Blindly, he hurtled toward the Herald office, going over the interview’s every parry and thrust. Had Fisk reacted ever so slightly when he’d tossed out Edwards’s name? From those stony features, it was impossible to read a thing. Still, Fisk’s refusal to answer his question meant he’d hit a nerve. Or did it? Whole blocks disappeared as, fueled by his furious thinking, Max stalked toward the Herald. An over-wound spring, he couldn’t bear being confined in a streetcar, not now.
The longer he walked, and the longer he thought, the better he felt. He had more ammunition than he could possibly use in a single article. Fisk had tried to intimidate him, but he’d forced the colonel into haughty denials. Pure gold.
Then he remembered 8 Macdougal and self-laceration flared again. Why hadn’t he posed a single question about that pestilent pile? Fisk had rattled him right away. What else was that fluttering in his chest but fear? On the other hand, the colonel had spewed out enough contempt to paint a wicked self-portrait.
As he crossed Printing House Square, he gained confidence. The facts were unassailable. He had the story of a lifetime in his grasp. He had survived Fisk’s withering silences, his sarcasm and slights, and he was still standing. What could the colonel do to him now? Instead of surrendering to his fears, he had to organize his material and write that first pointed line. He made a mental note to kick Fisk’s rationalizations up top.
There was no point in eating or sleeping until he composed his opening salvo; but before he reached his desk, Parnell summoned him to the throne. “What the hell’d you do? Fisk’s been burning my ear off on the telephone.”
Panic flashed through him. “What’d he say?”
“He wants your head, that’s all. He was squealing like a stuck pig. What the hell’d you stick him with?” Parnell’s white-lipped smile was all the encouragement Max needed.
“I’ve got the goods, Stan. Health Department records. The hospitals are safer than Holy Trinity’s shacks.”
“Use that.”
“What?”
“The hospitals. That’ll grab them. But don’t go overboard. Their lawyers will be sniffing out every word. This isn’t some batty old biddies; this is Holy Trinity.” The editor folded a sheet of paper and pushed it across his desk. “Use this. Straight from the colonel’s mouth. Now get out of here. You’re on deadline.”
Piling his mountain of material next to his writing machine, he froze for a moment. His crabbed hand had scrawled out too many facts, too many quotes, too many ideas. In the margins, in unblotted ink, he had recorded secondary issues and tangential calculations. Unfolded sheets were sprayed with half-legible information. A tidal wave of particulars threatened to crest over his head. How could he keep from drowning?
It was one thing to collect facts, quite another to carve a simple line through the mass of material. Now, facing the terror of the blank page, he fought with the simplest question of all: What was the story about? The condition of the buildings? The suffering of the tenants? The smugness of the landlord? Holy Trinity’s hypocrisy? (A follow-up interview with the Reverend Weems cried out to be written.) All of these and more?
He was no Sachs’ Cafe socialist, he had no ax to grind against property owners, but Fisk’s way of thinking burned him up. Part of it was personal, he had to admit. He didn’t care for being called Greenberg twice in that arch, patronizing tone. But the colonel’s rationalizations turned his stomach, too. A cold rage gripped him. Perhaps this fury had been bred into his bones all along, but he had never sensed its depths before.
He knew how an assassin must feel the moment the crowd parted and he could take a good clean shot at his tyrant. He also knew he would have to resist that temptation.
Then his fingers began playing the keys. “In 1864, a Holy Trinity Church property at 38 Cherry Street was cited by the Health Department for numerous violations, including a tainted water supply and ‘emanations from decomposing refuse.’ Today, almost thirty years later, the rambling tenement contains 438 persons who share a single water pump. As recently as January 8, 1893, Health Department investigators described the same pump as ‘lacking a handle and being virtually inoperable.’
“An analysis of recent deaths at 38 Cherry Street reveals a death rate three times the city average. Eight Macdougal, another Holy Trinity property, has experienced a rate of four deaths for every ten residents, every year. Cholera, tuberculosis, typhus, and influenza have all found fertile ground at 8 Macdougal and many other church-owned tenements. They are much like old hospitals, whose infected wards take their toll every year.”
Now he unfolded the quote Fisk had telephoned in to Parnell. “The idea that the church’s corporation ought to act in any way contrary to its stockholders’ interests is abhorrent. There are certain foreign doctrines that propose that business ought to build its own funeral pyre, but Holy Trinity’s board does not subscribe to them. I have a fiduciary responsibility which I do not propose to shirk.”
The colonel had outdone himself. Max worked up a transition and inserted Fisk’s quote. Now he started hacking away at the rest of the piece. Time melted as he poured it out, checking and rechecking his dates and figures, firming up attributions, revising a phrase here and there, bumping this graf up and that one down. Shape-shifting, slowly settling, hardening in place, the article rolled out before his eyes. Tearing the last sheet from the platen, he raced across the office and delivered.
Parnell went light with his pencil. “Garvey’s got his back up. Let’s go.”
“What’s up?”
“He wants to kill it. C’mon.”
Like disconnected spurts of electricity, his thoughts stuttered. They couldn’t, not now … all that reporting, all that composing … what was Garvey’s interest? Was he a Holy Trinity man himself? Numb, he stumbled behind Parnell into the glassed-in office.
A dyspeptic look on his face, Garvey stroked his soft doorknob of a chin. To Max’s surprise, Bennett stood glowering behind the managing editor. Under the publisher’s fierce gaze, he felt transparent. Stranger still, a bald working man in a linty jacket sat in the corner, rolling his cloth cap in his hands.
Garvey offered Max a curt nod. “Stan. Greengrass? I’ll make it short. I don’t give two figs about Fisk and his corporation, but he’s got a point. Where do we get off making accusations when none of this is their responsibility? Did they go around infecting their own tenants? Did they tell them to make a pigsty inside four walls and spread the clap while they’re at it? I don’t see it. We’re going off half-cocked, and we might end up in court.”
Frowning, Bennett asked, “What do you think of that, Greengrass? It’s my money you’re playing with. Suppose Garvey’s right, and I end up with some shyster choking me to death?”
“It’s not libel if every word is true,” Max shot back. A torrent of words swelled up in his throat, but he bit his tongue. The worst thing he could do was make a speech defending his work.
Bennett hooted. “Ha! What do you say to that, Garvey?”
“It’s way out of left field. Do you think the church’s trustees know a thing about this crap? I like to think twice before joining a lynching. What about the vestrymen? You’re talking about some of the best people in this city, and you know how nasty they can be. This can turn around and bite us, I’m telling you.”
Garvey was a celebrated infighter—he hadn’t become managing editor by being a creampuff—and he had Bennett’s confidence. Long ago he had damped down the publisher’s infatuation with Henry George, and he maintained an intricate web of contacts with Tammany and the Reverend Parkhurst’s goo-goos. After a lifetime serving the Bennetts, father and son, his word had a special weight.
Max’s heart sank. If they murdered this story, he was flat out of ideas. Bone-deep exhaustion gripped him. Pins and needles pricked at his right foot.
Parnell didn’t back down, though. “Those fellas read the Trib” he pointed out. “This thing’s got my-how-fhe-mighty-have-fallen written all over it. What else do you want? And it’s a beat,
for godsakes. Who else’s got it?”
“Exactly! That’s my point!” Bennett said vehemently. “Tompkins, what did I ask you to do?”
Shifting uncomfortably in his chair, the working man coughed into his fist. A pattern of freckles stained his naked scalp. “Excuse me, I gotta toucha the congestion. What I did was, I walked the whole island, and I seen how we was doin’ against the Wor/d.”
“Tompkins has been delivering for us for how many years?” A conspiratorial smile crept over Bennett’s sharp-etched features.
“Twenty-three, sir.”
The pomaded tips of Bennett’s mustache quivered. “No guesswork, right? I told you to find out the real figures, didn’t I? Not those self-serving estimates the Circulation Department loves to feed me, eh?”
“That’s right, sir. I went to every newsstand up and down and got an earful. Took me five weeks. The long and short of it is, we’re dead as a doornail.”
“The Worlds boxing our ears, isn’t it?” Bennett crowed.
“So they says.”
The publisher spread his arms wide. “What else do we need to know, Mr. Garvey? Whip it! Ride it ‘til it dies.”
chapter thirty-two
Belle was sitting up in bed with Faye, stroking her hair with one hand and rocking Leon’s cradle with the other.
“He’s got a fever,” she said, patting the mattress for Max to sit down. Her curly black hair hung loose on her shoulders, and her plain dress was unbuttoned at the throat.
He had tracked her to Sullivan Street after finding her note pinned to his door. This was not the rendezvous he had planned when he left the office, famished and longing for company. What he’d had in mind was a Blue Blazer at Jerry Thomas’s on 22nd, maybe a Tom and Jerry for Belle, a chat about the depredations of Holy Trinity—he knew she would love his imitation of Colonel Fisk—and then a surreptitious visit to her room around midnight.
Faye lay her head on Belle’s shoulder. “He was standing up and falling down,” she said in a faraway voice.
Leaning over the child, he put his hand on the tiny forehead. Leon was burning up. “Jeez, he’s hot as hell. You think he’ll be okay?”
Belle calmed his fears. “His temperature’s 103, but they run high at this age. We’ll keep an eye on him.”
He didn’t like Leon’s ashy complexion. Did he ever sleep?
“Pour yourself,” Faye offered, pointing a languid finger at the gin on her dresser.
Max took the liquor neat. There was no savor to the stuff, you just poured it down your gullet like medicine. For some unfathomable reason, women seemed to like it, though. Equally mysterious was the intimate bond Belle and Faye had forged out of the blue. He had been planning to tell Belle in intricate detail about 22 Spring Street, but Faye’s boudoir, with its astral lamp, its decorative screen and violet scents, didn’t seem like the right place.
“You should have seen Faye at the show today. She topped herself,” Belle said, an adoring note in her voice. She knew she sounded like a greenhorn to Faye and Max, but how could she help being entranced? Standing backstage, she’d seen Maggie Cline belt out “When Hogan Pays the Rent.” The way she sauntered around the stage and joked about her nine-dollar fan—Belle got knots in her stomach laughing so hard.
“I was light as a fairy,” Faye agreed.
“I watched from the wings,” Belle went on. “Danny did a nice turn, too.”
What amazed him was how easily she had insinuated herself into his cracked family. The way she was stretched out, her boots unlaced, rocking Leon, petting Faye, casting warm glances his way with those liquid brown eyes—it all seemed so natural that it frightened him.
“Mr. Swarms is nothing without me,” Faye said, a sly smile on her painted mouth.
“No, he’s something. I just don’t know what,” Max laughed, finally taking a seat on the edge of the bed. Everything was going so smoothly between Swarms and Faye, it made him itchy. He’d never given two thoughts to Danny’s character in their pub-crawling days. Swarms needed Faye in his act, but was that it? She was such an easy mark when she was in love. So far Swarms had been an angel, even hinting that he might adopt Leon when the time came. In fact, he had been too damned generous for Max’s taste. Danny Swarms, philanthropist, made his skin crawl.
“Is there a chicken leg or something in this dump?”
From somewhere under the covers Faye produced half a sandwich. “Polish sausage. Your favorite.”
He tore into the soggy bread. The meat was tasty, but it did nothing to satisfy his raging hunger. Morelli’s on Sixth Avenue grilled a nice T-bone steak. He wondered if their kitchen was still open. “So, Belle, are you camping out here or what? ‘Cause I’ve got to get my beauty sleep.”
Faye grabbed her friend’s arm and batted her eyelashes. “She can’t go. She’s my prisoner.”
Belle gave him a helpless look. “I have to keep an eye on Leon. If the fever spikes….”
Faye puckered her lips and blew him a kiss. “You know what you can do, Maxie? On your way home, tell Mrs. Darling Leon’s out for the next day or two.”
Suppose he and Belle got serious? Would he have to fight Faye for Belle’s attention? He would lose that battle every time.
“Let me borrow her,” he replied, taking Belle’s other wrist.
They wended their way through the crowded kitchen—Faye’s roommates were giving a potluck dinner for some of the other chorines—and out into the hall. The gas fixture threw a yellow light onto the whitewashed wall. Doors slammed. Water gushed in a hall toilet down below. As soon as they were alone, she fell into his arms, her kisses ardent, probing, and his chest went weak. Encircling her tiny waist, he swept her off the floor and held her close. His pinkie traced the hollow of her delicate ear. She ran her fingernail down the back of his neck. The tips of their tongues met. A current bolted through him, and he went hot and faint and hard all at once.
Biting her earlobe, he pressed her again. “Why don’t you come back with me? The kid’s gonna be okay, isn’t he?”
She wanted to more than anything, and she hadn’t forgotten the sheepskins either. Who knew where any man had been, especially this one? She didn’t answer until he set her down again. “Probably, maybe. I should keep an eye out.”
“It can’t be that serious, can it?”
“It’s most likely nothing, but I want to watch out for meningitis. Faye’s such a sweetheart, but between you, me, and the lampost, I don’t think she can boil water.”
Defeated, he leaned against the wall.
Her eyes fell on his pleated trousers. “You made a tent.”
“I’m not the only talented one in this family.” He pulled her against him again, kissed her and groaned. “Sorry, sorry, I couldn’t help that one.”
“Neither could I,” she said, stroking his face, tugging his mustache. “It’s so bushy.”
“Does it scratch?”
“No, it’s like a pillow on your face.”
Her hair corkscrewed in three directions at once. He was puffing like a Forney engine. They both burst out laughing.
“When you go to this Mrs. Darling, I haven’t seen her insides… .” As soon as the malaprop escaped her lips, she could feel her face burning. The things she said sometimes, he’d think she was an imbecile.
“Neither have I.”
She placed her palms on his chest and pushed him away. “Stop, you know what I mean. These places … sometimes, you have to make sure about them.”
“Did Faye say anything?” he asked, alarmed.
“Not exactly. It’s just the way she doesn’t talk about it.”
“Another Fayefaye expert, huh?”
“I’m getting my certificate.”
Three-day paint choked the numerals, but he could still make out the address, 217 Sullivan. Mrs. Darling turned out to be a jovial, three-chinned woman, and another Faye Greengrass acolyte to boot. Through the cracked door, she told him all about his sister’s largesse. “Oh, Faye, she gives me a f
ree ticket to Mr. Keith’s when she can snag one.”
“Mind if I get a glass of water? I’m parched.”
Her eyes hardened, scrutinizing him. “You’re not one of those gyps, are you?”
“Nah, I gave up forking years ago.”
That got a laugh out of her. Her chins jiggled. “We have to be quiet. They’re all asleep for once.”
She led him to a sink and gave him a greasy glass. The kitchen was cheerful enough, the walls papered with chromos of Kathy O’Neill, Ruth St. Denis, and Eva Tanguay, as well as anonymous Gibson Girls torn from Sunday supplements. With her theatrical airs, Faye must have impressed Mrs. Darling no end.
A pot of frankincense smoked on a deal table. The thick, cloying fumes didn’t quite cover another more complex stew of odors. Separating the kitchen from the inner chambers, a beaded curtain hung still in the dead air.
Before she could stop him, Max parted the clicking strands. In the shadows, he made out two large cribs. The room smelled of sour milk, mildew, and piss. Several infants were jammed into each crib. Mrs. Darling had stuffed at least seven or eight babies into the windowless room. He couldn’t be sure, but he thought he could make out a door to an interior chamber. Were there more stacked in there, like chickens in a coop?
How could Faye leave Leon here? He knew only too well. Faye had constructed a mythical Mrs. Darling—so attentive, so sweet—for her own benefit, and no matter how hard you drummed the facts, she would stick to her fantasy now. The truth was that she could dump Leon off here on the run—it was only a few doors away from her own tenement—and Mrs. Darling’s was probably dirt-cheap, too. Belle had sniffed out the truth right away.
“Oh, don’t look in there: I keep Leon in my room,” Mrs. Darling cooed, her hand on his shoulder.
“Oh, that’s better,” Max said. “It’s a little tight in there, eh?”
“Faye s not like the ones that thinks I’m a hotel. Oh, they’re sly, don’t you believe ‘em. They come to Mrs. Darling ‘cause they hear I’ve got the heart, and they put a little down, and you know what? God as my witness, it’s the last I see of’em. Then what am I suppose ta’ do?”
The Midnight Band of Mercy Page 31