The Fatal Flame Read Free Page A

have begun cropping up like dry rot.
    Ronan McGlynn, however, didn’t mean a word of it.
    I set McGlynn’s age somewhere north of fifty, for while his blue eyes remained clear and his ruddy skin hale, his shoulder-length hair was white and his legs sticklike beneath a jolly round belly. He wore perfectly cut doeskin trousers—not the ready-made slops New York has begun vomiting out, but sewn to measure—and a white vest beneath a violet frock coat. A snowy beard and a grey top hat completed the benevolent picture. But he was only a pantomime of a prosperous businessman. McGlynn owned a thin gash of a mouth and the stare of a born slave trader, the outline of a flask marred his jacket, and his nails where they gripped the pasteboard sign were dark with grit.
    I notice that sort of thing, though. When the Irish lasses poured off the boat, dazzled and hungry, they’d be lucky to notice a twenty-one-cannon salute. Not that they’d get one.
    “If it isn’t the ugliest pair o’ copper stars this side of Connell’s arse,” came a gruff Irish voice to my left.
    “Me arse is widely considered comely, truth be told. The shape of it, the heft and all. Are ye blind, Kildare?” a still-thicker Irish brogue questioned, amused.
    “Welcome to the festivities.” I smiled crookedly beneath the brim of my broad black hat.
    Maybe I ought to have objected to the greeting, but Mr. Piest’s bulging blue eyes and absent chin admittedly resemble a carp’s. As for my own appearance . . . the Fire of 1845 had replaced the upper right quarter of my face with skin like a poorly cobbled thoroughfare. No one to my knowledge found me unbearably ugly previous, but I hadn’t exactly taken a survey. People find Val plenty spruce in appearance, and we could be twins apart from the fact he has me beat by six years of age and eight inches in height. We’ve deep-set green eyes and a little downward half-moon stamped in our chins, clean features with a slender nose below double-arched dirty-blond hairlines. Youthful faces for all that we’ve both seen too much, his marred only by weighty bags beneath his eyes and mine by a scar ugly enough to pickle cucumbers.
    So I wasn’t going to argue with Connell. Not when I enthusiastically agreed with him that neither Piest nor myself belongs on a facial-tonic advertisement.
    As for our fellow copper stars, Connell has a pleasantly boxlike head, rough-featured and approachable, with flaming red hair he ties back with a short ribbon. Mr. Kildare, the taller and quicker-tempered of the two, rubbed at his wiry black side-whiskers. They joined us in the sail-repair shop’s shadow, leaning with indolent nonchalance against the brick wall.
    “Where’s the pimp, then?” Kildare wondered.
    “I’ll be after thinkin’ ye really are blind.” Connell nodded toward where McGlynn preened. “Will you look at the airs and graces o’ the scum.”
    “Shit’ll fly, if ye hit it with a stick,” Kildare reminded us.
    The last of the first-class passengers descended.
“You hired McGlynn?” I asked quietly.
    “Yesterday, ’twas. We’re meant to be the muscle for a goosing slum in Anthony Street,” said Kildare, whose beat had bordered mine when I’d spent sixteen hours a day trudging in a circle as one of the first New York police.
    “A real brothel or an imaginary one?” Jakob Piest asked, brow askew. He doesn’t speak much flash, but we deal with so many brothels it would have been absurd for him not to recognize
goosing slum
.
    “O’ course a real brothel. Don’t be insulting,” Connell said mildly. “Paid the madam five dollars in case McGlynn wanted to check up on our sincerity, didn’t I now? She’s a motherly sort to her stargazers, more than game t’ help flush out the likes o’ this rat.”
    “An unnecessary and ungallant query on my part, Mr. Kildare,” Piest apologized.
    Prostitution, I should mention, is illegal. Not in
fact
—merely on paper. When women resort to the practice