by Mark Helprin
“I can cook other things, do laundry, stand guard at night. I’m a good smith—not the best—but good.”
They broke through the gabardine waves of people and patrons dashing and dancing on the Bowery. The sun was setting, writhing and gesticulating in the imperfect black glass of uncountable windows. Meat roasters and singers were flooded with the onslaught of new evening, and the music halls began to boom in strokes of purple, green, and orange. The music could be heard even from steamers churning down the East River into the dark, leaving the Manhattan jewel box for warm sweet nights of mockingbird and the moon in the countryside and on the shore.
“I can tattoo.”
Peter Lake stopped dead. He turned to young Cecil. “You can what?”
“I can tattoo.”
“How’s that?”
“Before they put me in the wagon, I was an apprentice in a tattoo parlor.”
“I thought you lived on a herring boat.”
“After that. I became a tattooist.”
“Where?”
“In China.”
“Sure.”
“I mean in that place where the Chinese are. What’s it called? Chinatown!”
“All right, so what if you can tattoo.”
“I can make money for food. I used to tattoo rich women, in their mansions, secretly.”
“You?”
Cecil Mature shrugged his shoulders. “I would tattoo things all over their bodies. They would lie naked on their beds and I would tattoo them. I was ten.”
Peter Lake began to see Cecil in a new light. “What did you tattoo on them?”
“Maps, Sanskrit, the Bill of Rights (I copied from books). I tattooed the bue-tox of the mayor’s wife. Wa Fung told me what to do, while he and the mayor watched from behind a curtain. On one bue-tox, I put a map of Manhattan. On the other bue-tox, I put a map of Brooklyn. She did it for his birthday. They paid Wa Fung five hundred dollars, but I did all the work.”
Impressed by this versatility, Peter Lake allowed Cecil Mature to come with him, but only on the understanding that they might part ways at any time, and that Cecil would have to abandon his scalloped cap. They went into a dry-goods store to buy a Chinese hat, because Mootfowl had worn a Chinese hat and so had Wa Fung, of whom Cecil had affectionate memories. Peter Lake’s discourse in public was heavily Irish, like that of an hypnotic platform speaker. The sounds of the language were exquisite as he said to the proprietor, with courtly irony, “My squash cook and tattooist, Mr. Cecil Mature, would like to purchase a Chinese hat.” The proprietor got one for him. Cecil put it on. It looked rakish.
They lived on roofs and under water towers, existing at first almost entirely on Cecil’s tattoo jobs. But then, when things quieted down and the Mootfowl affair receded into the past, Peter Lake took blacksmith’s work under false names, or no name at all, and life for them began to look more promising. Late one night when they were ravenously hungry from having worked hard all day, they went to a saloon to drink beer and eat roast beef, freshly baked bread, and greens. The saloon was bright and noisy. There were at least two hundred people inside, and a hot fire, and talk rose to the ceiling and then crashed back over the heads of the saloon-goers in a general rush of breaking murmurs. A captivating roast, full of sizzling juices, was placed between Peter Lake and Cecil Mature. They were about to begin, but the place suddenly became silent. There had been such a great babble, and now all that could be heard was the ice melting in the icebox.
Pearly Soames had walked in, searching for something to do. He looked like a great big bristling cat. His silver mustache, silver beard, and the feline sideburns that projected from his rosy cheeks gave him a mesmerizing power that would have awed a cobra. Confidence, energy, and rascality radiated from him as if he had a marching band in his heart. He loved to quiet saloons just for the fun of it. He had recently become chieftain of the Short Tails, after the cruel and calculated slaughter of Mayhew Rottinel, their cruel and calculating founder. And he moved over to the bar, surrounded by a disgusting retinue of Short Tails, like a lord mayor. He looked around and noticed Peter Lake and Cecil Mature poised above their roast. His gaze went straight to the short sword hanging on Peter Lake’s belt.
“Can you use that sword?” he asked from halfway across the room.
Because it was as much a threat as it was a question, Peter Lake stood. A path opened between him and Pearly Soames. “Yes sir,” he answered.
“Can you really use it?”
Peter Lake nodded.
“Then use it!” cried Pearly Soames, pitching an apple fast and hard toward Peter Lake.
When the apple disappeared, Peter Lake was holding the same position that he had held before. It seemed to all that he had not been quick enough to draw his sword. Pearly Soames sneered. But then pieces of the apple were produced from the crowd behind Peter Lake, and brought to Pearly. It had been cleanly quartered, so Pearly declared that it must have shattered against Peter Lake’s chest. Peter Lake laughed, and said, no, he had sliced it up.
“Show me your sword.”
The sword was clean.
“Of course,” Peter Lake declared. “I cleaned it before I put it away.”
“You did?”
“Yes, here.” He showed Pearly Soames the streaks on his thigh where he had cleaned the sword. Even though Pearly bought them their roast, and plenty of beer, they knew that they were in trouble. But they were at an age when trouble was something they would have been hard pressed to do without.
He wanted them in the Short Tails. They protested that it was too dangerous. “Certainly not for you!” said Pearly, in a rare compliment. “Though, since I’m the one who’s asking you to join us, it might be dangerous not to.”
Unmoved, the two young men continued to devour the roast. Then Pearly’s eyes sparkled. “I know you,” he said. “Yes, I know you. You’re the two fellas that drove a spike through the heart of that religious duck.” They stopped chewing, and stared into Pearly’s diamond eyes. “What was his name? Moocock? Barn Owl? Blue Bird? Ah yes . . . Mootfowl! A nifty job, a very nifty little act. Every leatherhead in the city is looking for you. And you, fat boy, have a rather conspicuous silhouette. Wouldn’t you say? So! What shall it be?”
Peter Lake and Cecil Mature joined the Short Tails that evening.
MORE THAN ten years in the Short Tails taught Peter Lake a number of unorthodox trades. And he grew to know the city better and better, though he knew that it was too vast and mercurial to be comprehended. It changed continually—as he did, shifting from job to job in the Short Tails, who were a living encyclopedia of crime. Being with them, half-desperate all the time, was good training. He was able to see the city from many angles, as if he were stepping around a prism and peering in at the light. At the time of the meeting in the “tea bag” under the Harlem River, Peter Lake was working as a woola boy. He had been burglar, fancy bunco man, card sharp, art thief, dispatcher, engineer, bag man, envoy to the police, harbor thief, vault blaster. Being a woola boy was a relatively new possibility, since it was a rather narrow subspecialty that had come into being only recently.
It was called “Woola Woola,” and was a complicated technique for looting trucks and wagons. The chief woola boy was Dorado Canes, under whom were a dozen men in the Woola Woola team. Two or three of the men in the team hid in a doorway or an alley and waited for a wagon to pass. As it did, the woola boy would come from nowhere and run up to the driver, jumping up and down and screaming “Woola woola woola! Woola woola woola! Woola woola woola!” as loudly as he could. The drivers were shocked and distracted, and the watchers in the shadows then emerged to loot the wagon. A good woola boy could jump five feet in the air from a standing position. He would cross his eyes and say things in addition to “Woola woola woola,” and emit sharp birdlike honks. The teamsters stared open-mouthed and amazed, and did not notice until long afterward that their wagons were suddenly half empty.
As with all professions, Woola Woola had its refin
ements. Forever condemned to it (he had called Pearly the son of a whore, something which might have been forgiven had it not been the truth), Dorado Canes was hot for innovative improvements. First, he was determined to jump higher, so he loaded himself with weights and practiced jumping, or, as he called it, the “up and down stuff.” Eventually he carried two hundred pounds of lead on special belts and shoulder harnesses. To compensate for this, his leg muscles developed until he was transformed into a living spring. From a standing position, he could fly ten feet in the air—a breathtaking sight. Then Peter Lake made a pair of alloy spring boots, which increased Dorado Canes’ flight ceiling by five feet. Just the fact of a man jumping fifteen feet in the air while excitedly screaming “Woola woola woola!” was enough to hypnotize the wagon masters, but Dorado Canes didn’t stop there. He made a pair of folding canvas wings, so that, when he spread his long arms, the wings extended and he could glide. By jumping out as well as up, he could land thirty feet from his starting place. He soon discovered that the drag of the wings, the spring boots, and the great strength and flexibility of his legs allowed him to jump from the third story of a building. With a little practice, he made it four, and then five, stories. Much impressed, Cecil Mature pointed out that since wagons were about one-story tall, Dorado Canes could jump from six floors up and land on top of them, or, in other words, he could operate at will from the roofs of tenements and commercial buildings. Dorado Canes stitched himself a one-piece suit of shiny black silk that covered his neck and head in a tight cowl, leaving only his face exposed. He made up before every job, painting his face and hands orange, with the eyes in white cockpits and the lips purple. The undersides of his wings were yellow. After his breathtaking work, Dorado Canes would always approach the benumbed drivers and say, “I’m Vinic Totmule. On behalf of the clergy, the mayor, and the chief of police, welcome to our city. Don’t take any wooden nickels, don’t fool about with wicked women, and if there is no commode in your hotel room, don’t pee in the sink.”
Peter Lake loved the Woola Woola, and was pleasantly resigned to a life of varied criminal practice. There was much to learn, lots of work, and always the chance of a big haul. By the time he reached his early thirties, he was familiar with the rules of mechanics, the arts of a thief, and the strange skills of the Baymen, and he was just becoming free enough of the many happy anxieties of early life to notice the great beauty of the city and enjoy it. He was calm, content, and resigned to his thinning hair. He wanted only to witness the tranquillity of the seasons, turn his eye to pretty women, and take in the great and ever-pleasing opera of the city.
All changed in the tea bag deep in the mud of the Harlem River’s dense and mottled bed, when Pearly Soames alluded to the necessity of wiping out the Baymen, starting with the women and children. Peter Lake knew that if he attempted to dissuade Pearly, he would be killed. The only thing to do was to warn Humpstone John directly before the attack, and thus ensure that the Short Tails would be so badly hurt that they would never again even look in the direction of the Bayonne Marsh and the Newark Meadows.
This he did. When the one hundred Short Tails came drifting quietly on the mist, affixed by gravity to the floors of their slim brown canoes, the Bay villages were quiet. The Short Tails clutched their weapons, sure of an easy kill. But then the Baymen appeared as if from nowhere. Up they sprang from the water, blue with cold, after breathing patiently through reeds. Out they came from tunnels in the sand. They emerged from brakes of cattails, and dozens of them on Percherons and quarter horses came galloping down a spit of sand. They charged the Short Tails and dispatched them in great powerful strokes that made the air quiver. The enormous horses trampled the canoes, breaking them into pulp and staining the bloody water brown. Women and children with pikes harried the ablebodied among the enemy, chased stragglers, and dispatched the wounded. Terrified Short Tails tried to escape in the thigh-deep water and were struck dead by Baymen who overtook them in their swift canoes or on the horses that galloped in the shallows like trained prancers, churning a trail of foam and blood.
Romeo Tan, Blacky Womble, Dorado Canes, and ninety-four other Short Tails were killed. Poor Cecil Mature, just a boy in his twenties, ran like mad despite Peter Lake’s urgings for him to stay close. A mounted swordsman was about to kill him when Peter Lake gave the thrilling and inimitable whistle that the Baymen used, and the swordsman turned back. But Cecil Mature continued running, and he vanished into the cloud wall, clutching his Chinese hat. He seemed to have been swallowed up completely and forever.
Cool even in a losing battle, Pearly Soames took time from dispatching not a few Baymen (he, too, had special ties, and a destiny, and was not about to die at the hands of clamdiggers and minnow fishermen, no matter how good they were at war) to note the effects of Peter Lake’s whistle. Had it not been for that shrill call, he might have remained unaware that Peter Lake was neither fighting nor attacked. Now the last Short Tail, Pearly Soames fought his way to fast water, and escaped by submerging himself in the rapid current that flows out the Kill van Kull.
Heartsick, Peter Lake went back to the city (the cliffs of brown buildings were a warm and comforting attraction even for those in despair) and there watched from a distance as Pearly Soames rebuilt and reordered the Short Tails. Soon they were once again a hundred strong—faceless energetic soldiers, as wicked, obsessed, and steely as the age that bred them.
WITH THE two automobiles a long way behind, the white horse flew in great sinuous bounds, sailing through the air in a breathtaking flash of muscle. Peter Lake was used to Bay horses that took big leaps to move efficiently through shallow water. But this horse was not just a strong bounder, he was a champion in self-discovery. Before he had escaped for good and thrown in his lot with Peter Lake, he hadn’t been able to run as he was now running, or at least he did not remember it. There was a fire in his knobby white knees and in his dovelike breast. With precision that might have put an arrow to shame, he went south faster than any racehorse could have run. He could cover half a block in one stride, and his capacity steadily increased. At intersections packed with crooked lines of wagons, he jumped over whatever was in his way without knowing what lay beyond the obstructions. He had enough control and time to take such chances, for midway in flight he could spot empty runs upon which to land, and sail to them faultlessly to resume the gallop. He did something in the crowded streets way downtown, which made Peter Lake wonder. An entire block was full and waiting just north of Canal Street as heavy crosstown traffic tied everything up. With a muted and almost frightened whinny, the horse charged a crush of horses and trucks, and burst out above an amazed crowd, clearing the full block and Canal Street as well, landing almost on the corner of Lispenard. Though he had nearly lost his footing, by the time they reached the lean frozen trees at the Battery’s edge he had become accustomed to very long leaps, and from then on could accomplish them with ease.
Peter Lake dismounted and walked in front of the white horse, who was shy and would not look directly at him. He had never seen such a lovely animal: gentle black eyes set far apart on a wide white face, a soft velvety nose of pink and beige, an expression that looked like a sad smile, and a noble neck and chest finer than the best of any bronze monuments. The ears were tall, animated, sharp, alert, upright, and pointed. They had bent back in the gallop and moved like ailerons to help deal with the onrush of air. His arrogant tail strutted back and forth over flanks that were like big white apples.
“What are you?” Peter Lake asked quietly. The horse then turned to look at him, and, he saw, with a chill, that the eyes were infinitely deep, opening like a tunnel to another universe. The horse’s silence suggested that the beauty of his gentle black eyes had something of all that ever was or would ever be. And, like every horse, he was incorruptibly innocent. Peter Lake touched the soft nose and took the big face into his arms. “Good horse,” he said. But, somehow, the animal’s equanimity made Peter Lake very sad.
The people Peter Lake had k
nown while on the run were on the run as well, tumbling through greed and fire, hardly able to breathe as the city overwhelmed them, winter and summer, laying waste to their powers merely with its unprecedented scale. What Peter Lake had not had the opportunity to learn in his more than thirty orphaned years was that these tumbling souls, the ones he hardly knew, often managed to find one another for a short time and to silence the din. In a rank of trees through which a cold wind was blowing, he looked into the eyes of a horse. And as if they were all alone on some vast and snowy field upstate, the city stilled. He hoped not to be forever like the many millions on the run, always in the pitch of events, robbed even of their own inner tenderness. Something in the horse’s eyes told him that he was about to change. He had seen something in those black wells that took hold of him—a very tiny burst of gold which he had followed until he was overcome. He suspected that, in the gentle face and deep black eyes, he had seen everything.
Exhausted and cold, they left the Battery and returned to the streets. He intended to make his way uptown by way of the East Side, and to bed the horse and find a place to hide. That he knew precisely where to go and how to get there was a benefit of his iron-working days. The best refuge was above the barrel of the sky, atop the glowing constellations. To get there, they went miles and miles through snow-covered streets, until the violet evening made sleep dance in their eyes.
A FOREST of silver struts and perforated metallic arches surrounded Peter Lake, who reclined comfortably in a bent and fruitless grove, where riveted limbs were lit here and there by the backwash of small electric lights on the floor. The floor itself was a great half-barrel, the ceiling a grid of steel. All this was warmed by nearly visible streams of air rising above the lights, which were the stars of the constellations in the great vaulted roof of Grand Central Station—recently built with the notion of installing the sky indoors to shine permanently and in green. Peter Lake was one of the few who knew that beyond the visible universe were beams and artifice, a homely support for that which seemed to float. And he had returned by craft and force to the back of the sky, where once in another life he had helped to forge the connections between the beams, to rest now amid the props of the designers splendid intentions. He had provided himself with a plank platform of solid oak; a soft feather bed; a makeshift kitchen neatly tucked into a corner (canned goods and biscuits were stacked among the beams); a pile of technical books for late-night reading; a little lamp that had once been a star and had then disappeared without being missed from below; and a long rope on a drum, part of an elaborate escape system worthy of Mootfowl’s best and brightest pupil.