City of Promise (29 page)

“And you think those details might have come from either Obadiah or Israel.” There seemed no other explanation for the dwarf’s reluctance to tell the story at the foundry.

“I don’t,” Tickle said. “For one thing, Obadiah and me, we got the same grandma and grandpa. Same blood. And Israel . . . It’s just not his way. I guess I just feel more comfortable talking about all this here. With my sorts of people.”

Josh knew the other part of the story was coming. The thing that had made the dwarf’s face go dark with rage the day they first visited the foundry together, when Josh demanded to know if Tickle and Clifford were somehow partners. What was extraordinary was that the people around him seemed to know as well. Their talk first quieted, then died away. Until finally Ebenezer Tickle’s voice was the only sound in the place.

“That door Clifford had Mr. Kelly make for him back in Eddyville, it fit a cave in the woods near the lake. Not outside where it could be seen, door was halfways in. So’s you only knew it was there if you already knew about the cave and you was inside. Even then, you couldn’t open it unless you knew how the turns of the wheel went.”

“Which you did.”

“Yes. I helped make the door. So I knew.” After that the other man sat silent, puffing on his pipe.

Josh waited, but Tickle seemed to have run out of words, seemed to be sinking into his thoughts. Maude Pattycake had moved closer to their table and Tickle reached over and took her hand, then raised his head. “There was a wide open space behind that door,” he said. “All stone, hollowed out kind of. Big waterfall at the far end. A sort of flat place in the middle. And sloping walls all around. Lots of rocks and such jutting out here and there. Sort of like benches. Folks sat on them rocks so they could watch what went on down below.”

“A natural amphitheater,” Josh said. “That’s what you’re describing, isn’t it?”

Tickle nodded. “I think that’s the word, yes.”

“In classical times,” Josh said, “among the ancient Greeks and Romans, an amphitheater was meant for shows. Performances. Like the Colosseum in Rome.”

“Place they fed the Christians to the lions,” Tickle said.

Mama Jack’s was warmed by a few charcoal braziers and the body heat of all the drinkers, but Josh felt cold. Back on Belle Isle, watching Clifford and the guards using prisoners for target practice,
he’d felt cold as well. “What did Clifford do in the Eddyville woods, Mr. Tickle?”

“He had chariot races. There was a track marked out on the flat place, a big stretched-out circle.”

“An oval,” Josh supplied.

“That’s right. Clifford and his friends, they ran the chariots right round that oval in sets of two. Went hell for leather. Never mind who got tipped up, or run over by the metal wheels. Cracked them long whips at the team pulling their chariot and the other team as well. In the end the winner would be whoever beat all the other drivers, one by one.”

Josh heard the whispers all around him.

Long whips.

Metal wheels.

Hell for leather fast.

The entire room was listening and repeating the story, telling it as a sort of dirge. It was something most had heard before, but which had not lost its power to both terrorize and inflame.

“Did Clifford keep the horses in his cave?” Josh asked.

Tickle shook his head and the smoke of his pipe made wreaths in the air. “Weren’t no horses. Not enough room for ’em,” he said. “You’d have to take horses out into the woods and run ’em around the lake to keep ’em healthy. Someone would see. Them chariots was pulled by little people.”

Then, as if he wasn’t sure Josh understood, “By dwarves. They was paid seven dollars a night. A little man with no skill, maybe no daddy to put him in the way of earning a living in the big people’s world, that’s what he has to do to eat, Mr. Turner. One way or another, put himself on display.”

“Mr. Barnum’s freak show,” Josh said. Barnum sometimes took his spectacle on the road. Not just in America, all over the world. Crowds paid good money to come and look.

“Barnum’s museum and his traveling freak show, that’s bad,” Tickle agreed. “But nobody dies. Least not regularly.”

“I take it,” Josh said, “some of the dwarves pulling Clifford’s chariots did die.”

“Yes. At least one was killed most nights they was racing. Sometimes three or four. It was a thing you could bet on. Not just which team would win, how many would be dead when it was over. Clifford and the others, they whipped the dwarves something fierce. Made it so they had to veer over and drive the other chariot up against the wall, upend it maybe if it was going too fast. The edges of the wheels were kept sharp as knives. Drivers used their whips to make the team of little people pulling one chariot drag them sharp wheels over the team pulling the other. Best thing of all as they saw it was their team running those sharp wheels right over the neck of a dwarf on the other team. Cut his head off. When it was what they called a clean cut the driver, sometimes he’d reach down and lift up the cut-off head. Clifford, he always did that. He’d hold that dwarf’s head up by the hair and yell and shout while his team pulled his chariot right round again. Blood everywhere. Plenty of it running all down Clifford’s arm. He seemed to like that.”

“And the other dwarves?” Josh asked, his voice flat, the smell in his nose that of the riverbank in the fetid heat of Belle Isle. “What did they think of committing murder for the sake of spectacle?”

Tickle sucked on his pipe before he answered. When he did the smoke came out with his words. Circled them. Like underlining and exclamation points in a newspaper. “Can’t say what they thought, but I know what they felt, Mr. Turner. When there was a kill the little people on the team as made it got a dollar-a-man bonus. Two if it was a clean cut. Them dwarves, they felt richer.”

There was silence in Mama Jack’s when Tickle stopped speaking. It lasted a good while.

Finally, Josh said, “I take it you never pulled a chariot.”

“Never. Not Israel nor George neither. But me and George, we got in sometimes. We knew about what went on and we knew how to open the door. So we went to see. Did it twice. Shamed by it, I am. But
that’s what happened. Thought maybe we could tell others what it was like. Get ’em to stop coming. But that was foolishness. Maybe just an excuse. They already knew. Seven dollars a night. Sometimes eight or nine. No dwarf thinks he’ll get that for nothing.”

Another silence, but this one didn’t last as long. After a few seconds Tickle said, “That’s where I heard Mr. Clifford talking about having been in England. At the chariot races. Heard him say he’d met a man as wanted to make steel and didn’t know how. Me and George, we both heard.”

“And you think Clifford somehow got the information? He found out exactly how the Kelly brothers made steel, and sold the knowledge to Bessemer?”

Tickle shook his head. “It’s not what I think, Mr. Turner. It’s what I know. Just like I know how it was about a year and half after me and George heard Clifford talking about an Englishman who wanted to make steel but couldn’t that Bessemer showed up. Right there in Eddyville, buying Kelly’s patent for a few dollars because he was already making steel over in London. Finishing touch that was. Put the Kelly brothers right out of business.”

The talk around them started up again. Faster and louder than before. As if having heard the tale anew was a catharsis for the misbegotten sorts drinking at Mama Jack’s. Maude Pattycake whispered something to Tickle, then left. The two men were alone and no longer the focus of attention. Josh leaned down so he was looking into Ebenezer Tickle’s eyes. “That’s what you think Clifford is planning to do to me, isn’t it? Put me out of business in some way.”

“That’s what I think, Mr. Turner. And that won’t be to my advantage neither. That’s why when we discovered Clifford hanging about down by the foundry, George and me, we thought it was important to tell you.”

Josh took a much abbreviated version of the story to the police office on Broadway. “I can’t say what motive Captain Clifford may presently
have for murdering George Higgins, but I do know there was bad blood between them that went back to Kentucky some years past. And Clifford’s an evil bastard. I can attest to that.”

The copper listening to the tale—a Captain Willis in a belted, knee length frock coat with his star-shaped copper badge pinned to his chest and a top hat sitting near to hand—nodded. “Captain Clifford’s a reb. I know that.” He leaned forward over his desk. “Seems like you’d have no cause to like him, would you, sir?” No way to see the peg, given that both men were seated and facing each other. Still Josh had no doubt about the copper’s meaning.

“I bear Trenton Clifford no grudge, Captain. Certainly nothing that would induce me to falsely accuse him of murder. I merely suggest that I know he was in the vicinity when George Higgins was killed.”

“Begging your pardon, sir, you know he was down near Mr. Devrey’s Wall Street docks earlier that day.”

“My brother’s docks and my foundry,” Josh said. “Where Higgins worked.”

“Making steel for you.”

“That’s right.”

“But the midget was killed later. In your house.”

Josh could see no point in continuing the discussion. He stood up. “Look into it, Captain Willis. I’m sure I can trust your diligence in the matter.”

He didn’t need to mention Zac’s prominence directly. That was already well established.

A couple of days later another policeman, a Sergeant Hoyle, came to see him up on the building site. “We wanted you to know we done what you asked, Mr. Turner. Checked on Captain Clifford’s whereabouts the day of the murder.”

“What did you discover?”

Hoyle was craning his neck, taking in the remarkable skeleton of the future St. Nicholas flats, and he seemed more interested in the building than in a discussion of the murder. “This building, sir, it’s—”

“What about Clifford?” Josh interrupted.

“Trenton Clifford was at Kate Meacham’s establishment from close to four, soon as the snow started that would be, until the next morning.”

“Rather a long time to stay at a place like Kate’s, wasn’t it?” Everyone called Mrs. Meacham’s whorehouse by her first name. It was well-known for catering to any sort of notion, however bizarre. Sex with animals, with children, involving whips or chains or whatever. Anything at all. For a price you could do it at Kate’s. Or just watch it being done, if that’s what you fancied. Not the sort of homey place you might spend an afternoon and a night and eat breakfast the next morning.

“In the regular way, sir, yes, it would be. Figures to be only so long you can spend doing things with donkeys and freaks and such. But that’s just it, Mr. Turner. Captain Clifford was stranded ’cause o’ the storm. Everyone at Kate’s was. Has to be a dozen different people as saw him there from when I said, before four, until after breakfast the next day. So don’t seem like any way he could get away and stab the midget up at your house, then get back to Kate’s without no one knowing he was gone. Not on a day and a night like that one.”

Josh had heard the stories about police corruption. Tammany was said to have infiltrated the force and all but taken it over. But if that was operating here, he had no means to counter it. Clifford’s alibi seemed unassailable.

It was Mollie who prepared the pay packets Josh distributed on the third Saturday after the storm. She’d taken over that portion of George Higgins’s duties since his murder because Josh had no one else to do the work. “Only until I can find someone else,” he’d promised.

“I don’t mind doing it, Josh. I’m delighted to be of some use to you. And just now it can’t hurt to pay one less wage each week.”

“That’s certainly true, but . . .” He’d spoken the words with a nod in the general direction of her midsection, thickened enough now so
he couldn’t pretend not to notice, though given her delicate health after the storm, and his preoccupation with getting his building crews working again, the subject had not yet been discussed, simply assumed between them.

Mollie knew she was cornered. “I am quite well, Josh. Truly. The physician Simon recommended, Dr. Thomas, says I am none the worse for . . . for the storm,” she’d finished. And waited to be asked why she’d been caught in the snow in the first instance, and what had she been doing on Fulton Street. Josh asked nothing of the sort.