The Inner Circle - Brad Meltzer [258]
“What’s your name, child?” Pendergast asked gently.
The girl looked up at him, as if surprised to hear an adult speak to her in a solicitous tone. “Constance Greene, sir,” she said.
“Greene?” Pendergast frowned. “Of Water Street?”
“No, sir. Not—not anymore.” Something seemed to have frightened the girl, and, with another curtsy, she turned and melted away down a crowded side street.
Pendergast stared down the foul street and its seething crowds for some time. Then, with a troubled expression on his face, he turned and slowly retraced his steps. A barker stood in the doorway of Brown’s Restaurant, delivering the bill of fare in a loud, breathless, ceaseless litany:
Biledlamancapersors.
Rosebeefrosegoorosemuttonantaters—
Biledamancabbage, vegetaybles—
Walkinsirtakaseatsir.
Pendergast moved on thoughtfully, listening to the City Hall bell toll the urgent fire alarm. Making his way to Park Street, he passed a chemist’s shop, closed and shuttered, an array of bottles in diverse sizes and colors decorating the window: Paine’s Celery Compound; Swamp Root; D. & A. Younce’s Indian Cure Oil (Good for Man and Beast).
Two blocks down Park, he stopped abruptly. He was fully attentive now, eyes open to every detail. He had painstakingly researched this region of old New York, and the fog of his memory construct retreated well into the distance. Here, Baxter and Worth Streets angled in sharply, creating a crazy-quilt of intersections known as the Five Points. In the bleak landscape of urban decay that stretched before him, there was none of the carefree revelry Pendergast had found earlier, along Bowery.
Thirty years before, in the 1850s, the “Points” had been the worst slum in all New York, in all America, worse even than London’s Seven Dials. It remained a miserable, squalid, dangerous place: home to fifty thousand criminals, drug addicts, prostitutes, orphans, confidence men, villains of all shape and description. The uneven streets were broken and scored into dangerous ruts, brimming with garbage and offal. Hogs wandered about, rooting and wallowing in the fouled gutters. The houses seemed prematurely aged, their windows broken, tarpaper roofs hanging free, timbers sagging. A single gas lamp threw light into the intersection. On all sides, narrow streets marched off into endless darkness. The doors of the first-floor taverns were flung wide against the summer heat. The smells of liquor and cigar smoke issued forth. Women, bare-breasted, lolled in the doorways, exchanging obscene jeers with whores in the neighboring saloons or soliciting passersby in lurid tones. Across the way, nickel-a-night flophouses, riddled with vermin and pestilence, sat between the shabby cow-sheds of fencers of stolen goods.
Pendergast gazed carefully around at the scene, scrutinizing the topography, the architecture, for any clue, any hidden link that a mere study of historical records could not provide. At last he turned eastward, where a vast, five-story structure sat, decayed and listing, dark even in the light of the gas lamp. This was the former Old Brewery, at one time the worst of all the Five Points tenements. Children who had the misfortune to be born within were known to pass months or even years without tasting the outside air. Now, thanks to the efforts of a charitable group, it had been rebuilt as the Five Points Mission. An early urban renewal project for which, in 1880, the good Dr. Enoch Leng had volunteered his medical services, pro bono. He had continued to work there into the early ’90s, when the historical record on Leng vanished abruptly.
Pendergast walked slowly toward the building. An ancient sign for the Old Brewery remained painted along its upper story, dominating the far newer and cleaner Five Points Mission sign beneath. He considered entering the building, then decided against it. There was another visit he had to make first.
Behind the Five Points Mission, a tiny alley ran north into a dark cul-de-sac. Moist,