The Museum of Extraordinary Things

MAY 1911

THEY WOULD come for the body in broad daylight, during the afternoon show, for they were less likely to be seen in the midst of a crowd. The Professor would be engaged at this time, his attention on the flow of customers. No one would expect thievery, if that was what it could be called, in the middle of the day.

“This is a task best done by ghouls,” the liveryman said, for even he, with his criminal history, was queasy over the work that lay ahead.

“Then that’s what we’ll be,” Eddie said grimly.

“And how will we get into the cellar, if you don’t mind me asking?” When Eddie held up the keys Coralie had given him, the liveryman grinned. “I see I should give you a bit of credit. I won’t ask where you got those, brother.”

They had made a pact to work together, for this one day alone. They would never again speak of it, or speak of each other.

“What would make a person sew the mouth shut of a person who’d been murdered?” Eddie asked the liveryman as they traveled toward their destination.

“It’s a message. Ask no questions.”

“It was done to Hannah, the drowned girl.”

“No. I saw her for myself.”

“A person with a kind heart removed the thread. It may be he was killed for doing so.”

“Perhaps he knew more than he should have. Or at least someone believed he did.”

Eddie was now struck by the story of the man who’d been stuck in the mud; how the hermit had watched him struggle to break free. Someone had deposited Hannah in the river. Could this have been the man? “If that’s true it doesn’t serve to drive me away,” Eddie told his companion.

“I wouldn’t expect so. You’re stubborn.” The liveryman grinned. “It’s part of our heritage. If our people weren’t stubborn we would have disappeared by way of our enemies’ hands long ago.”

Eddie’s obstinate nature surfaced in his refusal to accept the physician’s verdict that his right hand might be useless in the future. At present, however, his disability was irrefutable. He had therefore stowed his camera in a cupboard, and he felt the loss of it even more deeply than he did the loss of his hand.

Eddie hadn’t expected the liveryman to be so companionable, or so intelligent in his views. “You seem sure of yourself,” he said. “I think we know each other well enough that I should call you by your right name.”

“Eastman is right enough.” The liveryman gave him a sly look. “As right as Eddie is at any rate. Names don’t matter. Our God knows how to call us to him when he wants us, it’s best to remember that.”

They didn’t speak much afterward; each man was lost in his own private thoughts. Eddie had worried about leaving Mitts alone with the hermit’s wolf, so he’d locked the dog in a stall in the stable, and he couldn’t help but think of the pathetic whining he’d heard when he left for the day. Once they’d entered Brooklyn, both men’s imaginings couldn’t help but turn to the horrors of the Raymond Street Jail, a turreted Victorian building that was damp and freezing cold, said to house the worst of criminal life, along with the largest, most vicious rats in New York.

“I’ve served my last term in jail,” the liveryman mused. “I’ll do myself in before I go back. Five years of my life gone to shit, watching the river and counting out the time, knowing I could never get it back. After this business today is done, I’m considering joining the military. It’s a better life for a man such as myself.”

“I thought you couldn’t leave your pipe.” Eddie tried his best to be civil in referring to the liveryman’s weakness for opium.

“I don’t wish to be a slave anymore. I’m switching to gin.”

They both had a laugh over that.

“And you?” the liveryman asked. “What do you intend?”

“Once I’ve done what I promised, I’ll go back for Coralie. If she’ll have me.” He noticed the liveryman’s dour expression. “I take it you don’t think she’ll leave with me?”

“Do you think it’s her choice?”

“It should be,” Eddie remarked. “And it will.”

“Then you’d best make sure you get rid of him,” Eddie’s companion told him. “I know him well, and what’s his is his.”

All that morning she could hardly keep away from the window. When she returned from Manhattan, she’d slipped back into the house before her father came home, but sooner or later a person breaking the Professor’s rules was bound to be caught.

“You’re a jittery one,” Maureen said. They were making fritters to serve during the living wonders’ tea break, but Coralie had dumped the dough in too quickly and the oil had splashed up, nearly burning them both.

“Spring fever,” Coralie assured her.

Maureen gave her a sidelong glance. “Is that what it is?”

Coralie offered a compliment to deflect attention from her nervous state. “I’m not a cook, though you’ve tried your best to teach me.”

Fortunately, there was much to be done, and Maureen was too busy to investigate any further. She was soon enough taking tickets at the entryway of the museum. Coralie had no one watching over her actions and was free to steal into the yard at the appointed hour. Eddie was already there, crouched beside the hydrangeas. Maureen had added vinegar to the ground to turn the blooms bluer, and they blurred against the color of the sky. As soon as she saw him, Coralie felt as she did when she was about to dive into the river; somewhere inside her there was a gasping, thrilling release of earth and air. She went to stand beside him in the grass. She smelled like salt to him, and some delicious variety of sweet, caramels. As for Coralie, she noticed everything about him in that instant, the cast on his hand, the shape of his head, the broad width of his shoulders, the way he gazed at her with his dark gold-flecked eyes, as if she had never been a monster possessing a monster’s heart and history.

The liveryman had left his carriage down the street, and he now joined them in the garden. It would take two strong men to complete this task, both with steady hands and strong stomachs. Coralie felt a stab of fear. She imagined what might happen if her father discovered them, but she forced herself to push such thoughts aside. They went into the kitchen the way a dreamer enters into a dream, slowly at first, then all in a rush. The liveryman led Eddie down the plummeting stairs to the cellar. They had no idea of how much time they had, and when Maureen might return from the ticket booth, so every instant mattered. Eddie gazed over his shoulder and saw the darkness close in on them as Coralie shut the door, ensuring that anyone entering the kitchen wouldn’t wonder if someone was in the cellar. Eddie quickly put the keys to work. Two turns of the locks and they were in.

“Don’t look at anything,” Eastman muttered. “Trust me, brother. You’ll think you’re in hell if you see where you are.”

They went directly to the wooden box and lifted it from the table. Nearby, the enormous bass was being kept on ice, its fish blood drained into a bucket. The ice had melted and some water gushed out of the makeshift coffin. Eddie tried his best to pay no attention to the skulls of varying sizes set upon the shelf, or the unborn child with abnormalities in its face and limbs that floated in a jar of pale yellow formaldehyde.

“Work, don’t look around,” the liveryman reminded him.

And so, Eddie turned his attention solely to the task at hand as the two men carried the coffin through the narrow door of the workshop. They managed to climb the stairs with the liveryman leading the way, the weight of the coffin resting on Eddie’s shoulder. Coralie guided them through the kitchen, and as she did Eddie took note of the plates and cups, the mops and brooms in a corner, napkins and tablecloths, sweets ready for tea, the stuff of everyday life. And yet amid these homely items Eddie’s thoughts turned to darker things—blood, and sorrow, and men who had no aversion to sewing through flesh with coarse thread. Before he had time to gather his thoughts, they were in the garden, the light so bright it brought tears to his eyes. The hydrangeas were so blue it seemed the sky had fallen. Coralie kissed him quickly, then whispered that she had given him her heart. It was not possible to live without one’s heart, yet she was smiling when she backed away. He thought about the first time he had seen her in this same place, as she came onto the porch, how it seemed as if he’d known her for a thousand years, and how it seemed that way still.

There were voices echoing, as customers on line for entry into the museum chattered to one another. They could hear the raucous calls of seagulls, those savage creatures, for birds circled above them. As they went on through the garden, the men inhaled the straw-like scent of lions from the cages of Dreamland across the street, and the sour, brackish odor of the sea, for it was low tide. They hurried from the yard, out to the street, where they stowed the box in the carriage. The plan was for Coralie to blame the liveryman. Eastman would then disappear. But now leaving her behind seemed all wrong. Eddie could see her gazing after them as Eastman shouted for him to get the hell onboard. The horse went full out when commanded to gallop, and still Eddie looked back, and still he saw her form, the swimmer from the river, the woman who had come to him the way a dream does, unbidden and uncalled for, impossible to let go of.

The horse was sweating when they crossed back over the bridge, racing to get out of Coney Island. They stopped beyond the marsh, to make certain the coffin was in place and the contents would arrive safely. It was broiling hot by then, and both men stood there hatless, sleeves rolled up, sweating through their clothes.

“Let me do it,” Eastman said when it came to removing the cover and peering inside. “I’ve seen terrible things. One more won’t do me any harm.”

Eddie was grateful for the offer, but he said it was his duty. In the end, they lifted the cover together to survey Hannah’s form. It was a shock to see the girl’s pale, lifeless body. They said the mourning prayers together as well, as if they were indeed brothers, and then they set to leaving Brooklyn. Most men, Eddie had learned, were too complicated to judge. He would leave such things to heaven. He knew only that, if he were in battle, he would want the liveryman beside him. Moses Levy had told him that all men saw what they wished to see, and that was the purpose of a photograph, to show the irrefutable truth of the world as well as its beauty.

He leapt down from the seat when they reached the funeral home on Essex Street, and while the coffin was carried inside by the undertaker’s sons, Eddie and the liveryman shook hands. The liveryman had sold his other horses that morning to another stable. He’d opened all the windows and watched his birds take flight. He had nothing left but the clothes he wore, his carriage, and this one horse, Jackson, an ancient bay no other stableman would want.

“It’s not Eastman. The family name is Osterman,” the carriage man said before he turned his old horse to trot along Essex to Grand Street, taking him as far as he could get from the life he’d led so far. “First name Edward. There’s another thing we share.”

“Between the two of us, the name is yours alone,” Eddie admitted. “As for me, I was born Ezekiel Cohen.”

THE TREES were in full leaf and the lilacs bloomed in great purple masses on the morning when those who had loved Hannah Weiss gathered at Mt. Zion Cemetery in Maspeth, Queens. Two black carriages had been hired, one to carry the coffin, the other to transport Mr. Weiss and his daughter, Ella. It was a lovely, bright day, but perhaps it would have been more fitting had the weather been gloomy. If that were so and sheets of rain had fallen, Mr. Weiss’s wailing might not have sounded so loudly, bringing the other mourners to tears as he fell to his knees. There were nearly fifty people in attendance, many of them girls who had worked alongside Hannah and Ella, as well as several officers of the Hebrew Free Burial Association, the organization paying for the funeral, including the carriages and the horses draped with purple ribbons and black netting. A representative from the Workmen’s Circle had been sent to deliver their membership’s deepest sympathies and an envelope of cash that would help the family. From where Eddie stood, at the rear of the crowd, his battered hat in hand, he recognized the representative as Isaac Rosenfeld. He made certain to steer clear, but when Rosenfeld caught sight of him, the other man wound his way around the gathering so he might come to stand beside Eddie. As the rabbi offered up the mourning prayers, both men stared straight ahead.

“I heard you found her,” Rosenfeld remarked.

Eddie shrugged, embarrassed. “A little late.”

“Late or not, the Weisses needed to set her to rest.”

Eddie wished he could erase the moment when he’d stood on the threshold of the Weisses’ flat to hand the old man the gold locket. “I wish you’d never hired me,” he’d confessed.

“It was the right thing.” Weiss had turned the locket over in his palm. “You did what you were supposed to do. Now you’ll find who did this to her.”

“That’s not what I do. I’m not a detective.”

There was no point in going to the police, certainly not in Brooklyn. Eddie most likely would end up in jail if he offered the slightest complaint against Coralie’s father. Even if he did, the worst the Professor might be accused of was possession of a body; a fine would be levied, little more. As for the men of the Tenth Precinct in Chelsea, they were not inclined to help those such as Hannah who might be associated with union activity. People disappeared and that was that. Once a corpse was discovered, there was no further inquiry. The matter was settled. But it wasn’t, and Eddie knew it. He thought of the message of the blue thread, Beck in his mud-splattered long underwear, the flattened ferns around the hermit’s body.

“You’re better than a detective,” Weiss insisted when Eddie had tried to beg off. “Your father said you would find out what happened to Hannah, and I won’t rest in peace until you do.” He gave Eddie a fierce look, eye to eye, man to man. “And you know as well as I, neither will you.”

Eddie, always prone to insomnia, hadn’t slept since they’d carried Hannah from that wretched workroom. He feared his dreams, filled with violent imaginings of what he might do should he ever come upon the cold-blooded killer who’d dared to take up a needle and thread to quiet the dead. He’d tried to pull himself together before attending the funeral, but his clothes were untidy and he hadn’t shaved. His good hand seemed to have a tremor.

“You’re in poor condition.” Rosenfeld took note of his old companion’s disheveled appearance, surprising Eddie with his concern. “Broke your hand?”

“It was broken for me.”

Rosenfeld handed over a card that carried the address of the Workmen’s Circle. “If you find out anything, contact me. Or if you need anything.”

“You’ve got the wrong person. I’m the fellow you despise.”

“Don’t forget how long I’ve known you.” Eddie had taken out his watch, which had continued to tell perfect time despite the broken face. Rosenfeld nodded, a smile at his lips. “Still have that, I see.”

A flush of embarrassment crossed Eddie’s face, for here was the one person who was well aware of how he’d come to possess the watch. The funeral was ending, and before Rosenfeld went to pay his respects to the family, he clapped his old companion on the back. “I’ve got the right person, brother.”

Eddie watched as the mourners departed. A few people lingered: some of the girls who had worked in the Asch Building, along with a young man wearing a frayed jacket with a black mourning band wound around his arm. Eddie took the opportunity to follow a path leading to Moses Levy’s grave, a site he hadn’t visited since his mentor’s death. Stalks of milkweed grew wild in the area, and Eddie pulled the weeds clustered around Levy’s headstone. It was the least he could do for a man who had given him so much. He thought with gratitude about the night when he’d first encountered Levy, for he didn’t like to imagine whom he might have become otherwise.

He left Mt. Zion and began the walk back toward the Second Avenue El, which would take him across the Queensboro Bridge, which had opened two years earlier to span the East River and cross into Manhattan. In the past, Eddie had journeyed to Queens County so that he might try his hand fishing in Jamaica Bay, but the varieties of fish once so common there, enormous schools of sheepshead and black drum, had all but disappeared. As he walked along now, he did his best to let the act of walking clear his mind. Yet he had a strange, spooked feeling. Perhaps he had been unnerved by visiting Moses’s grave, for an odd brand of loneliness had settled upon him as he was leaving the cemetery.

He turned onto a nearly deserted road, the sun beating down on his black hat and coat. As he continued, he paid attention to his surroundings, as Hochman had taught him to do. Listen, and you’ll hear a story being told, one you may need to know. Upon hearing a rustle behind him, Eddie stopped, as if to adjust the wrappings on his hand, taking the opportunity to peer behind him. He spied the young man who had lingered at the funeral, who now ducked behind a stable. He wondered if this was the man Beck had noticed in the muck near the river, and if he had found himself a murderer. Instead of continuing on, Eddie walked back toward the stable, going around the far side. He picked up a branch from a chestnut tree and approached his stalker, surprising him from behind, pushing him up against the shingled wall, the branch across his throat.

“Get off !” the younger man cried, choking out the words. He was only twenty-one or twenty-two, clearly unused to a fight. Eddie had no trouble keeping him in check, the branch pressed harder against his neck. “I’ve done nothing to you!” the young man managed to croak.

This man was a stranger to Eddie. “Why are you following me?”

“For Hannah. I think I know what happened to her.”

Eddie dropped the branch away. The young man bent over, coughing, his hand clutching his neck.

“How would you know anything?” Eddie asked when the other man had begun to recover.

“We were in love. We planned to marry. She wasn’t ready to tell her father, so we kept it to ourselves.”

This was the fellow R had mentioned when Eddie interviewed her, the man Hannah had loved. His name was Aaron Samuels, and he’d been a tailor, but no more.

“I can’t go back to my life. Not with what I know and what I let her do. We thought we could do what the unions couldn’t. She was meeting with someone that morning, a representative for the owners. She had proof they were locking workers into the sewing rooms. I’d helped her, God forgive me. I removed one of the locked doorknobs from the tenth floor—it was on the door that led to the fire escape—and she had it with her. If they refused to change the conditions, she would do her best to go to the city representative for the Lower East Side, Alfred E. Smith, and beg for his help.” Samuels broke down. He chided himself for his own idiocy and neglect. “I should have gone, but she thought she’d have a better chance of getting the boss’s people to show up. They’d consider her less of a threat. Because she was young and pretty and a girl, I believed they’d think she was harmless.”

“You know nothing about the person responsible?”

Samuels became agitated, and his dark eyes flashed. “If I did, don’t you think I would have found him?”

They began to walk together toward the El train, both deep in thought. There were factories along the route, and some vacant areas in which crickets had begun to call.

“Her sister said she ran off to get something to eat before work,” Eddie recalled.

“She was meeting him then. Before work. She didn’t want Ella to know.”

“So it was somewhere close by.”

“The alley behind Greene Street.”

Eddie’s brow furrowed. “Why didn’t you say so before?”

“I didn’t think it mattered,” Aaron Samuels said. “It was only an alley.”

“Anything more?”

“She told me not to worry. She always carried a spool of blue thread with her for luck.”

Eddie had returned the gold locket to Mr. Weiss but had asked to keep Hannah’s other possessions. Hochman always said what a person carried revealed more about his soul than his affiliations with any philosophy or religion. When Eddie came home from the funeral, he arranged Hannah’s belongings on his worktable. First the blue coat, then the hairpins and comb, and last the black buttons. He studied them, but he saw nothing unusual. Certainly, there was something beyond his vision and his understanding. He took out his camera, and though he struggled to work with his splint, he managed by tying his hand, splint and all, directly to the camera with a length of rope.

Each object looked ordinary enough through his lens. Once the plates had been developed and the prints readied, he tacked them to the wall to study them while they were still wet. The blue coat was in surprisingly good condition, girlish and hopeful, with its round collar and four gold buttons. The comb and pins made him recall that Ella had told him her sister combed her hair a hundred strokes each night. He turned his attention to the close-up photograph of the extra buttons, for they seemed an anomaly, too large and mannish for a young woman’s clothing. Each had a star in the middle with holes at the points in which there were bits of frayed black thread. He looked more closely at these bits of uneven thread. Then, quite suddenly, he understood that Hannah had torn them from her attacker’s coat.

He felt the swell of excitement he’d experienced as a runner for Hochman when he began to puzzle out the whereabouts of a missing husband or fiancé. He searched the cluttered tabletop for his magnifying glass, then set to work examining his photographs from the day of the fire. When the room became dim, he lit a lantern and several candles. He sifted through photographs he’d taken until he came upon a carriage pulled by two fine black horses. He brought the candle closer, though it dripped wax upon the print. He hadn’t looked carefully enough when he first developed the image. He’d had so many from that day, and his eyes had burned with cinders. Now he recognized the dark-haired man gazing out from behind the velvet curtains of the carriage as Harry Block. He was the attorney for several owners of garment factories near Washington Square, so it was not out of the question for him to be in the area on the day of the fire. Upon closer inspection, Eddie saw that the man holding on to the rear of the carriage was carrying a thick bully stick, meant to do grave damage if anyone in the despairing mob rushed those making their escape.

The man holding the club was the one who’d chased Eddie from the scene on that day. The same man who had tried to rob him outside McSorley’s. A man who might have used this same bully stick to pull himself out of the mud after he’d rid himself of a young girl’s body, who might have been convinced an old hermit knew of his terrible deeds.

Eddie took his watch from his jacket and placed it on the table, running a thumb down the crack in the glass. He thought of the look on Block’s face when he’d revealed the watch that had once belonged to him.

Eddie went to gather the prints from the library gala once more. A chill went through him when he came to the last photograph of the night. He studied the man who had attempted to rob him, the same individual who rode upon the carriage on the day of the fire, the one who was posted in the shadows of the front hall of the Blocks’ town house, avoiding the gold-toned light the Tiffany chandelier threw onto the richly decorated walls. When Eddie leaned closer, he saw what he hadn’t noticed before. Two black buttons were missing from his coat.

He should have gone back to Brooklyn, to address the matters of his own life and interests, returning for Coralie. Instead he took up his old post on the corner of Sixty-second Street. Something had taken hold of him, the urge to make things right. He barely knew himself or his desires. He had no obligations, and yet he was weighted down with a sense of responsibility. He felt naked without his camera, but he had come to this address for one reason alone. If he waited long enough, he was certain the fellow in the photographs who worked for Block would appear. It was morning, and the streets were busy, therefore Eddie didn’t notice when a young woman came up behind him, having been out walking with her dogs, two large black poodles. The dogs alerted Eddie to the woman’s presence, for they ambled up to him with a sort of haughty familiarity. The larger of the two nudged him.

“Go on now, big boy,” Eddie said to the dog, giving it a pat and doing his best to send it on its way. He grinned to think of what Beck’s wolf would make of such well-fed urban pets.

“He seems to know you,” a woman’s measured voice said.

Eddie turned to the young woman who had come to collect her dogs. She was dressed in an indigo silk and wool dress and wore a large fashionable felt hat, decorated with an assortment of blue feathers in a range from aqua to navy. She had dark blue eyes and a clear, pale face with fine features. “I know you as well,” she said. “You were at the library gala.”

Eddie realized he was in the presence of Harry Block’s sister. He wished he hadn’t the complication of being recognized.

“Perhaps you’re thinking of someone else,” he said politely, keeping his attention on the town house steps, so as not to lose sight of Block’s thug if he appeared.

“No,” Block’s sister said with assurance. “I’m not. You were there.”

“Only as a hired hand,” Eddie granted.

“Except that no one hired you, I checked into it. And now it seems”—she paused to observe his splint—“you no longer have a free hand to hire. We’ve never been introduced. I’m Juliet Block, and you’re the man who has my brother’s watch.”

Eddie searched her face and saw the intelligence there. She gazed back at him critically, but not without interest.

“Were you never taught not to speak to strange men on the street?” he asked.

Miss Block laughed. “I was taught all manner of things concerning what a woman should and should not do, and how the world should be run. Unlike the members of my family, I believe that all people have the right to speak, including women and workers.” The poodles were standing beside Eddie, nosing around. Miss Block clipped on their leashes. “They seem to fancy you. I, however, don’t know how I feel about you.” She had quite a serious expression as she recalled their initial meeting as children. “I was terrified you’d steal my coat on the day you found us playing in the office. My father had just given it to me.”

Eddie smiled. Pretense wouldn’t work with this outspoken young woman. “I thought of it. But I didn’t want to make you cry.”

“Well, I cried all the same as soon as you left. I cried because my coat cost more than most children my age had to live on for a month. I was embarrassed even before you shamed us. I took a pair of scissors to the horrid coat myself. Made quite a mess. Still, I managed to cut it to shreds.”

Eddie found he was at a loss for words. They stared at each other, each surprised at who the other had become. When Miss Block began to speak of her activities, it became clear she was an ardent feminist, involved in securing rights for workers and demonstrating for the women’s vote. Her family, she revealed, was not pleased with what they referred to as her “antics,” and had taken away her yearly stipend of twenty thousand dollars as punishment when she had protested at the Opera House and outside City Hall and had briefly been interned in the workhouse on Blackwell’s Island. That was when her funds were cut off. Her brother was set to inherit everything from their father, since Miss Block was not deemed responsible by her father and his attorneys. Harry was the one who insisted that she take the dogs for protection when she went out walking. He’d chosen them for her, and had them trained by an expert. Perhaps the dogs knew Juliet would have preferred to have left them at home. Indeed, she thought of them as an extension of her brother, more or less employees meant to keep her in check.

“That’s why they prefer you, sir,” she told Eddie. “Not that I share their sentiments. If you don’t mind, I’d like to know why you’re here.”

“I’m not sure you’d really like that, miss.” Eddie had felt a certain compassion for her on the day he stole the watch. As it turned out, he felt an unexpected concern for her even now.

“Women shouldn’t know too much? I take it that’s your point. It might affect their brains or, worse, their reproductive organs? You spoke to me once as if I were an equal when you told me to shut up, please do me the same courtesy now. And call me Juliet.”

Eddie was won over by her candor. Still, he hesitated. He had come for justice, and justice didn’t always resolve as people wished. He’d brought along the photograph he’d taken at the gala, which he now withdrew from within his coat. “The man behind your brother. What do you know of him?”

“Frank Herbert?” Miss Block said. “He’s my brother’s employee.”

“Does your family have anything to do with the Triangle Shirtwaist Company?”

“My brother is an attorney. He may have done some work for them. I believe he did.” She gazed deeply at Eddie. “And the work was questionable, I presume.”

“What if it was murder?”

Juliet suggested they walk around the corner, to the park, so they might find privacy and speak more freely. They did so, and the dogs were overjoyed to find they were not being dragged in the direction of home. They took a path that led to the reservoir. There were many starlings and sparrows on the branches of the trees. “Welcome to the petting zoo of the wealthy,” Miss Block said bitterly. Once they had found a bench hidden by bushes, she took out a French cigarette and lit it, which surprised Eddie.

“Oh, stop looking at me that way.” She laughed. “You can’t be that easily shocked. I’ll do my part to help you get Herbert, and in exchange you’ll forget about my brother. In all honesty, Harry probably has no idea of his henchman’s methods. He says make it so, and it’s done.”

“It was a young woman that was killed, if that makes a difference to your opinions regarding your brother’s responsibility in the matter. She worked on the ninth floor at the factory, but it wasn’t the fire that did her in. She never made it to work that day because somebody murdered her. They sewed up her mouth with blue thread, then tossed her into the river.”

Juliet stared at him long and hard. “It matters to me very much, whether you believe me or not. But he’s my brother. My offer stands. I’ll give you Herbert, and in return, you’ll leave Harry alone.”

JULIET BLOCK was to inform Frank Herbert that her brother had given instructions for him to bring a file of information to a meeting in the alleyway behind Greene Street. Eddie would see to the rest. The hour was late, after workers in the nearby factories had gone home. Dusk was settling. It was murky enough so that Herbert could not see clearly when he turned off the street, yet he spied the slim figure of a young woman who found her way into the alley. He likely gritted his teeth, annoyed to see an interloper in the very place where he was to make a delivery of important papers to his employer. He didn’t like taking orders from a woman, and had felt humiliated being told what to do by Miss Block, who, in his opinion, thought much too highly of herself, as if she was a man’s equal. He had his bully stick with him, and he didn’t mind issuing a threat or two to a stranger, then acting on those threats if need be. But before he could chase off the figure before him, Herbert took note of something odd. The girl in the alleyway looked familiar. Her pale hair plaited into braids, her girlish blue coat. It was the dimness surely, only a trick of the shadows, yet Frank Herbert hesitated, unsure. Quite possibly, the thing before him was not human in nature. Then, thinking himself ridiculous, he moved toward her. “Go on,” he said with menace in his tone. “This is no place for ladies.”

She looked at him fully. “Neither is the river.” The young woman opened her hands. There were the buttons she’d pulled from his coat when she struggled with him.

“Get on with you,” he said, confused. He took her now to be the girl he’d had to get rid of. Somehow she had returned from the river and found him. She had torn the blue thread from her lips to speak to him.

“I have your buttons,” she told him. “From when you killed me.”

He stepped forward, his club at the ready. “If you’re a ghost, then you won’t die again, though it was easy enough to kill you the first time.”

It was then the wolf came from behind her, the one who’d been on the porch when he’d seen to the prying old hermit who’d been on the hill the day he dumped the girl’s body. It seemed the wolf had died and returned as a ghost as well, and yet he was real enough that he had to be restrained with a chain, so intent was he on lunging at the man he recognized as his master’s killer.

“Hold on to him,” Herbert shouted. “He’ll be after me!”

“Because you killed the old man?”

“I did him a service putting him out of the misery he lived in. Now go away, the both of you! Vanish from here! There’s real business of the living to be going on in this place, and we don’t need the likes of you.”

Herbert did not hear the men from the Workmen’s Circle as they circled him, then leapt upon him. They were indeed the living, who beat him down and shackled him with a length of rope, then slipped on iron cuffs. Isaac Rosenfeld got a black eye in the process, of which he was quite proud. There had been six witnesses to Herbert’s confession; most Eddie had known as boys in the factories. Eddie took a photograph of the men who gathered around Frank Herbert, a memento they could show their mothers and girlfriends. Eddie had promised Juliet he would not pursue her brother, but that didn’t mean others wouldn’t take up the cause and do their best to connect him to the events that had led to Hannah’s death.

Rosenfeld took the buttons as further proof against Herbert. Ella, who had so bravely consented to play the part of her sister’s ghost, was asked if she would accompany them to the Tenth Precinct and make her statement as well.

“I need to go with them,” Ella said when Eddie wanted to walk her home safely. “My father will understand. And it’s you he’ll want to hear from. You’re the one he’s trusted.”

Mr. Weiss was waiting on the concrete steps outside his building, wearing a winter coat, though it would be summer in a matter of days. Eddie sat beside him, the wolf at their feet. When Eddie confirmed that the murderer had been caught, Weiss nodded. He didn’t seem surprised. “I knew you’d find him.”

“Yet I feel I’ve failed.” Hannah was still dead. Harry Block was still in the mansion on Sixty-second Street.

“Every good man feels that he’s failed.”

Eddie grimaced. He shook his head. “That’s not me. Good would never be a proper term.”

“Your father told me that you were. That was why I came to you.” Weiss seemed extremely sure of himself. “You know why I believed him?”

Eddie shrugged. “Because you pray with him each morning and a man you pray with is one you believe?”

“God is the only one I pray with,” Weiss corrected him.

“So maybe you trust my father because you grew up in the same town and you worked together.”

“Those things are true, but they have nothing to do with my faith in your father. In the town where we grew up, one boy slit his brother’s throat and another stole from his own grandmother so that he could flee to Paris. Coming from the same town means nothing. I’ve worked with many men I wouldn’t even speak to if I passed them on the street. Mules work together, so do men, it means nothing as well. I have faith in your father because he’s a good man, and like every good man, he, too, has failed. But I can tell you this, he knows what it means to be a human being.”

“To be a failure?”

Weiss sputtered out a laugh. His beard had turned white in a matter of months. He clapped Eddie on the back. “To forgive,” he said. “As he’s forgiven you.”