The Six Messiahs

by Mark Frost

  No: Two men wearing the same blue uniform had heard the whistle and were moving out of the station; passengers on the platform pointing in the direction of the bales. Both men blew their own whistles, pulled their guns, and ran toward where Kanazuchi crouched over the dead guard.

  A bullet smacked the cotton near his head with a dry splat; to the left Kanazuchi saw a third guard, pistol in hand, sprinting toward him down the tracks.

  Throughout the night, between her own bouts of fitful dreaming, Eileen laid her head back and studied Jacob Stern while he slept, his eyes moving rapidly back and forth behind their papery lids, forehead furrowed, lips twitching, small sounds of distress occasionally accompanying his shallow exhales. She didn't wake him, but the incongruity of the sight disturbed her; he seemed much more troubled asleep than awake.

  A slant of morning sun touched her face, and coming out of a dream, she realized the rocking of the car had ceased. She opened her eyes and was welcomed by Jacob's warm smile and twinkling eyes watching her benignly.

  "Are we here?" she asked.

  "Wherever we are, we seem to have arrived," he said.

  "Rise and shine! Rise and shine, friends!" Bendigo Rymer strode down the car, rousing the weary Players to groaning protest. "Like the mystical phoenix, whose name graces this fair city, we must arise from the ashes of our deathlike slumber and re-create ourselves in the image of a new day!"

  "Piss off," somebody muttered.

  Bendigo pretended not to hear their insults but dropped the poetic approach in favor of a more direct line of reasoning. "We've another train to catch, lady and gents, and if you expect to collect your wages this morning, you will remove your rear ends from these seats in short order and carry them along with your luggage to the station!"

  Perpetually vulnerable to economic arguments, the Players began to grumble and stir. Peering up from her position on the seat, Eileen saw two enormous pheasant feathers bouncing up and down the aisle: He's wearing that ridiculous Tyrolean cap again, she realized, the one that makes him look like Robin Hood gone to seed. God, what an annoying man!

  "Will you be staying in Phoenix long, Jacob?" asked Eileen, as she stumbled out of the car, shielding her eyes against the bright desert sunrise. Her legs felt rusted from sleeping in her seat, and one glance in a hand mirror proved traumatizing; hair tangled as a bramble bush, makeup ruined; mornings were frightful enough ordeals for a woman to begin with and far worse while on the road. Why did he have to see her like this?

  "To be perfectly honest, my dear, I haven't the slightest idea," said Jacob good-naturedly, breathing deeply. "This air is marvelous, isn't it? Dry but with a refreshing warmth to it and heavily scented with flowers."

  "It's a little early for me, Jacob," she said, thinking he could make a trip to the dentist sound like a country picnic.

  "But can't you smell it? It's almost sweet to the taste."

  "Life on the road, love; for we jaded sophisticates, one stop is pretty much the same as another."

  "What a pity; think how much you must miss."

  "This from a man who hasn't left his library in fifteen years."

  "And realizing the error of his ways, I assure you. But how fantastic to travel so much; you must have seen the entire country by now. Where are you off to next?"

  "Our head thespian has booked us a week in some godforsaken whistlestop somewhere out west of here____"

  "Where is that?"

  "Don't know; some sort of religious settlement—what's it called again, Bendigo?" she asked Rymer as he hurled by them. "This oasis you're taking us to."

  "The New City; capital T on the 'The,' " said Rymer, racing to oversee the transfer of sets and costumes to their connecting train. "A joy to meet you, Rabbi. May God always shield you from the storm."

  "And you, sir."

  "Lord, he makes my teeth hurt sometimes," said Eileen.

  When they reached the planked platform of the terminal, Eileen set down her makeup case, looked at Jacob frankly, and smiled, a winsome blend of affection and regret. "I'm sorry to say we're moving on within the hour actually."

  Jacob swallowed hard and looked down at his feet, shuffling them on the knotted wood. What's the matter with you, Jacob? She's a beautiful woman less than half your age that you've known for twelve hours whom you're never going to see again and you're behaving like a heartsick schoolboy. He groped through his thoughts, desperate for a conversation starter.

  "What sort of religious settlement is this place you're going?"

  "Like the Mormons, I guess. Bendigo's been as evasive as usual," she said, hearing the man's raised voice and turning to see him in the distance screaming bloody murder at some poor railroad hand transferring their sets between trains: Rymer had a gift for terrorizing menials.

  "Like the Mormons in what way?"

  "He didn't say. They probably all keep twenty-five wives apiece; a regular Sodom."

  Jacob blushed and Eileen instantly regretted her off-color tone, unused to censoring herself and feeling unladylike, realizing how long it had been since she'd kept company with a man who made her feel any other way.

  "Actually all he's told us is it's in the middle of the desert and they've built themselves an opera house and they're very keen to have some first-rate entertainment come through. So why they hired us is anyone's guess."

  "I hope this place is not too dangerous."

  "Compared to some of the dumps we've been, how bad could it be? Looking forward to it, actually; he said they're building a great big black castle out there that's really something to see."

  Ice water would not have been more effective: Jacob snapped instantly to his senses. "What sort of castle?"

  Before she could answer, a sharp whistle cut through the clatter of the station; her eye was drawn toward Rymer and the trains: fifty yards off, halfway between them, some kind of commotion behind a stack of cotton bales. She could see people moving toward the disturbance: a struggle?

  Two guards rushed out of the station behind them; Eileen and some other passengers on the platform pointed them toward the cotton bales. The guards blew their own whistles and pulled their pistols as they ran.

  Somewhere a shot was fired.

  "What's going on?" she asked.

  "I don't know," said Jacob.

  "Which way to the roof?" asked Jack.

  "I'll show you," said Stern. "What about the books?"

  "Bring them both," said Doyle.

  "I thought we wanted them to take the copy," said Stern.

  "We do but we don't want it to seem too easy," said Jack.

  "We don't even know if these are the same men," said Doyle.

  Footsteps crashing up the stairs. Stern slipped the original Zohar into a well-worn leather pouch while Jack picked up the copy.

  "And we don't care to wait and find out. Which way?" asked Jack.

  "Follow me," said Stern. He stuffed the Gerona Zohar under his arm like a football and led them out the nearest door, through a warren of cramped rooms connected by tiny L-shaped corridors, and up a seldom-used set of back stairs.

  "They" were the Houston Dusters, a street gang with a talent for prolific, unparalleled violence. The Dusters had ruled the Lower East Side from Houston Street to East Broadway for a generation, but new gangs were always stepping up to challenge their borders, in addition to their traditional antagonisms with more established outfits like the Gophers, the Five Pointers, the Fashion Plates, and the rising tongs of Chinatown.

  Economic hardship, collapse of the immigrant family structure—nearly all the Dusters were first- or second-generation Irish—and society's failure to provide a legitimate toehold for its disadvantaged undoubtedly contributed to the flourishing of gang culture, but when you came right down to the heart of the matter, the matter, the Dusters were a bunch of wrong guys, a character flaw that had never proved a detriment to getting ahead in New York. These ruffians absorbed the lesson early in life that a career in crime might be a disreputable path to prospe
rity and the American dream, but it was a crowded shortcut.

  Unmistakable, intimidating figures in their neighborhood, well over two hundred in number, the Dusters communicated with a vocabulary of savage war whoops inspired by the Indians their leader once saw in Buffalo Bill Cody's Wild West Extravaganza at Madison Square Garden. The nattiest of East Side gangs, they sported round, heavily padded leather caps that pulled down over the ears and doubled as protective helmets, steel-toed hobnail boots—the better to stomp you with— and pants with a loud red stripe running down the leg, symbolizing their fleetness of foot. Blades, concrete-filled lead pipes, and home-crafted blackjacks were their weapons of choice. The gang's code of honor considered shooting your enemy at a distance a coward's way to settle disputes. Blood on your hands, that was the Duster motto.

  For the last nine years, the Dusters had been commanded by a ruthless evil-eyed weasel named Ding-Dong Dunham, an unusually robust term of office in the gang racket. Ding-Dong had clawed his way up through the ranks, equipped with the sociopath's advantage of caring not a penny for the value of human life: His nickname derived from the greeting Dunham used to gleefully scream in the ears of robbery victims after his spiked cudgel connected with their hats. He also had a penchant for writing epic poems about the more fanciful acts of mayhem he and his cohorts committed; Ding-Dong regularly forced the Dusters to endure recitals of his work, an act of debatably greater cruelty than the crimes he was immortalizing.

  Earlier that day, Ding-Dong had accepted a commission from a goodlooking German man—-Dunham ascertaining that by the man's Teutonic accent, clever lad that he was—who said he was fresh off the boat, had no associates he could rely on in New York, and needed someone to keep an eye peeled on a particular fourth-floor office in a building on St. Mark's Place, just north of the heart of Duster territory. If anyone showed up in that office, Ding-Dong's boys were to take them into custody and escort them to headquarters so this kraut could question them personally.

  No mention had been made by this tall, blond fellow to Dunham about an old holy book or whose offices they were watching, but the man paid half his generous fee for the work up front in solid gold ingots, which went a long way toward discouraging Ding-Dong's idle curiosity about what this pretzel twister was up to.

  But the subtlety of detaining somebody and hauling them back for questioning was wasted on the thirty Dusters rushing up the front stairs of the tenement, most of them flying on cocaine—or "dust"—and cheap dago red. With their clubs and knives and saps at the ready, these psychotic brutes had no intention of deviating from their standard operating procedure: Beat the holy hell out of whoever got in the way and if they lived through it, drag the pieces back to Ding-Dong for him to sort out.

  As Stern led the others onto the roof above the sixth floor, the men could hear Dusters breaking into the offices below, sacking the place, smashing windows, destroying everything in their path like berserk Visigoths. Stern locked the door behind them, an act that might buy them two seconds of time, and directed them across the rooftop to the north.

  Jack handed the fake Zohar off to Doyle, waved them on ahead, and hung back, pulling something from a nest of pockets inside his coat as he knelt beside the locked door. He caught up with them as they climbed down a short ladder to the next roof, just as the first Dusters busted through the door behind them.

  The report from the explosion they triggered wasn't booming, it generated more of a loud theatrical hiss, but the flames were white-hot and the smoke laced with pepper and saltpeter. The first two Dusters went down, scorched and dazed by the detonation; a third, engulfed in fire, and "dusted" beyond the reach of rational thought, jumped off the roof. The second threesome through caught the full effect of the gas and fell to their knees, gagging, blinded, screaming bloody murder. The next ten Dusters that followed got wise, pulled their kerchiefs up over their faces, held their breath, and sprinted to the far side of the smoke, barking orders back down the stairs: Send the rest of the boys to the street; they're taking the roof!

  Jack jumped from the ladder and joined the Doyles as Stern took off ahead of them, picking his way through a tangle of clotheslines, box gardens, pigeon coops, and exhaust pipes on the tar paper roof; about thirty seconds behind them, ten Dusters reached the ladder and leaped down after them. The roof of the next tenement required a climb up twelve rungs; Jack brought up the rear and stopped at the apex, sacrificing half of their lead to pack something from a vial in tight against the bricks. By the time he planted a short fuse in the claylike substance and lit a match, the Dusters had reached the bottom rungs. Jack dodged a thrown knife, as Doyle and Innes drove the hoodlums momentarily back to the cover of a chimney with a barrage of bricks ripped from a retaining wall. Jack lit the fuse and they ran on again; the Dusters were halfway up the ladder when Jack's charge went off, ripping the bolts from the wall and sending the ladder and two lead Dusters crashing backward to the roof.

  Doyle diverted his path to the street side edge of the rooftop and glanced uneasily down through the soupy night air; the main pack of Dusters was keeping pace with them below, others sprinting ahead trying to anticipate where they could enter a building, climb up, and cut off their line of retreat. Doyle thought the Dusters, shouting taunts and whooping battle cries up at their quarry on the roof, looked and sounded like Stone Age savages on a hunt, which in many ways was exactly what they were.

  "Handy fellow to have along, your Jack," said Innes, joining him at the edge.

  "Quite," said Doyle.

  "Wish I had my Enfield," said Innes, squeezing off an imaginary shot at the Dusters in the street: anger in his eyes. In his element, Doyle noted with pride.

  "This way," said Stern.

  The roof of the next tenement turned out to be the last on the block; the top of the building on the street running to their left stood across a ten-foot gap with a drop of fifty disappearing below into darkness. They stopped and looked two roofs back where the pursuing Dusters, with their profound native ingenuity, had formed a human pyramid; half their platoon, already elevated up the ladderless wall, were pulling the others up behind them.

  "We'll have to jump," said Jack.

  "Is that really necessary?" said Doyle.

  "Unless you have any other suggestions," said Jack, laying a loose board on the bricks edging the roof, creating a small ramp.

  "What about the books?" asked Stern, who had done nothing to tarnish the sturdy impression of his mettle Doyle had formed on the Elbe.

  "I'll manage it," said Jack.

  Jack took both books from the men, stepped back, made a measured run up the ramp, and spanned the gap easily, landing nimbly on his feet.

  "You go next," said Doyle.

  "Don't fancy heights much, do you, Arthur?" said Innes, making his run. "You'll be fine."

  Stern followed: Jack and Innes caught him as he fell slightly short and hauled him over the lip.

  Doyle stepped back as far as he could for his try at the jump, steeled himself, wished he wasn't wearing his smooth-soled brogans, took a dead run, and closed his eyes as he went airborne. His crash landing put a dent in the roof and knocked out his wind.

  "All right then, Arthur?" asked Innes, as they lifted him to his feet.

  Doyle nodded, gasping for air.

  They caught up to Stern, standing at the edge of the next roof, staring apprehensively at the building a few steps below them.

  "What's wrong?" asked Innes.

  "The Gates of Hell," said Stern.

  "Here? In New York?" said Innes. "I thought they were in Wapping."

  "What do you mean?" asked Jack.

  "That's what this building is called. It's the most notorious slum in the city; over a thousand people live in there."

  Even viewed from above, amid the squalor of its neighbor tenements, this one stood out Tents and shabby huts congested the rooftop, and a solid column of stench that was nearly unendurable rose from the borders of the place; filth, ordure, disease, decaying m
eat.

  Whooping cries from the gap behind them, answered from the ground below, heralded the imminent arrival of the Dusters; there was nowhere to go but forward.

  As they ran across the roof, faces peered out at them from the huts; bone-white, starving, dispossessed. Inside the flimsy structures, they saw shadowy figures huddled around small ash can fires, waiting passively for more misfortune. As they neared the far side of the roof, the cries of the trailing Dusters were echoed by identical voices directly ahead; the vanguard of the pack on the street had outflanked them and climbed to the next roof, pinching them in. Following Stern's lead, the men doubled back and found a door leading down into the Gates of Hell.

  As dreadful as the smell had been on the roof, what they encountered inside was disabling: an abattoir, a battlefield left to rot in the sun. Each man was forced to cover his mouth and nose and fight a constant struggle to keep his gorge from rising. Stern moaned involuntarily. Jack distributed small capsules of ammonia, which they snapped into their handkerchiefs, burning their eyes but partially neutralizing the stink. Now it was a question of finding their way out through the nightmarish tomb; light from the noxious open gas jets was scarce, almost apologetic in the close halls choked with fumes from lamps and kerosene stoves.

  They could find no coherence to the nesting of the tenement's corridors and stairways, each floor a jumble of demolition and shoddy reconstruction; as they stumbled from room to room, none of its denizens offered any protest at their presence: Accustomed to invasion, they owned no sense of borders worth defending. No furniture aside from huge rough beds where multiple sets of dull eyes stared at them fearfully out of the darkness. Bodies slunk away from them like swollen insects. Aggressive rats the size of terriers stopped to regard them with less alarm than the humans. Opening one door that threw baleful light into a murky room, they were shocked by the sight of the far wall melting away, until they realized what they saw moving was a solid blanket of cockroaches.

  In one cavernous space, Doyle lost count after estimating at least sixty people lived there, most seeking solace in a sleep indistinguishable from death. The smells thickened the farther they descended, and everywhere they ventured lay a dread and dreary silence. They found a family of six huddled around a candle in the crawl space under a flight of stairs, all stamped with the same hollow-eyed expression, their poor possessions scattered around them. Doyle had read Dickens's devastating accounts of poverty in midcentury London, but nothing he'd ever witnessed could match this intolerable misery. The violence of this cold hell was first and foremost spiritual. With what high hopes had these damned souls journeyed to the New World? wondered Doyle, his feelings a hot whirl of pity, sympathy, and horror.