At the sound of the simultaneous hisses that came out of Mr. Moore, Cyrus, and me, the señora attempted to smile, and the faintest spark flashed in her lovely, deep brown right eye. “If you were to ask me,” she murmured, “I should say that I fell down the marble staircase of the consulate—after fainting from grief following the death of our child. You see, my husband and Consul Baldasano have already decided that, at those times when an explanation to outsiders is unavoidable, I am to say that my daughter was taken by illness. But she is not dead, Señor Moore.” The señora staggered forward a step or two, leaning on the umbrella. “I have seen her! I have—seen—” At that she seemed about to faint, and Miss Howard moved to her quickly, guiding her into one of Marchese Carcano’s plush easy chairs. I turned to Mr. Moore, and saw his face light up with a whole batch of reactions: anger, horror, sympathy, but above all consternation. He waved a hand in my direction vaguely. “Stevie …”
I already had the packet out and was lighting a stick for each of us. I handed him his, watched him pace back and forth a few times, and then got out of the way when he bolted for the telephone what was sitting on a desk behind me. “We’re way out of our depth here,” he mumbled, picking up the receiver. Then, in a stronger voice: “Operator? Police Headquarters on Mulberry Street. Central Office, Bureau of Detectives.”
“What?” Miss Howard said urgently, as a look of terror filled Señora Linares’s face. “John, no, I told you—”
Mr. Moore held up a hand. “Don’t worry. I just want to find out where they are. You know the boys better than that, Sara. They’ll keep it unofficial if we ask them to.”
“Who will?” the Linares woman whispered; but Mr. Moore turned his attention back to the ‘phone.
“Hello? Central? Listen, I have an urgent personal message for the Detective Sergeants Isaacson—can you tell me where they are? … Ah. Good, thanks.” He hung up the ‘phone and turned to me. “Stevie—apparently a body’s been discovered over at the Cunard pier. Lucius and Marcus are looking into it. How fast do you think you can get over there and get back with them?”
“If Cyrus’ll help me commandeer a hansom,” I answered, “half an hour. Three quarters at the outside.”
Mr. Moore turned to Cyrus. “Go.”
The pair of us sprang toward the elevator. Before reentering it, however, I paused just long enough to turn back to Mr. Moore. “You don’t think we should—”
Mr. Moore shook his head quickly. “We don’t know what this is yet. I won’t ask him to come back to this place until we’re sure.”
Cyrus put a hand to my shoulder. “He’s right, Stevie. Let’s go.”
I stepped into the elevator, Cyrus slammed the grate, and we moved back down the shaftway.
Because the Hotel St. Denis was right across the street, Number 808 had always been an easy spot to catch a cab at almost any hour of the day or night: there were two lined up outside the hotel when Cyrus and I crossed to it. The first was a four-wheeler, captained by an ancient geezer in a faded red liveryman’s jacket and a beat-to-hell top hat. He was nodding off in his seat and stank of booze from six feet away. His horse, however, was a good-looking grey mare who seemed game.
I turned to Cyrus. “Get him in the back,” I said, jumping into the driver’s seat and starting to haul the old man out of it. “Hey—hey, pop! Up and at ’em, you’ve got a fare!”
The old man made some drunken, confused sounds as I shoved him toward the little iron step on the carriage’s left side and down to Cyrus: “What—what do you think—what’re you doing?”
“Driving,” I answered, seating myself and taking the horse’s reins.
“You can’t drive!” the man protested as Cyrus forced him into the passenger compartment and sat alongside him, closing the little doors.
“We’ll double your rate,” Cyrus answered, keeping a good grip on the man. “And don’t worry, the boy’s an excellent driver.”
“But you’ll queer me with the cops!” the old tool bellowed on, removing his top hat and showing us the license what was fastened to it. “I can’t have any trouble with the law—I’m a licensed hack, see?”
“Yeah?” I looked back at him, grabbed the hat, and shoved it onto my own head. “Well, now I am—so sit back and pipe down!”
He did the one but not the other, and was still wailing like a stuck pig as I cracked the reins against the mare’s backside and we bolted out onto the pavement of Broadway at a speed that more than justified the quick measure I’d taken of the animal.
CHAPTER 4
By the time we rounded the corner of Ninth Street, we were moving at such a crazy pace—even, I’ll confess, for me—that the cab near went up on two wheels. The Cunard Line pier, in those days before the launch of the company’s really big liners (the Mauretania and the sad old Lusitania), was still located down at the foot of Clarkson Street, a short block above West Houston; but I was going to avoid that latter thoroughfare for as long as I could. Even late on a Sunday night it’d be a thick mass of whores, cons, and their drunken marks, one what had only gotten thicker in the months since Commissioner Roosevelt had left for Washington. The volume of their business would slow our movement badly. As it was, after we raced through the quiet residential blocks of Ninth Street, passed over Sixth Avenue, and headed west on Christopher, we began to see noticeable signs of what Miss Howard had mentioned earlier on our walk to Number 808: the criminal elements were conducting their affairs outside their dives, dens, and brothels in considerable numbers and with a total lack of the concern what Mr. Roosevelt had, if only briefly, drummed into them. Completing all this activity was the occasional sight of cops doing all those things that the commissioner had, by himself roving the streets at night on inspection tours, worked so hard to prevent: collecting graft payments, drinking outside dance halls and saloons, cavorting with whores, and sleeping anywhere they could. Yes, the old town was truly waking up to the fact that Roosevelt was gone and his reform-minded boss, Mayor Strong, would soon follow suit: the gloves were coming off of the underworld.
As we reached Bleecker Street, something snagged my eye (and, I’ll confess, my guts), and I reined up hard, somewhat to Cyrus’s surprise. “What’s happened, Stevie?” he called to me; but I could only stare across the street in momentary confusion at a patch of faded blue silk and an enormous head of blond hair. From Cyrus’s tone, I could tell he’d caught sight of the same thing, and I knew he was frowning: “Oh. Kat…”
I cracked the reins again and charged over to the blue silk and blond hair, both of which belonged to Kat Devlin, a—well, let’s just call her a friend of mine, for the moment, who worked at one of the kid dives and disorderly houses down on Worth Street. She was with a decked-out man who was old enough to be her grandfather, for Kat was but fourteen; and as they tried to cross Bleecker, I steered the grey mare into their path.
“We don’t have time for this, Stevie,” I heard Cyrus say, gently but with intent.
“One minute, that’s all,” I answered quickly.
Kat started at the sudden appearance of the mare and looked up, her small, pretty face and blue eyes going furious. “Hey! What the hell do you think you’re—” Then she caught sight of me. Her look softened, but she still appeared perplexed. A smile managed to work its way into her thin lips. “Why, Stevie! What’re you doing over here? And what’re you doing with that cab, besides trying to frighten off my trade?” At that she turned the smile up to the old man she was with and locked her arm in his tighter, making my heart burn hotter. The man patted her arm with an expensively gloved hand and grinned sickeningly.
“I was gonna ask you the same thing,” I said. “Bit west for you, ain’t it, Kat?”
“Oh, I’m moving up in the world,” she answered. “Next week I move my things out of Frankie’s for good and go to work on Hudson Street. At the Dusters’ place.” At that she suddenly sniffled hard and painfully, laughed a little to cover it, and wiped her nose quick. Her moth-eaten glove came away with
a trace of blood on it—and all, as they say, became clear to me.
“The Dusters,” I said, the burn in my chest turning into fear. “Kat, you can’t—”
She could see what was coming and started to move across the street again. “Just a friend of mine,” she said to the man she was with. Then she called over her shoulder to me, “Stop by Frankie’s and see me this week, Stevie!” It was as much a warning to back off as it was an invitation. “And don’t go stealing any more cabs!”
I wanted to say something, anything, to get her to leave her mark and come with us, but Cyrus reached up and gripped my shoulder hard. “It’s no good, Stevie,” he said, in the same soft but certain tone. “There’s no time.”
I knew he was right, but there was no resignation in the knowledge, and I could feel my body tighten up to the point where, for an instant, my vision went all cockeyed. Then, with a sudden, short yell, I grabbed the cabbie’s long horsewhip out of its holder, lifted it above my head, and lashed it toward the man who was crossing the street with Kat. The whip caught his high hat at the crest, cutting a nice hole in it and sending it flying six feet into a puddle of rainwater and horse piss.
Kat spun on me. “Stevie! Damn you! You can’t—”
But I wasn’t going to hear any more: I cracked the reins and sent the grey mare flying back along Christopher Street, Kat’s curses and protests loud but indistinct behind me.
I suppose you’ve figured out by now that Kat was something more than just a friend of mine. But she wasn’t my girl, by any stretch; wasn’t anybody’s girl, really. I couldn’t and can’t tell you just what place she held in my particular world. Maybe I could say that she was the first person what I ever had intimate relations with, except that such a statement might conjure up happy images of young love, which was far from the reality of it. Truth is, she was a question and a puzzle—one what would get even more perplexing in the days to come, as her life took an unexpected turn what was destined to intertwine it with the case we were only beginning to unravel.
By the time we reached Hudson Street I was still in a hell of a state, and I made no effort to slow the mare as I pulled the reins hard with my left arm and gave the animal the word to turn downtown. Once again we near went up on two wheels, and though the cabbie screamed in fear I heard no sound of protest from Cyrus, who was used to my driving and knew I’d never overturned a rig yet. Passing by the faded red bricks of old St. Luke’s Chapel on our right and then the saloons and stores of lower Hudson Street, we reached Clarkson in just a few more seconds and made another wild turn, this time west. The river and the waterfront suddenly sprang into being in front of us, the water blacker than the night and the pier at the end of the street unusually busy for the hour.
As we cleared the warehouses and sailors’ boarding hovels what lined the last couple of blocks of Clarkson Street, we could begin to make out the shape of a big steamer docked at the long, deep green superstructure of the Cunard pier: she was the Campania, not yet five years old and lying at proud rest, with strings of small lights on her boat deck that illuminated her two deep red, black-crowned funnels, her handsome white bridge and lifeboats, and the stately line of her hull, all of which impressively hinted at what wonders the company that’d pioneered transatlantic travel was going to achieve in the none-too-distant future.
On the waterfront near the pier was a fairly large group of people, and as we got closer I could see that a lot of them were cops, some detectives and some in uniform. There were a few sailors and longshoremen, too, and, strangely, a few young boys dressed in nothing but soaking wet pants what had been cut off at the knees. They had large sheets of canvas wrapped around their shoulders and were shivering and jumping up and down, half from the chill of the river water they’d apparently been swimming in and half from excitement. A few torches and one longshoreman’s electrical lamp lit the scene, but there was no sign as yet of the Detective Sergeants Isaacson. Which meant nothing, of course—they could easily have been at the bottom of the Hudson in diving helmets, searching for clues that the average New York detective would’ve considered useless.
Once we reached the waterfront, Cyrus pulled some money out of his billfold, stuffed it into the cabbie’s shaking hand, and said only, “Stay here,” a command that the man was in no condition to disobey. Just to make sure he didn’t bolt, though, I kept his hat and license on my head as we started to make our way through the crowd.
I let Cyrus do the talking to the cops, given that whatever little respect most New York City cops had for blacks, they had even less for me. I’d already spotted one or two officers that I’d crossed paths with during the years I’d been known as “the Stevepipe” and had been, I’ll admit, justifiably infamous around Mulberry Street. When Cyrus inquired after the Isaacsons, he was what you might call reluctantly directed toward whatever business was taking place at the center of the crowd, to a cry of “Nigger to see the Jew boys!” We shoved our way forward.
I hadn’t seen the detective sergeants in a few months, but it would’ve been impossible to imagine them in a more typical setting. On the concrete embankment of the waterfront, they were hunched over a wide piece of bright red oilcloth. The tall, handsome Marcus, with his full head of curly dark hair and big, noble nose, had a tape measure and some steel gauging instruments out, and he was busily recording the dimensions of some still unrecognizable object underneath him. His younger brother Lucius, shorter and stouter, with thinning hair what in spots revealed an always-sweating scalp, was poking around with what looked like the kind of medical instruments Dr. Kreizler kept in his examination room. They were being watched over by a captain I recognized—Hogan was his name, and he was shaking his head the way all the old guard did when faced with the work of the Isaacsons.
“There ain’t enough of it to make any sense of,” Captain Hogan said with a laugh. “We’ll be better off dragging the river to see if we can’t find something that might tell us a little more—like, for instance, maybe a head.” The cops around him joined in the laughter. “That thing ought to go straight to the morgue—though I don’t know what even the morgue boys’d do with it.”
“There are a lot of important clues in what we have here,” Marcus answered without turning, his voice deep and confident. “We can at least get an idea of how it was done.”
“And transferring it from the scene will only result in the usual damage to additional evidence,” Lucius tacked on, his voice quick and agitated. “So if you’ll just be good enough to keep these people back and let us finish, Captain Hogan, there’ll be time enough for you to make your delivery to the charnel house.”
Hogan laughed again and turned away. “You Jew boys. Always thinkin’. Okay, folks, step back, now, let’s let the experts do their job.”
As Hogan glanced our way, I pulled the top hat down over my eyes in the continuing hope of not being recognized, while Cyrus approached him. “Sir,” he said, with far more respect than I knew he felt, “I have a very important personal message for the detective sergeants.”
“Do you, now?” Hogan answered. “Well, they won’t want any Zulu boy taking them away from their scientific studies—”
But the Isaacsons had already turned at the sound of Cyrus’s voice. Seeing him, they both smiled. “Cyrus!” Marcus called. “What are you doing here?” The detective sergeant glanced around, and I knew he was looking for me. I already had a finger in front of my mouth, so that when he saw me he’d know not to say anything. He got the message and nodded, still smiling, and then Lucius did the same. They both got up off their haunches, and for the first time we could see what was lying on the oilcloth.
It was the upper part of a man’s torso, which had been cut off just below the ribs. The neck had likewise been severed, in a way what even I could see was not the work of any expert. The arms had also been hacked off of the hunk of flesh, which looked fairly fresh. That and the fact that there wasn’t much of a stench seemed to indicate the thing hadn’t been in the water all th
at long.
At a nod from Cyrus, Lucius and Marcus drew aside with us, and friendlier greetings were exchanged in whispered voices.
“Have you changed professions, Stevie?” Lucius asked, indicating my hat as he mopped at his head with a handkerchief.
“No, sir,” I answered. “But we needed to get here in a hurry. Miss Howard—”
“Sara?” Marcus cut in. “Is she all right? Has anything happened?”
“She’s at Number 808, sir,” Cyrus answered. “With a client and Mr. Moore. It’s a case that they seem to think you may be able to help them with. It’s urgent—but it’s got to be unofficial.”
Lucius sighed. “Like anything else that might actually advance forensic science these days. It’s all we can do to keep this bunch from taking these remains and feeding them to the lions in the Central Park menagerie.”
“What happened?” I asked, again looking at the grim quarter of a corpse on the oilcloth.
“Some kids saw it floating out in the river,” Marcus answered. “Pretty crude job. Dead less than a few hours, certainly. But there’re some interesting details, and we need to record them all. Can you give us five minutes?”
Cyrus nodded, and then the detective sergeants went back to their work. I could hear Lucius as he began to list various details of the thing to the other cops, his tone showing plainly that he knew it was useless and growing maybe just a little haughty as a result: “Now, then, Captain, you will note, I’m certain, that both the flesh and the spine have been cut with some kind of crude saw. We can rule out the possibility of any medical student or anatomist stealing body parts—they wouldn’t want to damage the organs in that way. And these rectangular patches of missing skin are extremely interesting—they’ve been deliberately cut away, in all likelihood to remove some kind of identifying marks. Tattoos, maybe, since we’re on the waterfront, or perhaps simple birthmarks. So the murderer almost certainly knew his victim well….”