The Angel Of Darkness

CHAPTER 13

The strange knife from the Philippines may not have done Miss Howard or Cyrus any harm, but it dealt a death blow to Mr. Moore’s reluctance to get started on finding the woman in our sketch. He’d known Miss Howard since childhood (her family’d had a house on Gramercy Park in addition to their estate in the Hudson Valley), and though she was always quick to maintain that she didn’t need any man’s help to protect herself-which was as true as true could be-Mr. Moore didn’t like the idea of crazed Filipinos following her or any of us around with kris at the ready. And so, bright and early Friday morning, he marched into Number 808, carrying a long list of every agency in town that offered care for infants and children. He’d told his bosses at The New York Times that he wasn’t going to be around for a while, and that if they didn’t like it they could go ahead and fire him. They hadn’t been much surprised by this statement, as Mr. Moore was known to be a loose cannon around his office; but since the scoops he periodically came up with continued to make it worth putting up with his uppity behavior, they didn’t let him go but gave him an indefinite vacation. (There were only a couple of occasions during his years at the Times when he crossed the line far enough to get the sack, and even then the exile was only temporary.)

The detective sergeants, Miss Howard, and Mr. Moore proceeded to divide the list up, and then each set out with photographic copies of Miss Beaux’s sketch, ready for long days of frustrating inquiries at places that were often run by very uncooperative people. All of us at Seventeenth Street knew that this process would take some time, time that would pass faster if we filled it with constructive activity. For the Doctor, that meant locking himself back up in his study and combing through more psychological texts, trying to determine a hypothetical background for the woman we were tracking. The occasional cries, curses, and execrations that came out of that room, though, indicated that he was failing to get much further than he had earlier in the week. As for Cyrus, the detective sergeants had secretly asked him to prepare a report on each member of the Doctor’s staff at the Institute, since they’d have to juggle that investigation with the Linares affair. No one knew the Doctor’s assistants-the teachers, matrons, even the custodians-better than Cyrus, and he took advantage of the time to put together a set of summaries what were very detailed.

As for me, I’d been struck, during the business with the Filipino knife, by my own ignorance of where and what those islands were and of their importance to the Spanish Empire. So I asked the Doctor for some books and monographs that might help me understand just what the situation regarding Spain and the United States was all about. Pleased by my genuine interest, the Doctor obliged, and I took the materials up to my room and sank into them.

So wrapped up did I become in these ruminations that by Saturday evening I was still going at it-two days of steady study, a longer time than I’d been able to manage in my two years of service with the Doctor. As night descended along with a late rainstorm that blew in from the northwest, I realized with a sudden start just how late in the week it was, and remembered that Kat had told me she planned to move out of Frankie’s dive and into the Dusters’ headquarters sometime during the next week. Checking to see that the Doctor was still locked up in his study, I told Cyrus that I was heading out for a while and began the long, wet walk down to my old stomping grounds near the intersection of Baxter and Worth Streets.

The dive known as Frankie’s was located at Number 55 Worth, and was as dismal a place as any kid ever passed an idle hour in. It was also the location where I’d first met Kat about six months previous. Its main attractions were bloody battles between dogs and rats in a deep pit, an even younger than usual collection of girls in the back, and a drink that was a nasty mix of buttered rum, benzene, and cocaine shavings. I’d never spent much time there during my criminal days, though I knew plenty who did; but my acquaintance with Kat had, I regret to say, caused me to journey down in recent months and pass far more hours amid the violence and squalor than I probably should’ve.

That Kat… She’d arrived in the city about a year before I’d met her in the company of her father, a smalltime con man who got too drunk one winter night and fell into the East River. After his death Kat had tried for months to make a legitimate living vending ears of hot roasted corn out of an old baby carriage on downtown streets, a job what wasn’t in any way as simple as it might sound. Hot corn girls in New York were something of a puzzle: most of them weren’t whores, but somehow the average person-particularly your run-of-the-mill out-of-towner-was always convinced otherwise. Nobody seems to know where the idea got started. The Doctor says it all had to do with “subconscious associations” that most people formed about young girls alone on the street selling something “hot” that had a general shape what the alienists call “phallic.” Who knows… The point is that a lot of men who bought corn off those girls figured they were actually making a bargain for sexual favors; and when Kat wised up to how much more money she could make actually selling those favors, well, she took the chance. I didn’t judge her for it; nobody who’s ever been on the streets would’ve. You could get damned sick and real tired standing barefoot in the cold all day hawking corn, not even making enough money to buy yourself a bed in one of the worst flophouses in town.

In her early days of whoring, Kat found her trade on the streets. But eventually she ended up working out of Frankie’s, as the kid trade was steadier, safer, and, she said, a lot less painful on her insides. I met her by chance, when I stopped in to Frankie’s to see an old pal. Sad and strange, what a year on the streets and working the skin trade can do to a country girl: she’d become all brass by the time we were introduced, having seen more of the way of the world in her short piece of a life than your average citizen experiences in a full one. Maybe I fell for her the minute I saw her, I’m not sure; but if it wasn’t that exact minute, it wasn’t too long after. The brass was mostly an act that covered something much more decent, I could see that even then, although she would never admit it. And I think maybe, too, that I just wanted to see one of those poor kids at Frankie’s make it out to a better way of life, since I’d learned that such a thing did, in fact, exist. It was all a boy’s romantic foolery, of course; but there aren’t many things more powerful in this life.

She made me pay for my time with her; said she had to or Frankie would get upset. But most of those nights we just went into the back and talked, her telling me about her years with her father, moving from small town to small town, one step ahead of the local law enforcement. For my part, I told her about my old lady, my underworld career, and growing up in New York in general. It was months before anything physical happened between us, and then it was only because Kat was hopped up on Frankie’s doctored liquor. The whole experience was difficult for me, as I knew nothing about such ways and she was already an expert, amused by my ignorance and embarrassment. We managed the act itself, and she said it wasn’t half bad; but it hadn’t been what I’d dreamed about having with her. We never repeated it, but we stayed friends, even though my continued attempts to get her to quit the trade were sometimes cause for real anger on her part.

As I made my way downtown that night, I passed by many of the streets I’d once lived on, which now looked more than ever to me like what they were: some of the worst stretches of tenement hell in the city. The rain was keeping most people inside, so I didn’t worry too much about getting jumped; and before I knew it, I was rounding the corner of Worth Street and closing in on Frankie’s. Saturday nights were, of course, especially wild there, and when I got close I could see kids spilling up and out of the dark basement space in various states of drunkenness and drug intoxication. Making my way down the steps through this crowd and saying hello to the kids I knew, I ran into Nosy, the boy what I’d seen on the waterfront earlier in the week. He told me that the cops had held him and his friends overnight in nothing but their shorts but that they’d gotten clear the next morning and had been having good laughs all week about the reports that were continuing to pop up in the papers about the “headless body” being the work of a crazed anatomist or medical student. Even the halfwit what Nosy called Slap knew enough to say that the story was a lot of hot air.

Inside Frankie’s the smoke was so thick I couldn’t even see the back wall, and the sounds of kids screaming out bets, a dog barking and growling, and rats squealing clued me in to the fact that there was a hot contest going on in the pit. I didn’t stop to look at it-that was one sport that truly made me sick-but kept on pushing my way through the crowd and into the back hall, eventually reaching the door of the little room that I knew Kat shared with two other girls. I gave the door a loud knock and heard some female giggling coming from inside. Then Kat’s voice sang out, “Come on in, though if it’s a good time you want, you’re too late!” I opened the door.

Kat was standing over the room’s lousy mattress, a small wicker suitcase open before her. The other two girls, who I also knew, were drinking and obviously had been for quite some time. The look in Kat’s eyes said that she wasn’t far behind them. A big smile came into her face when she saw me, and the other two girls started to laugh as they said hello; then Kat came over and threw her arms around my neck, reeking of benzene.

“Stevie!” she said. “You decided to come to my goodbye party! That’s sweet!”

I put my arms around her awkwardly, causing one of the other girls to say, “Go ahead, Stevie, get it while you can!” Then another round of giggles broke out.

“Hey, Betty,” I said to the one with the mouth, handing her a couple of bucks, “why don’t you and Moll go chase yourselves around the bar?”

“For two bucks?” Betty looked at the money like it was the Federal Depository. “You got it, lover-man!” As they went out she mumbled, “Give him something special, Kat, for his last whirl!” Kat laughed, the door closed, and we were finally alone.

“I mean it,” Kat said, looking drowsily into my eyes. “It’s sweet of you to come, Stevie-” She caught herself, then took her arms away. “Oh, no. Wait a minute. I’m mad at you. Almost cost me that gentleman, you did, with your damned whip. What’d you go and do that for, anyway? He was old, it didn’t take but a few minutes to make him happy. Easy jobs like that are tough to find, you know.”

I winced inside at that, but tried not to show it. “Things’ll be even tougher at the Dusters’.”

“Unh-unh,” she said, shaking her head. “I’m gonna have my pick of customers there. My new man says so.”

“New man? And who’d that be?”

“Ding Dong, that’s who.” She put her hands proudly on her hips. “How do you like that, Mr. Errand Boy?”

If her previous remark had brought a wince, this one hit like a sledgehammer. “Ding Dong,” I whispered. “Kat-you can’t-”

“And why not? If you’re thinkin’ he’s too old, the fact is he likes his ladies young-told me so. And since he’s one of them what started the gang, I’ll have protection all over the city. I don’t service nobody without he says it’s okay, neither.”

I didn’t say anything for a few minutes. I’d crossed paths with this Ding Dong many times during my days with Crazy Butch: he ran the kids’ auxiliary of the Hudson Dusters (whose turf was the West Side and the waterfront below Fourteenth Street), and he did it through the simple but brutal trick of turning kids into cocaine fiends and then controlling their access to the stuff. The Dusters were all what we called burny blowers, addicted to snorting powdered cocaine, and a few of them even jabbed the drug: it tended to make them wild, reckless, and violent, so much so that most other gangs just steered clear of them altogether, since none of their territory was what you’d call vital. They were darlings of the moneyed Bohemian crowd, who shared their craving for cocaine and liked to come down and slum it in their headquarters, an old dive on Hudson Street; and the sickening sight of the Dusters’ leader, Goo Goo Knox, having his praises sung in ditties and poems dashed off by educated but misled fools was, I’m sorry to say, not uncommon.

The blood I’d seen on Kat’s glove the night we’d run into her on Christopher Street had clued me in to how she’d been enlisted by the Dusters; and if that hadn’t been enough, she now sat on the bed and produced a sweets tin what was filled to the brim with the fine white powder.

“Want some?” she said, in that half-ashamed way that all drug fiends do when they can’t resist going to the well in front of another person. “I can get all I want.”

“I’m sure of that,” I said. Then urgency set my blood afire. “Listen, Kat,” I said, sitting on the bed next to her. “I’ve got an idea. It could get you out of all this. The Doctor needs a maid-a regular, live-in housekeeper. I think I could convince him, if you’d be willing to-”

I was interrupted by the loud sound of her snorting the burny off her wrist. Her face winced with the sting, then settled into relief. Finally she began to laugh. “A maid? Stevie-you ain’t serious!”

“Why not?” I said. “It’s a roof over your head, a good roof, and steady work-”

“Oh, yeah,” she said, “and I can just imagine what I’d have to do for this Doctor to keep it.”

A sudden wave of anger flashed through me, and I grabbed her wrist hard, spilling the cocaine off of it. “Don’t say that,” I growled through clamped teeth. “Don’t ever talk about the Doctor like that. Just because you never met people like him-”

“Stevie, goddamn it!” Kat cried, trying to salvage the cocaine I’d spilt. “You never get it, do you? So I never met people like him? I got news for you, boy, I met people like him ever since I came to this town, and I’m sick of it! Old gents ready to give you something, yeah, I’ve met ’em-but they always want something back! And I’m sick of it! I want a man, Stevie, a man of my own, and Ding Dong’s gonna be it! He ain’t no boy, no silly little kid with foolish ideas-” She stopped herself there and tried to catch her breath. “Ah. I’m sorry, Stevie. I like you, you know that-always have. But I’m gonna be somebody-maybe, I don’t know, a revue girl or an actress-and a rich man’s wife, someday. But not a maid, for Pete’s sake-I’m gonna have maids, plenty of maids!”

I got up and wandered toward the door. “Yeah,” I mumbled. “It was just an idea…”

She followed me over, again putting her arms around me. “And it was a nice idea-but it ain’t me, Stevie. If it’s a good place for you, that’s fine. But it ain’t me.”

I nodded. “Unh-hunh…”

She turned me to her and put her hands on the sides of my face. “You can come see me sometimes-but you gotta behave. Remember-I’m Ding Dong’s girl, now. Okay?”

“Yeah… okay.” I started to open the door.

“Say.” When I looked back, she was smiling. “Don’t I get a kiss good-bye?”

With some reluctance but more desire, I leaned over to comply; but just as my face was nearing hers, a big drop of blood ran down out of her nostril to her lip. “Dammit!” she said, turning away quickly and wiping at the blood with her sleeve. “That always happens…”

I couldn’t take any more of it. “So long, Kat,” I said, and then I ran out the door. I kept on going, through the bar, past the baiting pit, and finally out onto the street. Kids whose faces I couldn’t make out called to me, but I just kept on moving, faster and faster, near to tears and not wanting anyone to see it.

By the time I stopped running, I was near the Hudson and quickly made for the waterfront, the comforting smell of the river keeping me from breaking down and crying. It was foolish, I told myself, to feel so strongly about Kat’s fate, for it wasn’t like anyone was holding a gun to her head and forcing her to follow the path she was taking. She’d chosen it; and sorry as I might be, it was just plain ridiculous to take it so hard. I must’ve repeated that statement to myself a thousand times as I watched the night boats, ferries, and ships move up, down, and across the waters of the Hudson. But it wasn’t any attempt at being rational that finally mended my spirits; no, it was the sight of the river itself, which always made me feel, somehow, like there was hope. She has that quality, does the Hudson, as I imagine all great rivers do: the deep, abiding sense that those activities what take place on shore among human beings are of the moment, passing, and aren’t the stories by way of which the greater tale of this planet will, in the end, be told…

I finally wandered back into Dr. Kreizler’s house at well past three o’clock and stumbled on up to bed. The Doctor’s study door was open and that of his bedroom was closed, indicating that he might finally be getting some sleep-but then I noted that a dim light was shining out from the crack underneath the bedroom door. As I passed on up the stairs, I saw the light go out; but the Doctor never came out to ask where I’d been or why I was coming in so late. Probably Cyrus had already figured it out and told him, or maybe he was simply respecting my privacy; either way, I was grateful to be able to just get to my room, close the door, and fall onto my bed without any further words.

It wasn’t many hours later that I was woken by fairly violent shaking. I was still in my clothes, and it took me several seconds to come out of a very deep sleep. Cyrus’s voice became identifiable even before his face:

“Stevie! Come on, wake up, we’ve got to go!”

I shot upright, at that, figuring I’d overslept and forgotten to do something, though I couldn’t for the life of me remember what that thing might’ve been. “S’okay,” I said sleepily, cramming my shoes on. “I’ll get the horses-”

“I already have,” Cyrus answered. “Get some fresh clothes on, we’ve got to meet the others.”

“Why?” I said, going for a new shirt in a chest of drawers. “What’s happened?”

“They’ve found out who she is.”

I dropped a handful of clothes on the floor. “You mean-the lady in the sketch?”

“That’s right,” Cyrus answered. “And Miss Howard says there’s plenty of interesting details. We’re meeting them at the museum.” I was still having some trouble with my movements, and Cyrus held a shirt out for me. “Come on, boy, wake up now-you’re driving!”