At the sound of the simultaneous hisses that came out of Mr. Moore, Cyrus, and me, the señora attempted to smile, and the faintest spark flashed in her lovely, deep brown right eye. “If you were to ask me,” she murmured, “I should say that I fell down the marble staircase of the consulate-after fainting from grief following the death of our child. You see, my husband and Consul Baldasano have already decided that, at those times when an explanation to outsiders is unavoidable, I am to say that my daughter was taken by illness. But she is not dead, Señor Moore.” The señora staggered forward a step or two, leaning on the umbrella. “I have seen her! I have-seen-” At that she seemed about to faint, and Miss Howard moved to her quickly, guiding her into one of Marchese Carcano’s plush easy chairs. I turned to Mr. Moore, and saw his face light up with a whole batch of reactions: anger, horror, sympathy, but above all consternation. He waved a hand in my direction vaguely. “Stevie…”
I already had the packet out and was lighting a stick for each of us. I handed him his, watched him pace back and forth a few times, and then got out of the way when he bolted for the telephone what was sitting on a desk behind me. “We’re way out of our depth here,” he mumbled, picking up the receiver. Then, in a stronger voice: “Operator? Police Headquarters on Mulberry Street. Central Office, Bureau of Detectives.”
“What?” Miss Howard said urgently, as a look of terror filled Señora Linares’s face. “John, no, I told you-”
Mr. Moore held up a hand. “Don’t worry. I just want to find out where they are. You know the boys better than that, Sara. They’ll keep it unofficial if we ask them to.”
“Who will?” the Linares woman whispered; but Mr. Moore turned his attention back to the phone.
“Hello? Central? Listen, I have an urgent personal message for the Detective Sergeants Isaacson-can you tell me where they are?… Ah. Good, thanks.” He hung up the phone and turned to me. “Stevie-apparently a body’s been discovered over at the Cunard pier. Lucius and Marcus are looking into it. How fast do you think you can get over there and get back with them?”
“If Cyrus’ll help me commandeer a hansom,” I answered, “half an hour. Three quarters at the outside.”
Mr. Moore turned to Cyrus. “Go.”
The pair of us sprang toward the elevator. Before re-entering it, however, I paused just long enough to turn back to Mr. Moore. “You don’t think we should-”
Mr. Moore shook his head quickly. “We don’t know what this is yet. I won’t ask him to come back to this place until we’re sure.”
Cyrus put a hand to my shoulder. “He’s right, Stevie. Let’s go.”
I stepped into the elevator, Cyrus slammed the grate, and we moved back down the shaftway.
Because the Hotel St. Denis was right across the street, Number 808 had always been an easy spot to catch a cab at almost any hour of the day or night: there were two lined up outside the hotel when Cyrus and I crossed to it. The first was a four-wheeler, captained by an ancient geezer in a faded red liveryman’s jacket and a beat-to-hell top hat. He was nodding off in his seat and stank of booze from six feet away. His horse, however, was a good-looking gray mare who seemed game.
I turned to Cyrus. “Get him in the back,” I said, jumping into the driver’s seat and starting to haul the old man out of it. “Hey-hey, pop! Up and at ’em, you’ve got a fare!”
The old man made some drunken, confused sounds as I shoved him toward the little iron step on the carriage’s left side and down to Cyrus: “What-what do you think-what’re you doing?”
“Driving,” I answered, seating myself and taking the horse’s reins.
“You can’t drive!” the man protested as Cyrus forced him into the passenger compartment and sat alongside him, closing the little doors.
“We’ll double your rate,” Cyrus answered, keeping a good grip on the man. “And don’t worry, the boy’s an excellent driver.”
“But you’ll queer me with the cops!” the old fool bellowed on, removing his top hat and showing us the license what was fastened to it. “I can’t have any trouble with the law-I’m a licensed hack, see?”
“Yeah?” I looked back at him, grabbed the hat, and shoved it onto my own head. “Well, now I am-so sit back and pipe down!”
He did the one but not the other, and was still wailing like a stuck pig as I cracked the reins against the mare’s backside and we bolted out onto the pavement of Broadway at a speed that more than justified the quick measure I’d taken of the animal.
CHAPTER 4
By the time we rounded the corner of Ninth Street, we were moving at such a crazy pace-even, I’ll confess, for me-that the cab near went up on two wheels. The Cunard Line pier, in those days before the launch of the company’s really big liners (the Mauretania and the sad old Lusitania), was still located down at the foot of Clarkson Street, a short block above West Houston; but I was going to avoid that latter thoroughfare for as long as I could. Even late on a Sunday night it’d be a thick mass of whores, cons, and their drunken marks, one what had only gotten thicker in the months since Commissioner Roosevelt had left for Washington. The volume of their business would slow our movement badly. As it was, after we raced through the quiet residential blocks of Ninth Street, passed over Sixth Avenue, and headed west on Christopher, we began to see noticeable signs of what Miss Howard had mentioned earlier on our walk to Number 808: the criminal elements were conducting their affairs outside their dives, dens, and brothels in considerable numbers and with a total lack of the concern what Mr. Roosevelt had, if only briefly, drummed into them. Completing all this activity was the occasional sight of cops doing all those things that the commissioner had, by himself roving the streets at night on inspection tours, worked so hard to prevent: collecting graft payments, drinking outside dance halls and saloons, cavorting with whores, and sleeping anywhere they could. Yes, the old town was truly waking up to the fact that Roosevelt was gone and his reform-minded boss, Mayor Strong, would soon follow suit: the gloves were coming off of the underworld.
As we reached Bleecker Street, something snagged my eye (and, I’ll confess, my guts), and I reined up hard, somewhat to Cyrus’s surprise. “What’s happened, Stevie?” he called to me; but I could only stare across the street in momentary confusion at a patch of faded blue silk and an enormous head of blond hair. From Cyrus’s tone, I could tell he’d caught sight of the same thing, and I knew he was frowning: “Oh. Kat…”
I cracked the reins again and charged over to the blue silk and blond hair, both of which belonged to Kat Devlin, a-well, let’s just call her a friend of mine, for the moment, who worked at one of the kid dives and disorderly houses down on Worth Street. She was with a decked-out man who was old enough to be her grandfather, for Kat was but fourteen; and as they tried to cross Bleecker, I steered the gray mare into their path.
“We don’t have time for this, Stevie,” I heard Cyrus say, gently but with intent.
“One minute, that’s all,” I answered quickly.
Kat started at the sudden appearance of the mare and looked up, her small, pretty face and blue eyes going furious. “Hey! What the hell do you think you’re-” Then she caught sight of me. Her look softened, but she still appeared perplexed. A smile managed to work its way into her thin lips. “Why, Stevie! What’re you doing over here? And what’re you doing with that cab, besides trying to frighten off my trade?” At that she turned the smile up to the old man she was with and locked her arm in his tighter, making my heart burn hotter. The man patted her arm with an expensively gloved hand and grinned sickeningly.