The Empire of Shadows Read online

  For Wallace and Shirley Crabbe

  For their love

  of the written word

  For their love

  of the Adirondacks

  This is the forest Primeval. The murmuring pines and the hemlocks,

  Bearded with moss, and in garments green, indistinct in the twilight,

  Stand like druids of eld.

  Contents

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  Chapter Thirty

  Postscript

  One

  For brick and mortar breed filth and crime,

  And a pulse of evil that throbs and beats;

  And men are withered before their prime,

  By the curse paved in with lanes and streets.

  —GEORGE WASHINGTON SEARS, “OCTOBER” (FROM FOREST RUNES)

  No man knows the season of his passing. His grandfather used to say that, one of the many things the old man was in the habit of repeating. Tupper figured it was pretty true for the bastard he was standing over. He hesitated, standing alone in the dark, mesmerized by the gaudy brilliance of the welling blood. It held him spellbound. A single shaft of light from a nearby street lamp seemed to jab an accusing finger at the still form with its apron of red. Blood still oozed from the hole in the man’s chest, turning to black where it escaped the defining light. Tupper noticed how an occasional bubble would surface from the wound, the last breath escaping the deflated lungs in tiny blisters of crimson. He loved the color, revered it in his way. That the pale human body could contain something so jewel-like was always a wonder to him.

  He mumbled the prayer he’d learned so long ago, an age it seemed. It was fitting even for an enemy that he say the words. He felt his grandfather’s spirit beside him as he did so, and an approving echo seemed to whisper through the darkened construction site. He knew it was good, and he let the old man’s spirit wash through him. But there was something else. Tupper tensed as a chill, humid breath of air stroked his neck. In a slow crouch, he scanned the dark around him. He thought he sensed a presence, something beyond the benign sense of his grandfather, long past. Though he saw and heard nothing, it was a reminder of his peril. It wouldn’t do to be seen here. He’d stayed too long already, stunned as he’d been by the death at his feet. Death could do that, stun and disorient the living. It shocked the very roots of life’s assumptions, the next breath taken for granted. It was like that when he killed. It always was. The world slowed for things like this. Time stretched. It was the Hodianok’doo Hed’iohe’s way of showing him the weight and importance of life. He said the prayer again.

  “Hodianok’doo Hed’iohe must be thanked. The spirit of the dead as well, Jim, for the power it gives you.”

  Of course, his grandfather hadn’t been referring to human prey. It was the spirits of the deer and bear, the fox and coyote he sought to appease. Still, Tupper liked to think the old prayers worked for him in their way, even for this—perhaps especially for this.

  The body let out a low moan, startling him in the silence of the deserted construction site. He cast a wary eye at the maze of cast iron and brick. Great piles of wood, bags of concrete, and stacked iron girders were cast in confusing shadows and light by the brilliant new electric lamps out on the street. Nothing moved. He looked back down at the body. The eyelids flickered.

  “Sonofabitch!” Tupper growled, staring curiously at the man. Jim bent low over the body, his hand dipping into the pool of blood as he steadied himself. His other hand went to the neck, feeling for a pulse. It was barely detectable, nothing more than a birdlike flutter in the veins. He pressed the chest, feeling for life. A small fountain of frothy blood was his only reward. There wasn’t much reaction, just a momentary stiffening. Jim Tupper watched unblinking as the body relaxed. There was nothing in his eyes, no passion, no fear or exultation. If there was anything definable, it was satisfaction, hardened and glazed over like a frozen lake, black beneath the ice.

  Tupper stood, putting a small roll of greenbacks in his pocket as he did. The man wouldn’t need it, he reasoned and the cops would only pocket it once they found the body anyway. He grunted at the prostrate form at his feet.

  “Bastard had it coming,” he mumbled as if arguing with himself. The man had been his foreman and a nearly constant source of annoyance, riding him day after day like some bowlegged, beer-bellied jockey. The Mick had taken a dislike to him from the day he started working the job. He never understood why. Tupper knew it was because he was an Indian; but knowing and understanding were different things.

  Tupper had made the mistake of staying after work, drinking with the man in hopes of finding some common ground. At first it had gone well, but the Mick quickly turned into an ugly drunk, angry at the world and especially him. Things had gotten out of control, and when the Mick tried to brain him with a huge wrench, Jim gave him a knife in the chest for his trouble. He hadn’t wanted to do it but it couldn’t be taken back. He hadn’t hated the man, but he wasn’t about to let him crack his skull with that wrench either.

  Tupper guessed the man had taken his silence for timidity, but that wasn’t it at all. He’d simply needed the work. Life in the city cost more than he’d ever imagined. It was hard to keep fed and sheltered, let alone put anything by against his dreams.

  He hadn’t come to the city to fail, and he was not about to let that bastard drive him off the job, as he’d done with others he didn’t like. Tupper had always figured the winds would change and blow him a different fortune. It was only a matter of time and patience. It had become the foreman’s season, so it seemed, though the man never saw the change in the weather.

  Tupper turned to leave, slipping silent as a falling leaf past the hulking form of a steam derrick. Despite his care he nearly tripped over a small pile of steel braces hidden in its shadow. The site was dangerous in the dark. An unwary step could be painful at best, even fatal. Not much different than the Adirondacks at night. Jim was used to the dark. More than once he’d stalked the woods after wounded deer. He knew how to set a foot in rough terrain. Still, there was danger for any man foolish enough to ignore it. City or forest, it was much the same that way. Only the dangers differed.

  A minute later he slipped through the gate in the surrounding board fence and into the glare of a streetlight. It glowed with an unnatural brilliance, casting the nearly deserted street in violent shades of black and white. Tupper hated the things, hated electricity. It was outside the natural order, a work of man, purely. They had a cold, hard light, so bright at their core that it hurt to look at them. Not at all like the gaslights they were replacing. He shielded his eyes as he would against the angry ball of the sun, not seeing the cop in the glare.

  “Ho there, bucko!” a voice boomed from just feet away. “What the hell’re you up to, eh?”

  Brass buttons shone like stars in the incandescent glow. Tupper froze, a
jacked deer caught in the hunter’s light. Though he’d looked out on the street through the gap in the gate and listened for approaching footsteps, the cop had somehow appeared without him knowing it. He must have been just standing there, silently, out of his line of sight, perhaps leaning against the fence. He realized all in an instant that his hands were red, and blood was smeared in a crimson swath across his pants. The cop realized it too.

  He must have, for he stopped asking questions and started swinging. Tupper ducked under the nightstick, feeling the blackened hickory rustle his hair as it passed. He could have fought, could have gutted the cop easily, but something about the light, the infernal unnatural light, and the way it gleamed from inside those buttons, made him turn and run.

  Tupper could run. Since he was a boy he could run like a deer. He’d made a game of it when he was young, stalking and chasing deer through the heavy, dark forests of the Adirondacks, dashing after them as they bounded through thickets, over logs, up mountains, until he could hear their crashing no longer. He knew he was fast, faster than any electric-buttoned cop. He had full confidence in his abilities, so he ran with a smile on his lips.

  By the time the cop got his gun out, Tupper was a shadow flitting between the street lamps.

  “Jesus H. Christ!” the cop cursed in amazement. “Fastest sonofabitch I ever saw!” He trotted after, his heavy shoes clumping on the granite sidewalk. As he ran he pulled out the deadliest weapon in his arsenal.

  Jim heard the cop’s whistle behind. It carried with a shrill, warbling echo through the city’s canyons. Tupper’s heart sank at the sound. He’d used whistles for hounding deer or other critters. He’d called to the other men on a drive, keeping them on track in the dense woods, driving true toward the lakes, where the game could be cornered and slaughtered at will.

  Tupper bounded ahead at the sound, knowing what it meant for him if he allowed himself to be driven. He thought of himself as a deer, herded by answering whistles and heading for the gaps in the hounding warbles. Nightsticks clacked on sidewalks. Leather-soled feet clumped on flagstones. Twice Tupper saw the looming shadows of cops cast by street lamps, but was able to round a corner or duck into a blackened doorway.

  First from his right, then from somewhere to the north, then again from behind the whistles sounded. The occasional pedestrian gaped or stood back, afraid to interfere. He heard a man he’d passed shouting to the converging cops behind. “This way! West on Twenty-fifth.”

  He ran like the wind itself, trusting his speed and skill instinctively, no different from the deer in his way. This was one they’d never catch though. But, like a deer he ran from the whistles and the hounds in blue suits and glowing buttons. They were not hounds after all, he reasoned. They were big, slow city dogs, used to taking a horsecar to go around the corner.

  He grinned with a wolfish determination as the whistles started to fade behind. He continued west, past the brothels and bars of Satan’s Circus in the west Twenties, where pianos tinkled through the night and laughter was mixed with curses in equal measure. He’d put just a little more distance between them before he slowed, then he’d double back north, circling behind and out of the box they thought they had him in.

  The el was up ahead on the next block, the tracks a looming horizontal scar. They were another thing to hate about this blighted city. The smoke of the engines, the noise and clatter and crowds and ugliness and perpetual gloom beneath the overhead tracks were evils out of all proportion to the good of getting someplace faster. He took them only when absolutely necessary. He’d take one now, he decided, if he saw one coming. But as he neared Seventh Avenue it was plain there’d be no train. The tracks were silent, not a surprise at 3 A.M.

  Tupper rounded the corner of Twenty-eighth, figuring to head north under the deeper night of the el. He’d lose those fading whistles easily within a few blocks. He wasn’t even winded yet, still springing ahead with each stride, widening the gap with confidence. He was passing a darkened doorway when something shot out in his path, too quick to avoid. Tupper’s feet caught. He went down hard on the big stone pavers, his momentum throwing him forward, rolling him into the manure-clogged gutter.

  “Gotcha!” he heard above him as he tried to understand what had happened. He looked up in time to see the club coming down. One of those goddamned electric street lights seemed to explode in his head, blotting out the world. He was blinded, dazzled, dizzy with its brilliance, then the light vanished, leaving only stars and welcoming darkness.

  Ella Durant paced the soft wool carpet of her room in the Fifth Avenue Hotel. The whistling of the police had broken her fragile sleep. Even now she could hear, from somewhere off to the west, the blast of a single whistle. She gave no thought to their cause. There was too much on her mind to give anyone else’s troubles even passing attention.

  It annoyed her that she couldn’t seem to get back to sleep, and that as soon as her eyes were pried open by the sounds down on the street her troubles came rushing back. So she paced, going over yet again the things she had set in motion. A soft breeze stirred the curtains of her open window. She stopped her pacing for a second to glance down at Madison Square Park. The leafy little oasis billowed beneath her.

  “Damn my brother,” she breathed in the darkness. “Let him keep his stupid trees.” But what was hers was hers, or at least should have been, and she was not about to let William keep her from it, not if she had to cut all the trees in the Adirondacks.

  She was done with writing letters, done with appealing to her brother, her brother, for what was rightfully hers. It was the lawyer’s job now. The time for begging was done. Her mother had sided with William, as Ella had expected. There was no money in siding with her, after all. It was William who controlled it all, since their father died. It was William who paid Mother’s bills for her and kept her in luxurious ignorance of what he’d done. Millions. Millions!

  She was sure her father’s estate was worth at least two million. She knew her father had gotten well over $235,000 for the land around Prospect Park alone, and that was back in ’69. And there had been many more holdings, the railroad, and all those acres in the Adirondacks, nearly six-hundred-thousand of them, and houses, steamboats, and a long list of other things. And what had William sent her? What had he thought his sister’s share to be? Not even twenty-five thousand.

  It was the yacht that had done it. Even now the great steam yacht was being built in a Philadelphia shipyard. When she’d heard that she’d been more furious than ever. The thing was supposed to cost two hundred thousand! The nerve! She should keep her mouth shut, take a beggarly one percent of the estate and go quietly away while William sails the world with Huntington, or Morgan, or the Prince of Wales. Well that was not going to happen, not if she had anything to say in the matter.

  Van Duzer would see to it now. The old Dutchman with the shocking, white muttonchop sideburns had told her he’d set her brother on his ear in two shakes. She believed him. He was a crafty and well-connected old codger—if her friends were to be relied upon—and he traveled in rarified company. As a very old and respected name in New York life, and for the last thirty years at the New York Bar, he knew what strings to pull and pockets to line. The law, strictly speaking was only part of it.

  “We can make life difficult for your brother, Miss Durant—if you like,” he’d told her. “Very difficult indeed. I’ll need my head though, a clear rein to see to the things that need seeing to. You are willing to trust me in these matters implicitly, correct?” he’d said to her in a tone that allowed for no disagreement.

  “I’ll need to perhaps employ some, shall we say—unorthodox methods, if we are to be successful. I want your full agreement on that,” he’d insisted from under bushy eyebrows, his piercing eyes boring into her. “I’ll need to fight fire with fire to break him to your case, and once I set a course, I’ll brook no second-guessing.”

  “Do what you have to, Mister Van Duzer,” Ella had said. “My brother has earned it and more.
”

  “Good. I’m glad to hear you say that, Miss Durant. Your brother is well defended, legally speaking, and can tie us up in court for years if he likes, while he hides assets like a squirrel hiding nuts. Even if we win that way, I’ll guarantee it will be a hollow victory,” Van Duzer said, his fingers steepled under his bright red nose.

  Ella had sighed in his office that afternoon, sighed, then took a deep breath and said again, “Do what you must, Mister Van Duzer,” her fists clenched at her sides. “My brother has forfeited the right to civil action, though we’ll need that, too, I’m sure. But, by God, if the methods you employ are less than orthodox, well it’s nothing more than what William has done to me.”

  “The wheels will be set in motion this very day, Miss Durant.”

  That’s what Van Duzer had said as they parted. His fleshy, dark-spotted hand had held hers in a firm but very soft grip, a lawyer’s grip, like blades of steel in a velvet pillow. A chill had run through her then, but she had choked it down and simply said, “Thank you, sir. I place my future in your hands.”

  But that wasn’t all she’d placed in his hands, not by a long shot. And though she had walked from Van Duzer’s office with a grim set to her mouth, she could only think, “He’s still my brother.”

  So Ella Durant paced her hotel room floor while whistles sounded in the night, and heavy-shoed cops did whatever it was they were doing. It was nothing to her.

  Two

  And lungs are smothered and shoulders bowed,