Westside Read online

  Map

  Dedication

  For Yvonne

  and Dr. Baby

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Map

  Dedication

  One

  Two

  Three

  Four

  Five

  Six

  Seven

  Eight

  Nine

  Ten

  Eleven

  Twelve

  Thirteen

  Fourteen

  Fifteen

  Sixteen

  Seventeen

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  One

  I stole a glove.

  It dangled off a table in a decrepit leather shop in Thieves’ Market on the Eastside of Manhattan in sweltering late September 1921, and it was in my bag before I even knew it had been in my hand.

  It was white leather, paper thin and butter soft, with irises along the knuckles and a strange brand embossed at the wrist that showed a stamp smashing into a puddle of ink. In that vile shop, where canvas walls kept out sunlight but trapped heat, the glove was a splash of ivory in the darkness. It was surrounded by wallets, boots, belts, caps, jackets, aprons, strops, and straps—all stained, stolen, and badly made. The glove was too fine for that dusty stall, and so the shopkeeper was watching when I took it away.

  “Girl!” he barked. I did not turn my head, for that is not my name.

  He shoved aside a rack of loafers and strode toward me, bowlegged, sweating, a triangle of moles sprouting hairs just to the left of his mouth. He blocked my exit, and the smell of him made the sausage I’d called lunch lurch in my stomach.

  “Think I didn’t see it?” he said. “This is my place. I see everything.”

  “That’s no great accomplishment,” I shrugged. “It’s such a small place.”

  He bristled. “You give it back, or it’s trouble.”

  He wrapped his meaty fingers around a short leather club. My neck brushed against the canvas walls. There was nowhere else to go. I put on my sweetest society girl smile.

  “I really don’t know what you mean,” I said, “but trouble is something I strive to avoid at all costs.”

  “So hand it here.”

  I dug into my long, amorphous sack of a purse, and he smiled a horrid smile. He rolled the club between his hands. “Right, right. Nice and slow, and there’ll be no trouble at all.”

  He was right—it was no trouble for me.

  My little knife flicked open quick as a stinging wasp. I jabbed it toward the shopkeeper’s ample belly. His balance failed him, and he crashed into a table of leather scraps. I turned away, slashed a hole in the canvas, and leapt through it like an acrobat through a ring of fire.

  The leather shop was just one of a jumble of tents erected in the middle of the street, where sagging tables offered chipped glassware, stained collars, limp hats, out-of-date calendars, and purposeless hunks of metal. Most of it had been parted from the original owners, just as I was liberating this glove now. The crowd moved steadily, because no one was buying. They browsed to forget that they had nowhere better to go. From somewhere uncertain came the stink of gutted fish. From behind me came the shopkeeper’s shout.

  “She’s a thief! The little bitch is a thief!”

  Never mind that half the patrons in the market were thieves, either by vocation or necessity. Never mind that the entire operation was a clearinghouse for items stolen up and down the Eastside. These creatures protected their own. Two other shopkeepers heeded the leather man’s call, and the chase, I regret to say, began in earnest.

  A greasy hand reached for my wrist. I twisted away, slamming into the rock-hard gut of a man who sold lace. He leered at me, almost licking his lips, and I slipped under his arm before he closed it around my neck, and ran. They came after me, shoving shoppers and upending pushcarts and threatening unspeakable acts of violence against my person. These men had grown fat selling stolen goods, but I take one glove—not even a pair, but a single glove—and they threaten to remove my skin, tan it, and wear me as a coat.

  They were bloodthirsty and determined, those three shopkeepers, but I am small and passably nimble, and have spent my life running from bullies. I leapt over a family sleeping on the sidewalk, darted through a beer hall emptying after the lunchtime rush, and slipped through the alley toward Bleecker. When I was a child, these alleys were empty, but since the city was sliced in half, whole families have crowded into them, packed into ragged tents or huddling under the awnings of all-night oyster houses. The sun was blotted out by the makeshift shelters on the top floors of the tenements, where flimsy structures of two or three—sometimes even four—stories held apartments built of stolen timber and bedsheets that hung limp in the tepid September breeze.

  I ran down the narrow strip of pavement, dodging outstretched limbs and sleeping children. The shopkeepers burst out of the beer hall and called after me. My mouth burned with the taste of metal. For that matter, my legs burned too.

  I kept running.

  The stink of fish faded as I stepped onto Broadway, crowded and gleaming and smelling of money and judgment, and the fence blocked my path. Even in the punishing glare of the sun, it was a dark thing—thirty feet of wrought iron topped by sharpened spikes, stretching up the middle of the avenue, dividing the healthy Eastside from the deserted west. In the middle was a little door guarded by a little man whose uniform buttons sparkled in the light. I danced through the sludgy traffic and slammed against the iron.

  “Open the gate,” I said, flashing my license.

  A half-witted smile spread across chapped lips. “Just what business has a nice young lady like you got on the Westside?” he said.

  “Personal, and urgent.”

  “I guess you’re from out of town. I can’t let you through this door without a chaperone, and even then, I would advise against it. Things over there are, well, peculiar.”

  “I live on the Westside, I work on the Westside, and I have a Class C permit, which allows—”

  “Crossing the fence any time during normal business hours.”

  “So let me through!”

  He draped his jaundiced fingers across my shoulder and tried to look concerned. The leather man stepped off the sidewalk and waded into traffic, howling for blood.

  “You know, miss, you step through that door, the city cannot guarantee your safety.”

  “Remove your hand from my shoulder or I will bite the knuckles to the bone.”

  “Oh, miss,” he said, as disappointed as if his favorite terrier had just turned rabid. “Very well. Proceed at your own risk.”

  The shopkeeper and his friends fought two or three ill-defined lanes of automobiles, pushcarts, and horse carts, screaming for the gateman to stop. He was too preoccupied with the mechanism of the gate to pay them any mind. The squat iron door eased open. The leather man leapt, and his fingers brushed my shoulder as I threw myself through the gate.

  Damp moss broke my fall. Broadway was muffled by the sound of falling water. A silver cataract cascaded down the crumbling facade of an abandoned tenement, pouring over broken windows, splashing onto the moss-blanketed street, and rushing into the gutter. I have scaled that unsteady building, and seen the source of that waterfall, which bubbles straight from the peeling black tar roof. It is an impossible wonder. Such things are common here.

  When I stopped shaking, I twirled to face the men who had chased me, who now stood before the gate, too timid to cross into the Westside. I waved the glove at them. It was a childish gesture—how could I resist?

  The leather man took the gateman by the collar and screamed in his face.

  “Retrieve
her!”

  “Sir. If you would be so kind as to let me go.”

  “She’s a thief.”

  “I’m sorry to hear that. But my authority stops at the fence. Go after her. Cut her. Gut her. It doesn’t matter to me. But I’ll tell you what I told her: step through this gate, and you take your life in your hands.”

  My pursuers shifted back and forth, rubbing the sweat from their necks, each waiting for the other to take the first step.

  “Sirs,” said the gateman, a touch disappointed, “if you’ll not be crossing, it’s against regulations to leave the gate ajar.”

  The leather man was beaten. The gate swung closed, and the locks slammed into place. The rancid odor of September in Manhattan faded, replaced by the crisp, almost metallic Westside air. I dug my fingers into my hair and loosed the shaggy chignon that I generously call a hairstyle. Knotted curls fell across the peaked black shoulders of my jacket, which dangled around my slim black dress. I breathed deep. I was home.

  I soaked my handkerchief in the clean, unlikely water, and squeezed it onto my neck with a happy shiver. I sat on the sidewalk, feet resting on the quiet half of Broadway, and inspected the stolen glove. It was precisely what I had been looking for, but something was wrong.

  From deep in my bag, past notepads and soiled napkins and the remains of more than one sandwich, I pulled a second glove. Cream, with the same irises and the same rubber stamp, but made of weightless leather and held together by imperceptible stitches. Beside it, the stolen glove was hackwork. The leather was coarse, the stitching ragged, the brand a vague blob. It looked as ugly as if I’d made it myself. I flipped the gloves over. Both were for the left hand. They were not mates. They were twins, one made by an artist, the other by a clod, and the one I’d taken from Thieves’ Market had not belonged to my client after all.

  Another wasted day.

  Life on the Westside has always been peculiar. When the first Dutch settlers came to the island, the Lenape warned them against crossing the old deer trail that would become Broadway. The island’s western half was strange, they said. Dangerous. As white men are wont to do, the Dutch ignored them, and found the district fought every attempt at civilization. A 1628 letter from colony director Peter Minuit boasts of crops that grew taller and faster than could be dreamed, but complains of tools rusting and muskets refusing to fire.

  “Our homes shift on their foundations,” he wrote. “Our wood comes loose from its joints, and my dreams are plagued by visions of pestilence, stigmata, and the armies of hell.”

  The smart settlers returned to the east. The feckless, greedy, criminal, and mad stayed on, and through sheer Protestant stubbornness beat the Westside into submission. Their houses steadied, their tools stayed pristine, and their crops returned to human scale.

  For two centuries and more, the Westside was hardly distinguishable from the east. Perhaps it produced more than its share of suicides, murderers, and artists. Yes, its saloons were death traps. And certainly its brothels were hell on earth. But to the genteel city across the stem, this was no more than charming eccentricity—a badge of honor for refined New York, that the city could thrive in spite of the long, strange scar that marred the west side of its face. So it went for decades. Around century’s end, however, the Westside began to change.

  As if a sequel to Minuit’s letters all those years ago, the plants grew faster. The sidewalks cracked. Modern appliances seized up or caught fire. Guns rusted away to nothing, light bulbs burst in their sockets, and zippers became so unreliable that all but the bravest men entrusted their dignity to the button fly. Streets shifted in the night, and buildings sank beneath the earth. Water sprang up as if from nowhere, and strange new animals crawled forth from the sewers to the bafflement of scientists and the delight of the district’s children. The changes happened slowly enough that New York pretended they were not happening at all—you can always trust a New Yorker to ignore another man’s plight—even when people began to disappear.

  The vanishings started slowly. A man set out for a growler of beer and never came back. A young lover glanced over his shoulder for a parting look at his sweetheart and saw that she was gone. The story was always the same: someone alone in the dark, alone where she should not be, turned a dangerous corner and was never seen again. Such cases were not taken seriously by the police or the public—until the drip became a flood.

  I know the figures by heart:

  174 vanished in 1903—hardly more than normal.

  In 1905, nearly 300.

  In 1907, 419.

  In 1909, 912.

  At first, the vanishings were written off as an unfortunate offshoot of a nationwide spike in crime. The mayor’s office blamed bad gin, bad water, bad hygiene, and the simple savagery of the Westside gangs. The press blamed immigrants, the poor, white slavers, and suicide. The religious blamed the devil; the superstitious blamed the night itself. There were rumors of monstrous creatures that crept out of the subway tunnels, of an army of corpses that lived in the sewers, of a cadre of killers that roamed the dark. But by all civilized people, the barbaric Westsiders were blamed for destroying their own, for making their once-charming neighborhood an uninhabitable hell.

  No matter the actual reason—and I wouldn’t be surprised if it was all of these things, or none at all—the Westside was alone. No one listened when we called for help. No one listened until children began to die.

  In 1914, over three thousand citizens vanished from the Westside, vanished from alleys and streets, from apartments and houses, from schools and churches and restaurants and parks. Nearly one-third were younger than eighteen. I was twenty-one then, practically a child myself, and I lost many friends. Seven years later, I remember their faces. I have forgotten their names.

  All those who could afford it fled across the stem. The Eastside sagged beneath an added million. The Westside, vacant and dark, became more dangerous, and rumors began that its sickness was spreading. Vanishings were reported on the Eastside: first a few dozen, then more than a hundred, and finally, overnight, the city acted.

  The fence went up without debate, without warning, without ceremony. The Westside went to sleep and awoke behind quarantine. Thirteen miles of fence sprung up down the middle of Broadway, a tourniquet on a limb that had already lost too much blood. At first it was wood, but wood was soon replaced by iron, steel, and barbed wire. As far as New York was concerned, the Westside no longer existed—and neither did the fifty or sixty thousand too brave or mad or desperate to flee, who stayed behind the fence, intent on living their lives.

  After the fence went up, the vanishings slowed, and Europe gave us a war that could kill tens of thousands, not in a decade, but in an hour. The world forgot the Westside, but the Westside hasn’t gone anywhere. It is fat on the bottom and skinny on top, bending with Broadway all the way to the island’s top, where it is only a few blocks wide. It breeds New York’s finest painters, killers, poets, and thieves, and I am proud to be among their number. In what other city do the trees outclass the skyscrapers? Where else do rivers flow where streets used to be? And who would not love a city without guns or automobiles or coal-belching machinery? It is a strange place, insistently wild, and I love it. It reminds me of my father. It reminds me of me.

  And if you ask us, if you ask me, what happened, what claimed all those innocent lives? I will tell you that when tragedy strikes, only fools or cowards expect a simple explanation. I know better than to ask questions that don’t have answers, because those kinds of questions drive men mad.

  And the Westside has enough madness as it is.

  A few days earlier, I stared out the window of a shabby Turtle Bay apartment house, a cramped two bedroom whose saving grace was a window that offered a fragment of the East River. I watched the traffic on a river burdened with far too much shipping. A navy ship bore down on a tug that did not look nimble enough to get out of the way. Just before impact, the rattle of bone china on saucers drew me back into the room. Edith Copeland
emerged from the kitchen, in a severe white dress grown sallow from too many washings, gripping an overflowing tray of tea and cakes. She slammed it down on the coffee table. Tea sloshed from the cups, and she glanced at me with a practiced look of silent apology.

  “Quite an assortment,” I said, picking my way through madeleines and lemon squares to find my teacup.

  “We rarely receive visitors.”

  “This is not a social call. Don’t pretend we are friends.”

  “But everyone likes cakes . . .”

  “Why are you so nervous, Mrs. Copeland?”

  “I’ve never hired a private investigator before.”

  “Everyone has to start sometime.”

  “And your advertisement, it said G. Carr. If I’d known you were a girl . . .”

  “I’m twenty-seven, with more than a decade’s experience. Hardly a girl. And if you had known I was a woman, you wouldn’t have hired me, which is why I prefer to withhold that fact as long as is convenient. I’m sure you understand.”

  “I’m just not certain that someone so young will be right for this . . . this task.”

  She leaned forward, elbows on her knees, and straightened a pile of ladies’ magazines. She was wistful and silent and slightly infuriating. I began, I am afraid to say, to grow impatient.

  “It touches on the Westside?” I pushed.

  “I can’t imagine that—”

  “I expect it will. The city gives us few mysteries that do not. The matter concerns your husband?”

  “How did you know?” she asked, looking around, as if someone else would hear.

  “The way you’re shaking, it wasn’t hard to guess. Do you suspect him of murder?”

  “Heavens, I—”

  “Arson? Burglary? Embezzlement? Treason? Adultery? Rape?”

  “My husband is a good man!”

  “How nice for him. Is it a dangerous assignment?”

  “No.”

  “Marvelous. I do not take dangerous assignments. I solve tiny mysteries.”

  “Tiny mysteries?”