The Empire of Shadows Page 3

  Tupper had heard of that place. It was a place he didn’t want to go. Once inside, he didn’t give himself much of a chance of coming out again, ever. Murderers were treated harshly in the Tombs, very harshly indeed, from what little he’d heard.

  Like an animal in a trap, he was willing to chew off his own leg for freedom. He figured he’d do it now, if that was the only way. But, as a hunter he knew that patience must always outweigh fury. Banging his head against the walls of the wagon would gain him nothing. Time enough for fury when he saw the opportunity, if it ever came.

  The back of the wagon was tight and hot. The August sun slowly turned the cramped space into an oven. Tupper and the five other prisoners glistened with sweat, and small pools of it started to form on the floor around their feet as they leaked and dripped. The other prisoners were trying to keep their distance, though the cramped space didn’t allow it. At least now, with his hands cuffed in front, he could run his fingers through his long black hair.

  He was caked with dried blood. It was on his pants, hands, face, and hair. He was dirty and damp from his roll in the gutter and the smell of manure clung to him like a guilty conscience. He could only imagine what the others in this black box thought of him. They probably figured he was an escaped lunatic, gone on a spree of baby-killing. He smiled at the thought. The man across from him looked away.

  That man, of all of them, didn’t appear to belong there. His foppish scarlet necktie, only slightly askew, and his straw boater gave the thin, serious face an innocent look. Tupper rocked and bumped with the wagon, trying to figure what a neat, unassuming haberdasher—for that’s the image that immediately came to mind—was doing in this rocking-oven-ride to the Tombs.

  Jim guessed he had to be some sort of confidence man, forger, or an embezzler, maybe. Whatever he’d done, though, soon took a backseat to how he looked. He was sweating even more heavily than the rest. Little waterfalls were rushing out from under his straw hat, down his face, and into his paper collar. He was deathly pale, and getting paler with every rock and jolt of the wagon. He loosened the tie from around his green-tinted neck with a shaking hand. He shifted and craned toward the tiny rear window, sucking air like a landed fish.

  “You gonna be all right there, Mister Boater?” one of the others asked.

  “Mister Boater” said nothing, but nodded and gave them a pitiful smile. Then the wagon stopped.

  One of the cops got down to go into a station house, leaving the other on guard. They hadn’t sat there for more than a minute when it happened. “Mister Boater” had turned so pale and green he looked like death itself, and Tupper could see his Adam’s apple bobbing like he was trying to swallow something whole.

  Without warning the man erupted. There was no other word for it. Tupper had never seen the like of it in his life. “Mister Boater” convulsed, throwing his head back so hard his straw hat flew across the wagon, then he jackknifed forward, a monstrous stream of vomit spewing from his mouth with the force of a fire hose.

  In an instant nearly everyone in the wagon was hosed down. Successive convulsions blasted the hot men with half-digested food in a soupy broth of steaming bile. The other men cursed and shouted at the top of their lungs. One of the others, who now wore a vomit shirt, doubled over and let loose on the shoes of the men to his left and right.

  “What the bloody hell’s goin’ on back there?” the driver shouted. All he got back were shouts, cursing, and an insistent pounding on the front wall of the wagon. The cop must have smelled the cause of the ruckus then. “Goddamn you fuckin’ drunks!” he shouted. “Make you bastards wish you never done that.”

  The back door was thrown open, blinding Tupper in the bright morning sun. “OUT!” the cop shouted with a menacing wave of his daystick. “Out, and be smart about it.”

  Tupper was on his feet and stepping over “Mister Boater’s” feet before the words were out of the cop’s mouth, but so were the rest. It didn’t take much really, a shove from behind, a slip on the vomit carpet and Tupper was launched out the door.

  It was all in slow motion for Tupper. The falling face-first, the impact with the surprised cop, the crash to the pavement, the sound the cop’s head made when it hit the belgian blocks, were all distinct and vivid events spliced into an uncontrollable whole. The thing he remembered with crystal clarity was the way the cop’s eyes rolled back in his head, leaving almost nothing but white. From there things started moving fast, very fast in fact.

  The cop was out. Waiting for him to come to or for the other cop to come out of the station house was not an option. A quick search for the keys to his cuffs paid off. His hands were free a fumbling instant later. The cop’s gun and wallet were his a moment after that. He threw the keys to one of the other men, then walked away.

  He wanted to run, wanted to put all the distance he could between him and the cops, but in broad daylight, with witnesses on every sidewalk, walking was the safer course. Tupper made his head control the animal instincts of his feet, forcing his legs to slow until he felt like he was hardly moving at all. It seemed to work though, because he saw people on the street point, not at him but at the others who were running like scared rabbits.

  Tupper turned two corners and ducked down an alley in quick succession. He could hear the whistles already. Still, he did not run. He crossed Canal Street, dodging the wall of freight wagons that always seemed to clog that roadway. Heading north on Thompson, he saw a half-loaded wagon rumbling away from a loft building. Tupper was on the back and hidden among the boxes within a minute. Peering out between the crates, he watched as the cobblestones marched away behind. No one followed.

  Jim Tupper had stayed under the cover all day. The wagon he’d hidden in had headed for the North River docks. He’d kept his head down, particularly when the driver stopped after a few blocks to get lunch in a steamy little shack on Varick Street.

  Tupper kept a wary eye for cops, peeking out from between the crates. He saw only one patrolman a couple of blocks off and no sign of a chase. When the driver finished lunch and the wagon had rattled to within a couple of blocks of the waterfront, Jim hopped down.

  He ducked into a vacant doorway set deep in the side of an old prewar warehouse. He stood for anxious minutes, watching the street, his hand on the butt of the pistol. He was there for some time taking stock of his situation. The first thing that occurred to him was the need to change his appearance. His clothes were filthy and blood-smeared. His face and head were a mess of dried blood and manure. His hair, he decided, had to be cut.

  Tupper hated the idea. His hair was his pride. Every man in his family had worn their hair long for as long as he could remember. To cut it was to deny his heritage and admit defeat. He thought at first that he’d just buy a hat, but he finally admitted to himself that a hat was not enough. His hair was sure to be a red flag to the cops, once his description got circulated. It had to go.

  While Tupper tried to figure how to take care of his clothes and hair he noticed a pack of boys about twelve to fifteen years of age. There were five of them. Tupper watched as they approached. Their clothes were mostly ragged, but some articles had recently been stolen, he guessed. There was a new shirt with sleeves that didn’t reach the wrist, a pair of expensive, pinstriped pants so long they were tied up at the bottom with string, and a bowler hat on one of the older ones, perched on a head two sizes too big.

  Most had shoes of one sort or another, but two had no shoes at all. One limped on a twisted foot. None had weapons he could see, but knives or short lengths of pipe were easy enough to hide. As he watched he noted the eyes.

  They had the eyes of hunters, roving and scanning for an easy mark, an unattended wagon, an open doorway, or a rival gang. Still, they laughed among themselves as boys will, but with a hard and brutal edge to their fun.

  Tupper pulled out the cop’s wallet, checking its contents. The gang was almost by when he looked up. Two of them were watching him with focused, dark eyes. Tupper knew the risk he was taking
when he called to them.

  “You boys like to make a couple of dollars?” The leader of the gang, a compact kid with hard blue eyes in a pockmarked face stopped and looked him over. He looked up and down the street, then sidled over. The other boys fanned out to either side like well-trained troops on a flanking maneuver.

  “What kind’a man’re you? Look like an Injun or somesuch,” the boy said, punctuated by a spit of tobacco juice.

  “I am Mohawk, an Ongwe’onwe,” Tupper said. The leader of the gang seemed to accept this, as if coming upon one of the Ongwéonwe here in the bowels of the city was an everyday sort of thing. He shrugged and commenced to negotiate, doing the talking for the group as naturally as any clan chief. Tupper kept his back to the wall and the rest of the boys in sight. Within two minutes he had handed over two silver dollars, a day’s wage for a skilled worker. Tupper followed two of the boys with one hand in his pocket.

  They walked away from the riverfront for about two blocks or so, then ducked down an alley at the back of a ramshackle row of ancient buildings that sagged and leaned on decaying wooden bones. The alley was choked with garbage, junk, and the stench of more emptied chamber pots than the rain could wash away.

  A huge gray rat almost as big as a cat gnawed at the decayed leg of a pig. It stood its ground as they passed, baring yellow teeth. Neither of the boys spoke, and Jim said nothing to them. He cast an occasional eye behind as they slipped through a gloomy succession of connecting alleys and courtyards till even Tupper’s excellent sense of direction was slightly muddled.

  They came at last to a grand old door in a red brick wall. Oaken lions’ heads, now gray with weather, adorned each side just below where a large window might have been. The glass had been boarded over with crudely cut pine. Deeply carved panels, one with a crest of some kind were in the center of the door and though aged, seemed solid as a tree trunk. It was something salvaged from a fire or stolen long ago from a carpenter’s shop or construction site.

  Three raps on the old wood produced a long wait. The boy was about to knock again when there came a creaking and groaning of wood from within and the sound of bolts being drawn. The door opened just enough for the gaping muzzle of a shotgun to poke through.

  “Put it up, Ma. It’s me,” the larger of the two boys said. The shotgun didn’t waver. Tupper saw a shadowed face over the shotgun.

  “What’s this then? ’Oose that with ya?”

  “’e needs to get cleaned up, Ma.”

  “So tell ’im to go to a bathhouse. This ain’t no bloody hotel.”

  The boy looked at Tupper with a dark squint and a cock of his head.

  “Don’t think he can—’e’s the one what escaped,” the boy added. All illusions Tupper had of anonymity vanished. All the more urgent to change his appearance, if every urchin in the neighborhood knew he’d escaped.

  “Man can pay. Gave us a dollar just to bring ’im ’ere.”

  The shotgun wavered. “Show it to me, boy,” the woman said with gravelly interest in her voice.

  The boy held out the money for her to see. There was a moment’s hesitation, a wavering of the shotgun.

  “I can pay more, ma’am,” Tupper said evenly in his best and most cultivated white man accents. He reached for his wallet. The shotgun came to bear on his chest like the needle on a compass.

  “You don’t want to be doin’ nothin’ foolish, Mister,” the woman said, sounding more like a growling dog than anything human. Jim took his hand out slowly.

  “Just getting my wallet, is all. Relax,” he said, trying to sound like the prospect of being cut in half by the shotgun hadn’t tied his guts in a knot.

  “I says when it’s time to relax, Mister. What you done? You do the job on somebody? That it? Looks like it from the looks of you. You some kind o’ Indian or somethin’?”

  Tupper looked steadily through the crack in the door, doing his best to look sincere.

  “Haven’t killed anybody. But the cops don’t see it that way. The cops’re wrong,” Jim said. “I’m Iroquois. Mohawk tribe, if you got to know,” he added. He told her his proposition before she had a chance to say anything more. The woman listened and slowly the shotgun lowered.

  When at last the shotgun was put up and the grand old door opened on protesting hinges, Tupper was amazed by what he saw. The woman, as mountainous a mass of female flesh as he’d ever seen, filled the hallway from wall to wall, actually from box to box. The hallway was stacked high with boxes and packing crates of every description, leaving only a narrow passage between.

  The woman, who said her name was Bess, had stopped pointing her shotgun at Jim, though she still gripped it in one bloated, freckled hand. It was a wicked, sawed-off affair, with the stock cut down so it fit the hand like an enormous pistol. She let the hammers down carefully, muzzle pointed at the floor.

  “This way,” she muttered, maneuvering her bulk between the boxes.

  Bess disappeared back into the blackness of the house, or whatever it was. He heard the boys bolt the door behind. There was so much packed into the place it was hard to say if it had been a house or not. The only light filtered in through a pair of tightly louvered windows in front, which left most of the place as black as pitch. One room they passed seemed to have nothing but furniture in it, seemingly stacked at random all the way to the ceiling—chairs, dressers, chests, steamer trunks, desks, armoires, vanities, commodes, china cabinets, and sideboards in every condition teetered in the gloom. They passed hogsheads stuffed with cavalry sabers, carbines, muskets, and bayonets, and bales of clothes and boxes of liniment, laudanum, and baking soda. Bess lumbered to the front stairs, saying, “Watch the third step. It’s iffy.”

  The staircase groaned under her weight. Tupper could feel the banister wobble under his hand. The third step had a hole in it big enough to put a foot through. Even on the rickety stairs items were stacked in a crazy kind of order. Tupper said nothing and asked nothing. Bess was probably fencing or warehousing for a gang. Maybe the gang was the bunch of kids, although he doubted that this was all theirs. He didn’t know and he didn’t care, so long as Bess stuck to her end of the bargain.

  “In here,” Bess said over her massive, rounded shoulder. She led him into a bedroom, at least that’s what Tupper figured it for, because it had a bed and a bit less clutter than the other rooms.

  “Washbasin’s over there,” Bess said, pointing to an alcove off to the right. “God, you stink,” she said as he passed by her. “No offense, mind.”

  “Don’t mind it,” Jim said. “It’s the damn truth.”

  “I’ll find you some clothes, but let me see your money first,” Bess said stoutly, holding out one big hand. Tupper handed her a five-dollar gold piece.

  “This much now, the rest later if you’ve got things that’ll fit me,” Jim said. Bess hesitated, hefting the shotgun for a moment. She looked him up and down.

  “Got plenty to fit you, Mister,” she said, rumbling off into the gloom as Tupper watched her broad back disappear. The house vibrated.

  Tupper stripped down, wincing at the collection of bruises and scrapes he’d accumulated. He took the pistol out of his waistband and put it on the washstand close to hand. He sponged himself off, washing away the blood and dirt and horseshit. The lavender soap Bess had by the basin smelled better than anything he could remember. He started to feel human as he washed his hair.

  The floor shook as Bess returned, a bundle of clothes in her arms and a large pair of scissors balanced on top. Finding Jim naked didn’t seem to faze her in the least. He followed her lead and didn’t make any attempt at modesty.

  “These oughta do,” she said, throwing the pile on the bed. She stood there for a moment, hands on hips, looking him over with a studied gaze. “You don’t clean up half bad fer a savage,” she allowed, her eyes lingering on his cock. “Wouldn’t care for a bit o’ sport would ya? Used to be a sportin’ gal back a few years. Catered to the gentlemen who liked their ladies large,” she said with a grin t
hat showed a broken tooth. “I’m a bit thinner now though,” she said, her tone one of apology.

  Tupper stood before her feeling suddenly embarrassed. He turned away and forced what he hoped looked like a reluctant grin, saying, “Thank you, gakógo,” calling her a gluttonous beast, but making it sound like a compliment, “but my time’s run out in this city. I must go; the sooner the better.”

  Bess shrugged. “Better cut your hair and get on out then,” she said, picking up the scissors. Tupper thought she might have a mind to stab him for rejecting her, but she handed them over without a word.

  He cut his hair short, letting it fall to the floor in shining black clumps. With each cut he felt diminished. His hair was his most visible link to his heritage, a tattered flag worn with the pride of a last warrior. A true warrior, Tupper reminded himself, did what was necessary.

  The gluttonous beast watched from the doorway, more out of caution he might steal something than for any interest in him, he figured. He took his time, cutting until there wasn’t more than a finger’s breadth left. A different man stared back at him from the mirror. Tupper scowled at the reflection. He dressed, putting on everything she’d brought and finding that Bess had a pretty good eye for size, with the exception of the pants, which were a tad too short.

  “Wouldn’t recognize you,” Bess observed. “Got the rest of me money?”

  Jim paid her as agreed. They were going back down the stairs when Jim asked, “Got ammunition for a thirty-two Smith & Wesson?”

  Bess didn’t miss a step. “You got money, I got cartridges. How many?”

  “Box of fifty. How much?”

  “Two bucks.” Bess rumbled with a curious look, but in a sudden burst of charity said, “But, for you, a buck. Been on the wrong side of the cops meself,” she said in a tone that was almost sympathetic, “which ain’t quite the same as bein’ on the wrong side o’ the law, if you get my meanin’.”