31 Bond Street (28 page)

August 8, 1857

T
he newspaper was folded next to his breakfast plate. The birds sang in the leafy vines at the open casement windows. The garden was filled with glorious sunshine, and he was well rested from his trip to the cottage. Elisabeth came into the dining room, and she stood nervously, before pulling out her chair. She eyed him warily as she placed her napkin in her lap. Mrs. Fullerton deposited a plate of morning biscuits, and there were new maids upstairs, who helped keep the dust at bay.

As he unfolded the newspaper, he noticed that it had already been opened and the creases were not fresh. Now, Elisabeth was eyeing the paper as his eyes fell on the front-page headline.

“My lord, what the devil!” He rapidly scanned the page, and then pulled the pages open to see the story as it followed inside.

“This can’t be! I am astonished. Utterly astonished. I just saw her before we left. Elisabeth, why didn’t you call me downstairs when you saw this? How long have you known?”

“I just saw it a moment ago.”

“This is preposterous. It says Emma was arrested in a gambling den. How absurd. The last time I saw her, she was sequestered in that house, foolishly washing the windows.”

“Well,” said Elisabeth, “the cook has the
Herald
downstairs, and I’m sorry to say the story gets much worse. The gambling parlor was filled with women of ill repute, and Emma was found sleeping in one of the prostitute’s rooms.”

“Oh, Good Lord Jesus,” he said, throwing his napkin on the table.

“It seems Emma was carried away from the gambling den in a drugged stupor. The Police Captain and Oakey Hall took her into custody in a raid. And the paper reports that the daughter, Helen, has been seen with a boy in a minstrel band. The
Herald
is trumpeting moral degradation.”

He pushed his chair back. “I’ve got to get down to the Tombs. I have absolutely no doubt that Oakey Hall is behind this. This is a setup, a sting.” He hurriedly put on his suit jacket, which was draped on the back of his chair.

Elisabeth reached over and pulled the newspaper across to her side of the table, and started scanning the
Times
. “It says that everyone is wondering anew if she was the murderess, after all.”

At the jail, he followed the matron’s footsteps across the stone floors, down a long corridor of the dankest cells, dimly lit by sparse fixtures, giving it the atmosphere of a dungeon. The female warden separated an iron key from her ring and banged it into its hole. He had visited the prison countless times, but the Tombs had never felt so tomblike.

Emma Cunningham was sitting on a bare mattress, wearing a
stained prison gown. She was leaning against the wall, her mouth open and her jaw slack so that a trickle of saliva glistened along the side of her chin.

“Emma, I just got back to town, and heard the news. I have come to help you.” He went up to her and bent down, close to her, but she showed little reaction to his presence.

She gazed at him without answering, as if she had no powers of comprehension. She stared mutely. She sat with her limbs askew and her hair matted and tangled, her very being fractured and crumpled on the mattress. “Emma, do you recognize me? Do you know who I am?” Clinton wondered how she had fallen into this alarming condition. In his drive to push the case to its successful conclusion, he had created an image of her at odds with the woman before him. The strength and fortitude he believed she had possessed were merely an illusion. He now realized that he had committed a fallacy greater than any legal miscalculation: by collaborating in his fantasy of who she was, he had collaborated in her decline.

Humbled, he pulled a wooden stool close. “Emma, do you know why you are here?” he asked. “Do you know what happened?” He watched her, searching for answers in the strange dislocation of her face. She rolled her head. Her mouth curled up at the corner, to which he assigned a flash of cleverness, only to realize it was only an involuntary twitch. Then her jaw dropped, and she let out a sudden howl that blasted through the chamber; it was a cry of such anguish that Clinton was propelled to his feet and backward a step or two. The sound repelled him, cutting past his reserves of compassion. How many times had he heard cries of agony as he moved through the jails to the magistrate? He had believed that the power of law could make a difference, yet the fragile network of reason and logic stretched and cracked like a thin parchment over an unknowable and unreachable chasm.

“I will act as your counsel,” Clinton said, uttering the few words
that were necessary. “I promise, I will see that the charges against you are dropped. You have not committed any crime. I believe this is a case of entrapment, and Mr. Thayer and I will present that position before Judge Thomas. I am fairly certain you will be released within the week.”

Emma stared, uncomprehending, taking no notice of his words. Clinton moved to the door and gestured through the bars for the matron. She reappeared with the keys swinging from the hoop on her hip. She pulled open the barred door, and Clinton stepped out of the cell, hesitating a step. The door shut, and as he walked away he heard her moan, her cries rising and lowering in pitch, like a series of soft wails that trailed behind him as he headed down the corridor. “Don’t leave me, don’t leave me, don’t leave me,” he thought he heard her say. Was she calling him back? Or was it his imagination in the echoes in the Tombs? He did not turn back, lest he attach a meaning that wasn’t there.

August 22, 1857

S
amuel and Katuma leaned against the wall, under the awning of a shop front on the Bowery. In front of the shop, hats were piled high on tables—stovepipe hats, flat caps, and cheap bowlers that the boys on the Bowery wore with their colored kerchiefs and flared pants when they strolled for amusement. Vendor boards lined the pavement, advertising trinkets and penny entertainments, propped out in the middle of the sidewalk, so that pedestrians collided into them. The street was alive on a summer Saturday at noontime—young men had giggling girls on their arms and a week of pay in their pockets, strolling on the cheap.

Samuel stood behind the hat table, in shadow, under the shade of the shop’s awning, brooding. Quietta stood near Samuel, tracing a finger along the feather of a fedora on the hat man’s table. “He followed the boy, like a bloodhound after his scent. I saw him on the horse; he tracked him to the woods, looking for me.” He said, his furrowed brow obscuring the yellow glare of his eyes.

“I have kept my eye on him as well,” said Katuma. “He follows a path, like everyone. He will stop today at the séance parlor, where
the Gypsy sells cocaine on Saturday morning to the swells who come round to buy for the weekend.” Katuma moved out onto the sidewalk, in the glare of the noonday sun, scanning the broad intersection as traffic flowed past from every direction. “There he is,” said Katuma, looking up the avenue. “I see him now.”

Across the street and up a block, he spotted the tailored garb and flaxen hair of Ambrose Wicken, striding tall.

Katuma turned to Samuel, who slid back deeper in the shadow of the awning. “Get ready. Watch me closely, then wait five minutes and follow us into the alley.” Katuma gestured for his daughter. She was wearing a fringed and beaded dress, with bare legs and moccasins. Her black hair was slicked back in a braid down her back, thick as an arm. In her Indian costume, she looked like the daughter of one of the painted wooden Indians that stood before the cigar stores, instead of Katuma, whose faded workmen’s clothes hung loosely from his powerful frame.

Wicken had crossed the street and was nearing the shop front. Katuma took Quietta’s hand and led her a few paces, into a bright blast of sunlight in the middle of the sidewalk, where they stood and waited as Wicken approached. Samuel receded farther back into the shade behind the tables, his muscles tightening, and his blood pulsing through his body in a red rage, bracing against the instinct to attack.

As Wicken saw them, his pace slowed at the sight of Quietta standing in her beaded costume. An inquisitive look crossed his face, as if he were amused by one of the colorful signboards that beckoned with pleasurable trinkets for sale. Katuma whispered a phrase to Wicken; it was a quiet offer, muttered in an undertone. “Take my daughter, only ten dollars,” he was saying, with Wicken close enough to feel Katuma’s breath, and smell the musky allure of the girl’s skin.

Wicken’s eyes darted about at the pedestrians passing, not be
cause he feared exposure, but because a busy man always had to weigh his pleasures before he alters his schedule. He patted his breast pocket, and cocked his head, indicating that he had money, but like a savvy buyer, he was not willing to part with it until the wares were in hand. Katuma led his daughter by the arm, with Wicken, now grinning, following beside them, looking down, not at Quietta’s face, but at her firm breasts, which rose visibly under the smooth suede dress. When they passed by the hat vendor’s table, Wicken was too preoccupied with his prey to notice Samuel lurking in the shadows.

Samuel watched them pass, and waited under the awning, measuring the time. He calculated a minute passing, but it felt like an hour. The rays of summer sun seemed carved in stone. A street car clanged along the Bowery, and when the sounds of the bell finally faded away, he told himself to get moving. It was difficult for him not to break into a run.

A block and a half south was an alley, overrun with wooden shacks, sagging rooftops, and broken stairways with missing boards. The alley was so narrow that very little sun filtered through, keeping it cool and dim, even in the middle of the day. Samuel was neither too early nor too late. Wicken was holding Quietta’s hand, and his other was on his breast pocket, hesitating, this time to indicate that now that the tawdry wares were his, surely they were not worth ten dollars. Katuma was staring at his daughter’s hand, being fondled by Wicken. She was behaving with silent poise.

Samuel saw the men before Wicken noticed them. The two men were on a low rooftop, silent as alley cats. Even in the dim light, Samuel could make out that they were the friends of Katuma, Indians, dressed in black clothes. They rose from a prone position, and sprung off the roof, flying down as Wicken looked up, too late, until they were upon him, and he recoiled, as if warding off a blow from above. The men landed at his feet, one on each
side, grabbing Wicken from behind, and another flinging his arm around his throat and clamping his mouth, stifling a cry. Samuel saw the stricken look in Wicken’s eyes as he struggled. Then one Indian pulled a rag and a bottle from a burlap bag and soaked the rag with chloroform, smothering it across Wicken’s face, pressing hard. Wicken gagged in an effort to bring air to his lungs, sucking in the fumes. Quietta slipped back a few paces, and Katuma stood very close to her. Wicken tried to kick, but the motion made him unstable, and he lost his footing. When Wicken’s knees sagged, the man with the rag held it on for several more seconds until he was sure that the body had gone limp.

The Indian with the chloroform pulled the burlap bag over Wicken’s head and tied the drawstring at his feet. Then, like a dockworker, he hoisted it onto his shoulders, and tossed the bag into an open wooden cart that the men had brought to the alley.

“Run home, now,” Katuma said to Quietta, who swiftly turned and ran, her moccasins silent, dashing away like an Algonquian girl on a path through the woods. Samuel positioned himself at the barrow handles. The four men pulled the wagon down the alley and turned onto a walkway that led behind the buildings to Broome Street. From the side streets, they could make their way to the river. No one would even glance at three Indians and a Negro pulling a load of cargo through the city, for men did this every day, for a quarter, handed out by a foreman, at the end of a day of labor.

They arrived at the riverbank in half an hour. It was not yet one o’clock. The afternoon sun bounced off the blue river, shimmering through the trees. An abandoned glass factory sat on the bank, grown over with weeds and underbrush. One of the men dragged a flat panel of hammered boards away from the building, a raft they had constructed to carry the heavy load out into the river. They placed the bag on the raft and slid it to the river’s edge. Then they pulled a rowboat beside the raft—the boat was small, a
sturdier version of the dugout canoes that the Lenape still used to navigate and fish.

They stepped into the water, glistening with brown pebbles and minnows, swarming, a few inches deep. The water lapped against the wood of the boat. “Thank you,” Katuma said, with a nod. The two Indians gave a soft salute and left without a word, climbing back up the bank. Katuma tied a rope at the prow, and looped it through an iron ring on the raft. Samuel lay flat on the raft. Katuma used his oars to push into the current while Samuel helped with a long paddle. They floated into the Hudson, tethered together, using the oars as rudders to steer themselves. In a matter of minutes, they were heading south, reaching the quiet space in the center of the broad river, where the current ran strongest, while the buildings of the city receded into specks along the island’s ring. Even the tall schooners clustered at the ports and the ferries darting in the distance seemed like tiny toys. Two men on a small craft were as indistinguishable as workmen pulling a wagon on a city street.

They floated along for a time, sometimes rowing, sometimes drifting, toward Staten Island. Reaching the river mouth where it opened into the wide harbor, the water was often choppy, but on this August afternoon, it was still, with a breeze soft enough to cool the sun on their cheeks but barely able to ripple the skin of the water’s surface. White gulls swung above, their wingspan suspended, gliding on shafts of air, cawing and swooping for shellfish. Samuel and Katuma floated to the west of Staten Island, where the harbor seeped into miles of marsh.

“This land is sacred,” said Katuma as the marshes swelled out in a gentle fringe, edging the harbor for miles. “My father is buried here, in one of those mounds, and his great-grandfather, before him, who was the chief. They lived in peace in these parts.”

“This same marsh was to be the scene of infamy,” Samuel said.
The raft made its way, slowly lapping closer into the reeds. “There isn’t a bobwhite within a hundred miles of Manhattan in January, but when I heard the whistle, I knew it was you, for you had taught me well.”

“City people don’t know the sounds of birds, certainly no one on Bond Street.” That cold night after the carriage had dropped off Dr. Burdell, Katuma had made the long bird whistle, as a signal to Samuel. Then Samuel had taken the horse back to the stable, and pulled the rigging off, and removed his boots and britches, and changed into work pants and a warm jacket that was lined with sheep fur. Inside the stable he lit a lantern and kept it low on the floor. About twenty minutes passed, and Katuma appeared at the alley door. He stood there, holding his hands before him—the grey pants and shirt were covered with dark stains, and when Samuel brought the lantern over close to him, the stains turned crimson, for he was covered from neck to cuff with blood.

“Stand there, don’t come in,” said Samuel, who placed a sheet at Katuma’s feet. He stepped on top of it and gingerly began to remove his clothing and let it drop piece by bloody piece. Then he stepped off the sheet, naked, and began to put on fresh clothes that were waiting in a pile. Katuma wrapped the sheet around the clothes and carefully tucked the ends of the sheet together and then pried loose the floorboards and dropped the sheet into the dark hole. Before putting the boards back, Katuma asked Samuel to bring him a bucket of water. He dipped his hands into the bucket and then rinsed his hands over the hole, the soiled water falling deep into the chasm.

“You have done it, so let’s be gone,” Samuel said. “I wish there was another way, but I could not stop this myself.”

“There was no other way,” said Katuma. And then he went to the doorway and retrieved the dagger he had left on the ground. He returned to the bucket and washed it over the hole, and emptied the
remaining water, and placed the knife in the loop of his trousers. “No use losing a good knife.”

Samuel extinguished the lantern, and they saw the horse’s eyes in the dark, its breath smoky from the cold, and the restless movements of its tail. “The deed is done,” Katuma said. And Samuel remembered the uneasy feeling of dread at the plan Katuma had spoken of when he heard the conspiracies that were afoot. “Those swamps were the kingdom of my ancestors and the shells were our currency,” he had told Samuel. “The rivers and streams were our highways connecting to all the tribes. My spirit is Manitou, who speaks to me through my dead great-grandfather, once chief of the Lenni Lenape. The Dutchmen did not steal our land, for the land was there for all to share. They blocked our trade. Now the spirits have bidden me to stop theirs.”

It was with ease that Katuma had climbed to the second story, using a rainspout that had provided a grip as he scaled the wall. Then he had used a burglar’s wedge to unhinge the catch on the office window, and refastened it once he was inside. He had waited hidden, in the house, then had slain the beast and made his way out again with the stealth of a cat, locking the street door with a key Samuel had given him, after he exited. And the two of them, warmly dressed, made their way from the stable quietly down the alley to the Bowery, and slid around the corner without attracting any notice.

The sack lay motionless on the raft beside them. Katuma pointed to a rivulet that made a passage through the marsh, and they paddled into the reeds, with marsh grass forming a soft green wall on either side. “Bloody money,” said Katuma. Samuel and Katuma had retrieved the gold just a week earlier, going back to 31 Bond Street in the dead of an August night, near midnight. This time, Katuma used a knife to jimmy the lock of the kitchen door.
Once sprung, they left it broken and walked right in. To Samuel’s nose, the rooms were weighted down with death and decay. They went up the main stairs, and passed through the office, to the wardrobe passage. They pulled at the drawer—it had warped from the summer heat but, once removed, revealed a cool hole, and Katuma lowered himself inside, feeling his way down the ladder without a candle. He pulled up the contents of the cache, which consisted of the satchel Dr. Burdell carried that night and some rolled-up deeds for this marsh, and others for empty lands, some faraway, out in the West.

They left the house the same way and walked the mile west under a white moon, until they heard the sound of a screech owl and stopped near the graveyard on Greenwich Street. “This money is unclean,” Katuma had said, wiping his brow. “We’ll bury it here,” pointing to a spot between the roots of a very old oak. Katuma took a long sip from a bottle of rum he carried in his pack. Increasingly, Samuel had seen him swig from it to quell the spirits that raged inside of him.

“What about the girl?” Samuel reminded him.

“I’ll take her a portion,” said Katuma, and Samuel told him where she lived with the old woman, in the house, not far from the river, with the blue door. In the morning, Augusta would find a sack of gold and some papers sitting by the kitchen steps, like a bottle of fresh milk.

Samuel said good night and left Katuma to the task, for he was more adept at these shadowy jobs. They would hide the money for now, for possession of even a few gold coins was enough to damn a Negro or Indian. Then they could siphon it out in bits and funnel it to the church and the Underground workers, who helped to keep the slavers at bay. To Samuel, the money was fuel for the abolitionist cause. For Katuma, the shining coins represented a foul currency
destined to suppress his ancestor’s legacy, and it needed to be put under the earth, as if to purify it. Money was not a balm that could slake his anger. Samuel left Katuma resting under the oak tree, with the faraway squint of a man with a rifle site before his eye, still focused on revenge with a phantom target.