The Broken Lands (21 page)

Sawyer nodded, but the older man gave him a long look before he resumed smoking. They walked in silence until they reached the cluster of wharves facing the dark mass of Brooklyn. The river was still alive with the lights of ferries, but the wharf here was mostly quiet—the sailors, stevedores, and longshoremen having retired to saloons and whorehouses and rooming houses for the evening—so that only the lap of water, the creak of wood, and the soft thudding of hull against pier were audible.

“If you don't mind,” the man in the top hat said, “before we go our separate ways I'll invite myself along with you this one last time. My territory's closest, so if they're any kind of smart, they're headed to the Bowery to look for me already.”

Sawyer looked over the other man's shoulder into the dark street beyond. “Will your . . . your fellows be joining us?”

“If your boat'll carry us all.”

“Should do.”

The older man nodded, turned, and gave a sharp whistle. Four shadows dressed in outlandish coats and tall hats detached themselves from the darkness and sauntered forward. “I thought they were doing better this time,” he mused. “They're unaccustomed to being . . . unobtrusive.”

Sawyer led the group along the waterfront until they reached a little dock so cluttered with crates that the gig tied up at the end was nearly hidden from view. He tipped his hat to the two men waiting with oars at the ready, and one by one they piled aboard.

“Hawks, you'll let me know when you've gotten word to Arabella?” Sawyer asked when the boat was cast off and under way.

“I will, and I'll do it first thing of all, but you have got to keep your distance. I mean that, Sawyer. No matter what. Our responsibilities to the city are more important than our personal attachments. You cannot go to her. If anything should happen to you and me, she is the city's only hope.” He gave the young man a hard look. “And if you doubt how serious I am about this, I beg you to remember that there is also a woman waiting for me back home on the Bowery whom I am not likely to ever see again.”

The oarsmen pulled the gig across the river in a southerly crossing, until they reached a dock under the skeletal neck of the Great Bridge. They made the boat fast, and Sawyer, Hawks, and the four rowdies from the Five Points disembarked.

Now Sawyer and Hawks shook hands again, and without another word the younger man stalked up the darkened street and into Brooklyn.

Hawks turned to his crew and clasped his hands in front of him. “It's time, boys,” he declared, a slow grin spreading across his face. “You didn't believe me when I told you there were bigger battles to fight than the petty squabbles that pass for wars back in the Points. Well, you're about to see the truth of it for yourselves.”

 

“Well, the woman wasn't lying.” Stripped to the waist, his torso spattered with red, Walker strode across the sloping floor of the apartment above the Bowery saloon called the Blind Tiger's Milk to where Bones stood next to a quaking Frederick Overcaste. “There's no one else here.”

“Of
course
she was telling the truth,” Overcaste protested, his voice rising in poorly controlled panic. A trickle of blood ran under his boot. He made a gagging noise and scraped his foot on the wall, leaving a broken red smear.

Overcaste had led them south from Tammany Hall straight to the light-strewn thoroughfare that was the Bowery. There they wound their way through the evening crowds and past brilliantly gaslit theaters, policy shops and bucket shops, and dubious pawnshops that were probably fronts for confidence men. Even at this hour, vendors lined the road with carts, selling cigars, fruit, candy. Then Overcaste had turned down a side street, one that led straight toward the conjunction of roads known as the Five Points. Almost immediately the street had fallen apart under their feet. Stolen cobblestones left gaping holes. The ground was marshy, uneven, and the gutters ran with unidentifiable, stinking sludge. Walker had whipped a handkerchief from his suit coat and held it over his nose as he and Bones followed Overcaste to the saloon's entrance.

They hadn't been able to actually enter the saloon itself. The door could not possibly have been locked—they could see through the windows that the bar was thronged inside—but it wouldn't budge for any of them.

“So that's the sanctuary,” Walker had grumbled. “Find us a way in, Bones.”

Bones had held up a palm and blown across it, and his entire hand had disintegrated and spun on a sudden gust of wind, up over their heads to scrape against the sagging glass of the second floor. “The saloon is protected,” Bones had intoned. “His quarters above are not.”

Now he and Overcaste stood in that upper flat, watching Walker stalk like a predator from room to room. “I
told
you Hawks and Sawyer were supposed to meet Van Ossinick and me at Tammany Hall,” Overcaste continued. “They didn't show up, so they had to have spotted you. If they spotted you, if they saw what . . . what happened to Van Ossinick, they would never have come back to . . . to . . .”

“Yes,” Overcaste whispered dully. “To anyplace I could lead you to this quickly.”

Bones smiled thinly. “Easier every time.”

Overcaste turned to glance into the hallway behind him. “My point,” he said, his voice cracking, “is that his woman was telling the truth, and you knew it.” He looked at Walker. “You didn't have to . . . to—”

Walker tilted his head and fixed Overcaste with red-rimmed eyes. He smiled, and it was terrible enough to make the pillar take a step back. Then Walker turned and went into the next room, where a pitcher and basin sat on a washstand beside Hawks's bed.

“It was unlikely we would find him here,” Bones said as Walker started scrubbing his body clean. “But it would have been unacceptable not to check. Presumably Hawks has a hidey-hole nearby, somewhere he can go and still keep an eye on this place.” He nodded his head toward the hallway. “Walker was trying to draw him out.”

“Obviously.” Drying his neck with a rag, Walker returned and took his shirt and jacket from Overcaste with another of those grim smiles. “But I also just enjoy the hell out of my work. Everyone should, don't you agree?”

The politician squatted, his elbows on his knees. He was beginning to look sick.

“Just say yes,” Bones suggested.

“Now”—Walker finished buttoning his shirt and yanked on his jacket—“what about this Sawyer fellow?”

“He lives in Brooklyn,” Overcaste muttered toward the floor. “I don't know where.”

“Oh, we don't need you to tell us where to look,” Bones told him. “We just need you to get us there as fast as possible. The rest we can do ourselves.”

Overcaste raised his head, sweat on his forehead. “How?”

Walker took the pin from his right lapel and flexed the fin­gers of his other hand. “By the pricking of my thumbs, Overcaste. By the pricking of my thumbs.”

S
AM STROLLED ALONG
the track, eyes on the blue of the water in the near distance, just beyond the smoking chimney of the train pulling into Culver Plaza. It was early, and the plaza was pretty well deserted. Sam waved at the fellows sweeping out the front of Bauer's hotel and casino and attempted a jaunty nod at a pair of girls trying to keep their hats on in the morning breeze. They giggled, and although Sam never could tell when a girl's giggling meant she was laughing at him and when it didn't, he decided to interpret it today as a positive sign and grinned back. It was a beautiful Saturday. All in all, probably a good day for cards.

That was what he thought, at least until he saw the man sitting where Sam had been accustomed to setting up his table for the last year and a half. Porkpie hat and all, it was the same sharper who'd miraculously stacked a monte deck full of spades right under his nose. There he was, just like he belonged there, already working up a push of beachcombers who thought they could beat the odds and win themselves money for a fancy lunch.

Sam stopped dead, blinked to make sure he wasn't imagining it, and made an abrupt change of direction. When he got to the counter of Toftmann's, the open-fronted saloon on the east side of Culver Plaza, the barman had a cup of coffee and a milk roll waiting. “Sorry, Sam. I don't know where he came from.”

“Thanks, Oliver.” He took a bite of the roll and drummed his fingers on the bar. “How long's he been there?”

“About an hour. Sam, a couple of fellows tried to move him for you. Eamon Fowler, first, then Benny the Cooler. Evidently he challenged each of them to beat him at any game they wanted, and if they won he'd leave. They both lost.”

“He beat Eamon and Benny?” Sam asked incredulously. “How the heck did he manage that?” He swiveled on his chair, coffee cup in hand, for a better look at the sharper. “I've never even
heard
of anybody beating the Cooler.”

He watched for a minute, thinking hard. The man was playing three-card monte, not the same game he'd cheated Sam with, but one that everybody knew how to play. Some hustlers played it with three cards, where the object was to keep track of a specific one—the ace of clubs, say. Others played it with walnut shells, where the idea was to keep track of the shell with a coin or some such thing hidden under it.

Marks loved the game because they figured it couldn't be all that hard to follow the card you were supposed to be keeping an eye on. Of course, no hustler played a game like three-card monte as anything but a brace game—one that was fixed. And after what Sam had seen of this particular sharper's capability, he figured this fellow was either preternaturally fast with his fingers, or cheating, or both.

The man in the porkpie hat moved three slightly bent cards around on the table quickly, but not so quickly that Sam, even at a distance, couldn't follow the movements. The mark pointed confidently at the left-hand card, and the sharper, with a few words that Sam couldn't hear (but was pretty sure went something along the lines of
Are you sure, fella?
), flipped it over.

The crowd cheered. The fellow swept a few dollars into his pocket. The sharper had lost.

“If that's cheating, he's pretty bad at it,” Oliver observed.

“No, it's a brace game, for sure. That's just the first act. If a mark doesn't believe he can win, he's got no reason to play.” Sam shook his head and took another bite of the roll. “I guess if he can beat a proper gambler like the Cooler, fleecing me would be easy. But for the life of me, I still can't figure out how he braced up my own deck without me spotting it. That really burns me up.”

“To say nothing of the fact that that's
your
spot.”

“Well, yeah. That, too.”

“What are you going to do?”

That was the fundamental question. Sam actually had no idea what he
could
do about it. A momentary dream of rousing all of Culver Plaza to oust the interloper flitted through his mind, but that was impractical and unlikely. He was a local, but he was a kid, and so far he hadn't even been made to pay a fix for the privilege of playing cards here. Until he was contributing to someone's income, he had no right to expect protection from anybody. Furthermore, the sharper would surely be carrying enough money to pay a fix of his own if the law showed up, so calling the cops on him was pointless, too.

Anything Sam did was going to result in him losing face or money or—most likely—both. He sighed. “It was good while it lasted. I'm just going to have to find another spot.”

“Sam.” Oliver nodded in the opposite direction, away from the waterfront. Sam turned and willed the broad smile that plastered itself immediately across his face down to something less moronic. Jin was crossing the plaza toward them.

He turned to Oliver and punched him in the arm. “Quit staring, idiot.”

“That's a girl, right? She's coming this way.”

“I know, stupid. Quit staring.”

“I kinda can't,” the barman said helplessly.

Sam scowled at him. “Try.” Then he waved at the approaching figure. “Morning,” he called. “Come have a cup of coffee.”

“Good morning.” Jin glanced at his hand as he pulled out one of the barstools for her. “How are your fingers?”

They hurt like hell, and frankly he hadn't been sure how he was going to shuffle a deck, to say nothing about dealing cards all day. He certainly wasn't going to admit any of
that
, though.

“Not so bad,” he said, holding them out for her to inspect. “That stuff your uncle gave me was pretty amazing.”

She took his hand in both of hers and examined the blisters on his fingertips. “Those look dreadful,” she said, her tone making it perfectly clear that any bravado he tried to pass off on her was pointless.

Behind the bar, Oliver coughed. Sam gave him a grateful look. “Jin, this is my friend Oliver. Oliver, Jin.”

Oliver nodded. “Pleasure. How does your friend take her coffee, Sam? Or . . .” He frowned and scratched his head, plainly trying to remember anything he knew about the Chinese. Jin's face took on a guarded look. “Or do you prefer tea?” he finished, a touch awkwardly.

Jin tilted her head and gave him a hesitant smile, her guard relaxing. “I prefer coffee, if you don't mind. But . . . thank you. Just plain coffee.”

“Anything to eat? We've got some pastries, or I can fry up something.”

“The pastries are good,” Sam interjected. “Oliver does the baking.”

“Then I will try those. Thank you.”

Oliver disappeared into the kitchen behind the bar. Jin took off her hat, allowing her long ponytail to fall over one shoulder, unslung her rucksack, slid onto the barstool, and turned to take in the view across Culver Plaza and down to the waterfront. “This is very nice.”

“Not so bad in the morning, is it?”
In the morning,
by which Sam actually meant
without obnoxious boys calling you names, or savaged bodies turning up in the hedges, or uncanny folks trying to take over the city.