The Gods Of Gotham (16 page)

“If I caused you or your father any stray anxious thought, please forgive me.”

“Surely you see that it isn’t like you?”

“I’m wearing a copper star and living in the Sixth Ward. Do I
look
like myself at the moment?”

Mercy’s black brows drifted apart. Contemplating her equally, I lost my bearings for an instant. When we resumed walking, she’d inexplicably found something to smile about. It teased at the edges of her mouth, more audible in her breath than visible on her face.

“I’m sorry for your recent misfortunes,” she said softly. “All of them. I learned of them only yesterday, from Papa, of course, and wish I’d known sooner.”

“Thank you,” I said, feeling ungrateful. “How’s the book coming?”

“Well enough.” She sounded almost amused. “But I find it difficult to credit that you’re here without reason, from the sound of you. Are you about to tell me what it is?”

“I am,” I replied reluctantly. “Dr. Peter Palsgrave thought that you could maybe help the police identify a deceased boy. If you don’t wish—”

“Peter Palsgrave? My father’s friend, the doctor working on an elixir of life?”

“Is he? I thought he only tended children.”

“He does, which is how Papa and I came to know him. And yes, he is. Dr. Palsgrave has long been after the formula for a cordial capable of curing any illness. He vows it’s science, but I find it all rather impractical. Ought one focus so very hard on a magical cure-all while so many are dying for want of perfectly simple cures like fresh meat? But why should he think of me— Oh, I see,” Mercy sighed, shifting her basket up her slender arm. “Is the boy native?”

“If you mean were his parents born here or have they the accents and money to pass for it, I don’t know. But he seems Irish.”

Mercy gave me a brief smile like a darting kiss on the cheek, one corner of her mouth sweeping toward me. “In that case, I will certainly help you.”

“Why should his being Irish make you help us?”

“Because,” she answered, and the needle had crept back into the elegant weave again, “if he’s Irish, no one else in this city would dream of it.”

Viewing the body
—by that time clean and shrouded, I assumed, and only yards distant at St. Patrick’s on Prince and Mulberry—was more difficult than we’d imagined it would be. There first was the problem of my reluctance to approach the rough stone wall of the five-windowed side entrance with Mercy on my arm, knowing I was about to show her a corpse. More important, though, there were the thugs.

“We’ll burn Satan’s palace to the ground!”

A giant of over six feet with thick black side whiskers, who couldn’t possibly have yet reached twenty-five years in spite of those facts, stood before a small knot of workingmen wearing fierce faces. All their wrinkles etched deeper than they ought to have been. Men of honest work who’d just finished butchering swine or
pounding nails and had donned their best coats to pelt a cane basket full of river rocks at the Irish. They resembled Val in their tight black swallowtails and careful breastpins. Val wanted Irish votes, though, and Nativists wanted Irish deaths. They were men with hard lives, showing as much in their cold eyeblinks and their readily clenched hands.

“I’ll see to this,” I said to Mercy, nodding at the corner to tell her to wait.

“You inside-out niggers don’t dare to face down a single freeborn American! Come out and play, you cowards. We’ll drown you like a sack of pups!” the boy giant shouted, all teeth and carefully combed bear’s fur.

“Not today,” I suggested.

Eyes swept in my direction like vermin to a carcass.

“And you are, my sweet little skip-kennel?” the huge young fellow questioned in a voice that could only have come from New York.

“Not a footman. A copper star,” I said, translating
skip-kennel
. I needed a gesture, so I flicked my thumbnail over the badge the way I’d all too often seen Val do with mere buttons. For the first time, I felt something about that star other than rage or annoyance. “Find some pups who want drowning and leave the church as it is.”

“Oh, a
copper star
,” sneered the giant rough. “I’ve been meaning to give a copper star a beating for weeks now. He talks big though, don’t he? Seems to savvy flash.”

“That’s all just smoke,” slurred a drunken sort whose face seemed to have been mistaken for bread dough and rearranged. “There’s but one of him. And he don’t understand us.”

“Smack on the calfskin, I understand you. And I don’t need more than one of me,” I replied. “Get out of it or I’ll see you to the Tombs.”

As I’d predicted, the lanky monument they all looked to stepped forward. With his hands curling into their natural shape.

“I go by the name of Bill Poole.” He breathed downward, the gust tangy and ripe. “And I’m a free native-born republican who can’t abide the sight of a standing army. You’ll be flat as a sounder in a strammel when I’m through with you, copper star.”

Whether he was capable of beating me flat as a caged pig, I couldn’t tell. But I could tell he was drunk and loose in the limbs. So when he swung down at me, as a taller man will do when overconfident, I stepped in close past his fist and felled him with an elbow snapped up into his eye socket. Bill Poole dropped like a sack slung from my shoulder.

“Practice makes all the difference,” I advised candidly as his followers scrambled to get him upright. I touched the star again, wildly pleased with it now. “Get away from here before more of me arrive.”

Maybe there really is something to enduring hundreds of brawls with my older brother,
I thought,
if it helps me fight low and filthy for good reason.
The roughs, meanwhile, dragged their leader and their rocks away. I adjusted the cloth over my face while hope pulled hard and insistent at my spine. Mercy was behind me, after all. Mercy was …

Not behind me. The door, prettily curved at its top, was open.

Hope, I’ve discovered, is a sad nuisance. Hope is a horse with a broken leg.

Inside the cathedral, twelve enormous pillars like the roots of mountains supported the distant roof, each ringed at the top with four globes of muted light. Dim despite the glow, and the air thick with incense and ritual. When I spied Mercy, she stood earnestly listening to the priest I recognized from my visit to Mulberry Street in search of lodgings only weeks before. He must have struck me at the time, for I remembered him though we’d never exchanged either words or money. His head wasn’t bald, to start with; it was spherical and hairless, as if hair had never grown there. The features below that
sphere were cut strong and bullish and intelligent, however. His eyes flicked to me, interested.

“Mr. Wilde, I take it.” The prelate offered me the steady hand of the man who presides over the walls and the roof. “They told me you’d be payin’ me a call. Bishop Hughes is in Baltimore at the moment, in conference with the archbishop, and I’m servin’ as administrator. I live just adjacent to the cathedral in any case, and oversee the grounds. Father Connor Sheehy, at your service.”

“Thank you. The Bowery types have left your doorstep, you might want to know.”

“Sure, and they leave every afternoon about this time, afore the Catholic day laborers are through with cartin’ manure and want a dust-up.” He smiled. “We pay them no mind, Miss Underhill and myself. I get the feelin’ you humiliated them, though, which is all to the good o’ the copper stars. No, I do charitable work in Five Points with Miss Underhill here, and … your brother Captain Wilde seems to have sent me somethin’ grave. You’ll be wantin’ to see the lad. He’s in one of the side chambers. Come this way.”

The room’s trappings were so different from the police station’s that I couldn’t quite get my head around its being the same corpse. I could see the boy better in the free-flowing window light from high above, and here equally still pictures of saints surrounded him, keeping fit company. He wore a white gown now, facing the freestone ceiling, a cloth pulled up to his breast. You couldn’t take him for sleeping, though, not when you’ve seen death before. Dead things look
heavy
. Earthbound in a way living things don’t.

Mercy went right to him, setting her basket down. “Yes, I’ve the feeling I’ve met him before, but I can’t place him,” she said. “I take it you don’t know the boy, Father?”

“I do not. I wish I could say otherwise, seein’ what was done to him.”

“What was done to him?” Mercy questioned quick as thinking.

I shot Father Sheehy a glare fit to melt the ice blocks daily shipped down the Hudson. “Do you truly wish to know, Miss Underhill?” I asked. Willing the single word
no.

“Are you reluctant to tell me, Mr. Wilde?”

“A very deep cross was carved into the lad’s torso,” Father Sheehy explained, adding a far too knowing glance of sympathetic apology in my direction. I ignored it.

“To what purpose would someone do such a terrible thing?”

My memory slid dizzily back to Dr. Palsgrave and his unspeakable three-item list of
satanic spells, treasure hunting, food source.

“We’re working on it,” I said truthfully. “Every suggestion thus far has been ridiculous, from religious mania on down.”

Showing us the back of her slim hand as she brushed her fingers along her neck, a more stricken Mercy murmured, “He did not die of that, did he?”

“No, no,” I promised her. A half-formed thought was tapping at the back of my head. “He died of either pneumonia or else something less traceable. Miss Underhill, last year, did you treat any poor families who’d taken ill with the chicken pox?” I asked in a rush, snapping my fingers.

Lowering my head, I crossed to the body and pulled the kinchin’s gown down just an inch or two, at the shoulder. The nearly faded marks were scattered across the skin, less visible than his freckles but still clear.

Mercy frowned at one side of her mouth. “Last season was remarkably quiet regarding varicella cases. He could have had it without ever seeing me, of course, but I did go about for some two weeks with brown paper, soaking it in molasses, then plastering the children to reduce inflammation of the skin. There was a row of houses stricken, on Eighth Street between the Harlem Railroad and the
cemetery. Those were poor natives, though. A patch in Orange Street, all dreadfully ill, but they were Welsh. Oh,” she said with a little start, “a few houses in Greene Street, where …”

Peering down at the body, Mercy’s blood began a retreat from her beautiful face.

“He’s from a bawdy house,” I said quietly, putting a hand on her elbow. I was reasonably sure in that instant I did it for her, not for me. I hope I did. “He’s a kinchin-mab, isn’t he?”

“How could you know that?” Mercy questioned, her lips slack and startled. She took a step away from me, falling silent—as if I knew things I shouldn’t, had patronized such places myself and learned their roster of fleshy distractions.

“No, God no, I’ve never visited a den like that,” I protested. “There are particular clues. Where does he come from?”

After a pause, she continued. “I met him in a vile brothel in Greene Street last year, one owned by a Madam Marsh. Silkie Marsh. How did you guess?”

“I didn’t guess. I’ve an inside source, and I’ll tell you all about it. What’s the address? I need to question this Madam Marsh.”

Father Sheehy, his arms calmly folded over each other with an air of quiet fortitude, cleared his throat.

“You won’t be findin’ it easy to question Silkie Marsh, for I can tell you that St. Patrick’s has tried to set the fear of the most holy Trinity in that woman before now, and to no avail. Irish orphans wander into her den from time to time, you see, and they find it a great task gettin’ out again. She has connections.”

“What sort of connections?”

“Political ones.” He raised his brows in my direction, polite but incredulous. “Is there another kind?”

Mercy touched her fingertips to the child’s hair. “No wonder I didn’t recognize him. I saw him a year ago,” she said to herself, her voice strained. “He’s … he’s so much older now.”

“Be very careful about visitin’ that brothel, won’t you?” Father Sheehy advised, angling his perfectly smooth head meaningfully.

“Should I be frightened of a madam who follows politics?” I scoffed.

“Not a bit of it. I only mention it because I wonder if you are aware of how very put out your brother, Captain Valentine Wilde, would be to know you’re harassin’ a major Democratic contributor of his.”

“A contributor,” I repeated. It stuck on something fishhook-shaped that had sprung into my throat.

“Oh, and a mighty large one.” Father Sheehy nodded, smiling darkly. “A benefactor. One might even say a
very
personal friend.”

And with that, the priest departed on other business. Leaving me with the finest girl ever born, a brutally deceased kinchin-mab, an angry flush that felt wasteful and stupid since I already knew my brother as well as I did, and a single notion in my head. It wasn’t to go and talk to Madam Marsh any longer, not by a long haul.

Poor Bird Daly, I thought, was going to tell me the truth, or else have a pretty fair number of unforeseen consequences on her innocent hands.