Mister Slaughter (2 page)

"Well," Greathouse said with a gracious smile, as Matthew stepped into the rancid room. "We can't have that, can we?" He shut the door, and the skinny gray-bearded gent who was sitting in a chair at the back, having been interrupted in his massacre of a good fiddle, instantly returned to his display of screeching aural violence.

The cannon-voiced bullfrog behind the bar, whose name was Lionel Skelly and whose fiery red beard almost reached the bottom of his stained leather waistcoat, resumed his task of pouring a fresh—to use a word imperfectly—mug of apple destruction for a patron who turned a fishy eye upon the new arrivals.

"What, ho!" said Samuel Baiter, a man known to have bitten off a nose or two. To add to his charms, he was a heavy gambler, a vicious wife-beater, and spent much of his time with the ladies at Polly Blossom's rose-colored house on Petticoat Lane. He had the flat, cruel face and stubby nose of a brawler, and Matthew realized the man was either too drunk or too stupid to be cowed by Hudson Greathouse. "The young hero and his keeper! Come, have a drink with us!" Baiter grinned and lifted his mug, which slopped oily brown liquid onto the floorboards.

The second man in that declaration of "us" was a new figure in town, having arrived in the middle of September from England. He was almost as big as Greathouse, with huge square shoulders that strained his dark brown suit. He'd removed his tricorn, which was the same shade of Broad Way mud, to display why he was called "Bonehead" Boskins. His scalp was completely bald. His broad forehead protruded over a pair of heavy black eyebrows like, indeed, a wall of bone. Matthew didn't know much about Boskins, other than he was in his early thirties and unemployed, but had ambitions of getting into the fur trade. The man smoked a clay pipe and looked from Matthew to Greathouse and back again with small, pale blue eyes that, if showing any emotion at all, displayed utter indifference.

"We're expecting someone," Greathouse answered, his voice light and easy. "But another time, I'm sure." Without waiting for a response, he grasped Matthew's elbow and guided the younger man to a table. "Sit," Greathouse said under his breath, and Matthew scraped a chair back and eased himself down.

"As you please." Baiter quaffed from his drink and then lifted it high. He summoned a half-lipped smile. "To the young hero, then. I hear Polly's quite taken with you these days."

Greathouse sat down with his back toward the corner, his expression relaxed. Matthew took the measure of the room. Ten or twelve dirty lanterns hung overhead, from the end of chains on hooks in the smoke-greased rafters. Under a floating cloud of pipesmoke there were seven other men and one blowsy lady in attendance, two of the men passed out with their heads in a gray puddle of what might have been clam chowder on their table. No, there was an eighth man too, also passed out and face-down at the table to Matthew's left, and as Matthew recognized the green-glassed lantern of a town constable Dippen Nack lifted his swollen-eyed face and struggled to focus. Beside an overturned mug was the brutish little constable's black billyclub.

"
You
," Nack rasped, and then his forehead thumped down upon the wood.

"Quite taken," Baiter went on, obviously more stupid than drunk. "With your
adventures
, I mean. I've heard she's offered you a . . . what did she call it? . . . a 'season pass'?"

The invitation, on elegant stationery, had indeed arrived at Matthew's office soon after the first chapter was published. He had no intention of redeeming it, but he appreciated the gesture.

"You've read about Matthew Corbett, haven't you, Bonehead? If it wasn't for him, we couldn't walk the streets safe at night, could we? Couldn't even go out for a drink and a poke. Well, Polly talks about him all the time," said Baiter, with an edge of harshness creeping in. "About what a
gentleman
he is. How
smart
, and how
noble
. As if the rest of us men were just little creatures to be tolerated. Little useless creatures, but oh how that whore can go on about
him
!"

"I think the whole damned thing was made up, is what I think!" said the blowsy lady, whose sausage-skin was a gown thirty pounds ago. "Ain't nobody could
live
, fightin' fifty men! Ain't that what I think, George?" When there was no reply, she kicked the chair of one of the unconscious patrons and he answered with a muffled groan.

"
Fifty
men!" Dippen Nack lifted his head again. The sweat of effort sparkled on his ruddy, cherub-cheeked face. The constable was, in Matthew's opinion, though, closer to a devil than a cherub. Anybody who stole the gaol keys and went in at night to pee on the prisoners did not rate high in his book of life. "A damned
lie
! And me, boppin' that Evans bastard on the bopper and savin' Corbett's life, and not even gettin' my
name
in that rag! Takin' a knife in the arm for my trouble, too! It ain't
fair
!" Nack made a strangled sound, as if he were about to start crying.

"Sure he's a liar, Sam," said Bonehead, with a small sip from his own mug, "but that's a fine suit he's wearin'. Fittin', for such a smart cock to strut around in. How much that suit cost you?" This was spoken as Bonehead stared into the depths of his drink.

Now Matthew began to suspect why Greathouse had brought him here. Of all places, to the tavern where he knew two men had died in brutal fights right on this floor, which looked to him to be more blood-stained than brandy-splashed. Having clerked for Magistrate Nathaniel Powers, Matthew also knew that Lionel Skelly himself was no stranger to violence; the tavern keeper had cut off a man's hand with an axe he kept behind the bar. It didn't pay to try to swipe coins from the cashbox in here.

Greathouse spoke up, to parry the question: "Way too much, in my opinion."

There was a silence.

Bonehead Boskins slowly put his mug on the bar and aimed his eyes at Greathouse. Now he looked every inch a man who was neither too drunk nor too stupid but perhaps just enough of both to light his wick. In fact, he looked supremely confident in his ability to maim. Indeed,
eager
. "I was speakin' to the young hero," he said. "Not to
you
, old man."

Yep, Matthew thought as his heartbeat quickened and his guts went squirmy. Sure as rain. The crazed maniac had brought them here to get into a fight. It wasn't enough that Matthew had been doing very well in his arduous lessons on swordplay, map-making, preparing and firing a flintlock pistol, horsemanship and other such necessities of the trade. No, he wasn't progressing fast enough in that "fist combat" nonsense that Greathouse imposed upon him.
Remember
, Greathouse had said many times,
you fight with
your mind before you use your muscles.

It seemed that Matthew was about to get a demonstration of the great one's mind. And Heaven help us, he thought.

Greathouse stood up. He was still smiling, though the smile had thinned.

Matthew again counted the heads. The fiddler had stopped his fiddling. Was he a fighter, or a fixture? George and his unconscious companion were still face-down, but they might come to life at the first smack. Who could say what Dippen Nack would do? The blowsy lady was grinning; her front teeth had already been knocked out. Baiter would probably wait for Bonehead to bash a skull before he started nose-chewing. Skelly's axe was always near at hand. Of the five others, two looked like rough-edged wharfmen who craved a good bustarole. The remaining three, at a back table, were dressed in nice suits that they might not want to disfigure and were puffing on churchwarden pipes, though certainly they were no reverends. A throw of the dice, Matthew thought, but he really hoped Greathouse was not such a careless gamesman.

Instead of advancing on Bonehead, Greathouse casually removed his cap and cloak and hung them on wallpegs. "We just came in to spend a little time. As I said, we're expecting someone. Neither Mr. Corbett nor I want any trouble."

Expecting someone? Matthew had no idea what the man was talking about.

"Who're you expectin'?" Bonehead leaned against the bar and crossed his thick arms. A seam at the shoulder was threatening to burst. "Your lady friend, Lord Cornhole?" Beside him, Baiter sniggered.

"No," Greathouse replied, "we're expecting a man I might hire to join our agency. I thought this would be an interesting place to meet." At that moment, the door opened, Matthew saw a shadow on the threshold, heard the clump of boots, and Greathouse said, "Here he is now!"

Zed the slave walked in, wearing a black suit, white stockings and a white silk cravat.

As the place went quiet except for an inrush of breath and Matthew's eyes bulged in their sockets, Matthew looked at Greathouse with an effort that almost broke his neck and managed to say, "Have you gone
mad
?"

Mad or not, Greathouse had a gleam in his eye and a measure of pride in his voice when he next addressed the slave: "Well! Don't you look upright!"

How much of this praise Zed understood was unknown. The slave stood with his back against the door, his wide shoulders slightly bowed as if he feared disturbing the tavern's precarious peace. His black, fathomless eyes moved from Greathouse to take in the other patrons and then back again, in what was almost to Matthew's viewpoint a gaze of supplication. Zed didn't want to be here, no more than he was wanted.

"That's the coroner's crow!" came a shrill cry from the lady. "I seen him carryin' a dead man easy as a sack a' feathers!"

This was no exaggeration. Zed's tasks in service to Ashton McCaggers included the cartage of bodies from the streets. Matthew had also witnessed the slave's formidable feats of strength, down in the cold room in City Hall's cellar.

Zed was bald and massive, nearly the same height as Hudson Greathouse but broader across the back, shoulders and chest. To look upon him was to view in its full and mysterious force all the power of the dark continent, and so black was he that his flesh seemed to radiate a blue glow under the yellow lamps. Upon his face—cheeks, forehead and chin—were tribal scars that lay upraised on the skin, and in these were the stylized Z, E, and D by which McCaggers had named him. McCaggers had evidently taught him some rudimentary English to perform his job but, alas, could not teach him to speak, for Zed's tongue had been severed from its root long before the slaveship made fast to the Great Dock.

Speaking of tongues, Skelly found his. It threw forth a croaking blast from Hell: "
Get that crow
out of here
!"

"It's against the law!" shouted Baiter, just as soon as Skelly's voice finished shaking sawdust from the rafters. His face, mottled with crimson, wore the rage of insult. "Get him out or we'll throw him out! Won't we, Bonehead?"

"Law? 'Gainst what law? I'm a constable, by God!" Nack had begun to stir himself once more, but in his condition stirring was a far stretch from standing.

Bonehead had not responded to the threat his companion had just unsheathed; it appeared to Matthew that Bonehead was taking in the size of the new arrival, and Bonehead was not so thick-skulled as to wish to batter himself against that particular ram. Still, being as men are men and men who drink potent liquor become more mettlesome as the mug is drained, Bonehead took a slug of valor and said, though nearly speaking into his drink, "Damn right."

"Oh, gentlemen, let's not go down that path!" Greathouse offered his palms to the bar, affording Matthew a view of the small scars and knots on the man's well-used knuckles. "And surely, sir," he said, addressing Baiter, "you don't really respect any decree Lord Cornbury might have pulled from under his gown, do you?"

"I
said
," came the tavern-keeper's voice, now not so much a croak as the metallic rasp of a pistol being cocked, "get that
beast
out of my sight!"

"And out of our noses, too," said one of the gentlemen at the rear, which told Matthew that they had no friends in this particular house.

"Very well, then." Greathouse shrugged, as if it was all done and sealed. "Just one drink for him, and we'll be gone."

"He'll drink my
piss
'fore he gets a drop of my liquor!" hollered Skelly, and above Matthew the lanterns swayed on their chains. Skelly's eyes were wide and wild. His red beard, matted with the thousand-and-one grimes of New York, quivered like a viper's tail. Matthew heard the wind howl outside. Heard it shriek and whistle through chinks between the boards, as if trying to gnaw the place to splinters. The two wharfmen were on their feet, and one was cracking his knuckles. Why did men do that? Matthew wondered. To make their fists bigger?

Greathouse never lost his smile. "Tell you what. I'll buy a drink for myself. Then we'll leave everyone in peace. That suit you?" To Matthew's horror, the great man—the great fool!—was already walking to the bar, right up to where Bonehead and Baiter obviously longed to bash him down. Skelly stood where he was without moving, his mouth curled in a sneer, and when Matthew glanced at Zed he saw again that the slave had no interest in taking another step nearer destruction, much less getting a dirty mugful of it.