The Angel of Darkness

by Caleb Carr

  “It’s as positive an identification as I’ve ever seen anyone make,” Lucius said as he moved over to meet us, trying to keep his voice under control but seeming ready to burst out of his sweaty clothes.

  “Amazing,” Marcus added. “From a sketch! Doctor, if we could ever get this idea accepted by the department, it would change the entire process of identification and pursuit.”

  Miss Howard and Mr. Moore rushed over next. “Well, Doctor,” Miss Howard began, “it took a few days, but—”

  “You won’t believe it!” Mr. Moore said, chuckling in that strange way again. “It’s too rich, Laszlo, you’re never going to believe it, I tell you!”

  The Doctor was shaking his head impatiently. “I won’t if none of you tells me what the devil ‘it’ is! Kindly get some sort of a grip on yourself, Moore—and one of you, please, go on.”

  Mr. Moore just lurched away, holding his head in a kind of exhausted wonder and trying to stifle further laughter. It was up to Marcus to reveal what they’d discovered: “Suppose I were to tell you, Doctor, that last year—at the very same time that we were investigating the Beecham case together—the woman we’re now looking for was working just down the street from your own house?”

  I could feel my own jaw drop, and saw the Doctor’s and Cyrus’s do the same. But it was also plain that, though shocked by it, we all knew what Marcus was talking about :

  “You mean—the hospital?” the Doctor murmured, staring off at an Egyptian mummy case without seeing it. “The Lying-in Hospital?”

  Lucius smiled wide. “The New York Lying-in Hospital. Whose principal benefactor was and is—”

  “Morgan,” the Doctor mumbled on. “Pierpont Morgan.”

  “Which means,” Miss Howard added, “that even as you and John were being—entertained in Mr. Morgan’s house, this woman was, effectively, being paid by him to tend to mothers and newborns.” She glanced over at Mr. Moore with a smile what indicated doubts about his current mental condition. “That’s what’s got him so tickled, you see—that and sheer fatigue. He’s been that way ever since we found out, and I’m not entirely sure how to snap him out of it.”

  Mr. Moore’s amusement was thoroughly understandable. It might have been heightened by the relief of locating our quarry, but its main source was definitely the discovery that the woman in question had once been in the employ (even if indirectly) of the great financier who had played a crucial, and at times troublesome, part in our investigation of the Beecham murders. The thing had a kind of poetic—and, yes, amusing—justice to it. You see, during that investigation Mr. Moore and the Doctor had been kidnapped and taken to J. Pierpont Morgan’s house for a showdown over the effect that the case was having on the city; and while the result of that meeting had been a useful one for our cause, it’d left the pair of them with something less than the warmest feelings for the country’s most powerful businessman, banker—and philanthropist.

  Among his many other charitable activities, Mr. Morgan had been the main source of funding for the transfer of the New York Lying-in Hospital to a large mansion previously owned by Mr. Hamilton Fish, which stood, as Marcus had said, just half a block away from the Doctor’s own house, on the corner of Seventeenth Street and Second Avenue. There were those uncharitable but knowledgeable souls what said that Morgan had made the expansion possible so that he’d have enough beds to accommodate all his mistresses. Whatever the fact, the hospital was one of the few medical facilities that worked with children what the Doctor had no contact with: partly because its concern was unwed and impoverished mothers and their newborn infants, which was out of the Doctor’s area of specialization, but mostly because it was run by Dr. James W. Markoe, who happened to be Mr. Morgan’s personal physician.

  An amazing set of coincidences, some might say; but the born New Yorker knows what a small town this truly is, and that such things happen fairly frequently. So while it did take a good thirty seconds for the Doctor to absorb all this information, it took no longer, and he soon had his mind back on practicalities. “You say she worked there last year.” His eyes focused on Marcus. “I assume, then, that she was released or resigned?”

  “A bit of both,” Marcus answered. “And under what might kindly be called a cloud.” From the stack of papers in his hand Marcus pulled a single sheet. “Dr. Markoe wasn’t at the hospital this morning, and when we contacted him at home he refused to give us any help. We could’ve pressed it and visited him in an official capacity, but our feeling was that a little cash spread around to the other nurses at the hospital would be more effective. It was—and here’s what we found out.” He indicated the paper, which was covered with notes. “To start with, every one of the nurses who was working at the hospital last year was absolutely certain of the identity of the woman in the sketch. Her name is Elspeth Hunter.”

  Marcus paused for a second—but it was a long second, the kind I’d come to recognize from the Beecham case. When an unknown, unnamed person you’ve been pursuing—without even knowing for one hundred percent sure if they exist—stops being a bundle of descriptions and theories and becomes a living individual, it produces an eerie, frightening feeling: you’re suddenly certain that you’re in a very-high-stakes race, and that you can’t quit until you either win or get whipped.

  “Any more of a background?” the Doctor asked.

  “The nurses didn’t know anything,” Marcus answered, “but we were able to fill in some holes from her file.”

  Lucius looked at the Doctor with meaning: “Her file—at headquarters.”

  “So …” the Doctor breathed. “A criminal background, in fact?”

  “Not so much a background as accusations,” Marcus continued. Before he could go on, though, a swarm of children herded by several governesses came flying into the room, making a racket as they bolted over to look at the mummy cases.

  Glancing around at them, the Doctor said, “Upstairs,” quickly, at which we all made for one of the central cast-iron staircases and walked quickly up to the picture galleries. Moving through the rooms at the same fast pace, we reached one that was devoted to American paintings—and was deserted.

  “All right,” the Doctor said, quickly moving across the plain wood floor and taking a seat on a viewing bench in front of Mr. Leutze’s enormous painting “Washington Crossing the Delaware.” He glanced back the way we’d come when he heard someone approaching, but it was only the still clucking Mr. Moore. “Go ahead, Marcus,” the Doctor said.

  Marcus pulled out several other papers from his pile. “We—borrowed the file from Mulberry Street. It seems that Dr. Markoe reported Mrs. Hunter—she’s married, by the way—after several of the other nurses voiced disturbing suspicions concerning the patients she’d been attending.”

  Mr. Moore now pulled up to us and, having heard Marcus’s last words, straightened up, so quickly that it was disturbing: for a man to shift moods that fast, it seemed that something dire must be coming. “You’d better prepare yourself for this, Kreizler,” he said, breathing out the last of his humor and relief in a heavy sigh.

  The Doctor only held a hand up to him. “Patients?” he said. “Do you mean the mothers she attended?”

  “Not the mothers,” Miss Howard answered. “Their babies.”

  “It seems,” Marcus continued, “that during the eight months she was employed by the Lying-in Hospital, Nurse Hunter attended to an inordinately high number of babies who died—most of them only a few weeks after birth.”

  “Died?” the Doctor echoed, quietly but with a kind of frustrated bewilderment. It was as if he’d been given a square peg of information that just didn’t fit into some round hole of an idea that he’d formed in his brain. “Died…” The Doctor stared at the floor a moment. “But—how?”

  “Difficult to say, precisely,” Marcus answered. “The police report doesn’t go into any real specifics. But the nurses did. They claim that the children—there were four cases that they all agreed on, as well as some others that wer
e questionable—were perfectly healthy when they were born, but fairly quickly developed respiratory problems.”

  “Unexplained episodes of labored breathing,” Lucius added, “resulting, uniformly, in cyanosis.”

  “Hunh?” I noised.

  “A telltale bluish coloration of the lips, skin, and nail beds,” Lucius answered. “All caused by reduced hemoglobin in the small vessels—which generally indicates some kind of suffocation.” He looked to the Doctor again. “There would be two or three preliminary episodes, and then one during which the child would expire. But here’s the key: every time a child did die, Nurse Hunter was either rushing it to a doctor on her own or alone in a wardroom with it.”

  Dr. Kreizler just kept looking at the floor. “Did the doctors at the hospital ever draw any connection between the events?”

  “You know how things are in institutions like that,” Miss Howard said. “Sometimes the mothers had already left the hospital, giving their babies up. Under those kinds of circumstances there’s a high mortality rate, and nobody in authority tends to ask any questions. Dr. Markoe only went to the police because the nurses brought it to his attention—not that he’s a bad man, but—”

  ” But when you’ve got a dead infant and too few beds and nurses to start with,” Mr. Moore said, “it’s ship the body to the old potter’s field and on to the next case.”

  “Actually,” Marcus said, “the doctors had always considered Nurse Hunter’s efforts on behalf of the cyanotic infants to be quite—well, heroic, in a way. It seemed to them that she worked tirelessly to prolong the babies’ lives.”

  “I see …” The Doctor stood up and walked over to stare into the eyes of one of General Washington’s frozen oarsmen. “And what, then, made the nurses think that there was anything untoward?”

  “Well,” Marcus said, “they took note of all the similarities involved in the various incidents, and decided that they were too exact to be coincidences.”

  “Was Nurse Hunter particularly unpopular?” the Doctor asked.

  Marcus nodded. “That’s a problem—she was apparently very high-handed, very competitive, and could carry quite a grudge against anybody who crossed her.”

  The Doctor nodded along with the detective sergeant. “According to the other nurses, at any rate. I fear, Marcus, that these statements must be taken with a certain grain of salt—the medical profession breeds petty jealousy and infighting in all its branches.”

  “Then you’re reluctant to believe the other nurses?” Miss Howard asked.

  “Not reluctant,” the Doctor answered. “Not precisely that. But it simply doesn’t…” He shook his head once, hard. “Well—go on.”

  Marcus shrugged. “Like Sara says, the rest of the nurses made a stink with Dr. Markoe. He went to the police, and Nurse Hunter was brought in. She vehemently denied any wrongdoing—got so incensed, in fact, that she immediately resigned. And it wasn’t as if these crimes—if in fact they were crimes—could be proved. Every one of them looked just like spontaneous infantile respiratory failure. And the way Nurse Hunter told it, she’d kept them alive for as long as they did live. Markoe was inclined to believe her, but—well, he has to worry about his funding. There can’t be even a hint of scandal.”

  “True, Marcus,” Dr. Kreizler said. Then he held up a warning finger. “But you must remember that the facts can be construed so as to support the assertions put forward by Nurse Hunter.”

  “And Dr. Markoe, as I said, apparently agreed. He didn’t want to pursue the matter once Nurse Hunter had resigned, so there was nothing for the police to do. She went home a free woman.”

  “And do we have any idea,” the Doctor breathed, “where that home is?”

  “Yes—or where it was, at any rate,” Lucius said. “It’s in the police report. Ummm—” He took a piece of paper from his brother. “Number 39 Bethune Street. Down in Greenwich Village.”

  “Over near the river,” I threw in.

  “We shall have to check it,” the Doctor said, “although she has, in all likelihood, moved on.” He sat down again, and looked over at a whole wall of early American portraits in genuine and somewhat bitter consternation. “Died …” he said again, still unable to accept it. “Disappeared, I might have expected, but—died…”

  Miss Howard sat down next to him. “Yes. It doesn’t seem particularly consistent, does it?”

  “It’s beyond that, Sara,” the Doctor answered, holding his hands up in resignation. “It’s a positive paradox.” There were a few moments of silence, during which we could hear the laughing, shouting children downstairs; then the Doctor roused himself. “Well, Detective Sergeants? Why, having discovered all this, have you summoned us here?”

  ” It seemed as good a place as any to try to make sense of it,” Lucius answered. “We haven’t yet had a chance to do a really thorough search of the whole area or to retrace what this Hunter woman’s steps must have been. So, since it’s Sunday and there’s not much else we can attend to…”

  The Doctor shrugged. “True,” he said, standing up. “We may as well determine what the mechanical method has to offer. Señora Linares said the child liked to visit the sculpture gallery, isn’t that correct?”

  “Yes, sir,” Lucius answered. “On the first floor, in the north wing.”

  “Well, then”—the Doctor indicated the stairs with his outstretched arm—“let’s get started. Detective Sergeant, would you mind—”

  “Notes for the board,” Lucius said, pulling out his small pad. “Of course, Doctor.”

  We got back down to what the Metropolitan’s operators liked to call the “sculpture galleries,” but where in fact, as the Doctor’d told me on one of our first visits to the museum, most of the figures on display were plaster casts of great statues from other galleries and institutions around the world. They’d been put on display in New York for those folks what would never get the chance to travel and see the originals. This accounted for the uniform bright whiteness of many of the pieces, and for the way that they were thrown together, almost like they were in a warehouse. The sunlight what came in softly through big rectangular windows was reflected off ceilings and moldings what were also bright white, and also off the polished red marble floor. The wood paneling of the walls, by way of contrast, was dark and together with the arched doorways gave the place a kind of stately feel. But as for the sculptures themselves, they—like the stuff in the first floor of the south wing—didn’t do much for me, and I doubt I would’ve felt much different if I’d been looking at the originals. Greek and Roman gods, goddesses, monsters, and kings (or pieces of them, anyway); strange beasts and blank-eyed men from Babylonia; together with nudes, chalices, and vases from all over…. What about it could’ve been so entertaining for a fourteen-month-old girl was beyond me. But the more important question, as I listened to the others trade ideas, seemed to be what it all might’ve meant to Elspeth Hunter.

  “Providing, of course, that she actually spotted the señora and Ana here,” Mr. Moore said, “and not in the park.”

  “Why, John,” Miss Howard needled, “you actually referred to the child by her name. That’s progress. But I’m afraid your suggestion doesn’t seem very likely. If we stay with our theory that it was Ana’s cheerful, noisy demeanor that attracted the kidnapper’s attention in the first place, then it seems probable that the sighting occurred here—this is the place that she liked best.”

  “Sara’s point is sound, John,” the Doctor said. “For whatever reason, this was the Linares girl’s private playground. But what would bring a disgraced nurse here, I wonder?” He gazed around at the place, which seemed like a combination of a mausoleum and a menagerie. “What did Elspeth Hunter find so compelling in this room?”

  The question hung in the air unanswered for a good fifteen minutes, until everybody acknowledged that they had no ideas and agreed to move on to the next spot we knew Nurse Hunter must have visited: the construction site near Fifth Avenue, where she presumably had grabbed
her piece of lead pipe. As we got outside and wandered east I signaled to my fellow driver to let him know we wouldn’t be much longer. Then I fell in beside the Doctor and Miss Howard, who were following the paved path as the Isaacsons, Mr. Moore, and Cyrus fanned out and started sifting through the grass and debris that led to the actual building site. It wasn’t much more than a big hole in the ground at that point.

  “Have you seen the drawings of the new wing?” Miss Howard asked the Doctor as we walked.

  “Hmm?” he noised, his mind still fixed on other matters. “Oh. Yes, I saw the originals before old Hunt died. And I’ve seen his son’s latest editions, too—quite spectacular.”

  “Yes,” Miss Howard said with a nod. “A friend of mine works in their office. It’ll really be something—a lot of statuary.”

  “Statuary?”

  “Decorating the façade.”

  “Ah. Yes.”

  “I know it sounds like a bit of a non sequitur,” Miss Howard said with a laugh, “but there is a connection to what we’ve been discussing and looking at, Doctor. All those symbolic statues designed for the façade—the four principal artistic disciplines, the four great ages of art—they’re all to be female. Did you notice that? Only the smaller stone medallions will be male—and they’ll be actual portraits of great artists.”

  The Doctor drew closer to her. “I do sense a point, Sara.”

  Miss Howard shrugged. “A tired point, I’m afraid. The symbols are all women—the people are all men. It’s the same with those statues in the hall back there. The occasional goddess or some nameless ideal of beauty and womanhood who generally sprang from a man’s head—those are the female forms. But the figures with names, the living humans of any historical note? Men. Tell me—what does that teach a young girl, as she grows up?”