The Broken Lands (20 page)

He let himself into Mrs. Ponzi's house and found Constantine playing solitaire on the parlor floor. Ilana was stretched out on the sofa, asleep.

“We tried to wait up for you,” Con said quietly, throwing down a five of clubs. “Some of us failed.”

“What time is it?” Sam squinted at the clock on the mantelpiece.

“It's one in the morning,” the other boy told him. “Where the heck have you been?”

“You waited up this late? What's wrong with you?”

Constantine stretched. “Nothing's wrong with me. What's wrong with you?” He jabbed a finger at Sam. “You owe me some information. What's this I hear about you and a Chinese girl?”

On the couch, Ilana stretched and rubbed her eyes. “Is that Sam?”

“More important,” Con continued, “what's this I hear about you getting invited to watch fireworks at the Broken Land Hotel and you didn't take us?”

Sam glared at Ilana. “You.”

“Was it a secret?” she asked sleepily.

“I only told you so you'd tell your ma not to expect me for supper.”

“You didn't say I couldn't tell Con.” She sat up and brightened. “How were the fireworks? Did you see—what's her name —Jin?”

“Who's Jin, and why does Ilana know so much that I don't?” Constantine grumbled.

“Jin's the Chinese girl,” Ilana supplied, “the one who made the air explode when the horrible boys were bothering her. Sam, how were the fireworks?”

Sam ignored her question. “Something happened.” He hesitated, not sure he wanted to talk about it. “Illy, maybe you should go up to bed.”

The girl's mouth dropped open with such a show of indignation that Sam actually flinched. “I beg your pardon,” she said icily. “But this is
my house
.”

“It's your mama's house,” Constantine pointed out mildly.

“That's right, which makes it
my house,
too.”

“All right, all right,” Sam cut in. He told them about the body behind the hotel, which then prompted him to tell them about the body Jin had found near Mammon's Alley earlier, a detail he'd neglected to mention when he'd told Ilana he wouldn't be home for supper. Then he told them about Jack.

“That sounds like a folktale,” Con said.

Sam nodded. “That's what I said.”

“But you think this is real?”

“Well, I think someone killed two people because of that story, whether it's real or not.” He sighed. “Yes, I think it's real. I don't know how to explain it.”

Ilana tugged her sweater closer around her. “So . . . what are you going to do?”

“I have no idea.”

The three of them sat silently for a moment. “How were Jin's fireworks?” Ilana asked again at last.

Sam closed his eyes for a minute and pictured the sinking castle and the spinning catherine wheel. “I wish you could've seen them,” he said. “She's amazing.”

Ilana gave a happy sigh. Constantine flicked a card at her and hit her square on the forehead. “Sappy little fool.”

“Hey,” she said, fumbling for the card, “I've been practicing that, too. Watch. I can hit Sam from here. Sam, hold still.”

Cards flew, some more accurately than others, and another night came to an end.

I
T WAS WELL
after midnight when the cabriolet drew to a bumpy stop on East Fourteenth Street and the driver thumped on the roof, but the red brick and white marble Tammany Society building hadn't emptied out yet. Walker and Bones climbed down to the curb and regarded the huge edifice looming overhead and the stream of bodies—mostly men, but more than a few women—pouring forth from the double doors. Bright arched windows, three stories' worth, threw light down onto the street.

“And you thought the place would be deserted,” Bones drawled, easing himself into a spike of shadow between two windows, out of the way of the departing masses. “I bet we can still get ourselves a steak if we're persuasive.”

“Needle in a haystack,” Walker muttered, dodging through the crowd to join Bones. “Time to see if Doc Rawhead's trick works, or if he's just making me stick myself with pins to be funny.”

On his lapels, Walker wore the two pins Christophel had used to mark the tallow-coated map back in Red Hook. He removed the one on the left and used it to break the skin on the pad of his thumb. He jabbed the pin deep, but no blood welled up to mark the spot.

“Interesting,” Bones said. “So far, so good.”

“This is the part where it just gets silly,” Walker muttered. He stepped up to the marble trim of the nearest window and drew his thumb across it.

He started, stared. “Well, I'll be damned!” He looked at his thumb. It was still unmarked, showing no evidence of being jabbed with a pin, but there was now a broad smear of fresh blood marring the ivory-colored marble where Walker had touched the building.

“Looks like our man's still inside,” he observed.

They fought against the tide of exiting people and into the hall. A young man in livery tried to tell them the place was closing, but a hard glare from Bones made the kid back away and avert his eyes. Nobody else paid them any attention.

Walker took the pin from his lapel again and jabbed the rest of the fingers on his left hand. Just as before, the pin left no marks and brought no blood to the surface. He strode to the wall and followed the perimeter of the room, drawing his hand along the paneling, the jambs of the doorways that led to auditoriums, and the banisters of the staircases until Bones grabbed his shoulder. Walker turned to find he'd left a smeared and bloody handprint on the wall beside a stair leading down.

They elbowed their way into the basement, where some kind of show had just disgorged its audience, most of whom were trying to enter a saloon that was trying just as hard to close for the night. Walker strolled along the wall, trailing his hands across every entrance and exit, until he reached the saloon and found his fingers leaving bloody trails across one of the panes of the interior windows beside the door.

“Walker.” Bones nodded at the window. On the other side of the glass, past the throng of people entering and exiting, a pair of men—one with silver-gray hair, the other with brown—sat deep in conversation in a booth at the far end of the saloon.

Walker and Bones shoved their way inside, ignoring the protests of the patrons and the employees, and stalked over to the table. The two men looked up in surprise.

“Beg your pardon, gentlemen, but—”

Walker ignored the younger man's protests and put his hand flat on the table. It left a perfect bloody handprint.

“Make room,” Bones said coldly. “We'll be joining you for a moment. There's something we'd very much like to discuss.”

A waiter appeared beside the table, but the older man waved him off. “Please,” he said, sliding deeper into the booth and gesturing for them to sit. Bones sat beside him, and Walker grinned evilly at the younger fellow until he made room on his side.

Bones looked from the older man to the younger. “Which of you is tasked with protecting the city?” he asked.

The two men exchanged a glance. There was panic in the younger man's eyes, resolve in the elder's.

“I see,” Bones murmured. Then he rolled up the sleeve of his coat and reached for the face of the man beside him.

It was a bizarre thing to watch, even for Walker, who had seen it happen once or twice before. Bones's entire forearm seemed to disappear into the older man's mouth, and then the man began to cough. He fought spasmodically against Bones, and his cough changed swiftly to a harsh and racking choking noise as the gritty arm was forced further down his throat.

He turned red. Then he turned blue. Then he fell over onto the tabletop. Sand spilled from his mouth.

The waiter, on his way back over to try to hustle these lingering guests out the door, stopped dead in his tracks a few feet away, then backpedaled and nearly fell headlong in his haste to get away from the booth. He plunged out the door, shrieking at the top of his lungs, followed by the saloon's panicked remaining patrons.

“Bring us a beer when you come back,” Walker called after him.

Meanwhile, the brown-haired man had begun to shake. He made a motion as if he thought he could shove his way past Walker, who warned, “Don't even think about it.” And then, while the young man looked on in stunned terror, Walker's face underwent a horrifying change.

The freckles across his face deepened to black, and angry red welts shot out from each inky spot until his face was a webwork of scarlet marks. His red-rimmed eyes darkened and went bloodshot. Then Walker snarled, baring not one but two rows of teeth, the front set straight and normal and human, the back set jagged and made for tearing.

“Sit down, sir,” Bones said evenly. “We are here to discuss the surrender of the cities of New York and Brooklyn to Jack Hellcoal. I believe you are one of the five men authorized to speak for the cities.”

“Four,” Walker corrected. The word emerged as a growl.

Bones glanced at the dead man sprawled across the table. “Yes, of course. Four.”

“What do you want?” The fellow had gone shock-pale to the roots of his hair. “How could you . . . do you know who that
was?
”

“Do you know who we represent?” Bones demanded.

The man nodded without taking his eyes off of his lifeless companion.

“Then you know that no one is beyond his reach.”

“What do you want?” the brown-haired man asked again.

“As I said before, your city. And we can take it with your help, or we can just kill you, now that we know who you are.”

“And who are you, by the way?” Walker asked with the air of a man introducing himself to a new business associate. The young pillar turned to look at Walker's black-and-red face in disbelief.

“You don't know? How did you find us, then?”

Walker grinned and raised the hand he had punctured with Basile Christophel's pin, holding the palm a mere inch from the pillar's face. Blood began to seep from his fingertips. “The blood tells.”

“Oh, God.” The man dropped his head into his hands. “Frederick . . . Frederick Overcaste. I'm the keeper of the roads.”

“And your friend?”

“Henry Van Ossinick.”

“There's a Van Ossinick ironworks, isn't there?” Walker asked. “Van Ossinick was the smith?”

“Yes.” Overcaste shuddered and peered up through his fin­gers. “What now?”

“You have two options.” Walker reached across the table to grasp one of the bright gold buttons on Bones's coat. He gave it a sharp twist, plucking it free, and flipped it gracefully over his knuckles. “We can kill you, or you can trade us a bit of information for the privilege of our letting you live. It's entirely your choice. Unless you'd like to let the coin decide. I'll even let you call it.”

Overcaste watched the gold flash over Walker's knuckles. What had been a button now looked very much like a coin. Then he looked at the dead man across the table. Bones reached over and thumped Van Ossinick's back, and another cascade of sand spilled from his mouth.

It didn't take long for Overcaste to make up his mind. He opened his mouth, hesitated, and reached into his pocket. When he opened his hand a huge gold coin sat in his palm. Walker held up his own now-empty palm.

“Good choice,” Bones said, “and it's a fair payment, I think. Now, about the other three.”

 

On the other side of the glass window that bore Walker's bloody fingerprints, two men watched the exchange in the saloon. They were not men you would ordinarily expect to see keeping company with each other, but that was the point of meeting at Tammany Hall. It was a place for all sorts, and if there was no better answer for why men from such different walks of life might arrange to meet there, the simplest assumption—that one of them was paying off the other—could always be relied upon to answer any observer's curiosity.

One was a blond, broad-shouldered fellow scarcely out of his twenties. He wore a plain and sober sack suit and worried the brim of a derby hat with rough fingers. The other, closer in age to forty, was tall and gaunt and flamboyant in a blue velvet tailcoat, plaid trousers, and a top hat that added a full extra foot to his height.

The man in the sack suit turned without a word and joined the crowd making its way up the stairs. The man in the top hat took a silver toothpick from his waistcoat pocket and chewed it thoughtfully for a moment before he followed at a more leisurely pace back to street level.

They met again on the sidewalk. “Van Ossinick's dead,” the younger man said wonderingly.

“He knew the risk.” The man in the tailcoat took a gold cigarette case from his pocket and offered one to his companion. “They came here, which means they either knew we were meeting or knew about Overcaste and simply got lucky in their timing.”

He flicked a match to life and lit the other man's cigarette, and then his own. Then the two of them began walking east, toward the docks.

“Overcaste will break,” the man with the derby muttered.

“Obviously.” The word carried so much venom the younger man turned to look sharply at his companion, who smiled grimly and added, “He's a politician. Politicians are pragmatists. When power shifts, they cannot help but shift as well. It was always a risk with Overcaste.” He shrugged his velvet-covered shoulders. “But this means they know who we are now, Sawyer.”

Sawyer nodded. “My preparations are ready.” He cleared his throat. “And we—”

“
Someone
has to warn Arabella,” the flamboyant man interrupted. “It can't be you. Or me, for that matter. From now on, we cannot be found in the same place. We speak only through our seconds.” He shot Sawyer a sharp look. “In all seriousness, Sawyer, you cannot go. I'll make the arrangements. I'll see to it she's safe. Do not, do
not
play the hero.”