Westside, page 25
I kicked. I bled. Neither helped. My finger pulled uselessly at the trigger of the gun that was no longer in my hand.
I didn’t blame her for cutting my face, and I wouldn’t argue if she pushed me out the window. My spirit had drained out of me as quickly as the blood pouring from Van Alen’s blubbery chest, but my body had not given up the fight.
I have never been a brawler. I have always been small. But I had a funny habit of staying alive, and sometimes that’s all that mattered. Before she could make her second incision, I let my knees buckle and slid out from under her. The metal windowsill clawed at my dress, and I landed safely on the floor. Mrs. Van Alen would have tumbled out the window if Virgil hadn’t grabbed her by her belt, dragged her across the floor, and shoved her into her bedroom.
“Get downstairs,” he said, holding the door closed with the full weight of his body. “Find a callbox. Get Centre Street. Get Thorne.”
I smeared the blood across my cheek, nodded, and ran. No one in the stairwell looked up as I clattered down the steps. No one on the street was put off by the bloody woman sprinting down the sidewalk. There were callboxes on every corner. The first three were disconnected, and somewhere within me I took faint pleasure from knowing that not everything in this perfect city was shiny and clean.
At the fourth, I got through, and every cop I spoke to responded like he could hear the blood in my voice. They passed me up the chain, grateful to let me be someone else’s problem, until I reached the office of Edward Thorne.
“Virgil Carr has a mess that needs tidying,” I said.
“Who’s this calling?”
“You wouldn’t believe me if I told you. Get up to 172nd and get ready to move a body.”
“What address?”
“Hell.” I looked over my shoulder. The tenement was out of sight. “I don’t know. Half a block from Haven, on the north side of the street. For god’s sake, it’ll be the one with the bloody girl on the stoop.”
“I’m not coming until I know who this is.”
“Gilda Carr.”
“That’s impossible.”
“Entirely,” I said and cut the line.
The sidewalk was crowded with morning traffic, but the commuters parted for me. I dropped onto the stoop and dragged my face across my shoulder to scrape off the blood. The pain exploded like a fireball. I might have cried, but I didn’t want to salt the wound. I tried to tear the hem off my dress, to press against the cut, but my fingers were too bloody to rip the fabric.
I slumped against the side of the stoop, eyes squeezed shut, until I heard a siren. Thorne bounded out of the car, slim and shaved, his badge sparkling and his gun gleaming on his hip.
“You look good,” I said.
“Gilda. I . . . I don’t understand.”
“You were never meant to. Virgil’s on the top floor. Follow the screams.”
Thorne’s driver crouched beside me as his boss ran up the stairs. He had crooked teeth, soft eyes, and a moustache that would make a walrus jealous. By his uniform, his name was Asbury.
“A nasty cut there,” he said.
“It can wait. Thorne will need you upstairs.”
“He told me to tend to you, so I’ll tend. And he also wanted me to make sure you don’t run off. A girl covered in blood, reporting a murder—she’s someone we don’t want to lose hold of.”
He took a wad of bandages from the car, swabbed my face as best he could, and wound the fabric around my cheek.
“He’s a good cop, your boss?” I said.
“As good as any I’ve ever met. That man’s afraid of nothing.”
He finished his dressing. The bandage squeezed my cheek. It stung, but not unpleasantly.
“You’re good with this gauze.”
“A week at Amiens will turn any man into a field surgeon.”
He looked at his bloody fingers, then at the spotless pants of his uniform.
“Please,” I said. “Dry them on my dress.”
“I couldn’t.”
“It’s already ruined. Go ahead.”
“Thank you.”
“Did you ever know a cop named Koszler?”
“First name?”
“Emil. A tall fellow with the Fourth Precinct.”
“Of course! Emil. We shared a beat one winter, a few years back. My god, I haven’t thought of him in ages. He quit, I heard. Became a priest, of all things.”
“He didn’t seem cut out for life as a cop.”
“Few are.”
We sat, silent, until Virgil padded out the door. He looked smaller than he had an hour earlier, and exhausted. He did not look at me.
“Get on the horn and get an ambulance up here,” he told Asbury, “then get upstairs. Your boss’ll need you. We’re taking the car.”
Asbury hopped to attention. He was halfway down the block when I realized I never thanked him for the dressing. I called after him, but if he heard, he didn’t respond.
“No reason to thank the man,” said Virgil. “It’s his job.”
We climbed into the car. Getting it started flustered Virgil, who cursed under his breath at the machine. He seemed to take its defiance personally.
“Hate these things,” he said. “Never could get used to them. Never had any urge to. You can’t drive one, can you?”
“No. Can you?”
“Well enough.” We lurched into traffic. “Just as good that I do the driving. From here out, I’ll handle this whole situation. It was a stupid mistake bringing you up there.”
“As I recall, it was I who brought you.”
“Girl your age shouldn’t be in a room with a man like Van Alen. Shouldn’t never have to do . . . what you did.”
“No need to thank me. I was doing my job.”
Watching his face as he struggled to maneuver the uncooperative machine onto Broadway, I could tell there was a lot he wanted to say to me. There was certainly a lot I wanted to hear. Instead, we said nothing. I sank into the seat and felt the throbbing in my cheek sync up with the humming of the engine.
“You’ve ruined that dress,” he said somewhere past Central Park. “Your mother . . .”
“She isn’t my mother.”
“All the same, she’d wring my neck.”
“That’s why I can’t stay. You understand that, don’t you?”
“We’ll discuss it when this is through.”
“You seem to think it’s your decision.”
“Isn’t it?”
“Even if you were my father, I wouldn’t let you talk to me like that.”
“And that’s just the problem, isn’t it, with this other city of yours. It’s warped you. It’s made you hard.”
“That wasn’t entirely the city’s doing.”
“I suppose not.” He gripped the wheel, bit his lip, and performed a less-than-graceful turn toward the East River. “It was . . . my counterpart, his fault as well. I’d like you to stay, girl. Give me a year or two, see if we can’t sand down some of those rough edges, make up for the damage the other Virgil done.”
“I like my rough edges. I am my rough edges.”
“And do you like the taste of blood in your mouth? Did you enjoy the way that gun kicked in your hand? If you did, you should be scared, because those edges will get a whole lot rougher, and quick. I can’t change it so that you never killed that man. That road has no turnarounds. But I can stop you going any further. Your mother—Mary—and me.”
From his pocket he drew my gun. It was certainly my gun now. He placed it between us on the seat. Two bullets left.
“You want it? Take it. But if you pick that pistol up again, this city is closed to you. I’ve killed more men than I can count, and I see their faces every time I lay my head down to sleep. They look scared, and they beg me for a mercy that I can no longer grant. If you want that for yourself, take the gun. It belongs to you.”
I was reaching for it when the car clattered over a vicious pothole, and I slammed my head into the window.
“Are you all right?” said Virgil, reaching out a hand to steady me. I pushed it away.
“I’m fine. I’m fine.”
I rubbed my temple and looked outside, and in the shadows of the side street I saw something I should have seen coming.
“Stop the car!” I said.
“No.”
I threw open the door and leapt out. It wasn’t so daring—we weren’t going that fast—but Virgil was surprised, and frankly so was I. I stumbled but caught myself before I fell—caught myself on the handle of the door to the little shop whose display window held purses, wallets, belts, coats, loafers, riding crops, and gloves of all kinds, and whose door was marked with a carving of the bloody fist.
Virgil slammed the car to a stop and hopped onto the curb, flush with outrage. It had always been so easy to make him mad.
“Aren’t you coming in?” I said.
“Goddamn it,” he answered, slamming his fist on the hood of the car. He did not follow me inside.
The shop was narrow, long, and dark. The smell of leather was nauseating. The woman balanced on a stool behind the counter, not as fat as in my city, and not as happy to see me. She did not look up when I came through the door. Andrea Barbarossa was engrossed in her work—repairing the heel of a black leather boot—and nothing could tear her away.
I ran my finger along the wall, touching everything. No wonder she didn’t bother to greet her customers. Work this exquisite spoke for itself.
At the rear of the shop, a round table held a few dozen kid gloves, fanned out in a circle. They ranged from ivory to jet black, and each was decorated with irises and a single bloody fist. I chose the shade that matched Mrs. Copeland’s pair—the pair I had reunited only to lose with my house and everything else—and brought them to the counter.
“Just these?” said Barbarossa. I nodded, and she gave me the price. It was more than I’d spent on any item of clothing in my entire life, and it was not unfair.
“I’m purchasing these on behalf of my employer,” I said. “Galen Copeland. I believe he has an account.”
“Galen, yes. He still owes me for a pair he bought in July.”
“He plans to settle all accounts by Christmas.”
“It’s all right. I trust him. I don’t know why, but I’m a sucker for old friends. Do you want them wrapped?”
“Just the box will do.”
She slid the box across the counter. I dropped it into my bag and left the shop. Virgil was waiting in the car, red with irritation. The pistol was gone from the seat. He pulled back into traffic.
“Where is my gun?” I said.
“Why that shop?” he said. “Of all the leather merchants in New York, why did you choose that awful shop?”
“They do wonderful work. You know the proprietor?”
“Let’s not discuss her.”
“My father knew her too. He knew her before Mary Fall, and afterward, and all the years in between.”
I cackled. I couldn’t help it. Cruel laughter bubbled out of me like acid and stung Virgil Carr.
“What’s so goddamned funny?” he said.
“To think—you wanted to sand down my rough edges, and you’re as rotten as he was.”
“Don’t judge him too harshly.”
“And why shouldn’t I? That woman is vile. My mother was . . . she was everything.”
“She was. Is. No man could be equal to that. If your father reached for a woman like Barbie, he must have been very lonely, or very scared. It doesn’t excuse anything, but . . .”
“I’ll give you one thing. Your Barbie is a lot more beautiful than my father’s ever was. Now where is my gun?”
“We’re here,” he said, and the car slammed to a halt. Thorne’s ship was still moored at the pier. There was no sign of anyone from the Fourth Precinct. Virgil stepped out of the car and opened my door.
“The pistol,” I said. “Give it back.”
“I need to search that ship. Thorne’s partner might be inside.”
“Fantastic. Are you going to let me out of the car?”
“As a matter of fact, no.”
He shut the door and turned the key in the lock. I yanked the handle. It would not budge.
“Open it,” I said. “Goddamn it, Virgil, now!”
“You may not be my daughter, but you will stay in my city. I’m going to keep you safe.”
My father walked the streets of New York like he owned the pavement, and this man was no different. He dropped his keys in his pocket and strolled across the dock like all he saw was his. He bounded up the gangway, glanced up and down the deck, and disappeared into the ship.
I bruised my shoulder slamming it against that door and cracked my one unblemished fingernail attacking the handle. I did not consider shattering the glass until I heard the woman’s scream. It came from the street—a sharp cry, quickly silenced, short enough that even the kindest New Yorker could tell themselves that they hadn’t heard a thing.
Two people dragged a woman onto the dock, her slender frame as limp as a bag of straw. Her delicate curls, which looked slightly ridiculous on a woman her age, were mussed. Without seeing her face, I could tell it was Juliette Copeland who had been blackjacked and kidnapped. I did not recognize the Fourth Precinct cop who held her left elbow, but I saw the face of the woman who held the right, the woman with the rifle slung over her shoulder and the devil’s smirk upon her face.
It was Juliette Copeland too.
She hadn’t been a stowaway on that steamer. She had been the pilot. Thorne’s partner, his sniper, who killed her father for reasons unfathomable and came to this other New York to do the same to a girl who looked very much like herself. And we had given her directions to Mary Fall.
I lay on my back and kicked both feet at the door window. It didn’t crack. I clambered into the backseat and searched the floor for a toolbox, a jack, a spare wrench. It was bare.
The Juliette I knew, who mourned Galen Copeland but asked me not to bother investigating his death, hauled her double up the gangway without stopping for breath. She was at the ship’s rail when she saw me struggling to escape the car, shook her head, and smiled.
The glove box was locked, but it wasn’t as sturdy as the door. One kick, and it flopped open. I was hoping to find a spare pistol—one of the thousands of guns that seemed to litter this city—but I found nothing but handcuffs, maps, a desiccated sandwich, and a few blank notebooks. I tossed the junk aside and struck gold. Behind the notebooks, I found a nightstick.
I wrapped my fist around the club’s handle and punched its short end into the glass. A web of fine cracks spread from the point of impact. I punched, again and again, until my muscles screamed and my knuckles were raw and the glass sagged in the frame. One more blow shattered the window. I did not feel the falling glass. I raked the nightstick around the edge, clearing as many shards as I could, and dragged myself into the open. I flipped the nightstick around in my hand and charged toward the ship.
I was halfway across the pier when the ship pulled away from the dock. By the time I reached the edge, the steamer was nosing its way into the river. Even if I’d had the strength to jump, it was too far. I hurled the nightstick after the boat. It clattered off the hull and sank into the East River.
Juliette watched me from the deck until one of her sailors called to her, and she turned away. Two men emerged from the door to the hold, dragging the broken body of Virgil Carr. They dropped him at her feet. If the wind had been blowing toward me, I would have heard her laugh.
Sixteen
I ran west, toward Washington Square, toward Mary Fall, but I hadn’t gone more than a block when smoke drew me south. I arrived at Copeland Imports Ltd., just as the fire spread to the roof. A crowd stood around the base of that salt-stained, slanted waterfront building, wondering if the fire department would arrive before the building burned to the foundation. At the moment, the fire was winning.
On the sidewalk, a fruit vendor draped a tarp to protect his apples from the soot. To no one in particular, he gave his account of the blaze.
“Window burst, just like that—like pop. Glass came down all over, and I saw the fire. Third floor, Copeland’s offices. And now it’s burning—hoo. I said for years they need to get these buildings up to code, but does anyone listen? No. Couple of people got the girl, Miss Copeland, they got her out no problem.”
“What about Copeland?”
“Well, I suppose he’s still up there. Lord. The poor man.”
From the third floor came an old man’s screams. They sent a ripple of pleasure through the growing crowd. I threw down my bag, yanked open the building door, and bounded up the stairs.
The smoke was black, and it came in billows. By the second-floor landing, I was choking on it. I dropped to my knees and crawled. The sides of the stairwell danced with flame.
“Sweet god,” came the cries from Copeland’s offices. “Sweet merciful god—Juliette!”
I made the third floor, and the stairwell windows exploded. The white paint boiled on the walls, falling to the ground in bubbling strips. Copeland’s cries grew faint, then stopped.
I crawled into the office. He was strapped to a chair, a slumped old man in a spotless white uniform that was just beginning to attract the fire. I crawled in his direction. The walls were a tapestry of flame.
“Wake up, damn you!” I shouted. He did not. Above Copeland’s waist, the smoke was impenetrable. If I stood, I wouldn’t be able to breathe more than a few seconds. So I did the only thing that made sense. I bit him. Hard.
“The hell?” he murmured. I kept biting, stopping only when blood ran down my chin. He kicked, and I clawed the knots that bound his legs to the chair. My penknife, naturally, had been left in my bag.
“No use,” he said. “Out, girl. Run.”
“Hush.”
“Those are Flemish loops, tied by an old hand. You’ll never . . . there’s a knife.”
