Westside Saints Page 2

  “I thought you were without vice,” I said.

  “I am opposed to the devil’s intoxicants,” she said, her Haitian lilt discarded in favor of a bracing Westside brogue. “That does not mean I am without sin.”

  “Mam is waiting,” said Enoch.

  Mam was a woman in a soiled white cloak leaning on the fence beside the barred Waverly Place gate. She had thin peach lips and, beneath her hood, hair translucent white. She wore a heavy ivory glove on her left hand. Her right she offered to me.

  “Helen Byrd,” she said.

  “Matriarch of the Electric Church,” said Enoch. “Widow of its founder, the prophet and martyr Bulrush Byrd. Mam. And this is my sister Ruth.”

  Ruth had a pointed chin and flat hair. A heavy scarf covered most of her face. She stared through me blankly, looking so much like her mother that it made me a bit dizzy. With only the flickering light of Berk’s faraway fire to guide me, it was hard to tell if Helen looked young for her age, or if Ruth was old for hers.

  “I’m not impressed,” said Helen after she finished sizing me up.

  “I’d be worried if you were. What is it you want?”

  “Something has gone missing from our church. My children insist you are the woman to find it. I don’t agree, but they don’t care.”

  “If you’re waiting for me to defend myself, don’t bother. I’m too cold to beg.”

  She scowled more, somehow, and went on.

  “It is the finger of Róisín of Lismore, a saint. Our saint. It is a fixture of our ministry, the centerpiece of our faith, and it was stolen from our church earlier this week. I am told you specialize in finding tiny things.”

  “It’s the little finger,” said Judy. I couldn’t tell if she was trying to be funny, but I did my best not to laugh. “Left hand. Pickled.”

  “When was it stolen?” I said.

  “After dark on Thursday night,” said Helen. “Ruth noticed it missing at dawn.”

  “No one saw anything?”

  “If we had, we would not have come to you.”

  “Who has access to the church after dark? Just the four of you?”

  “The whole city has access to the electric faith.”

  “What?”

  “We leave our doors open to the neighborhood,” said Enoch. “That any passing vagrant might take shelter. We have nothing to steal.”

  “Not anymore, anyway,” I said, ignoring Helen’s and Ruth’s irritation. “You’re certain it was stolen? I find that the smaller the finger, the more likely it is to be misplaced.”

  “Saint Róisín’s finger resides in a small glass case,” said Helen. “It is never disturbed, even during services. The only key is kept in my office, and that door is always locked, no matter the needs of the city’s vagrants.”

  “The case was smashed?” I said.

  “To dust,” said Ruth, so low I could hardly hear.

  “Nothing else was taken?”

  “As my brother said, there really is nothing to steal.”

  “And why do you need the finger back?”

  “What kind of question is that?” said Enoch.

  “It’s, what, an inch and a half long? Shriveled? Pink? I can find you one to match in any snowbank on this avenue. I assure you, the donor will not mind.”

  “It wouldn’t be Róisín.”

  “And you really believe that little scrap of flesh you keep in a box is?”

  I thought they would be angry. If they were, it didn’t show. Enoch blanched; Judy cackled, and Helen became, if this was possible, even more blank. Ruth’s stern eyes softened, and she looked on me with pity as she took my hands in hers.

  “You have lost quite a lot,” she said, stroking my hands, searching my face.

  “So has everyone. That’s an easy thing to guess.”

  “You’ve lost a parent. Both parents?”

  “What does that have to do with your stolen digit?”

  “You have no family, few friends. You have seen too much bloodshed, too much pain. This winter has been hard for all of us, but harder for you. You try to carry the city on your back, and it has bent you double.”

  I tried to keep her from seeing that she wasn’t wrong. I don’t think I succeeded.

  “Róisín is the patron saint of suffering. Her death was more horrible than you could imagine, and she bore it with a smile. Our family has lost much, too, and our parishioners have lost even more. Decades of suffering, and she has always been there. Without her to point the way, our family, our church, will be lost.”

  “Our city, too,” said Enoch. “Without our church, the whole city is in jeopardy.”

  I had never been inside the building they called a church, but I had seen it. A onetime Italian banquet hall on Carmine Street, its old sign shone through the poorly painted marquee that invited the world to “Join the Electric Church.” I had always wondered why they chose it. In a district overrun with abandoned churches, some in serviceable condition, they preferred a dump.

  I looked at the four of them, their clothes and bearing as ridiculous as their faith. They were pathetic, but they were kind. In a city and a winter that fought so hard to crush those who believed in anything but greed and death, they pressed on. Delusional, certainly—Enoch couldn’t really believe the whole city was counting on them—but their intentions were pure. If they thought the finger would help them continue with that mission . . .

  “I’d be honored,” I said.

  “I still don’t like her,” said Helen.

  “And I don’t like you, but that doesn’t mean we can’t have a bit of fun.”

  Helen gave me the kind of look you normally expect from a Gorgon. Judy pulled her mother back and whispered, “She’s the only one.”

  “Fine,” said Helen. “Fine.”

  “A ringing endorsement,” I said. “I can’t wait to get started.”

  “Thank you, Miss Carr,” said Enoch. “And while you’re working for Mam, of course, you can let the blue ink go.”

  I appreciated that. I’m sure Bex would feel it was far more healthy to chase just one impossibility at a time.

  I could have gone back upstairs for another drink, but instead I let them walk me home, as they had done so often for my father, to the town house that stood alone on an empty block on the western edge of Washington Square.

  I stepped from the frozen street into my frozen parlor, lit a fire, and tried to drive the frost from my chest. I drew a fat album from a high shelf and laid it on the floor before the dancing flame. Inside were dozens of Bex’s drawings of the old man and the young woman, drawings of them walking and eating and bathing and living lives too ordinary to be believed. He was the Glen-Richard Van Alen who lived in another New York, far gentler than our own. She was Juliette Copeland. Him I’d shot in the chest. Her I’d drowned. These drawings, which I’d started commissioning from Bex when I realized my guilt would not fade with autumn, were glimpses into the sorts of quiet days my victims would never enjoy.

  I pasted the new pair onto blank pages. There was one more drawing inside Bex’s envelope that I could not bear to see. I left it inside and fell asleep by the fire, hoping that if the finger of Saint Róisín couldn’t save the city, it could at least save me.

  The next morning I breakfasted in the Upper West, on a sliver-thin side street nestled between Fifth Avenue and the fence, where the smell of old money still hung in the air. In a double-wide town house painted a chipped, fading blue, I was greeted by a woman with tight white curls whose skin was as wrinkled and clear as cellophane. This was my grandmother: the distinguished Anacostia Fall.

  “Did you bring it?” she said, as she welcomed me in from the cold.

  “Is there sausage?”

  “The way you can gorge without doing the decent thing and becoming monstrously fat—it simply baffles.”

  “I assure you—when out of your sight, I eat as delicately as a bird.”

  She honked out a laugh. I followed her across the polished parquet,
beneath a dripping, wax-encrusted chandelier, past a heavenly staircase that twisted to the floors above. Candles flickered over photos of relatives long dead, posed as stiff as corpses but smiling, as the Falls usually did, like hoodlums. The final picture showed Ana, severely corseted, flanked by her children: a boy with hair as matted as beaver fur and a smirking young woman named Mary Fall.

  In a dining room decorated with haunting landscapes of upstate New York, we sat at the corner of a table that could seat twenty-four paunchy men. Ana rang a bell, and a segment of wall shot open to reveal two steaming dishes of fatty sausage, buttered toast, and egg pudding. She carried the plates herself, hands shaking just enough to keep it interesting. The first bite warmed me down to my calluses, and I did not stop until I was numb with grease. I dried my fingers on the tablecloth.

  Now it was time to pay the check.

  I slid Bex Red’s envelope across the table. Ana flipped it open and eased out the picture. She stared at it for a long time, then slumped back and sighed.

  “Can I see it?” I said.

  “You don’t usually like to look.”

  “The dreams have gotten worse.”

  She handed it to me. Bex’s effortless lines showed a middle-aged woman sitting at her kitchen table, a tomato sandwich in one hand and a neatly folded newspaper in the other. The table was my table. The woman was my mother.

  Mary Fall died of pneumonia the summer of my tenth year. I’d thought that pain forgotten until last year, when I killed for the first time and she began to appear in my sleep. The dreams were violent enough to wake me, strange enough that I couldn’t shake them, and when they became unbearable I began visiting the only woman in New York who might understand.

  I’d hardly known Ana when my parents were alive, but she welcomed me without question and fed me well. When I told her how I was torturing myself with drawings of my victims living the lives I’d cut short, she asked if Bex could do the same for the daughter she’d lost decades before. We rarely spoke of Mary—we rarely spoke at all—but when we did, it was like opening a steam valve that eased the pressure and let me breathe again.

  “She looks happy,” I said.

  “She doesn’t. She looks normal. That’s enough.”

  I gave it back to her.

  “You didn’t approve when she married my father, did you?” I said.

  “Why would you ask me such an inane question?”

  “I’ve always wondered how they met.”

  “Your father was a brute, and after she met him, Mary was never my daughter again. I never bothered to ask how it began.”

  I followed her down the long hallway, keeping my eyes on the photo of Mary for as long as I could. At the end of the immaculate passage, one of the doors was open an inch. Behind it I saw a heap of broken furniture, rotted books, ruined artwork, tarnished silver, cracked glass, and other refuse far past the point of identification. Ana shut the door, and I pretended I hadn’t seen.

  She insisted on helping me put on my coat. As I slid my left arm home, I asked, “Was she as good as I remember?”

  “Better,” said Ana. “There never walked a purer soul.”

  She called her carriage, an electric green behemoth drawn by a black horse speckled white with snow, and I glided home. As we crossed the Borderline, the tranquility of the Upper West fell away, and I steeled myself for work.

  Two

  That winter had been all red gin and frozen corpses. Six months prior, my beloved Westside—a vast, desolate territory overrun with relentless vegetation but by unknown magic spared the tedium of modern technology like electricity, automobiles, and guns—convulsed into a civil war between the Upper West’s hulking dictator, Glen-Richard Van Alen, and the Lower West’s bootlegging bandit queen, Andrea Barbarossa. When their armies were slaughtered by the New York Police Department’s savage Fourth Precinct, in a massacre that it disgusts me to say was already being romanticized as the Battle of Eighth Avenue, the lawless Lower West passed into Van Alen’s hands.

  He promised order and the pathetic trappings of civilization that are the hallmarks of the bourgeois Upper West. He gave us nothing but a tattered force of guardsmen who feared our streets and loathed our people, and whose only contribution to civic life below Fourteenth Street was to light candles nightly at each intersection and walk on, abandoning the corners to those who thrive in the dark.

  Without Barbie’s army of eager children to patrol the sidewalks and alleys, the few thousand who remained below the Borderline became the targets of robbery, battery, murder, and rape, a wave of street crime not felt in the city since the close of the last century. When his new territory threatened revolt, the feverishly teetotal Van Alen relented by opening a distillery on Morton Creek, churning out industrial-grade gin stained red with beets. The stuff was toxic, but he sold it cheap, along with a warning that if even a drop of the red stuff appeared on the far side of the fence, where it might arouse the attention of the Volstead agents, he would burn the distillery to the ground.

  We had liquor. We had peace. But no dawn passed without one or two fresh bodies half buried under a snow that fell fat and yellow, like lard from heaven. When convenient, I reported the dead to the guardsmen or, on the rare occasion that I spotted one, a policeman. Mostly, I stared straight ahead as I walked past their stiffened forms, trying to forget the gray of their skin, the dusty red of their lips. These bodies were no mystery, and so they were not my concern. They were killed by anonymous thugs; they were killed by the city itself.

  I saw plenty of them after the Byrds engaged me in the quest for the purloined pinkie, when I burned three days combing the gutters, alleys, and ruined houses of Carmine Street, and finding no fingers save those on corpses’ hands.

  On the fourth day, thick, wet flakes swept across the city, and the Westside hardened like wax. Once, each block would have been scraped clean by one of Barbarossa’s little gangs of children—the One-Eyed Cats, the Gutter Girls, the Other Gophers, the Cut-Eyes, the Mercer Street Mercifuls, the Barkleys, the Toes—but they were all dead now, and Van Alen’s guardsmen lacked the numbers to do anything but hack a narrow path along the major sidewalks. The rest of the Lower West was left to freeze.

  When it was too cold to walk the streets, I brought a pound of brisket to Judson Memorial Church as an offering to Father Lamb. The defrocked priest’s speakeasy was closed until spring, and he was happy to trade a lesson in Catholic history for a side of Jewish beef. I set the table, and he pulled down a volume on the lives of the saints.

  “She was born on the south coast of Ireland in 632,” he said between bites. “A noblewoman who renounced her inheritance to minister to the poor. Good girl. While working among the wretched, she picked up a pox that twisted her spine, causing untold suffering until she perished in a poorhouse fire. The end.”

  “What was special about her finger?”

  “Doesn’t say. It might have been just a finger.”

  “Are there any other bits of her floating around?”

  “This has no mention of any relics, fingers or otherwise.”

  “And the Byrds . . .”

  “What about them?”

  “Are they as kind as they seem?”

  Lamb spent some time coughing down an oversized mouthful. I waited.

  “What the hell do you care?” he rasped.

  “They’re a client. Before I can find what they’ve lost, I have to know them, inside and out.”

  He wiped a greasy hand across his mouth and beard, cleaning some parts of his face and leaving others grimier than before.

  “Do you know why I got out of the business of God?” he said.

  “I thought you were tossed out for blasphemy.”

  He scowled. People hate it when you answer rhetorical questions.

  “I got tired of people needing something to believe in, needing what I couldn’t give ’em. The Byrds never quit. Even people you’d think are beyond the reach of human kindness, they try to help.”

&
nbsp; “Like who?”

  “Are you forgetting the many mornings Enoch saved your daddy’s life?”

  “All right, that’s one. But have they helped anybody who deserved it?”

  He stuffed the last wad of brisket into his cheek, wiped his hands on his pants, and said, “There’s a woman at St. Vincent’s you ought to meet.”

  Her name was Stacey Tarbell, one of an Irish colony that the guardsmen had herded into the quarantine ward at St. Vincent’s, where the thick-walled rooms were small and easy to heat. Sitting in that little cell was like cozying up inside a tubercular lung. Even after too long in the cold, it was hotter than I could stand. I’d have liked to strip naked and lie on the stone, but the walls were plastered with images of the saints, and I didn’t think they—or the defrocked priest sitting next to me—would appreciate the spectacle.

  Stacey had two chairs, and insisted Lamb and I take them both. She sat on her bed and told me, in a voice too cheerful for me to trust, that Helen Byrd had saved her life.

  “How?” I said, laying the skepticism on as thick as the syllable could bear.

  “My Tom worked the high steel, hammering rivets one hundred, two hundred feet in the air. One day it was wet. He slipped. That was all.”

  “After the funeral, she asked me to pray with her,” said Lamb. “I told her I quit that a long time ago.”

  “But he said he knew a woman who’s devoted to widows.”

  “So what did she give you?” I said. “Money? Advice? A list of eligible widowers?”

  “Lord, Gilda,” Lamb grumbled. “Can’t you have the smallest bit of faith in people?”

  “I’m just trying to understand the nature of the services they provide,” I said in my calmest, most open-minded voice. Quite a lot of sweat was dripping from my forehead, my neck, my upper lip. I dragged the sleeve of my dress across my face, sopping up as much as I could. Stacey was waiting for me, I realized, her smile undimmed. I asked her again: “What did Helen do?”