The Angel Of Darkness

CHAPTER 14

As we rolled off of Fifth Avenue and into Central Park, bearing right to head onto the Metropolitan Museum ’s carriage path, I understood for the first time just how insane, daring, or desperate the woman we believed had snatched the Linares baby must’ve been. The construction site for the museum’s new Fifth Avenue wing took up the full stretch of ground between Eighty-first and Eighty-third Streets, and beyond it to the west, inside the park, the square red brick mass of the museum’s three older wings occupied another city block or so of territory. The Metropolitan was what the Doctor and his architectural friends always called “a mongrel of styles”-Gothic and Renaissance revivals in the first three wings, what they called “Beaux Arts” in the new Fifth Avenue hall-but, different as the various sections were in their color and concept, even the first was not that much older than the one currently being built. All of which, so far as we were concerned, meant that there’d been precious little time for any trees or shrubbery to grow in this part of the park, and a lot of what had been planted or had sprung up had been ripped away by the never-ending process of construction. So when the detective sergeants said the crime had been committed in broad daylight and in a very open public spot, they meant just that. The only object what rose to any great height was the Egyptian obelisk what sat beyond the front (soon to be the side) entrance of the museum, and Señora Linares had been struck just as she got there: like I say, the abduction had been either a very gutsy, despairing, or crazy act, depending on how you elected to see it.

The ride uptown had been as quick as I could make it, and on the way the Doctor tried to relate some information from the front page of the Times, telling me as I drove that the Cuban rebels had massacred a party of Havana stagecoach riders while, in a separate engagement, the Cuban government was claiming to’ve killed one of the main rebel leaders. (The first report turned out to be true, the second wishful thinking.) But it was tough for us to keep our minds on any subject other than the business at hand, and as I kept urging Frederick forward past the churches of upper Fifth Avenue, where the wealthy families of Mansion Row were just leaving early services, I threw a panic into some people who figured Sunday morning would be a safe time to stroll absent-mindedly across the boulevard. I got some angry shouts and even a few curses from those ladies and gents for splashing horse dung and piss on their Sunday best, and I threw some feisty words back; but nothing stopped our forward motion, and we pulled up to the steps of the Metropolitan at just before eleven.

Ordinarily, the Doctor would have wanted to walk over and check what progress had been made on the new wing: the original architect, Mr. Richard Morris Hunt, who’d died a couple of years earlier, had been another old friend of his, as was Mr. Hunt’s son, who’d taken over the direction of the work. But, things being what they were on this day, the Doctor just jumped out of the calash and charged up the museum’s steps, passing between a large pair of iron lamp fixtures and through the square granite doorway. Cyrus followed him, leaving me with the question of what to do with the carriage. Spotting another driver nearby, I offered him four bits to watch our rig for what I said would only be a few minutes. It was above the going price for such a service-which was one that I sometimes performed myself for other drivers-and the man was glad to get the money. Then I took to the steps, glancing up at the red brick walls, the gray granite archways, and the high, peaked roof of the building, feeling the way I always did when we came to this place: like I was entering some sort of temple, whose services and rituals had once seemed as strange to me as a towel-headed Hindoo’s, but what I was coming to understand better and better the longer I lived under the Doctor’s roof.

The galleries just inside the entrance to the museum were full of what, for me, were the most boring objects in the place: sculptures, old (or, I should say, ancient) pottery and glass, and Egyptian artifacts. The Doctor figured that, given the señora’s description of the woman who’d snatched her baby, it was in the latter hall that we’d find our friends; and so we did. Mr. Moore and Miss Howard were near one carved and painted face of an Egyptian woman, holding up Miss Beaux’s sketch for a comparison and nodding, apparently agreeing that the eyes were a good match. But as they did so, Mr. Moore for some reason kept bursting into a tired, giddy kind of laughter. The detective sergeants, for their part, were going over a small stack of papers excitedly but with serious purpose. There weren’t many other people in the place at that hour, and when we approached our bunch they all lit up like it was six or seven holidays boiled down to one.

“It’s as positive an identification as I’ve ever seen anyone make,” Lucius said as he moved over to meet us, trying to keep his voice under control but seeming ready to burst out of his sweaty clothes.

“Amazing,” Marcus added. “From a sketch! Doctor, if we could ever get this idea accepted by the department, it would change the entire process of identification and pursuit.”

Miss Howard and Mr. Moore rushed over next. “Well, Doctor,” Miss Howard began, “it took a few days, but-”

“You won’t believe it!” Mr. Moore said, chuckling in that strange way again. “It’s too rich, Laszlo, you’re never going to believe it, I tell you!”

The Doctor was shaking his head impatiently. “I won’t if none of you tells me what the devil ‘it’ is! Kindly get some sort of a grip on yourself, Moore -and one of you, please, go on.”

Mr. Moore just lurched away, holding his head in a kind of exhausted wonder and trying to stifle further laughter. It was up to Marcus to reveal what they’d discovered: “Suppose I were to tell you, Doctor, that last year-at the very same time that we were investigating the Beecham case together-the woman we’re now looking for was working just down the street from your own house?”

I could feel my own jaw drop, and saw the Doctor’s and Cyrus’s do the same. But it was also plain that, though shocked by it, we all knew what Marcus was talking about:

“You mean-the hospital?” the Doctor murmured, staring off at an Egyptian mummy case without seeing it. “The Lying-in Hospital?”

Lucius smiled wide. “The New York Lying-in Hospital. Whose principal benefactor was and is-”

“Morgan,” the Doctor mumbled on. “Pierpont Morgan.”

“Which means,” Miss Howard added, “that even as you and John were being-entertained in Mr. Morgan’s house, this woman was, effectively, being paid by him to tend to mothers and newborns.” She glanced over at Mr. Moore with a smile what indicated doubts about his current mental condition. “That’s what’s got him so tickled, you see-that and sheer fatigue. He’s been that way ever since we found out, and I’m not entirely sure how to snap him out of it.”

Mr. Moore’s amusement was thoroughly understandable. It might have been heightened by the relief of locating our quarry, but its main source was definitely the discovery that the woman in question had once been in the employ (even if indirectly) of the great financier who had played a crucial, and at times troublesome, part in our investigation of the Beecham murders. The thing had a kind of poetic-and, yes, amusing-justice to it. You see, during that investigation Mr. Moore and the Doctor had been kidnapped and taken to J. Pierpont Morgan’s house for a showdown over the effect that the case was having on the city; and while the result of that meeting had been a useful one for our cause, it’d left the pair of them with something less than the warmest feelings for the country’s most powerful businessman, banker-and philanthropist.

Among his many other charitable activities, Mr. Morgan had been the main source of funding for the transfer of the New York Lying-in Hospital to a large mansion previously owned by Mr. Hamilton Fish, which stood, as Marcus had said, just half a block away from the Doctor’s own house, on the corner of Seventeenth Street and Second Avenue. There were those uncharitable but knowledgeable souls what said that Morgan had made the expansion possible so that he’d have enough beds to accommodate all his mistresses. Whatever the fact, the hospital was one of the few medical facilities that worked with children what the Doctor had no contact with: partly because its concern was unwed and impoverished mothers and their newborn infants, which was out of the Doctor’s area of specialization, but mostly because it was run by Dr. James W. Markoe, who happened to be Mr. Morgan’s personal physician.

An amazing set of coincidences, some might say; but the born New Yorker knows what a small town this truly is, and that such things happen fairly frequently. So while it did take a good thirty seconds for the Doctor to absorb all this information, it took no longer, and he soon had his mind back on practicalities. “You say she worked there last year.” His eyes focused on Marcus. “I assume, then, that she was released or resigned?”

“A bit of both,” Marcus answered. “And under what might kindly be called a cloud.” From the stack of papers in his hand Marcus pulled a single sheet. “Dr. Markoe wasn’t at the hospital this morning, and when we contacted him at home he refused to give us any help. We could’ve pressed it and visited him in an official capacity, but our feeling was that a little cash spread around to the other nurses at the hospital would be more effective. It was-and here’s what we found out.” He indicated the paper, which was covered with notes. “To start with, every one of the nurses who was working at the hospital last year was absolutely certain of the identity of the woman in the sketch. Her name is Elspeth Hunter.”

Marcus paused for a second-but it was a long second, the kind I’d come to recognize from the Beecham case. When an unknown, unnamed person you’ve been pursuing-without even knowing for one hundred percent sure if they exist-stops being a bundle of descriptions and theories and becomes a living individual, it produces an eerie, frightening feeling: you’re suddenly certain that you’re in a very-high-stakes race, and that you can’t quit until you either win or get whipped.

“Any more of a background?” the Doctor asked.

“The nurses didn’t know anything,” Marcus answered, “but we were able to fill in some holes from her file.”

Lucius looked at the Doctor with meaning: “Her file-at headquarters.”

“So…” the Doctor breathed. “A criminal background, in fact?”

“Not so much a background as accusations,” Marcus continued. Before he could go on, though, a swarm of children herded by several governesses came flying into the room, making a racket as they bolted over to look at the mummy cases.

Glancing around at them, the Doctor said, “Upstairs,” quickly, at which we all made for one of the central cast-iron staircases and walked quickly up to the picture galleries. Moving through the rooms at the same fast pace, we reached one that was devoted to American paintings-and was deserted.

“All right,” the Doctor said, quickly moving across the plain wood floor and taking a seat on a viewing bench in front of Mr. Leutze’s enormous painting “Washington Crossing the Delaware.” He glanced back the way we’d come when he heard someone approaching, but it was only the still clucking Mr. Moore. “Go ahead, Marcus,” the Doctor said.

Marcus pulled out several other papers from his pile. “We-borrowed the file from Mulberry Street. It seems that Dr. Markoe reported Mrs. Hunter-she’s married, by the way-after several of the other nurses voiced disturbing suspicions concerning the patients she’d been attending.”

Mr. Moore now pulled up to us and, having heard Marcus’s last words, straightened up, so quickly that it was disturbing: for a man to shift moods that fast, it seemed that something dire must be coming. “You’d better prepare yourself for this, Kreizler,” he said, breathing out the last of his humor and relief in a heavy sigh.

The Doctor only held a hand up to him. “Patients?” he said. “Do you mean the mothers she attended?”

“Not the mothers,” Miss Howard answered. “Their babies.”

“It seems,” Marcus continued, “that during the eight months she was employed by the Lying-in Hospital, Nurse Hunter attended to an inordinately high number of babies who died-most of them only a few weeks after birth.”

“Died?” the Doctor echoed, quietly but with a kind of frustrated bewilderment. It was as if he’d been given a square peg of information that just didn’t fit into some round hole of an idea that he’d formed in his brain. “Died …” The Doctor stared at the floor a moment. “But-how?”

“Difficult to say, precisely,” Marcus answered. “The police report doesn’t go into any real specifics. But the nurses did. They claim that the children-there were four cases that they all agreed on, as well as some others that were questionable-were perfectly healthy when they were born, but fairly quickly developed respiratory problems.”

“Unexplained episodes of labored breathing,” Lucius added, “resulting, uniformly, in cyanosis.”

“Hunh?” I noised.

“A telltale bluish coloration of the lips, skin, and nail beds,” Lucius answered. “All caused by reduced hemoglobin in the small vessels-which generally indicates some kind of suffocation.” He looked to the Doctor again. “There would be two or three preliminary episodes, and then one during which the child would expire. But here’s the key: every time a child did die, Nurse Hunter was either rushing it to a doctor on her own or alone in a wardroom with it.”

Dr. Kreizler just kept looking at the floor. “Did the doctors at the hospital ever draw any connection between the events?”

“You know how things are in institutions like that,” Miss Howard said. “Sometimes the mothers had already left the hospital, giving their babies up. Under those kinds of circumstances there’s a high mortality rate, and nobody in authority tends to ask any questions. Dr. Markoe only went to the police because the nurses brought it to his attention-not that he’s a bad man, but-”

“But when you’ve got a dead infant and too few beds and nurses to start with,” Mr. Moore said, “it’s ship the body to the old potter’s field and on to the next case.”

“Actually,” Marcus said, “the doctors had always considered Nurse Hunter’s efforts on behalf of the cyanotic infants to be quite-well, heroic, in a way. It seemed to them that she worked tirelessly to prolong the babies’ lives.”

“I see…” The Doctor stood up and walked over to stare into the eyes of one of General Washington’s frozen oarsmen. “And what, then, made the nurses think that there was anything untoward?”

“Well,” Marcus said, “they took note of all the similarities involved in the various incidents, and decided that they were too exact to be coincidences.”

“Was Nurse Hunter particularly unpopular?” the Doctor asked.

Marcus nodded. “That’s a problem-she was apparently very high-handed, very competitive, and could carry quite a grudge against anybody who crossed her.”

The Doctor nodded along with the detective sergeant. “According to the other nurses, at any rate. I fear, Marcus, that these statements must be taken with a certain grain of salt-the medical profession breeds petty jealousy and infighting in all its branches.”

“Then you’re reluctant to believe the other nurses?” Miss Howard asked.

“Not reluctant,” the Doctor answered. “Not precisely that. But it simply doesn’t…” He shook his head once, hard. “Well-go on.”

Marcus shrugged. “Like Sara says, the rest of the nurses made a stink with Dr. Markoe. He went to the police, and Nurse Hunter was brought in. She vehemently denied any wrongdoing-got so incensed, in fact, that she immediately resigned. And it wasn’t as if these crimes-if in fact they were crimes-could be proved. Every one of them looked just like spontaneous infantile respiratory failure. And the way Nurse Hunter told it, she’d kept them alive for as long as they did live. Markoe was inclined to believe her, but-well, he has to worry about his funding. There can’t be even a hint of scandal.”

“True, Marcus,” Dr. Kreizler said. Then he held up a warning finger. “But you must remember that the facts can be construed so as to support the assertions put forward by Nurse Hunter.”

“And Dr. Markoe, as I said, apparently agreed. He didn’t want to pursue the matter once Nurse Hunter had resigned, so there was nothing for the police to do. She went home a free woman.”

“And do we have any idea,” the Doctor breathed, “where that home is?”

“Yes-or where it was, at any rate,” Lucius said. “It’s in the police report. Ummm-” He took a piece of paper from his brother. “Number 39 Bethune Street. Down in Greenwich Village.”

“Over near the river,” I threw in.

“We shall have to check it,” the Doctor said, “although she has, in all likelihood, moved on.” He sat down again, and looked over at a whole wall of early American portraits in genuine and somewhat bitter consternation. “Died…” he said again, still unable to accept it. “Disappeared, I might have expected, but-died …”

Miss Howard sat down next to him. “Yes. It doesn’t seem particularly consistent, does it?”

“It’s beyond that, Sara,” the Doctor answered, holding his hands up in resignation. “It’s a positive paradox.” There were a few moments of silence, during which we could hear the laughing, shouting children downstairs; then the Doctor roused himself. “Well, Detective Sergeants? Why, having discovered all this, have you summoned us here?”

“It seemed as good a place as any to try to make sense of it,” Lucius answered. “We haven’t yet had a chance to do a really thorough search of the whole area or to retrace what this Hunter woman’s steps must have been. So, since it’s Sunday and there’s not much else we can attend to…”

The Doctor shrugged. “True,” he said, standing up. “We may as well determine what the mechanical method has to offer. Señora Linares said the child liked to visit the sculpture gallery, isn’t that correct?”

“Yes, sir,” Lucius answered. “On the first floor, in the north wing.”

“Well, then”-the Doctor indicated the stairs with his outstretched arm-“let’s get started. Detective Sergeant, would you mind-”

“Notes for the board,” Lucius said, pulling out his small pad. “Of course, Doctor.”

We got back down to what the Metropolitan’s operators liked to call the “sculpture galleries,” but where in fact, as the Doctor’d told me on one of our first visits to the museum, most of the figures on display were plaster casts of great statues from other galleries and institutions around the world. They’d been put on display in New York for those folks what would never get the chance to travel and see the originals. This accounted for the uniform bright whiteness of many of the pieces, and for the way that they were thrown together, almost like they were in a warehouse. The sunlight what came in softly through big rectangular windows was reflected off ceilings and moldings what were also bright white, and also off the polished red marble floor. The wood paneling of the walls, by way of contrast, was dark and together with the arched doorways gave the place a kind of stately feel. But as for the sculptures themselves, they-like the stuff in the first floor of the south wing-didn’t do much for me, and I doubt I would’ve felt much different if I’d been looking at the originals. Greek and Roman gods, goddesses, monsters, and kings (or pieces of them, anyway); strange beasts and blank-eyed men from Babylonia; together with nudes, chalices, and vases from all over… What about it could’ve been so entertaining for a fourteen-month-old girl was beyond me. But the more important question, as I listened to the others trade ideas, seemed to be what it all might’ve meant to Elspeth Hunter.

“Providing, of course, that she actually spotted the señora and Ana here,” Mr. Moore said, “and not in the park.”

“Why, John,” Miss Howard needled, “you actually referred to the child by her name. That’s progress. But I’m afraid your suggestion doesn’t seem very likely. If we stay with our theory that it was Ana’s cheerful, noisy demeanor that attracted the kidnapper’s attention in the first place, then it seems probable that the sighting occurred here-this is the place that she liked best.”

“Sara’s point is sound, John,” the Doctor said. “For whatever reason, this was the Linares girl’s private playground. But what would bring a disgraced nurse here, I wonder?” He gazed around at the place, which seemed like a combination of a mausoleum and a menagerie. “What did Elspeth Hunter find so compelling in this room?”

The question hung in the air unanswered for a good fifteen minutes, until everybody acknowledged that they had no ideas and agreed to move on to the next spot we knew Nurse Hunter must have visited: the construction site near Fifth Avenue, where she presumably had grabbed her piece of lead pipe. As we got outside and wandered east I signaled to my fellow driver to let him know we wouldn’t be much longer. Then I fell in beside the Doctor and Miss Howard, who were following the paved path as the Isaacsons, Mr. Moore, and Cyrus fanned out and started sifting through the grass and debris that led to the actual building site. It wasn’t much more than a big hole in the ground at that point.

“Have you seen the drawings of the new wing?” Miss Howard asked the Doctor as we walked.

“Hmm?” he noised, his mind still fixed on other matters. “Oh. Yes, I saw the originals before old Hunt died. And I’ve seen his son’s latest editions, too-quite spectacular.”

“Yes,” Miss Howard said with a nod. “A friend of mine works in their office. It’ll really be something-a lot of statuary.”

“Statuary?”

“Decorating the façade.”

“Ah. Yes.”

“I know it sounds like a bit of a non sequitur,” Miss Howard said with a laugh, “but there is a connection to what we’ve been discussing and looking at, Doctor. All those symbolic statues designed for the façade-the four principal artistic disciplines, the four great ages of art-they’re all to be female. Did you notice that? Only the smaller stone medallions will be male-and they’ll be actual portraits of great artists.”

The Doctor drew closer to her. “I do sense a point, Sara.”

Miss Howard shrugged. “A tired point, I’m afraid. The symbols are all women-the people are all men. It’s the same with those statues in the hall back there. The occasional goddess or some nameless ideal of beauty and womanhood who generally sprang from a man’s head-those are the female forms. But the figures with names, the living humans of any historical note? Men. Tell me-what does that teach a young girl, as she grows up?”

“Nothing useful, I fear.” Slipping his hand affectionately around her elbow, the Doctor smiled, a bit apologetically. “And the cumulative effect of thousands of years of it only makes matters exponentially worse. Women on pedestals… Change is coming, however, Sara-though I grant you, it approaches with glacial speed. But it will come. You shan’t be idealized for ever.”

“But it’s perverse idealization!” Miss Howard said, kicking a leg out and holding her free hand up. “In fact, there’s as much denigration in it as worship. Listen, Doctor, I don’t mean this as a purely philosophical conversation. I’m trying to think of what brought the Hunter woman here. I mean, look at those statues in there. The Babylonians and Assyrians, with their Ishtar, mother of the earth-and, at the same time, she was the goddess of war, a cruel, punishing bitch.” She gave me a quick look. “Sorry, Stevie-”

I could only laugh. “Like I ain’t heard worse.”

Miss Howard grinned and ranted on: “And the Greeks and Romans, with their scheming, plotting goddesses. Or the Hindoo deity Kali, their ‘Divine Mother’ who dispenses death and viciousness. There seem eternally to be two faces.”

Dr. Kreizler’s eyes narrowed. “You’re thinking of the apparent contradictions in Elspeth Hunter’s behavior?”

Miss Howard nodded, but slowly. “I think so. Though I’m not precisely sure of the connection. But-Señora Linares said that when she saw the woman on the train she seemed to be genuinely caring for Ana. Yet she also said that the woman looked like a predatory animal. Now we find out that she was a nurse, working in one of the most difficult-and admirable-areas of her profession. The doctors think she was a heroine; the nurses believe she was a murderer.”

Cyrus came jogging back to us at that point, the other three men following at a walk. “Nothing of any interest here, Doctor. The detective sergeant wants to try to walk it through, though.”

“All right,” the Doctor said. “Tell him we’re at his service.” Then, to Miss Howard, he added, “Hold your thought, Sara. I, too, sense something in it, though it’s vague as yet.”

The Isaacsons and Mr. Moore joined us, and Lucius stood at the center of our little circle, still taking notes.

“Okay,” he began, pointing at the steps of the Metropolitan. “Señora Linares comes out of the museum with Ana at about five o’clock.” He next indicated the huge pit that was the construction site. “The workmen have left or are leaving. It’s Thursday, and they expect to be back in the morning-so they don’t take as much care cleaning up as they would for the weekend, and the site is a good deal more cluttered than we see it now.” He moved over toward a collection of plumbing materials that was partly hidden by a useless wooden fence. “Nurse Hunter already knows what she’s going to do-at least generally. She’s searching for a weapon and spots the pile of pipe through this fence. That takes her in the opposite direction from the señora, which explains why she is never noticed by her intended victim.” He started to move west, back toward the Egyptian obelisk. “She takes her time and lets the señora reach the obelisk.” We all followed him as he moved toward it. “It’s the only area around that has any sort of tree cover-the only chance she’s going to have to strike if she’s at all concerned about getting away. Now it’s just past five. In another fifteen minutes to half an hour people will start to cross the park on their way home from work or simply to take in the evening air-although it looks like rain, so the second of those possibilities is probably cut down a bit. But it’s spring and warm enough, and plenty of people-armed with umbrellas-will still go through the park on their way home. So she’s got to make her move fast.”

By now we’d near reached the octagonal group of benches around the seventy-foot obelisk. This was, in fact, the only spot in the vicinity that was at all secluded by trees, being as the red granite obelisk (or so Lucius told us) had been in place since 1881, when it’d been given to the United States by the head man of Egypt.

“The clouds are keeping people away from this spot,” Lucius continued. “It’s out of the way and purely recreational-you don’t pass by it to get across or uptown. You only come here to while away an idle hour.” Which was true-the obelisk sat up on a little hill, off the park’s main paths. “Nurse Hunter knows that this is her only shot. She comes at the señora from behind, as she’s getting ready to sit on a bench, and hits her once, straight across the back of the head. She grabs the child and goes-where?” The detective sergeant looked around curiously. “Back out to Fifth Avenue is quickest-but she may not want to be seen quickly. And to get back to Bethune Street, she’ll need to get over to the West Side, to either the Sixth or the Ninth Avenue El, presuming that the trains are her usual method of travel.”

“If she hasn’t got a job anymore,” Marcus added, “that argues for the trains as an economic necessity.”

“Yes, but the señora saw her on the Third Avenue line,” Mr. Moore tossed in. “That argues for her having moved from Bethune Street.”

“Perhaps, John,” the Doctor said slowly, staring up at the obelisk. “But Sara and I have just been discussing something which may-” The Doctor stopped, his eyes having reached the base of the obelisk. He walked slowly over to it, his eyes searching a crack at the bottom of the large block of stone. He stared into the deep crevice, lifting his hand as if he wanted to reach into it; then he pulled back and turned to Marcus and Lucius.

“Detective Sergeants?” he said, with the beginnings of excitement. “Would you come here, please? There seems to be something in there.”

Marcus and Lucius rushed over, Marcus producing a small pair of steel tongs. He gazed into the crevice, then slowly inserted the tongs, got hold of something, and withdrew it: a tiny bundle of light cotton fabric.

He placed the balled-up bundle on the walkway near the obelisk’s base, then quickly put on a pair of very light gloves. We all crowded around as he began to untangle the little ball, its yellow-and-white fabric soiled and damp. As he proceeded, the shape of the thing became identifiable.

“Looks like a-a tiny hat,” Mr. Moore said.

“A baby’s hat,” Miss Howard said, indicating two little strands of delicate, braided cotton string what were used to tie the thing at the chin and a trim of white lace around its front.

“There’s something else,” Marcus said, still flattening out the fabric. He unfolded the back of the cap to reveal fine golden embroidery at its rear border: “ ‘A-N-A,’ ” he read out. The rest of us just stared at the thing as the detective sergeant looked up and out at the park. “Well… looks like west it was. She got rid of the hat in case somebody stopped her-probably the only identifying article on the girl.”

“Don’t jump to any conclusions, Marcus,” Lucius said. “She could have stuffed the hat in here and then gone the other direction.”

“I don’t know,” Mr. Moore said, standing between the obelisk and the benches. “It’s a good thirty or forty feet out of her way-that’s time she’s wasting, stuffing it in there. Plenty of other spots to hide it if she went east-starting with the construction site.”

“True, Moore,” Dr. Kreizler said, staring up at the obelisk. “But in addition, there is the question of where she chose to hide it-where precisely …”

“What do you mean, Doctor?” Marcus asked.

But the Doctor only turned to Miss Howard. “The Egyptian obelisk. It’s one of a pair. The other stands in London. Do you know what they are known as, Sara?” Miss Howard just shook her head. “ ‘Cleopatra’s Needles,’ ” the Doctor went on, looking back up. “An ominous title-she was quite a deadly woman, Cleopatra.”

“And yet,” Miss Howard continued, getting it, “the ‘Mother of Egypt,’ in her day. Not to mention the lover of Caesar and Antony -she even bore Caesar’s child.”

“Caesarion,” the Doctor said with a nod.

“What the hell are you two on about?” Mr. Moore demanded.

But the Doctor just kept talking to Miss Howard. “Suppose, Sara,” he asked, moving toward her, “that the apparent paradox is not a question, but the answer? Something connects the two sides of the character, the two faces of the coin. We don’t know what that connecting element is yet, but the connection exists. So that what we are faced with is not an inconsistency so much as a troubled unity. Aspects of a condition-related stages in a single process.”

Miss Howard’s face darkened. “Then I’d say we’re running out of time.”

The Doctor gave her a quick look of agreement, then called out, “Marcus! The children Nurse Hunter attended-how long did you say the average interval between their births and their deaths was?”

“Not more than a few weeks,” Marcus answered.

“Laszlo,” Mr. Moore insisted, in that way he did when he felt like the mental pack was pulling away from him. “Come on, what are you two talking about?”

The Doctor continued to ignore him and counted on his fingers. “She took the child on a Thursday-that was ten days ago.” He glanced at Miss Howard again. “You’re right, Sara-the woman may be entering a critical phase. Stevie!” I hopped it up to him. “Can we carry everyone in the calash?”

“Not at top speed,” I answered. “But I don’t see any cabs around.”

“I don’t want a cab,” the Doctor answered urgently. “We’ll need the time together to explain.”

“Well-traffic shouldn’t be too bad,” I judged. “We oughtta be able to go at a decent trot. Frederick ’s had a couple of days off, he’ll be game.”

“Then get him-now!”

As I shot off to fetch the calash, I heard Mr. Moore still asking what was going on and the Doctor telling him to hurry up and get into the carriage, that he’d explain what he and Miss Howard were thinking once they were on their way downtown. I pulled the rig around to them, and then Cyrus climbed up top with me, while Miss Howard squeezed between Lucius and the Doctor on the seat. Marcus and Mr. Moore roosted themselves as the detective sergeants had done during our commandeered cab ride, on the two iron steps on either side of the carriage.

“Where to?” I called back, though I was pretty sure of what the answer would be.

“Number 39 Bethune Street,” the Doctor answered. “With any luck the Hunter woman and her husband haven’t moved-and if they have, the new tenants may know where they are now!”

“It’ll be fastest if I cut through the park,” I said. “And use a few-shortcuts.”

“Then do it, do it!” the Doctor yelled, at which I slapped the reins against Frederick ’s haunches and raced off down the park’s East Drive, heading south.