The Angel of Darkness

  Once we were all back at Seventeenth Street, Lucius discovered that the Doctor had a nursing bottle in his consulting room (he used it, what you might call ironically enough, to lecture women who were having trouble weaning their kids) and began to mix a concoction in it what he thought might help Ana Linares get over the touch of colic what was continuing, every few minutes, to take away her usual happy smile and playful laughter. Milk, honey, and the little paregoric what was left over from my attempts to dose Kat all went into the brew, and as the detective sergeant fed it to the baby she did seem to regain her full color and spriteliness of spirit. It was a breath of fresh air, to have a contented, even happy, symbol of new life among a group of people who’d experienced nothing but violence and killing for days and nights on end. In fact, so potent was the effect of Ana’s presence that we all took turns holding and feeding her, letting the little girl’s unspoiled joy at being alive and our knowledge that we’d rescued her from a close brush with death perform the kind of healing magic what only children can bring.

  Along toward one A.M. Mr. Roosevelt and Lieutenant Kimball took their leave and headed back for Washington, to resume the business of planning the war with Spain what they believed and hoped was on its way. I don’t know to this day if anyone ever told the former police commissioner just how much our business that night might’ve been connected, if things had broken only a hair differently, to the outbreak of that war; something tells me that he and the Doctor must have had words about it before Mr. Roosevelt’s death earlier this year. But the most important fact, then as now, was that Mr. Roosevelt had come to our aid without knowing anything more than that his friends and an innocent child were in trouble. It only made me like and respect the man all the more; and as I think of him now, pulling away from the house in his landau on his way to Grand Central, flashing us that wonderful grin what would one day keep political cartoonists in such clover, I wondered why it was that so few men had his kind of strength: that particular ability to be gentle and loving with a baby on the one hand, and to crack the heads of mugs like the Hudson Dusters on the other. It’s a question what still dogs me.

  At about one-thirty the detective sergeants returned from the First Precinct house down on New Street, where the body of Libby Hatch’d been taken after its arrival at the police pier. From the First the corpse would be shipped on up to the morgue, a fact what made my spirit burn: I didn’t much like the idea of the murderess being in so much as the same building as Kat, even if they were both dead. Still, there was nothing to do about it, as an autopsy had to be performed on Libby. (The conclusions of said procedure, we later found out, were “inconclusive,” just as Mr. Moore’d suspected they would be.) As for El Niño, I half expected that he might telephone the house that night, just to make sure everything’d turned out okay; but then I realized that, so far as he was concerned, everything already had. His jefe had been avenged, and baby Ana would be returned to her mother; all that was left for him in New York was trouble with the law, and when I took the time to consider it I realized that I’d much rather he move fast to get safely out of town—and maybe out of the country—than slow down to risk contact with us.

  For her part, Miss Howard had, according to plan, ‘phoned uptown to the French consulate straightway when we returned to the Doctor’s house, to inform Señora Linares that all was well and that, as soon as she had police protection, she’d bring Ana to her. We all knew that the detective sergeants were needed for this job, and that they’d best be armed when they carried it out: there was no way of saying what new servants Señor Linares had hired when El Niño’d come over to our side, or if they, like the aborigine, had been keeping watch over the Doctor’s house. But as it turned out, such caution wasn’t necessary: Miss Howard, Marcus, and Lucius got the baby back to her mother without any sign of trouble. When they returned, they told us that the señora was in the process of deciding whether to go back to her family in Spain or to head west, to those parts of the United States where new beginnings were the common coin, and where, I’d once hoped, Kat might’ve been able to get a fresh start on life. But the great and inexpressible joy the señora’d experienced when she’d been reunited with Ana, Miss Howard and the Isaacsons said, was enough to make such decisions seem of small importance for the moment, and had given our three teammates the powerful feeling that everything we’d been through had been well worth it.

  Such may have been true, too—for them. For Mr. Moore and me, though, there would always be questions, questions about whether we’d been right in getting people we cared deeply about involved in a case what ended up costing them their lives. Such questions seldom come with easy answers, and they never go away: as I sit here writing these words, I can’t say as I’m any closer to quieting those doubts than I was at three A.M. that morning, when everyone finally went their separate ways and I sat for an hour in my windowsill, tearfully smoking cigarettes and seeing Kat’s eyes all over the starry sky.

  There were, of course, the funerals to attend to, and after a simple ceremony for Kat at Calvary Cemetery on Wednesday afternoon—one what I was grateful to every member of our group for attending—we all boarded a train early Thursday morning to head back up to Ballston Spa and watch Mr. Picton get planted in the ground of the same cemetery on Ballston Avenue what we had, only weeks earlier, violated. It was sadness, affection, and respect, of course, what drew us so far to say our last good-byes to the agitated little man with the ever-blasting pipe who’d refused to let the case of the murders on the Charlton road die, and who, in death, had given us the legal leverage we’d needed to openly pursue Libby Hatch in New York. But curiosity pulled us north, too: curiosity about what Mr. Picton’s final words about “a clue” in the cemetery had meant.

  Standing by his open grave as his casket was lowered in, each of us sneaked a peek at the headstones of the other members of his family; and we were all slightly shocked to find that every person in that plot—not only Mr. Picton’s parents, but a younger sister and brother, as well—had died on exactly the same day. This led the Doctor to put some gentle questions to Mrs. Hastings after the ceremony, which she answered by saying that indeed, Mr. Picton’s family had all been killed one night as they slept, by a gas leak in the big house at the end of High Street. Mr. Picton had been away at law school when it’d happened, and he’d never spoken of the matter in later years; and while Mrs. Hastings wouldn’t comment on the odd coincidence of gas leaking in so many rooms of the Picton house at one and the same time, she did say that it was after the tragedy that Mr. Picton’d decided to pursue a career in prosecution. This was enough for the Doctor, who knew—as did, I think, Mrs. Hastings—that the “coincidence” of the several gas leaks was so incredible as to be dismissable. Someone had deliberately done away with the family, and the fact that all the doors of the house had been bolted when it’d happened indicated that it’d been one of the Pictons themselves.

  Beyond that, though, neither the Doctor nor anyone else could do more than speculate. Had Mr. Picton’s mother, in a fit of some kind of despondency, done away with her husband, her offspring, and herself by means of gas—not an uncommon practice, according to the Doctor, among lethally melancholic women? Had Mr. Picton suspected the truth about the matter, and had that suspicion not only made him endlessly anxious for the rest of his days, but driven him for so many years to convict Libby Hatch? We would never know. But just the possibility, combined with the sad occasion of the funeral itself, was enough to keep us all very quiet during the train ride back to New York.

  Things calmed down eerily around Seventeenth Street in the days what immediately followed—the case was over, but there was no possibility of returning to a normal routine, being as, even if our spirits had been strong enough to bounce back so quickly, we were still waiting to find out the results of the court investigation into affairs at the Doctor’s Institute. On Friday morning the Isaacsons—who’d put off giving their testimony ever since we’d gotten back to town—finally went b
efore the closed court and told their tale. That same afternoon the Reverend Bancroft was called to give his opinion about how the Institute was set up, whether the staff were up to snuff, and if, in general, the place was a sound proposition. The court waited until Monday to hand down its decision, and I’m not exaggerating when I say that those two days were among the longest of my life. The weather turned foully humid, coating every person in the city in the kind of thin sheet of heavy sweat what seems impossible to get off and always sends tempers flaring. Monday was no better: the thermometer’d already climbed into the high eighties by ten, and when Cyrus, the Doctor, and I boarded the calash to head down to the Tweed court house at two I wasn’t sure that either Frederick—whose weeks of boarding had made him a touch lazy—or any of the rest of us was going to make it.

  But make it we did, in every sense of the word. Not only did Judge Samuel Welles surprise us by declaring that the affairs of the Institute were in order and the case of Paulie McPherson was “an obvious aberration,” but he went on to shock the entire courtroom by giving those city fathers what had brought on the investigation a tongue-lashing. Dr. Kreizler’s methods might be unorthodox, Judge Welles said, and some people might not be comfortable with them; in fact, he wasn’t so sure that he was comfortable with all of them himself. But you couldn’t argue with results, and the plain fact was that in all his years of operation the Doctor had lost exactly one kid, one who, as the detective sergeants’ investigation had plainly revealed, had been at least thinking about suicide before coming to the Institute, and who’d brought the instrument of the “crime” with him when he was enrolled. Reminding the Doctor’s critics that New York’s courts had better things to do than pursue unwarranted investigations, Judge Welles declared the whole matter dismissed.

  We’d known that Welles was an unpredictable character; but no public official had ever made that kind of statement in support of the Doctor’s work, and the event was enough to make you think that maybe there was some kind of justice in the world, after all. Mr. Moore’d taken the hopeful chance of engaging a private room at Mr. Delmonico’s restaurant for after the hearing (such rooms being the only places in the joint where Cyrus and I were allowed to eat), and during the meal that followed the adults stuffed themselves on more kinds of strangely named French food than I could possibly rattle off all these years later. As for me, I made do with a steak and fried potatoes, and Mr. Delmonico even rounded me up a bottle of root beer (though I think he had to send one of his boys out to fetch it from a local grocer). But even if I can’t remember just what it was that everybody ate, I can remember that it was an evening of a type what was rare for us: there’d been no killings or kidnappings, and no great mystery was the main topic of conversation. In fact, crime didn’t come up much at all—it was just a time to be happy in each other’s company, and remember that terrible events were not the only things that bonded us together.

  Being as the rest of the day had gone so well, we probably should’ve known that some unpleasant or at least disturbing surprise would be waiting for us at its end. The Doctor invited everyone back to his house after the meal at Delmonico’s, and when we arrived we discovered a very handsome brougham sitting at the curb in front of the front yard. But the two men sitting up on the driving seat didn’t exactly match the rig: wearing rough sailor’s jackets what indicated a familiarity with the seamier parts of the waterfront, they had the kind of deep brown features, thin, drooping mustaches, and large, dark eyes what immediately suggested they were from India, or that general part of the world. I was riding in a cab with Detective Sergeant Lucius, whose face—always jolly and rosy after a big meal and lots of red wine at Mr. Delmonico’s—suddenly went straight, even a little pale, when he saw the carriage and the men.

  “What the—” he whispered. “Oh, no.”

  “Oh, no?” I answered, looking at the brougham and then back at the detective sergeant. “What’s ‘oh, no’ about it? Who are they?”

  Taking a deep breath, Lucius said, “They look like lascars.”

  “Lascars?” I repeated, now a little disturbed myself: even I knew about the tough breed of sailors and pirates whose home waters were the Indian Ocean and the South China Sea. “What the hell are they doing here?”

  “Care to guess?” the detective sergeant said. “Lascars are a very common sight—on the Manila waterfront.”

  “Oh,” I noised, glancing again at the two mugs on the brougham. Then I just sank down into my seat. “Aw, shit…”

  By the time Lucius’s and my cab stopped, the others had already gotten out of a second hansom and the Doctor’s calash, and were gathered around the door of the brougham. There was no sign of life from inside the thing yet, and the first such that we got was a question:

  “Dr. Kreizler?” said a deep voice, one what bore a strong Spanish accent.

  The Doctor stepped forward. “I am Dr. Laszlo Kreizler. May I be of assistance?”

  The door of the brougham finally opened, and out stepped a very dark, handsome man of medium height and build, his hair carefully fixed with pomade. His clothes looked to be about the best that money could buy, and had that formal cut what seems to always mark the diplomat. In his hand he carried a walking stick what had a heavy ball of silver for a handle.

  “I am Señor Narciso Linares. I believe you know of me.”

  The Doctor just nodded with a small smile, having already guessed, like the rest of us, who the caller was. “Señor.”

  Señor Linares flicked his stick toward the house. “Is there a place where we may speak? The matter is most urgent.”

  “Please,” the Doctor said, indicating the front door. The señor moved toward it and the Doctor followed, after which the rest of us moved to do the same: but then the two lascars jumped down off the brougham and stood in our way at the gate to the front yard, folding their arms and seeming ready for an argument.

  The Doctor turned around, an expression of shock coming into his face. “Señor,” he said, very sternly. “What is the meaning of this behavior? These people are residents of and guests in this house.”

  Considering the matter for a moment, the señor just nodded and said, “So.” Then he mouthed some words in Spanish to the lascars, who glumly moved back toward the carriage. After that we all went inside, Cyrus keeping a very careful eye on the two boys at the curb as we did.

  The Doctor led Señor Linares up into the parlor and offered him a drink. When the visitor requested a glass of brandy, Mr. Moore fetched it, while the rest of us took seats. Cyrus stood by one window and opened it, still watching the lascars.

  “Dr. Kreizler,” Señor Linares said in some surprise, when he saw that we all intended on staying in the parlor. “My business with you is of a private nature—it is certainly not for the ears of servants.”

  “There are no servants here,” the Doctor replied. “These are my colleagues.”

  The señor glanced at Cyrus. “The black, as well?”

  Trying hard not to get openly irritated, the Doctor just said, “If you have something you wish to discuss, señor, you must do so in front of our collected company. Otherwise, I must bid you good evening.”

  Shrugging, Señor Linares drained his brandy and put the glass aside. “I shall come to the point, then. I have reason to believe, Doctor, that you know the whereabouts of my wife and child.”

  “Indeed?”

  “Yes. If this is so, I most strongly recommend that you reveal those whereabouts to me, unless you wish to provoke a diplomatic incident.”

  The Doctor paused and took out his cigarette case. “I had always understood that diplomats were tactful men,” he said. “Perhaps I was misinformed.”

  “The time for tact is long past,” Señor Linares answered testily. “I know that, some time ago, my wife sought the assistance of this woman—” He waved his stick in Miss Howard’s general direction. “Since then, my life has been a succession of difficulties. I warn you, sir, I am most sincere in my threat of an official p
rotest.”

  As he lit one of his smokes, the Doctor studied the señor for a few more seconds, then sat back. “Actually, you are not.”

  Señor Linares looked like he’d been slapped. “You call me a liar?” he demanded, getting to his feet.

  “Please, sir,” the Doctor replied, waving his cigarette and not at all concerned. “Spare me your Latin pride—or what is the term that men such as yourself use? Your machismo? It is wasted here, I assure you.”

  “Dr. Kreizler,” the señor answered, “I am not a man to endure such words—”

  “Señor Linares,” the Doctor said, “please do sit down. I submit that if you had any intention of actually involving either your consulate or your government in this matter, you would have done so long ago. And you would certainly not have arrived at my house in the company of such creatures as those two men”—he threw a hand lightly in the direction of the window—“whose presence was undoubtedly intended to extract through physical intimidation the information you seek. Fortunately for myself—less fortunately for you—I did not return home alone. Shall we dispense, then, with talk of diplomatic incidents?”

  The señor gave himself a couple of seconds, then sat back down and even managed a small, what you might call begrudging smile. “Yes. I heard that you were a clever man.”

  The Doctor’s face suddenly went hard. “And I have heard that you, sir, are a man who does not shrink from beating women, as well as anyone else who might be smaller and weaker than yourself. And that you have been perfectly willing, anxious even, to conceal the abduction of your own child. So perhaps you can tell me, señor—why is it that you come here now, as if you were the governor of some far-off Spanish colony, in an attempt to bully me into giving you information that I do not possess?”

  The señor looked up quickly. “Then you do not know what has become of my wife and daughter?”

  “If I knew, sir, I should hardly be likely to tell you. But you have my word that I do not.” Which was true: