The ledger against his stomach, he woke up at dawn. In the dim light he turned its pages again. Canal. Charlton. Christopher. Clarke. Clarkson. Commerce. Desbrosses. Dominick. Fulton. Grand. Greenwich. Grove. Houston. Hudson. Barrow. Broome. King. Spring. His mouth tasted like coal dust. Squeezing his eyes shut, he stabbed at the page with his index finger, picking an address at random. Ten and a half Grove Street. He’d been up and down that route a hundred times, sniffing out Famous and his gang. He could almost visualize 10½ Grove in his mind’s eye.
Fog was pouring in off the river. Groping his way down Seventh Avenue, he heard the slow clipclop of hooves, and the soft curses of a driver. Out of the mist, a fly cab drifted past. Blots of gaslight smeared in the haze. Wrapped in a shawl, a young woman skittered past. In full sail, a drunk burst out of nowhere, shouldering Max off the sidewalk. His shoes slathered with muck, he let go a few choice comments, but the reeling man had already disappeared, swallowed by gray capes of drizzle. At the comer of West Twelfth he ducked into a saloon for a cup of tea with a splash of rum.
In a curious trick, the rising sun seemed to illuminate the fog from within, the rolling mist luminescent now but no less blinding. Revivified, he plunged downtown, then veered west along Bleecker. The shops weren’t open yet, but here and there domestic skirmishes were breaking out, unseen voices clashing in their morning rituals. A pair of shutters flew open and a chamberpot emptied onto the paving stones. Lamps glowed in a few windows. He smelled coffee, horsepiss, and rotting vegetables. Ten and a half Grove Street swam into view.
An outside staircase clung to the side of the dilapidated three-story building. Max ducked into a nearby doorway as a man in a plush overcoat and a homburg picked his way down the wooden slats. At the foot of the stairs, he paused to tap out his ivory pipe. A baby-faced man with an immature brush of a mustache, he stretched and sighed.
Max strolled up to him. “How’s the pill upstairs?”
“Fook Yuen.” The man smiled.
The Fountain of Happiness brand had a good reputation. Faye had bought some one time, and after she came out of her dream she sang a dozen verses of “Willie, the Weeper,” the hophead dirge. Max wasn’t averse to the cloying, rippling pleasure himself.
“High-hat, huh?”
“The best,” the apparently satisfied customer testified. “Ask for Yung Fat. He’ll fix you up.”
Yung Fat turned out to be a black-haired entrepreneur in a snappy vest. Just to establish rapport, Max ordered up a gong and watched as Fat carved out a sticky opium pill with a pair of ritual scissors. Drapes kept out the morning light, but Max could make out other dreamers sleeping in bunk beds across the room. After a few hits on the yen tsiang, he drifted into a warm, curved place, and, for a while, in perfect bliss, he became golden syrup, liquid atoms.
Max rode the opiate waves to sweet surrender. Warm thrills broke on an internal shore, showering him with agonizing delight. In time’s slow dance, his mouth went slack. A miniature sun burst in the back of his neck, soothing streams of light running down his arms and legs. Saliva banked under his tongue and trickled in rivulets down his throat. Working his jaw was a luxurious act. One more dollar, one more pill, and he floated on mild updrafts into dreamland.
When Yung Fat raked open the drapes, exposing a bright globe of pain high in the sky, Max threw his arm over his eyes and rolled over on his bunk. Fat rocked him gently. “Time go now, mister. Come back later.”
Digging deep inside his being, Max roused himself. He knew he had to ask Fat an important question, but in his loopy state it kept eluding him.
“Time go now,” Fat repeated, shaking him harder this time.
Max gathered himself again. A great green sea weighed down on him, but he began swimming to the surface. Then he was sitting up, brushing away glistening cobwebs. It all came back to him. Then on a fresh swell of delight, he again forgot what it was. Shaking his head, he groped for it.
“Ten and a half Grove Street. Right?” he blurted.
“Ya, get up, mister. Got to mop.”
Some wire in his head suddenly lit up. Mrs. Edwards’s empire. “So, who owns this wreck?”
Yung Fat stopped wrestling with him. His even, flat features froze as he gave Max the once-over. “No know, mister.”
“Who do you pay your rent to? You don’t own the building, do you?”
“No know. Go, get out. Bad time.”
“You don’t know if you own it or not?”
“No know.”
Before Max could get another question out of his mouth, Yung Fat lifted him bodily and hurled him toward the door. The attack came so suddenly, Max stumbled, long enough for Fat to grab him by his collar and shove him out onto the staircase. Woozy, he rocked on the creaking structure, the door slamming in his face. Leaning over the railing, he peered inside, but Yung Fat raked his hand across the pigeon’s-blood drapes, sealing his den from view.
Meandering through the neighborhood, Max slowly regained his senses. He had half a mind to barge back into Yung Fat’s and give the man a lashing, but there was no percentage in it. Better to keep moving like a dumb beast from address to address until somebody spit up the goods. At 449 Greenwich, nobody would open a door to him. Four-Fifty-Five Greenwich might have once existed, but now it was a missing tooth in the street’s crooked row. Fifty-Two Commerce Street consisted of a stable, a blacksmith’s, and an upstairs apartment.
“Who’s the landlord around here?” he asked the smith.
“Who’s askin’?” A slight, rope-muscled man was nailing a shoe onto a skittish bay mare. “Stay still, you bitch bastard,” he muttered.
“Max Greengrass. New York Herald.”
When the horse tried to bolt, Max threw himself against the slatted wall.
“I’ll hit you with this here!” the blacksmith warned, grabbing the horse’s halter and waving his weapon between her eyes. “How the hell should I know who owns this bloody shack?” Turning back to the snorting mare, he shouted, “You there, I’ll knock your teeth down your throat. Mind your p’s and q’s, lady.”
Edging along the stable wall, his heart rattling against his ribs, Max crept back to the sidewalk. He wasn’t sure he wanted to reconnoiter the rest of 52 Commerce. Then he saw how to get up to the second floor.
“Yeah, go up there, put your questions to Connie. She knows everybody’s business,” the smithy called out, his animal under control again.
Connie Flannagan came to the door with a baby at her breast. A harried look on her pointy features, she bounced the child on her shoulder. “Whatcher want?”
“Max Greengrass. New York Herald. We’re doing a survey of the real estate around these parts.”
“Ahh, don’t go botherin’ me. Can’tcha see what I got to put up with?”
Over her shoulder Max saw several cribs. An infant climbed up on unsteady feet, trumpeting discontent. In a rolling rebellion, the children sent up cries of distress. “I got my own and then these here. Tie me up and ship me to Bellevue, might as well.”
“Do you know who owns this building? Who you pay your rent to”
“Sure. The beetle’s got his hand out every month, don’t worry.” Now Max saw that Connie Flannagan was much younger than he first supposed. Her drawn skin still retained a trace of youthful glow, but the purple bruises under her eyes and her collapsed mouth implied what was to come.
“The beetle? Who’s he?”
Her charges whimpered and mewled. “Shut up, the lot of you! The beadle, from the corporation.”
“Sorry to be so dull, but what corporation are you talking about?”
“Holy Trinity’s the landlord around here. My friend Eleanor, she pays ‘em, and Suzie Watkins around the corner. She’s got a room, plaster’s all muck in the rain. Falls down and sticks to your head like bird crap.”
He retained his bland mask; but at the mention of Reverend Weems’s Holy Trinity Church, his blood started racing.
“What’s your friend’s address?” he asked, all mildness.
“Around the corner. You’ll see. Chimneypot’s falling down. The mothers go God knows where, and who has to feed ‘em?”
“The exact address?” he persisted.
“You’re a reporter, ain’t you? Go find it yourself,” she snapped.
He’d squeezed Connie Flannagan dry, but within ten minutes Suzie Watkins named the beadle, a Mr. Cunningham. Suzie showed him the melting plaster, too, an irregular three-by-five-foot patch shaped like South America on her ceiling.
His pencil flew as Suzie Watkins poured out her disgust.
“Ask him, do his vermin pay rent too?” A doughy-faced woman in a shapeless dress, Suzie Watkins had a New York sense of humor.
“Rodents?”
“They live under his roof too, don’t they? Why don’t they cough up too? I sleep with a corn broom, don’tcha know?” It was easy to imagine why she needed this weapon at night, but Watkins seemed to relish the details. “They run right over your face if you don’t smash ‘em,” she told him.
Max had to repress the urge to race back to the office and start writing up these revelations, but he needed to build a firmer foundation. To clear his head, he took a hike downtown, planning his attack on the Buildings Department as the pavement disappeared beneath his flying feet. Mysteries of lot and block numbers, deeds, transfers, and obscure agents waited to be plumbed. He could already feel the thrill of ancient paper between his fingers, though his first foray into the old records had yielded nothing but blind alleys so far.
He needed a guide. In the Deeds Office, he surveyed the hive of lawyers, contractors, agents, managers, and cockroach landlords. These men seemed to come in twos and threes, their private colloquies conducted in bare whispers. When Max passed by, they turned their backs, and their voices fell to an inaudible register. In the hushed, suspicious atmosphere, great piles of bricks and mortar and human cargo were changing hands, undergoing the obscure surgery of clause and codicil, sundered partnership and hidden interest.
He felt a sense of awe. This simple municipal office with its dented spittoons, its murky official portraits and dusty light globes, was the epicenter of perpetual change.
In the far corner of the chamber, poring over a record book, a gawky water-bird of a man adjusted his pince-nez, then dipped his beak deep into a tattered volume. His lint-skinned suit hung limp on his skeleton. A hungry scavenger, Max surmised. It was too bad he was down to a single dollar again.
“Say, bub, mind if I ask you a question?”
“Depends.” The voice resonated surprisingly deep.
“Well, I’ve been trying to track down who really owns some property, and I think they’re using agents to cover their tracks.”
“Did you check the mortgages?”
“No, I was looking at those books over there.”
“Mortgages. Over there,” the man said. “Match the lot numbers.”
Max grasped the point at once. Discovering who owned the paper might be illuminating, although mortgages could be bought and sold until a bank in Chicago held the rights to a slum on Avenue C. On the other hand, if Mrs. Edwards’s addresses represented the holdings of a single great entity like Holy Trinity, some of her property should be directly linked to the parent corporation. Or had the church conducted a systematic campaign to hide its hand?
In a few hours of hauling down heavy volumes and squinting at chicken-track notations, Max mapped the church’s crazy-quilt empire. To start, he checked the mortgage for Moriarity’s warren. The church had done nothing to cover its tracks. It held the mortgage on 141 Varick outright. On the other hand, the 22 Spring Street rookery’s paper had been purchased by none other than the Canal Street Bank, but the latter had obtained its interest from Holy Trinity. Connie Flannagan’s Commerce Street digs were owned directly by the church, as were dozens of other properties in the Midnight Band’s portfolio.
Famished, his lungs sticky with dust, he made his way out of the Deeds Office, doing his best to keep an idiotic smile from cracking his face. He could barely believe his good fortune. Here was a story with deep roots and thick branches. No, it wasn’t just a story; it was too complicated for that. Once he started interrogating church officials, and Weems himself, his revelations would flower into a series. Then a delicious idea flashed through his mind. The Health Department.
Why show his cards yet? Draw a few more from the deck first. But before that, he needed Parnell’s benediction.
A perfectly morbid smile played on the metro editor’s lips as he read Max’s proposal. Irregular patches of color, faint but visible, stained his pallid cheeks. Then he sucked in his bloodless lips.
“Oh, we could raise holy hell with this…. It’s a nice piece of work. But there may be a problem.”
“What? Why? We could roast these stuffed shirts for weeks with this stuff,” Max burst out, shaking his handwritten pages in his fist. “Wait ‘til I dig into the Health Department records, Stan. I don’t even have to look at them to know what’s there, for godsakes!”
“What’re you, Baby Riis? We’ll have to go to Bennett. It’s got potential, but it may be too dicey.”
“Pulitzer would plaster this all over his front page. Dana would have a field day! We’ve got a scoop. Why should we wait?” He regretted the fine spray of spittle he was raining down on Parnell, but it was too late now.
The editor measured his young reporter with his gimlet eye. “Let me ask you a question, you damn hothead. Do you know where our publisher communes with his Maker?”
“No. Don’t tell me.”
“Pardon the expression, but our lord and master worships at Holy Trinity. Where else? We’ll have to go see him.”
His heart raced as they threaded their way to Bennett’s corner office. The aristocratic publisher sat at his tall desk, a distracted look on his hollowed-out features. The tips of his mustache pointed perfectly in opposite directions. “Do you know what’s happening in Rome now, Parnell?”
“Haven’t a clue, sir.”
“Leaves. The trees have leaves, and they’ve had them for weeks. What’s the news here? Snow around Albany. Ice in the river in April. What fool said hell was hot?”
“I suppose the Mediterranean is looking rather agreeable about now,” Parnell said, sensing the great man’s mood.
Max bit his tongue while Bennett passed through his spiritual crisis.
“The Mediterranean? That pisshole puddle? Oh, it’s warm, it’s sunny all right, but where is the action? In Paris, in London? They’re fossilized, if you want the bald truth. How many days of his life can a man spend in pleasant cafes?”
Skillfully, Parnell pushed Max forward. “Here’s a bit of action, Mr. Bennett. Remember Greengrass?”
The publisher squinted at Max with a look of complete incomprehension.
“You called Byrnes on my behalf?” Max offered.
“Ahh, you’re the one. Junkard stuck you, eh? Okay, I’m game. Spit it out!”
When Max explained what he’d found out about Holy Trinity’s property, Bennett cut him off. “What of it? Of course they own some buildings. Every imbecile with a temperature knows that.”
Placing a light hand on Max’s elbow, Parnell interceded. “That’s what I thought when he first came up with it. But I could see, if we handled this right, how we could give circulation a good shot in the arm.”
“Garvey says we’re flat as a pancake. But I don’t see the point. Every church in town’s got some real estate.”
Parnell went on, though, in a cajoling tone. “Just give Greengrass a chance to lay it out. You might change your mind.”
Bennett’s eyes flicked from the view of St. Paul’s spire to his editor’s pale, seamed face. Parnell held the publisher’s intent gaze, and Max realized for the first time that the editor was taking a risk for him. The sphinx had become his champion.
“Shoot,” Bennett said.
Max set his feet wide and launched into the story.
“It’s the scale of the thing that matters,” he explained, turning page after page of addresses.
While Max spoke, the publisher seemed to drift away. His pale eyes rolled back, he whistled under his breath and smiled while Max pounded a dreadful point home.
When Max finished, Bennett asked Parnell a single question: “If we go with this, do you think they’ll blackball me for good?”
“They may let you through the church door, but don’t count on any conversation,” the editor advised grimly.
“Ha-ha! That’s rich! They already threw me out of Society once! They can’t do it a second time! Go, go, Greengrass. What do we pay you for?”