by Caleb Carr
CHAPTER 18
By the time we entered the Lafayette and got to our table on the greenery-covered terrace, we’d all recovered enough to start smiling and even laughing a little at what we’d been through.
“Well!” Miss Howard said with a big, astonished sigh, as she sat and took a menu from our waiter. “I hate to be the one to start asking stupid questions, but if Ana Linares isn’t in Nurse Hunter’s house, where in the world is she?”
“I don’t know,” Marcus answered, “but between us we covered every inch of every floor of that place—”
“Including the basement,” Lucius threw in, scanning his menu.
“—and there was no sign of a baby.” Marcus let his head rest on one hand in bewildered weariness. “No sign at all.”
“The only thing I can suggest,” Mr. Moore said, grabbing at the wine list, “given what happened to the three of you on the street, is that the Dusters are in on it, and they’ve got her somewhere.”
I’d sat down on the floor and started to crawl in amongst some bushy greenery what ran along the iron rail at the edge of the terrace (the good-natured waiters generally let me do that); but Mr. Moore’s words made me pause. “The Dusters?” I said. “In on this kind of thing?”
“Why not?” Mr. Moore asked. “You think they’re above kidnapping, Stevie?”
I felt a little out of my place, saying anything more, and glanced at the Doctor for reassurance; but he was only staring hard at the surface of the table. “Well,” I answered uncertainly. “No, not above it, exactly … just—well—too stupid, really. Or too crazy.”
Lucius nodded a couple of times. “Stevie has a point. Organization and plotting aren’t the Dusters’ strong points. That’s why the other gangs leave them alone: because they don’t control any operations that conflict with anyone else’s or that another group would want to take over. They’re blowers and thugs—they don’t go planning kidnappings and blackmail.”
The Doctor spoke firmly without looking up. “The child is in that woman’s house. I would stake everything on it.”
Mr. Moore hissed. “Kreizler, you were there—she let us go through the whole damned joint.”
“And?” Miss Howard asked.
“And, the only other person who lives there is her husband. He’s got to be fifteen years older than her, and he’s a semi-invalid. Wounded in the Civil War when he was young, apparently, and never really recovered.”
“He recovered,” the Doctor said, a bit testily. “Or at least his wounds did. What the war left him with was an addiction to opiates.”
Marcus looked puzzled. “But he’s bedridden. And his wife said that he—”
“That woman couldn’t utter a true word if her life depended on it,” the Doctor shot back. “As for his being bedridden, had I been jabbed as full of morphine as he has, I should be bedridden, too. Didn’t you note the marks on his arms and the odor in the bedroom?”
“Yes,” Lucius said, getting an annoyed glance from his brother for his trouble. “Well, it was all perfectly plain, Marcus—the man’s been jabbing morphine for years.”
“With, I don’t doubt, the help of his wife,” Dr. Kreizler added. “The good Nurse Hunter.”
“What about her?” Miss Howard asked. “What was she like when you got inside? Because I have to say, she played you all like so many piano keys when you were on the steps.”
The others looked embarrassed at that, but the Doctor lost his scowl and laughed once. “True, Sara! I knew it was happening, yet even I couldn’t stop it initially.”
“So how does she manage it?” Miss Howard pressed. “What was her style, once she had you in her lair?”
“Well—I’ll just tell you this—” Mr. Moore set both the wine list and his menu aside, ready to order his food and drink but looking, despite his outwardly certain tone and manner, a trifle unsure of what he was about to say. “I know you hate it when men clean their language up in your presence, Sara, so I’ll put it to you straight: I couldn’t tell whether that woman wanted to fuck me or kill me.”
At that Lucius spat some water he’d been sipping clear across to the exterior wall of the restaurant, where it hit the bricks above a table that was, fortunately, empty. Everyone broke into deep laughter, and when the waiter came it proved no easy job for him to get coherent orders out of our group. Eventually the waiter started laughing, too, without knowing why, and when he went back to the kitchen he was still going.
“My God, John,” Miss Howard said, trying to calm herself. “I know I asked you all to be candid around me, but—”
“Ah, now,” the Doctor said, defending Mr. Moore. “You can’t have it both ways, my dear Sara. Either you receive it straight from John’s shoulder, or you don’t.” The still chuckling Doctor put a hand on Mr. Moore’s back. “Your talents really are wasted at the Times, Moore. A statement as colorful and unprintable as it is accurate. Elspeth Hunter is an unending string of seeming paradoxes—some of them, unquestionably, possessing deadly dimensions.”
Marcus dried some amused tears out of his eyes with his napkin and said, “And you really believe that the child is in the house, Doctor? Even though we searched it thoroughly, with the Hunter woman’s blessing?”
“I should not like to use a word like ‘blessing’ in connection with that creature, Marcus,” the Doctor said, as some white wine for the adults and a bottle of Hires root beer for me arrived at the table. “And remember, we searched only as much of the house as was visible to the naked eye.”
Marcus looked even more perplexed. “Meaning what?”
But the Doctor directed his next question to Lucius. “Detective Sergeant—if one suspected that Number 39 Bethune Street had recently been—structurally modified, in some way that we do not know and could not have seen … how might one confirm or eliminate the suspicion?”
Lucius shrugged, taking a sip of wine as Mr. Moore poured it. “Even if she intended, ultimately, to use the space for criminal purposes, she’d have to’ve gotten a building permit, if it was anything structural. Otherwise she’d have had inspectors all over her, and been shut down. So you’d go downtown and check the records. It’s not complicated.”
Mr. Moore chuckled once. “What are you thinking, Kreizler? That the woman’s built some secret room in the house, and is keeping the baby squirreled away in it?”
The Doctor ignored this, and kept on talking to Lucius. “But would the records be specific? About the work done, I mean.”
“Fairly. They’d give some kind of an indication, at least. Why, Doctor?”
At that Dr. Kreizler turned to the still smiling Mr. Moore, whose face suddenly went straight as he fixed his eyes with stubborn determination on an enormous silver platter of oysters that had been set in the middle of the table. “Don’t even try it, Kreizler,” he said. “I’ve done my legwork. I’m not tracking down some harebrained idea that you got out of installment fiction—”
“Never fear, Moore,” the Doctor answered. “You shall have Sara for company.” Miss Howard, who’d just picked up one of the oysters, didn’t look too pleased about that, but she just sighed in resignation. “Besides,” the Doctor continued, “I very much doubt that either of you would enjoy the other assignment that must be undertaken—nor do you possess the necessary emblems of office to complete it.”
Lucius had just slurped down an oyster, and as I reached up to grab one for myself I saw him looking suddenly worried. “Uh-oh,” he noised.
The Doctor nodded. “Another—how did you phrase it, Marcus? Another ‘rousting,’ I’m afraid. We must know why the Hudson Dusters take so keen an interest in the activities in and around Number 39 Bethune Street. I would suggest patrolling their neighborhood for the next few nights, and harassing one or two of the less threatening members of their gang. You needn’t employ our old friend Inspector Byrnes’s third-degree tactics, although the threat of such treatment might—”
“We get the picture, Doctor,” Marcus answered. “Shouldn’t be
too difficult.” He turned to his brother. “But don’t forget your revolver, Lucius.”
“As if I would,” Lucius answered uncomfortably. “What about you, Doctor? Where will you be, doing further psychological research?”
“If I thought it would help, yes,” the Doctor answered, downing an oyster and then taking a sip of wine. “And there may in fact be one or two women on Blackwells Island whom it will be useful for me to visit in that context. But there is another mystery that concerns me more immediately.” He turned to Cyrus, then looked down to the floor, trying to locate me. “Stevie, come up here for a moment.” I followed the order, slurping the last of the sweet, salty juice from an oyster shell as I stood by Cyrus. “Where is the stick? The one that you say this Ding Dong found lodged in his stricken gang member?”
I’d clear forgotten about the thing and quickly held up a finger; then I vaulted the iron rail of the terrace, ran to the calash, and checked under the driver’s seat. Luckily for me, the stick was still there. I grabbed it, jumped back over the railing, and handed the strange though simple object to the Doctor.
“We now have a most unusual coincidence,” he said, examining the stick. “On the night that the Philippine knife struck the doorway of Number 808 Broadway, Cyrus says that the only person he caught sight of was a young boy, dashing around a corner.”
“That’s right,” Cyrus said. “Looked to be maybe ten, eleven.”
“And Stevie, you say you saw a boy of about the same age disappearing from Bethune Street just after the Duster fell?”
“Yeah. This kid was black, though—definitely. There was enough light to tell.”
The Doctor nodded, and I grabbed another oyster before the others finished them off. “Cyrus?” Dr. Kreizler said. “Can you guess at the ethnicity of the boy you saw?”
Cyrus shook his head. “Too dark. He could have been black, though, I can’t rule it out.”
“What about his dress?”
“The usual, for a boy on the streets,” Cyrus answered with a shrug. “Baggy clothes—castoffs, looked like.”
“Or, as Stevie said, clothes that were too big for him?”
“You could say that.”
The Doctor nodded, though there was no certainty in his face; then he examined the stick again. “Either the same child, or two, then, have appeared at crucial junctures in this investigation. The first time was during a hostile, or at least a warning, event. The second, on the contrary—” The Doctor seemed to be caught by something, and his nose started to wiggle above his mustache like a rabbit’s. “What’s that?”
Mr. Moore looked up and around as a waiter came to clear away the empty oyster tray. “What’s what?”
“That—odor,” the Doctor said. He glanced around, and then his eyes returned to the stick. He held it closer to his face, waving the sharp tip of the thing under his nose. “Hmm … yes, unmistakably. Chloroform …” He smelled the thing again. “And something else …” Unable to place it, he handed the stick to Lucius as more plates of food arrived. “Detective Sergeant?” he said, almost skewering a nice piece of sautéed salmon that Lucius had ordered. “Can you identify it?”
Lucius took the stick and held it a careful distance from his fish, green beans, and potatoes. Then he moved his nose to its tip. “Yes,” he said, thinking it over, “I get the chloroform, all right. And the other …” His face suddenly brightened, then changed to a look of excited concern. “Stevie, would you say that the Duster was dead when they took him away?”
“Dead?” I answered, taking a dish of my favorite food—plain-grilled steak and salty fried potatoes—from the waiter and then making for my little green cave again. “No. Out cold, yeah, but—he was breathing, all right.”
Lucius smelled the stick once more and then handed it to his brother. “In that case—assuming he keeps breathing—whoever used this is as much of an expert as our knife man was.”
Marcus smiled a bit in recognition as he, too, sniffed the stick. “St. Ignatius bean,” he mumbled, his own face so intrigued that he ignored the broiled baby chicken in tarragon sauce that was steaming in front of him.
“What?” Miss Howard said, leaning over and looking at the stick in shock.
“Which explains the chloroform,” Lucius added, as he started to eat.
Mr. Moore, who seconds before had been looking very happy about the brook trout in almond sauce what the waiter had brought him, now dropped his fork and knife in frustration. “All right. Here I go again, the moron of the group.” He braced himself. “What are you people talking about, please?”
“St. Ignatius bean,” Miss Howard answered, as if the first mug what you might’ve buttonholed on the sidewalk outside the terrace would’ve known what she meant. “It’s one of the plants in which strychnine occurs naturally.”
“That’s it!” the Doctor said with a snap of his fingers. “Strychnine! I was certain I recognized it.”
“It’s soluble in water, sparingly soluble in alcohol, and very soluble in chloroform,” Lucius said. “Presuming the intent here was to disable and not to kill, our man knew exactly what proportions to use. And that’s no mean trick.”
“How come?” I asked, tearing into my steak and gulping down my root beer.
“Because strychnine’s more powerful than other drugs used for similar purposes,” Marcus said, handing the stick to Miss Howard and finally starting in on his chicken. “Curare, for instance, is a blend of ingredients—strychnine’s one of them—and that blending makes it easier to control. But in its pure form, strychnine is very tricky stuff. That’s why people use it when they’ve got severe vermin problems. Better than arsenic, really.”
“But can you really be so sure that it is pure strychnine?” the Doctor asked.
“The odor’s fairly distinctive,” Lucius answered. “And the presence of chloroform as a solvent would seem to confirm it. But I’ll take it home if you like, and run some tests. Fairly simple. Little sulfuric acid, some potassium dichromate—”
“Oh, sure,” Mr. Moore said, now devouring his trout. “I do it all the time …”
“Very well,” the Doctor said. “But let us, for the moment, assume you are correct, Detective Sergeant. Can you say who would possess such knowledge, offhand?”
“Well,” Lucius answered, “the stick appears to be some sort of aboriginal dart or arrow.”
“Yes,” the Doctor said. “That was my thought.”
“But as for who uses pure strychnine in hunting, or even warfare—there you’ve got me.”
“And there,” the Doctor said, setting to work on a plate of crab cakes, “I also find my own assignment for tomorrow.”
“Ah-ha!” Mr. Moore said, holding up his fork. “At last, a cryptic comment that I can decipher—you’re going to see Boas!”
“Exactly, Moore. Boas. I’m sure he’ll be delighted to render his services once again.”
Dr. Franz Boas was another of the Doctor’s dose scientific friends, the head of the Department of Anthropology at the Museum of Natural History and a man who’d helped our team gain some important tips at a crucial point during the Beecham investigation the year before, like Dr. Kreizler, Boas was a German by birth, though he’d come to this country later in life than the Doctor. He’d studied psychology before moving on to anthropology and the United States, so he and the Doctor had no trouble communicating on a whole batch of levels; and whenever he came to the house the dining room was pretty certain to be the scene of lively talks and occasional arguments, during which Dr. Boas would sometimes slip into German and Dr. Kreizler would fall right in with him, making it impossible for me to tell what in the world they were hollering about. But he was a kindly man, was Dr. Boas, and like most of your genuine geniuses he didn’t let his brains turn him into what you might call an intellectual snob.
“I shall take him both the knife and this projectile,” Dr. Kreizler said, “and tell him the story of the child or children that we have spotted on the occasions that the weapons
have been used. It may be that he can supply some insight, or that someone on his staff can. I confess, the entire matter mystifies me.”
A general noise of chewing agreement came out of the rest of us, showing that we’d pretty much reached the limits of what we could make out of the morning’s activities. For a while we just ate and drank, letting our nerves and our spirits piece themselves back together. But the silence was eventually broken by Miss Howard.
“For a woman whose original action seems to have been so impulsive,” she said slowly, sipping her wine and playing with a dish of fresh strawberries and hot chocolate sauce that had arrived for dessert, “this one seems to have planned how to elude capture awfully well.” She gently bit into a dripping strawberry. “Another paradox, I suppose, Doctor?”
“Indeed, Sara,” the Doctor answered, rolling a strawberry of his own in the chocolate. “But remember—all of you, remember—these paradoxes must not be considered contradictory. They are part of a single process. As a snake propels itself forward by pushing sideways across the sand, first to the left and then to the right, so does Nurse Hunter pursue her desperate goals. She is impulsive, then calculating. Flattering and promiscuous, then suddenly and mortally threatening. An apparently respectable woman with a bedridden husband, who nonetheless seems to have some important connection to one of the most degenerate, senselessly violent gangs in the city. By comparison, more outwardly excessive criminal behavior seems quite comprehensible. Even so obsessive a murderer as John Beecham moved along a course that almost appears linear and coherent—even though it was fatal—when held up against this woman. We find ourselves, in many ways, in an even stranger land when we face Elspeth Hunter. And with fewer maps …”