The Angel of Darkness

by Caleb Carr

  “We would not,” the Doctor replied. “We would and will leave that to someone trained in the field.” Pulling out his silver watch, the Doctor popped it open and squinted at it. “I should prefer someone of Sargent’s ability, but he is in London and would demand an absurd fee. Eakins might do, too, but he is in Philadelphia—even that is too far, given the urgency of our task. Our opponent may flee the city at any moment—we must move quickly.”

  “Let me get this straight, Kreizler,” Mr. Moore said, ever more dumbfounded. “You’re going to commission a portrait of this woman, based on a description?”

  “A sketch should be sufficient, I think,” the Doctor said, tucking his watch away. “Portraiture is an immensely complex process, Moore. A good portrait painter must be something of a natural psychologist. I see no reason why, given enough time with the señora, a very reasonable likeness could not be created. The first job is to find the right artist. And I believe I know where to get a reference.” He looked my way. “Stevie? Shall we pay a call on the Reverend? I believe we’ll find him at home and hard at work at this hour—provided he’s not out on one of his nocturnal rambles.”

  I brightened up. “Pinkie?” I asked, jumping out of the windowsill. “Sure thing!”

  Marcus looked from me to Dr. Kreizler. “‘Pinkie’? ‘The Reverend’?”

  “A friend of mine,” the Doctor said. “Albert Pinkham Ryder. He has many nicknames. As do most eccentrics.”

  “Ryder?” Mr. Moore wasn’t buying this idea, either. “Ryder’s no portrait painter—and it takes him years to finish a canvas.”

  “True, but he has a keen psychological instinct. He’ll be able to recommend someone, I’ve no doubt. If you’d care to come along, Moore—you, too, Sara.”

  “Very much,” Miss Howard answered. “His work is fascinating.”

  “Hmm, yes,” the Doctor said uncertainly. “You may find his rooms and studio less so, I’m afraid.”

  “That’s the truth,” Mr. Moore threw in. “You can count me out—that place makes my skin crawl.”

  The Doctor shrugged. “As you wish. Detective Sergeants—I dislike asking you to perform what I fear is a useless task, but it may be worth—how did you put it?”

  “Rousting the Cubans,” Lucius answered, sounding like there weren’t many things he’d like to do less. “Oh, this’ll be a treat… Black beans, garlic, and dogma. Well, at least I don’t speak Spanish, so I won’t know what they’re saying.”

  “I do apologize,” the Doctor said, “but we must, as you know, cover as many possibilities as we can. And as quickly as possible.”

  We all began to move for the door, Marcus bringing up the rear at a slow pace. “There’s just one thing, Doctor,” he murmured, taking deliberate steps as he turned something over in his head. “Señor Linares. What we’re assuming—and I agree with the assumption completely—is that this is an abduction committed by someone who didn’t know the identity of the baby.”

  “Yes, Marcus?” the Doctor said.

  “In that case, why is Linares trying to conceal it?” The detective sergeant’s face was full of concern. “The fact is that the woman we’re describing, whatever her psychological peculiarities, is in all probability American. That would be just as useful to the Spanish government as a politically motivated kidnapping. So why aren’t they using it?”

  Mr. Moore turned a somewhat smug face to the Doctor. “Well, Kreizler?”

  The Doctor looked at the floor and nodded a few times, smiling. “I might’ve known it would be you who would ask, Marcus.”

  “Sorry,” the detective sergeant answered. “But as you say, we’ve got to cover all the angles.”

  “No need to apologize,” the Doctor answered. “I was simply hoping to avoid that question. Because it’s the only one I can’t begin to answer. And should we find the answer, I fear, we will also find some rather unpleasant—and dangerous—facts. But I don’t think we can allow that consideration to delay our actions.”

  Marcus weighed this, then signaled agreement with a small nod. “It’s something we ought to keep in mind, though.”

  “As we shall, Marcus. As we shall…” The Doctor allowed himself one more slow, thoughtful lap around the room, coming to a rest at the window. “Somewhere out there, even as we speak, is a woman who unwittingly holds in her arms a child who could prove an instrument of terrible destruction—as devastating, in her innocence, as an assassin’s bullet or a madman’s bomb. Yet for all of that, I fear the devastation that has already occurred in the kidnapper’s mind most of all. Yes, we shall be alert for the dangers of the larger world, Marcus—but we must, once again, place our greatest efforts behind knowing the mind and the identity of our antagonist. Who is she? What created her? And above all—will the savage fury that drove her to this act eventually be turned against the child? I suspect so—and sooner, rather than later.” He turned to the rest of us. “Sooner, rather than later …”

  CHAPTER 10

  It’s always seemed to me that there’s two types of people in this life, them what get a kick out of what might be called your odder types and them what don’t; and I suppose that I, unlike Mr. Moore, have always been in the first bunch. You’d have to’ve been, I think, to have really enjoyed living in Dr. Kreizler’s house, for the folks he had in and out of there—even the ones like Mr. Roosevelt, who were long on brains and went on to great fame and success—were some of the more peculiar characters you could possibly have met in those days. And of all those strange but noteworthy souls, none was stranger than the man I liked to call “Pinkie,” Mr. Albert Pinkham Ryder.

  An artist by religion in addition to profession, the tall, soft-spoken, kindly man with the big beard and searching eyes gave off the general impression of a monk or priest, which was why he was known as “the Reverend” or “Bishop Ryder” to his friends. He lived in rooms at Number 308 West Fifteenth Street and spent most of his nights either working or on long walks around the city—its streets, its parks, even its suburbs—studying the moonlight and shadows that filled so many of his paintings. He was a solitary soul, a recluse, by his own estimation, who’d grown up in the spooky old whaling town of New Bedford, Massachusetts. He’d had a Quaker for a mother and a collection of brothers for company—all of which meant that one of his more extreme peculiarities was his way of dealing with women. Oh, he was polite enough, in a way what would’ve seemed chivalrous if it hadn’t been so damned odd. There was the time, for instance, that he heard a beautiful singing voice floating through his building and, when he found the woman who possessed it, immediately proposed marriage to her. Now, this woman was a fine singer, sure enough, but on the street and at the local precinct house she was known to be other things, too; and it was only when a group of his friends stepped in to lower the boom on the idea that poor old Pinkie was saved from what probably would’ve been a thorough fleecing.

  He liked kids; he was kind of a big, strange boy himself, and he was always happy to see me (the same could not be said for some of the Doctor’s other friends). By 1897 he was famous and successful enough, among those who understood art, to be able to live pretty much as he pleased—which was basically like a pack rat. He never threw a thing away, not a food carton or a piece of string or a pile of ashes, and his rooms really could get a little frightening at times for most people. But his gentle, quiet kindness and the definite pull of his hazy, dreamy paintings more than made up for all that, especially for me, a boy from the Lower East Side who was used to garbage piling up inside flats. That, combined with the fact that he shared my taste in food—he kept a kettle of stew always on the boil and, when out, preferred oysters, lobster, and baked beans in a waterfront restaurant—made his place a destination to which I was always happy to accompany the Doctor.

  It was just the three of us—Miss Howard, the Doctor, and myself—what made the pilgrimage that night, as Cyrus (who admired Pinkie’s paintings but, like Mr. Moore, didn’t think much of his living habits) begged off to get a full
night’s sleep. Pinkie’s building was just west of Eighth Avenue on Fifteenth Street, and was one of thousands like it in that neighborhood: a simple old brick row house that’d been converted into flats. We traveled by hansom, moving uptown with the thickening stream of traffic what was heading for the Tenderloin at that time of night and then branching off to find that a small kerosene lamp was burning in Pinkie’s front window.

  “Ah, so he’s home,” Dr. Kreizler said. He paid off the cabbie, then took Miss Howard’s arm. “Now, Sara, I must prepare you—I know that you find courtly deference to your sex abominable, but in Ryder’s case you really must make an exception. It’s perfectly innocent, and perfectly genuine—he does not intend it as any veiled attempt to keep women fragile and weak, I assure you.”

  Miss Howard nodded in a not-completely-convinced way as we climbed up the stoop of the building. “I’ll give anyone the benefit of a fair trial,” she said. “But if it becomes insulting…”

  “Fair enough,” the Doctor said. “Stevie? Why don’t you run ahead, so that Ryder has some warning.”

  I dashed inside the building and up the dark stairs to the door of Pinkie’s flat, then knocked on it hard and called out to him in a loud voice. I knew that he sometimes didn’t let even good friends in, if he was in a fever of creation, but I felt sure he’d respond to me. “Mr. Ryder?” I shouted. “It’s Stevie Taggert, sir, come with the Doctor!”

  From inside I heard the kind of rustling that squirrels make when they get into a pile of autumn leaves, and then some heavy, slow footsteps moved toward the door. The footsteps stopped, and there was a long pause, accompanied by heavy breathing that I could hear even in the hall. Finally, a deep, rich voice what was at once slow but a bit skittish asked:

  “Stevie?”

  “Yes, sir,” I answered.

  A lock was undone, and as the door was pulled away from me a large form moved in to fill the opening. I made out the beard first, then the high, glowing forehead, and finally the eyes, the color of which—light brown or blue—I could never quite figure.

  I moved inside with a salute. “Hellooo, Pinkie!” I announced, marching past the piles of books, newspapers, and just plain trash in his front room toward the back of the flat, where his studio—and the kettle of stew—were located.

  He smiled in his particular way, what Dr. Kreizler always called “enigmatically.”

  “Hello, young Stevie,” he said, wiping his paint-covered hands on a rag. For all that he’d lived in New York for years, there was still much of the old-time New Englander in the way he spoke. “What brings you to these reaches at this hour?”

  “The Doctor’s following me up,” I said, moving between walls covered with unframed canvases that, to the untrained eye, would have looked like finished pictures: beautiful golden landscapes, stormy dark seascapes (or what the art crowd called “marines”), as well as scenes from the poetry, drama, and myths what fascinated old Pinkie. He was quite a poet himself, and, like I say, his interpretations of “The Forest of Arden” or “The Tempest” would’ve looked to anybody else like they were ready for shipping. But it was near impossible for Pinkie to consider a painting done, ever, and he fussed and fidgeted with them, as Mr. Moore had said, for years before he’d release them to the usually exasperated patrons what had paid for them long ago.

  Grabbing a wooden spoon, I helped myself to a nice scoop of Pinkie’s hearty lamb stew, which he’d sweetened with some fresh apples. Then I took a turn around the studio. “Quite a crop, Pinkie,” I called to him. “How many of them are sold?”

  “Enough,” he answered from the front room. Then I heard the Doctor’s and Miss Howard’s voices and raced back put, so that I could witness the ritual that Pinkie went through anytime a woman came to his hideaway.

  Making a deep bow, he said, “I’m deeply honored, miss,” with rumbling sincerity. Then he held out a hand. “Please …” Next he started to quickly clear a path through all the garbage in the room to the one easy chair he owned, a beat-up but comfortable old thing that sat by the front window. As he finished clearing the floor in front of the chair, he grabbed a small oriental throw rug and spread it out so that Miss Howard could rest her feet on it once she’d sat down, like a Bohemian queen on a throne. Ordinarily, she wouldn’t have been a woman to go for such treatment; but coming from Pinkie, such things were just so sincere and so peculiar as to make anybody suspend their usual reactions.

  “Well, Albert,” the Doctor said cheerfully, “you look well. A bit swollen, perhaps, in spots. How is the rheumatism?”

  “Always lurking about,” Pinkie answered with a smile. “But I have my cures. May I offer you both something to eat? Or to drink? Beer? Water?”

  “Yes, I’ll have a glass of beer, Albert,” the Doctor answered, looking to Miss Howard. “It’s a pleasant night, though not as cool as I’d expected.”

  “Yes, beer would be lovely,” Miss Howard said.

  Pinkie held up a long finger, indicating he’d only be a moment, then started for the back of the flat. As he went, I noticed that his feet were making little squishing sounds. I looked down to see that he was wearing oversized shoes filled with straw and what appeared for all the world to be cooked oatmeal.

  “Say, Pinkie,” I said, following him, “I guess you know you’ve got oatmeal in your shoes.”

  “The best thing for rheumatism,” he answered, fetching a few bottles of beer and running a couple of suspicious-looking glasses under a cold tap. “My walks have become a bit painful lately. Straw and cold oatmeal—that’s the answer.” He started back for the front room.

  “O-kaay” I said with a shrug, still trailing him. “You oughtta know, ain’t nobody in New York walks as much as you do.”

  Moving with little huffing sounds, Pinkie set the beer bottles and glasses down on a table made of an old wooden crate and then started to pour. “Here we are,” he said, handing the glasses to the Doctor and Miss Howard. “To you, Miss Howard,” he toasted, holding his glass up. “‘I look upon thy youth, fair maiden, I look upon thy youth and fancy laden, Would that I a fairy were, That with magic wand I could deter, All evil chance, and spare thy coming years, All unwrought by rain of tears, With a rainbow bright.’”

  “Well said, Albert,” the Doctor replied, holding up his glass and drinking his beer. “Your own?” he asked, though I could tell that he knew it was.

  Pinkie inclined his head humbly. “Poor, but my own. And fitting for your companion.”

  Miss Howard seemed genuinely touched—and that was no easy trick, for a member of the male sex to move her. “Thank you, Mr. Ryder,” she said, holding up her glass and taking a sip. “That was lovely.”

  “Say, Pinkie,” I tossed in, knowing that he was also a turf enthusiast, “how’d you make out in the Suburban today?”

  A look of mingled disappointment and excitement came into his face. “I’m afraid I had no time to put a bet down,” he said. “But it’s odd that you should mention the races, Stevie …” He lifted the same long finger again and directed us to follow him to the studio, which we did. “A very strange coincidence, indeed! You see, I’ve been working on something. A picture with a story behind it, you might say. Some years ago, a waiter with whom I had a passing but convivial acquaintance wagered all of his life’s savings on a horse race—and lost. Despairing, he then shot himself.”

  “How dreadful,” Miss Howard said; but her shock could not hide the fact that she was becoming what you might call enchanted by the paintings that began to close in around her.

  “Yes,” Pinkie said. “It set my mind to work, I shall not tell you precisely how—but you must see the result, as I think it may have possibilities.”

  He took us over to a large easel in one corner of the room, on which rested a canvas of about two feet by three, covered with a light, stained piece of cloth. Pinkie lit a nearby gas lamp, turned its flame up, and then stepped to the easel.

  “Mind you, it’s nothing like finished,” he said, “but—well�
��”

  He took the cloth away.

  On the easel was one of the most eerie of all his pictures that I’d ever seen. It showed a scraggly oval track, surrounded by a similarly rough horse fence. On the muddy ground in front of the track was a large, nasty-looking snake; above it, in the distance, some barren hills and a sky so gloomy that it could’ve been either day or night; and on the track itself, a lone rider—Death, the Reaper himself—riding bareback in the wrong direction, holding his scythe high.

  Now; most of Pinkie’s pictures were mysterious, but this thing was downright grim—scary, even. The Doctor and Miss Howard, however, were clearly impressed, for their eyes positively glowed with fascination as they studied it.

  “Albert,” the Doctor said slowly, “it’s brilliant. Harrowing, but brilliant.”

  Pinkie shuffled self-consciously in his oatmeal at that, and did so again when Miss Howard added, “Extraordinary. Really … entrancing in its way …”

  “I’ve decided to call it simply ‘The Race Track,’ “Pinkie said.

  I looked from the Doctor and Miss Howard to Pinkie and finally back to the picture. “I don’t get it,” I said.

  Pinkie smiled at me and stroked his beard. “Now, that’s what I like to hear. What don’t you get, young Stevie?”

  “What’s with the snake?” I said, pointing at it.

  “What does it mean to you?” he answered.

  “Gotta be one fast snake, to keep up with that horse.” Pinkie seemed to find that very satisfying. “And speaking of the horse, Pinkie, he’s going the wrong direction—you oughtta know that.”

  “Yes,” Pinkie answered, looking at the picture.

  “And how about the sky?” I asked. “Is it supposed to be day or nighttime?”

  “Do you know,” Pinkie answered, squinting those strangely colored eyes. “I hadn’t thought about it.”

  “Hunh,” I said, giving the picture the once-over again. “Well, sorry, Pinkie, but it gives me the jitters. I’ll take that one up there.” I pointed to a nice, richly colored job that showed a pretty young girl with strawberry-blond hair: shadowy, yes, but comforting, not gloomy.