by Caleb Carr
And so a coat or, as was more likely during even that comparatively cool June, a jacket: a garment what would immediately be removed whenever Nurse Hunter entered a place where other people congregated, thereby cutting down on the number of hair samples that’d be present, but what she would wear when carrying the baby as she’d done on the Third Avenue El: tight, close to her bosom.
It was a slick piece of reasoning; and as Detective Sergeant Lucius finished it up, we all, including his brother, gave him a little round of applause. The others were anxious about whether or not Kat would be able to get the article of clothing in question, but I quieted all that nervousness down: without saying as much, I let them know that there wasn’t much in the run of everyday items that Kat couldn’t lift if she had a good reason.
Then came the question of what to do about Nurse Hunter’s basement. Miss Howard posted the diagram she’d made on the wall, and the rest of us went over it closely. The others proceeded to pound Mr. Moore with detailed questions, most of which he couldn’t come close to answering, even though he’d had free access to the space.
“I was looking for a baby, for God’s sake!” he protested after someone asked him if he’d noticed any areas of concrete or masonry that appeared newer than the rest. “I didn’t know I was supposed to be making an archaeological survey. It was a typical basement—it had a furnace, it had some cabinets, some garden tools, and a dirt floor. I think there was a rack of preserves, too, though I wouldn’t swear to it. And the usual, you know, artifacts of domestic living: old pieces of furniture, a few picture frames…”
“And this was the arrangement of it all?” the Doctor asked, studying the diagram. “That’s it.”
The Doctor made a noise of disappointment. “There’s certainly nothing remarkable in any of that. The key, I should think, will be to find the contractor who did the work.”
“Oh.” Miss Howard looked up, her eyes going wide like maybe something’d gotten by her that she hadn’t realized she’d missed. “But—he’s dead. We asked.”
The Doctor spun on her. “He’s what?”
“Dead,” Mr. Moore threw in simply. “Died right after the job was finished. Apparently, he was a friend of the clerk we spoke to at the Hall of Records. Did a lot of research work down there.”
The Doctor began to rub his temples. “Did the clerk happen to say what he died of?”
“He did,” Mr. Moore answered, absentmindedly rummaging through his pockets and coming out with an old piece of wrapped butterscotch. “Ahh—sustenance!”
“Moore,” the Doctor said impatiently.
“Hmm? Oh, right. The contractor. Got his name right here—it was on the permit.” He pulled out a scrap of paper as he sucked noisily on the butterscotch. “Henry—Bates. His office was in Brooklyn. Anyway, he had a massive heart attack a couple of days after he finished the Hunter job. And I don’t blame him. Working for that lady’d give me a heart attack, too.”
The Doctor just shook his head in his hand, sighing. Miss Howard grew ever more nervous as she watched him. “Do you think it’s important, Doctor?”
He lifted his head, pulling at the skin under his eyes with his fingers. “It does strike me as an odd coincidence, yes.”
“We’ve already had one coincidence on this case,” Mr. Moore announced, waving a careless hand. “You can’t take stock in too many of them.”
“I shouldn’t take stock in any of them, Moore,” the Doctor thundered back, “were they in fact coincidences! Marcus, I suggest that you find out what you can about a contractor named Henry Bates in Brooklyn. It may well be that he had a family.”
“And they’ll know his medical history,” Marcus said, noting the name on a pad with a nod.
Miss Howard clutched at her forehead. “Of course. Dammit…”
“What the hell are you all getting so worked up about?” Mr. Moore asked; and I’m bound to say that even I thought he was being a little dim at that point. “So the man had a heart attack. So what?”
“Moore,” the Doctor said, trying to be as patient as possible. “Do you happen to remember Dr. H. H. Holmes, the mass murderer whose existence caused your grandmother so much distress last year?”
“Of course I do,” he said. “Who doesn’t? Killed who knows how many people in that ‘torture castle’ of his.”
“Precisely,” the Doctor answered. “The ‘torture castle.’ A seemingly unending maze of secret rooms and chambers, each designed by Holmes himself to serve some horrendously sadistic purpose.”
“Well?” Mr. Moore asked. “What’s that got to do with this?”
“Do you know the first thing that Holmes did once the castle was completed?”
Mr. Moore’s face stayed simple. “Killed somebody, I’d imagine.”
“Correct. He killed the one person on earth besides himself who knew the exact plans of the place.”
Finally, Mr. Moore’s noisy smacking of the butterscotch came to an end. “Uh-oh …” He looked up slowly. “That wouldn’t have been—”
“Yes,” the Doctor answered quietly. “His contractor.”
Glancing from one of our faces to the next, Mr. Moore suddenly stood up. “I’m going to Brooklyn,” he said, racing toward the front door before any real abuse could be shoveled onto him.
“I’m going with you,” Marcus said, following. “The badge may come in handy.”
“We need the exact cause of death!” the Doctor called after them as they closed the elevator grate. “As well as any details of the job that he may have shared with his family, should he have had one!”
The front door banged closed, and the rest of us were left to listen as the Doctor mumbled in discouragement, “I ought to’ve known better. It’s hard enough to keep John’s mind focused in the cold weather, but in the summer …” He paused, and looked at the diagram on the wall again. “The basement,” he repeated softly. “The basement…”
Miss Howard came over to stand by him. “I really am sorry, Doctor. I was the one who should have thought of it.”
The Doctor attempted to be gracious. “I doubt that it’s cost us too much time, Sara,” he said. “And even if we do discover some terrible secret about the construction of this basement, the question remains, what can we do about it? A direct approach by the police, given Señor Linares’s attitude, is ruled out, not only because of the danger to the señora but because of diplomatic privilege, as well. The denizens of Mulberry Street, even if we could convince them to investigate the matter, would never defy the wishes of a foreign dignitary. And the dangers to our own group of returning to the house are now clearly evident—one word from Elspeth Hunter, and we should find ourselves, as Miss Devlin said, at the bottom of the river. And then there is the question of our unidentified friend with his arrows and knives …”
“Were you able to discover anything about all that?” Lucius asked.
“I received pieces of an answer,” the Doctor said. “To which it is necessary to add a conjecture—a rather bizarre conjecture—in order to obtain a likely answer. We are presented with two weapons. The first, as you said, Detective Sergeant, is the well-known trademark of the pirates, mercenaries, and simple thieves who haunt the Manila waterfront. The second is more obscure—an aboriginal weapon, as we surmised, one which, if judged by its small size alone, we could do no more than identify as originating with one of the pygmy tribes of either the southwestern Pacific, Africa, or South America. It is the strychnine that permits us to be more specific—it is known to be used in this way only by the natives of Java.”
“Java?” Lucius said. “But Java’s in the Dutch East Indies—far to the southwest of the Philippines. It wouldn’t seem to match with the kris.”
“True, Detective Sergeant,” the Doctor answered. “But you must bear in mind what the waterfront of Manila is—a stewpot of everything violent and criminal from as far away as Europe, San Francisco, and China. An habitué of the place is likely to become familiar with weaponry from much farther away
than Java—and if he is ethnically predisposed toward a particular weapon, the chances are all the greater that he will adopt it.”
“What do you mean?” Miss Howard asked.
The Doctor finally turned and walked away from the diagram. “In certain isolated parts of the Philippines—the northern part of the island of Luzon, for instance, and the Bataan Peninsula—there exist small groups of aboriginal pygmies. The Spanish and Filipinos call them ‘Negritos’; their own tribal name is ‘Aëtas.’ They are the oldest residents of the islands, thought to have crossed over from the Asian mainland when there was still an ice bridge over that part of the Pacific. They are quite negroid in their features”—the Doctor looked to me and Cyrus—“and their average height is about four and a half feet. Which might make them appear, at a distance—”
Cyrus nodded. “To look like a ten-year-old boy, in this country.”
“Precisely.”
Miss Howard suddenly gave out with a gasp. “My God,” she whispered.
The Doctor turned to her. “Sara? You have, I suspect, recalled something from one of your conversations with Señora Linares?”
“Yes,” she answered blankly, not bothering to ask how the Doctor’d guessed. “Her husband—he comes from an old diplomatic family. When he was a young man, his father was posted to the governor-general’s office—in Manila…”
The Doctor only nodded. “On the island of Luzon. There had to be a connection. The Aëtas are outcasts in Filipino society. If one of them should, for whatever reason, have found himself in Manila, virtually the only place where his presence would have been tolerated would have been on the waterfront. He would have brought with him the aboriginal hunting and warring skills of his people—and, in all likelihood, picked up other methods of combat necessary for his survival. At the same time, like many aborigines, the Aëtas place a high premium on loyalty. Should such a man ever have been employed or befriended by someone in a position of power …” He turned to Miss Howard. “It will be for you, Sara, to contact Señora Linares somehow, and determine whether or not her husband ever had such a man in his employ.”
“It won’t be easy,” Miss Howard said. “She’s being watched very carefully, day and night.”
“Then we must be creative,” the Doctor answered. “But we must know. This mysterious little man’s behavior has been marked by two apparently contradictory intentions—we must find out why, so that we can determine when or if we are likely to encounter him again.” As he crossed back to the sketch on the wall, his voice grew discouraged again. “None of which, I fear, solves the problem of this bloody basement…. How do we get in? And once in, how do we discover what she’s created there, and if, in fact, she is keeping the child within it?”
Lucius grunted. “There aren’t many times that I’d advocate the department’s usual methods,” he mumbled. “But in this case—what I wouldn’t give to break the door in and get down there with a good old-fashioned bloodhound, to smell the baby out.”
Everyone fell silent for a minute or two. I just sat there in my windowsill, knees tucked up under my chin, waiting for one of them to come up with a more practical idea. In such a state of mind, it took a few minutes for me to notice a small noise: Cyrus, gently clearing his throat in, it seemed, my direction. I looked over to find him staring at me, raising his eyebrows in an expression that appeared to say, “Well…?” I had no idea what he meant by the look, and I wrinkled my eyebrows and hunched my shoulders to tell him so. At that point he looked to the others, making sure they were still staring at the diagram, and then wandered over to me, leaning on the window frame and looking outside so that what he said couldn’t be seen or overheard.
“You still know that boy downtown?” he mumbled, casually putting an arm on the window frame and a hand across his mouth. “The one with the animal?”
For a minute I was bewildered, and even when I realized who he was talking about, it didn’t clear much up for me. “Hickie the Hun?” I said. “Sure, I still know him, but—”
“And you’ve seen the woman’s house,” Cyrus said. “Figure you could crack it?”
It was a little shocking to be asked such a thing—I mean, I was supposed to have forgotten all about such matters. “That joint?” I finally answered. “Yeah, of course, but—”
Cyrus finally looked dead at me. “This is your play, Stevie. If you want to make it …”
He wandered away again, leaving me a little stunned. I whispered, “But, Cyrus—” after him urgently; urgently enough to cause the Doctor to turn around.
“Stevie?” he said. “Do you have something to contribute?”
Turning quickly, I shook my head innocently. “No, sir.”
Cyrus mumbled, “Yes, you do,” toward the wall.
“No, I don’t” I said out of the side of my mouth.
“Okay,” he answered. “If that’s how you want it…”
“What is it?” the Doctor asked, perplexed. “Stevie, if you have some notion of how to break this deadlock, then please …” He held his hand toward the diagram.
I didn’t move right away, just sat there and ran the thing through my head. Then I groaned and stood up. There wasn’t much else to do. After all, I’d played a part in talking the Doctor into trying to save the Linares baby; and I figured, as I dragged myself across the room, that if I did know a way to take the next step, I owed it to the man to come across. So, shooting Cyrus a little look that said “Thanks for nothing”—to which he only smiled wide—I joined the other three at the diagram.
“Uhh,” I noised, not sure just where to start. “You—uh—might not have to do it the way Detective Sergeant Lucius says. I mean, you might be able to get the same job done without all the noise.” I pointed to the diagram. “If what you’re saying is that the baby’s scent oughtta be detectable in the basement, even if we don’t know just where the Hunter woman’s got her locked up—well, then, you might not have to bust in with cops and a bloodhound to find out. Did anybody notice what was on the back windows of the house?”
“Yes,” Lucius said. “I made a special note. They’ve had bars installed. Not too thick, but spaced at narrow intervals.”
“So you’d need a spreader,” I answered.
Lucius nodded. “Yes, but even if you had one, it’d be hard to create an opening big enough for a person.”
“You mean, for an adult person,” I said. “That’s how they generally set them bars. But…”
The Doctor looked at me, and it seemed like he couldn’t decide whether to be excited or stern. “Stevie—are you suggesting that you could get inside?”
I nodded with what you might call extreme reluctance. “There’s some stables right next door to the house. I noticed that much. Good place to hide out and then move from. Spread the bars, get inside, and go check out the basement. If we find the kid, I can bring her out.”
“And what would you find her with?” Lucius asked.
Shrugging, I answered, “I got a friend—” I felt the Doctor’s eyes on me. “I had a friend, anyway. Kid who does second-story jobs, like I used to. We call him Hickie the Hun, ‘cause he claims his family were German aristocrats, way back. They weren’t, though—Dutch, something like that. Anyways, he’s got this trained ferret. Name’s Mike. Hickie keeps him in a sack on jobs. Mike can get through all kinds of narrow openings.” I pointed at the diagram again. “And I could get him in there. Got a hell of a nose, does that animal.”
“But how does it know what it’s looking for?” Miss Howard asked.
“Hickie’s got this trick,” I told her. “He puts something that either looks or smells like what he’s trying to lift into Mike’s cage and don’t feed him until he learns to fetch it. It don’t take too long, generally. A few days.”
Lucius pondered the matter for a minute, then looked to Dr. Kreizler. “Doctor,” he said, his voice making it clear that he understood the risk but was excited, anyway. “This could work.”
“Wouldn’t we have to find a
way to get the Hunters out of the house, though?” Miss Howard asked.
“Just the wife,” I answered. “And if she’s spending time with Goo Goo Knox, well… all we gotta do is wait for her to leave some night. I don’t guess her husband takes care of the kid, if he’s as bad off as you all say. So she probably stows the baby while she’s out. I’d go in through the ground floor—the kitchen, probably. After that, straight to the basement. They sleep on the top floor, right? We heard the husband while we were outside.”
“That’s right,” Lucius said quickly.
“So it’d be pretty simple to pull it off while he was there. I done that kind of thing plenty of times. Not with a kid, maybe, but how much different than a sack of goods can a kid be?”
There wasn’t much more to say about the actual job, so I knew what was coming next: the Doctor said, “Would you both excuse us, please?” and took me by the shoulder toward the back of the room. There he folded his arms and looked at me for a second; then he turned away and stared out the window.
“Stevie, there is a great deal about this plan that makes me uncomfortable.”
“Me, too,” I said. “You got another idea, I’m all for it.”
“That’s just the problem,” he answered. “We don’t. And you know that.”
“Yeah. But I didn’t think of it to start with, Cyrus did. Anyway, it don’t—it doesn’t have to be such a big deal. You give me one of the detective sergeants to keep watch, and if we’ve got the calash ready in the stable, we oughtta be fine. A gun and a badge’ll take care of anybody but the Dusters, and by the time they find out what’s going on, if they ever do, we’ll be long gone.”