City Of Promise Part 25

"Ain't no more hay," the boy said. "Not if I'm going to have feed for the horses tonight."

"No more? But Mr. Turner said . . . You must go downtown, Ollie. Order a load of hay to be delivered at once. Tell them we must have it today or-" She stopped speaking and looked up. The sky was dark gray and covered in dense cloud. A few flakes were beginning to drift through the air. A few more appeared and then more, swirling around her until she and Ollie were standing in a shower of snowflakes.

Since that terrifying day three years before, she had shuddered with horror every time it began to snow. This time she wanted to laugh with delight. "Shall it last do you think, Ollie? Are the G.o.ds of winter playing with us, or are they serious?"

"Not sure about G.o.d, Mrs. Turner. Never heard nothin' about him being different in the winter than in the summer. But this looks to be a fair enough snow."

Mollie opened her mouth and stuck out her tongue and tasted an icy p.r.i.c.kle. "Go right now, Ollie," she said, but with less urgency than before. "Get as much hay as we need for a month and ride home with the carter."

"Much as we need for the garden, or just for the horses?"

The needles of a small blue-green fir-Abies balsamea-a narrow but clotted evergreen about as tall as she that would someday have sufficient size and substance to mark the turn of a brick path, were already frosted, and there was a coating of white on the hay spread on the perennial border. "Enough feed for the horses only. I do not believe the plantings will require more."

The boy hurried off on his errand. Mollie stayed where she was, watching the garden fill up with snow. Dreaming different dreams from those that had once filled her mind and soothed her heart. But dreams at least. Something. She stretched out both arms and held them open, as if she were welcoming someone. A child.

No, never.

But her embrace was not quite as empty as it had been before.

Book Two.

18801883.

18.

THE TELEPHONE WAS attached to the wall beside Josh's desk, a wooden box about a foot square. When he wanted to use it he lifted the earpiece and turned the crank and somehow, in what seemed miraculous even after a year, a man's voice said, "Exchange."

"Please connect me with Mr. Devrey."

There was a long and mostly silent pause, followed by a loud buzzing. Josh took out his watch and observed the movement of the minute hand. When after sixty seconds nothing had happened he jiggled the metal cradle of the earpiece. On the third try a different voice said, "Exchange."

"I was connected previously. I asked for Mr. Devrey but did not reach him."

"You weren't connected to me, mister." The rudeness of the phone men was already legend. "What's the number?"

"I can't remember the number. But I believe you have the list." There were, he knew, some two hundred fifty subscribers. At sixty dollars a month he suspected there might not be many more. "Mr. Zachary Devrey in the Devrey Building on Ca.n.a.l Street."

The phone man grunted. Another pause. Then Zac shouted h.e.l.lo in his ear.

"It's Josh, Zac. Can you hear me?"

"Loud and clear." With that hint of glee that still accompanied every one of these extraordinary communications.

"Are we set for this afternoon?"

"Can't hear you now. Speak up."

"This afternoon," Josh shouted into the funnel-shaped mouthpiece fixed above the crank. "At Suns.h.i.+ne Hill."

"Yes, what about it?"

"Is the auctioneer coming? Are we still on?"

Zac shouted still louder, as if to emphasize the affirmative. "I'm a.s.sured he'll be there at three."

"Good. I'll see you then."

Followed by the satisfying click when the connection was broken.

Thirty-two miles in all directions from City Hall; connected by cables buried underground which somehow carried spoken words, not merely Morse code. A marvelous leap of progress that came after Western Union funded Mr. Edison's improvements to Mr. Bell's invention.

Josh hung up the telephone and turned to the window. His office of the moment was on Seventh Avenue and Fifty-Third Street, on the fourth floor of a building that climbed five additional stories above his head and housed fifty-four flats. He'd occupy this one until he rented it, then he'd move on.

Steel-framed buildings remained his unique achievement. His detractors found their straight-up facades entirely too austere to be worth copying. Western Union's "tallest office building in the world" was ten floors, finished four years earlier downtown on Broadway and Dey Streets, but built entirely of masonry. It rose in tiers like a wedding cake, with similar furbelows and flourishes.

Josh cared nothing for his critics. Let them carp about Spartan exteriors unworthy of a great city. He housed people who without him would not have a private home. And he made a comfortable profit doing it. He no longer, however, made his own steel. The girders came from Pittsburgh by rail and coastal steamer. Caused a lot of dissension within his crew. "We're iron men, not janitors, Mr. Turner," Ebenezer Tickle fumed. "And you gave me your word we'd have our old jobs back at our old pay rate." Josh pointed out that he'd promised they would make his steel if he made it. Not the same thing.

He might not have prevailed had he not been able to put them back to work on construction and raise them a dime an hour. "That's forty-five cents an hour for your men, Mr. Tickle. Time and a half for anything over forty hours as before. And your salary up five dollars a week to thirty. Do we have an agreement?"

"It's six cents an hour less for the others and five dollars a week less for me. Since before the panic."

"It is," Josh admitted. "But economic upheavals of that magnitude have consequences."

The dwarf considered for a moment. "An extra two years rent-free on my lease," he said finally. "And I have to talk to the others 'fore I can say."

"An extra year," Josh said. "Not two. And I'll wait as long as a week for your decision. No longer."

It took three days, then their customary ritual of contract. Done, Mr. Tickle. Done Mr. Turner. Accompanied by a handshake.

Now he was considering putting up a new building on Fourth Avenue in the Nineties, something that seemed possible because civilization was marching toward 1060, and had in a few instances even moved beyond it. Why not? He could call the building the Park Avenue Flats. There was no reason not to appropriate the name the street bore in Murray Hill. These days there were plantings down the middle of the avenue uptown as well as down. For the same reason, disguising the venting of an underground train tunnel. Better still, he could call his new project the Park Avenue Apartments, the fas.h.i.+onable word of the moment.

But putting up a building of fifty or more flats in a place where probably no one but he imagined any gentleman would want to live . . . Yes, it was risky, but the thought got his blood going in a way that nothing else did. Particularly on a cold gray day that didn't feel at all like the middle of June. Josh opened the window and leaned out over the street. Below him Seventh Avenue seemed busier, more alive than he remembered it being in some time.

An economic uptick? He thought so, thought he could smell it in the stink of coal dust and hear it in the clattering rumble of the elevated railways.

Boss Tweed had coughed out his lungs and his life in Ludlow Street jail the year before, but his legacy was celebrated in every speck of ash that landed on the heads of pedestrians walking below an el. Building and running what the romantics called trains in the sky-a bit of a stretch for something only forty feet up-not only provided desperate New Yorkers with jobs, the els had at last made it easier for other workers to get to the jobs they already had.

Josh could see the tops of two of the lines from where he stood. The Ninth Avenue went as far as Eighty-First Street, and they were talking about extending it to Harlem in a few years. It was a grubby, workaday conveyance used by laborers employed along the great mercantile corridor that clung to the Hudson River, the mostly Irish dock workers and haulers of freight who manhandled the necessities of life on and off Manhattan Island. If he turned his head to the right, he saw the cheerful green stations and graceful wrought-iron roofs of the Sixth Avenue line. It offered comfortable cars not unlike a Pullman train, and heated, gaslit waiting rooms meant for ladies on their way to the Mile. As well as the very sorts of middling gentlemen who rented his flats.

The el further east on Third Avenue was neither as grimy as the Ninth nor as elegant as the Sixth. It pa.s.sed through largely residential parts of the city along an avenue lined with four- and five-story tenements, which were barely livable, but a huge improvement on the barracks-like squalor of the rookeries. Josh couldn't see the Third Avenue el from his window, but if he turned to the wall behind him it was carefully drawn on the map for which he'd paid a printing company called Galt & Hoy the outrageous sum of twelve dollars and fifty cents.

Exorbitant, but worth it. Three feet wide by seven feet long, the map showed every street and almost every building in the city. Josh had stuck pins with brightly colored heads in his own property. They formed a satisfying and very private rainbow. Yellow was for the five rooming houses he still owned, green signified his house at 1060 Fourth, and the five red pins indicated his apartment buildings in the East Fifties and Sixties. The one in which he was standing also had a red pin. It was an anomaly both because it was on the West Side-he'd picked up three contiguous lots for a song when the original owner went bankrupt-and because it was not actually pictured on the Galt & Hoy map. He'd built it after their cartographer did his survey. Another curiosity was that both the St. Nicholas and the Carolina were obscured by the draftsman's quixotic notion of showing Lexington Avenue continuing above Forty-Second Street and obliterating them. Josh stuck his red pins in nonetheless. He trusted reality more than the mapmaker's imagination. h.e.l.l, the man had chosen to show the Second Avenue el as completed when it had been started only a few months before, and he'd made a major feature of the Brooklyn Bridge. "And G.o.d knows if that will ever be finished."

"What's that, sir?" Hamish Fraser sat at a desk on the opposite side of the office, head bent over the accounts, and so quiet Josh had forgotten he was there.

"I was speculating on whether," Josh reached for his topper and cane, "the Brooklyn Bridge will eventually cross the river the way this map has it."

The Scot shook his head. "Och, it dinna' seem likely, Mr. Turner. If a man gets so ill he might die going beneath the thing, what will he suffer from being a hundred and thirty-five feet in the air on top of it? It's some evil sickness coming out of the river. Has to be."

June, Mollie thought, was her garden's moment. At least that's what she thought now when luscious purple and red roses twined among the lacy white blossoms of the clematis, and a drift of late-blooming tulips followed one of the garden's brick paths. The tulips shaded pale peach to deep pink, and s.h.i.+mmered with color despite the unseasonably cool and gray afternoon. Mind you, in a few weeks when the lilies and iris and peonies and hydrangeas of high summer were at their best in the perennial border, she would doubtless think that the perfect time in her private paradise.

Private was a relative term. Most days people of every size and sort stood peering through the bars of the iron fence that surrounded the property. They craned their necks to see around the artfully laid-out corners and curves, and inhaled the scents, and made appreciative sounds of pleasure and amazement at this thing of beauty crafted from an ordinary New York City building lot.

Mollie had little option but to tolerate the gawkers and gazers. Mr. McKim had suggested building a high stone wall, but that would create shadows and shade where she might not want it. Besides, she had long since admitted to herself that she rather enjoyed the attention.

She had become adept at looking toward the fence without seeming to do so, but a covert glance revealed no onlookers today. Instead Mollie saw a shabby van. It had a wooden sign that read DEANGELO BROTHERS hanging on its side and it was heading north on Fourth Avenue, pulled by two horses of the sort usually dismissed as nags.

She went back to her pruning, but when she looked up she saw that the driver had turned his horses onto the vacant ground next to the garden. Presumably he was taking advantage of the opportunity to turn around and head back downtown . . . no, perhaps that was not his intention. He had reined in beside the small gate she'd had cut so Ollie could conveniently carry plant tr.i.m.m.i.n.gs over to the empty lot for burning. "Delivery," the driver called out. Then he got down on the far side of his rig and busied himself with his horses.

Mollie made her way to the gate. She had no idea who these DeAngelo brothers might be or what they could be delivering, and at closer view the van was not just shabby, it was mud-spattered and dirty and the horses were in need of a good brus.h.i.+ng. "Yes, can I help you?"

"You Mrs. Joshua Turner?" The man had moved around to the rear, and he was bending his head over some papers. His trousers, she noted, were torn and patched, he wore no coat, and his s.h.i.+rt was stained with sweat.

"I'm Mrs. Turner, but I'm not expecting a delivery and I've never heard of DeAngelo Brothers. What do you have there?"

He continued to riffle through his papers, as if she were one of a series of customers. "Statue," he said at last, apparently having found the information in his doc.u.ments.

"What statue?"

"Says here it's Venus."

"Well, if that's what it says, I've no doubt it's true. But I did not order a statue of Venus or any other G.o.ddess, and I have no need of one. I'm afraid you'll have to take it back to wherever it came from."

He turned to her. She saw that he wore an eyepatch, and that his face matched the rest of him. He was scruffy and unshaven and as much in need of grooming as his horses.

"According to these papers, Mr. Joshua Turner ordered the statue. Paid two hundred for it as well. So you may as well have it."

"Are you quite sure," Mollie demanded, "your customer is Mr. Joshua Turner of 1060 Fourth Avenue? And that he has requested a statue of Venus to be delivered to our home?"

"That's what it says. Statue of Venus for the flower garden what's on lot number 1062."

"How extraordinary."

"You want to come around back and have a look 'fore I take it off? It's pretty heavy. Wouldn't want to unload it only to have you tell me to put it back on."

Mollie looked around. Ollie had gone downtown to buy some new tack required for the horses. The other members of the household were women, and they were all inside. "Perhaps I can get you some a.s.sistance, but-"

"Sure would like you to take a look yourself first," the man insisted. "See if you want it. I can take it back otherwise."

"Yes, all right. That's sensible." Mollie unlatched the gate and stepped through it. She was now near enough to the man to smell his body odor and a pervasive miasma of alcohol. She tried holding her breath during the few seconds it took him to unlatch the van's rear door. How extraordinary for Joshua to purchase a statue for the garden. Venus of all things. At such a huge cost and without saying a word about it to her. The only explanation she could think of was that her birthday was next month, but she could not remember the last time her husband had bought her a gift to mark the occasion.

"In here," the man said, holding open the door.

The van's interior was in deep shadows, and appeared empty. "I don't see any-"

There was a sense of movement, a whoos.h.i.+ng noise that lasted perhaps a second, then darkness as the cosh made contact with her skull and she crumpled.

"Caisson disease," Simon said when Joshua reported Hamish's remark about something evil in the river holding up the building of the Brooklyn Bridge. "There's a doctor named Andy Smith on the project, and that's what he calls it. Comes on after the workers have been some time in caissons below the water."

"Why didn't it show up on the Brooklyn side?"

"They only had to go down forty-some feet to reach bedrock over in Brooklyn. This side of the river they're down nearly seventy and they're still digging through mud. Tell that to your clerk."

"I shall, but I don't think it will convince him. Hamish prefers his evil river spirits."

Simon shrugged. "Even today people don't think of medicine as science." He broke off because a tall and fleshy man with a red nose and a swallowtail coat s.h.i.+ny with age brought his hammer down with a sharp crack on a sort of lectern, on top of a dais erected in the middle of the s.p.a.cious foyer of the house Nick and Carolina had built in 1845 and named Suns.h.i.+ne Hill.

"Sold for fifty cents," the auctioneer said, and a stranger claimed a box of old and rusty lanterns for which Nick and Carolina's children had no use.

A practical way to dispose of what was left, Josh knew. Necessary. Nonetheless, incredibly painful.

A new Avenue A had been pushed up from Fourteenth Street. The effect was to level the steep driveway and leave the house on a precipice. Both it and the land on which it stood were slated for the wrecking ball. So nothing to do but get rid of the furnis.h.i.+ngs and personal effects none of them wanted.

"Lot number three," the auctioneer intoned. "Two painted wooden chests. What am I bid, ladies and gentlemen? A dollar to my right. Can I have two? Excellent. Three fifty. Four. Four twenty-five behind you. Nothing more? Sold." The hammer came down and a couple of porters hauled in two iron bedsteads that had been stored in the attic. "Lot number four, ladies and gentlemen."

They had buried Nick in the winter of 1875, on the same day the hand of the huge monument to be called the Statue of Liberty was installed in Madison Square, in a ploy meant to help raise the capital needed to erect the full statue on Bedloe's Island. Josh remembered thinking how much his father would have enjoyed seeing the thing. Not, however, this sad dispersal of the last of his possessions, however old and unloved.

The auctioneer was getting set to bring down the hammer on a carton of children's books. Josh wondered if Simon might be going to bid. He and Rachel had two sons and expected a third child any day. His brother, however, showed no sign of moving. Josh raised his hand.

"Pure drivel," Simon murmured. "I had a look. Not a proper mystery in-"

"Mr. Turner," a boy's voice called from somewhere near the front door. "Mr. Joshua Turner."

"That's me." Someone topped his bid for the books and Josh let them go and pushed through the crowd to where the lad who'd called his name waited. "Yes," quietly, so he wouldn't interrupt the auctioneer's spiel, "I'm Joshua Turner. What do you have for me?"

"This note, sir." The boy held out a small envelope.

There was no name written on the front. Nothing on the back side either. "How am I to know this is meant for-" He broke off because when he raised his head he discovered the messenger had disappeared.

"You cannot," Zac said, "know that Trent Clifford is behind it."

"My gut tells me he is." Josh and both his brothers were in Josh's second-floor study at 1060. The note was the only thing on the desk. WE HAVE YOUR WIFE. YOU WILL BE CONTACTED. "Using a defenseless woman is exactly the sort of thing he would do."

"If it's him," Zac said. "And you've got no proof that it is, what do you think he wants? Look, I can talk to a few people. Find out which of the police is likely to be honest and-"

"No coppers," Josh said firmly, repeating what he'd been saying all along. The unsolved murder of little George Higgins was as fresh in his mind as if it had happened yesterday not six years before. "If you find any that are honest they'll probably be incompetent. And the others are all in Clifford's pocket. I've sent for-"

There was a tap on the door. Frankie Miller opened it, said something to the two men with him, then stepped inside. "Evening, gents. Sorry to hear the bad news, Mr. Turner."