The Angel Of Darkness

CHAPTER 4

By the time we rounded the corner of Ninth Street, we were moving at such a crazy pace-even, I’ll confess, for me-that the cab near went up on two wheels. The Cunard Line pier, in those days before the launch of the company’s really big liners (the Mauretania and the sad old Lusitania), was still located down at the foot of Clarkson Street, a short block above West Houston; but I was going to avoid that latter thoroughfare for as long as I could. Even late on a Sunday night it’d be a thick mass of whores, cons, and their drunken marks, one what had only gotten thicker in the months since Commissioner Roosevelt had left for Washington. The volume of their business would slow our movement badly. As it was, after we raced through the quiet residential blocks of Ninth Street, passed over Sixth Avenue, and headed west on Christopher, we began to see noticeable signs of what Miss Howard had mentioned earlier on our walk to Number 808: the criminal elements were conducting their affairs outside their dives, dens, and brothels in considerable numbers and with a total lack of the concern what Mr. Roosevelt had, if only briefly, drummed into them. Completing all this activity was the occasional sight of cops doing all those things that the commissioner had, by himself roving the streets at night on inspection tours, worked so hard to prevent: collecting graft payments, drinking outside dance halls and saloons, cavorting with whores, and sleeping anywhere they could. Yes, the old town was truly waking up to the fact that Roosevelt was gone and his reform-minded boss, Mayor Strong, would soon follow suit: the gloves were coming off of the underworld.

As we reached Bleecker Street, something snagged my eye (and, I’ll confess, my guts), and I reined up hard, somewhat to Cyrus’s surprise. “What’s happened, Stevie?” he called to me; but I could only stare across the street in momentary confusion at a patch of faded blue silk and an enormous head of blond hair. From Cyrus’s tone, I could tell he’d caught sight of the same thing, and I knew he was frowning: “Oh. Kat…”

I cracked the reins again and charged over to the blue silk and blond hair, both of which belonged to Kat Devlin, a-well, let’s just call her a friend of mine, for the moment, who worked at one of the kid dives and disorderly houses down on Worth Street. She was with a decked-out man who was old enough to be her grandfather, for Kat was but fourteen; and as they tried to cross Bleecker, I steered the gray mare into their path.

“We don’t have time for this, Stevie,” I heard Cyrus say, gently but with intent.

“One minute, that’s all,” I answered quickly.

Kat started at the sudden appearance of the mare and looked up, her small, pretty face and blue eyes going furious. “Hey! What the hell do you think you’re-” Then she caught sight of me. Her look softened, but she still appeared perplexed. A smile managed to work its way into her thin lips. “Why, Stevie! What’re you doing over here? And what’re you doing with that cab, besides trying to frighten off my trade?” At that she turned the smile up to the old man she was with and locked her arm in his tighter, making my heart burn hotter. The man patted her arm with an expensively gloved hand and grinned sickeningly.

“I was gonna ask you the same thing,” I said. “Bit west for you, ain’t it, Kat?”

“Oh, I’m moving up in the world,” she answered. “Next week I move my things out of Frankie’s for good and go to work on Hudson Street. At the Dusters’ place.” At that she suddenly sniffled hard and painfully, laughed a little to cover it, and wiped her nose quick. Her moth-eaten glove came away with a trace of blood on it-and all, as they say, became clear to me.

“The Dusters,” I said, the burn in my chest turning into fear. “Kat, you can’t-”

She could see what was coming and started to move across the street again. “Just a friend of mine,” she said to the man she was with. Then she called over her shoulder to me, “Stop by Frankie’s and see me this week, Stevie!” It was as much a warning to back off as it was an invitation. “And don’t go stealing any more cabs!”

I wanted to say something, anything, to get her to leave her mark and come with us, but Cyrus reached up and gripped my shoulder hard. “It’s no good, Stevie,” he said, in the same soft but certain tone. “There’s no time.”

I knew he was right, but there was no resignation in the knowledge, and I could feel my body tighten up to the point where, for an instant, my vision went all cockeyed. Then, with a sudden, short yell, I grabbed the cabbie’s long horsewhip out of its holder, lifted it above my head, and lashed it toward the man who was crossing the street with Kat. The whip caught his high hat at the crest, cutting a nice hole in it and sending it flying six feet into a puddle of rainwater and horse piss.

Kat spun on me. “Stevie! Damn you! You can’t-”

But I wasn’t going to hear any more: I cracked the reins and sent the gray mare flying back along Christopher Street, Kat’s curses and protests loud but indistinct behind me.

I suppose you’ve figured out by now that Kat was something more than just a friend of mine. But she wasn’t my girl, by any stretch; wasn’t anybody’s girl, really. I couldn’t and can’t tell you just what place she held in my particular world. Maybe I could say that she was the first person what I ever had intimate relations with, except that such a statement might conjure up happy images of young love, which was far from the reality of it. Truth is, she was a question and a puzzle-one what would get even more perplexing in the days to come, as her life took an unexpected turn what was destined to intertwine it with the case we were only beginning to unravel.

By the time we reached Hudson Street I was still in a hell of a state, and I made no effort to slow the mare as I pulled the reins hard with my left arm and gave the animal the word to turn downtown. Once again we near went up on two wheels, and though the cabbie screamed in fear I heard no sound of protest from Cyrus, who was used to my driving and knew I’d never overturned a rig yet. Passing by the faded red bricks of old St. Luke’s Chapel on our right and then the saloons and stores of lower Hudson Street, we reached Clarkson in just a few more seconds and made another wild turn, this time west. The river and the waterfront suddenly sprang into being in front of us, the water blacker than the night and the pier at the end of the street unusually busy for the hour.

As we cleared the warehouses and sailors’ boarding hovels what lined the last couple of blocks of Clarkson Street, we could begin to make out the shape of a big steamer docked at the long, deep green superstructure of the Cunard pier: she was the Campania, not yet five years old and lying at proud rest, with strings of small lights on her boat deck that illuminated her two deep red, black-crowned funnels, her handsome white bridge and lifeboats, and the stately line of her hull, all of which impressively hinted at what wonders the company that’d pioneered transatlantic travel was going to achieve in the none-too-distant future.

On the waterfront near the pier was a fairly large group of people, and as we got closer I could see that a lot of them were cops, some detectives and some in uniform. There were a few sailors and longshoremen, too, and, strangely, a few young boys dressed in nothing but soaking wet pants what had been cut off at the knees. They had large sheets of canvas wrapped around their shoulders and were shivering and jumping up and down, half from the chill of the river water they’d apparently been swimming in and half from excitement. A few torches and one longshoreman’s electrical lamp lit the scene, but there was no sign as yet of the Detective Sergeants Isaacson. Which meant nothing, of course-they could easily have been at the bottom of the Hudson in diving helmets, searching for clues that the average New York detective would’ve considered useless.

Once we reached the waterfront, Cyrus pulled some money out of his billfold, stuffed it into the cabbie’s shaking hand, and said only, “Stay here,” a command that the man was in no condition to disobey. Just to make sure he didn’t bolt, though, I kept his hat and license on my head as we started to make our way through the crowd.

I let Cyrus do the talking to the cops, given that whatever little respect most New York City cops had for blacks, they had even less for me. I’d already spotted one or two officers that I’d crossed paths with during the years I’d been known as “the Stevepipe” and had been, I’ll admit, justifiably infamous around Mulberry Street. When Cyrus inquired after the Isaacsons, he was what you might call reluctantly directed toward whatever business was taking place at the center of the crowd, to a cry of “Nigger to see the Jew boys!” We shoved our way forward.

I hadn’t seen the detective sergeants in a few months, but it would’ve been impossible to imagine them in a more typical setting. On the concrete embankment of the waterfront, they were hunched over a wide piece of bright red oilcloth. The tall, handsome Marcus, with his full head of curly dark hair and big, noble nose, had a tape measure and some steel gauging instruments out, and he was busily recording the dimensions of some still unrecognizable object underneath him. His younger brother Lucius, shorter and stouter, with thinning hair what in spots revealed an always-sweating scalp, was poking around with what looked like the kind of medical instruments Dr. Kreizler kept in his examination room. They were being watched over by a captain I recognized-Hogan was his name, and he was shaking his head the way all the old guard did when faced with the work of the Isaacsons.

“There ain’t enough of it to make any sense of,” Captain Hogan said with a laugh. “We’ll be better off dragging the river to see if we can’t find something that might tell us a little more-like, for instance, maybe a head.” The cops around him joined in the laughter. “That thing ought to go straight to the morgue-though I don’t know what even the morgue boys’d do with it.”

“There are a lot of important clues in what we have here,” Marcus answered without turning, his voice deep and confident. “We can at least get an idea of how it was done.”

“And transferring it from the scene will only result in the usual damage to additional evidence,” Lucius tacked on, his voice quick and agitated. “So if you’ll just be good enough to keep these people back and let us finish, Captain Hogan, there’ll be time enough for you to make your delivery to the charnel house.”

Hogan laughed again and turned away. “You Jew boys. Always thinkin’. Okay, folks, step back, now, let’s let the experts do their job.”

As Hogan glanced our way, I pulled the top hat down over my eyes in the continuing hope of not being recognized, while Cyrus approached him. “Sir,” he said, with far more respect than I knew he felt, “I have a very important personal message for the detective sergeants.”

“Do you, now?” Hogan answered. “Well, they won’t want any Zulu boy taking them away from their scientific studies-”

But the Isaacsons had already turned at the sound of Cyrus’s voice. Seeing him, they both smiled. “Cyrus!” Marcus called. “What are you doing here?” The detective sergeant glanced around, and I knew he was looking for me. I already had a finger in front of my mouth, so that when he saw me he’d know not to say anything. He got the message and nodded, still smiling, and then Lucius did the same. They both got up off their haunches, and for the first time we could see what was lying on the oilcloth.

It was the upper part of a man’s torso, which had been cut off just below the ribs. The neck had likewise been severed, in a way what even I could see was not the work of any expert. The arms had also been hacked off of the hunk of flesh, which looked fairly fresh. That and the fact that there wasn’t much of a stench seemed to indicate the thing hadn’t been in the water all that long.

At a nod from Cyrus, Lucius and Marcus drew aside with us, and friendlier greetings were exchanged in whispered voices.

“Have you changed professions, Stevie?” Lucius asked, indicating my hat as he mopped at his head with a handkerchief.

“No, sir,” I answered. “But we needed to get here in a hurry. Miss Howard-”

“Sara?” Marcus cut in. “Is she all right? Has anything happened?”

“She’s at Number 808, sir,” Cyrus answered. “With a client and Mr. Moore. It’s a case that they seem to think you may be able to help them with. It’s urgent-but it’s got to be unofficial.”

Lucius sighed. “Like anything else that might actually advance forensic science these days. It’s all we can do to keep this bunch from taking these remains and feeding them to the lions in the Central Park menagerie.”

“What happened?” I asked, again looking at the grim quarter of a corpse on the oilcloth.

“Some kids saw it floating out in the river,” Marcus answered. “Pretty crude job. Dead less than a few hours, certainly. But there’re some interesting details, and we need to record them all. Can you give us five minutes?”

Cyrus nodded, and then the detective sergeants went back to their work. I could hear Lucius as he began to list various details of the thing to the other cops, his tone showing plainly that he knew it was useless and growing maybe just a little haughty as a result: “Now, then, Captain, you will note, I’m certain, that both the flesh and the spine have been cut with some kind of crude saw. We can rule out the possibility of any medical student or anatomist stealing body parts-they wouldn’t want to damage the organs in that way. And these rectangular patches of missing skin are extremely interesting-they’ve been deliberately cut away, in all likelihood to remove some kind of identifying marks. Tattoos, maybe, since we’re on the waterfront, or perhaps simple birthmarks. So the murderer almost certainly knew his victim well…”

Having seen enough of both the butcher’s work on the ground and the way that the cops alternately laughed at and ignored what Lucius was saying about it, I turned to look at the boys who’d found the body. They were all still full of the shock and excitement of the thing and were continuing to jump around and laugh nervously. I took note that I knew the skinniest of their number and drifted over to talk to him.

“Hey, Nosy,” I said quietly, at which the skinny kid turned and grinned. I didn’t have to tell him not to call out my name in front of the cops: he belonged to the gang of boys what ran with Crazy Butch, one of Monk Eastman’s lieutenants, a group that I’d served with for a time before my incarceration on Randalls Island, and he knew I wouldn’t want any contact with the bulls, being as, once you were a kid that they’d marked as a troublemaker, they took a kind of sick pleasure in riding you wherever they found you, whether you’d done anything wrong or not.

“Stevepipe!” Nosy whispered, pulling his sheet of canvas tighter around himself and rubbing at the large, oddly shaped protrusion on his face that’d given him his name. “You cabbyin’? Ithought you was workin’ for that crazy doctor.”

“I am,” I said. “Long story. What happened here?”

“Well,” he said, his feet starting to dance in excitement again. “Me and Slap and Sick Louie, here”-I nodded to the other boys as Nosy indicated them, and they returned the greeting-“we was just walking the waterfront, you know, seein’ if maybe there was any unclaimed baggage lyin’ around the pier-”

I chuckled once. “ ‘Unclaimed baggage’? Jeez, Nosy, that’s rich.”

“Well, you gotta call it somethin’ if the bulls grab you, right? So, anyway, we’s workin’ our way down to the pier, and we seen this red package just floatin’ out there. Figured it might be somethin’ tasty, so we dove on in, as we’s in shorts, anyway. Got it up here okay-but I guess you can figure what it was like when we opened it.” He whistled and laughed. “Bro-ther. Sick Louie musta puked eight times-only got half a stomach, anyway-”

“Hey, hey,” Sick Louie protested, “I told ya a million times, Nosy, it’s my intestines, I was born widdout a buncha my intestines, dat’s what does it!”

“Yeah, yeah, whatever,” Nosy said. “So we went for a cop, figurin’ maybe there’s a reward involved. Shoulda known better. Now they won’t let us go-figure maybe we had something to do with it! I ask you, what would we be doin’ sawin’ people up? And how, for Chrissakes? I got one kid’s an idiot”-he flicked a thumb at the boy called Slap, who, when I took a closer look, didn’t seem to be catching much of what was going on around him-“and another kid with half a stomach-”

“I told you, Nosy!” Sick Louie protested again. “It’s my-”

“Yeah, yeah, your intestines!” Nosy shot back. “Now shut up, willya, please?” He turned back to me with a grin. “Fuckin’ morons. So-whattaya got goin’, Stevepipe, what brings ya here?”

“Ah,” I said, looking back at the crowd around the piece of a body and seeing that they were starting to break up. “Came to fetch a couple of pals.” Cyrus and the detective sergeants had started to move my way. “And I gotta go. But I’m coming down to Frankie’s this week. You gonna be around?”

“If these cops ever let us go,” Nosy answered with another cheerful grin. “Imagine tryin’ to hold us for a thing like this,” he went on as I moved away. “It ain’t logical! But nobody ever said cops was logical, eh, Stevepipe?”

I grinned back at him, touched the brim of the top hat, and then rejoined Cyrus and the Isaacsons, hurrying with them back to the hansom.

The cabbie had passed out again, though when Cyrus climbed back in he woke up with a start and whimpered a little, like maybe he was hoping the whole ride down had been a bad dream. “Oh, no… no, not again! Look, you two, I’m going to the cops if-”

Marcus, who had perched his feet on the little iron step on one side of the cab as his brother did the same on the other, flashed a badge. “We are the cops, sir,” he said in a firm tone as he slung a satchelful of instruments over his shoulder and then laid a solid grip on the side of the passenger compartment. “Just sit back and be quiet, this won’t take long.”

“No, it won’t,” moaned the old man, resigned to his predicament. “Not if the ride down was any measure…”

I got into the driver’s seat and cracked the reins, and we crashed back onto the cobblestones of Clarkson Street, leaving behind the strange scene on the waterfront and figuring-wrongly, it turned out-that we’d seen and heard the last of it.

My mind was still full of thoughts of both that bloody sight and my disheartening encounter with Kat and her mark as we dashed back east. But when we reached Hudson Street again and turned north, my attention was finally distracted by a familiar and-given the situation and my brooding-welcome sound: the Isaacson brothers, taking off after each other as soon as there were no other cops around to hear.

“Just couldn’t resist, could you?” I heard Marcus say over the din of the mare’s horseshoes on the stones.

“Resist what?” Lucius answered in a kind of squeak, already on the defensive as he clung for life to the side of the cab.

“You just had to take the opportunity to lecture them all, as if we were in some elementary school classroom,” Marcus answered in irritation.

“I was recording important evidence!” Lucius answered. Glancing back once, I could see that they were leaning in toward each other over Cyrus and the bewildered cabbie, like a pair of bickering kids. Cyrus just smiled at me-we’d seen a hundred scenes like this before. The cabbie, however, seemed to be thinking that the strange spat was further evidence that he’d been abducted by lunatics.

“ ‘Recording important evidence,’ ” Marcus echoed. “You were grandstanding! As if we don’t have enough problems in the department right now, without you acting like an old schoolmarm!”

“That’s ridiculous-” Lucius tried. But Marcus wasn’t having any of it.

“Ridiculous? You’ve been that way since you were eight years old!”

“Marcus!” Lucius was trying to get a grip on himself. “This is no place to bring up-”

“Every day, when we’d get home from school-‘Mama! Papa! I can recite my whole day’s lessons, listen, listen!’ ”

“-no place to bring up personal-”

“Never occurred to you that Mama and Papa were too goddamned tired to listen to your entire day’s lessons. No, you just went right ahead-”

“They were proud of me!” Lucius hollered, abandoning all attempts at dignity.

“What were you thinking?” Marcus bellowed as I drove the gray mare past Christopher Street and then east on Tenth, in order to avoid any chance of seeing Kat again. “That Hogan’s going to go back to Mulberry Street and say, ‘Jesus, Mary, and Joseph, those Isaacson boys certainly know their business-showed us a thing or two!’? One step closer to getting forced out, that’s all we are now!”

The “discussion” went on in that vein right up until I turned the cab north on Broadway and spun it around in front of the Hotel St. Denis. There weren’t two better detectives in all the world than the Isaacsons, they’d proved that much during the Beecham case: trained in medicine and law in addition to criminal science, they kept up with advances in tracking theories and techniques from every corner of the world. It was their knowledge of the still unaccepted science of fingerprinting, for instance, that’d put the first crack in the Beecham case. They had an arsenal of cameras, chemicals, and microscopes that they brought to bear on any problem what might seem totally incomprehensible to your average detective; but they did love to bicker, and most of the time they went at it like a couple of old hens.

Cyrus gave the cabbie a little extra cash and I gave him his hat back as we left him to recover his wits in front of the hotel. Then we walked quickly over to Number 808 and got back into the elevator. Once inside, the detective sergeants brought the volume of their argument down, but not the passion.

“Marcus, for God’s sake,” Lucius seethed, “we can talk about this at home!”

“Oh, sure,” Marcus mumbled, straightening his jacket and smoothing back his thick hair. “When you can bring Mama into it.”

“Meaning?” Lucius asked in some shock.

“She’ll take your side. She always does, because she can’t stand to hurt your feelings. Sure, she’ll tell you she always loved to listen to you recite. But she was actually bored stiff. Trust me-she used to say so when you weren’t around.”

“Why, you-!” Lucius started; but then the elevator reached the sixth floor and bumped to its usual weighty stop. The sign that Sara’d had painted on the door seemed to jolt the brothers back to adult reality, and they both fell silent, dropping the whole thing as suddenly as they’d picked it up. As for Cyrus and me, it’d been all we could do to keep from laughing out loud during the elevator ride. But as we stepped back into the old headquarters, seriousness of purpose returned to us, too.