The Six Messiahs

chapter 7

The hunt for the murdering Chinaman started poorly and went downhill fast. Troops mustered from the Territorial Prison at Yuma told anyone willing to listen that they were a lot handier dealing with criminals who were already behind bars, with their dependable tendency to stay put. What this mob knew about chasing fugitives you could print on the back of a postage stamp. Nor were they exactly at their spit-and-polish best when the call came in to rush down to the rail yard at five in the morning since most of them had been out drinking themselves comatose until two.

The railroad bulls and Pinkerton men who had lived through the Yuma Yards Massacre—as it inevitably came to be known, frontier journalism being what it was—were so consumed with shock, grief, or blinding rage that pulling them into a cohesive militia unit would have been beyond any officer less commanding than Robert E. Lee. That was certainly no description anyone had ever tried to hang on Sheriff Tommy Butterfield.

Sheriff Tommy was the most senior local lawman at the scene that morning. He spent the first ten minutes after he saw the carnage throwing up and the next fifteen wandering around in a daze. Wasn't as if Tommy added to the confusion rampaging through the camp; it's just that at a moment when these men needed a leader to pull them together, Tommy's passivity allowed the vigilante impulse to spin out of control and fracture into a dozen squabbling splinter groups, each with their own ideas about how to find this killer. Tommy had been elected sheriff on a peace platform—the territory was looking toward statehood, working to clean up its image in order to attract some serious money—and this soft-bellied, fat-headed political hack who'd never shot a man, even in anger, was a lot more adept at getting people to like him than he was at telling them what to do.

It didn't help that no two surviving witnesses could agree on a single characteristic of the man responsible, aside from the fact that he carried a sword, and that was hard to swallow even with one leg and two severed heads on the ground. Why would anybody in this day and age carry a sword when with the helpful hand of modern technology you could ventilate a man's lungs from a quarter mile away?

Neither could anyone confirm in which direction the maniac had made his escape, which left them with eight compass points to argue about. The bums could have filled in some blanks for them, particularly Denver Bob Hobbes, but figuring wisely that when the powers that be got around to handing out the blame for this they'd be on top of the list, the hobos were busy making tracks in those same eight directions.

But somebody somewhere heard somebody else say that the killer was a Chinaman, and when that idea raced through camp, it stuck hard and fast: Who else but an unhinged rice monkey would chop suey a bunch of white men with a sword? An Apache, for one, somebody said, and that set off a debate on the relative barbarism of the red and yellow man.

Sheriff Tommy Butterfield couldn't recall later if he was the first person to mention calling in Buckskin Prank—he wasn't—but being the consummate politico, Tommy was more than willing to take credit for the idea: If using Frank worked out, he could plug it right in as the keystone of his next campaign. Tommy knew there'd be a barrel full of details to sort out before they could spring him, but there was one thing the mob in camp could agree on that morning: If any man in the Arizona Territory could track down this homicidal heathen, it was Buckskin Frank McQuethy.

Unlike Sheriff Tommy, Buckskin Frank had shot, stabbed, and strangled a number of individuals on both sides of the law. Frank began his illustrious career as a deputy under Arizona's genius of publicity, Wyatt Earp, during Tombstone's heyday in the early '80s. Long before Wyatt reinvented himself as an ail-American folk hero, Frank had worked with the Earps as bouncer and bartender at the Oriental Saloon, one of the grandest whorehouses in the West. Wyatt was a charismatic son of a bitch—Frank couldn't help but admire his verve and relentless ambition—and when the Earps seized economic control of Tombstone, Frank rode their coattails to prosperity and minor celebrity.

But for a man who made his living with a gun, when it came to outright murder Frank had an inconvenient sense of right and wrong, and it led to a falling-out with the Earps when he refused to help slaughter the Clanton clan, a rotten bunch of horse-thieving half-wits who made the fatal mistake of horning in on their operations. With Wyatt busy transforming that nasty, one-sided ambush into the triumph of the O.K. Corral, Frank wandered north and solidified his hard-nosed reputation with a stint as an Army scout in the Geronimo Campaigns. His nickname came from the yellow buckskin jacket he took to wearing; the minute he put it on, the papers started writing that Buckskin Frank could track a man across a hundred miles of hardscrabble and shoot the eyes off a rattlesnake, but then he had learned the art of self-mythologizing from a master.

Except when he was drinking, Frank McQuethy was never anything less than a gentleman. Unfortunately, he had been drinking that night in '89 when he pushed Molly Fanshaw, his favorite girl, off the balcony of Whitely's Emporium in downtown Tombstone. Frank had been so pickled he couldn't even remember what they were fighting about—Molly was a mean drunk and had no doubt provoked him beyond human endurance—but he'd killed the only woman he'd ever loved in front of a crowd, plain and simple, so he pleaded guilty, took his life sentence like a man, and for the last five years had been a model prisoner at the Territorial Prison. And Frank hadn't touched a drop of liquor since Molly went over the rail.

Fellow inmates, the warden, even the guards, were all crazy about Frank; his courtesy, the not too obvious effects of his education, the way he held his head high in spite of his hard time, most of which he spent in the infirmary as chief assistant to the resident sawbones. During the cholera epidemic of '92, at considerable risk of contagion, Frank deprived himself of sleep for weeks to stand by their beds and ease the suffering of die afflicted. Frank's buckskin jacket hanging in a glass case remained the hands-down highlight of the twenty-five-cent tour the prison offered the paying public. Nearly every day, guards at the gate had to turn away some impressionable young dove who'd come to catch a glimpse of Frank exercising in the yard, brokenhearted that law would not allow her to speak with him face-to-face.

But Frank never failed to answer their letters, delicately suggesting that yes, it was likely they were destined never to meet, but perhaps a letter to the governor attesting to his character from such an upstanding woman—or anyone else of weight she might know in the community—could persuade him to reconsider his life sentence and make their meeting a reality. The governor even now had before him a petition to pardon Buckskin. Frank had sown the seeds of his freedom with the diligence of Luther Burbank, but it took the blood of a massacre to fertilize the field.

Sheriff Tommy called in every favor owed him. Warden Gates wired the governor and by breakfast they'd hammered out the deal: On a conditional furlough, he was still to be considered a prisoner and never left alone. But it was quietly agreed that if Frank could capture the man responsible for the Yuma Yards murders, clemency would be right around the corner.

At eight that morning, the guards unlocked Frank's cell; one carried his buckskin jacket like a piece of the true cross. By nine, Frank arrived at the shanty camp ready to play the savior and was met by the sorriest excuse for a posse working the sloppiest crime scene he'd ever come across.

Bodies, limbs, and heads of the victims had been jumbled like jigsaw pieces; every key witness was lost, exhausted, or hysterical; the muddy ground had been slogged into a quagmire. Frank's spirits, which had flown high as the warden explained their arrangement, settled around sea level. Five years in prison and he suddenly felt his age: Forty was old out here, and a new breed was taking over the West, stiffs like these, businessmen, desk jockeys. One of the last bona fide shooters, John Wesley Hardin, had been gunned down in El Paso in August, plugged in the back. Buckskin felt a real loss when he heard that news: For all their petty thievery and bullshit, the Earps, John Wesley, and Frank had been birds of a feather. One good look at this bunch and he knew those days were gone for good.

Frank walked the perimeter, followed by this pack of sap-heads; he found one faint set of tracks, a man moving at a dead run toward the swing bridge heading east over the Colorado. While the posse waited breathlessly behind him, he rolled a smoke, stood on the bridge, and asked himself: Where would he go if he'd done a crime like this?

Mexico, less than five miles downriver from where he was standing.

Then he had to ask himself a harder one: If one man armed only with a sword could slice his way. through a whole gang of seasoned railroad bulls like a stand of green saplings, how could he and this roundup of candy-ass amateurs ever "bring him to ground?

Two pleasant thoughts occurred to Frank at once: These knuckle draggers had no idea what their killer looked like except he was a Chinaman, and no white man he'd ever met could tell one of them from the other. Which meant as soon as he had a reasonable suspect in sight, he could drop the son of a bitch with a buffalo gun from a hundred yards and no one would be the wiser. Fuck this sword stuff.

He lit his cigarette.

The other thing was, if it all turned to shit, before this bunch ever caught up with him he could probably make it to Mexico himself.

PHOENIX, ARIZONA

As Frank stood smoking on the bridge, Kanazuchi slipped out of a boxcar in the morning freight arriving at the Phoenix yards. He made his way cautiously along the tracks between trains, alert to dangers resulting from his escape. The fight was regrettable but capture was not acceptable. Reviewing his behavior in light of the circumstances, no other action had been practical. He willed the matter out of his mind; further examination would cause unnecessary distraction. His brothers had chosen him for this mission because of his fierce dedication to mastery of budo.

Sensei's voice came to him: Do not think about winning, losing, taking advantage, impressing, or disregarding your opponent. That is not the Way.

Tired, half-starved, and thousands of miles from home, he reminded himself those perceptions were illusions resulting from an over identification with the concerns of the small self. That was not the Way, either. The future depended on him; if the missing Book was not returned, their monastery would weaken and die like a tree cut from its roots. The Way would fail. Thoughts of failure would only lead to failure.

In the absence of food or water, let that thought sustain me.

The early morning air carried the promise of heat; the ground flat and dusty, alien to him. As Kanazuchi drew within a hundred paces of the terminal, he heard voices approaching; he rolled beneath a car and hung from its undercarriage, tucking himself out of sight like a spider. Footsteps of a dozen men passed within ten feet of his hiding place; loud and purposeful, slamming open doors, examining the cars of the freight he had traveled on. He sent himself into their minds, felt tension and fear turned around into assertive, self-protective violence.

Identify with all things and all people; kill the small self inside and everything in creation can be known.

Word had been sent ahead along the singing wires and they are looking for me, he realized: One of the men had said the word "Chinaman."

After they passed, Kanazuchi lowered himself to the ground, pulled out his knife, and with one stroke sliced off his queue. He buried the hair under a rail tie: time for the "Chinaman" to vanish.

Crawling out, he continued toward the station, inching his way behind a long stack of cotton bales. Kanazuchi observed the bustling terminal; looking past the crowd of passengers, he could see the offices of the Santa Fe, Prescott and Phoenix Railroad, his original objective. But his plan would have to be delayed indefinitely until this pursuit quieted and he could assemble a new identity.

Fifty paces to his right, workers were unloading large canvas-draped cargo from a boxcar onto rolling sleds, which they hauled to a smaller train on a nearby track. A tall, fat man in a feathered hat strutted around, puffed up and busy as a rooster, pointing this way and that, squawking in a loud, empty voice, but the workers weren't even listening to him.

A steamer trunk tumbled off one of the sleds and opened on impact, spilling out its contents: packed layers of men's and women's clothes, heavy brocaded cloaks, clusters of shoes. The man in the feathered hat stood up on his toes and hectored the worker unmercifully; the worker ignored him and casually heaped the garments back into the trunk. The man in the hat pulled them back out and threw them on the ground again, demanding the worker fold the clothes properly before repacking them.

"Hey."

Kanazuchi wheeled to his left; a man had walked in behind him, standing six feet away. He wore a blue uniform and hat and a badge on the breast of his tunic. They stared at one another for a long moment—then Kanazuchi saw a look of fear cross the man's coarse features; before he could react, the man raised a whistle to his lips and blew one shrill, piercing note. He was reaching with his other hand for a gun holstered at his waist when Kanazuchi broke his neck and dragged the body down behind the bales.

Maybe no one has seen this, he thought.

No: Two men wearing the same blue uniform had heard the whistle and were moving out of the station; passengers on the platform pointing in the direction of the bales. Both men blew their own whistles, pulled their guns, and ran toward where Kanazuchi crouched over the dead guard.

A bullet smacked the cotton near his head with a dry splat; to the left Kanazuchi saw a third guard, pistol in hand, sprinting toward him down the tracks.

Throughout the night, between her own bouts of fitful dreaming, Eileen laid her head back and studied Jacob Stern while he slept, his eyes moving rapidly back and forth behind their papery lids, forehead furrowed, lips twitching, small sounds of distress occasionally accompanying his shallow exhales. She didn't wake him, but the incongruity of the sight disturbed her; he seemed much more troubled asleep than awake.

A slant of morning sun touched her face, and coming out of a dream, she realized the rocking of the car had ceased. She opened her eyes and was welcomed by Jacob's warm smile and twinkling eyes watching her benignly.

"Are we here?" she asked.

"Wherever we are, we seem to have arrived," he said.

"Rise and shine! Rise and shine, friends!" Bendigo Rymer strode down the car, rousing the weary Players to groaning protest. "Like the mystical phoenix, whose name graces this fair city, we must arise from the ashes of our deathlike slumber and re-create ourselves in the image of a new day!"

"Piss off," somebody muttered.

Bendigo pretended not to hear their insults but dropped the poetic approach in favor of a more direct line of reasoning. "We've another train to catch, lady and gents, and if you expect to collect your wages this morning, you will remove your rear ends from these seats in short order and carry them along with your luggage to the station!"

Perpetually vulnerable to economic arguments, the Players began to grumble and stir. Peering up from her position on the seat, Eileen saw two enormous pheasant feathers bouncing up and down the aisle: He's wearing that ridiculous Tyrolean cap again, she realized, the one that makes him look like Robin Hood gone to seed. God, what an annoying man!

"Will you be staying in Phoenix long, Jacob?" asked Eileen, as she stumbled out of the car, shielding her eyes against the bright desert sunrise. Her legs felt rusted from sleeping in her seat, and one glance in a hand mirror proved traumatizing; hair tangled as a bramble bush, makeup ruined; mornings were frightful enough ordeals for a woman to begin with and far worse while on the road. Why did he have to see her like this?

"To be perfectly honest, my dear, I haven't the slightest idea," said Jacob good-naturedly, breathing deeply. "This air is marvelous, isn't it? Dry but with a refreshing warmth to it and heavily scented with flowers."

"It's a little early for me, Jacob," she said, thinking he could make a trip to the dentist sound like a country picnic.

"But can't you smell it? It's almost sweet to the taste."

"Life on the road, love; for we jaded sophisticates, one stop is pretty much the same as another."

"What a pity; think how much you must miss."

"This from a man who hasn't left his library in fifteen years."

"And realizing the error of his ways, I assure you. But how fantastic to travel so much; you must have seen the entire country by now. Where are you off to next?"

"Our head thespian has booked us a week in some godforsaken whistlestop somewhere out west of here____"

"Where is that?"

"Don't know; some sort of religious settlement—what's it called again, Bendigo?" she asked Rymer as he hurled by them. "This oasis you're taking us to."

"The New City; capital T on the 'The,' " said Rymer, racing to oversee the transfer of sets and costumes to their connecting train. "A joy to meet you, Rabbi. May God always shield you from the storm."

"And you, sir."

"Lord, he makes my teeth hurt sometimes," said Eileen.

When they reached the planked platform of the terminal, Eileen set down her makeup case, looked at Jacob frankly, and smiled, a winsome blend of affection and regret. "I'm sorry to say we're moving on within the hour actually."

Jacob swallowed hard and looked down at his feet, shuffling them on the knotted wood. What's the matter with you, Jacob? She's a beautiful woman less than half your age that you've known for twelve hours whom you're never going to see again and you're behaving like a heartsick schoolboy. He groped through his thoughts, desperate for a conversation starter.

"What sort of religious settlement is this place you're going?"

"Like the Mormons, I guess. Bendigo's been as evasive as usual," she said, hearing the man's raised voice and turning to see him in the distance screaming bloody murder at some poor railroad hand transferring their sets between trains: Rymer had a gift for terrorizing menials.

"Like the Mormons in what way?"

"He didn't say. They probably all keep twenty-five wives apiece; a regular Sodom."

Jacob blushed and Eileen instantly regretted her off-color tone, unused to censoring herself and feeling unladylike, realizing how long it had been since she'd kept company with a man who made her feel any other way.

"Actually all he's told us is it's in the middle of the desert and they've built themselves an opera house and they're very keen to have some first-rate entertainment come through. So why they hired us is anyone's guess."

"I hope this place is not too dangerous."

"Compared to some of the dumps we've been, how bad could it be? Looking forward to it, actually; he said they're building a great big black castle out there that's really something to see."

Ice water would not have been more effective: Jacob snapped instantly to his senses. "What sort of castle?"

Before she could answer, a sharp whistle cut through the clatter of the station; her eye was drawn toward Rymer and the trains: fifty yards off, halfway between them, some kind of commotion behind a stack of cotton bales. She could see people moving toward the disturbance: a struggle?

Two guards rushed out of the station behind them; Eileen and some other passengers on the platform pointed them toward the cotton bales. The guards blew their own whistles and pulled their pistols as they ran.

Somewhere a shot was fired.

"What's going on?" she asked.

"I don't know," said Jacob.

"Which way to the roof?" asked Jack.

"I'll show you," said Stern. "What about the books?"

"Bring them both," said Doyle.

"I thought we wanted them to take the copy," said Stern.

"We do but we don't want it to seem too easy," said Jack.

"We don't even know if these are the same men," said Doyle.

Footsteps crashing up the stairs. Stern slipped the original Zohar into a well-worn leather pouch while Jack picked up the copy.

"And we don't care to wait and find out. Which way?" asked Jack.

"Follow me," said Stern. He stuffed the Gerona Zohar under his arm like a football and led them out the nearest door, through a warren of cramped rooms connected by tiny L-shaped corridors, and up a seldom-used set of back stairs.

"They" were the Houston Dusters, a street gang with a talent for prolific, unparalleled violence. The Dusters had ruled the Lower East Side from Houston Street to East Broadway for a generation, but new gangs were always stepping up to challenge their borders, in addition to their traditional antagonisms with more established outfits like the Gophers, the Five Pointers, the Fashion Plates, and the rising tongs of Chinatown.

Economic hardship, collapse of the immigrant family structure—nearly all the Dusters were first- or second-generation Irish—and society's failure to provide a legitimate toehold for its disadvantaged undoubtedly contributed to the flourishing of gang culture, but when you came right down to the heart of the matter, the matter, the Dusters were a bunch of wrong guys, a character flaw that had never proved a detriment to getting ahead in New York. These ruffians absorbed the lesson early in life that a career in crime might be a disreputable path to prosperity and the American dream, but it was a crowded shortcut.

Unmistakable, intimidating figures in their neighborhood, well over two hundred in number, the Dusters communicated with a vocabulary of savage war whoops inspired by the Indians their leader once saw in Buffalo Bill Cody's Wild West Extravaganza at Madison Square Garden. The nattiest of East Side gangs, they sported round, heavily padded leather caps that pulled down over the ears and doubled as protective helmets, steel-toed hobnail boots—the better to stomp you with— and pants with a loud red stripe running down the leg, symbolizing their fleetness of foot. Blades, concrete-filled lead pipes, and home-crafted blackjacks were their weapons of choice. The gang's code of honor considered shooting your enemy at a distance a coward's way to settle disputes. Blood on your hands, that was the Duster motto.

For the last nine years, the Dusters had been commanded by a ruthless evil-eyed weasel named Ding-Dong Dunham, an unusually robust term of office in the gang racket. Ding-Dong had clawed his way up through the ranks, equipped with the sociopath's advantage of caring not a penny for the value of human life: His nickname derived from the greeting Dunham used to gleefully scream in the ears of robbery victims after his spiked cudgel connected with their hats. He also had a penchant for writing epic poems about the more fanciful acts of mayhem he and his cohorts committed; Ding-Dong regularly forced the Dusters to endure recitals of his work, an act of debatably greater cruelty than the crimes he was immortalizing.

Earlier that day, Ding-Dong had accepted a commission from a goodlooking German man—-Dunham ascertaining that by the man's Teutonic accent, clever lad that he was—who said he was fresh off the boat, had no associates he could rely on in New York, and needed someone to keep an eye peeled on a particular fourth-floor office in a building on St. Mark's Place, just north of the heart of Duster territory. If anyone showed up in that office, Ding-Dong's boys were to take them into custody and escort them to headquarters so this kraut could question them personally.

No mention had been made by this tall, blond fellow to Dunham about an old holy book or whose offices they were watching, but the man paid half his generous fee for the work up front in solid gold ingots, which went a long way toward discouraging Ding-Dong's idle curiosity about what this pretzel twister was up to.

But the subtlety of detaining somebody and hauling them back for questioning was wasted on the thirty Dusters rushing up the front stairs of the tenement, most of them flying on cocaine—or "dust"—and cheap dago red. With their clubs and knives and saps at the ready, these psychotic brutes had no intention of deviating from their standard operating procedure: Beat the holy hell out of whoever got in the way and if they lived through it, drag the pieces back to Ding-Dong for him to sort out.

As Stern led the others onto the roof above the sixth floor, the men could hear Dusters breaking into the offices below, sacking the place, smashing windows, destroying everything in their path like berserk Visigoths. Stern locked the door behind them, an act that might buy them two seconds of time, and directed them across the rooftop to the north.

Jack handed the fake Zohar off to Doyle, waved them on ahead, and hung back, pulling something from a nest of pockets inside his coat as he knelt beside the locked door. He caught up with them as they climbed down a short ladder to the next roof, just as the first Dusters busted through the door behind them.

The report from the explosion they triggered wasn't booming, it generated more of a loud theatrical hiss, but the flames were white-hot and the smoke laced with pepper and saltpeter. The first two Dusters went down, scorched and dazed by the detonation; a third, engulfed in fire, and "dusted" beyond the reach of rational thought, jumped off the roof. The second threesome through caught the full effect of the gas and fell to their knees, gagging, blinded, screaming bloody murder. The next ten Dusters that followed got wise, pulled their kerchiefs up over their faces, held their breath, and sprinted to the far side of the smoke, barking orders back down the stairs: Send the rest of the boys to the street; they're taking the roof!

Jack jumped from the ladder and joined the Doyles as Stern took off ahead of them, picking his way through a tangle of clotheslines, box gardens, pigeon coops, and exhaust pipes on the tar paper roof; about thirty seconds behind them, ten Dusters reached the ladder and leaped down after them. The roof of the next tenement required a climb up twelve rungs; Jack brought up the rear and stopped at the apex, sacrificing half of their lead to pack something from a vial in tight against the bricks. By the time he planted a short fuse in the claylike substance and lit a match, the Dusters had reached the bottom rungs. Jack dodged a thrown knife, as Doyle and Innes drove the hoodlums momentarily back to the cover of a chimney with a barrage of bricks ripped from a retaining wall. Jack lit the fuse and they ran on again; the Dusters were halfway up the ladder when Jack's charge went off, ripping the bolts from the wall and sending the ladder and two lead Dusters crashing backward to the roof.

Doyle diverted his path to the street side edge of the rooftop and glanced uneasily down through the soupy night air; the main pack of Dusters was keeping pace with them below, others sprinting ahead trying to anticipate where they could enter a building, climb up, and cut off their line of retreat. Doyle thought the Dusters, shouting taunts and whooping battle cries up at their quarry on the roof, looked and sounded like Stone Age savages on a hunt, which in many ways was exactly what they were.

"Handy fellow to have along, your Jack," said Innes, joining him at the edge.

"Quite," said Doyle.

"Wish I had my Enfield," said Innes, squeezing off an imaginary shot at the Dusters in the street: anger in his eyes. In his element, Doyle noted with pride.

"This way," said Stern.

The roof of the next tenement turned out to be the last on the block; the top of the building on the street running to their left stood across a ten-foot gap with a drop of fifty disappearing below into darkness. They stopped and looked two roofs back where the pursuing Dusters, with their profound native ingenuity, had formed a human pyramid; half their platoon, already elevated up the ladderless wall, were pulling the others up behind them.

"We'll have to jump," said Jack.

"Is that really necessary?" said Doyle.

"Unless you have any other suggestions," said Jack, laying a loose board on the bricks edging the roof, creating a small ramp.

"What about the books?" asked Stern, who had done nothing to tarnish the sturdy impression of his mettle Doyle had formed on the Elbe.

"I'll manage it," said Jack.

Jack took both books from the men, stepped back, made a measured run up the ramp, and spanned the gap easily, landing nimbly on his feet.

"You go next," said Doyle.

"Don't fancy heights much, do you, Arthur?" said Innes, making his run. "You'll be fine."

Stern followed: Jack and Innes caught him as he fell slightly short and hauled him over the lip.

Doyle stepped back as far as he could for his try at the jump, steeled himself, wished he wasn't wearing his smooth-soled brogans, took a dead run, and closed his eyes as he went airborne. His crash landing put a dent in the roof and knocked out his wind.

"All right then, Arthur?" asked Innes, as they lifted him to his feet.

Doyle nodded, gasping for air.

They caught up to Stern, standing at the edge of the next roof, staring apprehensively at the building a few steps below them.

"What's wrong?" asked Innes.

"The Gates of Hell," said Stern.

"Here? In New York?" said Innes. "I thought they were in Wapping."

"What do you mean?" asked Jack.

"That's what this building is called. It's the most notorious slum in the city; over a thousand people live in there."

Even viewed from above, amid the squalor of its neighbor tenements, this one stood out Tents and shabby huts congested the rooftop, and a solid column of stench that was nearly unendurable rose from the borders of the place; filth, ordure, disease, decaying meat.

Whooping cries from the gap behind them, answered from the ground below, heralded the imminent arrival of the Dusters; there was nowhere to go but forward.

As they ran across the roof, faces peered out at them from the huts; bone-white, starving, dispossessed. Inside the flimsy structures, they saw shadowy figures huddled around small ash can fires, waiting passively for more misfortune. As they neared the far side of the roof, the cries of the trailing Dusters were echoed by identical voices directly ahead; the vanguard of the pack on the street had outflanked them and climbed to the next roof, pinching them in. Following Stern's lead, the men doubled back and found a door leading down into the Gates of Hell.

As dreadful as the smell had been on the roof, what they encountered inside was disabling: an abattoir, a battlefield left to rot in the sun. Each man was forced to cover his mouth and nose and fight a constant struggle to keep his gorge from rising. Stern moaned involuntarily. Jack distributed small capsules of ammonia, which they snapped into their handkerchiefs, burning their eyes but partially neutralizing the stink. Now it was a question of finding their way out through the nightmarish tomb; light from the noxious open gas jets was scarce, almost apologetic in the close halls choked with fumes from lamps and kerosene stoves.

They could find no coherence to the nesting of the tenement's corridors and stairways, each floor a jumble of demolition and shoddy reconstruction; as they stumbled from room to room, none of its denizens offered any protest at their presence: Accustomed to invasion, they owned no sense of borders worth defending. No furniture aside from huge rough beds where multiple sets of dull eyes stared at them fearfully out of the darkness. Bodies slunk away from them like swollen insects. Aggressive rats the size of terriers stopped to regard them with less alarm than the humans. Opening one door that threw baleful light into a murky room, they were shocked by the sight of the far wall melting away, until they realized what they saw moving was a solid blanket of cockroaches.

In one cavernous space, Doyle lost count after estimating at least sixty people lived there, most seeking solace in a sleep indistinguishable from death. The smells thickened the farther they descended, and everywhere they ventured lay a dread and dreary silence. They found a family of six huddled around a candle in the crawl space under a flight of stairs, all stamped with the same hollow-eyed expression, their poor possessions scattered around them. Doyle had read Dickens's devastating accounts of poverty in midcentury London, but nothing he'd ever witnessed could match this intolerable misery. The violence of this cold hell was first and foremost spiritual. With what high hopes had these damned souls journeyed to the New World? wondered Doyle, his feelings a hot whirl of pity, sympathy, and horror.

They picked their way down three floors before realizing they had heard no sounds of the gang following behind them: There were apparently some places even the Houston Dusters wouldn't go. Easy enough to stake out the rooftop while the rest of their war party waited on the street below, and, yes, when the four men looked out a filthy staircase landing window, there they stood, fifteen strong, outside the front doors.

"What do we do?" asked Stern.

Jack did not answer, took a reading on their location to set his internal compass, then led them to the western extreme of the tenement, into a room lined with six dark masses huddled on wooden pallets; entire families, they discovered, staring at them like wounded herd animals waiting for predators to finish the job. Doyle noticed one group sheltering the frail shrouded body of a dead child. Jack threw open the room's single window and measured the distance to the next building; eight feet away across an open air shaft. As the cowed inhabitants scurried away, Jack pulled a short iron bar from his jacket and pried loose a sturdy length of planking from the floor. He worked tenaciously, his expression never changing, the only one of them outwardly unaffected by their journey down through the tenement; his actions under fire, which had once seemed to Doyle the model of dash and heroic vigor, were now ruled by a brutal efficiency.

They laid the plank from one ledge to another across the air shaft and Jack went across first, testing his weight; the plank bowed slightly as he reached the middle but held firm. He smashed the window of the far tenement and hissed ferociously at the darkness inside, discouraging its residents, if there were any, from defending their territory. Stem followed, clutching the Zohar to his chest, then Innes, in three vaulting steps, and finally Doyle, whose bulk strained the plank to its limit. He could not sensibly close his eyes, but neither could he bear to look down; when the plank cracked, he was exactly halfway across and his response was to shout once in alarm, stand perfectly still until the board stopped bouncing, and then to stand still some more.

In spite of the others' frantic prompting, Doyle seemed completely unable to manufacture another step forward; a massive short circuit between his brain and feet. When the cries and war whoops from the ground below indicated that his shout had drawn the Dusters around the side of the building to them, he was still unable to move. Even when rocks and debris began flying around him, he could not convince his legs that one more step on this plank wouldn't splinter it and send him crashing to his doom, but as he waited the rift in the wood spread through it like a spider web.

"Come on, Arthur..."

"Two steps, old man."

The plank seemed to shrink down to the width of a toothpick; a single move in any direction will spell your end, Doyle's brain screamed at him. The three men in the window flapped their lips and waved their arms at him but he seemed to neither hear nor recognize them, resigned to spend the rest of eternity locked in this moment. A rock thumped into his shoulder, setting him swaying; the stinging bite of the blow had the salutary effect of unscrambling his mind and returning to him control of his limbs.

"Good Christ!" he shouted, realizing his predicament.

He took one long stride forward on the board and it caved in toward the middle, forming a momentary V before collapsing altogether; his hands desperately groped forward and found something to grab as the plank fell away beneath him. He looked up into Jack's face, framed in the window, felt something cold in his hands, and realized he held the hooked end of the crowbar that Jack was grasping. Jack and Innes pulled him up through the window and over the sill like an exhausted trout.

"I'd forgotten about your fondness for heights," said Jack.

"Like riding a bicycle," said Doyle. "You never forget it."

Bricks and bottles smashed against the walls, spraying shards of glass around them, and a second barrage angled down through the window from above; the Dusters on the roof of the Gates of Hell had discovered their position as well.

"We're not out of it yet," said Jack.

Doyle nodded gamely and climbed to his feet, the knees of his worsted trousers shredded, the toes of his shoes scrubbed raw. They moved into the hallway of the new building, ran down the first flight of stairs they came to, and immediately heard the Dusters breaking through the doors two floors below. Thumps and war cries from above told them that the rooftop contingent had bridged the gap as well: both feet in the jaws of a trap with nowhere to run.

Another sound took over: a low rumbling that increased with shocking suddenness, bearing down on them from every direction at once. The walls shook, plaster clogged the air, banisters and light fixtures rattled, and the intensity of the turbulence grew to a deafening roar. Jack threw a shoulder to the door directly before them; they rushed through an unoccupied apartment and were astonished to see the lurching, illuminated interiors of a train whipping by a few feet outside the window.

"The elevated train," said Stern. "Thank God; that's Second Avenue, I'd nearly forgotten where we were."

After the train passed, they leaped from the window to the train platform, resting a floor above the empty shop-lined street, running north and south as far as the eye could see. No sight or sound of the Dusters.

"Two questions," said Jack, staring down the narrow tracks. "Where's the next station and when's the next train?"

"The next station is north, Fourteenth Street, that way about nine blocks," said Stern, pointing ahead. "The trains run every few minutes."

Jack took off running to the north, stepping nimbly between the rails and ties, and the others tried to match his pace. Doyle could not accommodate his longer stride to the awkward width of the gaps, misstepped frequently, and was soon lagging behind, so he was the first to hear the yelps of the Dusters as they discovered the path they'd taken to the platform. Glancing over his shoulder, Doyle saw hoodlums pouring out of the window onto the elevated tracks two blocks behind; they ran after him right along the top of rails, their unnerving whoops and hollers echoing through the artificial canyon of the street.

"Come on, Arthur; don't look back," said Innes, slowing to run alongside him.

Doyle nodded. Lungs on fire, speech beyond their capacity now, the brothers devoted every last effort to following Jack's lead, but the relentless hunters held the edge of local knowledge: As they moved north, the gap slowly and steadily closed. Runners following on the street below actually began to pull ahead. On the parallel south-running tracks across the street, a train lumbered by, momentarily obliterating the scuffling of their footsteps in the cinder bed, the rasp of their breathing. Rocks and bottles began to crash around them as the Dusters pulled within range. Doyle caught a glimpse of a gingerbread Swiss chalet built onto the margins of the platform and wondered if he was hallucinating. A street sign popped into his field of vision: still three blocks to go.

Jack stopped abruptly ahead of them and tossed back a cannister into the narrowing span between the Doyles and the Dusters: White pepper smoke billowed, but the Dusters had learned from their earlier engagement and either sprinted quickly through or waited for the cloud to dissipate: a net gain of only seconds.

Now the station came into sight ahead, but the gap between groups was less than fifty yards and closing fast—on the verge of collapse, Doyle's muscles seizing up, Jack apparently out of tricks—when the platform began to rumble and hum. A hot white beam of light sharply outlined the churning Houston Dusters as the train bore quickly down on them. A hundred yards to the platform: Innes grabbed Doyle's arm and urged him to the finish like an Irish jockey.

The booming sonic horn of the speeding engine blasted the Dusters off either side of the elevation, some dropped to the street, others clung to the outside shell of the scaffolding as the train thundered by. Doyle tripped and fell hard, cinders embedding his palms as he skidded on the railbed. Drawing on some untapped superhuman reserve, Jack appeared beside them and, with Innes's help, lifted and threw Doyle up onto the platform just as the braking train glided by them into the station.

The doors opened. Stern carried the Zohar; Innes dragged Doyle into the last empty car, and they collapsed in the final row of seats. As the train pulled away, Jack dropped the false copy of the Zohar on the tracks and they watched the reassembled Dusters' final rush toward the back of the car fall short by inches.