Forever

78.

The bells of the Essex Market Tower were tolling six times when Cormac went up the steps of the Ludlow Street Jail. It was a mellow April evening, and he could hear a piano playing from the open doors of Erchberg’s Saloon across the street. He pulled a bell. A slot opened in the thick iron doors.

“Who do you want?”

“Mr. Tweed.”

“You on the list?”

“I should be.”

“Name.”

“Devlin.”

A pause. The slot slammed shut and the door squeaked open. A ruddy man in a pale gray uniform sat on a stool, holding a book. He was in a wide gray room with gray women and a few gray lawyers sitting on benches. There was a gray photographic print of the mayor on one wall, and a sad American flag nailed to another.

“Sign here,” the guard said, offering the book.

Cormac signed in as Devlin.

“What’s in the pail?”

“Ice cream,” Cormac said, lifting the lid.

“You been here before?”

“Yes.”

“Then you know the way.”

“I do.”

He walked through the gray room and down a corridor to a door at the rear. He knocked twice. The door opened and a young black man was there. He smiled at Cormac.

“Evenin’, sah.”

“Hello, Luke. How is he?”

“Not so good. The doctor bin here, and it don’t look none too good.” He smiled. “But he lookin’ forward to you comin’.”

Cormac entered the bedroom, where there was a narrow bed beside a curtained window, steel bars outlined by the street-lights beyond. A mattress was beside the bed, where Luke slept at night, watching over his boss. A pot of geraniums sat on a small night table, which also held a single candle.

“Jes’ go on through,” Luke said.

He opened a door and walked into the larger room. Tweed was sitting in a Windsor chair, a colorful quilt over his shoulders. The chair had been built wider than most such chairs, with special orders from Tweed, who was particular about his chairs, since he’d spent his youth making them.

“Well, you’re the first decent face I’ve seen since the last time you were here,” he said. The voice was lower, but had the old gravelly texture.

“How are you, Bill?”

“Not worth a fiddler’s fuck, if the truth be known. The doctors tell me I’ve got bronchitis, cystitis, some other fuckin-itis. My feet are numb with the diabetes. My head hurts. I feel like a bag of bonemeal.” He laughed. “But I’ve still got a heartbeat. Pull up a chair.”

Cormac set down the pail of ice cream and crossed the room for a chair. There was a boxy grand piano against one wall, a table for meals, flowers everywhere. Cretonne curtains. Bands of thick rubber attached to a casement for exercise. Two of Cormac’s own paintings hung on the walls, one of the Great Fire, and a view of Cherry Street toward the river, along with pictures of yachts outside the Americus Club in Connecticut and a daguerreotype of Tweed’s wife and children. Cormac took a chair from the table, twirled it so that the back faced Tweed, and sat with his arms draped over the curve.

“I’m worn out,” Tweed said. “Luke has some woman mad for him, that right, Luke?”

“Yeah, she crazy for me.”

“And she writes him these letters, very fancy handwriting. Mister Luke Grant, Ludlow Street Prison, on the envelope. Like he was the prisoner, not me. And so I help him with the writing. I mean, I talk, and he writes. He likes those big words.”

“She do too, boss. She likes that ‘extraordinary.’ She likes that ‘mellifluous.’ She likes ‘magnificent.’ ”

“She’s after your magnificent fortune, Luke.”

Luke laughed, and Cormac lifted the pail toward him.

“We’d better eat this before it melts,” he said. “There’s enough for the three of us.”

“Yes, sir, Mist’ Cormac.”

“You know how to spoil a man,” Tweed said.

“It’s from Braren, the German.”

“To hell with what the doctor says.”

Luke came back with two dishes and spoons, and Tweed started to eat.

“I hope they’ve got ice cream in Hell,” he said.

“I’m sure they don’t, so you’d better have all you want while you’re here.”

“Luke,” Tweed said, “fill this again.”

He wasn’t really old, only fifty-five on this night, but Bill Tweed looked ancient now. His beard was white without seeming patriarchal, his hair thin on his skull, gray and lank. But it was the eyes that looked a thousand years old. They were looking at last like the black sunken eyes in the Nast cartoons, with small stars of yellow light reflected from the gas lamps. He had never been a drinker, and smoked only a rare cigar, but the face looked dissipated, and there was a wheezing sound from his lungs. The great body was shrinking too, the shoulders somehow narrower inside the blanket.

“There’s less of me every time you show up,” Tweed said.

“There was a lot less of you when we met,” Cormac said.

“Aye, wasn’t there…”

“You were tough as a mule that night.”

“What the hell year was that?”

“It was 1844….”

“Jesus Christ.”

A summer night. On Grand Street, on the Seventh Ward side of the Bowery. I was still living on Mott Street, Cormac remembered. Painting. Writing the first of the dime novels. Laying cobblestones for a living. In early July, American nativists rioted against Catholics, killing two, beating hundreds, most of them Irish who thought they’d left all that behind.

“That scoundrel Ned Buntline was stirring them up that summer,” Tweed said. “Another goddamned writer that liked trouble.”

“And Morse.”

“That bastard,” Tweed said, taking a fresh dish of ice cream from Luke. “Samuel F. B. Morse. Always insisting on the F. B.”

“Which the Irish said stood for Fucking Bigot.”

“Which he was,” Tweed wheezed. “Him and his goddamned telegraph. An invention he thought gave him the right to judge people. If there was any justice, he’d have ended his days here, instead of me.”

“He certainly helped put those Know-Nothing idiots on the street that night.”

“The poor bastards.”

On that summer night in ’44, Tweed was walking west on Grand Street, while Cormac walked toward him from the east. They were a block apart when Cormac noticed him. Nobody else was in the street. Tweed was then twenty-one years old, and in the obscure light of Grand Street he walked with a big man’s casual confidence. If he was Catholic, that rolling gait would have infuriated the men who came upon him from the safety of their carriage.

“They thought I was a Catholic,” Tweed said. “Me, who believed in nothing, even then. Me, the child of Presbyterians from the River Tweed in Scotland.”

He laughed.

“The theory was simple: if they didn’t know you, you were a Catholic.”

On that night in ’44, the three men in black followed that theory. They leaped from the carriage, hefting clubs that were two feet long. From a distance, Cormac saw them approach Tweed but couldn’t hear their words.

“They said, ‘Hey, papist!’ ” Tweed said, “and I said, ‘Fuckest thee off!’ Which they thought was Latin. They started swinging the cudgels.”

Cormac saw Tweed knock down one of them with a punch, but he couldn’t dodge the clubs of the other two.

“Then you got into it,” Tweed said. “What the hell for?”

“I was like them,” Cormac said. “I thought you were a Catholic and I didn’t want you killed over some horseshit from the seventeenth century.”

Cormac picked up the club of the fallen man and stepped in, swinging. He gripped the club horizontally, kicked one of the young men in the ass to get his attention, then slashed left-right, then right-left with the club, driving the man’s jaw off its hinges.

“I remember the scream from the fucker even now,” Tweed said, laying the ice cream dish on a table beside a Bible.

“I didn’t need to hit the third idiot,” Cormac said.

“That’s for true. I was givin’ him a good hammerin’.”

His head rose now, remembering that night, and there was more light in his eyes.

“A terrible hammering,” Cormac said, remembering Tweed smashing the man against a stoop, wrenching the club from the man’s hand and tossing it behind him into the street. The carriage suddenly galloped away toward the East River. The last man was spread on the stoop, unable to rise because of the angle, and every time he tried to get up, Tweed hit him. The man pleaded that he was done. “Well, I’m not,” said Tweed, and hammered him again. Without his cap, the man on the stoop looked to be sixteen or so, with a hairless face, blood gushing from his nose and leaking from a cut over his right eye.

“Who are you, you rotten little shit?” Tweed said.

“Johnson, sir, I’m sorry. Bill Johnson, sir, sorry, a mistake—” Tweed stepped back, paused, then hit the man again, driving his head to the side. Blood now covered his teeth.

“Easy now, mister,” Cormac said. “You don’t want to kill him.”

“No, I don’t,” he said, and chuckled, then went fierce again, grabbing the frightened boy by the neck. “Who sent you after me?”

“I don’t know, sir, I—”

Tweed was laughing now in his room in the Ludlow Street Jail.

“I did get the fucker to tell me who’d sent him out to beat up people, including me,” Tweed said. “I remember that.”

Cormac again saw young Bill Tweed driving a hand between the man’s legs, grabbing his testicles, and squeezing. The man’s eyes bulged and a gargling cry rose from his throat. Then the first man who’d been knocked down by Tweed rose on wobbly legs. His bleary eyes gazed around for his club. He patted his jacket as if looking for a pistol. Cormac walked to him, again gripping the club with two hands, and jerked it hard to the man’s chin. The young man fell in a shambling pile. Two of them were groaning on the street now, while Tweed squeezed the third man’s balls.

“A name,” he said.

“Martinson, sir. Yes, that’s it. Martinson. Frankie Martinson, sir…”

“Of course. Frankie Martinson. That hopeless Know-Nothing idiot.”

Tweed called to Luke for a glass of water.

“Frankie Martinson,” he said. “Wasn’t that the man?”

“That was the man, all right,” Cormac said. “And I remember how you thanked the fella for his cooperation.”

“Oh, sweet Jesus…”

Cormac saw young Tweed step back, gaze down at the man for a moment, then grab his ankles and drag him roughly down the steps and out into the street. Tweed was laughing a deep, excited laugh. Holding each ankle, he swung the boy around, once, twice, three times, and then let him go. The young man sailed a few feet and then skidded through mud and horseshit and was still.

“Now,” Tweed said, turning to Cormac. “I believe I owe you a drink.”

He draped a large hand on Cormac’s shoulder (he was taller than Cormac by at least two inches) and they began moving toward the Bowery. Tweed laughed and said he knew Martinson from the endless arguments between the fire companies. Tweed was with the Big Six on Gouverneur Street. Martinson was a big shot with Engine Company 40, who called themselves the Lady Washingtons after the wife of the first president. Tweed had infuriated the man for arguing against the lunatics among the nativists and then laughing at his stupidity. He laughed harder that night at the memory of the three men laid out in the mud and fog of Grand Street; laughed, and said they should have delivered the wrecked trio to Engine Company 40; laughed, and then asked Cormac for his name. He told him his true name and Tweed said his.

“You’re a good man,” Bill Tweed said. “I think I’ve found a friend.”

Now that Tweed’s life was in ruins, Cormac could trace that friendship through all its labyrinthine ways; through the rise from the firehouse on Cherry Street that gave Tweed life and a sense of power, into politics as it was, not as he wished it could be. Tweed was like all the others in that New York who lived in the worst places or had the wrong names. They wanted some taste of power, to level out the rules of the game, and Cormac felt what they felt, and so did Bill Tweed. You have the banks, they said together, and you have the churches, and you have the mighty sailing fleets, and you have the deeds to land and the finest houses and servants and water; fair enough: But we have the votes.

“I can count,” said Bill Tweed when Cormac asked him one night why he supported the Irish against the Know-Nothings. Then laughed. Then looked down Orange Street and said, “Somebody better fight for the poor bastards.”

Cormac learned a few days after meeting Bill Tweed that the big man was also quite serious about fighting other enemies. The proof was in a brief note in the Herald: the saloon owned by one Francis Martinson, a volunteer fire captain of Little Water Street, had burned to the ground. The cause of the fire was being investigated. After that, Frankie Martinson was said to have moved to Albany. He was never again seen in the Five Points.

“Don’t get mad,” Tweed said one night, in a philosophical mood. “Get even.”

In the years that followed, Cormac often roamed the night town with Tweed, stopping in saloons, listening to the gossip and the jokes, hearing the tales of faction fights and endless schism. Almost always, Tweed was the man who suggested compromise, conciliation, the smooth solution of a decent job. He was big; the most violent men were all small. On these pilgrimages, Cormac tried to remain a shadow, someone who helped watch Bill Tweed’s back but who never stepped forward to insist on his own importance. And he never asked for anything. Not a job. Not a payday. And when Tweed rose and started consolidating his contacts and powers, when he sold the chair-making shop on Cherry Street to become a full-time politician (heavier now, craftier, measuring every uttered word), when he was elected to Congress for a term, Cormac continued asking for nothing.

“Where, for Christ’s sake, do you live?” Tweed asked one night. “I’ve known you for three years and don’t have a clue.”

He insisted on being taken to the flat on Mott Street. Cormac did not say that this was the room where he had tried to write a true novel, and failed, and where he had begun to write dime novels while working days as a laborer. Tweed stepped into the room in a clumsy way, glanced at the stacked books and clothes hanging from pegs, and a trapped look darted through his eyes.

“It’s like a cell,” he said.

Cormac laughed. “Just what I deserve.”

Tweed picked up a sheaf of Cormac’s drawings.

“These are yours?”

“What I do to keep out of a real cell, Bill.”

“They’re very, very good.”

“Thank you.”

“Why don’t you paint? You’d be a bloody good painter.”

“I couldn’t get a chair into this room,” Cormac said, “never mind an easel.”

“Well, get the hell out of here. I can find you a place. We can find one where you don’t even pay rent. Where—”

“Thanks, Bill. This’ll do me fine. Let’s take a walk. Get something to eat. It’s a lovely night.”

“I’m buying,” Tweed said.

Now Luke went to the door in the bedroom, and two more men arrived. Both were dressed in well-cut worsted suits, and they lifted their derbies as they entered. Cormac had met them both. One was a small precise Madison Avenue doctor named Frank Cahill. The other was Billy Edelstein, one of the first of Tweed’s lawyers after the fall, and now surely the last. Edelstein was plumper than Cahill and had a weary sardonic voice.

“A doctor, a lawyer, and me,” Tweed said. “The last living Indian chief.”

They laughed, since both were Tammany loyalists, members of the Society of Saint Tamenend, an Indian chief who had never existed. The Tammany headquarters in Fourteenth Street was known by friends and foes as the Wigwam.

“No law talk tonight, boys,” Tweed said, his face brightening. “No talk about my ailing heart. Just food, boys, and fun.”

“Fair enough,” Cahill said. “But not too much food, Bill.”

They all knew that for Bill Tweed food was fuel, pleasure, and even the producer of meaning. An extravagant meal told Tweed that he existed. He didn’t drink much, except for iced light Rhinelander wine. But in the glory days, he would have six eggs for breakfast with a slab of ham; three steaks for lunch; bowls of soup, loaves of bread, and buckets of butter with every meal. As he grew older and the power came, the appetite did not vanish. He could never name the void that he could not fill and neither could Cormac. He had one wife, eight children, two mistresses, three houses. Enough wasn’t ever enough.

“Sometimes I think this is all there is,” he said with a smile, twelve years after they met, as they settled into an immense platter of chilled oysters. “All the rest might be bullshit.”

Cormac heard that glorious word for the first time in the 1850s, and it came to epitomize for him all of New York’s rough skepticism. It had much greater weight than the word horseshit. Horseshit was flaky and without substance; it dried in the sun and was blown away in a high wind. Preachers were the masters of horseshit. But bullshit was heavier, filled with crude truth, a kind of black cement. The voters knew the difference and they appreciated bullshit when practiced by a master. Any politician who used God in a speech was practicing horseshit. When he talked about building schools, getting water into Chatham Square, or lighting the darkest streets, Bill Tweed was practicing bullshit. If a third of the bullshit actually came into existence, their lives were made better. Tweed, as he moved up in the system, was a master of bullshit.

The world in which he worked his public arts and his private craft had been formed years earlier by a political enemy named Fernando Wood, who would serve as mayor three times. Wood was a genius, the creator of alliances and secret agendas, his system’s machinery based on the understanding that politics was just another profession and the men who practiced it were entitled to rewards. The hard truth was known by all; to think otherwise was horseshit. Wood just didn’t have an idea in his head and made nothing happen.

When Tweed took power as head of Tammany Hall, he presented plans for water, for housing, for schools, for decent wages, for the right to form unions among tradesmen and mechanics; in some way, those ambitions were shared by all of the Tammany professionals, so much so that the principles were seldom mentioned. To talk too much about them would be bullshit. Cormac sometimes drew up the plans, making them at once precise and vague, and gave them to Bill Tweed and stood in the shadows as Tweed tried to make at least parts of them real. Tweed’s friends and associates listened, calculated, made swollen budgets and phony invoices to include their personal shares, and then sighed. They would need money to pay off the upstate Republicans. They would need money to pay off those who lived in the way of the street that must be widened. And of course they needed money for themselves and their boys. To Cormac, the Tammany sachems were like worldly archbishops who no longer believed in God.

In private, or over oysters, Cormac argued the issues of slavery with Tweed but was greeted with a shrug. “It’s an injustice, the whole goddamned thing,” Tweed said. “No doubt about it. But there’s nothing to be done. It’s the way things are.” They would walk along South Street at lunch hour, and Tweed would point at the endless rows of masts and the small armies of stevedores and say: “All from the South, brother. Cotton, sugar, all of it… If we lose that trade, we’ll be a cemetery.” And Cormac said, “If you keep it, we’ll be a cemetery.” And Tweed said nothing, as they walked among the Irish and the Africans on a day when Cormac did not hear a single word in Irish or Yoruba, in the city whose past was swiftly sliding away.

All of that seemed long ago, in this room in the Ludlow Street Jail. The table was set for five, and when Luke Grant went to pick up the food, the fifth man arrived: Charlie Butts, former head-breaker from the Cherry Street days of Tweed’s youth, now the owner of a livery business with 109 carriages. Butts had a thick neck, broad shoulders, fierce mustaches dyed black, hard gray eyes, and short legs. He was carrying a cardboard box, which held the birthday cake.

“Charlie, you know everybody here?”

“I do.”

“Could you do us a favor and fix some drinks for them that’s drinking? Luke’s gone for the chops.”

Butts lifted a bottle of Rhinelander wine from the glass ice bucket (no silver allowed in Ludlow Street) and gave Cormac a squinty look. They’d been seeing each other for twenty years in the company of Bill Tweed.

“You still a newspaperman, Cormac?”

“No, not for a long time.”

“Good. What’s said here is between us.”

Tweed said: “He doesn’t have to be reminded of the rules, Charlie. We’ve been friends longer than I’ve known you.”

“He looks too young for that.”

“He’s a freak of nature,” Tweed said, sipping his water.

Cahill, the doctor, leaned forward, trying to lighten the moment.

“He’s not a freak of nature,” he said. “He’s Irish. When they don’t drink, they look good forever. In Mayo, there’s a guy a hundred and nine years old, and not a white hair on his head.”

“Is he still fucking?” said Billy Edelstein.

“Only nuns,” Cahill said, and Tweed laughed and wheezed and grabbed at his chest until the doctor’s face went pale. He held Tweed’s wrist, he patted his back.

“For Chrissakes, Bill, we don’t want you dying over a hundred-and-nine-year-old Mick fucking nuns.”

That set Tweed going again, his eyes dancing with laughter, but the huge body wracked and hurting. He coughed a wad of phlegm into a handkerchief. Cormac saw a few spots of blood.

“Will somebody please talk about the fucking water problem?” Butts said.

“Or that rat Dick Connolly?” said Edelstein. “Blabbing away and living free in Paris.”

“Not till after dinner, for Jaysus’ sake,” Butts said.

The mention of Connolly calmed them all down. They knew that everyone else in the Ring was free, and only Tweed was in jail. Connolly was indeed in Paris, carrying with him six million dollars. Elegant Oakey Hall, the former mayor, supreme horse-shit artist (as the Boss called him), was off in London, charming the British. Brains Sweeny had paid a fat fine and was dozing in the country. Tweed was the only one of them in jail. And the attorney general, Charles S. Fairchild, had double-crossed the Boss, promising him freedom in exchange for some sort of confession. Tweed had confessed, and stayed in jail. There was a minute of somber silence as the faces of their old friends passed among them.

Then Luke returned with the food.

“Salvation, gentlemen,” Tweed said.

Luke laid out the veal chops, corn, asparagus, and roasted potatoes. He put a basket of bread on the small table, and a small tub of butter and slabs of cheese. Everybody got up, except Tweed. He tried, but fell back, and Cormac took one elbow, and Butts the other and they lifted him out of the Windsor chair. He shuffled to the head of the table. Cormac noticed that he gave off a moldy odor, as if something had exuded through his pores and dried on his skin.

“Jesus Christ,” he said in a feeble way. “Jesus Christ…”

They all carved away at the chops, remarking on their tenderness, while Tweed grunted and chewed. Cahill tried to guide the talk away from anything upsetting. They chatted about this fellow Edison who had invented a sealed light bulb, with some kind of filament inside that made fire impossible. “He’ll get rich on that one,” Edelstein said, “as long as he got it copyrighted.” Butts said they’d never get enough electric lights in New York to light a single avenue, and Tweed whispered, “You’re wrong, Charlie, you’re wrong. They’re gonna light up the whole city. There’ll be no such thing as night.”

“There’ll be subways too, Charlie,” Cahill said. “You’ll be out of business with the carriages if you don’t get a piece of them.”

“People won’t ride under the fucking ground.”

“They’re doing it in England.”

“New Yorkers will never do it. It’s like being in a tomb.”

“Or the Tombs,” Tweed said, and smiled.

“What do you hear from the wife, Bill?” Cahill said.

“She’s fine, she’s fine. You know, I just wanted her to be away from all the flying shit here if, if… She’s taken care of no matter what happens.”

He paused, the knife and fork in his hands.

“But listen to this,” he said. “She’s in Paris, right, with the young children? And she goes to the opera with some friend of hers. And who’s sitting in the twelfth row? Connolly. Slippery Dick himself.”

“Jaysus.”

“So at the interval, she goes right to him. He looks shocked to see her, but she says to him, ‘You, sir, are a cur.’ And walks out.”

“Good woman.”

“Bravo.”

A pause.

“I hope to join her there soon,” Tweed said. “If I get sprung.” “We’re working on it,” said Edelstein. “And we’ve got some chance. The public is outraged over Fairchild’s double-cross. They want the state to spring you.”

“I should have built this goddamned jail on Spring Street,” Tweed said, and they all laughed.

“Let’s talk about something else, Bill,” Cahill said. “I don’t want your blood pressure to go through the roof.”

“I wish I could go through the roof!”

Then he led them again into the food, like a commander set against a foe, eating with a kind of frenzy. Once Cahill placed a hand on his wrist, as if to slow him down, and he waited, inhaled, sipped some water, gave Cahill a filthy look, and went on. Edelstein said the corn was delicious. Tweed said, “I don’t have the teeth for it anymore.” He cleaned his plate with buttered bread. Then turned to Cormac.

“Where is that ice cream store, anyway?”

“Two blocks from here, Delancey and Essex.”

“Luke!”

They cleaned their own plates in the sink while Luke went for the ice cream. Then they helped Tweed back to his Windsor chair and sat facing him. He looked at Butts, and then at Cahill and Edelstein, and turned his face toward the barred window with the flowered cretonne curtains moving languidly in a breeze. Cormac noted their grave faces. Finally Tweed whispered, “I’m never getting out of here alive, am I?”

Ah, Bill, Cormac thought. Ah, you goddamned fool. God damn it all to Hell.

Tweed had helped him more than once, had helped them all, the way he’d helped thousands of people in the bad parts of town. He had paid for medical school for Cahill and law school for Edelstein. He’d arranged a place for Cahill on the staff of St. Luke’s and got Edelstein into a good law firm. Neither man was part of the Ring. They didn’t vote early and often. They didn’t line up with the shoulder hitters to intimidate voters on election days. They gave Tweed something in return that he needed more than cash or votes. They gave him unconditional loyalty, which was another way of saying that they loved him. In a way, that was all he truly wanted.

“I’d take a bullet for the man,” Cahill said one night after Tweed had been through a day of agony in a courtroom. “I mean it. I’d take the bullet.”

“He’s the only true Christian I’ve ever met,” Edelstein said on another night, silent with snow. “Jews don’t meet many of them.”

They knew, and Cormac knew, that Tweed was presiding over the most corrupt system in New York history. He didn’t tell them this, never brought them into the system. But they all read the newspapers, and particularly the New York Times, which had all the documents, and saw the Startling Revelations after 1871 about how Tweed took 25 percent of all city contracts, which were inflated by the contractors to cover the bribes (while Slippery Dick Connolly, as controller, took down his own 10 percent). Money was flowing everywhere in New York after the Civil War, and the Ring took its piece. The newspapers seldom mentioned that the system was invented in the 1840s by Fernando Wood, who was thinner than Tweed and slicker and knew as much about loyalty as an oyster. Tweed was in the business of politics and he would end up convicted of standard business practices. The newspapers didn’t mention that most of the swag, about twenty million dollars of it, went to the Republicans in Albany, because Tweed could get nothing done without their approval. New York was the only city in the state that could not levy taxes without the permission of Albany, and the upstaters would never give up such a cash cow. If Tweed wanted money for New York City schools, he had to bribe the Republicans. If he wanted Croton water to flow into the streets where the poor lived, he had to pay off Republicans. One night before it all went bad, Tweed paused over a meal at the Astor House and said, “It’s cheaper to buy the legislature than to elect it.” And laughed and laughed.

A lot of the money stuck to him, of course, and Cormac knew it. So did Cahill and Edelstein. Tweed owned the building on Duane Street where he ran his office on the third floor and accepted the bundles of cash. He owned property on both sides of the new Central Park. He moved from one large Uptown house to another as his family grew bigger, and each house was grander than the last, with three carriages always waiting at the curb. He had a seven-room suite at the Delevan Hotel in Albany and a more luxurious one at the Broadway Central, a hotel he loved because it had a back door. The Americus Club on the Connecticut shore had started as a fishing club where his friends could smoke cigars and drink brandy. But it became grander too, with formal clothes on Saturday night and testimonial dinners instead of clambakes. The old modest skiffs were replaced by yachts, and a separate cottage was built out in the woods for his mistress of the moment. Tweed hid almost nothing, which was why the voters loved him. He bought that diamond stickpin, which Cormac urged him to hide at once in a coal bin. It was the size of a nose and glittered in every room he entered. Tweed laughed and laughed, and flaunted the stickpin on every possible occasion. This added still another symbol to the sunken eyes, the swollen belly, the polished shoes, and the Tammany Tiger that flowed from the pen and brush of Thomas Nast.

They knew all that. They didn’t care. They lived in the real world, where bullshit warred with horseshit and sin was part of the deal. And besides, they were his friends.

Luke brought the ice cream, and Edelstein asked the Boss to tell Cahill about the great fights between the Dead Rabbits and the Bowery B’hoys in the 1840s, and Tweed smiled and wolfed down ice cream and started telling the old stories. Cormac had heard them all before, and surely so had Cahill, and even Charlie Butts. But they made Tweed happy in the telling, and in the remembering. Cahill and Edelstein lit up cigars. Luke brought brandy and took away the ice cream dishes.

“The thing you learn in a street fight,” Tweed said, “is that it’s not how big you are, but how smart you are. So…”

As Luke laid slices of birthday cake before them, Tweed talked about those days when he was a big lean street fighter, one of the Cherry Hillers, long before he joined the Big Six fire company on Gouverneur Street. They first fought two dozen Dead Rabbits on Bayard Street, and beat them badly, and then joined forces with the Bowery B’hoys to beat them again, and then the Rabbits came with guns and they dropped bricks on them from the Bayard Street rooftops and the police came and they shoved a chimney down on one of them too. And then…

“It was a rough old school,” Tweed said.

“I’m sorry I missed it,” Cahill said.

“Don’t be,” Tweed said. “Many’s the lad didn’t escape it.” He glanced away. “Or was broken by it.”

He looked tired again, staring at his hands. Then something in memory turned him to Cormac.

“Play the piano, Cormac,” he said. “Play that thing that the little blond girl loved.”

Cormac flexed his fingers, remembering the little blond girl named Rachel who had intoxicated Tweed for one long winter in the Broadway Central. There was a nocturne that she loved hearing.

“I hope I can remember it,” Cormac said.

“Give it a try.”

He went to the piano, gazed at the keys, saw—as he did each time he sat on a bench like this—the face of the Countess de Chardon, and began to play. The music of a nocturne filled the room in the Ludlow Street Jail. Full of night, with clouds scudding across the moon and a distant sound of the sea pulling on the shore. Cormac’s technique had been acquired the hard way, at the keyboards of tuneless pianos jammed against walls in saloons, in the studios of teachers, and, after moving to Leonard Street, at the piano he bought with the money from his first cheap novel. He played to the end, and then the four men clapped.

“Just beautiful,” Tweed said, his voice lower. “Just beautiful.”

Cormac started to get up.

“No. Nononono, Cormac. You know what you’ve got to play now. All of us need it. Me most of all.”

Cormac smiled. He’d learned the song in Tweed’s company, at clambakes and Fourth of July celebrations, at rowdy election night parties at Tammany, in oyster bars and a hundred saloons. Tweed called it the Fight Song.

Cormac started to play, plunking the keys as if the piano were a percussion instrument, the song a march of some kind, an American tune. He began singing in a light voice. Cahill and Edelstein knew the words too, and the three of them were singing together, with Butts finally joining too, and the music pounding, and then, without help, Tweed got up. He just stood there, the backs of his knees jammed against the seat of the chair. Then his arms were moving, his face was grinning, his eyes were sparkling, and he swung his arms like a bandmaster and joined in the final words: Then pull off the old coat!And roll up the sleeve!Bayard is a hard street to travel.Pull off the old coat!And roll up the sleeve!The Bloody Sixth is a hard ward to travel…I BELIEVE!

They roared at the end, and Cormac hammered the keys in punctuation.

Then Tweed sighed in a wheezy way and collapsed slowly into his chair, everything gone out of him, even the fight.

The bells in the Essex Market tolled eleven. Luke appeared from the bedroom, to signal with looks and hands that the warden wanted them all out, except, of course, Tweed.

“Happy birthday, Bill,” Cahill said.

“We’ll keep fighting for you,” said Edelstein.

“Thank you, fellas,” Tweed said without conviction. “Thank you, it was a grand night, thank you…”

When he looked behind him through the doorway, Cormac thought Tweed was the loneliest man in the world.

79.

Cormac, Cahill, and Edelstein stood for an awkward moment on the sidewalk in front of the jail. Butts was already on his way home. Music drifted from the saloon across the street. A few women chatted on the corner, gazing up at the dark windows of the prison. A drunk staggered across the street, heading south.

“Can I give you a ride home, Cormac?” Cahill said.

“Thank you, no. I’ll walk. It’s a lovely night.”

“It’s a lovely night in a bad part of town,” Edelstein said.

Cormac laughed. “I know the way. I’ll be all right.”

They shook hands, and Edelstein climbed into a carriage behind Cahill and the driver flicked a whip and they trotted away.

Cormac glanced once more at the jail and began to walk south. Into the past.

He told himself, Be careful now, you’ll be up all night. Be careful, you’ll be trapped again in memory.

He did know the way, walking down the Bowery until it became Chatham Street, and then turning west into the Five Points. That was the fastest way to Broadway and Leonard. He still knew every street and most of the houses but no longer knew the people who now lived in the houses. The name Five Points, after all, came from the meeting of five streets: Mulberry, Anthony, Cross, Orange, and Little Water, the noisy heart of the district. The streets were still there, although some of the names had changed since he moved among them after the countess went away. Anthony had become Worth, in honor of some blowhard general in the Mexican War. Cross had become Park, after a sour little park created from a lot left by a burned-out house, and Orange turned into Baxter Street, after another man who died in Mexico, but primarily to ease the sensibilities of Irish Catholics.

And he remembered now, as he seldom did anymore, the second night of the Draft Riots. For two days, sometimes with Tweed, he had moved through the anarchic city as men were shot down and women picked up guns and buildings were torched. Tweed pleaded with many of them, trying to save lives, and he did change some minds. But each day, the fighting got worse. When Cormac went out on Tuesday night, he strapped on the sword.

He had not carried the sword in years. It was part of the past, more an artifact than a weapon, reduced to an elegantly made relic of his father. He knew it was useless against guns. But when he hefted it in the smoky night, he was sure he felt again the sword’s old power. He strapped on the flaking leather scabbard in his room, tried a few of the old moves (which were so like the moves of boxers), and then took a long drink of water and went out. He had no aim, except to find Tweed and offer his help. Tweed had been threatened again and again, sometimes by decent men, sometimes by the Mozart Hall remnant led by Hughie Mulligan. Perhaps the sword could do its old work and save someone he wanted to save.

At the corner of Cortlandt Street, he saw a bonfire throwing flames into the night, came closer, saw a mob, came even closer, saw a noose attached to a lamppost with a pile of kindling and lumber stacked at its foot, and then saw a smaller mob coming from Broadway, carrying a black man above their heads. His arms and legs were bound. He was shouting for help. Cormac drew his sword.

“Stop, you fucking idiots!” he shouted.

And stepped into their path.

They paused. Most of them young. Many of them Irish.

“Put that man down!”

Remembering the odor of charred flesh in 1741. Remembering the screams.

“Feck off!” one man said.

He drew a pistol, and Cormac sliced off his hand. Saw the man’s astonished face and then heard his scream. Heard pistol shots, a furious roar, felt a forearm close on his neck, felt a sharp, sudden crack, and fell into a blinding whiteness.

Three days later, he woke up in a strange bed to see Bill Tweed peering down at him. His hands went to his head and felt wads of bandage.

“You’re lucky you’re alive,” Tweed said. “You’re lucky you’ve got a thick Irish skull.”

He put a brandy bottle to Cormac’s lips. The room dimmed and brightened, and he saw another man behind Tweed, saw Tweed nod, and the man slipped out. The young Frank Cahill. He saw flowers on a windowsill, and thick, high foliage beyond the glass. He heard canaries chirping from another room

“Welcome to the Tweed home,” said Bill Tweed. “Do you want some eggs?”

They sat together for a long time, as Tweed explained that the riots were over. Nobody knew the numbers of the dead: between two hundred and two thousand. There were no numbers at all for the wounded. The Colored Orphan Asylum had been burned to the ground. Many blacks had been lynched. Many had been saved, including a black man they’d wanted to hang and burn on the street where Cormac was found.

“The Five Points held,” he said. “And the Fourth Ward. Not a shot was fired, not a black man harmed, not a building burned. I suppose we should be proud of that.”

He turned away and gazed into the yard.

“But there’s nothing to be proud about in the bloody city. It was… terrible. We might never get over it.”

“You did what you could,” Cormac said.

“It wasn’t enough.”

Luke came in with a platter of fruit. Younger then, without gray hair. He laid the platter on Cormac’s lap.

“Thank you, sir,” he said to Cormac. “I heerd what you did.”

Then went out.

“It’s all right, Cormac,” Tweed said, and laughed. “It didn’t get into the newspapers, so you don’t have to worry about the gangs coming for your hard Irish head….”

“The way I feel, they could take it and make me happy.”

“Not on your life.” Tweed sighed. “I’ve got to go out now and visit the ruins.”

“One thing, Bill.”

“Yes?”

“When… when they found me, did they find a sword?”

“A sword?”

“A sword with spirals etched in the blade, and a grip made of wolf bone. My father’s sword.”

Tweed gazed at him.

“I’ll ask around,” he said. “But I suspect it’s hanging on some lout’s wall.”

From Tweed’s casual tone, Cormac knew, as he peeled an orange, that the sword was gone and might never again be held in his hand.

He saw Transfiguration Church in the distance, and other scenes merged in his mind: murders and suicides, in his days as a reporter, and deaths from cholera and smallpox and yellow fever. He remembered when the Collect Pond was still there, with the tanneries and garbage dumps at its edge. He watched as the Collect was drained (writing about it for a newspaper in 1804) and filled in (with the rocks and mud of the hill), and saw the new houses going up in 1811 before the land settled, and the way they leaned and tottered toward each other a year later, so that nobody would ever live there except the most desperately poor. They were still the only people living there.

And here came two of them, silhouetted against the distant shimmer of a gaslight.

“Evenin’, mister,” the first one said. Runty and belligerent and drunk. The other taller and gawky. Both with derby hats.

“Is it somethin’ you’re lookin’ for?” the gawky one said, his rhythm Irish, but the words hardened by New York.

Cormac tensed. “Just walking home.”

“Is it far ye have to walk?” the short one said.

“Not far.”

He started to go around them and they moved with him, blocking his way.

Aw, shit.

“You must be carryin’ stuff that’s weighin’ ye down,” the short one said. “I mean, tryin’ to get home alive.”

“Like money,” the tall one said.

Where are you now that I need you, Bill? When you were young and tough?

“Listen to me carefully,” Cormac said, as if addressing children. “You will get out of my way right now. And if you don’t, you’ll be very, very sorry. Fair warning, all right?”

The two men looked at each other. Cormac saw himself doing what he’d done a few times before. Two punches. Fast and vicious. Like cutting with a sword. One left hand, one right. Each to the neck. The men gagging, reeling backward, panting for air, each strangling in pain and shock.

He didn’t have to do it. They stepped aside, and he walked between them, thinking: It must have been the tone of my voice. Or the way I stood with my feet apart, ready to punch. Or maybe it was their own woozy weakness. No matter. He walked on, thinking: The city fathers change the names of the streets. They bring water pumps to the thirsty. The preachers open mission schools to teach trades. Tough, hard, determined people move on, Uptown, to the West Side, to Brooklyn. There are always idiots left behind. And sometimes the idiots get rich for a while, and then disappear. Like Hughie Mulligan disappeared.

One night, after leaving the Five Points for the larger rooms on Leonard Street (driven there by Bill Tweed’s scorn), Cormac found a note under his door from Hughie Mulligan.

MEET ME AT THE PIER FOOT OF CANAL AND NORTH RIVER. THURSDAY NITE EIGHT O’CLOCK. NEED TO TALK TO YOU. HUGH M.

This was on a night in ’68, when Bill Tweed was in the fullness of his power, and Hugh Mulligan was the boss of the opposition Democrats who had failed to get that power themselves. Cormac studied the note. Then he went to Duane Street and showed it to Tweed.

“Go,” he said. “See what the treacherous fucker wants.”

“It might have nothing to do with you,” Cormac said, and told Tweed what he’d done to Mulligan years before in the front parlor of the house of the Countess de Chardon. Tweed laughed.

“Jesus, you’ve got some terrible history in you, Cormac,” he said.

“I was young.”

“But he must’ve seen you around the Sixth Ward,” Tweed said, alert to a possible ambush.

“He saw me all right, over the years,” Cormac said. “At events I covered. At rallies. A few times in the street. But I don’t think he made the connection.”

“Don’t be so sure,” Tweed said. “Hughie looks dumb and slow, but he’s got something dangerous inside that brain too. He’s like a cunning old warthog.”

Cormac laughed.

“The only way to find out is to go to see him,” he said.

He turned to go.

“Wait,” Tweed said, turning to a wall closet. “I’ll give you a gun.”

“I don’t want a gun.”

“Why, for Chrissakes?”

“I might use it,” Cormac said. “That’s why.”

Two nights later, he went to the pier at the end of Canal Street. Mulligan was alone, holding a lantern. Cormac looked into the darkness behind him but couldn’t see anyone else. Water sloshed at the timbers. Boats moved on the river. The air was thick with the threat of rain.

“Hello, Cormac,” Mulligan said.

“What do you want with me?”

“I’ve got a job for you.”

“I’ve got a job, Hughie,” Cormac said.

“I mean a job.”

There was a pause, the water sloshing louder, sails flapping in the darkness. Mulligan led the way farther out onto the pier, until the river was beneath them.

“Why me?”

“ ’Cause you’re a nobody. You got no wife. You got no kids. You make crappy paintings. You work on a newspaper and nobody ever fucking heard of you.”

“You’ve got that right.”

“But you’re a nobody that’s close to Bill Tweed.”

“Bill knows ten thousand people like me,” Cormac said. “He even remembers their names.”

“But nobody like you. Nobody that goes up to his apartment in the Broadway Central when everybody else is leavin’. Nobody that sits around laughin’ wit’ him. Nobody that plays the piano and gets him singin’.”

“You’ve been watching, all right.”

“For a long time, pallie.”

He laid the lantern on the planks at his feet and lit a cigar, turning to gaze at the river with its black glossy sheen. A few drops of rain started falling. Cormac thought: Jesus, he’s big. And his cheekbones look like walnuts now.

“What’s the job?”

“Kill Tweed.”

Cormac laughed.

“Why the laugh, pallie?”

“I was thinking about a philosopher I once met. He said there were three categories of belief. Plain old belief, disbelief, and beyond fucking belief. This is beyond fucking belief, Hughie.”

“We don’t think so.”

Cormac looked toward the dark stacks of packing cases at the land end of the pier. He still saw nobody.

“What’s the deal?”

Mulligan took a drag on the cigar and let the smoke drift from his mouth.

“A hundred thousand,” he said. “Half up front, half when the job is done. You’ll get a whole new identity. You’ll get a first-class passage from Boston to France. You’ll get a place to stay in Paris, where you can make your fucking paintings to your heart’s content. You could just vanish.”

“Why Paris? Why not Mexico or Russia or County Mayo?”

“Go wherever the fuck you want to go, pallie. I don’t care. Why are you breaking my stones?”

“Details, Hughie. It’s all in the details. For example, how do you propose I do this… job?”

“Up to you. You can shoot him. You can stab him. You can strangle him. You can poison him. We don’t give a fiddler’s fuck. As long as he’s dead.”

A lone bell ding-dinged as a dark skiff moved downriver toward the harbor.

“A simple question, Hughie. Why do you want to kill Bill Tweed?”

Mulligan laughed.

“What kind of stupid question is that? He’s got the Ring.”

“And you want it.”

“Of course. He’s got the mayor, he’s got the controller, he’s got the aldermen, he’s got—”

“Wouldn’t you have to kill them all?”

“They’ll work with us if Tweed’s gone.” Mulligan paused. “There’s nobody else.”

“So the deal is simple. I kill Bill Tweed so you and your friends can get the swag.”

Mulligan shrugged. Why even discuss it?

“But Hughie, I’ll never get to spend the down payment. I’ll never get the rest of the money either, isn’t that right? I’ll never even make it to France. Because you couldn’t afford to have me around. If I’m alive, you’d have to pay me off forever. And you’d never do that. You’d kill the killer, isn’t that the way it’s usually done, Hughie?”

In the light of the lamp, Mulligan looked angry, his eyes sinking under his brows, his nostrils flaring. He wiped in an annoyed way at the falling rain.

“You put it that way, I might have to kill you now,” he said, “and get someone else for the job.”

“You’re welcome to try, Hughie.”

Mulligan stared at him, and then Cormac turned to go. Hughie grabbed his arm.

“I know you, pallie,” he said. “I know you from the whore-house. The one the countess ran. Where you made a fool of me.”

“It was a long time ago, Hughie.”

“And you never got what you deserved, pallie.”

“You’ve seen me around,” Cormac said. “You could have tried a hundred times.”

“Maybe I thought I could use you one day.”

“To humiliate somebody?”

“No. To get you in a jam and see how you wiggle out.”

“That’s the real reason I’m here tonight, isn’t it?”

“Yeah.”

“You’ve got the wrong man, Hughie.”

He pulled away.

“Where are you going?”

“Away from you.”

Now Cormac could see the rage, the tight mouth, the flickering eyes. And then there was a pistol in Hughie’s hand. Cormac kicked the lantern over the edge of the pier, heard it sizzle as it hit the water, then dropped to the deck as a shot rang out. He rolled toward Mulligan. A second shot ripped through his thigh. But he reached the bigger man and kicked at a kneecap from the ground, then got up and lunged for the pistol hand. The pain was searing his leg.

“Fucker, fucker…”

He grabbed Mulligan’s coat with both hands and butted him in the face with his head, then grabbed the arm, again in both hands, and jerked it backward as if breaking a tree limb. The pistol fell to the dark deck. Still nobody came from the darkness. Mulligan made thin, frantic sounds, full of pain, and went to his knees, searching desperately for the gun. Cormac stood over him, planted his feet, and bent him sideways with a punch. Then he reached around until he found the pistol.

“I’ve got the gun, Hughie.”

He cocked it so that Mulligan could hear.

“Don’t shoot,” Mulligan said.

“Get up.”

“Just don’t shoot me. I want to take care of you.”

“I’ll bet.”

“You can get very rich.”

“Don’t horseshit me, Hughie.”

Mulligan got up, his silhouette hulking and black.

“The one thing I’ll give you, Hughie. You came alone. But I think I know why. This is a private deal. It’s about you and me. You’ve been pissed off for thirty years at me. You’re getting old. You don’t want to die knowing I watched your funeral.” He laughed. “Your boys want nothing to do with killing Tweed. This was one of those great ideas that came to you at two in the morning. You get me to kill Tweed, and then you get me killed, and you have everything you want. You try to take the Ring, and I’m dead and gone.”

He could feel the blood leaking from his thigh down into his boot.

“You got it all wrong, old pal.”

“I don’t think so.”

Cormac hefted the pistol, put it to Mulligan’s chin, cocked it, heard a whimper, then turned and heaved it into the river.

“I’ll see you, tough guy.”

He started to walk away, and then Mulligan rushed him. It was like being hit by a cart. He bent away, let Hughie slide off him, then stood up and punched him in the temple. The big man staggered but did not go down. Cormac hit him again and felt the pulpy nose splay, and heard a whimper from his chest, and then he bent low and hit him with all his strength in the balls.

Mulligan staggered backward as if his immense body had been broken. His hands flailed. He gasped for breath. And then he went off the pier into the swift water.

The tide carried him out toward the watery boneyard that held the Earl of Warren.

The rain fell harder.

He told all of this to Tweed later that night, dressed in bathrobe and slippers while his clothes were being cleaned by Luke in the valet quarters of the Broadway Central. At first Tweed was serious, then amused, and then, as he pried the full tale from Cormac, he grew more and more merry. Finally he fell back laughing.

“It’s as funny as a Saturday night on the Bowery,” he said. “Except that Hughie’s dead,” Cormac said. “That’s not so funny.”

Tweed grew serious.

“I suspect someone will find a suicide note before dawn,” he said.

He looked at his nails, an expression of admiration on his face.

“And we were here together,” Tweed said. “If anyone asks.” A pause. “And nobody will.”

That morning, a housekeeper came to Hughie Mulligan’s suite at the Metropolitan Hotel, where he lived alone. She found a note on his desk. CAN’T STAND LIVING IN THIS TERRIBLE WORLD. HUGH MULLIGAN

Four days later, his body was found floating off Sheep’s Head Bay. It was bloated and partially eaten by fish. His boys threw him a grand funeral, and Tweed sent flowers and a few well-chosen words of respect.

80.

As he walked west, hurrying home on this night in April 1878, he remembered coming to the Five Points when for him it was an undiscovered country. He didn’t move to Mott Street, on the district’s eastern border, in a spirit of contrition, although some of that was alive in his tired bones. He didn’t move there to give himself a sense of proportion over the loss of the countess, and her bath, and the scent of lavender, although that was one of the things he received from the move.

The truth was that when Cormac crossed Broadway that first day, with a cartman behind him carrying his things, his mind felt like sludge. The countess was gone, and something he needed had gone with her: a current, an uncertainty, a set of undecoded codes that had kept his mind alert. When she left, it was as if a switch had been thrown. His body felt young, and looked young, but his brain felt ancient. That was when he remembered the German lesson.

The sludge had entered his brain before, early in the century, when he had been in New York longer than any other inhabitant. It was made up of age, memory, repetition, banality. Then, while trying to learn German in order to read Goethe, he discovered something about himself. When he entered another language, when he tried to absorb its rules, its nouns and verbs, and above all, its rhythms, the sludge in his brain began breaking up. He sought out Germans who could correct his pronunciation, who could explain subtleties of usage, and he could feel a small bright place opening in his brain. It touched everything else. He wrote better in English for the newspaper. He saw more sharply, absorbing details that had been sinking in the sludge. His mind became swifter, his visions more glittering, as if he were three years old again, learning English, or thirteen and learning Irish on the wrong side of the Mountains of Mourne.

He learned then, as Kongo had told him in the cave in Inwood, that in order to live, he must live. And living was a long learning. Learning to paint was a way to break up the sludge. The same was true of the piano. He learned in different ways: by trying to read everything by an author so that he truly entered the writer’s world; by distinguishing between one composer and another so that he could see immense landscapes while hearing a mere eight bars drifting from an open window; or by knowing without thinking the difference between an accent and an umlaut. And it wasn’t all in books or sheets of music. Truly knowing a woman was a way of smashing into the sludge. Knowing a place was another.

And to learn a neighborhood was like learning a language. That was what the Five Points taught him. You needed to recognize the subtle differences in accent, clothing, gesture. You learned to know if a certain blind pig was selling the illusion of menace, for a Saturday night thrill, or was truly a place of danger. Every newcomer had to learn that world in his or her own way. All of it was measured against the past. The Famine Irish measured their present against the horror left behind. From his monastic room on Mott Street, Cormac too looked back at Ireland, and the crossing of the ocean sea, the first years in New York and the years of the Revolution, and thought of them as part of his youth, that strange youth prolonged by a gift from African gods. That youth filled with miracles and magic. But a youth that was, he thought, only sporadically real.

In the Bloody Ould Sixth, he also learned that observing—as a painter or newspaperman—was not the only way of living. So he walked away from both, for a dozen years, and plunged into other ways of living, laying stones on Broadway, laying track for the omnibuses, working as a drover, and then selling groceries, and then unloading ships. Three of those years were lost to drink, which he at first forced himself to do, to see what it was about, to try to understand why it pulled at so many people, and made them so happy, and wrecked them. It wrecked him too. Led him into brawls in sawdust bars, into ferocious arguments, into foolish performances, into strange and dangerous women. That created a different kind of sludge: briny, eradicating, filled with shame and guilt. But it had its rewards too: In almost every place he entered, there was a piano, and the owners let him play.

And look, here I am tonight on Mott Street.

Here I am, and the building is still there, lived in now by others, all lost in sleep.

He remembered clearly the L shape of the tiny flat. He saw again the pegs where he hung his clothes, felt himself swivel again to stand and turn in the two feet between the edge of the bed and the wall. He could see the shallow oak cabinet he built under the narrow bed, locked on each end, the secret place in which he placed the sword, the earrings, the letters he had saved; remembered that secret place, and the cloudy window opening toward the tottering walls and sloping rooftops of the streets that descended from the height of Mott Street into the Five Points, the streets swirling with corner boys and oyster sellers, whores and dock wallopers, lurching drunks and proud abstainers, church bells ringing, glass breaking at midnight, much laughter, many tears.

Across Mott Street in those first years stood the Presbyterian church, locked and abandoned, the building that would later open its doors to the injured and humiliated believers as the Church of the Transfiguration under the command of a Cuban priest named Varela. That Catholic church right there now, across the street. Closed for the night. But seeming to give off its odor of candles, incense, and piety. In its shadows, Cormac had studied the texts of the great religions. Judaism and Catholicism and the infinite variations of Protestantism. He had read among the limited texts of Buddhism. He had found a foxed copy of the Koran, stained by its journey from Turkey to London to New York. He tried to approach them all with an accepting mind. He found in each some small thing of value that might help a human being to be more human. In the end, none dislodged him from his belief in what they all called the pagan. The gods of Ireland and Africa. The gods whose powers were proved by the absurdity of his life.

81.

Edelstein came calling just before noon.

“Get dressed and we’ll go,” the lawyer said. “Cahill’s there already.”

“How bad is it?”

“Very bad.”

They rode through streets where Tweed had worked day and night during the Draft Riots.

“You’re thinking too hard about him,” Edelstein said. “Let’s wait until we see him.”

“I was thinking of some good things he did,” Cormac said as they crossed Grand Street.

“He did a lot of them.”

“And nobody will remember any of them.”

“Except us.”

They were quiet for a while, the horse clip-clopping on cobblestones that Cormac had helped lay years before. They bumped over the rails of the tramlines, and he had worked on them for a year too: sanding them in icy winter, watering them in summer.

“The worst things he did, he did to himself.” Edelstein said. “Like the escape.”

“Definitely the dumbest.”

“That’s why three million in bail. That’s why twelve different trials. That’s why he’s not home now in bed.” He looked out into the street. “You were in on that, weren’t you?”

“I tried to talk him out of it,” Cormac said. “He said he wanted to see the ocean and flowers and his kids. He asked, so I helped.”

That was during Tweed’s first stay in the Ludlow Street Jail back in 1875. He had stayed in New York while the others fled, so he was allowed monthly trips around the city in the company of the warden and a policeman, and visits with his wife. On December 4, a Saturday, he went for a long ride. The last stop that day was his own house on Madison and Sixty-seventh Street, where he’d have dinner. Cormac was waiting around the corner in a landau carriage with a leather roof. He lolled on the seat as Tweed stayed until after dark. Then he saw him, dark felt hat pulled over his face, the huge body swathed in a cloak. He said nothing and climbed into the carriage. Cormac then took Tweed north along the river roads, to the cove where he had once waited with Kongo in sight of the mansion of the Earl of Warren. A rowboat was waiting. They embraced, and Tweed went off to a waiting sloop and the long journey that would take him to Key West and Havana and finally to Spain. Cormac was sure that night that he would never see Tweed again.

“He always said later that you were a stand-up fellow,” Edelstein said. They were at the jail now.

“I still wish I’d told him to fuck off.”

Here they were in the suite again, with Luke serving tea and biscuits, and Tweed dozing in his bed. His eyes were closed and his breathing was shallow. His body smelled like swamp. Cahill motioned to them to follow him to the living room.

“His daughter’s gone out for ice cream,” Cahill said quietly. “Her husband’s with her. She might be gone a while, since she doesn’t know the neighborhood.”

“I should have brought some from the German,” Cormac said. Cahill shrugged as if it wouldn’t make a difference.

“What is it, exactly, Frank?” Edelstein said.

“It’s everything. It’s his heart and his kidneys and his lungs. It’s his blood pressure. And now he’s got a mild pneumonia.”

Cahill inhaled deeply, pursed his lips and exhaled, then patted his jacket pocket for a cigar. He decided against it, as if the smoke would hurt Tweed.

“Why don’t you play the piano, Cormac?” Edelstein said. “You always make him feel better.”

Cormac sat down and noodled the keys, playing a nocturne. Tweed didn’t move. Then, slowly, Cormac began to play the Fight Song. Played it as a soft, distant march. But in some odd way, as a soft tune full of defiance. Cormac glanced through the connecting door at the heavy man on the bed.

Tweed’s eyes opened.

“God damn it, I was hoping it was you,” Tweed said. He smiled. His teeth seemed darker.

“Sing, Bill.” Cormac said. “Sing the song.”

“I’ll sing if you all sing.”

So they began to sing, the tempo slower than it was written, the march turned into a ballad.So pull off the old coat!And roll up the sleeve!Bayard is a hard street to travel.Pull off the old coat!And roll up the sleeve!The Bloody Sixth is a hard ward to travel…I BELIEVE!

Then it was quiet.

“Come here, Cormac,” Tweed said.

Cormac went over, his back to the others. Tweed reached under the covers and came up with an envelope.

“You’ve been a good friend,” Tweed whispered, his voice thin, the skin of his face slack, the fat no longer shiny. “The only one who never asked me for a fucking penny.” He handed Cormac the envelope. “So this is for you….”

“I don’t want anything, Bill.”

“Fine, you can throw it away if you want, or piss it away on a woman, or give it to the poor.”

He smiled, then laughed. “Just don’t give it to the fucking government,” he said. “It’s full of thieves.”

Cormac didn’t ask what was in the envelope, although he could feel the outline of a key. Tweed murmured that his wife and the family would be all right. “I took care of them long ago,” he said. “Before I went to Spain.” His lawyers had all been paid too, although that goddamned Hebe out there, that Edelstein, he wouldn’t take a dime.

“There were a few laughs, though, weren’t there?”

“Enough for five lifetimes,” Cormac said.

Tweed was quiet, and then he was gone. Cahill hurried over, took his pulse, and said, “Shit.” Tweed’s fingernails turned black.

The door opened and his daughter Josephine came in with the ice cream. She looked at them, looked at her father, and fell to the floor of the Ludlow Street Jail. The lid came off the pail and the ice cream made a cold white scab on the planked floor.

82.

The envelope contained a bank draft for five thousand dollars and the key to a safe-deposit box at the Bank of New York. And there was a note in Bill Tweed’s hand: “I wish this was more, but it’s something. So long, old friend.”

When Cormac opened the box on the following morning, he found the deed to a house on Duane Street next door to the building where Tweed did business while he was the Boss. He walked down there for a look and realized that he’d passed it many times without ever noticing it. Four stories of red brick on the northeast corner of Church Street. From across the street, he could see a studio on the top floor with windows facing south toward the harbor. A studio. With windows glistening in the sun. While newsboys shouted the story of the death of the Boss.

“Bill Tweed is dead, readallabout it!”

“Get it all in the Herald….”

Cormac’s hands trembled as he gazed at another note in Bill Tweed’s hand. “Fill in the blanks with whatever name you want to use,” the note said. “Then take it to Edelstein.” But that day, and part of the next, he couldn’t move. He lay on the bed in the Leonard Street flat, the newspapers scattered around him, images of Tweed in life gliding into the cartoons of Thomas Nast.

He didn’t go to the wake at the Tweed home on Madison Avenue and couldn’t leave Manhattan for the burial in Green-wood Cemetery in Brooklyn. But he waited under gray skies at Broadway near City Hall and watched the procession of eighteen carriages move south toward State Street and the Hamilton Ferry. Two mounted policemen led the way. Cormac joined those who walked behind the carriages, and then moved away at the ferry. He threw the Boss a salute and started for home. In the sky, a flock of seagulls cried a farewell.

The day after the burial, he went first to his own bank and added the draft to the one hundred and six dollars he had in his account. Then he walked to Hanover Square to see Edelstein.

“I hated yesterday,” Edelstein said.

“Yes.”

“That mayor wouldn’t even lower the flags to half-mast.”

“He’ll be forgotten when Bill is still remembered.”

“You’ve got something for me, right?” Edelstein said.

“I do.”

He handed the paper to Edelstein, the deed to the house on Duane Street.

“What name do you want to use?”

“I haven’t thought about it.”

“I have,” Edelstein said. “There was a man was killed in Antietam, no family, no relatives. I went to school with him. Francis Aloysius Kavanagh. No U in Kavanagh.”

“Sounds good to me.”

“In a year or two, we can change it to some company. We’ll make one up.”

“Even better.”

He started filling in the blanks on the deed, then took a stamp and some wax and a notary’s seal and thumped on the paper.

“Just sign here, Mister Kavanagh.”

Cormac signed his latest name.

“Done.”

“That’s all?”

“That’s all, Mister Kavanagh.”

Edelstein smiled and lit a cigar.

“It’s a fine house, Cormac,” Edelstein said. “You could live there forever.”