The Gods Of Gotham (12 page)

“Her hair,” I muttered. “Her hair, of course.”

Mrs. Boehm’s weirdly broad mouth curved into a dark smile. “You look at people close. Yes, her hair.”

“It could be a mistake.” I leaned back, letting my fingers trail along the grainy wood. “She could have been playing with an older sister earlier today.”

Mrs. Boehm shrugged. The gesture had all the weight of a beautifully penned argument.

For who in their right mind would do up a little girl’s hair like that of a woman of eighteen and then allow her to run, shoeless, out into the streets? Grown whores leave their hair down as a rule, trying to look as young as they can. Parade with their flimsy shirts open to their navels, their parched, brittle locks trailing behind them like brushwood twigs, hoping at least in appearance to shave off a few years’ worth of being poked with knives and cudgels and every other tool known to man. The children, though. Kinchin-mabs are most often hidden away indoors. But when they do walk abroad, they’re painted to look like tiny society women. Hair pinned up like the belles of a ghastly miniature ball.

“You think she escaped from a disorderly house,” I said. “If she did, she’s for a religious charity if she likes and back on the streets if she doesn’t. Never the House of Refuge. Not if I have a say in it.”

The House of Refuge is an asylum for orphaned, half-orphaned, vagrant, and delinquent children, just north of the populated city at Twenty-fifth Street and Fifth Avenue. Its aim is to remove homeless kinchin from the streets, where they are visible, and set them on an enlightened path from behind closed gates, where they are not visible. The main sticking point being less about the enlightenment and more about whether the self-satisfaction of New York’s upper classes is in any way threatened by the sight of starving six-year-olds huddled in sewage troughs. I happen to be unimpressed by the establishment’s precepts.

Nodding in agreement, Mrs. Boehm set her rib cage against the wood, unwrapping the wax paper and then breaking off a piece of the dark chocolate she’d revealed. She ate it pensively, pushing the small treasure toward me.

“What do you think she meant by saying, ‘They’ll tear him to pieces’?” I asked.

“Animal, perhaps. Into the backyard she goes, she has a favorite pig, the pig is killed, she runs. Blood from slaughter, I’m thinking. A cow, even, or a pony with broken leg sold for glue. Yes, her beloved pony. Of course they would tear him to pieces. We will find out tomorrow.”

Mrs. Boehm stood up, lifted a candle.

“Tomorrow I’ve only a half-shift,” I lied to the friendly little knobs of bones running down her back under the dressing gown. “You needn’t bother waking me.”

“Very good. I am glad you are a police. We need police,” she said thoughtfully, collecting her magazine. Then, after a pause. “It was only her pony, I am thinking.”

Mrs. Boehm was a practical woman, I told myself. And she was right: the blood could have come from anywhere. Only a pony’s, or even a dog’s, run down by a carriage and then promptly swarming with rats. I relaxed a fraction.

But the thought of rats left me sick and shaken again, staring uselessly across the room at a hairline crack in the plaster. I wondered, when carrying the other candle up to my chambers, just what it would take after a day like that to get my usual self back.

Next morning
, I awoke from a dead slumber to a pair of grey eyes examining me.

I stared, not comprehending. Still flat in bed and yet thrown off
balance. Sunlight streamed through my window, which never was the state of things when my eyes opened. My straw tick was still up against the wall, for the thought of bedding down in the sleeping-closet depressed me beyond words, and I’d have been pretty shocked the day before to think I’d ever be entertaining any company. Yet here I was. Wearing only loose drawstring smallclothes that stopped well above my knees, with enormous ash-colored irises pinned to my frame.

The little girl wore the lengthy blouse Mrs. Boehm had given her the night before. It hung to mid-thigh, and under she boasted a small boy’s set of nankeen trousers. Interesting, I thought. Her rosewood-colored hair was down now, tied back with a piece of kitchen twine.

“What are you doing in here?” I asked.

“I’ve been looking at your paintings. I like them.”

There weren’t any paintings, but I could see what she was getting at. Ever since I was a young kinchin I’ve scrawled things on any spare paper I could find when my brain wants quieting. And every day before the start of police work I’d drawn something. Going out in the heat made my face burn, and I hadn’t wanted people. I’d taken the Madison Line omnibus to the northeast frontier of the city, to Bull’s Head Village at Third and Twenty-fourth, where all the pens, cattle yards, and butchers migrated when driven off Bowery. It reeked of recent death there, and the animals screamed a good deal. But they had thin brown paper to wrap meat in for next to nothing, and I bought a pretty huge roll of it. Then I took a sack and filled it with spent coal from an abandoned brazier near the sheep yard.

Shortcuts. I know how they’re done.

“You need to leave, so I can dress.”

“This one,” she said, walking up to a brown swath tacked to the wall depicting the Williamsburg Ferry leaving Peck Slip beneath a lowering July thunderstorm. Just precisely as I like to think of river
travel, the way it still echoes in my mind—a boat cutting through a wide, placid river, seconds before a delirious collision of sunlight and rain. “I like it particular. This one is flash. How’d you learn?”

“Hand me my shirt,” I commanded. “There’s one by the washbasin.”

She carried it over, smiling. A genuine smile, I thought, but double-purposed: it was real charm coated on top of a measuring device. How was I going to respond to simple friendliness? Did I like that? I’d sized people up so myself, but I was better at it. Inwardly, I shook my head. This girl had been soaked in gore not eight hours previous, been subjected to God knows what beforehand, and I was worried about my apparel.

“I’m Timothy Wilde. What’s your name?”

“Everyone calls me Little Bird,” she said with a tilt of one shoulder. “Bird Daly. I can say the real one for you if you’d like me to, though.”

I said certainly, go on ahead, as I pulled on my shirt and wondered with an increasingly mortified feeling where my trousers had got to.

“Aibhilin ó Dálaigh. I didn’t used to be able to say it proper, so I called myself Bird because Bird is easier. But they mean the same thing exactly, only different languages, so Bird is just as good as the other, is what I think. What do you think?”

Trousers
, I thought. I now owned two pairs, and they’d never seemed so very important. Finally, my bare foot hit black worsted and I pulled them on quick as I could.

Now Bird was staring at a large sketch of a cottage in the forest, obviously and violently on fire. The woods surrounding were a blackly burned-out no-man’s-land, a dreamscape, and the whole thing smelled of incineration. I’d done it in spent fuel, after all. Whatever den she hailed from, she’d peered at paintings before. Her eyes were comparing new art to art she’d already seen. Not a Five-Pointer, then, from
our blackest pit of all, and not from the saltwater East River dives either. Too well fed, expensively dressed, and critical of charcoal studies.

“We need to talk about yesterday,” I suggested gently. “About what happened to you, and your nightdress, and where you belong.”

“Did you do this one when you were younger? It looks different.”

“No, they’re all pretty new. We’ll go and find Mrs. Boehm, see about some tea while you tell me what upset you last night.”

Bird paused before another patch of paper-covered wall, frowning. It was a simple portrait of a pale woman with black locks and a scholarly air, her cleft chin in her hand, looking off with wide-set eyes. Just Mercy, caught in a brown study.

“You like her,” Bird announced darkly. “You probably kiss her quite a lot, don’t you?”

“I … as a matter of fact, I don’t. Why—”

Pondering the sketch, I realized that the feelings of the artist toward his subject were, indeed, apparent to a ten-year-old. It didn’t aid my flusterment much. Meanwhile, Bird’s brooding face slipped into another—agreeable, pliant, erasing the trail of her mistake. “Not everyone likes kissing. Maybe you don’t? Anyhow, if you like her, I’ll go on and like her too. Since you brought me inside and all.”

“You won’t be seeing her. She’s a very … admirable lady, though.”

“She’s your mistress?”

“She is not. No. Listen, part of what we need to talk about is where you lived before. Because they’ll be wanting you back, and if they don’t deserve to have you back, well, we must find you a fresh start.”

Bird blinked. Then she smiled again, it having been safe the first time.

“I don’t want to talk about it,” she admitted. “But I’ll try if you want me to, Mr. Wilde. I think I’ll cap in with you from now on, you see. So I’ll try.”

“You will tell me,”
Mrs. Boehm said in a very kind voice, “what last night happened to your nightdress.”

Bird, sitting at the wide bakery table with a cup of heated currant wine mixed with water and a lump of sugar held prettily in her small hands, looked down at a wisp of steam. Her face colored hotly, then faded again. I was reminded of being asked by my father long ago whether I’d finished polishing the tack in the stables with whale oil, being suddenly terrified because I hadn’t, and then catching Val winking at me reassuringly from the corner of the room in a rare moment of rescue. It was the same quick flash of panic I’d just seen in Bird’s eyes, the sort that steals your breath.

“It’s a very pretty nightdress,” I mentioned from my seat on a chair in the corner.

The compliment rolled right over Bird, pulling her eyebrows up a fraction. I was grotesquely reminded that, while some children gobble encouraging remarks like gingerbread, Bird Daly had probably been subjected to
flattery
. And far worse obscenities.

“It did suit me, but it’s probably ruined now. I like your hat,” Bird said shrewdly. “It suits you too.”

When I perceived that she spoke like an adult because ninety percent of her interactions had been with grown men spending coin on her company, I felt my face darken before I could prevent myself. I made the decision then and there that I wasn’t going to be able to talk with Bird as if she were a kinchin and I a former star policeman of twenty-seven. Being outflanked because I’m not smart enough to drive the conversation is almost exhilarating. But being outflanked because I’ve read the opposition wrong is an outrageous embarrassment.

“I know you’re frightened,” I said, “because anyone could see
that something terrible happened last night. But if you don’t tell us what it was about, we can’t help anyone.”

“Where do you live, Bird?” Mrs. Boehm put in quietly.

Bird’s generous lips twitched, reluctant. It occurred to me in a distant way, like looking at a rosebush, that she was beautiful. Then I had to fight my stomach back down from my gullet again, which was getting very tiresome.

“In a house west of Broadway with my family,” she said simply. “But I’ll never see it again.”

“Go on,” I said. “We won’t lay into you, so long as you tell us the truth.”

The somber budlike lips convulsed again, and then words began gushing out of them. Wetly, as if she was crying. Though she wasn’t, not in a visible way.

“I can’t. I can’t. My father arrived, and he cut her with a shiv. He would have gotten me too, but I ran away, though I’d already dressed for bed.”

I exchanged a look with Mrs. Boehm, or I tried to, but her faded blue eyes were fastened to Bird.

“Who did he cut?” I asked gravely.

“My mother,” Bird whispered. “My mother was cut right across the face. She was carrying me up to bed, and there was blood everywhere. He’s mad when he’s been at the lush, but before he’d only used his hands. A walking cane he carried. Never a knife. My mother dropped me and she told me to run, told me not ever to come back because he blames me for costing extra money for food and togs.”

She stopped, rubbing at the rim of her cup with a trembling finger. Her eyes fixed onto a tiny chip in the china.