Westside, page 7
“Why don’t you put your hat back on?” I said. “The glint off your forehead is blinding.”
“That’s no way to talk to the star reporter of the Sentinel city room. That’s no way to talk to Max Schmittberger.”
“I suppose not. Goodbye.”
“Wait—wait. Hold on, lady. Hold on. Is this yours?”
He handed me a card, scorched around the edges:
G. Carr: Tiny Mysteries Solved
“Where did you find this?” I said.
“I think you know. Just like I figure you know what exploded there, and who got, uh, exploded.”
“You’re writing about the explosion at the docks?”
“Trying to. Gish squirms any time you mention the Westside.”
“Gish?”
“Mr. Gischler! City room chief. Don’t you know nothing?”
“Not if I can help it. Now please stop dancing up and down my steps. You’ll wear out the stone.”
He stopped, or tried to. His feet tapped as he talked, or he bit his lips, or his fingers played up and down his frayed lapel.
“We only cover the Westside because the publisher grew up in the Upper West, back when it was fine, and he thinks a little token reporting keeps him in touch with the old neighborhood. Never mind that the guy lives in the biggest, plushest, brightest penthouse on the stem. So anyway, Gish hears about this blast, right, and he says, ‘Schmittberger! Haul it over to the Westside docks,’ and so I haul. Some of the other boys, they don’t like coming this way, but I’m Max Schmittberger and I don’t scare. And what do I find?”
“I couldn’t say.”
“Not much. Police swept the place cleaner than the ladies’ washroom at the Hyperion Hotel. But there was this card stuck half an inch into the dock. Explosion shot it in there like a bullet.”
“Why do you say ‘like a bullet’?”
“Did I? Words just fall out of my mouth, you know. I don’t really pay attention. It’s just an expression. The real question is, G. Carr, who bought it at the docks?”
“The police wouldn’t say?”
“I got foisted off on some gin-soaked wreck at the Fourth. Had about as much vim as a worn-out handkerchief. He didn’t know a damn thing.”
“I can hardly hope to best him.”
“Come on. You gotta have something. Ain’t you been investigating?”
“I’m pursuing a matter tangentially related to the bombing.”
“So it is a bombing. A bombing could be page one.”
“Pardon me. I misspoke. ‘Explosion’ is the better word.”
“Certainly, miss. Certainly.”
His hand rubbed the pocket of his jacket, yearning to reach for the notebook inside.
“Have you a theory?” I asked.
“A thousand. But none fit to print.”
“What’s your personal favorite?”
“If this is a bombing, then there’s only one man in the city could be responsible. Van Alen. There’s a reason they call him Firecracker. You remember ’14, don’t you?”
The month after the fence went up, when it was still flimsy, and the mayor promised it might come down at any moment. A string of bombings up and down the Eastside—banks, theaters, power stations, subway stations, luncheonettes, and the homes of the wealthy. In six weeks, 237 dead, and then the Westside sealed off forever.
“Everybody knows it was Firecracker planted those bombs,” said Max. “One last kiss-off to the Eastside before the door shut for good.”
“It was never proven.”
“But everybody knows.”
“Surely he’s happy with his middle-class kingdom. He has the bazaar, his night-fires, his schools. Why start trouble?”
“Every man that ever had anything wanted a little more.”
“That’s quite profound for the city room.”
“You gonna loop me in on your little investigation, or aren’t you?”
“I assure you, Max, I couldn’t provide you with an inch of copy. Anything that goes boom is far beyond my purview. If you’ll excuse me . . .”
“Surely, miss. Surely.” He pocketed my scorched card. “I’m gonna hang on to this. A souvenir. You hear anything about that bombing or explosion or whatever you want to call it, you can find me in the city room.”
He tipped his cap and stepped backward, grinning like a mule. It would have been a dapper gesture had his foot found the step. I left him sprawled across the pavement, feeling blindly for his hat and his pride.
If my father made notes on the hunger of the night, they would be in his office with all the others. I could throw myself down the pit that had swallowed him, asking questions of the dark, or I could give myself the gift of a much-needed nap. I was still undecided when I reached for the bannister and my hand found empty air instead. I tumbled sideways, airborne, and crashed into the small table where my father once left his house keys. The bannister, that treacherous bit of wood, had deserted me.
“Goddamn it!” I got myself up, rubbing my various damaged parts. The posts of the bannister were shorn off at the base. Actually, no—not shorn. They were smooth, polished, as though the stairs had simply been built without a handrail. First my condiments, now this. I would have cursed more, or kicked the stairs, or simply stood and marveled at the impossible mysteries of the universe, but something far more interesting than a vanished bannister caught my eye. The frame was cracked, the glass was broken, and the photograph made the bile rise in my throat.
It was a family portrait, taken when I was a fat, disgruntled baby. My father held my mother as tight as he could, and she held me, straining her wrists to keep me from wriggling out of her grasp. She looked like she always looked, like the most beautiful woman in the world. I wore an expression of extreme displeasure, but she clutched me to her chest, holding me tight.
Holding me through gloves nearly identical to Edith Copeland’s.
I found the gloves deep in my parents’ closet, in a box of her clothes Virgil never got around to giving away. They were muddy brown, unadorned by the flowers that danced across Mrs. Copeland’s glove, but the brand was the same. They were as roughly cut as the one I’d taken from Thieves’ Market. I could not imagine my mother wearing something so clumsily made.
My mother was Mary Fall, a peculiar creature of New York society. She expended the last of her fortune to buy the town house on Washington Square and spent my youth pretending we still had money, stuffing me into lavish dresses that I would revenge myself against by picking at their barely visible seams during interminable Sunday teas.
I’m told she was delicate, with a bird’s laugh and thick brown hair that fell in curls across her shoulders. Her hair I inherited; her delicacy I forewent. How porcelain Mary Fall was courted and wed by the NYPD’s brilliant barbarian was one of the most powerful love stories of the nineteenth century. Or so I assume—no one ever bothered to tell it to me.
She died of pneumonia when I was ten—a tiny mystery all its own, summer pneumonia, especially since I recall the house smelling like Christmas the day she died. My father kept vigil outside their bedroom, in the least forgiving chair he could find. I lay at the other end of the hall, outside his office, curled in a tight ball, face pressed against the floor, staring down the endless hallway at Virgil, who waited hours for good news that did not come. In my memory, he does not cry. He never cried. But again, in my memory, it smelled of Christmas, so perhaps I am not to be trusted.
My mother had been a Methodist, of all things. Her family buried her as they buried all their people, but Virgil arranged a separate memorial at a Quaker meetinghouse. I don’t know why he chose it, but it was apt. I spent the Methodist funeral squeezed into another of those terribly fine dresses, enduring hours of platitudes about the wonderful place she’d gone now that she had died. At the Quaker service, there were no clichés. It was a long, peaceful silence, broken only occasionally by the words of someone who had known Mary Fall. There was no false comfort, and that suited me. I had lost my mother, and comfort felt wrong.
From then, Virgil went weekly to the Quaker meetinghouse. I don’t know what he did there; I was never invited. He had been drawn into the contemplation of truly large mysteries, cosmic and earthly, and they would consume the rest of his life. He began to ask the question that no one on the NYPD could bear: What was happening to the people of the Westside?
Even as the department refused to admit that the mounting disappearances were anything to be concerned about, Virgil plotted every vanishing, collecting hundreds of pounds of evidence that added up to nothing. Like all those who trouble themselves with big mysteries, as he failed to find answers, he let his mystery grow larger. The vanishings became a question of corruption at the highest levels of government. Every murder, every suicide, every death was part of the same question.
“This city is a cancer,” he bellowed at a particularly unusual press conference in 1910. “And the mayor and his cronies are so many vile, infected cells. The Westside is withering. Corruption has choked the life out of it, and that dead limb will putrefy. You take shelter on the stem. You take shelter in the light. But until the cancer is excised, all our heads are in the noose. Now—are there any questions?”
There were none.
It only takes a few such press conferences to end a career. Virgil was forcibly retired in 1912, and the V. Carr Agency was incorporated a week after his farewell banquet, which he marked with a particularly profane, drunken toast.
When the fence went up, his was the only detective agency remaining on the Westside, and he could have done very well solving the thousand puzzles of our blighted district. Instead, he assaulted the largest mysteries the city had to offer, emptying his bank account and withering his sanity as he barreled toward death.
Mary Fall had been gone nearly twenty years. Hellida and I were perhaps the only people in New York who remembered her name. To me, she was less a person than an idea—beautiful, perfect, funny, and fearless, and stronger than Virgil Carr. I would not let her be tarnished.
I put the gloves back into the box and kicked it hard into the recesses of the closet. My bannister. My mother’s gloves. Push against the Westside, the Westside pushes back.
That’s okay.
I push harder.
Five
I eased the front door shut, counted my breaths, and heard no sound from downstairs. Strange animal sounds came from within the park; screams of joy or pain came from beyond it. A chill spread across my back. I tried to pretend I wasn’t afraid.
As my eyes adjusted, familiar sights rose out of the gloom. Shattered benches, broken streetlights, the twisted railing looking taller than it ever had. The moon was slender as a clipped fingernail; the shadows were deep. Night was less inviting than I remembered.
My foot touched pavement. Two more steps, and my knee crashed into the front gate. I cursed, rather louder than I intended, and Hellida’s front door opened beneath the stoop.
“Is that a burglar?” she cried.
“It’s me.”
“Gilda Carr! Are you trying to shatter my nerves? Get back inside. Quick, flicka, quick!”
“I have work to do.”
“Work can always wait till dawn.”
“There’s someplace I have to go. I can only get in at night. You really needn’t worry.”
“I wish that were true.”
“Go back to sleep. I’ll be back for breakfast.”
Hellida was dressed for bed in a worn flannel nightgown, and she clutched a carving knife in her right hand. Graying blond hair fell limply across her shoulders. Her lips were pursed too tightly to scowl.
“Step inside,” she said. “I’ll have to change.”
“I don’t want you along for this.”
“You want whatever you want, and I’ll be right by your side. Shall I bring the knife?”
“I think we’ll be fine on our own.”
Forty-five minutes later, we were feeling our way through an alleyway just off Twelfth Street, and Hellida was complaining about her coffeepot.
“I’ve had it twenty-two years, and now I can’t lay hands on it. I was fixing coffee this morning, and I turned around to get the paper. When I turned back, it was gone. Perplexing. You didn’t take it?”
“No.”
“You’re certain? You didn’t sneak down into my apartment, crouch outside my door, creep across the floor, and snatch the pot while my back was turned?”
“I hope I’d remember if I had.”
“Has anything strange been going on in your part of the house?”
“No,” I said, lying all too easily.
“Just my coffeepot, then. Just one of those Westside things. I’d thought this sort of nonsense had stopped with your father. Things were always disappearing around him. Cuff links. House keys. Dollar bills. I told him, again and again I told him, ask mad questions, and madness will come home to roost.”
The alley ended. My hands searched the wall until they found the corsetry’s back entrance. I opened a small leather case. Silver instruments gleamed in the dark.
“I don’t like you owning burglar’s tools,” Hellida said.
“They were a gift from my father the year I turned twelve.”
“And did he teach you how to use them?”
“What do you think?”
The latch popped open as gently as a baby opening her eyes.
“We have penetrated Madame Fournier,” said Hellida.
“Don’t be vulgar. Burglary is a noble art.”
We crept through the back room and into the main storeroom, where faint moonlight fought through grimy windows. We kept low and felt our way toward the yellow corsets.
“Just what are we looking for?” said Hellida.
“That damnable crate. I spent all night trying not to wonder what was inside.”
“And?”
“I failed.”
Hellida picked up a particularly fearsome buttercup girdle, which had enough buckles and straps to restrain an inmate at Bellevue. She pressed it to her torso, considered it for a moment, then cast it aside. Some women have better things to worry about than an eighteen-inch waist.
“Call me simple,” she said, “because I know you’ll think this is just another stupid Hellida question, but isn’t there a chance that the crate is full of corsets?”
“Galen Copeland was not murdered for corsets.”
“Who’s to say? Fashion is cutthroat. Men have been killed for less.”
I reached deep into the rack of yellow corsets. The ones in front scratched my cheek, and dust got in my mouth.
“And besides,” she went on, “what business is it of yours how a man chooses to get murdered? Breaking and entering is one thing, but going out after dark is suicidal, Gilda. It reminds me of your father, the year before he left us, when we’d stay up all night drinking cocoa. You’d shake, remember? From the tips of your fingers to the split ends of your hair, and you’d tell me it was only the cold. But you were afraid for him, afraid he might not come back, and I was too. You can’t do that to me again.”
“I owe it to Mrs. Copeland. I—she hired me.”
“Your whole life, you’ve been happy to quit when something gets hard. So quit now.”
“I tried. I couldn’t. I promise, I’m as surprised as you.”
I withdrew my arm from the depths of the corset rack. I stared at the wall, and I stared at my hand, and I tried not to look at Hellida pleading with me to leave.
“There’s a door back there,” I said. “I can’t reach it. We’ll have to move this rack.”
“Yes, of course. Whatever you say.”
Without waiting for my help, she picked it up and moved it silently across the floor. There, faint but unmistakable, was the seam of the hidden door. I pressed on the wall, and it swung open. Beyond was darkness.
I reached inside the door and found a small lantern hanging on the wall. We lit it, dimmed the light, and stepped inside the storeroom, closing the door behind us to hide the glare from any unlikely passerby.
The light swept across the long, dusty storeroom, and I saw it wasn’t just one crate. It was dozens, stacked to the ceiling, going back thirty feet, perhaps more. All with the sigil. All begging me to peek inside.
“You didn’t happen to bring a crowbar?” I said.
“Crowbars are for weaklings.”
Hellida wrapped her hands around the lid of the nearest crate, braced her feet against the side, and ripped it open. She shoved it across the floor, scattering sawdust into the air, and laughed like I hadn’t heard her laugh in years.
“Congratulations, detective,” she said. “Corsets. As many as we want, and factory fresh.”
“Prewar quality,” I said, lifting the corset and holding it to the light. It was periwinkle, the same suffocating model I had tried on. I tossed it aside and it landed, thud, somewhere in the dark.
“Where next?” said Hellida. “We break into the vault at Aylesmere’s, maybe, and try on bridal gowns. Or better yet, we go home.”
“We should,” I said, but instead I picked up the second corset in the box. I ran my hands over it, tracing the stitching, testing the strength of the boning, wondering how much a woman must hate herself to strap herself into one of these every day. When I lowered it back into the box, the light glinted off something in the bottom of the crate.
I yanked out a few more corsets, hurling them over my shoulder, and halfway down the crate, my hands hit glass. I held the bottle to the lantern. The liquid sloshing around in there was crystal clear, and a quick sip, followed by a truly unladylike coughing fit, told me it wasn’t water.
“Copeland was moving liquor,” I said.
“Now, flicka,” said Hellida, finally stern. “I close this crate, and we go home.”
“I won’t stand in your way.”
She took the bottle out of my hand and lowered it back into the crate as though it might explode if mishandled. She was right to. I’m always happy to drink bootleg gin, but even I am not stupid enough to ask where it comes from. In Barbarossa’s New York, those kinds of questions are generally answered with a cut throat.
