The Midnight Band of Mercy

by Michael Blaine

  So she knew all about the bank run. That explained her opaque mood. How would she act when she found out Madison Square had picked his pocket, too? Faro banks wouldn’t stoop so low.

  “How terrible!” Mrs. DeVogt patted her mouth with a napkin. “The poor thing.”

  He shot Danny a killing glance. “Rotten luck,” he put in.

  Swarms picked up the ball. “Well, it’s been coming for a year now. All those Kansas banks. Ohio. These farmers are so jumpy, somebody says boo, they’ll start a run. ‘Free silver.’ Malarkey. They don’t understand the money is tied up in bonds. Mortgages and such.”

  Danny Swarms, economist. Max bit his tongue.

  Mrs. DeVogt’s voice reached a nervous pitch. “Of course, the Canal Street Bank isn’t J. P. Morgan, but these things are contagious. Beans, Mr. Greengrass?”

  Canal Street? Another fine institution with empty pockets? He almost fell out of his chair. Was it possible that Belle, Gretta, and Mrs. DeVogt didn’t know about Madison Square yet? What a fortunate disaster. In a wholesale calamity, Belle would have to excuse his personal misfortune.

  “The Canal Street Bank?” Recovering, he spooned khaki-colored beans onto his plate. “Did they shut the doors?”

  “Sure. The bigwigs had to pay themselves first,” Belle snapped.

  “That’s terrible. She lost all her money?” Gretta asked, as if she finally comprehended the conversation.

  Belle could barely keep the contempt out of her voice. “Oh, they’ll give her two cents on the dollar when they open again. Excuse me, when they reorganize? Her sarcasm came out bitter and undisguised. “It’s a cozy system, isn’t it? They take your money, they lose your money, they say whoopsiedoodle, we made a little mistake. Then they declare bankruptcy, and they reorganize.”

  Max didn’t care for this side of Belle. He agreed with her, sure, but did she have to sound so harsh? Here she was, Lady Light-Fingers, preaching to the world. Then, recalling her generosity, he softened. If it weren’t for Belle, Faye might still be stewing in the Jefferson Market lockup.

  Mrs. DeVogt’s voice quavered. “I saw it all in the 70s. They were building railroads to the moon and everybody went money-mad. All of a sudden, somebody noticed there were too many tracks going in the same direction and the banks lost their shirts.”

  “Other people’s shirts,” Belle pointed out.

  “Quite right,” Mrs. DeVogt agreed, patting Belle’s hand.

  “I saw something so strange yesterday,” Gretta continued, oblivious to Belle’s antipathy. “Near St. Marks Place. These men were marching without saying a word. Just plain men. They didn’t have banners, they didn’t say who they were, but they were parading right along. Their faces … they looked hypnotized.”

  “What were you doing down there?” Mrs. DeVogt inquired.

  Max knew what she meant—St. Marks Place with its seething immigrant tenements wasn’t Gretta’s natural habitat—and he knew the answer too. She was hauling her bellows camera with the polished mahogany body, her tripod, and the rest of her equipment around the square.

  “I was making a few plates,” Gretta explained. “It was quite eerie. Hundreds and hundreds of them, so silent, like some sort of religious procession. It reminded me of a Renaissance painting I once saw.”

  Only Gretta would put it that way, he thought. Her way of seeing was so foreign, it appealed to him. All at once his fascination with her flashed to life again. “Did the pictures come out?” he asked.

  “I haven’t had time to make prints yet.”

  “The men look like that ‘cause they’re hungry,” Belle said dryly.

  Gretta couldn’t ignore the jibe this time. “Of course I could tell they weren’t well-off. Why would they be marching otherwise?”

  “How about that Kodak? Did the company send the pictures back?” Max inquired innocently.

  Gretta’s face looked drawn, thinner, her skin stretched translucent over its sculpted structure, her eyes looking inward at a place he could barely imagine. His desire for her would never die, he knew it then, but he wondered at how her beauty had obscured her strangeness, her otherworldly eye.

  “Oh, they take a century. I’m sorry I wasted so much time,” she said.

  “Do you think we should withdraw our funds? These things seem to be catching,” Mrs. DeVogt worried. “What would happen to the house?”

  Mrs. DeVogt’s simple remark made dread palpable.

  Instinctively, they all looked around at the dining room. Could the sideboard with the colonial plates be swept away? Could the high-backed chairs disintegrate beneath them? Could the rugs, the drapes, the Japanese knick-knacks, their entire cocoon fall away like last season’s stage set?

  Pleading exhaustion, Max escaped to his room, but an overtired energy kept his mind racing. Idly he sat on the bed and flipped through Mrs. Edwards’s addresses, but the numbers refused to surrender their secrets. If he couldn’t decipher their meaning, how could he grind out the column-inches? What a way to scratch out a living, scavenging dustbins for scraps of memory; sifting lies; stitching together whispers, wild guesses and half-truths into paragraphs worth pennies. But he had no choice. He had no other skills, no other inclination. Painstakingly he began copying every single address on a separate sheet of paper. Through some failure of imagination, he had closed off every other way of being. He had to write to stay alive.

  chapter thirty

  The ledger against his stomach, he woke up at dawn. In the dim light he turned its pages again. Canal. Charlton. Christopher. Clarke. Clarkson. Commerce. Desbrosses. Dominick. Fulton. Grand. Greenwich. Grove. Houston. Hudson. Barrow. Broome. King. Spring. His mouth tasted like coal dust. Squeezing his eyes shut, he stabbed at the page with his index finger, picking an address at random. Ten and a half Grove Street. He’d been up and down that route a hundred times, sniffing out Famous and his gang. He could almost visualize 10½ Grove in his mind’s eye.

  Fog was pouring in off the river. Groping his way down Seventh Avenue, he heard the slow clipclop of hooves, and the soft curses of a driver. Out of the mist, a fly cab drifted past. Blots of gaslight smeared in the haze. Wrapped in a shawl, a young woman skittered past. In full sail, a drunk burst out of nowhere, shouldering Max off the sidewalk. His shoes slathered with muck, he let go a few choice comments, but the reeling man had already disappeared, swallowed by gray capes of drizzle. At the comer of West Twelfth he ducked into a saloon for a cup of tea with a splash of rum.

  In a curious trick, the rising sun seemed to illuminate the fog from within, the rolling mist luminescent now but no less blinding. Revivified, he plunged downtown, then veered west along Bleecker. The shops weren’t open yet, but here and there domestic skirmishes were breaking out, unseen voices clashing in their morning rituals. A pair of shutters flew open and a chamberpot emptied onto the paving stones. Lamps glowed in a few windows. He smelled coffee, horsepiss, and rotting vegetables. Ten and a half Grove Street swam into view.

  An outside staircase clung to the side of the dilapidated three-story building. Max ducked into a nearby doorway as a man in a plush overcoat and a homburg picked his way down the wooden slats. At the foot of the stairs, he paused to tap out his ivory pipe. A baby-faced man with an immature brush of a mustache, he stretched and sighed.

  Max strolled up to him. “How’s the pill upstairs?”

  “Fook Yuen.” The man smiled.

  The Fountain of Happiness brand had a good reputation. Faye had bought some one time, and after she came out of her dream she sang a dozen verses of “Willie, the Weeper,” the hophead dirge. Max wasn’t averse to the cloying, rippling pleasure himself.

  “High-hat, huh?”

  “The best,” the apparently satisfied customer testified. “Ask for Yung Fat. He’ll fix you up.”

  Yung Fat turned out to be a black-haired entrepreneur in a snappy vest. Just to establish rapport, Max ordered up a gong and watched as Fat carved out a sticky opium pill with a pair of ritual scissors. Drapes kept ou
t the morning light, but Max could make out other dreamers sleeping in bunk beds across the room. After a few hits on the yen tsiang, he drifted into a warm, curved place, and, for a while, in perfect bliss, he became golden syrup, liquid atoms.

  Max rode the opiate waves to sweet surrender. Warm thrills broke on an internal shore, showering him with agonizing delight. In time’s slow dance, his mouth went slack. A miniature sun burst in the back of his neck, soothing streams of light running down his arms and legs. Saliva banked under his tongue and trickled in rivulets down his throat. Working his jaw was a luxurious act. One more dollar, one more pill, and he floated on mild updrafts into dreamland.

  When Yung Fat raked open the drapes, exposing a bright globe of pain high in the sky, Max threw his arm over his eyes and rolled over on his bunk. Fat rocked him gently. “Time go now, mister. Come back later.”

  Digging deep inside his being, Max roused himself. He knew he had to ask Fat an important question, but in his loopy state it kept eluding him.

  “Time go now,” Fat repeated, shaking him harder this time.

  Max gathered himself again. A great green sea weighed down on him, but he began swimming to the surface. Then he was sitting up, brushing away glistening cobwebs. It all came back to him. Then on a fresh swell of delight, he again forgot what it was. Shaking his head, he groped for it.

  “Ten and a half Grove Street. Right?” he blurted.

  “Ya, get up, mister. Got to mop.”

  Some wire in his head suddenly lit up. Mrs. Edwards’s empire. “So, who owns this wreck?”

  Yung Fat stopped wrestling with him. His even, flat features froze as he gave Max the once-over. “No know, mister.”

  “Who do you pay your rent to? You don’t own the building, do you?”

  “No know. Go, get out. Bad time.”

  “You don’t know if you own it or not?”

  “No know.”

  Before Max could get another question out of his mouth, Yung Fat lifted him bodily and hurled him toward the door. The attack came so suddenly, Max stumbled, long enough for Fat to grab him by his collar and shove him out onto the staircase. Woozy, he rocked on the creaking structure, the door slamming in his face. Leaning over the railing, he peered inside, but Yung Fat raked his hand across the pigeon’s-blood drapes, sealing his den from view.

  Meandering through the neighborhood, Max slowly regained his senses. He had half a mind to barge back into Yung Fat’s and give the man a lashing, but there was no percentage in it. Better to keep moving like a dumb beast from address to address until somebody spit up the goods. At 449 Greenwich, nobody would open a door to him. Four-Fifty-Five Greenwich might have once existed, but now it was a missing tooth in the street’s crooked row. Fifty-Two Commerce Street consisted of a stable, a blacksmith’s, and an upstairs apartment.

  “Who’s the landlord around here?” he asked the smith.

  “Who’s askin’?” A slight, rope-muscled man was nailing a shoe onto a skittish bay mare. “Stay still, you bitch bastard,” he muttered.

  “Max Greengrass. New York Herald.”

  When the horse tried to bolt, Max threw himself against the slatted wall.

  “I’ll hit you with this here!” the blacksmith warned, grabbing the horse’s halter and waving his weapon between her eyes. “How the hell should I know who owns this bloody shack?” Turning back to the snorting mare, he shouted, “You there, I’ll knock your teeth down your throat. Mind your p’s and q’s, lady.”

  Edging along the stable wall, his heart rattling against his ribs, Max crept back to the sidewalk. He wasn’t sure he wanted to reconnoiter the rest of 52 Commerce. Then he saw how to get up to the second floor.

  “Yeah, go up there, put your questions to Connie. She knows everybody’s business,” the smithy called out, his animal under control again.

  Connie Flannagan came to the door with a baby at her breast. A harried look on her pointy features, she bounced the child on her shoulder. “Whatcher want?”

  “Max Greengrass. New York Herald. We’re doing a survey of the real estate around these parts.”

  “Ahh, don’t go botherin’ me. Can’tcha see what I got to put up with?”

  Over her shoulder Max saw several cribs. An infant climbed up on unsteady feet, trumpeting discontent. In a rolling rebellion, the children sent up cries of distress. “I got my own and then these here. Tie me up and ship me to Bellevue, might as well.”

  “Do you know who owns this building? Who you pay your rent to”

  “Sure. The beetle’s got his hand out every month, don’t worry.” Now Max saw that Connie Flannagan was much younger than he first supposed. Her drawn skin still retained a trace of youthful glow, but the purple bruises under her eyes and her collapsed mouth implied what was to come.

  “The beetle? Who’s he?”

  Her charges whimpered and mewled. “Shut up, the lot of you! The beadle, from the corporation.”

  “Sorry to be so dull, but what corporation are you talking about?”

  “Holy Trinity’s the landlord around here. My friend Eleanor, she pays ‘em, and Suzie Watkins around the corner. She’s got a room, plaster’s all muck in the rain. Falls down and sticks to your head like bird crap.”

  He retained his bland mask; but at the mention of Reverend Weems’s Holy Trinity Church, his blood started racing.

  “What’s your friend’s address?” he asked, all mildness.

  “Around the corner. You’ll see. Chimneypot’s falling down. The mothers go God knows where, and who has to feed ‘em?”

  “The exact address?” he persisted.

  “You’re a reporter, ain’t you? Go find it yourself,” she snapped.

  He’d squeezed Connie Flannagan dry, but within ten minutes Suzie Watkins named the beadle, a Mr. Cunningham. Suzie showed him the melting plaster, too, an irregular three-by-five-foot patch shaped like South America on her ceiling.

  His pencil flew as Suzie Watkins poured out her disgust.

  “Ask him, do his vermin pay rent too?” A doughy-faced woman in a shapeless dress, Suzie Watkins had a New York sense of humor.

  “Rodents?”

  “They live under his roof too, don’t they? Why don’t they cough up too? I sleep with a corn broom, don’tcha know?” It was easy to imagine why she needed this weapon at night, but Watkins seemed to relish the details. “They run right over your face if you don’t smash ‘em,” she told him.

  Max had to repress the urge to race back to the office and start writing up these revelations, but he needed to build a firmer foundation. To clear his head, he took a hike downtown, planning his attack on the Buildings Department as the pavement disappeared beneath his flying feet. Mysteries of lot and block numbers, deeds, transfers, and obscure agents waited to be plumbed. He could already feel the thrill of ancient paper between his fingers, though his first foray into the old records had yielded nothing but blind alleys so far.

  He needed a guide. In the Deeds Office, he surveyed the hive of lawyers, contractors, agents, managers, and cockroach landlords. These men seemed to come in twos and threes, their private colloquies conducted in bare whispers. When Max passed by, they turned their backs, and their voices fell to an inaudible register. In the hushed, suspicious atmosphere, great piles of bricks and mortar and human cargo were changing hands, undergoing the obscure surgery of clause and codicil, sundered partnership and hidden interest.

  He felt a sense of awe. This simple municipal office with its dented spittoons, its murky official portraits and dusty light globes, was the epicenter of perpetual change.

  In the far corner of the chamber, poring over a record book, a gawky water-bird of a man adjusted his pince-nez, then dipped his beak deep into a tattered volume. His lint-skinned suit hung limp on his skeleton. A hungry scavenger, Max surmised. It was too bad he was down to a single dollar again.

  “Say, bub, mind if I ask you a question?”

  “Depends.” The voice resonated surprisingly deep.

&nb
sp; “Well, I’ve been trying to track down who really owns some property, and I think they’re using agents to cover their tracks.”

  “Did you check the mortgages?”

  “No, I was looking at those books over there.”

  “Mortgages. Over there,” the man said. “Match the lot numbers.”

  Max grasped the point at once. Discovering who owned the paper might be illuminating, although mortgages could be bought and sold until a bank in Chicago held the rights to a slum on Avenue C. On the other hand, if Mrs. Edwards’s addresses represented the holdings of a single great entity like Holy Trinity, some of her property should be directly linked to the parent corporation. Or had the church conducted a systematic campaign to hide its hand?

  In a few hours of hauling down heavy volumes and squinting at chicken-track notations, Max mapped the church’s crazy-quilt empire. To start, he checked the mortgage for Moriarity’s warren. The church had done nothing to cover its tracks. It held the mortgage on 141 Varick outright. On the other hand, the 22 Spring Street rookery’s paper had been purchased by none other than the Canal Street Bank, but the latter had obtained its interest from Holy Trinity. Connie Flannagan’s Commerce Street digs were owned directly by the church, as were dozens of other properties in the Midnight Band’s portfolio.

  Famished, his lungs sticky with dust, he made his way out of the Deeds Office, doing his best to keep an idiotic smile from cracking his face. He could barely believe his good fortune. Here was a story with deep roots and thick branches. No, it wasn’t just a story; it was too complicated for that. Once he started interrogating church officials, and Weems himself, his revelations would flower into a series. Then a delicious idea flashed through his mind. The Health Department.

  Why show his cards yet? Draw a few more from the deck first. But before that, he needed Parnell’s benediction.