The Fatal Flame

by Lyndsay Faye

  Repelled beyond words, I dropped her arm. We had reached her doorstep. The two blond brick stories above, the basement below that frankly didn’t bear meditating over for reasons I’d prefer not to delve into. Strains of fiddle music spilling from the doorjamb, punctuated with peals of feminine laughter, laughter produced by fallen girls who by no means deserved to perish in flames as some of the more righteous among us argue they do. For the first time, looking at the building that had spelled disaster for so many, I didn’t know whose side I was on. That was terrifying. Like surviving a shipwreck only to find myself alone in a lifeboat. Albatrosses above, sharks below, adrift on a moonless sea. Madam Marsh drew a small silver key from her handbag.

  “News of the fire in Pell Street could have come from plenty of channels, and you’re nothing if not well informed,” I reasoned, regaining control of myself. “But how did you learn of the written threats to Symmes’s buildings?”

  “From the alderman’s property manager, of course,” she answered, silhouetted by the faintly orange shine of the hearth in her parlor. “I deal with him regularly, although I admit he could not possibly have spilled for altruistic reasons, as the man is a brute beast—that scrap of gossip was more likely a slip of the tongue. He is prone to them, I daresay.”

  “Give me a name so I can question him?”

  “Oh, his answers are never to anyone’s liking.” A toxin-laced lilt had corrupted her velvety voice. “But supposing you can locate him—and I’d suggest the Queen Mab bawdy house, though you may not appreciate the ambience, Lord knows I fail to see any redeeming qualities—please do ask Mr. Ronan McGlynn any questions your heart and mind desire,” she concluded, shutting the door behind her.

  I stared stupidly after Silkie Marsh, pulse racing like a trapped fox’s. Then I set off at an equally high-strung pace for the Tombs.

  Hailing a hack two blocks east on madcap, moonstruck Broadway would have taken more time than I had at my disposal. Anyway, I wanted the clarity that comes with long strides and deep breaths. So I marched down sparsely populated Greene through puddles of lamplight and gusts of spring air teasing at the furled leaves of the elm trees.

  Can you trust a single word Silkie Marsh says? I asked myself. Considering the shocking possibility that one answer might be yes.

  No, I concluded in three more steps.

  Does it fuddle you much that the proprietor of the clearinghouse Val was invited to is also Symmes’s property manager?

  No, I thought grimly, recalling McGlynn’s red-rimmed jackal’s eyes.

  Setting the question of Bird aside, as she’ll not come into this, can you abandon not merely Madam Marsh’s stargazers but all the many residents of buildings Symmes owns, to the mercy of a mad firestarter?

  No.

  Drastic, immediate action was required.

  The Tombs was largely deserted, its new-washed stone steps empty of the dregs who had haunted its entrance during the day. Hurrying past the odd star policeman escorting a bloodied drunk, I located the key to my office in my waistcoat pocket.

  Once at my desk, I wrote another terse, emphatic note to Chief George Washington Matsell, ending with the instruction that if he could manage the favor, he send a runner to alert me early the next morning regarding a time and a place for my desired rendezvous. After I’d sealed the letter with blue wax, it took me six minutes to traverse the echoing stone halls and tack it at eye level—Matsell’s, not mine—to his door. That put the hour at half past eight in the evening, for I’d stayed only briefly at the Knickerbocker 21. I made a left turn when I’d regained the cavernous entrance hall like a giant’s sepulcher, cutting across the yard under wisps of steely clouds. Then I trotted down a dank, mossy flight of steps into the men’s wing of the jail cells.

  A spotty blond star police sat before a partition of iron keys hanging from hooks. He’d a single wall-mounted lamp for company. But it hardly illuminated its own metal sconce, let alone the double row of cell blocks. He’d augmented the light with a squat bull’s-eye lantern, its faint tinny scent near drowned in the underground reek of Ward Six’s sewage runoff. Beyond, I heard snatches of an old drinking ballad meant to lead men through times of trouble.

  The song had its work cut out for it.

  “Evening, Mr. Wilde,” said the guard.

  “Evening.”

  I was growing gradually used to being recognized by then and had stopped berating myself over disremembering my associates. Not when it became obvious I’d never met the new yearly hires who’d heard tales of a bantam copper star with three-quarters of a face.

  “Mind if I have a word with one of our boarders?”

  “Not a bit. Did you really nab a picklock on account of his right shoe?” He spat a stream of brown into a tin pail at his feet.

  “Yes, actually,” I admitted sheepishly.

  “How so?”

  “He was left-handed, and when he knelt to crack the lock with the bess, his right foot would scrape the ground. He’d scratches all over the toe.”

  “God bless us, but you’re keen on the sharp. Which prisoner?”

  “Ronan McGlynn.”

  The guard winked happily. “Enjoy yourself. Need the key?”

  “No,” I said, puzzled.

  “Just as well. Wouldn’t stop sniveling the last time someone tuned him, and it’s loud enough in here as is. Shut your holes!” he screamed, and all the noises save for those made by the uninvited creatures ceased of a sudden.

  “We’ve been beating him? Who? When?”

  “Day he arrived, twice. Then again this morning. No harm done, a few kicks, a knuckle or two in his mazzard. I thought they said you was the one arrested him—do you even need to ask who?”

  “Apparently.”

  “It’s Maguire, O’Brien, and Murphy so far. Word got out as McGlynn was in the forcing-Irish-virgins line of work. They wanted to pay their respects. So have plenty of other copper stars—the redheaded ones, if you follow me—who stopped by to say a few words and raise a middle finger.”

  “But the three you mention figured he needed punishing. And you gave them the key.”

  “Course I did. The sick coward. I made sure it was just a few lumps—a minute at most, I timed them with my watch. I’ve only been at this post six weeks. Is there a problem, Mr. Wilde?”

  “I honestly don’t know. Might I borrow your bull’s-eye?”

  Spitting again in agreement, he nodded at the lantern, and I caught up its handle, heading for the cell where we’d deposited the wretch. It was hardly uncommon practice for some of my colleagues to leave our prisoners’ flesh mottled with their signatures. And God knows I’ve had to fight my way out of trouble with claws bared myself on plentiful occasions. Our work is dangerous even when it’s dull. And the Tombs is nothing if not a bleak place, and a violent one.

  Still. I’d not often heard of multiple visitors lacing the same stranger.

  Hisses underscored my footsteps, whispered taunts to come closer. I knew the bars for sturdy, but I felt backside frontward—as if I were the caged tiger and they the spectators taunting me with sharp sticks. Slender rivulets of condensation trickled down the uneven corridor, sparking reflections like darting minnows in the stone. I reached McGlynn’s seven-by-fifteen-foot chamber and cast my beam of light within.

  A pair of baleful eyes above a now-bloodied white beard blinked malevolently at me. McGlynn’s lip had been split, and I wondered whether he’d as many teeth today as he’d owned the day previous. His togs, so carefully arranged to make him seem a man of importance instead of a bloated species of leech, were crusted with the hellish concoction that makes its home on the underside of New York boots.

  My Irish colleagues, apart from doing an adroit job of smashing McGlynn’s suave façade, had decided that his cell needed decorating. This was apparently what the junior guard had meant by a quick chat and a flip of th
e bird—the floor surrounding the mildewed mattress and the dripping iron water closet was littered with orange peels, chicken bones, cheese rinds, an oil-soaked newspaper of the sort to house fried potatoes, several cracked and emptied lobster carcasses.

  When I realized their goal in tossing these gifts through the bars, I couldn’t help but admire their ingenuity. If there hadn’t been roaches and rats sufficient to their liking sharing McGlynn’s lodgings yesterday . . . well, there certainly would be tonight.

  “Come to attack a defenseless prisoner like those filthy Paddies?” the pimp snarled.

  My brow quirked as I parsed this statement.

  Ronan McGlynn had almost certainly been born in New York—his accent told me as much, if not his glib willingness to abuse fellow humans. But I’ll never comprehend how we Gothamites manage to divorce ourselves so completely from our pasts. As for mine, I know that our great-grandparents had come from a rural English hamlet and settled outside Manhattan in Greenwich Village to farm, and Henry and Sarah Wilde died before I’d thought to ask them more. But if McGlynn’s parents weren’t Irish, I’d eat my hat. And here he was whinging about Paddies as if he were Paul Revere’s nephew.

  It riled me enough to wish I’d brought a stale bread crust or a gnawed husk or two of buttered hot corn as a housewarming present.

  “I don’t need to kick you, though you deserve worse,” I answered, slinging my hand around one of the grainy bars as the other held the lantern steady. “I have a few questions, though.”

  “What makes you think I’ll give any answers to a runt pig who locked me in a dungeon?”

  I smiled. Digs at my height are simply tedious.

  “You’ve heard from your employer Symmes by now? He must have been here to see you, even if your bail is set too high for comfort.”

  The sullen set of McGlynn’s jaw beneath the blood-crusted beard tightened. “So he hasn’t come around yet, the alderman. So what? He has plentiful things on his mind, after all. He’s probably lacing Thundering Tom’s quarron black and blue right this very moment.”

  I blinked at the flash, but I shouldn’t have done. The veneer of the gentleman entrepreneur had been stripped away from him with boots and ripening fish heads, leaving a twenty-four-karat thug.

  “Probably so.” I tapped my fingernail a few times against the metal barrier. “He’ll be along tonight, then, you’d wager? After the bout at the Knickerbocker Twenty-one?”

  “Yes.”

  “Or maybe in the morning, first thing. If he’s wearied overmuch by the fight.”

  “Maybe so, maybe that’s more likely.”

  “Or by tomorrow night at the very latest, if he has Party appointments.” Snapping open the case of my pocket watch in a gesture meant to conjure Symmes’s presence, I checked the time.

  “What’s it to you?” he growled.

  I returned my loose grip to the bar. Reminding him of the solid impediments between his cell and the outside world. “I’m the one who has to investigate the incendiary, whether I’m endeared to you maggots or not.”

  “You’re a purblind fool to talk about an alderman that way, and one as powerful as Mr. Symmes,” he sneered. “He never wanted you on the job in the first place. He wanted your brother. It’s not Mr. Symmes’s fault you barged in like some sort of Sunday-temperance warden.”

  “You’re pretty untroubled by your side profession. The Queen Mab is yours, I take it. An alderman wouldn’t exactly want his name gracing the accounts ledger.”

  “He owns the land,” McGlynn growled, kicking an impressive Jamaica Bay clamshell my way. “But you’re right, the Queen Mab is mine. No use denying it when the alderman will have me clear of this shithole by tomorrow, as you say. He needs me.”

  “In that case I suppose we’ll have no choice but to let you walk. Even though you deserve to be strung up in the middle of Broadway for—”

  “Oh, don’t make me laugh, you puny prig. Those Irish lasses are born whores. God just went and turned their potatoes as rotten as their muffs. They all become mabs sooner or later anyhow, once they arrive here. Why should you care if I help them along? The way they take to it after a day or two and a few licks with a belt, you should see them—begging for it.”

  My stomach entered into an argument with my brain over whether spitting fresh bile into McGlynn’s cell or calling for the key from the pimple-faced guard would be more satisfying.

  “And don’t look so disgusted just because you’ve a wee little pencil between your legs,” he scoffed sulkily, linking his arms over his sore, swollen torso and wincing as he did.

  That wasn’t remotely true. But I stayed dark about it. Some lights are best kept hidden under bushels.

  “It was a low trick, sending those two-faced Paddy bastards to catch me out,” he muttered balefully. “Alderman Symmes wanted your brother, and it’s your brother he should have got.”

  I managed a nod, forcibly altering the mood. “I’ve no love lost on either of you, but I’d hate to cross Symmes direct, you understand. That’s why I’m here. I’ve nothing to go on and figured asking you about it while he’s busy politicking would be better than waiting. I might not be Valentine, but I’m not lazy.”

  “Asking me about what?”

  “The fire at your slum in Pell Street this afternoon, of course. The building was destroyed and two women killed. Symmes must have sent you word?”

  He hadn’t. And I’d figured as much.

  Watching folk absorb momentous information is a curious business. Most react instinctually, then school their features. Some few, like my brother, who have already lived through about the worst that can happen to them and thus developed leathery dispositions, show only the smallest tics. Fewer still, like Silkie Marsh, can channel startlement into new expressions, create artfully painted puppetry effects from horror. As for me, I have a grisly enough time keeping my head shut even when I do know the lay, let alone when I don’t.

  McGlynn, though—McGlynn was like watching the Wall Street freaks scribble stock prices in the steamy pits they call trading floors. Transparently, immediately shocked. Silkie Marsh, for all she was evil embodied and sheathed in a sublimely cut dress, had him pegged dead to rights—brainless slips of the tongue seemed to me well within the pimp’s repertoire.

  “Surprised?” I asked.

  He swallowed a few times, took a deep breath.

  “There’s nothing left. The place is rubble.”

  McGlynn approached the bars. “It . . . it was only threats!” he cried. “Christ, I . . . I never expected it to go this far. She’d threatened us, threatened Mr. Symmes I mean to say, but never— I never thought . . .”

  “And by her you mean?”

  “Sally Woods, of course. She . . . My God,” he whispered, seemingly addled over the prospect of his buildings on fire. He paced, shoes nudging up against the pork ribs that had been tossed at him as if he were a mastiff.

  “Can you tell me anything useful?”

  He stopped. Seemed to grow bone-weary.

  “Fuses were found, traces of energetic materials,” I prompted with less patience. “Any idea how someone might have placed them there?”

  He shuddered. “How should I know?”

  “Have you met Sally Woods personally?”

  “Of course I have. She’s a nasty bluestocking with a passion for trouble.”

  “The Nassau Street pantaloon manufactory property is likewise your responsibility,” I mused. “So you met her when Symmes was quashing the protests.”

  “Sure. Then. Other times. Saw plenty of her, and when the boss finally managed to shake her loose, the letters started coming. He showed them to me. Uppity wench.”

  “You think she’s dangerous.”

  “I think she’s an unbalanced bitch.”

  “Is she an incendiary, though?”

  “Well, she mu
st be, now, mustn’t she?” He glared at me, showing yellowed teeth framed in a humorless rictus of a smile. “Talk to the alderman—he’s the one who was sharing her sheets. If you ask me, Robert Symmes keeping the likes of Sally Woods as his mistress for all those months is about the most foolheaded decision in the entire history of New York, even if she’s a pretty little piece. But I don’t have to tell him as much, and neither do you. He’s paying for it dear enough now. Isn’t he?”

  10

  “What, a little sewing girl, eh? The very game I like—go away, boys, and let me talk to her—I spoke to her first, and by Jupiter, I’m the one to see it out!”

  “No—not quite so rapid, if you please,” replied the one who had spoken second—“we’ll toss up, Harry, who shall have her!”

  —NED BUNTLINE, MYSTERIES AND MISERIES OF NEW YORK, 1849

  BY THE TIME I’d trudged the stone’s throw back to Elizabeth Street and my cozy residence, with its front left shutter that rattles no matter how often I adjust the hinges and its relentless aroma of clove and butter, I felt about as witless as possible for a man with his skull still attached.

  Physically speaking, Robert Symmes, with his dashing airs and careful blond moustache, would look very well indeed next to Sally Woods’s boldly drawn features—her shapely afterthought of a nose and her radiant chocolate eyes. So long as she was wearing female attire, that is.

  Spiritually speaking, I might as well have imagined a snake bedding a beautiful winged Sphinx with lion haunches and Miss Woods’s arched brow and defiant gaze. So wrong that the mind made a balking, donkeyish halt. But human affection is a capricious affair.

  Sally Woods detests Robert Symmes with a sweeping purity like a famine or a drought. And there is no deeper hatred than that engendered by someone you loved once, and were hurt by, and can love no longer, I realized.

  I’d never managed to hate Mercy Underhill, as the blame for not having her rests on me. On eyes that never saw she wanted men’s company and took it when possible. On ears that didn’t hear her when I discovered the fact and left her, frightened and mortified, in a rented room in Silkie Marsh’s ken. On a tongue that never mentioned I love you and instead phrased it, and I quote, you aren’t stupid, the last fucking thing you are is stupid, you’ve watched me for years trailing after you, the way I look at you, it’s obvious to the entire goddamned world, you can’t stand there in front of me and claim not to have known it, and somehow supposed that a civilized observation.