Seven for a Secret (39 page)

My eyes slammed shut.

The newcomer was a shock, to be sure. But only because I own—deep down, beneath my speech and even beneath my thoughts maybe—an optimistic soul. And had supposed the situation could not possibly deteriorate further.

I was wrong.

Valentine walked easy as you please into the room and swung a small chair toward us, resting his hat on the carpet and sitting down as if we were all in a café ordering coffees. His leaded stick he rested against his knee. When I realized that his presence meant Jim was alive and had given an account of my abduction, I did manage a single breath of relief on that score.

The rest of me, meanwhile, was about as stupid with fright as a fox in a trap. It can rip a fellow open a bit, fighting such strong dual urges to scream
Help me
and
Get out of here.

“Captain,” Scarred Nose said. Cordial but measured. “With respect, you weren’t called for.”

Val crossed his legs, flashing the Tammany men a smile. He pulled a matchbox and half a cigar from his pocket and added his smoke to the sickening aura of dread in the room. His eyes lingered on the flame, as they always did, before he waved the lucifer out.

“I know. Figured it for an oversight, what with me such bang-up company and all. What a night, eh? I’ll not flam you, I’d my doubts about the venue, but you’ve gone and proven me a goosecap. We’re pulling in thousands down Castle Garden way.”

Pocket Watch shifted in his seat. “Captain Wilde, we’d like you to leave now. This matter doesn’t concern you.”

The flinch that crossed my brother’s features when he laughed looked positively excruciating. “My lord. I’ve been watering at the wrong punch bowl this evening. Your tangle-foot must have been fit to fell a bear. Are you lushy or just brainless?”

Flushing with rage, Pocket Watch began to rise. He was prevented by Scarred Nose, who caught his arm.

Pince-Nez, having finished his cigar, ground the end into a gilded tray. “Quite right. I see no point in mincing words. Captain, the painful fact is that your brother here has been making an unbearable nuisance of himself.”

“He has a habit of doing that,” Val agreed.

“And the more painful conclusion we have reached is that safety calls for us to eliminate this . . . hazard.”

“He’s been all this while disposing of hazards.” Val waved a vexed little zigzag in the air. “I
told
you. The colored family is legging it with a will, and that innocent in my bed didn’t up and walk away on her own, did she?”

No one expressed shock that Val’s bed had once contained a corpse. Save for me, at him voicing the fact. That was a shock of the stomach-spearing variety.

“You told them that—”

“Tim, press your teeth together and keep them that way,” he growled. Sighing in a martyred fashion, Val resumed smiling at the Tammany men. “Silkie Marsh leaked it, they tell me. She thought they should be posted. I’d like to savvy how
she
knew, but that’s another matter. Never fear, we’re all fast enough pals for them not to panic over a stiff one in my sheets. It isn’t as if I know how it got there. The point is, this tune has carried on too long, and the band ready for home. Untie my brother and we’ll call it square.”

“Your family feeling is admirable,” said Pince-Nez, “but he’s intractable. We are disposing of him.”

“You aren’t,” Val said quietly.

He began to twirl the walking stick. Tender half circles, turning the point on the carpet. You could barely see the motion. It’s one of the subtlest deadly gestures in his repertoire. Not that I was comforted by that. If I hadn’t already been bleeding, I think blood would have forced its way out, my heart was racing so.

“I think you’re forgetting who you’re speaking to,” Pince-Nez said, glowering down his Roman nose at us.

“Oh, no.” Val smiled. “I think
you
forget who
you’re
speaking to.”

“Of all the . . . ” Pocket Watch spluttered.

“And just who do you think you are, Captain Wilde?” Scarred Nose asked. Under the anger, he sounded grudgingly impressed.

“I think I’m the boss of Ward Eight.” Valentine, I realized, never looked at Pocket Watch, but divided his attention between Pince-Nez and Scarred Nose. “I think I’m the flashest goddamn boss of Ward Eight ever to breathe, and I think one of you is up for reelection as our alderman come spring. There are more starving Paddies than you can beat with a stick washing up every day. Thousands of them—more than any man could count. And I’m the cull who feeds them, finds them a steady graft and a ken with a roof, flashes his ivories at their snot-faced kinchin, and they
worship me.
They’d jump in the river on my say-so, and you think I’ll tell them how fond of you I am if you go through with this? I have slaved for this Party every day since I was sixteen years old. Doing ace work. And for what? To have my kin stolen from a fund-raiser and trussed up like a chicken? Last week I was in Albany, and there are Democrats there who’d break a cove’s skull if he so much as looked at me cutty-eyed. You do
not
want me peppery at you. Timothy Wilde is off the table. Permanently. Give me back my fucking brother before I lose my temper.”

Pocket Watch’s chest heaved with fury at the end of this speech. Pince-Nez’s eyes had gone glacial, half homicide and half intelligent calculation. As for Scarred Nose, he looked to be battling a smile.

“I begin to fear,” Pince-Nez said slowly, “that you are as intractable as your sibling, Captain Wilde. Are you willing to face the consequences?”

“Get the hell out of here, Val.” God help me, it wouldn’t stay in any longer.

Valentine stood, resting his stick against the chair. The cigar stump he tossed into the fireplace. Pulling out a pocketknife, he approached my chair and began sawing at ropes. The hemp was so tightly fastened that it snapped readily, audibly. The three Tammany men watched him. Pince-Nez aloof, Pocket Watch livid, and Scarred Nose allowing himself a rueful grin. Blood rushed back into my fingertips. It hurt.

But then, there wasn’t much of me that wasn’t hurting by that time.

“You need me,” my brother told them. “You haven’t even dreamed up all the ways you need me yet. Am I right?”

Scarred Nose tilted his head. “I think very possibly you are.”

“Bully. We can palaver over some new ones, then. Offer me a drink, for Christ’s sake, it makes for better conversation.”

Laughing openly, Scarred Nose reached for a decanter and poured a glass.

My brother hauled me up by one arm and dragged my none-too-steady carcass to the door. Throwing it wide, he said, “Go out through the front, I’ve left it unlocked.”

He launched me through the opening as if firing me from a rifle. Predictably enough, I fell. Seconds later, the lock slid into place behind me.

And I was alone.

•   •   •

Thanks to the
chloroform,
the head injury, and the ebbing panic, I lay stunned for some few seconds. Unsupported, I felt faint. The hallway I’d landed in had a waxed floor, and the building’s lights were out. Those were the two facts I managed to absorb as I lay there, debating whether Val’s odds were better if I left as he’d instructed or if I started up flinging myself against the locked door.

My instinct was to put my shoulder to it until they let me back inside. Since that was my instinct, I reasoned, it was probably a bad idea.

You have been remarkably useless, and he’s gotten you out of their sight. Do not ruin it.

You ruin so very many things.

Through my semi-conscious haze, I recalled that Neither Here Nor There was presently under siege. Shoving my hands against the floor, I pushed myself viciously upward.

As I crept along the wall, sentences drifted at random through my rearranged brains. One of them recurred, though. A sentiment I’d not examined with near thorough enough care.

Silkie Marsh leaked it . . . I’d like to savvy how
she
knew, but that’s another matter.

So I thought about that question. Since my visit to the Greene Street brothel, I’d been aware that Madam Marsh knew where Lucy died, but so much had been at stake since, I’d failed to dwell on a frankly bizarre instance of omniscience. My assumption had been that the murderer had told her—acted at her behest and reported back. But that line of thinking had gotten me nowhere.

Was another explanation possible?

I pushed through a door, dizzy and lost, and found myself in a deserted restaurant, pale starlight edging the windows. I’d never been to Tammany Hall, but it’s a popular gathering place, where concerts and lectures and Punch and Judy shows are held as well as political rallies. The ceiling loomed high above me, chandeliers hanging like nocturnal predators. Quick as I could, I picked my way past the potted ferns and the upside-down chairs.

I was midway across the room when one possible theory explaining Silkie Marsh’s strange prescience occurred to me, and I nearly set the whole place crashing down like a row of dominoes when I walked into a table.

“No,” I said out loud, gripping the edge. To steady it or myself, I couldn’t guess. “No, that isn’t right.”

All the air seemed to have left the room. There were stars behind my eyes again, the chamber lurching in sickly spins and contortions like an asylum inmate caught up in an ecstatic dance.

Because I’d just recalled something else.

You’re what he wants,
I’d said to Delia Wright regarding George Higgins. Though I shouldn’t have, for it was none of my affair.

George wants a figment of his imagination,
she’d answered.

Telling me, as usual, far more than the speaker intended for me to know.

Memories flooded back to me. Of speaking with every relevant party I could muster and wrongly supposing they’d told me nothing useful. Of reasons people kill and die and which are the strongest. The simplest. Of waking up time after time from dreams of magnolias with an uneasy feeling I didn’t understand. Of asking Silkie Marsh, face to face, whether Lucy’s name had been Wright or Adams.

That question is impossible to answer.

Screwing my eyes shut, I pictured the seven free blacks whose lives had needled and pierced and threaded into my own—the three Committee men, Lucy and her son and her sister, and Jean-Baptiste—and with a faint surge of hysteria it occurred to me that antique omens about sighting blackbirds ought not, could not, be trusted. Particularly when we were speaking of people. Not ravens on the wing at all.

And yet, in this particular case, I could have worked it all out from a nursery rhyme. Were I a different man. A mad one.

Seven for a secret, never to be told.

“It isn’t real,” I whispered. “None of this is real. It was all a lie.”

Charging for the door, I found it unlocked as Val had said it would be. The man clearly possesses a great many keys. I plunged into the intersection of Nassau and Frankfort that faces diseased City Hall Park at an angle, touching Chatham Street. Desperate for a hack. I could tell it was nearly dawn, for a milkman with a wagon full of jugs was drawing water from a nearby Croton pump to lengthen his profits, topping off the milk and the cream. Approaching five in the morning, then.

I was only late for my appointment by half an hour.

Perhaps there was still time.

She’s with God now, if sooner than she should be,
Julius had told Delia.

Is she?
the sister had replied in a voice like her own spectre’s.

“Stupid,
stupid,
” I whispered as I ran.

Finding a hack proved simple enough, and within a quarter hour I was in Chelsea, the stars fading above me as the night began to wash away, facing the doorway of Neither Here Nor There.

It was open.

I went in, my footsteps far too loud. The silence—God, that silence. It was suffocating.

Hesitant, I stopped in the hall.

“Mrs. Higgins?”

No one answered me.

“Is anyone here?”

The quiet wrapped itself around me, from head to foot like a white winding sheet, over my nose and my mouth and my ears. Freezing me in place.

I thought a cry sounded from a distance. But it was so faint the direction couldn’t be determined, nor if it was simply the soft mewling of the cat. Unable to bear the stillness any longer, I raced through the parlor, through the museum, and down the secret stairs into the hidden Railroad station.

As with much of the rest of this investigation, I never made a police report about what I found below.

But it was important, so very important, the story, what happened and why, more important to me than I can begin to convey, because I don’t have a great many confidants to my name. One of them, and one of the brightest and the bravest men with whom I’ve ever shared company, was born a free black in New York City and christened Julius Carpenter. He wasn’t like a brother to me, because Christ knows how terribly complicated I find that particular simile, but he was something I’d needed nearly as much—he was my friend. From the day I met him, he was effortlessly kind, the sort of person who makes you less alone in the world without leveling demands or challenges, who is so at home within himself he needn’t question why or whether you’re fond of each other. He was once ordered to give up his name, and he refused. I’ll never forget that.

Julius Carpenter died in the early morning on the first of March, 1846. He was felled by a gunshot wound to the chest, and I discovered him still warm on the floor of the subterranean sitting room.

Ten feet away lay the equally lifeless corpse of Seixas Varker, whose head had been smashed in with a nearby poker.

Long Luke Coles was slumped with gangly arms askew against the far wall, a bullet hole in his head.

Delia sat very still in the middle of the carpet, surveying her surroundings. The gun she held was a Colt revolver, and it had belonged in life to Varker. I’d once stolen it and then given it back.

“I told you I’d kill them if they touched Jonas,” she said when she looked up at me.

I slumped to my knees on the rug before her. Too horror-struck to answer, at least at first. Anyhow, speaking with her was problematic for another reason entirely.