The Styx (10 page)
my dear Marjory…arriving noon train Wednesday 13…please, please behave and remain charming…will call on you at beach suite in due time to discuss recent matter…until then hold your own counsel…pp.
Confined to my suite and ordered not to speak to any of the guests of the burning of the Styx and the death of a white gentleman found with a roll of money in his mouth indeed, she thought. It says no such thing! Pearson’s reading of the telegram was typical of a military man’s ciphering, strict and strident, black and white. It’s a wonder the north won the war at all with such men at the switch.
Her father was asking for her best manners because with him gone she was the only representative of the family on site. Rather than banning her from discussing the situation, her father knew of her inherent inquisitiveness and no doubt wanted to speak with her about the events to gain as much knowledge firsthand before others in his employ.
That was a far stretch from the angered and distressed accounting offered by Pearson. The true meaning of the message was only reinforced by the signature, pp, which was the endearing term “Pa Pa” that she had used with her father since childhood.
Marjory tucked the telegram back into her skirts and looked out onto the grounds. The man was after all very well regarded by her father and Mr. Flagler himself. She closed her eyes. Asking him out loud if he’d recognized the dead man! My God, girl, what were you thinking? Still, he had not confirmed nor denied, had he? She set back her emotions and in her head took account of what she’d witnessed at the Styx. In her mind’s eye she marked off the length of the lean-to, where the heels of the corpse lay, then the head. She was astonished that the fire hadn’t consumed the entire mess. She had seen the singed mustache, but hadn’t dared to look closely at the face, burned as it was. She squeezed her eyes tighter.
It would be best at this point to describe the man and the situation to her father when he arrived tomorrow in simple, vague terms. Was it possible that he would recognize the victim? She didn’t think so. Such a man was not the kind her father would have been acquainted with.
Marjory still had her eyes closed when the orchestra struck the opening cords of “After the Ball” and she opened them and looked out toward Coconut Grove. Maurice, the band’s conductor, was certainly dancing at his own boundaries, she thought, by playing the popular
Tin Pan Alley
tune. Then her eye was caught by a dark knot of men moving up the walkway toward the hotel entrance.
There were three, but only one mattered. He was the shortest of the group but the most imposing. The others were as accessories, flanking out from the substantial girth of Sheriff Maxwell Cox. No one, Marjory thought, would have to second-guess the identity of the notorious sheriff after a single glance. Cox was an imposing keg of a man, almost inhumanly broad in the chest with muscled arms and back curving down from his thick shoulders like oak slats on a barrel. His trunklike legs and hips moved as one, creating a rolling motion, and she couldn’t help think that if he fell he would surely continue to roll like a massive bowling ball to his destination. Marjory involuntarily put the tips of her fingers to her lips to stifle a laugh. Sheriff Cox was not a man to take as a joke.
She continued to watch the sheriff and his dark-suited entourage move up the walkway to the main entrance of the hotel. She had no doubt that their destination was the very office she’d just left. Cox was the leading law enforcement officer in all of Dade County, which encompassed everything on the east coast from Sebastian Inlet at the north boundary to the new village of Miami to the south. The sheriff had only recently been spending more and more time in West Palm Beach, where money and influence was flowing in on Flagler’s coattails. Pearson’s orders to bring him to the island had been followed with haste and now the big man was here to set things straight. Cox’s southern past came with a reputation of being particularly harsh when it came to Florida’s migrant population, and the very whisper of a white man found dead in a Negro community would have inspired him to inject his authority without wasting time.
Marjory watched the procession and caught the lyrics of the tune being played for those at tea in the grove, most of whom were no doubt oblivious of the burning of an entire community only a couple of miles from their afternoon merriment:
After the ball is over, after the break of morn,
After the dancers leaving, after the stars are gone,
Many a heart is aching, if you could read them all
—
Many the hopes that have vanished after the ball.
I
T
was the darkness that stunned Michael Byrne, kept him awake and outside on the platform of the caboose staring at the flat blackness of a moonless night. He had never encountered such a lack of light, a total void like a black painted panel of nothingness for miles and miles at a time. He could only imagine the silence because the train’s own mechanical huffing and grinding and clacking overwhelmed all else, but he knew it was out there in that blackness. That unchecked silence made him think of that barroom conundrum: if a tree falls in the woods and no one is there to hear it, does it make a sound? He could also only imagine the lack of movement since he stood on this platform and its constant rocking, back and forth, over the uneven and frequently dipping rails. But out there, he could see no tilt or rumble, push or shove, rise or fall. He might have been mesmerized. He might have even been a bit scared. But he wasn’t sleeping. This moving landscape was too strange and awesome for a young man born in the constant sidewalk swirl, cacophonic sound and unavoidable light of the city.
After Henry Flagler’s business meeting in Philadelphia and after his wife’s numerous boxes and cartons and purchases from Wanamaker’s were loaded, their private car was moved back onto a main track and switched onto yet another southbound train.
“This is one of Mr. Flagler’s own FEC trains,” Harris said. “Straight to Jacksonville now, lad, no stopping unless Mr. Flagler himself asks.”
When they hit Washington, D.C., Byrne’s view was restricted to what he could see when the train stopped briefly to take on passengers at the Pennsylvania railroad station at the base of Capitol Hill. Still in the late afternoon light, he could see the glowing white dome of the Capitol Building to the east and the towering Washington Monument to the west. He recalled a night at McSorely’s when a traveler described the monument as a giant spear shooting straight up into the sky, the tallest structure in the world, although some equally drunk Frenchman argued there was a taller tower in Paris that had been built for the World’s Fair. After seeing the marble shaft in the distance, Byrne would now have to side with the traveler, but that night he and the boys had a laugh when the man and Frenchy got into a fistfight over the whole affair and ended up out on Seventh Street lying in a gutter of frozen horse urine, which no one would argue was the lowest point in the United States.
The train rolled south for the rest of the evening and night. Byrne and Harris took turns walking the cars, again running surveillance on new passengers. “Puttin’ ’em in the iron sites,” Harris called it. But there was no one of interest. Another family, this time with the head of household in attendance, a businessman from D.C. whose shrewish wife stared at the side of her husband’s face when another woman passenger walked through ahead of Byrne to see whether he would look up from the papers he was reading. Two new men traveling alone had taken places in the club car. One was working at a flask in his coat pocket, surreptitiously hitting at the neck of the bottle. He’d be unconscious before eight o’clock, Byrne determined.
Mr. Faustus had reboarded. He winked once when Byrne passed through the sitting car. But Byrne avoided the subtle invitation to stop and talk, albeit with great reluctance. There was something about the old man’s interest in him that was palpable, or maybe he tested everyone he met on the train. Perhaps he’d even met Danny. Byrne wanted to pick the old man’s brain, find out more on his own rather than judge the man based only on Harris’ cryptic appraisal. But for now he would wait, as the sergeant had warned. Instead Byrne moved along and chose the “binder boys” as his intelligence target.
“Έvenin’, boy’os,” he said to the group and slid into a seat without asking.
The three glanced at one another and then the oldest looking of the team slid a bit over and said: “Free country, mate.”
“You’re on from New York, eh?” Byrne said, using his accent from the street, not kissing up, but unashamedly trying to take advantage of a connection based on Harris’ information.
“Brewer’s Row in Bushwick,” said one. He was German-looking. Byrne checked his hands, small and uncalloused, his eyes were clear and smart under high cheekbones. Might be the smartest of the bunch, he thought.
“Cherry Hill,” said the swarthier one. Italian, Byrne guessed. Scar on his cheek, possibly from a knife cut. His were shifting eyes, working his peripheral vision, expecting someone to come up behind him in a strange place.
The older one was looking at his mates, Byrne figured he was calculating his own answer. He was displaying an easy, knowledgeable air—strike up conversation with a stranger without a problem, feel them out for something to take advantage of. He’d be the one calling marks in off the street, reeling in the rubes for a game of three-card or into the brothel for a turn. He’d be the one most like Danny.
“Tenderloin, my friend,” he finally said like he’d pinned a flower in his lapel. “And you?”
“Gas House District,” Byrne said and then made careful eye contact with each one of the men. It might have been a declaration of battle if the conversation and demarcation of neighborhoods had been taking place on the streets of New York. But the need for piss-marking their territory was absent here on a train to a place called Florida. They all had something in common, an adventure into an unknown where none of them had been before and had no allies.
“A Pinkerton from the Gas House,” the older one said, looking down at Byrne’s shoes.
“That obvious?” he said, not bothering to dispute the fact.
“Them brogans are like a badge, Pinkerton,” he said. “Anybody with a brain on the street knows that, my friend.”
“That they would, my Tenderloin friend,” Byrne said, straightening out his legs, crossing his ankles out in the aisle and getting comfortable. “So boy’os,” he said. “Tell me about your game.”
“Don’t tell me a Lower East Side Pinkerton needs a course on three-card Monte,” the smart one said.
Byrne crinkled up a grin at the side of his face. “Wouldn’t tell you that, my friend. It’s not the card game I’m unfamiliar with,” he said, nodding at the leather briefcases tucked beside each one. “It’s the real estate business.”
The Italian’s hand was the first to go to his case, almost unconsciously placing his palm across the flap. Byrne guessed him to be the poorest of the lot and most likely to be one of those Harris had said would have borrowed the investment money from his family and friends to make a killing in sunny Florida.
“I’m not interested in the money, boy’os,” Byrne said, raising his palms toward them. “Only interested in the game.”
The older one eyed him. “Never trust an Irishman who says he’s not interested in the money,” he said and then let his own grin take a corner of his face.
“Indeed,” Byrne said and they smiled together and some sort of curbside trust was entered into.
“The premise ain’t much different from playin’ the streets,” Tenderloin said. “Buy somethin’ from the market down on Watts and then run it up Broadway and sell it as new for a profit before the yuks up there seen it.”
Byrne nodded. He and Danny had done the same thing as boys, snatching up new cloth their mother had acquired and running it up to a seamstress in mid-Manhattan where they got twice the price.
“The market for land is brand new and strong as hell down in Florida. The place is near empty, land spreadin’ out like a green jungle and just waitin’ for people to come work it or live on it,” the older one continued.
“Not much different than north Manhattan Island when your old da, and mine, got to America, right?”
Byrne started to react to the mention of his “old da” but since the man from the Tenderloin had tossed his own family into the mix, he let it go as an unintended slur.
“You need money to make money, right, Pinkerton? So you use what money you have and buy up a chunk of land that looks like it’s gonna be in the center of town in due time, and believe me, the times run damn fast down in Florida.
“My first trip down, Palm Beach was a pimple on me mum’s ass. Now the bloody place has a palace on the shore and it’s spillin’ across the lake to what they’re callin’ West Palm Beach. The county surveyor already wacked the place out into mapped lots and streets while it was still farmland. Sound familiar?”
Tenderloin nodded to his companion from Bushwick.
“Just like Brooklyn,” he said.
“Right-O,” said Tenderloin. “And while the Vanderbilts got the east shore line for their mansions early, the rest of ’em got the Cross Roads.”
Byrne sat back and watched the trio’s eyes, especially those of the Italian. Were they optimistic boys, or angry ones? He knew that the man he was paid to be guarding was not only considered an oil magnate and a railway magnate, but the phrase “robber baron” had also been used to describe him. Flagler had built his destination hotels down the east coast of Florida at a time when there wasn’t a damn thing south of Jacksonville.
“Not that you’ve got anything against the ones first in line,” Byrne said, not even attempting to be coy. The man from the Tenderloin began to laugh.
“Hell no, Pinkerton. We ain’t got nothin’ but admiration for your boss Mr. Flagler back there in car ninety.” He then leaned in conspiratorially. “People bigger’n us been following the old gent around for years, tryin’ to figure where he’s going next so’s they could jump up the price of their land or buy it out before the mighty Flagler arrives.