Quincy shrugged. “God knows. Life is strange. The years of loneliness, the sudden hope, and now this. I don’t know. I guess I never thought about it…beyond getting here, I mean.”
Coldmoon nodded. “My people have a saying: ‘The journey is the destination.’”
“Liar. Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote that.”
A brief pause. “Damn,” Coldmoon muttered.
“Nice try, though.”
Coldmoon glanced at his watch. “Look, I’ve got some time, the evening’s free. Let’s get you a hotel room for the night. And then maybe we can grab a beer.”
“Let’s grab that beer now. It’s a goddamned swamp outside.”
Coldmoon smiled again—faint but genuine. “I knew beneath that crusty exterior there was something about you I liked.” And, rising, he drained his coffee, dropped a twenty on the table, then followed the old man as he made his way, slowly and painfully, toward the exit.
80
THE MORNING SUN, FILTERED through a heavy veil of dust and coal smoke, fell feebly across the wide avenue in the west-central section of Manhattan. But it was a different sun, and a different city.
The broad thoroughfare where Broadway crossed Seventh Avenue was made of dirt, its potholed surface packed so hard from an infinitude of horse hooves, wagons, and trolleys that it seemed almost as impermeable as cement, except along the muddy areas surrounding the grooves of the cable car tracks and the hitching posts sunk deep in manure.
The intersection was called Longacre, and would not be known as Times Square for another twenty-five years. It was the center of the “carriage trade,” an outlying district of the rapidly growing city where horses were stabled and buggy makers toiled.
On this particular chilly morning, this broad intersection of avenues and streets was quiet save for the occasional pedestrian or horse cart passing by, and nobody paid much attention to the young woman with short dark hair—dressed in a purple gown of an unusual cut and fabric—who stepped out from an alleyway and looked around, squinting and wrinkling her nose.
Constance Greene paused, letting the initial flood of sensations sink in, careful not to betray any sign of the upswell of emotions that threatened to overwhelm her. The sights, noises, and odors unexpectedly brought back a thousand memories of her childhood, memories so distant that she scarcely knew she still retained them. The smell of the city hit her first and most viscerally: a complex mixture of earth, sweat, horse dung, coal smoke, urine, leather, fried meat, and the ammoniac tang of lye. Next were things she’d once taken for granted but that now looked strange—the telegraph poles, invariably listing; the gaslights on various corners; the numerous carriages, parked on or next to sidewalks; the ubiquitous shabbiness. Everything told of a city growing so fast that it could scarcely keep up with itself. One only had to gaze around at the hurried signage, the brick and brownstone buildings that looked slapped together, the accumulated filth that nobody seemed to notice, to realize this was true. Most strangely, the white-noise susurrus of modern Manhattan was missing: the growl of car traffic; the honking of taxis; the hum of compressors, turbines, HVAC systems; the underground rumble of subway trains. In its place was a relative quiet: hoofbeats of horses, shouts, calls, and laughter; the occasional crack of a whip; and, from a nearby saloon, the tinny, off-key strains of an upright piano. She had grown so used to seeing the boulevards of Manhattan as vertical steel canyons that it was hard to process this scene, where the tallest buildings, as far as the eye could see, were sun-soaked, no more than three or four stories.
After a few minutes, Constance took a deep breath. She knew where she was. Now she had to figure out when she was.
She looked north up the avenue, noting the ground that had just been broken for what she knew would become the American Horse Exchange. Then she turned south. Her gaze took in the nearest shopfronts: the New Washington Market; a dealer in imported marble; Klein’s Fat Men’s Shop; a purveyor of Gambetta snuff. She walked in their direction, careful to keep her pace unhurried and casual. The gown she had taken from her closet, while the most old-fashioned she owned, was far outside the mode of the time and might attract unwanted attention. And it was cold: she couldn’t help shivering. But there was nothing she could do about that—for now. At least it looked costly.
She walked past an execrable restaurant, its entrance shabby and dusty, offering a choice of oxtail goulash, potted veal chop, or pigs’ feet with kraut for five cents. Outside stood a busy newsboy with an armful of papers, his clear piping voice announcing the headline of the day. She passed slowly, staring, as he held one out hopefully.