Eight

As the glass crashed over her, Mary threw her arms above her head and twisted away from the window. I crossed the room in one, two, three long bounds, leapt over the couch, and smashed her to the floor. The glass cut, but I needed Mary down.

We landed at the base of the window seat. I pushed my back against it like a sensible soldier cowering in a trench. A stiff wooden rod poked out from the torn upholstery of my sofa. An arrow. I reached out to touch it, and another whipped through the broken glass and buried itself in my floor with a hideous thunk.

“Someone is shooting arrows at us,” said Mary.

“What gave you that impression?”

“Arrows!”

“Two so far.”

“It’s ridiculous. Does this sort of thing often happen to you?”

I shrugged. “It could be worse. Last fall it was rifles. Are you hurt?”

“I’m fine.” She said it and realized she had no idea if it was true. She patted herself down, confirming the arrow had missed her, and that the many cuts on her neck and arms were nothing that might threaten her life. She said again, rather more brightly: “I’m fine!”

The moment that the window broke, that the glass rained down, had been one of the longest of my life. I wanted to clutch her to my chest, to hold her until night fell and day returned. I could not bear to lose this woman again.

“Miss Carr,” said Mary. “You’re crying.”

“It has been a difficult year.”

“There’s no time for weakness. There’s an archer outside intent on spilling our blood across your hideous parlor rug. What are we going to do about it?”

Other children’s mothers held them when they were sad, and I’m sure it was a comfort. But for a lifetime on the Westside, there was no better training than a parent who wasn’t afraid to say shut up.

I crawled across the floor, keeping as close to the outside wall as my stiff joints would allow, and wriggled to the front hall. In the center of my great wood door was a brass mail slot that had not been used since the mail stopped, eight years before. I poked it open. An arrow thudded into the door and shook the whole house. I let the slot close.

“He’s in the red oak, the big one, just inside the park,” I said. Mary crawled across the floor and sat next to me, breathing hard against the door. She smelled of blood and sweat.

“No use screaming for the police, is it?” said Mary. She was whispering, and for reasons I didn’t understand, I did the same.

“No.”

She drummed her fingers against her cheek, a gesture I remembered from rainy days when she was stumped by a particularly vicious segment of jigsaw puzzle.

“If we open that door, we’ll be impaled,” she said.

“Like rotisserie pigs.”

“So we don’t leave through that door. We sneak out the back—there is a back, isn’t there?”

“Through the kitchen.”

“Then we go out that way and head west to Sixth Avenue, and on into the safety of the night.”

“Six months ago, that would have been the plan. But the tall grass is dead, and there’s nothing out the back door but snow. We’d be targets in a shooting gallery.”

“Oh. Damn.”

I looked over my front hall, examining it closer than I ever had before. Just as in the rest of my house, there was too much furniture: tables and an armoire and a thoroughly misplaced chair that half blocked the foot of the stairs.

“What do you think is the sturdiest piece of furniture here?” I said.

“Hard to say, it all looks cheap.”

I rolled my eyes. “Just choose.”

“That table, I suppose.” She pointed to a long, low table, once used for storing hats and mail and now retained mainly so I would have something to bang my shins on in the dark.

“What a shame,” I said. “I’ve always liked that table.”

I strode across the floor, reasonably certain I was out of the archer’s line of sight, bent low, and hefted the table with both hands. I walked up the stairs, turned, and hurled it back down. It exploded across the front hall, scattering splinters of wood and making Mary laugh like I didn’t know she could.

“Delightful!” she said. “Do I get to break something, too?”

“Maybe later.” I came back downstairs and handed her the largest fragment of wood—a piece of the table’s top that was just a little longer and a little wider than Mary’s slight torso. I took the second-largest piece. It wouldn’t cover all of me, but it would have to do. “When I open the door, run.”

“Which way?”

“Whichever looks safest. Toward Fourth, probably, and then west.”

“Which way are you going?”

“That archer attacked my house. He broke my window. I’m going into the park, I’m going up that tree, and I am going to drag him back to earth.”

She let out a kind of bellow and banged her shield against mine, hard enough to knock me back onto my heels.

“Miss Carr,” she said, “your attitude is improving all the time.”

Or I’m finally loony enough to keep up with you, I thought. It didn’t matter now.

She took her position at the side of the door, and I gripped the knob. Even through my glove, it was cold with the chill from outside. I yanked the door open, expecting an arrow to fly across the threshold. None did.

“Perhaps he’s gone,” said Mary.

“No,” I said.

“No.”

She shook her head, took a long breath, and charged out just as I was realizing that I was a fool to let her go first. She screamed, and my heart stopped for the awful, endless moment it took me to realize that she wasn’t hurt but was simply having a good time.

I leapt around the door, held the wood in front of my face, and started down the front steps. I’d planned to take them two at a time, but I’d forgotten about the ice, which forced me to inch pathetically down my stoop. I was nearly at the bottom when the first arrow hit.

It ripped into the wood, its silver point coming half an inch from my right eye, and opened a long crack along the already abused timber. The shield withstood one hit. I did not think it would absorb a second.

“This isn’t a pleasure walk, Miss Carr!” shouted Mary, who waited at the bottom of the steps, crouched low, mostly hidden behind her fragment of table. “Are we running or aren’t we? Quick quick!”

“Run,” I said, and run we did—across the sidewalk, onto the snow, our boots slipping and our bones aching as we fought to keep our footing on the frost.

An arrow took a bite out of the snow between us, plowing up a furrow as long as my leg.

“Not so close!” I shouted. “And not in a straight line.”

Perhaps Mary listened. If she did, it was the first time that week. I zigged a bit and zagged a bit more, and was almost at the edge of the park when the next arrow came.

It bit into the side of the wood, almost severing the fingers of my left hand and tearing the shield apart as neatly as a cracker snapped in half. I felt the wood disintegrate. As it tore, I saw the park before me, and I saw the marksman in the oak.

He wore a long black coat and a neatly blocked felt hat, and he looked as at home in the tree as a toucan in a boardroom. He clutched the bow like an expert, though, and without taking his eyes off me, he reached over his shoulder for another arrow.

I leapt over the low, snow-swamped fence that separated park from sidewalk. I slid on the ice, grabbed the trunk of the archer’s oak, and did not fall.

“Gilda?” cried Mary, worry in her voice for the first time. I did not see where she was. I looked up and did not see the archer, either. I covered my head and waited for the blow. It came from the side, as Mary flung herself over the fence and tackled me to the ground. I was looking for the correct words to curse her when an arrow slammed into the snow where I’d been standing.

“Oh,” I said.

“Yes.”

The ground shook as the archer leapt down, landing a few feet in front of us. His quiver was empty. He tossed his bow aside and ran deeper into the park. I sloughed off Mary and ran after.

In the summertime, I know the twists and turns of Washington Square better than any sane person in the city. In the winter, when the light fades early and snow clogs the paths, it is not clear.

The archer ran beneath the trees, where the snow was sparse and his tracks were harder to see. When I emerged at the ruined fountain at the square’s center, he was gone.

I looked up at the arch, badly cracked but still standing, the grime on its marble stark against the purity of the snow. The sun was gone and the moon not up. The darkness smelled cold.

Mary bolted out of the trees.

“Where is he?” she said.

“I don’t know.”

“Well show some goddamned imagination!”

“Shut up and follow me.”

I ran south. We emerged onto West Fourth just in time to see the archer step out of the trees, halfway down the block.

Once, we would not have been alone. Once, the One-Eyed Cats ceaselessly patrolled the southern edge of the park, terrorizing outsiders and welcoming locals with a smile. Once, a killer would have had no hope of crossing their territory without being struck down by a hail of brickbats and stones. Once, they’d have beaten him bloody, or lashed him to a tree and left him there howling and embarrassed as a warning to others. But those children were dead now, and the One-Eyed Cats were not coming to our rescue.

At least, not all of them.

The archer was nearly past the park when Cherub Stevens intervened. The onetime lord of Washington Square leapt out from behind a skinny old cherry tree and blocked the archer’s escape.

“Stop right—” Cherub managed to say, before the archer, hardly breaking stride, punched him in the jaw. I hate to admit it, but I’d seen it coming. Cherub fell hard but was able to grab the man as tight as he could—and failed utterly to drag him down. The archer shook him off and kept running. We reached Cherub, and I had to choose between helping this poor, daft man and continuing the chase. My legs ached and my lungs were doing little better. I decided to be generous.

“Running on snow is simply impossible,” said Mary, as I helped Cherub up. The archer rounded Mercer. I let him go.

“That was awfully brave,” I said.

“You don’t have to place so much stress on the word ‘awful,’” he answered. He looked cold, hungry, and cruelly sober. Mary inspected him, smiling charitably, as one might greet a particularly bedraggled alley cat.

“And what is the name of our would-be savior?” she said.

“This, Mary, is a Westsider born and bred, a soldier of the gutter, a legend of Eighth Avenue. I give you Cherub Stevens.”

She offered her hand. He bowed low, unable to resist, and gave it a smacking kiss. Mary blushed. I did not know she could blush. I did not like that she blushed because of Cherub.

I didn’t really like a lot of what was happening.

“Come back to my house,” I said finally, really just to say anything.

“I told you I’m not going back there,” he said.

“Then what are we going to do with you?”

“Food wouldn’t hurt.”

We walked north, and I found myself standing between two people whom I felt utterly unable to hold as tightly as I should.

“You were mad to try to stop him,” said Mary. It was the first time all week I’d heard her properly impressed. “That man was a terror with a bow and arrow.”

“Well,” said Cherub, not even bothering to feign modesty, “he had no arrows left.”

“It was stupid,” I said, “and a waste of effort if you weren’t going to at least knock him down.”

Cherub was too proud of himself to be bothered by my jab. He flicked up his fingers. There was a slip of paper clutched in his hand—a creased square torn where he had ripped it off the archer’s coat. Aside from the fact that the number on it read “83,” it was identical to the bit of paper Abner Byrd wore when he died.

I took it from Cherub and felt it with my bare fingers. The paper wasn’t flat. In the light of the rising moon, I saw an italic lowercase r.

I didn’t bother to tell Cherub good work. But his smug smile showed he knew he had gotten to me anyway.

 

A block west of the fence, flames flickered in the side of a hill that had once been a line of town houses. A year or two before, an enterprising cook dug a hollow in the earth and installed a long firepit, creating a makeshift restaurant. Between the dirt wall and the heavy canvas that cut out the cold, it was smoky, crowded, and mercifully warm. A metal grill rested atop a long trough of burning coals. Hunks of pork and bread sizzled and burned on the iron.

I slapped down our money and took three dented plates piled high with pork, bread, beans, and root vegetables unidentifiable but delicious. Mary waited at the counter, her eyes watering from the smoke. Cherub leaned beside her, telling one of his interminable stories of Westside heroism. I’d heard it a dozen times. It had never seemed so funny as Mary seemed to think.

Cherub gave me an icy look as I approached them, then returned to charming Mary. She was taller than me, more slender, her skin clearer, her hair an artful mess rather than an intractable quagmire. As he looked at her, an old gleam crept into his eye. It was childishly obvious that he was trying to make me jealous.

It worked.

I dropped the plates before them, and Mary tore fearlessly into the heap of crisped meat, looking with every passing hour less and less like the mother I thought I knew.

She finished in minutes and took a sip of water, leaving greasy fingerprints on the glass. She pushed her plate away and leaned an elbow on the splintered wood. Most of her cuts had stopped bleeding. I wanted more than anything to take her hand, but did not have the strength, and knew she wanted none of my comfort, anyway.

“So what now?” she said. “We’ve passed the evidence to your newspaperman and been chased about the park by a cut-rate Robin Hood. Shall we take the fight to them?”

“Not until we know who they are,” I said. “The Byrds’ blackmailing operation, the torched saloon, and your Robin Hood are all linked by this lowercase r.”

R for rancid?” said Cherub, not quite helpfully.

R for reindeer?” said Mary.

R for ragamuffin?”

R for really rude repairmen repair really rudely?”

For some reason, they considered all this hilarious. When they had stopped chuckling, I continued, feeling something like a sour kindergarten teacher who couldn’t understand why her charges didn’t find her fun.

“I know a woman who may know what the r stands for,” I said, “but it will have to wait till morning.”

“Why?” said Mary, serious again.

“She’s busy.”

“With what?”

“Everything.”

“That won’t give us much time before the resurrection ceremony.”

“We’ll have to make it count.”

“Then we’ve a night off?” she said, sharing a smile with Cherub that made the pork tap-dance in my stomach. “How shall we spend it?”

“When it comes to wasting an evening on the Westside,” said Cherub, “you could have no better guide.”

He offered Mary his hand, knelt low, and swept her off to see a miracle. As ever, he didn’t let my grumbling sour his mood.

 

At the Borderline, the bonfire burned hot and the snow was clear. We tipped our caps to Van Alen’s guards, crossing Fourteenth Street with an ease I had still not gotten used to. Technically it wasn’t a border anymore, but it still marked the line between Lower West and Upper, between desperation and simple poverty, between nightmares and pleasant dreams.

It was snowing softly as we walked up Fifth Avenue, the wind whispering the fresh powder back and forth on the spotless sidewalk. After months tramping across the imperfectly cleared pathways of the Lower West, it was like walking on a cloud.

We turned right on Seventeenth Street, just a few blocks south of Anacostia’s manse, and made for the fence. From over the iron came the blinding light and howling noise of the stem.

“Is that . . . ,” said Mary, gawking at the glare.

“The Eastside,” said Cherub.

“It’s pointless,” I said, “but it makes an awful lot of noise.”

Mary stepped to the fence, gliding like a sleepwalker, and I wondered if somewhere some memory was rising out of the muck. What might Mary Fall remember of the Eastside lights?

We would not learn that evening. Cherub guided her back into the dark. He had quieter entertainment in mind.

He led us to a limestone-fronted town house, holding out his hand to help Mary across the packed snow between the sidewalk and the servants’ entrance. On a street of broken windows and smashed doors, this house was protected by a stout silver padlock. Cherub had the key.

“After Eighth Avenue, I started a campaign of exploration around the Upper West,” he said. “Wanted to see if it was as charming as I’d been told. Mostly I was disappointed, but here . . . here I found something worthwhile.”

“Whose house is this?” said Mary.

“No idea.”

“Does it look familiar?” I asked her.

“I feel like . . . I feel like I’ve seen it in a dream.”

Cherub, never one to waste time on metaphysical questions, lit the lantern that hung inside the servants’ door. He led us through the butler’s pantry and larder to a flight of stone steps that wound down to the wine cellar. He pocketed two bottles and handed me two more.

“We came all this way for wine?” I said. “We have liquor downtown, and it hits a lot harder.”

“But it doesn’t taste half as good. That’s a Château Something or Other, straight out of the 1890s. But the wine isn’t why we’re here.”

Cherub took Mary by the hand and led us down more twisting steps into the earth. We walked for some time, until the air grew hot, with a hint of the funk of the riverfront in summer. I ran my finger along the stone walls. It was damp.

“Where are you taking us, Mr. Stevens?” said Mary.

“Don’t bother,” I said. “He considers himself a showman. He’ll never waste a surprise.”

We turned into a cavernous black room. Our feet echoed on tile. Mary took a step and Cherub wrapped his arm around her waist, pulling her back. I felt a temptation to rip them apart.

“If this basement is your miracle,” said Mary, “I’m not impressed.”

“Just wait,” he said, and started lighting candles. As each flame caught, the darkness of the great, lost room seeped back, inch by inch, and Cherub’s wonder was revealed.

“A swimming pool,” said Mary. “Here.”

“And all for us.”

In the candlelight, the tiles were a deep ocean blue. The water, opaque black, lapped at the edge, throwing up little wisps of steam and stretching farther into the darkness than our light could reach.

I splashed water on my face. It was hot and tasted of spoiled eggs.

“It isn’t possible,” I said.

“It isn’t half bad,” said Mary.

“This pool should have emptied years ago. Who’s maintaining it? Who is heating it?”

“I haven’t the faintest,” said Cherub.

“It could be fed naturally,” said Mary. “Some lost hot spring bubbling up out of the earth.”

“In Manhattan?”

“Or it could be just one of those beautiful Westside things,” said Cherub, standing closer to Mary than I could bear. He tossed a pair of bathing costumes at our feet.

“Don’t be a fool,” said Mary. She shrugged her shoulders and her dress fell to the floor. Either through gentility or shock, Cherub did not goggle but simply followed her lead. She dove into the pool, an arc as perfect as a rainbow, and Cherub splashed in after.

“Gilda,” said Mary, “even you can’t be sullen enough to turn this down.”

“You’d be surprised.”

“Wear a suit,” said Cherub. “The water’s astonishing.”

“That’s all right. You have fun. Someone has to work on the wine.”

I popped a cork, yanked off my boots, and dangled my feet in the water. It was warm enough to blot out the entire awful winter. I’d have liked to dive in, but that black water called to mind the hungry shadows at the bottom of the Hudson, and the woman I sent to her death. A foot bath and a bottle of vinegared wine were all the fun I could stand.

They splashed about, farther and farther into the dark, their laughter bouncing off distant tile. I fought the urge to shout for them to stay where I could see.

Finally Mary climbed out, her hair slick against her head, her skin reflecting the flickering orange. I had not imagined my mother could ever be so naked. She pulled her yellow dress back on and reached for the wine.

“That Cherub is an amusing fellow,” she said.

“Do you think so?”

“Don’t look so threatened. I don’t recall much about my taste in men, but I’m sure my preferences don’t run so short, filthy, or crass. I believe I lean more toward the powerful, the brooding.” She lost herself for a moment in contemplation of men imaginary, then brought us back to the earth. “Besides. He’s in love with you.”

Somewhere in the darkness, Cherub splashed and cackled like a happy seal. It was a pleasant sound.

“I have broken his heart too many times,” I said.

“It’s mended.”

“Why do you say that?”

“As soon as you were out of sight, he lost all interest in me. He only wants to make you green. I can see it’s working.”

She sat down, close enough that I could smell the sulfur in her hair. She breathed deep, eyes squeezed shut, and said, “The Lenstaadts.”

“Bless you,” I answered, unable to resist a bad joke.

“They lived in this house. I came for parties. I didn’t know they had a pool.”

I looked at her sharply. I’d never heard that story before, but there was so much about their youth my parents never bothered to tell. “What brought that back?”

“When we crossed Fourteenth Street, the city looked sane again. I began to remember. This district was my home.”

She wasn’t looking at the water; she wasn’t looking at me. She was staring into the dark, plumbing a memory as infinite and obscure as Cherub’s sulfurous pool. I didn’t want to push her, but I had to know what else she had found.

“Anything more?” I said.

“Anacostia Fall. Pierrepont. You were right. They were my parents.”

“You’re certain?”

“How could I have forgotten such outlandish names?”

I didn’t dare ask another question. After a while, she went on.

“I remember them, my parents. Not a lot. But Ana—everyone called her Ana—she was an eccentric. She painted our house pale blue, and everyone said she was insane. She taught us to think for ourselves. And Pierrepont—he was a painter, quite a serious one. Landscapes. Roamed all over the city, all over the state, painting scenes that I thought looked like heaven on earth. He was happiest when he was painting ruins. That burnt church? He would have made it a masterpiece.”

She looked at me. I don’t know if it was the candlelight or the damp, but she looked older than I had ever seen her—wrinkled and gray and ready to sleep forever. Worse than that, she looked afraid.

“What troubles you?” I said.

“That file of the Byrds, it was dated when?”

“1887.”

“And it said Pierrepont was deceased. But I remember him. A man dead thirty-five years.”

She wrapped my hand in hers. The warmth of the water was gone, and she was as cold as anyone out on the street.

“How old, Gilda?” she said. “How old does that make me?”

I hugged her, and she didn’t pull back. I had no better answer.

“This afternoon,” I said, “before the excitement, you asked me about doubt.”

“I did.”

“You should know—I do believe you.”

“All the way?”

“All the way.”

“And you’ll help me find out who I am? What I’m doing here?”

“You hired me, didn’t you?”

Cherub staggered out of the pool. He drained the rest of the bottle in one draught and hurled it into the dark. It splashed and was gone.

“In a minute I’m going to go back in,” he said, curling up on a towel and falling fast asleep. Mary draped a second towel over him, and I opened a fresh bottle. She watched him as tenderly as a mother looking down on a sleeping child.

She took a long sip from the bottle and winced.

“This wine’s past it,” she said.

“By ten years or more.”

She took another sip, but the bottle didn’t quite meet her mouth, and most of it spilled across the dress, staining soft yellow with sour red.

“Hell!” she said. “Your dress. I’ve really ruined it now.”

“My clothes have a way of being ruined. I’m used to it. When the sun comes up, we’ll swing by my house and put you in the least offensive of my black frocks.”

“You’re a good friend, Gilda Carr. The best on the Westside.” She thought for a minute. “And your family. Who are they?”

“My father was a cop. My mother died young. I hardly think of them.”

She shook her head, drank deep, and slumped backward across Cherub. I pulled my feet from the pool, dried off, and heaped a few towels on top of them. I lit another dozen candles, trying to beat back the dark as far as I could, and leaned against the wall, falling asleep certain that there was no way but cowardice to keep us both alive.

 

Dawn broke into our underground oasis through a strip of frosted glass panels in the ceiling. We woke with crushing headaches and bodies aching from a night spent on unforgiving tile. In the silver light of morning, the room was smaller than it had seemed in the dark, the pool nothing more than a few hundred gallons of murky, stinking green.