“He doesn’t have to. He’ll just suspend the normal standards and procedures.” Becky shook her head and smiled a little. “‘Until further notice.’ Whatever Inspector Barlow might think to the contrary, there will be war soon, and once it breaks out the cry of the day will be ‘public safety,’ ‘the security of the nation,’ or whatever they choose to call it. Why do you suppose we still have a ‘State of Emergency’ a dozen years after the failed attempt on President Lincoln’s life?”
Liam still had hold of Becky’s hands and he suddenly realized she’d made no attempt to pull away; the thought made an odd little tingle run up the back of his neck and he was sure he could feel the tops of his ears turning red.
“All that’s as may be,” he said in dead earnest, “but if I’m not much good on the legal side, I’m a whizbang when it comes to the other one. If there’s anything useful to your cause that’s being kept under lock and key anywhere, just point me and I’ll go get it for you.”
She cocked her head and examined Liam penetratingly, the moment stretching out long enough that Liam started to get uneasy. But before he could say anything further, she nodded as if she’d just come to a important conclusion and got to her feet, pulling Liam with her.
“Come on,” she said, “let’s go find a cab and pay a call on your grandmother. We can talk some more as we’re driving.”
Liam turned to look towards the north side of the Park, where Fifth Avenue ended and the downtown flow of traffic usually deposited a shifting delta of horse-drawn carriages and steam jitneys. Today, though, the traffic was being kept away from the Park by a row of improvised barriers, and one of the imposing Colt-Lovelace automata in full NYPD uniform stood squarely at the intersection of 5th and Waverly Place, its arms folded warningly on its chest. Liam turned to Becky with a puzzled frown:
“What’s all that about? And why use an Acme instead of live coppers?”
“It’s the DPS again. The Trainmen’s Union has called a General Strike for Wednesday, and the DPS has city police and reserve troops and its own people in plain clothes covering every park in town to prevent public gatherings. They’re covering mostly the big areas like Central Park and Union Square. That leaves automata for the little parks. Look there!”
She pointed across the Park towards MacDougal Street, and after a moment Liam was able to pick out another Acme standing in a narrow alley between two buildings.
“There’s another one over on the University Place side, and a couple more on the south end between … What on earth?”
Liam saw it too—a steam jitney was approaching the barriers at top speed, showing no sign of slowing down; a moment later it crashed through them, scattering bits of lumber in every direction as the vehicle screeched to a stop a foot away from the Acme, which flung its arms wide in a pantomime of alarm. In the same instant a man wearing a black hood that covered his whole head jumped out of the passenger side of the jitney, took two steps towards the Acme and clamped a large brown paper package against the automaton’s chest with a distinct metallic clank. Surprisingly, the package stayed in place, emitting a faint wisp of smoke as the man jumped back into the cab and it tore away into the distance.
“Get down!” shouted Liam, grabbing Becky and pulling her with him as he fell flat to the path and covered her as well as he could with his own body. Simultaneously, there was an ear-splitting explosion and bits and pieces of the shattered automaton flew in every direction, followed by five more explosions as close to each other as the fire from a battery of Parrott guns. More chunks of metal flew overhead, shrieking and whistling before the fragments smashed into buildings and crashed through windows.
“Good God,” muttered Liam dazedly, still firmly on top of Becky.
“I don’t want to seem ungrateful, Mr. McCool, but …” she said in a somewhat muffled voice. Instantly Liam leapt to his feet, blushing a bright scarlet as he pulled Becky to her feet.
“I’m very sorry, Miss Fox,” Liam said awkwardly, “I just …”
“Don’t even dream of apologizing,” she said firmly, “just look at that!”
She pointed to the bench they’d been standing by, and now Liam saw that half of the backrest had been torn away by shrapnel. He shook his head grimly, for once at a total loss for words.
“It’s the Whyos,” Becky said in a slightly shaky voice. “They declared war on the automata a few days ago when Danny Lyons was seized by one of the ‘curfew Acmes’ and hauled away to the Tombs.”
“They got Danny?” Liam raised his eyebrows. “I wouldn’t want to be an Acme just now. That was quite an operation, there must have been a half dozen jitneys all timing their attacks to the second.”
“The thing I don’t understand is what made the paper packet stick to the thing.”
“That at least is easy,” Liam said with a small smile. “Did you catch the clank as he jammed it against the Acme? There would have been some big, powerful magnets around the dynamite.”
Becky put her arm through Liam’s and guided him eastwards, towards the Broadway side of the Park. “It’ll make quite a story,” she said with a wry echo of Liam’s smile. “That is, if I can find anybody who’s willing to print it.”
Chapter Thirteen
Has the neighborhood changed much since you were a boy?” Becky looked around curiously, as if she were trying to imagine growing up where Liam had.
“Not a whit. It may not be pretty, but it’s still got more get up and go than all the rest of New York put together.”
They had let their steamer go at the corner of Canal and Mulberry, choosing to walk the few blocks to his grandmother’s flat so they could enjoy the spring sunshine. As they passed the corner of Bayard and Mulberry a shrill whistle split the air and Liam and Becky looked up to see a pretty, dark-haired woman about Liam’s age leaning out of a second-story window on the other side, waving and showing a generous amount of cleavage. Liam waved back, grinning appreciatively:
“Hallo, Rosie darlin’!” he called back. “Mind you don’t catch cold!”
The young woman grinned, stuck her tongue out at Liam and disappeared back inside. Becky gave him an arch look:
“I see you’re something of a celebrity.”
Liam spread his hands innocently: “Well, I’ve been to prison, haven’t I? Not to mention cracking enough rich cribs to buy a fancy place uptown.”
Becky acknowledged the riposte with a smile and they walked for a few minutes in silence, enjoying the tumult of street life boiling around them: sidewalk beer halls with oompah bands picking up the overflow from the Atlantic Gardens a couple of blocks to the east, musicians playing bagpipes and fiddles and squeezeboxes, tumblers and jugglers throwing somersaults, spinning plates and eating live coals, street singers, Punch and Judy shows, an Italian organ grinder with a monkey and a dog that walked on its hind legs, a Hindu sword swallower, and a Gypsy with a cross-looking bear on a chain and a placard advertising “Fortunes, Magic Potions and Curses.”
And everywhere a full-throated Babel of English, German, Yiddish, Russian, Italian, and every kind of unidentifiable gibberish as buyers and sellers haggled over old clothes, new knives and cutlery, books, pistols, broken-down chairs, anything someone with a few dollars or a handful of pennies might want to take home with them, as well as a stupefying variety of foods being hawked by pushcart vendors—oysters, hot yams, fresh-roasted peanuts and corn on the cob, knishes, Sicilian sausages, hotcakes and coffee, and sweet baked pears waiting to be lifted by their stems from syrup-filled pans.
“By Heaven,” Liam said feelingly, “I can’t tell you how much I missed all this down in the coalfields—I’d sooner spend six months on Devil’s Island.”
Becky looked at him thoughtfully. “If it’s not too personal,” she said, “I’d like to know how you found yourself in a position to get shanghaied by Pilkington’s Agency and shipped off to Henderson’s Patch.”
“My position,” Liam said with a wry grimace, “was flat on my back on a rope bed
in the Tombs, watching a cockroach cross the ceiling and betting how long it would take him to reach the other side. How I got into that particular position is a long story.”
“I don’t mind if it’s long,” Becky said, “I’m a good listener.”
Liam laughed. “All right, then. It all started with me doing a favor for my pal Mike Vysotsky. Something I swore I would never take a chance on and Mike knew it, too. Only he wasn’t asking for himself, he was asking for his Uncle Alyosha.”
“Good storytelling,” Becky said. “Lead off with a mystery.”
“Well, there’s no mystery about me and Mike—we grew up together, right here in Mulberry Bend. My Gran still lives in the flat I was born in, and Mike and his family lived right next door. You may have read about Aleksandr Vysotsky, that was Mike’s dad.”
“The anarchist? The one who tried to blow up Boss Tweed?”
“That’s him. Of course, when I was a kid he was just the crazy man next door, always walking up and down the floor of his sitting room making speeches to nobody while Mike’s ma worked in a book bindery and Mike ran the streets with me. My dad, now …” Liam shook his head. “He and Vysotsky were like peas in a pod. There’s a novel for you when you’ve time to write it; ‘The Anarchist and the Fenian, A Tale of Old New York.’ It was like they’d entered on a pact to save the proletariat by swallowing all the drink in town before it could reach the workers and bring them to harm.”
They stopped for a moment to watch a juggler twirling a plate with each hand while he balanced another on his nose.
“Didn’t you say on the train that it was your father who started you on languages?” Her tone was one of mild reproof, as if she didn’t approve of slanted reporting.
“It’s true enough,” he said grudgingly. “He’d been a schoolmaster back in Dublin, Greek and Latin and a fair bit of a scholar with it—he drilled me like a Tartar on the Classics till I was old enough to escape. And my Ma had been a governess to an English Duke’s kids, that’s another long story …” Liam drifted away for a moment, then shrugged it off and came back to Mulberry Street. “You’re right, though, the poor man could never understand why he wasn’t a grand success here in the Land of the Free and he tended to take it personally. Of course,” Liam laughed without much humor, “when he got off the boat there were signs everywhere he went saying ‘No Irish Need Apply.’”
“Did you teach yourself Russian, then?”
This time the humor was back in Liam’s laughter: “Not much! When he was little Mike couldn’t speak English worth a rip, so we taught each other, starting with all the curse words we knew. By the time I was through I could make a Russian sailor’s hair stand on end, and poor Mike got the short end of that stick—Russian cursing is like epic poetry, but English hasn’t got enough boring cuss-words to fill a thimble.” He grinned reminiscently. “That’s how the Butcher Boys came about, one by one all the odds and sods in Five Points drifted together with me and Mike—a Jap kid, a Frenchie from up North in Acadia, a Hunkie from Budapest, a whole omnium-gatherum of international misfits and not one of us older than twelve.”
He put out his elbow for Becky to put her arm through and they started walking again. “Some of your uptown colleagues seem to think poor kids start gangs out of wickedness, but I expect you know better.” He looked at her questioningly.
“Of course,” Becky said. “It’s the same everywhere I’ve been—kids are weak and numbers give them something to face the world with.”
Liam nodded. “Trouble was, everybody wanted a piece of us—especially the big boys in the Dusters and the Whyos and the Dead Rabbits and all the rest. Fly little kids are precious—you can train them as dips, you can send them down chimneys, just like Fagin. We weren’t having any, so we set up on our own.”
They walked in silence for a moment, enjoying each other’s closeness without quite knowing what to make of it. Finally, Liam resumed briskly, as if being matter-of-fact would help him steer clear of risky emotions:
“And that’s about it, really, each of us would go the limit for any of the others, and that’s why Mike turned to me when his Uncle Alyosha got pinched for heisting a painting from Astor’s mansion.”
“The Rembrandt? Mike’s uncle was the one who did it?”
“None other. Naturally Astor had Pilkingtons all over the place when he brought the canvas home, and Alyosha winkled it right out from under their noses the first night. It made them look so bad they had to say it was a gang of art thieves—they put it about that it was Max Shinburn and Adam Worth working together. But it was all down to Alyosha, he did it on contract for a rival of Astor’s and nobody would have been the wiser if the flaming eejit hadn’t started drinking vodka with some pals and shot his mouth off. The Pilkingtons pinched him later and beat him till he gave them a signed confession. That’s what Mike wanted me to get for him, out of the big strongroom in Pilkington HQ—Alyosha’s confession.”
He fell silent for a few moments and Becky finally poked him in the ribs: “For pity’s sake, Mr. McCool, a little less suspense if you please!”
“Ah, it still makes me mad to think of it. I never try a job like that without going in and having a look first. Maybe two looks, maybe three—you don’t want to hurry a thing like that. But they wanted to put Alyosha on trial and lock him up fast, so I had to go in cold—the confession was all they had, and their case would have collapsed if I had gotten it.” He snorted irritably. “But they got me instead. And a couple of weeks later old Mr. P. himself showed up in the Tombs and pulled a reverse Fagin on me.”
“I see,” Becky murmured.
“Not quite, you don’t,” Liam said. “I was counting on them sending me to Sing Sing after I went to trial, and I could have escaped from there.” He grinned at Becky’s surprised look: “Little Adam Worth and I got to be quite chummy a while back when we found out we’d both been in the War, and one night he told he how me busted out of Sing Sing back in ‘65. Nothing to it if you know what you’re doing. But old Mr. P. was too slick for me.”
Becky looked pained: “He used your grandmother to make you agree.”
“Good call, Miss Fox. My Gran was all the family I had after Pa was shot in the Draft Riots, but she’d really been the one that raised me as far back as I can remember. My poor Ma had a big heart and she loved me the best she could, but most of the time she had her hands full with my old man. Whenever the Punch and Judy show started up again, Gran would grab her hat and her purse with one hand and me with the other, and off we’d go on our travels.”
Liam paused for a moment, remembering, then laughed and went on: “She’d drag me wherever the fancy took her, up in the Central Park for a picnic or out to Staten Island for fish and chips or to the Metropolitan to see the paintings, or off to Harry Hill’s concert saloon to hear Harry himself read out his awful poems, and her all the time cracking jokes and telling tall tales and chatting up every stranger we ran into. There’s nobody quite like the old girl, and that’s a fact.”
“Surely Pilkington hasn’t threatened to harm her?”
Liam made a face. “My Gran’s no angel, Miss Fox. These last few years she kept food on our table by running a policy bank for one of the Italian gangs. Old Pilkington sewed her up tight on that rap and he put it to me plain and simple. Either I played his game or I stayed in the Tombs until I forgot the look of daylight and Gran got locked up in Leonard Street. Nobody knows better than you how bad that would be. When I was still planning to head for San Francisco with Maggie I got in touch with my pal Mike and fixed it for him to get Gran out of New York under Pilkington’s nose and bring her to meet us in St. Jo, But when Maggie was murdered I decided it was time to call Pilkington on his promise to let her go after I finished my work with the Mollies.” He made a face and shrugged: “You can see how that worked out.”
Becky’s face flushed angrily. “What a vicious old reprobate.”
“He is that, Miss Fox. But Pilkington and I made a deal,” he added grimly, “
and I mean to make him keep to it since there’s nothing left to do with the Mollies but round them up and clap them in choky.” He stopped and pointed to the building ahead of them. “Here we are then. Are you game to meet a fierce old lady from County Galway?”
Becky smiled. “Lead on, McCool!”
The contrast between the festive atmosphere outside and the Stygian gloom inside was overwhelming. Uptown, Secretary Tesla’s electrification policy had resulted in bright-as-day carbon-arc lighting on parts of Fifth Avenue and the Central Park, as well as softer indoor electrics in every building that could afford to install the new Tesla Steam Generators.
Here in Liam’s old tenement building, he and Becky were making their way upstairs with the aid of a single gas bracket on the third-floor landing, and the steps themselves were dark enough to make their climb painstaking. Add to that a thick palimpsest of smells, from today’s cabbage and onions through last week’s drunken piss, plus the pandemonium of yelling, tears, arguments and knockdown fights swirling through the hallways around them, and the sense of dislocation was sharp.
Liam put his foot through a broken step and bit back a curse. “Mind this step,” he cautioned. “I don’t think any-thing’s been mended here in fifty years.”
“I’ve seen worse,” she said. “I think perhaps it was in Bombay,” she added, laughing.
“You’re probably wondering how I could leave my Gran in a dump like this when I’ve got a nice empty flat on Bleecker Street.”
“Well, I was a little curious about that.”
“Wait till you meet Gran,” he said. “She didn’t want to leave all her old friends here in the Points and there was no budging her even though I argued till I was blue in the face. That old lady could will a charging rhinoceros to stop dead in its tracks.”
“Unlike her meek and docile grandson,” Becky said with a grin Liam could hear even if he couldn’t see it.
“I’ll tell you one thing, she’s moving back with me now, if I have to throw her over my shoulder and carry her off. I’ve got to get her out of Stanton’s reach as fast as I can.”
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