House of Thieves

by Charles Belfoure

  “Yes,” Cross said, nodding. “I can bring you your own copies of the drawings.”

  “From now on, it’s better to meet elsewhere. You’ll be told where to go and when.” Kent rose from his chair. The meeting was over. “Please don’t think me rude, but I have a Presbyterian Hospital board meeting in an hour over on East Seventy-Second,” Kent said apologetically as he escorted Cross to the foyer. “But before you go, you must see my latest treasure.”

  He led Cross to a large oak table with carved legs and removed a heavy sheet of paper, revealing what looked like a very old, yellowed parchment.

  “An early eighth-century illuminated manuscript from France. Isn’t it magnificent?”

  Though Cross didn’t give a damn, he pretended to be impressed out of courtesy. After taking a respectful amount of time to examine the gold-leaf-flecked pages, he nodded and walked toward the library doors.

  “Henceforth, Mr. Cross, you must learn to think like a criminal. Coming from your background, that may be difficult,” Kent said as he slid open the paneled doors.

  “It didn’t seem to be an obstacle for you.”

  Kent gave a roar of laughter. “I suppose Griffith told you all about me. True, Princeton didn’t give me much training for my line of work. You’re a Harvard man?”

  Cross nodded.

  “A satisfactory school, but they have no eating clubs, unlike Princeton. So uncivilized,” he said. “Do take a look around the building before you go. You’ll find it most interesting.”

  “I walked through right before it opened. The architect, Henry Hardenbergh, is a friend of mine. It’s a remarkable building,” Cross said softly, looking up at the ceiling. “The best apartment building in the city. I wish I had done it.”

  8

  In the courtyard of the Dakota, Cross drew a deep breath and looked up at the four seven-story-high stone walls surrounding him. He felt like a mouse trapped in a box.

  At the corner of Seventy-Second Street, he walked across Eighth Avenue into Central Park. The Transverse Road that cut across the vast green space was filled with carriages. It was the time of day when, rain or shine, society people paraded themselves. Various conveyances, pulled by teams of sleek horses with two men in full livery atop the box, traveled back and forth on the carriage drives. Every day without fail, hordes of onlookers lined the roadways of the park to watch the Knickerbockers, the parvenus, and the famous pass by in unending procession. Pure vanity, not fresh air, was what brought the society women to Central Park each afternoon. Cross paid them no mind. Instead, lost in thought, he veered off on one of the winding paths through the trees.

  George was safe, he told himself, and that was all that mattered. He could do nothing to stop his own involvement with Kent; no one was coming to rescue him. Griffith had been murdered before his meeting with Byrnes in the police department. Cross was on his own.

  He had no choice but to become a criminal in order to save not only George’s life, but the rest of his family’s as well. With his loved ones in danger, he shouldn’t be doubting what he had to do. And still—still he wavered. Was it out of some conviction that resorting to crime went against all that he believed? It wasn’t a matter of faith. Cross hadn’t been brought up in a religious family—society people went to church every Sunday, Easter, and Christmas because it was expected of them, but it was all for show.

  Was he afraid? Did he make a moral objection to committing crime as cover for this fear? Yes, Cross thought. He secretly knew this to be true. Deep down, he was a coward. More than twenty years ago, during the Civil War, he faced the decision of whether to fight. He hired a substitute to serve in his place. Not to pursue business or a professional career, like the other men of his class, but because the thought of being ripped apart by a volley of rifle or artillery fire in some far-off field terrified him.

  War had seemed a noble and abstract concept to him. Then he saw Matthew Brady’s photographs of the dead on the battlefield. No one had ever shown the cruel reality of war in such a way. The illustrated papers depicted only the victorious, marching to glory. Brady’s pictures were unbelievably real, a harsh image of bullet-ridden corpses rotting in the sun. That was someone’s son or brother lying there, Cross had thought, the soldier’s eyes and mouth wide open and frozen in shock, hundreds of flies buzzing about the open wounds. Cross’s mind transposed his own face onto one of the corpses, and he actually shook with fright.

  It was his father who told him of the substitute law. He was secretly overjoyed. Though he put up a pretense of wanting to fight, his father, a successful businessman who didn’t give a damn about slavery and saw the great profit to be made from the war, browbeat him into hiring a substitute. Cross was saved because his father could afford the three-hundred-dollar payment. But his older brother, Robert, refused to sit out the war. He volunteered immediately.

  While the war raged, Cross gave his choice no mind. But the Union won, and the returning warriors were admired and worshiped. His brother and the others had probably been scared to death. Yet they chose to serve. Robert had even won a medal for gallantry in action, which made Cross feel even more a coward. Ever since, a sense of shame had dogged his heels. And he was still a coward; he had proved that with his vacillations. But no matter how scared he was, he had to do this. Even if it meant getting himself killed.

  He needed to clear his mind and determine which place to rob. He came to the edge of the lake’s south dogleg and sat on the grass bank, watching the fleet of snow-white swans gliding along the still surface. Forming a list of past projects in his head, Cross tried to visualize each one, tried to remember who the client was and where the building was located. But he’d been in practice for fourteen years; there were more buildings than he could recall with any clarity. All the offices, the apartments, Saint Mary’s Church on West Sixty-Fourth Street, train stations in the suburbs, the Exchange Hotel, Manhattan Hospital and Dispensary, and scores of houses and cottages. He would have to go back to the office to refresh his memory.

  Cross made his way back through the trees to the Transverse Road, following it east until he came to the wide stone steps that swept down from the Mall to the Bethesda Terrace. There, the great fountain stood by the edge of the lake. It was an unbearably hot July day, and dozens of people refreshed themselves in the fine spray carried off the fountain by the breeze. Children stood at the edge, splashing the water at one another. A few ragged urchins, contrary to park rules, were wading. Some society ladies holding brightly colored parasols to keep the heat at bay had even gotten out of their carriages to stroll the Terrace.

  Cross stood at the top of the stairs, staring at the scene. Central Park had actually become the democratic meeting ground that its architects, Olmsted and Vaux, intended it to be. Below him, the wealthy rubbed elbows with the lowest of the low, immigrants from the Lower East Side and the Bowery. His class was never this close to such people, not unless they were shining shoes or washing floors. At any time they liked, the men and women of Cross’s class could travel to the Berkshires, Newport, or Long Branch for fresh air and nature. But the convenience of Central Park drew them in. For the poor, Central Park was their oasis, easily reachable by horse car or elevated train. There, they could stretch out on the grass for a few hours before returning to the squalor of their everyday lives. Cross saw the park as a masterpiece, a work of art. Everything, save the large rock outcroppings, had been designed and placed by man.

  With a sigh, Cross descended to the Terrace and circled the fountain. He was making his way back up when someone called his name. Turning, he saw an old client, William Cook.

  “Playing hooky from work, old boy?” Cook was a short man in his early fifties, not fat but exceedingly well fed. A member of the new rich, he’d made tens of millions in the shoe business in Saint Louis. His wife had then forced him to move to New York to breech the walls of Aunt Caroline’s high society. Many of the city’s milli
onaires were originally from the Midwest or West Coast. Like the tens of thousands of poor immigrants who streamed through Castle Garden in the Battery, these wealthy people descended upon the city each year, seeking a new life.

  While Cook was a “shoddyite,” dressed in only the best suits, he was a good, decent man. He only flaunted his wealth as offensively as he did because he wanted to please his social climber of a wife.

  “Hello, Bill. Yes, you’ve caught me. But why aren’t you at work?”

  “We’re shutting up the house and taking the steamer to the cottage at Newport tonight. Alice loves that place you designed for us, John. I think she likes it more than the one you did in the city.”

  “That’s kind of you to say.” The “cottage” Cross had designed for the Cooks on Bellevue Avenue in Newport was a twenty-four-room, wood-frame house covered with shingles and surrounded by deep porches. Cross considered it one of the best things he’d done. He loved when a client told him how much they appreciated his work.

  “Of course, I wanted to take a stroll in the park before we left. Nice thing about having a home on Fifth Avenue: Central Park is your front yard! I love walking about the place. Lot of good lookers on parade, if you know what I mean,” Cook said and winked.

  “Helen and I will be coming up later this month. I’ll give you a call. We can meet at the casino,” Cross said, waving good-bye as he trotted up the stairs.

  “That would be awfully jolly,” Cook called.

  Cross looked back and smiled. The new rich, Granny complained, were always using vulgar British phrases like that.

  On Fifth Avenue, Cross walked along the inside of the low stone wall separating the park from the wide sidewalk. He stopped at East Seventy-Eighth Street and surveyed the Cook mansion from behind the trunk of an elm tree. He smiled when he saw the huge Renaissance Revival mansion.

  The house looked impenetrable from the outside because a dry moat surrounded it on all four sides. After his first trip to England, Cook had become crazy about castles and moats and wanted one like a child covets a toy for Christmas. A real moat was out of the question for his new city mansion, but Cross had cleverly provided one without water, a stone-lined ditch that was fifteen feet wide and twenty feet deep. It actually had a practical purpose; it accommodated two stories of kitchens, storage rooms, and servants’ quarters below the street level, with windows even. To Cook’s delight, his architect added iron-and-wood drawbridges to span the moat to the front door and to the rear service entry. At night or when the house was empty, the drawbridges were raised, creating a wide, deep, protective chasm between the sidewalk and the house. But best of all, Cook felt that the unique design meant that he didn’t need a night watchman while he was away.

  Yes, this will do nicely, Cross thought.

  9

  Though he was a prisoner, George had to admit the jail was magnificent. Especially the views. To the south, you could see Kaaterskill High Peak; to the north, South Lake and North Mountain. George and his jailer, Tommy Flannigan, were taking a stroll along the front of the Kaaterskill Hotel, the finest in the Catskill Mountains. A four-hundred-foot-long building with three-story columns, it boasted six hundred rooms with steam radiators, running water, and electric service bells.

  “You know what I like best about this place, Georgie? The air. It’s so cool and refreshing. Not like bein’ in that steam bath in Manhattan. I thought it might be more pleasant for us to spend some time together out here.”

  “Yes, it feels wonderful,” George said. He hadn’t given the weather a second’s thought. It wasn’t as important as knowing whether he would live or die.

  It was a shrewd move on Kent’s part, bringing him up there. If he’d kept him captive in Manhattan, George could have escaped and been on the next boat to China. But in the Catskills, one hundred thirty miles north of the city, he was in the middle of a wilderness with no place to run.

  “Look at the size of this joint, will you? You know that it all got built on account of a fight over fried chicken?”

  “What?”

  “The owner, George Harding. He was staying over at the Catskill Hotel and wanted his daughter to have fried chicken, but they wouldn’t give it to her because it wasn’t on the day’s menu. They told him to go build his own hotel if he wanted fried chicken. And that’s what he did,” said Flannigan with a braying laugh.

  The sound reminded George of a jackass.

  As they walked back to the main lobby, George watched Flannigan out of the corner of his eye. For years, he’d terrorized victims in the Five Points and the Bowery. Once, when he was arrested, the police found a price list for services in his pocket: nineteen dollars to break an arm; fifteen dollars to bite off an ear; ten dollars to break a nose and jaw; twenty-five dollars to stab or shoot in the leg. But for all these horrible acts of violence, Flannigan had a soft streak, and he’d been George’s constant sympathetic companion for the previous two days. George could see that the genial bear of a man was downhearted about having to kill him.

  “Come on, Georgie,” he said, slapping George on the back with his big paw. “Things will work out. From what I hear, Mr. Kent may let the debt slide.”

  “After you break my arms and legs and poke out my eyes.”

  “Oh no, Georgie. I’d never do that to you. I’ve always had a hard time beating the hell out of really handsome guys like you. Seems like destroying God’s best work.”

  “That’s very noble of you, Tommy,” George muttered.

  The two men entered the hotel lobby, which was crowded with families waiting to check in and out. Since its opening in 1881, the Kaaterskill had become a fashionable destination for New York society. Like a Madrid bull, Flannigan rammed and pushed the well-dressed customers aside to get to the front desk. George waited in a sitting area, looking over a copy of the Tribune. Soon, he realized, his death might be a front-page article. Most murder victims in New York City were found floating in the East or Hudson Rivers, their bloated bodies bumping against the bulkheads of the wooden piers lining the island. He could imagine the police going to his home and asking his father to identify his rotting corpse. His family would be crushed. It’d be better, George thought grimly, for my body to completely disappear. Then no one would discover the ugly circumstances of his downfall. Kent was a gentleman—of a sort. Perhaps he would be amenable to such an arrangement.

  “Mr. Cross.”

  George looked up to see Mary Morse, a pretty, blue-eyed brunette in a navy-blue walking dress and matching hat. Next to her was a small woman in her fifties, with beady eyes and an expressionless face. The chaperone, thought George. Every girl of Mary’s set had one who followed her like a shadow.

  “Hello, Miss Morse.”

  The lack of enthusiasm in George’s voice brought a look of disappointment to Mary’s face. She had hovered about him at his graduation party like a fly around horse manure—to his annoyance.

  “It’s so nice to see you here,” she said brightly. “We’re stopping for a few days before traveling to Newport. This afternoon, we’re going on a walk in the Catskills to visit the waterfall. It’s most beautiful. I do hope you might join us. Mrs. Rampling, my mother’s great-aunt, will be with me.”

  Mrs. Rampling gave George the iciest of smiles. There would be no monkey business on her watch.

  “I’m sorry, Miss Morse, but I’ve made other plans,” George said. “Maybe later this week, if you’re still here, I could call on you.”

  “Oh yes! We’re in room—”

  “Holy shit, I had a helluva time fightin’ my fuckin’ way up there to get the goddamn key. Oh, hello there,” said Flannigan, trotting up to them.

  “Miss Morse, this is Mr. Flannigan…a friend of mine,” George managed.

  “Damn glad to meet ya,” Flannigan said, thrusting his broad red hand toward Mary. She shook it gingerly, as if it were dipped in blood. “And who’s
this other gorgeous dove?”

  “Mrs. Rampling,” snapped the chaperone, stepping back. Clearly she had no intention of touching Flannigan.

  “Hey, what do you say we all have a drink in the bar, huh? I’m buying.”

  “Miss Morse was on her way to take a walk in the mountains, Mr. Flannigan. Maybe another time,” George said.

  “Sure. What’s your room number? I can come by later to get you.”

  “I already asked them, but unfortunately, they’ve made plans for later.”

  “Oh, that’s a goddamn shame.”

  “Miss Morse, maybe we’ll run into each other again.” George bowed and dragged Flannigan away by the arm.

  “Good-looking babe, George. Were you making time with her? I hope I didn’t butt into anything.”

  “No, Tommy. In fact, you rescued me, and I’m eternally grateful,” George said, laughing.

  Mary was like all the girls in his world. Marriage was their only vocation; it was what they were brought up for. With his looks and family background, he was a prime candidate—or victim—for their machinations.

  Flannigan and George walked to their room on the sixth floor of the east tower, the best spot in the hotel. The room was large but not fancy. It had plain white walls, two beds, a chest of drawers, and a bright carpet. A green recamier stood in the corner; George flopped down onto it, rubbing his hands over his face. His mind was racing. When—and how—had his life changed?

  George knew the answer. He could picture the winter night he’d first stepped through the door of Pendleton’s, the most exclusive den of iniquity in the city. Some Harvard upperclassmen had taken him during Christmas holidays in ’84. At Pendleton’s, gentlemen of the highest pedigree could gamble, drink, and seduce chorus girls, free from the disapproving eyes of Aunt Caroline’s New York society. Tucked away in a brownstone on East Forty-Fifth Street, the interior of the club was lavishly designed, with walnut-paneled walls, marble floors, and crystal chandeliers. In private gambling rooms, one could play faro, poker, baccarat, or roulette. Liquor and food flowed freely. It was as if George had opened a trapdoor and walked down a stair into a magical world of enchantment and pleasure.