City of Dreams

by Martin, William

  Fanny said to Gil, “My girls need their rest.” Then she put out her hand. “Unless you pay double.”

  Gil said, “I’m not here for fuckin’, and I got no money.”

  “Well, dearie, this here’s a business. And time is money. We sell time with pretty girls. You can do with it what you want. Ain’t that right, Leaner?”

  Leaner grunted.

  Gil brought his face so close to Fanny’s that he could smell the grease in her makeup. “If that fire gets here, you won’t have a business. So instead of callin’ in the Leaner to scare me, you should put him up on the roof with a bucket of water.”

  The blind Negro stopped playing the flute, “I do smell smoke, Miz Fanny.”

  The old whore licked her yellow teeth and shifted her eyes to Leaner. “Maybe you better see what’s happenin’ outside.”

  Leaner went for the door. The music started again. And Gil went up the stairs.

  “That’ll cost you, Gil Walker,” cried Fanny. “Or Leaner’ll beat it out of you.”

  On the second floor, a man was stepping out of a room. He did not make eye contact with Gil. In a whorehouse, some customers would look a man in the eye and some looked at the carpet. Some were flush and free, some were married and skulking.

  Gil pushed open Loretta’s door: a bed, a chest, a woman sitting in front of a mirror, combing her hair. She stood and pulled her shift around herself. “Gil!”

  He picked up the carpetbag from the corner and threw it onto the bed. “Pack your things. I have the gold. I’ve hid it. We’re leaving.”

  “But, Gil—”

  “No time to waste.”

  “But . . . Fanny and the Leaner.”

  Gil pulled the linen sheet from the bed, picked out the corner that looked the cleanest, and tore a piece with his teeth. “Wipe your face.”

  She took the linen, hesitated a moment, as if she knew the step she was taking, then she did it. The rouge and white powder left streaks, and tears washed down through her mascara. But she smiled.

  “That’s better,” he said. “Now hurry.”

  She finished wiping, gave a quick glance in the mirror, then shoved her things into the bag. Dresses, shoes, shifts, the matched mahogany boxes he had given her. Then she picked up the corset.

  He snatched it from her and told her she wouldn’t need it.

  “I was hopin’ you’d say that.”

  “And put on comfortable shoes. We got some runnin’ to do.” He glanced out the window at the reddening sky. Then he took her winter cape from the back of the door. “Wear this. It’ll keep the sparks off.”

  “But, Gil”—she grabbed his arm—“can we really get away?”

  “You have my word.” He reached into his pocket and pulled out the crown finial. “I don’t have anything fancy to give you just now. But take this. The night I got it, things stared changin’ for me. It’s my promise that they’ll change for you, too.”

  FANNY AND THE Leaner were waiting at the bottom of the stairs.

  “Why ain’t you up on the roof?” Gil said to Leaner.

  “Fire may never get here,” said Leaner. “I looked.”

  Gil tried to push past him. “Out of the way.”

  “I want my pay,” said Fanny, “and she’s goin’ nowheres.”

  “Ain’t you heard?” said Loretta. “It’s a free country. You was there when they read the Declaration.”

  “The country might be free for streetwalkin’ whores,” said Fanny, “and it might be free for reg’lar folks—”

  “Say, Miz Fanny,” said the slave, “is it free for blind niggers, too?”

  “Shut up and play.” Fanny kept her eyes on Loretta. “I made a contract on you, dearie. Hot food and a roof over your head, so long as you do your work in bed.”

  Gil slipped his hand around the cat’s paw in his pocket. “There’ll be no roof, soon enough, so there’ll be no contract neither.”

  Leaner moved toward them, and Gil snapped the cat’s paw into Leaner’s jaw, dropping him where he stood.

  Fanny screamed, “Murder!”

  Gil and Loretta raced out the door and into the rain of firebrands and sparks. The beast had eaten its way to within a few blocks of Saint Paul’s Chapel. The sound of it was like a great hurricane wind.

  Gil said, “This whole neighborhood’s goin’. Let’s get the gold and get to a boat.”

  They hurried across the street and went through a gate into the churchyard.

  “Did you bury it?” asked Loretta.

  A man ran past them from somewhere with a ladder over his shoulder.

  “We need help! Help!” The rector stood at the foot of a ladder leaning against the back of the chapel. Nearby two men were working well pumps, while others were trying to organize a line to pass buckets all the way from the river. And the buckets were rising up the ladder, and water was playing onto the roof, and sparks were sizzling angrily.

  “We need more men,” cried the rector, “on the other side of the roof!”

  “The church, Gil,” said Loretta. “Can we help? The rector been good to you. He been good to us.”

  “That he has.”

  A firebrand landed on the roof. Someone shouted to stomp it out, and the rector called again for help.

  And Gil Walker did something he had been doing more often. He stuck his neck out. He told Loretta to stay close to the church because it was made of good New York stone. Then he told the rector, “I promised to come back, Reverend.”

  “Well, bless you, Gil Walker. Take the pump.”

  Gil grabbed the handle and went to work, while Loretta jumped up on the ladder and slung buckets.

  Gil pumped and pumped, bucket after bucket, and knew that he was doing something good in all this terror, saving something worth saving. So when his right arm began to stiffen he changed to the left and pumped some more.

  Then he heard a shout: “There’s one, right at the pump! Arrest him!”

  Gil realized then that he should have killed Corporal Morison, because here he came, sobered by fire and filled with anger, leading a group of marines through the streets.

  The rector shouted that they could not arrest a man who was saving God’s house, but Corporal Morison said, “There’s soldiers comin’ right now to help you, Father, but this here is one of the incendiaries. We’re arrestin’ him.”

  And as they dragged him away, Loretta shouted, “Gil! Gil! Where should I go?”

  Gil might have shouted the name of the Queen’s Head, but he feared that the tavern was gone . . . or of Haym Salomon, but he feared that if the British were rounding people up, the Jew was sure to be one of them. So he said, “The Woodward house. See a maid named Nancy. Tell her you’re a friend of the Bookworm. She’ll help you.”

  She held up the finial. “And what about this?”

  “The Lord seeth all and loveth all!” he answered.

  iii.

  The fire burned west to the river, north to the campus of King’s College.

  By morning, a swathe of smoldering black rubble reached from the Whitehall slip, up Broad Street, across Broadway at the Bowling Green, and eight blocks north. A third of the city lay in ruins. Even mighty Trinity Church was no more than a chimney and a pile of charcoal.

  Hundreds of new-made homeless had fled to the grassy safety of the Common, where some collected now in clusters, and some wandered in search of loved ones, and others simply sat and stared at the ground or at the smoke still blowing like fog across the face of the sun.

  But St. Paul’s remained, its roof glistening with the baptism of water that men had been pouring all night to fight a baptism of fire. Dr. Inglis had opened the chapel doors and set up tables to serve hot tea that even rebel sympathizers did not reject.

  On the northern edge of the Common, two stone buildings also stood. The Provost Jail and Bridewell Prison rendered unto Caesar (and the king) as St. Paul’s rendered unto God (and the king). The Bridewell faced Broadway. It was long and low, built in that style of b
alance and symmetry named for the king’s own father. The Provost, on the Post Road, resembled a college building with dormers, cupola, and foursquare four-story solidity.

  But symmetry and solidity served only discipline (and the king). In both jails, the usual debtors and criminals had been joined by rebels captured on the battlefield and by some two hundred suspected incendiaries rounded up during the fire.

  Gil Walker stood in the Provost’s Chain Room, one of two long cells on the second floor. He could not sit down because scores of men crowded in around him. Some he knew, most he had never seen before, but all smelled of soot and sweat, of fear and the faint odor of urine.

  The British had been in power for barely a week, but the reputation of the provost marshal, a burly thug named Cunningham, had spread like an infection. Before the war, the Sons of Liberty had made him kneel on the Common and decry the king. Then they had ridden him out of town on a rail. Now he was taking his revenge, torturing some prisoners and hanging others, all without due process or the permission of General Robertson.

  Cunningham . . . Robertson . . . what did it matter? If the last week had made anything plain to Gil Walker, it was this: he was no longer the master of his own destiny. When he faced his fate—a musket ball or a ball of flame—it would be no use to avoid it. Like all the souls crammed into that cell, he was part of something so large that it would roll on under its own weight and grind them all to dust in its own good time. So the best course was simply to do what was right and let fate make its decisions.

  Nevertheless, when the doors of the Chain Room swung open and the guards shoved prisoners in or pulled them out, Gil put as many men in front of him as he could, because those who were pulled out seldom came back.

  Around noon, he felt his eyes droop. He wanted to sleep, but there was nowhere to lie down, and when he closed his eyes, he saw the horrors of the night before:. . . the old woman cursing . . . Loretta crying out as he was dragged away . . . the erupting spire of Trinity Church . . . Big Jake with blood bubbling at his nostrils, saying . . . what?

  Someone moved, and Gil was able to slip into a space along the wall. He leaned a shoulder against the cool stone, closed his eyes, and heard a thirst-rasped voice:

  “Perhaps you wish now that you rejoined the Bookworm at Harlem, eh?”

  Gil looked into the face of Haym Salomon. “They arrested you, too?”

  “In some places they would arrest me because I am a Jew. Here, they arrest me because I am a patriot. They took me as a spy last night. They brought me before General Robertson this morning.”

  “Robertson, not Cunningham?”

  Salomon shrugged. “I was lucky in that, anyway.”

  There came a sound of clanking chains, a heavy key turning in a heavy lock, the cell door swinging open. Four tall Hessians in blue uniforms and mitred brass helmets forced their way into the cell, bayonets first, and began to growl in that aggressive guttural language. They were calling a name: Hiller. John Hiller.

  Gil noticed a skinny little man, whose clothes marked him as a schoolmaster, cowering in the corner.

  The Hessians swung their bayonets around and again growled the name.

  Those who knew John Hiller moved aside, as if they preferred that his fate should visit him rather than them.

  The little man looked up at the Hessians and said, “I have done nothing.”

  The Hessians gestured with their bayonets and spoke more German.

  Then Haym Salomon spoke . . . in German.

  The Hessians turned to the sound of their own language and answered.

  Salomon smiled and said, “Danke schöen, herr soldats.” Then he looked to the corner where John Hiller was trembling in a puddle of his own piss. “You can go. Your Tory master says that his children need their tutor and that you are no incendiary. He has vouched for you to the provost marshall.”

  The little man stopped trembling but finished pissing. He thanked Salomon and added, “I am no incendiary.”

  “None of us are!” shouted a burly blacksmith who pushed through the cell and shouted it again, right into the face of one of the Hessians.

  The guard looked at him for a moment, as if he were a dumb beast, then skulled him with the butt of his musket. Then two Hessians led the tutor to freedom while two more dragged the blacksmith out by the feet.

  THAT NIGHT, GIL and Salomon sat together and took their first prison food, a cloudy broth that tasted like chicken fat and trampled grass.

  “They use the Hessians as guards because there are so many of us,” said Salomon, “and the Hessians are so brutal.”

  “Ferocious fighters, too, or so I’ve heard,” said Gil.

  “Mercenaries, mostly . . . peasants, vassals to the prince of Hesse-Cassel. He sells their services to other monarchs, like the British king. Their discipline is harsh. Their pay is a pittance. Their profit comes from plunder. But I will speak to them in their own language. It may bring us better treatment.”

  “Until they hang us.”

  “Or release us,” said Salomon.

  “Release us? You Jews are dreamers.”

  “We Americans are dreamers. Otherwise we would not have rebelled.”

  “My friends said we were fools to rebel. Now, two of them are dead . . . or three.”

  “Then honor them,” said Salomon with sudden anger. “Do not despair. Despair is a sin against God and the gift of life he has given you.”

  Gil sipped at the soup and looked around at the stone walls. “Most of the men in this cell are in despair.”

  “Despair? You think you are in despair? Let me tell you about despair.” Salomon drained his soup. “About a boy who had to leave his family when he was sixteen.”

  “You?”

  “The Poles decided to tax Jews for being Jews. My parents could not pay for me. So I left home . . . in despair. But I left determined. I worked in many countries, Spain, Germany, France. I learned their languages. I learned the business of currencies and how to exchange one for another and take a little profit along the way. I brought this knowledge to America, and New York welcomed me. So don’t despair.”

  “Were you ever in jail before?”

  Salomon shook his head.

  “It’s easier not to despair,” said Gil, “if you’re in France and not jail.”

  Salomon shrugged, as if to say that he had no answer to that.

  So Gil finished his soup and put his head back. This time, the images went away and he slept. And when he awoke in the morning, he remembered Big Jake’s last words: “Do somethin’ good with that gold.”

  OVER THE NEXT few days, Gil watched Salomon make friends with the Hessians, talk to them in their own language, and earn better rations for the men in the Chain Room.

  Then, on the fourth morning, two Hessians came in, came straight for Salomon, and dragged him out.

  And that, thought Gil, was the last he would see of his friend. Respectful speaking meant nothing in the Provost Jail, especially for a Jew charged with spying. And once Cunningham was done with the spies, he would turn to the incendiaries.

  The British believed that Americans had started the fire to deny them winter quarters. The Americans believed that the British had started it themselves. A few believed that it had begun by accident in a tavern. But people all over New York wondered why so many fires had erupted so quickly, not only on Beaver Street, but on Broadway and Broad Street, and in John Blunt’s house on New Street, too. At least the Queen’s Head had survived.

  This was what men discussed in the Chain Room, because their loved ones had been allowed to speak to them through the grate in the front door, usually for a price.

  Gil hoped that none of them had been on New Street the night of the fire, or they might kill him right there, for all the trouble he had brought on them.

  And he wondered why Loretta had not come to the grate to speak to him. Had she fled? Or had Fanny Doolin found her and forced her back to her indenture?

  Those questions soon faded, how
ever, because two Hessians came in, came straight for Gil, and dragged him out, too.

  In the hallway below were two chambers. A turn to the right led into the office of Cunningham—judge, jury, and executioner. A turn to the left led into the Long Room, where guards awaited Cunningham’s bidding.

  The Hessians pushed Gil into the Long Room.

  And the first face he saw was beefsteak red, edged in a white wig: Cunningham himself. The burly provost was stalking toward him, looking him up and down as if he were vermin, and stalking out.

  So, thought Gil, there would not even be an interrogation, only a condemnation.

  He peered toward the end of the room, expecting to see the hangman holding his noose or a pair of Hessians holding truncheons. Instead, he saw Haym Salomon, a Hessian officer, and a Tory named Mr. Tongue, a small and precise man who wore no wig and dressed in the brown coat and waistcoat of a working merchant.

  Tongue was reading from a report. He looked up and said to Gil, “A Corporal Morison testifies that he saw you running through the street the night of the fire. He says you assaulted him with a bag. This Jew says that you were working for him.”

  Gil looked at Salomon, whose impassive expression told him that the question was no trick. So Gil said, “I work for many men. I work at the Queen’s Head, too.”

  “Yes,” said Tongue. “They vouch for you.”

  “Ze bag?” said the German.

  Salomon said to Gil, “General Heister wants to know what was in the bag. But as I told him, you were carrying bottles of wine.”

  “Yes,” said Gil, picking up on a story that he had told Salomon earlier. “I was bringing wine to the Holy Ground, so British officers would have something to . . . to tickle their palates while the girls tickle their . . . their pricks. . . . Beg pardon, sirs.”

  “Pricks?” said the German general.

  Salomon translated, and the general laughed.

  That, thought Gil, was a good sign. No nooses, no truncheons, and a laughing officer in Hessian blue.

  It seemed that General Heister had heard about the Jew who could speak their language and understood exchange rates. He had concluded that such a man would be a helpful one to work with Tongue as a purveyor of goods for the Hessians in New York.