Westside Lights, page 6
“This is no time for wit,” he said. “We are in the midst of a catastrophe.”
“I take it you found my boat.”
“The Peacekeepers boarded it after they fished you out of the river. They told me what they saw. What happened there?”
“I slept through it.”
“Jesus, Gilda. This is no joke. This is . . . you have no idea what’s going to happen next.”
He looked over my shoulder. At first I thought he was simply trying to collect himself, but then I realized what he was staring at: a little white speck, some ways down the river but coming up fast. Now I understood why he looked so afraid.
“That’s a police boat,” I said.
“Yes.”
For the first time since I dove into the river, I felt cold. I saw where this was going, as sure as that ship was sailing up the river, and I did not approve.
“But this is a Westside crime.”
“And if it were a stolen purse or a broken window, they’d be happy to leave it to our Peacekeepers. But this is a massacre. Of rich Eastsiders. There was no keeping them away.”
I pulled my shoulders as straight as the cage would allow.
“And what does that mean for me?”
“That’s just what I’m here to discuss. As far as the NYPD is concerned, the District does not exist. If they can’t see it, they can’t police it, and we’ve all worked very hard to keep them from having to see. I spent all morning on the Eastside conferring with our contacts in the department, and the deal we worked out is this: their boat ties up, but they don’t come ashore. We hand you to them. Life in the District goes on as it always has.”
“That is a wonderful agreement for everyone besides Gilda Carr.”
He squeezed his mouth tight. He looked to be in terrible pain. He tried to speak, but his voice broke. He collected himself and tried again.
“You’re my friend, Gilda. I’ve always meant that, no matter what you think of me. I’m not going to let . . . I’ll join you on the boat. I’ll see to it that you get the full backing of the Roebling Company, and Cornelia Prime assures the same for the Van Alen team. Between us, we have the kind of lawyers that make policemen cry. At this point, what more could you ask?”
There was something appealing about being given over to the police. In the past, my dealings with the law had been with the ragged remains of the Westside NYPD—drunks and lunatics, mostly, with a few sadists thrown in for seasoning. The men cruising up here on their boat, which gleamed as brightly as the white suits on the Boardwalk, would not be like that. They would be clean, efficient, ready to tell me what to do and where to go and when to die. Only the image of Cherub gluing leaves to the sidewalk held me back.
“I’m afraid I’m too busy at the moment to take a vacation at the Tombs,” I said. “Someone killed the man I loved. How can I let that go?”
He buried his face in his hands. When he came up for air, he said, “I know. I know. But there is no other way. This is too big for you. It’s too big for me. Marka and her friends were famous, and they had powerful friends. Every paper in the city is screaming for justice. The police are under immense pressure. Lieutenant Koszler—”
The name went through me like a cleaver. I banged my fist on the cage. Lee shut up.
“What was that name?” I said. My voice was calm and still, but my heart was threatening to burst out of my chest.
“Emil Koszler. My contact at Centre Street. Used to be a Westside man. Do you know him?”
Oh yes. I absolutely did.
“Release me from this cage.”
“Not until you agree to—”
“Open the goddamned lock!”
I thrust my fingers through the slats and got as close to Lee as my captivity allowed. He shook. It occurred to me that I had been approaching this from the wrong angle. He needed me as badly as I needed him. This was no time to beg.
“The moment those police step onto this dock,” I said, “your business is under threat, and for a Roebling man, that’s a matter of life and death. You want me to board their boat? I won’t even consider it until you let me out of this cage.”
Lee ran his hands across his hair. There was no point to the gesture—his mop was slicked down so tight, it would take a crowbar to loosen a strand—but perhaps it made him feel better. He stared down the river. The police were almost here.
“Conforto!” called Lee. The other man returned, pulling at the ring of keys that dangled from his hip. After an interminable search, he found the one to my cage. As he popped the lock, I saw he had stumps where his pinkie fingers once had been. Interesting.
The door to the cage swung open. I ducked out of it. Things in my back cracked and fire shot through my joints, but I held myself straight. Even without my boots, I was nearly as tall as Oliver Lee.
“I’ve known Koszler since he walked a beat for the Fourth Precinct. His uniform was tattered and he rarely opened his mouth, because he was shy about the gaps in his teeth. He was known to celebrate the end of a shift by finding a drunk to beat senseless. At Eighth Avenue, I saw him put bullet after bullet into children’s chests. Their bodies clogged the gutters.”
The mention of Eighth Avenue put a jolt through Conforto. Perhaps that was where I last saw his face. I wondered whom he fought for, and how he was still alive.
Lee glanced down the river and saw the NYPD boat was nearly upon us. He got a little more pale. He tried to speak, but I shouted him down.
“The last time I encountered Emil Koszler, he was forcing a friend of mine to kneel in a heap of broken glass. I buried a broken bottle in his back and twisted until I hit bone.”
I said it like I was proud of what I’d done, but I’d never gotten comfortable with it. I still had dreams of plunging bottles into Emil Koszler’s back, and every time I woke up certain I could feel his blood.
“The lieutenant has spent two years on the Eastside,” said Lee. “I’m sure he’s put all that behind him.”
I looked at him like he was an utter lunatic.
“A Westsider never forgets,” grunted Conforto in agreement.
The NYPD boat pulled up to the dock. Police swarmed across its deck like eager cockroaches. A rope flew through the air. Conforto caught it and busied himself with tying it to the pier. From deep within the boat, there echoed the thud of wood.
Thump, thump, thump. Each impact sent a shock through me. I remembered the way Koszler had squirmed underneath me when I buried that glass against his spine. I had always counted it a blessing that I never saw him again. I did not want to see what I had done.
Another thump, and Koszler emerged. His skin was blotchy; his lips were swollen. When I’d known him he’d been skinny, ratlike. His face had plumped out in the last two years. On some men, that would have been an improvement. He just looked like a fat rat. He stood at the top of the gangway, breathing heavy, leaning on a gleaming black cane.
“You got her?” he said. His voice had not changed. I wanted to answer him, but my throat was painfully dry.
Lee put a gentle hand on my shoulder.
“It’s time to go. As I said, we will do everything to make sure you’re given fair treatment. If you say you didn’t kill the people on the boat, I believe you. We are friends, after all.”
Perhaps we were. But I was past the point where friends could help. I felt my hand curling into a fist.
Koszler tapped his cane on the deck of his ship. Lee tried to look stern. It didn’t suit him. This man had always tried to be nice to me. He’d laughed at my jokes, bought me drinks, asked me to dance when Cherub was away. He really had been a friend.
He had also put me in a cage.
“Now, Miss Carr. Now—”
I punched him in the throat. Men hate that. He collapsed like his legs had been dynamited. The cops on the boat scrambled for the gangway, shouting curses. Conforto held his arms wide, blocking the path to shore. He smiled, waiting to see what mistake I would make next.
I planted a foot on the roof of my cage.
“There’s a reason most prisons have walls,” I said, and flung myself over the edge.
I was in the air for a long while before the Hudson took me back.
The current grabbed like a noose. By the time I spluttered to the surface, my little prison was very far away. I was closer to the middle of the river than the shore. A gull flicked its head at me, neck cocked, trying to figure out if I was food. I slipped back under the water, kicked, and surfaced again. The bird was gone.
Since we came to the river, Sundays had been for swimming lessons. Cherub insisted on it, not because he was particularly concerned about my safety, but because he was a passable diver and liked showing off. Between dives, he would stretch out across the deck of the Queen, letting the sun dry the water on his chest, and opine.
“You can’t trust the Hudson,” he’d say, as though he’d spent his life on the river and not a scant few months. “Let it grab you, and there’s no telling where you’ll end up. We’re lucky to be where we are—on it but not in it, not quite onshore, not quite off. We see the way it bends, we know how quickly it can change its mind. We have to learn how to dip in and out.”
I’d press myself against him until I felt the water on his body seep through my bathing costume and soak my skin. It was a lovely place to be.
“And should the river take me, Captain Stevens, whatever shall I do?”
“Kick and kick and don’t stop kicking until the water’s shallow enough to stand.”
It wasn’t clever advice, but that didn’t make it wrong. I thrashed until I reached the rotted remains of the nearest pier. After a day in the cage, it almost felt good to move. I took one heaving breath and was about to collapse into the mud when I heard the far-off barks of the police. They’d seen me go into the river; they’d seen me surface. They would be here soon.
A plain of mud sloped into the darkness beneath the Boardwalk. I hobbled away from the water, ankle deep in muck, following the fragments of sun that peeked through the cracks in the wood. With the light came bits of conversation—the chatter of a world that felt hundreds of miles away.
“Cold beer!”
“I’ll break your neck.”
“Hot donuts!”
“Kiss me again.”
“Hot donuts, cold beer!”
“You stupid bastard!”
“Cold beer!”
“Being with you is like making love to a sewing machine.”
“Cold beer!”
“At least come back to the boat.”
Their footsteps were like machine gun fire. Their conversation didn’t matter at all.
The mud stopped at a wet stone wall that looked like it had been imported from the dungeon of some grisly French prison. I turned uptown, staying under the Boardwalk, praying for a break in the wall. Water splashed beneath my feet. The tide was coming in.
I walked faster. The wall continued, unbroken and impenetrable. At the edge of the Boardwalk, there were two heavy splashes as a pair of cops dropped into the water. They stared at me but did not advance. At first, I thought they were afraid of venturing beneath the Boardwalk, but they were simply blinded by the sun. It would not take long for that to change.
They took a step under the Boardwalk, their hands shielding their eyes, squinting into the gloom. God knows I should have stayed put, hidden, bargained, fought, but all of that would have meant trusting my luck, and my luck had been rancid.
I ran.
The water was knee deep and rising fast. The moment my foot hit it, they heard me. Perhaps they saw me, too. They shouted things—clever remarks like “Stop!” and “Get back here!” I did not oblige. I ran on aching legs, my bare feet slurping in the mud, the filthy water doing its best to drag me down. They closed the gap quickly.
The river bent and the wall bent with it. I followed the curve and, for a moment, I was out of their sight. I picked up my knees, begging my body for a little more speed. It was too much to ask. My foot came down hard on a jagged piece of rock. My legs went out from under me. I landed on all fours.
When I got my head above water, I heard them behind me, breathing hard, very close. I stuck out my hand, looking for something to grab on to. For the first time since I entered that wet hell, I touched wood. It was a door, hip high, half buried in the muck. I kicked it hard, forcing it open an inch or two.
“I see her!” cried one of the cops, terribly pleased with himself. They were just a few feet away.
I rammed my shoulder against the little door. The surf spilled into it, pressing it open farther, enough for me to squeeze myself through. Splinters sank into my skin as I squirmed into a tunnel of soft, stinking mud.
A hand closed on my ankle, calloused and cold.
I jerked my leg into the passage and braced my feet against the little door. The darkness was complete.
The cops threw their full weight against the door. My shoulders sank into the mud. I straightened my legs. The door stayed closed.
“This is stupid,” said one of the cops.
“Even so.”
“Let’s go up and tell him we saw her.”
“Koszler will skin us.”
“I know, I know. But I can’t take another minute under here.”
“She’s right here, Frank. A girl. We can’t get beat by a girl. Let’s try the door one more time.”
I scrambled up the lightless tunnel and kicked a heap of mud against the door. The cops heaved and wheezed and cursed and, finally, gave up.
“Forget it,” said the one who was not Frank. “We’ll tell ’em where we saw her. We’ll grab her the second she comes up for air.”
Their plan was not terribly sporting, but it would work. I would have to find another way out.
Five
The tunnel squeezed like a fist, tighter and tighter as I got farther from the door. In that absolute blackness, it was hard to judge distance, but I crawled for what seemed like a long time, twisting my hips and squirming my shoulders, fighting for every miserable inch. There was air, but not much, and it quickly grew stale.
And to think, just a few hours prior, I had been relaxing in the sun in my own personal riverfront cage. As I forced onward, continuing simply because I was certain I would suffocate if I tried to stay still, I wondered why I had bothered to run. It would have been so simple to surrender to the police and ask Emil Koszler to cut my throat and dump me in the river. Perhaps my corpse would have found Cherub’s. Instead it seemed I would die here, choking on dirt in a muddy tomb, refused even the chance to rot alongside my beloved.
But surrender would have meant giving up whatever hope I had of finding the people who killed him and inflicting upon them some measure of pain. That vile hope was all I had, and it pushed me steadily on.
The mud was infinite. It caked my hair and fingernails, clogged my eyes and hung so heavy on my nose that every breath was a battle. I shut my eyes against it and kept crawling. It’s not like there was anything to see. The tunnel grew more and more cramped, until there was not a part of me the mud did not touch, and still I fought on, inch by agonizing inch, another awful hour in what was proving to be a remarkably awful day.
And then came the stench. It started as a tickle in my nose, a pleasant distraction from the wet rank earth. It was sweet, with a playful tang, like the favorite candy of some hideous child. It quickly became suffocating, clogging my nose and filling my throat, making my eyes water through the mud.
As the stench grew stronger, a sickly gray light filtered into the tunnel. It was one of the most beautiful things I’d ever seen. The tunnel sloped up sharply and that smell dragged me along like fishhooks in my nostrils. It took so much work not to gag that I hardly noticed when the tunnel reached its end.
Gray light filtered through a canvas flap. I pushed it open and tumbled onto a coarse woven rug. My body burned, inside and out, and I found myself divided between the need to breathe and the fear that another taste of that foul, sweet air would make me vomit. Before I could make up my mind, the tip of an umbrella jammed itself under my collarbone.
I sat up straight and saw the woman whose peace I had disturbed: Lady Birdlady. Her floral hat was gone, and her white hair floated like a halo around her head. She’d been angry when we met. Now her rage was volcanic.
I didn’t have the time.
I smacked the umbrella away and got to my feet. My legs worked badly. I forced them across the room, a candlelit windowless box whose wooden walls were painted a sickly, peeling green. The floor was crowded with faded rugs and oversized furniture that had once been expensive. I reached for the door. A swift blow from the woman’s umbrella knocked my hand away.
“What are you doing in my wall?” she said.
“Having a picnic.”
I reached for the door again. She bashed her shoulder into me, knocking me across the floor, and leveled her umbrella at my throat.
“You’re the girl, the human girl, the one doesn’t know how to treat a gull. What happened to you?”
I tore the umbrella from her hand and tossed it over my shoulder. She lunged for it, and I slipped past her.
“You mustn’t go in there,” she screamed. I had no interest in listening to, well, anyone, and so I opened the door.
This was an error.
The doorway led not to a hallway, not to the street. It opened onto a closet—or perhaps it would be more accurate to call it a cavern—clawed into the mud as roughly as my tunnel had been. The space was low, rising just to my jaw, but cut so deep into the earth that I could not see a back wall. It was filled to hip height with feather mattresses that had been torn to shreds.
Except that feather mattresses do not stink like that, and feather mattresses do not ooze.
They were birds. Hundreds of rotting birds, the ones on top freshly dead, the ones on the bottom nothing but wads of feather and flesh dripping milky white. Their blank eyes stared at me, as hard as ball bearings. Their feet were wrinkled leather; their beaks a brittle point.
They all looked like Grover Hartley.
I slammed the door and spun on the balls of my feet. Lady Birdlady stood pointlessly in the center of the floor. Before I quite knew what I was doing, I had the lapels of her suit gripped in my fists. She let me do it. The fight had gone out of her. It had not gone out of me.
