaken. Although the thunderstorm had driven people inside and temporarily halted the rioting, scores were injured, an untold number were dead, and Negro men, women, and children feared for their lives. “Terrible, terrible,” Phineas kept saying.

He had a copy of the
Tribune.
Margaret read Greeley's editorial.

Where was Cicero? What had happened to Lon? As the day passed, her fears and anxieties worsened. By evening, when Phineas bid her a reluctant good-bye to go home and protect his Eileen, she was pacing the downstairs, sweaty in her heavy traveling dress, unable to eat, unable to rest, unable to keep away from the parlor windows where she saw rooftops once again silhouetted against red skies.

A neighbor, an elderly gentleman retired from a brokerage in Exchange Place downtown, looked in at half past seven to be certain she was all right. He knew she was alone; would she care to spend the night with him and his wife? They had extra room. No, she said, she'd be fine, here in respectable Gramercy Park she feared nothing. It was a pathetic lie.

“I wish you would reconsider, Mrs. McKee. Mobs have been seen all over the precinct.”

Margaret shook her head. “I'll stay. It's important that I do.”

The old gentleman briefly described some of the day's horrific events: a mob attack on the Union Steam Works where four thousand carbines were stored; soldiers of the Eleventh New York Volunteers confronting rioters on Thirty-fifth Street with two small fieldpieces that fired grapeshot and canister into the crowd; barricades of wrecked wagons, carts, fallen telegraph poles, tangled wire, in Ninth Avenue; Governor Seymour back in the city, speaking from the steps of the Army's temporary headquarters, the St. Nicholas Hotel, declaring a state of insurrection, ordering rioters to cease and desist, but still promising that the draft would end.

There was more. Soldiers fresh from the ordeal of Gettysburg were being rushed back to put down the rebellion. Hapless Negroes were being shot or hung from streetlamps without cause. Ladies of the evening who happened to be colored were dragged from their establishments and stabbed to death. The old gentleman didn't say, “Terrible, terrible,” but his head shaking and hand wringing testified to a similar opinion. An hour after he left, a platoon of police marched in from Twentieth Street and stationed themselves around the park.

On a green marble table in the foyer, a sealed vellum envelope drew Margaret's eye more than once. Her farewell note to Donal; her statement that she was leaving him for another man.

At dawn, sleepless and still dressed, she carried the envelope to her writing desk. A smell of dampness and smoke soured the house. She felt a perfect fool for the hope and joy she'd allowed herself to experience since Saturday.

She opened the envelope, tore up the note. She wrote another while silent tears ran down her cheeks. She didn't know whether Lon was dead or alive, but she knew he wouldn't be coming for her. Not tonight. Nor ever.