Westside Lights, page 21
“It is not easy for me to trust you.”
“So what? You do not have another choice.”
I nodded. He exhaled. And then I reached for the little glass box labeled “Master Control.”
All color drained from Lee’s face. For the first time, I saw his makeup. I held the box above my head. It had almost no weight, but it was deadly cold. Its cables dangled like heavy braids.
“No,” he said.
“Those lights are poison. You said it yourself. I’m not waiting around for a cure.”
“Think what’s going to happen when those lights go out. There are thousands of people out there, drunk, entitled, and far from home. How many of them are going to get hurt? How many will die?”
“How many will die if these lights stay on?”
He took a step toward me. I made like I was going to drop the box, and he stopped walking.
He squeezed his fists. He squeezed his jaw. It appeared he was attempting to look tough. His eyes were fixed on me, on the bauble in my hand. He did not see Cherub inching around behind him, or the wrench clutched in my lover’s hand.
“It’s a pointless gesture,” he said. “Stupid, even. Bourget was not the only genius working in this facility. Even if you break that connection, they will have the lights up again in an hour, maybe two.”
“Then why do you look so afraid?”
“Because these things aren’t stable! God knows what they’ll have to do to get them working again, how much more they will hurt.”
“But you’d still turn them back on?”
“It is my job.”
Cherub swung the wrench. Lee’s eyes lost focus. He swayed. He collapsed.
Cherub stared at the red smeared across the head of the wrench. He opened his fingers and let the tool clatter to the floor. His mouth formed silent words. I think they were “Oh god, oh god, oh god.” He squeezed his eyes shut. I don’t think it did any good.
“Two days ago we were respectable parasites,” he said. “Now look at us. Can’t even have a simple conversation without the other person getting their head bashed in.”
“Is he breathing?”
Cherub knelt beside Lee and, with great effort, placed a hand on his chest. He nodded. I was mildly horrified to find that I wouldn’t have minded if the answer had been no.
I tossed the little glass box gently from hand to hand. The cold left my palms red and numb.
“What do we do with this?” I said.
“He’s right. The dark would be dangerous.”
“But it would be the kind of danger we understand.”
Cherub smiled, and I smiled too, and between us there was no pain. I raised the box over my head and was about to smash it against the worktable when it occurred to me that he needed this more than I did. I placed it gently in his hands.
“Be careful. That’s Roebling Company property.”
“Terribly valuable, I’m sure.”
He tucked the box against his cheek and spun like a shot-putter. The cables twisted and stretched and were about to snap when he released the box. It sailed over Lee’s shuddering body, straight toward the great window that looked out over the Lower West. Glass shattered. Cables snapped.
Across the District, every light went out.
Sixteen
The door led to a narrow stairwell. We descended as quickly as the darkness allowed. We met no one on the stairs. Through the walls we heard pounding feet, unintelligible conversation, the odd shout, and the thumps and groans of uncooperative machinery. The people trapped in the bowels of that strange factory must have been terrified. I would not weep for them.
The stairs ended at the street. We were up the block from the factory’s main entrance, where panicked scientists and engineers stood in a clump, using lighters and matches to hold back the night—surely the darkest they’d ever seen. Welcome to the true Westside, I thought. If they saw us, they showed no interest, and so we slipped away.
“Where now?” said Cherub.
“I don’t know. I ran out of ideas hours ago.”
But in that moment, for the first time since my last nap on the Misery Queen, I was certain I’d think of something. The night was cool, the darkness like ice against my forehead. My spine straightened and my headache drifted away. My feet were so light, I wanted to run, but the persistent ache in my side reminded me what a bad idea that could be. So instead, we strolled, arm in arm, like we had always done. And between our footsteps, between the slap of the river, I heard soft feet scuttling in the darkness and a snap that might have been a switchblade.
Westside sounds. Even after only a few minutes of darkness, the villains who owned this land were coming home.
At first there were only a few of them, and they were little more than children. Skinny and scarred, missing teeth and patches of hair, they seeped up from the street itself. Once they’d have paraded in gutter finery—sunken top hats and stolen silk—but in today’s Westside, there was nothing for them but rags. They were joined by old men with deep scars, grinning women with long knives, and others who had watched their neighborhood be taken away from them, brick by glittering brick. With every step, there were more—ten, twenty, too many to count—and they kept picking up speed, until we had to run to keep from being trampled.
“We need to get out of here,” hissed Cherub.
“I think that door has closed.”
Trying to leave would have only drawn their attention. As long as we kept with the pack, we were part of it. I could not tell if we were passing or if we truly belonged, but that was a puzzle for another time.
I pulled him close, my fear steady and familiar, almost a comfort. As his body molded against mine, I had a dangerous thought. I had come to the river worn as thin as old lace. Life on the Queen had just made it worse, and for that I’d blamed my friends, my lover, my bird, my booze. I’d denounced the entire concept of waterborne transportation and cast suspicious glances at the river itself. And the entire time, the lights were there, on the land and on the party deck, burning me from the inside out.
“What if it wasn’t us?” I said. “What if, on the boat, when we were miserable—”
“I wasn’t miserable.”
“When I was miserable, then. If it wasn’t because of who we were, if the lights were to blame. We could go back to how things were. Happy, simple. Just you and me.”
“On the river?”
“Who knows?”
“That would be nice.”
There was no hope in his voice. I squeezed his hand tighter, and he pulled it away.
“The lights weren’t the problem,” he said. “It was us, dearest. It was us, the whole time.”
“And what does that mean?”
He sucked in another deep breath. It looked like it hurt. I braced for the words I’d expected one of us to say for a year or more: “It’s done.” Perhaps that would be better, if he really didn’t want me anymore, if . . .
I swallowed. We were close to the Boardwalk. The air smelled of violence. Cherub and I, thank god, would have to wait.
A figure at the front of the mob turned to face the pack. It was the white-haired woman, her long silver coat fluttering like a cape as she ran backward at an astonishing clip. Her eyes were black pits and her smile showed every rotted tooth. But her laughter and her speed belonged to a much younger girl. Every few steps, she snapped at one of her people. They peeled off, wordlessly, to bring her unspoken message to some other quarter of the growing mob. Give her a boat, and she could have been Amelia Slaybeck. Give her a black dress and a permanent headache, and she might have been Gilda Carr. She carried no weapons and wore no uniform, but she was unquestionably a general, and this was her war.
“The dark,” muttered the warrior at my elbow, a round-faced boy with close-cropped hair and an exquisite pair of sideburns. He tossed a club from hand to hand. The wood was fresh, well-polished. It had not yet tasted blood. “She finally got the dark.”
Beneath the moonlight, the river was a silver ribbon. Against it, we saw the shadow puppets of a hundred or more well-dressed tourists, wandering from dock to dock, trying to beg a ride home. We were too far away to hear them, but I could imagine their voices, slurred from education and champagne. I had learned to walk among them, and part of me wanted to warn them against the coming storm, but I did not want to betray the Westsiders. They were my home, too.
Just before her wave crashed over the dock, the white-haired woman stopped. The mob stopped with her, barely contained, like water about to boil. Men in top hats and boaters stepped uneasily to the front of the tourist crowd, hands shooing their women back. Now Cherub and I moved, slipping sideways, trying to slide away without being seen. I did not have an appetite for another fight.
We were nearly out of the pack when the silence broke. A tall man, whose impeccably tailored dinner jacket only made him look gangly, waded into no-man’s-land. The moon lit up the ringlets at the back of his head, and he looked for a moment like a gigantic, beautiful baby. He lit a cigarette.
“If you’re looking for a boat, you’ll have to wait your turn.”
The white-haired woman approached him.
“That’s all right,” she said. “We’re not leaving.”
He smiled, the same way he’d been smiling at women his entire life. For perhaps the first time, it did not go as he expected.
I don’t know where she got the hammer. It was a magic trick—her hand was empty, and then it wasn’t. One swing, and the man with the curls was on his knees, blood in his hair, his fingers still gripping his cigarette.
It was a match on dry kindling. The Westsiders hurled themselves at the tourists, screaming things that were not words but were simply the purest expressions of long-buried rage. In groups of two or three, they swarmed anyone who looked like they might have money. They tore pearls from necks and wallets from coat pockets, but robbery was not the point. They weren’t even trying to kill. They had spent a year and more watching these people infest their neighborhood, swallowing their anger every time another shipload of tourists was vomited upon their shore. This was their chance to tell the world how bad that hurt.
The Eastsiders did not try to fight. They ran in every direction, smashing headfirst into their cousins, lovers, friends, and neighbors, tripping and falling and becoming that much more appealing targets for the Westside wrath. The District’s best customers were caught in a noose, and the noose tightened fast.
I had Cherub by the wrist, or perhaps he had me. We spun away from charging Westsiders, ducked blows and leapt over the bodies beginning to litter the ground. We headed east toward Spring Square, but we were swimming against the current, and we had not even escaped the Boardwalk when our path was blocked by a screaming man.
“Help me, somebody help me . . .”
He was curled in a ball on the ground, surrounded by four boys who seemed intent on stomping him into a paste. They took turns on his hands, his gut, his face. They neither laughed nor shouted. They were too intent on their work.
“Bastards,” said Cherub. “That’s no way to fight.”
“Forget them. Look what’s coming next.”
I pointed past the Boardwalk, to the muddy rubble of Spring Square, where the forces of law and order were preparing a charge. Roebling men clutched knives and knuckledusters; Van Alen’s guardsmen balanced nail-studded clubs on their shoulders; and the men of the NYPD twirled their nightsticks. There was no one directing them, so for the moment they remained a muddle, but in a moment or two they would find their nerve, and the situation on the Boardwalk would grow much, much worse.
Cherub did not care. Pummeling an unarmed man was an offense to gangland honor—a concept I’d always considered moronic, but which meant quite a bit to him. He pulled away. I followed, not because I had to, but because in that moment I realized that risking one’s life to save someone else was hardly more stupid than doing so to learn a bandleader’s middle name. Cherub was kind. He cared, even when it was a mistake.
That is a beautiful thing.
We had no weapons. Beyond that, we had both run out of fight hours prior. But I’d spent my youth deflecting the misplaced aggression of boys who thought they were tough. They did not frighten me.
We slammed hard into the biggest of the boys. He stumbled over his victim, landing face-first on the Boardwalk, looking so stupid that his friends forgot immediately that they were supposed to be fearsome. Cherub lunged at one of them, growling like a rabid dog, and their resolve crumpled. They broke ranks and melted into the fray.
The heap at our feet began to cough. I stuck out a hand and dragged up something that looked like a very sick fish. His hair was wild and his shirt was beyond repair. His glasses had been smashed to dust. Only once I caught the stench of his cologne did I recognize Marvin Howell.
We dragged him to the edge of the Boardwalk, in the uneasy space between the ongoing brawl and the slowly congealing mass of law.
“You,” he snarled. “I should have guessed this was your doing.”
“You’re welcome. For saving you, that is.”
“Saving me? You’re the reason I was almost killed!”
“I turned out the lights. I can hardly take credit for the rest.”
“Gilda Carr, under the authority granted to me by Glen-Richard Van Alen and Ida Greene, I hereby place you under—”
“Shut up,” said Cherub. Howell shut up. He looked grateful for the opportunity. This man was not comfortable being in charge.
“What are you doing out here?” I said.
“Van Alen sent me to see about the lights. Ida Greene said he asked for me specifically, that he’s been quite impressed with my work, that—”
“Wait. He’s in the District? Glen-Richard Van Alen is here?”
Howell nodded, smirking as he reveled in knowing something I did not.
“Since spring. Took private rooms at the top of St. Abban’s. He heard we were running an impressive operation, and he wanted to see for himself. He liked it so much that he decided to stay on for the rest of the season.”
I wasn’t looking at him anymore. I was seeing past the riot, past the cops, to the cupola at the top of St. Abban’s. I could almost see the power bottled up there, stored like water behind a fragile dam. Here was deliverance. Here was hope. Here was Glen-Richard Van Alen, a killer with principle, the last of the great New York brawlers, emperor of the united Westside. Here was a man who trusted me, who’d known my daddy and liked me better. Here was the only man who could turn those lights off for good.
“Take us to him,” I said. “Now.”
Howell massaged his scalp, trying to reclaim his center part.
“I wouldn’t waste his time with you.”
I liked the way he said that. There was a snarl in his voice, a little blood. For the first time, I could see the gangster he had been. Luckily, I knew how to snarl back.
“You’ve had quite a beating, Howell. The only reason you’re still conscious is because your body is working overtime to hide the pain. But if I do something like this . . .”
I dug my thumb into a gash on his cheek. Howell’s mouth fell open; his skin blanched. He did not make a sound. I felt vile hurting an injured man. But even as the guilt welled up in me, I remembered the thirst I’d felt on the Long Pier that morning, when Howell’s friends left me to rot in the sun, and I pushed a little harder.
I withdrew my hands. He slumped to the ground. I waited until he was breathing normally and whispered in his ear, “Will you take us to Van Alen now?”
He smiled, and I knew something was wrong. He didn’t hit me; he didn’t bite. Instead he screamed.
“It’s Gilda Carr!”
Six of the hardest-looking Westsiders looked our way. They were men and women, most older than me, with the scars and limps and never-healing wounds that marked a lifetime winning tougher fights than this. They carried chains. Behind us, the line of police had become impenetrable. We were stuck in the middle, and the middle was getting small.
Howell kept yelling.
“The butcher of the bay! The girl that killed Marka Watson! She’s got me. She’s got me. Save me and you’ll have the thousand-dollar—”
Cherub seized Howell by the collar and smacked him hard. He stopped yelling.
“Camembert, I thought you were better,” said Cherub.
“None of us were.”
Cherub let Howell fall. The six strolled our way, as steady as the tide. The one in the front of the pack twirled her chain, then cracked it on the Boardwalk like a whip. Cherub found my arm. His grip was firm, and when he spoke there was an unsettling note of courage in his voice.
“I’m tired of running,” he said.
“As am I.”
“But you’ve got work to do.”
And then he screamed—a sickening yowl, a sound humans are not meant to make, a sound New York had tried to forget. The war cry of the One-Eyed Cats. And it meant, as it always had, that Cherub was about to do something gallant or dumb or both.
I seized his arm. He broke away and hurled himself into the six, punching and kicking and laughing like he’d never had so much fun. Even on his best day, they would have been stronger than him, but he fought for something they couldn’t understand, and that put him on top—at first, anyway. His laughter stopped when he took the first blow to the face, yet he did not fall. He leaned back on his heels as his six opponents formed a ring around him, their chains rapping dully on the dock.
Every part of me wanted to go after him, but then he caught my eye. There was misery there, and fear, and a warning.
“I gave you this chance, dearest. Don’t waste it.”
Taking my eyes off him felt like an amputation, but I did it. I ran. Behind me, the dull smack of metal on flesh melted into the din of battle, but I knew it would ring in my ears for the rest of my life. The riot had splintered into little knots of violence—two lean Westside women tearing the dinner jacket off an unconscious tourist; a pair of Eastsiders pummeling a boy who’d lost his knife; a woman in a scarlet gown standing in the eye of the storm, her mouth gaping as blood streamed down her ruined face—and I was able to escape without attracting much interest. Several Westsiders spotted me, but none bothered to attack. It was obvious I had nothing to steal.
