The Angel Of Darkness

CHAPTER 6

As we ate supper in amongst the iron trellises and overhanging greenery of the Café Lafayette’s outdoor terrace on Ninth Street and University Place, the Isaacsons told us what they believed they’d learned from their interview with Señora Linares. The theory put their talent for drawing unexpected conclusions from what seemed like a confused jumble of facts on ample display-and, as usual, kept the rest of us shaking our heads in amazement.

The blow that the señora’d taken across the back of the head, the detective sergeants said, presented us with two choices as to her attacker: either a good sap man, a specialist who’d had a lot of experience rendering people unconscious, or someone of much more limited strength who’d landed a lucky shot that didn’t do any really severe damage. There were real problems with the first idea: if the attack had been the work of an expert, he’d have to’ve been about the same height as the señora, given the angle and location of the hit, and he’d have to’ve put his sap away in favor of a much harder and more risky weapon, such as a piece of pipe. Even more important, though, was the fact that he’d risked being spotted in what was a very public and popular location-right outside the Metropolitan Museum -at an extremely risky time of day.

Given these considerations, the detective sergeants were prepared to dismiss the idea that the Linares baby had been taken by a professional kidnapper, whether someone working for hire or in business for himself. Such characters just wouldn’t take the risk of whacking somebody on the head with an unpadded piece of pipe, and they certainly liked to make their moves in more isolated spots than the Egyptian obelisk in Central Park. That left us with the notion of an amateur, one probably working without a plan-and it was very possible, maybe even likely, that said amateur was a woman. The fact that the señora herself had referred to her attacker as “him” didn’t count for anything: she’d admitted that she’d never gotten a look at the person, and, coming from an upper-class diplomatic family, she’d just assumed that no woman would be capable of such an act. But the blow itself was consistent with a woman of average strength who was about the señora’s size-and the description that she herself had given of the woman on the train matched these specifications.

What about that description, anyway? Mr. Moore wanted to know. What made the detective sergeants so ready to accept what she said? Wasn’t it an awfully detailed story for someone with one good eye who’d just caught a quick glimpse of her missing child-and was in a sudden state of shock as a result-to come up with? Not at all, Lucius answered; in fact, the señora’s description had lacked certain details that what he called “pathological liars” (which, I knew from the Doctor’s work, meant people who were so far gone that they actually believed the lies they told) would’ve included. For instance, she could say generally what kind of clothes the woman was wearing but not what color; she could give a vague idea of the woman’s size but nothing more; and she couldn’t even remember if the woman’d had a hat on. And there were other, more subtle reasons to think that she’d been telling the truth at just that point-“physiological reasons,” Lucius termed them.

Apparently, some bright bulbs in the detecting world had recently been floating the idea that people undergo physical changes when they lie. Some of the possible symptoms, these types said, were a quickening of the pulse rate and respiration, increased perspiration and muscle tension, and a few other, less obvious alterations. Now, there was no actual medical or what Lucius called “clinical” support for any of this; but all the same, Marcus had, as I’d noticed, kept one finger on the señora’s wrist while they were discussing the mysterious woman on the train. At the same time, he’d kept a steady eye on his watch. They’d been talking about some very upsetting subjects, but there’d been no change in Señora Linares’s pulse rate at any time, not even when she looked at the photograph of her daughter. Like so many of the Isaacsons’ techniques and conclusions, that one wouldn’t have meant anything in a court of law, but it gave them further reason to buy what she was saying.

All this was enough to quiet Mr. Moore’s doubts about the señora-but the more important issue continued to be whether or not Dr. Kreizler would be willing to get involved in the case. I took a lot more grilling on this score, along with Cyrus, after he got back from the Astoria, and I’ll confess that the both of us grew a little defensive after a while. Whatever our own fascination with the case, our first loyalty was to the Doctor, and the Linares business was quickly growing into something much deeper and more challenging than a night’s diversion. Neither Cyrus nor I was sure that the Doctor was in any shape to go getting involved with a venture what was so demanding. It was true, as Mr. Moore pointed out, that given the court order, our friend and employer would have some time on his hands; but it was also true that the man was in sore need of rest and healing. Miss Howard respectfully observed that the Doctor always seemed to find the most peace and solace in some kind of work; but Cyrus answered that he was at a lower point than any of us had ever witnessed before and that sooner or later every person has to stop and take a breather. There was just no way to call it in advance, and by meal’s end we’d come back to the same conclusion I’d voiced to the others as we’d left Number 808: the Doctor’s reaction to the idea was going to be determined by how hard he took his departure from the Institute. Cyrus and I promised that one or the other of us would phone Mr. Moore at the Times as soon as the Doctor was back home. Then we all went our respective ways, each bearing the queer feeling that the actions we took in the next day or two could have ripples what would reach far beyond the confines of Manhattan, an island that suddenly seemed, somehow, smaller.

I managed to squeeze in a few hours’ sleep when we got home, though it wasn’t of a quality what could really be called restful. I was up at eight sharp-realizing, as I launched out of bed, that it was the first official day of summer-and found that the last of the rain clouds had disappeared and a fresh breeze was blowing in from the northwest. I got into some clothes and managed to comb my long hair into something that resembled order, then headed down to the Doctor’s narrow little carriage house next door to give Frederick, our always reliable black gelding, a few oats and a morning brushdown in preparation for his day’s labors. Heading back into the house, I concluded from the clanging of pots and pans in the kitchen that our latest housekeeper, Mrs. Leshko-a woman who couldn’t boil water quietly-had arrived. I contented myself with a quick cup of her bitter coffee, then got onto the calash and under way.

I took my usual route- Second Avenue downtown to Forsyth Street, then left onto East Broadway-but I didn’t push Frederick, knowing he’d worked hard the night before. It was a route that took me past many of the dance halls, dives, gambling hells, and saloons of the Lower East Side, the sight of which only made it harder to understand how in the world things had so fallen out as to make this trip necessary in the first place. Oh, the specific reason was apparent enough: a twelve-year-old boy at Dr. Kreizler’s Institute, Paulie McPherson, had woken up in the middle of the night a couple of weeks back, wandered out of his dormitory and into a washroom, and there hung himself from an old gas fixture with a length of drapery cord. The boy was a small-time thief with a record so short none of my old pals in Crazy Butch’s gang would have owned up to it; he’d been nailed, if you can believe it, trying to pick a fly (that is, plainclothed) cop’s pocket. Because of his inexperience, the judge had given him the option of spending a few years in the Kreizler Institute, after the Doctor’d examined the kid and made the offer. Now, Paulie was small time, but he was no chump-he knew what the alternatives were, and he’d accepted right away.

There wasn’t anything unusual in all this: several of the Doctor’s students had come to the Institute by similar routes. And there hadn’t been any outward signs of trouble with Paulie since his arrival on East Broadway, either. He was a little moody and uncommunicative, sure, but nothing more than that, certainly nothing that hinted he was getting ready to string himself up. Anyway, word of the suicide had made its way through the city government and the parlors of New York society like, if you’ll pardon my being plain, shit through a sewer. The incident was offered by many armchair experts as proof positive that Dr. Kreizler was incompetent and his theories were dangerous. As for the Doctor himself, he’d never lost a kid before; that, combined with the unexpected and unexplained nature of the suicide, tore the hole in his spirit that’d been ripped open by Mary Palmer’s death even wider.

And out that hole had drained much of what had always seemed a bottomless well of energy with which the Doctor’d been able, for so many years, to meet the almost daily attacks of the hostile colleagues, social thinkers, judges, lawyers, and average run-of-the-mill skeptics that he ran into during the operation of his Institute and his work as an expert witness in criminal trials. Not that he ever quit; quitting wasn’t in him. But he lost some of his fire and confidence, a portion of the mental belligerency that’d always kept his enemies at bay. To understand the change, I suppose you’d have had to’ve seen him in action before it took place-as I had, firsthand, some two years earlier. Brother, had I seen it…

The encounter had taken place in Jefferson Market, that imitation of a Bohemian prince’s castle what always struck me as entirely too beautiful to be a police court. Like I’ve said, I’d been mostly on my own since I was three, and fully so since I was eight, having at that time gotten fed up with breaking and entering to support my mother and her various men friends. The final straw’d come when my old lady’s taste ran beyond booze to opium and she started frequenting a den in Chinatown run by a dealer everybody called You Fat (his real Chinese name was unpronounceable, and he never seemed to get the insult contained in the very appropriate nickname). I told her I wasn’t running into a lot of other eight-year-olds what stole to support their mothers’ alcohol and drug cravings-the kind of statement that’s pretty well guaranteed to get a kid a good beating around the head. As she flailed away at me, she screamed that if I was going to be such an ungrateful little wretch I could just fend for myself; I pointed out that I already was, mostly, then left for the last time to take up with a bunch of street arabs in the neighborhood. My mother, meantime, moved in with You Fat, using her body instead of my larceny to secure an endless supply of her drug.

Anyway, my gang and me, we looked out pretty good for each other, huddling together over steam vents on winter nights and making sure we didn’t drown when we cooled down in the city’s rivers during the summer. By the time I was ten I’d made a pretty good name for myself as a banco feeler, pickpocket, and general criminal handyman; and though I wasn’t big, I’d gotten to be fairly expert at defending myself with a short section of lead pipe, which was where I got my nickname, “the Stevepipe.” A lot of kids carried guns or knives, but I found that the cops went easier on you if they didn’t find you armed to the teeth; and God knows I was getting into enough trouble with the law by then for that to be a real consideration.

In fact, my record and my reputation eventually reached the point where I was approached by Crazy Butch, who, like I’ve also mentioned, was in charge of the kids who worked for Monk Eastman’s gang. I’d always liked Monk, with his flashy derbies and his rooms full of cats and birds (or, as he said it, “kits ’n’ boids”); and though Crazy Butch was a little too deserving of his title for my taste, I jumped at the chance to move up in the underworld. Instead of picking pockets on my own, I was soon stripping whole crowds of citizens with my gangmates, along with waylaying delivery vans and lifting whatever we could from stores and warehouses. Sure, I’d get caught sometimes, but generally I’d get released, too; because we were such a big team, it was generally pretty hard for a prosecutor to make a charge stick to just one of us. On top of that, I was only eleven, and I could usually play the innocent orphan when I needed to.

But the judge I got that one day at Jefferson Market, he wasn’t buying any acts or any excuses. The cops’d nailed me for breaking a store dick’s leg over at B. Altman’s joint on Nineteenth Street while me and the gang were picking shoppers’ pockets. I could usually control my trademark weapon better than that-I generally tried to leave a nasty bruise instead of a break-but the store detective had me by the throat and I was that close to choking. So, quick as spit, there I found myself: in the main courtroom at Jefferson Market, getting one hell of a lecture as I sat under the tall turret of the courthouse’s fine clock tower.

The old windbag on the bench called me everything from a nicotine fiend (I’d been smoking since I was five) to a drunkard (which showed how much he knew-I never touched the stuff) to a “congenitally destructive menace,” a phrase which, at the time, meant a whole lot of nothing to me-but which was, it turned out, destined to be the key to my salvation. You see, it happened that a certain crusading mental specialist with a particular interest in children was just outside the courtroom that day, waiting to testify in another case; and when the judge let out with that “congenital” phrase and then went on to sentence me to two years on Randalls Island, I suddenly heard a voice rise from somewhere behind me. I’d never heard anything quite like it-certainly not in a courtroom, anyway. Tinged with a combination of German and Hungarian accents, it rolled with all the thunder and righteousness of an old-time preacher.

“And precisely what,”the voice demanded, “are your honor’s qualifications for coming to so precise a psychological conclusion concerning this boy?”

At that point all eyes, including mine, turned to the back of the courtroom to get a glimpse of what was, for most of them, a familiar sight: the renowned alienist Dr. Laszlo Kreizler, one of the most hated yet respected men in the city, charging in, his long hair and cloak floating behind him and his eyes burning with coal-black fire. I had no way of knowing that one day I’d become accustomed to that sight, too; all I knew then was that he was the damndest person, with the damndest nerve, that I ever saw.

The judge, for his part, put his forehead into his hand wearily for a moment, like the good Lord had just sent a rain of toads down on his little patch of earth in particular. “Dr. Kreizler-” he started.

But the Doctor already had an accusing finger up. “Has an assessment been done? Has one of my esteemed colleagues given you any reason for using such language? Or have you, like most other magistrates in this city, simply decided that you are qualified to speak expertly on such matters?”

“Dr. Kreizler-” the judge tried again.

But with no better luck: “Do you have even the slightest idea of what the symptoms of what you call ‘congenital destructiveness’ are? Do you even know if such a pathology exists’?This insufferable, unqualified, inflammatory rhetoric-”

“Dr. Kreizler!” the judge bellowed, slamming a fist down. “This is my courtroom! You have nothing to do with this case, and I demand-”

“No, sir!” the Doctor shot back. “I demand! You have made me a part of this case-myself and any other self-respecting psychologist who is within earshot of your irresponsible declarations! This boy-” At that he pointed in my direction and, for the first time, actually looked at me-and I’m not sure I’m up to describing all that was in the look:

His eyes sparkled with a message of hope, and the smallest, quickest smile told me to have courage. All in a rush and for the first time in my life, I felt like someone over the age of fifteen truly gave a good goddamn about my existence. You don’t really know that you’ve been living without that commodity until someone makes you aware of the possibility of it; and when they do, it’s a very peculiar sensation.

The Doctor’s face went straight and stern again as he snapped back around to the judge: “You have said that this boy is a ‘congenitally destructive menace.’ I demand that you prove that assertion! I demand that he be given a new hearing, conditional upon the findings of at least one qualified alienist or psychologist!”

“You can demand anything you like, sir!” the judge responded. “But this is my court, and my ruling stands! Now kindly await the call of the case for which you have been retained, or I’ll hold you in contempt!”

A bang of the gavel, and I was on my way to Randalls Island. But as I left the courtroom, I looked again to the mysterious man who had appeared-out of thin air, it seemed to me at the time-to take up my cause. He returned the look with an expression what said the matter was far from settled.

And so it was. Three months later, inside my leaky brick cell in the main block of the Boys’ House of Refuge, I had that “encounter” with a guard what I’ve mentioned. Now, the simple truth is that you can find a bit of lead pipe almost anywhere if you look hard enough, and I’d found one pretty quick after my arrival on the Island. I kept it hidden inside my mattress, figuring the day would eventually come when one of either the boys or the guards might force me to use it-and the particular bull that finally did will be forever sorry for it. While he was busy trying to hold me down and undo his pants I laid hold of my pipe, and inside of two minutes he had three fractures in one arm, two in the other, a busted ankle, and a mass of bone chips where his nose used to be. I was still going at him, to the encouraging shrieks of the other boys, when a couple more guards finally pulled me off. The superintendent of the place asked for a hearing to decide whether or not I should be transferred to an insane asylum, and word of the incident got out to the press. Dr. Kreizler caught wind of it and showed up at the hearing, once again demanding that no sentence be pronounced without a proper psychological assessment being done first. The judge this time around was a lot more reasonable, and the Doctor got his way.

For two days, he and I sat in an office on the Island, doing little more than talking-and for most of the first day we didn’t even talk about the specific facts of my case. He asked me questions about my childhood and, even more important, told me a lot about his, which went a long way toward easing my discomfort at being in the presence of a man what I was grateful to but who nonetheless filled me with a kind of nervous awe. During those first hours, in fact, I learned many grim facts about the Doctor’s life that almost nobody knew or knows-and I can see now that he was using his own past as a way to coax mine out of me.

It was peculiar: as we talked, I began to comprehend-to the extent that an uneducated young boy could-that I might not just be doing things at random, that maybe I’d decided on a life of crime and mayhem as much out of anger as out of necessity. This wasn’t an idea that the Doctor planted in me; he let me come to it myself by showing sympathy for all I’d been through and even a kind of admiration for my attitude. In fact, he seemed to find the fact that I’d survived what I had and was doing what I was doing not only remarkable but in a way amusing; and I quickly got the feeling that I was providing him with something more than statistics-the man was enjoying himself.

That was the real secret of his success with kids: it wasn’t charity work to him, it wasn’t the kind of wooden-nickel generosity you’d get from mission types. What made troubled children, rich and poor, trust the Doctor so much was the fact that he was getting something out of helping them. He loved it all, really loved spending time and effort on his young charges, in a way that was at least partly selfish. It was like they made the miserable parts of the adult world what he inhabited so much of the time-the prisons, madhouses, hospitals, and courtrooms-easier to take: gave him hope for the future, on the one hand, and pure and simple amusement, on the other. And when you’re a kid, you look for that, for the kind of adult who isn’t giving you a hand just to get in good with Jesus Christ but is doing it because he enjoys it. Everybody’s got an angle, is all I’m saying, and the fact that the Doctor’s was so obvious and uncomplicated made it all the easier to trust him.

At my sanity hearing the Doctor used all the things that we’d talked about to make short work of the idea that I was crazy, backing his claims up with a little theory he’d worked out over the years, one he called “context.” It was the core idea behind all the rest of his work, and the basic gist of the thing was that a person’s actions and motives can never be truly understood until the full circumstances of his or her early years and growing up are brought to bear on the discussion. Straightforward and harmless enough, you might think; but in fact it was no small job to defend this notion against the charge that it ran counter to traditional American beliefs by providing excuses for criminal behavior. But the Doctor always maintained that there was a big difference between an explanation and an excuse, and that what he was trying to do was understand people’s behavior, not make life easier for criminals.

Luckily for me, on that particular day his statements found a receptive audience: the members of the hearing board bought the Doctor’s analysis of my life and behavior. But when he went on to propose that I be enrolled at his Institute, they balked, apparently still feeling that so notorious a young hellion as “the Stevepipe” needed to go someplace where he’d be kept on a shorter leash. They asked Dr. Kreizler if he had any other ideas; he thought about the matter for some two minutes, never looking at me, and then announced that he’d be willing to take me into his employ and his home and assume personal responsibility for my actions. The members of the board grew a little wide-eyed at that, and one of them asked the Doctor if he was serious. He told them that he was, and after some more consultation the deal was set.

For the first time, I felt a little unsure; not because I’d seen anything in the Doctor to distrust but because the two days I’d spent with him had set me to thinking about myself and wondering if I’d ever really be able to change my ways. These doubts nagged at me as I cleared my few belongings out of my cell and headed off through the grim old courtyard of the House of Refuge to meet the Doctor at his carriage (he had his burgundy barouche out that day). My confusion wasn’t eased by the sight of an enormous black man sitting in the barouche’s driver’s seat; but the man had a kindly face, and as the Doctor stepped out of the carriage, he smiled and held a hand up toward his companion.

“Stevie,” he said. “This is Cyrus Montrose. It may interest you to know that he was on his way to the penitentiary-and a fate far worse than yours might’ve been-before we crossed paths and he came to work for me.” (I later learned that Cyrus had, as a younger man, killed a crooked Irish cop who’d been beating the life out of a young colored whore in a brothel where Cyrus played piano. Cyrus’s parents had been killed by an Irish mob during the Draft Riots of ’63, and at his trial the Doctor’d successfully argued that, such being the context of his life, Cyrus had been mentally incapable of any other reaction to the situation in the brothel.)

I nodded at the big man, who tipped his bowler and gave me a warm look in return. “So,” I said uncertainly, “am-I gonna work for you, too, is that the deal?”

“Oh, yes, you’ll work,” the Doctor answered. “But you’ll study, as well. You will read, you’ll learn mathematics, you’ll investigate history. Among many other things.”

“I will?” I said, swallowing hard; after all, I’d never spent a day in school in my life.

“You will,” the Doctor answered, taking a silver cigarette case out, removing a stick, and lighting it. He looked up to see me staring hungrily at the cigarettes. “Ah. But I’m afraid that stops. No smoking for you, young man. And this,” he went on, stepping over and examining the little pile of things I was carrying, “will no longer be necessary.” He pulled my piece of lead pipe out of some clothes and threw it away onto a patch of thin, ratty-looking grass.

It was looking like I was going to be left with nothing but studies, and that fact was not causing me to be any less edgy. “Well-what about the work?” I finally said. “What’ll I do?”

“You mentioned,” the Doctor said, climbing back into the barouche, “that when your activities with Crazy Butch involved waylaying delivery trucks, you were generally assigned to drive them. Was there any particular reason for this?”

I shrugged. “I like horses. And I took to the driving pretty good.”

“Then say hello to Frederick and Gwendolyn,” the Doctor replied, indicating with his cigarette the gelding and mare what stood in front of the barouche. “And take the reins.”

My spirits picked up considerably at that. I went over, patted the handsome black gelding’s long snout, ran a hand along the brown mare’s neck, and grinned. “Seriously?” I asked.

“You seem to find the idea of work more comforting than that of study,” the Doctor replied. “So let us see how you manage. Cyrus, you may as well come down and help me with this appointment schedule. I’m a bit lost. It seems, from my notes, that I was scheduled to be at the Essex Street court house two hours ago.” As the big black man got down from the driver’s seat, the Doctor glanced up at me once more. “Well? You have a job to do, don’t you?”

I gave him another grin and a quick nod, then jumped up into the driver’s seat and cracked the reins against the horses’ haunches.

And I never, as they say, looked back.

Yes, they were fine days, those, when we’d never heard the name John Beecham and Mary Palmer was still alive. Fine days whose return, I realized, we now had good cause to doubt. Those people what had always fought the Doctor and his theory of context (and were driven, it seemed to me, by fear of the way his investigations into violent and illegal behavior led him to poke around in the area of how Americans raised their kids) had generally countered his arguments by saying that the United States had been built on the idea that every man is free to choose-and is responsible for-his individual ideas and actions, no matter what the circumstances of his early life may’ve been. The Doctor didn’t really disagree with them on a legal level; he was just looking for deeper scientific answers. And so, for many years, there’d been a kind of stalemate in the battle between the controversial alienist and them what he unnerved so badly. When little Paulie McPherson had hung himself, though, it’d given the Doctor’s enemies a chance to break that stalemate-and they’d grabbed at it.

But the judge who’d presided over the first hearing on the matter had been a fair-minded man, and he didn’t just flat-out shut the Doctor down. Instead, he ordered the sixty-day investigation period I’ve already mentioned, making the kids at the Institute wards of the court for that time and putting the place in the temporary charge of one Reverend Charles Bancroft, a retired orphanage superintendent. The Doctor himself was forbidden to set foot inside the Institute during that time: for a man of his antsy temperament, sixty days-with no sure knowledge of what would come after-could be a genuine eternity. And the question of how hard he’d take leaving the Institute didn’t involve just him, either. The kids themselves would play a crucial part, for if even one of them snapped while he was gone-and some of those kids were wound pretty tight-the Doctor would, I knew, take all the blame onto himself. He’d always taught his charges to draw strength from the fact that at least one person believed in them and to be ready to use that strength in future times of trouble. But would they be able to do it when the stakes were so high and the outcome was so uncertain…?

The sudden thunder of a gunshot bellowed out of an alleyway just after I’d turned onto Forsyth Street, causing Frederick to rear in fright and me to stop daydreaming and jerk my head around to locate the source of the trouble. It’d come from back by an old rear tenement building, the closest thing to Hell that any living person ever called home. I jumped off the calash to calm Frederick down by stroking his powerful neck and feeding him a couple of cubes of sugar what I always kept in my pocket when I was driving. Keeping my eyes locked on the alleyway, I soon saw the agent of the mayhem: a crazed-looking man, small and wiry, with a big, drooping mustache and a slouch hat. He came wandering out of the alley carrying an old side-by-side shotgun, brazen as can be, with no apparent thought to who might be watching. A scream followed him out, but his only answer was to declare, without turning around, “Now I’ll take care of your fuckin’ little boyfriend!” He then disappeared at the same quick pace around the corner of Eldridge Street. There wasn’t a cop to be seen, of course; there rarely was in that part of town, and if one had been around, the sound of the gunshot would in all likelihood have sent him scurrying in the opposite direction.

I got back onto the driver’s seat of the calash and made for the Institute at a quick pace. Reaching Numbers 185-187 East Broadway-the two red brick buildings with black trim what the Doctor’d bought and converted into one space many years back-I found that there was a young patrolman stationed at the foot of the steps to the main entrance. Jumping to the ground, I gave Frederick a few more pats on the neck and another lump of sugar, then approached the cop, who was too green to know me by sight.

“I don’t suppose you’d be interested to know that there’s a mug wandering up Eldridge Street with a shotgun,” I said.

“You don’t say,” the cop answered, looking me over. “And what business might that be of yours?”

“None of mine,” I said with a shrug, “Just thought it might be some of yours.”

“My business is right here,” the cop announced, straightening his light summer cap and puffing himself up so that his blue tunic looked near to busting. “Court business.”

“Unh-hunh,” I said. “Well, maybe you could tell Dr. Kreizler that his driver’s here. Seeing as getting him off the premises seems to be the main point of the court’s business.”

The cop turned toward the steps, giving me a glare. “You know,” he said, as he went up to the door, “an attitude like that could get you in some tight spots, sonny.”

I let him get inside before shaking my head and spitting into the gutter. “Go chase yourself,” I mumbled. “Sonny.” (Maybe I ought to note here that one of the things all my years with Dr. Kreizler never did affect-besides my taste for smokes-was my attitude toward cops.)

In a few minutes the patrolman reappeared, followed by Dr. Kreizler, a small group of his students, and a pious-looking old bag of bones what I took to be the Reverend Bancroft. The kids, some of the Doctor’s younger charges, were pretty typical of the range of types he generally had at the place: one was a little girl who came from a rich family uptown and who’d refused throughout her life to speak a word to anybody but her nanny-until she met Dr. Kreizler, that is; another was a boy whose folks owned a grocery business in Greenwich Village, a kid who’d taken more than his fair share of beatings for no greater reason than that his conception’d been an accident and neither of his parents could stand having him around; then there was another girl, who’d been found by a friend of the Doctor’s working in an adult disorderly house, even though she wasn’t but ten years old (just how the man happened to find her in said disorderly house, the Doctor never inquired too closely about); another was a boy who hailed from a big manor house in Rhode Island and who’d passed most of his eight years breaking everything he could lay his hands on in a string of unending tantrums.

They were all dressed in the Institute’s gray-and-blue uniforms, which the Doctor had designed himself and required the kids to wear so that the richer ones couldn’t lord it over the poorer. The first little girl, the one what had never spoken to her family, had a firm grip on one of the Doctor’s legs, making it tough for him to move as he walked alongside the reverend and gave him some last bits of instruction and advice. The other girl was holding both her hands behind her back and looking around like she wasn’t quite sure what the hell was going on. The two boys, meantime, were laughing and taking playful jabs at each other from opposite sides of the Doctor, using him as a shield. All in all, a pretty typical scene for the place; but if you looked close, there were clues that something unusual was up.

Chief among these was the Doctor himself. His black linen suit was rumpled and wrinkled in spots, making it pretty clear that he’d been up working all night. Even if the clothes hadn’t given him away, his face would’ve: it was drawn and exhausted, and the look of contentment what could be found in his features only at the Institute was nowhere to be seen. As he spoke to Reverend Bancroft, he leaned forward with a kind of uncertainty that was unusual for him, and the reverend seemed to sense it: he put his hand on the Doctor’s back and told him to just relax and try to make the best use of the weeks to come, that he was sure everything would work out for the best. At that point the Doctor stopped talking and just shook his head in resignation, rubbing his black eyes and suddenly becoming conscious of the kids what were all around and over him.

He smiled and tried to perk up as he first pried the one little girl off his leg and then got the two boys to calm down, speaking to them like he did to all us kids, with affection but directly, as if there was no wall of age between them. When he looked up and caught sight of me at the curb, I could see that he was trying to hold himself together long enough to make it to the calash-but the second little girl proceeded to make that job a lot tougher. Out from behind her back she brought a bunch of roses, wrapped in the plain paper of a local flower shop but still showing the full glory of the new summer in their white and pink petals. The Doctor smiled and kneeled down to take them from her, though when she threw her arms around his neck, that former fallen angel what the Doctor’d given a second lease on childhood, his smile disappeared and it was all he could do to keep his composure. He stood up quickly, told the boys one more time to behave themselves, then shook hands with Reverend Bancroft and near ran down the steps. I had the carriage door open, and he shot in.

“Get me home, Stevie,” was all he managed to say, and like spit I was back up top, whip in hand. The kids continued to wave as I turned the calash around and headed back the way I’d come; but Dr. Kreizler made no reply, just sank further into the maroon leather seat of the carriage.

He remained silent during the trip uptown, even when I mentioned my near run-in with the shotgun-toting maniac. I glanced back just a few times, the first to see if he was even awake. He was; but though the morning was only growing more beautiful, with the breeze continuing to blow the smells of fresh, full greenery and leaves around the street so that they near overcame the stench of garbage piles and horse manure and urine, he didn’t seem to take note of it. He had his right hand balled into a fist that he tapped against his mouth as he stared intensely at nothing, and with his left hand he clutched at the bunch of roses so tight that one of the thorns stabbed him. I heard him hiss a little in pain, but I didn’t say anything-I didn’t know what I could say. The man was a spent bullet, that much was clear, and the best thing for me to do was get him home in a hurry. With that in mind, I gave Frederick a little ripple of the reins and told him to pick up his pace, and soon we were moving back around Stuyvesant Park.

Once inside the house at Seventeenth Street, the Doctor, his face by now ashen with exhaustion, turned to Cyrus and me. “I’ve got to try to get some rest,” he mumbled, starting up the stairs. He stopped and flinched a bit at the sound of a bucket overturning in the kitchen hallway with what was, even for Mrs. Leshko, an amazing crash. The racket was followed by a long stream of what I figured were Russian curses.

The Doctor sighed. “Assuming it’s possible to communicate with that woman, would you please ask her to keep the house quiet for a few hours? If she’s incapable, give her the afternoon off.”

“Yes, sir, Doctor,” Cyrus said. “If you need anything-”

The Doctor only held up a hand and nodded in acknowledgment, then disappeared up the stairs. Cyrus and I looked at each other.

“Well?” Cyrus whispered to me.

“It isn’t good,” I answered. “But I’ve got an idea-” Another crash and more curses came from the kitchen. “You handle Mrs. Leshko,” I said. “I’m going to telephone to Mr. Moore.”

Cyrus nodded, and then I bolted down through the kitchen hallway and past the muttering, mopping mass of blue linen and stout flesh that was Mrs. Leshko. I kept on going through the white ceramic tiling and hanging pots and pans of the kitchen itself and finally got into the pantry, where there was a telephone on the wall. Closing the pantry door, I grabbed the phone’s small receiver, yanked the stem of the mouthpiece down to my height, and got hold of an operator, telling her to connect me to The New York Times. In a few seconds, I had Mr. Moore on the other end.

“Stevie?” he said. “We’ve had some developments. Interesting ones.”

“Yeah? Any word on the baby?”

“Only confirmation that she is, in fact, missing-none of the help at the consulate have seen her in days. I didn’t want to question anybody higher up, though, not with what the señora’s been through. But tell me-what’s the word on your end?”

“Well, he’s in pretty bad shape right now,” I answered. “But he’s gone up to rest. And I think-”

Mr. Moore paused, waiting for me to go on, and I could hear the clack of typewriters in the background. “You think-?”

“I don’t know-this case. If you were to put it to him just the right way, he might… I mean, the whole connection to the Spanish business-and the señora, if we could get him to meet her… and that picture of the little girl…”

“What are you saying, Stevie?”

“Only that… he’s in a mood, all right. And if this case leads in the direction it might-”

“Ahhhh,” Mr. Moore noised in a happier tone. “I see. …. Well. Your education’s starting to pay off, kid.”

“It is?”

“If I get you right, you’re saying that this case may end up revealing some pretty unattractive things about the same kind of society types that’re trying to shut the Doctor down. And the fact that it involves an innocent baby is just so much gravy. Right?”

“Well, yeah. Something like that.”

Mr. Moore whistled. “I’ll tell you what, Stevie-I’ve known Laszlo since we were younger than you are. I don’t care how fed up and exhausted he is, if that doesn’t get him going, we can start planning his funeral now-because he’s already dead.”

“Yeah. But we gotta slip the idea to him right.”

“Don’t you worry about that. I’ve already figured it out. Tell the Doctor the rest of us are coming by for cocktails.” I heard a voice call to Mr. Moore in the background. “Yeah?” he answered, away from the mouthpiece. “What? Bensonhurst”?No, no, no, Harry, I cover New York !I don’t care what Boss Platt says, Bensonhurst is not New York! But it wasn’t my story to start with! Oh, all right, all right!” His voice grew more distinct in my ear. “Got to go, Stevie-some fool doctor tried to shoot his family in Bensonhurst last night. Apparently the authorities don’t like the way we reported the story. Listen, don’t forget-we’ll be by for cocktails.”

“But you haven’t told me about the other developments-”

“Later,” he answered.

The line clicked dead, leaving me with no choice but to wait until that evening to find out what in the world Mr. Moore could’ve been talking about.