Having seen enough of both the butcher’s work on the ground and the way that the cops alternately laughed at and ignored what Lucius was saying about it, I turned to look at the boys who’d found the body. They were all still full of the shock and excitement of the thing and were continuing to jump around and laugh nervously. I took note that I knew the skinniest of their number and drifted over to talk to him.
“Hey, Nosy,” I said quietly, at which the skinny kid turned and grinned. I didn’t have to tell him not to call out my name in front of the cops: he belonged to the gang of boys what ran with Crazy Butch, one of Monk Eastman’s lieutenants, a group that I’d served with for a time before my incarceration on Randalls Island, and he knew I wouldn’t want any contact with the bulls, being as, once you were a kid that they’d marked as a troublemaker, they took a kind of sick pleasure in riding you wherever they found you, whether you’d done anything wrong or not.
“Stevepipe!” Nosy whispered, pulling his sheet of canvas tighter around himself and rubbing at the large, oddly shaped protrusion on his face that’d given him his name. “You cabbyin’? Ithought you was workin’ for that crazy doctor.”
“I am,” I said. “Long story. What happened here?”
“Well,” he said, his feet starting to dance in excitement again. “Me and Slap and Sick Louie, here”-I nodded to the other boys as Nosy indicated them, and they returned the greeting-“we was just walking the waterfront, you know, seein’ if maybe there was any unclaimed baggage lyin’ around the pier-”
I chuckled once. “ ‘Unclaimed baggage’? Jeez, Nosy, that’s rich.”
“Well, you gotta call it somethin’ if the bulls grab you, right? So, anyway, we’s workin’ our way down to the pier, and we seen this red package just floatin’ out there. Figured it might be somethin’ tasty, so we dove on in, as we’s in shorts, anyway. Got it up here okay-but I guess you can figure what it was like when we opened it.” He whistled and laughed. “Bro-ther. Sick Louie musta puked eight times-only got half a stomach, anyway-”
“Hey, hey,” Sick Louie protested, “I told ya a million times, Nosy, it’s my intestines, I was born widdout a buncha my intestines, dat’s what does it!”
“Yeah, yeah, whatever,” Nosy said. “So we went for a cop, figurin’ maybe there’s a reward involved. Shoulda known better. Now they won’t let us go-figure maybe we had something to do with it! I ask you, what would we be doin’ sawin’ people up? And how, for Chrissakes? I got one kid’s an idiot”-he flicked a thumb at the boy called Slap, who, when I took a closer look, didn’t seem to be catching much of what was going on around him-“and another kid with half a stomach-”
“I told you, Nosy!” Sick Louie protested again. “It’s my-”
“Yeah, yeah, your intestines!” Nosy shot back. “Now shut up, willya, please?” He turned back to me with a grin. “Fuckin’ morons. So-whattaya got goin’, Stevepipe, what brings ya here?”
“Ah,” I said, looking back at the crowd around the piece of a body and seeing that they were starting to break up. “Came to fetch a couple of pals.” Cyrus and the detective sergeants had started to move my way. “And I gotta go. But I’m coming down to Frankie’s this week. You gonna be around?”
“If these cops ever let us go,” Nosy answered with another cheerful grin. “Imagine tryin’ to hold us for a thing like this,” he went on as I moved away. “It ain’t logical! But nobody ever said cops was logical, eh, Stevepipe?”
I grinned back at him, touched the brim of the top hat, and then rejoined Cyrus and the Isaacsons, hurrying with them back to the hansom.
The cabbie had passed out again, though when Cyrus climbed back in he woke up with a start and whimpered a little, like maybe he was hoping the whole ride down had been a bad dream. “Oh, no… no, not again! Look, you two, I’m going to the cops if-”
Marcus, who had perched his feet on the little iron step on one side of the cab as his brother did the same on the other, flashed a badge. “We are the cops, sir,” he said in a firm tone as he slung a satchelful of instruments over his shoulder and then laid a solid grip on the side of the passenger compartment. “Just sit back and be quiet, this won’t take long.”
“No, it won’t,” moaned the old man, resigned to his predicament. “Not if the ride down was any measure…”
I got into the driver’s seat and cracked the reins, and we crashed back onto the cobblestones of Clarkson Street, leaving behind the strange scene on the waterfront and figuring-wrongly, it turned out-that we’d seen and heard the last of it.
My mind was still full of thoughts of both that bloody sight and my disheartening encounter with Kat and her mark as we dashed back east. But when we reached Hudson Street again and turned north, my attention was finally distracted by a familiar and-given the situation and my brooding-welcome sound: the Isaacson brothers, taking off after each other as soon as there were no other cops around to hear.
“Just couldn’t resist, could you?” I heard Marcus say over the din of the mare’s horseshoes on the stones.
“Resist what?” Lucius answered in a kind of squeak, already on the defensive as he clung for life to the side of the cab.
“You just had to take the opportunity to lecture them all, as if we were in some elementary school classroom,” Marcus answered in irritation.
“I was recording important evidence!” Lucius answered. Glancing back once, I could see that they were leaning in toward each other over Cyrus and the bewildered cabbie, like a pair of bickering kids. Cyrus just smiled at me-we’d seen a hundred scenes like this before. The cabbie, however, seemed to be thinking that the strange spat was further evidence that he’d been abducted by lunatics.
“ ‘Recording important evidence,’ ” Marcus echoed. “You were grandstanding! As if we don’t have enough problems in the department right now, without you acting like an old schoolmarm!”
“That’s ridiculous-” Lucius tried. But Marcus wasn’t having any of it.
“Ridiculous? You’ve been that way since you were eight years old!”
“Marcus!” Lucius was trying to get a grip on himself. “This is no place to bring up-”
“Every day, when we’d get home from school-‘Mama! Papa! I can recite my whole day’s lessons, listen, listen!’ ”
“-no place to bring up personal-”
“Never occurred to you that Mama and Papa were too goddamned tired to listen to your entire day’s lessons. No, you just went right ahead-”
“They were proud of me!” Lucius hollered, abandoning all attempts at dignity.
“What were you thinking?” Marcus bellowed as I drove the gray mare past Christopher Street and then east on Tenth, in order to avoid any chance of seeing Kat again. “That Hogan’s going to go back to Mulberry Street and say, ‘Jesus, Mary, and Joseph, those Isaacson boys certainly know their business-showed us a thing or two!’? One step closer to getting forced out, that’s all we are now!”
The “discussion” went on in that vein right up until I turned the cab north on Broadway and spun it around in front of the Hotel St. Denis. There weren’t two better detectives in all the world than the Isaacsons, they’d proved that much during the Beecham case: trained in medicine and law in addition to criminal science, they kept up with advances in tracking theories and techniques from every corner of the world. It was their knowledge of the still unaccepted science of fingerprinting, for instance, that’d put the first crack in the Beecham case. They had an arsenal of cameras, chemicals, and microscopes that they brought to bear on any problem what might seem totally incomprehensible to your average detective; but they did love to bicker, and most of the time they went at it like a couple of old hens.
Cyrus gave the cabbie a little extra cash and I gave him his hat back as we left him to recover his wits in front of the hotel. Then we walked quickly over to Number 808 and got back into the elevator. Once inside, the detective sergeants brought the volume of their argument down, but not the passion.