Caleb Carr - The Angel Of Darkness

I kept nodding, and then thought about our host in Ballston Spa. “And Mr. Picton?” I didn’t even have to wait for the words; Miss Howard just gave me a look, and I smiled. “Yeah, you’re right. He’ll laugh himself sick-and this guy’ll give him a run for his money in the gab department, that’s a fact. Well, then…”

Miss Howard turned to the aborigine. “All right,” she said, indicating the bed of the buckboard. “Climb aboard-and tell us what we should call you.”

“Call me El Niño!” he said, slapping his chest again. Then his face grew more cautious. “I work for you?” he asked, as if he didn’t quite believe it.

“You work for us,” Miss Howard answered. “Now get in.”

“No, no! It is not right so-El Niño can walk, while the lady rides.”

Miss Howard sighed. “No, El Niño, that is not right. If you work for us, you’re one of us. And that means you ride with us.”

Looking about ready to bust, the aborigine did a little piece of a dance in the roadway, then sprang onto the bed of the buckboard with the speed of a jungle cat. He stood up on the bed behind us, grinning from ear to ear. “With El Niño to work for you,” he declared, “you find baby Ana! Sure!”

Not quite believing or understanding what we’d gotten ourselves into, I gave the Morgan the reins and we headed for home.

We got the full story of El Niño’s life on that trip, one what we relayed to the others once we’d reached Mr. Picton’s house. It seemed that as a boy in the jungles of the Philippines’ Luzon Island, the aborigine had been out hunting with the men of his tribe one day when they’d been set upon by a party of Spaniards. The older Aëtas had been killed for sport; the younger ones had been taken to Manila and sold into a lifetime of bondage. El Niño had escaped his first master after several years, then spent his early manhood haunting the waterfront and becoming a roving mercenary. He’d done time as a pirate, fought in small wars all over the South China Sea, and finally found his way back to Manila, where he’d been arrested for petty thievery. Brought before a Spanish magistrate, he’d been sentenced to life at hard labor-which was when the older Señor Linares, a diplomatic official, had stepped in and given him a chance to work off his “debt” to the Spanish Empire as a household servant. I couldn’t help, when I heard all this, but think of my own experiences with Dr. Kreizler; and this common background quickly formed a bond between me and our new partner.

He was a character, there was no denying that much: everybody in Mr. Picton’s house found his strange mixture of manly posturing and gentle, almost childlike kindness to be both amusing and touching. When he met Cyrus in particular, he behaved in a way what was very affecting yet still kind of comical. He bowed in a deep, respectful manner, and was amazed when the bigger man-who he seemed to think was some kind of oracle-actually offered him his hand. The fact that “Mr. Mont- rose ” (as El Niño would always pronounce it) lived among whites as a trusted equal-wearing the same clothes they did, eating the same food, and sleeping in the same quality of accommodations-seemed to the aborigine to mean that he had attained a high level of secret knowledge; and El Niño set out to model his behavior on that of my big, quiet friend. Such, of course, was no easy task, for such a chatty, active little fellow.

None of this, though, gave us any better idea of what we were going to do with our new ally. We didn’t particularly need anybody followed or rendered unconscious, at the moment, and he was bound to cause comment wherever he went in Ballston Spa-especially after I gave him the evening clothes I’d promised, which he put on right away. Strutting around like a peacock (he’d been right in supposing that the clothes would fit him), he looked ready to take on the world; but we all wondered if the world would be similarly prepared for him. Thinking for the moment of practicalities, a confused Mrs. Hastings put El Niño to work washing up the dinner dishes, a job what he took to with great good spirits.

As for the information Miss Howard and I brought back from Stillwater, it was duly posted on the chalkboard in Mr. Picton’s living room. Then we moved out onto the back porch to talk over the importance of the tale. It was no surprise to anybody that Mrs. Muhlenberg hadn’t known the full details of the Hatch case, being as she lived in a different township, which meant a different sheriff’s department-and small-town sheriffs were generally even less cooperative and communicative with each other than New York City police precincts. As for the poor woman’s refusal to testify, Mr. Picton informed us that such was no great loss, being as Saratoga County’s resident Solomon, Judge Charles H. Brown, was a stickler for trying every case on its own merits, and almost certainly wouldn’t have allowed any unproven allegations about something what’d happened ten years ago to reach a jury’s ear. The same held true for all the work we’d done in New York, which, our host firmly reminded us, hadn’t even resulted in an official police investigation. The case of Libby Hatch’s murdered children would have to be confined to just that; the only purpose Mrs. Muhlenberg’s story could serve would be to help us better understand the character of the woman we were dealing with.

What it offered us along these lines was further proof (not that we needed any) of just how clever our opponent was. The Doctor told us that Mrs. Muhlenberg’s little theory of how Libby’d killed her son, Michael, a tale what some might’ve written off as the ramblings of a woman driven half mad by grief, was very likely the truth: such substances as poison, taken by a nursing woman, can in fact pass on through her milk into whatever baby she’s feeding. As for the packet of black powder Mrs. Muhlenberg had found in Libby’s room along with the arsenic, the Doctor suspected that it’d been, to use his term, carbo animalis purificatus , Latin for “purified animal charcoal.” The rest of the world knows the stuff as “bone black,” and it’s commonly used as an antidote for many poisons-including arsenic. Libby’d probably kept it handy just in case she got impatient with her plan and took too high a dose of the arsenic herself. As for why she’d done what she’d done, we all knew the answer to that one by now: little Michael Muhlenberg had committed the lethal mistake of making it obvious that Libby didn’t have much in the way of maternal talents, and instead of just admitting as much and trying to find something else to do with her life, the murderess had concocted a situation in which she came off looking like a hero for her efforts to save a kid she was actually killing. It was the same pattern we’d identified in the cases of Libby’s “adopted” children, along with the babies at the Lying-in Hospital: the woman had been at her grim work far longer than any of us-except, of course, the Doctor-had suspected, or likely would’ve believed.

There was one bit of information what passed for a helpful clue contained in Mrs. Muhlenberg’s sorry tale: if Libby Hatch had been hiring herself out as a wet nurse, it meant that she had to’ve given birth to a child of her own, at some point. If Libby hadn’t been lying on the hospital forms we’d seen, and was now thirty-nine, then in 1886 she would’ve been twenty-eight, and said kid could’ve been anywhere from an infant to my age-although the fact that she’d shown up at the Muhlenbergs’ alone indicated that the child was probably dead (which came as no big surprise to any of us). But dead or alive, there had to be some evidence of his or her existence somewhere.

So Miss Howard and I would now be looking for more than just Libby’s parents, over on the east side of the Hudson: most probably, another child’s grave awaited us, too. The interview with Mrs. Muhlenberg had given us only a general idea of where to start our search-there was a whole string of small towns on the opposite bank of the river-and because of that we needed to get started as soon as possible. I think Miss Howard would’ve been just as happy to leave that night, but there was no way I was going anywhere in the dark again; besides, we owed El Niño his first night in the bed we’d promised him. Mr. Picton showed him to a room up on the top floor of the house, the two of them chatting like old chums as they went up the stairs: we’d been right in thinking that their vocal natures would make them friends from the start. As for what in the world would become of El Niño once the case was over, Mr. Picton said he wouldn’t at all mind keeping him on as a servant; it’d certainly give the citizens of Ballston Spa something to talk about. His fate happily decided in this manner, the aborigine dove into the moderately sized bed in his room like it was an ocean, pausing in his wild celebration only when Mr. Picton told him that Mrs. Hastings wouldn’t appreciate his rolling around in the bedding with my dress shoes on.