Westside Saints, page 24
The next part was worse. There was no more distraction, no more feeling, no more hope. I simply put one foot in front of the other, struggling to keep my shoes level on the shifting snow, each uneven movement sending spikes of pain through my otherwise numb legs. The wraps around my head fell away, and my gloved fingers were too clumsy to put them back. Spit froze on my face. Ice filled my hair. I kept walking.
I stopped looking at the street signs. They told me nothing I wanted to know. My legs were heavy and my steps were slow.
Mary, utterly invisible through the snow, was moving faster, driven by reserves I did not know a person could possess. I could not keep up. The rope drew taut, digging into my back, pulling tighter and tighter until the knot slipped and the line snaked away. I reached for it, but I was moving so slowly, I had no chance. It was already gone.
“Mary! Virgil, you bastard, stop!”
My voice was no match for the wind.
I was a woman overboard, and the ship that had dropped me was out of sight. I strode forward, already lost, not caring at all. I did not need them. They had died before, and I had pressed on. I had seen things they could not imagine. I had passed through death. I had saved the Westside. Girls like that have no use for parents.
I came to a corner. I couldn’t read the street sign, but it looked like letters, not numbers. Perhaps I’d passed Houston. Perhaps I was close. But I was just so unfathomably cold.
Around the corner, I heard voices. I followed them—just a step, just a few steps. I saw a beam of light, thick as a finger and bright as the sun, shining through the falling snow. Using all the strength I had left, I pushed open the door.
I stumbled into a saloon lit by gas and candlelight, its walls lined with wood and floors softened by deep crimson carpet. I didn’t know where I was, but I knew it was warm. A few dozen were scattered at tables and booths, and the air was laced with sounds of conversation and laughter and clinking glass.
“The door!” called a voice from the back, too happy to be angry. A woman hopped up from her table and helped me close it tight.
“You look like hell,” she said. Before I could tell her what I needed, she guided me toward the bar. The bartender smiled like he’d been waiting his whole life for me to walk through the door.
“A triple whiskey and a bowl of chowder hot enough to burn,” I said. He poured a pint glass full of whiskey. I drank as much of it as I could stand. It didn’t even tickle my throat.
“Is this whiskey,” I asked, “or rusty water?”
“It’s the finest we’ve got, ma’am. Perhaps you’re not used to the good stuff.”
He topped up my glass, and I drank it dry.
“Where’s the soup?” I said, and looked at him for the first time. He had a broad nose and coarse hair, fat suspenders and a shirt striped in black and green. His rating was 64. His name was Abner Byrd.
“Oh hell,” I said.
“If you want to call it that,” he said, and his skin split along the veins in his face, drying and spluttering as blue fire burned out from inside him and charred him to black. His crumbling hand reached out for me. I threw myself backward but did not move. He took me by the throat.
The world went black. The cold returned. My neck felt ready to burst. The next thing I saw was Mary’s face. She pulled me out of the snowbank by my scarf, dragged me to my knees, and smacked me until I could stand. She shook the loose end of the rope in my face.
“Where the hell did you go?” she said, as panicked as if she were really my mother, and I were really her lost child. “Good lord, Gilda. Good lord.”
“What happened?”
“I felt the rope go slack. I screamed and you didn’t answer. Virgil refused to stop. I untied myself and came back to find you. You’d fallen into a snowbank. Buried in an instant. Nothing sticking out but those big black boots.”
“Thank you.”
“Shut up and walk,” said Mary. “Let the rope go.”
We walked on, hand in hand. We found Virgil a block or two south. Our snowshoes came loose and we abandoned them. The going was too uneven now, and they were more harm than good. We shed our excess layers, reasoning that numb is numb, and moved faster without them. The sun came up and the snow did not stop, but neither did we, the three of us together, bulldozing downtown, then east until a sign, at last, said Mulberry Street, and the longest walk of my life was at an end.
Brandyce Funeral Parlor was a sagging building, a relic from early in the century sustained by the convenient fact that even the poor need to die. Out front was a hearse buried nearly to the driver’s seat in snow. A foolishly handsome youth hacked at the mess with a shovel, but every gust undid his work. His curses were carried our way by the wind.
I started toward him, but Virgil pulled me back. He waved a heavy paw at the building across the street.
“You gotta eat, don’t you?” he said. “You gotta get warm?”
“I wouldn’t fight it,” I said.
“We’re so close,” Mary said.
“But in no state to fight.”
“Up here,” Virgil said with a nod. “I know a guy.”
We clambered over the snow and lurched through the front door of an anonymous tenement. Virgil bounded up to the third floor, his legs full of a bounce that seemed impossible, and banged on the front apartment. The door cracked open.
“Vanish, detective,” said a voice from the other side.
“If it were a raid, I’d have brought friends,” said Virgil. “Tell Brass we just want a seat by the fire.”
The apartment was bare save for a few unfinished benches and chairs and a pair of tables where men in coats and gloves shot dice. Felt curtains blocked out the light. The room was deliciously hot. The floor was wet with melted snow.
Mary and I fell into chairs by the front windows. I cracked the curtain and saw the undertaker’s across the street.
“Close that curtain!” cried one of the gamblers.
“Why?” I said, with venom enough to let him know that I was not in the mood for an argument.
“The police might see.”
“The police are already here, idiot.”
That satisfied him enough to leave me alone. Across the room, Virgil spoke to a slight young man in a green suit so well-tailored and so old-fashioned that I could only think of it as something a dead man would wear. He headed our way while Virgil took a spot at one of the tables, brushing the shooter aside and seizing the dice. As he tested their weight, he stared at Mary.
“Brass Aiken,” said the man in the green suit, sitting down with us. “Proprietor. You got an appetite?”
“Like a newborn,” said Mary.
Brass waved his hand and somewhere, I assumed, the process began of getting us something to eat.
“Which of you is the one Clubber’s set on marrying?” he said.
“Pardon?” I said.
“You look more his type. Bitter, worn, a little rough.”
“Thanks. I do try.”
He looked at Mary. “I can’t imagine someone as sweet as you going near him, though.”
“Over my dead body,” said Mary, laughing hard enough that Brass had to laugh, too. A waiter in an incongruous tuxedo set steaming black tea and tin plates of baked beans on the table. It was barely edible, and it tasted sublime.
Brass left us to eat and gaze out the window, where the boy with the shovel finally gave up his fight. We watched the drifts grow higher and the wind blow stronger, as Virgil lost what little money he had, until I was ready to say the thing I had realized while I was dying in the snow.
“You can’t stay here,” I said. Mary set down her tea. It may have been the first time I had managed a surprise.
“Gilda Carr, giving in,” she said. “I never thought I’d see it.”
I pointed a thumb at the policeman sulking in the corner, cursing rigged dice, demanding Brass stake him for another throw.
“I knew he’d be rotten,” I said. “He’s worse than I imagined. I cannot abandon you to him, to this city, to death.”
“What changed your mind?”
“You pulled me out of the snow.”
“So?”
“It wasn’t that you saved my life. It was . . . it was the way I felt when I came out of that dream and saw your face. I lost it a long time ago, and then it came back to me, and I knew that I would be a fool to let it go again.”
“And if that means you die?”
“I don’t think I will. Something about being with you—it’s made me think that maybe things can change, that a bit of stubbornness and good cheer are enough to rewrite history.”
I don’t think she bought it. I didn’t, either, but we were both willing to pretend.
She embraced me, and I laughed with her, enjoying it more than I ever thought I could, but there was something cold inside my gut. I felt quite close to death, or something worse—to having never existed at all. But it didn’t matter. She was the sun made flesh, and her life would mean more to this city than mine ever could.
Eighteen
Two hours and several welcome plates of beans later, a figure trudged up Mulberry toward the undertaker’s. She hunched low, moving slowly but with irresistible purpose. When she climbed the steps to the battered old house, I was certain it was Helen Byrd.
We were halfway to the stairwell when I remembered my father. Virgil had sweet-talked, or possibly threatened, Brass into giving him another stake, and he had made it last. He gazed down on a pile of coins and crumpled banknotes like a proud father and looked surprised to see that we wanted to leave.
“Are you coming?” I said. He looked at Mary and looked at the dice, showing equal affection for both, but I knew where his decision would lie.
“Not while I’m winning,” he said.
We were already on our way out. We raced down those dark, slick marble stairs and threw open the door to outside. A fresh wave of snow roared across the threshold. It was like a white hurricane. Mary gave a mad grin.
“Well,” I said.
“Quick quick.”
We leapt into the street. The fragile warmth we had built over the last hours was erased by the time we got across. Once again, it was impossible to imagine anything but cold.
The drooping porch dipped beneath our feet. A hand-scrawled sign informed us that Brandyce’s was closed, due to the storm. The door was locked to drive the point home, but the lock was as old as the house and just as ready to give up. It opened in an instant, and we stepped into a parlor where black curtains hung from every surface. Even the stairs were draped in dark velvet. The ceilings were low and the air was close, swollen by heat from an unseen fire and polluted with the tang of formaldehyde. Steep steps led up to the second floor.
The first doorway opened onto a reception room. A chalkboard welcomed guests to their final viewing of Barnabas Byrd, 1885–1888. At the front of the room, before a dozen neatly arranged chairs, a platform as small as a boy waited for the coffin.
“Poor bastard,” I said.
“Yes,” said Mary.
Voices drifted from a door at the end of the room: a woman and a man. We crept along the wall, our steps muffled by mildewed carpet, and listened as best we could. The chemical stench took hold. We were near where the magic was done.
“I want the body out before noon,” said Helen.
“But with the funeral tomorrow—”
“The funeral doesn’t matter.”
“What will we have for the viewing?”
“Show them an empty casket. Keep the lid closed. Nobody wants to see that . . . thing anyway. Can you move the body today?”
“We can try. Some of the ferries are running, I’ve heard, and there may still be a way across the bridge.”
“Go. I’d like to be alone with my boy.”
Silence from the embalming room. We crept closer. Through the half-open door, we saw Helen, and we saw her child.
I could tell it had been human, but not much more than that. The body was tiny, fragile, charred. The face was a brittle husk. She brushed her lips across its forehead, and then she reached for the undertaker’s tools. She wiped the bone saw on her leg, shaking loose some of the rust, and applied the saw to what remained of her son’s hand.
She was a strong woman, and she worked with purpose. Back once, forward once, and the smallest finger dropped off the boy’s fist to her palm. She lowered it into a small jar, filled it with murky liquid, and set it aside. Here, at last, was one mystery solved: the finger of Saint Róisín. A false relic, but holy all the same. Religion remained an impotent farce, but there were miracles in a child’s hands.
“Should we fetch Virgil?” I whispered.
Mary shook her head. She took my hand in hers, and we stepped into the embalming room together. It was a long, narrow passage with marble tables in the middle and a door to the backyard on the far end. A bank of grimy windows filled one wall. The others were a jumble of toxic chemicals, saws, hammers, and knives. Helen whipped around at the sound of us. She leaned back, blocking our view of her son’s body. Her hand inched toward the saw.
“Don’t try to hide it,” I said. “I saw you cut him. Why?”
“I can’t let him go. Not yet. Not ever. And your question yesterday, about the finger of—who was it?”
“Róisín.”
“With Bully gone, we’ll need something to draw people to the church. I’ve always wanted a relic, and yours was as good an idea as any.”
“But Bully isn’t really gone, is he?” said Mary.
“He certainly isn’t here. Why are you two so stuck on him?”
I walked closer. I wondered if I was near enough to snatch that saw before she could get a grip on it. I didn’t trust my own speed. I had been numb too long.
“You’re a smart woman,” I said, “and many decades my elder, so I’m going to do the respectful thing and tell you the truth. I suspect you know most of it anyway. After the fire, Bully returned to the church. A gate opened there—a gate through time, created by Enoch in the year 1922, because he wanted his daddy home.”
“That’s insane.”
“Isn’t it though?” said Mary.
“Bully stepped through that gate and wreaked havoc upon my city,” I said. “He stole thousands in silver, he killed, and he came back here.”
“Who did he kill?” said Helen, raising the saw. She was a calculating woman, cynical and deceitful and cruel, but I remembered what it had done to Mary to learn about her own death. No one needs to know how they die.
“No one important to you,” I said, and I think she believed me. “I followed him back here, and I want to find him—”
“And what? Bring him to justice?”
“Is that such a joke?”
“Some men are beyond its reach. Dead men, madmen, and those who simply do not have a soul. Bully is gutter-grade filth. He will tell any lie, he will break any law—man-made or otherwise—to get what he wants.”
“And what does he want?”
“An easy life. To do whatever he wants, whenever he wants it, and to have the world cheer him on.”
“Then why have you kept him around?”
“He was useful. He could pull money out of thin air, amuse the children, swindle suckers so that we could eat. I never let him too close to the kids; I never let him into my heart. I thought I had him under control.”
“What changed?” said Mary.
She didn’t answer. Something came over her that I hadn’t seen before. Tired. She was as tired as any woman I had ever met.
“It was the fire,” I said. She nodded. “You knew it was going to happen. What was the plan?”
“The church was bankrupt. We didn’t have nothing but the building and our flock, and you can’t hock faith. The church was insured. A fire was the only thing for it.”
“And the kids?” said Mary.
“Knew they wasn’t supposed to play in the basement. Children don’t listen.”
“How is Ruth?”
“What do you care?”
Mary stared out into the swirling snow, ignoring Helen, ignoring me, and seeing only the face of the woman she would kill. I might have told her that now was not the time, but guilt is fiercely impatient.
“I liked her,” said Mary, “when I met her yesterday. She seemed such a terribly normal child.”
“Not anymore,” said Helen. “I spent the last bit we had on the doctor, and he was a butcher. Her face is mangled; she misses her brother, she misses her daddy, too.”
“Just tell her, when she gets older—tell her to forget New York. Tell her to go far away.”
“I think it’s time both of you leave my family the hell alone.”
Mary had Helen’s full attention. I was sick of this room, of the corpse at the center of it, and of Helen and Bully Byrd most of all. Deciding it was one of those days where it was a mistake to turn your back on me, I crossed the floor, snatched a particularly long knife off the wall, and pressed it to Helen’s back.
“Oh,” said Helen.
“Yes,” I answered.
Mary took the bone saw out of her hand.
“It’s time to give Bully up,” I said.
“I’ll say it again,” said Helen, “the bastard’s not here!”
My knife pierced her mourning dress and nestled against the lacing of her corset. The blood drained from the back of her neck. She looked at Mary, asking if I meant it, and Mary nodded.
“She’s a true Westside brute,” she said, with honest pride in her voice.
“If he’s not here,” I said, “where is he?”
Helen didn’t answer. I twisted the hilt. Her blood oozed. One, two, three drops fell to the sawdust on the floor. She shook her head, then banged hard on the nearest window.
“Goddamn it!” she shouted. “It’s finished. Come inside!”
The door swung open, letting in a swirl of snow and a blast of cold and the grinning, half-frozen figure of Bully Byrd. He wore a stolen coat that stopped two inches short of his wrists; his once-gleaming white suit was wrinkled and stained. His face was red, his hair matted with ice. His cheeks and fingers were frostbitten black. At last he looked as evil as I knew him to be. His smile faltered somewhat when Mary pushed the bone saw to his throat.
