“Let’s go find something to eat while we talk,” Anna said. “I have things to tell you too. I wish I didn’t.”
• • •
“OF COURSE WE have to take them to see him,” Sophie said. Her tone was matter-of-fact, no doubt or hesitation. When Anna started to get caught up in ambiguities, Sophie could be trusted to lead her out of the wilderness.
“You have reservations,” Sophie said.
Anna wrapped her hands around her teacup. “I do have some concerns. Thinking back now, would you have wanted someone to take you to see your father, at the end?”
Sophie didn’t answer that question. Instead she said, “The choice is whether we cause them pain now, or later.”
“I think knowing is better than not knowing,” Anna said.
“Well, then, we’re decided. Do we need special permission to take them to the island? Can the detective sergeant arrange it for us?”
“I mentioned the possibility to him. He said he could make arrangements. I think he’ll come too, if he can manage it,” Anna said. “Having someone there who speaks Italian is a good idea. If not Mezzanotte, then maybe Detective Sergeant Maroney might be willing.”
Sophie laughed. “You call him Mezzanotte? Why?”
Anna grimaced into her empty teacup and tried to construct an honest answer. “I suppose I’ve been trying to keep some distance.”
“And failing.”
“Oh, yes. Miserably.”
Sophie put a hand on Anna’s shoulder and squeezed but said nothing more. It was a kindness, and Anna managed a smile.
10
EARLY SATURDAY A note came from Jack, written on the police headquarters stationery: he had had word from the island. Carmine Russo had died the previous evening and would be buried at noon. If she wanted to attend with the little girls, he would arrange it. Detective Sergeant Maroney would call for them, take them to the burial, and then see them home. The message boy would wait for her answer.
All through that difficult day she wondered about the least important issue of all: Jack Mezzanotte sent his partner to accompany them, instead of coming himself.
Standing at the graveside with a trembling Rosa pressed against her side, Anna tried to block out the dull monotone of the chaplain reading from a funeral service in order to focus on the girls. What she could do for them. If anything could be done for them. What to say, or not say. Over the years she had developed a way to tell an adult that a mother or sister or daughter was gone. She tried to answer the questions, and she listened patiently. She was empathetic, but calm. None of that seemed possible standing by this particular grave and a coffin of cheap pine.
Rosa’s sorrow was palpable, but Lia seemed to be in a kind of waking dream. Her expression was almost blank, her eyes fever-bright, and she made no noise at all. Oscar Maroney was holding her for the simple reason that when he tried to put her down, her legs wouldn’t support her. Even Sophie, who had the gentlest and most compassionate of touches, could not get Lia’s attention. When she reached out to put her hand on Lia’s back, the girl turned her face to press it against Oscar Maroney’s shoulder.
It was Maroney who got through to Lia, on the ferry ride back to Manhattan. She sat on his lap with Rosa close beside him, and for the whole journey he told them what Anna took to be children’s stories. He changed his voice and hunched his shoulders, opened his eyes in mock surprise and whispered.
And this, she told herself, was why Jack had sent Oscar. Because he knew that Oscar had a talent for dealing with children in distress.
If only he could do that much for lady doctors in distress, too. She was embarrassed by this thought but could not deny the underlying truth: she had hoped to see Jack Mezzanotte, had wanted his support and help. Such a short amount of time she had spent with him, and already she had unrealistic expectations simply because he had flirted with her a bit. It was good that he had stayed away, she told herself. She would go home and nurse her hurt pride and wounded ego, and tomorrow she would start over again. A highly educated physician and surgeon, with work that satisfied her, and a loving family that now included two little girls.
• • •
SHE HAD ALMOST convinced herself of this when they got back to Waverly Place to find a letter waiting.
Savard: If you are free tomorrow I suggest we go together to talk to the people at the Society for the Protection of Endangered Children about the boys. Unless I hear from you I’ll expect to see you at the Washington Monument in Union Square at one. We can walk from there.
I’m sorry I couldn’t come with you today to help with Rosa and Lia.
—Mezzanotte
• • •
AS JACK CAME out of the front door of the shop on Sunday afternoon, he saw Anna. She walked right by him, lost in her thoughts. He called her name and she came to a sudden stop and turned toward him.
“Detective Sergeant Mezzanotte.”
Back to the formal, then. He inclined his head. “Dr. Savard.” Her gaze moved over the sign above the door: MEZZANOTTE BROTHERS FLORISTS.
“Oh,” she said. “This is where you live. I don’t know why I didn’t realize; I pass this corner all the time.”
She was nervous, and embarrassed about being nervous.
“I don’t live in the shop,” he said, and turned to point. “The house is farther down, behind the brick wall. If you’d like to see—”
She shook her head, flustered now. “Another time, maybe.”
“Come on,” he said. “Let’s stop for coffee, and you can tell me how it went yesterday.”
• • •
IT WAS A reasonable idea and something concrete to do; a chore to focus on. As soon as they found a table in the coffee shop across the street, Anna started talking and she didn’t stop until she had related the whole grim story.
“It would have been so much worse without Detective Sergeant Maroney,” she said. “We owe him—and you—a great favor. The girls needed more help than we could provide.”
“You don’t owe me anything.” He paused as the waitress put down their coffee cups. “But if you feel strongly about it, there is something you can do for me.”
Anna drew in a deep breath. “If it’s in my power, of course.”
He leaned forward—something he did a lot, she was noticing—and smiled.
“I’d like you to relax. There’s nothing to be anxious about.”
She let out a small laugh. “I’m normally a very composed person,” she told him. And in a fit of honesty: “You make me nervous.”
“That much is obvious.”
For a minute there was a silence between them while they tended to their coffee cups.
She said, “I didn’t realize that there was more than greenhouses behind that wall. It must feel like an oasis in the busiest part of the city, living there.”
“The house was part of the original farm,” he said. “With a walled garden. My uncle Massimo bought it when he first came from Italy, thirty years ago. There were still orchards then.”
He talked easily about the extended Mezzanotte families, the uncles who came from Italy, one by one, and were all involved in the florist business in one way or another, about the cousins who worked in the shop and greenhouses, and about his aunt Philomena, a benevolent dictator, her supremacy in the kitchen unchallenged.
“She made the sandwich you liked so much.”
“I still think about that sandwich,” Anna said, a little wistfully. “So you live with your aunt and uncle while you’re here in the city.”
“No, there are two houses. Massimo and his family live in one on the far end of the original property. In the other it’s just my two sisters and me.”
“The sisters who embroider.”
“Yes.”
He was easy to talk to and slow to take offense, and so she let her curiosity r
ise to the occasion. She said, “When did you come to the States?”
It was a question he had answered before, most probably many times, no doubt sometimes put to him by people who were unhappy about immigrants or Italians or both. But he answered her in what she imagined was more detail than was usual with nothing in his tone but friendly interest. He had been three, he told her, with one younger and one older brother. They came at the invitation of an uncle who had bought a large farm about fifteen miles outside Hoboken.
“Massimo, the one who manages the business?”
“A different uncle. I’ve got a crowd of them.”
When they had left the coffee shop and had started uptown, she gave in to her curiosity and picked up the subject again.
“Then you don’t really remember Italy.”
“Sure I do. I spent two years at the University of Padua.” And in response to her raised brow: “Reading law. But I wanted to be home. My parents weren’t happy, but it was the right decision.”
After a moment he said, “How much do you know about this organization we’re going to?”
He was changing the subject, which might mean she had asked too many questions, or questions he didn’t care to answer. And really, she told herself, she shouldn’t be surprised if he did take offense.
She cleared her throat. “Almost nothing, I have to admit, but even Sophie couldn’t tell me much about it. She said she thought it was fairly new. She knows most of the orphan asylums, some of them quite well.”
He struck his brow softly with a half-curled fist. “That reminds me. We’ll have to get a sister from St. Patrick’s to come with us when we go to the Foundling Hospital, or we won’t get very far. Preferably someone who had personal contact with the Russo children. Maybe Sister Ignatia, since you got along with her so well in Hoboken.”
He was grinning at her.
“You’re teasing me.”
“And you like it when I tease you.”
Anna quickened her pace in an effort to regain her equilibrium. “Tell me what I need to know about this organization and what help they might be to us.”
“For right now,” Jack said, “you should know that they take in children in order to place them out. Sometimes to local foster families, but over the last few years they’ve been sending boys west by train. Mostly I think they go to farms.”
“But Tonino Russo is so young.”
“As I understand it, they sometimes place children as young as four.”
Anna was silent for a long minute.
“You disapprove?”
She almost laughed. “On what grounds could I judge them? I can see that things would go wrong sometimes, maybe even disastrously wrong, but somebody is trying, at least.” And then she told him what she had really been thinking.
“I shouldn’t have to ask you or Sophie about these things. It’s a failing, I recognize that. I close myself off in my work. I don’t even read the newspapers. In some ways it feels as if I’m just waking up, and that’s Rosa’s doing.”
• • •
JACK WATCHED HER color rise as she told him about something that she saw as a flaw in the way she lived her life.
“I’d be at the hospital right now,” she was saying, “if not for Sister Mary Augustin showing up at the door on that Monday morning. There was something about Rosa when I first saw her in that church basement. My history is nothing like hers, but feels as though it is, to me.” She raised her head suddenly to look at him, disquieted, embarrassed. As if he would judge her.
She changed the subject abruptly. “I haven’t told you about my visit to St. Patrick’s Orphan Asylum. I went to vaccinate the children—you remember that conversation I had with Sister Ignatia, I’m sure—and found that in the meantime the mother superior had seen to it that they were all vaccinated.”
“They didn’t let you know?”
She shook her head. “She let me come anyway, because she wanted me to examine some of the sisters. My guess is that she knew one of them needed surgery and they don’t want to go to the Catholic hospitals where they don’t allow female surgeons.”
“And you examined them, of course.”
“Of course. And in the next weeks sometime I’ll be operating on one of them.”
“For . . .”
“That’s not information I can share, Mezzanotte.”
Back to last names; some progress was being made. “Well then,” he said. “Tell me about some other surgery, something you’ve done recently.”
She gave him a frankly suspicious glance. “You’re not interested in the fine points of suturing internal incisions.”
“But I am. Really, I’m curious.”
She started slowly. As she went on and saw that he was paying attention, that his curiosity was sincere, she spoke more freely. Jack listened closely, because he had the idea that later there might be a quiz. It was one he wanted to pass.
• • •
UNLIKE THE DEEP quiet at the Catholic orphan asylum that had made such an impression on Anna, the offices of the Society for the Protection of Endangered Children were chaotic. The society occupied most of an older building on Thirty-first Street, three floors of offices and children. Anna’s first impression was that the place was cramped and overextended, but then that had been true of most of the agencies she had seen thus far. There was no lack of orphaned and homeless children, but funding was always sparse.
They passed a large room where a group of a dozen boys had presented themselves for some kind of meeting, all of them subdued. Anna paused to scan the faces she saw there. Two of the boys were of the right age, but neither of them was Tonino Russo. She knew it was naïve to hope that this search would end so quickly and easily, but then she realized that Jack Mezzanotte was studying the boys as well. It seemed that the detective sergeant was less cynical than she would have expected.
They found the door they were looking for, and Jack opened it for Anna.
• • •
ANNA STARTED BY relating the short history of the Russo children in as far as she knew it. Jack had added some details, watching the superintendent and not liking what he saw. Mr. Johnson swiveled his chair away to look over the street as Anna finished, running a hand over his scalp. He had long, thin fingers that tapered like candlesticks.
“Let me understand this correctly,” he said when he turned back to them. “These boys you’re looking for are not any blood relation?”
“They are not,” Anna said. “But my family has taken in the girls, and we would do the same for the boys if we can find them.”
“And why, may I ask, would an unmarried lady with such an advanced education want to take on the trouble of four Italian orphans?”
Jack didn’t like the man’s tone or the implications. Anna seemed not to notice or care, because she answered him.
“I myself was orphaned very young,” she said. “My cousin—who is also a physician—was orphaned at ten. We were fortunate to be taken in by a loving aunt who is agreed on this course of action. I am very aware of the responsibilities, and our finances are in good order.”
It didn’t answer the question he had asked, but it told him what she wanted him to know.
“The whole idea is very irregular,” said Mr. Johnson.
“We’re not asking for your permission,” Jack said flatly. “Consider this a police matter, if that suits you better. Two little boys have gone missing from St. Patrick’s Orphan Asylum. We want to know if one or both of them might have come through here, and where they would be if they had. Now, can you help us?”
Mr. Johnson was taking great pains not to look intimidated, but Jack saw the flutter of an errant muscle at the corner of his eye. A man who was easily insulted and slow to forget. His inclination was to deny them help, but he also had a solid understanding of what trouble the law could be if he made an e
nemy of a detective.
“We wouldn’t have taken the baby,” he said. “But it’s possible that the older boy went out with one of the groups that left last week. Before we go any further, Dr. Savard, you do realize that there are thousands of destitute and homeless children in this city.”
“Tens of thousands,” Anna said, her tone much cooler.
“And I hope you’ve already submitted queries to the Catholic Church?”
When she assured him that they had, he got up to leave. “I may be a half hour or more,” he said, and closed the door behind himself.
• • •
THE OFFICE WAS small and overheated, and Anna felt perspiration gathering beneath the weight of her hair and along her spine. She stood abruptly, but Jack was already at the door and holding it open for her.
She said, “That group of boys we saw when we first came in. Do you think they were being sent out for placement?”
Jack said, “That would be my guess. They looked a lot like these boys.” He inclined his head to a row of a dozen framed photos that lined the walls. Groups of boys bracketed by adults, staring solemnly at the camera. Neatly dressed according to the season, faces and shoes both polished to a shine. Children as old as fifteen, by her estimation, but there was little of childhood even in the youngest faces.
The most recent one was dated just the previous week and was neatly labeled.
Placement agents Charles Tenant and Michael Bunker departing March 1883 for Kansas with their charges: Gustaf Lundström, Alfred Jacobs, Federico DeLuca, Harrison Anders, Colum Domhnaill, Lucas Holtzmann, Samuel Harris, Michael and Dylan Joyce, James Gallagher, Zachary Blackburn, Galdino Iadanza, Nicholas Hall, Erik Gottlieb, Marco Itri, John Federova, Alfred LeRoy, George Doyle, and Henry Twomey.
Anna wondered what had become of these boys, if they were well looked after and content in their new homes. Common sense said that they would be better off out of a city where children routinely froze to death for lack of a roof, but sending children off to be taken in by total strangers gave her a deep sense of misgiving.
Behind them Mr. Johnson said, “Our most recent group. You see Michael and Dylan Joyce—” He indicated two boys alike enough to be twins. They were no more than eight, fair hair sticking out from under their caps.