M
Edward pocketed the letter, finished his ale.
“Another?” Jimmy asked.
“I’ll move along,” Edward said.
“Anything I can do, say the word,” said Jimmy.
“If I ever figure out the word I’ll let you know.”
He walked back to Main Street and climbed the stairs to his workroom. He noted the time, nine-forty-five on the mantel clock, as he picked up the revolver from the desk. He put it in his back pocket and walked down the stairs, feeling the bulk of the pistol, opened the front door and stepped onto the porch. He stared at the long shadows the trees made on Main Street’s bricks, at the sky incandescent with moonlight. The brilliant blackness was suffusing his being like an elixir of resolution. He took the pistol from his pocket and stared at it. He saw Emmett’s finger on the trigger. There is a reason for everything.
He walked into the house and through the hallway to the kitchen, down the back steps and across the yard to Emmett’s toolshed. He found matches and candle and lit them. He saw Emmett’s vise covered with dust. He broke open the pistol and let the six bullets fall onto the workbench. He opened the vise jaws and put the pistol barrel between them, tightened the jaws. He took down a small sledgehammer from its hook and swung, then swung it again, and again, until the pistol broke in three pieces. He opened the vise jaws, tossed the pieces and the bullets into the trash bucket.
Giles, Felicity, and I bring you greetings even so, Maginn.
Edward Goes to the Tenderloin at a Late Hour
DIVISION STREET, FIVE blocks long, ran west from Quay Street on the river, then crossed Broadway, Liberty, Dallius, and Green Streets, which at this hour formed a neighborhood grid thrumming with the revels and lusts of the night city. This was Albany’s Tenderloin, and life was open, the streets full of motion, the Palace Lodging House catering to quick turnover, Scambelluri’s and Marino’s poolrooms, side by side, both busy, Dorgan’s Good Life Saloon, which called itself a concert hall, thriving on music for illegal dancing, for thou shalt not dance in a saloon in Albany. And on the stoops of houses with telltale awnings on their windows (business was so good Jidgie Shea had opened an awning shop on the street), whores of the white race, and one mulata on the stoop of the Creole house, were taking the air this stifling night; and together they formed a tableau of discrete enticements. Youths too poor to buy any of their offerings walked Division Street, hoping for a charitable glimpse of raised thigh, unsequestered breast.
“Come and get it,” one whore said to Edward. “Anything you want you can find right here. You don’t find it, you ain’t lookin’ for it.”
Sixty-five Division Street, a three-story brick dwelling, gave entrance off street level. It adjoined the Good Life, and Edward heard the saloon piano and banjo ringing out a ragtime melody he could put no name to as he rang the bell. A well-shaped woman in her forties, wearing high-necked blouse and long, black skirt, greeted him. Edward flashed that she should have one crossed eye, but she did not.
“You looking for company?” she asked.
“I’m looking for Maginn. Is he here?”
“He’s here,” she said, gesturing for Edward to enter.
“My name is Edward Daugherty.”
“I know who you are.”
“How is that possible?”
“He talks about you.”
Maginn talks about you, of course. He plots to destroy you. Why didn’t you know this the instant Giles blew Felicity into naked infinity? Who profited from that explosion? Yes, the cur Cully was a likely avenger. But when myopia wanes, Maginn, without doubt, emerges as the epiphanic presence at the slaughter. And you, Edward, the true target, you couldn’t see that; you and Maginn such great friends, brothers of the ink stain, comrades of the imagination. Gainsaying fool is what you were. Now here you stand, believing you can goad evil into explaining itself, wondering what the whore of justice looks like, wallowing in your pathetic desire to mean.
“He’s at the bar,” the woman said, and led the way to a large parlor furnished with two sofas and three armchairs of dark red plush, a scatter of Oriental rugs, maroon drapes on the two windows, and lighted by four electrified gas lamps with pale-blue taffeta shades. Music and tobacco smoke came through a half-open door that led to the dance floor of the saloon (Edward could see two women and two men dancing), and at the small bar at the end of the parlor a very young, carrot-haired woman, wearing a blouse that covered little of her large, shapely breasts, was pouring liquor for a man in shirtsleeves who was smoking the butt of a thin cigar. Maginn.
“Ah, Daugherty, you worthless mutt,” Maginn said, “you’re here at last. You look well for a man whose life has been destroyed.”
“You don’t look well at all, Maginn. You look shriveled. You look like a chimney sweep’s brush. Are you dying?”
“Aren’t we all? But I’ll live out the week.”
Maginn had lost hair on his head and had blackened his mustache. His skin was sallow and he was thinner by fifteen pounds from Edward’s last vision of him. A broomstraw of a man, probably venereally ravaged. His sickly look delighted Edward.
“Have you met Nell?” Maginn asked.
The woman who’d brought Edward in stood next to Maginn.
“Nell runs this emporium,” Maginn said. “She’s also my wife, my strong right arm, my favorite toss, and a font of money and strumpet wisdom. I love her like a sister. I’d be lost without her. Do you remember her?”
Edward looked at Nell and again recognized something but did not know what.
“You met in that tenebrous tent city we visited during the State Fair. You fancied her and she you, but you went forward to a more elderly crotch, while I regressed to the nubile Nell, a relationship that’s endured for, what is it now, sweet suck of my life, twenty-seven years, on and off? Nell remembers you, Edward. I reminded her how she upped her skirt for you. Would you up it again, Nell? Give him a new look at the old puss?”
“He looks like a real gentleman, is what I say. Such fine duds he’s got. The genuine article.”
“A gentleman, oh yes.” And Maginn, visibly perturbed by the remark, turned to the barmaid. “And this is Cherry. Say hello to Edward, Cherry.”
“Howdja do, Edward,” Cherry said.
Edward smiled at Cherry.
“And pour him a brandy, the best we have for this gentleman. Cherry, Edward, played the twelve-year-old virgin in the last house she worked. But she swiftly aged into this million-dollar set of tits, with only irony for a hymen. Does Cherry interest you, Edward?”
Edward said nothing.
“Let the gentleman sit down with his drink,” Nell said. “Let him get a word in.”
“Of course. Sit, Edward, sit. Get a word in, if you have any left after that theatrical debacle.”
Edward and Maginn sat in the plush, facing each other.
“Gentleman. You called him a gentleman,” Maginn said to Nell. “This is Eddie, a mick to the heel of his boot, transformed by adroit social maneuvering into the elite, affluent Edward Daugherty, Esquire, famous playwright, a bit infamous lately, though. He recently had a major opening night with his new play, staged with considerable fanfare at the Hall. But, alas, it was only another facade, a mongoloid mishmash, an ambitious botch that closed with a wail and a snivel after one performance. My condolences, Edward. Did you like my critique of it?”
“At what point did you become an assassin, Maginn?”
“Uh-oh, he’s getting personal, Nell. Time for the parade, get a bit of life in this party.”