The Fatal Flame (15 page)

I could feel her own heartbeat, having bent down to measure it, the way it leapt from her throat against my lips and tongue. Even as I belatedly realized that all the care I’d taken only told her unequivocally I didn’t need her, not in that way.

“I pictured you at the fund-raiser. You being careful, you being
courteous
,” she gasped, arching. “Worrying about her and hiding it. Trying not to hurt me. I did not like thinking about this. It was disgusting. I went to Herr Getzler’s and spent the evening with a man who wants to brand his name in my arm.”

“
You
don’t want
him
, though.” The low growl that emerged shocked the pair of us, I believe.

Pushing me, she stepped away, her chest with its tiny points of bosom heaving. “No, I don’t.”

“I don’t give a damn how much chink he’s saved so he can swill more of his own product—he doesn’t deserve you.”

“No.” She laughed in a short burst. “No, he doesn’t deserve me.”

“Nor do I, for that matter.”

Elena shook her head, exasperated. “You are my friend. Qualities you have, that I have mentioned. Stop,
bitte
, the being ridiculous.”

“But it’s the truth. What do you want from me?”

Elena returned to the table, still keeping a safe distance, and drained her whiskey. Touching her fingers to her slender curve of a mouth, she shook her white-blonde head once more.

“I visit your room sometimes,” she said in a faraway voice. “We share things. Secrets. Skin. A gift you have, you realize, for listening, for making people feel they are
heard.
Never have you knocked at my door, wanting, greedy. Sinking into me uninvited. This is the sort of care you take with a woman you do not love. I admire you—I should not have mocked that you are kind. But I think you would prefer to find new lodgings than to stain my bedsheets.”

She turned to go, and that was . . . ruinous.

“I won’t apologize for not being more cruel,” I rasped.

“I won’t apologize for not being more kind. You do not live here, you see, not really. You live for your brother, and for police work, and for Bird, and for your memories of this girl as she was before. If I cannot make you feel anything . . . what, then, is the point?”

“You do make me feel things!” I cried, following her to the base of the stairs, where she was gliding upward in the gloom without a candle. “For instance, at the moment you’re scaring me half to death.”

Elena stopped, hand on the banister rail. She turned to peer at me. Her cloud-colored eyes were barely visible in the thickness of the enveloping dark.

“Good,” she concluded, continuing on her way.

—

I
passed a night of cold sweats and bone aches in an unhappy in-between where Mercy and Elena stood before the Tombs holding torches. Flushed with righteous approval as the enormous blaze burned criminals and copper stars alike to good clean ash. I’d no sooner awoken from that vision than, drifting fitfully, I was treated to another—Valentine being crowned King of the Rats whose realm prevails beneath the Tombs and appointing McGlynn as prime minister, the long-tailed rodents shrieking their cheers.

After that dream brought me awake, after turning up my lamp while gentle rain pattered against the shingles, I pulled out my charcoal and paper and sat at my desk, meticulously rendering Elena Boehm from memory. She’d been lying on her stomach with her arms crossed over the edge of my bed, smoking a tiny cigarette with her left hand, while I did nothing more complex than to read the
Herald
cross-legged with my back to the wall and my fingertips occasionally exploring the lush landscape of her lower half. She’s distressingly thin but constructed like a ripe September pear, and she was dead wrong. She made me feel many things. I’d just slid the portrait under her bedroom door, the one I don’t allow myself to knock on for reasons both well intentioned and apparently terribly selfish, when the banging commenced.

Elena appeared at the bottom of the stairs after answering the knock, staring up in surprise to find me awake and dressed. Seeing that there was no need to rouse me, she nodded at the half-open door, pulling a basket of chicken feed farther up her arm as she headed for the rear yard.

I liked her watchful silence just about as much as I liked my next task.

Thus it was that, at six in the morning on April 21 and having followed the chief’s courier, I found myself next to George Washington Matsell in a pair of emerald velvet armchairs so overstuffed as to verge on the ludicrous, seated across a continental expanse of desk from Robert Symmes, one of two candidates for Ward Eight’s alderman. Symmes appeared to have passed the night stewing in the vat of his own hot rage. His neat moustache and dapper togs were well in hand, but he wore a volcanic expression, neck knotted with tension and eyes rimmed in a vengeful red.

Meanwhile, I was severely grateful for the chief’s elephantine presence, calm and collected in his grey sack coat and striped trousers. Symmes needed interrogating further. But that didn’t mean I was eager to end up croaked for my thoroughgoing professionalism. So we were questioning him in tandem, in his positively opulent mansion in Varick Street, with the warm apricot light of a spring dawn streaming through the giant pair of bay windows in his study.

A portrait of Symmes hung behind the desk, which was so typically self-obsessed a choice of décor that I found it nearly humorous. The Symmes of the painting looked down with a benevolent smile gracing his manly features. The Symmes of flesh and blood glowered at us, positively bilious with the force of his pique.

“Your family,” the latter Symmes said in a poisonous undertone, “has been proving a
great
disappointment of late.”

I didn’t bother denying it—I was wracked enough over the two deaths at Pell Street without his assistance, and as for Valentine’s candidacy, I couldn’t rightly argue with the man.

“Captain Wilde alerted me via letter yesterday stating his intentions and expressing wishes that the alderman race be conducted with as little collateral damage to the Party as is possible, a sentiment I’m certain you share,” Matsell observed in a voice equally dry as it was exhausted. “Your disappointment, as you term it, must be expressed in the spirit of republican fair play.”

“Oh, I plan to smash Val Wilde at the polls, if not literally,” Symmes hissed. “In fact, Chief Matsell, I confess myself surprised you haven’t already sacked the traitor.”

Matsell only smiled coldly, tapping his broad fingertips together in a habitual gesture. “Were I to sack every copper star who owned strong opinions in either the Hunker or the Barnburner direction, Alderman, I’d have to replace my entire staff.”

“When I’m reelected, I’ll see to it Captain Wilde is dismissed in disgrace.”

“When you’re reelected,” Matsell answered with the glint of gunmetal in his eye, “you’re welcome to. Meanwhile, an incendiary threatens and the younger Mr. Wilde is one of those tasked with finding the culprit with all possible speed.”

“I can’t say that bolsters my confidence,” Symmes sneered as his pocket watch made its first appearance. I don’t know how his pals felt about the timepiece, but I wanted to shatter the thing. “He is hardly even the intellectual equal of his turncoat brother. My warning was crystal clear, and nevertheless I am now the owner of a pile of soot where was once a thriving rental property.
Disgraceful
.”

“Ronan McGlynn sends his regards,” I interjected, determined anew not to let my chief suppose I was inadequate to the task of chasing after a firestarter. “I’m not fool enough to pretend to like you, Alderman, but I’m not fool enough to let a crackbrained incendiary run amok through Manhattan either. So I questioned your employee last night. He thinks you’re en route to the Tombs to post bail.”

“Oh, I fear I couldn’t conscience posting bail for Mr. McGlynn. He served me well enough as a property manager, no doubt, but while a man is entitled to, shall we say . . .” Symmes drew his tongue across his upper lip, considering. “. . . recreational female company, I was unaware McGlynn’s establishment took such an
aggressive
recruitment line. And on property rented from me, no less. I need not even bother with dismissing him but shall merely allow justice to take its natural course.”

Smirking, he linked his fingers. I recalled Symmes’s mentioning
fresh as they come
to Valentine and actively detested him an additional dram for lying through his teeth to me.

“McGlynn likewise pegged Sally Woods as the incendiary,” I continued. “Mentioned previous threats as well. I need to see them.”

Symmes traversed his sumptuous Oriental rug, opened a squat but prettily worked English Chubb safe in the corner, and returned with a small bundle. Dropping it before my nose on the desk with a loud smack, he regained his chair and regarded me and the chief with the same respect he might expend on a spat lump of phlegm.

We began to sort through and read them. The format, to my stifled alarm, was identical to the threat against the alderman’s buildings: the same heft of paper and typesetting printed on a single side with neatly aligned margins. Before we’d been reading long, Matsell and I had a graphic impression of the mental state of the author.

I think my favorite was:

You soulless fiend whom once I cherished, may you suffer exquisite torment in hell’s eternal fires for your crimes. May I be there, with all the water on planet earth at my disposal, and never lift a finger to ease the bubbling of your seared flesh.

That one was . . . compelling. Though the chief, I recall, coughed when he encountered:

Not a day passes when the dream of murdering you by my own hand fails to bring solace to this husk of a human, this empty vessel you drained so utterly dry.

So maybe the latter had better claim to literary merit. Anyhow, they were certainly of a
theme.

“These are pretty . . . personal,” I suggested.

A flash of feeling sharper than his usual umbrage appeared and disappeared. There and gone in a heartbeat, but informative nevertheless.

Sally Woods frightened Robert Symmes more than she frightened me.

Recovered, the alderman regarded his fingernails with perhaps unmerited interest. “Miss Woods is violently hysterical, and now she is a murderess to boot. Surely it’s small wonder that her monomania is passionately expressed.”

“My impression of her—”

“My impression of
you
, Mr. Wilde,” Symmes snarled, “is that you are so blinded due to personal dislike that you refuse to arrest a threat to this entire city. Had you imprisoned Miss Woods before now, my property would be intact and two dead people would be
alive
.”

Since my hand was already wrapped into a fist, I settled on tapping it against my knee. “That isn’t quite what I meant. Or wasn’t Miss Woods your mistress? Matters must have ended about as badly as possible for her to want to kill you after you parted ways.”

“How
dare
— My private life is
not
the concern of a stunted copper star with . . . with delusions of competence,” he spluttered.

“It is, though. Under the circumstances.”

“
I
am the
victim
of this heinous crime!” he cried. “What about this are you failing to grasp?”

“Just what your relationship to Miss Woods was prior to the threats starting,” I answered dryly.

“Oh, I was bedding her on a regular basis, Mr. Wilde,” he growled, leaning forward. “I wonder, though, whether ending a trivial affair with a saucy little manufactory wench quite merits
death threats.
And I wonder what steps I can take to protect myself, my property, and my city when you appear to have discarded your masculinity altogether and joined the ranks of murderous anarchists and bluestockings.”

I’d have delivered a poor response to this if Matsell hadn’t prevented me.

“So there’s a long-standing dispute between you and this Miss Sally Woods. Setting firestarting aside for the moment, bedding your garment workers was never going to end well, was it?” Matsell sniffed, seeming as much disappointed as galled. And truly, Symmes’s blend of arrogance and peevishness begged for a swift cuff to the ear. “Of all the multitudinous ways it
could have
begun and ended badly between you, just how
did
it begin and end badly, might we ask?”

“That’s a personal matter.” Symmes waved his hand as if shooing a gnat.

“Alderman, while I sympathize with your desire to protect both your holdings and your privacy, I’m considerably more motivated by the former. You’re the one who dipped your wick into your own payroll. Answer the question.”

Symmes and Matsell exchanged lethal volleys with their eyeballs. It brightened me considerably. Then, as if a line in the sand had been smoothed over, the alderman’s fury was replaced by an almost pleased-looking moue of distaste. I wondered what on earth it meant and then realized that part of Symmes was glad at being forced to discuss his conquests—that he was as kittled rosy to brag about Miss Woods opening her legs for him as some would have been over displaying a rare species of butterfly drugged senseless and stabbed to a corkboard.

It was, quite frankly, repellent.

“Very well, if I am to be interrogated, let it be by the chief of police rather than an inept underling,” Robert Symmes whined, physically shifting in his chair to face Matsell. “From the moment my foreman hired her for the pantaloon manufactory we established in eighteen-forty-six, Miss Woods made every effort to catch my eye when I appeared on routine visits. Eventually she approached me directly after an inspection, bold as any heathen, to discuss the plight of the outworkers and better wages for the cutters. She’s a striking woman, and needless to say an immoral one—it took me all of a week to seduce her. Appalling. She argued, I listened or pretended to, and for all her factually absurd cant about
equality
, she was an inventive little slut between the sheets.”

Eyes burning like embers in my skull, I stared back at him. I wasn’t certain he’d wronged Miss Woods at all beyond dismissing her from the manufactory, but when I recalled her saying in a lifeless tone,
It’s personal, and can’t be helped anyhow . . .
Between Woods herself and the Queen Mab, and even Jim’s hushed words of warning regarding the alderman’s reputation, a definite suspicion had formed.