The Angel of Darkness

by Caleb Carr

  But I was smiling a little, too.

  “To Stevie,” Miss Howard went on. “Who’s done what none of us could have done,” she continued, “because he’s lived what none of us have lived.”

  The rest of them all said, “To Stevie!” together, took big sips of their drinks, and then came at me in a wave.

  I just looked at Mike and then out the window, as uncomfortable and as pleased as I can ever remember being.

  “Okay, okay,” I said, shielding myself with my hands from their displays of affection and appreciation. “We got work to do, remember …”

  CHAPTER 25

  On Sunday, Mike the ferret went home with Hickie, and I no longer had a companion to help me forget how badly I’d left things with Kat. But Monday morning saw our investigation pick up pace, and I was soon too busy carting the Doctor and the others around town to think much about where she might be or what she might be doing. I knew that she’d written to her aunt, and was waiting for a reply before heading to California; and I could only hope that she’d see her way clear to contacting me before then. But hoping was a step up from worrying, and as Kat had her money and her ticket now, I figured it was safe to put my fears for her aside, regardless of whether or not I heard from her. The Doctor, Mr. Moore, and I started out Monday morning on the long trip up to St. Luke’s Hospital, which had moved the year before from its old home on Fifty-fourth Street to five new buildings between Amsterdam Avenue and Morningside Drive at 114th Street. I saw the Doctor and Mr. Moore as far as the entrance to one of the pavilions—by coincidence, the Vanderbilt Pavilion—where nurses in long, sky-blue dresses and white aprons were trying to keep little white caps perched on their heads as they shuffled quickly up and down a spiral steel staircase what surrounded a small elevator. The Doctor and Mr. Moore got into the elevator and headed to an upper floor, while I went back to the calash and drove down to Morningside Heights, to spend the next few hours smoking a batch of cigarettes and looking down the steep rocks into the wide stretch of Harlem below.

  The visit didn’t go as well as the Doctor’d hoped: those physicians, surgeons, and nurses on the hospital staff what had attended to Mrs. Libby Hatch and her “son” two years earlier were horrified by the suggestion that she might’ve done the boy in, and the Doctor had been forced to appeal to higher authorities in order to get access to official records. And those records hadn’t revealed anything new about Mrs. Hatch’s visits to the hospital: like the documents I’d stolen from her house, they all said that she’d acted with speed and courage, and kept herself composed throughout the ordeal in a way what had only inspired the admiration and sympathy of the staff of St. Luke’s.

  This last bit interested the Doctor particularly, he told me and Mr. Moore during the ride downtown. It seemed that in Germany there were a batch of alienists, psychologists, and nerve specialists (what they called “neurologists”), who, while studying the subject of female hysteria, had found that their patients could sometimes become as addicted to the attention of medical professionals as any morphine jabber or burny blower was to drugs. If Libby Hatch shared this need, the Doctor said, she might’ve been using the illnesses of the children what she took care of (or failed to take care of) to satisfy it. It was two birds with one stone, you might say: she would’ve been covering up her maternal inabilities and getting attention and praise from doctors and nurses in the process. We’d know for sure if she did have such a craving when we got more information about her past, as it was a characteristic that would’ve formed early in life and showed up over and over. The day might even come when we could use the need against her somehow, being as, like any fiending behavior, it was at bottom a severe weakness and handicap, one what could betray and even destroy the person afflicted with it.

  Mr. Moore, after considering all this, flew the idea that such a craving could’ve been the reason why Libby Hatch, or Mrs. Hunter, had treated Dr. Kreizler in a very different way than she’d approached either himself or the detective sergeants. True, she’d come at each man in a fashion designed to appeal to his weakness or vanity; but maybe there was something more in her very respectful treatment of the Doctor. Maybe she hadn’t figured on such a person taking part in the investigation of the abduction, and maybe, when she’d tried to be cordial to him as we were all leaving, she’d felt a real need for him to respond in kind, to believe that she was innocent. Certainly, that would help explain the furious way she’d reacted when he’d rejected her attempts to be cordial. And, Mr. Moore continued, if she did harbor some sneaking desire to be approved of by the Doctor, the fact that he was going to stay on the case with the cops might be something the detective sergeants would want to include in their warning to her: a little worm to plant in her brain, so to speak, just to help keep her off balance. When we met up with Marcus and Lucius that night at Seventeenth Street, they agreed with this line of reasoning wholeheartedly, and decided to make it a part of their presentation.

  That event would not take place, though, until after they, with the help of Miss Howard, had further investigated the deaths of the babies at the Lying-in Hospital, being as they wanted to be loaded with as much ammunition as possible when they faced our opponent. But this side investigation proved especially tricky, being as it was difficult if not impossible to even locate most of the mothers of said babies, much less get them to talk. The Lying-in Hospital, like I’ve said, catered to unwed and poor mothers, and a lot of them didn’t give their right names when they checked in. This was true, in particular, of the more well-to-do women who were in the Hospital to cover the results of adultery or who’d enjoyed the advantages of matrimony before actually bothering with its formalities. It took the detective sergeants and Miss Howard days to find even a single woman who’d acknowledge that one of the dead babies had been hers; and when they did find that lone mother and told her about their suspicions, the woman showed them out in a hurry, smelling legal trouble and wanting no part of it. So they were forced to press on with their search.

  The Doctor and Mr. Moore, meanwhile, went about their next task: getting in to see the honorable Mr. Cornelius Vanderbilt II, him what Mr. Moore had referred to as “Cornell.” (The name distinguished him from his grandfather, the larcenous old coot who’d put the family on the map, and also from his own son, Cornelius III, who was called “Neily.”) He was a generous man when it came to charities, was Mr. Cornelius II, but he was also about the most holier-than-thou customer in New York; and he certainly had no interest in meeting with someone as questionable as Dr. Kreizler. If any of our team was going to be admitted to the enormous mansion—which was known to architectural types as a “French Renaissance château”—that took up the whole end of the block of Fifth Avenue between Fifty-seventh and Fifty-eighth Streets, favors were going to have to be asked of third parties: specifically, Mr. Moore would have to seek the help of his parents, something he genuinely despised doing. And, though they did fix an audience up for Thursday afternoon, they also told Mr. Moore that, whatever his business was, he’d better make sure he didn’t bring up the subject of Mr. Vanderbilt’s son Neily, whose existence the old gent wasn’t currently recognizing.

  Apparently, young Neily’d had the nerve to go and marry somebody he actually loved, but who his family considered socially below him. The battle over the marriage had become so hot that Cornelius II had actually had a stroke, and pretty well written his oldest son out of his will. The young man himself had gone through with the marriage, then hightailed it to Europe with his bride. They’d only recently returned, though the city’d been buzzing with word of their doings the whole while. The yellow press, of course, had jumped into the thing, and all on the side of love, the better to sell papers. Most of high society was likewise sympathetic to the young couple, since really old New York families, like Mr. Moore’s and Miss Howard’s, considered the recently rich Vanderbilts gate-crashers at their long-running party in the first place. The affair had continued to wear on Cornelius II (who was now migrating between hi
s palace in New York and his even more ridiculously elaborate joint in Newport, Rhode Island), and by that summer he’d grown so bitter and self-righteous that it was actually killing him. Seventy million dollars and the New York Central railroad system all his own to play with, and the man was going to let two young people’s romantic escapades drive him into the ground: there was and is no figuring rich people sometimes …

  Anyway, Thursday afternoon arrived and we drove uptown in the covered calash. The average daily temperature had been steadily going up as we dragged deeper into July, and by the eighth it was rising so fast that it was causing that depressing type of warm summer rain that always fails to cool or cleanse the city. Sloshing our way through particularly nasty-smelling horse waste, we rolled over Murray Hill and then entered the mansion district in the Fifties, eventually passing the other Vanderbilt palaces, what had all been built within a few blocks of Cornelius II’s. The main purpose of each of those mansions, it’d always seemed to me, was nothing more than to outdo the rest, even if that meant piling on so many details and extras that the structures themselves crossed over into what you might call laughable, or just plain unsightly.

  This was true of One West Fifty-seventh Street most of all: the bright red color of the bricks against the whiteness of the limestone used for the window frames and detailing may’ve been supposed to re-create the look of the French Renaissance, but for my money it came a lot closer to a circus tent. The addition that’d been built onto the back of the house by Mr. Richard Morris Hunt—him what had designed the new wing of the Metropolitan Museum—was much easier on the eyes, and could even be considered handsome, if looked at apart from the rest. But the effect of the front of the house, when you came at it from downtown, was to make you think that you were on your way to see some kind of high-class joker. Which, of course, you were; it was just too bad that Cornelius II himself didn’t get the gag.

  About half a block south of Fifty-seventh Street the noise of our carriage, along with those around us, suddenly died: huge sheets of some kind of padding—it looked like tree bark—had been laid down on the blocks around One West Fifty-seventh, so that the ailing Mr. Vanderbilt wouldn’t be disturbed by the sounds of passing horses and rigs. It might seem unbelievable, nowadays, to think that whole city blocks would be repaved just to let one man rest easier; but Cornelius II was that important to the city, mostly because of his philanthropic work. Of course, it wasn’t noise that was making him sick, as the Doctor pointed out: you could’ve put the man into a room lined with concrete and lead, and, so long as he had the thought of how little control he’d been able to exercise over his son to keep him company, his body would’ve continued to deteriorate.

  When we got to One West Fifty-seventh, the Doctor informed Mr. Moore that, especially as the interview had been so tough to obtain, he was not to enter it intending to tweak Mr. Vanderbilt’s nose, as he’d said he wanted to. They’d just tell the sorry old invalid that they were trying to trace Mrs. Hatch’s movements in order to contact her, being as they thought she could be of some assistance with a case the Doctor was working on; nothing else. Mr. Moore reluctantly agreed, and then they walked on up the front steps to the big, arched limestone doorway. Mr. Moore rang the doorbell and a footman answered, saying that they were expected by Mr. Vanderbilt in the “Moorish room” at the back of the house. Knowing enough to realize that he was talking about a smoking room what probably looked like a plate illustration for A Thousand and One Nights—such rooms being all the rage among rich people in those days—I got down off the calash’s driver’s seat and, when the footman returned, asked him if he wouldn’t mind keeping an eye on the carriage for a minute, as I had an errand I had to run for the Doctor a few blocks uptown. The man very decently obliged, and I tore off to and around the corner of Fifth Avenue. When I reached the back of the house, near the handsome porte cochere what Mr. Hunt had designed, I found that a fairly high cast-iron fence separated me from the backyard. I wouldn’t have any trouble getting over the thing, of course, but there were a few strollers around, even on that wet afternoon, and so a bit of caginess was called for.

  I tried an old trick: looking to the high roof of the mansion across the street, which was only a bit less luxurious than Mr. Vanderbilt’s, I pointed up and screamed:

  “He’s going to jump!”

  This, of course, is the single statement guaranteed to get any and all New Yorkers to stop whatever they’re doing and turn to search the direction indicated. The strollers out on Fifth Avenue that afternoon were no exceptions, and in the few seconds it took them to realize that I’d been putting them on I got over the Vanderbilts’ fence and ran to hide behind one of the square columns of the porte cochere. Scanning the back of the house, I soon caught sight of an open bay window on the western end, out of which were drifting voices. I could easily hide on the far side of the bay, and did, allowing myself just one peek inside the room.

  If there’s one word to describe the Vanderbilt family’s taste, I’m not in possession of it. You could, I suppose, just say that they liked “more”: more stone with their stone, more frills with their frills, more artwork with their artwork, more food with their food. The “Moorish room” that I peered into that day was a very good example of all this. It wasn’t enough that the wood of the walls—fully two stories high—was as expensive as possible or that it was carved in more complicated patterns than the Arabian models what it’d been based on; no, the walls also had to be inlaid with other precious substances, including, if you can believe it, mother-of-pearl. Mother-of-pearl in your walls … if you can order that kind of nonsensical detail—and order it from no less a designer than Mr. Louis Comfort Tiffany—then it’s no wonder, I suppose, that you’d have a stroke when your own kid refused to do what you told him. Hanging from the high ceiling was a gigantic, bulbous Tiffany lamp, with smaller lamps, also of Tiffany glass, suspended in a circle from the top of this central fixture. Below that conglomeration, set in front of a marble Moorish fireplace and on top of several enormous, thick Persian carpets, were some straight-backed velvet chairs. In two of these sat the Doctor and Mr. Moore, seeming very small in that room; and opposite them—covered, in spite of the July heat, by a rich fur blanket—was Mr. Vanderbilt, looking like what he was: a man on a slow but steady course to death. His long face and glaring eyes, which once could intimidate most men even from a good distance, were now full of a beaten sadness, and his voice was rough.

  “And what reason can you possibly have to come to me for such information?” he was asking.

  I ducked back down to hide and listen as Mr. Moore responded, “The woman was a servant of yours, Mr. Vanderbilt, for a time—at least, she listed you as her employer on some hospital forms we’ve seen.”

  “What of it?” Mr. Vanderbilt answered, in a tone what you might politely call condescending. “Yes, she was employed here. But as to her private dealings—they were precisely that, and respected as such. Elspeth Hatch was a trusted servant. She had been since her arrival in the city.”

  “And that was—” the Doctor asked.

  I heard a hoarse sigh of exasperation come out of their host, causing Mr. Moore to add, “If the matter weren’t so urgent, Mr. Vanderbilt—”

  “Urgent?” old man Vanderbilt cut in. “Urgent, yet you will not tell me what it is?”

  “The confidentiality of patient and physician,” the Doctor replied. “I’m sure you understand.”

  “And we really wouldn’t impose on you,” Mr. Moore said, “if we had any choice.”

  “Well,” Mr. Vanderbilt grunted. “At the very least you recognize that it is an imposition. Had I any less regard for your family, Mr. Moore—”

  “Yes, sir,” Mr. Moore answered. “Quite.”

  Another irritated sigh got out of Mr. Vanderbilt. “We engaged Elspeth Hatch in—I should say it was in the summer of 1894. Very soon after the tragedy. We had heard of her misfortune from friends upstate, and my wife thought that offering her a position—we
needed a maid in any case—would offer her a chance to leave her home and put the past behind her. Mrs. Vanderbilt is a woman of uncommon compassion.” He grunted again. “And breeding …”

  There followed a few more silent moments, during which I figured that the Doctor and Mr. Moore were glancing at each other, trying to come up with a way to find out what the “tragedy” Mr. Vanderbilt had mentioned was. Given his attitude, it didn’t seem likely he’d share any information about his former servant’s personal misfortune if he thought his visitors weren’t already aware of it.

  “That was indeed uncommonly compassionate of your wife, sir,” the Doctor finally said. “And no doubt it helped Mrs. Hatch recover. A change of locale is often the only effective antidote to such an unfortunate experience.”

  “‘Unfortunate experience’?” Mr. Vanderbilt rumbled back. “Seeing your own children shot down before you by a madman? Are you a disciple of understatement, Doctor, or have you simply become inured to tragedy through your work?”

  That statement caused my eyes to pop a bit; and I could only think of how hard the Doctor and Mr. Moore must’ve been working to hide a like reaction.

  “I—certainly didn’t mean to sound callous, sir,” the Doctor finally said. “Perhaps my work sometimes does prevent me from treating—murder”— he said the word carefully, as if he half expected a contradiction; but none came—“with the proper consideration,” he finished.

  Mr. Vanderbilt huffed, rather than grunted, this time. “I suppose that’s to be expected. At any rate, she arrived here just two or three months later. And she worked with uncommon diligence, considering that the fate of her eldest daughter remained so uncertain.”

  “Ah. Yes, of course,” Mr. Moore said. “And she left your employ, you said …?”

  “I did not say, Mr. Moore. But she departed from our service the following May, when she was remarried and her nephew was left in her care. I offered her a recommendation, and it would have been an unqualified one, but she said that she wished to pursue a career in nursing. I told her that if I could be of any service in that regard, she should not hesitate to contact me. She never did. And that, gentlemen, is really all I can tell you.”