The Styx (5 page)

“No school today, Mrs. McReady, and it’s me, Michael.”

The old woman huffed at the correction, whiffed her hands and turned to wrestle with the handles of her cart, the diameter of the wooden posts thicker than her own tired legs. Byrne swung his satchel over his shoulder and helped her move the cart to the position where it had sat every day for two decades.

“Bless you, Mikey, but don’t touch my cart again boy or I’ll tell your mum and she’ll whip you solid,” the old woman snapped. Byrne would have laughed at the threat but for the image of his mother that instantly jumped into his head. She had never touched him in anger, and in her last years she’d barely had the strength to stand.

“I’d appreciate you not telling her, ma’am,” he said to Mrs. McReady.

“Aye, this one time, boy.” She reached in under the canvas that covered her cart and withdrew a small green apple and pressed it into his palm. “Now get on with you, you’ll be late for school.”

Byrne hugged the old woman, squeezing the rumpled bundle hard but was still unable to feel the bones hidden somewhere inside that magically kept her upright.

“So I’m off,” he said as she stood there, her eyes gone vacant, looking befuddled and slightly stunned by the odd recognition of a man’s arms around her if only for a second.

Byrne started north on Pitt, the sky in the east showing just a smoldering of light as if the sun was being held down by some giant gray fabric. The air was moist and the cold penetrating, the only advantage of winter was that the garbage and sewage in the streets was frozen, which kept the stench at a minimum. Though the streets were still empty of people, Byrne walked along the edges of buildings, head down and eyes up. By habit he knew that in these neighborhoods you did not draw attention to yourself regardless of your errand. As he skirted the western edge of Hamilton Fish Park he could make out the huge arch of the gymnasium, the place where New York Police Captain John Sweeney had found him and big Jack and others when they were boys and drafted them into a yet unofficial junior police crew. It was in that gym that Byrne had learned the use of the telescoping baton. Captain Sweeney had given him rudimentary anatomy lessons, nerve points on the human body, weak spots where grown men could be struck and quickly rendered harmless. That knowledge and his own mechanical perfection of the balance and design of the steel baton had impressed Sweeney and had saved Byrne’s ass more than a few times on the streets.

When he and Jack Brennan were seventeen, Sweeney pulled them aside and told them he could pave their way into the city’s police department. The pay would be minimal, but they’d have a chance at regular jobs, a perk that few like them could get without being beholden to the neighborhood bosses.

“You’re smart boys. You know the streets and the characters out there. We need young men like yourselves to tap into what’s going on so we can clean out some of the vermin, you know.”

When Byrne took the offer to his brother, Danny scoffed in his face.

“I’ll make more money in a week on Broadway than you will in a year,” he said and Michael knew it was true. By then Danny was working as a barker out in front of the follies and running a gambling table in the basement of the place at night. Since they were kids Michael had tagged along but only watched, careful to stay out of slapping range of his brother’s hand, but soaking up the atmosphere, the gestures, and the faces of pimps and prostitutes, opium sellers and dice shooters. He could still recall the day Danny was up on his soapbox while Michael sat on his heels in a nearby alcove. In his memory, he was filing away the details, the way his brother used his arms and hands to articulate his pitch, the voice he used, so different than his normal conversational voice, the eye contact, picking through the potential buyers versus those too smart or to conservative to take a chance. He memorized what clothes Danny wore, gaudy jackets and vests Michael had never seen at home that were either borrowed from other barkers or kept somewhere secret so their parents wouldn’t know. But when Michael’s eyes got to his brother’s feet he noted that he was wearing mismatched socks—one checkered and one blue—and when he looked down at his own feet, he was wearing the exact same pair—one checkered and one blue.

Somehow, seeing Danny up close shielded him of the allure of it all. Instead he watched and memorized faces, names, the knowing winks, and the strange vernacular of a dozen languages and accents.

He may have admired his brother’s way of dealing with the streets, but when Michael and big Jack got the chance to join the police, they both got hired on the spot with Sweeney’s recommendation. They did some minimal training and were sent out as fodder to manage the traffic on Broadway, dancing in between the horse wagons and push carts and the pedestrians moving to and from the elevated and plowing beneath the iron structures. After the day’s street duty they’d be called in as muscle in the so-called vice sweeps of the west side of Manhattan in Hell’s Kitchen or to quell skirmishes between their own Irish brothers and the Negros living nearby in the San Juan Hill section.

After three years Byrne knew he was not made for the job. He lacked the ruthlessness of his sergeants and shrank at the orders of the ward bosses who called for the outright beatings of citizens who Byrne could plainly see simply couldn’t afford to live in the neighborhoods or were of the wrong ethnic persuasion to stay there. He was also too adept at recognizing the graft and payoffs being made to authorities on a regular basis, a detailed accounting of which he’d brought to upper command only to be told to put his sharp eyes and ears to better uses and keep his Irish yap shut.

It was Captain Sweeney who saved him yet again and got him assigned to a special unit that was assembled to provide security against looting during the massive reconstruction of the Grand Central Terminal on Forty-second Street. There Byrne’s eye and ear for both graft and outright theft gained the attention of the private contractors who cared more about their money than the ethnicity or social standing of those ripping them off.

When the Pinkerton agency made inquiries about hiring him away from the police two years ago, Byrne didn’t hesitate. Now, after receiving Danny’s telegram, it was he who’d gone to the agency bosses to ask them if he could have a position on a security team for the railroads. They’d been surprisingly quick to assign him. He now had an eight o’clock appointment on board a southbound train to Washington D.C. and points beyond.

So it was that Michael Byrne, the last of a New York immigrant family, found himself walking across East Houston in the chill dawn, skirting around a short line of Colonel George Waring’s sanitation wagons. There he slowed to watch a group of men in white uniforms who were armed with ropes and a jury-rigged slide as they loaded the half frozen carcass of a horse that had been left where it dropped by some unlucky freight man overnight. Normally the crew would be shoveling black snow, a mixture of ice and garbage and refuse that was piled alongside the street, which would then be dumped in the East River. A dead horse was an occasional break in the routine. Byrne passed quietly and made his way west on Houston. His plan was to slide along the northern edge of the Bowery—better to avoid any trouble with the gang boys there who no doubt wouldn’t be awake and out of their dens as of yet, but why take the chance. In the now dull light he could see the raised rails of the El running above Second Avenue. He estimated he had four miles to negotiate to reach Grand Central, but turned up First Avenue anyway. He wanted to walk his city one final time.

Heading north, he lengthened his gait on the wide sidewalks, absorbing the signage of a hundred businesses as he passed: a cutter displayed a giant pair of scissors at Third Street; a sausage maker had a huge worst protruding from his first floor shop at Fourth. At St. Marks Place the family crest of the Medici family with its three gilt balls indicated a pawnbroker. Byrne stopped at the intersection and looked east, where he could now see the skeletal trees of Tompkins Square, and he touched the side of his face with his fingertips where the bruise from last night was still tender, but he smiled at the recollection of his wand against the back of the head of a Five Pointer.

The farther north he marched the better the business venues. Still, most of them had adopted an old world style of hanging their signs out over the sidewalks to gain attention: an enormous pair of eyeglasses advertised an optician; an outsized cutout of a violin for a musical instrument shop.

Soon he began to move through areas of a class where he rarely traveled unless on police business and where, as a citizen, he didn’t belong. Large, multistoried homes of stately architecture adorned the side streets, although age and the city’s constant soot and pollution had stained their facades. Even the rich could not partition off the air. Past Fourteenth Street, he glanced west and could see the buildings of Stuyvesant Square Park, named after one of the richest patriarchs of the city, where he had once delivered a man of means to the New York Infirmary after a beating in a brothel down on Bowery. It was all done quietly of course, but despite warnings from his superiors, Byrne had never forgotten the man’s name and had tucked it away for some future use.

His ability to remember even the most mundane details was something Captain Sweeney had both praised Byrne for and warned him against.

“You’ve a sharp mind, lad. Wasted down here and truth be told, wasted in this department, considering. Mind that memory of yours doesn’t get you in trouble, Michael. Some things are best forgotten in this godforsaken life. The reason you’re here, hell, the reason we’re all here is to forget the past and move on to a better future, boy. Don’t let what’s already happened get in the way of what can be.”

Byrne had listened intently to the man’s lessons. And as was his nature, he would never forget a single word, or anything else that cared to strike his mind.

Within another mile, he began to feel anxious, a shiver of nerves running into the muscles of his upper back. Ahead were the red brick walls of Bellevue Hospital, the notorious house of the mentally deranged. Byrne had not forgotten a single whispered word that he’d overheard between his mother and neighbors after his father’s disappearance on a winter day years ago.

“Screechin’ like a madman, he was, Ann Marie.”

“Wild as a cut beast one minute, starin’ inta the afterworld the next.”

“It was in his eyes, luv. Ya can’t deny that. His mind was gone.”

“It’s the best, Ann Marie. Before he turns on ye and the boys.”

“Three times this month, Ann. Naked in the freezin’ street. He’s insane, woman. Deal with it.”

His mother always denied it. She would never admit that she’d had their father, her own husband, committed. The tale told to her sons about their father’s accident on the street had been her story and she stuck to it.

But after he’d been made a cop, Byrne would ask for his father by name at Bellevue and a dozen other madhouses in the city whenever he was in a district on assignment. He tried to make it sound official, as if he were investigating a crime. The intake officials would sometimes pretend to go through the lists, finally looking up to give him a raised eyebrow that only meant that for a bit of a bribe they might have someone who fit the description. He’d even paid a couple of times at first, only to have some poor bugger marched out who was a foot shorter or some dark-skinned European who would no more pass for Irish than an African slave. But even the old white-skinned wretches they’d bring forward, Byrne could always tell by the eyes. He would know his own father’s eyes if he saw them again, even if they had gone insane.

Today he had to march on. Was he giving up the search for a father whom he still believed was lost if not dead? Yes, he supposed he was. He had someone else to search for now, and a train to Florida was a portal to that quest. As he walked north the smell of the East River blew in, an air salty and fresh mixed with the refuse and excrement piled along its banks. He took out his own cheap watch and checked the time: seven fifteen. The sidewalks around him were already starting to busy up with pedestrians, their nostrils blowing with steam as they made their way through still freezing temperatures. They were mostly laborers at this time of day, men in the trade uniforms of construction and iron workers and steamfitters moving west as he was now along Forty-second Street. Within two blocks he could see the enormous train shed of the new Grand Central Station rising up at Lexington Avenue. The glass and steel construction dwarfed everything around it, and it was not yet finished. Already Byrne could hear the clanging echoes of iron against iron, the dragging friction of hard stone being moved. He went through the instructions in his head: meet with Pinkerton detective Shawn Harris on lower track three aboard the southbound train to Washington D.C.

Byrne had worked the station as a cop, when it was in different stages of construction, but when he entered the enormous waiting area this morning and looked out from the staircase it was still bewildering in size and scope. Sixteen thousand square feet of chiseled and carved stone and marble, and across the way a cast-iron eagle with a wingspan that had to be the equal of any wagon on the street outside. Byrne stood a full five minutes, staring at the movement of people below, appearing in miniature like insects scurrying to assignments unknown. Unconsciously, he reached inside his coat and touched the shaft of his baton. He could not help but think of himself as like them, impotent BBs in a boxcar, as he moved down to join them.