The woman had been screaming for a minute or more. I hoped she was nearly done.
It wasn’t a scream, really, but a rumble that started deep in her gut and vibrated out of every part of her. Her arm was wrapped around my neck, gripping it so tight that I worried my spine might crack, but I did not complain. Of the two of us, she was having the harder day.
The contraction ended, and the woman—a Portuguese mother of two come down from the Upper West to deliver her third—sagged against me to catch her breath.
“That was an easy one,” she gasped. “Was it too easy? Are they slowing down?”
“You’re fine,” said the woman who knelt at her feet. She wore tortoiseshell glasses and a white dress so fashionable that I couldn’t be sure if it were for medical use or simply style. She was Ida Greene, right hand to Glen-Richard Van Alen. Undoubtedly the most important person on the Lower West, she may have also been the most powerful black woman in the country. I could imagine no one else who might know who had sent that archer to kill me. As predicted, she was busy.
We were in the ballroom of a Fifth Avenue mansion abandoned before the fence went up. Blackout curtains covered the towering windows, and clusters of candles gave soft light for the ten laboring women who ranged up and down the polished parquet. There were beds provided, but the women preferred to crouch, lean on their partners, or brace themselves against the white paneled walls. Others occupied the hallways, dining hall, parlor, and library of the faded house, filling it with laughter, screams, and noises inhuman. The entire place smelled irresistibly of women. I had not predicted how happy it would make me feel.
The Portuguese woman began rumbling again. Another contraction was on its way. Mrs. Greene signaled for her midwife, just back from catching a baby, wearing a pink sweater flecked with blood. As the midwife stepped in, we stepped out, but the Portuguese woman would not let Mary leave.
“She’s helping,” she said, gripping Mary’s wrist. “She stays.”
“Of course,” said Mary, with a warmth I had not seen since I was a child.
“Twenty hours,” said Mrs. Greene as she led me across the room. “A third child will usually come quicker, but something is holding this one up.”
“Will she live?”
“Yes!” She chuckled. “She’ll be fine. An Eastside doctor would have sliced her open ten hours ago and she’d be bleeding out on his table. We let her go at her own pace. The baby will come.”
When Van Alen took over the Lower West, he pledged to bring civilization with him. Candles were distributed. Food was given away. Libraries, schools, soup kitchens, shelters, concert halls, and food stalls were promised—all the amenities Van Alen provided in the Upper West, available below the Borderline for the first time. The birthing center was the first to open, to provide for women whom Eastside doctors refused to treat. None of the other promises had been fulfilled, but the center was thriving.
“We have women coming down from the Upper West,” said Mrs. Greene, “we have women crossing over from the Eastside because they’ve tired of their doctors’ rough, patronizing care. I have three times as many patients as I can handle, too few midwives, too few beds, too few supplies, and I’m wasting time talking to you. Why?”
I showed her the scrap of paper. I let her feel the lowercase r.
“Oh hell,” she said. She nestled a cigarette into her ivory holder. She pressed on the wall, popping open an entrance to an old servants’ passage. She closed the door, and the din of life faded. She lit a lantern, then the cigarette. “Where did you get this?”
“From a man who shot my town house full of arrows and tried to do the same to me. A late employee of the Basement Club wore one like it. And I found the same mark in forms used by the Byrds, who have been spying on those who seek comfort in prayer.”
“Why did you bring it to me?”
This was less a question than a lamentation. I answered it anyway.
“I wanted to know what kind of syndicate is bold enough to adorn criminal evidence with an official seal. I know that when you’re not delivering babies or butternut squash, this is the sort of thing that keeps you up at night.”
“I advise you to change course.”
“I’d like nothing better. Were my time my own, I would content myself searching for blue ink and missing fingers. But those things didn’t try to kill me. The man who wore this paper did. That makes me mad.”
“Don’t play tough, Gilda. It doesn’t suit you.”
“Fine. I’m scared past the limits of my senses, for me and for that nice young woman out there, who matters more to me than I can reasonably explain. I need to find out who wants us dead. I need to change their minds.”
Ida Greene did something that, in our brief acquaintance, I had never thought possible. She removed her glasses. Without them, her face was rounder, her gaze softer. She truly seemed worried for me.
“That’s the mark of Storrs Roebling: a dull, dangerous man. His outfit is the Roebling Company. They’ve been a power on the Eastside since before you were born.”
“I’ve never heard of them.”
“They prefer it that way. You’re accustomed to the Westside, where criminals are baroque. The Roeblings are different. They own tenements, tanneries, warehouses, mechanics’ shops. Their money pads the pockets of the NYPD; their stock is traded on the Wall Street exchange. And all of it is supplemented by saloons like the Basement Club, where they profit off the city’s worst vices, without any pretense of pleasure or class. They push liquor and heroin and kill anyone who wastes their time.”
She finished her cigarette and lit another off the butt. The air in the narrow tunnel was close and getting closer all the time.
“And blackmail?” I said.
“I wouldn’t be surprised. What you’ve described sounds like Roebling to a T. He’s ravenous for information. Slurps it up like a baleen whale taking mouthfuls of ocean, then strains out whatever dirt he thinks might be of use.”
“But the form—why the form? What kind of lunatic puts his brand on something like that?”
“A lunatic with nothing to fear. Roebling is rich, powerful, respectable—to the people he needs to appear respectable to—and ruthless. Every minute of his employees’ time is tracked, every movement is watched, every action is recorded, checked, double-checked, and written down. They have forms for everything. Why should blackmail be any different?”
“And you let him open up in the Lower West?”
Mrs. Greene took an extra beat to answer that question, blowing smoke out of the side of her mouth in a long, narrow stream, amused that I could be so stupid.
“How much control do you imagine we have?” she said.
“Enough to stop parasites like the Gray Boys from infesting the Lower West. If a man like Roebling had tried to cross the stem when Barbarossa was in charge—”
“She’d have let a few hundred children die to protect her bottom line. We don’t do that. We’re not an army. We’re not thugs. We provide social services and protection to people whose city has given up on them.”
“Then you should have protected us from Roebling.”
“With what? Half our guardsmen died at Eighth Avenue; most of the rest deserted. We’re trying to run twice as much territory with a tenth the men. When Roebling opened up the Basement Club, I had to allow it or start a war I couldn’t win.”
“But that didn’t stop you from selling him your red gin.”
“What can I say? I’m a businessman above all else.”
A businessman. A humanitarian. I had seen her with a switchblade. She dressed better than Barbarossa, but she was no less ruthless.
“If you couldn’t stop them building the Basement Club,” I said, “could you be the one who burned it to the ground?”
“Miss Carr, you demonstrate admirable imagination.”
“That’s no answer.”
“It’s the best you’ll get. Lord, I hate this intrigue. All I want is to help people—give them food, shelter, a midwife, a chance. But all that costs a hell of a lot of money, and crime is the only thing that pays.”
A horrid roar came from the other side of the thin wood panel: a woman in the throes of something I could not imagine. Ida Greene shook her head.
“We tell them not to scream like that,” she said. “It’s a waste of energy.”
“It seems like a reasonable response.” I tried a new tack. “Did you know the Byrds are working for Roebling?”
“Until this week, I was blessedly unaware that the Byrds existed at all. Then I started seeing handbills for their electric resurrection. Idiotic.” She rapped her knuckle on the door. “If people want to beat back death, they should work a shift here.”
“What if the Byrds can really do it?”
“Don’t be a fool. We seem to be the only two people in the Lower West who know that death is final. The district is buzzing about this ceremony. It’s going to be a mess.”
“Could you stop it?”
“Only if I want a riot. Unless I have cause, the best I can do is contain it.”
A banging on the door. Mrs. Greene opened it. On the other side was a sweat-soaked midwife’s assistant whose graying hair hung limp around her face.
“What?” said Mrs. Greene.
“Towels. We’re running low, and the washing women are all backed up, and—”
“I keep a reserve store hidden in the cupboards beneath the stairs. Take all you need and send two of the attendants to help with the wash.”
The door slammed shut. Mrs. Greene put her glasses back on and gave me a look that said our audience was coming to an end.
“Your time is precious,” I said.
“And you’ve taken up more than your share. You obviously want a favor—what is it?”
“Arrange a meeting for me with Storrs Roebling.”
“We don’t have that kind of relationship.”
“Then tell me where I can find him.”
“Whatever you’re planning, Miss Carr, it’s a mistake.”
“You have no idea.”
She pressed the “83” tag against the wall, scratched out an Eastside address, and handed it to me. Then she popped open the door and returned to the ballroom. The flood of light, of pain, was almost blinding. Mrs. Greene sliced through the chaos like a butcher through bone, and I struggled to keep up.
“I’ll need you to get me across,” I said, following at her elbow.
“Did you misplace your papers?”
“I’m in order. My companion is not. Can we use one of your tunnels?”
“Fine. But if Storrs Roebling doesn’t kill you, I’d like you to tell me everything you learn.”
I nodded, and we took our places at the sides of the Portuguese woman, who was now laboring on her hands and knees. Mary bent over her, pressing hard onto her lower back, while the midwife wet a towel for her neck.
“There is one more thing,” I said, as softly as I could. The Portuguese woman glared at me, and I wished I had the power to sink into the floor.
“What?” hissed Mrs. Greene.
“There’s a few dozen people freezing to death in the quarantine ward at St. Vincent’s. You owe them food and coal.”
“I’ll see that they get it—now be quiet.”
When the contraction ended, Mary stepped back, stretching out her muscles but not making a sound of complaint. Mrs. Greene took her place, one woman’s hands replacing another’s. When we left, the mother was screaming again.
Ida Greene’s Twelfth Street passage was a narrow crawl space wedged between Broadway and the thundering BRT. It was cramped, badly lit, and wet with melted snow. I had brought a skinny package wrapped in newspaper, and keeping it out of the muck made the trip an ordeal. Mary chattered the entire time.
“It just seems a waste, crossing over to the Eastside if we’re not going to visit the Hall of Records as well,” she said. “What does any of this have to do with me?”
“These things always connect.”
“That’s a stupid thing to say.”
I did not disagree. But I also wasn’t wrong, and she didn’t turn back. My hand splashed into a puddle of black slush. We crawled the rest of the way in silence.
It had been gray, dark, and threatening snow when we went into the tunnel. When we emerged from its terminus, a Van Alen–owned lamp shop, snow fell like powdered sugar on Broadway’s glittering sidewalks. The lights were blinding and the noise, as always, was more than I could comfortably bear. Motionless, blaring automobiles filled the narrow strip of asphalt between the sidewalk and the fence, stuck in the kind of traffic jam we are never subjected to on the Westside. Pedestrians weaved around them freely, cursing, shouting, and shivering from the cold.
The spectacle hit Mary like a hammer to the forehead. I was two doors down before I realized she hadn’t followed me. She stood frozen before the lamp shop, speechless and pale, stunned by modernity’s gaudy face.
“Tourists,” I muttered, and took her by the hand.
Eastside crowds are notoriously sluggish, and the snow made them worse. Three months prior, they would have greeted the gentle dusting with holiday cheer, but we were in the pit of winter now, and the mood on the avenue was frantic and depressed as people fought to get home.
“I’ve never seen anything like this,” said Mary.
“You don’t know what you’ve seen.”
“I don’t. I don’t, of course, but I know . . . nothing like this.”
We were halfway across Tenth Street when Mary stopped and cackled at the gutter.
“What?” I said.
“They clear the sidewalks here. No snow. No trash.”
“No corpses, either.”
“It puts your Westside to shame.”
A horn blared. I jerked her out of the crosswalk before she was squashed. The driver bellowed a few choice oaths, and I returned fire so forcefully that Mary almost looked impressed.
“What are those machines all over the street?” she said.
“Autos. Horseless carriages.”
“Are they a recent invention?”
“Hardly. They’re more common all the time.”
We slogged south, block by block, passing stationery stores and dress shops, chophouses and oyster rooms, pawnshops, a billiard hall, three newsstands, a speakeasy disguised as a doctor’s office, and a doctor’s office that was filthier than any saloon. Mary stopped at every one, marveling at the cheap baubles that were the great achievement of our age, so impressed with it all that she couldn’t see how deeply I did not care.
At Waverly, where the herd fought for admittance to the subway, a nickelodeon barker begged Mary to come inside.
“One minute to showtime, ma’am, which means you’re in under the wire! The season’s finest motion picture, ‘Sally Out West,’ and I’ve got two seats left, fine seats, perfect for a pair of young women with ten cents to spare.”
“Out of the way,” I said, but Mary was transfixed.
“Motion picture?” she said.
“Not just a motion picture, the motion picture: seventeen minutes of giddy joy from Sally Feeney, comic sensation of our age, only a nickel, only a nickel, but hurry up, would ya, because picture’s about to roll.”
“We don’t have seventeen minutes,” I said, “and I don’t have a nickel. Let’s go—quick quick.”
“Maybe next time,” apologized Mary. I dragged her south, her eyes fixed on the blinding colors of the theater marquee. For all my admonishment, I failed to convince her to pick up speed.
“Is the Eastside always so startling?” she asked while gawking at a wigmaker’s dummies.
“It hits me like a toothache: one I’d thought I’d shaken and forgotten how much I hate.”
“You’re a terrible grouch, and if you hate the Eastside I think that’s the finest recommendation there is.”
“That’s because you literally don’t know anything.”
“Hmph.”
The snow picked up. We were nearly at our destination. Mary stopped again—not to peer into a barbershop or cobbler’s, but to look at me with a curiosity whose ferocity was almost frightening.
“Why does this all seem so new?” she said.
I knew what she was driving at, and I did not want to let her get there.
“Most of it is new, and it won’t last a week,” I said. I tried to press on, but she held my wrist tight.
“Before my memory was taken from me, I must have seen thousands of autos, watched hundreds of motion pictures. None of this should surprise. But it’s struck me like a girl’s first taste of liquor. Why do I feel I’ve never seen any of this before? Where have I been?”
On a quiet side street in the Upper West, under an elm, in the yard of a Methodist church. The Fall family vault, where some ancient endowment ensured that no weed may grow on New York’s holiest ground.
“I don’t know,” I said. “Perhaps you don’t get out much.”
It stopped her questions, but it didn’t make her happy. We walked the rest of the way at a nice clip, all the wonder that had animated Mary’s face wiped clean.
In a whitewashed cast-iron palace at the corner of Third Street, the Roebling Company looked down on the stem. A small door marked “ROEBLING” opened onto a lobby with an elevator. An old man in a tidy uniform sat behind a gold desk. He informed us that the Roeblings occupied floors five through seven. We signed his book, and he waved us on to the elevator.
“What name did you use?” asked Mary.
“Sally Feeney.”
“I’m Fairy Mall.”
I couldn’t help it. I giggled, and she looked at me like I’d sprouted polka dots.
“I didn’t think you knew how to laugh,” she said.
“I didn’t know—really, I never had any idea—that you were funny.”
“Keep watching. You’ll learn a lot.”
The elevator was old but spotless, every brass fitting shining bright. The operator, a middle-aged woman who looked like she was built out of railroad iron, guided it up with a touch so gentle that it made Mary say “Oh!” Another unexpected surprise.
We stepped off the elevator and were greeted by a massive gold-plated r. Beneath it, a frail young man with hair as wet and rounded as a scoop of ice cream eyed us like we were a stain. After our trip through the tunnel, we might as well have been. The plate on his desk read “Sullivan.” Pinned to his breast was a little slip of paper that said “71.” He set down his glass of water and said, “We don’t get many women here.”
“It’s a matter of lost property,” I said. “An employee of yours was—”
Mary ripped the long package from my hands and slapped it on Sullivan’s desk.
“This is the property of Storrs Roebling,” she said. “We shall return it to him personally, or we shall give it to you in the neck.”
“Hand it over and I’ll make out a receipt,” he said, not looking at Mary.
Mary tore open the package, revealing a sparkling silver arrowhead. She pointed it at Sullivan’s throat.
“Oh,” he said. “Perhaps you should speak to the floor manager.”
There was a little noise at his waist—a snap popping open, I realized a moment later—and the soft tap of something heavy brushing against polished wood. He’d drawn a pistol. I believe it was a semiautomatic, although I am happily no expert in these matters. It looked large enough to blow a hole through an elephant, however, and it was pointed at Mary’s gut. With his other hand he lowered the arrow until it pointed at the floor.
“I thought you said there were no guns here,” said Mary.
“Just west of the stem. Here, they are an essential accessory.”
“You’ll come with me,” said Sullivan.
“You are absolutely right.”
Sullivan shrugged toward the door behind him. I opened it, and Mary stepped inside. He followed us into a long room of clerks scribbling numbers at little desks with little lamps. There were windows along the western wall, but the shades were drawn tight. At the back of the room, a smoked glass bubble protruded from the wood.
Our feet were silent on the white carpet. I tilted my head toward Mary, feeling that even my softest whisper was louder than the room could bear.
“What happened to sweet-talking our way in?” I said.
“Sometimes it’s better to do something loud.”
Someday, I would give Mary a talk about the importance of patience. It would go brilliantly, I’m sure.
The clerks wore their ratings on their jackets: 77, 74, 79, and one terrified 62. Their suits were spotless and well-trimmed, cut to accommodate the blue steel pistols that dangled from every waist. I had not seen so many guns since the year before, when I emptied a boatload into the Hudson River, and the sight of all that gleaming death made me shiver.
“Mr. Sullivan,” said Mary, in her calmest Sunday school voice. “It’s quite difficult to follow you when you’re behind us with that gun.”
“Back wall,” he hissed, “then we’ll talk.”
We stopped before the smoked glass bubble, where a hairline crack in the paneling marked a hidden door. I leaned close to the glass, trying to catch a glimpse of who might be inside, and was rewarded only with a twisted view of my own ridiculous face.
Sullivan tapped his pistol on the door, and it popped open. Mary stepped through. Sullivan went after, and before I could follow, the door slammed in my face. I reached for the knob, but there was none. I banged on the wood. No answer came.
“Mary,” I said. “Mary?”
The clerk nearest, a grease-slick man with a 68 rating, sneered. Others snuck glances before returning, as quick as they could, to their work. Panic snaked through me like wildfire. My feet felt heavy, my mind sluggish. I was surprised by how scared I could feel.
I decided it was time they felt a little fear, too.
I grabbed the back of 68’s chair and spun him around to face me.
“What the hell, woman?” he said, straining to return to his desk.
“How do you get in that room?”
“You don’t.”
He pushed me, hard enough that I stumbled, and got back to work. I leaned over him and caught a stultifying glimpse of the long ledger he was reviewing, line by line, whose every minute character was inscribed in Enoch’s sunset blue ink. I snatched his inkpot and screwed the cap on tight.
“That’s my ink,” he said.
“Shut up,” I told him, and I took his lamp, too.
I pulled it from the outlet and threw it across the room in one smooth motion. It may have been the most graceful thing I’d ever done.
The smoked glass wall fell slowly, like a sheet of ice cracking off a mountainside. The scratching of pens stopped. The only sound was the relentless ticking of the great clock at the end of the room.
Behind the destroyed glass, Mary stood between Sullivan and an ancient man in a slim-fitting black suit who leaned on a silver cane. His skin was like week-old oatmeal, scaly and soft, and an ashy moustache drooped across his mouth. Sullivan looked like he yearned for death, but the other two smiled cheerfully.
“Miss Carr,” said Mary, “meet Jerome. I was just telling him we needed to speak to his boss.”
“Welcome to the Roebling Company, Miss Carr,” said Jerome.
He prodded the last remaining shard of window with his cane. It landed on the carpet with a soft thump that was as loud as a starter pistol. The clerks got back to work.