The Empire of Shadows (3 page)

The reek of horse shit was so strong it was like a slap in the face. That there should be shit in the lake was such a shock he couldn't convince himself of the truth of it. He shook his head and cleared his eyes. There seemed to be a huge pile of it, mountainous and steaming, just inches from his face. He moved and bits of gravel dug into his cheek, but when he tried to brush them away his arms wouldn't respond. They were locked behind his back and, despite his best effort, they wouldn't budge.

From somewhere behind him he heard a footstep. A large black shoe descended into the pile of manure before him.

“Looks like he's coming to, Blackjack,” a voice said above him. Tupper's eyes followed the blue-clad leg up as far as his neck would bend. A nightstick twirled in a big, dark hand, and a bushy mustache under a massive nose came into view. The rest of the cop's face was a black mask under the shade of his cap. A street lamp behind outlined his immense form in stark contrasts of shadow and light.

“On your feet,” said a voice from the blackened face. Jim Tupper remembered where he was.

Jim pulled his knees up and rolled over using his head as a pivot. It took three tries, but he finally managed it while the cops watched and laughed. “Tough with no hands, eh? Get used to it. You'll be spendin' plenty o' time in cuffs, Injun, for what you done,” one of them said.

Tupper rose slowly to his knees. Blood trickled down his forehead and into his eyes in a stinging, blinding cascade. He shook his head, blinking out the blood, sending a spray left and right. It fell in red-black drops on the smooth cobbles.

“Shit!” the cop to his right shouted, stomping his feet in the manure-clogged gutter. “Blood on me spankin' new pants!” A tremendous blow caught Tupper in the right shoulder, sending him crashing to the street. With no hands free to break his fall, his head hit hard. He didn't get up.

Tupper woke some time later to the insistent pounding in his skull. BOOM, BOOM, BOOM, BOOM. It felt like a nightstick coming down over and over, and for an instant he imagined it was. But when he opened one eye, sticky with drying blood, what he saw was the rough wool of a blanket, and beyond that, bars. He let the image seep into his pounding head like a sponge under a dripping faucet.

Slowly it came back, the blood and the whistles and the cops and clubs. He was in a jail somewhere. How long he'd been there was harder to say. His head put that question off. There was nothing to be done about that. What needed his attention was what he was going to do. But even that had to take a back seat to the pounding, which seemed to drown out both sight and thought itself.

Tupper slipped away again to the sound of the drumming. He was in the council house, the central fire casting gigantic, distorted shadows of the dancers on the walls. They shuffled and stomped to the sound of the drums. The old songs were being sung and the prayers repeated. The code of the prophet, Handsome Lake, was being celebrated. It held the people to the old ways, when the Six Nations ruled for a month's travel in any direction. Smoke from the council fire wrapped the congregation in bonds of sacred smoke. The drumming was good.

It was morning when Tupper woke again, though in the damp basement cell there was no daylight. The smell of overcooked coffee gave him his only clue to time. There was no pounding this time, just a distant drum, as of a signal calling him to the council fire. It didn't hurt, not even when he sat up. A grim smile slithered across his lips. There was magic in his dreams. It had lifted the hammer from his temples and restored balance to the world. “You better be off that cot in ten seconds, Injun, or it's another whack you'll be getting,” an approaching voice boomed. “Get up! We're goin' for a ride, ye bloody bastard.”

Ten minutes later Tupper was in the back of a Black Maria. His only view of the world was through a small, barred window in the rear door. He saw enough, though, to know he was somewhere on the West Side, heading south. Over the next half hour or so the wagon stopped at two precinct houses. Each time more prisoners got on, some cuffed, some not. The back was nearly full after the second stop, and Tupper heard one of the cops say, “It's one more stop, then straight on to the Tombs, Harry.”

Tupper had heard of that place. It was a place he didn't want to go. Once inside, he didn't give himself much of a chance of coming out again, ever. Murderers were treated harshly in the Tombs, very harshly indeed, from what little he'd heard.

Like an animal in a trap, he was willing to chew off his own leg for freedom. He figured he'd do it now, if that was the only way. But, as a hunter he knew that patience must always outweigh fury. Banging his head against the walls of the wagon would gain him nothing. Time enough for fury when he saw the opportunity, if it ever came.

The back of the wagon was tight and hot. The August sun slowly turned the cramped space into an oven. Tupper and the five other prisoners glistened with sweat, and small pools of it started to form on the floor around their feet as they leaked and dripped. The other prisoners were trying to keep their distance, though the cramped space didn't allow it. At least now, with his hands cuffed in front, he could run his fingers through his long black hair.

He was caked with dried blood. It was on his pants, hands, face, and hair. He was dirty and damp from his roll in the gutter and the smell of manure clung to him like a guilty conscience. He could only imagine what the others in this black box thought of him. They probably figured he was an escaped lunatic, gone on a spree of baby-killing. He smiled at the thought. The man across from him looked away.

That man, of all of them, didn't appear to belong there. His foppish scarlet necktie, only slightly askew, and his straw boater gave the thin, serious face an innocent look. Tupper rocked and bumped with the wagon, trying to figure what a neat, unassuming haberdasher—for that's the image that immediately came to mind—was doing in this rocking-oven-ride to the Tombs.

Jim guessed he had to be some sort of confidence man, forger, or an embezzler, maybe. Whatever he'd done, though, soon took a backseat to how he looked. He was sweating even more heavily than the rest. Little waterfalls were rushing out from under his straw hat, down his face, and into his paper collar. He was deathly pale, and getting paler with every rock and jolt of the wagon. He loosened the tie from around his green-tinted neck with a shaking hand. He shifted and craned toward the tiny rear window, sucking air like a landed fish.

“You gonna be all right there, Mister Boater?” one of the others asked.

“Mister Boater” said nothing, but nodded and gave them a pitiful smile. Then the wagon stopped.

One of the cops got down to go into a station house, leaving the other on guard. They hadn't sat there for more than a minute when it happened. “Mister Boater” had turned so pale and green he looked like death itself, and Tupper could see his Adam's apple bobbing like he was trying to swallow something whole.

Without warning the man erupted. There was no other word for it. Tupper had never seen the like of it in his life. “Mister Boater” convulsed, throwing his head back so hard his straw hat flew across the wagon, then he jackknifed forward, a monstrous stream of vomit spewing from his mouth with the force of a fire hose.

In an instant nearly everyone in the wagon was hosed down. Successive convulsions blasted the hot men with half-digested food in a soupy broth of steaming bile. The other men cursed and shouted at the top of their lungs. One of the others, who now wore a vomit shirt, doubled over and let loose on the shoes of the men to his left and right.

“What the bloody hell's goin' on back there?” the driver shouted. All he got back were shouts, cursing, and an insistent pounding on the front wall of the wagon. The cop must have smelled the cause of the ruckus then. “Goddamn you fuckin' drunks!” he shouted. “Make you bastards wish you never done that.”

The back door was thrown open, blinding Tupper in the bright morning sun. “OUT!” the cop shouted with a menacing wave of his daystick. “Out, and be smart about it.”

Tupper was on his feet and stepping over “Mister Boater's” feet before the words were out of the cop's mouth, but so were the rest. It didn't take much really, a shove from behind, a slip on the vomit carpet and Tupper was launched out the door.

It was all in slow motion for Tupper. The falling face-first, the impact with the surprised cop, the crash to the pavement, the sound the cop's head made when it hit the belgian blocks, were all distinct and vivid events spliced into an uncontrollable whole. The thing he remembered with crystal clarity was the way the cop's eyes rolled back in his head, leaving almost nothing but white. From there things started moving fast, very fast in fact.

The cop was out. Waiting for him to come to or for the other cop to come out of the station house was not an option. A quick search for the keys to his cuffs paid off. His hands were free a fumbling instant later. The cop's gun and wallet were his a moment after that. He threw the keys to one of the other men, then walked away.

He wanted to run, wanted to put all the distance he could between him and the cops, but in broad daylight, with witnesses on every sidewalk, walking was the safer course. Tupper made his head control the animal instincts of his feet, forcing his legs to slow until he felt like he was hardly moving at all. It seemed to work though, because he saw people on the street point, not at him but at the others who were running like scared rabbits.

Tupper turned two corners and ducked down an alley in quick succession. He could hear the whistles already. Still, he did not run. He crossed Canal Street, dodging the wall of freight wagons that always seemed to clog that roadway. Heading north on Thompson, he saw a half-loaded wagon rumbling away from a loft building. Tupper was on the back and hidden among the boxes within a minute. Peering out between the crates, he watched as the cobblestones marched away behind. No one followed.

Jim Tupper had stayed under the cover all day. The wagon he'd hidden in had headed for the North River docks. He'd kept his head down, particularly when the driver stopped after a few blocks to get lunch in a steamy little shack on Varick Street.

Tupper kept a wary eye for cops, peeking out from between the crates. He saw only one patrolman a couple of blocks off and no sign of a chase. When the driver finished lunch and the wagon had rattled to within a couple of blocks of the waterfront, Jim hopped down.

He ducked into a vacant doorway set deep in the side of an old prewar warehouse. He stood for anxious minutes, watching the street, his hand on the butt of the pistol. He was there for some time taking stock of his situation. The first thing that occurred to him was the need to change his appearance. His clothes were filthy and blood-smeared. His face and head were a mess of dried blood and manure. His hair, he decided, had to be cut.

Tupper hated the idea. His hair was his pride. Every man in his family had worn their hair long for as long as he could remember. To cut it was to deny his heritage and admit defeat. He thought at first that he'd just buy a hat, but he finally admitted to himself that a hat was not enough. His hair was sure to be a red flag to the cops, once his description got circulated. It had to go.

While Tupper tried to figure how to take care of his clothes and hair he noticed a pack of boys about twelve to fifteen years of age. There were five of them. Tupper watched as they approached. Their clothes were mostly ragged, but some articles had recently been stolen, he guessed. There was a new shirt with sleeves that didn't reach the wrist, a pair of expensive, pinstriped pants so long they were tied up at the bottom with string, and a bowler hat on one of the older ones, perched on a head two sizes too big.

Most had shoes of one sort or another, but two had no shoes at all. One limped on a twisted foot. None had weapons he could see, but knives or short lengths of pipe were easy enough to hide. As he watched he noted the eyes.

They had the eyes of hunters, roving and scanning for an easy mark, an unattended wagon, an open doorway, or a rival gang. Still, they laughed among themselves as boys will, but with a hard and brutal edge to their fun.

Tupper pulled out the cop's wallet, checking its contents. The gang was almost by when he looked up. Two of them were watching him with focused, dark eyes. Tupper knew the risk he was taking when he called to them.

“You boys like to make a couple of dollars?” The leader of the gang, a compact kid with hard blue eyes in a pockmarked face stopped and looked him over. He looked up and down the street, then sidled over. The other boys fanned out to either side like well-trained troops on a flanking maneuver.

“What kind'a man're you? Look like an Injun or somesuch,” the boy said, punctuated by a spit of tobacco juice.

“I am Mohawk, an
Ongwe'onwe,
” Tupper said. The leader of the gang seemed to accept this, as if coming upon one of the
Ongwéonwe
here in the bowels of the city was an everyday sort of thing. He shrugged and commenced to negotiate, doing the talking for the group as naturally as any clan chief. Tupper kept his back to the wall and the rest of the boys in sight. Within two minutes he had handed over two silver dollars, a day's wage for a skilled worker. Tupper followed two of the boys with one hand in his pocket.

They walked away from the riverfront for about two blocks or so, then ducked down an alley at the back of a ramshackle row of ancient buildings that sagged and leaned on decaying wooden bones. The alley was choked with garbage, junk, and the stench of more emptied chamber pots than the rain could wash away.

A huge gray rat almost as big as a cat gnawed at the decayed leg of a pig. It stood its ground as they passed, baring yellow teeth. Neither of the boys spoke, and Jim said nothing to them. He cast an occasional eye behind as they slipped through a gloomy succession of connecting alleys and courtyards till even Tupper's excellent sense of direction was slightly muddled.