The Fatal Flame (4 page)

Symmes sat with a smirk hastily scrawled over his face, trying to decide whether to be mocking or bored. Valentine merely coughed in contentment, running a pugilist’s knuckles down his costly waistcoat.

“Threats of this sort are common enough,” I reasoned, keen to escape upstairs. “People borrow wild language from the morning editions, lay ideas that never hatch.”

“Granted, I suppose many locals are corrupted by the writings of foreign anarchists and Yidishers,” Symmes owned, yawning.

Not caring to address this topic, I returned to the previous one. A man can own the deftest tongue on the planet, but I’ve found if his audience lacks ears, talk is ineffectual. Anatomically speaking.

“I suppose we burn the letter, then?” I hazarded. Knowing the Party’s ways.

“Oh, no, not when it’s clearly of such
use
to you.” Symmes sighed pettishly, staring now into the middle distance. “That document will be further proof against the culprit, who has been threatening to incinerate me in my bed for weeks.”

My black boot stopped inches from the fireplace, a reddish haze gleaming hungrily over its toe.

A mad correspondent was one thing. We’ve both local and imported religious radicals, utopians in pristine white uniforms, half-witted screeds in the place of journalism, and a national congressman who insists that the solution to the slavery dilemma is to slit the throats of all blacks and chalk the experiment up to an honest mistake. Hell, Hunkers within the Party are calling for Barnburners to hang for traitors to Tammany, and vice-versa arguments are screamed with equal bloodthirsty enthusiasm.

But a mad correspondent who actually acted—I’ve dealt with such vipers’ nests before. As for a genuine incendiary, exactly nil words in the English language ketch me quite the way
fire
does.

I needed out of that room.

Valentine shifted in his chair. “In that case just give out the guilty party’s moniker and we’ll—”

“Who do you imagine wrote this, then, Mr. Wilde?” Symmes demanded of me lazily. “Make use of your . . . faculty, whatever it is, and identify the perpetrator.”

I’ve lived for thirty years on this unfortunate planet, six years less than Valentine. And the only person I have ever heard interrupt him without fearing for his health is me. My brother’s eyes were sparking like the Harlem line train’s iron wheels.

“A tailor, obviously,” I grated out. “They think the seamstresses lower than fleas for stealing their livelihood, and the unemployed ones breathe in air and breathe out inflammatory articles. You’re after one with an idle needle and a busy press.”

“Wrong.” Symmes checked his pocket watch again. “What a disappointment you are in the end, Mr. Wilde. I’m after a bumptious wench with a busy press and a busier mouth. A Fanny Wrightist harlot by the name of Sally Woods, whom I was forced to sack from one of my aforementioned manufactories. You can find her at one-thirty Thomas Street.”

I blinked.

My abnormally patient brother at last stirred. “You’re being threatened by a
bluestocking
,
Alderman?”

“Yes, to my profound annoyance. I’ve so very many demands on my time during this eventful elec—”

Val sat forward with such abrupt force that Symmes stopped midsentence. My pulse quickened uncomfortably. But at least the world as I knew it had returned the north to its pole.

“You mean to suggest to me,” my brother said in an undertone dark as coal dust, “that you called me here, wherever here is—during, I need not remind you, the height of
your
election season—to ask me to muzzle a moll who sent a kite through your window for a lark. Because this doesn’t go very far toward guaranteeing an actual fire.
Sir
.”

“I asked you to speak plain English, and I meant it. Of course she’d never dare to go through with her threat, but—”

“But since you’re not up to controlling your manufactory wenches, you summoned me. Notwithstanding the sprees I’ve yet to plan nor the spungs I’ve to wring for campaign funds nor the manderers I’ve to dress like Democrats within a fortnight for you.
Sir
.”

“Captain Wilde—” Symmes sputtered, furious.

“Do you honestly think you’re the only man in this room with starch in your collar and time at a premium? Or can’t you lion a Bowery gal at all? They need ginger management, I’ll own as much, spitfire creatures to the last of them, and if you’ve a weak hand—”

“Valentine!” I exclaimed, aghast.

“Treat me like a spicer,” my brother growled to Symmes with a positively voracious smile on his face, “and I will—”

Several thumps and a muffled shout emanated from the cracked ceiling, sending my hackles skyward.

“Enough of this posturing, Captain!” the alderman cried. “Show a modicum of respect. Of course I’d thought to make the errand, and I’ll admit an errand of sorts it is, albeit likewise a civic duty, worth your while. Why do you think we’re
here
, for God’s sake?”

“Try me,” I shot back, glaring upward at the plaster dust drifting onto the brim of my hat.

Seeing my expression, Val pushed to his feet. “You’ve ten seconds left to jaw, Symmes. Make them bleed for you.”

“Oh, for Christ’s sake, don’t act the innocent, Valentine,” Symmes snapped. “It’s ludicrous on you. You’re a man of appetites, and everyone knows it. This afternoon is just a small token, a gratuity if you will, for settling this little matter of mine—fresh as they come.”

“Val,” I hissed, stomach knotting, “we’re—”

“Just what in the name of the devil,” Valentine said tenderly, advancing toward the politician with his mother-of-pearl-topped stick firmly in hand, “were you planning to
tip
me with, Alderman?”

A sharp scream sliced through the thin flooring. I was off like a hare, my brother audible at my heels.

Whatever was happening needed to end. Instantly.

“Do I want to savvy why you’re really here?” Val demanded from the stair behind me. He’s quicker, but there wasn’t space for him to pass.

“No,” I admitted, swinging myself up and into the hallway by the newel post. “Should you have insulted—”

“No,” he snarled, “but I’ve been keen to for
years.
And if what I suspect is true—”

I skidded to a halt in an open doorway, my brother towering behind me.

It was a spare room with six straw mattresses in it. Filthy and lice-ridden as their scores of temporary occupants, pooled with tallow-colored stains that didn’t bear scrutiny. The floor was achingly bare, the two windows boarded over, the room’s only light emanating from a set of brass kerosene fixtures attached to either wall, leering like rotten teeth. Pondering what had been done in that room countless times over would have been hard enough going without a set of nine frightened Irish girls herded inside, suffering torments.

But that wasn’t quite the case either.

Carefully, I took in the scene.

Ronan McGlynn had his dirty hands up in apparent shock. Mr. Connell stood in the corner with his burly arms spread wide. Mr. Piest murmured soothing words from a spot near the door. The nine Irish lasses did indeed look frightened, pale skin waxy in the jaundiced light, huddled into a pack with their backs together and their teeth bared.

And one of them—a blazing redhead with a face freckled as if she’d been lovingly splattered by her ancestors with a tiny paintbrush—held a makeshift knife point-up against my friend Mr. Kildare’s throat.

Woman’s Rights, or the movement that goes under that name, may seem to some too trifling in itself and too much connected with ludicrous associations to be made the subject of serious arguments. If nothing else, however, should give it consequence, it would demand our earnest attention from its intimate connection with all the radical and infidel movements of the day. A strange affinity seems to bind them all together. . . .

—
HARPER’S NEW MONTHLY MAGAZINE
, NOVEMBER 1853

A
S
WITH
MOST
SITUATIONS
ending in life, death, or arrest, the arrival of newcomers garnered a healthy percentage of the room’s attention. Piest fell silent, Connell speared me a canny sidelong look, and the Irish girls as one organism inched farther into the back of that beastly room. Kildare suffered a tensing of the knife at his throat and murmured an appeal in his own language. Whether to God or to the redhead more immediately deciding his fate, I couldn’t say. His face was chalk-drawn in the way only a man with his life taken out of his hands can look.

Meanwhile, I’d been having a chat downstairs with a politician. I will never lose the ability to surprise myself. And I don’t mean that as a compliment.

“All right. Let’s have a short palaver, and then we’ll all be on our way. Except for that man,” I added, pointing a finger like a pikestaff at McGlynn, “who will be going to jail.”

McGlynn’s eyes narrowed into snake slits, white beard jutting in defiance. I feared a hidden exit but suspected there wasn’t one—any molls incarcerated to be broken there might have found it. Unfortunately, I’ve rich experience with girls being abused as men please. My very young friend Bird Daly, who’d provided not only my first crime of citywide significance but my first friend after the fire had scarred me, was once imprisoned in a chamber with cleaner bedclothes but an identically rank purpose. One finds few escape routes built into dungeons, whether they belong to the absent-hearted Madam Silkie Marsh, who sold mere kinchin for pleasure, or to dockside kidnappers.

I stepped ever so carefully aside. For the single reason that I wanted my brother to have a clear sight line more than anyone else in the room.

Mr. Piest’s brow was damp, but his voice emerged calm and reedy as ever. “I was just saying the same, Mr. Wilde, and also that these two fellow Irishmen you see here, madam, as well as myself and the two noble gentlemen who have just arrived, are star police of New—”

“Liar!” she hissed. Her blade seemed to have been honed from the end of a cheap pewter soup spoon, the bowl of which was clenched in one hand, Kildare’s hair fisted in the other. “These ten minutes and all they’ve been a-standin’ there, ogling, arguin’ our price.”

“I know.” I advanced a single step more. “It’s part of our—”

“Saints have mercy, what call d’ye expect me to trust a
policeman
fer, even if ’tis gospel yer speakin’? Pigs,” she added, spitting at us.

There was a point that I couldn’t rightly argue. We’re not all of the same stripe, we copper stars. Oh, we wear the same badge and we work under Chief Matsell, who, for a political man, is a shockingly decent one. But none of us are quite meant to be here, after all. Some of us are meant to run a distillery or own a haberdashery or till a farm. Others are meant to keep a gambling hell or host a bear-baiting ring or rob headlong midnight stagecoaches. Plenty are a little of both sorts, like my brother, both ruthless and pastoral, and skirt dangerous boundaries. But we’ve all been blasted by something that scored lasting marks. Not a man of us woke up and said,
May I one day be a policeman of New York?
—because we simply didn’t exist. Who could imagine such work as keeping a city safe?

And that makes for a wide, wavy ribbon of light and dark.

“’Tis from the docks themselves we’ve been tracking ye this past hour,” Connell pleaded. “When y’ came off the gangway, that bonnie lass wi’ the dark hair and the blue shawl there was on your arm, and us watching, a-fixed to trap this rat in his—”

“That proves a great barrel o’ nothin’ as I figure it.” She angled the knife higher, shining wide grey eyes on each of us by turn. “Could have been spying fer any reason, and none of ’em decent.”

“What if—” Piest began, advancing.

“Get back afore I cut his bollocks as well as ’is worthless throat!” she cried.

We did. Posthaste. Kildare glared daggers at Piest, who blushed crimson and then promptly continued, dogged as ever.

“They’ve copper stars in their pockets, madam, the identical ones that we wear,” Piest repeated. “Show her, Mr. Connell, that you are a stalwart vessel of the—”

“I. Hate. Pigs.” The emigrant woman jerked at her captive’s scalp. I couldn’t muster the energy to fault her for it.

“Please tell us, just what is your plan here?” I begged, palms forward.

“Now, that’s the right question,” Valentine said pleasantly from behind me.

The Irish girls swept eyes made all the brighter by dint of dirt and tear tracks toward us. It was like being stared down by an ancient, many-headed creature in the gloom of its echoing cave. Downright uncanny. And my lungs were already strapped tight with fear.

“Do you
want
to kill that man?” he inquired. As if asking after the likelihood of rain or location of the closest apothecary.

If the panicked huddle knew what to make of the giant who’d stolen the spotlight, they didn’t let on. Propping his stick against the wall, Valentine pulled something from his waistcoat, which act violently alarmed both sides. But it was only a cigar stub. He smiled, a real one, with teeth that weren’t meant to rend, and lit the cigar with a vesta struck against his thumbnail. The instant the tobacco aroma began to drift, soporific and familiar, the charged atmosphere shifted.

“I did actually want to know,” Val objected when the lass holding the shiv stood glaring wordlessly. “You can want to kill him or not, as long as you tell me which.”

What in hell is wrong here,
I thought,
other than the obvious?

I realized in another clock’s tick that my sibling wasn’t speaking flash. And that—after long wondering—I at last knew whether or not he could tell the difference. It was the right lay to make, to be sure. How could a green girl from a green island understand our blackest speech? And so he was talking plain English. As I’d not heard him do since . . . I could scarce remember.

“What’s yer part in this?” the girl demanded. “Boss o’ the place, are ye? Or just a
patron
?”

“I’m another star police, same as these.” Val waved the cigar in a cordial arc. In every direction save McGlynn’s, whom we’d trapped in the corner when we crowded the entryway. “This is my brother here, the small one. Ever seen a family work that way? All the height, brains, and good looks to one brother?”

“Don’t forget vices,” I couldn’t help but retort.

But he had the girls, if not remotely in the palm of his broad hand, at least listening. Part of his appeal to them was the charm he can gush as if he’s a Croton pump fitted for the purpose. But the rest was simpler far—he was the only man in the room not exuding a rank musk of dread. Deliberately, I lowered my shoulders. One or two faces at the other end of the room, meanwhile, almost smiled at the thought of their siblings.

“I’d still appreciate knowing what you plan, miss.” Valentine blew a fat smoke ring as if reclining on a veranda.

“Gettin’ out o’ this den of whores and pimps alive,” she snarled. “What else?”

“A very fine goal, and may I—” Kildare began before his speech was stopped by the pressure of an exceedingly sharp spoon.

The other copper stars froze, statuelike. All save my brother, who leaned against the left side of the doorframe with his arms crossed.

“Do you want to
kill
that man, though?” he insisted. “It would be messy for everyone, all that mopping up blood and filling out paperwork, and you’d be a murderess, you see, and we’d be forced to lock you up. Not that Kildare here is so very inspiring. He isn’t. I hardly need to tell you that—you’re the one netted him like a butterfly. It’s just the principle of the thing. Anyhow, I’ve a suggestion. You can take it or leave it, but hear me out?”

By then I was on a kinchin’s merry-go-round, reeling inwardly. Not having heard Val speak actual English since, say, around 1830. It was like watching him whisk his own face off to reveal a second one, but one I recognized from childhood.

“D’ye need my permission t’ speak, or shall we mill about till yer ready?” Kildare’s captor returned.

Two of the girls giggled, several smiled. Valentine dropped his head backward and laughed, flinching as if he’d a cracked rib.

“Right, yes,” he agreed. “I’m going to offer you a trade. I will remove any man you please from the present situation. Take your pick. One of us I eliminate for you as a gesture of good faith.”

“And then?” she prompted defiantly.

“And then you march Kildare here or whomever else you like downstairs at the end of your blade, me if you fancy, and when you breathe the fresh air, you let the poor bastard go. You’ve won, you see. This is me negotiating the terms of our defeat. I like my plan better than your plan, and I figure you do too. So I’ll just wait until you’ve picked a fellow, and then I’ll get rid of him.”

Piest stared at Valentine with eyes wide as chowder bowls. Kildare appeared, as was only to be expected, less than pleased with this lay. Connell glanced heavenward as if praying for it to work without killing anyone.

I searched my brother for a signal. None seemed remotely apparent.

Valentine returned to smoking, pointedly not looking at anyone, leaving the girl to her choice uninterrupted. Then, quite by accident, he studied the gritty floor beneath the doorframe, and his boyish, careworn face turned hard as exposed bone. I followed his gaze and saw along the cheap pine a pattern of nail gouges from previous attempted escapes. Just as a frothy tide of rage washed over me, Val snapped back into focus.

“Well?” he asked in a friendly tone. “Any ideas?”

She’d already nerves of sheer Irish cliffside and a heart to stand up for her friends—even if they weren’t her friends at all. That would have been more than ample, for my money. But the girl thought it over, and she gave it time.

“That one,” she determined, her eyes staking a claim on Ronan McGlynn. “Give me the dog who dragged us t’ this den and call it even.”

“Thank Christ.” Valentine shoved his cigar in my direction. “Hold this. For a moment there, I thought we’d all have to witness something unpleasant.”

My hand had scarcely moved before McGlynn hurled himself at my brother with a knife snatched from within his boot, swinging wide and wishful. Val, pivoting on the instant, blocked the strike with his forearm. Snarling, McGlynn tried his luck with a backhanded stab, twisting all his weight onto his opposite foot to lend more strength to his gnarled fist.

It didn’t work.

Valentine caught McGlynn’s wrist with a little circle that looked like a waltzer’s flourish and tethered it, the knife now pressed against the hollow of the villain’s spine. With his other hand gripping McGlynn’s shoulder, Val took four quick steps forward with his shorter, weaker antagonist and sent his head through the wall.

By saying
through
the wall, I mean literally. For the walls were crumbling back into forest sod, and the upkeep was nonexistent.

One speechless moment passed, everyone staring at the hole with McGlynn’s motionless pate resting inside it. A fragile bird cradled within an inhospitable nest. Then Val uncurled his hands and Ronan McGlynn slumped to the floor. Breathing, as I could see plain in the swells of his swollen belly. As oblivious as an unborn babe, fresh blood caressing his eyebrows.

I traced my mouth with my fingers introspectively. Wondering just how Val expected me to drag a fourteen-stone villain to the Tombs. And certain as the Party is crooked, he wasn’t going to be helping.

The girls burst into spontaneous applause. All except their ringleader, who was still shoving honed metal into my friend Kildare’s neck. Exchanging a look with Piest that was equal parts relief and exasperation, I lowered my hands.

“Everyone back flat against the walls save Kildare, who doesn’t try anything exciting.” I hoped she remembered he had a name, however much she mistrusted him.

Val strode in my direction and plucked his cigar from my fingers as the others retreated. I’d forgotten I’d been holding it.

“Victors first,” he announced, winking.

The girls, Kildare, and his lovely freckled captor foremost, headed for the stairs. Connell raised a ginger eyebrow at me as if demanding to know what abominable alchemy had created my only sibling and what in bloody hell we were doing with our lives.

I’d have given him an answer or two. But I hadn’t any.

When the girls had filed out, we waited to give them a nice, amiable head start. Connell, worried over his closest mate, followed them first. Mr. Piest nudged McGlynn’s temple with the blunt toe of his weighty Dutch boot and, finding him incapable of further atrocities for the time being, turned to my brother with palm outstretched.