City of Promise (49 page)

“Good evening, Mr. Tickle.”

“Evening, Mr. Turner. We wasn’t expecting you.”

The couple turned to give him a second look. Josh was always surprised at how well known he had become. It had started a few years back when he built on Seventh Avenue and Pulitzer’s
World
published an editorial titled “Housing for the Common Man.” The paper mentioned his having lost a leg in the war and made him out to be a hero. He hated it, but there was nothing he could do. “I’d like a word, Mr. Tickle. Perhaps after you take this lady and gentleman to their destination. I’ll come along for the ride, if I may.”

The dwarf nodded. Somewhat warily Josh thought.

“Fourth floor, please,” the man said. The couple went into the elevator. Josh followed. Both men immediately removed their hats. The lady sat down on the red velvet banquette that went around three of the dark mahogany walls of the cabin. The words Otis Safety Elevator were inscribed on a polished brass plaque. They gleamed in the light of four gas sconces. Tickle reached up and grabbed the leather strap that pulled shut the lobby door, then yanked the door across and secured the strap on the opposite side. The inner door, a folding metal grid, slid closed soundlessly on well-greased runners. The dwarf shot a sideways look at Josh and he nodded acknowledgment.

Tickle took hold of the brass handle that operated a large black
wheel and spun it a quarter turn. There were a couple of clangs and a hissing sound, then the elevator began slowly to rise. The little man kept his gaze fixed on the indicator high above his head. When it was just past three he eased back on the wheel, bringing it to a full stop when the moving arrow pointed to four. “Here we are,” he said, sliding open the metal door and unhooking the leather strap that freed the solid door leading to the hallway. He pulled that open as well and glanced down. The floor of the elevator was precisely level with that of the hallway. He smiled. Sometimes the operator had to play with the crank repeatedly to get that right.

The couple got out. Josh wished them a good evening. Tickle closed both doors. “Visitors,” he said. “Their grandson lives in Four A.”

“I see. I wasn’t expecting you to be running the elevator, Mr. Tickle, but it’s just as well. You’re the man I came to see.”

“Regular man’s sick,” Tickle said. “I took his shift since it was right here in my own building. Anyways, the elevator stops running at eight. What can I do for you, Mr. Turner?”

“I need a favor, Mr. Tickle.”

Josh hadn’t seen Mama Jack’s Cave since the Tickles’ wedding six years before, but nothing had changed. Certainly not Mama Jack, sitting on her throne on a platform suspended above their heads. She acknowledged the arrival of the Tickles and their guest with a nod of her huge head. Tickle nodded back—almost bowed Josh thought—then turned to Josh. “Stay here. Me and Maude, we’ll move about, talk to folks. Anybody says they maybe know something, I’ll send ’em over to talk to you.”

Josh took a seat. The lady with the luxurious beard brought him a tankard of what turned out to be best-quality ale. Five minutes or so went by.

He was conscious of a number of people staring at him openly, particularly after Ebenezer Tickle talked to them. He felt the covert
gaze of others against the nape of his neck, but no one approached him with information. Josh had protested the Tickles’ plan, said he didn’t think he should accompany them to the Cave. “Surely you’d do better on your own. I’m the outsider. Why should they help me?”

“Not such an outsider as all that,” Maude had said, nodding at his peg. Her husband added that if he hinted at Trent Clifford being one of the villains, Turner would gain plenty of allies.

Josh could see Ebenezer moving through the room, but Maude seemed to have disappeared. Another dwarf started in Josh’s direction, but either he changed his mind or Josh had misread his intent. The dwarf stopped in front of the giant with the trumpet. Big Black Tonio reached down and lifted the man into his arms so they were face-to-face. For a few minutes they spoke earnestly, then Tonio set the dwarf down and he turned and went back the way he’d come.

“Psst. Mr. Turner.” Josh looked around.

“Up here, Mr. Turner. Mama Jack’s roost.”

He glanced up. What the voice had called the roost, Mama Jack’s floating platform, had swung into position just above his head. Mama Jack was in the shadows, but he could see Maude standing at the platform’s edge and leaning towards him. “Her,” she said, pointing somewhere off to Josh’s right. “Go with her.”

He turned his head and saw the woman whose hands were attached to her elbows. She reached him after a few seconds. “Come with me,” she said. “Mama Jack wants to talk with you.”

He was bad with heights. Always had been unless he was sitting on a horse. And there didn’t seem room on the roost for one more person. Nonetheless, he followed what Barnum had called the “Incredible Armless Lady.”
See her use her feet to drink a glass of milk and comb her hair!
She went through a door beside the bar, then up a steep flight of stairs. After which she led him along a narrow stone ledge that circled the tavern some twelve feet in the air. The ledge was no more than two feet wide, and made of dark stone like the walls. Had to be why he’d not noticed it on either of his two previous visits. The Incredible
Armless Lady turned back toward him. “You managing? Peg leg and all?”

“I’m managing.” He didn’t add that he was gritting his teeth and leaning so far into the wall he thought his shoulder might be carving a furrow in the stone.

“Almost there,” she said. Then, stepping onto a spot where the ledge was slightly wider, “Come out onto this bit here and wait.”

Josh did as she instructed, fighting off nausea, trying to press himself back against the wall. The woman turned, squeezed past as if they were on an ordinary sidewalk, and went back the way they had come. After a few seconds he heard a soft grating sound and looked up. A series of cables crisscrossed the ceiling—he could reach up and touch it from where he stood—and Mama Jack’s roost was whirring toward him. For a moment he thought he’d be crushed between the woman’s great bulk and the stone wall, but the platform halted a few inches from the ledge. “Good evening, Mr. Turner. My sympathies for your ill fortune.”

“Good evening, Mama Jack. Thank you for talking to me.”

A match flared and she lit a candle in a holder fastened beside her. The flickering light revealed the many chins that obscured her neck, and made her huge head seem to grow out of her shoulders. But in the candle’s light her skin was flawless and alabaster pale, and her eyes large and black and long-lashed. She would have been a fine-looking woman without the fearsome burden of her mountains of flesh, and that was somehow the most shocking thing about her. He wondered if she knew she was pretty. “Please,” he said, “whatever you know. I’ll be extremely grateful. If there’s anything—”

“Be on your guard, Mr. Turner. Do not make any rash promises. You have a dwarf couple living in one of your buildings and apparently their fellow residents accept that. I do not think you could rely on that degree of accommodation if you sprinkled a variety of freaks among the other of your flats.”

Her quiet voice and her educated speech astonished him more
than her appearance. There was no reason to think only the poor and the ignorant were prey to such misery as hers, but he’d nonetheless made the assumption. “I didn’t mean to imply a promise beyond my ability to deliver.”

“No, of course you didn’t.” She waved the apology away with a slight motion of a hand the size of a dinner plate. “Now, I must be direct and return to my post.” Mama Jack leaned in, fixing him with her dark stare. “Two of the people involved in this affair are not strangers to you. One is a pawnbroker, a Jew named Solomon Ganz. The other is an attorney. A Mr. Jeremy Duggan. You must be very careful with both, though one profits from your downfall and the other from your ascendance.”

“Who told you such things? How can you possibly know—”

Mama Jack tugged on a cable attached to one of the arms of her chair. The platform whirred off across the ceiling. Josh was left standing alone in the semidarkness.

19

T
HE NOTE HAD
been pushed under the front door some time during the evening. Tess saw it first and sat in the front hall with it clasped in her hand until Josh returned from Mama Jack’s Cave.

“From them what’s got her? It is, ain’t it, Mr. Turner?”

“Yes, Tess. It is.”

“Is she all right?” Holding an already sodden handkerchief to swollen eyes.

“They say she is. We can only pray they’re telling the truth. Get Ollie, Tess. Hurry.” Cursing meanwhile the fact that he and Zac had telephones only in their offices.

“Well,” Zac said, “at least now we know what the villains are after.”

“I’ve been thinking,” Josh said. “I’ve one suitcase left in the clockworks. It’s only half full, but that’s a hundred thousand.” He’d left it in place all these years. His fund of last resort, insurance of a sort.

“You think they’ll take cash rather than the lots?”

Josh was standing beside the window of his study looking north
across the garden. It was nearly midnight. A bright sliver of moon illumined a patch of white petals that had drifted to the grass, blossoms of the late flowering Roxbury Russet apple. Something he knew only because Mollie had told him. “I’m hoping so,” he said. “I can’t think Mollie will care much about surviving if I sign away all this. The garden has become her reason for living.”

“All the lots you own west side of Fourth Avenue,” Zac said, looking at the note that now lay on Josh’s desk. “Eighty-Seventh to Ninety-Fifth.”

Josh nodded. He’d bought the remainder of his mother’s uptown lots from the estate soon after his father died. Goldie had remained in England all these years—some sort of unconventional liaison, her brothers assumed—and she needed cash. The purchase of the additional Fourth Avenue lots had served her purposes and Josh’s, and neither Zac nor Simon had objected.

All for this. He glanced down at the ransom note, then out through the window. He’d been too long on his feet and his right leg felt like it might give way, still he stared out at what Mollie had spent five years creating, the child that comforted her childless sorrow. A cloud covered the moon and the garden seemed to be disappearing before his eyes. “They’re specific,” he said. “We have to give them that.”

Zac was scratching something on a pad. “What’s your reckoning? Is forty thousand for each lot fair market value?”

“At the moment it is.” Josh’s voice was heavy with something close to despair. “They’re going up every day. But even at the present rate . . . That’s three hundred and twenty thousand, isn’t it?”

“Look,” Zac said quietly, “I’ve nothing remaining in the clockworks, but I can raise about a hundred and fifty thousand in cash fairly quickly. A day or two perhaps.”

“Cunard,” Josh said, knowing the passenger line had for some time been trying to buy a couple of the Devrey piers.

“Probably.”

Zac had been struggling to keep the Devrey assets whole for years.
Now, because of Josh, Zac’s defenses were about to be breached. And whatever was happening to Mollie, that was his fault as well. “Damn! Damn! Damn!” It was a litany of impotent rage and frustration. “The bastard knew exactly what to ask for and when to do it. In good times I could sell something else to raise the cash. With the market as it is . . . It could take weeks.”

“What bastard?” Zac asked. “Clifford?”

“I think so, but . . . I’m not sure, Zac. I can’t be.” His good leg was about to collapse. Josh hobbled to where he could catch hold of one corner of the desk and swung himself into his chair. “I’ve told you about Mama Jack’s Cave?”

“You’ve told me.”

“I was there earlier and according to the woman who owns the place, Mama Jack, there are two others to be—”

The door burst open. Ollie was red-faced and panting. “Mr. Turner, sorry sir. But I found out something. Important. Maybe. I mean . . .”

“Come in, Ollie. Sit down. I thought you’d gone to bed. Zac, would you mind . . .” Nodding to the pitcher of water on a table across the room.