36

36

C EDRIC D EDDINGTON- B UTE, F IFTH B ARON Jayeaux, lay sprawled across the stylized reproduction of an Egyptian sarcophagus, circa 800 BC, carved out of lignum vitae. From the eiderdown bolsters cushioning his limbs, he gazed with satisfaction around his salon.

The real Cedric Deddington-Bute, newly arrived from Southampton, was now decomposing peacefully in the muck of the East River, and Diogenes had smoothly appropriated the man's identity and worldly goods. To honor his memory, Diogenes had created this opulent nest with an extravagance that would have been impossible in the twenty-first century. The salon itself was decorated in the Etruscan style; the bath, Egyptian; the dining room, Roman Empire; and the bedroom, a mélange from the fevered minds of Huysmans and Baudelaire. Years ago, Diogenes had learned that money—when spent extravagantly—could spin straw into gold. At present, he had an enormous amount of money: with his knowledge of future market movements, he'd acquired an immense fortune on the New York Stock Exchange with astonishing speed and was now deploying it to his own gratification. It had been easy to do in this Gilded Age, when labor laws, OSHA, building codes, UNESCO conventions, and the Lacey Act remained far in the future.

The Etruscans had been famous for their skilled goldsmiths, who could coax gold to granulation and work it into intricate filigree. Nearly every inch of Diogenes's salon—from the caryatids sculpted to look like living pillars, to the very jointure of the furniture—was covered in such Etruscan gilt. The drapes of the third-floor room were thrown wide, and the winter light that flooded in gave the natural sheen of every surface a brilliance. Thirty-Fourth Street lay outside the five-story town house he'd purchased, and he'd paid a great sum to have it immediately secured with iron bars, special locks, and soundproofing. There were other retrofittings he planned to make himself… when time permitted.

With a sigh of leisurely enjoyment, he looked over at the dish set beside his couch and the various fruits that lay upon it, glistening with tiny droplets of water. He quoted dreamily to no one in particular:

The silent man in mocha brown

Sprawls at the window-sill and gapes;

The waiter brings in oranges

Bananas figs and hothouse grapes

"Livia," he said in a somewhat louder voice, "would you be an angel and peel me a grape?"

For a moment, all was still. Then one of the caryatids lowered her hands from their mock position in support of the ceiling, stepped down off her plinth, and walked toward him. Unlike the room's other ornaments, she was flesh and blood; dressed from the waist down in billowy white silk, but also covered from face to navel to toes in fine baker's sugar, of a golden color.

"Of course, my lord," she said, approaching him with a sly smile.

She took a seat on the couch beside him, lifted a paring knife from the plate, and began expertly preparing a grape. Diogenes watched, appreciating her artless poise, the lissome manner in which she moved. It was a gift that only nature could confer: dancers might practice for decades and never achieve it.

Diogenes liked Livia very much indeed. She reminded him of another woman with a similar name he had been very close to: Flavia. The women were also similar in their self-assurance, their lusts, and their willingness to experiment. But while Flavia had been obsessed by the art of causing pain, Livia—who had been born into a family of destitute academics—was much more interested in things intellectual. As such, she and Diogenes were twin adventurers in the realms of the mind and senses. Flavia, alas, had died a few years back in the Florida Keys, assisted into the next world by Constance Greene, among others. So many of those in his brother Aloysius's orbit seemed to suffer a premature demise.

Livia delicately placed first one grape on his tongue, then another. And then—eager to draw off the sugar from her limbs by slow strokes of his tongue—he smiled and beckoned her to lie beside him.

Soon, the sweet taste was flooding his senses even as his mind continued to roam. He reminded himself: Flavia was not dead; she hadn't yet been born. Neither had he, for that matter. How strange it was, this parallel universe. Diogenes, agent and abettor of chaos, found himself fascinated by it. With his entropic turn of mind, he couldn't accept that such a precise duplicate of his world should exist. As he'd moved through this mirrored New York of the nineteenth century, he'd been alert for discrepancies. What if Thomas Edison championed AC current, rather than DC? Or John Keats had avoided tuberculosis and gone on to write another dozen famous odes? Yet wherever he looked, he'd detected no departure from history, however minute—aside from the changes he and his compatriots from the twenty-first century had wrought in their arrival.

And that bloody tower. There was no such tower in his New York, and he had never heard of such a one previously existing. This lone discrepancy from his own timeline vexed him.

Meanwhile, the tip of his tongue had traced a line up Livia's left arm and was now moving in semicircles toward her breast, taking away arcs of golden sugar with each stroke. But as the Egyptian Revival clock struck the hour, he realized he had dallied too long—the workhouse required his presence.

"Livia, my pulchritudinous poppet," he said, lifting a fingertip to trace one of her eyebrows, then drifting it along the center part of her brunette hair, "would you mind terribly if we pause for just a while?"

"Of course not," she said. "As long as you promise to finish."

"I swear to make it a climactic event of the first order."

"Should I regild—?" She paused, looking down at the streaks on her smooth flesh where the gold was now gone.

"Oh, please don't bother. I have some additional adornments in mind for tonight."

"How delicious!" Livia knew better than to spoil things by asking what these might be. "I'll order up some caviar and read Justine while I wait."

Of course she meant the novel by the Marquis de Sade, rather than the other, yet unwritten, one by Lawrence Durrell. He kissed her, whispered something in her ear that made her gasp, then rose and left the salon.

In his private dressing chamber, which nobody—including Livia and his manservant—ever entered, he changed clothes and washed, transforming himself into the Right Reverend Considine, the stiff-necked, narrow-minded bane of Leng's existence. He left the dressing chamber through a hidden panel and passed down a narrow, blind staircase that ended at a door beneath the level of the street.

Beyond was a narrow, low-ceilinged passageway that had once been intended as a crypt for a church, demolished fifty years before. A new, larger church had been built in its place, and its entrance—at the end of this passageway—was as carefully hidden as the one within his own town house. He had no idea which prior owner built the secret staircase to his dressing room, or why; he only knew it had sat unused and forgotten for half a century.

Reaching the far end, he slipped into an unused basement room of the rebuilt church, closed a hidden door behind him, then threaded a circuitous path up into the active area of the building. Although he saw nobody, he had already devised a backstory for his clerical presence in the church at any time of the day or night.

Diogenes went out the front door of the church onto Thirtieth Street and walked in the direction of Broadway, where he planned to hail a cab to the Five Points. According to Royds, Leng was still attempting to gain access to the Mission and the House of Industry. Diogenes was determined to deal definitively with Leng—the only man capable of seriously threatening his own existence in this strange old snow globe of New York.

He soon became aware he'd been observed leaving the church and was now being tailed. It was one of Leng's Milk Drinker gang, of course. No avoiding that: he realized he cut a conspicuous figure in the getup of Considine.

Diogenes caught a glimpse of the tail as he passed a mirror in a barbershop window. A gangly, unkempt fellow—he felt offended the man hadn't done him the courtesy of a decent disguise, remaining clad in the unofficial Milk Drinkers uniform. Diogenes slowed a little, smiling as he saw the thug quicken his own walk. Now it became clear: the man wasn't just following him, but planned to kill him.

How delicious.

Bringing himself into acute awareness of everything going on around him—on the street, the sidewalk, the buildings above—Diogenes waited for the right opportunity. Two coaches were clip-clopping down the cobbled street, and here, in midblock, the pedestrians had thinned out.

He dipped three fingers into the hem of his cassock, withdrew them, and then suddenly turned to face the man, a beatific smile on his face, hands cupped together before him as if preparing to administer the Eucharist.

"Would you care to confess your sins, my son?" he asked.

The man's grimy face screwed up in confusion—just long enough for Diogenes to sink the short-handled icepick he'd palmed into the man's solar plexus, the movement hidden by his billowing cassock. As the would-be assailant wheezed in surprise and pain, Diogenes leaned in familiarly, patting the man's shoulder with one hand while the other—as with Miss Crean—probed the point for the sweet spot.

The man's eyes widened as Diogenes found the artery and pierced it, neatly stepped back, and then with a sharp nudge tripped the man up, over, and into the street—even as he feigned a gesture to arrest his fall—directly in front of the wheels of the closest cab. The horse neighed; the driver pulled on the reins with a curse; but nevertheless a satisfying thump- thump informed Diogenes it hadn't stopped in time.

But he was already looking toward the second coach. As the driver slowed instinctively, Diogenes grabbed the door and hoisted himself up and in.

"What in thunder?" the cabbie cried, looking back into the compartment and spying the white dog collar around his customer's neck. "Begging Your Grace's pardon, I mean."

"I believe he was drunk, poor soul. I tried to arrest his fall, but failed—alas. We can only hope the next life is easier for him than this one was, my friend."

"Aye, true enough."

Diogenes, glancing out the window, saw the first cabbie was now down on the street and kneeling by the thug lying motionless between the wheels. The icepick guaranteed there would be little external blood. And there was not even the remotest chance Leng, thorough and clever as he was, would note the similarity in wounds between this fellow and the former director of the workhouse—for the simple reason that Ms. Crean's corpse no longer existed, save at the atomic or subatomic level.

"Well, my man, time waits for no one," he said gravely. "Canal Street, please."

With a whistle of the whip cracking the air, they lurched immediately into a trot.