Seven for a Secret (25 page)

One reclined, presiding.

Mulqueen wasn’t the only copper star present. He’d claimed the room’s sole oaken bench and was flanked by his two roundsmen associates, men I’d once given collegiate nods when we’d spied the stars pinned to each other’s jackets. And there Mulqueen sat—cigar in his mouth, glass of Croton water at his elbow—sampling what he supposed were the wares.

A colored girl of seventeen or eighteen years stood before him, eyes trained on her own forearm. Mulqueen’s fingers crept steadily up it while he held her limp wrist in his other hand. The touch screamed possession and threat beneath a very thin veneer of lust. All the many people not looking at the bench did so in a studied, frightened fashion, as if avoiding the sight of a syphilis sore. The picture told me a story, clear as if it had been printed in the
Herald.

Mulqueen
uses his copper star to bully Five Points girls into bed with him.

My next thought was—admittedly—neither cautious, nor very considered. It took the form of a resolution and went about as well as most of my plans tend to go.

And I am going to do something about it.

fourteen

Of course the negroes form a large and rather controlling portion of the population of the Points, as they bear brutalization better than the whites, (probably from having been so long used to it!) and retain more consistency and force of character, amid all their filth and degradation.

—GEORGE G. FOSTER,
NEW YORK BY GAS-LIGHT: WITH HERE AND THERE A STREAK OF SUNSHINE
, 1850

B
ut I didn’t
bring my papers, sir,”
the brown-skinned girl said to the police officer who held her tethered by the forearm as if she were a calf.

She wore an orange dancing dress of cheap nankeen and had tied her thick black hair down in front with a purple cloth. Her voice chimed out high and distinctly Southern—Georgia, or thereabouts. She wasn’t a New Yorker.

But neither was she an escaped slave, for that matter.

I don’t understand the instinct that resides in men like Mulqueen. The urge to rend something lovely until it is in tatters, and you have accomplished a raw physical victory wholly of your own making. Torn what was whole once. Sometimes I think it’s mindless behavior. Beastlike brutality of the sort that left a Bible verse in Lucy’s skin. Other times I think it’s a foul perversion of the drive that led me to carve H
ENRY
W
ILDE,
S
ARAH
W
ILDE,
V
ALENTINE
W
ILDE,
T
IMOTHY
W
ILDE
in the elm tree by the gate of our burned shell of a house in Greenwich Village. Something to stake my claim in time and place. Bleed out the grief. I’d been vicious with that penknife, stabbed at the tree as if it had wronged me. So either the trait of wanton destruction is animalistic or entirely human.

Just then, I didn’t care.

“I never do carry free papers.” The girl’s feet wavered back and forth. Debating whether allowing Mulqueen temporary use of her arm or ripping it away would be the faster route to escape. “’Cept when I leave town, for the roads aren’t safe. You’ve got to believe me.”

“I’d like to be thinkin’ you’ve all the proper free papers.” A smug gleam lit Mulqueen’s brow, and his backward-tilting ears glowed pink, painted by the fire. He called to mind a ginger cat preening itself before the hearth. “But your voice, my dear. ’Tisn’t a
local
sound.”

Her lower lip trembled. “When Dad bought his liberty from the Greens nigh two years gone, they sold me to him for half price. Only two hundred. They always thought kindly of him. Please let me go. My papers are at the house.”

“Maybe ’twould be quicker if you and I were to have a private interview, settle this matter between ourselves?”

“Stop touching her,” I said.

Mulqueen’s smile soured. A few of the nearer dancers stopped dancing. The many-colored people not looking at the bench suddenly failed to look at the bench with much more absorbed concentration. The fiddler played on, jerking his elbow like a figure atop a music box.

“Mr. Wilde,” Mulqueen greeted me. He didn’t relinquish the girl’s arm. “And why should I do such a thing?”

“I told you to.”

The two other copper stars exchanged predatory glances. I’d no notion of their names. But one was small and piggish, almost infantile—native by his looks. The other was black Irish, pale as the whites of his cold, sober eyes, with a fist about the size of my head.

“Oh, to be sure, ye did,” Mulqueen reflected.

He forcefully flung her arm away, and she staggered back with a startled cry. The fiddler stopped. Then the dancers stopped, straining for breath.

Mulqueen’s pale green eyes dragged over me. “Do you mind tellin’ me, Wilde, just who the fuck you think you are?”

“I need to ask you a few questions.”

“What if I don’t find myself in much of a mood to be answerin’?”

I thought that over.

“Get out of here,” I said, turning to the girl. “Run.”

She kept running right up until she was gone. That was the last pleasant experience I was to have for a spell.

“Now you’ll be less distracted,” I noted.

What in hell are you doing,
my head supplied. Unhelpfully.

Mulqueen stood. His fellow copper stars likewise rose. The one who looked liked an ancient scarlet baby was practically spitting at me, and the black Irish cohort stared greedily at the veins in my neck.

“Did those stray pigs outside look hungry to you?” the Irish fellow asked his countryman.

“They always do,” Mulqueen replied.

The bartender, at whom I hazarded a questioning glance, was colored. A little more than forty years old, with grizzled grey hair like a snug cap. His eyes burned brightly, a stark line etched between them. I looked him square in the face, and he nodded. And then, after a brief but blinding vision of Grace of the Millington household, the maid who’d been so very ardent about me
not
finding a nameless black chimney sweep, it all made a bit more sense. As did the golden rings adorning Mulqueen’s fingers, and the watch chain, and—now I’d noticed it, or perhaps it was new—a small diamond tiepin.

“This is your regular game, isn’t it?”

Mulqueen pursed his lips.

“You’re in league with Varker and Coles,” I decided. “Of course you are. Christ, it’s so simple.”

“I’m not in
league
wi’ anyone,” Mulqueen spat, “though aye, our paths often enough cross. Varker and Coles see that runaways are returned. But bringing fugitives to justice is never a
game
, is it now?”

“Fugitives, my eye. What’s your share of the take, when you turn in an alleged slave?”

“They’re only
alleged
slaves to wee little nigger-loving abolitionists who sit on their arses at the Tombs until Matsell’s prick wants servicing. To me, they’re stolen property. And I a lawman
,
and all.”

Doing figures in my head, I’d soon enough calculated the economics. Extorting petty chink from stargazers and gambling halls wouldn’t bring in nearly the money earned each and every time Mulqueen and his ilk collared a supposed refugee. I wondered how many other copper stars were in the same business, and I felt faintly ill.

“Advertisements for runaways in the papers usually offer twenty to sixty dollars reward,” I mused. “Quite a sum. But if you captured a man and simply shipped him south and sold him—a healthy male slave is worth what? Six hundred dollars on the open market at the Capital? Four hundred for a woman? More if she’s pretty? Even if Varker gives you only ten percent of
those
figures, it makes for some thick honey.”

“What does this puppy want to ask you, Mulqueen?” the baby-faced copper star wanted to know.

“Hell if I can say as I care.”

I’d riled a bull. Mulqueen’s nostrils pumped like bellows. Prudent dancers edged out the doors while the Bowery rabbits in the corner chuckled morbidly. Clearly making bets with the firedogs as to how quickly I was going to die.

“I wanted to ask about your anonymous warning of a disturbance the other day. In Ward Eight. My brother’s rooms, a mile or so from your own rounds. Who was it posted you?”

My fellow copper star just smiled. That annoyed me.

“You,” I announced, “are wearing the wrong badge.”

“And how so?” he questioned, smile widening.

“I thought men who raped penniless local women were generally of
British
extraction. Maybe you’d look better in a Royal Guards uniform.”

That was a mistake. An already enraged man doesn’t require the single insult equating him with his worst enemy to be hurled gleefully in his face.

“We’re headin’ outside,” Mulqueen decreed. “Ye’ll be wearing a wooden coat by morning, Wilde.”

His cohorts beamed. My heartbeat all at once seemed to be emanating from my throat, a disconcerting sensation. So I ignored it. Meanwhile making an about-face and heading for the door to be pummeled into a mash.

The bartender, wringing out a slop rag, followed me with his eyes. “Good luck,” he murmured. “Get him against the wall if you can, and may the best man win.”

I managed a faint nod, knowing him a friend. And I don’t mean to suggest that no measures against Mulqueen had already been taken inside Uncle Ned’s. They had, and long before my arrival. There had been a hundred whispers I’d catalogued, dozens of glances. Several girls who’d entered and then silently backed out the door again due to unknowable signals.

No, the problem was that Mulqueen was a copper star. And we needed copper stars. And no one had yet gauged what to do with the crooked ones.

The late evening air gnawed the tips of my ears, and I tasted the leathery scent of coal smoke outside. Behind me, the Bowery boys and the engine runners trickled after us with the more aggressive of the Germans, ready to watch a sport that wouldn’t have looked out of place in a Roman amphitheatre. Smallpox posters were plastered over the decrepit structure opposite Uncle Ned’s, warning that symptoms begin with weariness, dizziness, chilliness, vomiting, and many other unpleasant complaints. Not a far cry from how I myself was feeling just then.

Supposing you do have smallpox, at least you’ll be dead before you pass it along.

The bystanders formed a wide ring. Mulqueen, ten or so feet distant, had never looked healthier. He pulled a tin from his coat and lodged a plug of tobacco in his cheek. Then he replaced the tin and drew a biggish jackknife instead.

I soberly considered taking to my heels. But Mulqueen was going to fight me. One way or another. And I’m keener to catch a shiv in the heart after having landed a jawbreaker or two than find a shiv in my kidney when I report to work of a morning. Anyway, my blood was up, and I’d one advantage Mulqueen wasn’t aware of. Yes, I was smaller than he was. I’m smaller than everyone. Yes, there were three of them and one of me. But Mulqueen wanted my guts unstrung like so much scarlet holiday ribbon for his personal trophy, so I’d likely be grappling with him alone. And I knew something he didn’t.

After Valentine Wilde teaches me something, I am very, very good at it.

Six months after our parents died, Val commenced lessons in pugilism—not by request, mind—by periodically punching me in the ribs. I loathed him for it. I was heartsick and puny and livid, and I’d used to fight him like a rabid rodent, with head and feet and teeth. Much later I realized that I was never more than a bit scraped up after these interludes of higher learning. But the outcome of warding off an attacker who is larger and stronger than you hundreds of times is that you learn every filthy trick left out of the rule book.

Which might have been the point, come to think of it.

So I fight like a fork-tailed devil when riled. And just then I was in a pretty warm rage.

I sidled warily round and got the stairs behind me. That earned me a sneer from Mulqueen. Then I reached back toward the ruined banister and yanked a spindle from the rotting wood. The end came free with a nail or two attached.

“Two dollars on the dwarf,” I heard from behind me.

“I’m five feet four,” I said irritably. “That’s hardly—”

I didn’t have time to say anything after that.

Mulqueen charged with his head down, wielding the knife low and sidearmed. When I dodged him, I nearly slipped on greasy chicken bones, but managed to come up swinging with both fists on the makeshift club. His arms were longer but so was my weapon, and he eyed me as I danced away.

Keep moving.
Mulqueen was clearly slower than I was, judging by the first volley.
If you can exhaust him, he’ll make a mistake.

Growling, he dove at me. This time I let him in closer before spinning away with torso hunched backward, just shy of his blade. My balance was off, but I swung the club anyhow and caught his calf with the nail.

Scattered applause followed first blood. Mulqueen came forward with teeth bared. Twice he swung, each thrust blocked by the end of my club. Then he lunged forward, catching the end of my makeshift weapon one-handed and wrenching my arm nearly out of its socket.

I gave him a fight over it, though. When I’d torn the banister free, I took the hardest swing I could and caught him where his neck met his shoulder.