She paused as a younger boy came into the parlor to lean against her chair and send longing glances to the plate of cookies that sat untouched on the table. Anna wondered how many children of their own they had raised in this very building.
“Timothy,” said Mrs. Howell. “Go see if Baldy is in, please. Tell him I need to talk to him, right away.” She turned back to Anna.
“And in the meantime, I’d like to hear more about you, Dr. Savard.”
• • •
JACK DIVIDED HIS attention between Hank’s story of a boy who had been arrested for drawing a knife on another boy in the dormitory, and Jenny Howell’s sure-handed solicitation of Anna’s help in one more worthy cause. And he was listening at the same time for Baldy. It was no more than five minutes before he burst into the room as if the roundsmen were at his heels. The kid had enough energy to fuel all of New York’s elevated train lines by himself.
“Did you want to see me, Ma Howell?” Then he caught sight of Jack and drew up sharply, his long, gangly body suddenly utterly still.
“No trouble,” Jack said. “I’m not here for you.” And he added something in Italian that made the boy both relax and smile.
“Sit yourself down,” said Hank. “The detective sergeant and this lady are looking for a boy, and you might be able to help.”
Baldy lowered himself onto a stool and nodded. While Jack talked he listened with an expression that made it clear that while he would cooperate, he would not be so foolish as to believe anything this Detective Sergeant Mezzanotte had to say. A completely understandable position to take, after all. Jack had arrested him more than once.
When Jack had finished, Baldy said, “This kid, a Neopolitán with blue eyes?”
“Blue eyes, black hair.”
“Somebody like that would stick out. You’re sure he’s Neopolitán?”
Jack nodded, and Baldy shook his head. “Can’t help you.”
“You could ask around,” Jack said. “See if Vince or Bogie or anybody in one of the gangs has seen him.”
“I could,” Baldy said. His gaze had come to rest with obvious interest and curiosity on Anna. “You took his sisters in, miss?”
“This is Dr. Savard,” Jack corrected him.
“Dr. Savard, if you’re in the market for homeless Italian kids, I could volunteer myself.” He thumped his chest with a fist. “I’m better than Italian. I’m one-hundred-ten-percent-head-to-toes Siciliano.”
“And you’re not a child,” Mrs. Howell said. “Though you seem to forget from time to time. Eighteen is a man grown. Or should be.”
The young man had a head of dark hair so thick that it stood straight up from his scalp and beneath that, a clever mind. Jack had issued some kind of challenge that Anna didn’t catch, but Baldy jumped right into a conversation that was half banter and half dispute and all in Italian. Anna leaned toward Mrs. Howell and lowered her voice. “Is there somewhere I could speak to Baldy alone for a half hour or so?”
• • •
ANNA CLOSED THE door to Mr. Howell’s office behind herself and smiled at the boy’s attempt to look both worldly and innocent.
“Baldy,” she began, and then interrupted herself with a question. “What is your real name, if I may ask? There must be something more dignified to call you.”
He inclined his head. “I am Giustiniano Gianbattista Garibaldi Nediani.”
“I see.” She paused.
“You don’t like Baldy?”
“I don’t dislike it, but it doesn’t really suit you.”
“I have a very long name,” he said. “And I am very tall. If they had thought to give you a longer name, maybe you would have grown to a full size.”
At that Anna had to laugh out loud. “Maybe Anna isn’t my full name,” she said. “If you don’t have a preference, I’ll call you Nediani or Ned. Does that suit?”
The boy gave an almost regal nod. “What is it you want to know?”
Anna didn’t have to prompt very hard to hear his very brief story. Orphaned at age eight, abandoned by an uncle, four years on the streets, three of those as a newsie. Since then he had been working at the lodging house as a jack-of-all-trades and pursuing other avenues of self-improvement, as he put it. He rattled off the facts with such ease that Anna didn’t know what to think. It might be a well-rehearsed story, or a history that had to be handled like a live coal, cautiously, quickly, lest it do more damage.
“You are still active as a newsie?”
“I outgrew that years ago, except for looking out for some of the younger boys. Mostly I’m busy here.”
“Are you content to continue here, or do you have plans?”
At this he looked somewhat affronted. “I have three hundred twenty-two dollars and fifty-five cents in savings. You can ask Ma Howell, she keeps the books. I’m thinking when I’ve got enough saved, I’ll buy an interest in a shop.”
“That’s very enterprising of you,” Anna said. “But it is slow going, saving for a better life.”
“You got a job you want me to do, right? You want me to find this little kid for you.”
“Yes. I realize that we are asking you to look for a little boy you don’t know, and that it might put you in a difficult position, now and then, to ask questions in certain quarters. On the other hand, you know the streets. Your experience and understanding of the way things work gives you a great advantage.”
He inclined his head. “True.”
“I am asking you to act as a kind of unofficial—detective, I suppose the title would be. And as such, you should be compensated.”
As if she had spoken Jack’s name aloud the boy said, “I don’t want no business with no cops.”
“This arrangement is between you and me,” Anna said. “No one else. With the understanding that you will not put yourself in danger, under any circumstances.”
He broke out in a wide and amused smile, and rightly so: it was naïve to think he could avoid trouble, or even wanted to.
She said, “Now about compensation. I’ve been thinking about it. Do I understand that staying here costs ten cents a night?”
“For older boys. The little ones pay six cents. Another dime for two meals,” he said. “Morning and evening. Ma Howell runs a good kitchen.”
“Very well,” Anna said, endeavoring not to smile. “Let’s say one and a half dollars a week for your lodging and meals. Six dollars would cover four weeks. That will serve as a retainer. If you are successful tomorrow or if we are successful, if anyone finds Tonino or reliable word of where he’s gone, you will still keep the fee I am paying today. If you find him or reliable word of where he is, I will pay you another ten dollars. If in four weeks there is still no word of him, we will reassess the situation and discuss whether to continue. Are these terms agreeable to you?”
“Yes,” he said with great dignity. “I accept.”
She took papers from her bag and placed them on a corner of the desk. She had asked permission to use the pen and ink, and so she got those ready, too. “Now, I believe that you’ve been attending classes since you first came here, and so you can read and write English. I’m going to write out our agreement here and we’ll both sign it. If that’s acceptable?”
“I’m always ready. Write on, Dr. Savard.”
• • •
WHEN SHE RETURNED to the parlor, both the manager and his wife had gone to take up their duties. Jack sat alone reading a paper, his legs stretched out and his ankles crossed. Something changed in his face when he saw her, but there was no suspicion there. She wondered if he was ever surprised by anything. She wondered if he played poker.
“What?” Anna said, as he unfolded his long frame from the chair.
“What?” she said again, as he stopped right in front of her, not touching but so close she could smell the starch in his shirt collar.
&nb
sp; He said, “Did you bribe that kid?”
She raised her head sharply and took a step back; Jack moved two steps forward.
“I paid him for his services,” Anna said, refusing to step away again and trying to convince herself this had to do with calm self-assertion and nothing else. “That’s not bribery. Why must you always put things in terms of criminal behavior?”
The corner of his mouth quirked. “Because I’m a cop,” he said. “And Baldy is a criminal.”
Anna felt her heart pick up a beat. “He may have broken the law—” she began.
“Laws,” Jack said. “Multiple. Often, with great skill and enthusiasm.”
“Well,” Anna said, shifting in her irritation. “Of course he’s no angel.”
“How much money did you give him?”
“Six dollars with the promise of a bonus if he’s successful. And before you say anything else, Mezzanotte, you should know that if he just takes the six dollars and never does anything to earn it, I will still consider the investment to have been worthwhile.”
For a long moment he looked down at her, a crease in the fold between his eyebrows, and one corner of his mouth pulled up, as though she were a puzzle that resisted solving.
“Come on,” he said. “We have a couple more stops to make.”
Anna said, “I’m almost afraid to ask.”
• • •
FOR THE NEXT two weeks, Anna was on high alert and agitated with herself about it. Some days there was a note from Jack Mezzanotte with news about the search, but more often when she left for the day the porter would have a note asking her to meet somewhere: the Protestant orphan asylum, the Our Lady of the Rosary convent, the Boys’ Protectory on Broome Street, the Sheltering Arms Home, the Society for the Relief of Destitute Children, the Asylum of St. Vincent de Paul.
They would meet, talk to the head of the asylum or hospital, and go their separate ways. If it was dark when they finished, Jack insisted on seeing her home, and they talked of everything and nothing at all. Anna wondered if she had imagined his interest in her. But then he would come to call and sit down to talk to Rosa about what they had learned and where they would go next, and during those visits she was well aware of his regard.
He touched her often, in ways that a more strictly brought-up woman would not have allowed. She felt his hand on her shoulder, very briefly, or he touched her lower back when they made their way through one room to another, so lightly that she might have imagined it, if not for the satisfied look on Mrs. Lee’s face.
He was playful with the little girls and could make even Rosa laugh, while Lia giggled so hard that she would dissolve into hiccups. He told tall tales in English and Italian, he produced butterscotch drops out of a seemingly bottomless pocket, and all the time his gaze returned, again and again, to Anna.
One early evening on an omnibus traveling down Broadway he had picked up her hand and examined it as if it were some strange object found on a park bench. He undid the three mother-of-pearl buttons at her wrist, and then, too late, looked to her for permission.
“May I?”
She wanted to say that he should not, but somehow his manner was so disarming that she just nodded.
“The only time I’ve ever seen you without gloves in public was on Randall’s Island, when you treated that infant with—” He couldn’t recall the name.
“Ankyloglossia,” Anna supplied. “He died that same week.” After a moment she said, “I only take off my gloves when I’m working, or when I’m at home without chance of company.”
With a few quick tugs he slipped it off and cradled her hand like an injured bird. And it was pitiful, rough and red and swollen, the nails cut to the quick for the sake of antisepsis. There was no denying that her hands were terrible.
“I wash—I scrub my hands and forearms dozens of times every day.”
“What exactly do you use?”
“We used to scrub nails, hands, and lower arms with potash soap and then rinse with a five percent carbolic acid solution.”
“Used to?”
“It worked fairly well. You can tell by dipping your hands in nutritive gelatin just after finishing the process. If no microbes grow in that culture in three days, that’s proof that the regimen is killing all infectious agents. Unfortunately it also was horrendously hard on our hands. So now we start with scrubbing, as before, but rinse first with eighty percent alcohol for a minute and then a three percent carbolic acid solution. It works as a sterile procedure and isn’t quite so hard on the hands. Still, Mrs. Lee’s hands are not nearly as bad, and she’s been scrubbing floors for all of her life.”
She was rambling, but it was hard to watch him studying her hand while her fingers twitched, ever so slightly. “The whole thing is made more complicated by the fact that I can’t operate if there’s even the slightest break in my skin. Then I put myself at risk. Someday they will come up with a better way to protect the patient and the surgeon both from infection.” And then, more hesitantly, “Are you put off by my hands?”
She had startled him. He raised his head to frown at her. “That would be very narrow-minded of me.”
Anna tried to draw her hand away, but he held on to it, his grip gentle but unyielding. For a moment she had the sense he might kiss her palm, and the idea of his tongue against her skin made her squirm.
“Don’t,” she said quietly, and, with fingers that were almost numb, put the glove back on.
“What you need,” Jack said after a long moment, “is some kind of glove made out of thin material. Not cloth, that wouldn’t work. Something like—”
His expression went momentarily blank, and then cleared. “Something like condoms, for the fingers and hands.”
The image that came to mind was outrageously funny. And intriguing, somehow.
He said, “Condoms are made out of lamb intestines, I think. If they could be sterilized and sewn into a glove, wouldn’t that work?”
Anna couldn’t help smiling. “This must be the oddest conversation of all time.”
“But wouldn’t it work?”
She thought for a moment. “That particular material is permeable, so the surgeon would still have to scrub diligently. I don’t think soap alone would be enough.”
“But say for a minute that it’s possible to sew a sterilized glove out of lamb’s intestine or something similar. You could test it with your gelatin—what did you call it?”
“Nutritive.”
“—to see if microbes grow. And if they did, you could experiment with different kinds of materials and sterilization and how you treat your hands, first. Until you got the right combination.”
“That would likely take years,” Anna said. “And someone willing to do the labor. The curing and sewing and sterilizing.”
“But it might just work,” Jack said. “It’s worth thinking about, at the very least.”
That evening when he walked her to her door, he paused in the shadow of the garden wall to kiss her.
“Savard,” he said, against her mouth. “I spend a lot of time thinking about you. Night and day, I think about you. And it’s not your hands that first come to mind.”
He kissed her again, thoroughly, roughly, and then waited until she had opened the door.
“I’m thinking about those gloves,” he called up to her. “Even if you aren’t.”
11
AT THE VERY beginning of her medical training Sophie had realized that the most difficult challenge she would face was not chemistry or pathology, but what Aunt Quinlan called her tenderhearted nature. Medicine demanded calm, rational, reasoned thinking and quick decisions. The ability—the willingness—to cause discomfort and even pain in pursuit of a cure. Sophie learned to think of her heart as something she had to put away, lock away while she worked.
Children died of diseases that were preventable. W
omen died in childbirth despite the very best medical care. They came to her with cancers of the breast and womb and mind, with hands crushed in factory accidents, with burns and broken bones, with their fears and their stories. She listened, and where she could, she helped. She sometimes—too often—failed.
As now she feared she was failing Rosa. Certainly she had had no real comfort to offer when they took the girls to Blackwell’s Island to see their father buried.
Lia took comfort in being held and rocked and read to. Rosa, calm, efficient, ferocious Rosa had retreated into her sorrow and anger and would accept nothing from anyone. The only time she seemed to relax at all was when she was in the garden with Mr. Lee, and it was only with Lia that she allowed herself to bend when her little sister remembered, suddenly, that they had found and lost their father on the same day.
Rosa wanted nothing for herself and was almost impossible to engage in any conversation, unless it had to do with her brothers.
For almost three weeks now Anna and Jack had been visiting child welfare institutions, whenever they both had a few hours to spare. Twice or three times a week he would come for supper and then afterward sit at the kitchen table with Rosa and go over where they had been and what they had discovered. It was an impressive list, and a disappointing one. They had interviewed staff and children at the Society for the Protection of Endangered Children, the Children’s Aid Society office and lodging house, the Howard Mission, the Shepherd’s Fold, the Leake and Watts Orphan Asylum, the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children, and orphan asylums run by the Episcopal, Protestant, Baptist, and Methodist churches. Within the next few days they would start visiting Roman Catholic orphan asylums together.
They made other inquiries, too, that they did not tell Rosa about, and might not simply because they hoped it would never occur to her that her brothers could be someplace far worse than an orphan asylum.
Just now Jack and Anna were in the kitchen talking to Aunt Quinlan and Rosa. From the open door came the sound of voices rising and falling in a regular rhythm, and then Rosa’s voice rose and wobbled and broke. She so seldom cried that Sophie wondered what news Jack had brought.