“You’re changing the subject. Come on down and help me.”
“How?” Rhyme asked. “How’m I supposed to do that?”
“I had a friend who was challenged,” she began. “And he -”
“You mean he was a crip,” Rhyme corrected. Softly but firmly.
She continued, “His aide’d put him into this fancy wheelchair every morning and he drove himself all over the place. To the movies, to -”
“Those chairs…” Rhyme’s voice sounded hollow. “They don’t work for me.”
She stopped speaking.
He continued, “The problem’s how I was injured. It’d be dangerous for me to be in a wheelchair. It could” – he hesitated – “make things worse.”
“I’m sorry. I didn’t know.”
After a moment he said, “Of course you didn’t.”
Blew that one. Oh, boy. Brother…
But Rhyme didn’t seem any the worse for her faux pas. His voice was smooth, unemotional. “Listen, you’ve got to get on with the search. Our unsub’s making it trickier. But it won’t be impossible… Here’s an idea. He’s the underground man, right? Maybe he buried them.”
She looked over the scene.
Maybe there… She saw a mound of earth and leaves in a patch of tall grass near the gravel. It didn’t look right; the mound seemed too assembled.
Sachs crouched beside it, lowered her head and, using the pencils, began to clear away leaves.
She turned her face slightly to the left and found she was staring at a rearing head, bared fangs…
“Jesus Lord,” she shouted, stumbling backwards, falling hard on her butt, scrambling to draw her weapon.
No…
Rhyme shouted, “You all right?”
Sachs drew a target and tried to steady the gun with very unsteady hands. Jerry Banks came running up, his own Glock drawn. He stopped. Sachs climbed to her feet, looking at what was in front of them.
“Man,” Banks whispered.
“It’s a snake – well, a snake’s skeleton,” Sachs told Rhyme. “A rattlesnake. Fuck.” Holstered the Glock. “It’s mounted on a board.”
“A snake? Interesting.” Rhyme sounded intrigued.
“Yeah, real interesting,” she muttered. She pulled on latex gloves and lifted the coiled bones. She turned it over. “ ‘Metamorphosis.’ ”
“What?”
“A label on the bottom. The name of the store it came from, I’d guess. 604 Broadway.”
Rhyme said, “I’ll have the Hardy Boys check it out. What’ve we got? Tell me the clues.”
They were underneath the snake. In a Baggie. Her heart pounded as she crouched down over the bag.
“A book of matches,” she said.
“Okay, maybe he’s thinking arson. Anything printed on them?”
“Nope. But there’s a smear of something. Like Vaseline. Only stinky.”
“Good, Sachs – always smell evidence you’re not sure about. Only be more precise.”
She bent close. “Yuck.”
“That’s not precise.”
“Sulfur maybe.”
“Could be nitrate-based. Explosive. Tovex. Is it blue?”
“No, it’s milky clear.”
“Even if it could go bang I imagine it’s a secondary explosive. They’re the stable ones. Anything else?”
“Another scrap of paper. Something on it.”
“What, Sachs? His name, his address, e-mail handle?”
“Looks like it’s from a magazine. I can see a small black-and-white photo. Looks like part of a building but you can’t see which one. And underneath that, all you can read is a date. May 20, 1906.”
“Five, twenty, oh-six. I wonder if it’s a code. Or an address. I’ll have to think about it. Anything else?”
“Nope.”
She heard him sigh. “All right, come on back, Sachs. What time is it? My God, almost one a.m. I haven’t been up this late in years. Come on back and let’s see what we have.”
Of all the neighborhoods in Manhattan, the Lower East Side has remained the most unchanged over the course of the city’s history.
Much of it’s gone of course: The rolling pastoral fields. The solid mansions of John Hancock and early government luminaries. Der Kolek, the large freshwater lake (its Dutch name eventually corrupted to “The Collect,” which more accurately described the grossly polluted pond). The notorious Five Points neighborhood – in the early 1800s the most dangerous square mile on earth – where a single tenement, like the decrepit Gates of Hell, might be the site of two or three hundred murders every year.
But thousands of the old buildings remained – tenements from the nineteenth century and Colonial frame houses and Federal brick townhomes from the prior one, Baroque meeting halls, several of the Egyptian-style public buildings constructed by order of the regally corrupt Congressman Fernando Wood. Some were abandoned, their facades overgrown with weeds and floors cracked by persistent saplings. But many were still in use; this had been the land of Tammany Hall iniquity, of pushcarts and sweat-shops, of the Henry Street Settlement house, Minsky’s burlesque and the notorious Yiddish Gomorra – the Jewish Mafia. A neighborhood that gives birth to institutions like these does not die easily.
It was toward this neighborhood that the bone collector now piloted the taxi containing the thin woman and her young daughter.
Observing that the constabulary was on to him, James Schneider went once again to ground like the serpent that he was, seeking accommodations – it is speculated – in the cellars of the city’s many tenant-houses (which the reader may perchance recognize as the still-prevalent “tenements”). And so he remained, quiescent for some months.
As he drove home, the bone collector saw around him not the Manhattan of the 1990s – the Korean delis, the dank bagel shops, the X-rated-video stores, the empty clothing boutiques – but a dreamy world of bowler-clad men, women in rustling crinoline, hems and cuffs filthy with street refuse. Hordes of buggies and wagons, the air filled with the sometimes pleasant, sometimes repulsive scent of methane.
But such was the foul, indefatigable drive within him to start his collection anew that he was soon forced from his lair to waylay yet another good citizen; – this, a young man newly arrived in town to attend university.
Driving through the notorious Eighteenth Ward, once the home of nearly fifty thousand people crammed into a thousand decrepit tenements. When most people thought of the nineteenth century they thought in sepia – because of old photographs. But this was wrong. Old Manhattan was the color of stone. With choking industrial smoke, paint prohibitively expensive and dim lighting, the city was many shades of gray and yellow.
Schneider snuck up behind the fellow and was about to strike when Fortune’s conscience, at last, cried out. Two constables chanced upon the assault. They recognized Schneider and gave chase. The killer fled east, across that engineering marvel, the Manhattan Bridge, completed In 1909, two years before these events. But he stopped halfway across, seeing that three constables were approaching from Brooklyn, having heard the alarm raised by the whistles and pistol reports of their confederates from Manhattan.
Schneider, unarmed, as chance would have it, climbed onto the railing of the bridge as he was surrounded by the law. He shouted maniacal diatribes against the constables, condemning them for having ruined his life. His words grew ever madder. As the constabulary moved closer, he leapt from the rail into the River. A week later a pilot discovered his body on the shore of Welfare Island, near Hell Gale. There was little left, for the crabs and turtles had been diligently working to reduce Schneider to the very bone which he, in his madness, cherished.
He turned the taxi onto his deserted cobblestoned street, East Van Brevoort, and paused in front of the building. He checked the two filthy strings he’d run low across the doors to make certain that no one had entered. A sudden motion startled him and he heard the guttural snarling of the dogs again, their eyes yellow, teeth brown, bodies dotted with scars and sores. His hand strayed to his pistol but they suddenly turned and, yelping, charged after a cat or rat in the alley.