The Fatal Flame

by Lyndsay Faye

  It didn’t work.

  Valentine caught McGlynn’s wrist with a little circle that looked like a waltzer’s flourish and tethered it, the knife now pressed against the hollow of the villain’s spine. With his other hand gripping McGlynn’s shoulder, Val took four quick steps forward with his shorter, weaker antagonist and sent his head through the wall.

  By saying through the wall, I mean literally. For the walls were crumbling back into forest sod, and the upkeep was nonexistent.

  One speechless moment passed, everyone staring at the hole with McGlynn’s motionless pate resting inside it. A fragile bird cradled within an inhospitable nest. Then Val uncurled his hands and Ronan McGlynn slumped to the floor. Breathing, as I could see plain in the swells of his swollen belly. As oblivious as an unborn babe, fresh blood caressing his eyebrows.

  I traced my mouth with my fingers introspectively. Wondering just how Val expected me to drag a fourteen-stone villain to the Tombs. And certain as the Party is crooked, he wasn’t going to be helping.

  The girls burst into spontaneous applause. All except their ringleader, who was still shoving honed metal into my friend Kildare’s neck. Exchanging a look with Piest that was equal parts relief and exasperation, I lowered my hands.

  “Everyone back flat against the walls save Kildare, who doesn’t try anything exciting.” I hoped she remembered he had a name, however much she mistrusted him.

  Val strode in my direction and plucked his cigar from my fingers as the others retreated. I’d forgotten I’d been holding it.

  “Victors first,” he announced, winking.

  The girls, Kildare, and his lovely freckled captor foremost, headed for the stairs. Connell raised a ginger eyebrow at me as if demanding to know what abominable alchemy had created my only sibling and what in bloody hell we were doing with our lives.

  I’d have given him an answer or two. But I hadn’t any.

  When the girls had filed out, we waited to give them a nice, amiable head start. Connell, worried over his closest mate, followed them first. Mr. Piest nudged McGlynn’s temple with the blunt toe of his weighty Dutch boot and, finding him incapable of further atrocities for the time being, turned to my brother with palm outstretched.

  “Always an absolute pleasure to work with a man of your caliber, Captain Wilde,” he announced happily, wringing my brother’s hand.

  He would say that, though. Mr. Piest is crazier than a sack of river rats.

  “You want a rough on the muscle, I’m your scrapper.” Val turned to the wall, grinding his cigar out on the peeling paint. “I’ve seen you fight. It looks like a chicken after the ax has come down.”

  Laughing, Piest marched for the door. It was true, after all, and Jakob Piest owns the rare virtue of not allowing true remarks to unsettle him.

  “I didn’t know you spoke English,” I informed Valentine. It sounded ridiculous even to me.

  “You . . . I what?”

  We headed in Piest’s thudding wake, Connell’s flaming head just visible entering the front foyer. Unfettered light streamed into it from the open door beyond. It gladdened my heart as nothing had that morning.

  “You’ve been palavering flash more or less nonstop since I was five,” I said to the back of Valentine’s neck. “I didn’t know whether you savvied the difference any longer.”

  I didn’t add, And it sounded good to me, old and familiar, as if we were about to feed the horses and then give them the sour apples from the crooked tree by the fence. Do you remember that, how we’d collect the fallen ones? Do you remember that tree, and do you remember their hot teeth against our fingers? Because that is just the sort of thing we absolutely do not mention. Whether by unspoken agreement or purblind cowardice, I couldn’t possibly say.

  “Of course I savvy the difference,” Val retorted. “Hell on horseback, I can read, can’t I? Do you use that pate of yours for anything other than decorating your neck? You do know what flash is for, yes, my Tim?”

  “To keep respectable people from understanding a word you say.”

  He half turned to look up at me. “Yes, and to prevent mace coves and canary birds and idiots like the alderman from realizing I’m educated and can outbrain them in jig time.”

  “That’s . . . extremely clever,” I owned reluctantly. “And never occurred to me.”

  “Pissing away from the wind doesn’t occur to you,” Val muttered as we passed through the miserable pornographic hallway and into the greater world of Ward Four.

  The spring breeze carried manure along with the sharp salt, but it struck our faces like a benediction nevertheless. Five steps with an iron rail on either side led to the Queen Mab’s entrance, and our colleagues had arranged themselves on the stairs as if playing a child’s game where to touch the street meant losing. All save for Kildare, of course, who stood with a spoon to his neck in the middle of the cobbled road. Beginning to look hopeful. The girls surrounding him were boneless with relief, one or two openly weeping and the others smiling in wonderment at a miracle. As for their leader, her bright, speckled face was flushed with triumph.

  “Sláinte chuig na fir, agus go mairfidh na mná go deo!” she cried, and pushed Kildare away.

  A roar of merriment went up as the molls started cheering and embracing. Connell barked a laugh and yelled something I understood equally poorly, while my brother swept his black silk hat off in salute. The curve of a smile tugged at my lips, and Mr. Piest shouted, “Welcome to America, patriots all!” at the top of his concave lungs.

  “Any lass who wants good cheer and stout Irish company, come to the Knickerbocker Twenty-one Engine Company of a Sunday in Ward Eight, and don’t forget to bring your menfolk!” Val called out, returning his hat to his high brow. “Real employment for your beaus, rum and hot stew gratis, all courtesy of the Democratic Party!”

  I sighed. “Will you ever stop politicking for as much as five seconds?”

  “I’ll be croaked one of these days, and then likely a good deal quieter,” he returned cheerfully.

  Nine girls waved to us, turning back toward the waterfront. The sight of all those dark and brassy heads striding away from the Queen Mab was a considerably spruce one. I was about to demand that Val help me with the unconscious blackguard upstairs whether he wanted to or not when a hoarse shout prevented me.

  “Wait!” Kildare cried. “You wi’ the spoon and all! I don’t even know yer name!”

  One by one, the lasses glanced at one another.

  And then, as was only fitting, exploded into laughter again.

  “Dear heavenly saints on high, have mercy upon the mad and likewise upon the merely stupid,” Connell prayed, chuckling heartily.

  “Oh, my God,” I said.

  “Well, can you blame the man?” Val grinned, leaning against the railing like a card sharp at a table. “I’d split that doxie like a fence post, given an invitation.”

  “Valentine.”

  “Oh, come off it, just look at her!”

  “The course of true love never did run smooth!” Mr. Piest cackled.

  Kildare stood at stark attention, almost leaning after the moll who’d just spent a solid ten minutes threatening to kill him. She returned to the front of her ragged band, red-gold curls dancing in the wind, staring with hard but amused grey eyes at a genuinely pathetic batch of star police.

  Then, grinning broadly, she cried, “Caoilinn!” and threw her slender arms wide into the air as if about to take flight.

  More cheers went up, a “Bravo!” from Mr. Piest as Kildare made a low bow. But recalling with a queasy sensation our unfinished business, I plucked at my brother’s coat sleeve and we returned to the front parlor, away from the shrill whistles and the friendly insults and the most disturbing courtship it has ever been my sincere privilege to witness. The alderman, of course, was long gone. Val raised his agile eyebrows expectantly.

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nbsp; “Symmes,” I said.

  “Ah,” he said.

  “That was . . .”

  “Necessary.”

  “Couldn’t be helped.”

  “Seeing as I can’t diary the last time I was offered a free rape in lieu of a thank-you note and I’ve wanted to put that looby’s head in my chamber pot since he went into politics, no, it couldn’t,” he growled.

  “He tried to kill me once. It isn’t as if I’m fond of him.”

  “I have not forgotten the occasion,” my brother said in a voice I can describe only as knifelike.

  “But what are we going to do?”

  The Party works on a system. If you have chink, buckets and barrels of it, and you give plenty to Tammany, and you own the flexibility of a Chinese acrobat when it comes to morals, you can be a politico with a smile on your mazzard and your thumbs tucked into your braces. If you’re dangerous and hardworking and intelligent and loyal, you can be a ward heeler or a copper-star captain.

  Trouble is, the hierarchy is inviolable.

  “I don’t know yet,” Valentine answered.

  My lips parted in dismay.

  “Dry up, bright young copper star. I said yet. Meanwhile, Symmes is an ambulatory sack of mouse droppings and a goddamn Hunker to boot.”

  The nigh-successful bloodbath over Texas, combined with the highly contested condition of Oregon—both of which might as well be their own continents they’re so bafflingly immense—has started up a bare-knuckled regional battle. Whig or Democrat now makes no difference. It’s North versus South in the Capitol, and it’s Southern sympathizers versus Northern ones in the free cities above the Mason-Dixon. The Hunkers, in brief, are of the mind that the South should be coddled, or we’d face a devastating war rather than regular fisticuffs in the Senate. This position is not unrelated to the fact that plantations produce cotton, and New England produces cloth, and our manufactories produce slave clothing out of the cloth, which the South purchases in bulk. Like a poisonous snake biting its own tail. The Barnburners think the new territories should be kept slave-free and that the Hunkers are a pack of yellow-livered cowards with their pebbly capitalist arses hanging bare in the wind for the South to wallop as it pleases.

  The Wilde brothers, for once in concert, believe the latter. I don’t tend to have political opinions. Other than that politics is a pretty ripe joke. But I have plenty of antislavery opinions, and Val thinks of Hunker complacency the way sharks think of bleeding minnows.

  “Stop looking like a sheep caught in a bramble patch,” Valentine ordered irritably. “I’ll think of something.”

  “Symmes had a point regarding your reputation. You could be more careful about your person.”

  I once thought my brother would sleep with anything that breathes. But that isn’t true. He sleeps with gorgeous free black women, beautiful emigrant molls with lusty appetites, high-spirited Bowery girls, and an aristocratic male English pianist by the name of James Playfair, with whom he practically lives, though they maintain separate residences and double sets of keys. So far as I know, I’ve listed those in ascending order of frequency. It’s no wonder the man is infamous. His trousers are as often open as shut.

  “Where would be the fun in that?”

  I shook my head. “Are you going to help me carry the pimp you laced to the Tombs?”

  Val chuckled, wincing. “Of course not. Afternoon, brother Tim.”

  He turned to go. I have often suspected with a queasy tingle on the underside of my ribs that something terrible is going to happen. That circumstances recently set in motion are heavy—crushing, really—and they will now roll momentously toward a sharp dip in the cliffside. I’m usually right about such things.

  Unfortunately, that doesn’t go a very long way toward preventing them happening.

  “Are you going to keep campaigning for Alderman Symmes?”

  “Fuck no,” Valentine scoffed, throwing wide the door and slamming it behind him.

  4

  We view it as a most insane and ludicrous farce, for women in the nineteenth century to get up in a public and promiscuous assemblage and declare themselves “oppressed and fraudulently deprived of their most sacred rights,” when, if they really knew what belonged to their true position, instead of stirring up discontent and enacting such foolery, they would be about the sober duties and responsibilities which devolved upon them as rational beings, and as “helpmeets” of the other sex.

  —THE LIBERATOR, SEPTEMBER 15, 1848

  TRANSPORTING THE FRAGRANT LUMP that was the concussed Ronan McGlynn proved simpler than I’d anticipated, since Ward Four thrives on shipping and my colleagues are resourceful men. By the time Valentine departed, the girls had gone and Mr. Connell was returning from a freight yard with a rickety wooden handcart. He’d obtained permission to use the device by offering not to inspect their premises for unreported—and thereby untaxed—cargo. Which was big of him.

  When we’d dumped McGlynn in the most swamplike cell we could find, roaches fleeing in pretend and temporary fright, Mr. Piest offered to return the cart in exchange for my making out the police report. It was a hard bargain, since I loathe that particular task. Writing police reports flattens living people into headstones, erases motives, erects paper monuments to dark errors and cruel whims. But I’ve never told Piest as much, so no malice was intended on his part.

  “All right?” I asked Kildare as he made to exit. Only half joking.

  “It’s the queerest o’ things, when it happens,” he replied dreamily. “Caoilinn may not ha’ slit my throat, but she stabbed me through the heart sure as—”

  “Stop afore ne’er Wilde nor Piest is able t’ keep a meal down fer the rest o’ their natural lives,” Connell ordered, escorting his friend forcefully out of the lockup.

  I could have told Kildare I knew what he felt like. But it wouldn’t have helped—nothing about love can be helped—so I let Connell drag him off to be hosed down or fed whiskey or whatever the Irish do in extreme situations such as the one in which Kildare found himself.

  I lit for my office, a two-minute trek down one of the Tombs’ interminable echoing corridors, rolling my stiff neck to coax McGlynn’s deadweight away. Reaching it, I unwound a notch. Not that my office is comfortable exactly—I think of it in good humors as a whitewashed mouse hole, in bad ones the benign sort of coffin. Admittedly I’ve equipped it well. Bookshelves of local directories and codes of law, drawers that lock and pens that flow. A carved pine desk and an armchair upholstered in dark green preside, both given to me by a friend who moved to Toronto. A better-than-decent lamp painting an incongruously civil glow over the room. Two plainer chairs, ones I scavenged, wait for colleagues and crime victims. Finally I’ve a little table with Dutch gin and glasses resting on it, for whenever my colleagues stop by to ease the aches from their wearisome rounds.

  Dipping the steel nib in my inkpot, I wrote:

  Report made by Officer T. Wilde, Ward 6, District 1, Star 107. Upon investigating the activities of one Ronan McGlynn, now incarcerated under prisoner number 52640, discovered that claims of manufactory employment were a front for abducting female emigrants and forcibly ruining them. As witnessed with Roundsman Jakob Piest, Star 341, nine women were led . . .

  My handwriting—always perfectly legible when recording human indecencies—steadily filled the foolscap. Which never fails to disgust me.

  When I’d finished, I chewed my pen and debated warning George Washington Matsell over the Symmes debacle. After some unfocused staring at the watercolor-coded map on my wall found my eyes uneasily tugged back to Ward Eight, I concluded that disclosure was the better part of valor and pushed to my feet to visit the chief. Not on my life would I have confided in anyone else ensconced in the Party’s upper echelons—but Matsell trusts Wildes and makes plentiful use of us, so we trust him and occasionally request assistance in return. Up and up I wen
t through the Tombs’ vaultlike stone halls, finally knocking at the chamber with the plaque reading GEORGE WASHINGTON MATSELL: CHIEF OF NEW YORK CITY POLICE.

  “Come in,” he called in his flat, sober baritone.

  Chief Matsell wasn’t doing anything I’d expected him to be doing. He wasn’t working, for one, nor was he fiddling with his lexicon. Matsell finds flash patter both fascinating and necessary, and thus, for copper stars yet damp behind the ears, he’s compiling definitions of street slang. The dictionary is like his kinchin—he dotes upon the project, lends it every spare minute. Which is why I was so queered at finding him idle. He was merely sitting. All three hundred robust pounds of him, face deeply scored in inverted V-shaped lines from the edges of his noble nose straight through to his porcine jowls. Looking neither at the framed portrait of his hero, the original George Washington, hanging high above him, nor out the massive barred window sending dark, scarlike lashes across his polished floor.

  “Wilde,” he grunted. “Have a seat. Whiskey?”

  “Thank you.” Dropping my hat on the chair back, I hesitated. “Is something the matter?”

  “Plenty.” He poured neat golden drinks into two tumblers. “But why don’t you talk about what’s in your hand first, so I don’t spend any more time trying to guess at it.”

  I set the dubious report on his desktop, tapping it. “Ronan McGlynn, newly in custody. He’s a rapist and a fleshmonger who deceived nine emigrant Irishwomen into accompanying him to a clearinghouse this afternoon. And they were far from the first, God help us. Piest was on hand to assist, of course, along with Connell and Kildare.”

  “Your usual complement, then. Any snags?”

  “I think Val gave him a concussion, but that’s hardly a snag. The man is a fiend.”

  The chief scowled even deeper than his perennial frown. When a man’s neutral face appears already highly displeased, some find that man difficult to read. But I could see urgent business tap-tap-tapping within his huge pate.

  “So you wrote out this report and delivered it personally.”