Westside Lights, page 5
I had been abducted into a cheap melodrama—Blood on the Misery Queen. I wanted to throw myself under the quilt and hide, but I had a part to play. I was the one who survived.
Perhaps.
The Queen rocked violently to one side, whipping the boom across the cockpit. It slammed into place.
Thunk.
Ah, so that’s what that noise was. A mystery solved. What comfort.
I grabbed the nearest line and dragged myself to my feet. Fists tight on the railing, I breathed in the river, coating every hidden part of me with bitter air. Over the city, night was sliding from black to gray. The sky was clear. It was going to be a beautiful day.
“You are a detective,” I told myself. “This is a crime scene. Do your work.”
I tugged my dress over my nose and stopped myself from looking away from the bodies. I put one foot in front of the other until I was as close as I could bear.
The skin of their chests and faces was not cut—it was simply gone. Where their arms covered their faces, the muscles and bone were chipped, hanging loosely, savaged by whatever nightmarish tool their killer used.
“Who did this to you?” I asked them. “You were tiresome people. You repeated your jokes, you danced like fools, you talked without listening and laughed without joy. That’s no reason to die.”
The boat rolled. The boom swung above my head. I no longer flinched when it fell into place. I no longer felt anything at all.
Farther up the ship, something splashed into the water. It was becoming harder to believe I was alone on the boat. I should have crept back to the cabin and hid under my blankets, but I was quivering with something that may have been impatience and may have been fear. Whatever was going to happen to me, I wanted it to happen soon.
An empty champagne bottle was trapped between Bess Barron’s ankles. I tugged it free and held it like a club. I had no hope against the person or persons who had massacred these women, but I would give it a try.
“Someone there?” I called.
There was no reply, save for the meaningless rhythm of clacking steel and flapping canvas, and the awful thunk of the boom. I hopped onto the deck, hand tight on the railing, and worked my way forward.
The ship rose with the current. A thick slop of blood and meat swept down the deck. My foot slipped on a chunk of viscera, but I stayed on my feet. I walked on, trying to hold my head high, intending to greet the monsters with a smile. But when I rounded the corner, the bottle slipped from my fingers and splashed into the river. There was nothing here that was even close to being alive.
The Bourget Device was out, but the faint glow of the rising sun was enough to show me the scene. Half a corpse was draped over the railing. There was no telling where the rest of it had gone. Everyone else was in pieces. Shards of bone, of leg, of arm, of torso, of foot, of skull rolled across the deck with every movement of the water. Broken bottles mixed with the mess, giving the stench of a cocktail party’s last desperate hour, when the carpet had gone squishy with spilled booze.
I squeezed the line tighter, knowing that if my knees buckled I would not be able to get back up, and attempted to distract myself with a bit of cheerful mental math. That night there had been quite a crowd on the Misery Queen: myself and Cherub, plus seven guests. There were two dead in the back. That left six to find.
“You are a detective,” I hissed. “Count the bodies. Find six and he’s dead. Find less and he might be alive. Just count them. Count them, and you’ll know what you have to do.”
But there was nothing left to count.
I forced myself to wade through the carnage, nudging bits of flesh aside with my boot, trying to fit the pieces together to imagine what person they might have been. Gashes had been hacked into the wood of the deck, presumably from the weapon or weapons that had torn these people apart. It must have been something big—an ax, a saw—and whoever wielded it either had assistance or was fearsome enough that no help was required.
I looked for evidence of the people who died here. I found a bloody handkerchief that could have belonged to Stuyvesant Wells and the heel of a shoe that may have been Mercury Tyne’s. I tried to keep track of what I found, to match each bit to one of the people who had passed through here, but this puzzle was missing too many pieces. Even at my best—and that morning I was far from my best—I could not have filled in the gaps.
A rare unbroken bottle rolled to my feet. More Diana’s Fire. There was no liquor left inside. I flung it at the deck. Glass exploded across the wood, catching the light of the steadily rising sun. It was not the only thing that shone. In a tangle of sodden rope just before the bow, I found something hard, gleaming—perhaps the only thing on the ship untouched by blood.
A pearl. One of Marka’s pearls.
I squeezed it, as I’d done with the tooth, then let it drop. It rolled across the deck and plinked into the river. I saw no other pearls.
I tried to hang on to the idea that I could think through this, that I could be a detective, that I could be steel. There was no telling what flesh had belonged to whom, or how much had already washed over the side. This was not six bodies, not necessarily, and that meant Cherub might have gotten away. Perhaps he saw the killers approaching and dove overboard, like any good coward would. Perhaps the boat had been stolen before he’d come aboard, and he was back on land, pacing and cursing and demanding someone take him out on the river to find his missing Queen.
Perhaps Cherub Stevens was alive.
And then the boom whipped across my head and I saw what was written on the mainsail, and I knew that he was dead.
Thunk.
A portrait of a one-legged seagull, red as the blood sloshing over my feet, ran the length of the long sail.
Beneath it, the words that ended me:
CHERUB GOT HIS
There was a roar so loud, it made me flinch. It sounded like an oncoming wave or water gushing into the hull, but it was just the blood thudding in my ears. I looked back at the sail. The letters did not move. They did not become any less true.
Cherub got his.
Well, that was that.
I glanced at the life preservers and found I had no life to preserve. I stood at the railing and leaned back until I toppled into the river. I let it take me away.
I sank fast. It was black under there and the current was strong. My dress was heavy as cement; water filled my shoes. I fought the urge to kick.
There had been times in my life when I wanted everything to end. When my mother died, when my father followed, when the city I loved turned on its citizens and so many of my friends and neighbors vanished, punching holes in Manhattan as neatly as a biscuit cutter through dough—these were sensible times to crave death. Through cowardice or inertia or animal stubbornness, I did not give in. But that night, the river was the first cool thing I’d felt since summer hit, and it felt like home.
My lungs ached. I tried to think beyond the pain. I seized on an autumn day in 1915, when the world was at war and the Westside, newly walled off from the city, had taken its true, insane form. Mammoth trees burst into every color fire has ever burned. Birds sang like lunatics. Unknown flowers grew, bloomed, and died in an hour. The entire spectacle seemed put there for the sake of two new lovers, Cherub and Gilda, who were certain they were the only people who mattered in the world.
I was dozing on the parlor couch, enjoying cold air and a heavy blanket, when I heard him on the sidewalk, cursing the wind.
“Still, goddamn it, be still!”
Propped on one elbow, I watched him dash across the mossy pavement, snatching at dancing leaves. His legs tangled. He went sprawling but did not drop the foliage clutched in his hands. I might have called to him, but his struggle was simply too much fun.
The wind died. He got to his feet and began laying a row of leaves across the sidewalk, choosing each as carefully as a mason assembling a wall. Every few seconds, he consulted a scrap of paper and adjusted what he had made. The work was slow, but he was smiling until the wind whipped up, scattering his masterpiece and starting him cursing again.
Oh, I thought, he’s lost his mind. What a shame.
Wrapping the blanket tight, I abandoned my couch and opened the front door. He snapped around like he’d been caught.
“Not yet, not for hours!” he said. “You’re not to see it till it’s through.”
“Until what’s through? You haven’t made anything but a mess.”
“And that’s just why I won’t have you looking until it’s ready. Your gaze is corrosive. You’ll spoil it.”
I shrugged the blanket off my shoulders and gave my arm a little wiggle. He blushed, flooded with the kind of foolish lust I’d never imagined I could inspire. But instead of following me up the steps, he squeezed his eyes and shook his head.
“I must see to my work.”
I slammed the door. I threw on actual clothes and hunted through the storage closet until I found a jar of paste. I walked back outside and shoved it into his hand.
“Paste is cheating,” he said.
“So cheat. Who cares?”
“Don’t you?”
“I’ve based my entire professional life on the principle that corners were made to be cut. I’m going to go eat some ham. Find me when you’re done.”
I swallowed two plates of ham and was just finishing the previous day’s coffee when Cherub strolled into the kitchen and said, “It’s time to cover your eyes.” I wiped my hands on the wallpaper and clapped them over my face. Despite myself, I was excited to see what nonsense he had put together. My heart beat quickly as he led me outside.
“Well?” he said, hopefully.
“My eyes are still covered.”
“Oh! Oh right. You can look now. I hope you like it.”
I did. Of course I did. The sidewalk was in shade by then, but the dipping sun lit up the trees of Washington Square like stained glass. By golden light I read a message written in leaves whose colors shifted from summer green to yellow, orange, flaming red, and petrified brown.
ALL THINGS DIE BUT MY LOVE FOR GILDA CARR
I blotted my eyes and kissed him until he fell off the stoop. Then, at last, I dragged him upstairs.
That was the first time he said he loved me. I told him I loved him too, and he said he was well aware, and we kept telling each other every chance we got. That was the first time around, before he proposed, before I broke his heart, when fun came easily. Years later, when he gave me my second chance and we took to the water, he still said it all the time, but I rarely answered. I didn’t need those words tying me down. But I loved him relentlessly, and he knew it without ever being told.
Surely he knew.
My lungs wanted air. Suddenly, I did too. Cherub Stevens was the finest lover to ever grace the city of New York. Someone had killed him.
That someone deserved to die. And I did not—not yet.
A shard of light caught my eye. I kicked for it but only fell farther away. I wrenched off my shoes, dropping them as an offering to the river’s dead. I could not escape my dress. I kicked and thrashed, eyes on that shimmering light, lungs howling. I got nowhere. And then, without warning, my head broke the surface. The breeze kissed my face and humid air poured into my lungs.
My relief did not last.
The river surged as a silver longboat bore down on me. It grew like a tumor, filling the sky, following no matter how hard I tried to swim out of the way.
“Look out!” I cried. “Look out, goddamn it, there’s a woman down here!”
If they heard, they didn’t care.
Right as it would have rammed me, I ducked under the water, twisting so that the keel caught my left shoulder instead of my head. It hurt. Dear god, it hurt, an explosion of pain so hot I was surprised it didn’t make the water boil. I came up scrambling, reaching with my one good arm for an oar. Just before I touched it, it sprang out of reach.
“Stop!” I shouted, but those oars stopped for nothing. They split the water and the boat was halfway past. Again, and it was nearly gone. With my last bit of strength, I smashed a fist against the hull and screamed something vile.
The oars dropped again. Before they pushed away, an iron hook fell in front of my face. I threw my arm across it and held on as it jerked me out of the water and threw me across the deck of that beautiful ship, where I quivered like a dying fish.
The agony in my shoulder, the burning in my lungs and limbs, the liquor coursing through my blood swept over me. There really was no point being awake.
“Nice fishing,” I said. Before my eyes sagged shut, I recognized the uniforms: Roebling Company flannel and the rainbow silks of Van Alen’s guards. The only face that stood out had eyes the color of Cornelia Prime’s pencils and jowls like hanging meat.
“Have I met you before?” I murmured. “Didn’t I watch you die?”
If he answered, I didn’t hear it. I slept, appropriately, like a corpse.
I woke in a cage.
Four
The sun climbed. It heated the metal of my little prison and scorched every bit of exposed flesh. The skin on my face started to peel. The bottom of my stomach had dropped out, and there was nothing in me but a sucking desire for griddled ham and fried potatoes and runny eggs. I wanted coffee and ice water and tomato juice spiked with raw liquor. I wanted to shovel food down my throat until there was none left on the island, and then I wanted revenge.
When I find the person who killed Cherub, I thought, I shall crush their skull.
When I find them, I shall force them to drink a bottle of Ida Greene’s cheapest gin, flavored with a quarter cup of arsenic.
When I find them, I shall trap them thoroughly, and then I shall force them to peel their own skin and hack their body to bits.
But first, I supposed, I would need to get out of this goddamned cage.
The ceiling was high enough that I could almost kneel, if I didn’t mind the metal digging into my knees. The gate was padlocked, and no matter how hard I kicked, it didn’t come free. I might have picked the lock if I had my burglar’s tools, but they were in my bag and my bag was on the boat, and the boat was, well, not someplace I wanted to return.
I was at the far end of the Long Pier, my back to the swift Hudson current. There was no one in the neighboring cells, no jailer making the rounds. Pressing my face against the cage, I could just make out the crowd on the Boardwalk: couples dressed in white, gangs of men drunk from breakfast and prowling for women, and Peacekeepers paired like lovebirds on every corner. I screamed for help. No one turned their heads.
The wind shifted and I smelled ketchup and powdered sugar, roasted meats and charred vegetables, riding on a current of sizzling batter. My stomach clenched and I hated all of them so much more.
I kicked and screamed and clawed, bloodying my fingertips and straining my voice. Finally I tried to sleep. The cage was not long enough for me to stretch out, so I curled into a ball and tried to imagine I was dozing in the shade of Washington Square on a cool spring day.
Instead I saw Cherub being torn apart.
I was no stranger to blood. I had survived the Battle of Eighth Avenue, when the cream of the city’s teenage gangsters was slaughtered like a herd of sick cattle. I had stabbed men and beaten women. I had sustained beatings myself. But I had never seen anything, never heard of anything, so awful as the massacre on the Misery Queen. Those people hadn’t just been killed. They had been pulped, and as I roasted in that little metal oven, I saw it happen again and again and again.
Cherub’s skin peeled back from his skull.
His perfect smile shattered.
His hands, so coarse and so gentle, crushed into hamburger.
His heart torn from his chest.
I could have made him give up the river. If I’d had the courage or the sense to tell him how badly I wanted something else, he’d have followed me back to the town house. No matter how miserable it made him, he’d have returned to life on land. But it was easier to say nothing, and because I took the easy path, he was dead.
The sun beat down harder. I surrendered to the ache in my joints and stomach and skull. The Boardwalk filled and the smells continued to torture. As the sun burned my hands redder, I fancied the skin was stained with blood—of the children who died at Eighth Avenue, of a man I shot in the stomach, of a gentle printer crushed beneath the wheels of a tram. I rubbed my hands raw but, as expected, they did not come clean.
It was late afternoon when my captors came to call.
Oliver Lee’s tuxedo was immaculate—no smudged cuffs today—and his shoes sparkled in the sun, but his eyes were red and his skin looked drained of blood. Trailing behind him was the blue-eyed man from the boat. I still couldn’t place him, but I didn’t care, because he had a hunk of bread in his hands that was as black and lush as Lee’s tux. I’d never seen anything look so good.
“Miss Carr,” said Lee. His voice was hoarse, so faint I could barely hear. “I never expected to see you in this position.”
Twelve hours prior, I might have said something clever. Instead, I snapped: “Give me the bread.”
“It won’t fit through the bars,” said the other man.
“An easy fix. Let me out.”
Lee shook his head.
“Not until we’ve had a little chat.”
“Then tear it into pieces and shove it through the slats.”
The blue-eyed man tore off wads of bread and forced them through the gaps in the iron. I caught every crumb. Some of my pain backed away. When the bread was gone, he wandered to the far side of the pier to stare at the sky. Lee squatted beside me.
“I am having a very difficult day,” he said.
“You’re not the one who’s trapped in a cage.”
He smacked his hand against the slats. The metal rattled. My head throbbed.
