Unholy Fire

by Robert J. Mrazek

  It was approaching eleven o’clock when I crossed off the name of the last house on Mahoney’s list. I had spoken to the madam, and she had failed to recognize the girl’s likeness. Beyond Missouri Avenue, I could see the dingy buildings, weed-filled open lots, decrepit rooming houses, and saloons that were part of the area known as Murder Bay.

  I was ready to admit defeat, but before heading back to Mrs. Warden’s, I went into a small corner tavern to rest my feet. Workmen in coveralls stood with their pints at a long bar. Even at that hour, the tables were filled with local families, including a number of small children.

  The light was very dim, the smoky air hot and stale. I sat down on one of the rough wooden benches along the wall, and ordered a glass of hot cider. Someone across the room was playing a mournful dirge on a lap organ, and it complemented my mood. I closed my eyes and tried to figure out what to do the next morning. Once more the fleeting memory I was trying to recall rose to the edge of consciousness and then receded.

  At that moment I felt someone sit down next to me on the bench. A shoulder moved close to mine, and I smelled the strong scent of rosewater and an unwashed body. Opening my eyes, I took in the face of a young woman. Her warm breath exhaled into my ear.

  “You not happy?” she said.

  I gave her an exhausted smile and shook my head. She would have been pretty except for the badly misshapen front teeth.

  “Hilde … Deutsche,” she said, pointing at herself and smiling.

  “Deutsche?” I repeated.

  “Ja,” she said. “Hilde … German.”

  Almost as a reflex, I removed the drawing of the dead girl from my blouse and showed it to her. She unfolded the cream-colored paper like it was a surprise gift. When she saw what it contained, her face lit up in a smile.

  “Anya,” she said.

  “What?” I said, not believing it was possible that she actually recognized the dead girl.

  Pointing at the girl’s likeness, she said, “Das ist Anya.”

  “German?” I said … “Deutsche?”

  She nodded her head.

  “Anya Hagel.”

  I shook my head in wonder at the remarkable coincidence that had placed this girl next to me.

  “Where does Anya live?” I said.

  A bewildered look came into her eyes.

  I tried to pretend I was sleeping by putting the palms of my hands together next to my check.

  “Where does Anya sleep?”

  Confused, the girl got up and walked to the bar, returning with a heavyset older woman who looked like Benjamin Franklin.

  “She spreache Englische,” said the young girl, pointing at her.

  I told the older woman that Anya had been murdered. I’m not sure what reaction I expected, but she did not seem surprised. She told me that Anya had come to the United States a year earlier from Germany with a large group of girls who were promised work in Washington as domestics and house servants. Anya had drifted into prostitution.

  I then asked them about the raven-haired girl, describing her from memory. Neither of them showed any recognition. However, Hilde thought she knew where Anya lived, having seen her come out of a house several times. I offered her two dollars to show me the place. She happily agreed.

  It was only a few blocks from the tavern, just inside the district known as Murder Bay. There were no gas lamps in the neighborhood, and the houses were old, ramshackle wooden structures built side by side along the narrow street. As Hilde led me into a dark alley, something came at us from the darkness with a ferocious growl. I stopped short and raised my arms, waiting for it to leap on me. I was grateful to discover that the hulking dog was tethered to a stout chain.

  Halfway down the alley, she pointed to a rickety set of stairs that led up to the rear entrance of a two-story building. When I arrived at the top of the stairs, the outline of a door emerged out of the murk. There was no point in knocking on the door. The lock had been broken off, and it stood wide open.

  Lighting a sulfur match, I stepped inside.

  The room was about ten feet square and contained a narrow bed, pine chest, and one chair. It reeked of spilled perfume. A candle was melted to the surface of the pine chest, and I put my match to it.

  Someone had literally torn the room apart, obviously in search of something. The drawers of the pine chest had been turned upside down, and the contents spilled on the bed. Her powder jars and ointment bottles lay smashed at the foot of the far wall.

  The floor was covered with mice droppings, and water was dripping down from a crack in the ceiling onto the bed. A film of white face powder lay over everything in one corner. Kneeling at the edge of it, I could see the clear imprint of a man’s boot.

  I imagined Val kneeling there beside me, having already managed to divine the man’s height and weight, along with his name. I could discern nothing further. Glancing at the bed, I saw that even the padding in her quilt had been ripped apart. A pair of women’s shoes lay on top of the bed, the soles torn away from the heels. As I stared at the carnage, I wondered what he could have been searching for. I wondered whether he had found it.

  Looking at my watch, I saw that it was almost midnight. I was no closer to finding the sad-eyed girl and completely played out. It began snowing as I walked Hilde back to the tavern on Missouri Avenue. Perhaps I would have a new idea in the morning, I thought.

  Riding in a hansom cab back to Mrs. Warden’s, I leaned against the headrest and stared out at the falling snow. It was coming down in large flakes, reminding me of the night I had escorted Mavis Bannister back to her lodgings in Falmouth. And that was what finally jogged my memory. In my mind’s eye, I was sitting close beside her and gazing out at the snow.

  I even remembered the exact words she had whispered to me.

  “Will I see you at the party?” she had asked. At the time I thought she must be confused, or perhaps there was another party scheduled for the next night. But that was impossible because General Burnside had already issued his order for dependents to return to Washington on the day following the party.

  “One must be discreet,” she had said next.

  What if there had been another party, I wondered, a more intimate gathering that she had been invited to by General Hooker or General Sickles. Since she had seen me with General Hooker, perhaps she had thought I was going to be there, too.

  “I hope to see you very soon,” had been her last words.

  It seemed probable that the dead girl and her raven-haired friend had been invited to the party as well. Knowing General Sickles’s proclivities, my next thought was the girls could have been his inspired idea of a special birthday gift for General Hooker. But Laird Hawkinshield might also have been responsible for bringing them to Falmouth. If so, I knew there had to be a financial incentive involved. What if he was blackmailing General Hooker to buy his silence? I wondered next. Yet General Hooker had never made any secret of his scorn for “riding with God’s cavalry.” The whole army knew of his fondness for prostitutes.

  I needed to find Mavis Bannister and yelled to the driver to turn around and head for the Provost Marshal’s Office at the asylum. Although it was well past midnight, Lieutenant Mahoney was still working in his office when I knocked on the door. He put an immediate damper on the possibility of quickly tracking down Mavis Bannister.

  “There are no records kept on married military dependents,” he said. “Tomorrow morning you could look up Bannister’s service file at the War Department. At least his last known address will be in there.”

  “There is nothing I can do tonight?” I asked.

  “Do you know anyone else on Hooker’s staff?” he replied. “They might know where she is staying if she is here in the city.”

  As soon as he said, “Hooker’s staff,” I remembered hearing the joke muttered by one of the sentries on the night I first met General Hooker. It was right after the young prostitute had arrived at his convalescent suite.

  “Leonora,” I said out loud.


  “And a beautiful name it is,” said Mahoney, “the name of my sainted mother. How did you know?”

  I didn’t tell him it was also the name of one of General Hooker’s whores.

  “Have you ever heard of a hotel named the Carroll Arms?” I asked instead.

  “It’s not a hotel, son,” he replied. “It’s the fancy name of a mediocre whorehouse in Foggy Bottom.”

  “I need directions to get there,” I said.

  The Carroll Arms turned out to be a new, wood-framed rooming house in the middle of a narrow street filled with beer parlors. Already sagging inward from shoddy construction, it was sided with undressed lumber and painted a gaudy yellow. A saloon took up the first floor. The sound of raucous singing blared out into the street as I got out of the cab.

  There was a separate entrance to the three floors above the saloon. Two women with heavily painted faces stood like sentries on either side of the open door. At the top of the stairs, an old black man was sitting in a chair that was tipped back against the wall. I removed a dollar from my coat and handed it to him.

  “Leonora,” I said.

  “Number thirty-seven,” he replied wheezily, pointing up the next flight of stairs.

  The building was a rabbit warren of dark, narrow passages that smelled of urine and tobacco smoke. A low, wailing sound came to my ears from one of the rooms on the third floor. I steeled myself to ignore it, feeling guilty all the same. Using a match, I went down the corridor until I found the door marked thirty-seven. There was a crack of light under it. I knocked once.

  “Go away,” came a dispirited voice.

  There was no lock on the door. I pushed it open and stepped inside. She was sitting on the edge of the unmade bed. I closed the door behind me.

  Leonora was wearing the same red dress she had had on when she spent the night with General Hooker. Since then someone had apparently ripped it from her shoulders. It was crudely mended around both straps. There were dried sweat stains under each armpit. The side of her mouth was bruised purple and swollen on one side. Her thighs were slackly spread on the bedclothes.

  The last time I had seen her, Leonora’s eyes had danced with the confidence of a pretty young woman who knew she had power over men. Now they were the wary eyes of a mistreated animal.

  “Just go away,” she repeated. “I ain’t workin’ no more tonight.”

  “I need your help, Leonora,” I said.

  She stared up at me with a slack-jawed weariness that suggested her first twenty years had been enough for a lifetime. An empty liquor bottle lay on its side next to the bed.

  “I know you?” she asked.

  “I met you about a month ago. You came to visit General Hooker.”

  She thought about that for several seconds.

  “Fighting Joe,” she said, with the hint of a smile. “I took the fight out of him.”

  “You told me where you lived when I met you that night.”

  She nodded as if vaguely remembering, and then looked around the squalid room with a vacant stare.

  “You want me?” she asked, as a big tear rolled down her face.

  “I would like to pay you for some information,” I said.

  She was having trouble focusing her eyes, and I realized she was drunk.

  “How much?”

  “Four dollars,” I said, which left me exactly one dollar for a hansom.

  “All right,” she said warily. “But give it to me first.”

  I took the bills out of my pocket and gave them to her.

  “Have you ever visited General Hooker down in Falmouth?” I asked, after she had counted it.

  “Where is that?” she said.

  “With the army down in Virginia.”

  “No … I been invited a’course,” she said. “I don’t like boats.”

  “Do you know this girl?” I asked, showing her the drawing of Anya Hagel.

  “Anya,” she said, without hesitation.

  “Anya had a young friend … very pretty … tall … long black hair,” I said, holding my breath.

  “Amelie,” she said after a brief pause. “They’re birds of paradise.”

  “Birds of paradise. What is that?”

  “I’ve had it rough,” she said, bleary-eyed.

  “I’m sorry.”

  She got up from the bed and tried to smooth out the front of her stained dress.

  “I think they’re going to put me in the shows,” she said, with an involuntary shudder.

  “The shows?”

  “They make you do things you wouldn’t believe.”

  “Have you ever thought of going back to Moline?” I asked, remembering the name of the place she had said she was from.

  Leonora gave me a bitter laugh.

  “I’d rather go to the shows than go back there,” she said.

  “What are the birds of paradise?” I asked once more.

  Her eyes came into focus again.

  “You know where the castle is?” she asked.

  I knew she meant the new Smithsonian Museum and nodded.

  “It’s a private club on the road that goes south from there down to the river,” she said. “The house was built in the olden times. Only five girls work there. They all have their own rooms … not like this.”

  “What is the address?”

  “You’ll know it when you see it,” she said. “But it ain’t open to the public. You have to belong.”

  I thanked her and turned to leave.

  “You want to have me … just you, I mean?” she asked, desperately trying to bring an alluring smile to her bruised and swollen mouth. “I could be good for you.”

  I had no heart to tell her no.

  “I know where you live now,” I said. “Thank you.”

  As I walked down the stairs, I remembered Patrick Mahoney saying, “Every whore has a story to tell.… It’s hard for most of them to keep their stories straight. The simple fact is that most of them sell themselves because it’s easy and it pays well … or at least it does until they get shopworn. Then it’s a different story. They tend to age real fast.”

  Leonora had gotten shopworn in less than a month.

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  It was almost two o’clock in the morning when my hansom passed the Smithsonian castle and turned south onto the cobblestoned street that led down to the Potomac River. There were street lamps every hundred feet or so, revealing a succession of large, brick government buildings and warehouses, all with their windows dark. As we approached the river, I saw what had to be the Birds of Paradise club. It was the only building in the entire neighborhood with all the downstairs windows lit.

  The place was unlike any other I had seen in the city, comprising an acre of ancient trees and plantings enclosed behind a white picket fence. Built in the early colonial times, the house was a sprawling, red-painted, three-story wooden structure, with two side wings, wrapping porches, and dormer windows sticking out from under the peaked roof.

  I told the hansom driver to stop at the carriage park in front. Another coach was already there. As I watched, two men in evening clothes came out of the house and made their way slowly down the front path. One of them was obviously drunk and barely able to stand up. His compatriot assisted him into their coach.

  “Should I wait?” asked my driver with a leer.

  “No,” I said, immediately regretting it.

  There would be a long walk back to Mrs. Warden’s if my hunt was unrewarded. The men on the path had left the front gate unlatched. I walked up to the front door, which was flanked by two large gas lamps, along with a brass knocker in the shape of a woman’s leg.

  As I lifted it to knock, the door swung open to reveal a heavyset black woman. Behind her the hallway led toward a large, well-lit parlor. A wide staircase rose up into the gloom of the next floor.

  “I wish to see Amelie,” I said.

  The woman erupted into a thick patois of words that sounded like French but somehow weren’t. Whate
ver she was trying to tell me, it was obvious she wanted me to leave.

  “Amelie,” I repeated slowly. “Amelie.”

  The woman began to close the door in my face. When I pushed back, she started yelling in the same strange language, all the while kicking out at me with her right shoe.

  A shadowy figure appeared at the top of the stairs.

  “Tante Louise,” came a commanding voice. The old woman went silent as the figure came slowly down the stairs.

  I recognized her as soon as she came into the light, although her long black hair was bound up in a towel. She was barefoot and wearing a loose-fitting white dressing robe.

  “Should I know you?” she asked. Her voice was low and vibrant, and had a lilt to it.

  “We almost met in Falmouth three nights ago,” I said. “I saw you at General Hooker’s birthday party. You were there with Anya Hagel.”

  The expression on her seemingly guileless face didn’t change at the mention of the dead girl’s name.

  “She was murdered that same night,” I said. “That is why I am here.”

  “I did not know,” she replied.

  “May I ask your full name?” I said.

  “My name is Amelie Devereaux,” she said.

  She was as lovely as I remembered, with a delicate beauty that radiated both innocence and intelligence. It seemed inconceivable to me that she could be bought and sold. The thought of it made me angry.

  “I know it is late, Miss Devereaux, but I must ask you some questions about Anya Hagel’s death.”

  “You have proper identification?”

  “Of course,” I said, silently berating myself for not having already shown it to her. I withdrew my identification card from my tunic and handed it to her.

  “John McKittredge, Captain, United States Army,” she said, reading the words aloud. “Provost Marshal General’s Department.”

  “I am investigating her murder,” I said. “Obviously, you are an important witness to her final hours.”

  “Yes, I understand. Please excuse me, but I have just finished my bath,” she said. “Would you come with me?”