Westside Saints, page 23
Or my ribs.
Or my jaw.
“I couldn’t tell you the meaning of half these words,” he said, “but yeah, it sounds like arson.”
“You could take it to a judge and have Bully arrested tonight,” said Mary.
“I could at that, if it weren’t a clear forgery. It’s dated three months from now.”
“It’s not a forgery,” I said. “It’s a mystery, and doesn’t that draw you in? Aren’t you tempted by the inexplicable, the strange?”
“I believe in what I can touch, taste, and kill. Worrying about any more than that will make a man dyspeptic or dead.”
It was sound advice. I wished I could tell him to have those words embroidered on all his clothing, that he might remember them two decades hence, when an obsession over the biggest mysteries the city had to offer would drive him to his death. But he was swaying, and his eyes were drooping, which meant our audience was nearly at an end.
“I thought you were supposed to be a great detective,” I said.
“And just who told you that?”
You.
I couldn’t say it, though. I could barely even think it. Here he was, as aggravated and useless as I remembered. The grief I had buried, the grief I thought I had put behind me, swept back up and swallowed me, and I fell into the trap that had consumed so much of my life: of wishing that just for a moment he would be as great as I wanted him to be.
Mary had no such frailty. She reached into his shirt and grabbed hold of the carpet of hair half-hidden beneath the cloth. She twisted hard, pulling him close, until both of us saw that she had been right—this man smelled like a corpse.
“Find him for us,” she said.
“Or what?”
“Or so help me god, I will marry you, and that will destroy us both.”
For a moment, she seemed bigger than him. Virgil was frozen. I recognized those glassy eyes and slack jaw from my childhood—the look of a man so forcefully put in his place that he was physically dazed.
“I’ll get word to Mulberry Street at dawn,” he said, his voice shaking with a little fear and a little love.
“Now,” said Mary.
“I’ve got a chest cold that’d kill a weaker man,” he said. “Stepping into the rain would be suicide.”
“Lucky you. It’s turned to snow.”
Grumbling incoherent curses, Virgil pulled a massive nickel-plated flask from his pocket. He filled it with Boulton’s and headed for the nearest precinct house. Mary strolled after him, serene as glass, and as I saw her silhouetted against the snow, I thought for the first time that she looked like my mother.
Seventeen
We walked east. I might have marveled at the uncanny sight of streets I knew in an era I didn’t or the bizarre sensation of crossing Broadway without having to show my papers, but the snow had become impossible.
It whipped sideways, slashing our faces, carried by wind so strong we could hardly walk. That evening’s rain had turned to ice, and the sidewalks were as rough as any on the Westside. We had not gone more than a block when the electric streetlights died. Aside from the gas flickering out of the saloons, the city was dark. The streets emptied. By the time we reached Fifth Avenue, we were alone in the world.
It was just a few more blocks to the precinct house, but they were longer than any I’d ever known. Blinded by the snow, we were frozen past the point of reason. The short walk seemed to go on forever. I thought the winter of 1922 had been brutal, but this was a frozen hell.
Something whipped through the air, quick as an arrow and right past my face. I stopped, and snow welled up in the collar of my coat as I reminded myself how to breathe.
“What was that?” I said.
“Telegraph,” said Mary. She picked up the fallen wire. The wind had snapped it in half.
“Does this sort of thing happen often in your city?” I said.
“Not that I’ve ever noticed.”
“I’m beginning to think I’d prefer cold rain.”
“I’m beginning to think I’d prefer having never met you,” Virgil muttered.
“Don’t say that,” Mary said sweetly. “We’re on an adventure.”
Virgil scowled at her and I did, too. I couldn’t tell which of us disliked her more.
We pressed on. There was little else to do. I tucked my chin against my chest and buried my hands in my pockets, walking almost parallel to the ground in order to push against the wind. Virgil was beside me, tilting like a dead oak.
I was unsure how much farther I could go when he grabbed me by the wrist and pulled me through a door. We crashed into a drafty old station house where policemen dozed and rats scuttled around the corners. I slumped against a wall, my eyes burning, every part of me cold or wet or both, my mouth too numb to speak.
“Thorne!” said Virgil.
A head popped out from around the corner, and I saw the stupid, surprisingly handsome face of Eddie Thorne.
“Eddie can get you whatever you need,” said Virgil. “He’s an idiot, but he listens, which is more than I can say for most of the scum that make up this department. I’m going to see about a goddamned cup of coffee.”
Virgil stomped off, scattering snow everywhere, and Eddie waited for me to boss him around. Just a few months prior, it seemed to me, he had been responsible for the deaths of thousands, children mostly. What good would it do, I wondered, to snatch the pistol off his hip and shoot him through the eye? Would it save those dead boys? Would it snap the universe in half? Such questions remained beyond me. I left his pistol where it was, partly because I was too cold for gun-grabbing, and partly from my characteristic certainty that nothing I did could ever improve the world.
“We need everything you have on the Byrds,” I said, forcing the words through lips stiff with cold. My mouth felt stupid. “Their preaching, their movement, the fire.”
He flitted off. Mary leaned on the sergeant’s desk, not even rubbing her arms, just staring frozen into space. A prod beneath the collarbone roused the nearest sleeping cop, who was gentleman enough to let us collapse onto his bench. We sat, sensation creeping back into dead limbs, and watched as refugees from the storm staggered inside, each entering with some variation on “That snow is a goddamned bastard!” A consensus formed: New York had never seen anything like this, and it showed no signs of slowing down.
“They’re shutting down the elevateds,” said a lean, older cop between attempts to claw the ice from his beard. “Streetcars are frozen in their tracks. Horses won’t go more than a step. Horses are smarter than me.”
Quietly, citizens and police gathered blankets and pulled them tight. They filled their pockets with food, and watched the gaslights nervously, fearful they might go the way of their electric cousins. They were preparing for a siege. As usual, I didn’t care.
“It’s that finger,” I said, suddenly enough to startle Mary.
“The world is ending, and you’re stuck on that?”
“It isn’t ending. It can’t. We have seen it, decades from now. Ice melts. Snow blows away. New York rebounds. But that finger . . .”
“What?”
“Kings whatever-it-was inspired Enoch to grind up a saint’s finger and use it in his father’s rite. He hoped it would bring back the dead, and it worked.”
“That’s no more insane than anything else that has happened to me this week. Why shouldn’t it have?”
“Because it didn’t. The Bible verse suggested a prophet’s bones might bring a dead man back to life. Enoch had the supposed finger of a saint—not a prophet, but a saint—and even if one believes in magical holy skeletons, it is staggeringly unlikely that what the Byrds called a relic was truly the thirteen-hundred-year-old finger of Saint Róisín. And even if it were her finger, it brought no one back to life, did it? It simply opened a gate through time.”
“Simply?”
Her skepticism was justified, and so I ignored it. “If it wasn’t poor, martyred Róisín’s finger, then whose was it? And why did that specific finger, combined with the rite and the fire and all the other hokum, connect 1922 with today?”
“I don’t care, so long as it gets me away from here.”
I leaned back and let the frigid wall suck away the last of my body heat. I looked around that dim room and thought about the brute who’d led us here. I couldn’t believe I’d thought the sight of him might convince her to stay.
“You’re still set on leaving?” I said.
“I used to love my city in the snow. But after seeing your Eastside, my New York feels stale. I should like to taste something new.”
“But Virgil—” I said.
“Please. I’ve seen rats more likely to inspire love at first sight.”
My father raised me to believe in lost causes, but even I had to admit this one was particularly dire. Mary closed her eyes, and I let her pretend to sleep.
Virgil returned with coffee, spiked with enough whiskey to make my eyes water, and Thorne came in his wake. As he delivered his report, Thorne kept his eyes locked on Virgil, searching his hero’s face for any glimmer of approval. It didn’t come.
“A fire department arson investigator named, ah, Tom MacNaughton informed us last week that he considered the fire at the Byrds’ church suspicious. The next day, he disappeared. We’ve had a man keeping watch on the Byrd apartment for the last few days, looking for some sign of Bully. They haven’t seen him.”
Tom’s name sent a spike of pain through Mary that pierced the cold. I wanted to hold her hand. I didn’t think she would let me.
“Did your man call in tonight?” I said.
“He did. Two women came to see Helen—ladies in whores’ dresses with strange haircuts who . . . oh. That was you.”
“Yes. After we left?”
“No more visitors, but Helen went for a walk at . . . nine fifteen.”
“Where?”
“To a funeral parlor on Mulberry Street. It’s where they’ve got the body of her boy.”
“Then Bully’s coming home.”
“How can you be sure?” said Virgil, still not convinced he cared.
“Because they won’t bury that boy until he does,” said Mary.
“How far do you think it is to Mulberry?” I said.
“Two miles downtown,” said Thorne. “But how will you get there?”
“I’m a New Yorker. I’ll walk.”
“It’s the apocalypse out there.”
“Then I should be right at home,” I said, looking around for something to smash. “Have any of you got an ax?”
“Can’t we at least wait till morning?” said Virgil.
“I’m not staying in this city one minute longer than I have to,” said Mary. “If Gilda wants an ax, fetch it.”
“I don’t think we—” Thorne started, but I was finished waiting. I brought my foot down onto the bench we’d been sitting on, as hard as I could, hoping to smash it into bits. It barely groaned. Virgil let out a rare, beautiful laugh, and elbowed me aside.
“This is my sort of police work,” he said, and crushed the bench beneath his feet. Every head in that dim, cold room turned, then looked away when they saw that it was simply Detective Carr in one of his destructive moods. “Now, why did I just do that?”
“Snowshoes,” I said.
“Isn’t she clever?” said Mary.
I pulled a blanket off the nearest supine cop, tore it into strips, and lashed a pair of boards to my feet. Virgil and Mary did the same. Thorne brought a rope, and we tied it around our waists to create a chain: Virgil, to Mary, to me.
“Thorne, your gun,” said Virgil. Eddie obliged. “I want every scarf, every blanket, every coat in this room. I’m taking two ladies for a walk, and they’re going to be warm.”
There was grumbling, and then there was Virgil scouring the crowd with his hand on his club, and then there was a pile of blankets and jackets. We cocooned ourselves in as much fabric as we could pack on, until we were nothing but three pairs of eyes peeking out above the cloth. Between the corset and the coats, I could hardly move, and I was so hot under those layers that every part of me sprang out in sweat before we took a step. It didn’t matter. The Carrs were together at last.
Snow, dry and hard, blew from every direction, shredding my inch of exposed skin like a shower of broken glass. A foot or more had fallen, and it surged across sidewalk and street like a rolling white wave. The snowshoes helped, but not much. Within a few minutes, the cold had cut through all my layers. My sweat began to freeze.
At the head of our procession, Virgil kept himself going with a furiously profane song about a prostitute named Anne Marie Foddan’s “notorious bottom.” How, I wondered, could this man be responsible for me?
I had known him when he was broken by failure and grief. Knowing he had once been a violent, overgrown boy had let me look at him with something other than sadness. It had helped keep my love for him alive. Seeing that boy in the flesh, I realized that Virgil Carr did not wait until old age to become pathetic, and I hated him as much as I ever had, even as I yearned to have him back in my life.
The wind picked up when we crossed Twenty-Eighth Street, blowing hard enough that I could do nothing but curse and stand still.
“Pick it up!” cried Virgil. The rope around my waist jerked, and I stumbled forward until the street was passed. A snowdrift, seeming to move on its own, roared toward me. I pulled my legs high, my muscles burning, and got out of the way.
My eyes stung so badly that I could hardly keep them open, much less look straight ahead. Not that there was anything to see. The rope disappeared into the white. There were moments where I could see Mary’s silhouette, but as we stumbled south those moments grew rarer. Her figure was gray, small, indistinct. She looked like the ghost I had always imagined.
Feeling seeped out of my toes, then my feet, then my legs, and the snowshoes became dead weight. I kept on.
The wind’s screaming was pierced by something—a thump? A whoosh?—that forced my head up. Through the gloom, I saw a shadow tumbling through the air. I pulled on the rope, jerking Mary sideways. She fell into the street, and the pile of falling snow landed where she had stood.
I fought my way forward and helped her up. The scarf around her face had slipped. Her skin was gray. She looked too cold to be afraid.
“It is bad out here,” she said.
“Are you all right?”
“No.”
I wrapped her scarf tight. The rope jerked, and we pressed on. Over my right shoulder, I saw the vast, swirling black of Madison Square, unshielded by the skyscrapers and hotels that would gird it in my own time, where the wind whipped the snow into shapes too terrible to contemplate. We staggered onto Broadway, and I thought of summer. I thought of spring. I thought of Cherub Stevens, a decade from being born, leaping from branch to branch in one of the towering oaks of Washington Square, with a laugh that could beat back any snow.
The rope went slack. I wondered, numbly, if Virgil had died. I kept walking, gathering it in my hands until I reached Mary, who said nothing. We found Virgil leaning on a carriage that sat askew, half on the sidewalk, its horse and driver long vanished, the snow piled nearly to its windows. Virgil drained his flask and hurled it into the night. It landed silent and unseen.
“I need a break,” he said.
“Where?” I said.
“Here.”
He pulled open the carriage and was halfway inside when someone cried, “It’s taken!” Virgil dragged the occupant out by his hair, hurling him backward into the snow. He turned, a savage smile on his lips, and offered his hand.
“Ladies?”
Mary climbed in and I followed. Before I shut the door, I looked back for the man Virgil had possibly sent to his death. He had vanished into the snow.
Virgil filled the rear bench. Mary and I pressed against each other on the front. We sat for some time, saying nothing, too tired to shiver, and waited for feeling to come back. Every time I looked at Virgil, he was staring at Mary with all the admiration of a puppy just meeting its master. At last, he remembered he was a detective.
“Where did you come from, with hair like that?” he said.
“Philadelphia,” said Mary.
“Oh, aye. They’re strange there. And what’s got you set against the Byrds?”
“They swindled my mother. You met her.”
“I did? I did! The tough old bitch with the funny name. She was steel, that one. Scared the hell out of me.”
“Fall women have that effect,” I said.
“I like a woman who scares me,” said Virgil. There was no polite answer to that, and so for some time, we were quiet again. I may have slept, or the snow outside may simply have achieved the power of nightmare.
“How far have we gone?” said Mary.
“We just crossed Twentieth,” I said.
“No,” said Virgil. “That was Twenty-First. Twentieth is next, then Union Square, then god knows how much more. Better to just stay here.”
“We’ll freeze.”
“You might. I probably won’t.”
He closed his eyes. I kicked his bench. He did not stir. Mary laughed and leaned her head on my shoulder. It was not unwelcome.
“I expected he would be better,” I said. “I was wrong.”
“How could you know?” said Mary.
“We can go on without him.”
“What’s the point? I thought we’d gone farther. Halfway, maybe more. How long have we been walking?”
“I don’t know.”
“It’s tough going out there, Gilda. It’s very, very tough.”
“Then we’ll just have to be tougher.”
I kicked open the door, and the snow howled in—a few inches in an instant.
“Would you close that goddamned door?” said Virgil, his eyes still shut. I smashed my elbow through one window, then another, then the last. I was so thoroughly padded that I didn’t even feel it. Our little pocket of warmth popped. Virgil looked mad.
I hopped out, and Mary followed. We gripped the rope through gloved hands and pulled until Virgil flopped out of the ruined carriage and started to walk again. He didn’t sing anymore.
