Westside, page 27
I lowered my head and kept climbing. It would take quite a light to drive those shadows back. My hands were slick, my muscles aching, my lungs burning, but I had seen Cherub’s foolish grin as he charged down that dock, saber held high, and I kept his face fixed at the front of my mind until I finished the climb.
I reached the lip of the deck and hauled myself aboard. If Juliette had posted any guards to this side of the ship, they had deserted their stations. I opened the door to the hold and went below. Any noise I made clattering down the metal steps was masked by gunfire and the screams of dying men.
The ship was lit by dim electric lights—another wonder imported from the other New York—and I had no trouble finding my way into the belly of the ship. I turned a corner and paused, not sure where I was going, but certain I had to get there fast. I knew I’d made an error when I felt the hand on my shoulder and the gun nestle against the base of my skull. I smelled bad liquor and knew it was Eddie Thorne.
“I’m not as stupid as your daddy thought,” he said.
“You’re still not very bright.”
He brought the butt of the pistol down against my head. Pain exploded across my skull, yellow and red and blinding. I fell to my knees and fought the urge to vomit. Thorne laughed. It was an unappealing sound.
“You get it?” he barked. “You get it? I’ve got the guns. I’ve got the liquor. I’m not a joke anymore.”
He kicked me in the stomach. Or, rather, he tried to. He was sluggish, like he was underwater, and I was able to roll onto my back before his boot connected. It wasn’t much of an advantage—I was still flat on the deck, staring up at the pistol clutched in his sweaty, swollen hand—but it was a comfort, a shred of hope, until he pulled the hammer back. He squatted on top of me, holding me down with one hand, pressing his knees against my arms to keep me from getting away.
“I’m gonna kill you,” he said. Normally, I might have responded with something clever, but nothing glittering came to mind.
“Thorne—”
“Shut up,” he said. To drive home the point, he pressed the pistol against my lips. He pushed hard, but I would not part them. Let him kill me if he wished, but I would not tolerate humiliation. “Open your bitch mouth!”
I shook my head, and he pulled back to bash me across the face. I turned my head to the side and said, “Afraid I’ll talk you out of it?”
“Nobody talks me into nothing,” he said, with a drunk’s dizzy confidence. “Not anymore.”
“Juliette will have you as her puppet.”
“I’m not nobody’s—”
“But you are.” He did not like being interrupted. He bore down with his knees, and the pain screamed nearly as loud as the ache in my head. But he let me keep talking. “Does she listen to you? Does she heed your advice? Does she respect you any more than Barbie ever did?”
“Barbie is dead.”
“We both know she’s not. She was a demon, and you weren’t strong enough to kill her, which means that someday, she’ll be back.”
“I’ll be waiting. I stopped her once, and . . . and . . .”
He trailed off. A great glistening stream of snot hung from his nose. He wiped it on his shoulder. The stain shone in the ship’s hazy light.
“I never considered,” I said, “how trying these last weeks must have been for you.”
“Yeah?”
“All this scheming. What focus it must have required. What industry. What guile.”
“It was tough, yeah. Tougher than it looked.”
“And now you’re in charge.”
“That’s what I keep saying!”
“And you see a lifetime of hard work stretching out ahead of you. You’re a hero of the NYPD, and heroes don’t get to soak themselves in bootleg gin. They are sober. They work hard.”
“I can do that too.”
“But how hungry you must be for a reason to quit.”
He scratched his ear with the sight of his revolver and considered my offer for a time. I was right, and we both knew it. But there are some men who hate a woman far more when she’s telling the truth. He chuckled, and grabbed me by the cheeks, and forced my mouth open with his hand.
“This ain’t even for you,” he said. “It’s for your dad. God, I wish I’d had the chance to kill him.”
He pressed the pistol against my mouth. The taste burned my lips. I tried to kick, to free my legs. He was too heavy. I let the barrel into my mouth and spat out one final, garbled offer.
“Eyel kih huh.”
“What?” he said, pulling out the gun.
“I’ll kill her,” I said.
“Juliette? She’d shoot you down like a rat.”
“Barbie,” I said, and he set the gun aside. “I’ll find her, and I’ll kill her. I’m good at finding people—you know I am.”
He stood up. With seizing muscles, I scrambled back against the wall and did my best to stand.
“Yeah,” he said, “you could find her. But you really think you could kill her?”
“I absolutely do,” I said. He believed it, and I believed it too.
“And what should I do?”
“Go back to your bottle. Let the women sort this out.”
He shrugged and holstered his pistol, happy to have orders at last. He wandered back toward the hold.
I wanted to sob, but I didn’t have time. I ran deeper into the ship, until I saw the glow of the engines. I yanked the gas can off my shoulder and went to work.
Much later, I received a full account of the battle at the docks. I don’t doubt that it was highly embellished, as all good Westside yarns must be. I am told it was a glorious affair, that there were heroes on both sides, that every warrior stood tall, that all proved themselves true Westside men. But I had seen the agony with which the first victims died, and I do not believe it could have been glorious at all.
The fight was short. A third of Van Alen’s men were killed in the first barrage, and that many fell again before the little band of Westsiders reached the end of the dock. By then, the numbers were even. Van Alen and his rainbow guard lived for a good hand-to-hand scrap, and they acquitted themselves well. They smashed the rifles out of the policemen’s hands, cracked their skulls, and knocked their limp bodies into the river. Cherub Stevens, I am told, ran two of them through with his saber—the first time, I believe, it ever tasted blood. Ugly felled a pair with his ax, and Ida Greene, who insisted so indignantly that she ran a train station and nothing more, cut the throat of at least one cop.
Casualties were heavy, but by the time I appeared on the starboard deck, the battle was won. On the dock, the cops lay slaughtered in a heap. Van Alen stood with his foot on the bodies and pointed up the gangway.
“If there’s any of you left up there,” he shouted, “come down and die.”
The object of his challenge sat outside the door to the pilot’s house, her rifle clutched in her hands, her back pressed to the railing.
“That’s all right,” Juliette called back.
“Who the hell is that?” answered Van Alen.
“The last voice you shall ever hear.”
She didn’t have to surrender. She didn’t have to fight. For she saw what I had seen. From where we stood, the land had disappeared. The dock had been eaten away. In its place was a wall of darkness, of swirling shadows whipped into a frenzy by the blood in the air. They vaulted down the dock, and Van Alen’s last surviving guardsmen disappeared with choked-off screams.
Ida Greene grabbed Van Alen by the shoulders and dragged him backward toward the edge of the dock. Ugly and Cherub ran alongside. The shadows ate away the dock, a few inches a second, until there was only a single plank left for the gallant warriors to stand on. There, the shadows stopped, edging back and forth, almost hesitant, and I gnawed on my knuckle, waiting for the surprise that only I knew was coming.
Juliette lacked my patience.
She stood, unslung her rifle, and leaned on the ship’s rail. She peered down the sight and squeezed the trigger. Van Alen didn’t say a word when he caught the bullet in his back. He sank to one knee and bled from both sides.
Now the shadows pounced.
Now the engines exploded.
A ball of fire tore through the starboard side of the ship, scorching the deck and driving the shadows back. Water rushed through the gash in the hull. The freighter lurched horribly toward the dock, throwing Juliette and myself into the railing. The fire was bright enough to turn night into day and cast off every shadow for ten blocks in either direction. By its light, I saw Van Alen collapsed in a heap on the dock, surrounded by Mrs. Greene, Ugly, and Cherub. By the same light, Juliette saw me.
“I told you, Gilda, this was not your concern,” she called, as her ship sank deeper into the water. She leaned against the railing, holding her rifle at her hip. I looked straight at it, and I felt I could see all the way down the darkened barrel and into the hell that lay on the other side. I could not tell if I was ready to die.
“My life would be simpler if I took other people’s advice,” I said, “but I simply don’t have the patience.”
“Take one step, and I’ll put a bullet through your heart.”
Who was this woman? What was she to me? We had met just a handful of times. We had shared a bottle and memories of fathers useless and dead. We did not rank as friends, but even with her rifle trained on my chest, I could not really consider her an enemy. She was not Andrea Barbarossa, who had been a legend of the Westside night since before I was born. She was just a person, twisted by grief and greed into doing things that once she might have called evil. She was convinced that one of us would have to die. I, who had already killed that day, burned to find another way.
“Did you hurt her?” I said.
“Did I hurt who?”
“Mary Fall. The woman in the house on Washington Square. Did you hurt her?”
“Dear god, Gilda—are you really worried about your mommy? I thought we understood each other, that we were too mature to be restrained by the . . . the idiocy of the family bond.”
“Did you hurt her?”
“No. I hardly had the time for anything like that, and really, what would be the point? You see me as some sort of bloodthirsty maniac, Gilda, and that wounds me.”
Smoke burned my eyes. The ship lurched again, and from the pilot’s house stumbled the other Juliette, blindfolded and bound, and the Virgil Carr who was not my father, whose face was bloody, and who could hardly walk. I gripped the railing hard enough that I felt I could rip it free with a single hand.
“Set them free,” I said.
“What do you care about their lives, daughter of the bloody Lower West, detective of tiny mysteries?” said Juliette. “Have you come to arrest me? To—oh, what is that dime novel phrase—‘to bring me to justice’? That’s quite a concern of yours, isn’t it? Who killed whom, and why?”
She reached into her pocket and set Galen Copeland’s notebook on the railing of the ship. As we listed farther and farther, it slipped closer to falling into the water.
“You would have been quite interested in this relic of my papa’s,” she said. “It wasn’t shipping coordinates, but a journal written in code—a terrible outpouring of guilt and self-pity for every death the Westside ever suffered, from some nitwit named Alice Pearl right down to the formidable Virgil Carr.”
“He was right to feel guilty.”
“He certainly knew how to tell a story. He scratched out six pages on the night your father died. A moonlight cruise to Spuyten Duyvil—just your father, my papa, and Andrea Barbarossa. Wouldn’t you like to know what happened? Wouldn’t you like to hear whose name Virgil called as his throat was cut and whose hand held the knife?”
“That’s not why I came.”
“I’ll give you the book, I’ll tell you the story, if you just walk away.”
“I made your mother a promise.”
“My mother is a nitwit, and I am disappointed in you, Miss Carr.”
“Why?”
“Because after you’ve seen the other side, I expected you would understand. There are many worlds. Impossible variations, each more awful than the last. When we know that to be true, how can any human life matter? Kill one Galen Copeland, there is always another around the corner. Kill one Juliette, and another takes her place.”
“We are creatures of the Westside. We belong here.”
“Then die with it. I’m getting out.”
The ship caught against the dock. The force of the impact knocked the journal off the side, but Juliette caught it without letting her rifle slip.
Somewhere, in a New York that wasn’t mine, a woman named Mary Fall waited for her husband to come home. She would have finished preparing dinner. By now, she’d be stretched across the sofa in the front parlor, a drink at her elbow and a book in her lap, watching the lights come on in the park, never doubting that at any moment, Virgil Carr would step through the door.
“Let those two walk away,” I said. “They do not belong in this city. They should not die for it.”
“The other Juliette will die. That is nonnegotiable. I must take her place.”
“Then send down Virgil Carr.”
“In exchange for what?”
“For me.”
That made her smile.
“What would I want with you?”
“Please—surely I’ve been at least an irritant. Surely I have made things harder for you. Surely you would prefer to see me dead. Don’t deny me that.”
“You don’t want to live?”
“I haven’t, for a long time.”
“Well, who needs answers?” she said and tossed Copeland’s journal into the river. It floated for a moment, as the water soaked its pages, and then it was gone. “Learn a truth about a dead man, and you will find peace. Didn’t you tell me that?”
“I can’t be sure. I say all sorts of things.”
That made her chuckle. She was still smiling as she thrust Virgil forward, and I walked to meet him. Virgil’s eye was swollen shut, and his hair was matted with blood. He could hardly walk, but he did his best to stand up straight. He said nothing and did not look my way. For the first time, this man looked as broken and beaten as I remembered the Virgil Carr who was my father. He turned as we passed, angling his shoulder just far enough that I couldn’t see his face. My hand brushed against his jacket, and I found something interesting in the pocket.
“Come to me,” said Juliette. “I’m sure I can find an inventive way for you to die.”
“I’d prefer both of us walk away.”
“That’s the beautiful thing about firearms, Miss Carr. You never have to compromise.”
I had tried. At least, I think I had. Juliette was correct. That night, it could only be light or dark.
I walked up the gangway. I had nearly reached her when I fired the gun. It bucked in my hand, and the bullet might have flown straight had it not been for the long burn across my palm. Instead, it went wide, and the gun fell out of my grip.
Before it hit the ground, I was on my knee reaching for it. If I hadn’t moved so quickly—if I hadn’t expected to drop it, if I hadn’t been so in touch with my natural clumsiness—Juliette’s bullet would have pierced my heart. Instead, it passed just over the nape of my neck. I did not breathe. That could wait for later.
One bullet left.
To hell with it. I let the gun alone.
My fingers touched the deck, and I shoved off like a track runner. Before she could fire a second shot, I had my arms around her waist. My momentum carried us to the prow, and over the railing, and down toward the river.
The icy Hudson washed away the smoke and the blood. Juliette’s fingers dug into my throat, my eye. I let go of her, drew my arm back, and bashed my elbow into her face. We moved slowly, our blows deadened by the weight of the water. Neither of us could hurt the other, but the river was stronger than us both. My lungs caught fire.
I kicked her as hard as I could, and her grip on my throat loosened. I brought my elbow down on her nose, and her blood dyed the water pink.
The edges of my vision grew dim.
I brought my elbow down again. She stiffened around me, holding as tight as she could.
We sank. The light of the burning ship faded, and down on the river’s bottom, the shadows swirled. How many dead sailors were waiting there to drag us down? How many vanished souls?
From the mud of the river, or the hungry shadows, or the panicking depths of my dying brain, I heard a woman’s voice. I’d never heard it before, but I recognized it like I would my own.
“My name is Alice,” she said. “Help me.”
I hit Juliette one more time. She went limp and sank away. It was dark at the bottom of the river, but not so dark that I couldn’t see the shadows swirling to greet her. Noise carries beautifully in water, even oily river water, and I heard her choking scream like it was coming from my own mouth. The noise twisted through the shadows, growing sharper, stronger, more painful, until it wasn’t Juliette’s voice and it wasn’t mine, until it was the final, unfinished scream of Alice Pearl.
I could have stayed down there forever. A few more seconds, and the last bit of air would have burst out of my lungs, out of my mouth, and water would have come rushing in. I could have just opened my lips and followed her to the black river floor. But I had lied—I wasn’t ready to die. Not yet. I kicked, and I rose, and I tasted the foul Westside air. The shadows were gone.
Seventeen
Cherub pulled me from the river. I flopped onto the dock, warmed by the burning ship, and spat out the taste of death and the Hudson, not sure where one flavor left off and the other began. The shadows were beaten back, and all was still.
The question of Juliette Copeland was settled. The solution had been vile, but solving tiny mysteries—I reminded myself as I coughed up a wad of river scum—is about finding the truth, whether or not it’s what the client wants to hear.
Before I could delve any further into those weighty questions, Cherub yanked me to my feet and wrapped me in a blessedly uncomplicated embrace.
