Minetta Street was madness, a bedlam of screaming horror, a single curving block of Hell itself that ran from the intersection of Sixth Avenue and Bleeker Street in the south to Minetta Lane in the north. Flaming barricades blocked both ends, the tumbledown barriers of tables, chairs and broken-down carts and barrows guarded by an assortment of whores, thieves, murderers and worse, most of them black and few of them armed with anything more lethal than a blacksmith’s hammer or a rough-made cudgel.
The narrow cobbled street, deep gutters thick with night soil overflowing from the backyard cisterns, had once been a place for tradesmen and families of moderate wealth, but those days had vanished long ago; what was left was a collection of plain, three-story brick buildings and tottering five-and six-floor tenements, their foundations rotting in the muck that was once Minetta Creek and that was now a sludge-and rat-filled sewer that led invisibly to the Hudson River, spewing out the city’s filth beneath Pier 47 at the foot of Clarkson Street.
It was hardly a place where anyone would expect to find any sort of reasonable plunder, but on that Monday night in July it was in the mob’s way. Three snaking arms of the marauding horde, burning, terrorizing and murdering their way from west to east, came together from Bleecker, Sixth Avenue and Carmine Street, where the roasted corpse of poor Abe Franklin hung suspended from a lamppost.
With a single furious moan of hatred, the mob converged in the intersection, then fell upon the barricades, tearing away the improvised bulwarks and fighting hand to hand with the defenders. The pitched battle lasted less than five minutes. Those able to run ran for their lives. Those who couldn’t were trampled underfoot. It was a rout and a massacre.
A hundred died, some beaten so badly their brain matter spread out on the cobbles in large, slimy patches. A baby, torn from its mother’s arms, snatched away by an aproned laundress up from the wretched hell of Five Points, was swung around by one arm like a child’s doll until the arm was literally torn from its tiny body. The laundress’s drunken companion then spiked the dying infant on a pitchfork and marched about with it like a proud soldier trooping the colors.
A surge of men and women broke windows, smashed doors and scuttled through the rabbit warren of the tenement rooms, stealing what they wanted and destroying everything else in their path. But like any plague, it passed. The mob swept over like a swarm of locusts, then turned north again, heading for Washington Square, the little street strangely silent, small fires burning here and there, the cobbles covered in blood and broken glass.
The pitchfork, the gray sagging flesh of the infant dangling, stood up against a wall beside the eviscerated body of its mother, disemboweled with a filleting knife, coils of her entrails trailing into the filthy gutter, her blank eyes staring up without expression at the corpse of her child.
The street wasn’t entirely empty, though; shadowy figures flitted from building to building, whispers could be heard, calling in wailing chirps and rattling warbles. Something was there. Something less than human. In the dark, smoky sky above Minetta Street, nighthawks swooped and dove, feeding on the clouds of moths attracted to the rioters’ fires.
Leaving the crypt beneath the graveyard of Saint Patrick’s Cathedral, Kate Warne followed the Chinaman down a fetid, earthen-walled tunnel lit only by the man’s guttering linen-wrapped torch soaked in paraffin. She knew that every step she took was one step farther away from the young Van Helsing girl and the strange scarred creature whom she’d seen lying on the Haitian’s grave.
Removed from the sound of his hypnotic voice and those startling, seething eyes, she’d felt his hold on her diminish and with it her belief in his unholy tales of a life everlasting, fed by the blood of the innocent, humankind turned into nothing more than herds of soulless milking cows, or even for the simple pleasure of the slaughter.
Eventually the tunnel ended beneath a brick-lined arch and they turned into a much larger passageway. It stank, but not like a sewer, and Kate realized that she was following the course of one of the old rivers that ran beneath the streets of the city and were being charted by Allan Pinkerton’s particular friend, Brigadier General Egbert Ludovicus Viele of the Corps of Engineers.
Following Fu Sheng, she continued along the narrow walkway above the sluggish stream and wondered once again whether she’d been wrong to leave Echo behind. But then again, what choice did she really have? If Gould managed to corner gold, it was as good as giving New York to the Confederacy. The city was fundamental to the Union, and if it seceded under financial pressure or simply declared itself an open city, then all would be lost; the president would have no choice but to occupy the city, bleeding masses of infantry from the Army of the Potomac to garrison it. The president had to be warned, and above all the rioting in the streets above her had to be stopped.
After what seemed hours, the Chinaman stopped and Kate saw a series of iron rungs set into the brick like a ladder. Fu Sheng pointed upward and waited. She would be forced to go ahead of him; the Chinaman was leaving nothing to chance. Kate climbed.
The iron ladder led to a trapdoor, which Kate pushed upward. She boosted herself up, followed by Fu Sheng. For a moment she thought they must have walked around in circles underground because there could be no doubt that they were in a crypt; lead vaults let into narrow niches in the walls of a gloomy underground chamber.
“Where are we?”
The Chinaman made no response, but simply pointed to a stone staircase at the far end of the crypt. She went to it and climbed, eventually coming up behind a carved wooden pulpit. The pulpit was crowned with a wooden, white-painted coronet and six white wooden feathers. The church was neither grand nor ornate. Two rows of white Corinthian columns marched down the nave, and the altar stood under a simple, slightly flattened arch. Light was offered by a row of hissing gaslight chandeliers that stood in a long row between the columns above the central aisle that ran between the simple pews.
Kate immediately knew where they were: Saint Paul’s Chapel on Vesey Street, no more than a few blocks from their destination. Whatever else this Draculiya was, he kept his word. The church was empty and the doors were barred against the rioting and looting outside. Saint Paul’s, despite its name, was a church for Episcopals, not Romans, and wealthy Episcopals at that.
Fu Sheng led her off to one side, then unbarred the small door that led outside to the small cemetery. The air was full of smoke as thick as fog, and the Chinaman handed her a bandanna, indicating that she should tie it over the lower half of her face. She turned and stared at the glow of flickering light that outlined the steeple of the church. Broadway was on fire, and the air was full of white-hot cinders, dancing like fireflies across the night sky. They headed out onto Vesey Street.
The market street had been hard-hit earlier in the day, fruit stalls and barrows overturned, awnings ripped to shreds and windows smashed. A toy store had been vandalized, and broken dolls and push toys, brightly colored in reds, yellows and blues, lay on the sidewalks. A fishmonger had been raided and for the better part of a block the street was awash in oyster shells and rotting fish. The upper stories, mostly small manufacturing concerns or coffeehouses, seemed to have fared a little better, but Kate and her guide were the only ones willing to take a stroll along the vandalized and plundered thoroughfare.
They reached Washington Street and the docks, but the ferry slip was abandoned and there was not a soul to be seen. Far off across the river she could see the faint lights around the canal basin at Paulus Hook. She heard a brief whistle and what sounded like the cocking of a pistol.
A man stepped out of the shadows around a warehouse close to the pier. “Don’t move, either one of you thieving bastards! And put up your murdering hands.” The man was black, of medium height with powerful arms and slightly bowed legs. He had a handsome, open face and deep brown eyes. He was wearing a brass-buttoned pea jacket and off-white canvas trousers, flared at the cuff: what passed for a seaman’s uniform in the United States Navy. He also had a pistol in his hand.
Kate pulled off the bandanna covering her face and grinned. “Guarding an empty pier, Barnabus Coffin?”
“Last ferry’s gone. Anybody ain’t on it is likely dead by now.” The man laughed and lowered the hammer on his heavy Colt Navy, letting it hang freely from its braided lanyard. “Kate Warne, as I live and breathe! What in the name of all that’s holy are you doing here? And playing at being a man again.”
“Looking for you, as a matter of fact,” she answered. “But first I should introduce you to the man who brought me here. A friend, I think.”
“What friend?” said the sailor.
Kate turned. There was no sign of Fu Sheng. The Chinaman had vanished.