The Fatal Flame (22 page)

Not the way Valentine looks terrible before noon as the morphine sweats out of him, skin grey and slick as if he’s made of river clay. And not the way he looks terrible when he’s in altitudes on the godless substance, glassy green eyes sharp as broken bottles and laughing as if he has a spear in his side. This was a version of terrible I’d not seen in years. He held his weighted cane cocked over one shoulder, always a weapon if also a crutch when the wretch can’t see straight, opposite hand planted arrogantly on his hip. But a tremor below his left eye jumped erratically, his mouth seemed parched at the corners, and the face that normally tempers flinty anger with a gleam of irony didn’t seem remotely amused. It was a moonless-midnight expression, one that frightened me.

“What am I doing here? Well, strike me dead if Valentine Wilde himself didn’t just ask a stupid question.” Todd sounded wearied by his fire-dousing efforts but otherwise unmoved. “Is that building just there smoldering, and am I wearing a red shirt?”

The Neptune men not occupied with spraying down the remnants of a furnace chuckled. The Knickerbocker men cast placid smiles at one another. The breed of smile meaning,
While we are not amused by the previous jest, the odds of knocking some teeth to the cobbles seem to be pleasantly increasing.

Val swung his stick down and used it to take a step or two forward, his lips curling.

“Pardon, let me rephrase that question,” he offered in the sugary tone that meant things were about to go very, very wrong. “Do you pack of scamp-foots mind telling me what in the name of the devil’s red arse you’re doing here when your engine house is in
Ward
Two
, and how in burning blazes you got here so quick-footed, and why in holy hell that building looks to me as if it was torched deliberate-like?”

Catching a brass rail, Drake Todd swung down from the engine, on a level with Valentine. He wasn’t nearly so tall—no one is—but his bowlegged swagger and the countless scars on his knuckles were enough to bode ill.

“It looks like a deliberate torch job because it is one.” He spat on the ground—not directly at my brother, thankfully, which would have been a cardinal mistake. “White phosphorus planted all through the place. Never saw clearer signs of an incendiary.”

“Sick son of a bitch,” Val mentioned coldly. It sounded both rote and meaningful, as if it were the amen at the end of a prayer.

“Sick son of a bitch,” Todd intoned. “Though from what I hear, ‘sick
bitch
’ is more likely. You savvy whose building this is, I take it?”

Unable to remain in the shadows, watery knees or no, I sidled up behind my brother. His cronies nodded at me, as did Todd. Val turned, and the brows above his haggard eyes knotted in confusion.

“I was heading for the Knickerbocker and saw the commotion,” I explained. “You look like a warmish stiff.”

“And you look like a stunted puppy with a face fit to turn milk into cheese,” he snapped.

A force beyond my control drew me back an inch or two. Several of the Knickerbocker men muttered under their breath, and one made a few trilling sounds like the ironic chirping of crickets. It was apt enough. No one was laughing.

I swallowed whatever had risen in the back of my throat, which felt like it could have been my spleen.

Val and I have always fought like wildcats. Before I hated him, when I was a kinchin and thought him a king. All the long while I hated him, when I thought him senselessly malicious. After I’d stopped hating him and knew him for courageous and shattered and vicious and steadfast. And I can’t remember a time, whether in the honeysuckle meadows of Greenwich Village or sleeping in a turned-over skip, when he hasn’t mocked me for my scrawny size. Often it’s couched in bizarrely complimentary insults along the lines of
That’s my brother—built like a Pygmy, but that lad could have you flat on the ground before you so much as saw him make a fist.
So
miniature idiot
or
fluff-brained little dandelion
or even the memorable
thimbleful of shit
wouldn’t have even merited a blink on my part.

My face, though. My face is a wound that looks healed over but isn’t. And Val
never
rags me over that. Oh, he’ll suggest,
If you keep rubbing at your face like you’re kneading dough, I’m putting your pate in my oven
or
How you think you draw less attention to a scar by twisting it like a bloody wine cork I will never understand.

But those remarks—crude as they are—stem from the fact he seems to hate that I hate the disfigurement. As if I were rabbit enough to fly it like a battle standard.

I’m not.

Something that could almost have been consternation tightened my brother’s square jaw.

All at once he turned back to Todd.

“White phosphorus, you say,” he resumed. “Casualties?”

Forcing air from my lungs, I reminded myself that I could always break my brother’s nose after the present conversation had concluded. And held my tongue.

“Aye, white phosphorus,” Todd allowed. “Nary a death this time, we were that quick about it, and the second and third floors unlivable. Actually
impossible
to live in, if you take my meaning, not a cellar with shit seeping through the walls. The flooring had rotted clean through, kept falling on the heads of the residents. Archie! Share and share alike with Timothy Wilde, as he’s taken an interest.”

Todd’s friend Archie Vanderpool, soot-smeared and sweating like the heavily muscled hog he was, approached us. He passed me an open cigar box, angling a disgusted glare at Valentine. I wondered why. But I was livid enough with my sibling to take the object myself and pretend with a will renewed that the smell wasn’t making me nauseous. Nestled within the cheap pine receptacle was a chunk of spent fuel, yet smoking, the source of the evil white smoke. It had reddened the eyes of all present, turning already aggressive men to scarlet-gazed demons.

“I take it this is energetic material,” I said.

Ordinarily my brother would have jeered at me for not knowing. But he only peered downward. “Phosphorus, all right.”

“And this building belongs to Alderman Symmes, I assume.”

“Of course it belongs to Symmes,” Valentine grated out, drifting a bit sideways but steadying himself with his cane. “What I still want to know is what the Neptune Nine boys are
doing
here
.”

“They put out the Pell Street fire too.” I glanced at Val as the memory stirred. The too-beautiful engine in the midst of my ward’s catholic—and I mean that in both the religious and in the adjective senses—squalor. “That’s Ward Six.”

As if it were possible, Valentine’s scowl deepened. “Are you Neptune coves tired of Ward Two? Can’t say as I blame you, manufactories popping up like mushrooms—it would leave me in tears.”

My mind tied itself into a truly painful knot. Picking over details as a miner sifts for gold, I recalled our initial meeting with Todd and Vanderpool, and Mr. Piest’s preamble explaining our presence.

It seems that the building’s owner has been the target of scurrilous threats,
he’d reported.

Threatening letters, you said?
Vanderpool had questioned minutes later.

Only Mr. Piest hadn’t said anything about letters at all.

“Someone warned you this building was specifically at risk,” I realized. “Now. Today.”

Drake Todd tipped his head readily. “In the flesh, at our engine house.”

“Who turned stag?”

Todd mulled it over in the careful manner I generally associate with reluctant truth-telling. “Never left a name, said Symmes shared his dustier mail with her and she was there on his say-so. Good meat on her, pale brown hair, very comely.”

My blood froze.

“Surname of Abell?”

“Maybe so,” Archie Vanderpool demurred. “Seemed a good girl, for my money. That’s twice she’s tipped us—put us onto the Pell Street blaze as well. Symmes told us in person to treat whatever she said as gospel.”

I ought to have expected it. Supposing Miss Woods owned even the residue of a conscience, she wouldn’t have wanted the city entire to burn for her cause. She’d have given fair warning. And Miss Abell had all but confessed to me she was further involved.

When Mr. Symmes showed me the note about setting outworkers afire, I thought of Dunla at once. He agreed Pell Street may well be at risk, so I did all I could.

And yet I hadn’t expected it. Even Val, who’s never surprised, blinked owlishly at the rival gang.

“Miss Woods sends Symmes notice a hairsbreadth too late to stop her,” I understood, “and he’s arranged for you to race to whichever property was targeted.”

“Pays us fair chink for it too. As if dousing stirs weren’t our honor-bound duty. Supposing
some
firemen aren’t fit for the job, it’s the lot of the rest to take their place,” Todd finished.

A grim, grainy silence fell. It was punctuated by the American natives and Tammany Irishmen of Val’s fire company edging forward. Jack, a fair-haired friend of my brother’s with gaps in his mouth like missing fence posts and a pair of gold front teeth, grinned as he advanced. Others contented themselves with gleeful cracking of knuckles and the donning of brass ones.

Valentine tapped the pearly head of his cane against his palm. It’s the least often employed and least subtle of the motions he uses to threaten people with the thing. And therefore the most distressing.

“Our engine house is within buggering spitting distance of this wreck. Explain
fit for the job
, if you please,” Valentine hissed.

The Neptune 9 men had begun similarly massing. Leaving the last of the spraying hoses and tugging closed the gushing Croton pumps. Sensing atmospheric violence crackling, the way bats can see in the dark.

Drake Todd’s wickedly slim lips quirked. “It’s no wonder you can’t savvy the good the manufactories have done, Captain. Ward Eight didn’t
burn
in the ’Forty-five fire. Ward Eight wasn’t a
trash heap
and us the men what cleared it.”

My brother took a furious step forward as I caught his elbow. He shook me off as if I were a scrap of lint.

“You’re taking the snuff,” he seethed. “I walked into five sodding blazes on Broad Street and dragged eighteen people out of them, shoveled rubble and ash and baked body parts into barrows the same as the goddamn best of you.”

I know what my brother does. And I know why he does it. But it splintered me yet further, the actual hearing him tell it.

“Did you rebuild your own ward after you’d tidied it?” Todd growled. “I did. I did, and so did Robert Symmes, and so did all the other tycoons who turned right around and
kept building.
If you want to fault my loyalties, you can sod straight the fuck off.”

“Oh,
loyalties
, my apologies. Just post me, is this a political conversation?” Val crooned. “Or a personal one?”

Todd’s entire body coiled like a furious bowstring. “The businessmen of this town keep the whole bloody clockwork oiled, and you cheddar-brained Barnburners are going to shove a wrench straight in the works with your goddamned
principles.
Who gives a shit about slavery when New York can’t even feed itself?”

“I funnel more chink toward my voters through Tammany-appointed jobs in a week than Symmes pulls out of his arse for his manufactory wenches in a year.” Val’s eyes narrowed into brilliantly sparking slits.

Todd merely spread his feet wider. “You’re looking at a Hunker firehouse, and the more jobs at
any
pay the better when people rot to death on street corners. But that’s neither here nor there.
Obviously
, I’ll man up when the closest engine house refuses to put out fires if the buildings are owned by Symmes.”

My brother found himself at a loss for words. It was like watching an alley cat botch a landing—unnatural and vaguely embarrassing for the onlooker. He just stood there, staring with leaden pistol-shot irises. The rest of the Knickerbocker 21 seemed similarly winded.

“When the
what
?” I spluttered on everyone’s behalf.

“You heard me,” Todd scoffed. “These snakes won’t touch a Symmes building. Look who their bloody delusional captain is—it’s on his orders, no less.”

It wasn’t true. I didn’t even have to ask. My brother would as soon leave a fire unchecked as he’d overcook a lamb chop.

“That is the biggest hummer I have ever heard. My ears are bleeding,” Val snarled, swaying like a sapling in a thunderstorm. “Of
course
I never—”

“You did, and any man who disavows protection over certain buildings for his own ends is a disgrace. I’d not waste my own spit in the eye of such a purblind coward as that.” Casually, as if donning a scarf, Todd slid a set of brass knuckles over his fingers. His interests weren’t merely mercenary—he’d actually swallowed what he’d been fed.

I went very still inside.

“Symmes told you that?” I wanted to know as I pulled my hat and jacket off, slinging them over a handy embellishment on the Knickerbocker engine.

“He did. You want a fight, eh? My quarrel isn’t with you, Mr. Wilde. What the hell are you playing at?”

I wasn’t sure myself. But firedogs who’d gladly have lain down in the mud and been run over by carriages for Valentine Wilde gathered around me. We were of a sudden hivelike. Buzzing with toxin-tipped tails, swarming in the direction of a mutual foe. I’d never felt such a sensation. Amidst the haze of spite and smoke, I called out, “Val, what do we do with their engine after we’ve fibbed them black and blue?”

It was a genuine question, by the by. I’ve helped to quell riots, but I’d never joined a gang brawl previous. I’d have felt more comfortable teaching our local street pigs flight.

Unfortunately, just then my brother chose to slump to the ground as if an avalanche had cracked a mountain in two. He lay there on the wet, ash-coated cobbles. As aware of the world and the impending clash as his own corpse would have been.

A lancing pang of panic told me that it
was
his corpse in fact.

Two Knickerbockers dove for Val’s body, dragging the sprawling hulk underneath their engine. If I’d had a better plan, I’d certainly have suggested it to them. But it’s difficult to do any masterful mental work when you’re gaping in distress at your collapsed brother’s boots as they bump and skid along the cobblestones away from you.