Red Snow

Deep in the heatwave summer of 1929, and Leon Trotsky was in exile from Soviet Russia, full colour television had been demonstrated by Bell Laboratories in New York, a study had revealed that Germany would finish paying war reparations by 1988, and stock market prices were pronounced by none other than Irving Fisher, respected professor of economics at Yale, to have reached “a permanently high plateau.”

Even curled up in the furthest corner of the basement, life on the street still flickered down toward her from above. Kids ran. Streetcars rattled. Bicycles ticked. Horses clopped. Then, at long last, night finally fell. So easy now to escape this tired old building, alley by alley and shadow by shadow, then climbing rooftop to rooftop, pinnacle to pinnacle, spire to spire. This new New York was a place where cats prowled and rats scurried and dogs howled against the blue dark, and where pigeons fluttered from her fingers, bright with beating blood, and windows yawned in tired tenements as sleepers tossed in the sweat of their dreams, and soot washing hung against the stars. This city. Her city. Until she reached the place where the El scattered sparks along the Bowery, and slipped toward the soot ruin below.

Ducking around a line of Fire Department sawhorses into what remained of a backyard, a warped and blistered door leaned sideways, and the corridor beyond was a midnight forest glimmering with jewels of melted glass. Karl, is that you? The house straining to reform itself around Corpseman’s memories—a place of long, dark silences and empty corridors where spoons clicked and the kids outside shouted “Kike” and “Yid.” But most of the roof had collapsed in this big room where Harriet Mackenna had once sat and stared down at her own transformed self at a long table, and where all this destruction had begun. She sniffed and roamed until her fingers encountered something solid amid the wet rubble. That gun. His gun. Her gun. The Navy Colt. The El rocked by again outside, raining down lumps of masonry and threatening to bring down what was left of the house as she clasped the precious weapon and picked it carefully clean. But what good was it without bullets? And what good was she?

The evening ferry pulled off from Battery in grey-white streams of steam and gulls. New Jersey on one side and Brooklyn on the other, and for a few moments as the ship turned toward Staten Island, the air on the hottest day yet of this record summer felt so cold she had to bite back the chatter of her teeth.

“Sure I have.” Leaning on the rail, Mickey Mackenna tipped his fedora and lit a cigarette. “But you shouldn’t be such a stranger, sis, least of all with your own blood. You know, I go home to see Ma most Sundays now. Bring a fruit pie and help carve the roast. Since I’ve been doing so well lately, I’ve been able to get her a new fridge for the kitchen. Not that she’s grateful, of course.”

Mickey watched the ash from his cigarette drift toward the foam. “The nuns at the sanatorium do what they can, and of course Ma lights candles and prays. But I don’t think she actually visits him much, seeing as suicide—and even if it didn’t quite work—is a mortal sin. What can you do, eh? But you’ve changed, sis, an’ I don’t just mean that hair. You look paler than ever, for a start.”

“Thing is, if there was such as thing as lookin’ well and not at all well all at the same time, that’s how I’d say you look. Can’t see why you’re hiding yourself beneath that big ole hat, or those lovely eyes behind them tinted old-man cheaters either…” Mickey leaned toward her—a knowing, smiling, almost Da-shaped shadow—as if to lift them off, and Harry had to force herself not to flee or strike out.

They were passing the flags and cannons of Governor’s Island now, and the whole Hudson was scattered with white liners and chugging tugs and grubby dredgers. And, hey, wasn’t that a seaplane swooping down in a glittering spray? Then there were sails instead of smokestacks, and the cranes raised high above the piers of New Jersey dissolved into rural browns. Harry grasped hard at the ferry’s handrail to stop more of Corpseman flooding in.

“No more than you do, Mickey—selling cheap swill for people to deaden their hopes with.”

“Less of the cheap, if you don’t mind! The stuff I got in my van in the hold is the best Canadian Club. Least, that’s what it says on the labels. But just look at it, sis…” He tossed the butt of his cigarette. “Ain’t this the greatest city in the world?”

And it was. Rising so sheer and gleaming across the crimsoned waters that, even wearing these tinted glasses, and with a cold sweat of antimony pouring out of her, the vision seared her eyes. Even now, and if only the dark parasite at its heart could be destroyed, it could be turned from a city of dream into something true and real. In fact, that was her best, and only, chance.

“To be honest, sis, I still reckon all that rights-for-the-workers stuff is just another teamster scam. Plain fact is, you gotta look after number one. An’ this number one you see right here…” Mickey tapped his lurid tie. “Well, he ain’t doin’ so bad. I got contacts. Otherwise, I sure as hell wouldn’t a been able to get you what you were askin’ for.”

“’Course I did. An’ I hope you’re noticing the way I ain’t asking no questions. If there’s one thing you learn in my line a work, it’s that the answers ain’t worth it. Like that wanted picture, fer instance, looking a whole lot like you, that was in all the papers a while back. Or why the hell, when as I recall you was always talking about nonviolent protest, my little sister has all of a sudden gotten hold of a gun.”

“Yeah—I s’pose not. An’, like I say, maybe better not to ask.” He lifted a screw of brown paper from his coat pocket. “You’re lucky I’ve got this friend, see, that makes dum-dums. Although you’ve got no idea just how hard any kind of bullion is to get hold of at the moment. For some reason, there’s people buying up the stuff like it’s going out a fashion.”

“Nah. Don’t worry.” He pushed the screw of paper, a surprisingly heavy weight, into Harry’s gloved hand. “An’ if you want my advice, which I’m sure you don’t, don’t ever use them at all.”

They were closing in on Staten Island now. He’d need to get back down to his hooch-laden truck, and she could smell the seep of his sweat, see the thickening fold of fat above his shirt collar, and knew she had to get more of something—soon, and it really didn’t matter what—into her veins.

“But, Jesus Christ, Harry…!” He shook his head. “Silver bullets! An’ such a big old calibre, an’ all. Like something out of the Wild West, if you really, truly, have gotten hold of that kind of gun… If I didn’t know you better, sis, I’d say Ma was right when she used to go on about you commies dancing around in the altogether an’ kissin’ Satan’s arse.”

“That’s more like my little sis. Just like Da used to say, lemon-sweet and lemon-sharp…” Mickey almost patted her shoulder before he shivered, shoved his hands into his pockets, and swaggered off.

So here she was, Sibylla Lee, dressed with money from the Unison Books cash register, and her hair a fashionable bob that somehow stayed blonde without needing more of Charity’s Goldbeam. Her hats, of course, were broad-brimmed, and she wore long gloves and silk stockings just like any other modern gal, and the thing about Bayton and Stritcher’s summer jackets was that the pockets were strong and deep enough to hang well with the copy of Looking Backward she’d retrieved from the realtor at Riverside Heights on one side to balance out the weight of the Navy Colt on the other. Then, there was lip rouge and facepowder to be layered over the foundation until her face was protected from the merciless sun, and of course everyone wanted to know exactly where she’d got those adorable little blue glasses from. But the finishing touch that really counted in all this endless charade was a languid sense of fuck-you-all. Now, at long last, she’d become the creature Corpseman had wanted. And the world finally wanted to know.

If you said you thought the work of some newly proclaimed genius was pretentious rubbish; if you pronounced that caviar tasted like fish glue, and that Eddie Cantor was a preening oaf, and all these private gardens should be people’s parks; if you said that all the people at this absurd clambake were bloated parasites who deserved to be taken into a cellar and shot like the fucking Romanovs, they handed their glasses to the servants and clamped their ivory cigarette holders between their teeth and cried Bravo! Well done, Sibylla! And you must, must, must come again tomorrow, and also stay over the weekend at our place in the Hamptons, and we won’t hear otherwise, no matter if you’ve got fifty other invitations or, as you say, a million better things to do.

She’d gotten beyond the point of staring at people with disgusted curiosity, and had asked the seemingly more likely candidates outright. Are you a monster? Have you existed for centuries? Do you drink blood? Do you dwell in a place of fine mirrors and glass? Only to hear the questions repeated along corridors and across terraces with headshakes and rueful smiles. She’s such a one, that Sibylla. “Incorrigible” is the word. Soon, her questions would become catchphrases, with drinks or dances named after them.

Somewhere amid all of this, caught in the dark gleam of polished floors, trompe l’oeil walls and sunset ceilings, and in the shadows of arbours, or standing mockingly at her back, was the one, the source, the figure, who moved on these currents as they had for centuries, and as shark drifts the oceans in the lazy interludes between each kill. But there were mirrors everywhere, floor to ceiling, in this clamorous new life, drowning out everything in their light and noise. They even sheathed the latest buildings, tumbling her into her own reflection as she roamed the sweating, chafing streets.

Then leaping down into this dark, final alley close to the junction of West Forty-Seventh, where this had all somehow begun, and where jagged fire escapes strove, but somehow never seemed reachable, the star-fogged sky. Daisy, is that you…? But not even a body—not even a hint of that particular distinctive odour of decay amid the softer tones of human garbage and feral catshit—and the creatures she’d once tended looked up with hungry, innocent gold and emerald eyes before they dissolved in a squalling flurry of blood and fur.

Then it was Labour Day, when even the filthiest troglodytes were supposed to get a break from their squalid lives. All those special trains to Coney Island, crammed with big-bosomed mamas and snotty-nosed kids. There’ll be tears, for sure, before nightfall, and vomit on the boardwalk, and blood on the sand, and maybe a fight in Luna Park—but hey, guys, and instead of heading up to my cabin in the Catskills, why don’t we go along?

So it was all aboard the Sea Beach Line, or at least the best of this summer’s gang. Which of course meant Ben and Tim, not to mention Freddie and Connie, and obviously dear, sweet Sibylla. For things just weren’t the same without her. She’s so darling and daring. So bitter and dark.

Jostling amid elbows and picnic baskets in a bilious carriage, Freddie nudged Connie, and Connie nudged Harry, and she realised they were passing around these dried-up buttons, and chewing them with wincing grins.

“Don’t you want some? It’s peyote…” whispered Ben or Tim, but with Carter’s Mayan Purple now burning her flesh with icicle flames, and last night’s claw-marks already healed across her face and arms, she shook her head. Then it was terminus, terminus, and the carriage voided its load.

Harry wandered amid the rip-off coconut shies, pinging test-your-strengths, creaking Ferris wheels, and faithful recreations of the Galveston Flood. Everything had changed, but it all seemed so familiar. Although—squinting down from the boardwalk above Brighton Beach at the crowded sands—she knew from some twist of newness in her head that Corpseman had never experienced the delights of Coney Island.

People. There were so many of them, crammed against the ocean like half-naked lemmings, that they seemed to lose all purpose and particularity. She could understand the moods and needs of the dark presence far better here. It would be a favour, a sacred privilege, to relieve one of these creatures of its puny needs. A quick spin on the carousel, or a dark ride in the funhouse. Everyone was already screaming here anyway. So very hard to resist that endless, itching, why not?

Drawn toward the crackle and bark of a loudspeaker around which hunch-shouldered men spat and smoked, she realised she remembered this exact spot. Da had parked the Packard right up by that Feltman’s stall. And she, seeing as she often got carsick, had ridden all the way up front.

Harry turned. As usual, May Linden was exquisitely dressed, this time in long slacks and a puffy linen blouse with appliqué detailing, and matching two-tone shoes, gloves, and handbag, and a tam o’shanter cap.

“You should be impressed I even recognise you, my dear.” She leaned beside her. “Although I’ll admit that, standing over there and listening to Jimmy Foxx hit the hell out of our boys, it took me a while.”

She shrugged. One thing she’d learned this summer, along with the various flavours of printer’s ink and animal blood, was that the real trick of pretending to be someone—yourself, or anyone else for that—was not to give a shit. “Isn’t living in New York supposed to be about finding things out?”

May Linden hitched a quizzical eyebrow above her sunglasses. “And maybe enjoying yourself as well…? Although you can’t beat Coney Island on a Labour Day—especially with the Yankees playing away. Otherwise, Sibylla, you know exactly where to find me, rain or shine, spring, summer, or fall.”

Seeking shade as the day unravelled, Harry found herself exploring the freak shows, peering through curtains at Ursa the bear girl, and Lo the dog-faced boy, and several varieties of Siamese twins. Then she saw Freddie Longstreet, whom she’d last spotted with a troupe of office girls. Now he was alone, and grinning at some writhing thing in a pit called Rubberneck Roy, for the man had an unerring nose for degradation.

“Hey, Sibylla!” He staggered across the foetid tent. “And here was me thinking I’d seen everything…” His pupils were pinpricks, his collar had come loose, and a sheen of sweat covered his face.

He was in no state to argue as she grasped his arm and drew him outside, where he fumblingly lit a cigarette. “The ceremony of innocence is drowned,” he muttered as he studied its glowing tip. “And what rough beast, its hour come at last…”

“You know, you’re nothing but a beast yourself—an ignorant, brutal oaf.”

“Ha!” He nodded and laughed. “And you must think all the iron in that pier over there should be used for building tractors, seeing as you’re such a dyed-in-the-wool bolshie.”

“It’s true, I detest what Coney Island stands for, Freddie. But not as much as I detest you.”

Freddie smelled unwell, and swayed as he walked. He gazed oddly at things, and jumped at sounds even she couldn’t hear amid the wheeling, funhouse roar.

“Absolutely.” He fumbled in his pockets. “But this time, dear, sweet Sibylla, you’ve got to have some as well.”

She slipped the button into her pocket beside the loaded Navy Colt as Freddie diligently chewed and pulled a lemony face. He wasn’t handsome now. He didn’t even seem young. In fact, he looked lost and dirtied and worn out. Poor little rich boy, grabbing and destroying everything he’d ever touched. She could almost feel sorry for him, but she pushed the feeling resolutely away.

She led him on through the crowds and fed him more peyote as the sky grew pale. Then she held back a flop of his hair as he tried and failed to vomit into a fire bucket, and assured him it really didn’t matter about the piss stain down his leg as she helped him down onto the littered sand.

“It doesn’t matter.” She steered him beneath the boardwalk. “Have another button.”

Heaps of rotting seaweed, beer bottles, shed condoms, driftwood, odd shoes, and picked fishbones flickered in the passage of feet overhead. That, and a familiar, fleeing scurry of rats. But this was not the time.

“The others can find themselves. You know New York better than most, don’t you, Freddie? Its factions and parties, its ups and downs?”

“You must have seen a lot. Must know everyone that’s worth knowing, and quite a few that aren’t? Places as well.”

“And there’s a particular place and person I’m looking for, Freddie. In many ways, they’re right up your street. Or, at least, some dark back alley where you can treat women like the toys you probably used to break as a kid.”

“No, you just listen to me, Freddie Longstreet, because I think you might just be the kind of vermin who can help me with this. You must have been to some places—you must have seen some things. The kind of party, for example, where it seems as if the music and the dancing have been going on for centuries. There’s fine wine, I guess, and all the usual bullshit, and no expense has been spared. But that isn’t really the point of this particular shindig. What I’m really talking about, Freddie, is people getting killed for the fun and the hunger of it, and their blood being drunk like the wine. And the host—well, they’re all over everything, and so hellishly cultured and polite and well connected you can scarcely see they’re there at all. Does that ring any bells, Freddie, in whatever you have that passes for a brain?”

“Of course not—no.” But there was a kind of dawning knowledge in those bloodshot eyes even as he shook his head. “There isn’t—”

“But there is, isn’t there, Freddie? You know it as well as I do. It’s the place you’re always trying to get to next in those tedious jaunts about town.”

“Sometimes…” He gave a ticking swallow. “People say it’s—I don’t know… Somewhere that used to be, and will be soon again. A fine old ship moored out on the marshes, maybe, or a brand-new house filled with mirrors right uptown. But it’s never tonight, and it’s always some place you only hear about from a friend of a friend of a friend…” He attempted a pathetic smile. “But, you’re right, Sibylla. A place like New York, it’s simply got to be there.”

Amazing, how much of the stuff he’d brought with him. He didn’t even know the value of these poisonous little brown pellets, let alone the life and dignity of others. She grabbed his lapel, and felt shivering resistance as she forced yet more peyote into his mouth.

He couldn’t even say can’t now, and his eyes were wide, and he was struggling to breathe.

“You really need to get this stuff down your throat, Freddie. Otherwise you’re simply going to choke…”

She regarded him with tender delicacy as he started to gulp and judder. Then she felt around in the damp sand for a broken bottle, and drove the jagged crown of glass into his wrist. He shuddered and his eyes rolled, but she held him tightly and fought back the pull of her need as the red flow bloomed wastefully into the sand. Terrible, to deny herself this moment of easy pleasure, but good as well. After all, there were countless ways to consume a human being.

“But if you want to know, if you really want to know, what it’s like to be at that party, Freddie, but also if you want to live…” She lifted his pulsing arm to his lips. “You have to drink.”

The best thing of all was that he did, gasping and sucking at his own blood in a desperate need to swallow as his lungs clawed for air and cold wings of unconsciousness began to beat over him. Then, in a wheezing rush, the blockage cleared.

Leaving Freddie Longstreet sobbing and shuddering, she climbed out from under the boardwalk and headed back along West Brighton Beach under a deep-crimson sky as night flooded in.

“Look, John, I’m onto something vitally important. Something that could change… Well, everything—including you and I. There’s this figure, right here in New York. They’re clever and they’re powerful. And if I can find them, if I can work out who and what they really are, I can achieve more than we’ve ever dreamed of. And if I don’t…” She stared down at her dark-mooned nails. “I’m somehow going to have to live—or not live—with the consequences.”

“That all s-sounds incredibly d-d-dangerous, Harry. I mean, this whole m-mysterious b-business you seem to have been involved in all s-summer—”

“When did you ever think changing the world was going to be safe? As opposed, say, to running a bookstore?”

“Well, n-n-never. But I feel I should be th-there with you. Maybe it’s b-best if I simply take a t-train straight back to N_N_New York. There are still a few things to sort out here, but I can always—”

“This isn’t because I d-doubt your abilities, Harry. You know I’m your b-biggest admirer. In f-fact—”

“Can you telegraph some money into the store account? As soon as you can. I mean, assuming you’ve now got proper access to the inheritance from your aunt. Say a hundred dollars. Second thoughts, make that two. Can you do that? I know it sounds like a lot, but it’s vital to what I have to do.”

If you squinted hard enough, you could see the edge of summer beyond these endless green Saratoga flats. The last day of the last meet of the season, and there was a damp green chill inside the marquees.

The chill had seeped in elsewhere as well. The London Stock Exchange had hit the buffers a couple of weeks earlier, and none other than Roger Babson, celebrated guru of finance, was warning of a coming crash. But what could you do? Well, quite a bit, actually. You could quietly move out of stocks, reinvest in commodities, securities, or maybe even land, and of course there was always bullion. And, meanwhile, it was crucial to talk the market up, at least in the popular share comics, and outside the confines of places like these invitation-only marquees. Make sure the unwashed continue to pour in whatever’s left of their savings to take up the slack, eh? Only a hiccup anyway. Things’ll be back to extraordinary normality well before Christmas at the latest, if not before.

Out amid the roar and the hats, and beyond the upmarket enclosures, most of New York seemed crammed against the rails for a glimpse of thundering turf. At least, those who didn’t have to be at work at 3:00 p.m. on a weekday. Guys with broad ties and big bellies. Women who cursed like marines. Daisy Thompson could and should have been here. So should Charity Hart. Da, as well—and probably had been. Mickey too. And that dead art dealer, and most likely May Linden, and why not John Burton, now he had all that P-Philadelphia m-money?

Sibylla Lee accepted smiles, nodded greetings, and sipped pointlessly at drinks, but some cold even deeper and more bitter than the Dark Ochre which had scabbed her arm and turned her flesh to marble seemed to be closing in. Here in the winner’s enclosure, though, the latest equine star tossed her head in a haze of steam. Loopy Lark, at three to four on, had a pedigree that would rival all the two-legged bags of blood clustered about her. But all credit to her owner, a fat matriarch in a floral hat that Loopy Lark kept trying to eat, for Daphne Callaghan was an esteemed patron of this most noble of sports.

The winning party trooped back along the duckboards as the filly was finally led away. What lay ahead of them wasn’t just a tent, but more a kind of vast, candy-striped bower. Medieval monarchs had surely prepared to joust for the honour of their kingdoms in less extravagant pavilions than this. On and on it went, grotto after grotto, although of course no one challenged Sibylla Lee in her Pateau blouse and sporty Suzanne Lenglen–style headscarf. This was exactly where she belonged.

There were Persian carpets, and a string quartet, and of course there was malt whisky and vintage champagne, for no one here had ever bothered about the Volstead Act. At the centre of all of this ballyhoo, raised on a dais and seated on a throne of velvet and gold, and still batting away congratulations—after all, she’d barely done a thing—was the venerable Daphne Callaghan.

Sibylla Lee pushed through this milling inner sanctum as the other guests glanced at her in the subtle way of those who, even if they didn’t know her, knew they probably should. It was always the same crowd. A step away from the Rockefellers and second cousins on the distaff side to the Peirpont Morgans. And isn’t that Connie over there, although, and not that I’m one to spread gossip, I hear Freddie Longstreet hasn’t made it today, isn’t well in the head… These people always knew someone who knew someone who knew everyone else. Most would have said they’d heard of the darkly mysterious owner of a mirror-glittering house, but of course to admit otherwise would have been bad form.

“Well, thank you.” Daphne Callaghan of the fabled Callaghans of Boston looked both bloated and withered, and her skin seemed more powder than flesh. After all, there were many varieties of the undead. “And you are?”

“Sibylla Lee. I’m just over from Ireland for the summer to take in the sights.”

“Although I do have some Boston connections. You know, from the old times before all the new money ruined everything.”

“How very true!” She gave a smiling wince, much as a fencer might to acknowledge a good thrust. “But you’re much too young and pretty, my dear, to talk about how things were.”

“You’re probably right. But there are two Callaghan names I seem to recall. A brother and sister named Oonagh and Morgan?”

“It was all most tragic.” Cousin Daphne wasn’t smiling now. “Saltwater—”

“I think you mean Sweetwater.” She could see a concertina of reinforced cotton; whalebone corset, left behind in the back of a drawer. Hear the echo of Morgan’s voice. Woman was a snob back then, and, believe me, Karl, she hasn’t changed one jot in all the years since.

“Yes…” She wobbled her wattles. “I believe that was the name they gave to the town they tried to build out in the West. I even went there, you know, one summer back in the 1860s. Their last, as it turned out. But those two always tried my patience, and I really have very little tolerance for mud. Then, they chose to overstay the winter out in Kansas, and…” She waved a hand. “As I say, it was all most tragic. Of course we had their bodies brought back to Boston, and held a proper mass for them at Holy Cross, and took care of the few possessions they still had.”

“I don’t think anyone has.” Cousin Daphne’s fingers closed around something bright at her throat. “All quite a mystery, really. Although it was a long time ago, and they always were an arrogant, difficult, pair. And poor Oonagh was already ill, and wasn’t long for this earth.”

She could see Oonagh right now. A thinly pale, beautiful woman with long, dark hair. Sitting propped up in a grand bed in some ornate sickroom with pheasant wallpaper, tall windows and the blaze of a large fire. Reaching to open a drawer and offer a jewel, a holy relic, the frozen tear of the dying Christ, a filigree glitter which this gross yet shrivelled creature now clutched to her breast.

“Of course, there were lots of theories. There was talk of another visitor, a tall man who came not long after I left. Some said he was an old friend… I believe the family lawyers even considered hiring a private detective, although you can imagine what the law then counted for in a place like Kansas.”

Then she saw Oonagh Callaghan again, but now her body lay sprawled in some frosted place of heaped possessions, glass and stars, as that jewel glittered timelessly amid the gore at her throat.

The streets were just beginning to awaken with a morning clamour of coal carts, ice vans, milk jalopies, garbage trucks by the time she finally hauled herself back to Manhattan. Across Houston and Stanton and Rivington Streets, and now even the cats had fled from Daisy Thompson’s alley, and she wasn’t far from the Astor Library where she’d once asked for the Lenin’s What Is to Be Done? Burning Questions of Our Movement, and the woman at the counter had looked down at her as if she was a dog turd. Over there was the spire of Saint Patrick’s where she’d been confirmed, God help her, with a thousand other girls in white dresses and patent slippers. All the currents of her lost life tugging all about her in burning, sunlit swirls.

Surely, there had to be a house somewhere nearby—a fabled, fabulous palace, filled with a fine collection of ancient things and even more ancient lust. There was the same wild scrawl of a signature on a document Corpseman had found dated 1651 buried in the public records of Strasbourg, and again on a receipt on Grey Garthside’s corpse in his apartment right here in New York. There were all the bodies he’d collected in his van.

But even the walls of the old Waldorf-Astoria where she’d taken tea just a few months ago were now keeling to the wrecking ball in vast clouds of dust, making way for some new edifice they were talking of calling the Empire State. If she was anyone right now, she was Julian West, that young American in Looking Backward, catapulted into a different age, where, even amid the broad thoroughfares of a great, libertarian city, she remained eternally lost.

Shivering in the blessed gloom at her old desk in the Rose Reading Room in the Main Public Library, hunched over ancient shipping records as the other occupants glanced at her even more disdainfully than the librarian back at the Astor had once done, she studied reports of the Galeria, bound to this city on tides of ill rumour from Ghent in Belgium in 1798. And then that of the San Pedro which had crossed the Atlantic from Bilbao a year or so later. Stories, too, winding throughout most of the last century and on into this, of some endless bacchanalia aboard a fine galleon moored amid the East River’s tidal marshes. Which, as far back as the times before the Indians sold all of Manhattan to the Dutch for 60 guilders worth of beads, had been a good place to hide. Even now, there must be dozens of old vessels, marooned and abandoned at this city’s fringes. She might even find an emptied hold somewhere. Another black pit of a dead end, just as at Esbarun and Warsaw and Strasbourg. Or perhaps she should be looking for the RMS Etruria, which had supposedly borne someone called Sibylla Lee to New York from Galway in Ireland. Or maybe it was the Flying Dutchman from that execrable new opera by Wagner.

Then she rummaged through random piles of city newspapers, past adverts for Mint Parasols and Life Saver candies, and photos of the Pope shaking hands with Mussolini, until she noticed an item about two interlinked deaths that chimed a memory that almost made sense. A minor architect named Neville Tildsley had driven his car off the approach to the Macomb Dam Bridge five years ago, and was presumed drowned, although his body had never been found. Then, this very summer, his wife had thrown herself into the Harlem River at the exact same spot. She scoured the papers and trade records for more information, but thousands of lives and businesses came and went in this city almost daily, and almost all disappeared without trace. No wonder Corpseman had felt so lost.

A dim hum of traffic and a bang of distant doors. Who was she now? A strange, pale, ragged creature with too-dark eyes and wild straw for hair, dressed in torn, stained and pointlessly expensive clothes, although the sharp distinction she’d once drawn between homespun places like Crafts & Arts and upmarket stores such as Bayton and Stritcher was now entirely lost. And what exactly had happened to her headscarf? Then, looking up, she seemed for a moment to be staring across the desks at a younger, scruffier version of herself.

She headed out down Seventh Avenue toward Greenwich Village through the settling dark, where the streets had grown rowdy as men fought over newspapers or jostled around radios to follow the stock market’s latest plunge, and the stink in the basement of Unison Books had gotten worse than ever, thanks to all the shrivelled corpses of all the birds and rats she’d somehow dragged in here. She needed to get a grip. Needed to find herself some decent notebooks and an office calendar for what was left of 1929, and pay better attention to the phases of the moon. That, or find another way. Or no way at all.

Her hands scattered bottles of clotted Cadmium Yellow and dried-up Cobalt Blue, seeing as the last of the Midnight Black was long gone, and even Dark Ochre was getting low, and what would Master Nesch have said about her neglect of these precious pigments? She clawed instead through the clothes she’d worn once, then never laundered or reused, until, in the sanded pocket of a jacket that still smelled faintly of vomit and cotton candy, she found four, no five, dry little buttons.

She cupped them in her palm, considering possibilities. But this was all so unscientific, and so unlike Corpseman, and maybe unlike Harry Mackenna, or Sibylla Lee or Lys, as well. But, crouched over the stormdrain, she swallowed the last of her bottle of Deep Crimson to help push the peyote down.

She was wandering the loosened pillars of a temple under the shadow of a thinning moon, beneath mountains that had shifted their shoulders, and the world below, which had once been a realm of fields, roads, and palaces, was now nothing but a black, glittering sea.

Once, yes, men in rich cloaks and women in girdled gowns had come here in murmuring procession to offer lives and riches in exchange for the words which only she, Sibylla, could know. Not one Sibylla, of course, but many, captured in raiding parties then dragged toward this sacred place where, in the flash of silver, the old Sibylla’s bitter blood was caught and offered to the new in a golden bowl.

But many years had since passed in a dim flicker of daylights, and the processions had grown less regular, and key elements of ritual had been forgotten, and the few who still came did so not out of awe, but mere curiosity, and wrinkled their noses in disgust, and dared to claim they didn’t even believe. Then, even they had ceased to come. No wonder she felt so alone.

Still, though, and with her temple fallen and all her acolytes gone, a sense of sacred duty remained. By keeping from the sun and counting the moons, this Sibylla learned how to dull her hunger on the blood of forest animals, and by chewing the seeds of a certain bitter-tasting plant. Sometimes, she offered these same creatures as poor sacrifice to the pit below. But its voices seemed dulled to her now. More a dim murmur than the roar of power and certainty they had surely once been. That, and even she had to admit that the stink had grown worse.

She saw men again now. In the village which had appeared down on the shore, or mounted on rumbling wagons and jangling horses as they followed the dusty coastal road. They spoke in different voices, and wore strange clothes. Some—she came to believe they were called hermits, priests, or pilgrims—sang songs of a deity very different to hers. Not, she supposed, that any of it mattered. Once, she had been revered and greedy and powerful. Voice of the pit. Drinker of blood. Guardian of the gateway of souls. But, having lived so many different lives, she had grown very tired. She sometimes even considered using the silver scythe she’d discovered in a crack amid the rocks—and which she was sure had once had some vital, sacred purpose—to join with all the other Sibyllas who’d been thrown into the pit below. But after waiting so long, it was surely better to allow death to embrace her in its own slow time.

Then he came—this thin lad dressed in sacking robes, out collecting berries and herbs for the kitchens of that village which they called Esbarun, and crackling through the forest loud enough to frighten a boar. Of course, she saw and avoided him. But one twilight, he had the temerity to try to follow her, and something about this foolishness, or perhaps the lost part of her which still remembered ordinary life, prompted her to let him do so. And then to spare him. After all, she was still Sibylla, and what did she have left to lose?

She awoke to find herself still in a reeking cave, but the clamour of newsvendors, arguing voices, and hurrying feet told her that another day had already begun above this cellar, here in this modern city of New York. Then the phone started jangling from up in the store.

“Let me g-guess—d-different. Just the way you’ve sounded since all of this started. And, f-frankly, Harry, I’ve h-had enough.”

“D-Don’t don’t me either. This isn’t about my family in Ph-Philly any longer, or what’s h-happened to my shop. Whatever you’re involved in sounds as if it’s either mad or d-downright d-d-dangerous. And p-probably both.”

“I don’t really c-care what this isn’t, Harry. I’ve b-been t-thinking, and something’s occurred to me about this person you’re seeking. You s-see, if they really are as clever and p-powerful as you keep saying, d-don’t you think they’d have f-f-found you already?”

“I’m s-saying they’ve already met you, Harry. I’m saying they’ve befriended you at one of those rich p-parties you keep going to. I’m saying they’re someone you already think you know.”

We could escape all this, Sibylla. Discover ourselves. Harry stared down at the phone.

“But that’s rather the p-point, isn’t it? I’m here and you’re th-th-there. And I’ve d-done everything I can up here in Philly, and I’m s-sick of being told to stay away.”

Something thumped at the store window. You fucking commies did all this, a voice yelled.

“The m-markets are in t-turmoil, and I may end up losing all my aunt’s m-money before it’s really mine. But perhaps that’s good, Harry. Perhaps we’re much closer to a c-changed world than we ever im-imagined.”

“So I’m t-taking the train back to New York this afternoon. I know this s-summer has been d-difficult for you, and I’m n-not making assumptions about wh-where we go from here. Let’s just meet up over coffee at Schultz’s like we used to. Say about six this evening. Does that sound ok-k-k… all right?”

October 29, 1929. A succession of black days—Thursday, Friday, and Monday—had ended with this Tuesday, which was the blackest of all. Interest rates were rocketing as the Federal Reserve strove to rescue the value of the dollar. All that money, borrowed on the promise of making even more, turned into paper as worthless as the tickertape that clotted the gutters.

The streets and the sidewalks were gridlocked by panicking crowds, yet people sensed a cold presence at their shoulders and let Harry through until she finally saw the rise of the Yankee Stadium’s concrete rim. No sea of hats and no programme sellers today. The place seemed as abandoned as some great amphitheatre from another age. Still, the doors of Gate Two beneath the balconies and famous Longines clock were open, and it was just possible to catch the scents of matchday bratwurst and hot peanuts, and hear the murmur of lost crowds, along the passageways beyond.

You know exactly where to find me, Sibylla. Rain or shine. Spring, summer, or fall. But she didn’t pull out her Navy Colt as she climbed the final steps toward the upper stand. All the benches up here were as empty as this whole stadium anyway, apart from a few tiny figures diligently repainting the bleachers far below. But up along the highest row, where the wind already tasted of winter, she noticed a small weathered plaque.

In Memory of Margaret “May” Linden.

A Great Supporter Of The Pinstripers.

1885–1927

The worst thing, she decided as she read these words, was how she felt no real sense of revelation or surprise. That, and how it had been John Burton, of all people—he knew nothing and wasn’t even in this city—who’d worked this out. She wasn’t the trap, and never had been. She was the prey, the prize. Sibylla and Sibylla, and now Sibylla again, and the figure which had taunted and betrayed her for centuries had slipped through her fingers once more.

The Harlem River made sluggish swirls, here where the Macomb Dam Bridge straddled the divide between Manhattan and the Bronx. The characteristic bathtub shape of Polo Grounds—where the Yankees had played when she was young—in one direction, and the new, yet already fabled, Cathedral of Baseball in the other. An iconic spot, but the traffic snarled, seemingly striving both to flee and enter this doomed city. Harry had no idea what she should do next—except to maybe go on and on like this, searching for some mocking obscenity until the ink in her veins dried up and she lost her last grip on what was left of her humanity, and became something even worse. She wasn’t Corpseman. She lacked the harsh resolve which had dragged him through the decades to this spot. And why did it even have to be her? Some chance resemblance, and that was all?

The blue paint on the stretch of rail along the parapet on which she was leaning seemed newer than the rest. She stroked it with her ragged gloves. Must have been replaced after some automobile accident a few years back. That, and there was far more recent litter of cigarette butts, screwed-up gum wrappers, and coffee cups scattered nearby. Cops, despite the OCME’s continued pleas, still being cops. She could even see the blazing Klieg lights as the woman who would soon be identified as Iris Tildsley was drawn out, dripping, in seaweed tweed, from the brackish water below. All of this on Corpseman’s last night as a corpse man, or any kind of man at all, and when it had already been far too late to spit for luck.

Then, although she had no idea why she was doing this, she took her creased copy of Looking Backward from the pocket of her jacket and let the wind riffle its pages until the dedication—To Harry—lay flattened in the grey light. Beneath was a scrawled signature she’d often tried, but always failed, to decipher. But now she knew it for what it was.

This long walk back toward her childhood home through New York, as men fought and women wept in the queues outside banks, stock agents, and pawnshops, and glass shattered and smoke drifted and sirens howled as capitalism finally died, was one she’d often made in her dreams. Yet, the closer she got to the Lower East Side, the less anything seemed changed.

Sidewalk cracks Harry Mackenna had avoided on the way home from school, and those kids out playing ball could be her and Mickey, and here was what everyone called Clancy’s Store, although Clancy had been dead for decades, and this was the corner around which the boys paraded in their Fenian sashes and wooden rifles on Saint Patrick’s Day. It could have been the same washing hung out on the same lines. All that was missing was Da’s Packard parked outside their block by the hydrant, and heaven help any kid who happened to kick a can or a ball in that direction—and even now, a kind of darkly shining car-shaped shadow somehow still lingered.

Up the stairs with the sounds of babies crying and radios playing, and the Brodys still having their argument, to the third floor, where the front door gave with an easy push, and Ma was standing in the kitchen at the far end of the dark hallway, peeling potatoes and plopping them into a pan.

“Oh?” She barely looked up. “So it’s you again, Harriet Mary Mackenna…” Another potato emerged, newly white, in her gnarled hands. She had this knack for unwinding the peel into incredibly long loops like the flypapers which hung around her on the ceiling. “Although I’d have scarcely thought it was you at all, got up and looking like that. If, that was, it hadn’t been the way you think you can turn up here after all this time without a by-your-leave or a thank-you.”

The next potato splashed into the pan, and Harry had to fight back a helpless feeling of being a child again. Next thing, she’d be chopping the onions, and course Ma would criticise the results. And meanwhile Da just stood in his peaked driver’s cap in that photograph above the fireplace, which was bedecked in Palm Sunday crosses and black velvet ribbons, as if he was already dead.

“Answers…?!” She plucked another potato from the sack. “As if there are any answers ’cept those the good Lord gives us through prayer.”

Enough of that holey-moley crap, Ma…! All the tired arguments she must swallow. “It’s about one of the people who used to come here, Ma. The ones Da—my father, your husband—knew and drove about this city—”

“Yes, I know, Ma. Da was a saint. He was Jolly Jim Mackenna, and nothing was too much trouble for him. He’d take the brides to church and the widows to Mass in his lovely, smart car, and he wouldn’t hear a word or charge a penny…” Harry took a breath. Forced this dark, familiar room, with the scars and stains on the kitchen table laid before her like the map of an ancient battlefield, back into its shrunken, present-day dimensions. “But there’s a man, at least a figure, who was here one afternoon when I came home from school. It must have been almost ten years ago. They clearly knew Da, and they were sitting waiting for him right there in our parlour. And they gave me this…” Her hands were shaking as she fumbled out the book and splayed its pages amid Ma’s curls of peel. “See, they even wrote my bloody name in it—not Harriet, even, but Harry. They knew who I was, and they signed it as well.”

“Well, if there’s a signature…” Ma sighed, and, as a sure sign of some kind of seriousness, put down her potato and leaned forward to peer at the same seemingly letterless hieroglyph, that Harry—no, Corpseman—had seen back in Strasbourg in a document dated 1651, and again last winter in Beekman Place on that auction house chit on Grey Garthside’s body. “Isn’t this another of those ghastly, ungodly books of yours…?”

The woman leaned back. Gave a wincing blink. Rubbed her eyes with the back of her hand. Her hair was greyer now, sticking out from a netted bun in brittle wisps, and her patterned apron was so faded the red blotches no longer looked like roses, but the evidence of some ancient crime. And her hands really did look like roots dug up from the earth, and she smelled earthy as well—musty and sweet, but with a faintly urinous whiff of stale lavender water beneath, as a dulled roaring began to rise in Harry’s ears. “I wouldn’t be able to read that scribble, even if I did get my reading glasses from by the bed. Doctor O’Conner, and he’s a lettered man, can manage better than that.”

“But Da knew this person, Ma, I’m sure of it. They were here, they were—”

“Your father knew, had always known, a great many important people in this city. I was just—”

“Oh, come on, Ma! Don’t do the little woman act with me. I’ve seen what you’re like, lording it over the other women at St. Vincent de Paul coffee mornings. A word to the precinct chief about someone’s son, and another to some shyster druggist about a daughter who’s got herself into trouble. Just tell me, Ma, about this one person. They were slim, pale, well dressed. A grey linen suit, a hat indoors, and a beguiling accent. They gave me this book”—she stabbed the pages—“that fucking changed my life, right here in this bloody house. They could have been anyone, or everyone, Ma. But they weren’t. And they weren’t loud like the others, and they didn’t reek of booze or hair oil, and they weren’t bragging or stupid. I just want to know who they are, Ma… Or were… That’s all. It’s really that simple.”

Ma didn’t exactly nod, but she didn’t shake her head either. For a breathless moment, Harry thought she was on the brink of some kind of revelation. But then Ma scowled, picked up her knife, and returned to her potato.

“What you don’t seem to understand, Harriet Mackenna,” she said with her head lowered and her hands slightly trembling, “is that your da was the kind of man who knew all sorts of people long before I married him. Sure, he was a good-looking lad, and we made a lovely handsome couple, but how do you think he ever got the money to get into the chauffeuring business? And do you think my family would have allowed me, otherwise, to even be introduced to such a Jack-the-lad?”

“Of course it was! Things weren’t like they are now, my girl, with dancing and drinking, and lads and lassies getting up to all sorts of business unchaperoned in those ghastly dancehalls. Approaches were made. Then there was proper supervision…”

“There was respect, and young people did what was expected of them. So when I married Jim, I thanked my parents and the Lord, and prayed—although maybe I should have prayed harder—for the blessing of some lovely, faithful children. I took the role that was ordained to me, Harriet Mackenna, just as I do now. And I didn’t ever bother the man of the house with pointless questions that were none of my business. That’s what’s been lost to this modern world, and that’s what I brought to my marriage to Jim, may he rest forever in the arms of our Father.”

But Ma had already picked up another potato. “And when it comes to arrangements, my girl, a little bird told me that you’re living in one of those stores that sells those wicked, wicked books and pamphlets. There’s even some rich older man involved. And your da always used to say you were such a sweet, pretty little thing. To think—”

With a sweeping blow, Harry dashed the boiling pan from the table. It caught Ma as it spun off, twisting the peeling knife up into her hand. A shocked, dripping silence followed as potatoes rolled and Ma’s cut thumb made red patterns across the splayed and sodden pages of Looking Backward.

“There never was an arrangement, Ma,” she continued more quietly. “All there is is you and me, right here in this kitchen. Mickey’s a gangster, and Da’s a vegetable, and we both know you’re never happier than when you’re miserable… And who’ll ever eat all these ghastly stews you keep making?”

Even as Harry spoke these words, the silence seemed to deepen. Ma’s red-streaked hand went to her throat, where she wore a silver cross that had been blessed by the city bishop, and the smell of her blood and her fear was ripe and rich. What phase of the moon was it, anyway? And how much poison was there still left in those tired inks? But Harry knew that none of those things mattered as a surge of hunger, sweetly painful, a premonition of what was to come, slammed through her, wetting her mouth and crotch, and tingling across her breasts.

Ma was backing off now as Harry moved toward her around the table. Her eyes were wide, she was muttering prayers, and still feeling for that cross with bloodied fingers, although its cheap chain could be broken as easily as everything else. The woman was feeble, manipulative, ignorant—a mere bag of blood—and Harry was standing over her as she cowered in the furthest corner of her kitchen amid the spilled potatoes. Another moment, and the shadows of this room would close around them to beat in the bright, familiar wings of slaughter, but Harry stumbled back, out into the hall, fleeing past the parlour with its tawdry ornaments, and the empty space of that waiting chair, as Ma wept and cursed her ungrateful, ungodly child in the name of all the saints. And just wait, just you wait, my girl, until your da gets home…

Late afternoon, and even the mothers and older sisters standing with arms folded outside the railings of Saint Jerome’s were talking nervously of share prices, or scanning newspapers. Not that everything wouldn’t turn out all right, what with so many wise and clever men involved, but when it came to who was really responsible, it was hard to look beyond the Jews. And, of course, it did no harm to light a few candles… As the bell rang, they stopped and turned toward this strange creature with the odd clothes, short hair, tinted glasses, and Dark Ochre–tinged lips, who clearly didn’t belong here, and sheltered their children with wary backward glances as they led them away.

The nun who’d come out in the wake of the departing kids was studying Harry from across the schoolyard.

“Oh, don’t worry! After all this time, I wouldn’t expect you to remember. It’s Cecelia. And you’re Harriet Mackenna, aren’t you? Although as I recall, you always wanted to be called Harry, and boy did we have to rack our brains when it came to Confirmation, because, believe me, Saint Harrys are thin on the ground.”

Harry smiled. Sister Cecelia had taught sewing and music—subjects she’d regarded as a complete waste of time—but had always been one of the nicer nuns. Her wimple-framed face hadn’t aged in the way Ma’s had. It looked plain and smooth and untroubled, and Harry felt a pang of envy for the certainties of the life this woman led.

“You know,” the nun said, putting a hand on Harry’s arm as she drew her past the school gates, “I’ve often wondered what might have become of Harriet Mackenna. And now I see you, I’m honestly still not sure.”

Harry followed her to a far wooden door set with studs and an iron cross—an object of fear and speculation for generations of children at Saint Jerome’s. It was said that the nuns kept the bodies of the dead in the walls beyond, just as they were rumoured to do in Italian churches.

Sister Cecelia opened the door with a groaning creak, and stood back to let Harry in to the mossy courtyard beyond.

“I visit our sanatorium as often as I can. Not that working with you children isn’t wonderful, of course. And not”—Sister Cecelia almost giggled—“that you’re a child now. But it puts a different, and dare I say clearer, perspective on life. And we all probably need that even more than ever on a day like today, for even a community such as ours has investments…” Because of her starched surplice, she had to turn most of her body sideways to talk as she bustled along corridors filled with a smell of old toilets and bleach, and smoothed by the passage of many generations of penitents.

“I hope this doesn’t need saying, but your father couldn’t be in a better place. Many of my fellow sisters are trained nurses. Not, of course, that prayer and compassion aren’t vitally important.”

And money—there was always that too. So unlike Da, who in most ways was a gambler and chancer, to have some decent insurance to pay for all of this. One other thing that Ma couldn’t complain about. Although, of course, she did.

“Ah! Here we are… Or at least I think we are, anyway. This is the refectory, where most of the long-term residents of Saint Jerome’s like to spend their afternoons. Of course, and when there were more vocations, we nuns inhabited it. But I do sincerely believe that our guests, our residents, still have a calling in life too…”

An echoingly bare, characteristically ecclesiastical, space. High windows. A huge old bookcase, stuffed with yards of yellowed boxfiles, was dwarfed by the arched ceiling and pillared walls. Here and there were other old bits of church architecture which had been relegated from the chapels when they started to fall apart, and some dim aspect of Harry’s changed consciousness noted the need for new gilding on the halo of a kneeling Christ, and how that screen over there should either be removed or repaired, seeing as it was clearly infested with damp. But the true gargoyles here were hunched slumbering in corners, or over dusty checkers tables, or corralled around a buzzing radio set.

“At least, I think he’s here…” Sister Cecelia was peering at faces. “Ah, yes. Jim—here you are. You’ll never guess who’s come to see you today.”

Harry wanted to protest that the back of the head the nun was addressing clearly wasn’t Da’s, and even more so as she began to turn the heavy wheelchair around. The right side of the jaw was missing, and the eye and that side of the mouth were uptilted in a grim leer. But, as the other half of the profile turned toward her, Harry saw that it really was, or had once been, her father.

“You’ll probably want to spend some time together in a quieter spot.” Sister Cecelia steered the chair toward a far door. “Jim’s room—in fact, they’re the old nun’s cells—is just down here.”

Another grey corridor. Then, in a series of forwards and backwards turns, the nun steered him through an arched doorway into a tile-floored, stone-walled room which still looked like a nun’s bare cell, although some attempts had been made to make the place more personal. There was a peeling wicker chair, and a bedside table with a photograph of Harry and Mickey Mackenna standing in their costumes—and, yes, she was wearing that swimming cap—on the crowded sands of Coney Island. And another of Ma and Da, arm in arm in one of those old studio portraits with a fake classical background. They’d once made a truly handsome couple.

“There…” Sister Cecelia turned Da around to face the wicker chair. “I’ll leave you both to have a good old chinwag. Feel free to call if you need any help, although if you just want to head off, you’ll find there’s no lock on the main doors. After all, this isn’t a prison. But please don’t be a stranger to us, Harry, now you’ve returned.” Her breath smelled like fresh laundry as she leaned close. “I really am curious to hear what you’ve made of yourself.” Then she bustled off.

His hands shook and his jaw trembled, and his blood-threaded green eyes seemed almost dead. And there was something of the convict about Da’s hessian slippers and striped, pyjama-style clothes, despite what Sister Cecelia had said. No doubt he wore them to facilitate bathing and changing.

Still nothing. Was there really so little there, or was he playing another of his games with her? Hard to believe this of a mind once so quick and agile. Just a mumbling thing who’d lost his wits the way another man might lose an eye or a leg, and the textbooks called it Soldier’s Heart. Then she noticed, on a dusty shelf beside an old copy of The Cloud Of Unknowing, that someone had left a tube of Da’s favourite flavour of Life Savers.

Clears the head and freshens the breath—especially if you’d been drinking, although the adverts never mentioned that. Da’s stubbled chin just trembled and his mouth made shapes without words as Harry absently thumbed out a candy and placed it on her own tongue. Years since she’d tasted one, but it was still the shape, the hole in the middle and the ridged lettering, that you noticed as much as the flavour of sugared mint.

Those drives out with Ma and Mickey. Upstate, or a visit to the Bronx Zoo, or of course to see the Yankees. Although often, especially as Ma didn’t care for baseball and Mickey had somehow decided he supported the Dodgers, it was just her and Da. At the Polo Grounds or, later on, the House that Ruth Built on the far side of the Harlem River. And, seeing as she often got carsick, he’d have to stop the Packard, and hold back her hair as she threw up. Which, she guessed, was probably where that thing about spitting off the Macomb Dam Swing Bridge had originated, seeing as no one else ever did it, and the all-conquering Yankees scarcely needed any more luck than they already had.

Yes, she remembered. The taste and shape of this Life Saver in her mouth, and the seasick slide of that car. And Da always being Da. The creak of the brake. The cooling tick of the engine. The fleshly, sticky feel of the leather against her legs as Da leaned over to open the glovebox and take out another tube of Life Savers and pop one, with plump nicotine fingers, first into her mouth, and then his own.

He must have bought other flavours—maybe Mint-o-green, or Lic-o-ric; they all had to have an “O” in the middle of them, like the candy itself—but it was Pep-o-mint that still lingered as a precise, delicate circle on her tongue. The trick, the game, the crucial task being to let it dissolve so carefully that it never, ever broke, and nothing else could happen and this frozen moment would just go on and on. But it didn’t. At least, not always. Da being Da.

A lot to expect, and a lot to understand. Especially when she was his sweet, his lemon-sharp favourite, and she loved and honoured him, just as it said in all the hymns and prayers at Saint Jerome’s. He was fun and he told jokes and he was the only da in the whole street to have such a swanky car, and he made Harry feel so special that it seemed that there was no escape—at least until a shadowy figure had given her a copy of Looking Backward in their front parlour, and she’d glimpsed a fairer, better world.

A puzzle of a man was Jolly Jim Mackenna. Prone to fits and rages as much as jokes and japes. She once even caught him washing what looked like blood from the back seat of the Packard, and he’d told her to get the hell out of his sight. But the cold circle of the Life Saver was now broken, and as Harry grew older, she came to see her father for the sour, unjolly, bullying, wheedling, lusting coward he really was.

“Is that still you in there, Da? Is there anything left of what you really are? Come on, you old bastard—you owe me this much.”

But the blank, dead, reddened eyes were like sea-corroded marbles, and once again she was slipping, even if the Life Saver had dissolved to a sour, sweet bitterness in her throat. Hey, sweet, is that you? The burr of Da’s voice as his Packard slowed across a New York street. She was much older now, and had probably been on her way to the Rose Reading Room in the City Library, or to some meeting or demonstration—she’d believed far more in the efficacy of mass action back then—or to browse the shelves of a socialist bookstore she’d recently discovered over in the Village. But it was just starting to rain, and, just as always, all her plans and hard-won certainties seemed to dissolve as Da leaned his grin and an elbow from his side of the car. So she got in. Da being Da.

In many ways, this was just like any other drive as they headed uptown past the huge new department stores, those temples of capitalist greed. Although, as the rain beat the windows and wipers thwacked and the lights streamed, it was hard to tell exactly where they were.

But Da knew this city, and knew almost everyone it in. Actors, politicians, and gangsters. Good men, and bad. Had had them all, at one time or another, in the back of this car. She could even feel the shade of their continuing presence like a cold breath at her neck. Almost glimpsed them as something more than a shadow in the rearview mirror, and she wondered if she’d ever leave these journeys behind, or stop feeling lost.

“What’s the matter, sweet?” Da laughed uneasily. He’d put on weight, lost hair, and his hands had a tremor even as they gripped the wheel. “Aren’t you comfortable being alone with your own Da?”

“You know I’m not, you bastard.” A simple statement which, if she’d tried to frame it in any other way, would have never come out.

“That’s”—Da frowned, pretending to concentrate on some convergence of lights and traffic on the wet road ahead—“well, and in a way, that’s understandable.” Tyres screamed. Someone sounded a horn. “I mean, I haven’t always been the best kind of father that any girl might want. No.” He shook his head. Crunched gears. “I’m not saying exactly that. But what I am saying”—now he nodded to himself—“is that we had some good times?”

“All you’ve known—all you’ve ever known—is what you want for yourself.”

“Not sure that’s rightly fair, sweet. I mean, most would say I’ve devoted my life to the service of family and honest hard work.”

Da rubbed his sleeve across his mouth. Was he actually crying? Amid all these sliding shadows, it was impossible to tell. Where were they anyway, and what exactly, seeing as they’d already passed the upmarket areas where he might have stopped to buy her a new treat, was all of this about? She swiped condensation from the window beside her. Saw the dark, familiar gantries of a swing bridge, and the scudding Harlem River. A few moments later, Da pulled in at the side of the road and killed the Packard’s engine, and a familiar, helpless feeling swept over her as they sat there in the car-ticking, rain-pattering silence. Maybe they’d drive on to Cold Spring Harbour or Orange County. That, or all the Mackennas could sit together like any other family on the sands beside the boardwalk at Coney Island, and everything would be just as it always should be and was. So much depended on these rides, and the circle of secrecy she dare not break with her tongue.

“Well, it’s a start, isn’t it?” He gave a phlegmy laugh. Anywhere other than in this car, which he liked to keep fragrantly clean, he’d be reaching for a cigarette. “You know what people say? They say Jim Mackenna’s a proud man. But the truth is, sweet, I’m not. And I don’t just mean…” His hands made a stunted me-and-you gesture. “Sure, I know everyone. Sure, I drive them”—another stunted gesture—“here and there. But it isn’t just that, sweet. Things can get complicated and dangerous and difficult—”

His sideways grimace was a premonition. “You always were lemon sharp and lemon sweet.”

“I guess that’s true. But what I’m trying to tell you, what I mean to say, sweet, is that I’m a man who’s done bad things, and I’m sick of the world not even noticing or caring. You have no idea—even you, sweet, have no idea—of what I’ve done, what I’ve seen. There are dark things, dark places. Even here, right at this spot by the Macombs Dam Bridge where you and I used to stand before we went to cheer the Yankees on, I’ve…” His mouth twisted. “Life’s like this, sweet…” He snapped his fat brown fingers. “And I’m fucking Judas. Only instead of silver, I took the bloody gold.”

So this was it. He’d sought her out, dragged her here so he could give a confession he was too ashamed to make in church. And what did he expect from her? Fucking forgiveness? Bloody absolution? Harry had forgotten that Da didn’t only disgust her physically, but intellectually as well.

She reached to open the passenger door, and as it swung open into the ripe salt smell of the river and the rain, Da said something like Please don’t leave me, sweet, and lunged toward her in a clumsy embrace. And he was still strong, pathetically weak though he was, and Harry felt—almost—as if she was six again. But not quite. For, whatever Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov Lenin would have done in such a situation, it would surely not have been to submit. She fumbled the catch of the glovebox until it fell open in a waft of sugared mint. The gun was there, and then it was in her hands.

She’d have expected Da to fight, or plead, or resist. But instead, the hands which closed over hers drew the weapon up toward his face, and his fingers closed around hers, and there was a shattering blast, and there was smoke, and a thick wet dripping, and she was running across the Macombs Dam Bridge as the chanting rain beat against her face, and then she was falling, and she was back in this grey cell with its sour smell of bleach and old toilets.

Not even now. Then, again, the years unravelled and a cop was standing in the front parlour just hours after to announce that Da wasn’t even dead, and Ma was only almost a widow. Of course, it was a sin to attempt suicide, and no one could quite believe it of Jolly Jim Mackenna, but the police had been almost clear that that was what had happened, and even Mickey, who already knew a thing or two about guns, muttered that if one of Da’s many acquaintances had wanted to do such a thing, they’d have done it more professionally than this. The world rearranged itself around what seemed like the truth, and the Packard was sold, its ruined interior in serious need of some reupholstery, to a guy who did weddings in Queens, and Harry fled what little was left of her old life, and took up John Burton’s offer to stay up in the attic above Unison Books. At least, until things had settled down, or the revolution came. It became a kind of joke between them.

“Who is it, Da?” she asked, now, in this cell of a room. “This man, this woman, this nothing shape-shifting creature, this fucking everything and nothing, you served? I’ve seen them as well, Da. I know what they’re like, or at least I know that they’re ancient and evil and they aren’t even remotely human. They’ve taunted me just the way they taunted you. Sure, it’s not just one name or one face—I understand that now. But you fucking drove them about in the back of that car, you bastard, just like that coach driver did back in Strasbourg. You collected the victims and washed the blood from the back seat and did who knows what the hell else to help cover things up. Did you help get rid of that architect, for instance? Was that your work? Some guy called Tildsley? Or at least, did you send his car through the parapet into the Harlem River so no one would ever wonder what really happened to his body, that it was sacrificed to some beast in a pit? Is that what you did? Is that the kind of man you are? You even let that thing you served come to our home, you bastard. Allowed them to sit in our own parlour. How, otherwise, do you think I ever got this…?”

She shoved the sodden pages of Looking Backward, with its signature now covered in pinkish drops of Ma’s blood, toward Da’s crumbling face, but he still didn’t even blink.

“Did you ever really know what you were dealing with, Da? Is that it? Are you as uncaring and ignorant as all the rest?”

But Da would have known. He was, or had been, Da. In startled desperation, she looked around again at this near-empty cell. Those photos. Ma and Pa. Mickey and Harriet. All handsome in their own mingled ways. And, overlaid in the shining glass, the loom or her, or something’s, features, which were far paler and more deathly than even Da’s.

She glanced back toward him, and sensed a shift in the shadows that anchored this grey space to the world beyond, and saw something stir deep in the black of his green eyes that had once been so like her own. Then, with a clear sudden motion, he raised an untrembling hand toward his rough cotton collar and pulled hard until a button spun loose, and the good side of his face briefly twisted back into that old knowing smile as he offered her his bared neck.

Da’s life flowed smoothly out through the sour parchment stubble. So little of it left anyway, and such things always so frail to begin with. Easily extinguished—even as the bright reek of fresh urine clouded her nostrils—in moments far more tawdry than this. Hot, salty, and sweet. Bless me, Father, for we have both sinned. His body spasmed in a final clutch and tremor, scarcely a farewell, then lolled as the chair rolled back toward the dusty crucifix on the wall.

She stood for a blazing moment, considering options and scenarios as the joy of possession roared through her. Then she fled the grey corridors, the dark doorslams, the spastic gargoyles. A wall, a fall, and the whole city awaited. Where a strangely festive atmosphere reigned. The kids were still up, and the speakeasies had stopped pretending to be furtive, and there were rowdy scenes in theatres and movie halls, and car horns were sounding, and church bells were ringing, and couples were kissing, or fighting, or both. There would be deaths and conceptions tonight. There would be suicides. As she sped amid the uncaring crowds, she saw that the window of Crafts & Arts was shattered, and the whole store was going up in flames.

Wasn’t this what Harry or Harriet Mackenna had always wanted? Couldn’t she see the spires of a new world already rising from the ruins of the old? But she knew this city far better than that. Knew its sour cul-de-sacs and dead-end deceits. Here, for example, outside Unison Books, which no one would ever bother to loot, the paint on its peeling side door crumbled easily beneath her clawing hands to reveal the remains of the old letters beneath—Neville Til sley and P ners, A chit cts — sk A ime for a F e imate—and she hunched, sobbing, down the step, and the years turned, and the weather changed to sleet.

Rumble of the Packard. Thwack of the wipers. Dark sweetness of veneer and soft leather. Hey watch it, buddy. Sounding the horn as she steered amid the wet, headlight-glittering muddle of these streets. Someone should take a wrecking ball to all of this, and probably soon would. But, meanwhile, she stopped. Killed the engine. Peered out through the hunched hats and lit machines, at the sign of a firm of cheap architects on a door beside a shop selling paintpots and bedpans, here on Lower East Houston Street in Greenwich Village.

The figure, the boss, the client, the passenger, the presence was right there at her back. She’d look, but she daren’t. She’d smile, but it would hurt her face. She’d say something, but she can barely breathe. Instead, she shivers, and hates the feel of her own skin, and her own endless eagerness to please, and the sharp, sweet crunch in her mouth of this last Life Saver mint. Hates even the thought of how much she misses her daughter, and how she wishes she’d never had a daughter at all. But then she raises a hand, and tilts the rearview mirror.

House of Mirrors and Glass

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