The Angel of Darkness

by Caleb Carr

  “Don’t let the banter fool you,” Mr. Moore answered, going for a box of cigarettes that sat on the Doctor’s desk. “He’s got one of the sharpest legal minds I’ve ever run across. He could have had any job in the state, but like the fool he is he decided to play it straight instead—cried bloody murder to the legislature about corruption in the city DA’s office, and got run out of town on a rail. There were rumors about some kind of a mental breakdown after that.” Mr. Moore lit his cigarette. “I never really got the details.”

  Cyrus spoke up, in a slightly perplexed voice: “Then he’s saying that she shot the children?”

  “Yes,” Miss Howard answered. “He seems quite certain of it.”

  “More victims to add to the roster,” Lucius said.

  “They could’ve been the ones in the picture,” I threw in. “The photograph I saw in the desk, of the three older kids together.”

  “It would make sense,” Lucius answered. “You can’t exactly induce cyanosis in three children who’re old enough to struggle—and to talk, if they survive.”

  “But it doesn’t really fit the pattern, does it?” Cyrus asked, still unclear. “She’s only killed infants, that we know of—because she’s had trouble with them during that stage of life.”

  “It’s a wrinkle, Cyrus, to be sure,” the Doctor answered, toying with a pen on his desk. “But the overriding similarity remains—the children were attacked, and the attacker’s intention was clearly to kill them all.”

  Marcus let out a stunned kind of sigh. “If this whole thing weren’t so horrifying, I’d say it was getting ridiculous”

  “Far from it, Marcus,” the Doctor answered. “This news only confirms the entrenched nature of her tendencies. Her past is at one with her present behavior.” The Doctor’s voice grew quieter as he mouthed the words that were the closest thing he had to a motto: “The keys are in the details …” He stood up, and turned to look out the window of his study at the small garden behind the house. “And those details are upstate—not here. If we wish true progress, then we must go.”

  “Is that smart?” Lucius asked. “If we leave, she may think we’ve given her the field—and God knows what’ll happen then.”

  “We shall not leave before the two of you confront her, Detective Sergeant,” the Doctor replied. “And now you can include our awareness of this incident in your statement. We can only hope that such awareness will make her act with even greater caution. Because if we stay here, we will remain stymied. The past is our way in—we must follow it.”

  Marcus spoke again, very carefully: “And the other matter, Doctor? How do you feel about leaving with your own affairs—unresolved?”

  The Doctor shrugged. “As you both have said, Marcus, there is little I can do before the hearing. If there had been any secrets to unearth, I know that you would have found them. Whether I stay or go is of little consequence.” Watching him, I saw something that seemed almost like bitterness enter his face. “And I confess,” he continued, again softly, “that I have never been so weary of this city. Or its citizens …” He shook the moment off and turned to face us. “Getting away may be the best thing, all the way round.”

  “No question about that,” Mr. Moore said cheerfully. “Especially given the destination. Saratoga’s absolute heaven at this time of year. And when you add the—diversions…”

  Everyone else in the room smiled and groaned, and Miss Howard picked up a book to fling at Mr. Moore. “Yes, we all know why you want to go, John—but you’ll have precious little time for your usual pursuits.”

  “I’m just talking about our off-hours!” Mr. Moore protested, shielding himself. “We can’t work day and night, you know! And let’s face it, Saratoga—”

  “Saratoga is a vulgar, disgusting sty,” Miss Howard finished for him, “where fat, wealthy men gamble, lie to their wives, and make panderers and prostitutes rich.” The harshness of the words made it clear that she sincerely meant what she said.

  “Oh, you sound like your friend Nellie Bly,” Mr. Moore replied with a wave of his cigarette. “Besides, I’m not married—or fat.”

  “Give yourself time,” Miss Howard returned. “And as for Nellie, everything she wrote about that wretched place in the World was true, and it took great courage to say it.”

  “Yes,” Mr. Moore countered. “Almost as much courage as it took to marry that seventy-five-year-old millionaire of hers.”

  Miss Howard’s eyes went thin, and she poised herself to strike. “Mr. Seaman is not seventy-five.”

  “No. He’s seventy.” Marcus had said the words absent-mindedly; but a glance from Miss Howard was all it took to make him regret it. “Well, I’m sorry, Sara, but he is—”

  “My God, it’s a miracle the human species still exists,” Miss Howard seethed, “with apes like you carrying it forward!”

  “Children, children!” The Doctor clapped his hands. “We have far more pressing matters to deal with. It’s now Monday evening. How soon can we all be ready to depart?”

  “Tomorrow,” Mr. Moore answered quickly, obviously dying to get up to the great American resort town of Saratoga Springs, where, as Miss Howard had said, gambling, whoring, and philandering had long ago pushed taking the waters out of the way to become the chief pastimes.

  “Marcus and I’ll need a bit longer,” Lucius threw in. “I don’t think we’ll have any trouble selling Captain O’Brien on the idea that we’re going along to watch your movements, Doctor, but it may take a couple of days to tie everything up—and, of course, there’s that little visit to Bethune Street to make.”

  “Very well,” the Doctor answered. “Shall we say Thursday morning?” There was general agreement to this idea, and the Doctor grabbed for his copy of the Times. “We can take one of the paddle steamers as far as Troy, and from there the train to Ballston Spa. Moore, as for going on to Saratoga, you’ll have to arrange that yourself.”

  Mr. Moore grinned wide. “That won’t be any trouble—they’ve put in an electric trolley from Ballston to the center of Saratoga. Fifteen or twenty minutes, and I can be standing in front of Canfield’s Casino.”

  “I’m delighted for you,” Miss Howard mumbled, what you might call acidly. Mr. Moore just grinned at her.

  “Stevie?” the Doctor said, and I snapped to it. “In the morning you’ll go down to the Twenty-second Street pier—see what embarks Thursday morning. Try for the Mary Powell, if she’s available—I prefer her private parlors, and she’s generally less crowded than the other day lines.”

  “Right,” I said. “How many parlors?”

  “We should need only one,” the Doctor said. “But get two in the event that the rain doesn’t subside. As to packing, I should recommend planning on a month’s stay, to be safe. Moore, I leave the hotel accommodations to you and Sara. All right, then, everyone—let’s waste no more time.”

  At that we all left the room, and split up to start packing and preparing. The prospect of getting out of New York in midsummer quickly began producing its usual effect—relief and a giddy sort of joy—despite the disturbing things we’d learned from Mr. Rupert Picton: if we had to pursue the miserable case of Libby Hatch, it would be a sight more pleasant to do so in the green wilds of upstate New York than in the sweltering heat of Manhattan.

  That, anyway, was what we thought at the time.

  CHAPTER 27

  Things were humming on Seventeenth Street for the next couple of days. We not only had to pack our things but board the horses and close up the house itself for what might be an extended absence. And then there was the job of finding somebody to look in on the place occasionally, somebody less destructive—and, hopefully, with a better command of English—than Mrs. Leshko. The Doctor eventually snuck an offer, through Cyrus, to one of the custodians at his Institute, a fellow he knew could use some extra money; and through the same agent, the man agreed. Luck was with us all the way around on this score, because when we told Mrs. Leshko we’d be leaving and that she wouldn’t
be needed while we were gone, she said—or at least, as best we could tell she said—that such was just as well, being as she wasn’t going to be able to work for us anymore. It seemed that she and her husband had decided to head out west to try their luck opening a restaurant in a silver-mining town in Nevada. The Doctor, relieved that she’d spared him the job of firing her, gave her two weeks’ salary and a nice-sized bonus, to boot. But none of us was what you might call optimistic about the prospects of her actually selling her cooking. We tended to doubt that even miners got that hungry.

  As it turned out, the Mary Powell was indeed making a day run up the Hudson on Thursday, and I was able to book us two private parlors. It continued to look like this was a wise precaution, being as the rain didn’t let up all through Tuesday. That afternoon Mr. Moore and Miss Howard—still bickering about the morality of the wild activities of Saratoga—came to the house at Seventeenth Street to wait with us for the detective sergeants, who’d gone downtown a little earlier to put Libby Hatch on notice as to what we knew about her. It was a nervous few hours that we spent in the parlor, with Cyrus trying to keep everybody calm by playing the piano softly. But despite his efforts, the building wind and rain outside seemed to say that some kind of calamity was on its way.

  That particular fear, however, turned out to be uncalled for. The detective sergeants showed up at about five, in very relieved and slightly tipsy spirits. Their visit had gone as well as they could’ve hoped for: the mistress of Number 39 Bethune Street had once more tried to play coy and seductive with them, and had even invited them inside again—but they’d stood their ground and said their piece right there on the doorstep, with the rain and the runoff from the roof pouring down on them. They’d listed every important point that we’d devised, both false and true, starting with the declaration that the Police Department was aware of what she was doing and then moving on to our knowledge of her secret “hideaway” in the basement and the Doctor’s continuing to serve as a special consultant on the case. They’d wound up with the announcement that they’d figured out what’d happened in Ballston Spa three years ago and were on their way to confirm their suspicions. If anything happened to her husband in the meantime, they said, or if a baby answering Ana Linares’s description turned up dead somewhere, she could look forward to a date with the electrical chair at Sing Sing. It was true that few women got executed in the United States, they’d told her; but someone with her murderous record could definitely count on gaining entry into that select group.

  Lucius described the woman’s reaction to all this. She’d gone from playing the coy temptress to forcing some tears and protesting her innocence, then moved on to saying that the detective sergeants just didn’t understand the “extenuating circumstances” of what she’d done (such being Lucius’s phrase, not hers). Finally, pure malevolence had made its way into those golden eyes. That was the only moment, both the brothers said, when they’d become truly unsure of what they’d started. They were, after all, in the heart of Hudson Duster territory and open to attack from the gang, assuming that Libby Hatch felt like having her boyfriend’s thugs tend to the matter and didn’t just shoot the pair herself. But the Isaacsons had warned her that plenty of people in the department knew where they were and what they were doing, and if they didn’t make it back to headquarters, nobody’d have any trouble figuring out why. When he and Lucius walked back to the cab they had waiting, Marcus said, he could feel the pure hatred coming from the doorway of Number 39, like bright sunshine on bare skin; then as they left they’d heard a loud slam of the door and a small cry of rage from inside. But they’d made it out of the neighborhood without any trouble, and had stopped on their way to the Doctor’s house only long enough to calm themselves down with a quick shot of rye and a short beer—a rare thing for Lucius—at the Old Town Bar on Eighteenth Street and Park Avenue.

  And so, as Mr. Moore put it, war had been declared, and directly to our enemy’s face. But the Doctor was quick to remind him that, while we could be happy that all had gone well and the detective sergeants were safe, thinking of Libby Hatch as our “enemy” was not going to help our cause. We were on our way upstate not only to learn exactly what she’d done, but why; and while it might be tough, given all the things we knew about her, to try to see things as she’d seen them during her years of growing up and becoming a mother, it was more important than ever that we do so. Talk about “enemies” and a “war” wasn’t going to help that process: if we were ever going to understand what had driven the woman to her past and current acts of violence enough to guess at her next moves, we were going to have to let go of the image of her as the Devil’s handmaiden. She was a person, one who’d been made capable of unspeakable things by unknown events what we would never really appreciate if we couldn’t see them through the eyes of first the girl and then the young woman she’d once been.

  This was all sensible talk, and I’d heard similar from the Doctor many times before; and maybe if the weather had calmed down at all on Wednesday, it would’ve been easier for me to stay equally reasonable. But dawn that morning saw the sky black and every window in the house starting to rattle in its frame. By noon a howling gale had roared up from the southwest to slam into not just the city but the whole eastern part of the state, as well. Up in Matteawan, we later learned, the rain was so heavy that a whole set of dams burst, and eight people were killed in the flood that followed. Maybe it’s true that what goes on in the sky is just weather and doesn’t signify anything more; but the notion that we’d stirred the wrath of some powerful being somewhere flitted into and out of my head all day long as we made our final preparations for departure the next morning.

  By late Wednesday evening the storm was still raging, and I still hadn’t seen or heard anything from Kat. As the night wore away, I realized with ever more misgiving that she would likely end up leaving for California while we were upstate and, lacking any way to contact me there, would think I had no interest in what had become of her. Caught up in such thoughts, my mind was tormented for several hours with the question of whether I should make a quick circuit of her usual haunts. When she’d been at the Doctor’s house, she’d left me with the notion that she wouldn’t be going back to the Dusters’; but the amount of cocaine what had clearly been in her body when she’d come to Number 808 Broadway had made me doubt that she’d kept completely clear of the place. And as I sat in my room and watched the lightning, thunder, and rain throw branches of the trees in Stuyvesant Park first one way and then another, my doubts only multiplied. Did she have a flop, I wondered, on a night like this? She had the money to afford someplace decent, that was certain—or had she already spent it on a burny binge? Had Ding Dong found out about her good fortune, and forced her to fork it over? Could she count on anybody besides me to care enough to find out? I hoped so. Because no matter how fretful I got that night, I found that I just couldn’t head out the door. I told myself it was the high winds and the rain; but a voice inside me answered that I’d spent plenty of time wandering the streets in weather like that. Then I protested that it was her place to come to me for once, if she needed help; but I knew that, mad as she’d been when we parted, she never would. The plain truth was that I didn’t know why I couldn’t go out to look for her. I was worried whether I’d ever hear from her again, I was worried about where she was and what she was doing, but I simply couldn’t go after her and I couldn’t say why.

  I woke the next morning to find that the great storm had blown out to sea. Sunshine and a light breeze were quickly drying the city, while the temperature had finally dropped into the seventies. There were a few branches on the grass and walkways of Stuyvesant Park, but other than that the tempest didn’t seem to’ve left any permanent scars on our neighborhood. It wasn’t yet 7:30, but the carriage the Doctor’d engaged to take our bags and ourselves down to the Twenty-second Street pier would arrive in just half an hour, and the Mary Powell was due to get under way at nine; so I dressed and cleaned up quickly, sitting
on the lids of the big suitcase and small valise the Doctor’d given me so that the things would close, and then banging my way downstairs with them.

  Cyrus and the Doctor were both awake, the Doctor in his study packing books and papers and Cyrus in the kitchen, once again making coffee. By the time it was ready, the three of us were, too: we’d stacked our bags and trunks by the front door and had nothing left to do but drink Cyrus’s strong coffee and grow ever more anxious to get on the boat, the first of which activities only aggravated the second. I made a last round of the back door, the yard, and the carriage house, sneaking myself a smoke as I made sure everything was locked down tight. Then, finally, the hired rig appeared. The driver, an old German who the Doctor spoke to in his native language, helped us get the bags aboard, and then we turned to say our good-byes to the house, not knowing just when we’d pass through the little iron gateway to the front yard again.

  The weather only improved as we made for the Hudson, the breeze remaining mild and the sky marked by just a few large, quick-moving clouds. When we reached Ninth Avenue and Twenty-second Street, I stuck my head out of the carriage and looked ahead to the pier: the Mary Powell was docked and surrounded by a large crowd. We crossed over Tenth and then Eleventh Avenues, and as we did the number of people and rigs making for the pier steadily increased. The smell of the river and the prospect of going someplace new and exciting were making my blood positively race, but I didn’t know how agitated my movements had become ’til the Doctor threw a playful arm round my head, telling me it was the only way he could think of to keep my skull from exploding.

  Our fellow passengers at the pier seemed to be as excited and relieved by the sudden change in the weather as we were. Most of them weren’t near as laden down with baggage, though—ships like the Mary Powell catered mostly to day cruisers—and we didn’t have any trouble finding a porter to help us with the bags. I told the Doctor that I’d help the man get them off the carriage and on board the ship if he and Cyrus wanted to go ahead and check our parlors to see which other members of our party had arrived. This they did, and I quickly commenced moving the luggage onto the amiable Italian porter’s hand truck with the assistance of our big German driver. I didn’t understand a word what either man said, but that didn’t matter; the sight of the river steamer all decked out and ready for the voyage, her twin stacks and big side paddles signifying confidence and power, together with the excitement that was coursing through the merry collection of people both aboard the ship and on the pier, kept me moving in a happy, spirited, and sure fashion.