The Museum of Extraordinary Things (33 page)

The wolf-dog was chained to the porch, frantic. I assumed he had seen the murder of his master, and because he was shackled he could do nothing to defend Beck. I thought he might attack me, but, when I set him off his chain, he merely darted into the woods. Good, I thought, for that was what the old man had wanted, for the beast to be set free.

I then burned the shack to the ground, as Beck had asked. I had the rain barrel readied to ensure the flames wouldn’t get out of control. My bad hand was aching even more, and my heart was aching as well, but I set to my work with a vengeance. Beck’s house was a flimsy edifice, and it went up easily. I’d seen enough of fire, and I hoped this one would be the last I ever saw. Afterward, I poured water on the remaining embers in case a flame or two should survive.

It was near dark, but I had no fear of these woods. I felt I had inherited them for whatever time there was left for them. It was then I saw Beck’s wolf staring at me through the smoke. If there was anyone in the world who might understand who I’d been and how I’d lived my life it was this creature. We couldn’t go back to the lives we were meant to live. Beck had wanted the wolf to be free, but there was no wild for him to return to and no man to be his master, and he stood there uneasily, between worlds. I called him to me, and he came. I had said I would care for him, and I would do so. We walked downtown together, not quite companions, wary of each other, but together all the same. When we reached the more populated avenues, I found a rope on the street and looped it around his neck so that he wouldn’t startle when he saw carts and automobiles. He was surprisingly calm. Though the horses in the stable below my studio panicked at the sight of him, the wolf ignored them, as he ignored Mitts, choosing to slink beneath the table, where he made a sort of den for himself. I do not know if he had a name, but I called him North, an appellation I think Beck would have approved of, for it was the name the Dutch called the Hudson River when they first came here, when men set to changing the world in their image, and gave all the wild things their own names.

M
AY 1911

THEY WOULD
come for the body in broad daylight, during the afternoon show, for they were less likely to be seen in the midst of a crowd. The Professor would be engaged at this time, his attention on the flow of customers. No one would expect thievery, if that was what it could be called, in the middle of the day.

“This is a task best done by ghouls,” the liveryman said, for even he, with his criminal history, was queasy over the work that lay ahead.

“Then that’s what we’ll be,” Eddie said grimly.

“And how will we get into the cellar, if you don’t mind me asking?” When Eddie held up the keys Coralie had given him, the liveryman grinned. “I see I should give you a bit of credit. I won’t ask where you got those, brother.”

They had made a pact to work together, for this one day alone. They would never again speak of it, or speak of each other.

“What would make a person sew the mouth shut of a person who’d been murdered?” Eddie asked the liveryman as they traveled toward their destination.

“It’s a message. Ask no questions.”

“It was done to Hannah, the drowned girl.”

“No. I saw her for myself.”

“A person with a kind heart removed the thread. It may be he was killed for doing so.”

“Perhaps he knew more than he should have. Or at least someone believed he did.”

Eddie was now struck by the story of the man who’d been stuck in the mud; how the hermit had watched him struggle to break free. Someone had deposited Hannah in the river. Could this have been the man? “If that’s true it doesn’t serve to drive me away,” Eddie told his companion.

“I wouldn’t expect so. You’re stubborn.” The liveryman grinned. “It’s part of our heritage. If our people weren’t stubborn we would have disappeared by way of our enemies’
hands long ago.”

Eddie’s obstinate nature surfaced in his refusal to accept the physician’s verdict that his right hand might be useless in the future. At present, however, his disability was irrefutable. He had therefore stowed his camera in a cupboard, and he felt the loss of it even more deeply than he did the loss of his hand.

Eddie hadn’t expected the liveryman to be so companionable, or so intelligent in his views. “You seem sure of yourself,” he said. “I think we know each other well enough that I should call you by your right name.”

“Eastman is right enough.” The liveryman gave him a sly look. “As right as Eddie is at any rate. Names don’t matter. Our God knows how to call us to him when he wants us, it’s best to remember that.”

They didn’t speak much afterward; each man was lost in his own private thoughts. Eddie had worried about leaving Mitts alone with the hermit’s wolf, so he’d locked the dog in a stall in the stable, and he couldn’t help but think of the pathetic whining he’d heard when he left for the day. Once they’d entered Brooklyn, both men’s imaginings couldn’t help but turn to the horrors of the Raymond Street Jail, a turreted Victorian building that was damp and freezing cold, said to house the worst of criminal life, along with the largest, most vicious rats in New York.

“I’ve served my last term in jail,” the liveryman mused. “I’ll do myself in before I go back. Five years of my life gone to shit, watching the river and counting out the time, knowing I could never get it back. After this business today is done, I’m considering joining the military. It’s a better life for a man such as myself.”

“I thought you couldn’t leave your pipe.” Eddie tried his best to be civil in referring to the liveryman’s weakness for opium.

“I don’t wish to be a slave anymore. I’m switching to gin.”

They both had a laugh over that.

“And you?” the liveryman asked. “What do you intend?”

“Once I’ve done what I promised, I’ll go back for Coralie. If she’ll have me.” He noticed the liveryman’s dour expression. “I take it you don’t think she’ll leave with me?”

“Do you think it’s her choice?”

“It should be,” Eddie remarked. “And it will.”

“Then you’d best make sure you get rid of him,” Eddie’s companion told him. “I know him well, and what’s his is his.”

All that morning she could hardly keep away from the window. When she returned from Manhattan, she’d slipped back into the house before her father came home, but sooner or later a person breaking the Professor’s rules was bound to be caught.

“You’re a jittery one,” Maureen said. They were making fritters to serve during the living wonders’ tea break, but Coralie had dumped the dough in too quickly and the oil had splashed up, nearly burning them both.

“Spring fever,” Coralie assured her.

Maureen gave her a sidelong glance. “Is that what it is?”

Coralie offered a compliment to deflect attention from her nervous state. “I’m not a cook, though you’ve tried your best to teach me.”

Fortunately, there was much to be done, and Maureen was too busy to investigate any further. She was soon enough taking tickets at the entryway of the museum. Coralie had no one watching over her actions and was free to steal into the yard at the appointed hour. Eddie was already there, crouched beside the hydrangeas. Maureen had added vinegar to the ground to turn the blooms bluer, and they blurred against the color of the sky. As soon as she saw him, Coralie felt as she did when she was about to dive into the river; somewhere inside her there was a gasping, thrilling release of earth and air. She went to stand beside him in the grass. She smelled like salt to him, and some delicious variety of sweet, caramels. As for Coralie, she noticed everything about him in that instant, the cast on his hand, the shape of his head, the broad width of his shoulders, the way he gazed at her with his dark gold-flecked eyes, as if she had never been a monster possessing a monster’s heart and history.

The liveryman had left his carriage down the street, and he now joined them in the garden. It would take two strong men to complete this task, both with steady hands and strong stomachs. Coralie felt a stab of fear. She imagined what might happen if her father discovered them, but she forced herself to push such thoughts aside. They went into the kitchen the way a dreamer enters into a dream, slowly at first, then all in a rush. The liveryman led Eddie down the plummeting stairs to the cellar. They had no idea of how much time they had, and when Maureen might return from the ticket booth, so every instant mattered. Eddie gazed over his shoulder and saw the darkness close in on them as Coralie shut the door, ensuring that anyone entering the kitchen wouldn’t wonder if someone was in the cellar. Eddie quickly put the keys to work. Two turns of the locks and they were in.

“Don’t look at anything,” Eastman muttered. “Trust me, brother. You’ll think you’re in hell if you see where you are.”

They went directly to the wooden box and lifted it from the table. Nearby, the enormous bass was being kept on ice, its fish blood drained into a bucket. The ice had melted and some water gushed out of the makeshift coffin. Eddie tried his best to pay no attention to the skulls of varying sizes set upon the shelf, or the unborn child with abnormalities in its face and limbs that floated in a jar of pale yellow formaldehyde.

“Work, don’t look around,” the liveryman reminded him.

And so, Eddie turned his attention solely to the task at hand as the two men carried the coffin through the narrow door of the workshop. They managed to climb the stairs with the liveryman leading the way, the weight of the coffin resting on Eddie’s shoulder. Coralie guided them through the kitchen, and as she did Eddie took note of the plates and cups, the mops and brooms in a corner, napkins and tablecloths, sweets ready for tea, the stuff of everyday life. And yet amid these homely items Eddie’s thoughts turned to darker things—blood, and sorrow, and men who had no aversion to sewing through flesh with coarse thread. Before he had time to gather his thoughts, they were in the garden, the light so bright it brought tears to his eyes. The hydrangeas were so blue it seemed the sky had fallen. Coralie kissed him quickly, then whispered that she had given him her heart. It was not possible to live without one’s heart, yet she was smiling when she backed away. He thought about the first time he had seen her in this same place, as she came onto the porch, how it seemed as if he’d known her for a thousand years, and how it seemed that way still.

There were voices echoing, as customers on line for entry into the museum chattered to one another. They could hear the raucous calls of seagulls, those savage creatures, for birds circled above them. As they went on through the garden, the men inhaled the straw-like scent of lions from the cages of Dreamland across the street, and the sour, brackish odor of the sea, for it was low tide. They hurried from the yard, out to the street, where they stowed the box in the carriage. The plan was for Coralie to blame the liveryman. Eastman would then disappear. But now leaving her behind seemed all wrong. Eddie could see her gazing after them as Eastman shouted for him to get the hell onboard. The horse went full out when commanded to gallop, and still Eddie looked back, and still he saw her form, the swimmer from the river, the woman who had come to him the way a dream does, unbidden and uncalled for, impossible to let go of.

The horse was sweating when they crossed back over the bridge, racing to get out of Coney Island. They stopped beyond the marsh, to make certain the coffin was in place and the contents would arrive safely. It was broiling hot by then, and both men stood there hatless, sleeves rolled up, sweating through their clothes.

“Let me do it,” Eastman said when it came to removing the cover and peering inside. “I’ve seen terrible things. One more won’t do me any harm.”

Eddie was grateful for the offer, but he said it was his duty. In the end, they lifted the cover together to survey Hannah’s form. It was a shock to see the girl’s pale, lifeless body. They said the mourning prayers together as well, as if they were indeed brothers, and then they set to leaving Brooklyn. Most men, Eddie had learned, were too complicated to judge. He would leave such things to heaven. He knew only that, if he were in battle, he would want the liveryman beside him. Moses Levy had told him that all men saw what they wished to see, and that was the purpose of a photograph, to show the irrefutable truth of the world as well as its beauty.

He leapt down from the seat when they reached the funeral home on Essex Street, and while the coffin was carried inside by the undertaker’s sons, Eddie and the liveryman shook hands. The liveryman had sold his other horses that morning to another stable. He’d opened all the windows and watched his birds take flight. He had nothing left but the clothes he wore, his carriage, and this one horse, Jackson, an ancient bay no other stableman would want.

“It’s not Eastman. The family name is Osterman,” the carriage man said before he turned his old horse to trot along Essex to Grand Street, taking him as far as he could get from the life he’d led so far. “First name Edward. There’s another thing we share.”

“Between the two of us, the name is yours alone,” Eddie admitted. “As for me, I was born Ezekiel Cohen.”

THE TREES
were in full leaf and the lilacs bloomed in great purple masses on the morning when those who had loved Hannah Weiss gathered at Mt. Zion Cemetery in Maspeth, Queens. Two black carriages had been hired, one to carry the coffin, the other to transport Mr. Weiss and his daughter, Ella. It was a lovely, bright day, but perhaps it would have been more fitting had the weather been gloomy. If that were so and sheets of rain had fallen, Mr. Weiss’s wailing might not have sounded so loudly, bringing the other mourners to tears as he fell to his knees. There were nearly fifty people in attendance, many of them girls who had worked alongside Hannah and Ella, as well as several officers of the Hebrew Free Burial Association, the organization paying for the funeral, including the carriages and the horses draped with purple ribbons and black netting. A representative from the Workmen’s Circle had been sent to deliver their membership’s deepest sympathies and an envelope of cash that would help the family. From where Eddie stood, at the rear of the crowd, his battered hat in hand, he recognized the representative as Isaac Rosenfeld. He made certain to steer clear, but when Rosenfeld caught sight of him, the other man wound his way around the gathering so he might come to stand beside Eddie. As the rabbi offered up the mourning prayers, both men stared straight ahead.