The Museum of Extraordinary Things (27 page)

Eddie gulped a bitter mouthful of the liquor. “Do you think they killed her?”

“She was already gone before they got here. I checked. No breath. No heart. But somebody killed her for certain.” The hermit brought something out of his pocket. A strand of blue thread. “Her mouth was sewn shut. I couldn’t let her stay that way, so I told myself it would be like untangling fishing wire, otherwise it would have been too terrible a deed to undertake.”

He gestured for his companion to take the thread, but Eddie recoiled.

“I figured this would happen,” Beck grumbled. “You’re scared by a thread.”

Eddie’s expression was dark; there was only so much insult he could take. “Thread doesn’t scare me. I used to be a tailor.”

“Well, I used to be a baby,” the hermit responded. “Doesn’t make me one now.”

Eddie reached out, and Beck deposited the thread in his outstretched hand.

“The carriage men were there to steal the body,” the hermit said with a sober expression. “The one in charge seemed happy to do so. Not your mermaid, though. She was crying.”

“My mermaid?”

“You almost crashed right into her one night. She and I were both watching you and your rabbit.” He patted Mitts, who panted happily at the attention, tongue lolling. “I wanted to make sure you didn’t burn down my land, so I stayed up on the ridge. She was hidden in the trees. She’s a good swimmer, and she’s got good eyes. But you weren’t much good at seeing what was right in front of you. That’s why I’m leading you out now.”

Eddie felt a burst of heat run through him. He must have glimpsed the girl. That was why he couldn’t rid her from his dreams.

“Who is she?”

Beck shrugged. “A girl that thinks she’s a fish. Maybe your trout brought her round. I told you that fish would lead you someplace.”

“I don’t suppose you recognized the men.” An impossible, hopeless question Eddie didn’t so much ask as think aloud.

“The first fella who almost drowned in the mud?”

“No,” Eddie said. “The two with the body.”

“Oh, I knew one of them, all right.”

This was the way it happened, a single question that could crack open the world, letting in a shaft of light that might allow him to glimpse the truth.

“I saw his picture in the paper years ago. He was a criminal.”

It was dark where they’d stopped, but through the trees the water shone a silvered, glittering gray.

“Do you remember his name?”

“Can’t read. I just use the paper to wrap my fish to soak in cold water. But I read his face just fine, and I remembered it. It was the same man I saw with your mermaid. He put the body under the seat. Then he stood behind the carriage and fed the blackbirds crumbs from his hand. Never seen anything like it.”

Eddie felt a chill along his neck and back. Beck was describing a scene Eddie knew well. The first thing he heard every morning was the sound of the horses breathing in the stalls below him and the liveryman crooning to his pigeons as he sang their praises.
Birds are smarter than you think. They never forget a kind word or a face.
He’d often witnessed the liveryman feeding the blackbirds out in the alleyway as they perched along his arms, each one waiting its turn, as if entranced.

“Now I’ve told you everything,” the hermit said, “and all that I have belongs to you when I’m gone.” They had reached the riverbank, the end of Beck’s territory and his world. “Don’t forget my wolf.”

The city was quiet, but Eddie’s mind was racing. On his way downtown, he found a grassy place and lay down to rest, his dog beside him. A mouth was sewn shut when there were secrets that might escape or when a punishment was delivered to an individual who talked too much. The thread was nothing special, not silk or mohair, just machine grade. Eddie closed his eyes, and sleep overtook him. When he dreamed he saw his father at his sewing machine. The thread he used was made of glass. It splintered in his hands and drew blood, but his father went on working as if this was an everyday occurrence.
This is what happens,
his father said in his dream.
This is what every man faces in his life.

Dawn was approaching when Eddie woke. He stretched his legs, cramped from sleeping on the grass. He whistled for Mitts, and they headed back to Chelsea, trotting part of the way. Eddie’s breath was hot and he could feel sweat stinging his body. The dog was joyous to have his master run along with him, and they ran until Eddie was doubled over, a stitch in his side. The last moments of night were drifting in between the wooden piers in bursts of blackened clouds. At the mouth of the harbor, the first rays of light broke through in glints of gold and red, and the dark night turned a wild, shivering blue.

The horses in the stable were just waking, ready for their breakfast, restless in their stalls. Their keeper was there and had already piled up hay with a pitchfork. Several of his prized pigeons perched along the old wooden beams. The liveryman sang to them as he brought out their breakfast of seed. With great trust and familiarity, his pigeons came to eat from his wide, callused hands. He turned, wary when he heard the door slide open, suspicious of who might arrive at such an ungodly hour, but broke into a grin when he spied Eddie and the dog. They’d been good neighbors over the years.

“Out early I see,” the carriage man greeted Eddie. “Up before the birds.”

“Long before the birds,” Eddie said grimly. He thought of blackbirds and the silver river. He thought how little he knew about this neighbor of his.

The liveryman finished feeding the pigeons. He then leaned to pet Mitts under the chin. “Here’s a good boy who stays away from my birds, isn’t that right?” The dog, exhausted from his walk, flopped down at the liveryman’s feet. “I expect you’ll both be looking for a few hours of sleep.”

“It’s not sleep I’m after.” Eddie closed the door behind him. At the sound of the heavy doors shutting, the pigeons scattered to the rafters above. “It’s you I’m looking for.”

THEY CROSSED
the Williamsburg Bridge early the next day, at a time when a steady stream of crowds were headed in the opposite direction, toward Manhattan and the working world. Eddie sat beside the sullen carriage man on the driver’s high bench seat. He wanted to keep an eye on his companion, and for good reason. When confronted, the stableman had professed to know nothing of the matter of a missing girl. But when Eddie hadn’t backed off, and had described the exact location where the body had been found in the muddy hollow, the liveryman had been stunned.

“You can’t know that,” he blurted. “No one knows where we’ve been and what we’ve done excepting my horse, and he wouldn’t tell you if he could.”

The stableman seemed under the influence; perhaps he was a drinker. Certainly, he was not reasoning clearly. He ran his mouth before he could think better of it, eyeing Eddie as if he possessed the psychic powers of a demon. “I told him I wanted nothing to do with it. I said it was bad luck, but he wouldn’t listen and he was the one paying, so what was I to do?”

The liveryman swore he’d committed no offenses, for the girl was dead when they’d come upon her. All he did was help move the body to Brooklyn, and then only as an employee who had no choice but to obey the demands placed upon him.

“In the eyes of the law, that’s an offense,” Eddie assured him. “You’ll be in the Tombs if the authorities find out. Maybe even Sing Sing prison.”

“The eyes of the law are blind. You know it as well as I. Let’s settle this as men, for men is what we are. I could kill you here and now,” the liveryman boasted, “and never hear a word of this again.”

Eddie laughed. “You?”

“Would you feel differently about holding a threat over my head if you knew I already served five years in Sing Sing?”

Eddie had assumed something about his companion’s station in life from his scars, tattoos, and gold-capped teeth. But time in Sing Sing meant a serious criminal background.

“You know nothing about me, so don’t pretend you do.” The liveryman shook his head, for life in that infamous prison upstate was too harsh for anyone who hadn’t served time to grasp. It was pure cruelty to lock men away and give them a view of the Hudson, keeping them always in sight of the beauty of the world while caging them like beasts. Many prisoners had tried to escape; some had drowned in the river, still more had wished they had when they were hauled out like fish and beaten with ropes and chains. “You have no idea what the world is like in that place or what men are willing to do in order to live another day. I’m including myself. I take responsibility for the man I used to be, for I carry him with me. As strong as I am, he’s a heavy burden.”

The liveryman’s story tumbled out. This quiet, stocky fellow had run one of the toughest gangs in the Five Points section of the Lower East Side. His wild boys, the Allen Street Cadets, rode like madmen on their bicycles, perched upon their handlebars so they might attack a victim with a club before leaping down to finish a robbery. He’d risen through the ranks, from a bouncer at the New Irving Hall, a saloon on Broome Street, to a gang boss. The houses of prostitution and opium lairs under his control were overlooked by the officials at Tammany Hall, for those who were meant to govern for the good of the people were happy enough, once paid off, to ignore unlawful acts. In those days, this humble carriage man had often sauntered into the Tenth Precinct, where he let himself into the captain’s office with ease, bringing gifts of whiskey and cigars. He’d considered himself untouchable, and for a while he was, but his long sentence in Sing Sing prison had left him without allies or connections.

When he was released, early, for good behavior, he’d had no choice but to hire himself out for petty crimes, including his work for a professor in Brooklyn. He was now thirty-four, and in the streets where he’d ruled, younger, more brutal men had taken his place. He’d found himself running a livery, mucking out stables, hiring himself out on a daily basis.

“So you lost your power and came to body snatching?”

“I was brought low by a certain passion I have,” the liveryman admitted.

Eddie recalled the times he’d seen this fellow crouched in the alleyway behind the stable, all but hidden in the falling dusk. He’d often had a pipe with him. There had been times when Eddie had observed him fast asleep beside his horses, dead to the world or only half-awake, his eyes hazed over from the effects of smoking poppy. There were opium houses across lower Manhattan, in the cellars of bordellos and taverns. Eddie had been to many such places while working for Hochman. His young age hadn’t mattered to anyone in this world where a man’s craving was paramount. All that was necessary for him to gain admittance was to pay a dime to the sheriff who guarded the door; he was then allowed to search through the warren of cubbyholes. In these dim and filthy cubicles a man could smoke himself into a stupor, most often lying on one hip so he could get to his pipe even as he slipped into a dream. It was a dream from which he’d never have to wake, as long as he had money enough, and wasn’t murdered in his sleep.

“The Professor concocts his own opium in his workshop,” the liveryman informed Eddie. “He takes the raw stuff that looks like amber flakes and mixes it into a paste with those chemicals of his. He’s a wizard, I’ll grant him that. He vowed I’d never go without as long as I keep my mouth shut.”

“But you’re talking now,” Eddie reminded him.

“So I am. I’ve had enough of being lorded over by the likes of some so-called scientist who has me dragging around the dead. I may take his money, but he hasn’t got my loyalty. You keep me out of it, and I’ll talk all right.”

“You’ll do more than that. You’ll take me there.”

Eddie then brought out the dime-store photograph of Hannah. After a single glance, the liveryman looked away, pained. Even a man such as he had a soul, one he worried over more as each year went by.

“That’s her,” he admitted. “God forgive me.”

To Eddie’s great shock, the carriage man then began the initial phrases of the Kaddish, the mourning prayer of the Jews.
Yit’gadal v’yit kadash sh’mei raba.
May His great Name grow exalted and sanctified.
B’al’ma di v’ra khir’utei.
In the world that He created as He willed.
V’yam’likh mal’khutei b’chayeikhon uv’yomeikhon.
May He give reign to His kingship in your lifetimes and in your days.
Uv’chayei d’khol beit yis’ra’eil
. And in the lifetimes of the entire family of Israel.