Soon they were driving in the darkness between the listing tenements. Hattie told Sarah to turn down into a nearly invisible cobblestone path beneath a shadowy archway, and around various corners past curtained windows and peeling walls until they came to a small cobbled court with a blue scrap of sky at its top, as if they were deep in a well. Barred windows and heavy doors stood on every side, and the air smelled of must. One of the heavy doors creaked open, and a large bearded man with a leather cap and apron peered out at them. He frowned at the car before recognizing Hattie, but immediately agreed to keep watch on the car and look after the dog for half an hour. Hattie introduced him as Percy, and Percy took the willing dog under his arm and led them into the building and up stairs and through vast empty rooms and small rooms crowded with bags and barrels. Bingo stared at everything with intent interest. “Who is Percy?” Tom whispered, and Hattie said, “Bone merchant. Human hair.” The man took them through a dusty parlor and back out into the slanting street. They were across the street from Maxwell’s Heaven.
“Just follow me now, and don’t talk to anyone or stop to stare at anything,” Hattie said.
Tom crossed the narrow street a step behind her. Sarah gripped his arm through the cape. The series of linked tenements built by Maxwell Redwing seemed to grow taller with every step.
“Are you sure you want to come with us?” he whispered.
“Are you kidding?” she whispered back. “I’m not going to let you go in there alone!”
Hattie walked unhesitatingly into an arched passageway and disappeared. Tom and Sarah followed. The light died. Hattie was visible only as a small dark outline before them. The air instantly became colder, and the odors of must and dry rot—along with a thousand others—seeped from the walls. They hurried forward, and seconds later followed Hattie out of the passageway.
“This is the First Court,” Hattie said, looking around them. “There are three, altogether. Nancy’s in the second. I’ve only been as far as her place, and I suppose I’d get lost if I tried to go any farther.”
In the jumble of first impressions, Tom had taken in only that the space around him looked vaguely like a prison, vaguely like a European slum, and more than either of these like an illustration from a sinister comic book— tilting little streets connected by wooden passages like freight cars suspended in the air.
Three or four ragged men had begun shambling toward them from a doorway next to a lighted window across the court. Hattie turned to face them. The men shuffled and whispered to each other. One of them gave Hattie a wave that flapped the entire sleeve of his coat. They shambled back toward their doorway, and sat down, puddled in their coats, before Bobcat’s Place.
“Don’t mind those old boys,” Hattie said. “They know me.… Tom! Read this writing.”
He moved beside her and looked down. At his feet was a square brass plaque on which the raised lettering had been rubbed away to near illegibility, like the letters on an old headstone:
ELYSIAN COURTS
DESIGNED BY THE PHILANTHROPIST MAXWELL REDWING
BUILT BY GLENDENNING UPSHAW
AND MILL WALK CONSTRUCTION CO.
FOR THE GREATER GOOD
OF THE PEOPLE OF THIS ISLAND
1922
“LET EACH MAN HAVE A HOME
TO CALL HIS OWN”
“See that?” Hattie said. “That’s what they said—‘Let each man have a home to call his own.’ Philanthropists, that’s what they called themselves.”
1922: two years before the death of his wife, three years before the murder of Jeanine Thielman and the construction of the hospital in Miami. Elysian Courts had been Mill Walk Construction’s first big project, built with Maxwell Redwing’s money.
Maxwell’s Heaven looked like a small city. Crooked little streets twisted off the court, which was lined with a jumble of bars, liquor stores, and lodging houses, connected overhead by the wooden passages that reminded Tom of freight cars. Through the lanes and mazelike passages, he saw an endlessly proliferating warren of cramped streets, leaning buildings, walls with narrow doors and wooden stiles. Neon signs glowed red and blue, FREDO’S. 2 GIRLS, BOBCAT’S PLACE. Laundry hung on drooping lines strung between windows.
“Look out below!” a woman yelled from above them. She was leaning out of a narrow window in a building across the court. She overturned a black metal bowl, and liquid streamed down, seeming to dissolve into the air before it struck the ground. A barefoot man in torn clothes led an exhausted donkey and a ragged child through one of the passages into the maze.
Hattie took them toward the passage from which the man with the donkey had come. White letters in the brick gave its name as Edgewater Trail. It led beneath one of the suspended wooden freight cars.
Hattie said, “Old Maxwell and your grandfather thought that street names from your part of town would be a good influence on the people in here—over there’s Yorkminster Place, and where we’re going there’s Ely Place and Stonehenge Circle.” Her black eyes flashed at him as she led them into the passage.
“Doesn’t the mail ever get mixed up?” Tom asked.
“There’s no mail here,” Hattie said from in front of him. “No police, either, and no firemen, no doctors, no schools, except for what they teach themselves, no stores but liquor stores, no nothin’ but what you see.”
They had emerged into a wide cobbled lane lined with high blackened wooden walls inset here and there with slanted windows. The same white inset letters, some of which had fallen off or been removed, gave its name as Vic or a Terrace. A crowd of dirty children ran past the front of the lane, splashing in a stream that ran down the middle of the street. Now the odor was almost visible in the air, and Sarah held an edge of the cape over her nose and mouth.
Hattie jumped over the stream and led them up a flight of wooden steps. Another crooked flight, marked Waterloo Lane, led upward toward darkness. Hattie scurried down a murky corridor, and began to move quickly toward the next set of stairs.
“What do they do here?” Tom asked. “How do they live?”
“They sell things to Percy—their own hair, or their own rags. Some get out, like Nancy. These days, most young ones manage to get out, soon as they can. Some of ’em like it here.”
They had come to a wide space where wooden walkways spanned the fronts of the buildings on all sides. Rows of doors stood on the far sides of the walks. A man leaned against the railing of the second walkway, gazing down at them and smoking a pipe.
“You see,” Hattie said, “this here is a world, and we’re in the center of it now. Nobody sees this world, but here it is.” She looked up at the man leaning on the railing. “Is Nancy home, Bill?”
The man pointed with his pipe at a door farther along the walkway.
Hattie led them up the wooden steps to the second walkway. “How is she, Bill?” she asked when they had come near to him.
The man turned his head and looked at each of them from beneath the brim of his soft cap. His face was very dirty, full of hard lines, and in the grey light of the Courts, his cap, face, and pipe all seemed the same muddy color. He took a long time to speak. “Busy.”
“And you, Bill?”
He was staring at Sarah’s hair, and again took a long time to respond. “Good. Helped a man move a piano,
