The Fatal Flame

by Lyndsay Faye

  No, learning to hate Mercy when I’ve such plentiful practice hating myself would have proved a wash.

  I’ve come close, though. Before she started writing me, before she admitted she’d allowed me to fashion her into an irresistible cipher. I’d done the lion’s share of that work, built a towering, ornately bejeweled pedestal when what was wanted was a goddamned bed. And she’d every right not to love me—I’d never asked her to. But knowing I’m to blame didn’t go far toward cheering me in those early days of her absence, staring at my ceiling in the thin grey hours. Imagining her laugh as a stranger drew his fingertips across her navel, crooking an arm and pulling her higher up onto his spread thighs.

  That was generally the juncture when I’d send my fist into my headboard, where it wouldn’t reverberate through the wall.

  The wind had picked up, scattering torn scraps of local ward flyers and the smell of horses and a few mild drops of rain, when I turned north onto Elizabeth Street. I was skirting by long habit the toxic fissure in civilization called the Five Points, so troubled I could scarce see my feet before me, when the door to the house next to Mrs. Boehm’s Fine Baked Goods flew open and a booming laugh barreled down the street.

  A family of Germans live packed into the building next door like smoked oysters in a tin-lined can. Flooding the road with the sounds of drinking, brawling, and music-making, often simultaneously. We buy rye beer from them, and whenever the clan is either mourning or celebrating, they hire Elena Boehm to bake the identical white, almond-dusted “joy and sympathy” cake. They’re boisterous people, equal parts coarse and kind.

  My landlady stood in their doorway, wide mouth cracked in an answering grin, on the arm of Herr Getzler, who either had consumed about a dozen mugs of ale or had managed to sunburn his nose on a mild spring day. He’s one of the better of the good-hearted if disorderly mob, with a round belly and a thick brown beard and a laugh like a tuba. He was regarding Mrs. Boehm as if she were a particularly tempting pastry display. That was typical.

  He was also patting her hand where it rested on his forearm.

  That was new.

  “Oh, tch, and here it seems about to drench you,” he tutted in his pleasant guttural growl, holding a hand out to measure the rainfall. “One moment wait, I will get my coat.”

  “Don’t be silly, I have to walk only five steps from here,” Elena said with a chuckle. “Look—an escort appears from the shadows. What luck. Good night, Josua.”

  “Gute Nacht,” he answered, sweeping her hand up for a kiss before waving curtly at me as he returned indoors.

  Elena took my arm. She wore one of her better frocks, of a rich ivory cotton and a flatteringly worked pattern of layered flounces that made her too-thin waist nearly ample and her too-fair hair shine beneath the flecks of spring rain. It occurred to me that we both work such long hours I can count the number of times I’ve seen her outside the house without removing my boots. To me she’s a thin-lipped smile across a warm kitchen and a dough-smeared table, that or a carefree gasp in the dark of my room when my thumb glides lightly between her legs.

  “Did you have a good time at the—”

  “Why were you speaking English with Herr Getzler?” I questioned, apparently annoyed. Though I certainly shouldn’t have been. “You speak Bohemian and German fluently, and his English sounds like a rusted hacksaw.”

  “Practice.” She angled a look at me with water-blue eyes. “Josua wishes to become man of business, not petty seller of small beer. Have for himself and his two sons a brewery. Considerable money he has saved for this future. When I see him, now that he wants title and property like a real American, we speak together English.”

  We were at the door by then. My key slipped for the second time. Elena dropped my arm, setting her palms on the spots where I knew amiable hip bones jutted beneath the soft fabric, amused at my struggle. Her mirth didn’t render me any less peppery. An incendiary was keen to raze bits of the city, I’d practically signed on as Silkie Marsh’s new champion, and my brother had just torpedoed his own ward. It was hardly my fault that the lock needed oiling.

  “The day Herr Getzler sounds like an American will be the day America transplants itself to Prussia,” I decreed uncharitably as I finally thrust open the door. Setting my hat on its peg blind, I lit the lamp that always rests on the three-legged table with a match from my waistcoat pocket. “And if you’re correcting his grammar, he should pay you.”

  The oil flared to life and sent a glow spilling through the dark bakery. Elena smoothed her hands over her damp hair. “What’s a word of advice between friends?”

  You aren’t friends with Josua Getzler, I thought as a petty sting bit at the edge of my scar. You trade him fresh eggs for good beer and open the windows when he’s singing Faust because you love the story and he has a fine tenor.

  Lifting the hinged countertop, I carried the lamp in search of a much-needed whiskey. After pouring two generous splashes without thinking, I recalled I was irked at Mrs. Boehm and grew still more irked. “Bird asked after you.”

  “My sweet girl. I miss her during the school year.”

  “I was surprised you’d missed her deliberately. Though that was before I was surprised my brother announced he’s running for alderman.” I pulled a chair away from the worktable. “Oh, and before I was surprised Silkie Marsh arrived.”

  Elena’s horrified intake of breath wasn’t a bit satisfying, and I cursed myself for being in a uselessly foul mood. Instead of taking the seat, I set the liquor down and stepped to where she leaned against the floured wood, her other fingertips tracing her prominent collarbone.

  “It’s all right. Well, no it isn’t, but Madam Marsh— Bird is fine, they never spoke. She’s sore at me, but that’s nothing special. I sent her off with a friend.”

  I failed to mention that Silkie Marsh had spied Bird all too clearly and correctly identified a fit crowbar to pry my ribs open. That would have added injury to insult, the way I saw matters, and anyhow I’d never let affairs come to such a pass.

  “Which friend?” Elena asked hoarsely.

  “Jim Playfair. She’s snug in bed by now and none the wiser.”

  Elena’s eyes closed as the fingers at her throat curled in on themselves. I brushed my hands across her shoulders in apology. She sighed, stepping in closer. And my arms fit around her instantly, because I like her better than I do almost anyone, far better than I did myself just then.

  “That awful woman, at your brother’s firehouse,” she said to the edge of my cravat. “What reason could she have?”

  “She was troubled by incendiary threats against the buildings Alderman Symmes owns. Her brothel is one of them. I’m taking care of it.”

  “Your brother, then. What will come of him running for office?”

  “Nothing whatsoever to the good.”

  “So seldom Bird leaves the orphanage.” The downy center part in her hair tickled along the underside of my jaw. “I should have been there.”

  “You couldn’t have known, and there isn’t any harm done.”

  “Still.”

  A thought occurred. A belated thought, one that ought to have been obvious, and my grip tightened fractionally.

  “You’d wanted to see Bird tonight, you’d said as much. Were you keen to avoid me at the fund-raiser?”

  She raised her head without haste, though the sweep of her mouth had turned stormy. “No,” she declared. “I was making it easier for you to avoid me.”

  Shifting my hands farther down her arms, I studied her from brow to narrow chin. “What sort of call would you have to say that?”

  “You treat your friends well, do you not, Mr. Wilde?”

  I twisted my lips. “I hope I do. I’m sorry about—”

  “A good man you are, a man with principles,” she continued without minding me, her tone casual, as if she were asking me to pa
ss her the morning copy of the Herald. “Important, you think it, to be a gentleman. Yes?”

  “Yes. I never meant to—”

  “You respect me, and you respect where we live.” Her spine where I’d slid one hand round her waist was fast petrifying. “You respect feelings. You respect privacy. So respectful, always, so careful to leave what you found where you found it, unchanged. Never taking away without permission. Never leaving a mark. I think, this is Timothy, very deeply he has been hurt, so has his family, this is a way he has. He takes care. And then I see you with this woman from London. The poet.”

  She brought her hands up and linked them where the hairs were prickling along the back of my neck, her usually soft gaze piercing. “A very great surprise, her returning here, and I am curious. How could I not be curious? I have never seen her before, but I have read her Light and Shade stories until in my heart it is like I know her—I understand why you love her, and it is another sad story like all the many sad stories in the world, and I think, Timothy, such care he would take with Mercy Underhill if he saw her again. And then I am wrong.”

  We were locked into each other by this point. Fused. Cruelly mimicking a dance or a prelude to lovemaking when what it felt like was a crossed pair of dueling swords.

  Elena pressed her hip against mine, about as close as two people could be and remain clothed. “This woman Mercy, who is so troubled in her mind, you look at her, and then you look away because it is too much, and you do not want to take any care with her. Oh, no. You think you want to make her happy, but all of that is to convince her to look at you and never stop looking. With her you actually want to take a hook and sink it deep in her chest where she will feel you there and where she will bleed if she moves away from you.”

  “Elena, please—”

  “Try to deny it.”

  My heart was pounding. I wanted to say, That’s a lie. I didn’t. I couldn’t. Because it was merciless and it was shameful.

  But it was true.

  “You do not like it, you do not like it at all, but it is so, and I know, I remember how I looked at Franz before he died,” she hissed. “I fell in love in Danzig in the slow summer, with a German merchant who had stopped at the port to buy a ship from my father. My father, he wanted to marry away my three older sisters, find them good matches, and half the time he could not see me at all. Forgot my name and called me słoneczko, ‘little sunbeam.’ For a week Franz was there, negotiating. I was sixteen. He could do anything with his hands—comfort frightened horses, fix my clock that wouldn’t chime. When the ship he bought from my father sailed, I was on it. When he lost the ship in a storm on its way to Odessa, I had already married him. When we boarded the ship for New York, heavy I was with little Audie. We had fifty thaler, no relations in America, and whenever Franz looked at me, I wanted to dig my hands in his chest and feel his heart pumping.”

  I could feel her own heartbeat, having bent down to measure it, the way it leapt from her throat against my lips and tongue. Even as I belatedly realized that all the care I’d taken only told her unequivocally I didn’t need her, not in that way.

  “I pictured you at the fund-raiser. You being careful, you being courteous,” she gasped, arching. “Worrying about her and hiding it. Trying not to hurt me. I did not like thinking about this. It was disgusting. I went to Herr Getzler’s and spent the evening with a man who wants to brand his name in my arm.”

  “You don’t want him, though.” The low growl that emerged shocked the pair of us, I believe.

  Pushing me, she stepped away, her chest with its tiny points of bosom heaving. “No, I don’t.”

  “I don’t give a damn how much chink he’s saved so he can swill more of his own product—he doesn’t deserve you.”

  “No.” She laughed in a short burst. “No, he doesn’t deserve me.”

  “Nor do I, for that matter.”

  Elena shook her head, exasperated. “You are my friend. Qualities you have, that I have mentioned. Stop, bitte, the being ridiculous.”

  “But it’s the truth. What do you want from me?”

  Elena returned to the table, still keeping a safe distance, and drained her whiskey. Touching her fingers to her slender curve of a mouth, she shook her white-blonde head once more.

  “I visit your room sometimes,” she said in a faraway voice. “We share things. Secrets. Skin. A gift you have, you realize, for listening, for making people feel they are heard. Never have you knocked at my door, wanting, greedy. Sinking into me uninvited. This is the sort of care you take with a woman you do not love. I admire you—I should not have mocked that you are kind. But I think you would prefer to find new lodgings than to stain my bedsheets.”

  She turned to go, and that was . . . ruinous.

  “I won’t apologize for not being more cruel,” I rasped.

  “I won’t apologize for not being more kind. You do not live here, you see, not really. You live for your brother, and for police work, and for Bird, and for your memories of this girl as she was before. If I cannot make you feel anything . . . what, then, is the point?”

  “You do make me feel things!” I cried, following her to the base of the stairs, where she was gliding upward in the gloom without a candle. “For instance, at the moment you’re scaring me half to death.”

  Elena stopped, hand on the banister rail. She turned to peer at me. Her cloud-colored eyes were barely visible in the thickness of the enveloping dark.

  “Good,” she concluded, continuing on her way.

  —

  I passed a night of cold sweats and bone aches in an unhappy in-between where Mercy and Elena stood before the Tombs holding torches. Flushed with righteous approval as the enormous blaze burned criminals and copper stars alike to good clean ash. I’d no sooner awoken from that vision than, drifting fitfully, I was treated to another—Valentine being crowned King of the Rats whose realm prevails beneath the Tombs and appointing McGlynn as prime minister, the long-tailed rodents shrieking their cheers.

  After that dream brought me awake, after turning up my lamp while gentle rain pattered against the shingles, I pulled out my charcoal and paper and sat at my desk, meticulously rendering Elena Boehm from memory. She’d been lying on her stomach with her arms crossed over the edge of my bed, smoking a tiny cigarette with her left hand, while I did nothing more complex than to read the Herald cross-legged with my back to the wall and my fingertips occasionally exploring the lush landscape of her lower half. She’s distressingly thin but constructed like a ripe September pear, and she was dead wrong. She made me feel many things. I’d just slid the portrait under her bedroom door, the one I don’t allow myself to knock on for reasons both well intentioned and apparently terribly selfish, when the banging commenced.

  Elena appeared at the bottom of the stairs after answering the knock, staring up in surprise to find me awake and dressed. Seeing that there was no need to rouse me, she nodded at the half-open door, pulling a basket of chicken feed farther up her arm as she headed for the rear yard.

  I liked her watchful silence just about as much as I liked my next task.

  Thus it was that, at six in the morning on April 21 and having followed the chief’s courier, I found myself next to George Washington Matsell in a pair of emerald velvet armchairs so overstuffed as to verge on the ludicrous, seated across a continental expanse of desk from Robert Symmes, one of two candidates for Ward Eight’s alderman. Symmes appeared to have passed the night stewing in the vat of his own hot rage. His neat moustache and dapper togs were well in hand, but he wore a volcanic expression, neck knotted with tension and eyes rimmed in a vengeful red.

  Meanwhile, I was severely grateful for the chief’s elephantine presence, calm and collected in his grey sack coat and striped trousers. Symmes needed interrogating further. But that didn’t mean I was eager to end up croaked for my thoroughgoing professionalism. So we were questioning him in t
andem, in his positively opulent mansion in Varick Street, with the warm apricot light of a spring dawn streaming through the giant pair of bay windows in his study.

  A portrait of Symmes hung behind the desk, which was so typically self-obsessed a choice of décor that I found it nearly humorous. The Symmes of the painting looked down with a benevolent smile gracing his manly features. The Symmes of flesh and blood glowered at us, positively bilious with the force of his pique.

  “Your family,” the latter Symmes said in a poisonous undertone, “has been proving a great disappointment of late.”

  I didn’t bother denying it—I was wracked enough over the two deaths at Pell Street without his assistance, and as for Valentine’s candidacy, I couldn’t rightly argue with the man.

  “Captain Wilde alerted me via letter yesterday stating his intentions and expressing wishes that the alderman race be conducted with as little collateral damage to the Party as is possible, a sentiment I’m certain you share,” Matsell observed in a voice equally dry as it was exhausted. “Your disappointment, as you term it, must be expressed in the spirit of republican fair play.”

  “Oh, I plan to smash Val Wilde at the polls, if not literally,” Symmes hissed. “In fact, Chief Matsell, I confess myself surprised you haven’t already sacked the traitor.”

  Matsell only smiled coldly, tapping his broad fingertips together in a habitual gesture. “Were I to sack every copper star who owned strong opinions in either the Hunker or the Barnburner direction, Alderman, I’d have to replace my entire staff.”