The Kingdom of Bones

by Stephen Gallagher

  “So you can stay and watch the fight?” Sebastian said. “I don’t think so. Console yourself with the thought that it’ll be over before we reach the street. Can’t you hear what they’re all saying?”

  “About what?”

  “Those scars on the man’s right hand.”

  Sayers looked back at Burwell. The big man’s hand and forearm were slightly misshapen. His hand was like a bag of walnuts with fingers, his forearm marked with a jagged scar of old lightning. It didn’t look like the kind of hand a man could fight with at all.

  “Caught in a cartwheel and mangled,” Sebastian said. “The surgeon fixed his knuckles with plates of Monell metal. Everyone in this room seems to know it. Apart from his opponent.”

  Sayers looked back again. The young man was limbering up by spreading his arms like a bird and stretching the muscles in his chest and shoulders. He had no idea of what he faced.

  “That’s a disgrace,” Sayers said.

  “It’s not your affair,” Sebastian said as the two opponents squared up. “I’m your only concern right now.”

  They reached the ballroom’s double doors, but when Sebastian tried to open them, he couldn’t. Someone saw him trying and called out, “The doors are always barred for a contest.”

  Sebastian spun around, dragging Sayers with him like an oversized errant child. He scanned over the heads of the roaring crowd, looking for another way out.

  In the ring, the two men were circling each other. The young man tried a jab. Burwell blocked it and responded with an openhanded slap across the cheek. Then another.

  “Fight like a man!” the younger man protested.

  “Fight like a man,” Burwell mimicked, mocking him in a girlish voice, and slapped him again. The young man responded instantly with another jab, and this one took Burwell by surprise. It landed on his mouth, knocked his head back, and split his lip.

  Sebastian spied a possible way out. It was through the dining rooms, and they’d have to go around the outside of the crowd to reach it. With a mutter of frustration, he jerked Sayers back into motion.

  Burwell feinted twice and then smashed in a single right-handed blow to the young man’s face. That hand, that twisted log with its hidden freight of stainless steel, was like a sack of bolts on a side of meat. Sebastian was no expert, but even he could tell that the cheekbone had probably gone in that moment. The fight was as good as over, but the young man struggled on, almost blind with pain and weaving like a drunk while the other man continued to play with him.

  But Sebastian had other concerns. As they moved, he leaned close to Sayers’ ear.

  “Where have you stashed it?” he said. “And how much is missing?”

  Burwell now had hold of the young man’s shirtfront and was slinging him from side to side, spinning him about and then releasing him to lose his balance and fall. The noise from the clubmen was deafening. It was hard to see over the heads of the crowd for what happened next, but it seemed that Burwell dropped to one knee, pinned the boy down with his left hand, and pounded on his face with the right until the referee finally stirred himself and intervened.

  “Calm yourself,” Sayers said. “I still have most of it. You’ll have it back. There’s no need to handle me so.”

  The man in the ring was now challenging the crowd. Without any warning, Sayers jerked his arm and freed it from Sebastian’s grip. In a second he was gone, diving in among the backs of the watching spectators.

  Sebastian followed him into the sea of bodies, and immediately found himself thrown this way and that as the crowd raged. There was Sayers, a few feet ahead, bobbing his way toward the ring. What had looked like a move to escape was now beginning to look like something else.

  Sayers was the bigger man, and more able to make his way. No one was letting Sebastian through.

  Now Sayers was there in the middle of the room, ducking under the rope to enter the ring with a delighted-looking Henry Burwell.

  “Oh no,” Sebastian said, and felt his heart dropping like a filled bucket down a well.

  He saw Sayers throwing his coat over the rope. Sayers didn’t bother to roll up his sleeves. The young man’s friends had removed him from the ring and were appealing to those around them for a medical man, but all seemed to be more interested in urging on the new contender.

  Most of them probably considered Sayers a fool. For a man to enter the ring without knowing what he faced was merely stupid. To be driven in by anger after witnessing the danger…well, such a man deserved whatever was coming to him.

  “Come on, then,” Burwell called to Sayers, gleefully raising his voice above the noise of the crowd. His split lip had bled a little, but otherwise he was untouched. Even the wax on his mustache was still holding up. “Be a man. Avenge your friend.”

  Sebastian couldn’t reach the ring. No one was prepared to yield his place. He stopped trying and stood, helplessly, watching the scenario unfold.

  The same referee took charge, and the contest began. At first it looked to Sebastian as if Sayers was in for it, doomed to fall within the first minute. They squared up and he immediately took a couple of hard body blows.

  Then it got worse. He punched, but he punched weakly. Burwell blocked him without trouble, slammed another into his side. Sayers backed off to regather himself, but it wasn’t looking good. The passage of time and the years of abuse must have taken their toll. Perversely, it seemed as if cleaning up had done him no good at all. The deadening effect of the booze must previously have worked in his favor.

  Another ineffectual exchange, another retreat. Sayers had made a terrible mistake. The fight was no more than two minutes old and the ex-boxer was getting visibly groggy. His only chance of survival seemed to lie in staying back out of Burwell’s reach. The big man was getting annoyed; this was no good, all this chasing his opponent around the ring. The crowd was getting annoyed, too, and some of the clubmen were starting to boo and whistle.

  Sebastian saw his chance and managed to get to the rope, from where he called Sayers’ name. Sayers seemed not to hear him. He wove and stumbled as Burwell shepherded him, crowding him back toward one of the corners where he’d be trapped. The smile had gone from Burwell’s face. This was one to be finished, as quickly and as cruelly as possible.

  Sebastian tried to enter the ring, but more than one hand grabbed him and pulled him back. He heard cries of “Bad sport!” from those all around him.

  Sayers was trapped in the corner, his balance going, his guard falling. He was an easy target. Burwell took aim. He let everyone see what he was doing. He drew his walnut-knuckled fist back beyond his shoulder and then let it fly with all his strength.

  Sebastian could do nothing. Those who were holding him had let him go. He could make no difference now.

  But something happened between the launching of the blow and its landing.

  Sayers snapped upright. He leaned aside the exact distance required for the flying fist to pass harmlessly over his shoulder. Burwell’s knuckles plowed straight into the wooden pillar, splitting the skin that covered them and causing blood to fly out in a spray. He screamed in pain.

  Sayers, his face now only inches from Burwell’s own, said loudly enough for all to hear, “And I’m not even his friend.”

  The metal plates had embedded in the timber. Burwell could not pull his hand free without a risk of tearing it apart.

  Sayers now set about him with a precision that was almost scientific. It took three blows to break Burwell’s nose, but with persistence it went. Sayers continued to snap Burwell’s head this way and that until, finally, the man’s hand worked itself free of the pillar and he staggered backward.

  By some miracle, he did not fall. Sayers circled him as he stood there, arms hanging, body swaying, blood spattering down onto the wooden floor from a hand destroyed twice over. Then he put in one clean punch that dropped the big man where he stood. Once Burwell was down, he did not move.

  Everyone cheered. The bully’s seconds ducked int
o the ring to deal with their fallen champion. Then the rope fell and the crowd surged forward. Sayers held up a hand, trying to make himself heard. Those immediately around him stopped to listen to their new hero. Others paid no attention.

  Someone gave him his coat. He searched around inside it and brought out a postcard that Sebastian recognized as the fighter’s long-cherished picture of Louise Porter. He held it up for all to see.

  They started to grow quiet.

  It was after this that the real trouble started.

  THIRTY-NINE

  Sebastian dragged Sayers into the dining room and turned to get the door shut behind them, only to find that two men had followed them through and were taking care of it. On the other side of the door, the uproar continued. Beyond the empty tables, waiters and club staff appeared from out of the kitchens and hesitated, looking worried.

  The two clubmen turned and fell back against the door. They were laughing so hard that they could barely breathe. The Virginia lawyer was red in the face and his shorter companion was all but in tears.

  “Well done, sir,” Calvin Quinn said as he struggled to recover. “Well done. You win the heart and mind of every man in the room and then ask them for the whereabouts of a particular whore.”

  “That’s nothing like what I said!” Sayers protested.

  “But it’s pretty much how everyone heard it. Come on, before they break the door down.”

  That seemed like a real possibility, so Sebastian went along with it. The four of them hurried out through the porticoed entranceway and down onto East Franklin, where streetlamps lit their way toward the extensive gardens around the capitol.

  At a safe distance from the club, they slowed. “Oh my,” Quinn said, recovering at last. And his companion said, “Thank the Lord I didn’t find a fool to take my bet. What kind of idiot would I seem now?”

  “Sylvester found a mark and lost a hundred,” Quinn said, and that set them off again.

  Through all of this, Sayers had been looking distracted and Sebastian hadn’t cracked a smile.

  Now Sebastian said, “This is far enough for me, gentlemen. We need to thank you for your help and take our leave. Mister Sayers and I have some business to address.”

  “Can’t that wait?” Quinn said, and then he looked at Sayers. “You can’t duck out now.”

  And his companion said, “We’re taking you to the woman you’ve been looking for.”

  Through empty streets that were not the safest part of the city when the sun was down, the four men made their way to the abandoned theater of varieties. Night had turned it into a chalk and pencil sketch of a ruin, all shadows and silver. It faced the street like a skull in the moonlight.

  In its foyer, they found a few burned-down stumps of candles. Quinn’s companion hunted out a usable lantern. Both men seemed to know their way around.

  Quinn stood in the middle of the foyer and called out, “Miss D’Alroy!” But this drew no response.

  Long shadows danced across the auditorium as they crossed it. The stranger led the way up to the suite of rooms above the foyer. Sayers stayed close behind the stranger, whose name had not been mentioned. Sebastian stayed close behind Sayers.

  “This isn’t looking quite so promising,” Quinn said.

  They clattered up the uncarpeted stairs, emerging into the big room with the brick fireplace. There was a stink of food that had been left to rot; there seemed to be no doubt at all that this squat had been abandoned for some days.

  Sebastian Becker crouched before the fireplace and picked over some of the ashes. He saw the half-burned remains of newspaper theatrical pages.

  “She clings to what she knows,” he said to himself.

  Sayers turned to the stranger, who was standing by the doorway. He said, “She’s actually been living here? Not just using the place for assignations?”

  “That I can’t say for sure. But it’s the way that it looked to me.”

  A sudden sound from one of the adjoining rooms had Sebastian and Quinn reaching for the revolvers they carried. Sebastian moved to the door and called out, “I warn you! We have guns! Whoever you are, show yourself!” and then he raised his boot high and kicked it open, bursting the latch. Anyone on the other side would have been startled and at a disadvantage, but their lights revealed no one.

  They advanced into the room with caution, stifling a cough at the dust raised by Sebastian’s violent action. There was a table, a broken water jug on the floor, a pallet in the corner.

  From behind them, the stranger said, “This was her room. The servants slept back there.”

  The sound came again.

  “Rats in the walls,” Sayers said. He went over to one of the dividing walls, its plaster long gone, and banged on the timber slats. There was an immediate flurry of panic and scuttling from the other side. More dust was shaken down, and a squeak or two helped to confirm the explanation.

  Sebastian had Sayers raise the lantern high while he moved closer.

  “Look at the boards,” he said.

  “What of them?”

  “They’re old. But the nails are not.”

  Sayers looked more closely. The nails weren’t new, but their exposed heads showed clean metal. They’d been hammered sometime recently. He tested the slats, and they were firm.

  He handed the lantern to Quinn and went over to the table.

  “What are you doing?” Sebastian said.

  “Stand back.” Sayers lifted the table and carried it toward the wall. Sebastian understood his intention and took the other side, and together they swung it against the boards. Where the forward edge met, the wood splintered inward.

  The timber wasn’t rotted, or the job would have been easy. But with one of the slats broken, they could lever out the pieces and start on the board next to it. Something had been bundled into the space behind. Quinn and the stranger watched as the two men went at the work, uncovering an area of rumpled canvas.

  “That’s a backcloth,” Sayers said. “Painted.”

  He and Sebastian both took a hold on the backcloth and tried to pull it out through the hole, but it was heavy and the glue size in the paint had stiffened the material. No matter how hard they tugged on it, the canvas stayed wedged inside the wall.

  So they ripped out a few more slats to enlarge the hole and tried again, one on either side, each taking a grip. Sayers glanced back and saw Quinn and the smaller man standing there with an expression of dread.

  Sebastian said, “On three. One, two…”

  On the third count, they heaved on the canvas. It came out of the wall. With the backdrop came the body that had been wedged into the space behind it. It was naked, and male. It flopped out in a cloud of white dust, tumbling onto the floor as if from the back of a cart. There it lay, all hunched up, while plaster swirled in the air all around it. That smell they’d noticed as they’d entered the rooms—it was not the rotting of abandoned food. It was this.

  Sebastian picked up the lantern and held it for a better look. Curled up as he was, it was impossible to say how tall the man had been in life. His hair was all mussed and dusty, and he had a long mustache in the same condition. His mouth was wide open, and his jaw was right down into his chest, as if he’d died trying to sing the lowest note of his life.

  He’d been in the wall long enough for his skin to begin drying out and shrinking; the contracting flesh had begun to expel a variety of sharp objects used to pierce and penetrate it. It was hard to be sure what their purpose was, other than to cause lasting discomfort. The rats had been at him as well.

  Sayers looked toward their two local men. Neither appeared to have been expecting this.

  “Do you know this man?” he said.

  Both of them went on staring. Neither of them said yes or no.

  Sebastian said, “Someone will.”

  FORTY

  Sebastian hadn’t been gone for more than a couple of minutes when Calvin Quinn and his nameless friend exchanged a glance and then quit the scene
. Only Tom Sayers waited, along with the dead stranger. By the light of the lantern, he searched the rooms for some further sign of Louise. He found none.

  Sebastian returned a short time later with a police party. He showed them the body and gave the best explanation of the circumstances that he could.

  Over the Pinkerton man’s protests, the officers arrested Sayers.

  As they were taking him away, Sebastian called out, “Quickly, Sayers. Where’s my money?”

  Sayers, in handcuffs for the second time in his life, looked back over his shoulder and said, “Get me out of this and I’ll tell you.”

  They took him to the Richmond City Jail, where he spent the night sharing a common cell with all the drunks, thieves, and vagrants that the night watch had scooped up in the course of their shift. They booked him as a suspect found in the presence of a murdered man, unable to give a satisfactory account of himself. He sat on the hard floor of a communal cell with his back against the wall, and he did not sleep. He hoped that Becker might appear and somehow get him released, but the hours passed without any sign.

  The next morning, all were put in shackles and walked out in a shuffling procession to a wagon that would take them to city hall.

  Richmond’s city hall was a building that, on the outside, resembled the Gothic whim of a mad Bavarian king. The shackled prisoners were marched down into the basement where the police court was held. Sayers was herded into a pen at the back of the room with all his overnight fellows. They shared no sense of fellowship.

  When the clerk of the court instructed all to rise, Sayers realized that the presiding judge was none other than the man whose name had caused such awe in the doorman that previous evening.

  Justice John Crutchfield proved to be a spare, thin-lipped man in a black string bow tie. He set about the business of the day with a terrifying if somewhat erratic efficiency.

  After reading over the charges against the first prisoner to be called before him, he looked up and said to the man, “Where you from, nigger?”

  “North Carolina, sir,” the prisoner replied.