The Angel of Darkness

by Caleb Carr

  Señora Linares had left New York over the weekend but hadn’t made her final destination known to Miss Howard before going. She planned to write when she was resettled and all was well.

  Taking the Doctor’s statement, it seemed to me, more lightly than a man in his position might’ve been expected to, Señor Linares rested himself against his stick and said, “I see. So. It seems that I have wasted my time coming here.” Then he glanced up at Mr. Moore, almost like he was annoyed that he hadn’t been given another brandy yet.

  Pouring it for him, Mr. Moore couldn’t help but get into the action: “Was it just because she was a girl? They don’t count for much in your part of the world, do they—female offspring?”

  The señor shook his head. “You Americans—such provincial moralists. Do you imagine I would conduct myself as I have without compelling reasons?”

  “What reasons,” Miss Howard asked, quietly but what you might call disdainfully, “could possibly be ‘compelling’ enough to make you abandon Ana?”

  Glancing around the room at each of our faces, Señor Linares downed his second brandy, then began to nod his head slowly. “I suppose my motives must seem horrifying, to your rather naïve way of thinking.”

  “We’re not sure what your motives are” Marcus offered.

  “We’ve been trying to determine that since the beginning,” Lucius added. “Without success.”

  Still nodding as Mr. Moore poured him yet another shot of brandy, Señor Linares said, “I can understand the difficulty. You, like the rest of your countrymen, believe what is in your newspapers. The Spanish Empire is a decadent collection of arrogant militarists, who would like nothing better than to prove their virility against whatever nation offends them. Well…” He took a smaller sip of brandy. “You are right, in part—but only in part.” Indicating the Doctor’s silver cigarette box, the señor said, “May I?” to which the Doctor, now very interested in what the man was saying, nodded. The señor lit up one of the number inside the box, drew on it, and let the smoke out with a look of satisfaction. “Very fine,” he said. “Russian?”

  The Doctor nodded again. “Georgian. Blended with Virginia.”

  The señor took another drag. “Yes. Very fine indeed…. Tell me, Doctor. Have you ever heard of a cousin of mine—General Arsenio Linares?” The Doctor shook his head. “He commands at Santiago de Cuba. Or of Admiral Pascual Cervera y Topete, commander of our naval squadron at Cádiz?” Again the Doctor came up blank. “I did not think so. But you know—you all know—of the ‘butcher’ General Weyler, and of the belligerent clique of monarchists and military officers that surround the queen regent…. They are the men who are quoted in your newspapers. Your Mr. Hearst and Mr. Pulitzer—they will not sell their product by printing voices of reason.”

  “Reason?” the Doctor asked, looking puzzled.

  The señor gave him a tough, straight look. “You don’t really suppose, Doctor, that we are all so blind as to be unable to recognize the reality which surrounds us? Yes, there are many Spaniards in Cuba, and in Spain, and even in my boyhood home of the Philippines, who believe that your country has meddled in our affairs and insulted our leaders past the point of toleration. And they are right. But they wish to resolve the matter through war—they wish it almost as much as do many Americans. There are those in our country, however, who know what the inevitable result of such a war would be. The men I have mentioned, for example, know. And I know.”

  “Would you mind telling us?” Mr. Moore said.

  Señor Linares looked over at him and chuckled. “This country… it is like a youth who has suddenly grown into manhood, and does not yet realize the extent of his own strength. If Spain goes to war with your country, señor, the result will be disastrous for our empire. We will lose what little we still possess in this hemisphere, and probably a great deal more. But such arguments are lost on those who wish to defend our pride with arms. They pay no attention to the warnings of experienced officers like my cousin, or Admiral Cervera, who know how great our weakness is. Nor do they listen to mere consular secretaries, who have seen your great ships under construction in Brooklyn, in Newport, and in Virginia.” Staring into his glass, Señor Linares seemed to grow bitterly downcast. “They do not listen.”

  The Doctor’s eyes had gone wide. “Are you saying,” he asked quietly, “that you deliberately tried to suppress knowledge of your daughter’s abduction in order to keep political extremists in your country from obtaining further rationalizations for declaring war on the United States?”

  Looking not at all ashamed of it, the señor answered, “What would you have done, Doctor? The Spanish Empire is sick—dying of its own arrogance, which seeks any excuse to be unleashed. I know this. Yet at the same time, I was raised to be a part of that empire. My family has served it for three hundred years. I must do all that I can to hold off the final destruction.”

  “Including letting your own daughter quite possibly die?” Miss Howard said.

  Señor Linares didn’t look at her as he answered. “Spain needs sons—not daughters. The cost had to be weighed against the return, as you Americans say.”

  “So now,” Marcus went on for him, “you’re just trying to make sure that they won’t resurface somewhere. You want to be certain the matter is really ended.”

  The señor shrugged. “I should like an annulment from my wife, if she will not return to me. I shall marry again. As I say, Spain needs sons.”

  Suddenly standing up, his eyes burning, the Doctor said, “I have told you that we know nothing of the whereabouts of your family, Señor Linares. That is the truth. And now I must ask that you leave my house.”

  The señor didn’t look like the fairly rude order came as much of a surprise: he got up, leaning on his stick, then nodded and walked into the hall.

  “Señor,” Miss Howard called after him. The man stopped at the top of the staircase and turned. “If a man can place a greater priority on his country than his own child—and if his country not only tolerates but encourages such a choice—then hasn’t that country already been destroyed?”

  “In the months to come,” Señor Linares answered quietly, “I suspect that we shall learn the answer to that question.”

  Stepping quickly, almost lightly, the señor made his way out of the house and back to his carriage, leaving the rest of us to sit quietly and think over this, the last missing piece in the case of Libby Hatch.

  CHAPTER 59

  Of course, war between the United States and the Empire of Spain did come, just months after we sat in the Doctor’s parlor with Señor Linares; and in spite of what a lot of people seem to’ve taken to believing since, what the señor had called Spanish “arrogance” was just as responsible for the bloodbath as were all the rantings and ravings of those Americans what favored the idea. Señor Linares’s predictions about the outcome of the thing proved just as accurate as his ideas about its causes: the Spanish Empire was pretty well destroyed, and the United States found itself in possession of a whole string of new foreign possessions—including the Philippine Islands. I don’t guess that much of anybody, even in Washington, had a really sound idea of what they were getting themselves into by taking over such places: as Mr. Finley P. Dunne, the newspaper wag, wrote at the time, most Americans couldn’t have told you whether the Philippines “were islands or canned goods” before the war. As for me, I had only one thought—a question, really—when I heard that we were the new rulers of the place: Had El Niño returned to his homeland before we invaded, and had he then become part of the native army what quickly began to fight against our country for independence? I never found out; but it would’ve been like him.

  The detective sergeants returned to their regular duties at the Police Department after they’d finished their investigation of the Doctor’s Institute, but their position there remained as troubled as it’d always been. Over the years there’ve been commissions what’ve investigated corruption in the department—in fact, it sometimes seems
like there’s always a commission investigating said corruption—and Marcus and Lucius have given testimony before all of them, in an attempt to get at least the Bureau of Detectives cleaned up. But the only real result of their efforts has been to isolate them even more from their “peers,” and I’m sure that, if it wasn’t for the brilliance what they’ve demonstrated on so many cases, they would’ve gotten the axe a long time ago. But they keep on going, squabbling, experimenting, and generally trying to use forensic science to push police work forward; and many’s the thief, killer, rapist, and mad bomber what wishes that the Irish brass’d been able to get rid of the “Jew boys” a long time ago.

  Miss Howard kept her operation at Number 808 Broadway going after the Hatch case; in fact, she and it are still going, though she eventually expanded its services so that both men and women could gain the benefit of her skills. Over time she’s gotten to be kind of a legend in the detection world, a fact what makes her very proud, though she’d never admit as much. And, despite all her talk about men’s defects, she’s actually taken the time to get herself mixed up with one or two of them along the way, though it’s not for me to reveal the details of those experiences. What I can say is that she remains the most singular woman I’ve ever come across, always displaying a combination of deep friendship and independence what many members of her sex are as incapable of achieving today as Libby Hatch was twenty-two years ago. I guess that this situation exists, as Miss Howard has always maintained, because of all the guff that women are fed as young girls—and maybe the solution is for more females to carry guns, I don’t know: Miss Howard’s certainly put quite a few more bullets into men’s legs over the years, and it’s only helped her stay her own person.

  Cyrus’s and my friendship, well, that’s always been one of the rocks of my life. He got married, not too long after the business of Libby Hatch was completed, and his wife, Merle Spotswood, came to live with us, ending our long search to find a decent cook. She was and remains one of the best ever born, besides being as personally decent and strong as her husband. I was still living in the Doctor’s house when their three kids came into the world, and though they turned the top floor of the place into a noisy nursery (the young ones moved into the room what had once belonged to Mary Palmer), I didn’t mind. It did sometimes drive the Doctor a little crazy; but the kids always made sure to walk softly when they passed by his study door, and having children around the house did a lot of good for everyone’s spirits. Seventeenth Street was a happy place during those years, one what I was not a little sorry to leave when it came time for me to move out into the back room of my store and start life on my own.

  As for the Doctor, once his name’d been cleared he dived back into affairs at his Institute like a man what’d been deprived of life’s necessities. That’s not to say that there weren’t questions raised during that spring and summer of 1897 what stayed with him—there certainly were. Some of them—What had driven Paulie McPherson to hang himself? What’d actually happened to Mr. Picton’s family? How many children had Libby Hatch killed that we didn’t even know about?—were unanswerable, and faded with the years; but others were more personal, and didn’t go anywhere. In fact, they seem to occupy the Doctor still, at times, as he sits in his parlor of a late night and ponders the complications of life. You couldn’t say that those questions were put into his head by the clever Clarence Darrow, exactly, for the Doctor had always vexed himself with nagging doubts; but Mr. Darrow’s skilled statement of those doubts during Libby Hatch’s trial gave voice to what might otherwise have stayed unspoken ideas. Most of all, the question of why the Doctor had—and has—always worked so hard to find explanations for the terrible events he’s encountered in his professional life seems to have been tough for him to come to grips with. Mr. Darrow’s suggestion that maybe he was at heart using his work as a way of quieting the doubts what he had about himself obviously struck a deep chord; and as the Doctor watched his onetime opponent go on to great fame in courtrooms all across America, I think the idea only haunted him all the more. But it never stopped him from working, from pressing ahead, and it’s that ability—to work through the self-doubts what any worthwhile human being feels—that is, so far as I can tell, the only thing what separates a meaningful life from a useless one.

  And then there’s Mr. Moore. I have the luxury of writing these final words because, for the first time since opening this shop, I have an assistant: sportsman that he is, Mr. Moore has conceded the bet after reading the rest of my manuscript, though he was careful to tell me that whatever spirit the narrative may have has been “regrettably marred by an appalling lack of style.” Says him. Anyway, he’s out there now, apron and all, selling smokes to swells and, I think, enjoying the opportunity what it offers him to badger such people in the way what only a shopkeeper can: nothing’s ever pleased my old friend more than being given a chance to spit in the face of the upper crust from which he hails.

  His return to the Times after the Hatch case wasn’t easy for him: he would’ve liked to’ve chronicled our recent exploits in the pages of the paper, but he knew that his editors wouldn’t touch the thing with a very long stick. So he decided to console himself by taking over coverage of the legal proceedings what followed “the mystery of the headless body.” It was Mr. Moore’s hope that he’d be able to inject some of the lessons we’d learned from pursuing Libby Hatch into that second story of intimate murder, though he really should’ve known better. The victim of the crime, the dismembered Mr. Guldensuppe, was soon forgotten by just about everybody, while his former lover, Mrs. Nack, and her most recent conquest and partner in crime, Martin Thorn, found themselves the subject of a full-blown public melodrama. Mrs. Nack quickly became, so far as the press, the public, and the district attorney’s office were concerned, a damsel in distress: she passed herself off as having been misled and corrupted by Thorn, when in fact she’d helped plan the killing and assisted in the job of dismembering the corpse. To top it all off, by giving the state everything it needed to send the unfortunate sap Thorn to the electrical chair at Sing Sing, Mrs. Nack managed to get the district attorney to ask the judge in the case to impose the lightest possible sentence on her, which he did: she got fifteen years at Auburn, which, with good behavior, could and did end up being only nine.

  When the day came for Thorn to go to the chair, Mr. Moore went up to Sing Sing, determined to get some kind of statement from the doomed prisoner to the effect that society was still willing to let women get away with brutal outrages just because it was too disturbing to believe that they were capable of them. He buttonholed Thorn as the condemned man was being led into the death chamber, and asked him what he thought about Mrs. Nack’s light sentence.

  “Oh, I don’t know,” Thorn answered, beaten down and resigned. “I don’t care much about it one way or the other.”

  So ended Mr. Moore’s little crusade to bring to light some few of the truths we’d learned from Libby Hatch. The “savage” Thorn and the “deluded but redeemed” Mrs. Nack (as the D.A. labeled them) turned out to be, in fact, very ordinary people, while the “monsters” what everyone in town had originally thought were responsible for the crime—the grave robbers, mad anatomists, bloodthirsty ghouls, and the like—were just shadows, dreamed up to glorify policemen, sell newspapers, and scare unruly kids. True to the Doctor’s beliefs, the real monsters continued, then as now, to wander the streets unnoticed, going about their strange and desperate work with a fever what looks to the average citizen like nothing more than the ordinary effort required to get through an ordinary day.

  As for me, I’ve done better than might’ve been expected, I suppose, given where I started out. Most of my old pals and associates ended up either in jail or dead on the streets, and while it’s hard to feel sorry that the likes of Ding Dong and Goo Goo Knox went that way, it seems sad that someone as good-hearted as Hickie the Hun should’ve spent most of his adult life walking the yard at Sing Sing. My own life’s pretty much been this shop;
and while tobacco’s done all right by me in terms of money, it’s also left me—in an example of what the Doctor calls “horribly tragic irony”—with this wretched hack, a condition what will, very probably, keep eating away at my lungs until there’s nothing left to cough up. I get the feeling, sometimes, that the Doctor feels guilty about never getting me to give up the smokes; but I was a nicotine fiend long before I ever met the man, and, caring and patient as he always was, there were just some things about my early life what even his kindness and wisdom couldn’t undo. I don’t hold him responsible, of course, or love him any the less for it, and it makes me sad to think that my physical predicament only gives him one more reason to vex himself; but again, I guess it’s that very vexing, and the ability to keep working through it toward a better sort of life for our mostly miserable species, what makes him such a very unusual man.

  There’ve been women in my life every now and again, but none who’ve filled me with the kind of dreams what I once shared with Kat in the Doctor’s kitchen. All of that died with her, I guess; and if it seems strange that such should’ve happened so early in my life, I can only say that it sometimes occurs to me that those of us what grew up on the streets did everything too early—too early, and too fast. Once a week I take the subway out to Calvary Cemetery and put flowers on Kat’s grave, and there’s times—more and more often, these days—when I find myself sitting and chatting with her, much the way we did on that morning when she downed the better part of a bottle of paregoric. Wherever she is, I suppose she knows that I’ll likely be joining her sometime fairly soon; and while I don’t like to think about leaving my friends, and especially the Doctor, behind, there’s a kind of a peculiar thrill in thinking that in the end I’ll find her again, all grown up and free of her cravings for burny and the high life. We might even, at long last, be able to make some kind of a peaceful, pleasant life together—the kind of life what she never knew during her short time on this world. A lot of people, I guess, might consider that a silly sort of dream; but if you came from the world what Kat and I did, it wouldn’t seem that way at all.