Where the Light Enters

by Sara Donati

  “It was her mother’s idea, she’ll foot the bill.”

  “I could have predicted that,” Jack said. “So I proclaim officially that progress has been made. Now give me the bad news.”

  Oscar knocked on the tabletop. “Louden is fit to be tied and the mayor ain’t exactly happy with us.”

  “Because we haven’t found her, or because of the newspaper article?”

  “Does it matter? Best we stay clear for the day. There’s something interesting to do, anyway.”

  The look in Oscar’s eye meant he had a very good lead.

  “Who?”

  With a wide grin Oscar said, “Pittorino.”

  Pittorino was a confidence man they had been trying to pin down for weeks.

  “Where’d the tip come from?”

  “A bricklayer by the name of Mackey came to me with the story. Late last night. Apparently Pittorino got himself a new mark way uptown, near the Athletic Club.”

  “Who’s this bricklayer?”

  “Another Irishman with a poor opinion of our paesani. He’s working on a new house at the corner of Sixtieth and Sixth, says that there’s a dirty wop there who spends his time painting pictures on the walls behind a locked door.”

  “That does sound promising. And if we’re going all that way—”

  “We can stop by Amelie’s,” Oscar said. “And let her feed us.”

  Jack had to grin. Oscar had a real affection for Amelie Savard, born of mutual respect and long friendship in troubled times, but his mind turned first to Amelie’s reputation as a fine cook.

  “Maybe she will,” he said. “And while we’re there maybe we can talk to her about Mrs. Visser.”

  Amelie Savard had provided invaluable help to them during the multipara investigation. She saw things hidden between the lines, things even Anna and Sophie missed.

  “Unless you think we should give up on the Visser case,” he finished. Knowing full well that this would irritate Oscar.

  “Not likely,” Oscar said, reaching for his hat. “So let’s get to work.”

  * * *

  • • •

  JACK LIKED GETTING out of the city and he especially liked the idea of laying hands on Pittorino, but there were no department hacks to be had, and it was a long haul from Mulberry to the Athletic Club on the west side of Central Park. They could walk to Ninth Avenue to take the elevated train for part of the trip; they could get on a horse trolley. Either way it would be more than an hour of riding and walking.

  Oscar pulled a wad of bills out of his pocket and held one arm up in the air for a cab.

  “Good night at the card table?”

  One corner of Oscar’s mouth jerked, the only answer Jack would get.

  The first cab that stopped was waved away without explanation; Oscar wanted a horse that didn’t look half-starved and an open carriage. Better to get wet, if it happened to rain, than to boil in the stink and heat of a closed carriage.

  Finally on their way, Oscar wanted to know more about Tonino, but the traffic made it almost impossible to hold a conversation. Instead they watched the street, in the way of coppers everywhere: looking for trouble. And still Tonino was right there with them. Jack’s mind kept turning back to the sight of the boy, pale, sweat-soaked, half asleep in Sophie’s arms. Rosa and Lia standing apart, waiting to be allowed closer. Rosa’s expression, as mournful as a Madonna.

  “Sonny Jesus on a bicycle,” Oscar griped, taking off his hat to use it like a fan. “The traffic would try the patience of a saint.”

  By Forty-fifth Street they were down to a crawl and at Fifty-fourth they came to a standstill, right in front of the newly opened Arundel building, French flats designed for the upper class. Jack had time to hope that Alfred Howard would not be looking out his windows when Oscar swore under his breath.

  “Here he comes.”

  An elaborately costumed doorman bowed as Mr. Howard exited the building he had designed and built. Howard had named the elegant apartment house after royal connections, to impress the old Manhattan families and, of course, to attract the kind of people who could pay the rents he charged.

  Oscar took a hard look at Howard. “Old before his time. How long since he immigrated?”

  “Ten years, maybe.”

  “Ten years of the cold shoulder.” He gave a mock shudder.

  Howard was a man of great wealth and perfect manners, but he had failed to gain the attention of any of the first families. None of them—Astors and Vanderbilts, Van Cortlandts, Provosts, Kipps and Verplancks—had opened their social circle to him, but then Howard was also a papist.

  Apparently it had come as a shock that Howard’s first cousin—the Duke of Norfolk—wasn’t enough to get him into Mrs. Astor’s parlor. Jack doubted a Roman Catholic had ever come in her front door. In a city that had been flooded with poor Irish for decades—and more recently, with Italians—anything and everything Catholic was more suspect than ever.

  Howard had a deep, rich baritone that was easily heard over the street noise.

  “Detective Sergeants! A word!”

  With traffic at a standstill there was no way to avoid the man. Jack raised a hand to touch his hat in greeting. “Mr. Howard.”

  “I have been expecting a report on Pittorino for days, Detectives. Days.”

  “As it happens we may be able to put our hands on him today. We have a lead. That’s where we’re headed now.”

  The cab jolted and inched forward a paltry few feet; Howard kept pace.

  “I will have my day in court,” he said, raising a finger to make his point. “I will see that scoundrel Pittorino brought low. I stare at my bare ceiling every night and my resolve is renewed.”

  Howard was angry not so much because he had been swindled, but because it was an Italian who got the best of him.

  “How many is it now that he’s deceived?”

  “Four, at last count,” Jack said. He thought: Or eight. Or twelve. Most rich men would rather lose cash than face. Howard was not the only one who would be mortified if it were to become public knowledge that he had been taken in by an Italian confidence man, but he was too outraged to swallow the insult and had sought out the law.

  “Four people robbed,” Howard was saying. “And where is he now, may I ask? Where is he up to his tricks today?”

  The cab lurched and began to roll forward.

  “You will be the first to know when we have something to report,” Jack called back. Then Howard was lost in the crowd.

  “Dit’ nel culo,” Oscar growled. And Jack couldn’t disagree: Howard was a pain in the ass.

  They were coming up to the southwest corner of Central Park, where Broadway, Eighth Avenue, and Fifty-ninth Street met and traffic devolved into something like a stampede. Two coppers armed with nothing more than whistles did what they could to keep things moving, but it would take the cab at least ten minutes dodging pedestrians, omnibuses, wagons, and carriages of all types to get to the far side.

  “We could walk from here,” Jack said.

  Oscar snorted. “You may be feeling suicidal, but I’ll stay where I am.”

  There were accidents here every day; most usually they involved streetcars and delivery wagons, but Jack himself had seen more than one cab crushed to splinters and leaking blood. He sat back and considered Pittorino.

  A good confidence man—a successful con man—was always on the hunt for a new opportunity. Salvatore Pittorino had been finding likely marks at St. Patrick’s Cathedral, where the city’s most successful Roman Catholics showed off their wealth every Sunday. How Pittorino figured out which of them were building new houses was something they didn’t know yet, but his method was consistent. Once he identified a target he would approach with a business card:

  Maestro Salvatore Pittorino

  Artist and Master Muralist

>   Rome, Florence, Paris, London

  A successful confidence man could talk his way into or out of any situation, and Pittorino was very good at what he did.

  “It’s almost musical,” one of his victims had admitted, a lumber exporter and a close friend of the archbishop’s, a man with two brothers who were priests and three sisters in convents. “The way he talks, the sheer depth of knowledge on art and artists and details about the Vatican. He went on about the quality of light in my parlor—” The man shook his head in admiration of Pittorino’s craft, if not his chosen profession.

  “Standard for his kind,” Oscar had said. He stopped short of telling the lumber baron that it was his own greed and vanity that made him ripe for plucking. Pittorino probably couldn’t paint at all, but he could compose compliments to stroke the egos of rich men.

  “His uncle is the bishop of Milan,” the first of Pittorino’s victims to come forward had told them. “He said our plasterwork was just as elegant. He said the proportions of the parlor were sublime.”

  Mr. Howard was the fourth or maybe the tenth who had discovered a sudden deep yearning for a mural to be painted on the walls of his bedchamber. He paid Pittorino in advance for the materials—the finest oils, silver and gold leaf—as well as a daily sum for the artist’s humble needs—and agreed to a single stipulation. As any patron of the arts must know, meticulous work required concentration and time. He must be allowed to work alone, without interruption. And his work could not be seen until he had finished.

  The evidence indicated that he had spent all his time in the man’s chamber sleeping on the luxurious bed he had liberated from its layers of drop cloths.

  The carriage turned out of the traffic circle to pass the Manhattan Roller Rink, where three coppers were dragging two boys out the doors, both of them protesting and wailing the usual sad song. Jack knew the patter: all a misunderstanding, wasn’t me, swear to God. Every day there was another letter in the papers, another story about the immoral goings-on in roller rinks. Oscar was taking bets on when this one would be forced to shut down.

  “You know,” Oscar said now, jolting Jack out of his thoughts. “Pittorino could be speeding up. He might take on more than one of his projects at a time.”

  “Sure,” Jack agreed. “It’s the greed that trips them up in the end.”

  Oscar’s cigar had gone out, but he kept it plugged into the corner of his mouth and worried at it while he stared at a double line of schoolgirls walking toward the park gate, an odd contrast to the chaos on the opposite side of the road. Block after block of buildings being torn down and newer ones going up.

  “Look at this. When my father came from Ireland he lived for a while in Seneca Village, rented a room from an Ishmael Allen, just a ways up from here. They knocked it all down to make the park, grabbed the land, and threw everybody out. “

  “Squatters,” Jack said.

  “Not squatters,” Oscar sputtered. “Those people owned their land.” His shoulders shifted and he looked over his head.

  “Now they’re building all along the west side. It looks like a battlefield.”

  It was true that at every cross street you could see empty lots piled high with lumber and bricks. Row houses at different stages of construction were strung along cheek to jowl, identical in every way from the color of the brick to the dimensions of the front stoop and the number of windows. Behind each of them something that was supposed to be a garden, not big enough to grow vegetables to feed a family of four.

  “Better than the Points,” Oscar said, reading Jack’s mind. “Indoor plumbing.”

  It was true that these houses would be far better than any tenement. Jack didn’t doubt that most of them had already been sold, sight unseen. A one-family house was less and less a possibility in a city that grew as fast as this one and was surrounded by water; New York had a lot of rich men with families to house.

  “This is it coming up,” Oscar said, pointing with his chin. “Klaus Natter, originally of Munich.”

  “Saloons?”

  “No,” Oscar said. “He brews the beer and distributes it as far as St. Louis.”

  Gardeners were hard at work on the landscaping while men went in and out with crates. Delivery wagons were parked for a block in both directions.

  Oscar palmed his badge as they were getting out of the cab and walked up to a man who was scowling at a clipboard. The badge flashed in the sunlight, silver and blue enamel, and he waved them on without hesitation.

  The overseer who was running the building site was sitting behind a battered table in what would soon be a very elegant parlor. Workmen were installing electric lighting, and Jack stopped to watch them while Oscar dealt with the overseer.

  To a worker passing by with an empty paint bucket Jack said, “A minute of your time?”

  The painter stopped, one brow raised, his mouth open to show tobacco-stained teeth.

  “We’re looking for a man who comes in to paint murals. An artist, from Italy.”

  That got him a nasty smile. “I was wondering when youse’d catch on. You’ll find that sneaky little Eye-Tie on the third floor.”

  Jack glanced over his shoulder to Oscar, who was still in deep conversation, leaning in close to make his point.

  The painter said, “Donoghue—the man the other copper is talking to? Donoghue is lying to him. He’s under strict orders not to admit the artiste is upstairs because the owner’s got it in his head that somebody will offer the painter more money and steal him away. Doesn’t want him to go before he’s finished his masterpiece.”

  His harsh laugh gave way to a hacking cough, and he turned his head to hawk into the empty bucket. “Serves Natter right,” he said, wiping his mouth on his sleeve. “Damn Heini waving his money around. See how he likes being robbed, and by a wop.”

  * * *

  • • •

  DONOGHUE TOOK THEM to the third floor, where they found a boy sitting on the floor, his back against a set of double doors. He had a cat in his lap, a big old tom missing one eye and all of his tail. Both boy and cat were softly snoring.

  Oscar stomped hard and bellowed, “Benito!”

  The boy blinked up at them; the cat yawned. Jack studied the tom, who was returning the favor with his single yellow eye.

  “I see Caesar is still with us,” Jack said. “So where’s Pittorino?”

  The boy climbed to his feet, dumping the cat and rubbing his face with both hands. “How should I know?” he said, sullen. “Artists.” He held up a hand, palm facing sideways, and tapped his brow on the midline, the Italian gesture for somebody not in his right mind. “He pays me to sit here, I’m not going to turn down good money.”

  “Step out of the way,” Oscar said.

  For a second it seemed the boy hesitated, but then he shrugged and did as he was told.

  “You stay right there.” Oscar went on in rapid Italian. “You and me and Caesar, we’re going to have a talk. You decide to take off, I know how to find you.”

  “What is going on here?” Donoghue mopped his face with a handkerchief, as nervous as a man going into battle. “What will I tell Mr. Natter? He is going to be very angry.”

  Oscar shook his head. “But not at us. And not at you, either, so keep your pants on.”

  “But I smell the paint and turpentine. I think you’ve got the wrong man.”

  Jack said, “Just open the door.”

  * * *

  • • •

  THE SINGLE ROOM was bigger than many cottages that could be seen from the windows that looked west toward the Hudson. It was empty but for a straw tick mattress neatly made with a blanket and two open cans, one of paint and one, unmistakably, of turpentine.

  The walls and ceiling were blank plaster.

  Donoghue looked around with his mouth hanging open, and a bright red flush traveled up from his skinny ne
ck like mercury up a thermometer.

  “He’s been working in here for a week,” he spat out. “Every night. Says he works best by candlelight. Says he’ll be finished tomorrow. Mr. Natter—” He pulled his handkerchief out again and wiped his brow. “Mr. Natter is going to throw a fit.”

  “You never see Pittorino during the day?” Jack asked.

  Donoghue shook his head. “He’s here at six in the evening, never a minute late.”

  “Then we’ll be here at half past five,” Oscar said. “But keep this quiet, do you hear me? Not a word to anybody, not even to your Mr. Natter, or this freeloader of yours will get wind of it and disappear.”

  * * *

  • • •

  WHEN THEY HAD finished with Benito, who had nothing useful to add to what they knew of Pittorino, Jack and Oscar stood for a long minute in front of the house watching a herd of sheep grazing in Central Park.

  “You know what you said about him running more than one game at a time?” Jack asked finally.

  Oscar’s eyebrows peaked and he turned to look north. More construction, including something that might have been a castle.

  “The Dakota. You think he’d dare?”

  “It would be quite a feather in his cap.”

  “Then let’s go.” Oscar grinned, rubbing his palms together. He’d been looking for an excuse to get inside the Dakota since construction started. Jack couldn’t blame him.

  There were fancy apartment blocks going up on every fashionable street, but the Dakota was something out of the ordinary. That had to do at least in part with the fact that it was so far north, almost too far, some said, to be considered in the city at all. More intriguing still: it was the brainchild of Edward Clark, who had founded the Singer Sewing Machine company and sunk such a large amount of his tremendous fortune into it that the stress had knocked him down dead before it was even halfway done.

  “When are people supposed to start moving in?” Jack asked.