The Angel of Darkness

by Caleb Carr

  “Nothing useful, I fear.” Slipping his hand affectionately around her elbow, the Doctor smiled, a bit apologetically. “And the cumulative effect of thousands of years of it only makes matters exponentially worse. Women on pedestals … Change is coming, however, Sara—though I grant you, it approaches with glacial speed. But it will come. You shan’t be idealized for ever.”

  “But it’s perverse idealization!” Miss Howard said, kicking a leg out and holding her free hand up. “In fact, there’s as much denigration in it as worship. Listen, Doctor, I don’t mean this as a purely philosophical conversation. I’m trying to think of what brought the Hunter woman here. I mean, look at those statues in there. The Babylonians and Assyrians, with their Ishtar, mother of the earth—and, at the same time, she was the goddess of war, a cruel, punishing bitch.” She gave me a quick look. “Sorry, Stevie—”

  I could only laugh. “Like I ain’t heard worse.”

  Miss Howard grinned and ranted on: “And the Greeks and Romans, with their scheming, plotting goddesses. Or the Hindoo deity Kali, their ‘Divine Mother’ who dispenses death and viciousness. There seem eternally to be two faces.”

  Dr. Kreizler’s eyes narrowed. “You’re thinking of the apparent contradictions in Elspeth Hunter’s behavior?”

  Miss Howard nodded, but slowly. “I think so. Though I’m not precisely sure of the connection. But—Señora Linares said that when she saw the woman on the train she seemed to be genuinely caring for Ana. Yet she also said that the woman looked like a predatory animal. Now we find out that she was a nurse, working in one of the most difficult—and admirable—areas of her profession. The doctors think she was a heroine; the nurses believe she was a murderer.”

  Cyrus came jogging back to us at that point, the other three men following at a walk. “Nothing of any interest here, Doctor. The detective sergeant wants to try to walk it through, though.”

  “All right,” the Doctor said. “Tell him we’re at his service.” Then, to Miss Howard, he added, “Hold your thought, Sara. I, too, sense something in it, though it’s vague as yet.”

  The Isaacsons and Mr. Moore joined us, and Lucius stood at the center of our little circle, still taking notes.

  “Okay,” he began, pointing at the steps of the Metropolitan. “Señora Linares comes out of the museum with Ana at about five o’clock.” He next indicated the huge pit that was the construction site. “The workmen have left or are leaving. It’s Thursday, and they expect to be back in the morning—so they don’t take as much care cleaning up as they would for the weekend, and the site is a good deal more cluttered than we see it now.” He moved over toward a collection of plumbing materials that was partly hidden by a useless wooden fence. “Nurse Hunter already knows what she’s going to do—at least generally. She’s searching for a weapon and spots the pile of pipe through this fence. That takes her in the opposite direction from the señora, which explains why she is never noticed by her intended victim.” He started to move west, back toward the Egyptian obelisk. “She takes her time and lets the señora reach the obelisk.” We all followed him as he moved toward it. “It’s the only area around that has any sort of tree cover—the only chance she’s going to have to strike if she’s at all concerned about getting away. Now it’s just past five. In another fifteen minutes to half an hour people will start to cross the park on their way home from work or simply to take in the evening air—although it looks like rain, so the second of those possibilities is probably cut down a bit. But it’s spring and warm enough, and plenty of people—armed with umbrellas—will still go through the park on their way home. So she’s got to make her move fast.”

  By now we’d near reached the octagonal group of benches around the seventy-foot obelisk. This was, in fact, the only spot in the vicinity that was at all secluded by trees, being as the red granite obelisk (or so Lucius told us) had been in place since 1881, when it’d been given to the United States by the head man of Egypt.

  “The clouds are keeping people away from this spot,” Lucius continued. “It’s out of the way and purely recreational—you don’t pass by it to get across or uptown. You only come here to while away an idle hour.” Which was true—the obelisk sat up on a little hill, off the park’s main paths. “Nurse Hunter knows that this is her only shot. She comes at the señora from behind, as she’s getting ready to sit on a bench, and hits her once, straight across the back of the head. She grabs the child and goes—where?” The detective sergeant looked around curiously. “Back out to Fifth Avenue is quickest—but she may not want to be seen quickly. And to get back to Bethune Street, shell need to get over to the West Side, to either the Sixth or the Ninth Avenue El, presuming that the trains are her usual method of travel.”

  “If she hasn’t got a job anymore,” Marcus added, “that argues for the trains as an economic necessity.”

  “Yes, but the señora saw her on the Third Avenue line,” Mr. Moore tossed in. “That argues for her having moved from Bethune Street.”

  “Perhaps, John,” the Doctor said slowly, staring up at the obelisk. “But Sara and I have just been discussing something which may—” The Doctor stopped, his eyes having reached the base of the obelisk. He walked slowly over to it, his eyes searching a crack at the bottom of the large block of stone. He stared into the deep crevice, lifting his hand as if he wanted to reach into it; then he pulled back and turned to Marcus and Lucius.

  “Detective Sergeants?” he said, with the beginnings of excitement. “Would you come here, please? There seems to be something in there.”

  Marcus and Lucius rushed over, Marcus producing a small pair of steel tongs. He gazed into the crevice, then slowly inserted the tongs, got hold of something, and withdrew it: a tiny bundle of light cotton fabric.

  He placed the balled-up bundle on the walkway near the obelisk’s base, then quickly put on a pair of very light gloves. We all crowded around as he began to untangle the little ball, its yellow-and-white fabric soiled and damp. As he proceeded, the shape of the thing became identifiable.

  “Looks like a—a tiny hat,” Mr. Moore said.

  “A baby’s hat,” Miss Howard said, indicating two little strands of delicate, braided cotton string what were used to tie the thing at the chin and a trim of white lace around its front.

  “There’s something else,” Marcus said, still flattening out the fabric. He unfolded the back of the cap to reveal fine golden embroidery at its rear border: “‘A—N—A,’”he read out. The rest of us just stared at the thing as the detective sergeant looked up and out at the park. “Well … looks like west it was. She got rid of the hat in case somebody stopped her—probably the only identifying article on the girl.”

  “Don’t jump to any conclusions, Marcus,” Lucius said. “She could have stuffed the hat in here and then gone the other direction.”

  “I don’t know,” Mr. Moore said, standing between the obelisk and the benches. “It’s a good thirty or forty feet out of her way—that’s time she’s wasting, stuffing it in there. Plenty of other spots to hide it if she went east—starting with the construction site.”

  “True, Moore,” Dr. Kreizler said, staring up at the obelisk. “But in addition, there is the question of where she chose to hide it—where precisely …”

  “What do you mean, Doctor?” Marcus asked.

  But the Doctor only turned to Miss Howard. “The Egyptian obelisk. It’s one of a pair. The other stands in London. Do you know what they are known as, Sara?” Miss Howard just shook her head. “‘Cleopatra’s Needles,’ “the Doctor went on, looking back up. “An ominous title—she was quite a deadly woman, Cleopatra.”

  “And yet,” Miss Howard continued, getting it, “the ‘Mother of Egypt,’ in her day. Not to mention the lover of Caesar and Antony—she even bore Caesar’s child.”

  “Caesarion,” the Doctor said with a nod.

  “What the hell are you two on about?” Mr. Moore demanded.

  But the Doctor just kept talking to Miss Howard. �
��Suppose, Sara,” he asked, moving toward her, “that the apparent paradox is not a question, but the answer? Something connects the two sides of the character, the two faces of the coin. We don’t know what that connecting element is yet, but the connection exists. So that what we are faced with is not an inconsistency so much as a troubled unity. Aspects of a condition—related stages in a single process.”

  Miss Howard’s face darkened. “Then I’d say we’re running out of time.”

  The Doctor gave her a quick look of agreement, then called out, “Marcus! The children Nurse Hunter attended—how long did you say the average interval between their births and their deaths was?”

  “Not more than a few weeks,” Marcus answered.

  “Laszlo,” Mr. Moore insisted, in that way he did when he felt like the mental pack was pulling away from him. “Come on, what are you two talking about?”

  The Doctor continued to ignore him and counted on his fingers. “She took the child on a Thursday—that was ten days ago.” He glanced at Miss Howard again. “You’re right, Sara—the woman may be entering a critical phase. Stevie!” I hopped it up to him. “Can we carry everyone in the calash?”

  “Not at top speed,” I answered. “But I don’t see any cabs around.”

  “I don’t want a cab,” the Doctor answered urgently. “We’ll need the time together to explain.”

  “Well—traffic shouldn’t be too bad,” I judged. “We oughtta be able to go at a decent trot. Frederick’s had a couple of days off, he’ll be game.”

  “Then get him—now!”

  As I shot off to fetch the calash, I heard Mr. Moore still asking what was going on and the Doctor telling him to hurry up and get into the carriage, that he’d explain what he and Miss Howard were thinking once they were on their way downtown. I pulled the rig around to them, and then Cyrus climbed up top with me, while Miss Howard squeezed between Lucius and the Doctor on the seat. Marcus and Mr. Moore roosted themselves as the detective sergeants had done during our commandeered cab ride, on the two iron steps on either side of the carriage.

  “Where to?” I called back, though I was pretty sure of what the answer would be.

  “Number 39 Bethune Street,” the Doctor answered. “With any luck the Hunter woman and her husband haven’t moved—and if they have, the new tenants may know where they are now!”

  “It’ll be fastest if I cut through the park,” I said. “And use a few—shortcuts.”

  “Then do it, do it!” the Doctor yelled, at which I slapped the reins against Frederick’s haunches and raced off down the park’s East Drive, heading south.

  CHAPTER 15

  Frederick had just bounded at a crisp trot off of the Central Park carriage drive and onto the broad grass plain of Sheep Meadow (a questionable thing for me to ask of him, I know, but a shortcut’s a shortcut) as the Doctor began to speak to his assembled colleagues:

  “When we first undertook criminal investigative work together,” he said, “we accepted as our starting point the idea that the criminal mind could be, medically speaking, sound, and formed like any other healthy person’s—through the context of individual experience. I have seen nothing, professionally, during the last twelve months to convince me that the true incidence of mental disease among criminals is any higher than I thought then. Nor have I heard anything about this Hunter woman which would suggest that she suffers from either dementia praecox”—which was the term alienists used in those days for what they’re now starting to call ‘schizophrenia’—“or one of the lesser mental pathologies. She may be impulsive, and extremely so—but impulsiveness, like extreme anger or melancholia, does not on its own indicate a disease of the mind. The fact that she is also capable of elaborate calculation, particularly within compressed time frames, supports the notion that we are dealing with someone who is quite sane.”

  Mr. Moore shook his head and looked off toward Central Park West as we rejoined the carriage path. “Why do I find myself wishing we could be up against a lunatic this time?” he said with a sigh.

  “You’ve got good cause to, John,” Lucius said. “Lunatics may be dangerous sometimes, but they’re a hell of a lot easier to track.” The detective sergeant started scratching at his pad again. “Please go on, Doctor.”

  “We begin, then,” the Doctor continued, “with the notion that this woman is sane—she has kidnapped a child and may well have killed others, for reasons that we can postulate.”

  “And what do we do if we catch her?” Marcus asked. ‘You’re talking about a real sacred cow, Doctor—no matter how many women knock off kids in baby farms, no matter how many crones make fortunes running abortion parlors, no matter how many mothers kill their offspring, people don’t like to get near cases that deal with women’s relationships toward children being anything other than healthy and nurturing. You heard Mrs. Cady Stanton the other night. That’s the majority opinion: if women are doing something bad concerning birth and kids, either they’re crazy or men and the society that men have created are behind it somewhere.”

  The Doctor was trying to stop Marcus with an impatient hand. “I know, I know, Detective Sergeant, but it will be our job, again, to ignore popular sentiment and focus on facts. And the most salient fact is this: we are faced with a woman whose behavior embodies what appear to be two diametrically opposed attitudes and acts. The one is nurturing; the other, destructive. Perhaps even murderous. If we accept that she is sane, we must link them.”

  “Tough,” Mr. Moore said. “Very tough.”

  “Why, John?” the Doctor asked as we exited the comforting greenery of the park at its southwest corner, then passed by the Riding Academy and moved through some very sparse traffic around the Columbus Monument. “Who among us can’t claim to embody conflicting urges and conflicting goals at times? Take yourself. How often do you go out and ingest enormous amounts of a liquid poison, in the form of expensive alcohol, while at the same time inhaling dose after dose of a toxic alkaloid called nicotine—?”

  “And who,” Mr. Moore asked indignantly, “very often accompanies me?”

  “You miss my point,” the Doctor answered. “Sometimes, after these bouts of marginal self-destruction, you must spend hours caring for yourself, nurturing yourself, as if you were a child. Where is the consistency in that?”

  “All right, all right,” Mr. Moore said in annoyance. “But it’s a long jump from mocking my bad habits to showing how a woman can be nurturing—can be a nurse in natal care, for Christ’s sake—and harbor a desire to kill infants, and be sane, all at the same time.”

  “Has your research helped you at all, Doctor?” Lucius asked.

  “I fear not,” he answered with the same gloominess he’d shown on the subject for days. “As I’ve told Sara, there is precious little in the current psychological literature that touches on the subject. Both Krafft-Ebing and Freud are willing to discuss the sexual dimension of a mother’s relationship to her children, particularly in the context of male children. And such men will even discuss the desire of children to destroy their parents, either literally or figuratively, again emphasizing boys. In addition, there are some explorations of violence by men against children, although these usually occur within broader discussions of the secondary effects of alcoholism and drug addiction. But I have searched in vain for truly meaningful discussions of women attacking children that are in their care, whether the children are their own or someone else’s. The general consensus is that such cases are either extreme or delayed manifestations of postpartum psychosis or, where that cannot be made to apply, mental disease of unknown etiology. I’m afraid that legal records and explorations have been far more helpful than psychological ones, in this respect.”

  “Really?” Marcus said with some surprise: he’d had a fair degree of legal training before joining the force. “Progressive thinking from lawyers—that’s a switch.”

  “Indeed,” the Doctor replied. “And I don’t mean to imply that there’s been anything like a systematic stu
dy of the phenomenon in legal or judicial circles. But the courts are forced to acknowledge the realities that are placed before them—and those realities, all too often, include cases of mothers, governesses, and other adult women committing violence against children. Very often infants.”

  “But if I’m not wrong,” Marcus commented, “the act of infanticide is usually laid at one of two doors in the legal system: poverty or illegitimacy.”

  “True, Marcus—but there have been cases, even a few celebrated ones, that could not be explained by either the mother’s being too poor to support the child or her being unmarried. Nor could they be hidden under the rug with a sweeping pronouncement of some unknown kind of insanity. You will recall the case of Lydia Sherman?”

  At the drop of that infamous name, which occurred just as we were making our way across Forty-second Street on Eighth Avenue, both of the Isaacsons and Miss Howard went into a kind of rapture.

  “Lydia Sherman,” Lucius said wistfully. “‘Queen Poisoner.’ Now, there was a case …”

  “We’ll never know how many people she actually murdered,” Marcus said in the same tone. “It could’ve been dozens”

  “And,” Miss Howard added, bringing things a bit more to the point, “some of them were children—including her own children. And she was neither poor nor unmarried when she poisoned them.”

  “Exactly, Sara,” the Doctor said. “She had killed the children’s father, desired to marry again, and found her children to be simply, as she put it, ‘in the way.’ The newspaper accounts were quite abundant. But as far as the alienists of the day, as well as those of subsequent years, were concerned, the case might as well have never existed—even though many of them judged her to be perfectly sane at her trial, and that was a good twenty-five years ago.”

  “I hate to break up this little admiration society,” Mr. Moore said, “but Lydia Sherman was no nurse—she was a lying fortune hunter.”