They left the hotel with Echo feeling almost naked wearing one of Matthew’s rather outrageous checked suits and a brown, medium-crown bowler that was too big for her head but which was perfect for accommodating her excess hair. The brushing together of her trousered thighs and her complete lack of stays felt utterly scandalous and dizzyingly rude, but Miss Warne assured her that the disguise was perfect and that she’d do quite well as her younger, and handsomer, brother. For her part Echo was simply relieved that Matthew had left the hotel to go and watch the cricket game on the other side of the avenue. At Kate’s instruction she hid the wicked-looking dagger in her boot.
Crossing the hotel lobby, she was sure that every eye was upon her, but somehow she and the Pinkerton agent made it to the doors without seeming to attract any undue attention and went outside onto the crowded street. Warne had a hackney coach with a Negro driver waiting. Unaided for the first time in her life, Echo climbed up into her seat, sweeping away nonexistent skirts before she sat, feeling the trousers stretch against her bottom, flushing with the sensation as she settled into the padded leather.
“You’ll get used to it,” whispered Kate Warne, dropping down beside her with a smile. “But stop brushing your skirts; it makes you look a bit of a Mary.”
“Mary who?” Echo asked. The driver twitched the reins and they moved out into the flow of traffic on the roadway.
“A Mary, a Nance, you know,” said the lady Pinkerton agent. “A sodomite.”
“Oh. Yes, I see,” nodded Echo, though once again she wasn’t quite sure she saw at all. “Where are we going, by the way?”
“According to Allan’s man at the Yard, your Count Draculiya carries his wealth in gemstones, so we’re going to see a man about some diamonds,” answered Warne. She leaned forward and spoke to the driver. “Tiffany’s, Billy, down Broadway to Warren Street,” she instructed. “Across from City Hall Park.”
“Yes’m,” replied the driver.
“You know better than that, Billy.”
“Yes, boss,” said the driver, correcting himself. “Sometimes I forgets you wearing such comfortable footwear.”
Deciding for her own sake that the Negro driver and the Pinkerton detective were having some private joke together, Echo concentrated on the drive down Broadway instead. At first there were a few vacant plots of earth, like the cricket pitch across from the Sturtevant, but as they drove along the broad avenue the buildings became more concentrated, with fewer lanes and alleys and no vacant lots at all between them, and very little to be seen in the way of greenery.
Unlike London, where old soot-covered stone was the rule, most of the buildings along Broadway were plain, square and brick, four and five stories high, their facades glaringly covered with gigantic painted signs, the street-level entrances and windows shaded by broad canvas awnings. In a single block she saw signs advertising Meads Hats and Clothing, Bailey’s Signs, Brawley’s Hardware, Shoonmaker Paper Hanging, three different hotels, eleven saloons and restaurants and the appropriately solemn Underhill Casket Company. She remembered gawking down the length of Regent Street in London, but Broadway seemed to go on forever, block after block, as Billy maneuvered his two plodding steeds through the morning’s smoky haze along a never-ending parade of buildings that bought, sold, made, traded, imported, exported and warehoused every object, product, service or commodity one could think of, guiding the carriage and his two passengers through a steady elaborate design of traffic going in every direction possible with no discernible rule or right-of-way.
And such traffic it was! Carts and wagons heading south loaded with produce, some drawn by mules, some drawn by oxen and even pushcarts drawn by human brawn. Heavy wagons loaded with barrels and boxed goods, lumber or bales of yard goods trundled north, offloading when necessary, blocking lanes and turning without any sort of signal beyond a shrill whistle or a yell lost in the general tumult.
In among the turning, swaying, rumbling and roaring of all this was the squeak and shriek of the omnibuses being pulled along their embedded iron rails like so many angry yellow bumblebees. The muck carts roamed like kitchen flies. The mucking boys, usually barefoot ragged children, busily scooped up the horse dung almost as it dropped. The cart was generally pushed by an adult foreman while the muckers did the dangerous work of dodging wheels, whips and horses’ hooves as they gathered up the stinking waste that would eventually be sold as fertilizer.
Even the darting boys and overflowing carts couldn’t seem to keep up, because there was manure and all sorts of garbage piled at the curb. According to Kate there were entire blocks above Fifty-seventh Street and in the borough of Queens devoted to horse dung called manure blocks. Here and there on the hour-long drive down from Twenty-ninth Street, Echo saw dead horses rotting by the side of the avenue, covered in maggots and clusters of flies. Once again Kate explained that there was no organized system for dealing with such occurrences—frequent in a city where almost two hundred thousand dray animals were kept—and except for itinerant butchers willing to sell cuts of meat from the freshly dead creatures, local merchants had no alternative but to pay for the removal of the dead animals out of their own pockets, and few in the midtown area were willing to do so.
The result of this, combined with the night soil of close to a million people, was that as well as being a giant stinkpot, the city of New York, grand as it was and a center of wonder and fabulous commerce, was also a cesspool of disease and incipient disaster. Cholera, plague, malaria and even yellow jack were fairly common, and there were almost as many fires as there were firemen.
“And there’s thousands of them,” said Kate with a laugh. “More every day with the boss in charge.”
“The boss?”
“Boss Tweed,” explained Kate as the carriage bounced and rattled over the cobbles.
“The mayor?” Echo asked.
Kate laughed even louder and puffed happily on her cigar. Echo was beginning to wish she had one of her own; the stench of the street was almost overpowering, mixed now with a faint breeze tinged with an odor that was sickeningly sweet.
“Better than that,” said the Pinkerton detective. “He’s the new Tammany boss, the big fixer, a pol. He owns the Seventh Ward, lock, stock and barrel, has every Irishman in the city in his hip pocket and the Germans and all the rest on his watch chain. Some people say that Bill Tweed has more money than God and the Devil as his best friend.”
“I’m not sure what that has to do with firemen,” said Echo. It seemed the farther she went down Broadway the more confusing New York was becoming.
“It has everything to do with firemen,” explained Kate. “The city is divided into wards, each ward has an alderman, and each alderman controls the fire station in that ward. Some wards have two or three. The firemen are appointed by the aldermen, but their salaries are paid for by the city. The aldermen are all Tammany, and Tweed’s the Tammany boss. Understand things better now?”
“No,” answered Echo honestly.
“Say you’d like your son or your friend or your brother to have a good job as a fireman. Slip your local ward pol—your alderman—a bribe and the job is yours. A little piece of that bribe will find its way into Bill Tweed’s big, deep pockets, and so will a piece of every other city dollar spent on just about anything you’d care to name.”
“This Tweed is corrupt?” Echo said. “Is that it?”
“Corruption is his mother and his father, my dear Van Helsing. This city runs on corruption like a steamship runs on coal.” Kate glanced up. “Ah,” she said, “here we are.”
Echo looked out of the open coach. The park was triangular, with City Hall itself, an impressive building of granite with a narrow clock tower at the widest end of the park, and a pleasant stand of trees at the narrowest, marred now by a wooden platform draped with bunting and hung with signs looking for new recruits and offering county, state and U.S. government bounties for the willing. An ancient-looking cannon stood on the grass in front of the platform, and several older-looking soldiers in uniform were clustered around the rickety gun trunnion, smoking clay pipes and laughing together.
“Another good reason to be a fireman,” commented Kate, climbing down from the carriage. “Being one of Tweed’s appointees automatically exempts you from military service.”
Echo followed the Pinkerton agent down to the street. Tiffany’s was a slope-roofed wooden building on the corner of Warren Street with a figureheadlike sculpture of Atlas over the door, painted bronze and supporting a large clock on its shoulders.
The interior of the store was cool, with all the counters’ glass set into wooden display cases. The walls were paneled in dark wood and the floors were marble. The clerks all wore dark morning suits and to a man they were all clean shaven. There were more soldiers in the store than outside at the recruiting platform. They were all officers and most were examining the large displays of ornamental swords the store had on offer as well as cases showing an array of gold braid for uniforms and various models of Colt revolvers with chased barrels and cylinders and fancy ivory-or silver-etched grips. Well-dressed women in voluminous skirts hung on the officers’ arms, their eyes wandering from the swords to the brooches, rings and necklaces laid out on plump blue velvet pillows behind the curving glass of the cases.
“Something I can do for you…Mr. Warne?”
Echo turned and found herself staring up at a very tall, quite handsome man in his forties, slim and dark-haired except for a sprinkling of gray at the temples and at the edges of his full, perfectly trimmed beard. It was clear from the twinkle in his eye that he knew Mr. Warne was no mister at all.
“Mr. Tiffany,” said Kate, smiling. “This is my friend Mr. Van Helsing.” She turned to Echo. “Mr. Van Helsing, Mr. Charles Tiffany, the proprietor.”
Echo shook the man’s hand but said nothing, following Kate’s instruction to remain silent.
“We need your help,” said Kate.
“Certainly,” said Tiffany with a short, bowing nod. “Anything to be of service to Mr. Pinkerton,” he added in a murmur.
“Your office, perhaps?” asked Kate.
“Certainly,” said Tiffany, nodding again. “This way.”
The two women followed Tiffany down the long, narrow store, Echo silently delighted that not a single one of the customers paid her disguise the slightest attention—not a single deferential “ma’am,” not a bow or even a finger to a hat brim. By putting on a pair of trousers and a man’s tie she had become invisible.
They reached a narrow stairway at the rear of the store and followed Tiffany up to an expansive office on the second floor that had a large, balcony-like gallery that looked out over the store below. The office, like the store, was dark paneled. There were several leather chairs, a large desk and a scattering of mantel lamps on small occasional tables in various corners of the room. A small painting was displayed on an easel. Echo thought it looked like a landscape by the popular French painter Camille Corot. Tiffany gestured to the leather armchairs and seated himself behind the desk.
“Well, then,” he said, sitting back in his chair. “What can I do for Pinkerton’s today?” The eyes twinkled again. “Somebody going to rob our next shipment of pearls?”
“Not that we’re aware of,” said Kate. “We’re looking for someone associated with Mr. Van Helsing, here.”
“Oh?” Tiffany said, arching an eyebrow. “Associated how?”
“We’re almost sure it’s in a criminal fashion,” answered Kate. “Murder, in fact.”
“Dear me,” said Tiffany.
“Dear me, indeed,” agreed Kate. “He deals in gems.”
“Deals in them?”
“Travels with them from place to place,” responded Kate. “He was recently in London. We think he’s come here.”
“Do you have a name?”
“Draculiya,” murmured Kate. “A foreign count.”
“Strange name,” answered Tiffany with a thoughtful frown. “I’ve never heard it before.”
“He almost certainly changed it when he came here,” said Kate.
“What kind of stones would he have traded in?” Tiffany asked. “Was there any gem he seemed to prefer especially?”
Echo thought for a long moment, trying to remember whether there’d been any indication of a preference that she’d noticed when she’d visited Draculiya at Carfax Abbey. Suddenly she had a brief vision of a pendant she’d seen around Lucy Westenra’s neck that night, and the carved stone of the vile monster’s signet ring. “Rubies,” she whispered harshly, speaking aloud for the first time. “Rubies the perfect color of blood.”