Threads and Flames (34 page)

There was laughing. At first Raisa couldn't believe what she was hearing, but when she turned her head to look behind her, she saw the group of flashily dressed young men and women huddling together, the girls giggling with nervous anticipation, their escorts puffing out their chests, proud of themselves for having come up with such a clever way to find entertainment on a Sunday morning.

“Yes, Misery Lane, that's what they called the pier after the
Slocum
disaster,” one of the young men was explaining to his fascinated girlfriend. “This is where they brought the dead from that fire, too.”

“The
Slocum
?” the girl repeated, wide-eyed.

“You wouldn't know about that one, sweetheart,” he said, chucking her under the chin. “It happened some seven years back, when you were still in pigtails. The
General Slocum
was one of those big paddle-wheel steamers, and a bunch of dutchies from Little Germany rented it for a picnic excursion out to Long Island. They didn't get far, I'll say! The boat burned down to the waterline and over a thousand of 'em died—almost all women and kids, too. I remember my dad taking me down here then to watch the show. Man, that was something to see!”

“Is this going to be
very
dreadful, Johnny?” the girl asked in a false-sounding babyish voice.

“Don't you worry, sweetheart, I'll take good care of you,” her boyfriend replied, putting his arms around her waist.

An unshaven man in a raggedy coat sidled up to the cooing couple. “Buy the lady a souvenir, mister?” he offered. He held out a small, covered cardboard box. “A little something special to remember the day? I got a real nice choice of rings here, gathered up myself, with my own two hands last night off the sidewalks by Triangle. Rings right off the hands of the jumpers, and more besides. Bracelets, watches, combs, even a couple of handkerchiefs. My little miracles, I call 'em. Not even a singe on 'em, but you can't say the same for the girls who owned 'em. Here, how about this? A pretty rose you can pin on your hat. Go on, pick it up, give it a sniff. That's a smell you're not going to run across every day, if you're lucky. If that don't guarantee this is the genuine article, I don't know what—”

Three men seemed to come out of nowhere and close in on the seedy little peddler. One of them knocked the box out of his hands, sending the contents flying. The other two dragged him away while he squealed in protest. There were many policemen on duty all up and down the line, but not one of them even blinked in his direction.

“You, too.” The man who had knocked away the box of trinkets positioned himself between the sensation-seeking couples and Raisa. “You have no business here. Get out or I'll make you get out, you ...” He said something in Italian. The meaning was clear even for someone who didn't speak a word of that language.

“Now, look here, this is a free country and we've got a right to be here!” one of the male gawkers blustered.

“And I will have the right to break your miserable face,” the young man countered.

Raisa recognized the voice. “Paolo?” She touched his back gently. Luciana's brother turned to look at her. It was an ill-timed move. Still eager to impress his girlfriend, the young man who'd been gleefully recounting the
Slocum
disaster took advantage of Paolo's momentary distraction to take a swing at him.

“Paolo, look out!” Raisa shoved him to one side just as the young man's fist swung through empty air. Paolo sprang forward, catching the young dandy in the belly with his shoulder, lifting him high before throwing him clear of the line. He rolled over the cobbles like a beer barrel, landing flat on his back. His friends ran after him to help him to his feet. All his cheap finery was torn and soiled.

“Get out of here, or I will give you something more!” Paolo shouted.

“I'd like to see you try it! I'll sic the cops on you, just you wait and see!” the young man yelled back, but he didn't fight it when his companions hustled him away.

“Raisa, it is—it is good to see you,” Paolo said as his friends rejoined him. His happiness was deeply shaded with personal sorrow, but there was nothing halfhearted in the way he scooped her off her feet and hugged her. Mrs. Kamensky and Selig looked on, not knowing what to make of this strange display.

“This is Paolo,” Raisa said as soon as he set her down again. “He's my friend Luciana's brother.”

“Your sister . . . ?” Mrs. Kamensky didn't need to finish her question.

“That is what we have come to learn,” Paolo replied. “My mamma, she could not bear this, and Papa is sick. I am the only one who must be strong enough to look for our Luciana.” He glanced back to the end of the line. “We had better go or it will be night before we are allowed inside.”

Mrs. Kamensky grabbed his wrist and pulled him into line with them. “You stay here.” She glowered at the people just behind them in line, defying them to say a word. They were too broken and wrapped in their own misery to make any objection.

Raisa didn't know one of Paolo's friends, but she recognized Renzo. “It's good—it's
truly
good to see you again,” he said. “If you wouldn't mind, I'll say a prayer of thanksgiving for you to the Blessed Virgin.”

“Thank you,” Raisa said.

The line worked its way to the iron gates of Misery Lane. Raisa saw more than a few people in the crowd who were as well dressed as the thrill-seeking group that Paolo and his friends had sent packing. Sometimes they were ordered out of the line by the police; sometimes they made it all the way to the entrance to the ugly yellow building before being turned away, under loud protest. Too often they were able to sneak in, either by attaching themselves to a group of the truly bereaved or by finding an official who didn't see the harm in pocketing a little extra money for looking the other way. At last, Raisa and the others were allowed to go in.

The coffins lay in a double row under the harsh glare of electric lights. Each box was numbered, the pitiful contents partially draped to spare the searchers the added pain of seeing what fire or a bone-shattering fall had done to their dear ones. The victims' heads were propped up so that their faces could be more easily recognized, at least for those who still had faces. The air was filled with sobs and sighs, with shrieks and howls and wailing.

They made three circuits of the rows, searching, searching, first for an undamaged face, then for some small resemblance, then for any clue at all to reveal the identity of the remains. Mrs. Kamensky walked with her backbone turned to steel, glancing quickly left and right, only lingering when the remains in a coffin looked to be male. In some cases, it was hard to tell. Raisa walked in her shadow, looking hard into every coffin they passed. She was seeking more than Gavrel. Though her stomach lurched every time she saw one of the fire's more terribly burned victims, she forced herself to look closely, in case there might be some small sign on the blackened body to tell her that here lay Zusa, here was Luciana, here was cheerful, generous Gussie or tiny, birdlike Jennie, or the girl who'd run the sewing machine to her right side or to her left or across the finished-garments bin in the center of the long wooden tables.

All I can do to help them now is to find them,
she thought.
If I can do anything to cut short poor Selig's search, or Paolo's, I must. How can they stand it, looking into one coffin after another, especially the ones where the body is—where the body's hardly there anymore? I have to help them—

A heartrending cry tore through the air of Misery Lane. Selig stood transfixed at the foot of a coffin. In some cases, the city officials had ordered the personal possessions of the dead kept separate from the bodies, to prevent theft by the pickpockets who had infiltrated the pier along with the ghouls and gawkers. But in those cases where the fire had made the bodies nearly unrecognizable, the dead were permitted to keep their few small treasures.

Now Selig pointed at the charred thing in the coffin and said, “I gave her that locket. Look, there's a little bunch of forget-me-nots etched on the cover. I told her—I told her that someday she could keep her sweetheart's picture in it and she said . . . she said that she was never going to get married because all of the good men were already in love with other girls. Joking! Always joking, always making us laugh, even when things were bad. Oh, Zusa, dearest child, no more, no more laughter! No more ever again, my darling little girl!” He burst into storms of tears.

Mrs. Kamensky and Paolo had their arms around him before Raisa could get near. A weary official approached the distraught man, ready to take down the information that would be needed before Zusa's coffin could be mercifully closed, then marked as identified and claimed. Raisa heard a weird, animal-like noise echoing loudly in her ears and realized she was listening to the sound of her own grief. She called out her friend's name with so much force that she felt her throat go raw, but even so, her cry was only one small note of anguish in the chorus of despair around her.

“
Now
aren't you glad I gave that stupid mick cop a tenner?” The self-satisfied voice snapped Raisa's attention to the dapper, milk-faced man strolling past the coffins with two of his equally well-tailored friends. “It's better than anything running in the theaters, believe me, and won't the boys at the club be envious when we tell them where
we've
been today!”

A pair of high-society ladies stood within earshot, cheeks aflame. “How dare you speak that way?” the older of the two exclaimed. “Have some respect for the dead.”

The man snorted. “Go play your charity games somewhere else and mind your own business.”

“Mind
yours.
” Renzo grabbed the man's shoulder, spun him around, and punched him in the jaw. His companions raised their walking sticks, shouting threats, and closed in on Renzo, but their attempt to take him on, two against one, was stopped cold when Paolo and his other friend came running.

It was a short brawl, truly little more than a scuffle. The five men stumbled back and forth just long enough to collide with the two society women. The older one let out an indignant squawk, but kept her footing. The younger, however, turned pale and went soft in the knees. The whites of her eyes showed as the horrors of Misery Lane caught up with her and she stumbled, fainting against the edge of the nearest coffin.

Raisa ran forward to catch her before she could sprawl across the ghastly contents of the long wooden box. Gently she lowered the young woman to the ground and supported her body with one arm, her own pain temporarily banished by concern for another. The young woman's expensively plumed hat rolled away across the morgue floor. Raisa raised her free hand to pat the unconscious woman's cheeks, the only remedy she knew of for a faint.

Her hand froze. Her heart beat faster. For a moment that became its own eternity, Raisa could not draw another breath. And when at last she could speak, she was only able to whisper a name: “Henda?”

Even as the word left her lips, her mind rejected the possibility.
No. How could it be? Look at her, how expensively she's dressed, the jewelry she's wearing! Impossible. It's been years, but still . . .

She stared into the young woman's face, drawn along a trail of memories. The last image of her sister was a glimpse of Henda's desperate face the night she'd fled Glukel's home. Raisa remembered her sister's features, how pretty she was, but also how pale and badly fed she'd been, nothing at all like this stylish, rosy-cheeked beauty.
No,
she thought again.
There's only a resemblance, but I want it to be more than that so much it hurts! I've lost Gavrel, so I'm grasping at dreams.
She patted the young woman's cheeks and saw her eyelids begin to flutter open once more.

“Hey! What are you trying to pull there, girly?” Strong hands hooked themselves under Raisa's arms and pulled her to her feet while a handsome, elegantly dressed young man threw himself forward to cradle the waking woman in his arms. The woman's eyes suddenly went wide. She raised her hands and grabbed at Raisa's shawl, but whoever was behind Raisa, dragging her away, was too strong. The woman's grip on the shawl broke after the shortest of struggles.

The heels of Raisa's shoes scraped over the floor as a gruff voice in her ear muttered about the plague of thieves and pickpockets infesting the pier. “Like this wasn't hell enough. Damn buzzards! I'd like to skin all of you down to your crooked bones.”

Raisa squirmed around until she saw that she was in the grip of an exasperated policeman. “Let me go!” she exclaimed. “I wasn't doing anything wrong.”

“No, I guess trying to rob a helpless woman's just hunkydory where
you
come from,” the policeman sneered.

“Officer, what are you doing to that poor child?” The older society lady rushed up to plant herself in front of Raisa and the policeman. “Hasn't she suffered enough? I give you my word as a witness that she was only trying to help Mrs. Taylor. Let her go at once!”

“If you say so, ma'am.” The policeman released Raisa, touched the brim of his cap, and walked away without a word of apology.

“Are you all right, my dear?” the older woman asked. Her concern was sincere.

“Yes, I—who did you say I helped?” Raisa's glance darted back toward the spot where she'd been jerked away from the fainting victim. There was no sign of the fashionable young woman or her escort.

“My friend, Mrs. Harrison Taylor. Poor dear, the strain of being in this awful place was too much for her. If you hadn't caught her when she fainted, she might have done herself an injury.”