Westside, page 28
“Would it be too sentimental to say that I’m glad you’re alive?” he said.
“Too much by half,” I said and pushed his face away before he could draw me into a kiss. He wanted to celebrate. I was not ready yet.
I freed myself from his arms and saw that I was not the only exhausted Westsider to be saved from the river.
Virgil stood over Eddie Thorne’s soaked hide, dripping blood onto his face.
“Clubber,” Thorne gibbered. “You came back.”
“You’re a disgrace,” said Virgil. “You’ve always been a disgrace, but what you’ve done here is monstrous.”
“It was for the sake of . . .”
“Of what?”
“Order.”
I tore Thorne’s shabby gold shield from his chest and dragged its pin across his cheek until his bloodshot eyes snapped open. I threw the badge in the river. Virgil pulled back to punch Thorne. I stopped him.
“The things he’s done,” said Virgil. “The children. He killed children. I’ll kill him, Gilda, I’ll be your hangman. I’ll keep your hands clean.”
“Do it,” said Thorne, head hung low like a humiliated dog. “Just end me. Just snap my neck and dump me in the river and let me be forgotten.”
“No,” I said, and Virgil looked faintly proud. “He’s right. He deserves much worse.”
“What do you have in mind?”
I reached inside Virgil’s jacket and found a pair of gleaming silver handcuffs. I twisted Thorne’s wrists behind his back, and the cuffs clicked as loud as any cocking pistol.
“He goes with you,” I said. “Take him back through Spuyten Duyvil and lose him in the Tombs.”
“On what charges?”
“Whatever you choose. Don’t pretend you’re above it. You were ready to railroad Van Alen, weren’t you? In this city or any other, no cop ever faked evidence quite as well as Virgil Carr.”
“And if he pleads innocence?”
“Let him. The first guard who hears his story will clap him off to Bellevue without a second thought, and Lieutenant Thorne, dictator of the Lower West, will live out his reign as a guest of the asylum.”
“Gilda, please,” said Thorne, with his old thirsty look. “It’s not fair.”
“Not hardly,” I said. I nodded at Virgil, and he kicked Thorne in the jaw, hard enough to send him sprawling into unconsciousness. He would wake in chains.
Juliette was gone, Thorne broken, and the ship was nearly burned down to the waterline. We collected the rifles and pistols left behind by Thorne’s routed Fourth Precinct and tossed them into the Hudson one by one, savoring each tiny, peaceful splash. Every gun went to the bottom of the river, to rust down to nothing, as Westside guns should.
Well, nearly every gun.
When we were finished, Virgil ran his hand through his thick gray whiskers and shook his head. He wanted to say something, but we didn’t have the time for him to find the words.
“Thank you for passing me the pistol,” I said. “Even if I’ll never be a crack shot.”
“Is that such an awful thing?”
“I’m just glad you’re, well, I’m glad that tonight Mary Fall will get to welcome you home.”
“I don’t have to go alone.”
I was about to answer him when, for the second time that day, I heard Juliette Copeland scream. This time, she did so without fear. It was a squeal, really, the way a girl might squeal on coming face-to-face with a newborn kitten. By the light of the burning ship, she saw a woman who looked very much like the mother she had lost two years before.
She ran to wrap her in a hug tight enough to knock the wind out of the poor old woman.
“What’s gotten into you, child?” asked Mrs. Copeland. “Set me down. Please!”
But Juliette would not set her down, and when Mrs. Copeland saw Galen at the end of the dock, she understood why—or thought she did, anyway. They all burst into tears, an impossible family brought back from the dead, crying too hard to speak.
I nodded at Ugly La Rocca, who had fetched my client from the Eastside. He bowed low, threw his blood-flecked ax over his shoulder, and walked north into the shadows, which were behaving themselves at last.
Mrs. Copeland swept me up in a dizzying hug of her own and set me down again, laughing harder than I ever thought she could.
“How did you do it, Miss Carr? How did you bring him back from the dead?”
“The simple answer is that I did no such thing.”
“And my Juliette, she’s changed. She looks happier than she has in years. What did you do to her?”
“Miss Carr has had a trying day,” said Galen. “We can tell the story better than she.”
“We’ll explain everything on the yacht, Mother,” said Juliette, putting more love into that last word than I could bear.
“And the gloves,” I said. “They’re on the boat. Galen can give them to you all over again.”
“My gloves? Who cares about gloves at a time like this!”
“A sound point.”
“It’s a miracle, simply a miracle.”
“When they explain it all to you, you won’t be as pleased with me.”
She was dangerous. She was murderous. But she was your daughter, and I pushed her to her death. How the hell do you explain such a thing? How can you even try? Mrs. Copeland smiled again and hugged me close, and the whole dreadful week crashed down all at once. I felt so very tired.
“It doesn’t matter,” she said. “You’ve changed my life. You’ve saved me.”
“I don’t know if that’s true. Get on the boat and go.”
“But we have to celebrate.”
“Please. Go.”
They boarded the ship, chattering and laughing like a family of tourists embarking on a pleasure cruise. Virgil helped Cherub hoist Van Alen into his coach. Ida Greene walked up to me, wiping the blood away on the hem of her dress.
“How is the big man?” I said.
“It will take more than one bullet to kill Glen-Richard Van Alen.”
“I suppose in this city, that’s true.”
“Now that, Miss Carr, is something I haven’t seen before.”
“What?”
“For a moment, you almost smiled.”
“The Westside needs that man.”
“I’m glad you understand that now. You know, Gilda, you are not such a hopeless detective. If you ever need work, or a home, there is a place for you above the Borderline.”
I thanked her, and I smiled like I believed her, but I knew she was wrong. She climbed atop Van Alen’s coach and drove north. As they disappeared around the bend, Virgil put his hand on my shoulder.
“You should go,” I said. “It’s really not safe here after dark.”
“You’re not coming home.”
“This is my home.”
“It’s Edith Copeland’s home too, but you brought her to leave with those people she’s never met.”
“I don’t know if it was the right thing to do. It might destroy her, but I couldn’t help it. That’s the coward in me.”
“I’ve seen a lot of you today, and not one ounce is a coward.”
“I couldn’t stand telling that woman that I’d killed her daughter, that her husband was never coming back. Somebody deserved to be happy.”
“But not us.”
“You can be. You have Mary Fall.”
“I’d like to have you too.”
“You saw what I did today. What I did twice.”
“Please, Gilda. For your mother.”
“I’m not that woman’s daughter. I’m not . . . I don’t know how to go back.”
I wasn’t crying, not really, until he took me in his arms. It was what I’d wanted for a very long time, but it didn’t take the pain away. It wasn’t what I needed anymore.
I broke the embrace and shook my head, and he climbed aboard the yacht. A peal of laughter from Juliette or Edith, I could not be sure, echoed giddily down the gangway, sending a wave of nausea rolling down my chest, a hot wire that shot up from my stomach and into my throat. I turned away, not wanting them to see me be sick.
“Gilda,” called Virgil, but I did not turn around. I held my stomach, willing my body to cooperate for just a minute more. “Gilda.”
Finally, the engines started, and the yacht pulled away. My nausea subsided. I turned around and saw the lights of the little boat pulling up the river. In the darkness, I couldn’t see the man named Virgil Carr. I fell to my knees, slumped on the dock, and whispered something like goodbye.
I shook the gas can on my shoulder. A few ounces of fuel still rattled around in there. I reached into my bag. One bullet left.
The Christopher Street IRT was deserted. The long dark corridor stank of spilled liquor. A trickle of moonshine dripped down the platform, oozing from the bullet holes in the stills like leaking blood.
Barbarossa’s car waited on the downtown tracks. Its stolen blue door, of which she had been so proud, had been hacked apart. The windows had been shot away.
“I heard legends of this place,” said Cherub Stevens as we crossed the flimsy wooden bridge that led to the car. “Rotgut’s great storeroom. Her museum. Her private car. I always imagined grandeur. This is . . . well, it’s a bit like a dragon, isn’t it?”
“What?”
“They can have all the treasure they want, but they have to live in a cave.”
The inside of the car was a wreck. Her treasured globe lay cracked open like an eggshell. Feathers from a slashed mattress blanketed every surface. Defaced statues, torn paintings, every piece of furniture smashed to pieces. Somewhere in the wreckage of broken glass lay my father’s last taste of Boulton’s Rye.
“What are you looking for?” said Cherub. I didn’t answer. I kicked aside the wreckage. I found nothing worth saving.
“How do you feel about a walk in the dark?” I said.
“I’d rather get back on the surface, if it’s all the same to you. Dinner, maybe.”
“Go ahead,” I said. I left the car and hopped from the bridge onto the tracks.
“Where are you going?”
“North.”
I took a few steps into the tunnel. The light of my torch quivered. The shadows wrapped around me like a blanket, and I felt my chest growing cold.
“Gilda?” called Cherub. I did not make a sound. Behind me, he landed softly. His torch chased off the shadows. His hand found mine, and I did not push it away. He was trembling, and I could tell by his breathing that he was trying hard to keep his teeth from chattering. “She’s dead. Everyone knows it. It was in the Sentinel. Thorne told you himself—he burned her body.”
“Cops lie.”
“How could she have gotten away from that fight?”
“She knew how to move in the dark.”
“You saw what happened in that intersection. You and I were the only ones who got out.”
“We would have felt it. This city would have heard the echoes if she died.”
“You’re mad, you know that? Utterly mad.”
“Come on. Walk. There’s nothing to be afraid of . . . or at least, nothing we can do anything about.”
We walked north along the IRT—the third rail shining through tunnels cut but never used. We passed Fourteenth Street, Eighteenth, Twenty-Third. The only noise was an occasional rumbling, sometimes from a faraway train, sometimes from my stomach.
“Do you think they’ll really tear down the fence?” said Cherub, somewhere around Thirtieth Street.
“Not anytime soon.”
“Imagine, if they opened up the Westside. Trains running in these tunnels. Unarmed children in Washington Square. It might not be so bad.”
“Stop. Close your eyes.”
“But the dark . . .”
“Just try it.” He closed his eyes, and I closed mine. “Don’t you feel the cold sweeping over you? The shadows tugging at the sleeves of your jacket? Your fingertips growing numb? Open your eyes, damn it. As long as the shadows are hungry, the Westside will be no place for ordinary people.”
“But without the Copelands running back and forth between the two cities, the Westside will heal.”
“Maybe. If it does, it will take some time before things are balanced out, and finding balance can be painful.”
“You’re not the type who thinks things get better, are you?”
“Some situations are simply insane.”
We kept walking, feeling our way through the darkness, our feet occasionally brushing the dead third rail. It was strange, being so close to him in the dark. It was the first time in two years that I’d felt at ease walking next to him and saying nothing at all.
Thirty-Fourth Street was barren and pristine. Our torches found only one blemish: on the black iron column that separated the local track from the express, we saw a smeared bloody handprint.
“She came this way,” said Cherub, amazed and almost giddy. “She ran north. She got out. She’s alive!”
“It looks that way.”
“The IRT hits the stem at Times Square.”
“It does.”
“There’s a fence in the tunnel.”
“There is.”
“Then either she got through, or she’s somewhere up ahead.”
“Wait here.”
“What do you want her for?”
“I want to know if she killed my father. I want to hear her justify it, to try to lie her way out of it, to crack and admit that she cut his throat and severed his head, same as she did to that poor stupid guard I saw her killing the night of the massacre, killed him because it meant she could make a little more money every year. I want to let the pain wash over me, to really feel that he is gone, and then I want to start to forget.”
“And what will you do with that?” he said, pointing at the pistol I clutched in my hand.
“I don’t know.”
“Would you kill her?”
“Twice now I’ve killed someone who was trying to do the same to me. I don’t feel good about that, but I think I can justify it to myself. To avenge my father, to kill for the sake of justice . . . those are ideals much higher than any I’ve ever claimed for myself. I don’t know if I can do it. I’m going to find out.”
“If you’re not back in five minutes . . .”
“You’ll keep waiting.”
“Okay.”
Torch in one hand, gun in the other, I proceeded north. Far ahead, I saw the pinprick of light at the Times Square station, where the healthy city was sealed off from the Westside. Every minute, a train thundered past on the other side of the wall, loud enough to shake the bones in my chest. Every time, I froze, certain the train was coming my way. It never did.
Between trains, I heard people. They laughed, clear and pure, a laughter I hadn’t heard in a long time. From the joy in their voices, they might have been another species from myself. They certainly lived in another city.
The fence was cast iron, three inches thick but slightly open at the top, just enough to let in a bit of light from the stem and show the Westside what we were missing. But at the bottom, it went all the way to the ground.
That’s where I found Barbarossa.
There was blood on her chest, and her fingers were rubbed down to the bone from trying to claw her way through the iron. I could tell, from the way the rats gnawed at her ankles, that she’d been dead for days. On her lips was something that could have been a smile.
I took a short, shuddering breath, then threw the pistol back onto the tracks. It clanked, steel against steel, a meaningless sound.
“Where now, Gilda?” asked Cherub. “How shall we waste the rest of our night?”
We’d been walking for an hour or two. The streets were empty, perfectly silent, as even our footsteps were muted by the moss. The week was over, and I would not miss it. I looked at Cherub and noticed that somewhere in the night, he’d discarded his sword.
“I’ll wake Bex Red and ask her for breakfast,” I said.
“I’d rather you come with me.”
“Where?”
“You’ve lost your house. I’ve lost my gang. Wouldn’t it be fine to start somewhere new?”
“I’m not cut out for life in the Upper West.”
“There are other cities, you know. We could be anyone. We could be adults.”
“That sounds terrifying.”
“It sounds like an adventure.”
I looked up and saw we had turned onto Washington Square. The park was a jungle, the trees were mammoth, and the arch was as filthy as it was meant to be. Dawn was flaring up in the east, but it was still night on the west side of the park, and the shadows were hideously thick. They swirled around my empty lot, not level on the ground, but sloping upward, staggered, as though they were standing on—
“My stoop,” I said. I snatched the torch from Cherub and ran across the park. The dark cloud twisted to meet me. I vaulted over my old fence, and stood on my land, and bellowed at the shadows: “Take me! Take me back to her!”
They did not move my way. I pulled out my penknife and dragged it across my palm. The shadows flickered in my direction. They were sluggish, weak, dying. They would require more encouragement. I squeezed my fist, and blood poured from my hand, down my arm, and into my dirt. Now the shadows swarmed.
“Get back,” cried Cherub. He reached for the collar of my dress. I shoved him hard and sent him sprawling.
“Wait,” I said, before the shadows took hold. My body went numb, and the world turned dark.
I opened my eyes and saw Cherub frozen on a white sidewalk. He was shouting, but I couldn’t hear. I turned, and beneath an ivory sky, I saw my house standing proud. A dozen ghouls crowded the stoop, pounding against my father’s great wooden door. When I appeared, they turned to me. They marched down the stoop on flickering, smoky legs, the fire in their eyes dancing in anticipation. I had my key in my pocket. I only had to clear a path. Their smoke reached out to claim me as one of their own.
I held the torch close enough to scorch my chest and plunged into the pack. Cold smoke slithered ’round me, but the dancing light was bright enough to keep the shadow creatures at bay. They parted, and I saw the dazzling fire of their eyes, and the slack dark clay that hung in the shape of their faces. If they could feel anything, I’m sure it was pain.
