Irene Adler 08 - Spider Dance

  I decided to watch the Episcopal Club of New York and moved my cart to the street across from it.

  Hacks came and went, and the occasional carriage. The churchmen who went in and out were indeed a dark-clad lot, mostly clean-shaven, somewhat portly, and none reminded me of the lean, cloaked figure that had glided into the club in the wee hours of last night.

  My presence attracted other local loungers and peddlers, and we engaged in a lively conversation on whether churchmen were more or less free with a coin to the working poor.

  It soon became clear that the Episcopal Club of New York was a favored daytime refuge of the local clergy, but also functioned, as some London clubs did, as a convenient place for out-of-town members to bunk overnight on occasion.

  So some members were resident, some transient, and all appeared to be respectable to the point of inspiring total despair that my watch duty would be anything but stuporous.

  I missed London’s concealing fogs. I was forever having to hide my presence or produce some make-work reason for it after dark, such as repairing a broken wheel on my cart.

  At least I was off the overlit thoroughfares blazing with that accursed innovation of Edison’s, electric lamps. Both the criminal and the detective have reason to abhor this latest invention.

  The street had emptied by midnight. I had lit my pipe and was wistfully regarding its thin blue haze in the light of a distant gas lamp as some wisp of fog when three men on foot came hastily down the street.

  The pipe was smoldering in my pocket, and I was enfolded against the inset doorway in an instant.

  Like my thin cloaked man, these fellows were overdressed for a summer night. They wore long ulsters and wide-brimmed soft felt hats.

  And they avoided the club’s front entrance for a side approach. All sight and sound of them melted inside before I could ascertain their exact means of entry.

  I had hardly bestirred myself to find out when I heard the soft twitch of a hinge, and the muffled noises of many men.

  My doorway remained my bulwark as I saw four men exit the building for the street. My hand went to the pocket sheltering not a warm pipe bowl but cold steel with a checkered walnut butt: my Webley Metropolitan Police pistol.

  Watson knew I seldom carried this weapon. Indeed, I find weapons a bother, so Watson is only too happy to unearth in my service the Adams six-shot revolver, a souvenir of his time in the Second Afghan War. Here, abroad, I must equip myself for all eventualities. This was indeed one, for the fourth figure in the men’s midst was hooded and bound and being rushed from the sedate environs of the Episcopal Club of New York to God only knew where.

  I followed, my shoes soled with silence, my pipe growing as cold as my pistol, and my will hardening as well. At last I was on the trail of the villains who had slaughtered the old man. I am never surprised by the monstrosity of man, but now I was eager to know how and why these particular men had come across Europe, apparently, to invade the castle of an American millionaire.

  I had, of course, studied a map of Manhattan Island. On foreign ground, I was as obligated as an invading general to know the lay of the land. Call me Cornwallis.

  Here, in New York, I followed a fretwork of streets. We headed south, toward the tangled area comprising Greenwich Village (amazing how these Yanks memorialized British place names right and left).

  Beyond this lay the industrial areas reaching toward the docks and all the warehouses, gin mills and doss joints that plague every port city throughout the world.

  I must tread as close on my prey’s toes as possible without alerting them to my presence. The thrill of the hunt is like none other I have known. While I would never slay a dumb brute in its tracks, be it bird or beast, I find man the most subtle and rewarding game. One can never underestimate the prey’s ability to turn and fight, to defeat my simple object of finding where he goes to ground.

  My every sense and all the faculties I had spent a lifetime honing were at fever pitch. I sensed each sound and smell in front of and behind this party. I was Toby, the tracking hound, only I had a secondary charge: to remain invisible and undetected, even as I hunted the unseen spoor of unknown men abroad for an undisclosed purpose.

  That the ground was not familiar added a certain challenge in the blood.

  Ah! They had vanished into a row of warehouses. The reek of salt and fish enveloped all. Lights? No electricity here near these docks.

  I could sense the oily water washing against ancient rotting wood only a few hundred feet away. Miss my prey, and they could be afloat on those soiled waves, striking for some steamship or boat.

  No. Their business was here. With Vanderbilt. And myself.

  I began to breach each apparently abandoned building, testing doors, peering into the deeper darkness, scenting oil and tar and rotting rope.

  These men knew where they went. I had to find out where that was. I feared for the muffled form in their midst. If I took too long, came too late . . . another body for the billiard table.

  Of course she had been absolutely right, coming on the scene, knowing nothing about the history of it. The woman. As always, as Eve in Eden, deceptive but perceptive in equal measure. Immediately reacting in character, like the superb actress she was. Is. And perhaps superb in another area. Holy Mither of God! No cheap stage accent, but the genuine rhythm and lilt of Mother Ireland. Otherwise I would have been alerted to the impersonation. What a woman! Crucified. A word not bandied about at the end of the nineteenth century, by God. In an instant she had transfixed what I had not yet seen.

  I . . . am an idiot Apostle, and she is the Magdalen on Resurrection Day. She saw, she was first. I know that much.

  I would not be here but for her.

  So where am I? Thrown off the trail, frantically hunting men who mean no good. When have men ever meant good if they were not forced to it?

  Ah. This door opens on an oiled hinge.

  I cling to the wall. Waiting, sensing. I do not think, I feel, the only time I allow passion to overcome reason, and only now because it alone works.

  The air is still. Yet . . . someone has passed. There is a scent of . . . sealing wax. Ink. Fear.

  Here! I open another door, cross vast expanses of piled crates and machine oil.

  Oil. I withdraw the small pocket lantern, cast a narrow beam on footprints through the slick surface of the floor.

  We are all snails, in our way, and as simple to track.

  Even now, at midnight, I hear great winches whining and creaking, lading on crates of goods bound for Singapore and Queensland and South America’s many soiled cities.

  The oil tracks fade, but I have another clue to follow.

  A screech, sharp as an owl’s in this vast, high warehouse where no bird has perched.

  A scream, unmistakably a man’s.

  No time for secrecy, I must race to the rescue before it’s too late—

  I clamber up rough stairs, around a blind corner, the pistol out of my pocket . . .

  Nothing stealthy about my charge . . . oh, for Watson at the rear!

  I have reached a bridge of iron, high above the warehouse floor. Some overseer’s office, halfway to heaven.

  Men scatter like spiders, to the side, below, down stairs, suspended from railings.

  My pistol marks them and holds silent. They slither away. They are prey now. I must find their own victim.

  I open a door, half frosted glass, onto some cat’s cradle of an office strung far above the warehouse floor.

  Cramped, dirty, hardly more than a hole, occupied by a battered desk.

  On that desk, a man.

  With his hands transfixed to the old, oily wood with the sharp impaling spikes of . . . letter openers.

  The man’s eyes roll in his head as he swoons with pain. He is alive and can speak, can I but . . . unpin him and take him away from this mad, mercantile torture chamber.

  I do, but he swoons nonetheless.

  One man I can carry.

  I watch all t
he way for those who have done this, but they have melted away like spiderwebs in the rain. I know, can I but return to a civilized street in this city of devils, that I have captured a witness.

  32

  HELTER SHELTER

  The [newspaper] boys called him a great fake, but they were hardly just to him in that. I should rather call him a great actor, and without being that no man can be a great detective.

  —JACOB RHS, THE RECORDER OF LATE NINETEENTH-CENTURY NEW YORK CITY POVERTY, ABOUT INSPECTOR THOMAS BYRNES, NYC CHIEF OF DETECTIVES AND INVENTOR OF THE THIRD DEGREE

  FROM THE CASE NOTES OF SHERLOCK HOLMES

  In London I know every crevice where vice and venality might be found, where petty criminals go to ground.

  Here, in New York, I am in a new world.

  I stowed my rescued man in the capacious bottom of my peddler’s cart, unconscious, and set out to find my new friends, Hungry Joe and Mother Hubbard.

  In the middle of night the city shivers with skittering life forms. Like cockroaches, the criminal element scuttles over the empty streets, either celebrating successful felonies or in the process of robbing, killing, devouring.

  In London, I had a half dozen hidey-holes where I could don a disguise or wait like a spider until the web of my weaving trembled with the touch of my prey upon the silk.

  Not in New York.

  Everything was new, and forbidding. I needed allies, and quickly.

  Hungry Joe I finally found in a saloon not too far from the Vanderbilt mansion on Fifth Avenue. Great wealth always sits cheek-by-jowl with great larceny.

  “Oh, yeah! The peddler from Vanderbilt Row. Whatcha want, fellow? I’m off for the day, drinkin’ my profits away.”

  “I need a safe place to go to ground. I’ve a near-dead man to tend.”

  “Do you, now?” He whistled sharp over the foamy head of his beer. “Why should I help you?”

  I showed him.

  “Well, that’s damn patriotic of you! My pocket’s never offered a warm nest for a gold eagle before. We none of us have a place to call our own but the streets and the alleys. ’Cept Mother Hubbard. She’s got a crib, if’n you can pay the rent Down lower town way, where the swells don’t go ‘cept to get late-night ladies.”

  I waved the ten-dollar piece in front of his nose, and soon we were lurching along the darkened streets, he pulling my cart, I pushing. The sum was princely, but Vanderbilt could afford it and the case was dire.

  Watson is wrong. I have a heart. It was beating hard for the cause of the wounded man in my charge. My witness. If he lived.

  The place stank of beer and urine, no worse than any Whitechapel doss house or opium den. I could have used the calming effects of my 7 percent solution, but not here, where I controlled nothing.

  Mother Hubbard eyed, then acknowledged me, then demanded five dollars. I felt like a character in a Dickens novel, but I paid.

  I was shown to a somewhat sheltered corner, with a blanket in a crumpled heap. There I laid my charge, and dosed him with cheap whiskey for his wounds, and cheaper bread for his sustenance.

  Not for some time had I found occasion to go to ground so far on the selvage edge of a society. I was reminded of camping out on Grimpen Mire, unsuspected. Save now I was in the middle of a great metropolis, yet in a place somehow as wild as any moor in England.

  The man I tended raved in his sleep. I heard talk of giant spiders, and Ultramontanes, and the approaching hot irons. I felt transported to an earlier, viler age, to the Inquisition, when each man’s inviolable conscience was an invitation for torment and unimaginable torture.

  Crucifixion.

  A barbaric concept. The stuff of ancient history, and yet . . . relevant to the Vanderbilt case.

  I bandaged my charge’s wounds, wishing Watson were here to explain their extent.

  The poor youth caught my coat collar in his mutilated hands, and sang my praises, thanked me. In my own terms, I’ve done nothing. The overall pattern still eludes me. His suffering is a slap in the face. Yes, I’ve saved him from further torment, but until I know everything, that means nothing.

  He raves. Speaks in tongues. Spanish. French, which I know. He finally mutters a word. A word I know so well my blood chills. A name. Irene. The woman. I’d made certain that she remained far from my Vanderbilt investigation, and now I hear her name mentioned by the second victim of this shadowy conspiracy. I can’t doubt that she has somehow become the target of these pitiless villains.

  “Irene Norton,” he murmurs again. “No. No. No!” he screams.

  33

  DINING AT DELMONICO’S

  I used to wonder what disguise you would come in,

  but I never thought I would see you as Nellie Bly.

  —THE MATRON AT NEW YORK CITY POLICE HEADQUARTERS, 1889

  FROM NELLIE BLY’S JOURNAL

  Of course I asked Quentin Stanhope to lunch at Del-monico’s.

  Already he was squirming, no doubt remembering the disaster that had transpired the last time we two had dined at Delmonico’s.

  I wanted him to remember that awkward occasion. A man not at ease is a man I can bend to my own purposes, even a self-assured Englishman.

  For a wild moment, it occurred to me that I could try to enroll Sherlock Holmes in my quest . . . but, no, he had no such gentlemanly strictures piled upon him as Quentin. Nor had he the normal gentleman’s reluctance to treat a woman harshly. Only one woman might command extraordinary patience from him, and I was not she.

  I wondered briefly what Irene and her henchwoman Nell might be up to. Surely nothing as interesting, as scandalous, as bloody awful as the Affair at Noll Cottage. At last I could put to use the information on Madame Restell I had gleaned during the previous month!

  Nothing was wasted in the inventive reporter’s experience.

  I made sure that the maître d’hStel at Delmonico’s seated Quentin and myself in the fenced outdoor portion of the restaurant, where we could be seen by all comers.

  “Wouldn’t you rather lunch inside?” he inquired with a divinely attractive frown when we were led to a prized public table his English accent had commanded. “It’s beastly hot outside.”

  “You’ve survived the beastly heat of India,” I pointed out, “and I prefer a natural breeze.”

  At this he frowned further, for not a breath of wind was stirring.

  “You said you had an investigative matter to consult me upon,” he noted as soon as we had been seated.

  “Hold your horses, Mr. Stanhope. We haven’t even read the menu. It’s bad for the digestion to rush into lunch on a hot day.”

  So we ordered, I an iced tea, he a lemonade, not iced. The British abhor ice, except in their manner at times.

  Quentin’s manner was becoming frosty, if not ice-cold.

  “This meeting smacks of an attempted bribery,” he said. “You know I can’t help you reveal the Ripper.”

  “You’d be bribed by a lunch at Delmonico’s?”

  “You have more on your mind than lunch.”

  “Why, Mr. Stanhope, you can’t be implying that I would resort to . . . seduction to get a story.”

  The dull flush beneath his sunburned skin was even more attractive. Perhaps I would resort to seduction to get a story, though I never had before. Silly Nell was not injudicious where she cast her girlish affections. . . .

  “I am obligated to deal with you politely,” he snapped out as sharply as Sherlock Holmes might have, “but you are mistaken to think that because I wear kid gloves on occasion I don’t have access to iron fists. You treat matters of the greatest international gravity as a joke, or worse, grist for your personal glory mill. I won’t have it”

  “My, the heat does make you testy!” I dropped my coy manner and leaned over the table. “Listen, Quentin. I’m on the trail of a really juicy story. A domestic story. Set here in the good old U.S. of A. If I get this story, and you help me, you can keep your nasty old Ripper and all those funny foreign place names. This story wil
l rock New York City, and the whole country!”

  “What do I have to do?”

  “Ever the cynic, Quentin.”

  “Ever the news-hungry hound, Pink.”

  The waiter came with our beverages. I admit that I had worked up a thirst. Englishmen are never easy. I would swear I will never marry one, but then I’d already sworn I’d never marry, so the oath was redundant.

  The ice clicking against my teeth as I sipped the tea made Quentin set his jaw as he lifted his lemonade glass to his lips. I suppose iced teeth are anathema to an Englishman, the way smothered news stories were an affront to me.

  “You don’t have to do anything,” I told him, “except trot around New York City with me and claim to be my husband.”

  That Delmonico’s lemonade must be strong stuff, for I watched his expression grow as sour as his drink when he heard my words.

  34

  WHAT THE NURSEMAID SAW

  One of the most astounding stories of conspiracy, of turpitude,

  of plot and counter-plot, ever revealed outside the

  realms of improbable fiction.

  —The World

  FROM NELLIE BLY’S JOURNAL

  Although I didn’t need Quentin Stanhope for my earliest investigations, it tickled me no end to insist he come along.

  Maybe I wanted to a get a midge up Miss Nell’s corset. Maybe I wanted to make the ones who had gagged me after the Ripper hunt pay, and Quentin was the nearest representative.

  Maybe I liked to be seen in his company. Certainly the boyos at the paper sat up and snapped their suspenders when he showed up at the World on my instructions . . . or at my insistent invitation, shall we say?

  “Mr. Quentin Stanhope,” I introduced him around the office. “Of London.”

  Talk about killing two birds with one stone! The office gossips had a new target for their suspicions, and I was putting Quentin through hoops for the sin of trying to shush me like an unruly child.

  He took being paraded through the offices with good grace, and even shook hands with Mr. Pulitzer, impressing the boss with my taste in men.