Dark Duets Part 39

"Well, then, you can't be expecting other people to hold up their end of a bargain, can you?"

"Of course I can-they gave their word!"

"B-but-"

She waved her hands in the air. "I'm tired of this discussion."

"You're tired! I'm exhausted!"

RASHEEDA LEFT WITH Eunice to take her back to the house and secrete her in the bas.e.m.e.nt. After all, the maid had suffered no damage and, as Rasheeda said, no point in wasting a good revenant. She'd be cleaned up and rented out again in no time.

She left Liath to ransack the Traugott household and make it look like a robbery. Liath set to it, but only to get it over with. A week before and he would have been gleeful for the opportunity. But tonight the only thing that interested him were the Traugotts themselves. And their butler. He tried to ignore his growling stomach, but . . .

Mrs. Traugott lay on her fainting couch, her macerated liver exposed-Eunice had apparently dined on that. Liath stared at the b.l.o.o.d.y tissue. It looked so tempting. He'd always loved liver and onions-he did a lot of cooking and that was one of his favorites-but never raw . . . and never human.

G.o.d help him, his hand took on a life of its own and tore off a piece. He hesitated, then shoved it into his mouth. He closed his eyes and let his head fall back as he chewed. Ambrosia.

He swallowed, then, remembering it was supposed to look like a robbery, slipped the pearls from the lady's neck. He glanced again at her liver. He wanted more, but a wave of self-loathing prevented it.

He fled to the second floor to remove himself from temptation. He might have sobbed had he still the capacity.

Not only was he dead, but a cannibal as well.

2. Under a Half Moon A whole week wasted.

Worse than merely wasted-wasted wearing a dress and a veil.

Liath had crisscrossed the Five Points area and the Bowery time and again. He'd even dared the East River docks, which weren't suitable for a lady, fending off more than one proposition. With the towers of the half-constructed Brooklyn Bridge looming in the background, he'd spied many a fellow smuggler wandering the streets there. He'd paid particular attention to the boyos he'd worked with, but not a one of them was giving anything away.

He'd spent his nights as a shadow in the city. Difficult work when you've got no coin. And yet he'd learned nothing of his murderer.

He'd had enough.

Wearing his own comfortable boots and a dark suit from Rasheeda's collection, he headed for the rooms he rented on Fletcher Alley near the docks. The key had been missing from his suit pockets, but he went there anyway, figuring he could break in-and not by bashing down the door. Rasheeda had been quick to peg him as a common back-alley beef. Rasheeda and her opinions! No, he'd never met a lock he couldn't pick. Even the new Yale tumblers.

As it turned out, no need for picking: the door sat ajar. He pushed it open and stood on the threshold surveying the premises. He could afford better but had never liked to advertise his affluence. The important thing was it had a gas stove where he could cook to his heart's content. Otherwise he spent little time here, so a bit of shabbiness was tolerable. But now . . .

His room had been ransacked.

His pipe lay on the floorboards with the tobacco trampled into the cracks.

The ginger jar his sister had given him: smashed. His teakettle lay overturned. Every hinge bent on his gas stove; the basin upended. Clothes plucked from the line, the drawers pulled from the dresser, the mattress cut up. Even his calendar was torn-well, that might have been torn before.

Liath gritted his teeth. Not enough that some goat dogger should stab him through the heart. But his home? They had to vandalize his home? Looking for . . .

What?

If only that last night alive were a bit clearer.

He righted a stool and sat on it. He leaned back, rested his boot across his knee, and closed his eyes, trying to remember. He'd been on his way to his sister's for supper. That much was firm in his mind-but not a reason to have got him killed.

No . . . nothing came to him but bits of his past. He'd been ten on his arrival here in New York with his parents and his older sister, Moira. That had been 1846, during the great Irish diaspora at the height of the potato blight. Two years later folks discovered gold in California, so his father took off to make his fortune in the rush and was never heard from again.

As a teen Liath worked in a chophouse where he learned to cook, but he supplemented his income-he was pretty much sole support of his mother and sister-by running with the Dead Rabbits gang in the Five Points area, stealing, rum-running, and helping them put the squeeze on illegal gambling dens and faro games.

Eventually he developed his own smuggling enterprise. Liath chose the items with the highest duty and smuggled them in quant.i.ty. His policy was to split the difference with the merchant so they'd both make out. His business had been thriving because he gave everyone a fair shake. Why not? Plenty to go round.

Of course he, like everybody else, had to pay a tribute to the Whyos, the current rulers of the city streets, but that was just the cost of doing business. And he always paid, so he couldn't see them doing him in.

Ah, well, nothing was coming. He opened his eyes and was about to stand up when he noticed that his right boot heel was just a tad off center. He pushed on it and it swiveled, revealing a hollow.

The diamonds!

He rechecked the hollow to be sure it was empty, then swung it back into place before leaping to his feet.

Yes! He remembered. On the night he died, he'd received his cut of a shipment of velvet, plus half a dozen uncut diamonds. He'd hidden the gems in his heel and sold off a goodly portion of the fabric. He'd been paid in gold coins.

The coins . . .

He raised his gaze to the ceiling. The rusted tin squares were still in place. Flaking and sagging, but in place. Even the loose one.

He dragged the stool over and positioned it under the loose tin. It folded back on concealed hinges he himself had crafted. The loose square revealed the small hole in the lathe and beyond that, the gap between his ceiling and his neighbor's floorboards.

They were still there, round and sweet, stacked in the little cubby between all that board and lathe. At least he had some spending money.

But the diamonds . . . now he knew the motive for his murder. Who had known about the diamonds?

As he stuffed some of his clothes into a duffel bag, Liath came to a decision: no more slinking around. Time to come out in the open and rattle some cages.

RASHEEDA STOOD BETWEEN a recently disinterred middle-aged man and a scrofulous drunk Toby had acquired from downtown-both connected by the silver chain-and chanted the ancient Vedic verses. This fellow would make someone an excellent butler.

The book was not the original Vedic ma.n.u.script, but a transcription hand copied by her father. She missed him. A little. Well, not really.

He'd been an archaeologist who'd married a descendant of Siraj ud-Daulah, the last Nawab of Bengal. Rasheeda had been born in Bengal and grew up in a bilingual household. In 1857, at age nineteen, she and her parents had fled India because of the Sepoy rebellion. A year after their arrival in London, her father had been killed during a robbery. Oddly enough, the only thing taken was an ancient Sanskrit Vedic ma.n.u.script that had been in her mother's family for many generations.

Stolen, but not completely lost: her father had transcribed a copy before his demise. Rasheeda had never been interested in the book before, but now she delved into it. She found a ritual for supposedly raising the dead. As a lark, with no hope of success but little else to occupy her time, she tried it out on animals and, to her shock, found that it worked.

Alastair was the first human she resurrected-sacrificing her other lover, Rupert, to bring him back. She'd kept the revenant around for a while, but he proved such a dullard that she rekilled him.

The experience had kindled a fire in her, however. To gain access to more of the recently dead, she learned the undertaking trade-even though a woman undertaker was unheard of-and perfected the resurrection process. In 1865, under a cloud of suspicion and ugly rumors connecting her to disappearances of wastrels from the Limehouse district, she took her share of the money her father had left-not a great amount by any stretch-and emigrated to the States.

Shortly after opening her mortuary in Harlem, she innovated the first crematorium in the United States. Although she offered the service to her clients, few opted for it. No matter. She had her own uses for it.

She wished Toby were around to a.s.sist today, but she had sent him off to help that shanty Irishman find his killer. Anything to speed the return of her sustaining oil.

LIATH AND TOBY stood in a doorway on Bleecker Street, just east of Lafayette. The sun had dropped below the rooftops and traffic was light. Across the street, on the corner of Bleecker and Shinbone Alley, stood the Stone Ox pub.

"All right," he said, pointing, "that's where me boyos gather of an evening. I'll be going in and buying a few rounds for the house. None of that crew will be leaving while there's free drink to be had unless-"

"Unless they know you should be dead."

"Exactly." He clapped Toby on the back. "You're a smart lad, that's why I asked your help."

"I don't work for you," Toby said stiffly. "Miss Basemore told me to help."

"Only because I asked for you. I don't think she appreciates your abilities, Toby. I know you can handle this."

Toby visibly swelled with pride. Liath had noted his frustration and reluctantly decided to play on it. Reluctant because he did owe the young man his renewed life, such as it was. And as for Rasheeda, she had threatened Liath if anything happened to him. Toby had plenty of faults, she'd said, but she had no time to train a new a.s.sistant.

"I'm sure I can," Toby said. "But what exactly do you have in mind?"

Liath pointed again at the Stone Ox. "Only two ways in or out. Obviously the front entrance, but there's also a delivery door in the alley there. This vantage offers a view of both. If you see anyone come out, follow them."

"That's all? Just follow?"

"Yes. He knows me, but he'll not be knowing you. I'm sure you could easily apprehend him, but I have a feeling that more than one miscreant was involved in me untimely demise, and I want them all."

"We could catch him and make him talk."

"Shaky business, that. You're never knowing whether you're hearing the truth or just what the fellow thinks you want to hear. Better if I see it with me own eyes."

"Right, then," Toby said with a confident nod. "Simple enough."

"He'll probably be slipping out into the alley. If he comes this way, just get behind him and follow. If he heads deeper into the alley, don't follow him there-you'll give yourself away. Shinbone turns left and opens onto Lafayette, so head over to the corner and watch for him there."

Toby nodded his understanding.

Liath squared his shoulders. "Here I go."

He crossed the street, dodging a mix of horse-drawn carriages and steamers. When he stepped through the Ox's swinging doors, he wanted to have maximum impact on the guilty party. To that end he'd made a point of wearing the suit he'd died in-cleaning away the dirt and bloodstains first, of course.

He burst into the room and raised his hands.

"Who'll be wanting a drink on me?"

Pipes and cigars were puffing, drinks were sitting on the bar and the tables, spilled beer wet the sawdust on the floor. Every eye in that smoke-filled s.p.a.ce turned toward him, and every face, the familiar and the not-so, broke into a smile.

No, not every face. Jesse Timbers, a smuggler he'd worked with on occasion, went white as a virgin's wedding dress.

Liath's vision blurred for an instant as he remembered Timbers's face looming out of the dark that night, just as his life faded. But Timbers hadn't attacked him. His a.s.sailant had been extremely powerful, and skinny Jesse Timbers was anything but.

Liath staggered a step, then someone grabbed his elbow.

"Whoa there, mate. Looks like you're a bit buckled already," said Sean Healy, one of Liath's oldest friends in the city.

"I've had a few."

"And you're so pale," Sean said.

"Been off me feed, but I'm okay now."

Pretending not to notice Timbers, Liath bellied up to the bar and slapped a gold piece down. "Give these beggars one of whatever they want!"

As a cheer went up and all the mild porter drinkers suddenly switched to whiskey, Liath kept watch on Timbers from the corner of his eye. His pallor was shading toward green now. And instead of shouting out a drink order like the others, he was edging toward the side door.

What was driving him away? Fear? Guilt? The need to get word to someone about how the man they'd shivved and robbed and buried was alive and well and in the Stone Ox buying for the house?

All three, he hoped.

As his mates yelled "Slainte!" and slapped him on the back and asked him where he'd been hiding the past week, Liath watched Timbers slip out into Shinbone Alley.

All right, then. He had to trust Toby to take it from here.

He sipped his whiskey and almost gagged. It tasted like s.h.i.te. He looked around. His mates were downing theirs with gusto. What had happened to him? He had no appet.i.te for food and never slept. Was he to be denied strong drink as well?

All he had an appet.i.te for was human offal, and he wasn't giving in to that again. He'd bought slices of calf's liver and tried it both raw and cooked, but neither did the least to a.s.suage his hunger. What sort of a thing had he become? He couldn't see spending year after year with this foul craving.

He shook his head. Once he found his killer and evened the score, he'd find a way to die again-permanently.

He waited around, resisting the urge to be out on the street following Toby. Instead he increased his popularity by buying a second round. Too soon, Toby appeared at the swinging doors, his expression grim.

"The news isn't good, I take it," Liath said as he joined him on the sidewalk.

Toby shook his head. "I'm afraid not. I followed him up Lafayette but lost him in the street by Cooper Inst.i.tute."

"Aw, no."

"Well, it was dark, and he simply disappeared into the crowd around there."

Liath wanted to scream that no one simply disappears but resisted the outburst along with the urge to throttle the boy.

"Don't worry," he forced himself to say. "All is not lost. After seeing him, I'm surer than ever that more than one snake was involved. He's run off to tell someone. Five'll get you ten there'll be a snake slithering back here to confirm the dead man sighting."

So they retreated to another doorway farther east on Bleecker but on the same side as the Ox, where they couldn't be seen from the tavern.

"You're sure he's involved?" Toby said.

Liath nodded. "It fits. Jesse Timbers is a fellow smuggler, mostly gin."

"We have plenty of gin here. Why smuggle it?"

"He specializes in Old Tom gin, which you can get here but only after paying a forty percent duty. But here's the thing: Timbers knows I smuggle gems among other things and knows about me boot heel. He didn't stab me, of that I'm sure, but that expression on his face when he saw me says he knows who did-maybe even put them up to it for a share."

They waited, and, sure enough, less than a quarter hour later who appeared but Jesse Timbers himself, accompanied by a hulking, thuggish fellow, a hardchaw if Liath had ever seen one. The streetlamp revealed a long scar down his right cheek. He might have been the one who wielded the knife, though Liath was not convinced.

"Keep watch," he told Toby, pressing himself deeper into the doorway. "I don't want them to see me."

"They're entering the Stone Ox," Toby said. Half a minute later he added, "Now they're back on the sidewalk, looking around." After a few seconds his voice rose in pitch: "They're coming this way!"