by Paul Boor
For Nicolas, it was a time to act.
65
Buffalo
His mind had cleared, and it was set. He would travel to Buffalo, as Renée had suggested in Saratoga. He’d take the noon train.
Nicolas wasn’t familiar with the city of Buffalo. A booming port on Lake Erie, gateway via the lake to Chicago and the Wild West, Buffalo had sprouted big, violent neighborhoods, a patchwork of languages, a mishmash of immigrants. That was precisely what he was after, according to Renée Keiller.
Nicolas counted himself lucky he hadn’t burnt Renée’s letters. Once he’d dumped the morphine and the needle, and survived the consequences, he pulled the packets of letters from his secretary and studied those she’d sent after their return from Saratoga.
Renée had given careful thought to the child slave trade; her sound thinking was well detailed in her letters. She’d discovered that other European countries had developed white slave trades in young women and boys. In England, where laws were already enacted, a movement was afoot to outlaw children in a man’s workplace. But the clincher was the scrap of paper she carried with her—the page of the racing sheet where Nicolas had sketched the mark he’d found, the mark of the slave trade.
Ж
Clearheaded now, Nicolas shuddered at the sight of it. Renée explained that according to a university colleague from Saint Petersburg, the mark was the Russian letter known as “zhe.” It sounded like the “s” in “treasure” and was thought by children to represent an insect, or a frog on the surface of a pond. Most likely a poisonous one, was Nicolas’s thought. But what does that have to do with murdered boys, or a slave trade in child labor?
The men they were after, according to Renée, had to be Russians. The city of Buffalo, Nicolas knew, had plenty of Russians, Poles, Serbs, and Slovaks, in addition to the more numerous Germans. Most of the Russians, he’d learned, were Jews, long-haired, fervent followers of their faith escaping starvation and persecution. But others were bad, the dregs of a giant country, criminals from the underbelly of Mother Russia. These men, Nicolas surmised, would live in tightly knit neighborhoods and form inner circles, or gangs, where they could speak their native language and draw others—perhaps even innocent orphans—into their web.
Nicolas judged that another discussion with Professor Flynt at the medical school would illuminate where such men could be found in Buffalo, if Austin Flynt could be coerced to give away any more than Thomas Chubb.
The brown stone that housed the medical college of Buffalo at the corner of Main and Virginia Streets was more accommodating in the warmth of an Indian summer than it had been when Nicolas last visited in the icy rain. He quickly found Flynt’s office, but, on entering, was taken aback at the sight of an entirely different sort of gent behind the desk. This professor was a frail, elderly fellow, a mop of white hair atop a plethoric countenance.
“I was hoping to see Professor Flynt,” Nicolas said, nonplussed.
“Flynt’s gone, sir. I’ve been given his place here, good fortune for me. Just haven’t changed the name on the door yet. Budgetary constraints and all.” The elderly fellow rose on wobbly legs to offer his hand. “Name’s Ainsworthy, sir.”
“Mine’s Van Horne. May I ask what’s become of Flynt?”
“Disappeared, it seems. Are you a friend of his, or was it a professional association?”
“I had dealings with him last year.”
“Then you know the sort he is. Well, most of us figure he simply tired of the routine. It makes sense. Old Flynt was under a great strain, what with the dastardly duties he’d been given. He moved on, perhaps no longer in medicine. No one’s sure.”
“No forwarding address? Nothing?”
“As I say, no one knows.” Dr. Ainsworth leaned forward in his chair and pressed the tips of his bony fingers together as if preparing to say grace. “It was a bit disconcerting, his leaving. One Friday, late, he packed up his desk, mumbling about a ‘vacation somewhere warm.’ But the odd thing is, Flynt was a great fisherman. The next day his fishing boat was found washed up on the lakeshore, the Canadian side. I’d have thought he’d take it with ’im, don’t you?”
“He’s not been heard from?”
“No, but Flynt was an odd one. Always was. Kept strange bedfellows and all.”
“Yes, I imagine he might’ve,” Nicolas said, thinking of Thomas Chubb.
Nicolas had one last question for this Ainsworthy fellow. “Whereabouts in the city do your Russians live?” he asked.
“Why, they’ve practically taken over the lower east side. Quite an influx we’ve had. Along with the Polish, they’re becoming quite prosperous, I must say. Why do you ask?”
Nicolas hailed a cab to carry him to the Russian neighborhood. “Yep,” the driver told him, “that’s where them Muscovites settled all right. Along William Street and Jefferson Avenue. Only a few blocks of ’em, but I’m sure there’s more coming.”
The driver’s mare was old and slow. When their cab pulled near the neighborhood, dusk had fallen. Nicolas paid the driver and walked the blocks he judged to be the Russian area. The bright electric lights that lit the downtown hadn’t made it here yet, and the shop windows threw scanty yellow light onto the sidewalks. Shadowy, ill-defined figures, many of them bearded, long-haired, and wrapped in brown cloaks, ducked in and out of the three-story brownstone buildings that seemed to be everywhere in this city.
In the monotonous darkness, everything seemed foreign, and when the evening chill blew off the lake, the desolation of the steppes fell with it over the streets. Nicolas realized he should’ve taken an earlier train to Buffalo. He had run out of light and couldn’t have sorted out a Mr. Wilson if one were in front of him. He hailed a cab on Jefferson Avenue and asked to be taken to the finest hotel in the downtown area.
“It’s the Hotel Fillmore, then,” was the driver’s response. “It’s near the lake, too, sir.”
The following morning, as he took tea and biscuits in the Fillmore’s elegant dining room, Nicolas’s thinking was at its clearest. He had a plan. He’d use the earliest daylight hours to search the city for lost boys and get to Wilson that way. The port of Buffalo was nearly as lively as Chicago. There’d be plenty of workers on the waterfront, where vast quantities of grains, flour, and Chicago meat passed from Lake Erie to the Erie Canal and the train routes.
On foot, Nicolas made his way to the waterfront in a tepid, Indian-summer predawn mist. Along the length of Commercial Street grain elevators constructed of wood towered at the edge of the lake. It was barely daylight, yet looking at the massive grey outlines, Nicolas realized what an ingenious idea this elevator was. It had been a clever New Yorker who’d linked an ancient invention—the bucket—to a modern steam-driven belt. Grain was scooped, bucket after bucket, out of the ships at harbor and carried high into a storage tower, where the buckets automatically dumped when the belt ran over a pulley. For as far as he could see, steam engines belched smoke and ash into the air.
Smaller ships, however, didn’t benefit from this modern marvel; those vessels, mostly smaller side-wheelers, were unloaded on the backs of men, mostly grimy, impoverished Irishmen or—as Nicolas quickly noted—on the backs of young boys.
Taking a seat on a low, shoreside barrel, Nicolas studied the morning’s labor. Sacks of produce were loaded directly onto barges here or, further along, directly into railroad cars. Many of the youngest workers fit the bill as Nicolas’s lost boys—young and scrawny, mean tempered, and cursing like sailors. He needed only approach, pick out a sure one, and befriend him, or perhaps threaten him. He chose a particularly skinny lad.
“Say there,” Nicolas called. “You.” The boy plunked his sack of grain into the bottom of a barge. Nicolas fixed him with a stern look. “Hold it right there. I need to speak to you, and now!”
“Who in hell are you?” the boy said with a sneer, his eyes shifting this way and that.
“I’m a friend of Mr. Wilson. He sent me to check on you, boy.”
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br /> The youth’s eyes popped wide. “Me? I done nothin’ wrong.” He edged toward the gangway to his ship.
“Wilson sent me, boy. Now come here.”
“I’m working hard, I tell ya. Leave me be.”
“Wilson said he’s coming to check himself, and soon.”
The boy’s forehead wrinkled. “He don’t come this early.”
“When’s he come then?”
“Never until late, just before we quit after dark. Honest, mister, I been working hard. Daylight or not. You tell him that, will ya?”
“I’ll do just that. Now back to work.”
Nicolas walked the waterfront one more time. He had them now—these men who enslaved boys, the poor young devils suffering backbreaking work for their masters, and cheaply. Tonight, he’d have one of the Wilsons, maybe the Russian himself.
Nicolas had the rest of the day to find the two names that Renée had given him in her correspondence. The first name she’d urged him to act on turned out to be a university man who’d studied Buffalo’s neighborhoods and the immigrants who filled the city. The man knew a dozen languages. The second name Renée had provided was the Erie County constable, who, her researches uncovered, was an old classmate of Van Horne’s. Nicolas didn’t remember too much about the gent, but they had a connection. Harvard, class of ’68.
A congenial sort of fellow, and eager to help.
Late in the day, a different sort of Mr. Wilson walked the waterfront. Nicolas had taken a seat on a barrel near the barge-loading area he’d studied earlier. Darkness had fallen and most dockside workers were already in the taverns. The crew of boys, exhausted, were staggering under their sacks of grain when a fellow with stick-thin arms and legs, a potbelly, and dressed in an ill-fitting suit strutted alongside the barge. “Last one for today,” he shouted. “Come on. Move it.”
This Mr. Wilson was a redheaded Irishman. Hardly a Russian; Nicolas could see that clearly. And the slight stagger to the gent’s gait made him a drunken Irishman. “Come on, come on, ya want some supper, don’tcha?” the irritable fellow snapped at the boys. Nicolas shadowed the Irishman down the harborside to the next barge.
“Sir! I need a word with you. Are you Mr. Wilson?”
The fellow turned and shot Nicolas a dirty look. The signs of alcohol poisoning were clear—the flush, the spidery vessels on the cheeks. The fellow stood, waiting, his pale blue eyes expressionless.
“I have a bone to pick with you, sir. You are Mr. Wilson, are you not?”
“I work for Wilson, and what’s it to ya?”
“I’m a colleague of Thomas Chubb. You know of him?”
“I do not.”
“Well, then, your top man does. Where’s your top man, the big Mr. Wilson?”
“What would ya want with him?”
“We have a certain connection. I’ve done jobs for him.”
“Where you from?”
“Upstate,” Nicolas snapped back, deciding not to tell this underling too much.
“Yeah, yeah.” The Irishman turned away.
Nicolas grabbed the Irishman’s scrawny arm from behind and spun him around. “So where do I find him, huh?” He felt the man tense. “Listen, you, it’s important business I have with the Russian.”
“The boss’ll be where he always is. Next door to Ted Sweeney’s place. He’s there every night, late, on Canal Street where we all report.”
“Ted Sweeney’s place.”
“No, I told ya—the building next to Sweeney’s. You’ll find him there.”
The brownstone next to Sweeney’s Pub had a single, low entrance. It looked abandoned; the windows were unlit. Nicolas pushed the door open and stepped into a darkened hall. A sporadic murmur like some sort of machinery far below came and went. Nicolas took a set of stairs; the rumble grew louder. At the bottom of the stairs he stepped into a circle of bright electric light and realized the sound was the crash of candlepins. He was in a basement bowling alley, four lanes, all busy, and nearly midnight.
A player was standing idle at the first lane. When Nicolas asked for Mr. Wilson, the player gave a nod to another small door at the back. Nicolas walked the length of the hardwood lanes, past the pin boys frantically setting pins, returning balls, and jumping clear when pins went flying. Nicolas opened the door into a smoke-filled room with a dozen small tables where men in business attire were smoking cigars, and playing cards. A few women, dressed to the hilt, lounged near their men. A cluster of crap shooters stood along one wall, stooped over the dice.
Nicolas surveyed the card tables. Several of the men were large, well-built, beefy types, not unlike the Mr. Wilson who’d come for Knox and the one Nicolas had questioned at Saratoga’s clubhouse. At one of the furthest, smallest tables sat the heaviest, most Herculean of the lot. This bigger gentleman wasn’t playing cards; rather he had an alluring young brunette at his side, a bottle of clear liquor and shot glasses in front of him. Stout, broad across the shoulders, and dressed in an excellent business suit and fine silk shirt obviously tailored for his brawny physique, he presented the most powerful appearance in the room. The gent’s thickened, boxed ears spoke of physical violence, as did the crook in his long, thin rudder of a nose.
Nicolas approached. He caught a few words, quite musical, in a low-pitched Slavic tongue. The couple’s eyes shifted to Nicolas. They went quiet. He asked, point-blank, “You’re Mr. Wilson, the Russian, aren’t you?”
The man leaned back. Looking down the majestic angle of his nose, he nodded. “We’re all Russian here. And who the hell are you?”
“I am Nicolas Van Horne, a colleague of Thomas Chubb.”
“A useful man, Thomas. You come for him?”
“I come on my own.”
“Well, then, sit and have drink with us.” Wilson reached for the bottle, poured two shot glasses full, and pushed one toward Nicolas. The woman watched dumbly for a beat or two, then looked away, bored.
“What has Thomas Chubb to say these days?”
“I don’t care what Chubb says. I’ve come to clear up this business he’s gotten me into.”
A frown passed across Wilson’s broad face. “First, drink.” The glass disappeared into his fist. He downed it in a blink.
Nicolas took down the liquor and continued unbidden. “I trade in ice, you see. I ship all over the country. Thomas is an old collaborator, but he drew me in, used my ice business for your purposes. It’s a bad business, this cheap labor you deal in, sir. Do you hear what I’m saying?”
“I hear a man who’s afraid, Mr. Ice Man. Here, another drink.” Wilson filled their glasses. “For courage.”
“I’m not afraid,” Nicolas said, struggling to steady his hand as he reached for his glass. “I know about your business, and I want no part of it from now on. That’s what I’ve come to say.”
“How you know my business?”
“I’ve seen these boys with your mark, the burn mark, whatever it means.”
A deep sound like a guffaw rumbled in Wilson’s throat. “Haa! You say you know my business. What means my mark, then, huh?”
“It’s meaning? I don’t know.”
“See, so now you learn something, Mr. Ice Man. That ‘mark’ you call it is the first letter of my name, Zhivakov. Russian is ‘zh.’” Wilson sounded out the letter. “Look.” He dipped his finger into Nicolas’s drink and drew the letter in vodka on the table:
Ж
“See, now you know Russian language.”
“I’m not Russian.”
“Many men work for me not Russian, but they know good money. Young boys are good money. Young girls, too.”
“But some are murdered. Why?”
“I tell you. See, business like a family, big family. I—Vladimir Petrovich Zhivakov—I look at work-boys and orphan girls like family. Sometimes necessary . . . how you say? . . . to ‘discipline’ in family. Sometimes my men too eager, the discipline is too much, too strong discipline, and what we got then, eh?”
“A dead body.�
��
“Yes, but an example is what we got. An example to others, what we get rid of.”
“And that’s where Thomas Chubb comes in. And me. How long has Thomas worked for you?”
“Years. Thomas take care of many examples. Once you work for me, you cannot go back.” Zhivakov thumped a fist on the table. “You see, Russian man is not like American man. Russian man knows how to discipline children, beat wife, how to keep control.” Zhivakov glanced at his paramour and smiled. “And Russian man love to fight other man. We have war every ten years. In Russia, no man is without a war, no matter his age. We do not look at killing like American man.”
“That doesn’t make you better. It makes you worse.”
Wilson’s broad face cracked with a smile. “I like you, Ice Man. You come here to scold me, huh? You travel a lot, maybe you do special jobs better than Thomas Chubb. I can use smart man. I got people working everywhere, you know. America is great country.”
Nicolas stood on shaky legs. “Thank you for the drink, Mr. . . . Mr. Zhivakov, but I won’t be doing any more of your work. And I warn you, I’m not considering this matter closed. Not at all.”
The big Russian’s eyes narrowed to pinpoints. “You threaten me, Mr. Ice Man?”
Nicolas glanced around the room, which had gone eerily quiet. He thought of the long walk to the street. He sensed he’d entered a wasps’ nest, and this Zhivakov, by a mere lift of a finger, could stir the nest to a stinging frenzy.
The Russian spoke again, softly now. “We Russians love sayings, you know. We have saying that ‘you fight with me, or fight against me.’ And men who fight me end up in lake. Or worse. Ask Thomas Chubb.”
“We’ll see about that,” Nicolas said as he backed slowly toward the door. “We’ll see.”
He said the Russian’s name perfectly. “Zhivakov,” with the “zh” sound at the start. On his way downtown he whispered it to himself over and over, hammering it into his head. Nicolas was sure he’d get it exact when he reached the Erie County constable’s office. He even knew the first letter, in Russian.
