“Your honor. My client obviously has no record, isn’t a threat….”
“Released in your recognizance, Mr. Maple. Get a date! Next!”
A weak smile clinging to his face, the lawyer let Mrs. Edwards pass down the aisle. Max followed close behind her, eager to put a dozen questions to the Midnight Band’s leader. He finally caught up with her on the Police Court’s steps.
Trotting fast to the bottom step, he blocked Mrs. Edwards’s way. “Excuse me. Max Greengrass, New York Herald. Would you mind saying a word about the charges against you?”
Standing close to her, he noted Mrs. Edwards’s small, delicate hands, the faint wrinkles radiating from the corners of her eyes, her mild smile. It was difficult to imagine those fingers smothering a powerful, struggling animal. Recalling Mrs. Warner’s savage technique, though, his stomach sank.
Mrs. Edwards drew her head back and gazed at him intently. For a moment she fiddled with her elbow-length white glove. Had she seen the Heralds coverage of her cause? He hoped not. If his instincts were right, she took the Trib, religious-society periodicals, and nothing more.
She didn’t shrink from him. Instead, in measured tones, she launched into her own defense. “This affair is an outrage, and when the case comes up I will show that it is so. Here I set out in answer to a request made to me by a respectable resident of the city, and because I chose to stop on the way to perform an act of kindness, I am arrested and locked up in prison overnight. It’s a shame.”
He offered his sympathy, inspiring her to go on.
“Some time ago I was notified that there were fourteen stray cats in the yard of 32 Cornelia Street. Thursday night I started to get some of them, but succeeded in dispatching only two, as the others were too wild anc would not come near me.”
“You went uptown then?”
“I got on the El car headed for Mrs. Smock’s house on One Hundrec Thirty-Sixth Street. I saw a poor little starving kitten running along i hedgerow on an open lot near the house where I was going. I stopped anc did what under the circumstances was the most humane thing to do.”
“I understand.”
“After that, I placed it in my basket. The attitude the general public takes toward a work which is productive of such good results is really remarkable.”
“Actually, we’ve received a number of letters supporting your cause. Did you deposit the cat somewhere?”
The cords in her neck grew taut. “Where we take them and where we put them is our own affair. We make decisions based on modern science.”
Mystified by this reference, he returned to a more concrete question. “Are you gaining public support?”
“Dozens of people have volunteered to join us lately, but our membership secretary, Miss Van Siclen, tells me most are entirely unsuitable.”
“How so?”
“Well, they weren’t quite the right sort for doing good works.”
“Not everyone has the proper character for reform,” he agreed, offering his practiced neutral face. “Would you mind giving me your membership secretary’s address?”
She turned the question aside smoothly. “I couldn’t impose on her. She’s a very private person.”
“I just need to ask her one or two questions.”
“Certainly not,” she snapped. As she drew her head back, her lips compressed and her nostrils flared as if she had smelled something foul.
He had pushed too hard. Before she could flee, he shifted to a more congenial subject. “What inspired you to perform these charitable acts?”
“The Henry Bergh Association is supposed to look out for all stray animals in New York, but they are neglecting their business. I have taken 122 homeless cats from the churchyard of St. Brigid’s at Avenue B and Eleventh Street in the last year. In the yard of 217 West Forty-Ninth Street, there are seventeen half-wild cats I have as yet been unable to capture. Go look at the vacant lot at 430 Columbus Avenue. There are a dozen more starving there. Not to speak of the ones still running wild around the yard of 32 Cornelia Street. The ASPCA is euthanizing abandoned dogs, but they are derelict when it comes to suffering cats.”
Despite some of her cryptic remarks, Mrs. Edwards appeared far more rational than Mrs. Warner, who seemed totally unhinged. Now he dropped in the question that had been plaguing him, watching her intently to see if she reacted. “Would you happen to know Martin Mourtone?”
Mrs. Edwards barely blinked. “No. Who is he?”
“Oh, probably nothing to do with you. What about an establishment called Stephenson’s?”
She failed to react to this wild stab either. “No, I never heard of it. But why don’t you go to those locations I mentioned? See for yourself. We have the resources to carry on this fight indefinitely. Put that in your paper.”
“I’ll pay a visit to Cornelia Street.”
“Mr. Greengrass. I am aware that because we are women and choose to depart from conventional methods, we are ridiculed and funny stories are written about us.” She gave him a penetrating glance. Nervously, he shifted his weight from one foot to the other.
“I see.”
“I find among the poorer classes a disposition to harbor half-fed cats that are compelled for want of food to seek the streets, where they eventually die. In the cellars of tenements I sometimes find dozens of cats in all stages of disease.”
He was struck dumb. Mrs. Edwards went hunting in tenement basements. The depth of her compulsion shook him. Why would this goo-goo with her fine diction and apparent social position crawl around in reeking cellars? What about sloshing around ankle-deep in standing sewage? How did she know a water rat wouldn’t creep into her drawers? All of his attempts to penetrate her thinking were useless. Mrs. Edwards, however decorous, was in the grips of a mania that had nothing to do with reform.
“You actually go into the cellars?” he asked cautiously.
She went on serenely, a subtle shift in her tone suggesting spiritual exaltation.
“We have to make these sacrifices. These are the places to go if one wishes to see the misery cats are forced to undergo, and these are the places where the Bergh officials do not go. In the last two years I’ve been compelled to do away with over three thousand strays. Do you think I like doing it?”
She drew her shoulders back and stared at him defiantly.
Her eerie calm rattled him. Perhaps what she denied was at the core of her compulsion. Did she derive pleasure from killing cats? Why else would a person seek out these repugnant and dangerous places night after night? And why would she claim so many victims, unless she thought the sheer numbers would cast glory on her name? Stranger still, her following was growing, as the letters to the Herald demonstrated. He might think she was a dangerous crank, but to some Herald renders she was Joan of Arc.
“I’m certain you don’t. That’s quite a large number of cats you say you’ve killed. Do you think it’s accurate?”
“We keep extensive records.” For the first time he noticed the ends of raw scratches high on her forearms. Her elbow-length white gloves didn’t totally cover the evidence of some recent skirmish.
“It occurs to me that the tenement cats are doing a service, aren’t they?”
“I can’t imagine what.”
“Well, they keep down the rodents.”
“We have a saying: ‘A house full of cats is a house full of sores.'” She chanted these lines. “You and your newspaper should brush up on modern thinking, Mr. Greengrass.”
Hopping rapidly up the courthouse steps, a shrunken man in a pearl-colored derby practically bowled Max over. Barely five feet tall, he wore narrow, high-heeled shoes. His black, darting eyes and his close-cropped black mustache gave him the air of a confidence man. A pink wart clung to the tip of his nose.
“Sorry, sonny,” he apologized as he bounded past Max and took hold of Mrs. Edwards’s elbow. Despite his odd appearance, the man exuded self-assurance.
“Mrs. Edwards? May I have a word with you?”
Now
Max recognized him. It was Abe Hummel. Fascinated, he watched the lawyer consult his death’s-head watch. Compared to his extravagant partner William H. Howe, Abe Hummel sported a mere three diamond rings and was otherwise the picture of sartorial restraint.
The gimlet-eyed attorney spoke rapidly. For once, Mrs. Edwards seemed to lose her composure. Her even features contracted in a look of furious concentration. Hummel was working her over fast.
Max stood there gaping. What attraction could the Midnight Band’s case hold for Howe and Hummel? The Band’s entire operation, however bizarre, bore goo-gooism’s distinct odor. Mrs. Edwards would fit right into Mr. Comstock’s Society for the Suppression of Vice, not exactly Abe Hummel’s natural habitat. Yet Martin Mourtone had earned a bullet in the head after claiming knowledge of the Midnight Band. When his remains disappeared, William H. Howe had materialized. Hummel’s interest in Mrs. Edwards seemed natural in that light. If the firm also represented
Stephenson’s, as Max suspected, Howe and Hummel were cradling every possible conflicting interest in their gentle hands.
His mission completed, Hummel made a toy soldier’s bow and clicked away in his shiny “tooth-pick” shoes. Max took a step toward Mrs. Edwards, but, scowling, she waved him off.
chapter fifteen
Under the Third Avenue El, an endless shower of iron dust had turned awnings on either side of the avenue rust-red. Max bounded up the stairs to the station two at a time. In a minute, a Forney steam engine roared in, he leaped aboard, and he was on his way to 32 Cornelia Street.
Gazing around the half-empty car, Max observed a Syrian reading an Arabic newspaper, a proper church lady, a pair of yarmulke-wearing observant Jews, a Chinese, a Bohemian peasant woman in fantastic garb, and an unconscious tramp, his fish-white stomach winking into view as he snored away. A Negro in a lemon-yellow suit and a pigeons-blood cravat sat perfectly upright, hands gripping his knees.
Max loved these exotic tableaus and had to remind himself to tear his gaze away from the odd foreigners. He knew they were just human beings who craved a decent meal, someone to love, and a dry place to sleep, but they appeared so utterly alien that he couldn’t stop staring. Yet he had been born abroad too, and he could summon up scraps of memories. He recalled Viennese boulevards, a garden with an ivy-covered wall, and a rusty iron ring on a worm-eaten door. He remembered a village with puddles for streets, a man with a beard that covered his chest trundling by. His mother said mice lived inside that greenish beard and shook with laughter when he hid under her skirts.
When his family landed in New York in 1873, he had been almost five, but he learned English in a few months and now spoke with a pure New York accent. Only in a technical sense was he an immigrant, he believed. It was the others, the recent arrivals, so strange and destitute, who were the real aliens. True, his family’s original name was Visneshevski, a moniker reeking of the Pale. On the boat from Hamburg, his father had heard about a fabulously wealthy German-Jewish family named Greengrass and managed to convince the immigration officer that Visneshevski meant Greengrass in Polish. Max had always known his new last name was an invention. His pedigree amounted to a petty fraud.
On his walk through Greenwich Village, cats trotted along with bits of fish in their mouths, cats got their backs up, hissed, limped, and tore at their fur. Cats lounged in the sun, cats sniffed around the back doors of restaurants. It took some groping to find the right alley, but he finally penetrated the 32 Cornelia Street courtyard. In the walled enclosure, a woman in a baggy dress was working the outdoor water pump that served the entire rear tenement. Two toms were chasing each other in dizzying circles. The first one had a fresh fish head in its jaws. In the shadows, a gray with a white chest was digging into a mass of slops. A wiry black cat darted into the appetizing swill and made off with a chunk of gristle.
That was all Max needed to see. He had his angle. His editor would eat this one up, he was sure.
Back in the newsroom, he asked Parnell whether he should see the paymaster and received a blank look in return. Worse, in the deep furrows of his editor’s forehead, Max read the onset of a black, Parnellian mood.
“You said I was on full-time? Do I have to sign some papers? Don’t I have to tell the paymaster when I started?”
“What the hell’re you talking about, Greengrass?”
Was the door slamming in his face again? He could barely believe it. Then a familiar sensation took hold. Filled with shame, he was plunging down a black hole of his own invention. Once again his blind optimism had gotten the better of him. Angry, embarrassed, he could barely stammer out the words. “Before I went out, you said you were hiring me.”
“For that story! That’s all. Christ! How long have you been a space man?
Haven’t you ever heard a figure of speech? If I want you on staff, you’ll know, don’t worry.”
Stunned, he fought to keep his balance. The words rattled out of him. “Right. I’ll knock out the Midnight Band piece. I caught an interview with the queen assassin. You’ll like this angle….”
“No rush on it. We’re jammed up already. There’s a decent fire on King Street. Want it?”
Jammed up? His stomach went into freefall. Parnell was losing interest in the Midnight Band just when the story was getting more intricate. “She had some blueblood lawyer. There was damn near a riot. That judge, Bernstein, was tearing his hair out.”
“You want the address?” bure.
The editor scribbled out the number, emitted a low noise resembling a growl, then spun away. Opening and closing his fists, Max stood there staring at the back of Parnell’s scrawny neck, a fresh-shaved, paper-white neck that never saw the sun.
Singed curtains and blackened bedding. The fire turned out to be a bust.
Despite his black mood, he rode the El back to the Herald and went through the motions. He commandeered a messenger and sent a note to Howe asking for an emergency audience. He assumed the lawyer would dodge him again, but he wanted to be sure.
To kill time, he spread his notes out and started to reconstruct Mrs. Edwards’s arraignment. He tried three different leads, but they sounded too flat. Disgusted, he yanked the sheet from the typewriter’s barrel and started again. Slowly, his mind returned to the courtroom. He recalled a cabby’s booze-seared face, the hissing gallery, the snickers, the jeers, the egal gobbledygook, the bubble and squeak of justice. On his smeared lotebook page, he reread a sentence he’d written in capital letters. The courtyard angle. Only a couple of hours ago, he’d been sky-high about it. Now he wasn’t sure he could pull it off.
Numb to his surroundings, he picked at his nails, took two trips to the ohn, pecked out another fewgrafs. Every word seemed questionable, every sentence a house of cards. Yet here and there a phrase lived, a quote sounded like the street’s mouth.
He’d missed his deadline, but Parnell was going to get the story whether he liked it or not.
All the while, Howe and Hummel maintained an Olympian silence.
Max had a bender in mind, but he needed to drag Danny along.
Mrs. DeVogt’s sitting room smelled of wax and varnish. Muttering furiously, Swarms sat squirming on the sofa, snapping the pages of his newspaper.
“Come on out, I’m buying,” Max said. He could already feel the first spine-melting drink.
Darkened by sweat, Danny’s thinning hair looked like a nest of wires. When he saw Max, he began reading newspaper ads aloud. “Sarah Jacob’s Blood Thickener. Dr. Oresetes Fainting Powder. Firbanks Nerve Tonic. Do people throw money at these things?”
“They’ll throw money away on Corbett and Mitchell.”
Unable to contain himself, Danny shook the pages. “I’m not talking about some two-bit heavyweights. Dr. Minsky’s Electric Belt! Christ! A perfectly good company seizes up, and all people can think of doing is throwing away every dollar on quackery. If people would just do the right thing, save a little, we wouldn’t be in the shape we’re in.”
Since Swarms never save
d a dime, Max found his tirade incomprehensible. After his own disasters, he didn’t have much patience left either. A jittery, overtired sensation drove him on. “What’re you raving about? Let’s take the cure; come on.”
“You probably don’t know what’s going on, do you? You’re just standing there and grinning like an ape.”
Danny looked so bereft, Max let up. “What happened? Did you lose your spot at Tony Pastor’s?”
“Might as well have. Equitable went belly-up. They can’t peddle a bond to a blind man.”
“What does that have to do with you?”
“Nothing too drastic. Yesterday they approved my loan, that’s all.”
“The business loan?”
Max knew that Danny had been counting on the money to bail out his music-publishing venture. Without it, the actor would have trouble making next month’s rent on his spartan office. Well, all the more reason to tear up the Rialto together tonight.
“Credit’s tighter than a witch’s sphincter.”
“What about some other bank?”
“The banks are falling like tenpins. You got your head in the sand, or what?”
“C’mon. A few farmers’ banks in the Midwest. Not here. New York’s got all the gold.”
“We were ready to put out this tune, ‘Lorelei, I’ll Remember to Recall.’ It’s kind of ‘A Mansion of Aching Hearts,’ without the dragging tempo. Lah lalah lalala, lah lalah la lee, you hear it once, it screws right into your head. Now. Pfft.”
“How much are you into Sim for?”
“That bloodsucker? Don’t even ask me.”
“Yeah, well, I got hired and fired in the same day.”
Distracted from his own misery, Swarms brightened. “That’s a new one. How’d you pull that off?”
“Talent. You have to be born with it. How about a nice fresh one? You know what they look like, with the foam on top?”
He didn’t hear her come in. Under the archway that separated the sitting room from the dining room, Gretta stood glaring at both of them.
The Midnight Band of Mercy Page 14