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
'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
