by Caleb Carr
“A little off the beaten trail for a secretary, isn’t it?” I asked. Sara didn’t answer, but a look of bitter disappointment filled her face, a frustration so severe that all I could do was open the calash door. “What about it, Cyrus?” I said. “Any objection to taking Miss Howard and myself on a little errand?”
Cyrus shrugged. “No, sir. Not so long as I’m back at the Institute by the end of interviewing hours.”
“And so you shall be. Climb aboard, Sara, and meet Mr. Cyrus Montrose.”
In an instant Sara’s aspect went from ferocious to exuberant—not an uncommon transformation for her. “There are moments, John,” she said, jumping up onto the calash, “when I think I may have been wrong about you all these years.” She shook Cyrus’s hand eagerly and then sat down, throwing a blanket over my legs and hers when I got in. Directing Cyrus to an address on Mott Street, she clapped her hands once excitedly as the calash began moving.
There aren’t many women who would have ventured into one of the worst parts of the Lower East Side with such relish. But Sara’s adventurous spirit had never been much tempered by prudence. Furthermore, she had experience with the area: right after Sara’s graduation from college, her family had gotten the idea that her education might be fully balanced by some firsthand experience of life in places other than Rhinebeck (where the Howards’ country estate was located) and Gramercy Park. So she put on a starched white blouse, a dreary black skirt, and a rather ridiculous boater and spent the summer assisting a visiting nurse in the Tenth Ward. During those months she saw a great deal—most, indeed, of what the Lower East Side could throw at a person. None of it, however, was any worse than what we were bound for that day.
The Santorellis lived in a rear tenement a few blocks below Canal Street. Rear tenements had been outlawed in 1894, but there had been a grandfather clause in the bill, so that those that already existed were allowed to remain standing with minimal improvement. Suffice it to say that if a tenement building that fronted the street was dark, disease-ridden, and threatening, the smaller buildings that often stood behind them—in place of a yard that might have brought at least a bit more air and light to the block—were exponentially more so. By the look of the particular front tenement we pulled up before that day, we were in for a typical experience: huge barrels of ash and waste stood by the urine-soaked stoop of the structure, on which was gathered a group of filthy, rag-clad men, each indistinguishable from the next. They were drinking and laughing among themselves, but they stopped abruptly at the sight of the calash and Cyrus. Sara and I stepped out and onto the curb.
“Don’t wander too far, Cyrus,” I said, trying not to betray my jitters.
“No, sir,” he answered, gripping the pommel of his horse-whip tightly. With his other hand he reached into the pocket of his greatcoat. “Perhaps you should take these, Mr. Moore.” He produced a set of brass knuckles.
“Hmm,” I noised, studying the weapon. “I don’t think that’ll be necessary.” Then I dropped the sham. “Besides, I wouldn’t know how to use them.”
“Hurry, John,” Sara said, and then we mounted the stoop.
“Here!” One of the loitering men grabbed my arm. “D’you know there’s a coon driving your rig?”
“Is there?” I answered, guiding Sara through the almost visible stench that hovered around the men.
“Black as the ace of spades!” another of the men asserted, seemingly astonished.
“Remarkable,” I replied, as Sara got inside. Before I could follow, the first man grabbed me again.
“You’re not another cop, are you?” he asked menacingly.
“Absolutely not,” I answered. “I despise cops.”
The man nodded once but said nothing, from which I divined that I was allowed to pass.
To get to the rear building it was necessary to navigate the pitch-black hallway of the front structure: always an unsettling experience. With Sara in the lead we felt our way along the filthy walls, trying but failing to adjust to the lack of light. I started when Sara stumbled on something; and I started even more violently when that something began to wail.
“Good lord, John,” Sara said after a moment. “It’s a baby.”
I still couldn’t see a thing, but as I got closer the smell gave it away—a baby, all right, and the poor creature must have been covered in its own excrement.
“We’ve got to get it help,” Sara said, and I thought of the men on the stoop. When I looked back toward the front door, however, I saw them silhouetted against the snowfall outside, swinging sticks as they watched us, and occasionally laughing in a very unpleasant way. There would be no help from that quarter, so I began to try doors inside the hall. Finally finding one that would open, I pulled Sara toward and through it.
Inside were an old man and woman, ragpickers, who would only accept the baby after I offered them a half-dollar. They told us that the infant belonged to a couple across the hall who were out, as they were every day and night, jabbing morphine and drinking in a dive around the corner. The old man assured us that they would get the baby something to eat and clean it up, at which Sara gave them another dollar. Neither of us was under any illusions as to how much good a cleaning and feeding would do the child in the long run (I suppose you could argue that we were simply easing our own consciences), but it was one of those all-too-common moments in New York when one is faced with a damnable set of options.
Finally, we reached the back door. The alleyway between the front and rear buildings was overflowing with more barrels and buckets full of garbage and sewage, and the smell was indescribable. Sara placed a handkerchief over her nose and mouth and told me to do the same. Then we ran across to the ground-floor hallway of the rear building. There were four apartments with what seemed like a thousand people living in them on the first floor. I tried to identify all the languages being spoken, but lost count at about eight. A smelly collection of Germans with growlers of beer were camped on the staircase, and they parted grudgingly as we went up. It was evident, even in the half-light, that the stairs were coated with almost an inch of something extremely sticky that I didn’t want to investigate. It didn’t seem to bother the Germans.
The Santorelli flat was on the second floor in the back: the darkest spot in the whole building. When we knocked, a small, horribly thin woman with sunken eyes answered the door, speaking the Sicilian dialect. I knew only enough Italian for the opera, but Sara was better off—again because of her nursing days—and communicated quite easily. Mrs. Santorelli was not at all alarmed to see Sara (in fact she seemed to have been expecting her); but she expressed much concern over my presence, fearfully demanding to know if I was either a policeman or a journalist. Sara had to think fast, and said I was her assistant. Mrs. Santorelli looked puzzled at that, but finally let us in.
“Sara,” I said as we entered, “do you know this woman?”
“No,” she answered, “but she seems to know me. Strange.”
The flat was composed of two rooms without any real windows, just small slits that had recently been cut in the walls to comply with new tenement regulations concerning ventilation. The Santorellis had rented one of the rooms to another family of Sicilians, which meant that six of them—the parents and Giorgio’s four brothers and sisters—lived in a space about nine feet by sixteen. There was nothing hanging on the bare, soot-encrusted walls, and two big buckets in the corners took care of sanitation. The family also had a kerosene stove, of the inexpensive type that so often used to put an end to such buildings.
Lying on an old, stained mattress in one corner and wrapped in what blankets they had was the cause of Mrs. Santorelli’s great agitation: her husband. His face was cut, bruised, and swollen, and his forehead was drenched in sweat. There was a bloody rag lying next to him, and, incongruously, a bound wad of money, which must have amounted to several hundred dollars. Mrs. Santorelli took up the wad, shoved it at Sara, and then urged her at the husband, tears starting to stream down her face.
We soon discovered that Mrs. Santorelli believed Sara to be a nurse. She had dispatched her four children to find one only an hour earlier. Again thinking quickly, Sara sat and began to examine Santorelli, quickly discovering that one of his arms was fractured. In addition, most of his torso was covered in bruises.
“John,” Sara said firmly, “send Cyrus for bandages, disinfectant, and some morphine. Tell him we’ll want a good clean piece of wood to use as a splint, as well.”
In what seemed one movement I was out the door, through the Germans and the alleyway, and down the stoop to the curb. I shouted the order to Cyrus, who sped off in the calash, and as I went back through the men on the stoop one of them held a hand to my chest.
“Just a minute,” he said. “What’s all that for?”
“Mr. Santorelli,” I answered. “He’s badly hurt.”
The man spat hard at the street. “Damned cops. I hate those damned guineas, but I’ll tell you, I hate cops more!”
This recurring theme seemed once again to be the signal for me to proceed. Back upstairs, Sara had gotten hold of some hot water and was washing Santorelli’s wounds. The wife was still chattering, waving her hands and occasionally bursting into tears.
“There were six men, John,” Sara said to me, after listening for a few minutes.
“Six?” I echoed. “I thought you said two.”
Sara indicated the bed with a jerk of her head. “Come over here and help me—she’ll be suspicious, otherwise.” Sitting down, I found that it was difficult to say which smelled worse, the mattress or Santorelli. But none of it seemed to bother Sara. “Connor and Casey were definitely here,” she said. “Along with two other men and two priests.”
“Priests?” I said, taking up a hot compress. “What in hell—”
“One Catholic, apparently, and one not. She can’t be more specific about the second. The priests had the money. They told the Santorellis to use some of it to pay for a decent burial for Giorgio. The rest was a—consideration, apparently for silence. They told her not to allow anyone to exhume Giorgio’s body, even the police, and not to talk to anyone about the matter—especially any journalists.”
“Priests?” I said again, wiping at one of Santorelli’s welts with no great enthusiasm. “What did they look like?”
Sara put the question, then translated the answer. “One short, with large white sideburns—that was the Catholic—and one thin with spectacles.”
“Why in the world would two priests have any interest in this?” I wondered. “And why would they want to keep the police out of it? You say Connor and Casey were here for that conversation?”
“Apparently.”
“So whatever’s going on, they’re involved. Well, Theodore will be happy to hear that. Two more vacancies in the Division of Detectives, I’ll wager. But who were the other two men?”
Again, Sara put the question to Mrs. Santorelli, who rattled off an answer that Sara didn’t seem to comprehend. She asked again, but got the same reply.
“I may not understand this dialect as well as I thought,” Sara said. “She says the other two weren’t policemen, but then she says that they were policemen. I don’t—”
Sara stopped and we all turned when a loud knock came at the door. Mrs. Santorelli shied away from it, and I was in no hurry to thrust myself into the breach; but Sara said, “Oh, go on, John, don’t be foolish. It’s probably Cyrus.”
I stepped to the door and opened it. Outside in the hall was one of the men from the stoop. He held up a package.
“Your medicines,” he said with a grin. “We don’t allow no coons in this building.”
“Ah,” I said, accepting the package. “I see. Thank you.”
Giving the goods to Sara, I sat back down on the bed. Santorelli was by this time semiconscious and Sara administered some of the morphine: she intended to set his arm, a trick she’d learned during her days with the visiting nurses. The break was not bad, she said, but it nonetheless made a somewhat nauseating cracking sound as she got it back into place. Between his grogginess and the drug, however, Santorelli didn’t seem to feel a thing, though his wife let out a nice little howl and some kind of a prayer. I began wiping disinfectant on the other wounds while Sara continued her conversation with Mrs. Santorelli.
“It seems,” Sara said at length, “that Santorelli got very indignant. Threw the money in the priests’ faces, and said he demanded that the police find the murderer of his son. At that point the priests left, and…”
“Yes,” I said. “And.” I was well aware of how Irish cops generally dealt with a lack of cooperation from the non-English-speaking population. A good example of the technique was lying next to me.
Sara shook her head. “It’s all so strange,” she sighed, starting to apply gauze to some of the worst cuts and bruises. “Santorelli nearly got himself killed—yet he hasn’t seen Giorgio for four years. The boy’s been living on the streets.”
Mrs. Santorelli’s trust had been inspired by Sara’s care for her husband, and once she began to tell us the story of her son Giorgio, it would have been difficult to stop her. Sara and I kept laboring over Santorelli’s wounds as though they were the primary center of our attention, but our thoughts were very much fixed on the peculiar story we heard.
Giorgio was a shy boy in his early years, but smart and determined enough to attend the public school on Hester Street and get good marks. Starting at about age seven, however, there was a problem with some other boys at school. The older ones were apparently able to persuade Giorgio to perform sexual acts, ones that Mrs. Santorelli didn’t much want to define. Sara pressed her on the issue, however, sensing that such information would be important, and we found that it involved sodomy of both the anal and oral varieties. The behavior was discovered and reported to the parents by a teacher. The Latin concept of masculinity being as broad and forgiving as it is, Giorgio’s father nearly lost his mind, and took to beating the boy at regular intervals. Mrs. Santorelli demonstrated for us how her husband would bind Giorgio by his wrists to the front door, then whip him across the backside with a wide belt, which she also showed us. It was a cruel implement, and in Santorelli’s hands it apparently inflicted such damage that Giorgio sometimes avoided school altogether, simply because he couldn’t sit down.
The odd thing, however, was that instead of becoming more compliant, Giorgio only grew more willful every time he got a whipping. After months of such punishment, his behavior progressed to an extreme: he began to stay away from the family’s flat for nights at a time, and gave up school altogether. Then one day the parents spotted him on a street west of Washington Square, wearing ladies’ cosmetics and hawking himself like any street cruiser. Santorelli confronted the boy, and said that if he ever returned home he’d kill him. Giorgio screamed angry insults in return, and the father was getting ready to attack him right then and there when another man—probably Giorgio’s panderer—stepped in and advised the Santorellis to disappear. That was the last they ever saw of their son, until they viewed his mangled body at the morgue.
The tale roused many questions in my mind, and I could see that Sara felt the same. We would never get to ask them. Just as we were wrapping Santorelli back up in the worn, dirty blankets in which we’d found him, a booming came at the door; and I, thinking it was the men from the stoop, opened it. In an instant, two large, mustachioed thugs in suits and bowlers had forced their way into the flat. The mere sight of them sent Mrs. Santorelli into hysterics.
“Who the hell’re you people?” one of the thugs demanded.
Sara made a brave show of saying that she was a nurse; but the explanation that I was her assistant, which had worked so admirably on a desperate woman who didn’t speak English, went nowhere with these two.
“Assistant, eh?” the thug said, as they both moved on me. Sara and I carefully edged our way to the door of the flat. “That’s a hell of a rig out there, for an assistant!”
“Well, I do value your opinion,” I said
with a smile; then I grabbed Sara and we flew down the stairs. Never have I been so grateful that the girl was of an athletic disposition, for even in her skirt she was faster than our pursuers. Such did not help, however, when we reached the hall of the front building and saw the men on the stoop blocking our exit. They began moving our way, slapping their sticks in the palms of their hands ominously.
“John,” Sara said, “are they really trying to trap us?” Her voice was, I remember thinking, damned steady—which, given the circumstances, I found extremely irritating.
“Of course they’re trying to trap us, woman!” I said, breathing hard. “You and your detective games, we’re going to get beaten to death! Cyrus!” I cupped my hands and bellowed at the front door as the men began to move our way. “Cyrus!” I let my hands fall, despondent. “Where in hell is the man?”
Sara only clutched her bag tightly without a word; and when the two thugs in the bowlers appeared at the rear end of the hall, apparently sealing our fates, she reached into it. “Don’t worry, John,” she said confidently. “I won’t let anything happen to you.” And with that she withdrew a .45-caliber Army Model Colt revolver, with a four-and-a-half-inch barrel and pearl grips. Sara was what you might call a firearms enthusiast; but I was not reassured.
“Oh, my God,” I said, ever more alarmed. “Sara, you can’t just blast away in a dark hallway, you don’t know what you’ll hit—”
“Can you suggest a better idea?” she said, looking around, realizing that I was right and feeling alarm for the first time.
“Well, I—”
But it was too late: the men from the stoop were upon us in a screaming rush. I grabbed Sara and covered her with my body, hoping she wouldn’t shoot me in the gut during the ensuing attack.
