The Styx

by Jonathon King

  Somehow, seeing Danny up close shielded him of the allure of it all. Instead he watched and memorized faces, names, the knowing winks, and the strange vernacular of a dozen languages and accents.

  He may have admired his brother’s way of dealing with the streets, but when Michael and big Jack got the chance to join the police, they both got hired on the spot with Sweeney’s recommendation. They did some minimal training and were sent out as fodder to manage the traffic on Broadway, dancing in between the horse wagons and push carts and the pedestrians moving to and from the elevated and plowing beneath the iron structures. After the day’s street duty they’d be called in as muscle in the so-called vice sweeps of the west side of Manhattan in Hell’s Kitchen or to quell skirmishes between their own Irish brothers and the Negros living nearby in the San Juan Hill section.

  After three years Byrne knew he was not made for the job. He lacked the ruthlessness of his sergeants and shrank at the orders of the ward bosses who called for the outright beatings of citizens who Byrne could plainly see simply couldn’t afford to live in the neighborhoods or were of the wrong ethnic persuasion to stay there. He was also too adept at recognizing the graft and payoffs being made to authorities on a regular basis, a detailed accounting of which he’d brought to upper command only to be told to put his sharp eyes and ears to better uses and keep his Irish yap shut.

  It was Captain Sweeney who saved him yet again and got him assigned to a special unit that was assembled to provide security against looting during the massive reconstruction of the Grand Central Terminal on Forty-second Street. There Byrne’s eye and ear for both graft and outright theft gained the attention of the private contractors who cared more about their money than the ethnicity or social standing of those ripping them off.

  When the Pinkerton agency made inquiries about hiring him away from the police two years ago, Byrne didn’t hesitate. Now, after receiving Danny’s telegram, it was he who’d gone to the agency bosses to ask them if he could have a position on a security team for the railroads. They’d been surprisingly quick to assign him. He now had an eight o’clock appointment on board a southbound train to Washington D.C. and points beyond.

  So it was that Michael Byrne, the last of a New York immigrant family, found himself walking across East Houston in the chill dawn, skirting around a short line of Colonel George Waring’s sanitation wagons. There he slowed to watch a group of men in white uniforms who were armed with ropes and a jury-rigged slide as they loaded the half frozen carcass of a horse that had been left where it dropped by some unlucky freight man overnight. Normally the crew would be shoveling black snow, a mixture of ice and garbage and refuse that was piled alongside the street, which would then be dumped in the East River. A dead horse was an occasional break in the routine. Byrne passed quietly and made his way west on Houston. His plan was to slide along the northern edge of the Bowery—better to avoid any trouble with the gang boys there who no doubt wouldn’t be awake and out of their dens as of yet, but why take the chance. In the now dull light he could see the raised rails of the El running above Second Avenue. He estimated he had four miles to negotiate to reach Grand Central, but turned up First Avenue anyway. He wanted to walk his city one final time.

  Heading north, he lengthened his gait on the wide sidewalks, absorbing the signage of a hundred businesses as he passed: a cutter displayed a giant pair of scissors at Third Street; a sausage maker had a huge worst protruding from his first floor shop at Fourth. At St. Marks Place the family crest of the Medici family with its three gilt balls indicated a pawnbroker. Byrne stopped at the intersection and looked east, where he could now see the skeletal trees of Tompkins Square, and he touched the side of his face with his fingertips where the bruise from last night was still tender, but he smiled at the recollection of his wand against the back of the head of a Five Pointer.

  The farther north he marched the better the business venues. Still, most of them had adopted an old world style of hanging their signs out over the sidewalks to gain attention: an enormous pair of eyeglasses advertised an optician; an outsized cutout of a violin for a musical instrument shop.

  Soon he began to move through areas of a class where he rarely traveled unless on police business and where, as a citizen, he didn’t belong. Large, multistoried homes of stately architecture adorned the side streets, although age and the city’s constant soot and pollution had stained their facades. Even the rich could not partition off the air. Past Fourteenth Street, he glanced west and could see the buildings of Stuyvesant Square Park, named after one of the richest patriarchs of the city, where he had once delivered a man of means to the New York Infirmary after a beating in a brothel down on Bowery. It was all done quietly of course, but despite warnings from his superiors, Byrne had never forgotten the man’s name and had tucked it away for some future use.

  His ability to remember even the most mundane details was something Captain Sweeney had both praised Byrne for and warned him against.

  “You’ve a sharp mind, lad. Wasted down here and truth be told, wasted in this department, considering. Mind that memory of yours doesn’t get you in trouble, Michael. Some things are best forgotten in this godforsaken life. The reason you’re here, hell, the reason we’re all here is to forget the past and move on to a better future, boy. Don’t let what’s already happened get in the way of what can be.”

  Byrne had listened intently to the man’s lessons. And as was his nature, he would never forget a single word, or anything else that cared to strike his mind.

  Within another mile, he began to feel anxious, a shiver of nerves running into the muscles of his upper back. Ahead were the red brick walls of Bellevue Hospital, the notorious house of the mentally deranged. Byrne had not forgotten a single whispered word that he’d overheard between his mother and neighbors after his father’s disappearance on a winter day years ago.

  “Screechin’ like a madman, he was, Ann Marie.”

  “Wild as a cut beast one minute, starin’ inta the afterworld the next.”

  “It was in his eyes, luv. Ya can’t deny that. His mind was gone.”

  “It’s the best, Ann Marie. Before he turns on ye and the boys.”

  “Three times this month, Ann. Naked in the freezin’ street. He’s insane, woman. Deal with it.”

  His mother always denied it. She would never admit that she’d had their father, her own husband, committed. The tale told to her sons about their father’s accident on the street had been her story and she stuck to it.

  But after he’d been made a cop, Byrne would ask for his father by name at Bellevue and a dozen other madhouses in the city whenever he was in a district on assignment. He tried to make it sound official, as if he were investigating a crime. The intake officials would sometimes pretend to go through the lists, finally looking up to give him a raised eyebrow that only meant that for a bit of a bribe they might have someone who fit the description. He’d even paid a couple of times at first, only to have some poor bugger marched out who was a foot shorter or some dark-skinned European who would no more pass for Irish than an African slave. But even the old white-skinned wretches they’d bring forward, Byrne could always tell by the eyes. He would know his own father’s eyes if he saw them again, even if they had gone insane.

  Today he had to march on. Was he giving up the search for a father whom he still believed was lost if not dead? Yes, he supposed he was. He had someone else to search for now, and a train to Florida was a portal to that quest. As he walked north the smell of the East River blew in, an air salty and fresh mixed with the refuse and excrement piled along its banks. He took out his own cheap watch and checked the time: seven fifteen. The sidewalks around him were already starting to busy up with pedestrians, their nostrils blowing with steam as they made their way through still freezing temperatures. They were mostly laborers at this time of day, men in the trade uniforms of construction and iron workers and steamfitters moving west as he was now along Forty-second Street. Within two blocks h
e could see the enormous train shed of the new Grand Central Station rising up at Lexington Avenue. The glass and steel construction dwarfed everything around it, and it was not yet finished. Already Byrne could hear the clanging echoes of iron against iron, the dragging friction of hard stone being moved. He went through the instructions in his head: meet with Pinkerton detective Shawn Harris on lower track three aboard the southbound train to Washington D.C.

  Byrne had worked the station as a cop, when it was in different stages of construction, but when he entered the enormous waiting area this morning and looked out from the staircase it was still bewildering in size and scope. Sixteen thousand square feet of chiseled and carved stone and marble, and across the way a cast-iron eagle with a wingspan that had to be the equal of any wagon on the street outside. Byrne stood a full five minutes, staring at the movement of people below, appearing in miniature like insects scurrying to assignments unknown. Unconsciously, he reached inside his coat and touched the shaft of his baton. He could not help but think of himself as like them, impotent BBs in a boxcar, as he moved down to join them.

  At an information kiosk he was directed to the southbound Hudson River Railroad line below. In the bowels of the building the noise created by the massive steam engines and their giant wheels screeching along steel rails was an assault on the ears and caused Byrne to narrow his eyes in a grimace. Making his way in the directions given, he had to search through clouds of smoke and steam to find the numbered markers and letterings. He stopped a uniformed railway worker and shouted in his ear: “The Flagler departure?”

  In response he got a finger wagged in a northerly direction, and of the response shouted back, the words “number ninety” was all he could make out. With his shoulders hunched as if to shield his chest from the onslaught, Byrne made his way down the platform, dodging the wheeled wooden carts of baggage handlers and the occasional geyser of steam spurting from the undercarriage of the train until his attention was snatched by a handsome forest-green railcar with the gold gilded lettering “90” expressed on its façade. He took a step back to take in the entire car. Above the row of windows the name Florida East Coast Railway flickered in the same gold lettering. It was Flagler’s private rail car. Since he couldn’t determine by sight which end of the train car held the back door he approached the most northern end, putting one foot onto the iron stair step. When he stood up, his nose met the knee caps of a large man balefully staring down into his face.

  “My name is Shawn Harris,” the man said. “And you had best be one Michael Byrne, lad. Or your ass is mine.”

  After he had assured the estimable Mr. Harris that he was indeed Michael Byrne, he was allowed to board the train “after you wipe the grime and shite from those company shoes, m’boy. We don’t allow that part of New York City to travel aboard Mr. Flagler’s railroad.”

  Once his soles were passable, Byrne climbed up the wrought iron stair and joined Mr. Harris inside the car. The warmth was the first of several surprises Byrne encountered as the two men entered.

  “This, lad, is number 90,” Harris said with a sweep of his giant paw. The grand movement instantly struck Byrne as out of place for a big Irish thug of a former cop. But he soon understood the man’s pride.

  The interior walls of the Mr. Flagler’s private car were paneled in a light-colored satin wood and framed in hand-carved white mahogany that even without the aid of the electric lamps gave the place a feel of sunshine that was the polar opposite of the dark, polluted gray of the city Byrne had just walked through.

  Passing through the sitting areas and a desk surrounded by shelves of gilt-bound books, Byrne was aware that he’d unconsciously pulled in his elbows and turned his hips as not to come even close to touching anything. The furniture was upholstered in decorative floral designs of greens and gold, as were the carpeting and curtains. Harris looked back with a raised eyebrow and warning tip of his chin to the gleaming bronze chandelier as he maneuvered his big head around its cut glass. Byrne looked up, even though he knew his own height did not in danger of touching the object, but he noticed when he did that even the Empire ceilings of the car were put him and decorated with gold leaf. His mouth must have been hanging open, for Harris cleared his throat and winked at the younger man’s show of amazement. As they passed through the dining area he saw the fireplace, flames dancing at a low level, which explained the warmth of the place. He’d barely had time to take in the opulence when Harris opened a door and they both stepped out onto the open balustrade at the opposite end of the car. The shot of cold in his nostrils caused Byrne’s eyes to water, and Harris let him take a second to adjust.

  “That, my young detective, is Mr. Flagler’s sanctuary, and our number one duty is to keep out anyone that don’t belong inside.

  “Mr. or Mrs. Flagler or his chief, Mr. McAdams, are consulted directly before any person is allowed to enter. You screw that assignment up, lad, and you’ll be off the train regardless of whether she’s stopped or still movin’, eh?”

  “I understand, sir,” Byrne said, giving the sergeant his due respect even though he was still measuring the man.

  “Good,” Harris said. “We run shifts on the fore and aft platforms when we’re stopped for loading or unloading and especially when we spend anytime overnight on a side track for any reason.

  “Mr. Flagler considers number 90 to be his hotel room on the road so that’s the way we protect it and him.”

  Byrne nodded, absorbing as he always did, and then working out a response if indeed a response was even called for.

  “Protect from who?” he finally figured it best to ask.

  “Ha!” Harris gave a snort, which Byrne was soon to realize was his standard guffaw at all things he understood and felt others didn’t. “From the same goddamn scalawags and supposed business moochers that you guard him from in the city, boy. ’Cept here they’re more brazen cause maybe they think since they’re on the same train as he is that he’s like their neighbor or something. Most of these wags wouldn’t dare walk up to the man’s house or office in the city but think they can come right through the train cars to his door and tap him for an audience.”

  As a cop, Byrne had indeed once been ordered to provide “security” for the Flaglers’ mansion on Forty-second street, just a few blocks west of Grand Central on a night when a crowd of so-called protesters had gotten their courage up to march against the rich and powerful. After a minor scuffle with a knot of the more drunk and aggressive of them, it had been one of the more boring nights he’d spent on the police force. Yet he knew even now that the small legend of that night had somehow led to this very day.

  “Then there’s the beggars and assorted nasties who try to push their way through when we’re at some common rail stop along the way down south,” Harris said. “But I don’t figure that’s going to be a problem for you, eh, Byrne.”

  And there it was. Proof of what wouldn’t be said to him directly when his Pinkerton commander came and gave him this assignment.

  Harris was giving him that wink and a grin that meant he wanted the story from the origin. Byrne pretended he didn’t understand and simply nodded.

  “Oh, come on lad. At least show me this little piece of weaponry I’ve heard bragged on by men I’d have to admit aren’t easily impressed.”

  Byrne had already anticipated the inevitability of the request, and in a motion like a magician’s flick of a satin scarf, the baton flashed up in his hand with a whisper and was instantly in front of his face, bringing Harris’ eyes up to meet his.

  “I heard there were six men, big men mind you, lyin’ in the gutter outside Mr. Flagler’s house within less than a one minute round,” Harris said, focused on the short steel wand. “Boys said you never skinned a knuckle, never drew your gun.”

  “There were only four,” Byrne said, and then with a snap of his forearm, the baton telescoped to three times its length with a sound like a switchblade being opened. “And they weren’t that big.”

  The dis
play did not make Harris jump, only his hand moved, tucking quickly into the thick breast flap of his coat.

  “Aye,” he said, now measuring the piece of steel from its tip to Byrne’s fist and then looking back up to the younger man’s eyes. “Let’s get you back to the caboose, lad, where we’ll have some breakfast and I’ll fill you in on the rest of your duties before he himself gets here.”

  Byrne jumped down from the steps onto the platform, landing lightly on his toes. He could feel the big Irishman’s eyes on the back of his shoulders and knew it was he who was now being measured. He retracted his baton and tucked it away in an inside pocket where it would be easily accessible.

  CHAPTER 4

  IT was barely eight o’clock and the sun was already heating the back of Ida May Fluery’s indigo blouse. She could feel internal heat rise to the collar at her throat and spread up to the perspiration beading on her wide dark forehead. She was standing on the very same spot where she had so often stood—at the head of the cul de sac in the Styx, organizing if she needed to, greeting when she wanted to, and cajoling when she had to. But this morning there was no shade on the hard-packed sand in front of what had been her home. The tree cover was now blackened and bare, the sun streaked through still rising wisps of brown smoke. This morning Miss Ida was giving out prayers and consolation in whispers and small tight hugs to the residents of her community.

  Ida had not slept. She’d remained up throughout the night, helplessly watching until the flames that consumed every dwelling in the Styx had finally eaten all they could and then settled down as coals glowing like lumps of living, satisfied evil.