Mr. Moore only frowned and looked to the doorway again. “I shall direct my comments to you, Cyrus. Knowing you to be a person of integrity, I can assume that there is some good reason for your being here.”
Cyrus nodded, with the ever-so-slightly-patronizing smile that often came onto his face when he spoke to Mr. Moore. “Miss Howard says there is, sir,” he answered. “That’s good enough for me. You’d better ask her about it.”
“And supposing I don’t wish to speak to her?” Mr. Moore grunted.
“Then, sir, you’ll be a long time getting an explanation…”
Faced with no other option, Mr. Moore paused, shrugged his shoulders, then plopped down onto the bed again. “All right, Sara. Tell me what’s so all-fired important that it’s got you breaking and entering. And for God’s sake, Stevie, give me a cigarette.”
As I lit up a stick and handed it to Mr. Moore, Miss Howard moved around in front of him. “I have a case, John.”
Mr. Moore let out a big, smoky sigh. “Splendid. Do you demand the front page, or will the inside of the paper do?”
“No, John,” Miss Howard said earnestly. “I think this is real. I think it’s big.”
Her tone took a good bit of the sarcasm out of Mr. Moore’s voice. “Well-what is it?”
“A woman came to Number 808 this evening. Señora Isabella Linares. Ring a bell?”
Mr. Moore rubbed his forehead hard. “No. Which gives her something in common with you. Come on, Sara, no games, who is she?”
“Her husband,” Miss Howard answered, “is Señor Narciso Linares. Now, does that ring a bell?”
Mr. Moore looked up slowly, intrigued in a way that clearly pleased Miss Howard. “Isn’t he… he holds some position in the Spanish consulate, doesn’t he?”
“He is, in fact, private secretary to the Spanish consul.”
“All right. So what’s his wife doing at Number 808?” Miss Howard began to pace around the room purposefully. “She has a fourteen-month-old daughter. Or had. The child was kidnapped. Three days ago.”
Mr. Moore’s face turned skeptical. “Sara. We are talking about the daughter of the private secretary of the consul of the Empire of Spain in the City of New York. The same Empire of Spain that Mr. William Randolph Hearst, our friend in the Navy Department”-by which he meant Mr. Roosevelt-“certain of my bosses, some of the business leaders, and much of the populace of this country have been openly insulting and trying to goad into war for years now. Do you honestly think that if such a child were to be kidnapped in New York, said Empire of Spain would not make the most of the chance to cry foul and declare the barbarity of its American critics? Wars have been fought and avoided over less, you know.”
“That’s just the point, John.” As Miss Howard went on, both Cyrus and I drew closer, now very interested in what she was saying and not wanting to miss a trick. “You would think that the Spanish officials would react that way, wouldn’t you? But not at all. Señora Linares claims that the kidnapping occurred when she was walking alone with the baby in Central Park one evening. She couldn’t see the abductor-he came from behind and hit her on the head with something. But when she went home to tell her husband what had happened, he reacted strangely-bizarrely. He showed little concern for his wife, and less for his daughter. He told her that she must tell no one what had happened-they would wait for a ransom note, and if none came, it would mean that the child had been taken by a lunatic and killed.”
Mr. Moore shrugged. “Such things do happen, Sara.”
“But he didn’t even try going to the police! A full day passed, no ransom note came, and finally Señora Linares declared that if her husband wouldn’t go to the authorities, she would.” Miss Howard paused, wringing her hands a bit. “He beat her, John. Savagely. You should see her-in fact, you’re going to see her. She didn’t know what to do-her husband said he’d do worse if she ever talked of going to the police again. Finally, she confided in a friend of hers at the French consulate, a woman I helped out with some minor marital rubbish a few months ago. The Frenchwoman told her about me. The señora’s waiting for us. You’ve got to come and talk to her-”
“Wait, wait, wait, now,” Mr. Moore answered, holding up his cigarette and trying to salvage his night of pleasure. “You’re forgetting a few things here. In the first place, these people are diplomatic officials. The laws are different. I don’t know exactly what they are in a case like this, but they’re different. Second, if this Linares character doesn’t want to pursue it, then who are we to-”
Mr. Moore was interrupted by the sudden appearance, behind Cyrus and me, of the woman he’d just minutes ago been in bed with. She’d apparently retrieved her clothes from the hall and was fully dressed and ready to depart.
“Excuse me, John,” she said quietly. “I wasn’t sure what these people wanted, but it does sound important-so I thought I ought to go. I’ll see myself out.”
She turned to leave, and Mr. Moore suddenly looked like he’d done a few seconds in the electrical chair: He cried “No!” desperately, secured his sheet around himself again, and bolted toward the bedroom door. “No, Lily, wait!”
“Call me at the theater tomorrow!” the woman answered from the front door. “I’d love to take this up again sometime!” And with that she was gone.
Mr. Moore stalked over to Miss Howard and glared at her what you might call hotly. “You, Sara Howard, have just destroyed what was well on its way to becoming one of the three best nights of my life!”
Miss Howard only smiled a bit. “I won’t ask what the other two were. No, really, I am sorry, John. But this situation is desperate.”
“It had better be.”
“It is, trust me. You haven’t heard the best part yet.”
“Oh. Haven’t I…?”
“Señora Linares came to me in the greatest secrecy, after normal business hours. In order to make sure that she wasn’t followed by anyone from the consulate, she took the Third Avenue El downtown. When she got off the train at Ninth Street, she walked along the platform toward the stairs down to the street-and happened to glance into the last car of the train.”
Miss Howard stopped for a moment, causing Mr. Moore to get a bit agitated. “Sara, you can dispense with all these dramatic pauses. They’re not going to improve my mood. What did she see?”
“She saw her child, John.”
Mr. Moore’s face screwed up. “You mean she thought she saw her child-wishful thinking, that kind of thing.”
“No, John. Her child. In the arms of a woman.” Miss Howard allowed herself one more smiling pause. “A white American woman.”
Mr. Moore digested that little tidbit with a kind of tormented but interested moan: the newshound was winning out over the libertine. He turned to me, still not looking much happier, but clearly resigned to his fate. “Stevie-as a means of atoning for this invasion, will you help me find my clothes? Then we’ll get down to Number 808 and, God willing, find out what this is all about. But so help me, Sara, derringer or no derringer, if this case is a bust you will regret the day we ever met!”
“Oh, I regretted that ages ago,” Miss Howard answered with a laugh, one that Cyrus and I picked up on. “Come on, Stevie. Let’s see if we can’t get our distraught friend here cleaned up. We need to move quickly.”
CHAPTER 3
It was a walk I hadn’t made in a year, that down to Number 808 Broadway, but you wouldn’t have known it from the way my body moved along the route. I remember reading in The Principles of Psychology-that doorstop of a book what Dr. Kreizler’s old teacher at Harvard, Professor William James, had written some years back, and which I’d fought my way through along with the rest of our team during the Beecham case-that the brain isn’t the only organ that stores memories. Some of the more primitive parts of the body-muscles, for instance-have their own ways of filing away experience and recalling it at a moment’s notice. If so, my legs were proving it that night, for I could’ve made the trip even if somebody’s cut my spinal cord below the cerebral cortex and left me running on nothing but my brain stem, like one of those poor laboratory frogs what Professor James and his students seemed to be always chopping into little pieces.