The horse was sweating when they crossed back over the bridge, racing to get out of Coney Island. They stopped beyond the marsh, to make certain the coffin was in place and the contents would arrive safely. It was broiling hot by then, and both men stood there hatless, sleeves rolled up, sweating through their clothes.
“Let me do it,” Eastman said when it came to removing the cover and peering inside. “I’ve seen terrible things. One more won’t do me any harm.”
Eddie was grateful for the offer, but he said it was his duty. In the end, they lifted the cover together to survey Hannah’s form. It was a shock to see the girl’s pale, lifeless body. They said the mourning prayers together as well, as if they were indeed brothers, and then they set to leaving Brooklyn. Most men, Eddie had learned, were too complicated to judge. He would leave such things to heaven. He knew only that, if he were in battle, he would want the liveryman beside him. Moses Levy had told him that all men saw what they wished to see, and that was the purpose of a photograph, to show the irrefutable truth of the world as well as its beauty.
He leapt down from the seat when they reached the funeral home on Essex Street, and while the coffin was carried inside by the undertaker’s sons, Eddie and the liveryman shook hands. The liveryman had sold his other horses that morning to another stable. He’d opened all the windows and watched his birds take flight. He had nothing left but the clothes he wore, his carriage, and this one horse, Jackson, an ancient bay no other stableman would want.
“It’s not Eastman. The family name is Osterman,” the carriage man said before he turned his old horse to trot along Essex to Grand Street, taking him as far as he could get from the life he’d led so far. “First name Edward. There’s another thing we share.”
“Between the two of us, the name is yours alone,” Eddie admitted. “As for me, I was born Ezekiel Cohen.”
THE TREES were in full leaf and the lilacs bloomed in great purple masses on the morning when those who had loved Hannah Weiss gathered at Mt. Zion Cemetery in Maspeth, Queens. Two black carriages had been hired, one to carry the coffin, the other to transport Mr. Weiss and his daughter, Ella. It was a lovely, bright day, but perhaps it would have been more fitting had the weather been gloomy. If that were so and sheets of rain had fallen, Mr. Weiss’s wailing might not have sounded so loudly, bringing the other mourners to tears as he fell to his knees. There were nearly fifty people in attendance, many of them girls who had worked alongside Hannah and Ella, as well as several officers of the Hebrew Free Burial Association, the organization paying for the funeral, including the carriages and the horses draped with purple ribbons and black netting. A representative from the Workmen’s Circle had been sent to deliver their membership’s deepest sympathies and an envelope of cash that would help the family. From where Eddie stood, at the rear of the crowd, his battered hat in hand, he recognized the representative as Isaac Rosenfeld. He made certain to steer clear, but when Rosenfeld caught sight of him, the other man wound his way around the gathering so he might come to stand beside Eddie. As the rabbi offered up the mourning prayers, both men stared straight ahead.
“I heard you found her,” Rosenfeld remarked.
Eddie shrugged, embarrassed. “A little late.”
“Late or not, the Weisses needed to set her to rest.”
Eddie wished he could erase the moment when he’d stood on the threshold of the Weisses’ flat to hand the old man the gold locket. “I wish you’d never hired me,” he’d confessed.
“It was the right thing.” Weiss had turned the locket over in his palm. “You did what you were supposed to do. Now you’ll find who did this to her.”
“That’s not what I do. I’m not a detective.”
There was no point in going to the police, certainly not in Brooklyn. Eddie most likely would end up in jail if he offered the slightest complaint against Coralie’s father. Even if he did, the worst the Professor might be accused of was possession of a body; a fine would be levied, little more. As for the men of the Tenth Precinct in Chelsea, they were not inclined to help those such as Hannah who might be associated with union activity. People disappeared and that was that. Once a corpse was discovered, there was no further inquiry. The matter was settled. But it wasn’t, and Eddie knew it. He thought of the message of the blue thread, Beck in his mud-splattered long underwear, the flattened ferns around the hermit’s body.
“You’re better than a detective,” Weiss insisted when Eddie had tried to beg off. “Your father said you would find out what happened to Hannah, and I won’t rest in peace until you do.” He gave Eddie a fierce look, eye to eye, man to man. “And you know as well as I, neither will you.”
Eddie, always prone to insomnia, hadn’t slept since they’d carried Hannah from that wretched workroom. He feared his dreams, filled with violent imaginings of what he might do should he ever come upon the cold-blooded killer who’d dared to take up a needle and thread to quiet the dead. He’d tried to pull himself together before attending the funeral, but his clothes were untidy and he hadn’t shaved. His good hand seemed to have a tremor.
“You’re in poor condition.” Rosenfeld took note of his old companion’s disheveled appearance, surprising Eddie with his concern. “Broke your hand?”
“It was broken for me.”
Rosenfeld handed over a card that carried the address of the Workmen’s Circle. “If you find out anything, contact me. Or if you need anything.”
“You’ve got the wrong person. I’m the fellow you despise.”
“Don’t forget how long I’ve known you.” Eddie had taken out his watch, which had continued to tell perfect time despite the broken face. Rosenfeld nodded, a smile at his lips. “Still have that, I see.”
A flush of embarrassment crossed Eddie’s face, for here was the one person who was well aware of how he’d come to possess the watch. The funeral was ending, and before Rosenfeld went to pay his respects to the family, he clapped his old companion on the back. “I’ve got the right person, brother.”
Eddie watched as the mourners departed. A few people lingered: some of the girls who had worked in the Asch Building, along with a young man wearing a frayed jacket with a black mourning band wound around his arm. Eddie took the opportunity to follow a path leading to Moses Levy’s grave, a site he hadn’t visited since his mentor’s death. Stalks of milkweed grew wild in the area, and Eddie pulled the weeds clustered around Levy’s headstone. It was the least he could do for a man who had given him so much. He thought with gratitude about the night when he’d first encountered Levy, for he didn’t like to imagine whom he might have become otherwise.
He left Mt. Zion and began the walk back toward the Second Avenue El, which would take him across the Queensboro Bridge, which had opened two years earlier to span the East River and cross into Manhattan. In the past, Eddie had journeyed to Queens County so that he might try his hand fishing in Jamaica Bay, but the varieties of fish once so common there, enormous schools of sheepshead and black drum, had all but disappeared. As he walked along now, he did his best to let the act of walking clear his mind. Yet he had a strange, spooked feeling. Perhaps he had been unnerved by visiting Moses’s grave, for an odd brand of loneliness had settled upon him as he was leaving the cemetery.
He turned onto a nearly deserted road, the sun beating down on his black hat and coat. As he continued, he paid attention to his surroundings, as Hochman had taught him to do. Listen, and you’ll hear a story being told, one you may need to know. Upon hearing a rustle behind him, Eddie stopped, as if to adjust the wrappings on his hand, taking the opportunity to peer behind him. He spied the young man who had lingered at the funeral, who now ducked behind a stable. He wondered if this was the man Beck had noticed in the muck near the river, and if he had found himself a murderer. Instead of continuing on, Eddie walked back toward the stable, going around the far side. He picked up a branch from a chestnut tree and approached his stalker, surprising him from behind, pushing him up against the shingled wall, the branch across his throat.
“Get off !” the younger man cried, choking out the words. He was only twenty-one or twenty-two, clearly unused to a fight. Eddie had no trouble keeping him in check, the branch pressed harder against his neck. “I’ve done nothing to you!” the young man managed to croak.
This man was a stranger to Eddie. “Why are you following me?”
“For Hannah. I think I know what happened to her.”
Eddie dropped the branch away. The young man bent over, coughing, his hand clutching his neck.
“How would you know anything?” Eddie asked when the other man had begun to recover.
“We were in love. We planned to marry. She wasn’t ready to tell her father, so we kept it to ourselves.”
This was the fellow R had mentioned when Eddie interviewed her, the man Hannah had loved. His name was Aaron Samuels, and he’d been a tailor, but no more.
“I can’t go back to my life. Not with what I know and what I let her do. We thought we could do what the unions couldn’t. She was meeting with someone that morning, a representative for the owners. She had proof they were locking workers into the sewing rooms. I’d helped her, God forgive me. I removed one of the locked doorknobs from the tenth floor—it was on the door that led to the fire escape—and she had it with her. If they refused to change the conditions, she would do her best to go to the city representative for the Lower East Side, Alfred E. Smith, and beg for his help.” Samuels broke down. He chided himself for his own idiocy and neglect. “I should have gone, but she thought she’d have a better chance of getting the boss’s people to show up. They’d consider her less of a threat. Because she was young and pretty and a girl, I believed they’d think she was harmless.”
“You know nothing about the person responsible?”
Samuels became agitated, and his dark eyes flashed. “If I did, don’t you think I would have found him?”
They began to walk together toward the El train, both deep in thought. There were factories along the route, and some vacant areas in which crickets had begun to call.
“Her sister said she ran off to get something to eat before work,” Eddie recalled.
“She was meeting him then. Before work. She didn’t want Ella to know.”
“So it was somewhere close by.”
“The alley behind Greene Street.”
Eddie’s brow furrowed. “Why didn’t you say so before?”
“I didn’t think it mattered,” Aaron Samuels said. “It was only an alley.”
“Anything more?”
“She told me not to worry. She always carried a spool of blue thread with her for luck.”