Gun Machine

Soon, of course, the inevitable happened. The Dutch flooded this tiny primitive market with fake wampum. They massively overproduced it, at great speed, and the villages of Mannahatta couldn’t absorb more than a fraction of it. Wall Street caused and presided over America’s first financial collapse. But the furs and the food and the other goods obtained from the Lenape with fake currency allowed the wall of Wall Street to grow until it enclosed and swallowed villages like Werpoes. It’s still there now, buried under downtown, a hidden place of power. I don’t think of it as subsumed into the new power of Wall Street.

I think of it as lying in wait, glowing with the half-life of its lessons learned and its vengeance pending.

I’m not supposed to go near Werpoes. If you can see this friends-locked entry, then you know there are issues in my life that I can discuss only in the most allusive of ways. But I invent new reasons, weekly, to get a little closer. Purchasing cut flowers from a certain store. Getting food from a certain café. I edge nearer, incrementally, despite the risks, because my first interest was in power. And Werpoes was the first community I know of that was crushed by the sort of financial wrongdoing that I did for a living. The living that, in fact, gave me, completely, the life I have now.

I’ve had to learn a lot about Native American culture since those days. I’m drawn to it, fascinated by it, and hope that what I’ve learned will protect me in the years to come. But I’m drawn to power, too, and there is power there.

Don’t go to Werpoes. It’s not safe.

Nineteen

TALLOW WOKE up about six a.m., feeling like boulders had been rolled over him in the night.

The shower didn’t help. He endured a short but explosive session on the toilet, and when he turned to flush there was blood in the bowl. He got dressed, stuffed some things back in the laptop bag, and left.

At seven a.m., he was outside a large florist’s store that he knew, on Maiden Lane. They were just opening, bringing in leafy goods from trucks temporarily double-parked on the tree-lined street. Tallow slid in the front door, past two unpleasantly healthy men in wife-beaters and jogging pants carrying pallets of heavy pots like they were cafeteria trays. A slender woman spotted him in the gap between two large and odious monoliths of vegetation that might have been triffids and said, “I’m sorry, we’re not really open yet.”

With a smear of regret, Tallow badged her. “I know. I just have a quick question about something.”

The woman walked around to him, wiping her palms on a pair of jeans that hadn’t been blue in five years. She was white like lilies, and willowy, her hair the pale glow of blondes who have worked in the sun for a long time. “What did you need, Detective? Is this quick question for a wife, a girlfriend, or your mother?”

“I didn’t badge you to get special treatment, I promise. I need to see a tobacco plant, if you have one.”

Her eyes said she was in her forties, but only two lines were drawn on her forehead as she made a small pensive frown. “Hm. You know, I think I do. Come with me.”

She led him past four or five stages of plant life, along an aisle, and into a small jungle of shrubs. Tallow watched her eyes tick down and across three levels of shelving. She settled on a small pot containing a sickly-looking collection of sticks topped with wispy white heads. “Woman’s tobacco,” she told him. “The Native Americans used the leaves to alleviate heavy periods, postnatal sickness, and stomach problems.”

There were so few leaves on the object that Tallow didn’t want to touch them for fear of killing the thing.

“Or there’s this,” she said, lifting a heavier pot filled with a vivid, vigorous green foliage that sprayed white trumpets of flowers whose mouths were a warm pink. “Your basic Nicotiana tabacum, cultivated tobacco, a distant relative to the tobacco seeds the Taino Amerindians gave to Christopher Columbus, which became the plants that Jean Nicot gave to the French court, where people were so goddamn delighted by the effect the ground-up leaves had on their heads that they named the plant after him.”

Tallow rubbed one of the leaves between thumb and forefinger. He got a, yes, a distant relative of that slightly sharp scent, just barely suggestive of cigarette tobacco, that he’d detected in apartment 3A.

“That’s it,” he said. “I think. Maybe if I crushed it up and burned it.”

“You crush and burn it, you buy it,” the florist said with a smile.

“Sorry,” Tallow said. “It’s for something I’m working on, believe it or not. You seem to know about this stuff.”

She rolled her eyes around the room. “I kind of should, don’t you think?”

“Sorry. Sorry. I’m not really awake yet. Would you know if this is the sort of tobacco plant that would have grown naturally around here, way back when?”