The Angel of Darkness

by Caleb Carr

  “Moore, we’ve no time for games,” the Doctor said. “What the devil are you talking about?”

  By way of an answer Mr. Moore just held up a finger, then grabbed hold of the shovel’s handle. The tool didn’t come away from its resting spot at his touch; instead, it pivoted at a point on the floor, to which it was, it seemed, anchored. As Mr. Moore lowered the thing on that pivot, lo and behold, the rack of preserves began to move, as if by itself: it swung away from the brick dividing wall by the furnace and revealed a three-foot-square hole leading down through the stone floor and into the ground below the building.

  “Oh, my God,” Miss Howard whispered, stepping forward toward the hole. The Doctor and I followed, shocked past speech.

  “Just big enough for an average adult to negotiate,” Mr. Moore said, picking up one of the Isaacsons’ portable torches what lay nearby. “As is the entire passageway.”

  “Passageway?” the Doctor echoed.

  “Come on,” Mr. Moore said, taking a few steps down onto an iron ladder what was fixed to the side of a deep shaftway what led downwards from the hole. “I’ll show you.”

  With that he disappeared below ground, while the rest of us looked nervously to each other.

  “How come I got no big desire to go down there?” I said quietly.

  “You’ve been through an awful lot, Stevie,” Miss Howard answered, putting a hand to my arm. “And what’s down there may not be too pleasant.”

  “It would be completely understandable if you wished to wait here,” the Doctor agreed.

  I shook my head. “It ain’t that. I want to see it, but …” Trying to shake off my severe jitters, I stepped down onto the ladder. “Aw, hell,” I said, “how much worse can this thing get?”

  Moving carefully, I followed Mr. Moore’s torch, which appeared to come to a stop about fifteen feet down. “Wait for one second before you come all the way down, Stevie,” he called to me, “so I can get into the side passage. Each of you will have to do the same.”

  “The side passage?” I repeated.

  “You’ll see when you get here.”

  And I did. At the base of the shaftway, the walls of which were rough concrete, was an opening into a narrow tunnel what ran sideways. The thing was just high enough for a person to crouch in, so’s you could kind of scurry along without actually crawling. Mr. Moore guided me into this space when I got down, then did the same for Miss Howard and the Doctor when they arrived. After that, he turned his torch in what I calculated to be the direction of the backyard, revealing that the passageway—what was also concrete—went on for another forty feet. There was a dank smell to it, but it wasn’t nearly as stifling as it should’ve been.

  “Is that a draft?” Miss Howard asked, licking her finger and holding it up.

  “It becomes almost a breeze,” Mr. Moore answered, his face lit up like a jack-o’-lantern by the light of the torch, “once you get to the other end.”

  “But what produces it?” the Doctor asked.

  “All part of the surprise, Laszlo,” Mr. Moore answered, starting down the tunnel toward a small glow of light that filled its far end. He cupped his free hand in front of his mouth. “Lucius! You still there?”

  “Yes, John,” came Lucius’s whispering reply. “But keep your voice down, dammit!”

  We kept scuffling along, crooked over like coal miners, and as we went, a thought occurred to me: “I don’t hear any baby crying,” I said grimly.

  “No,” Mr. Moore answered, in that same inscrutable tone of voice he’d used on the roof. “You don’t.”

  In another few seconds we’d reached the end of the passageway and arrived at a small wooden doorway. It was cracked open just a bit, and the crack was producing the light we’d seen from the other end. It appeared that this entranceway led into yet another chamber; and as we collected ourselves to go on in, my nerves fluttered worse than ever. Pictures of torture chambers in castle dungeons began to flash through my head: racks, iron maidens, red-hot irons, exposure to filth and rats—who knew what Libby Hatch had used to try to get the unruly kids she kidnapped to behave? I began to wonder if maybe I shouldn’t have taken the chance to just wait up top—but once again, I swallowed all such hesitations.

  “All right,” Mr. Moore said. “Everyone set?” Nobody said they were, but nobody said they weren’t, either, and Mr. Moore took that as a sign to proceed. “Then follow me.”

  He swung the little door open, and we entered the room.

  The first thing you noticed about the space was light: bright light, produced not by bare electrical bulbs but by very pleasant little lamps what sat on a pair of wooden night tables and a small chest of drawers what was painted a gentle pink. The walls had been covered with patterned paper what showed little pictures of smiling baby animals against a white ground. The paper reflected the light of the lamps and made the glare, especially as you came out of the dark passageway, all the harsher. As Mr. Moore had said, the draft we’d felt became a kind of breeze once we’d entered the room, one what was actually very refreshing: it was produced, he told us, by electrical fans inside smaller ventilation shafts what led up to the backyard and drew air down from there. On the wall opposite the chest of drawers was a handsome crib with a white lace canopy over its top. In a third wall a window frame had been installed, complete with glass, and behind this some talented person had painted a quiet country scene, one what resembled the rolling hills and open pasture-lands of Saratoga County. There was a handmade carpet on the floor, and a fine oak rocking chair in one corner; and all over the place there were mountains of toys, everything from an expensive musical box to stuffed animals to building blocks.

  In fact, if you’d been above ground, it would’ve been a first-class nursery.

  “Holy Christ,” I mumbled, too shocked to offer anything else by way of an opinion. My dumbfoundedness was only increased when I looked into the corner and at the rocking chair:

  In it was sitting Detective Sergeant Lucius, gently rocking back and forth as he held a content Ana Linares in his arms.

  Faced with three stunned faces, the detective sergeant blushed a bit. “I had to change her diaper to get her to stop crying,” he said with some embarrassment. “But it was all right—I’ve had a lot of practice with my sister’s children.”

  “Apparently,” the Doctor said, approaching the pair and bending down to put a finger to Ana’s face. “You’ve done very well, Detective Sergeant. My compliments.”

  Miss Howard and I gathered around. “She’s all right, then?” Miss Howard asked.

  “Well, she’s undernourished, certainly,” Lucius answered. “And slightly colicky. But that was to be expected, I suppose.” His eyes suddenly lit up with interest. “What about Mrs. Hatch?”

  “The aborigine got her,” Mr. Moore announced. “The navy boys are fetching her body now. And according to our resident gangland expert, here”—he pointed my way—“we’ve all got to get moving, before the Dusters come back looking for even bigger trouble.”

  “Yes,” Lucius replied nervously, as he carefully stood up with the baby. “I think that would be a wise idea. Sara, would you like to—”

  Miss Howard, though, made no move to take the child; instead she just smiled a little deviously. “You’re doing extremely well, Lucius. And I’ve had a rather nasty bump on the head, I’m afraid—I might lose my balance on the way out.”

  “Do you mind taking her, Detective Sergeant?” the Doctor asked, roaming around the room and trying, it seemed to me, to burn the startling image of it into his mind before we had to leave.

  “No, no,” Lucius answered, still rocking the baby. Then he turned a warning look on the rest of us. “I just don’t want to hear about it for years to come, that’s all.” Taking a few steps forward, he stood by the Doctor and gazed around the room with him. “A little difficult to accept, isn’t it?”

  The Doctor only shrugged. “Is it? I wonder…”

  “What do you mean, Laszlo?” Mr. Moore
said, picking up a little stuffed dog and rubbing it against his nose. “Given who we’ve been dealing with, I would’ve expected something a lot more—austere. And that’s putting it euphemistically.”

  “That was only one side of her, John,” Miss Howard said, running a finger over the grinning baby animals of the room’s wallpaper.

  “Indeed, Sara,” the Doctor agreed quietly.

  “Well,” I offered, finally getting over my own amazement, “one thing’s for sure, anyway.”

  “Stevie?” the Doctor asked, looking my way.

  I shrugged. “She finally got some privacy. Had to dig halfway to China to get it, but…”

  The Doctor nodded. “True.” He glanced at Ana Linares. “And yet, even here, sealed off from the world, she could not—could not…” The Doctor’s words trailed off as he stared into the baby’s enormous round eyes, which were almost as dark as his own. “You,” he said, forgetting his last thought and putting a hand to Ana’s chin, making her smile that big, game grin what we’d come to know so well from the photograph her mother’d given us. “You have been a very difficult young lady to find, Señorita Linares. But thank God you’re safe. Thank God …”

  “Well,” Mr. Moore said, “she won’t stay safe if we all don’t get out of here. So get a good last look, Kreizler—something tells me we won’t be coming back into Duster territory for quite a while.”

  With that we all started back into the passageway, leaving the Doctor behind for a few seconds to give him just a little more time to mentally memorize the strange hideaway what had been Libby Hatch’s obsession, and what was now, being as she was dead, the only remaining blueprint he had to the workings of her tangled mind.

  Back upstairs, we found that Mr. Roosevelt and Lieutenant Kimball had come into the house, along with Marcus. The rest of the navy boys were gathered around the steps outside, and a couple of them were carrying a folding stretcher what they must’ve fetched from one of the torpedo boats. Strapped to the stretcher was Libby Hatch’s body, draped in a bedsheet. The general mood of the bunch seemed to have changed from celebration to concern: apparently a couple of sailors had seen a few Dusters making moves what indicated that the gang was in fact preparing a new attack. So we got out onto the sidewalk quickly, the sailors forming a circle around Lucius, who still had the baby, and the men what were carrying the stretcher. Then, at double time, we began to trot back toward the river.

  As we went, I fell in beside Cyrus. His clothes were a little rearranged, but otherwise he looked hale, hearty—and very satisfied. “Ain’t many people what come away from locking horns with Ding Dong looking as healthy as you do, Cyrus,” I said, smiling up to him.

  He shrugged, though he couldn’t help but grin a bit, himself. “That’s because there aren’t many people who get him in a fair fight,” he answered.

  “So I’m guessing you came out on top?”

  Glancing up ahead to the construction site of the Bell Laboratories, what was now on our left, Cyrus answered, “I’ll let you be the judge of that.”

  He nodded in the direction of a big pile of bricks: propped up against them was Ding Dong, his face a patchwork of bruises and his arms and legs sticking out at what you might call angles.

  “Jesus,” I breathed, whistling low. “Is he alive?”

  “Oh, he’s alive, all right,” Cyrus answered. “Though in the morning he may wish he wasn’t.” I nodded grimly at that, feeling some deep sense of justice; and as we trotted on toward the river, Cyrus looked down at me meaningfully. “You know I always thought she was trouble, Stevie,” he said. “I won’t deny that now. But she did right by you, by us, and by the baby, in the end—so I guess I was wrong.”

  I gave him a look what I hoped was as full of thanks as I felt. “You weren’t wrong,” I said. “Trouble she was. But she was other things, too.”

  Cyrus nodded. “That’s so …”

  The general mood of our little army improved considerably once we got back across West Street and started to move, at the same double-time pace, south on the waterfront. As the huge black outline of the White Star Line pier began to grow bigger, you could start to feel the cloud of the anxiousness lifting from over us; but it was up to Mr. Roosevelt to give the official signal that it was okay to breathe easier.

  “Well, then, Doctor!” he boomed as we trotted past Perry Street. “It would seem that we’ve enjoyed a victory!”

  “I shall reserve final judgment until we are safely cast off,” the Doctor answered cautiously, still watching the streets around us. “But the preliminary results are encouraging.”

  Mr. Roosevelt roared with laughter. “By God, Kreizler, if I ever met a man more apt to see the dark side of a situation, I’m not aware of it! True, we didn’t take that infernal scoundrel Knox into custody—but we delivered a message that those swine won’t soon forget, and at the cost of only a few bruises to our own men! Enjoy the moment, Doctor—savor it!”

  “Our casualties were no greater than bruises?” the Doctor asked, still not ready to give in to celebrating.

  “Well, all right, two men’s arms were broken,” Mr. Roosevelt conceded. “And another suffered a fractured jaw. But I assure you, the culprits were paid back with interest. So I’ll have none of your melancholy, my friend, none at all! You must learn to enjoy your triumphs!”

  The Doctor did smile at that, though I think it was as much out of amusement at his old friend’s incorrigible attitude as any real joy over what had just taken place at Number 39 Bethune Street. Oh, he was happy we’d rescued little Ana, I didn’t doubt that; but the final secrets of why all the horrors we’d experienced had been necessary in the first place were now lying forever hidden on the stretcher what the two sailors next to Detective Sergeant Lucius were carrying. Legally prevented, for the time being, from using the operating theater at his Institute, the Doctor had no place to perform a postmortem on Libby Hatch’s brain, to see if it’d been abnormal in some way; and even if he hadn’t been so restricted, the detective sergeants couldn’t exactly deliver a body with a dissected head to their superiors. Coming on top of Libby’s death, these considerations would, I knew, always prevent the Doctor from seeing our experience as “a triumph,” just as Kat’s death would always make the memory of the adventure especially bittersweet for me.

  We got to the torpedo boats without any trouble, and got Libby Hatch’s body stowed aboard the closest of them. The Isaacsons planned to accompany said boat to a police pier down by the Battery, where they’d be able to close the case what their department had been so unwilling to open in the first place. Miss Howard, in the meantime, would take Ana Linares in the lead boat with the rest of us, first back to the Brooklyn Navy Yard and from there on to the Doctor’s house. Once safely home, Miss Howard would telephone the señora, who, since that afternoon, had been waiting for a message at the French consulate, where she’d gone to hide from her husband.

  Her head now completely clear, Miss Howard got into the lead torpedo boat without any trouble, and waited for Lucius to bring Ana down the ladder to her; but, not unpredictably, Mr. Roosevelt stepped in to do the honors.

  “You get back to your boat, Detective Sergeant,” he said, taking the baby. “I’ve had quite a lot of experience with such little bundles as this one, and you may rest assured that I shall get her safely aboard!” Cradling Aña in one arm, Mr. Roosevelt then made his way nimbly down the long ladder from the pier to our boat. He moved with much greater ease, considering his cargo, than any of us could have done; and I remembered, watching him, that he had five young kids of his own, who he must have toted around in similar if not identical situations many times.

  Once he’d gotten aboard and was handing the baby over to Miss Howard, Mr. Roosevelt took a moment to actually look at Ana’s appealing little features. “Why,” he said, in a soft way what wasn’t at all like his usual manner, “what an extraordinary face. Look at her eyes, Doctor!”

  “Yes,” the Doctor said, as he jumped down from the ladder
into the boat. “I’ve seen them, Roosevelt. A beautiful child.”

  Letting one of his big fingers play around little Ana’s face, Mr. Roosevelt offhandedly asked, “Whose is she?”

  Mr. Moore, Miss Howard, the Doctor, Cyrus, and I all froze; but fortunately Mr. Roosevelt was too preoccupied to notice.

  “Whose?” the Doctor repeated smoothly, as our boat’s engines rumbled to life and our crew began to cast off. “Does it matter, Roosevelt?”

  “Matter?” Mr. Roosevelt answered with a shrug. “I don’t know that it matters, but after what we’ve been through, I should like to meet the parents.” He grinned wide as Ana reached out to grasp hold of his finger. “And tell them how lucky they are to have engaged you all.”

  “Her parents,” Miss Howard said, coolly and quickly, “are consular officials. French consular officials. Unfortunately, they plan to return home as soon as they’re reunited with the child. Understandably.”

  “Ah. Yes.” Mr. Roosevelt nodded, looking serious for a moment. “That is understandable, I suppose—quite understandable. But I hope you’ll emphasize to them, Sara, that this sort of incident is hardly typical of our nation.”

  “Of course,” Miss Howard answered.

  Grinning again as he went back to studying Ana, Mr. Roosevelt said, “French, you say? What a pity they weren’t Spanish. She has something of a Spanish look about her, this little one. It might have been useful to show those blackguards how a free people handles a problem like this!”

  “Mmm, yes,” Mr. Moore said casually. “It might have been.”

  “Still,” Mr. Roosevelt went on, as our boat cruised out into the center of the Hudson, “as you say, Doctor, it hardly matters who her family is. She is a child, and she is safe now.” At that Ana reached out again to clutch Mr. Roosevelt’s playful finger, causing his smile to widen. “Do you know,” he said quietly, “I think a baby’s hand is the most beautiful thing in the world.”

  CHAPTER 58