The Midnight Band of Mercy

by Michael Blaine

  A perfectly morbid smile played on the metro editor’s lips as he read Max’s proposal. Irregular patches of color, faint but visible, stained his pallid cheeks. Then he sucked in his bloodless lips.

  “Oh, we could raise holy hell with this…. It’s a nice piece of work. But there may be a problem.”

  “What? Why? We could roast these stuffed shirts for weeks with this stuff,” Max burst out, shaking his handwritten pages in his fist. “Wait ‘til I dig into the Health Department records, Stan. I don’t even have to look at them to know what’s there, for godsakes!”

  “What’re you, Baby Riis? We’ll have to go to Bennett. It’s got potential, but it may be too dicey.”

  “Pulitzer would plaster this all over his front page. Dana would have a field day! We’ve got a scoop. Why should we wait?” He regretted the fine spray of spittle he was raining down on Parnell, but it was too late now.

  The editor measured his young reporter with his gimlet eye. “Let me ask you a question, you damn hothead. Do you know where our publisher communes with his Maker?”

  “No. Don’t tell me.”

  “Pardon the expression, but our lord and master worships at Holy Trinity. Where else? We’ll have to go see him.”

  His heart raced as they threaded their way to Bennett’s corner office. The aristocratic publisher sat at his tall desk, a distracted look on his hollowed-out features. The tips of his mustache pointed perfectly in opposite directions. “Do you know what’s happening in Rome now, Parnell?”

  “Haven’t a clue, sir.”

  “Leaves. The trees have leaves, and they’ve had them for weeks. What’s the news here? Snow around Albany. Ice in the river in April. What fool said hell was hot?”

  “I suppose the Mediterranean is looking rather agreeable about now,” Parnell said, sensing the great man’s mood.

  Max bit his tongue while Bennett passed through his spiritual crisis.

  “The Mediterranean? That pisshole puddle? Oh, it’s warm, it’s sunny all right, but where is the action? In Paris, in London? They’re fossilized, if you want the bald truth. How many days of his life can a man spend in pleasant cafes?”

  Skillfully, Parnell pushed Max forward. “Here’s a bit of action, Mr. Bennett. Remember Greengrass?”

  The publisher squinted at Max with a look of complete incomprehension.

  “You called Byrnes on my behalf?” Max offered.

  “Ahh, you’re the one. Junkard stuck you, eh? Okay, I’m game. Spit it out!”

  When Max explained what he’d found out about Holy Trinity’s property, Bennett cut him off. “What of it? Of course they own some buildings. Every imbecile with a temperature knows that.”

  Placing a light hand on Max’s elbow, Parnell interceded. “That’s what I thought when he first came up with it. But I could see, if we handled this right, how we could give circulation a good shot in the arm.”

  “Garvey says we’re flat as a pancake. But I don’t see the point. Every church in town’s got some real estate.”

  Parnell went on, though, in a cajoling tone. “Just give Greengrass a chance to lay it out. You might change your mind.”

  Bennett’s eyes flicked from the view of St. Paul’s spire to his editor’s pale, seamed face. Parnell held the publisher’s intent gaze, and Max realized for the first time that the editor was taking a risk for him. The sphinx had become his champion.

  “Shoot,” Bennett said.

  Max set his feet wide and launched into the story.

  “It’s the scale of the thing that matters,” he explained, turning page after page of addresses.

  While Max spoke, the publisher seemed to drift away. His pale eyes rolled back, he whistled under his breath and smiled while Max pounded a dreadful point home.

  When Max finished, Bennett asked Parnell a single question: “If we go with this, do you think they’ll blackball me for good?”

  “They may let you through the church door, but don’t count on any conversation,” the editor advised grimly.

  “Ha-ha! That’s rich! They already threw me out of Society once! They can’t do it a second time! Go, go, Greengrass. What do we pay you for?”

  chapter thirty-one

  Stookey emerged from a shadowy aisle, an armful of folders clutched to his chest. A plump man whose cousin was married to a cousin of Big Tim Sullivan, he had purchased his Health Department clerkship at a discount. “You oughta get a load of this life sentence,” he complained, jerking a thumb at his domain of overstuffed cabinets and shelves. “I get a snoot fulla dust,” he went on, coughing into his fist, “somethin awful.”

  “Maybe working in the Health Department’s killing you,” Max sympathized.

  “In the winter I get the grippe.” He stroked a his scraggly beard. “Here’s the goods.”

  Bennett had come across with a decent advance, so Max put down a token of his esteem. Patting the mass of papers, he sighed. “I may need some more of these later.”

  With mounting excitement, he repaired to a high table and cracked the records for 22 Spring Street. At his right hand he placed his handwritten copy of the Midnight Band’s ledger. Before he approached Colonel Fisk, the president of the Holy Trinity Corporation, or any of the vestrymen whose names Bennett had provided, he needed numbers. The white-bearded, spotless Fisk, who as a youth had served in Mexico with Cadwallader’s regiment at the battle for the Churubusco convent, could dismiss any accusation with the time-honored question: Who was to blame for the destruction of the property but drunkards, their lax wives, and wild children?

  He needed ammunition to counter the colonel’s predictable fusillade.

  Twenty-Two Spring Street, he hoped, would become the tip of his lance. First, the material seemed a jumble: reports, scraps of paper, a page from Hallorhan’s Steak and Chops menu, correspondence between departments, and death certificates. In 1891, typhus had struck 22 Spring hard. Records showed that the disease had taken twelve lives, including five children. A memo referred to “standing water compromising the building’s water supply,” but the agency hadn’t pursued the matter. A copy of a receipt for a pump handle dated January 12,1892 surfaced, but he had no way of knowing whether it had been intended to combat the foul water.

  One report observed: “Emanations from decomposing refuse surround this property and permeate its apartments.”

  A remark by one investigator intrigued him: on September 14,1892, the Health Department estimated that 97 people were living at 22 Spring. For that same year, he added up the toll of cholera, typhoid, smallpox, and other plagues. Twenty-eight people had gone to their higher reward from 22 Spring, it turned out, fairly close to one out of three of its residents. Stunned, he reworked the figures, but came up with the same result.

  One rookery wouldn’t prove his case, though. Stookey handed over more stuffed folders. “These oughta hold you,” he muttered.

  Eight Macdougal Street consisted of one front and two rear tenements. “The north wall leaks in storms, and one water pump serves 18 families,” an inspector noted on January 27, 1892. A catalogue of violations leaped out: leaky roofs, crumbling walls, filthy cellars, broken and uneven flagging in the yard, loose plaster, standing water, closets in the last stages of filth. Meticulously, Max went over every death certificate the 8 Macdougal file had disgorged.

  The address had a talent for dysentery, but was no less proficient at scarlet fever and measles. The 1891 cholera outbreak had visited as well, and the white lung had claimed its usual toll. Dazed, he added up the numbers. A full thirty of 8 Macdougal’s men, women, and children died every year. Based on the assumption that each apartment contained eight human beings, related or otherwise, he developed an average number of Macdougal corpses per year, between 1890 and 1892. According to his thumbnail estimate, close to four out often tenants were losing their lives every year.

  Dimly, he became aware that he was grinding his teeth. He was a creature of the city; he knew Fifth Avenue and Bottle Alley, the Hoffman Hous
e and Stephenson’s; but nevertheless he had been blind to this quiet plague. And though, from a newsman’s point of view, hypocrisy was a quaint concept, he was disgusted by the way Holy Trinity was growing fat on sickness while the Reverend Weems campaigned for higher moral standards. He was horrified, disgusted, enraged.

  He could hear Belle in his head now, the way he always heard Faye. She’d want to flay Colonel Fisk and his minister alive. Didn’t she have a case? He realized something else, too. He was shocked. And stunned at his own naivete.

  Possessed now, he gathered more folders and worked out more calculations. Thirty-Eight Cherry Street, an ancient church property that had been cited for violations as long ago as 1864, contained 462 persons. Mutely, he checked off the Cherry Street casualties. One out of three residents, year after year, had expired in the old warren. In silence, in secret, the invisible war raged on. Sheet by sheet, Max ransacked the records. A ground-floor restaurant at 421 Canal Street was separated from living quarters “only by a skeletal partition. Raw sewage pours into basement.” Two-Eleven Varick featured a roof “twisted into an outlandish shape.” At 515 Greenwich Avenue, during the winter of 1891, six children under the age of five caught pneumonia and died within days of each other.

  When Max was growing up, children had always been coming down with fevers and chills and poxes with exotic names. Sammy Solomon, his friend from first grade, spit blood on his desk, but stayed in school until he couldn’t stand up. Theresa Sloane, an ethereal blonde girl he admired from afar, caught some nameless plague and disappeared one showery spring day. Before he was born, his mother had “lost"—a bland euphemism that made him think of misplaced purses and loose change—his brother Meyer, and a sister Lily, who had lived for eighteen days. Children died with the regularity of the seasons, a sad but immutable part of existence.

  He forgot to eat. Stookey closed down for lunch, but Max hunkered down, mesmerized by the vision conjured by the numbers. His bill of particulars grew building by building. Death by death, he expanded his indictment. Fingering the old documents, he kept reminding himself that each one represented a human being who had once taken a dip in the Hudson or licked syrupy ices on a summer day.

  Small details swam before his eyes: “Walls no more or less than the baseboards of a barn… . Roof in last stages of decay, warped and curled into hillocks and depressions … floor a patchwork of boards … newspapers and scraps of muslin tacked to the ceiling to hold plaster … $12 per month.”

  “Closing time!” Stookey called out.

  Max barely heard him.

  “This shop is closed!” the clerk boomed out again. “You, buddy. Time to skedaddle.”

  Max blinked. Spasms grabbed his lower back, and his neck was a single throbbing muscle. In a scrawled hand he’d rilled dozens of pages with notes. Piling folders in a tall stack, he staggered to Stookey’s counter.

  “You want to join the department?” the clerk proposed.

  “Huh?”

  “What paper’d you say you’re from?”

  “Herald. Yeah, well, I guess this should choke ‘em. Here’s two bits for your trouble,” he added, tipping Stookey a second time. “Publisher says keep this …” He made the timeless gesture, palms pressing down empty air.

  “And you wouldn’t know why?”

  “I can see how a man can get the sticky lung in here.” He coughed into his fist.

  He sent his card in to Colonel Fisk’s office with a note from Bennett himself. Sitting on the edge of a calfskin-covered chair, he arranged and rearranged his notes, attaching a question to each damning fact. He intended to start with a few innocuous queries, and then try to confront Fisk with the appalling conditions he’d uncovered, all in a bland, disinterested tone. Fisk was a tough nut, he knew. On staff with General Winfield Scott, he’d penetrated the fort at Chapultepec, though he denied the rumor that he was the one who stole Santa Ana’s spare wooden leg. A few years later, he’d stormed the citadels of Manhattan and ended up managing property for the Astors and Van Rensselaers. His ascension to the Holy Trinity Corporation’s presidency in 1887 had been like a coronation.

  A high-ceilinged, spacious chamber, Fisk’s office was carpeted with Persian rugs. Heavy mahogany furniture predominated. Prints with classical architectural themes hung on the walls, along with a water color of a Mexican cafe. A commotion of blazing candles, swirling red and white skirts, and sword-wielding hidalgos, the picture was the single reference to the military man’s storied past.

  At sixty-three years of age, the compact, barrel-chested Fisk still affected a bluff, soldierly manner. From behind his desk he gave Max a frank onceover. “What’s this all about, young man? I can give you three minutes.”

  Fisk’s face was carved soapstone. Not a single hair in his close-clipped white beard was out of place. He radiated force.

  “Mr. Bennett sent me,” Max stumbled.

  “I received the note,” Fisk snapped.

  “Some complaints about church property have come to my attention,” Max said, regaining his balance. He’d survived Byrnes and William H. Howe. Why let this martinet faze him? Still, he couldn’t quite quell a fluttering sensation in his chest.

  “The address?”

  “Actually, I have dozens you might want to comment on.”

  “Leave them with my secretary. We investigate the slightest problem. It’s our property, and we would be foolish to let it deteriorate, wouldn’t we?” Fisk said in a crisp tone. “Tell Bennett we’re guarding our investments. That should give him peace of mind.” He took up a pen and dismissed Max with a curt nod.

  The gesture got under Max’s skin, and in an even voice he pressed on. “I understand the corporation’s holdings are quite extensive. These issues,” he said, shaking his sheaf of papers for emphasis, “may have escaped your attention.”

  “Doubt it. We run an exceedingly tight ship. However, as our friend Bennett sent you, you have my word that my secretary will look into the matter.”

  He had hoped to hold back his strong suit, but the interview was slipping away from him. “There’s quite a bit of sickness in your buildings; were you aware of that?”

  Wielding silence, Fisk held Max in an icy glare. For an endless moment, he wondered if Fisk would deign to reply at all. Hands folded in his lap, Max returned stillness for stillness.

  Finally, realizing the reporter would not relent, the manager said: “Mr. Greenberg, I’m a property manager, not a physician. Call on the Health Department. They deal in this sort of thing.”

  “It’s Greengrass. I’ve been to the Health Department.”

  “Whatever you call yourself.” Fisk examined him with detached curiosity. “You don’t intend to write something, do you?”

  Incredulous, Max realized that the colonel had no comprehension of what an unfavorable article could do to the church’s reputation. That such a piece might come into being was totally beyond Fisk’s imagination. Twenty-Two Spring Street was grotesque enough, but Fisk’s disinterested savagery struck him as even more deeply malformed. He suppressed his rage. Barely.

  “I certainly do intend to write an article, but I want to give you a chance to disabuse me of certain notions I’ve developed….”

  “Such as?”

  “Some details I came across at the Deeds Office, to begin with. Let’s start with 22 Spring….”

  Not bothering to hide his irritation, Fisk fell back in his chair. “Make it short.” Sure.

  But halfway through Max’s presentation, Fisk cut him off. “Tell your publisher you are poorly informed. Our records are open to him at any time.”

  “Are they open to the public?”

  “These tenements you’re talking about may be on our land, but we didn’t put them up, and we don’t own them.” From his research, Max knew this was true only in part. Holy Trinity engaged in every real estate configuration known to man: it leased, it rented, it mortgaged, it owned directly, it used agents to collect rent, and it collected rent itself. Still, he let F
isk ramble on, scribbling shorthand notes in his lap without peering down. “We offer every inducement to our tenants to put up new buildings. If a tenant will do so, we will provide a twenty-one-year lease. The Holy Trinity Corporation is not responsible for buildings on its property that are owned by others. We cannot dictate to these owners any more than we can dictate to owners on land we don’t own.”

  “When you say ‘tenants,’ you’re referring to the builders who lease your land, correct?”

  “Of course. Does Bennett have a business reporter I could talk to? I don’t have time to educate you in these matters.”

  Max ignored the slight, his confidence growing in leaps and bounds. “All of your property is handled in this way?”

  “Not all, of course. These transactions can become complicated.”

  “The church’s corporation holds some tenement property directly, doesn’t it?”

  Fisk’s mouth pursed in disgust. Without saying a word, he communicated that his distaste had become highly personal. “It is my job to protect the corporation’s assets. Whether the Croton Reservoir’s water is clean or not is a matter for the city. Good day, Mr. Greenberg.”

  Max didn’t bother to counter the repeated slight. In his own increasingly cantankerous way, he took it as a sign of victory. He almost pitied the old soldier. Fisk didn’t understand that he had made a noose of his own words. “By the way, has a Mrs. Edwards ever worked in your office?”

  The colonel rose from his desk, strode to the door and held it open himself.

  Outside, Max blinked in the torrent of sunlight. Had he been too aggressive? Had he tipped his hand too quickly? His carefully constructed attack had lost direction under Fisk’s pressure, but he had regained his footing, hadn’t he? The notes he’d scrawled, while keeping a straight face, proved his coolness under0 fire, didn’t they? Leaning against the office building, he extracted the crumpled sheets to make sure he could make out his chicken-scrawl. He had to squint to decipher the penciled lines, but they were legible. He could breathe again.