Smoke and Mirrors Read online

  ‘I am here looking for a man.’ This seemed a better course in which to steer the conversation than the one in which it was so obviously headed. ‘I thought I might find him at Carey’s and I was just on my way there.’

  The gleam in his eyes disappeared and his smile faded. ‘I am truly sorry I delayed your search. Burke, ma’am.’ He dispensed with another bow and gave me a nod. ‘At your service.’

  ‘Well, Mr Burke—’

  ‘Not mister. Just Burke.’ A smile lit up his dark eyes.

  ‘Well, Burke, as I was saying, I am looking to find a man who may be at Carey’s. That’s where I was headed—

  ‘When I upended you.’ His smile twisted with regret. ‘If it wasn’t for that dadblasted Kimbal—’

  ‘We would not have met.’ I stepped back and away from him. ‘Good day to you, Mister … er … good day to you, Burke.’

  He wasn’t wearing a hat but he made to tip one. ‘Good day to you, miss.’

  I turned and left his company as quickly as I could, grateful that, on the Bowery, there was so much activity and so much of interest that no one seemed to have noticed our clumsy encounter. I kept my gaze focused on Carey’s, waited for a carriage with a lively, strutting team of horses to pass and crossed to the other side of the avenue. At the front of Carey’s, a man in a red-and-white-striped sit-down-upons (or unmentionables as they were sometimes called) and wearing a white jacket stood on a wooden crate in front of a blue-curtained doorway, outside of which hung a larger-than-life drawing of a woman whose head was topped with the mane of a lion and whose teeth were man-eating fangs.

  ‘Half-lion! Half-woman! All ferocious!’ The man tapped the picture with the tip of a cane. ‘Come inside and see Lionette, the strangest wonder in the world!’

  ‘Strange, indeed,’ I mumbled to myself, for I knew from first-hand experience that though Lionette looked lion-like enough in the drawing, my brother had come to see her for himself and had come away chuckling.

  ‘Poor makeup,’ Phin had told me at the time. ‘Terrible false teeth.’

  And still people paid their pennies to see her.

  I was about to do the same – not so much that I might gape at Lionette but so that I could get inside Carey’s and thus search for Jeffrey Hollister – when Burke stepped in front of me, blocking my way.

  ‘You don’t really want to go in there, do you?’ he asked.

  I was sure I did, so why my voice wavered when I looked past his buckskin and beads, I cannot say. ‘I … I’m sure I need to go inside. I’m looking for—’

  ‘A man.’ The corners of Burke’s mouth tugged into a look of disgust. ‘Are you sure you wish to find such a man? Someone who comes to a place like this so he might make sport of the unfortunate freaks Carey puts on display is not the type of man who is worthy of your concern.’

  Had he been talking about Phin, I would have disputed his observations. But when it came to Carey’s, I knew better. I had heard stories of Nathaniel Carey’s cruelty from our own oddities. I knew he baited his performers with food and beat them when they could not or would not obey. My stomach clutched.

  I was no fool; I knew the patrons of our American Museum were sometimes known to taunt our performers, but I knew, too, that when my brother was about none of them dared. Yet here at Carey’s I’d been told the more boisterous the crowd, the more Carey poked his performers, so as to whip the audience into a frenzy.

  ‘I have no desire to look for anyone who might patronize this establishment,’ I told Burke.

  ‘Then you’re looking for someone who works here? One of the freaks?’

  It was not a word that sat well with me. I swallowed down my distaste. ‘I am looking for a man named Jeffrey Hollister. He worked here once and might again.’

  ‘We could ask.’

  ‘And be lied to.’

  He conceded the correctness of my observation with a tip of his head. ‘But we’ll ask anyway, why don’t we?’ And with that and a shiver of the fringe at the seams of his clothing, Burke whirled around and strode up to the barker at the door.

  I had no illusions that this was the path to the truth. While Burke engaged the barker in conversation, I scooted past them, parted the blue curtain and ventured into Carey’s.

  I had heard about the jeering crowds, the prods, the performers who were treated as less than human and left to sleep in filth inside cages.

  But I had never before seen such depravity, and I suppose in my heart I had hoped the reports of such were nothing more than tales told to frighten and titillate. Behind the blue curtain, I am sorry to report, I saw the stories were true.

  There were four cages lined up one against the other just inside the door as a tease of things to come, an oddity in each, and the stench of the place and the inhumanity of the patrons who lined the entryway and pelted the cages with rotten fruit and called the oddities cruel names took my breath away. I stood frozen with loathing and disgust, bile rising in my throat, and I thought to race out the way I’d come in.

  Until I remembered Jeffrey.

  Beyond the entryway was a large open room and a stage, now empty. The seats in front of the stage were filling quickly with b’hoys and g’hals in high and ugly spirits and a smattering of patrons who looked to be of a better class but were no less excited to see the show begin. I did not take my seat on the benches with them but walked to the side and, since there was no one there to stop me, I slipped behind the stage.

  Here there were no tallow candles flickering from the ceiling as there were in the outer theater, no odor of burning fat and curling trails of smoke. The darkness behind the stage was heavy with the smell of sweat and desperation. I stepped carefully over the rope that would be used to pull up the curtain when it was time for the show and ignored the man whose job it was, no doubt, to do the pulling. He hardly cared, being so engrossed in a mug of beer he paid me no mind.

  Further into the bowels of Carey’s, I found Lionette sitting on a low bench in front of a cracked mirror, adjusting her wig.

  She did not spare me a look. ‘Ain’t nobody supposed to be back here.’

  ‘I’m well aware of that, but I thought you might be able to help me.’ I introduced myself and held out my hand.

  Just as I expected, the Barnum name worked its magic.

  Lionette turned in her seat, the better to shake my hand. ‘You’re looking for performers, are you?’

  ‘We might be.’ I consoled myself with the fact that this wasn’t exactly a lie. My brother always had an eye out for the new and the unusual. ‘I am actually looking for Jeffrey Hollister.’

  She wrinkled her nose and reached for the wooden teeth, painted white, she would fit into her mouth before she made her appearance on stage. ‘Who?’

  I swallowed down my disappointment. ‘It was some time ago. He worked here. He’s a young man and his skin …’ I was unsure how to describe Jeffrey. ‘He works for us now at the American Museum. As the Lizard Man.’

  ‘Lizard, eh? Well, ain’t no lizards around here.’ For reasons I cannot explain, Lionette found this particularly funny; she threw back her head and laughed, exposing gaping holes where her teeth used to be, now just gums that were swollen and bleeding from hours of wearing the lion fangs. ‘I’ve only been here a year or so. You might ask …’ She waved one hand in an indeterminate direction, somewhere back in the darkness. ‘Samuelson’s been here since he was a lad, or so I’ve been told. Per’aps he can help you. And if someday I should have a chance to come around there to Mr Barnum’s museum …’

  She didn’t dare to come right out and ask but dangled the question.

  ‘Ask for me. Or for my brother, Mr Barnum. I’m sure he’d be most happy to talk to you.’

  Before she could get any further commitment out of me, I headed in the direction she’d pointed.

  There were more draperies here, separating the backstage area from the place the performers lived. I parted them and choked on a stench like the worst muckheap. I clapped a hand
over my nose and mouth.

  ‘Mr Samuelson!’ My voice was small but I could hardly blame myself. There was no breath in my lungs. ‘Mr Samuelson, are you here?’

  ‘Out back,’ a voice answered, and what I’d thought was a pile of rags in a nearby cage shifted to reveal a man with no arms, his eyes devoid of hope. ‘You’ll find Sam out back.’

  I thanked him and hurried away.

  I found a door and stepped into a stone enclosure no bigger than my room a world away on Fifth Avenue. There were buildings on all sides of the little courtyard and their walls kept out the sunlight but, blessedly, not the hint of fresher air. Just as I gulped down a mouthful of it, a knife whizzed by not a foot in front of my nose. The blade slammed into a bare and twisted tree over on my right with enough force to bury itself to the hilt.

  ‘So what do you think of that, eh? Mighty fine aim. Mighty fine throwing.’

  My heartbeat, suspended for that one moment of surprise, started again with a thump and I looked to my left and the man who must have been Samuelson. His ears stuck out from either side of his head like enormous, misshapen sails. Proud of his accomplishment, he rubbed his hands together and I saw that his fingers, all ten of them, were nothing more than stumps.

  ‘You don’t see precision like that, do you? You don’t see anyone who can throw a knife like ol’ Sam can.’

  ‘It is quite impressive.’

  ‘Should have yelled to let me know you were coming out,’ he told me on his way past so that he could wedge his palms on either side of the knife and pull it from the tree. ‘You might have gotten hurt. Make no mistake about that. When Sam throws, his aim is strong and true. Surely, you might have gotten hurt.’

  ‘I was depending on your accuracy,’ I told him and offered him a smile. ‘And your memory, too, Mr Samuelson. Lionette says you might know a man named Jeffrey Hollister.’

  ‘Jeffrey? Got himself a cracking position over at Barnum’s place. Lucky devil.’

  ‘He does, indeed, work for Mr Barnum. But he’s currently missing and I thought you might—’

  ‘Missing?’ Samuelson examined the tip of his knife, testing its sharpness against the tip of his tongue. ‘Where’s he gone to?’

  ‘I thought you might be able to tell me that. Is he here?’

  ‘Jeff?’ As if he actually had to think about it, Samuelson tipped his head and the bit of light that seeped into the yard showed through his right ear, turning it pink and highlighting a network of purple veins. ‘Nah. Not here. Never here. Ol’ Carey just about went all to pieces when Jeff left and went away with the circus. Jeff was just a young man then and he’d lived here with Carey two, three years.’

  ‘In a cage.’ The words tasted bitter in my mouth.

  ‘Don’t take no offense there, miss. Sometimes it’s for our own good.’ Samuelson shrugged as if there might actually be a kernel of truth in the statement. ‘At least we don’t have to worry. You know, at night, when the b’hoys might come back looking for a little excitement.’

  It was not something I could stomach thinking about. ‘So Jeffrey left with the circus.’

  Samuelson nodded and his ears flapped. ‘And then went to Barnum’s from there, or so I’m told. Haven’t seen him since.’

  My shoulders drooped. ‘I hoped you might know where he is.’

  Samuelson plodded across the yard and planted his feet, rolling the hilt of the knife between his palms, ready to throw it again. ‘Can’t say. Wouldn’t know.’ He squinted, aimed and, though I was not in the path of the blade, I stepped back instinctively just as he let the knife fly. Again it slammed into the tree, and Samuelson threw back his shoulders and crowed, ‘Now there’s some pretty throwing!’

  I acknowledged it with a smile but refused to digress. ‘Do you happen to know where Jeffrey came from? Before he came to Carey’s, who were his people? Where did he live?’

  ‘People!’ He didn’t so much spit out the word as he laughed around its syllables, as if they were foreign to him. ‘We ain’t got no people. Not the likes of me and Jeffrey and the others in there. But I heard him say once that when he was a boy, after he was tossed out of the house on account of how odd looking he was and how his father didn’t want to spend a penny to feed him, he used to sleep behind St Patrick’s Cathedral at night.’

  St Patrick’s.

  I did not need to commit the name to memory, for I knew well enough where it was and where I had to go.

  Five Points.

  The last of the afternoon sunlight touched the facade of St Patrick’s there at Mott and Prince Streets with gold, softening the look of the sturdy stone building and the brick wall that surrounded the churchyard beside it. Like all churches, this one should have been a haven of peace in the bustling city but, like so many other New Yorkers, I knew the truth – Five Points was disease-ridden and crime-infested, and much of the violence that tore through the area was between Protestants who had long made the neighborhood their home and the Irish Catholics who increasingly came to this country from their homeland and settled in the tumbledown tenements and bedraggled shanties that were packed one on top of the other on every street in Five Points. The wall around the church and the burial ground was not for aesthetic purposes. For the Irish Catholics, it was a rampart meant for self-defense.

  About to enter the burial grounds through the doorway in the red brick wall, I looked both left and right. For now, there was no one about but me and three pigs that rooted in the refuse that littered the street, and for this I was grateful. None other than Charles Dickens had visited Five Points earlier that year and had declared it as wretched a place as any he’d ever been; my insides would be tied into far fewer knots if I could find Jeffrey quickly and leave before anyone took note of me.

  My heart in my mouth, I stepped into the burial ground, its standing monuments gray and ghostly in the long shadow of the wall. Not far away a man sat on the ground, his back to me, and my fears instantly vanished in a surge of hope.

  ‘Jeffrey!’ I hurried around to stand in front of the man and my excitement plummeted. This was not Jeffrey but a thin, elderly fellow with ashen skin and sunken eyes who looked neither surprised to see me nor even the slightest bit interested in why I might be there.

  ‘Jeffrey Hollister?’ I asked him. ‘Have you seen him? He is a man with …’ I twiddled my fingers up and down my arms by way of indicating Jeffrey’s peculiar skin condition. ‘You would certainly remember him. He is green.’

  But the man did not answer.

  There were others huddled in the shadows of the gravestones not far away, dressed like the first man, in rags and with all their earthly belongings tied in sacks beside them. But when I asked after Jeffrey they either ignored me or shook their heads. I think they weren’t so much telling me they did not know Jeffrey as they were simply dismissing me altogether, insignificant to their misery.

  Disheartened, I left the burial ground and looked briefly into the church with the thought of asking God why so many lived in wretchedness. There was no answer forthcoming, and I decided to be on my way.

  It was only then that something caught my eye from across the way, its passing so fleeting as to make me wonder if perhaps I was imagining it – the flash of fawn-colored buckskin and the vague impression of an amused, and bemused, smile.

  SIX

  The next day being Sunday, I did not have the opportunity to continue in my search for Jeffrey. As a family, we attended Universalist services in the South Reformed Dutch Church on Murray Street, and it wasn’t until we were in our carriage and traveling toward home that Charity bothered to address me.

  ‘We are calling on Sebastian Richter this afternoon.’

  I confess I was paying little attention as the carriage that contained the children was behind ours and I’d turned to see how it was progressing.

  I shook away my momentary confusion. ‘A call on …’

  Charity’s sigh filled the carriage. ‘Sebastian Richter. The man who lives across the way.’
>
  ‘From?’

  My brother sought to save me embarrassment by erupting into laughter. ‘Across the way from us, of course,’ he said, and he reached across the space that separated the two facing seats of the carriage so that he might pat my hand. ‘You know our Evie,’ he added, leaning closer to his wife who sat on the bench next to him. ‘She does nothing but work all day and isn’t one for poking around the neighborhood. Her head is filled with the details of the museum. She hardly pays attention to what’s happening out in the world.’

  ‘Well, perhaps she should.’ Charity smoothed one hand through the fringe on one end of the fine wool shawl thrown over her shoulders. ‘Richter is an influential man. He owns a good many breweries and I’ve been told he’s quite wealthy.’

  ‘But not as wealthy as we are, is he?’ Again my brother laughed. ‘Why is it you said we’re going to visit the man?’

  Charity had thin lips that pulled into a line when she shot her husband a look. ‘Because he invited us.’ She turned the same look on me. ‘All of us.’

  In an attempt to make her relent, I offered a smile. ‘I thought perhaps I would take the children to the park. There are ponies at—’

  ‘The girls have no need to see ponies,’ Charity said.

  ‘But I thought perhaps Walter might like riding them and—’

  ‘My son is too young to ride.’ Her word was the final say, or so the mettle in her voice told me. ‘Nurse will keep them at home where they belong. We, on the other hand, are going to Sebastian Richter’s.’

  We went to Sebastian Richter’s.

  Lest it be said that I am not sociable, I must defend the fact that I was less than enthusiastic about the prospect. It was a beautiful September day, warmer than it had been when I had ventured to the Bowery and Five Points, and I would have liked nothing better than to be out of the house, preferably with the children. Barring that, I would have enjoyed a walk on my own and taken a book along so that I might find a place to read and, while I was at it, to contemplate the mystery that was Andrew Emerson’s death and the place Jeffrey Hollister had in it.