We passed through the marble lobby and into the great cage that was the elevator, then started the slow, laborious drift up to the sixth floor. Looking at Cyrus and Mr. Moore, I could tell they knew as well as I did that, all nervousness aside, we weren’t going to come back down again without having gotten into something we might regret. Part of that was our mutual friendship for Miss Howard; part of it was, well, something that born New Yorkers just carry in their blood. A nose for the thing, call that thing whatever name you want: the story, the case, the ride-any way you cut it, we were getting on board. Oh, sure, we could pray that it wouldn’t involve the kind of devastation what the Beecham case had; but pray was all we could do, for we didn’t have the power to back out now.
The elevator came to the kind of heavy, sudden stop typical of commercial jobs, for Number 808 was a commercial building, full of furniture builders and sweatshops. That was part of the reason Dr. Kreizler had picked it in the first place: we’d been able to carry out our investigative affairs under the harmless cover of small businesses. But secrecy was no longer an issue for Miss Howard, and through the elevator grate I could see that she’d had a very tactful sign painted on the sixth-floor door:
THE HOWARD AGENCY
RESEARCH SERVICES FOR WOMEN
Drawing the elevator grate aside, she unlocked the door and then held it open as we all filed in.
The big expanse of the near-floor-through room was dark, with only the light from the arc streetlamps on Broadway and McCreery’s upper windows across the street throwing any illumination inside. But that was enough to see that Miss Howard had made only a few changes in the decor of the place. The furniture what Dr. Kreizler had bought at an antique auction the previous year-and what’d once been the property of the Marchese Luigi Carcano-still filled the room. The divan, large mahogany table, and big easy chairs rested on the green oriental carpets in their usual spots, giving the place the sudden, unexpected feel of a home. The billiard table was now in the back by the kitchen, covered with planking and a silk drape. It wasn’t the kind of thing, I figured, that would have given Miss Howard’s lady clients much reassurance. But the five big office desks were still there, though Miss Howard had arranged them in a row rather than a circle, and the baby grand piano still sat in a corner by one of the Gothic windows. Seeing it, Cyrus went over and lifted its lid with a little smile, touching two keys gently and then looking to Miss Howard.
“Still in tune,” he said softly.
She nodded and smiled back. “Still in tune.”
Cyrus put his bowler on the bench, sat down, and gently started to play. At first I figured he’d go for one of the operatic tunes what the Doctor always had him give out with at our house, but I quickly realized that it was a slow, sad rendition of some folk melody what I couldn’t immediately place.
Mr. Moore, who was staring out another window at the barely visible glimmer of the Hudson River in the distance, turned to Cyrus and beamed with a little smile of his own. “ ‘Shenandoah,’ ” he murmured quietly, as if to rightly say that Cyrus had found the perfect tune to summarize the strange and melancholy feelings what had only grown stronger in each of us at the sight of the room.
In another shadowy corner, I could see that Miss Howard had made an addition to the furnishings: an enormous Japanese screen, its five panels fully open. Peering out from behind one end of the screen was a section of a large black standing chalkboard, bordered in oak: the board, as we’d always known it. How long had it been hidden away? I wondered.
Miss Howard, having given us a few minutes to adjust to our return, now rubbed her hands in anticipation and again spoke with a kind of hesitation what was unusual for her.
“Señora Linares is in the kitchen, having tea. I’ll just get her.”
She glided back toward the rear of the building, where a dimly lit doorway indicated some sign of life. Again automatically, I walked over and jumped onto one of the windowsills that overlooked the church garden-my accustomed roost in this place-and took a small knife out of my pocket, using its blade to trim my fingernails as Cyrus continued to play and we heard the seemingly faraway sound of the two women’s voices in the kitchen.
Soon a pair of silhouettes appeared against the faint light in the kitchen doorway, and even in the near darkness I could see that Miss Howard was helping the other lady walk-not so much because the woman was physically unable to stand on her own (though she did seem in some pain) but more to help her overcome what I sensed was a kind of terrible dread. As they came into the center of the room, I could see that the woman had a fine figure and was richly dressed in black: layer upon layer of satin and silk, all of it crowned by a broad hat from which drooped a heavy black veil. She held an ivory-handled umbrella in one hand, and as Sara let go of her arm she steadied herself on it.
The rest of us got to our feet, but Señora Linares’s attention was fixed on Cyrus. “Please,” she said, in a pleasantly toned voice what had obviously suffered through hours of weeping. “Do not stop. The song is lovely.”
Cyrus obliged but kept his playing soft. Mr. Moore stepped forward at that point, offering a hand. “Señora Linares-my name is John Schuyler Moore. I suspect that Miss Howard has informed you that I’m a reporter-”
“For The New York Times,”the woman answered from behind the veil as she shook Mr. Moore’s hand lightly. “I must tell you frankly, señor, that were you in the employ of any other newspaper in this city, such as those belonging to Pulitzer and Hearst, I should not have consented to this meeting. They have printed abominable lies about the conduct of my countrymen toward the rebels in Cuba.”
Mr. Moore eyed her carefully for a moment. “I fear that’s so, señora. But I also fear that at least some of what they’ve printed is true.” Señora Linares’s head bent forward just a little, and you could feel her sadness and shame even through the veil. “Fortunately, though,” Mr. Moore went on, “we’re not here to discuss politics, but the disappearance of your daughter. Assuming, that is, that we may be certain the two subjects are not connected?”
Miss Howard gave Mr. Moore a quick look of surprise and disapproval, and Señora Linares’s head snapped back up into a proud position. “I have given my word to Miss Howard-the facts are as I have represented them.”
Miss Howard shook her head. “Honestly, John, how can you-”
“My apologies,” he answered. “To you both. But you must admit that the coincidence is rather remarkable. War between our two countries is spoken of as commonly as the weather these days-and yet of all the children of all the diplomats in New York to mysteriously disappear, it’s the daughter of a high Spanish official.”
“John,” Miss Howard said angrily, “perhaps you and I had better-”
But the Linares woman held up a hand. “No, Miss Howard. Señor Moore’s skepticism is, we must grant, understandable. But tell me this, sir: If I were a mere pawn in some diplomatic game, would I go to these lengths?” At that the woman pulled her veil up and over the black hat and moved further into the light that drifted through the window.
Now, in the part of the Lower East Side where I was born and spent my first eight years, you tended to get pretty used to the sight of women who’d been worked over by their men; and given my mother’s taste in male companions, I’d gotten some especially close looks at just how that work was done. But nothing I’d seen in all those years exceeded the outrages that somebody had committed against this very comely lady. There was an enormous bruise that started above her left eye, then moved down to swell the eye shut and end in a gash in the cheek. A rainbow patch of purple, black, yellow, and green spread out on either side of her nose and reached under her right eye, the one she could still see out of, showing pretty clearly that the nose itself had been busted. The flesh of the chin was all scraped away, while the right side of the mouth was dragged down into a continuous frown by another bad gash. From the painful way she moved, it was pretty apparent that the same kind of injuries had been inflicted to the rest of her body.