The Fatal Flame Read Free

was playing at one when it began.
    I stood huddled in the doorway of a sail-repair shop in plain view of the lumbering East River, jostled by leathery first mates placing orders. I’d a fine vantage point of the James Slip, just at the corner of Oliver and South Streets—briny April wind in my face, a pickled seaside sun in my eyes. Birds wheeled above, screaming for scraps. There are plentiful dregs to be found along the waterfront.
    We were after the human variety.
    “When can we expect this coldhearted villain to make his appearance?” my friend Jakob Piest asked, ducking into his gruel-speckled muffler.
    My closest police comrade has a tendency to wear what he eats. I think of Piest as my partner-in-whatever-it-is-we-do, since I don’t know the name for hunting down criminals after the fact rather than stopping crimes in progress, as the roundsmen do. Somebody should conjure one up. The police have existed for three years now—that’s plentiful time to have figured out a title for my job. Most of the copper stars walk in circuits, eyes peeled for mayhem. Thanks to Chief Matsell’s esteem, I decipher unsolved mayhem. Whenever I can borrow Piest, I do—it’s keener sport with a mad companion beside me. His eyes are invaluable, and he’s honest as the frayed cuffs on his frock coat. I likewise appreciate that he resembles your friendlier breed of barnacle and talks like a knight-errant. It’s a good job there aren’t many windmills left in Manhattan and that jousting poles are similarly scarce, or Mr. Piest would never set aside the time police work requires.
    “According to the shipping wires, they’re smack on schedule, so he should be here any minute now,” I mused. The vessel before us rocked and groaned in protest, lashed down like a frothing wild creature. The gangway was rising, and swarthy stevedores with tobacco in their cheeks leaned against dollies, waiting to grapple with the huge ship full of luggage and dry goods about to be disgorged.
    “I hope that I am neither a vicious nor a petty person, Mr. Wilde.” Piest’s stringy grey hair waltzed in the spring breeze. “But I relish the thought of Ronan McGlynn passing his days in a Tombs cell, watching the mice cross the great mountain range of his belly as he attempts to lull himself to sleep.”
    I smiled at my friend’s quixotic turn of phrase, eyes skipping across coal-stained enginemen and the chalk-and-rouge-smeared whores who survived off their nickels. Piest’s tone was pure poison, but so was our target. We’d recently learned that for months Ronan McGlynn had been turning a tidy profit in plucking comely Irish virgins straight from the gangways and welcoming them to worse than hell with a smile. And nothing scrapes either of our tempers thinner than the exploitation of wide-eyed innocents.
    Before us, reporters from the
Herald
and the
Tribune
gathered, salivating over the freshest news from overseas. Beyond, the water lapped at the tugs and the sloops and the freighters, striking in lacy plumes against the docks.
    “Ah,” breathed Mr. Piest.
    “Bully,” I agreed.
    The great ship, hull glistening, had commenced hemorrhaging first-class passengers. Fine-featured ladies, feet invisible under the great swaying bells of their skirts, once-careful curls harassed by the ocean wind. Gentlemen at their sides, nodding vague approval beneath their black hats and checking the time and generally congratulating themselves. In ten minutes they’d have disappeared with their steamer trunks piled high behind the hacksmen, gliding away to make vastly important decisions about proper hotels and appropriate restaurants and the writing of letters back to wherever they came from.
    We didn’t give a damn about them, though. Another figure had materialized, bouncing on the tips of his boots in anticipation, carrying a sign tucked under his arm. It read APPLICANTS FOR MANUFACTORY WORK WANTED . Which is true enough, now that these eerie mass workplaces