The Fatal Flame (23 page)

And anyway, I was distracted. Drake Todd’s eyes shone bright as the brass on his knuckles as his fist made its honey-slow arc toward my face.

Be assured that the “OLD HUNKERS” have drank too deep at the fountain of power—have been fed and pampered too long upon the spoils, and relish them with too keen an appetite, to allow this their last opportunity to pass without a desperate and tremendous struggle.

—
NEW-YORK DAILY TRIBUNE
, OCTOBER 27, 1847

T
HE RESULTS OF THE
legendary mitten-mill between eleven Neptune 9 men and eight Knickerbocker 21s were as follows, as I wrote in my police report that late afternoon:

Report made by Officer T. Wilde, Ward 6, District 1, Star 107. Arrived on scene of a quelled conflagration at 510 Washington Street. Determined by experts to be incendiary blaze, suspected culprit Miss Sally Woods, printer by trade, sworn enemy of property holder Alderman Robert Symmes. Neptune 9 Engine Company responsible for eradicating fire, having been paid by Symmes direct for protection according to their senior engineman Mr. Drake Todd. These circumstances, in my opinion, deserve further and most immediate scrutiny.

Afterward a fight broke out between the Neptune 9 company and the Knickerbocker 21, the nearest engine house to the site geographically. The altercation escalated due to multiple causes.

I paused. At a profound loss for words.

“Hit a rough patch?” Valentine sneered.

We Wildes sat opposite each other in one of Tammany Hall’s private spaces. Officially, it’s a parlor a few corridors away from the main dining room, concert space, meeting hall, et cetera—all the blithely populace-friendly façades that convince Manhattanites to think of Tammany as a benevolent grandfather with hard candies in his pockets. Unofficially, it’s where my brother convinced his own cronies not to murder me in 1846. The study resembles a men’s club, filled with important books and pictures of doubtless important politicos and carpeted with important-seeming rugs. I sat behind a positively magisterial carved desk, awaiting the powers-that-be who’d summoned us to explain ourselves. Val sprawled in a leather armchair opposite, being about as helpful as a genital rash.

Oh, I was still weak with relief he was alive, mind. But that feeling mingled with the desire to shake him until his head snapped off.

“Need some suggestions?” he added cuttingly, nodding at the report.

“That would be so helpful. What part should I scratch first, then?” I asked him sweetly. “The part where you fainted because you treat yourself like an open sewer, the part where you weren’t conscious while I was getting punched in the guts with brass knuckles—which hurts, by the way—the part where you were asleep when your pal Jack’s head was smashed against your own engine, or maybe the part where you were
bloody unconscious
when we beat them despite their outnumbering us?”

It had been a quick, nasty thunderstorm of a fight. I’d floored two opponents including Todd—him with a chopper to the eye after landing several other blows and dodging (once unsuccessfully) his gleaming metal knuckles, the other with a doubler to the solar plexus. Thanks in no small part to Val, I’m a feral little fighter. Regardless, when it was over and the hands of the bested shaken like decent men and the field of battle cleared, I’d still had to accost a lady two streets over for smelling salts to revive my disastrous kinfolk.

Shame looks like rage on both of us, scarlet and raw, so Val merely ground his teeth at me.

I stared at the unfinished page I’d half written. Hating it.

“What is the
matter
with you?” my brother snapped. “So Tammany gets wind of a mitten-mill, and they send for us, and they tell you to have the police report
ready.
Jesus, how hard can it be?”

“I
always
hate writing them. They record things I don’t want to even think about let alone remember, but I guess I have to diary them, don’t I, since you landed me the worst graft in all of Manhattan Island. I really don’t thank you for that often enough.”

He sniffed. “You were born for police work. And you’re a pretty article, forgetting you’re literate the instant the Party wants a report from you.”

“
You’re
a pretty article, swooning in the middle of a free-for-all,” I hissed.

“As if I
meant
to do that,” he returned contemptuously.

“Oh, you didn’t
mean
to do that?” I cried. “My mistake, you should only be held responsible for things you do
intentionally.
Fair enough, did you mean to take so much morphine you keeled over like a newborn deer? Did you mean to mix it with hashish or laudanum or ether or whatever made you so weak your firedogs had to
hide you under your own engine
?”

Val lurched forward in his chair, livid. “I have a political campaign to win in
less than a week
, I have been
working.
Writing speeches, visiting Democratic cronies for handshakes and assurances, fund-raising, running my goddamn engine house, policing just in case it slipped your mind I was a police captain, and let’s not forget trying to
find Sally Woods
, which you seem incapable of doing. Or did you track her down during the fire brawl, Timmy?”

At the calculated word
Timmy
,
which nickname I despise, I could feel my blood boiling under my shirt collar. Maybe I wasn’t capable of finding Sally Woods. But I was capable of making my brother pay a pound of flesh for saying so.

“How’s Jim, by the way?”

“What the devil does that self-righteous nancy have to do with anything?”

“Oh, you’ve not seen him since he left, then. I figured as much,” I remarked, realizing only as they left my lips that the words I spoke were true, “seeing as you seem barely capable of so much as dressing yourself without your
wife
to look after you.”

If I’d stood up and slapped him in the face, he’d not have reacted any differently. Val’s eyebrows shot up, then crashed down again, the veins in his neck quivering with fury.

“Listen to me, you unspeakably obnoxious ant,” he bit out. “I have a lot of pals, which is a way of life that’s pretty foreign to you, but I don’t
need
any of them in particular. It’s flash to have a pack at your heels, but I am my own man, and I sure as hell don’t require a whinging sodomite who disappears into the ether the instant I most want his support
.
”

“Your cock in his arse is irrelevant to his being a sodomite, of course. You probably didn’t
mean
to put it there. You tripped, and Jim was strategically posed.”

“Leave it the fuck alone,” Val raged, on his feet by now and gripping the other edge of the desk with white knuckles.

I mirrored him instantly, palms on either side of the failed police report, the pair of us facing off with fangs bared like street curs. “Aces, you do plenty more than that by accident. Did you mean to make Robert Symmes so peppery that God only knows what he’ll do to us?”

“I meant to serve my city.”

“Oh, of course, perfect, you’re running on a Barnburner platform out of
altruism.
Did you mean to call me ugly in front of two entire fire gangs?”

“I am sorry about that!” he shouted, incensed.

“You’re
sorry
about it?” I yelled in disbelief.

“Yes, I apologize!”

“You’re never sorry for anything, ever, and you’re sorry about
that
?
That
is what you’re sorry for?”

“Are you deaf?”

“What in hell is
wrong
with you?”

“Whatever’s wrong with me, at least I’m capable of writing a police report.”

“No you aren’t, not having been
awake
to
observe
events as they progressed
.”

He made a grab for the pen. I’d been poking him in the chest with it, in the interest of emphasis. We grappled for the thing, arms straining, pulling and yanking in what resembled a bizarre version of arm wrestling. I hesitate to name it our most dignified exchange.

“I
hate
you,” I spat for the first time in years.

“I don’t give a solitary, singular shit.”

“Yes you do, you thoroughgoing prick.”

“No I—”

The door behind my brother opened, and a pair of men walked in. One was George Washington Matsell, a fatigued grey monument in his sack coat with the gold chief’s star pinned to the lapel. The other was a Tammany boss of sufficient importance that I might as well refer to him as God. Not to imply that he boasts impressive moral fiber—merely that when Abraham Kane says
jump
, your boot soles are generally in the air by the time he’s finished the syllable. Glancing down to the unfinished police report, I began to regret my shortcomings.

After all, I’d met Mr. Kane on the first occasion I visited Tammany. The involuntary occasion, the one at which Symmes had lusted for my blood.

I’d given Abraham Kane the moniker Scarred Nose when I’d no notion of his real title. But while the scar is striking, it doesn’t go very far toward describing a uniquely arresting person. For instance, Chief Matsell is almost as tall as Valentine and about twice as wide. But despite his owning a medium stature, Kane’s sheer density makes him appear just as formidable as his colleagues. And then his eyes are remarkable—an ordinary brown but sharp as shivs, with fine feathers of wrinkles amplifying their incisiveness. He dresses like a rich Party bureaucrat. Doeskin trousers, billowing blue silk cravat, and a stovepipe hat. But somehow he doesn’t look wealthy, appears oddly more
real
than most people. And as for the small white seam just at the bridge of his beak—the skin might have split there, but unlike many pugilists’, his nose has obviously never been broken.

Best of all, he has a way of being amused by insubordination that implies he’s reasonable as well as deadly. Or maybe Abraham Kane is simply tickled by the thought that anyone could possibly defy him. If he wants you promoted, you prosper. If he wants you dead, you die. Quick or slow, as he best pleases.

“Is that pen of particular value, gentlemen?” Chief Matsell inquired irritably.

“It would be of signal use if I’m to finish this police report, sir,” I groused.

“He ran into spelling difficulties,” Val sneered, releasing his grip.

“I’m going to kill you,” I told him, resuming my seat as Val did the same, my pen scratching along like a crackling fire. “I’m going to put my hands around your throat and squeeze until you are dead.”

“Your hands wouldn’t even fit around my throat.”

“Don’t make me laugh.”

“As if that’s even possible. You never laugh.”

“Gentlemen, my time is at a premium,” Abraham Kane announced, pulling up a simple wicker chair and seating himself as if it were a Viking’s rough-hewn throne. Val edged the armchair he’d been using to the side, Matsell likewise dragging a comfortable perch into the semicircle they’d formed around the desk where I furiously scribbled. My brother dropped his hat on the floor and, in a gesture I associate with utter frustration on his part, thrust both hands through his dark blond hair until he resembled a caged lion in a zoo.

“Apologies,” Val offered the politician with genuine deference. “This week has been . . . taxing.”

“I see as much. Drinks, I take it, are in order?” Kane headed for the glassed-in sideboard and its liquor. “I can hear you fine from here, Captain. Start talking.”

“It’s no secret that Symmes and I have always tugged at each other’s hackles,” Valentine admitted hoarsely, elbows on his knees. “His politics are slender as a fresh-landed Irish, and he wouldn’t even know he had a ward if he wasn’t required to live in it.”

“If you’re implying his fortune is vast and little else interests him, I won’t contradict you,” Kane mused, pulling down a gin bottle.

“I am at that. But more to the point, he offered me a bleak-mort in trade for getting Sally Woods out of his way, and any cove who’d treat a girl as if she were a carrot deserves to be thrashed. I should have checked with you lot before my play at the Knickerbocker benefit, I’m aware—I did post Chief Matsell here, who I assume passed the news along. But it’s been almost three years since I was promoted to police captain, and between the state of the nation and the state of Ward Eight—”

“Captain Wilde, I fear you’re characterizing this disintegrating situation as isolated when unfortunately it is all too common,” Kane interjected, thrusting a glass of gin in Val’s face. Another appeared before me, and Kane returned to the sideboard for his and Matsell’s. “The deterioration of Hunker and Barnburner relations is widespread enough that I fear it signals national calamity. Meanwhile, nothing you can say about Robert in particular interests me in the slightest. Nor does Robert interest Cornelius, for that matter.”

My pen paused in considerable surprise.

Cornelius,
I thought.

He meant Cornelius Villers. I’d once called him Pince-Nez, and along with Kane and Symmes he’d completed the triumvirate of Party aristocrats who’d wanted to throw me in the Hudson. Villers is the merciless brains behind Tammany, the thinking apparatus who sits beside Kane like a grotesque two-headed deity. He has a pince-nez resting on his hooked nose and is cadaverously thin, with a cadaver’s affable nature. No one likes Villers, but liking him isn’t the point of the man. He’s omniscient.