The Blackest Bird (24 page)

From where he sat on the recliner, Hays glimpsed a scroll, not unlike the one he had seen with Edgar Poe, partially hidden by a folded black handkerchief at the desk corner. He picked the tight roll up, slipping off the black ribbon, and began to separate the packet of pages. Noting Colt’s precise, elegant hand, one bit of doggerel written thereon caught his eye, causing the high constable to replace his magnifying spectacles on his nose to read his way with fascination through
Colt’s most curious version of the aftermath to the Samuel Adams’ murder in verse:

In the half-light Hays sat pondering. He realized all must for him be reduced to a simple axiom: If Colt had made escape, he would catch him and see him pay. Any and all who had seen fit to aid this murderer and abet him, they too would be dealt with the same. Be it who it may, Trencher, Colt’s brothers, Edgar Poe, Monmouth Hart, whosoever. They would pay too.

He put down the handwritten verse and settled down in Colt’s recliner, relaxed further. Remarkable how the supple leather molded and supported the small of the back. Colonel Colt was indeed a clever fellow. Hays had personally tried his Paterson pistol. The revolving weapon certainly had its imperfections. After the chambers were emptied, it was not a small feat to reload. But the implication of the weapon was clear to Hays. Once Colt had ironed out the kinks, the high constable had no doubt all men in law enforcement would want one of these equalizers, and it would make the profession that much easier. The real problem, however, Hays thought just before he fell into sleep, was that all villains and blackguards would desire one of Colt’s revolvers as well, and that acquisition would make their profession that much easier, and lethal, just the same.

L
ater that evening, a grave cartman arrives on Lispenard Street, an irregularly shaped object of some size wrapped in thick gray blankets, bound with strong blue braided cord, and posited in the carry-bed of his two-wheeled wooden cart.

The man struggles to unload the bundle, drag it to the door, and knock. After some moments, Olga Hays answers, drying her hands on a dish towel. She has been cleaning the kitchen following dinner: clearing the dishes, scrubbing the pots, wiping down the table of its crumbs.

Lately, directly after dinner, her father has seen fit to abandon her. Already upstairs in his bed, under the covers, fueled by a cup of brewed black tea, a magnifying glass in hand, he would read, and reread, Poe’s strange and eerie tales, “MS. Found in a Bottle,” “Maelzel’s Chess-Player,” “The Fall of the House of Usher,” “The Masque of the Red Death,” “The Pit and the Pendulum,” “The Murders in the Rue Morgue,” “The Black Cat.”

Meanwhile, downstairs, Olga asks of the cartman, “What is this?” to which he wipes his spongy nose with the back of his hand before responding.

He pulls an envelope, twice folded from his back pocket. “A gif ’ fer
’igh Consuble ’ays from Cunnel Sam’l Colt,” he manages, clearly uncomfortable with speech. He hands over to Olga the folded communication, which he has managed to unfold in a manner.

Olga takes it, scrutinizes the soiled envelope, but does not open it.

“Does High Constable Hays know about this?” she asks. “He men tioned nothing of it.”

“I dun’ know, ma’am? Mind if I bring thu bun’le in, be on m’way?”

She tells him to wait, excuses herself, goes to the stairs, the soiled envelope in her hand, calls, “Papa?”

When there is no answer, she hurries up.

By the time she comes back down, the chair is in the center of the parlor, the cartman standing over it, sawing away on the final strand of rope by which it had been tethered.

A few moments later her father follows her down the carpeted stair, the envelope torn open, the letter in his hand. He offers the folded page to Olga:

“Take it back.”

But the cartman is already heading for the door, not hearing, not understanding, or just plain ignoring the high constable.

His protest unheeded, the cartman gone, Hays sits himself heavily at the dining room table, glowering, purposely not looking at the chair positioned in the middle of the parlor floor.

“Olga, have you done with your chores?” he asks.

“I have.”

“I have been reading author Poe’s ‘Purloined Letter.’ Again the detective Dupin. I ask you, Olga, in all my years, I have never heard of such a thing. What is a
chevalier
anyway?”

She tells him. “A French term. A man of honor. One of some nobility.”

He grumbles at that too.

She asks about the chair, the gift from Colonel Colt, why does it upset him so?

He refuses to answer.

She sighs. “Make use of it, Papa. At least as long as it is here you might as well. Especially if it is as comfortable as you have told me it is. Don’t be so stubborn.”

“I shall not have it,” he snaps. “And for your information, the last thing I am being is stubborn, Olga.”

“Don’t be silly, Papa. You are too being stubborn. You told me over dinner Colt’s chair was the one thing you have found that in any way makes your legs stop their ache. Don’t spite yourself.”

Hays snorts, puffs his pipe vigorously, glances at the chair with scorn, then relents, sits back down in it, and reclines.

“Would you like me to read you the rest of your story?”

“Yes, that would be very nice.”

She goes upstairs to his bedroom and comes down with the pamphlet volume,
Recent Tales of Ratiocination
. As she picks up from his bookmarker, he listens tight-lipped to her pleasant, authoritive enunciation.

“‘And then came, as if to my final and irrevocable overthrow, the spirit of perverseness. Of this spirit philosophy takes no account. Phrenology finds no place for it among its organs. Yet I am not more sure that my soul lives, than I am that perverseness is one of the primitive impulses of the human heart—one of the indivisible primary faculties, or sentiments, which give direction to the character of Man.’”

Her father’s voice interrupts her.

“The deeper we descend into Mr. Poe’s writing, Olga, the more my instinct tells me to strong-arm the man once and for all, get him to tell me what he knows exactly of Mary Rogers and her death.” She then hears him mutter, “I’ll give him a well-disturbed mind.”

But long listening is not what Old Hays can endure this evening. His pipe still clamped between his teeth, it is not long before he has closed his eyes, and in the comfort of Colt’s gift patent chair, and in the bascom of his daughter’s comforting voice, he has once more succumbed to sleep.

T
ommy Coleman’s father, the ward heeler Timothy Coleman, had made his life doing his masters’ bidding. Timo Coleman lost his first son to the hangman, but the nature of politics in the Sixth Ward, part of it comprising the Five Points, has changed. The Irish now walked arm in arm with the hall of St. Tammany, and had begun to learn how to tether some Democratic might.

When it became apparent that John Colt would not outdistance the hangman, Samuel Colt sent his delegate, his brother James, to approach ward heeler Coleman, pointing out to him that it had become abundantly clear that both families, the Colts and the Cole-mans, were in the same boat, Timo’s son Tommy no more likely to escape his own jerk to Jesus than their John.

Timo Coleman sat in awe of such a rich and powerful man as this James Colt, come to talk, paying special attention to what he had to say to him.

Immediately following he went directly from that reverential meeting, hat in hand, to his taskmasters.

As a result, a fruitful parlay occurred between those parties involved, where overtures were discreetly proposed and reached,
ample and generous payoffs assessed, a plausible escape planned and eventually hatched.

First, of course, the arson needed to be engineered as diversion, a body procured, some poor besotted soul married to that harlot Alcohol, found lying facedown one cold midnight, drowned in the open sewer of Canal Street, eventually to have a jade and ruby encrusted dagger implanted in his drink-sunk chest.

As predestined, fire broke out. The body discovered. An inquiry fixed, jurors bribed.

The final act, perhaps the most crucial, would by necessity be to arrange for the rhum-pickled corpse to disappear from the cemetery where it had been interred, laid to quick bed with a shovel, so as to at least temporarily prove unavailable to be identified as not that of John C. Colt.

Here, Tommy Coleman learned after his escape, his part would come into play. If there was no body to bear witness to the duplicity, all future investigators would forever be silenced. Who cared what the rumormongers and croakers might say? No one would ever (could ever) be the wiser. What had become of John Colt—was he alive or dead—could never be proven if there was no body to give evidence, no squelcher to tell the tale.

To this end (and with substantial added monetary sweetener proffered by the fair-minded family Colt), Tommy Coleman, called to account, trailed by a half dozen of his most trusted and strongest cohorts, left his hidey-hole at the Five Points Mission, setting out on his scurrilous way along these scurrilous streets.

Anticipation of the night’s activity chilled all hearts. Fear and wretched glee pervaded. The lot of them Forty Little Thieves, sitting silently in the chilly flatbed truck, alone with their private thoughts as the four hide-bare mud brown horses leaned into their traces, smoke pouring from their runny nostrils, steam from their rib-studded flanks. The horses’ hooves clattered and sparked along the cobblestones in the cold night air. Behind Tommy, at the gang’s feet, lay
shovels, pry bars, pickaxes, rope, an evening’s accoutrements for an evening’s hard toil.

Across from the St. Mark’s-in-the-Bouwerie church there stood a stable near the corner of Second Avenue and Eleventh Street. Opposite, Tommy drew rein underneath a spreading chestnut tree, denuded by the cold and wind of all leaves. He waited there until the bobbing heads on the avenue grew few and fewer with impending midnight. Until the tradesmen and recreationers died away altogether and went home to their beds. Until all was silent and black and soulless.

Tommy finally saw what he was waiting for—a sign: a guarded flash of lantern, relayed from across Eleventh Street, and a boy in a filthy Joseph coat stepped out from the stable to signal all clear. Tommy flicked the long reins, the leather cracking over the team, and the truck rolled forward, lurching to a halt outside the iron gates and stanchions, where Tommy dispatched his broader-back boys, Pugsy O’Pugh and Boffo the Skinned Knuckle, laden with picks and shovels.

A faint wind moaned through the trees, and Tweeter Toohey voiced his crazy fear it might be the dead making complaint upon being disturbed. The boys talked little, and only under their breath, for the silence, time and place, and the pervading solemnity oppressed their spirits.

Pugsy and the Skinned Knuckle found the sharp new heap of fresh earth they were seeking and ensconced themselves within the protection of three great Dutch elms that grew in a bunch within a few feet of the grave they knew to be designated as John Colt’s.

As wet as it was, the ground, newly dug up and turned on top of it, gave softly as Tommy watched from his perch while the strong core of his boyos worked to uncover the remains of that unlucky rhum lushington from his final earth-bath.

The pugnacious Pugsy swung his pick enthusiastically, relishing the project, the frightful grin on his face counterpoint to the frozen frown affixed to the terrified sour throbbing gob of the bigger Boffo. For some time there was no noise but the grating of spades discharging
their freight of mold and gravel. Finally a shovel struck upon the coffin with a dull woody accent. Then, within seconds, carried on the night breeze with pungency, reaching their nostrils, the first whiff of m’lady Death.

Each and every night, past this particular boneyard, a roundsman, his lantern bobbing, would follow his appointed rounds, looking in on the grave of Peter Stuyvesant, died 1672, the watchman’s voice ringing out solemn and clear over the silent St. Terra: “By the grace of God, one a.m., in peace!”

By previous pecuniary arrangement put in place by certain trusted servers of that political society of Tammany, fueled by funds from the family Colt, never did such constable peer through the fence that night. Neither through the fog to where Van Rensselaer lay, nor to where Trumbell’s stone barely obscured the gaping maw of John Colt’s ground sweat.

Standing about the open grave, one at each corner of the pit, Tommy’s boyos dropped ropes of braided red and blue hemp into the hole and reached down to slip the weave around and through the brass coffin handles, and, as one, they made attempt to tug and heave and coax the dead weight of the polished mahogany crate up and out.

With no luck.

Head down, downtrodden, Pugsy came trudging back to the wagon where Tommy Coleman still sat.

“We need another hand,” he said to Tommy.

So Tommy trailed him nervously back over the slate path, back over the flat marble tombstones, past the white limestone family crypts. Four at a post they stood, each at their corner, each at the ready, and leaned in, pulled with all the strength God gave them.

The coffin sucked mud and groaned and came loose and slowly rose, the voices and nervous laughter of them, “Oh heave-ho! Oh heave-ho!” cojoined in unison, like the pirates of yore about whom they had heard so much thrilling tale while standing an evening around a drum fire.

As they worked together, the faces of the boys were etched with the task, and when they felt the give, the sudden delight of success, it was only somewhat tinged with ghoulism. Yet as the coffin finally gave forth from the moist earth, the band of them broke into unseemly grins, taking air into their lungs shallowly because of the offensive odor of human rot.

“Any of you boyos wanna open ’er up?” Tommy’s eyes glinted playfully. “Who’s dying to see the dead looby, gone a week, face to face?”

Tired eyes, red with fatigue, widened wildly.

“Beware!” Tommy murmured. “Lest he rise up and jump yer bones!”

Pugsy gulped, Boffo shivered, Tweeter gaped, and they, the night’s pallbearers, stumbled with nervous trepidation.

They struggled to carry the death trough back to the truck. There they tossed it into the bed, clamored up themselves, and anxiously awaited Tommy to strike up the sorry horses, the four dozing on their feet.

Under his breath, to appease himself, Tweeter softly hummed a sour “Rock of Ages.”

But Tommy Coleman made no move to stir the horses, his attention momentarily caught in the distance, across the graveyard, where he had seen something move. The long leather reins remained poised but failed to slap the snuffling nags. Their thin flanks did not budge save an involuntary quiver against the cold.

Tommy nudged Tweeter next to him and murmured, “Shhh, d’you see a watcher across the way?”

With that, as if on cue, a shade moved, slinking through the gravestones and hocknobby, slipping by the boneyard, beneath the oak tree from whose stout limb Tommy had once heard an ancient evildoer by the name of Lemuel Peet had been hanged two hundred years before for just such an offense as this passel had just committed—necrophilia.

But who can be sure what is seen in a night so dark, so charged?

Still Tommy cried out at the real or imagined augury. “They’re coming after us!”

Gagers bulged, straining the darkness, across the way, in the trees, they all saw it, a bit of reflection, a face, indeed, a glint of light on an expanse of forehead, and then a shape, fully illuminated at the opposite end of the cemetery for the briefest instant in the pale, flickering gas streetlight before disappearing.

“See it? Spectre or squelcher?”

And with that the shade tremoloed, and Tommy cried out his own answer, “Spectre!” and everyone jumped in fright, and Tommy snapped the long reins with terrified abandon, the strops slapping down on the snuffling horses’ bony backs, and the team veritably leaped forward, jolting the lot of Little Thieves as they cowered in pure fear.