Seven for a Secret (4 page)

two

In disposition the negro is joyous, flexible, and indolent; while the many nations which compose this race present a singular diversity of intellectual character, of which the far extreme is the lowest grade of humanity.

—DR. SAMUEL GEORGE MORTON,
CRANIA AMERICANA,
1839

I
am that rarest
of deviants
in New York City: one who feels about politics the way most men feel about scraping pig dung off their boots. My antipathy stems from the fact that I spent most of my life thinking my brother, who is an enormous cog in the Democratic engine, one hundred percent despicable. I’d been mistaken—Val is only three-quarters despicable. But when he landed me a job with the copper stars, he could place his highly unpolitical sibling only in Ward Six.

The appointment required me, as was the case with all star police, to live in Ward Six. Which was a shame, because previously I’d always treated the neighborhood just as everyone else does: avoided it. Now that I’ve a comfortable set of rooms and a landlady who pours me a small beer of an evening without my asking, I can’t be bothered to find new lodgings. Anyhow, I’m mere blocks from the Tombs. But that doesn’t make the scenery any more agreeable.

As I walked toward Mr. Piest’s beat that morning, I turned onto Bayard to discover a pair of flame-haired Irish girl kinchin trading their one pair of shoes. The littler stood in the gritty frozen road porridge with toes gone pearl-white, offering a supportive shoulder as her sister peeled disintegrating moccasins off her own feet and passed them along.

Red toes are the first sign of frostbite. White means worse news. Those lasses were the sort Mercy had fought tooth and claw for, risking her health for tiny skeletons with pupils like gun barrels, and I found myself wondering how Manhattan’s kinchin could ever survive without her. With a hat pin stuck in my throat, but nary a spare coin, I passed them by. More Irish, scores of them, trudged in their blue brass-buttoned jackets out of Ward Six in numb search of day labor. Sans gloves, sans overcoats in most cases. Hopeful as pallbearers and shivering in the weightless morning light.

Carts sagging with bolts of gingham lumbered by when I reached Chatham Street—or Jerusalem, as many call it—and its Dutch Yidisher pawnshops, each with three golden balls painted above the door. A mayor’s office employee carrying a
BEWARE OF MOCK AUCTIONS
sign nearly slipped on a wheel-crushed rat, its guts still steaming. Before we star police existed, my friend Jakob Piest was a night watchman and private finder of lost property, so Chief Matsell routed him along Manhattan’s epicenter for fenced goods. Most shops on Chatham are respectable as churches. They sell candles, spices, secondhand rifles, jewelry from tasteful to tawdry. But a few specialize in vanished objects, goods there and gone in an eyeblink.

And Mr. Piest knows them as intimately as the back of his lobster-claw hand.

I found him quick enough. Just at the corner where Chatham angles off into Pearl Street, I glimpsed an awkward sideways gait emphasized by enormous Dutch boots. Shrimplike legs came next as my eyes moved upward, then a gaunt torso in a threadbare black coat. Above all floated a chinless face crowned by lively tufts of grey hair and a top hat gone shiny at the edges. The copper star pinned to his lapel had a drip of gravy clinging to it, which wasn’t exactly unusual.

“Mr. Piest!” I called out. “I need a favor if you’ve time to spare.”

The roundsman’s face split into a grin. Scuttling around a vendor selling thread, almanacs, and games of jacks from an open box, Mr. Piest wrung me by the hand.

“At any hour of any day, Mr. Wilde. With relish.”

“There’s been a job done on Fifth Avenue. An original Jean-Baptiste Jacques Augustin has gone missing, a tiny study of a shepherdess. Might you show me around a shelf or two?”

His fluffy silver brow quirked. “Of course, yes, by all means. It shall be done to the utmost of my ability, this very instant. What exactly is a
shelf
, Mr. Wilde?”

“Sorry, that’s flash,” I lamented, passing my hand over my mouth.

I use flash patter, the argot of thieves and all other breeds criminal, when solving any crimes in Ward Six. And when speaking with my sole surviving family member, which is how I came to know it at all. It’s as much style as cipher, but daily the slang creeps further into plainspoken English—one of these days, the whole country will be calling pimps
jack
-
gaggers
and liars
confidence men.
Enough rowdies and swells leap on board, and even low cant can turn fashionable. Using flash unconsciously felt pretty disturbing, though. Valentine hasn’t an inkling when he’s speaking it. Next I’d sprout flowers all over my waistcoat and a Bowery-style cigar end from between my teeth.

“I was dealing with the cutthroat breed of Orange Street counterfeiters all of last week. My proper American evaporated,” I confessed. “Pawnshops. Can you take me round to any pawnshops that might fence paintings?”

“Why, Mr. Wilde,” the wonderful old madman exclaimed, “I thought you wanted a
favor.
What do you think my rounds consist of?”

He set off, and I followed. Aside from the usual manic commerce, most businesses were peddling valentines, of course. Turner & Fisher sported a hideous sign offering original verses by the anemic New York University type in the display window who was churning out
PROSE OR VERSE, WITTY, SATIRICAL, LOVING, COMICAL, IRONICAL, OR ENIGMATICAL
. I was just thinking I’d quite enough
Valentine
in my life already, thank you, and also
May God strike me dead if I ever pay a badly shaved bean sprout to write Mercy poetry and sign my name to it,
when Mr. Piest began pulling me into a series of secondhand establishments smelling of musty cloth and used metal.

I was instantly fascinated. The pawnshops each boasted floor-to-ceiling shelves presided over by a merchant whose skin resembled parchment that would disintegrate if exposed to sunlight. Tortoiseshell combs jostled against pearl-handled razors and weirdly curved knives from the East. Books were wedged into every crevice. Dusty and molding volumes sat propped against kettles, pots, lamps, clocks—and, in one notable case, stacked at the base of a stuffed grizzly wearing a rather fetching pearl necklace.

“I heard the most
disturbing
gossip regarding your rival down the road, Mr. De Groot,” Mr. Piest whispered loudly in one such cave. “It seems that Mr. Duitscher—who we both know owns no scruples and is a blight upon the length of Chatham Street—recently came into possession of a painting. A very
small
painting, of a shepherdess, by Jean-Baptiste Jacques Augustin. Can you credit that he would attempt to sell an item so recognizable it endangers the
entire neighborhood
?”

“Sounds like Duitscher down to the letter,” De Groot agreed. “But I’ve heard nothing of it.”

“Might I then—purely as a customer, for my dear mother’s birthday fast approaches,” crooned the ancient copper star, “have a glance at the contents of your safe?”

“
Natuurlijk.
” De Groot smiled toothily.

“Ik dank u vriendelijk,”
my friend returned.

And so it went in every establishment. De Groots, Duitschers, Smiths, Emeriks, Kieks, and Johnsons—none had heard rumor of the miniature. In one shop, we did spy a suspicious monogrammed silver tea service. But it turned out to have once belonged to the other sort of stockbroker: the kind who prefers a quick introduction to the river to a slow introduction to being hungry.

Regarding the painting, we earned not the smallest sliver of a clue.

At last, Chatham Street behind us, we stood at the edge of that cankerous blot on the face of Manhattan, City Hall Park. I discouraged, Piest frenziedly thoughtful. To our right, City Hall and the Hall of Records presided over a wintry wasteland barren of cheer, leaves, and dignity. By then the sun was high. Urchins and emigrants and addicts trickled out from the naked trees, where last night they’d made beds from stone steps and hearths from dead grass. Just south of us, the fountain that in the blazing summer had presented a dry bowl littered with tadpole corpses now sprayed malicious plumes of ice water in the faces of passersby as far off as Broadway. The molleys who congregate there—men inclined to share tenderer intimacies with other men than simply dinner and a glass or two of rum—ought to find a new gathering place, I thought. The ways of New York fountains are mysterious. Possibly sadistic.

“Thank you for your help.” I pulled up my greatcoat collar and adjusted my muffler beneath. “Though that tack didn’t go quite as I wished.”

“No, indeed! Fortunately, there is a saloon just over in William Street that serves corned beef with dandelions. Best to eat and think this through.”

“I can’t take you away from your beat any longer,” I protested.

“I’ve a night route, starting at six in the evening,” he called back over his shoulder, hair streaming from his head like the explosion of a silver firecracker. “My shift just ended, at ten. We’ve all the time in the world.”

•   •   •

Dark booths a
single step
off the ground lined the walls of Calverey’s American Dining Saloon. Alcoves, really, with coarse brown plush draperies. Mildewed and cheap, though the corned beef and wilted winter greens were far better than edible. Two candles shone between us. Mr. Piest had just pushed our cleaned plates aside and twitched the cobwebby curtain halfway round.

“Why can’t it have been one of the servants?” he asked cannily, shoving a wooden pick into his chaotic mountain range of teeth. Just what artifact he hoped to find in there I knew not. But I wished him well with the project.

“It can. It’s just . . . unlikely anyone I spoke with would risk their place. Not impossible, mind. I can be queered same as the next fellow.”

“No, not quite the same as the next fellow, in my experience.”

“Anyhow, the painting is
gone
.” I glanced downward, having appropriated the back of the daily menu and begun to sketch the music room with a lead stub from my pocket. Out of undiluted frustration, probably. Drawing settles my brains. “It isn’t in the servants’ quarters, which means if it was one of them, we’re already hocussed. How reliable are those pawnbrokers?”

“I’ll own that it’s a perpetual twelve-sided game of chess.” Piest stuck four fingers of each hand within the opposite coat sleeves. “But I’ve a fifteen-year relationship with most of them. And a shared language, no less, with both the Dutch and the Yidisher vendors. My father was a Jew, you know. I fear the painting hasn’t been pawned by the usual channels.”

Puzzled, I made a few calculations, contrasting what I knew of my friend’s police history with the figure
fifteen years.

“Just how old are you?” I asked without thinking.

“Thirty-seven. Why do you ask?”

I felt my jaw dropping and then shut it so fast I must have looked as if a leg cramp had seized me under the table. Not my best performance. But apparently, police work ages a man as do seafaring and the tanning industry. It seemed at twenty-eight, I’d myriad delights in store. I dug deep for an explanation, but thankfully Piest was riveted by my room sketch.

“Mr. Wilde, your talents range far and wide,” he exclaimed. “That is very fine. Now, what of the Millingtons?”

“Mr. Millington went straight to the chief, after all. Seemed disappointed when he saw me. And Mrs. Millington . . . no. Just no. She’s decorative as her house.”

“So it was stolen by an invisible being,” Piest chuckled. “A ghost who favors collectibles.”

I smiled at that bit of foolery. Then stopped, midway through darkening the edges of the fireplace.

There was a thought. Or the beginnings of one, anyway.

“Mr. Wilde?”

Closing my eyes, I passed my fingers over them. It was more of an instinct than an idea, really. But there are plenty of invisible beings in New York. We walk past them every day. They’re silent as our paving stones, no more solid than the stench in the air or the shadows thrown by our lofty stone monuments. Unnoticed and unseen. And one sort of unnoticeable would surely have visited that chamber often. The room’s layout required it by law.