The Kingdom of Bones (25 page)

THIRTY-FIVE

T
om Sayers traveled by the Pennsylvania Railroad to Washington, and changed there for the Richmond train. The southbound service had three coaches, a diner, four Pullman carriages, and two baggage cars. For a while Sayers mostly wandered, restlessly, up and down the aisles. In his coach were a couple of families and a group of seven or eight men of business. The men all seemed to know each other, and were passing the journey by playing cards and talking politics. They wore middling-good suits and talked too loudly.

Outside, farmland gave way to wooded Virginia countryside. Sayers could see that his wandering was making the porters nervous. So he sat for half an hour, and fidgeted instead. When an attendant came through announcing lunch, he went along to the dining car, took a table, and ordered a steak. He could afford to live decently, at least for now. Dead broke and being punched daily for a living was no way to keep himself presentable for Louise. With each day that went by, he felt less like a dispirited slugger and more like the Tom Sayers of old.

He wondered if the Pinkertons had discovered their loss yet. Sebastian would be mad at him, for sure.

On the arrival of the plate, he found himself looking down at the food without much enthusiasm.

In a way, it was easier to keep on yearning for one’s goal than to be taking such a definite step toward it. Day-to-day life could continue, and the goal remained a safe and distant dream. There’d be none of the uncertainty that he felt now; none of the fear that he might make a wrong move or a bad decision, and so wreck his hopes forever.

He glanced out of the window. They were on a trestle bridge passing over a wide, slow river. A flock of birds took off from the water as the train went by.

One thought sustained him. It was of that night back at Maskelyne’s, when Louise had looked down from the stage and told him to forget her. She’d finally come to understand the truth of him. If only he could now make her see the truth about herself.

She was not lost. He couldn’t believe that. Abused, manipulated, misled…all of these things. But never fit to be damned. All of the evidence so far suggested that her steps toward hell were no more than consensual games of harm, enactments of evil without the guts of evil in them. Charged with inflicting pain, she sought out those whom pain would make happy.

That might change, of course; the incident with the child in Yarmouth had pointed to a much darker prospect. Only sheer luck had kept the child alive that night. Louise might have taken on the role of the Wanderer and shaped it to suit herself, but she moved forward with the guidance and coaching of the Silent Man and his equally taciturn wife. They served Wanderers, not impostors. They would waste no opportunity to propel her ever closer to the edge and, if the chance came, to tip her over it.

Louise was not pure. But who was?

Sayers picked up his knife and cut into his steak. For a man with no appetite, he went at it pretty well from then on.

The train got into Richmond early in the evening, crossing the James River within sight of the old Tredegar Iron Works and entering Main Street Station in a great cloud of venting steam. Sayers climbed down from the coach with his one small piece of luggage, then made his way toward the station building and the street. The building was recent, and towered above the elevated tracks like a brick château. Down below, horse cabs were lined up waiting for passengers.

Where to begin? He knew little of Richmond. Only that the city had been extensively reconstructed over the past few decades and, like the station, was mostly new; and that much of the new, like the great Monument Avenue, spoke of an obsession with what had been lost. The former capital of the Confederacy had been put to the torch when its troops had evacuated before the Union advance.

He first needed somewhere to stay. On Main Street, he began looking out for playbills. If he could find his way to the theater district, he could locate the watering holes that served it. Not those where audiences dined or drank, but the quieter ones where show people gathered. Sayers could usually spot a performers’ haunt over a place that served the general public by instinct alone.

In any of those he’d be on his own territory, and could strike up a conversation with some stagehand or between-shows vaudevillian. He could learn where the cheapest digs were to be found and how the local scene was set. He might even get to hear something of Louise; a recent arrival herself, she’d be working just as hard to make her way—although not, he was sure, in exactly the same circles as he.

His inquiries took him to Broad Street and into the alleyways running off it. One promising-looking saloon became even more promising when he spied a couple of musicians walking out, wearing street coats over their pit clothes. It was an insignificant doorway in an unappealing spot, likely to be bypassed by anyone with no good reason to seek it out.

Once inside, Sayers faltered. Something wasn’t right. This room was occupied by both white folks and Negroes, drinking peaceably side by side. His understanding was that the war had freed the slaves but that the races were still kept apart. Was Richmond’s backstage world a common ground, where no segregation existed?

Then he realized that, of course, it was nothing of the kind.

Sayers stopped by one of the tables. “Excuse me,” he said. “Would you be the Black Patti Troubadours?”

The seated man in blackface shook his head. “The Al Fields Minstrels,” he said.

Sayers made his way to the bar. The bar was elaborately carved, with a spittoon by every footrail bracket. Before it stood a black waiter in a spotless white shirt, waistcoat, and floor-length apron, leaning on the brass handrail and talking to the bartender. As Sayers approached, the bartender finished the conversation and the waiter moved off to look for orders and pick up empties.

Sayers set his bag down alongside a bar stool and ordered beer. It came in a heavy crystal glass. He took one sip and then returned the glass to the bar.

He needed to take more care. It was as if that one sip had opened a door before him. Beer always led to a whiskey chaser and one whiskey chaser always led to another. They were the first notes in an extended melody that, once begun, would tease him onward and onward and would likely end with him facedown in the alley outside.

Once, moderation had been an option. No more. Now it seemed that his only options were total abstinence, or its equally extreme alternative.

He turned from the bar and looked at the room. His attention was drawn to a woman in one of the back-wall booths. She hadn’t been alone when he’d walked in, but she was alone now. The sight of an unaccompanied woman was unusual in itself, but she was also the worse for liquor.

Sayers’ guess was that she was an unsteady whore, here to work the crowd. The waiter seemed to think so, too, and stopped to engage with her. She started shaking her head. The waiter looked up and caught the white bartender’s eye. The barman came out from behind his bar, and the waiter stood back while the bartender went about the noisy business of throwing the woman out. Those all around either ignored the scene, or did their best to pretend to.

Sayers studied the floor until the waiter and the barman came in from the alley, dusting off their hands. The waiter took a call from a nearby table and the barman returned to his station. Sayers saw the man eyeing his barely touched glass, and he beckoned him over.

“Something wrong with the beer?” the man said as he moved closer.

“Nothing at all,” Sayers said. “Excuse me if I speak out of line, sir, but I’m glad to see you run a decent house here.”

“And I’m happy to know it’s appreciated,” the barman said.

“Be assured that it is,” Sayers said. “With all those playhouses just around the corner, I imagine you get quite a lot of the theater crowd.”

“Some,” the barman conceded.

“I’m in that line myself,” Sayers said. “Looking for a place to stay with clean sheets and a management that doesn’t fret or show too much interest in the hours a man keeps. Would you know of such a place?”

“I might,” the bartender said. “Is one beer all you plan to buy?”

“Give me a whiskey chaser,” Sayers said, “and pour one for yourself.”

When the whiskeys were paid for, the barman reached under the counter and then slid a printed card across to Sayers.

Sayers tilted it to catch the light, then read it. The card advertised a small guesthouse with reasonable rates. Theatricals especially welcome. Sayers then said, “Thank you,” and slid down from the bar stool. He picked up his bag.

“What about the drinks?”

“Both for you,” Sayers said, and walked out.

In the alley beside the saloon, Sayers’ first sight as he came out of the doors was of the ejected whore. She had fallen down, and could not get up. She could be seen from the end of the alley, but no one passing had felt moved to walk in and help her. Sayers went over. He lifted her to her feet, and guided her to where some crates were stacked against the opposite wall. Three of them came up at just the right height to make her a seat. The empty bottles in them clinked together as he helped her to settle.

“You need to get home,” Sayers advised her.

“You take me.”

“No.”

“Damn you for thinking you can do better.”

“I wasn’t thinking any such thing.” Sayers hitched himself beside her and watched as she rearranged both her clothing and her dignity. It was hard to say which was the more in disarray.

“Yah,” she said dismissively. “You got a sweetheart. That don’t worry me. Everybody’s got a sweetheart.”

“You got one?”

“Used to.”

“Me, too.”

She looked at him. Contrary to the fashion, she was made up heavily. Instead of adding to her allure, it emphasized the coarseness of her features and the bad condition of her skin. Sayers wouldn’t have dared to guess at her age. He reckoned she’d lived hard and probably looked much older than she really was.

She said carefully, “I apologize. You were being a gentleman. You stopped to help me and I’m calling you names.”

“I didn’t hear any names,” Sayers said.

“I was doing it in my head. It’s just that sometimes the drink stops them making it to my tongue.” She giggled. Smiling softened her, but not by much.

Sayers said, “If you laid off the drink, you might attract more trade.”

“If I didn’t drink, I couldn’t face the trade at all.”

That was hard to argue with. “You’ve been around,” Sayers said.

“That I have,” she said, and stopped to look thoughtfully into the distance. It was as if an idea of great import was starting to form, like a ship coming forth out of the mist. A second later, she rose slightly and cut a fart that rattled the empties in all three of the crates they were sitting on. It was as if the ship of thought had suddenly sounded its foghorn.

The clanging bell of a passing electric streetcar echoed down the alleyway for a few moments, capping the fart like a cymbal shot and relieving him of the need to pass comment. She settled back, unperturbed.

Reckoning that he had a perfect opportunity and nothing to lose, Sayers said, “Can I ask you a question that would offend most women?”

“Ask away,” she said. “I’ll lay a hundred dollars that you can’t offend me. If you’ll furnish me the hundred.”

“I can’t do that,” he said, “but let me ask you this. There’s a certain kind of man who takes a certain kind of pleasure.”

“Nances?”

“Not nances. I’m talking about the kind of man who looks to physical punishment as a source of gratification. Can you tell me where in this city might such men be found?”

“You want a beating? I can do that for you.”

“It’s not for me. It’s complicated to explain.”

“I’ll bet it is,” she said. And then she drew in a big breath and sighed and settled and gave the matter some serious thought.

“You want to find men with an appetite for that kind of thing,” she said, “you need to look for the places where the rich ones gather. Get a bunch of ’em together and they turn into little boys. And those little rich boys…the only woman’s touch they ever knew was being spanked by their nannies. That’s their idea of paradise now they’re grown men.”

“What kind of places are we talking about?”

“The sporting clubs. Except there’s more to their sport than horses and guns. That was easy. Give me a dollar and ask me something else.”

“Okay,” he said, and gave her two. “Say a woman has a child growing inside her. Someone presses her into ending that child’s life before it begins. I imagine that would affect her. How long do you think it would take for her mind to achieve any kind of peace?”

She frowned. It was as if he’d suddenly broken into a foreign language, but she hadn’t realized it and was struggling to construe the words in terms that she understood.

Sayers began, “What I mean is…” but she cut right across him.

“I heard what you said.” With a sudden lurch forward, she rocked onto her feet. He stood up along with her. “I heard what you said and the hell with you!”

She took a swing at his face and he didn’t really have to avoid it, because she missed him by a mile and lost her balance; he caught her arm to stop her from falling and she shook him off, violently. She grabbed the crates to steady herself instead, and then made a big effort and heaved the topmost one toward him. He skipped back as it crashed down onto the stones at his feet, the plank lid bursting off and broken glass flying everywhere.

She was screaming now, and sobbing at the same time, damning him over and over in language he’d never heard coming out of a woman before. People at the end of the alley were stopping to watch. The lower crates were open and she started pulling out empty bottles and lobbing them in his direction. Her face was a painted mask, fury and tragedy in a single design.

“Forgive me,” Sayers said uselessly, and her answer was a flying bottle propelled by more abuse. He flinched and fended it off, taking another step back for safety. She was like a wild thing. He’d obviously started this, but he had no idea of how it might be stopped. If there was any way of stopping it at all.