The Styx

by Jonathon King

  Harris led the way, passing slowly through the first passenger car, touching the top corners of each seat as he passed. The gesture was made not to collect his balance—his experience of walking through the rolling train was like that of a seaman and he rarely wavered—but to signify some sense of ownership to the riders he seemed to study one at a time.

  Byrne followed, but his sea legs were not yet established. He pitched side to side with the sway of the cars and twice bumped into the shoulders of men sitting on the edge of the isle.

  “Pardon me,” he said both times.

  When they left the first car and stood on the outside connecting platform, Harris lectured him.

  “Don’t ever offer apologies, lad. You’re security here and the likes of them know that just from the look of you.” Harris tipped his chin back toward the car. “A little respect goes a long way if somethin’ should occur. It also warns ’em if they start to think they can cross you. You know what the uniform does on the street? It’s the same here. You want them to know you’re Pinkerton.”

  Byrne knew the tactic: force and bully. It was not a method he preferred. His best work was done undercover, working the sidelines and shadows. He did not fear direct confrontation, the steel whip in his hand was more than effective, but he liked the advantage of observing trouble first before jumping into it.

  “Now let’s see that talent of yours that Captain Sweeney bragged on to get you there,” Harris said. “I’ll go through the next car. You follow in five minutes and I’ll meet you on the next platform.”

  Byrne waited until the door closed on Harris’ back and then slipped his watch from his pocket, checked the time. Out in the midmorning sun he watched as the landscape changed to bare winter trees and chilled brown shrubbery and the occasional rail siding flashing by. He closed his eyes and took a deep breath of the air and this time he held it without choking. The smell was of leaves decomposing on the ground, not unpleasant like the odor of rot, but something simply changing and refueling the soil. It was a sensation completely foreign to him.

  When the five minutes had passed Byrne opened the door to the passenger car and walked through at a pace that was unhurried, but not so slow as to draw attention. No one fails to at least look up as a stranger passes by in such close quarters, but what they notice, and what each one remembers, is the key. Captain Sweeney had obviously passed on word of Byrne’s ability.

  When he stepped out onto the open platform, Harris was waiting with a smarmy grin on his face, arms folded across his broad chest almost in the manner of a challenge.

  “OK, lad. Tell me what you saw.”

  “Twelve passengers,” Byrne started, “Seven men and two women in their midtwenties. The women are both married. Three children, two of them girls. The younger of the women with her son is nervous enough to be holding her St. Christopher’s in her left hand. Her shoes are the kind a woman who had several miles and days to go would wear. The other woman is wary of men. She keeps cutting her eyes up at the old guy up front and flinched hard when I came even with her shoulders. Her clothes make her a social elite. If she’s going to Philadelphia, her husband is probably a businessman.”

  Harris had stopped grinning and stared at Byrne’s eyes.

  “And the gentlemen?”

  “Not a farmer among them,” Byrne started. “The three by themselves are salesmen is my guess by the worn threads on their jacket cuffs and the resoled shoes. The valises they have are probably filled with samples and clean white shirts.

  “The three fellows facing each other in the middle are interesting. They’re playing three-card Monte, but there’s no money being exchanged. It looks like the two on the north seats are actually teaching the scam to the other. By his accent, he’s probably a Pole from Brooklyn. I’m not sure about the document briefcases they all seem to be carrying. But shysters sometimes all look alike even when they aren’t trying.”

  By now Harris had raised that spiked eyebrow of his and had dropped his folded arms to rest on his newly relaxed belly.

  “And the last?” he said.

  “Older man.” Byrne hesitated before picking his words. “A poor man’s version of Mr. Flagler himself. The cigar wallet in his suit coat pocket. Three rings, one with a nice stone. The shoes are new and expensive, but the collar of his shirt is too off-white for professional laundry. That briefcase he’s got next to him has a lock on it, never seen one of them before.”

  Again he hesitated.

  “Is that all?” Harris said.

  “The old guy was studying me as much as I was him. Nothing gets past that one. Reminds me of Sweeny himself.”

  “Aye,” Harris said. “And the old captain didn’t let you slip past either, did he now. Right as rain he was with the likes of you, young Byrne. Talent as advertised. Now I’ll have to worry about you takin’ my own job.”

  Byrne did not blush at the compliment. He’d been asked to demonstrate his photographic memory before and he had not shown Harris even the beginning of his abilities.

  He was later to learn that the women were indeed wives, one of a Philadelphia investment banker and the other meeting her husband who was homesteading a piece of land in Florida. She would continue with them for the entirety of the trip. The salesmen were just that, men working the connections between New York and Philadelphia. The three budding card sharks were “binder boys,” as Harris called them. They were young men who’d put chunks of money together through whatever means: beg, borrow or steal. Now they were headed for Florida and the promised land of booming real estate. Harris again explained that these three would join a growing number of speculators who had found early on that previously useless land in the newly blossoming cities along Mr. Flagler’s rail line was gaining in value by the day.

  “The crooks’ll get a stake from some business type in New York and come down and buy a binder on the sale of a piece of land and then slap away the mosquitoes while the price keeps risin’,” Harris said.

  Harris explained that a binder was a nonrefundable down payment that required the remainder of the cost of the land to be paid within thirty days.

  “They might swat the insects for twenty days, maybe even twenty-eight before they sell it again before the final payment is due. And the profit, m’boy. You ain’t never seen the price of land climb the way it does in Florida.

  “I watched a binder pass through six hands before the last fool got caught holdin’ the bag with no more buyers around. But hell, this is just the beginning of these rascals. That group is goin’ to the end of the line in Miami, and believe me, they’re playin’ three-card Monte with land deeds down there, lad.”

  Byrne filed the information away. It takes money to make money, unless of course you’re a thief or taking advantage of someone else’s cash. Those weren’t hard lessons to learn on the streets of the Lower East Side. They were also lessons he’d watched his brother Danny employ on a regular basis. If there were three of a kind in the business of fleecing someone, maybe they had run across Danny in their travels. He’d find an acceptable time and place to speak again with that group.

  “And what about the gentleman?” Byrne said, wanting the same background on the older man who had eyeballed him.

  Harris tried to straighten his face to give a flat look that was a mighty effort for a rough Irishman.

  “Faustus,” he said. “Stay clear, Byrne. He’ll be tryin’ to recruit you to some unholy religion that’ll lead to trouble that we have no part of and no relation to. Leave that sleepin’ dog lie, hear?”

  Byrne was ordered to again take up his post on Mr. Flagler’s car while they made a short stop at the North Philadelphia station where the Germantown and Chestnut Hill lines merged. Soon enough they crossed the deep running Schuylkill River and merged onto yet another line. Byrne watched the landscape change yet again as they approached the city and caught sight of charred destruction. It became evident that the main rail station had recently been destroyed by fire, and although the tracks had b
een cleared, there was still the scent of charred and smoldering wood in the air. Byrne coughed and thought of his new sensitivity to clean air and how quickly one could recognize the sullied version.

  Byrne climbed number 90’s outside ladder. From a vantage point over the roof he could see the French Renaissance building of city hall growing in the distance with flags aflutter at several cornices surrounding the spire at its middle where a statue of William Penn stood impossibly high in the sky.

  When the train pulled slowly into Philadelphia’s center city stop at Broad Street, Harris jumped down and gave Byrne a hand signal to do the same. They oversaw the uncoupling of Flagler’s car and its positioning on a side rail where it would sit alone like some elegant museum piece while the smoke and ash and soot of the rest of the rail yard swirled round it.

  Byrne stared wide-eyed at the grand towers of the Masonic Temple across the wide street.

  “The exterior you’re looking at is built of Cape Ann syenite, which takes its name from Syne in Upper Egypt, where it was quarried for monuments by the ancient Egyptians,” a deep voice said. Byrne turned to see the man called Faustus standing just behind him, worrying on a pair of calfskin gloves. “The other sides are of Fox Island granite from the coast of Maine. Each stone, in accordance with Masonic tradition, was cut, squared, marked and numbered at the quarries and brought here ready for use.”

  “Is that so?” Byrne said, turning his head back to the Temple but admonishing himself for not detecting the man’s presence earlier, “Mr. Faustus.”

  Despite the use of his name by a complete stranger, the elderly man did not miss a beat.

  “Amadeus Faustus,” he said, extending his gloved hand. Byrne shook it. “She was dedicated on Friday, September 26, 1873,” Faustus continued. “The eighty-seventh anniversary of the independence of The Grand Lodge of Free and Accepted Masons of Pennsylvania.”

  This time Byrne looked directly in the man’s light gray eyes, holding them. Was this the pitch of recruitment that Harris had warned him against?

  “Thank you, sir. I will not forget,” he said.

  Faustus did not disengage his look. He reached into his vest pocket.

  “I have no doubt of that, young man,” he said and flipped a large coin into the air in Byrne’s direction. Byrne snatched the object with a movement and speed like that of a snake strike. His reaction was habit, formed from hours of practice at a game he and Danny had perfected. Since they’d been kids on the street they’d passed idle time by positioning three coins on their forearms and then in a motion tossed all three into the air in front of them. The goal was to snatch all three out of the air, individually with separate strikes of the hand, palm down, before the last coin touched the ground. They’d been working on four coins when Danny left New York.

  Byrne turned the coin in his hand and slipped it into his pocket.

  “Not going to bite it to test its quality?” Faustus said, passing him in the direction of the entryway to the Temple.

  “No sir,” Byrne said. “That would be crass.” He heard a sharp whistle from the direction of number 90 and hustled back to Harris’ side.

  “Mr. Flagler will need you to escort him to a business meeting, lad, while I accompany the missus to Wanamaker’s,” Harris said. They squared their shoulders in the direction of the departing Faustus, watching after him. Byrne showed the detective the coin the old man had tossed to him.

  “I don’t recognize it,” Byrne said. “Worth anything?”

  Harris looked at the markings on the metal and laughed.

  “Not a penny,” he said. “It’s an old Confederate fifty-cent piece re-strike, lad. Not worth the metal it’s stamped on. Useless, just like the man who gave it to ye.”

  CHAPTER 6

  BY mid morning there were more white people in the Styx than had ever set foot there at one time.

  Mr. Wayne T. Pearson, the manager of The Poinciana and the Breakers, had arrived with his assistant. At first he’d simply been riled by the lack of a consistent staff at the hotels as the Negro workers had begun taking turns surveying their burned homes and sifting through the ashes for anything they could salvage. But when reports that the body of a man, a white man, had been found in the debris, Pearson was compelled to investigate. The fire had now become an urgent matter of rumor control.

  Since it was his wagon being used to transport the black workers, Mr. Carroll, the head liveryman, was also there. Thorn Martin had relayed to him word of the white man’s body, and that news, as well as blatant curiosity, had pulled him to the place as well. And then there was Miss McAdams, who had not left Ida May Fleury’s side.

  When Mr. Pearson arrived, the rest of the group was still standing near the rear of Shantice Carver’s burned out shack, and they parted as if his substantial chin were the prow of boat.

  Pearson did not say a word, only reading the eyes of the gathered people who glanced back at a flame-darkened lean-to. It was indication enough where the focus of the day lay. He stepped beyond the gathering and looked down on the corpse of the dead man. The body was stretched out on a platform of wood and protected to a degree by the lean-to roof that had obviously been used to store kindling and firewood. Pearson surprised the onlookers by going down on his haunches to get a better view. His assistant initially tried to follow suit but blanched at something—the look of the dead man’s partially seared face or maybe the smell of burned flesh—and quickly abandoned his boss for a nearby tree trunk on which to retch. Pearson did not react. He was an older man and had seen battle in the Civil War as a teenager. Dreams and visions had visited him many times since. This experience was a mild dose of death.

  Before him lay a man who appeared to be in his late twenties, broad of shoulder and tall, probably five-feet, nine-inches. The body was dressed in a dark-colored blouse, possibly of some kind of linen or even silk that appeared to have actually melted in spots and adhered to the man’s skin. His trousers were of a style befitting an evening suit. His shoes were definitely made for a more formal affair than one this place might offer. Despite the disfiguring burns to the man’s face, Pearson could see high cheekbones and remnants of a mustache that was indeed partially wrapped around a roll of singed U.S. paper currency protruding from the corpse’s mouth. Pearson was unable to determine the denomination of the bills. Some six inches below that, where the dead man’s Adam’s apple should have been, was a blackened hole. Though his past experiences had been with wounds created by musket balls, Pearson had no trouble discerning that a bullet had been fired into the man’s throat.

  The manager finally stood and stepped back to give the site a more thoughtful survey, noting the near total destruction of anything flammable, including the four walls of the nearby shack. He took a folding knife from his pocket, approached the corner of the lean-to and took a deep carving from the wood and examined it. As he suspected, the wood, probably salvaged from some shipwreck or washed up on the beach from a floundering barge, was Dade County Pine, a wood known to be so hard and strong that it was nearly impossible to drive an iron nail through it. The wood’s properties also made it impervious to only the hottest of flame, and it had indeed sheltered the dead man’s body instead of hastening its total consummation by fire.

  “Does anyone recognize this poor soul?” Pearson finally asked aloud, looking specifically at the livery supervisor and young Martin and then at his own assistant. “Percival? Step up here and take a look.”

  The assistant hesitated at the request and only jerked his knee as if his foot was railroad spiked into the dirt.

  “For God’s sake, son, it isn’t diseased, it’s only dead,” Pearson said, and the younger man finally did manage to take a closer look but only shook his head in the negative and then backed off.

  “Has anyone gone across the lake to inform the sheriff?” Pearson then said, again looking only at the white people in attendance.

  “Uh, I believe, sir, everyone was waiting on you, sir,” Mr. Carroll said.

 
“Well, I am not the coroner, Mr. Carroll. I am only a hotel manager. I suggest you go fetch Sheriff Cox and let him do his job, and as for the rest of you, we have guests at The Poinciana and Breakers who need not know anything of this.” He finally eyeballed the Negro members of the group. “And should I find that those vacationers have heard of the details of this incident then I will surely know from whose mouths those details came.”

  All of the workers were now nodding their bowed heads under their manager’s baleful eye and starting to take small, nearly imperceptible steps away from the space as if Pearson was wrong about the diseased nature of the scene.

  “Meantime, I do commend you, Mizz Fluery, for your impromptu scheduling in the face of this adversity, but we do have a hotel to run.

  “And Mr. Carroll, I do suggest that after summoning Sheriff Cox, you make sure that nothing, and I do mean nothing, changes here before he arrives.”

  The manager then turned on his heel and stepped over to Miss McAdams, offering her his crooked arm.

  “You, Miss, may return with me in my carriage,” he said, with a look that was not meant to be challenged.

  The ride to the hotel was made in silence. Pearson and Marjory McAdams sat in back, looking out opposite sides of the carriage while the manager’s assistant sat up with the driver. When they reached the turn to the Breakers’ entrance, the assistant glanced over his shoulder for instruction. With a flip of his wrist Pearson indicated they veer right to The Royal Poinciana. Before protesting that her accommodations were in the beachside hotel, Marjory caught herself and kept her lips sealed. She’d been in trouble before when she was discovered doing something “untoward” and knew it was useless to react to anyone other than her father.

  She sat back in the carriage with her hands folded in her lap and stared out at the meticulous landscaping of hotel grounds. It was now nearing noontime and the temperature had risen to the midseventies. The breeze from the ocean had also increased, and a scent of salt tinged the air. Couples were out walking along the wide, crushed-stone avenue, parasols raised against the sun. Others were bicycling toward the ocean. It was a quaint policy that no other vehicles were allowed on Flagler’s hotel properties, certainly not the motorized kind that some of the wealthy guests from the north had recently been infatuated with. When Flagler’s train pulled across the lake bridge to deliver his guests to what was now the largest resort hotel in the world, the noise of machines was something the oil tycoon’s influential friends would not be bothered by. As an accommodation, guests moving about the island could be ushered any distance in the hotel’s “Afromobiles.” This contraption married a bicycle to a large wicker chair inside which guests could ride while a valet peddled from behind, taking them to any destination or simply for an hour’s ride about the property. These conveyances were publicized as Afromobiles because most of the valets were Negro men.