The Fatal Flame (5 page)

“Always an absolute pleasure to work with a man of your caliber, Captain Wilde,” he announced happily, wringing my brother’s hand.

He would say that, though. Mr. Piest is crazier than a sack of river rats.

“You want a rough on the muscle, I’m your scrapper.” Val turned to the wall, grinding his cigar out on the peeling paint. “I’ve seen you fight. It looks like a chicken after the ax has come down.”

Laughing, Piest marched for the door. It was true, after all, and Jakob Piest owns the rare virtue of not allowing true remarks to unsettle him.

“I didn’t know you spoke English,” I informed Valentine. It sounded ridiculous even to me.

“You . . . I
what
?”

We headed in Piest’s thudding wake, Connell’s flaming head just visible entering the front foyer. Unfettered light streamed into it from the open door beyond. It gladdened my heart as nothing had that morning.

“You’ve been palavering flash more or less nonstop since I was five,” I said to the back of Valentine’s neck. “I didn’t know whether you savvied the difference any longer.”

I didn’t add,
And it sounded good to me, old and familiar, as if we were about to feed the horses and then give them the sour apples from the crooked tree by the fence. Do you remember that, how we’d collect the fallen ones? Do you remember that tree, and do you remember their hot teeth against our fingers?
Because that is just the sort of thing we absolutely do not mention. Whether by unspoken agreement or purblind cowardice, I couldn’t possibly say.

“Of course I savvy the difference,” Val retorted. “Hell on horseback, I can
read
, can’t I? Do you use that pate of yours for anything other than decorating your neck? You do know what flash is
for,
yes, my Tim?”

“To keep respectable people from understanding a word you say.”

He half turned to look up at me. “Yes, and to prevent mace coves and canary birds and idiots like the alderman from realizing I’m educated and can outbrain them in jig time.”

“That’s . . . extremely clever,” I owned reluctantly. “And never occurred to me.”

“Pissing away from the wind doesn’t occur to you,” Val muttered as we passed through the miserable pornographic hallway and into the greater world of Ward Four.

The spring breeze carried manure along with the sharp salt, but it struck our faces like a benediction nevertheless. Five steps with an iron rail on either side led to the Queen Mab’s entrance, and our colleagues had arranged themselves on the stairs as if playing a child’s game where to touch the street meant losing. All save for Kildare, of course, who stood with a spoon to his neck in the middle of the cobbled road. Beginning to look hopeful. The girls surrounding him were boneless with relief, one or two openly weeping and the others smiling in wonderment at a miracle. As for their leader, her bright, speckled face was flushed with triumph.

“Sláinte chuig na fir, agus go mairfidh na mná go deo!”
she cried, and pushed Kildare away.

A roar of merriment went up as the molls started cheering and embracing. Connell barked a laugh and yelled something I understood equally poorly, while my brother swept his black silk hat off in salute. The curve of a smile tugged at my lips, and Mr. Piest shouted, “Welcome to America, patriots all!” at the top of his concave lungs.

“Any lass who wants good cheer and stout Irish company, come to the Knickerbocker Twenty-one Engine Company of a Sunday in Ward Eight, and don’t forget to bring your menfolk!” Val called out, returning his hat to his high brow. “Real employment for your beaus, rum and hot stew gratis, all courtesy of the Democratic Party!”

I sighed. “Will you ever stop politicking for as much as five seconds?”

“I’ll be croaked one of these days, and then likely a good deal quieter,” he returned cheerfully.

Nine girls waved to us, turning back toward the waterfront. The sight of all those dark and brassy heads striding away from the Queen Mab was a considerably spruce one. I was about to demand that Val help me with the unconscious blackguard upstairs whether he wanted to or not when a hoarse shout prevented me.

“Wait!” Kildare cried. “You wi’ the spoon and all! I don’t even know yer name!”

One by one, the lasses glanced at one another.

And then, as was only fitting, exploded into laughter again.

“Dear heavenly saints on high, have mercy upon the mad and likewise upon the merely stupid,” Connell prayed, chuckling heartily.

“Oh, my God,” I said.

“Well, can you blame the man?” Val grinned, leaning against the railing like a card sharp at a table. “I’d split that doxie like a fence post, given an invitation.”

“Valentine.”

“Oh, come off it, just look at her!”

“The course of true love never did run smooth!” Mr. Piest cackled.

Kildare stood at stark attention, almost leaning after the moll who’d just spent a solid ten minutes threatening to kill him. She returned to the front of her ragged band, red-gold curls dancing in the wind, staring with hard but amused grey eyes at a genuinely pathetic batch of star police.

Then, grinning broadly, she cried, “Caoilinn!” and threw her slender arms wide into the air as if about to take flight.

More cheers went up, a “Bravo!” from Mr. Piest as Kildare made a low bow. But recalling with a queasy sensation our unfinished business, I plucked at my brother’s coat sleeve and we returned to the front parlor, away from the shrill whistles and the friendly insults and the most disturbing courtship it has ever been my sincere privilege to witness. The alderman, of course, was long gone. Val raised his agile eyebrows expectantly.

“Symmes,” I said.

“Ah,” he said.

“That was . . .”

“Necessary.”

“Couldn’t be helped.”

“Seeing as I can’t diary the last time I was offered a free rape in lieu of a thank-you note and I’ve wanted to put that looby’s head in my chamber pot since he went into politics, no, it couldn’t,” he growled.

“He tried to kill me once. It isn’t as if I’m fond of him.”

“I have not forgotten the occasion,” my brother said in a voice I can describe only as knifelike.

“But what are we going to
do
?”

The Party works on a system. If you have chink, buckets and barrels of it, and you give plenty to Tammany, and you own the flexibility of a Chinese acrobat when it comes to morals, you can be a politico with a smile on your mazzard and your thumbs tucked into your braces. If you’re dangerous and hardworking and intelligent and loyal, you can be a ward heeler or a copper-star captain.

Trouble is, the hierarchy is inviolable.

“I don’t know yet,” Valentine answered.

My lips parted in dismay.

“Dry up, bright young copper star. I said
yet.
Meanwhile, Symmes is an ambulatory sack of mouse droppings and a goddamn Hunker to boot.”

The nigh-successful bloodbath over Texas, combined with the highly contested condition of Oregon—both of which might as well be their own continents they’re so bafflingly immense—has started up a bare-knuckled regional battle. Whig or Democrat now makes no difference. It’s North versus South in the Capitol, and it’s Southern sympathizers versus Northern ones in the free cities above the Mason-Dixon. The Hunkers, in brief, are of the mind that the South should be coddled, or we’d face a devastating war rather than regular fisticuffs in the Senate. This position is not unrelated to the fact that plantations produce cotton, and New England produces cloth, and our manufactories produce slave clothing out of the cloth, which the South purchases in bulk. Like a poisonous snake biting its own tail. The Barnburners think the new territories should be kept slave-free and that the Hunkers are a pack of yellow-livered cowards with their pebbly capitalist arses hanging bare in the wind for the South to wallop as it pleases.

The Wilde brothers, for once in concert, believe the latter. I don’t tend to have political opinions. Other than that politics is a pretty ripe joke. But I have plenty of antislavery opinions, and Val thinks of Hunker complacency the way sharks think of bleeding minnows.

“Stop looking like a sheep caught in a bramble patch,” Valentine ordered irritably. “I’ll think of something.”

“Symmes had a point regarding your reputation. You could be more careful about your person.”

I once thought my brother would sleep with anything that breathes. But that isn’t true. He sleeps with gorgeous free black women, beautiful emigrant molls with lusty appetites, high-spirited Bowery girls, and an aristocratic male English pianist by the name of James Playfair, with whom he practically lives, though they maintain separate residences and double sets of keys. So far as I know, I’ve listed those in ascending order of frequency. It’s no wonder the man is infamous. His trousers are as often open as shut.

“Where would be the fun in that?”

I shook my head. “Are you going to help me carry the pimp you laced to the Tombs?”

Val chuckled, wincing. “Of course not. Afternoon, brother Tim.”

He turned to go. I have often suspected with a queasy tingle on the underside of my ribs that something terrible is going to happen. That circumstances recently set in motion are heavy—crushing, really—and they will now roll momentously toward a sharp dip in the cliffside. I’m usually right about such things.

Unfortunately, that doesn’t go a very long way toward preventing them happening.

“Are you going to keep campaigning for Alderman Symmes?”

“Fuck no,” Valentine scoffed, throwing wide the door and slamming it behind him.

We view it as a most insane and ludicrous
farce, for women in the nineteenth century to get up in a public and promiscuous assemblage and declare themselves “oppressed and fraudulently deprived of their most sacred rights,” when, if they really knew what belonged to their true position, instead of stirring up discontent and enacting such foolery, they would be about the sober duties and responsibilities which devolved upon them as rational beings, and as “helpmeets” of the other sex.

—
THE LIBERATOR
, SEPTEMBER 15, 1848

T
RANSPORTING
THE
FRAGRANT
LUMP
that was the concussed Ronan McGlynn proved simpler than I’d anticipated, since Ward Four thrives on shipping and my colleagues are resourceful men. By the time Valentine departed, the girls had gone and Mr. Connell was returning from a freight yard with a rickety wooden handcart. He’d obtained permission to use the device by offering not to inspect their premises for unreported—and thereby untaxed—cargo. Which was big of him.

When we’d dumped McGlynn in the most swamplike cell we could find, roaches fleeing in pretend and temporary fright, Mr. Piest offered to return the cart in exchange for my making out the police report. It was a hard bargain, since I loathe that particular task. Writing police reports flattens living people into headstones, erases motives, erects paper monuments to dark errors and cruel whims. But I’ve never told Piest as much, so no malice was intended on his part.

“All right?” I asked Kildare as he made to exit. Only half joking.

“It’s the queerest o’ things, when it happens,” he replied dreamily. “Caoilinn may not ha’ slit my throat, but she stabbed me through the heart sure as—”

“Stop afore ne’er Wilde nor Piest is able t’ keep a meal down fer the rest o’ their natural lives,” Connell ordered, escorting his friend forcefully out of the lockup.

I could have told Kildare I knew what he felt like. But it wouldn’t have helped—nothing about love can be helped—so I let Connell drag him off to be hosed down or fed whiskey or whatever the Irish do in extreme situations such as the one in which Kildare found himself.

I lit for my office, a two-minute trek down one of the Tombs’ interminable echoing corridors, rolling my stiff neck to coax McGlynn’s deadweight away. Reaching it, I unwound a notch. Not that my office is comfortable exactly—I think of it in good humors as a whitewashed mouse hole, in bad ones the benign sort of coffin. Admittedly I’ve equipped it well. Bookshelves of local directories and codes of law, drawers that lock and pens that flow. A carved pine desk and an armchair upholstered in dark green preside, both given to me by a friend who moved to Toronto. A better-than-decent lamp painting an incongruously civil glow over the room. Two plainer chairs, ones I scavenged, wait for colleagues and crime victims. Finally I’ve a little table with Dutch gin and glasses resting on it, for whenever my colleagues stop by to ease the aches from their wearisome rounds.

Dipping the steel nib in my inkpot, I wrote:

Report made by Officer T. Wilde, Ward 6, District 1, Star 107. Upon investigating the activities of one Ronan McGlynn, now incarcerated under prisoner number 52640, discovered that claims of manufactory employment were a front for abducting female emigrants and forcibly ruining them. As witnessed with Roundsman Jakob Piest, Star 341, nine women were led . . .

My handwriting—always perfectly legible when recording human indecencies—steadily filled the foolscap. Which never fails to disgust me.

When I’d finished, I chewed my pen and debated warning George Washington Matsell over the Symmes debacle. After some unfocused staring at the watercolor-coded map on my wall found my eyes uneasily tugged back to Ward Eight, I concluded that disclosure was the better part of valor and pushed to my feet to visit the chief. Not on my life would I have confided in anyone else ensconced in the Party’s upper echelons—but Matsell trusts Wildes and makes plentiful use of us, so we trust him and occasionally request assistance in return. Up and up I went through the Tombs’ vaultlike stone halls, finally knocking at the chamber with the plaque reading
GEORGE WASHINGTON MATSELL: CHIEF OF NEW YORK CITY POLICE
.

“Come in,” he called in his flat, sober baritone.

Chief Matsell wasn’t doing anything I’d expected him to be doing. He wasn’t working, for one, nor was he fiddling with his lexicon. Matsell finds flash patter both fascinating and necessary, and thus, for copper stars yet damp behind the ears, he’s compiling definitions of street slang. The dictionary is like his kinchin—he dotes upon the project, lends it every spare minute. Which is why I was so queered at finding him idle. He was merely sitting. All three hundred robust pounds of him, face deeply scored in inverted V-shaped lines from the edges of his noble nose straight through to his porcine jowls. Looking neither at the framed portrait of his hero, the original George Washington, hanging high above him, nor out the massive barred window sending dark, scarlike lashes across his polished floor.

“Wilde,” he grunted. “Have a seat. Whiskey?”

“Thank you.” Dropping my hat on the chair back, I hesitated. “Is something the matter?”

“Plenty.” He poured neat golden drinks into two tumblers. “But why don’t you talk about what’s in your hand first, so I don’t spend any more time trying to guess at it.”

I set the dubious report on his desktop, tapping it. “Ronan McGlynn, newly in custody. He’s a rapist and a fleshmonger who deceived nine emigrant Irishwomen into accompanying him to a clearinghouse this afternoon. And they were far from the first, God help us. Piest was on hand to assist, of course, along with Connell and Kildare.”

“Your usual complement, then. Any snags?”

“I think Val gave him a concussion, but that’s hardly a snag. The man is a fiend.”

The chief scowled even deeper than his perennial frown. When a man’s neutral face appears already highly displeased, some find that man difficult to read. But I could see urgent business
tap-tap-tapping
within his huge pate.

“So you wrote out this report and delivered it personally.”

“Yes, sir.”

“And for some reason that is inexplicable to me when discussing so simple a task as arresting a rapist, your brother was also present today.”

I took a sip of the whiskey. For bravery, not flavor. It seared my empty stomach nicely. “We encountered Valentine there. He’d been summoned by a Party man to partake of the merchandise, as a gift to secure a favor. My brother . . . didn’t take it well.”

“No.” Matsell pressed at his temples. “No, he wouldn’t. What unfortunate Party man would that be?”

“Alderman Robert Symmes, sir.”

I was prepared for diverse reactions to this information. Including but not limited to stony silence, sanguine discussion, and being ordered out of his office while he dealt with more important matters. I did not expect his meaty fist to come crashing down like a judge’s gavel. Startling me and the whiskey alike. I nearly flinched, and the liquor quivered pitiably.

“Sir?”

“Apologies, Mr. Wilde.” The chief downed his drink, rose, poured another, and left the bottle between us. “What time is it?”

“I have twenty to four.”

“It has already been a long day.”

Matsell pulled open his desk drawer, removing a document and spreading it open. The foolscap looked as if a chart had suffered a bout of hysteria and dissolved into inky delirium. It appeared to have begun as a complete list of Democratic-versus-Whig candidates, the vote on which would be decided in ten days’ time (the Liberty Party was also running, but talking about the actual plight of Africans is a deft form of political suicide). These predictable camps had splintered into frenzied subfactions to show the Hunker-versus-Barnburner candidates pitted against each other in their own ward elections.

I’ve never voted for anything in my life, finding the whole process farcical. But if I were a political man, it would have looked like the anatomy of a nightmare.

“Behold,” Chief Matsell announced, “the collapse of Tammany on paper. Ever since the Barnburners convened to choose their own delegates for the Democratic Convention, our local Party has been dissected into rancorous cliques. You see listed by ward a number of candidates for office whose names I will not speak aloud, because it would depress my spirits so much as to alarm your sensibilities. And now you are telling me,” he continued, pressing his long finger against the only straightforward part of the page, “that the boss of Ward Eight has been deeply offended by the Ward Eight candidate for alderman.”

It wasn’t a question, so I held my tongue.

“Do you have an impression whether your brother will continue to campaign for Symmes?”

“I have an impression,” I confessed.

“And?”

I shook my head.

We drained our drinks. Matsell refilled them. I’ve never been fond of, friendly toward, anything other than disgusted by the Party. They’re a corrupt propaganda manufactory that strives to make their followers feel righteously patriotic for voting for an organization no better than the amoral businesses lining their pockets. But they also feed starving Irish who’ve nowhere to turn, employ countless able men, allow them to sweat in exchange for commodities like edible stew and snug roofs. Men like me and my brother. So the concept of our safety net fraying into so many flimsy threads was . . . distressing.

Chief Matsell drew a ponderous question mark below the name Robert Symmes. He didn’t enjoy the task. But our chief is about as calm as bedrock, which goes a long way toward herding the purblind scoundrels who populate his police department.

“Any insights?”

“I only wish.” I finished my drink, standing. “Save for life-or-death circumstances, I don’t know that Val’s ever crossed the politicians who give him orders before.”

A smile lurked behind Matsell’s teeth. “I notice you didn’t say his ‘superiors’ or his ‘betters.’”

“No, I don’t think I did,” I realized, raising my brows quizzically. “Surprising.”

“What was the alderman after, anyhow?”

I explained about the note, terse but duly sober.

George Washington Matsell folded his hands over his wide belly and his spotless grey waistcoat, nodding. Weighing mighty risks the way the great dockside scales weigh freight tonnage.

“So you’re after an incendiary,” he said slowly.

“No,” I pointed out. “I’m after a slightly too enthusiastic correspondent.”

“Whose topic of choice is deliberate firestarting. And you’ll be . . . comfortable with that, Mr. Wilde?”

Willing myself not to bare my teeth, I contemplated Chief Matsell. Daring that mountain of a man to say,
You’re a whey-spined coward when it comes to fire, and I’m aware of the fact,
or, still worse,
Would you like someone better suited to settle this?

“Supposing you’re ruminating over an answer, I’ve all the time in the world,” he drawled, eyes twinkling with both impatience and amusement. “Make yourself comfortable.”

“I’ll handle it,” I answered, jaw tight. “Worry about your elections.”

“Oh, I will, trust in that.” George Washington Matsell sighed. “Steer well clear of Alderman Symmes until I’ve had a chance to speak with him—the man enjoys disproportionately crushing opposition. Alert your colleagues of the situation and learn whether the threat of an incendiary is genuine. And tell your brother not to do anything drastic, foolish, or impulsive.”

A frown crooked my lips. “He’s never yet in his life listened to me of all people.”

Matsell shrugged, replacing the deformed chart in his drawer
.
“Then embrace change, Mr. Wilde. I certainly intend to, if only to keep myself from resignation and the idyllic forests of New Jersey.”

“You truly think we’ll live to see retirement to the countryside?”

Chief Matsell didn’t answer me, returning his attention to his whiskey glass. An action for which, in retrospect, I cannot fault him in the smallest degree.

—

W
alking the easy distance home to my rooms above Mrs. Boehm’s Fine Baked Goods, constellations hung close as paper lanterns above me, I wondered whether Val had worked out an angle yet. Seeing as Robert Symmes was as likely to beat a problem to death as to negotiate with one. When the anxiety had well curdled my stomach, I forced myself to picture the Irish girls—finding real manufactory jobs, or work as serving girls pouring white-capped beer mugs, or as housemaids. Those being their three options other than
voluntary
brothel work. Recklessly, I envisioned them fat grandmothers who’d grown particular about keeping fresh flowers in their wallpapered front halls. I’d nearly made myself cheerful again by the time I’d entered my rented residence on Elizabeth Street and was assaulted by aromas of eggs and cherries and nutmeg.

Hanging my broad black hat on its peg, I ducked under the hinged countertop and into the downstairs kitchen. Elena Boehm—widow, baker, and a single year my junior—didn’t glance up when I entered. She never does. That’s a compliment meaning I’m part of the house, like her windowsill or her mixing bowl, an inventoried item with as special a place indoors as her best teacups. But her thin sickle of a mouth perked at the corners. She was playing solitaire, the remains of a dish of rabbit stew with currant jelly before her.