The Fatal Flame (21 page)

So instead, I asked for help.

“’Tis a waiting game now,” Mr. Connell offered, his bluntly plain face troubled. “Now Sally Woods is away from her lair, lackin’ the means fer daily coin, she’ll buy her last chestnut, get peckish, get careless. . . .”

Connell sat before me where I listlessly presided. Mr. Piest reclined on my desk’s edge, sipping the Dutch gin we keep in my cave for ruminative purposes. Mr. Kildare leaned against the wall next to my stacked record books, smoking with his arms crossed. Kildare’s eyes appeared a shade more glazed, his beard a tad less kempt.

Love,
I thought,
is extremely unhealthy.
And then recalled seeing Mercy that morning with a sensation like my heart flapping great feathery wings within my chest. Thereby proving my own point.

I sat with a strip of butcher paper before me, listlessly sketching. Later I’d write dust-dry facts about April 21, about suffering Symmes’s ire that morning and getting my pate cracked by an incendiary and harassing a beautiful woman. But in the meantime—colleagues at either elbow. Charcoal in my hand. Shapes shifting gradually into the sweet drape of Miss Abell’s hair, the daring line of Miss Woods’s trousered knee, the pleasant sphere of Miss Duffy’s face. Swirls merging into sense, like a sandstorm in reverse.

“Whatever else I think of this abhorrent business,” Piest said, “and mind you all that I hold no crime lower than inflicting terror upon innocent bystanders, innocent
New Yorkers
no less, remember, remember the fifth of November after all—”

“We might be rememberin’ Catholics trying to blow up the British Parliament a wee bit differently, like,” Kildare remarked coolly. “Meanin’ no offense t’ ye and always bearing in mind that there’s more than a bit o’ ketchup on yer sleeve there.”

“Oh! Please forgive any unintentional offense perceived, my fellow peacekeeper,” Piest said hastily, scraping at his coat with his thumb, “but surely—”

“Surely ordinary folk need not be martyred fer some daft notion o’ justice, even inside your sad, sorry pate, Ian.” Connell shook his head at my ceiling. “Never mind Kildare, he’s that addlepated after the Queen Mab. You lot could tweak his nipples clean free and he’d ne’er make a peep save for a lusty sigh.”

“McGlynn plays a bigger role in this than we savvy yet,” I mused, not looking up from sketching Bird’s ear. I didn’t know how long I could live with my small friend not speaking to me but felt like I’d mere hours before expiring.

“I’ll question him,” Connell offered.

“Allow me t’ do the honors. I’ve better cause,” Kildare snarled.

“Don’t break McGlynn too much,” I advised.

“Just enough.” Kildare smiled. “And a wee bit extra, like, fer Caoilinn.”

“God help us,” I sighed. “We break him later, if we have to, when we
must
.”

Seeing the point of this, the others made no answer.

“As for Mr. Wilde and my humble self . . . we will separately question all involved and comb the streets in search of Miss Woods, in the name of our fair city,” Piest concluded.

“Aye. We’ll help t’ search everywhere she e’er was or planned to be.” Kildare rallied himself to his full height.

“And we watch this Miss Abell, and this Miss Duffy, and this unholy Mr. Symmes, may Christ grant yer brother all fairest weather,” Connell said quietly.

I nodded. “Thank you.”

Not with any reluctance. I agreed with them, mind.

But I knew, having learnt my own brains more thoroughly than when I’d first started police work, that legwork and muscle weren’t what was wanted just then. If they had been, Val could have punched someone in the phiz already and sent the secret spilling, ruby red and precious, out of that person’s mouth.

And so I peered at the shapes floating on the butcher paper like the pale scraps of visions. My dreams tend to dissolve within seconds upon my waking—fade into a color or a mood or a whispered word. That sense of reality losing its edges was apparently infecting my daylight hours. Partially realized monsters lurked behind vaporous curtains, hinting at tragedies I couldn’t understand.

I stayed in that sorry state of poor spirits and worse police work for nearly four days’ time. Clutching at straws, knocking on boardinghouse doors. More or less waiting, for all I tried everything I could think of, for all that my weary feet were afire each night when I blew out my candle and fell into an almost-sleep as torturous as the almost-waking.

It was the second fire that snapped me clean out of the dumps.

The factory girls of Amesbury have had a flare-up and turned out. . . . The girls were told they must tend two looms in the future, by which they would weave double the number of yards that they now weave on one loom, and this without any advance of wages.

—
BOSTON EVENING TRANSCRIPT
, MARCH 25, 1836

S
O MANY DISTASTEFUL OCCURRENCES
plagued me during the four days between my parting with Ellie Abell and the second fire, it behooves me speak of them only in brief.

When I arrived back the night of April 21, none too pleased with myself, Elena Boehm left off crushing fresh salted butter into loaf sugar for frosting. She then deliberately smeared my cheek with a streak of it she’d scooped onto her forefinger. The tail end of the stripe landed at the outer edge of my scar.

“What are . . . ?”

She shrugged, returning to her mixing bowl. “Nothing to do with love it has, no great announcements.”

“Still,” I insisted.

“You mark me on paper with charcoal, I mark you with creamed sugar. Do not worry yourself.”

“So you’re marking me because . . .”

“Because you finally did the same, marking me on paper and leaving it for me to find, and I am glad, because that is what people who know other people and touch them and talk to them
do
to each other,” she snapped. “Mark them. Go away. I am working.”

Mr. William Wolf, I discovered on April 23, after scouring Manhattan for traces of Miss Woods and getting predictably nowhere, wasn’t merely the author of the New American Textile Manufactory strike article. He was also a ruthlessly intrepid professional who nosed after every crusting blood trail like a prize hound and had recently returned to his incognito work. He’d thus remain impossible to find for the foreseeable future.

“You say you’ve
nil
notion of where Mr. Wolf might be holed up?” I demanded of Ninepin. Again at Buttercake Joe’s, though absent the half-promised Mercy Underhill. Plenty of reasons existed for me to be testy at the kinchin. “And I’m meant to believe you?”

“You truly figure me for a cross-cove?” Ninepin tore his dainty spectacles off and regarded me with the full ire of the New York news hawker. I’m man enough to admit it was daunting.

“No, of course I don’t—”

“Because I ain’t never
once
played you for a paper-skull.”

“I’m sorry, the case is just that much of a manure pile.”

“You think I’m a whipster after all, then. Not just some trumped-up lullaby-kid.”

“You’re fully aware that I respect—”

“But you think I ain’t crumey enough nohow to court Miss Daly, is that what’s after pestering your pate?”

Opening my mouth, I found it better sport to close it again. Ninepin rose to his full five feet five inches of fifteen-year-old manhood—which admittedly is an inch taller than I am—and shot me a glare that could have felled a six-point buck.

“I’ll have the Wolf for you by this time next week,” he said bitterly, adjusting what I suspected to be a transformed county-fair first-prize ribbon he was employing as a cravat.

“Thank you. I’ll bring—”

“You keep Miss Underhill. I’ve always said she’s an iron insider, and I’d never take it back. But I’ve other fishes to fry. And I mean that honorably, Mr. Wilde,” he amended hastily.

That was a thoughtful clarification. But it didn’t make me any more endeared to the poor lad as he strode out of Buttercake Joe’s.

As for Bird, she ignored every opportunity I presented her to forgive me my churlishness and go back to being fast mates. But she granted me other concessions. Brief, grave smiles. Allowance of comfortable silences. That is, until April 25, when we were ensconced on our bench outside the Catholic Asylum, sun brushing our faces in passing like an absentminded grandmother, and she asked me a question.

“How do you know if you’re in love?”

So close,
I thought,
so close and now this.

I actually considered baldly changing the subject. I’ll be ashamed of that cowardly urge until the day I’m a meal for a lusty earthworm.

“There’s a mutual . . . connection,” I attempted helplessly.

“What sort?”

“Different sorts, depending on the person. People, rather.”

“What sort for you, then?”

It was a fair question. “I’m not exactly sure. The sort that feels as if . . . as if they’re a part of who you are. If they were gone, you’d miss them like a missing limb.”

“That’s just as I thought,” she declared quietly.

I’ve never claimed to be a brilliant man. But the following conversation will irrevocably sound the final chip in that tombstone carving.

“Bird, you don’t
know
James Playfair. And without knowing a person, you can’t really love them the way you might think you do. Trust me.”

I was met with a chiseled-ice stare just as I patted myself on the back for not saying to a former kinchin mab—one who’d known men since she was eight, though I don’t suppose conversations about the nature of love are ever easy—anyhow, my point is I didn’t say,
You’re too young
or
He doesn’t suit you
, because when did any of her other suitors fucking suit her? Or God forbid,
He’s too old for you,
when she’d had far older
.

Nor,
He’s in love with my brother.

“I don’t know him, fair enough. But that’s easily solved,” she reasoned.

“How so?”

“I’ll
get
to know him.”

Pinching my nose between my fingers, I said, “Ordinarily, that would be a flash lay.”

Bird’s pale face turned ivory hard beneath the freckles. “But?”

“But . . . not in this one.”

“And?”

“This isn’t something I know how to tell you. It’s a touch on the . . . indelicate side.”

“Oh,” she said softly. A breeze whipped a tendril of mahogany hair against her chin, and she pulled it away. “It’s not something a cove would normally talk about with . . . with a kinchin, is that what you mean?”

“Yes.”

“But you figure you need to tell me anyhow?”

I gnawed my lip, registering the faintly prickling sensation that I was about to botch it all spectacularly. God knows I am absolutely incapable of botching things in a niggardly fashion.

“You’re acting so gingerly because you don’t want to tell me that he’d never want someone who used to work as I did,” she whispered. “Aren’t you?”

Twenty kinds of horrified, I caught her by the hand. “
No
, God no, that—”

Pulling away, she stood up. There’s an almost statuesque sadness to her calm, square face at times, a timelessness like a marble figure. But this sorrow was messy. It could have felled me, nearly did, in fact. And I’ve plentiful practice at grief.

“I don’t lie to you anymore—I don’t want you to have to lie to me either,” she said hoarsely.

Bird used to be a remarkable liar. A masterful painter of alternate scenes, vistas blazing to life as she filled her canvas with near-truths and brazen falsehoods. They were often better stories than the truth would have made. They were often kinder.

“You’re
entirely
mistaken,” I pleaded.

“Then what the devil were you going to say?”

“He’s a molley,” I blurted out. “Bird, that’s what I was going to say. Not—
nothing
like what you thought.”

The tears in her grey eyes spilled over. Brushing them away with her sleeve, face still as a doll’s, she shook her head.

“You’re not as good a liar as I am,” she managed, turning away.

“Bird, it’s the truth. Now, for God’s sake—”

“I’d rather you not come tomorrow, Mr. Wilde,” she answered, quickening her pace back in the direction of the Catholic orphanage and whatever lessons and lectures she’d have to endure that afternoon with a fresh-broken heart.

My hands were shaking, I discovered as I watched her disappear into the school. Pulse going like a spooked tomcat’s.

I got to my feet, returned my hat to my head. Started walking. Since I was on Prince and Mott, my boots steered me straight for the Knickerbocker 21.

There was a day I’d never have dreamed of walking
toward
Valentine Wilde when facing a crisis. But this was a different sort of Thursday, the worst Thursday I could have passed in a year of Thursdays, and my brother is always at his engine house on Thursdays, and he might be the debauched king of the dead rabbits, but he’s also fond of Bird and brutally honest when I need him to be.

So I plunged into placid Ward Eight.

Distantly, as if I were peering at a careful model replica of the world, I noted that my brother’s ward was plastered with political posters. That was typical—we’d an election May 1, and anyway, slogans of yesteryear keek through rips in today’s pet mottoes as if the Democrats and the Whigs had combined forces to spread a brightly scaling rash over Manhattan’s skin. We locals scarcely saw them. That is, until I encountered a matched pair of broadsides pasted in the window of a coffee shop skittishly attempting to maintain political neutrality, and I stopped in my tracks.

On the right was a newly printed woodcut of Alderman Symmes. His handsome features and elegant moustache had been elongated to make him look smugly devilish. The text, printed in at least six different fonts of howling capitals, read:

IS THIS THE FACE OF PROGRESS?

ROBERT SYMMES, TEXTILE TYCOON, HAS BEEN FOR FIVE YEARS

ALDERMAN OF WARD EIGHT

HAS HE DONE RIGHT BY YOU?

ARE PITTANCE WAGES & CRUMBLING BOARDINGHOUSES PROGRESS?

VOTE FOR

VALENTINE WILDE

WARD BOSS, POLICE CAPTAIN, SENIOR KNICKERBOCKER 21 ENGINEMAN

AND SPIT IN THE EYE OF HUNKER OPPRESSION

Adjacent was another portrait, this one of Val. His arched hairline curved into a villain’s peak, still-boyish face cruel as a schoolyard bully’s, the ever-present sacks beneath his eyes etched in malicious smears.

DEMOCRATIC PARTY INSIDER

OR . . . TRAITOR TO TAMMANY?

VALENTINE WILDE—FOR YEARS THE VERY FACE OF:

CORRUPTION, INSIDE DEALMAKING, GRAFT, AND NEPOTISM!

NOW MAKES A BID FOR ALDERMAN GUARANTEED TO TEAR APART THE HEART AND SOUL OF WARD EIGHT

VOTE FOR YOUR LOYAL SERVANT

ALDERMAN ROBERT SYMMES

AND TAKE A STAND AGAINST DANGEROUS BARNBURNER RADICALISM

It was tamer than it could have been. It didn’t say anything about
nigger-lovers
or
sodomites.

Nevertheless.

I set off walking again. The posters were thoroughly disquieting, I grant. But I was so splintered by then I scarce noticed the new worriment—as if a penny had been added to the Tammany coffers or a cup of water poured into the Hudson.

A rich whiff of smoke met my nostrils, and I looked up.

Someplace a few blocks away from me, black soot and white steam poured into the air, gushing like blood from a wound.

For a moment I stood frozen in place.

There are accidental fires in New York every single day,
I thought.
This is only another.

Breaking into a run, I discovered that I hadn’t been listening. Hadn’t heard the tender hissing, the distant crackle like a sweet caress over satin. Nor the mildly clanging bells and the gentle shrieks of whistles. Men’s faint, faraway shouts.

Whereas I’d not been meditating direct on my brother seconds previous, the combination of
Ward Eight
and
fire
was enough to deluge my entire brain with the scoundrel. When I veered south on Spring, the crescendoing half-thrilled, half-terrified hubbub told me I was nearly there. A final quick left on Washington landed me in the midst of the chaos.

The fire was out, it seemed. Mostly. The structure was in a row of low, mean, unkempt lodging houses. Adjacent to the briny western slips where seafarers quit their creaking boats to find cheap temporary digs and cheaper temporary company. The building was still alive, however. Hissing and spitting and steaming, expelling wet smoke and hot ash like snowflakes. A monster taking its last spittle-choked breaths before shuddering to sleep.

A smell lingered, something meaner than smoke. Something leering. It crept down the throat syrup-slow.

But worse—or potentially worse—two engine companies stood before the grim wreck.

One, I saw when I careened to a halt, was Neptune Engine Number 9. Drake Todd stood at the helm of his machine, red fireman’s shirt soaked, his hawkish face and the long silvery scar beside his eye making him resemble nothing so much as a pirate at the helm of his ship.

Opposite him—apparently just having arrived to discover a rival fire gang and smoking rubble instead of a fire—stood my brother before his own perfectly polished engine. He was flanked by his volunteer firedogs, their ropy hands fisted on hips or lightly slung over the axes in their belts, braces cinched tight over pugilistic shoulders. Puzzling whether the Neptune 9 crew might be in the market for some friendly smashing.

“Do you pack of scamp-foots mind telling me what in the name of the devil’s red arse you’re doing here?” Valentine snarled.

My brother looked
terrible.