The Angel Of Darkness

CHAPTER 27

Things were humming on Seventeenth Street for the next couple of days. We not only had to pack our things but board the horses and close up the house itself for what might be an extended absence. And then there was the job of finding somebody to look in on the place occasionally, somebody less destructive-and, hopefully, with a better command of English-than Mrs. Leshko. The Doctor eventually snuck an offer, through Cyrus, to one of the custodians at his Institute, a fellow he knew could use some extra money; and through the same agent, the man agreed. Luck was with us all the way around on this score, because when we told Mrs. Leshko we’d be leaving and that she wouldn’t be needed while we were gone, she said-or at least, as best we could tell she said-that such was just as well, being as she wasn’t going to be able to work for us anymore. It seemed that she and her husband had decided to head out west to try their luck opening a restaurant in a silver-mining town in Nevada. The Doctor, relieved that she’d spared him the job of firing her, gave her two weeks’ salary and a nice-sized bonus, to boot. But none of us was what you might call optimistic about the prospects of her actually selling her cooking. We tended to doubt that even miners got that hungry.

As it turned out, the Mary Powell was indeed making a day run up the Hudson on Thursday, and I was able to book us two private parlors. It continued to look like this was a wise precaution, being as the rain didn’t let up all through Tuesday. That afternoon Mr. Moore and Miss Howard-still bickering about the morality of the wild activities of Saratoga-came to the house at Seventeenth Street to wait with us for the detective sergeants, who’d gone downtown a little earlier to put Libby Hatch on notice as to what we knew about her. It was a nervous few hours that we spent in the parlor, with Cyrus trying to keep everybody calm by playing the piano softly. But despite his efforts, the building wind and rain outside seemed to say that some kind of calamity was on its way.

That particular fear, however, turned out to be uncalled for. The detective sergeants showed up at about five, in very relieved and slightly tipsy spirits. Their visit had gone as well as they could’ve hoped for: the mistress of Number 39 Bethune Street had once more tried to play coy and seductive with them, and had even invited them inside again-but they’d stood their ground and said their piece right there on the doorstep, with the rain and the runoff from the roof pouring down on them. They’d listed every important point that we’d devised, both false and true, starting with the declaration that the Police Department was aware of what she was doing and then moving on to our knowledge of her secret “hideaway” in the basement and the Doctor’s continuing to serve as a special consultant on the case. They’d wound up with the announcement that they’d figured out what’d happened in Ballston Spa three years ago and were on their way to confirm their suspicions. If anything happened to her husband in the meantime, they said, or if a baby answering Ana Linares’s description turned up dead somewhere, she could look forward to a date with the electrical chair at Sing Sing. It was true that few women got executed in the United States, they’d told her; but someone with her murderous record could definitely count on gaining entry into that select group.

Lucius described the woman’s reaction to all this. She’d gone from playing the coy temptress to forcing some tears and protesting her innocence, then moved on to saying that the detective sergeants just didn’t understand the “extenuating circumstances” of what she’d done (such being Lucius’s phrase, not hers). Finally, pure malevolence had made its way into those golden eyes. That was the only moment, both the brothers said, when they’d become truly unsure of what they’d started. They were, after all, in the heart of Hudson Duster territory and open to attack from the gang, assuming that Libby Hatch felt like having her boyfriend’s thugs tend to the matter and didn’t just shoot the pair herself. But the Isaacsons had warned her that plenty of people in the department knew where they were and what they were doing, and if they didn’t make it back to headquarters, nobody’d have any trouble figuring out why. When he and Lucius walked back to the cab they had waiting, Marcus said, he could feel the pure hatred coming from the doorway of Number 39, like bright sunshine on bare skin; then as they left they’d heard a loud slam of the door and a small cry of rage from inside. But they’d made it out of the neighborhood without any trouble, and had stopped on their way to the Doctor’s house only long enough to calm themselves down with a quick shot of rye and a short beer-a rare thing for Lucius-at the Old Town Bar on Eighteenth Street and Park Avenue.

And so, as Mr. Moore put it, war had been declared, and directly to our enemy’s face. But the Doctor was quick to remind him that, while we could be happy that all had gone well and the detective sergeants were safe, thinking of Libby Hatch as our “enemy” was not going to help our cause. We were on our way upstate not only to learn exactly what she’d done, but why; and while it might be tough, given all the things we knew about her, to try to see things as she’d seen them during her years of growing up and becoming a mother, it was more important than ever that we do so. Talk about “enemies” and a “war” wasn’t going to help that process: if we were ever going to understand what had driven the woman to her past and current acts of violence enough to guess at her next moves, we were going to have to let go of the image of her as the Devil’s handmaiden. She was a person, one who’d been made capable of unspeakable things by unknown events what we would never really appreciate if we couldn’t see them through the eyes of first the girl and then the young woman she’d once been.

This was all sensible talk, and I’d heard similar from the Doctor many times before; and maybe if the weather had calmed down at all on Wednesday, it would’ve been easier for me to stay equally reasonable. But dawn that morning saw the sky black and every window in the house starting to rattle in its frame. By noon a howling gale had roared up from the southwest to slam into not just the city but the whole eastern part of the state, as well. Up in Matteawan, we later learned, the rain was so heavy that a whole set of dams burst, and eight people were killed in the flood that followed. Maybe it’s true that what goes on in the sky is just weather and doesn’t signify anything more; but the notion that we’d stirred the wrath of some powerful being somewhere flitted into and out of my head all day long as we made our final preparations for departure the next morning.

By late Wednesday evening the storm was still raging, and I still hadn’t seen or heard anything from Kat. As the night wore away, I realized with ever more misgiving that she would likely end up leaving for California while we were upstate and, lacking any way to contact me there, would think I had no interest in what had become of her. Caught up in such thoughts, my mind was tormented for several hours with the question of whether I should make a quick circuit of her usual haunts. When she’d been at the Doctor’s house, she’d left me with the notion that she wouldn’t be going back to the Dusters’; but the amount of cocaine what had clearly been in her body when she’d come to Number 808 Broadway had made me doubt that she’d kept completely clear of the place. And as I sat in my room and watched the lightning, thunder, and rain throw branches of the trees in Stuyvesant Park first one way and then another, my doubts only multiplied. Did she have a flop, I wondered, on a night like this? She had the money to afford someplace decent, that was certain-or had she already spent it on a burny binge? Had Ding Dong found out about her good fortune, and forced her to fork it over? Could she count on anybody besides me to care enough to find out? I hoped so. Because no matter how fretful I got that night, I found that I just couldn’t head out the door. I told myself it was the high winds and the rain; but a voice inside me answered that I’d spent plenty of time wandering the streets in weather like that. Then I protested that it was her place to come to me for once, if she needed help; but I knew that, mad as she’d been when we parted, she never would. The plain truth was that I didn’t know why I couldn’t go out to look for her. I was worried whether I’d ever hear from her again, I was worried about where she was and what she was doing, but I simply couldn’t go after her and I couldn’t say why.

I woke the next morning to find that the great storm had blown out to sea. Sunshine and a light breeze were quickly drying the city, while the temperature had finally dropped into the seventies. There were a few branches on the grass and walkways of Stuyvesant Park, but other than that the tempest didn’t seem to’ve left any permanent scars on our neighborhood. It wasn’t yet 7:30, but the carriage the Doctor’d engaged to take our bags and ourselves down to the Twenty-second Street pier would arrive in just half an hour, and the Mary Powell was due to get under way at nine; so I dressed and cleaned up quickly, sitting on the lids of the big suitcase and small valise the Doctor’d given me so that the things would close, and then banging my way downstairs with them.

Cyrus and the Doctor were both awake, the Doctor in his study packing books and papers and Cyrus in the kitchen, once again making coffee. By the time it was ready, the three of us were, too: we’d stacked our bags and trunks by the front door and had nothing left to do but drink Cyrus’s strong coffee and grow ever more anxious to get on the boat, the first of which activities only aggravated the second. I made a last round of the back door, the yard, and the carriage house, sneaking myself a smoke as I made sure everything was locked down tight. Then, finally, the hired rig appeared. The driver, an old German who the Doctor spoke to in his native language, helped us get the bags aboard, and then we turned to say our good-byes to the house, not knowing just when we’d pass through the little iron gateway to the front yard again.

The weather only improved as we made for the Hudson, the breeze remaining mild and the sky marked by just a few large, quick-moving clouds. When we reached Ninth Avenue and Twenty-second Street, I stuck my head out of the carriage and looked ahead to the pier: the Mary Powell was docked and surrounded by a large crowd. We crossed over Tenth and then Eleventh Avenues, and as we did the number of people and rigs making for the pier steadily increased. The smell of the river and the prospect of going someplace new and exciting were making my blood positively race, but I didn’t know how agitated my movements had become ’til the Doctor threw a playful arm round my head, telling me it was the only way he could think of to keep my skull from exploding.

Our fellow passengers at the pier seemed to be as excited and relieved by the sudden change in the weather as we were. Most of them weren’t near as laden down with baggage, though-ships like the Mary Powell catered mostly to day cruisers-and we didn’t have any trouble finding a porter to help us with the bags. I told the Doctor that I’d help the man get them off the carriage and on board the ship if he and Cyrus wanted to go ahead and check our parlors to see which other members of our party had arrived. This they did, and I quickly commenced moving the luggage onto the amiable Italian porter’s hand truck with the assistance of our big German driver. I didn’t understand a word what either man said, but that didn’t matter; the sight of the river steamer all decked out and ready for the voyage, her twin stacks and big side paddles signifying confidence and power, together with the excitement that was coursing through the merry collection of people both aboard the ship and on the pier, kept me moving in a happy, spirited, and sure fashion.

Strange, what little things can change your mood faster than spit: a sound, maybe, or even just a smell can sometimes twist your thoughts and feelings worse than hours of conversation or days of experience. For me, that morning, it was a sight-just a glimpse, really-of the person I least wanted to see in the world:

Ding Dong. He was sitting about thirty yards away, atop a big pile of freight on the wharf-but his eyes were honed right in on me. His vicious features were twisted by the same evil, idiot grin that was generally in evidence; and as soon as he knew I’d caught sight of him, he jumped to the ground, grinned even wider, and made a vigorous, obscene movement with his hands and his pelvis.

I got the message, all right: Kat had gone back to him.

It hit me hard, forcing my eyes to the ground and my jaw to fall open. Then a voice sounded from somewhere inside my own head: Of course she went back to him, it said. She didn’t have anywhere else to go, thanks to you…

By the time I looked back up, Ding Dong had vanished into the crowd. Most likely he’d trailed us from the Doctor’s house and, satisfied to see us leaving town, just wanted to send me off with a personal message that’d make my heart as sore as I’d made his face. He’d succeeded, all right. I dropped the suitcase I had in my hand and just kind of collapsed onto it, so dazed that I barely heard a familiar voice-this one definitely outside me-calling.

“Stevie!” It was Mr. Moore, moving my way with a suitcase of his own in hand. A porter carrying a trunk was trailing behind him. “Stevie,” he said again as he reached me. Then he crouched down. “What is it, kid, what’s going on? Where’s the Doctor?”

“They-” I shook myself hard, trying to get rid of the shock. “They-went aboard already. I’m bringin’ our stuff-with the porters.”

Mr. Moore put a firm hand on my shoulder. “Stevie, has something happened? You look like you’ve seen a ghost.”

“Not a ghost.” I couldn’t go into a full explanation, but a piece of one was called for. “Dusters. Must’ve followed us here.”

Spinning to search the wharf, Mr. Moore squinted. “They didn’t get on the boat, did they?”

“Nah,” I said. “They’re gone. Just letting me-us-know they’re still watching.”

“Unh-hunh,” Mr. Moore answered. “Well, come on. With any luck, we’ll be out of town long enough for the Dusters to forget all about us.” I got back up and moved with him toward the gangplank of the Mary Powell, our porters following close behind. “It’s not like you to let them rattle you this way, Stevie,” Mr. Moore said, punching my shoulder lightly. “Though after that brawl, I guess I can understand it.”

I didn’t answer, just nodded and tried to get my breathing back to some kind of regular pace. By the time we got on board, I’d almost managed that much, too; but the burning rock of guilt in the pit of my gut wasn’t going anywhere.

Once on the ship, Mr. Moore and I let our porters lead the way to our private parlors. Located amidships on the portside upper deck, they were handsome rooms indeed, with trimmed wood paneling, rich furnishings, and windows that would offer us views not only of the Palisades cliffs soon after our departure but the Catskills and other handsome mountains along the way. For the moment, though, all such pleasures and advantages were lost on me. Once I’d seen the bags safely into the rooms, where the Doctor, Cyrus, Miss Howard, and the detective sergeants were already lounging and exploring happily, I mumbled something about wanting to get a look around the ship and left quickly.

Down on the main deck, just forward of the large dining rooms, I found a public men’s room and entered it, getting a bit of a skeptical glance from the old attendant as I did. Locking myself into one of the toilet stalls, I leaned against the tiled wall on one side and lit up a smoke, trying to drive away the devilish thoughts and feelings what were tearing at my insides. I hadn’t made much progress before I heard the attendant outside the stall:

He cleared his voice with purpose and said, “This washroom is for gentlemen.”

Which was not the kind of attitude to take with somebody in my condition. “This toilet is for passengers, mug,” I snapped back. “So go chase yourself, unless you wanna finish this trip with a busted arm.” I heard the man take a deep, angry, and insulted breath, but he didn’t say anything; and as I took another deep drag off my smoke, I remembered that he was just doing his job. “Don’t worry, pal,” I said, quietly now. “I’ll be gone in a second.” I allowed myself another minute or two’s smoking, then dropped my butt into the toilet and headed out without looking at the attendant.

As I headed back up the wooden steps to the upper deck, a huge bellow came out of the ship’s main whistle: we were getting under way. Not yet ready to return to the others, I went on up to the promenade deck and got as far forward as I could, cramming myself into the narrow little corner of space between the outer railing and the steering house. I was on the starboard side of the ship, away from the pier so that I couldn’t see the crowd ashore. Then the Mary Powell started to slowly move out and away from the waterfront. Before long we’d eased out to the middle of the river, where the big side paddles engaged with a loud rumble and rush; not loud enough, though, to quiet that same voice in my head.

She ain’t like you, it said. She didn’t grow up in this town; she’s never understood it, really, no matter what she says; and you stood there and let her wander right back off into what you knew was trouble, just because she embarrassed you-

Lost in all this bitter thinking, I pretty near jumped clear of the deck when I heard the Doctor’s voice behind me:

“You won’t see very much from this side,” he said, joining me at the rail. “Or did you want to watch the city fade behind us?”

I turned back to look at the waterfront of Hell’s Kitchen as we moved steadily past it. “Something like that” was all I could say.

The Doctor nodded, and for a few more silent moments, we just stood there. “We’ll be coming up on the Palisades soon,” he finally said. “Shall we go to the other side?”

“Sure.” I peeled myself off the rail and followed him round the back of the wheelhouse.

On the ship’s port side the distant view before us changed as dramatically as if we’d stepped into another world. On our left were the small, quaint houses of Weehawken, New Jersey, while in front of us the sparse outskirts of other towns formed a picture what was similarly humble and peaceful. Soon greenery closed in completely on the river, not to be interrupted again until we reached those giant brown-and-gray slabs of rock that rise hundreds of feet into the air for miles on end and are known as the Palisades. The cliffs were the first of many remarkable natural wonders what the Hudson had to offer the day traveler, and their effect-like the river’s itself-was to reassuringly remove a person from the immediate cares of the human world.

As we stared at those rocks, the Doctor took in a deep breath, then let it out in what seemed to me a peculiar combination of relief and consternation. “This is a strange case, Stevie,” he murmured. “Strange and disorienting. The human mind does not readily accept such events and possibilities.” Continuing to look out at the Palisades, he held up a hand. “And do you know, I cannot help but think of my own mother, when considering it. Is that odd, do you think?”

“I-don’t really know,” I answered. “Depends on what brings her to mind, I guess.”

“A simple realization, really. I have always been unable to understand why, when things between my father and myself were at their worst, my mother never intervened. Even when I was only three or four years old, and utterly unable to defend myself, she never involved herself.” His eyes seemed to be questioning the water, forest, and rocks before us, as if they might offer him some clue to the matter he was contemplating. There wasn’t any sense of self-pity in the look, for the Doctor despised and avoided such tendencies. It was just a kind of honest, sad questioning-and he was entitled to wonder.

From the time Dr. Kreizler’d arrived on this earth, it seemed, the people closest to him had been either a vexation or a heartache, and sometimes both. His father, a rich German publisher who’d come to America after the European revolutions of 1848 went bust, had had it in for his son right from the start. Though in society circles the old man was a popular and admired character, at home he was a boozy tyrant, who treated his Hungarian wife and his two kids (for the Doctor had a sister who currently lived in England) to the backs as well as the fronts of his hands-fists, too. I didn’t know just what had made the Doctor bring the subject up that day, but I was grateful to think and talk about anything other than Kat.

“Maybe she didn’t know what was happening,” I said with a shrug. “Or maybe she was afraid he’d lay into her even worse than usual if she did anything.”

The Doctor’s face filled with a look that said he’d considered such suggestions many times. “As to her not knowing,” he said, “that seems unlikely, if not impossible, given her own violent relationship with the man. And as to her not wishing to incur his wrath-she did so deliberately far too often for me to accept that proposition. I have always known that his violence toward her gratified some perverse part of her psyche. But the violence toward my sister and myself? I don’t think she relished that.” He squinted a bit, and seemed to be struggling with an idea. “No, since we began this case, another possibility has presented itself to me-the thought that, although my mother cared for her children, their welfare was simply not her first priority. And the real question is not why that should have been so, but why it should have been such a difficult theory to either formulate or accept-why, indeed, it should have taken a murder case to make me think of it. After all, a man who makes his children of secondary or even minor importance, though he may be criticized by some, is hardly held to be unusual. Why should we believe any differently of a woman?”

“Well,” I found myself saying, simply and automatically, “because … she’s your mother. It’s only natural.”

The Doctor chuckled. “That answer from you, Stevie?”

I realized the stupidity of what I’d said, and tried to cheat my way out of it: “Well-it’s not like we’re talking about my mother-”

“No. In such discussions we never seem to be talking about anyone’s mother. We seem to be talking about what Sara would call an abstract-a myth.” The Doctor took out his cigarette case. “Have I ever told you about Frances Blake?”

“The woman you almost married when you were at Harvard?” I asked.

“The very same. She would have surprised you. Wealthy, a gadabout-fairly intelligent, but too personally ambitious to take the time to develop her insights. Just ask Moore. He quite disliked her.” Lighting his cigarette, the Doctor chuckled. “As I grew to, eventually.” He blew out some smoke, and his face took on a puzzled look. “She was not unlike my mother, in many ways…”

“So what was the attraction?” I asked.

“Well-in addition to some more obvious factors, she had a rather vulnerable side, one that seemed to allow her to understand the destructive foolishness of much of what she did. In my youthful naïveté, I believed I could nurture that side of her until it became dominant.”

“So-you wanted to change her?”

“Do I detect censure in your voice, Stevie?” the Doctor asked, laughing quietly again. “Well, you’re right to put it there. I behaved idiotically… Imagine, contemplating marriage to a woman simply because you perceive her as vulnerable to change. She wasn’t, of course. As pigheaded as… well. Set in her ways, shall we say.”

I looked down at the waters of the Hudson as they churned away from the bow of the steamer. “Unh-hunh,” I said, jabbing a finger on the rail in front of me and thinking about my own life as much as about the story I was listening to.

A big gust of cool wind hit the ship, and the Doctor drew his jacket tighter. “It was all unconscious, of course,” he said. “But then, one can be as foolish unconsciously as consciously, eh?” He took another drag off his stick and turned his back to the wind. “And then, as I grew older, I realized that my actions had embodied something more sinister than a simple desire to change Frances. I had actually believed that if she failed to change and continued on to the life for which her own silly desires had destined her, it would somehow be my fault.”

“Yours?”I said, looking up at him. “How did you figure that?”

He shrugged. “I didn’t ‘figure’ it. I felt it. I was an inexperienced young man, Stevie, one whose relationship to his own mother had failed in some central way. I couldn’t help but take the responsibility for that failure on myself-precisely because of all the things we’ve talked about. It’s ‘unnatural’ to hold your own mother accountable for terrible wrongs. So I buried such feelings, and looked for some other woman whose behavior I could alter. The only blessing is that another, equally primitive part of my mind told me I couldn’t sacrifice my entire life to such an endeavor. And so I said farewell to Frances.” He shook once in the wind. “Still, it’s an interesting technique-leaving one person behind in order to find her or him somewhere else. And in someone else.”

“Yeah,” I said, quietly amazed that-as usual-he’d been able to speak to exactly what was troubling me without ever mentioning my life at all.

Then I had a constructive thought of my own: “It’s kinda like what we’re doing on this job.”

“Indeed?”

I nodded. “We’re leaving Nurse Hunter in New York to go and find Libby Hatch upstate. Only difference is, they’re not like each other-they are each other. So maybe this time, that kind of technique can actually work-since it’s aimed at the right target.”

The Doctor considered that as he finished off his cigarette. “You know-you may have a talent for this sort of work, Stevie.” He glanced around, then stuck the butt of his cigarette into a nearby bucket of sand. “Well, this wind is stiffening. We’ve ordered breakfast. Steak and eggs for you. Come down when you’re ready.”

He gave me the quickest of glances, along with that fast but reassuring smile of his. Then, clapping his hands together, he walked back to the stairs-a bit unsteadily in that swelling, tidal portion of the lower Hudson-and vanished below.

I turned and looked back at the Palisades, feeling for the packet of cigarettes in my pocket; but then I decided against having another one. The horizon before me was beautiful, but it would be beautiful from our parlor, too, and I suddenly realized that my mood was changing, and I didn’t want to be alone anymore.

“Well, Libby Hatch,” I said, looking ahead at the long, wide stretch of the Hudson and then drumming my fingers on the rail as I turned away from it. “You got no place left to hide…”

I bounded down the stairs that the Doctor’d taken without ever glancing at the waters behind us.

If I had taken a peek in that direction, I would’ve seen a small steam launch what was trailing behind the Mary Powell as fast as its small engine would permit. And if, having caught sight of said vessel, I’d squinted and looked hard, it’s possible I would’ve made out a small figure standing in its prow: a figure whose dark features, bushy hair, and suit of baggy clothes I would’ve recognized. But no matter how hard I’d looked, I wouldn’t have seen the arsenal of strange weapons from the Orient what the mysterious little character was carrying-for those he kept hidden from view, until he was ready to strike.