The Fatal Flame (42 page)

“He knows it.”

“He suspects,” she corrected, looking almost wicked.

“You’re one of the most remarkable women I’ve ever met.”

“Now,” she said flatly, “you are being again ridiculous. Sit there and I will bring
držkovský
with butter when it comes out of the oven. I cannot say to you how sorry I am for the time you passed. No one deserves such, least of all—”

“I’ll miss this place so much,” I choked out, my fist wedged against my teeth.

Mrs. Boehm turned back to me, her lovely colorless eyes deepening nearly to blue in her shock.

“I apologize,” I forced out, pressing the heels of my hands to my streaming eyes. “Forgive me, please. I’ve never left here, you know, never past Brooklyn or Harlem, and I hate it, I
hate
what New York turns people into—this city makes the best of us no better than the rats—but I’ll never leave, will I? I can’t. I have a horrible job I’m inexplicably talented at, and I flatter myself Bird needs me, and if I take my eyes off Val for so much as a second, he’ll manage to finally kill himself. If I could marry you in earnest feeling and take you to California . . . I’m sorry. I’m a disastrous person, I know, but I needed a new home, and I found one here. Scouting out another will be . . .”

Elena kissed me to shut me up.

If she’d ever made a grander gesture for charity, I couldn’t think of it. But she was about to outdo herself. Just after she’d sweetly pulled my lower lip into her mouth and then shifted to kiss me sideways—parallel, chaste. As if we were making a cross, her hand in my hair all the while.

“Your brother, he is always saying you are stupid,” Elena breathed. “Teasing is what he is doing, but sometimes I wonder.”

“Why would you wonder about that? I
am
—”

“Listen to what I am telling you,
bitte.
Josua has great savings for California—for all his brewing, he is yet very careful. Money I have as well, a great deal, much from baking, much from hosting a lodger. A friend. You say you will miss this home?
You
will miss it? Audie was born here, Franz built that table
with his two hands
.
I
will miss it, and strangers will not live here.”

I didn’t understand. Her nails on my scalp I could fathom, the tender drag over skin, but her words? She might as well have been speaking Bohemian. Or German. Or both.

“Not everything I’ve taught her yet, but enough.” Elena pulled away to glance around her. “I think Bird is a better cook than a baker, but if that is what she wants, the ovens are large and your brother, maybe he can tutor her more. He is very apt at cooking.”

Comprehension trickled, leisurely as a drop of tree sap, from her voice to my ears and into my skull.

“In two months I will go west.” Elena stood, brushing a thumb over my mouth where she’d reddened it. “We can talk plenty before. But this will all be for the pair of you. Bird, she will be finished school at the orphanage soon. I once needed nothing more than a place and a purpose. I hope she never needs the same when I could have given it to her. She is like my kinchin to me. Money enough you have, Timothy, to settle our accounts.”

Elena Boehm speaks excellent English, in a slightly guttural accent that blends German and Bohemian. Somehow I still couldn’t follow her.

“Timothy,” she said—exasperated, hands on her prominent hip bones.

“You mean to sell me this place?” I marveled finally. “But it’s . . . Good God, how much is it worth? What’s your price?”

Elena skimmed her finger along a bowl’s edge, tasting sweet clotted cream thoughtfully. “Three questions. So many. Yes, I mean to sell you my home. Your home. Second, it’s worth several hundred dollars. What was the third? Newly engaged people, notoriously they are distracted.”

“What’s your price?” I repeated slowly, smiling.

Elena Boehm grinned wider, sampling the leavings from the spoon before passing it to me.

“I don’t know. How much do you have?”

—

F
our days later, my hair yet smelling of lamp oil but no longer of Armageddon, I was walking toward Sally Woods’s Thomas Street greenhouse on a disturbingly cheerful spring morning when I caught a shock in my peripheral vision.

The young hawker screaming out headlines from the
New Republican
could probably have done a side business fighting fires for all the spittle he was producing. I momentarily quieted the din as I traded coin for news and then settled myself on a splintering park bench on the north side of Duane Street. Not out of earshot—that would have meant a pilgrimage to Canada. But at least out of the line of fire.

I turned up to the article that had arrested my attention.

STAR POLICE: FRIENDS OR FOES?
GRUESOME SECRET PRACTICES OF THE COPPER STARS REVEALED

By Mr. William Wolf

Reading the copy took me all of five minutes, after which I didn’t know whether to dissolve in laughter or in tears. None of it was strictly untrue, mind. On the contrary. And I liked William Wolf considerably. But the contents ranged from:

As the Reader has gleaned from the brutal nature of tactics used by the “coppers” to elicit information from men who imagine themselves drowning and are in fact near to it, and with apologies to the Sensitive for the detailed nature of my description, I wonder whether it is possible to trust any Organization so eager to torment an unarmed New Yorker.

Which would have been bad enough without:

A singularity clear and true as the Polestar within this rabble is found in the person of Mr. Timothy Wilde, Badge 107, whose dedication to the unraveling of mysteries seems secondary only to his acumen—or so the gentleman would like us to think of him, for this reporter suspects that Mr. Wilde’s candor reaches no further than do his immediate loyalties.

This highly readable claptrap continued in like vein at such length, painting a light-and-shade portrait of the copper stars with me as their tainted champion, that I quickly allocated it to the gutter. Or rather the bench, where someone might want it for a blanket. I’d rolled it up to shove between the slats when another item entirely caught my eye, at the back nestled amongst the obituaries, and I flattened the paper on my lap again in gaping disbelief.

We learn with sadness that Mr. Cornelius Villers, a longtime Democratic Party leader, Wall Street tycoon, and distinguished member of the New York Lepidopterist Society, was discovered untimely dead at his home yesterday. It appears that, following a meeting at the Tammany Wigwam, Mr. Villers suffered stomach complaints and retired to his home only to decline still further. The gentleman has long been a sufferer of the severest allergic reactions, and we can only surmise that he met with some accidental misadventure of the culinary variety. The coroner has confirmed he died of natural causes, and no other guests were similarly afflicted.

I sat there, merely and wholly stunned, for about three minutes. Reading the notice over again. Picturing a brothel mistress with striking hazel eyes and ethereal blonde hair.

Then I slapped the paper against my knee, lodged it in the pine bench, and was on my way again.

For all Silkie Marsh’s faults, and they are exhaustive if not global, I’ve never liked Cornelius Villers.

Or bullies.

Or incendiaries, come to that.

The Thomas Street landlady received me with her usual enthusiasm, but I was nevertheless happy to see that her mumps had improved. Approaching the quiet greenhouse, the symphonic riot of spring tendrils brushing my wrists as I crossed the yard, I heard the incongruous clicking of typesetting and knew that Sally Woods had returned to work.

She answered my knock warily but brightened at the sight of me. That was a relief, as I’d not been certain of welcome. Miss Woods was still in male costume, but one I hadn’t seen before, wearing brown checked trousers with pink-collared shirtsleeves and a brown velvet vest. Her coat was tossed carelessly over a chair, and a gem of sweat glistened on her temple.

Miss Woods smiled at me.

Effortlessly, I smiled in return.

“I shouldn’t be any too kittled to see you, but I told you I’ve terrible taste,” she jested, though her tone was weary as she elbowed the door open.

Stepping inside, I rocked my hat on my fingertips. “I’ve arranged for you to have a better guest in an hour, but if you don’t mind a quick chaff in the meanwhile, there’ve been developments.”

Sally Woods was already pouring the whiskey. Despite the alarming attire, I now felt free to admit to myself: I thought she was marvelous. I liked her and admired her the way I’d esteem a newly discovered species of jungle predator, perhaps. The sort I didn’t understand but knew to be formidable.

“What guest? You’re never this cagey.” Miss Woods tossed her head, carelessly pinned hair flying.

“Have you been reading the papers?” I redirected.

Her hand froze in the act of recorking the liquor. “No. I’ve been cloistered here at the behest of the star police. And I’ve been up to my ears in missed print orders. And scant enough on chink to care. And . . . a damn coward, if I’m honest with the pair of us.”

“Robert Symmes is dead.”

Sally Woods sank ever so slowly into the nearest chair.

I tried to be as considerate as I was efficient. But I needed to tell her all manner of things. That I knew what Ronan McGlynn had done to Ellie Abell at the alderman’s vile behest. That I knew Sally Woods had been told it was her fault entirely, and she was wrong if she’d ever believed so. That I planned to see McGlynn hanged, that I’d arrested Simeon Gage on the charge of falsifying documents, that Miss Abell may have been falsely grateful to Symmes for employing a ruined woman, but the reign of terror was over and New American Textiles had passed into the hands of a Symmes cousin currently en route from Boston. That Symmes, in his despair over the unexpected humiliation of losing the election, had apparently leapt to his death, mortifying his prestigious family.

By the end of the hour, the whiskey bottle was half empty and my handkerchief soaked, wrapped like brass knuckles around Sally Woods’s fist.

“I can’t believe he’s really gone,” she said thickly. “It’s as if God Himself struck him down. I wanted to quiet that bastard so many times. With a shiv, with my bare hands.”

“You would have,” I said, believing it.

Sally Woods flapped my own kerchief at me, blinking swollen brown eyes. “All I did was write useless letters.”

“You didn’t want Miss Abell to come to further harm.”

“For my own sake? Certainly. I adore the girl. For hers? Yes, still more so. But that hardly speaks to the favor of a self-proclaimed revolutionary. I wasn’t strong enough to kill him, Mr. Wilde,” she concluded, every limb tensed.

“Even if that were true, and it’s not, it would have been no poor reflection on you, Miss Woods,” I confessed. “Neither was I.”

A small knock sounded.

Ellie Abell pushed the door open. She wore a simplified version of her Bowery finery, just a blue-and-white-striped spring frock with a jaunty red jacket. There were lavender moons under her light brown eyes, and her lily complexion was mottled from crying.

I’d never wanted to harm her. She’d experienced the unspeakable already as the pawn of a power-mad monster. But I’d written a short, direct letter anyhow, one pointing the finger at Symmes more than it alluded to her own hurts whilst still making all clear to her. Because the way I saw it, now Symmes was dead and the storm passed, if Ellie Abell and Sally Woods still didn’t have each other, didn’t try to patch back together the sisterhood they’d once forged . . .

That wasn’t the right story. And when I can alter endings to suit me, I do.

“Ellie?” Sally Woods cried, rising.

My hat was already in my hand and I was almost to the door. As I passed Miss Abell at the threshold, she caught my hand.

“I don’t like to conjecture what your opinion of me must be,” she said hoarsely.

“I think you a very brave woman,” I supplied.

“Thank you for the letter. Hullo, Sally,” she added, attempting a smile.

“What ho, Ellie.” Sally Woods emitted a laugh like a cracked bell in a church tower—broken but pure as hymns. “Oh, Ellie. I’ve missed you so.”

They didn’t need an audience. Continuing out the door, I paused only to say, as a sympathetic man would say, or so I imagined, “Atop everything else, I’m deeply sorry for your loss, Miss Abell.”

For a moment she looked puzzled. Then her brow cleared and a spark of cold stone appeared in her eye. I wondered what callous creature had summoned it.

“You’re sorry I lost that animal Ronan McGlynn’s baby?”

Hesitating, I studied her.

“Because
I’m
not,” she concluded without the smallest hint of uncertainty. Entering the greenhouse and closing the door behind her.

—

T
hat afternoon I examined my bank account.

It wasn’t spectacular, but at least it existed. Mrs. Boehm had insisted repeatedly in the face of my dense disbelief that I could give her a dollar or a hundred dollars and it would make no difference. But I wanted to do right by her. So I took out a small loan, one that I’d make up within six months’ finding lost things with the aid of Mr. Piest’s vision, and drew a cheque in her name.

Then I went home and boiled myself a cup of coffee and began writing this story.

It’s taken me years to complete it. To separate the truth from the facts.

Sometimes I think about the Timothy Wilde who lives in the three manuscripts about his life as a copper star, the third nearly finished now. The sheaves of parchment are connected in my mind to the smell of charcoal as I draw crime scenes or suspects. Or my own history or my dreams. But these almost-books . . . they aren’t the same as the pictorial exercises in dread I roll into a great ball about every other month.

No, I picture the pages, their two dimensions, the words themselves and their finite number of letters written in my obscenely neat penmanship. Then I look down at myself, and I’m real. Corporeal. A lean, short copper star, but one with a rib cage nevertheless. A backbone. I think how hard I tried to make the paper Tim resemble me.