Alice Hoffman - The Museum of Extraordinary Things

The horses in the stable were just waking, ready for their breakfast, restless in their stalls. Their keeper was there and had already piled up hay with a pitchfork. Several of his prized pigeons perched along the old wooden beams. The liveryman sang to them as he brought out their breakfast of seed. With great trust and familiarity, his pigeons came to eat from his wide, callused hands. He turned, wary when he heard the door slide open, suspicious of who might arrive at such an ungodly hour, but broke into a grin when he spied Eddie and the dog. They’d been good neighbors over the years.

“Out early I see,” the carriage man greeted Eddie. “Up before the birds.”

“Long before the birds,” Eddie said grimly. He thought of blackbirds and the silver river. He thought how little he knew about this neighbor of his.

The liveryman finished feeding the pigeons. He then leaned to pet Mitts under the chin. “Here’s a good boy who stays away from my birds, isn’t that right?” The dog, exhausted from his walk, flopped down at the liveryman’s feet. “I expect you’ll both be looking for a few hours of sleep.”

“It’s not sleep I’m after.” Eddie closed the door behind him. At the sound of the heavy doors shutting, the pigeons scattered to the rafters above. “It’s you I’m looking for.”

THEY CROSSED the Williamsburg Bridge early the next day, at a time when a steady stream of crowds were headed in the opposite direction, toward Manhattan and the working world. Eddie sat beside the sullen carriage man on the driver’s high bench seat. He wanted to keep an eye on his companion, and for good reason. When confronted, the stableman had professed to know nothing of the matter of a missing girl. But when Eddie hadn’t backed off, and had described the exact location where the body had been found in the muddy hollow, the liveryman had been stunned.

“You can’t know that,” he blurted. “No one knows where we’ve been and what we’ve done excepting my horse, and he wouldn’t tell you if he could.”

The stableman seemed under the influence; perhaps he was a drinker. Certainly, he was not reasoning clearly. He ran his mouth before he could think better of it, eyeing Eddie as if he possessed the psychic powers of a demon. “I told him I wanted nothing to do with it. I said it was bad luck, but he wouldn’t listen and he was the one paying, so what was I to do?”

The liveryman swore he’d committed no offenses, for the girl was dead when they’d come upon her. All he did was help move the body to Brooklyn, and then only as an employee who had no choice but to obey the demands placed upon him.

“In the eyes of the law, that’s an offense,” Eddie assured him. “You’ll be in the Tombs if the authorities find out. Maybe even Sing Sing prison.”

“The eyes of the law are blind. You know it as well as I. Let’s settle this as men, for men is what we are. I could kill you here and now,” the liveryman boasted, “and never hear a word of this again.”

Eddie laughed. “You?”

“Would you feel differently about holding a threat over my head if you knew I already served five years in Sing Sing?”

Eddie had assumed something about his companion’s station in life from his scars, tattoos, and gold-capped teeth. But time in Sing Sing meant a serious criminal background.

“You know nothing about me, so don’t pretend you do.” The liveryman shook his head, for life in that infamous prison upstate was too harsh for anyone who hadn’t served time to grasp. It was pure cruelty to lock men away and give them a view of the Hudson, keeping them always in sight of the beauty of the world while caging them like beasts. Many prisoners had tried to escape; some had drowned in the river, still more had wished they had when they were hauled out like fish and beaten with ropes and chains. “You have no idea what the world is like in that place or what men are willing to do in order to live another day. I’m including myself. I take responsibility for the man I used to be, for I carry him with me. As strong as I am, he’s a heavy burden.”

The liveryman’s story tumbled out. This quiet, stocky fellow had run one of the toughest gangs in the Five Points section of the Lower East Side. His wild boys, the Allen Street Cadets, rode like madmen on their bicycles, perched upon their handlebars so they might attack a victim with a club before leaping down to finish a robbery. He’d risen through the ranks, from a bouncer at the New Irving Hall, a saloon on Broome Street, to a gang boss. The houses of prostitution and opium lairs under his control were overlooked by the officials at Tammany Hall, for those who were meant to govern for the good of the people were happy enough, once paid off, to ignore unlawful acts. In those days, this humble carriage man had often sauntered into the Tenth Precinct, where he let himself into the captain’s office with ease, bringing gifts of whiskey and cigars. He’d considered himself untouchable, and for a while he was, but his long sentence in Sing Sing prison had left him without allies or connections.

When he was released, early, for good behavior, he’d had no choice but to hire himself out for petty crimes, including his work for a professor in Brooklyn. He was now thirty-four, and in the streets where he’d ruled, younger, more brutal men had taken his place. He’d found himself running a livery, mucking out stables, hiring himself out on a daily basis.

“So you lost your power and came to body snatching?”

“I was brought low by a certain passion I have,” the liveryman admitted.

Eddie recalled the times he’d seen this fellow crouched in the alleyway behind the stable, all but hidden in the falling dusk. He’d often had a pipe with him. There had been times when Eddie had observed him fast asleep beside his horses, dead to the world or only half-awake, his eyes hazed over from the effects of smoking poppy. There were opium houses across lower Manhattan, in the cellars of bordellos and taverns. Eddie had been to many such places while working for Hochman. His young age hadn’t mattered to anyone in this world where a man’s craving was paramount. All that was necessary for him to gain admittance was to pay a dime to the sheriff who guarded the door; he was then allowed to search through the warren of cubbyholes. In these dim and filthy cubicles a man could smoke himself into a stupor, most often lying on one hip so he could get to his pipe even as he slipped into a dream. It was a dream from which he’d never have to wake, as long as he had money enough, and wasn’t murdered in his sleep.

“The Professor concocts his own opium in his workshop,” the liveryman informed Eddie. “He takes the raw stuff that looks like amber flakes and mixes it into a paste with those chemicals of his. He’s a wizard, I’ll grant him that. He vowed I’d never go without as long as I keep my mouth shut.”

“But you’re talking now,” Eddie reminded him.

“So I am. I’ve had enough of being lorded over by the likes of some so-called scientist who has me dragging around the dead. I may take his money, but he hasn’t got my loyalty. You keep me out of it, and I’ll talk all right.”

“You’ll do more than that. You’ll take me there.”

Eddie then brought out the dime-store photograph of Hannah. After a single glance, the liveryman looked away, pained. Even a man such as he had a soul, one he worried over more as each year went by.

“That’s her,” he admitted. “God forgive me.”

To Eddie’s great shock, the carriage man then began the initial phrases of the Kaddish, the mourning prayer of the Jews. Yit’gadal v’yit kadash sh’mei raba. May His great Name grow exalted and sanctified. B’al’ma di v’ra khir’utei. In the world that He created as He willed. V’yam’likh mal’khutei b’chayeikhon uv’yomeikhon. May He give reign to His kingship in your lifetimes and in your days. Uv’chayei d’khol beit yis’ra’eil . And in the lifetimes of the entire family of Israel.