Gilded Needles (Valancourt 20th Century Classics) Read online

  For the Irish woman wandering the Battery, whose infant had just perished in her arms; for the Italian merchant who had just sold his last morsel of tainted horse meat to the squatters living in shacks on the hilly wasteland above Eightieth Street; and for all those in between: for the poor whose poverty was such that they would soon die of it, for the criminals whose criminality was no final guarantee against the poverty they tried to escape, for the mildly prosperous and moderately respectable, for the moderately prosperous and very respectable, and for the very rich who needn’t trouble themselves with respectability, the year of Our Lord 1882 was begun.

  Part I: The Black Triangle

  Chapter 1

  On a narrow short bed in a narrow short room lay a young woman whose freckled skin was pale and blotched, whose unrefined features were slack and heavy, whose long red hair spread tangled and disordered over the thin coverlet. Two children of eight years, each with a penny taper in a tin holder, approached the bed cautiously. The light flickering across their faces showed identical features and only the barest differentiation of sex.

  The little girl, who was called Ella, poked a sharp finger into the ribs of the red-haired woman to make sure that she was dead. Ella nodded to Rob, her twin brother, and they set their candles, identical as themselves, on a rickety table by the head of the bed.

  While Ella struggled to remove the coarse woolen skirt of the dead woman, Rob fetched a sharp pair of scissors from the dresser that stood near the hearth. He lifted the corpse’s head, twisted the wiry red hair around his fist, and then snipped the tresses free, close to the scalp. Ella, plucking gingerly at the blood-drenched undergarments, breathily chanted: “No ’rings, no watch, no jew-la-ry . . .”

  “No ’rings, no watch, no jew-la-ry,” echoed her brother in an identical accent, and sharply turning aside the heavy head with his elbow, he cut the last thick strand of hair from behind the ear. The woman’s shorn head dropped back onto the pillow, and the filmed eyes flew open as if in outrage at the indignity.

  Rob loosely twisted the hair and carried it to the dresser, well away from the candle flames. Then he assisted Ella in stripping the dead woman naked. Her clothes they folded and placed in a shallow basket, pulled from beneath the bed.

  As her brother stretched and rolled the checkered cotton stockings, Ella went off briefly and came back with two wetted rags with which the children methodically wiped the corpse, paying particular attention to the clotted blood that colored the inside of her thighs. In a wandering melodic counterpoint, Rob and Ella Shanks continued their refrain: “No ’rings, no watch, no jew-la-ry . . .”

  When finished, they undressed themselves, stacking their garments neatly upon the dresser. From a wooden box in the corner of the room, they took filthy, vermin-infested tatters of cloth and hung them upon their bodies in some mockery of attire. Then at the grate, where a small fire of coals burned smokily, Ella scraped the walls of the hearth with a poker to dislodge soot. After the children had smeared their faces and hands with the ashes, they appeared indistinguishable from any two street Arabs perishing of cold that night on the streets of New York.

  Taking one another’s hands, they pulled aside a corner of the curtain over the room’s single window and peered out into the night but could see nothing more than the cold bright stars, the flat angular expanses of smoke-darkened brick, and the rotting fences that enclosed the blasted yard behind the house.

  As they turned around again, a tall angular woman with harsh set features slipped noiselessly into the room. She had dark skin, black eyes set wide apart in a flat face, and a low beetling brow with greasy black hair crimped severely down over it. Louisa Shanks’s dress was of heavily starched yellow bombazine and shone metallically in the scant firelight.

  She approached the bed, bent forward from the waist, and passed one of the children’s candles slowly up the length of the corpse. She eyed the dead woman with more of a critical than a moral or religious interest. She righted herself, turned to the children, and nodded her approval.

  At this signal from their aunt, Ella unlatched the door that opened into the tiny yard in the back of the house. A blast of frigid air blew out the candles. The little girl ran out into the yard and pulled a low two-wheeled cart up to the door. A ribbon of bells running from one post to another across the back jingled merrily. Ella strapped herself into the harness of the small vehicle and stood patiently in the cold.

  Inside, Louisa Shanks and her nephew Rob pulled a burlap bag over the corpse of the young woman on the bed, tied the top loosely, and then carried the body to the cart just outside. They concealed the burlap bag beneath a pile of rags.

  Rob then ran to the end of the yard, quietly pulled open a wide picket gate, and scampered along a foul narrow passage to King Street. In a moment, Ella and Louisa heard his low-pitched whistle. Ella pulled the cart forward into the alleyway, which was only inches wider than the cart itself; she trembled with the cold. Louisa closed the gate behind her niece, and retreated into the house with the ribbon of bells she had removed from the cart so that the children’s progress would be silent.

  Crouching at the end of the alleyway, Rob waved his sister cautiously on and Ella pulled the cart out into the narrow street, dark but for the pallid yellow light that spilled from ground- and second-floor windows. All along the street men and women reeled in drunken boisterousness from one low hall to the next; muffled music grew suddenly louder whenever a street door was flung open. However, no one took any notice of the ragpickers who shambled up the middle of the street, silent and weary and slow, dark spots of cold misery in the midst of the New Year’s revelry.

  On busy, well-lighted MacDougal Street, they narrowly dodged two carriages whose drunken drivers were racing one another to City Hall Park on a bet, and went northward until they reached Bleecker Street—that strange compromised avenue where impoverished gentility shared lodgings with wealthy criminals in hiding, where married women met gentlemen who were not their husbands, and where well-bred octoroons entertained philanthropists and politicians. Rob dashed ahead of his trudging sister, an unconcerned beggar swinging around lampposts and staring doltishly in lighted shop windows.

  But at a certain number, while his sister trailed wearily behind, harnessed to the cart, Rob leapt up the steps and through the unsecured entrance of a small brick house. He dashed down a greasy unlighted hallway and knocked at a door behind which was the loud uncontrolled laughter of several men and the stench of cheap tobacco.

  A young man wearing ill-fitting trousers and a striped shirt opened the door and stared down at Rob. His laughter, evidently occasioned by some joke told by one of the several men who lounged about in the smoke-filled room behind him, died away, but a sharp sarcastic smile took its place. “Yes?” he said mockingly to Rob, “and to whom do I owe the honor of this first visit of the New Year? Sir? Have you a card to present?”

  The four other young men in the room, laughing anew, pressed forward to examine the urchin in the doorway.

  “Please, mister,” whispered Rob, “I have something for you in my cart outside.”

  “Lettuce!” cried the young man, “you have brought me lettuce! As a New Year’s gift!”

  Rob shook his head bewildered.

  “Or my sister,” the young man cried. “You have brought my sister on a visit! John, come here, you have always said you wished to meet my sister. Well this young man, evidently an agent of the Pennsylvania Railway, has brought her to us on his cart. Sir,” he said to Rob severely, “why have you left my sister in the cold? Bring her in! Bring her in!”

  “Please, mister,” said Rob, “maybe it is your sister on my cart. But if it is, then I’m sorry to tell you she’s dead.”

  The man who had answered the door then waved his cigar in Rob’s face as if it had been a candle by which he might observe the boy’s features. “I’ve seen you befor
e, haven’t I?” he said soberly.

  “Twice, sir.”

  “A young girl?”

  Rob nodded.

  “How did she die?” The four men behind the questioner listened intently to the exchange.

  “Don’t know, but she’s dead.”

  “How much do you want?”

  “Seven dollars.”

  The medical student nodded. “She’s on your cart?”

  “Yes, sir. Just outside. My sister’s there. She’s wrapped in burlap.”

  The medical student turned to his friends and called for a collection. The seven dollars was quickly made up in change and gold. While counting it over, he said, “John, you and Dick, go out there and bring it in. And for God’s sake, don’t let yourselves be seen!” Two of the men slipped into the passageway, and hastened toward the street door.

  The medical student poured the money from one hand into the other while he waited for his friends to return. Rob stood patiently by.

  In another moment the two friends appeared again in the doorway, furtively supporting the burlap bag between them. Once inside they hurried down the hallway and into the medical student’s chamber. One of them loosened the string at the top of the bag and the shorn head of the dead girl flopped out onto the threadbare carpet.

  The coins dropped into Rob’s outstretched hands and in another second, he was gone. The door of the medical student’s room closed softly, and the key was turned in the lock.

  Chapter 2

  In the first hour of the new year, Lena Shanks sat alone in the parlor of the house on West Houston Street. Occasionally someone passing along the brick walk outside rapped an insolent greeting on the glass of the barred windows, but the thick layers of drapery were always closed to prevent the curious from peering in. The parlor was sumptuously but curiously decorated. All the fine furniture, all the upholstery, all the papering and paint and decoration were but a single color: gold.

  The walls were covered in flocked gold paper, and the moldings and the plasterwork in the ceiling had been painted in gold leaf. The draperies and hangings, the lambrequins and the pillows, the hearth and the hardware were all the same color. The carpet on the floor was a dull gold wool squared with thin black lines, with funereal rosettes of black flowers in each gold square. The furniture had been painted gold and covered in gold-and-white striped damask. The ornaments on the mantel were of gold, and the paintings that hung upon the walls were encased in ornate gold frames. One of a pair of gold-painted curio cabinets contained books with gold-tooled leather bindings and the other displayed a motley collection of gold plate, jewelry, and gimcracks. The mirror above the mantel and the pier glass between the two windows had been sprayed with a fine layer of gold, so that the little in the room that was not gold was reflected in the one pervasive color. The furnishing of the oppressive chamber had not only an identity of hue, but of origin as well—everything had been stolen.

  Lena Shanks sat bolt upright on a small gold chair drawn up before the gold-tiled hearth, with a basket of fine linens in her lap. By the light of the fire she worked with a pair of delicate scissors, pricking out the monogram that had been stitched into the corner of each piece.

  Lena Shanks was five feet three inches tall and weighed about two hundred pounds. She possessed a face that was wide, common, and obviously Germanic. Her large nose was flat, her dull eyes were heavy-lidded, her wide lips were dull brown, cracked and generally parted—for the drawing of breath in so large a woman was ever a difficulty. Her fine brown hair was always pulled tight into a dense bun at the nape of her neck. This was to conceal the fact that she was missing her left ear, which had been bitten off in 1869 during a fight with Gallus Meg of the Hole-in-the-Wall; that ear was still to be seen, preserved with several others, in a jar of alcohol behind the bar of that low-down but flourishing establishment.

  Lena wore dark voluminous skirts, white blouses, and tight black jackets with black lace edging. She was slow-moving, deliberate, and always walked with the help of a cane, which on occasion doubled as a weapon. The neighborhood knew her as “Black Lena,” because of her jackets, but sometimes—more poetically—she was called “My Female Uncle,” for “uncle” denoted a pawnbroker, and “pawnbroker” was a transparent euphemism for a receiver of stolen property, her primary occupation.

  When the gold clock upon the golden lambrequin that covered the painted mantel chimed one o’clock, her daughter Daisy appeared in the doorway of the room.

  “Girl and boy ought to be back,” said Lena. Her German-accented voice was slow and thick and she did not look up from her work.

  “Well, I hope they ain’t been stopped!” cried their mother from the doorway. “How do you think Ella would explain the girl in her cart?” she laughed.

  The girl whose corpse was tumbled in the corner of the medical student’s single room, awaiting a sober dissection by the five friends, was one of Daisy Shanks’s rare failures. For Daisy, a careful abortionist, there was rarely the necessity to dispose of a corpse, whether by depositing it on Bleecker Street, in the rooms of a succession of medical students, or in the cold lap of the North River. The unfortunate young woman had been a waiter-girl at a saloon on Bayard Street; she had died in the fourth-story chamber where the actress now slept fitfully.

  It was Lena Shanks who had established the abortion trade on West Houston Street in 1874, when her younger daughter was fourteen. Daisy had quickly found out everything there was to know of the methods of arresting a pregnancy, and her manner with the understandably nervous clients was so fetching and reassuring that in five years Lena entrusted the entire practice to her daughter and gratefully retired to the more congenial occupation of fencing stolen merchandise.

  Daisy Shanks was twenty-two years old, a pretty young woman with a full figure that was always heavily trussed. She had flaxen hair, flaxen brows, but shamelessly dark eyes. Her lips were thin and colorless and needed paint to be seen at all. Daisy was bustling and energetic and wore a perpetual smile. Nothing cast her down, nothing could rouse her anger beyond a brief breathy petulance, and nothing could mitigate the love she bore her stern mother and her mute sister Louisa. She tended to dress in clothes that were certainly too tight and not very short of gaudy. But since she had expressed no interest in any man since the policeman—dead in an anarchist bombing—who had fathered Rob and Ella, her finery was evidently assumed only to please herself. Daisy was affectionately fond of her twins, but had never interfered with the strict upbringing and careful education of the pair by their aunt and their grandmother.

  Daisy was adept in her illegal craft. She was always successful in aborting the unborn child, the mother rarely died, and her fees were not exorbitant. Depending upon her whim—or the needs of the household—she charged between fifteen and thirty-five dollars. Occasionally, in an attempt to attract a better class of client than the prostitutes and petty thieves who were her mainstay, Daisy advertised her service in the daily papers:

  MADAME SHANKS, Professor of Midwifery, over 10 years successful practice in this city, promises and guarantees certain relief to ladies, with or without medicine, at one interview. The unfortunate are encouraged to apply for sure relief. Please write Box 445.

  Her results, for the most part, were procured by the use of powerful purgative drugs, which was certainly safer than the more prevalent expedient of sharp instruments. Though these drugs sometimes resulted in the dilapidation of the pregnant woman’s nervous system, the collapse would not occur for several days, long after the client had safely returned home. The drugs produced fewer corpses than the forceps, and for that reason Daisy preferred them.

  At one time, Daisy had sold these purgative drugs through an advertisement also. It read:

  Madame Shanks’ female antidote. The only reliable medicine that can be procured; certain to have desired effects within 24 hours, without inst
ruments or injurious results.

  Since the medicine sold for $7.50 a bottle, and the ingredients cost only thirty cents, Daisy could realize a fine profit. But when her mother pointed out that some women who purchased the medicine might otherwise have come to her for a much more lucrative abortion, Daisy left off distribution of the home remedy.

  The nature of Daisy’s service was of course known to the police, whose headquarters was but a few streets distant, but officers happily took bribes. Lena Shanks was also a steadfast contributor to the coffers of the Democratic Party. The politicians did not consider it inconsistent to beg financial support of a household that had no voting members, and Lena had never drawn attention to this inequity. The contributions to Tammany Hall, and the double eagles that were dropped into the cops’ pockets, she considered simply to be in lieu of municipal licensing. Abortion was adjudged by the state of New York to be manslaughter in the first degree, punishable by an imprisonment of between four and seven years but Daisy had never associated the appearance of a policeman with the possibility of arrest. There was carefully no mention made of the West Houston Street address in the advertisements that were published in the Herald, and Daisy and her mother considered this circumspection enough.

  Daisy picked a piece of work from her mother’s basket, and sat in a chair on the other side of the hearth.

  “Where’s Louisa?” demanded Lena.

  “Gone to see ’Lotta.”

  Lena jerked her head upward. “What about that one? She dead too? Don’t want to send boy and girl out again tonight.”

  Daisy giggled. “Course not, Ma! Quiet now. Gave her laudanum with the medicine.”

  “Shouldn’t mix,” said her mother harshly, and tossed a handful of threads into the fire.