Westside Saints, page 17
“The police?”
“Absolutely not. If that buffoonish detective had gone after the Byrds when my mother told him what they’d done, there would have been no fire, and those four children would still be alive today. I was finished with the NYPD, now and forever. I took it to Tom.”
“Yes. Tom.”
“You’re annoyed at me for keeping him from you? I don’t blame you. But he was the finest man this city has ever spit out, and you are coarse and cruel. You did not deserve to know his name.”
It was a stupid, childish, incoherent sentiment. It was also exactly the sort of thing I would have said. We were at the corner of Washington Square, and Mary would walk no farther. The moon slid out from behind a cloud. Its light was nothing compared to the brightness in Mary’s eyes when she spoke of Tom. Her speech was soft, matter-of-fact, and quick. I wanted to sympathize, but that night I just didn’t care.
“Tom MacNaughton was the only man I’ve ever loved, the only man I ever will love,” she said. “He was with the fire department—an assistant marshal specializing in arson.”
“You met him after the fire?”
“Two years before. You don’t get to know how. You don’t need to know anything more than that he was more handsome than I thought possible for a Scotsman, that he was brilliant and kind, that I loved him, and that I saw him die.”
The wind picked up, strong enough to cut through a coat that had stopped seeming warm enough hours before. My hands were numb, and my feet were, too, but somehow they hurt anyway. Over on Sixth Avenue, I saw torchlight and heard the remnants of Bully’s crowd, angry still. I pulled Mary against the yellow brick of Father Lamb’s church. Her skin was ice.
“What did you tell him about the fire?” I said.
“That I thought Bully had burned the church for the insurance money, and that it had gotten out of hand.”
“Do you think he knew about the children in the basement?”
“I cannot say. It would take a monster to set a fire when he knew there were children downstairs, but that man is as close to a monster as I’ve ever seen.”
“And did Tom believe you?”
“Of course he did.” She forced a smile. “He loved me, and besides, I’m brilliant. Two nights after the fire, we were on the trail of Bully Byrd. We watched him walk the streets, all the light gone out of him, and followed him to the ruins of his church. The earth was still smoking. The bodies had not been removed. He knelt in that stone archway. He prayed. I was egging Tom to go ahead and arrest him already when the stone lit up blue.”
“What do you mean?”
“A light came out of the archway where Bully knelt. First just a pinprick, but blinding, like a welder’s torch, then bright enough that it might have been day. Turquoise light—same as the blue from the fire. It poured out of the archway, and I know it sounds lunatic, but I swear that light spoke Bully’s name.”
“And did he answer?”
“He just stepped through.”
“And what did you do?”
“I grabbed Tom’s hand and told him to stop whimpering and dragged him across the street and leapt in after.”
“What did you see?”
“Nothing. It was too bright. I shut my eyes against the light and held on to Tom’s hand until I felt it slip away. Then I was scrambling for him and gasping for air and when I opened my eyes, I saw Tom with his skull cracked open and Bully running away.”
“You didn’t see Enoch, or Judy or Helen or Ruth?”
“No one but Bully Byrd.”
Sixth Avenue was dark again. I stepped away from the wall, toward the comparative warmth of home.
“Come on,” I said.
“You still want me in your house?” It wasn’t an apology, nor was it an admission of any kind of guilt. She looked amused by my anger, as she had been by everything I’d done that week. I wondered what it would take to make this woman take me seriously, and decided I didn’t care enough to try.
“You need to warm up or you’ll die,” I said. “You pick.”
She followed me down the sidewalk, rubbing the thin arms of her dress in a hopeless attempt to warm them up. Our brief stop had given the cold a chance to settle in, and we both moved like we were half-asleep.
“Why amnesia?” I said.
“I thought you would believe it. I wanted to kill Bully, to avenge Tom, and I didn’t need you getting in my way.”
“But you didn’t just lie. You performed. You told me things were coming back. Every minute we were together, you were manipulating me.”
She shrugged. Perhaps my numb mouth had not properly expressed how angry I was. More likely, she didn’t care.
“I hired you, Miss Carr. I didn’t adopt you. I’m surprised you think I owe you anything at all.”
“Again, if nothing else, you owe me money.”
“Really, the way you’ve fixated on that, it’s absurd.” She stopped me outside my gate. “And it’s not as though you’ve been entirely honest with me.”
“What haven’t I told you?”
“I don’t know. But you have a cunning face, and I can tell you lie. Now, since I’ve been so generous with the truth, is there anything you’d like to tell me?”
I looked at her, hated her, and told her no.
I built a fire in the kitchen and heated a pot of water to boiling. I carried it up the stairs, refusing Mary’s help, walking slow enough that I didn’t spill a drop, and drained the pot into the tub. I cut it with cold water—the only type that came out of my faucet—pouring in just enough that the water was steaming but would not burn.
“That’s too hot for me,” said Mary.
“Good.”
I didn’t bother asking her to get ready. I gripped her dress by the shoulders and ripped it open, then shoved her toward the water. She lowered herself in, wincing ostentatiously. I threw her a dishrag and soap.
“I suppose a touch of privacy would be too much to ask?” she said.
“Shut up and wash.” She obliged. A trail of blood snaked through the water. There was a long cut down the side of her right arm.
“What’s that?” I said.
“I cut it on the ice.”
“Give it here.”
I grabbed her arm and scrubbed the wound clean.
“That hurts,” she said. I grunted and scrubbed harder.
“How old are you?” I said.
“Twenty.”
“Funny. You look much older.”
“But not nearly as old as you.”
The cut was as clean as I could get it. I gave her back her arm. I stood and turned my back to her. I wasn’t sure if it was for her benefit or mine. For a long time, there was quiet.
“That bath is probably cold by now,” I said.
“Do you think Ruth is going to die?”
I looked at her again. With her hair slicked back against her head, she looked small, even girlish. I lacked the words or energy to give her the comfort she wanted. There were more important things at stake than life and death.
“Forget her,” I said. “Our job is getting you home.”
“And suppose I don’t want to go?”
“You can’t stay here. Every grieving soul on the Westside wants your hide.”
“I have work to do.”
“If you mean killing Bully, forget that, too.”
“We don’t know how I came here. How are we going to get me back?”
“Tomorrow, I’m going to show you how good a detective I am.”
She wore a stiff smile, the same one I saw every day in my own mirror. It was the face of a woman who was going to do whatever she wanted and wouldn’t let anyone get in her way.
I took the ruined dress and hung my least-mildewed towel across the sink.
“I’m suddenly quite tired,” I said. It wasn’t a lie. “Find your own way to bed.”
That night, after Mary went to sleep, I took the heap of photos hidden beneath my bed—images of a mother and daughter at play, posed with family, posed with friends, sitting in front of backdrops of landscapes real and imagined, always smiling, drenched with a love that neither time nor death could spoil.
I carried them to the roof and I burned them all.
I woke around dawn, surprised by the unfamiliar sensations of a clear head, a settled stomach, and a mouth that wasn’t sandpaper dry. I had been dreaming of dead women’s fingers.
I lit a candle and felt that something was wrong. I tossed my quilts aside and tugged open the curtains to let in the dim, gray morning light, and saw that every stack of papers, every pile of tangled clothes, every forgotten bowl of food and red-stained empty glass—all was where it was meant to be. The only thing different was my closet door.
It was closed. I hadn’t bothered to close that door in years.
I turned the knob and was greeted by my collection of black dresses in varying styles, of varying lengths, all varying degrees of unflattering. The dress I tore off Mary the night before had been my finest. Now the next-best was gone, too, and my spare coat along with it.
On my dresser, I saw that my wallet was thinner than normal. My meager supply of cash had been taken along with my papers.
I crashed out of my bedroom and met Hellida on the stairs.
“She’s gone,” said Hellida.
“She’s gone. She took my identification. She’ll have gone east.”
I pulled on my coat as I stomped down the steps, getting the arms wrong twice and disregarding the buttons entirely. Hellida followed me out the door. As our eyes strained against the gloom, I told Mary’s story.
“That stupid girl has made my life hell,” I said. “I put her up, coax her through that ridiculous amnesiac’s charade, risk my life and reputation and career and sanity to help her find answers. How does she repay me?”
“You look like you don’t want me answering that question.”
“By stepping on my toes. By ignoring me. By starting a riot and doing everything she can to get herself killed and make me look an idiot in the process.”
We reached Fifth. I headed uptown.
“You’re not going after her?” said Hellida.
“I can’t. Not without my ID. That little slip of paper is the only truly valuable thing I own, and she took it without a word.”
“What do you think she’s doing?”
“I couldn’t possibly care.”
In one of the crumbling high-rises of lower Fifth, a door hung loose on its hinges. I kicked it shut as I passed, hard enough to make Hellida wince.
“My mother was a saint,” I said. “My father put her through hell and she never bent, she never broke. She was as sturdy as an iron wall. She was not a giggling, impertinent little girl. She did not lie, and she did not run when things got tough.”
“That’s just how you remember her. That wasn’t how she was.”
“You have no idea. She was gracious, she was gentle, she was—”
“Putting on a show for her little girl. And don’t pretend your father was the only one giving her hell. You were a rotten child from the night you drew your first breath. A skinny, screaming runt that grew into an impossible, disobedient girl. Mary was flesh, and no matter how cruelly you and your father jabbed at her, she never let you see her bleed.”
We stood at the mouth of Washington Mews, where the wind was relentless. Hellida stared at me the way she had so often during my childhood, when I fell off a bench or tumbled headfirst down a flight of stairs. Her lips were tight; her eyes were cold. She was waiting for me to pick myself up and admit I was okay.
“What’s going to happen to me?” I said.
“You mean what by that, exactly?”
“That woman is needed in the past. She needs to meet Virgil Carr, to fall into some kind of impossible love, to marry, to . . .”
“To have you.”
“If I can’t find her . . .”
“You will vanish into the mist. Or not. It will be like you never existed. Or not. How should I know?”
“Then you think I should let her go?”
“Good god, girl, you were stupid when I met you and you’re stupid now. Why do you think I stay? You’re irritable, you keep bad hours, you drink too much. You treat me like a servant and, worse, call me friend. You don’t even pretend to do the dishes. But for this neighborhood, you’re a good woman. The city needs more like you. What you did last fall? There’s people alive because of you. One of them’s me. If you were never born, then all them are dead. I call that not worth the risk.”
Through the whole speech she stayed rooted to the pavement. It was on me to get my useless body moving. I did so, and she nodded, satisfied.
“So what do I do?” I said.
“What you’d do to any twenty-year-old nitwit who threatened your life. Put her in her place.”
At last, she wrapped me in a hug that smelled of all the peculiar beauty products that were her cherished vice—creams and ointments scented with lilac, lavender, rosemary, eucalyptus, and god knows what else. It was a ridiculous smell, and I would have it on my collar for the rest of the day. A blessing.
She went home and I walked north, passing men huddled around a rare clear street corner, sharing a cigarette and talking about the excitement of the night before.
“I knew they was swindlers,” said one, speaking with the dubious authority of a man who is certain he is always right.
“They were honest,” said a colleague, who had a square head and an even squarer beard. “It was that loon with the ax what ruined it.”
“Doesn’t matter. I’ll string ’em all up if I don’t get my two bucks back and fast.”
“Why waste time with rope? If I don’t get my money back today, I’ll burn the whole city down.”
I lowered my head and kept walking, always uphill, always into the wind.
Thirteen
At some point while Mary and I were bickering, the Portuguese woman gave birth to a slight but healthy baby girl. That was the report, anyway, from the midwife who answered the door at Ida Greene’s labor palace.
“Mother and child rest happily,” she said. “We’ll send them home in a few days. A nice little baby.”
“And Mrs. Greene?”
“She’s at the plant on Morton Creek.”
On the banks of the twisting waterway that swallowed Morton Street in 1915, Mrs. Greene had built herself a distillery. Slushy current turned a paddle wheel that crushed grain into white alcohol, which her half dozen employees dutifully stained beet red. With its wide gates bolted shut against the cold, the freshly painted maroon structure looked like it might once have been a barn—or a slaughterhouse. I let myself in through a side door and was walloped with the cloying stench of fermentation. It was like being drunk inside a loaf of bread.
The only distillery I’d ever seen had been Rotgut Barbarossa’s underground bootlegging operation, where spilled liquor puddled on every rusty surface. Next to that, Mrs. Greene’s barn was gleaming, orderly, and perfect. Four mammoth tanks nestled together in the center of the spotless floor, bubbling ceaselessly to provide the lubricant that kept the Lower West from shuddering itself apart. The women who tended the stills were absent, but light burned in an office on the second floor.
Floating on the fumes, I climbed the steps and crossed a narrow catwalk where windows looked over the ice-choked creek. I did not bother knocking on the office door.
I was expecting Ida Greene, and I was expecting her angry. I was not prepared for the man himself. Glen-Richard Van Alen, benevolent dictator of the Upper West, leaned against the wall like a coat tossed in the corner, sipping tea. He looked hollow. His skin was nearly as white as the snow outside, his hair brittle and gray. A bullet to the stomach will do that to a man. I couldn’t believe he had survived the trip downtown. He looked nearly as surprised to see me.
“What the hell gives you the idea that you have a free pass to bother me whenever you like?” said Mrs. Greene, not bothering to look up from the wad of papers in her hand.
“Gilda Carr means trouble,” said Van Alen, a younger man’s smile spreading across his face. “Trouble is something I’ve always enjoyed.”
“I need passage to the Eastside,” I said.
“I gave you that yesterday,” said Mrs. Greene. “You brought nothing in return.”
“I’ve come to report. Storrs Roebling is—”
“Immaterial.”
“But I spoke to him. I saw the inside of his building, got a rundown of his entire operation from one of the senior staff. I—”
Mrs. Greene brushed me aside with a single well-dressed shoulder and handed the paper she’d been working on to Van Alen. He skimmed it and grunted.
“That’ll work,” he said.
I could have asked what they were talking about, but it was faster to snatch the paper out of his hand. It’s so easy to take things from old men. The document was a brief accounting of every Van Alen asset on the Lower West—the distillery, the midwifery, the guards—with notes about how quickly they could be transferred north.
“What the hell is this?” I said. “You’re leaving?”
“It hasn’t worked, girl,” said Van Alen. “When Barbie did the world a favor and dropped dead, I saw an opportunity to spread the empire of light below the Borderline. I’m a vain, silly old man, and I thought I could make the Westside whole. Alas . . .”
“You promised schools. Doctors. Markets. Street cleaning. Fire protection. Lights!”
“My guardsmen are spread thin as wax paper, and no matter how much we steal from the Eastside, it’s nowhere near what we need to make the Lower West anything close to habitable. Last night sealed it. These people are unruly. If Roebling wanted to crack the Westside, he couldn’t have picked a better chisel than Bully Byrd.”
“So you’re just going to give us up?”
“I can hardly afford to fight. My god, girl—”
“Don’t call me girl.”
“If you’d told me a year ago I’d be slopping out red liquor to keep Barbie’s district docile, I’d have spit in your eye. I am too old to compromise.”
I looked out the rippling glass window. A figure dragged its feet down the icy path. I couldn’t tell if it was man or woman, young or old. It stopped for a moment, coughing horribly, then continued on its way.
