Caleb Carr - The Angel Of Darkness

“Yes,” Lucius replied nervously, as he carefully stood up with the baby. “I think that would be a wise idea. Sara, would you like to-”

Miss Howard, though, made no move to take the child; instead she just smiled a little deviously. “You’re doing extremely well, Lucius. And I’ve had a rather nasty bump on the head, I’m afraid-I might lose my balance on the way out.”

“Do you mind taking her, Detective Sergeant?” the Doctor asked, roaming around the room and trying, it seemed to me, to burn the startling image of it into his mind before we had to leave.

“No, no,” Lucius answered, still rocking the baby. Then he turned a warning look on the rest of us. “I just don’t want to hear about it for years to come, that’s all.” Taking a few steps forward, he stood by the Doctor and gazed around the room with him. “A little difficult to accept, isn’t it?”

The Doctor only shrugged. “Is it? I wonder…”

“What do you mean, Laszlo?” Mr. Moore said, picking up a little stuffed dog and rubbing it against his nose. “Given who we’ve been dealing with, I would’ve expected something a lot more- austere . And that’s putting it euphemistically.”

“That was only one side of her, John,” Miss Howard said, running a finger over the grinning baby animals of the room’s wallpaper.

“Indeed, Sara,” the Doctor agreed quietly.

“Well,” I offered, finally getting over my own amazement, “one thing’s for sure, anyway.”

“Stevie?” the Doctor asked, looking my way.

I shrugged. “She finally got some privacy. Had to dig halfway to China to get it, but…”

The Doctor nodded. “True.” He glanced at Ana Linares. “And yet, even here, sealed off from the world, she could not-could not…” The Doctor’s words trailed off as he stared into the baby’s enormous round eyes, which were almost as dark as his own. “You,” he said, forgetting his last thought and putting a hand to Ana’s chin, making her smile that big, game grin what we’d come to know so well from the photograph her mother’d given us. “You have been a very difficult young lady to find, Señorita Linares. But thank God you’re safe. Thank God…”

“Well,” Mr. Moore said, “she won’t stay safe if we all don’t get out of here. So get a good last look, Kreizler-something tells me we won’t be coming back into Duster territory for quite a while.”

With that we all started back into the passageway, leaving the Doctor behind for a few seconds to give him just a little more time to mentally memorize the strange hideaway what had been Libby Hatch’s obsession, and what was now, being as she was dead, the only remaining blueprint he had to the workings of her tangled mind.

Back upstairs, we found that Mr. Roosevelt and Lieutenant Kimball had come into the house, along with Marcus. The rest of the navy boys were gathered around the steps outside, and a couple of them were carrying a folding stretcher what they must’ve fetched from one of the torpedo boats. Strapped to the stretcher was Libby Hatch’s body, draped in a bedsheet. The general mood of the bunch seemed to have changed from celebration to concern: apparently a couple of sailors had seen a few Dusters making moves what indicated that the gang was in fact preparing a new attack. So we got out onto the sidewalk quickly, the sailors forming a circle around Lucius, who still had the baby, and the men what were carrying the stretcher. Then, at double time, we began to trot back toward the river.

As we went, I fell in beside Cyrus. His clothes were a little rearranged, but otherwise he looked hale, hearty-and very satisfied. “Ain’t many people what come away from locking horns with Ding Dong looking as healthy as you do, Cyrus,” I said, smiling up to him.

He shrugged, though he couldn’t help but grin a bit, himself. “That’s because there aren’t many people who get him in a fair fight,” he answered.

“So I’m guessing you came out on top?”

Glancing up ahead to the construction site of the Bell Laboratories, what was now on our left, Cyrus answered, “I’ll let you be the judge of that.”

He nodded in the direction of a big pile of bricks: propped up against them was Ding Dong, his face a patchwork of bruises and his arms and legs sticking out at what you might call angles.

“Jesus,” I breathed, whistling low. “Is he alive?”

“Oh, he’s alive, all right,” Cyrus answered. “Though in the morning he may wish he wasn’t.” I nodded grimly at that, feeling some deep sense of justice; and as we trotted on toward the river, Cyrus looked down at me meaningfully. “You know I always thought she was trouble, Stevie,” he said. “I won’t deny that now. But she did right by you, by us, and by the baby, in the end-so I guess I was wrong.”

I gave him a look what I hoped was as full of thanks as I felt, “You weren’t wrong,” I said. “Trouble she was. But she was other things, too.”

Cyrus nodded. “That’s so…”

The general mood of our little army improved considerably once we got back across West Street and started to move, at the same double-time pace, south on the waterfront. As the huge black outline of the White Star Line pier began to grow bigger, you could start to feel the cloud of the anxiousness lifting from over us; but it was up to Mr. Roosevelt to give the official signal that it was okay to breathe easier.

“Well, then, Doctor!” he boomed as we trotted past Perry Street. “It would seem that we’ve enjoyed a victory!”

“I shall reserve final judgment until we are safely cast off,” the Doctor answered cautiously, still watching the streets around us. “But the preliminary results are encouraging.”

Mr. Roosevelt roared with laughter. “By God, Kreizler, if I ever met a man more apt to see the dark side of a situation, I’m not aware of it! True, we didn’t take that infernal scoundrel Knox into custody-but we delivered a message that those swine won’t soon forget, and at the cost of only a few bruises to our own men! Enjoy the moment, Doctor-savor it!”

“Our casualties were no greater than bruises?” the Doctor asked, still not ready to give in to celebrating.

“Well, all right, two men’s arms were broken,” Mr. Roosevelt conceded. “And another suffered a fractured jaw. But I assure you, the culprits were paid back with interest. So I’ll have none of your melancholy, my friend, none at all! You must learn to enjoy your triumphs!”

The Doctor did smile at that, though I think it was as much out of amusement at his old friend’s incorrigible attitude as any real joy over what had just taken place at Number 39 Bethune Street. Oh, he was happy we’d rescued little Ana, I didn’t doubt that; but the final secrets of why all the horrors we’d experienced had been necessary in the first place were now lying forever hidden on the stretcher what the two sailors next to Detective Sergeant Lucius were carrying. Legally prevented, for the time being, from using the operating theater at his Institute, the Doctor had no place to perform a postmortem on Libby Hatch’s brain, to see if it’d been abnormal in some way; and even if he hadn’t been so restricted, the detective sergeants couldn’t exactly deliver a body with a dissected head to their superiors. Coming on top of Libby’s death, these considerations would, I knew, always prevent the Doctor from seeing our experience as “a triumph,” just as Kat’s death would always make the memory of the adventure especially bittersweet for me.

We got to the torpedo boats without any trouble, and got Libby Hatch’s body stowed aboard the closest of them. The Isaacsons planned to accompany said boat to a police pier down by the Battery, where they’d be able to close the case what their department had been so unwilling to open in the first place. Miss Howard, in the meantime, would take Ana Linares in the lead boat with the rest of us, first back to the Brooklyn Navy Yard and from there on to the Doctor’s house. Once safely home, Miss Howard would telephone the señora, who, since that afternoon, had been waiting for a message at the French consulate, where she’d gone to hide from her husband.