Caleb Carr - The Angel Of Darkness

Her head now completely clear, Miss Howard got into the lead torpedo boat without any trouble, and waited for Lucius to bring Ana down the ladder to her; but, not unpredictably, Mr. Roosevelt stepped in to do the honors.

“You get back to your boat, Detective Sergeant,” he said, taking the baby. “I’ve had quite a lot of experience with such little bundles as this one, and you may rest assured that I shall get her safely aboard!” Cradling Ana in one arm, Mr. Roosevelt then made his way nimbly down the long ladder from the pier to our boat. He moved with much greater ease, considering his cargo, than any of us could have done; and I remembered, watching him, that he had five young kids of his own, who he must have toted around in similar if not identical situations many times.

Once he’d gotten aboard and was handing the baby over to Miss Howard, Mr. Roosevelt took a moment to actually look at Ana’s appealing little features. “Why,” he said, in a soft way what wasn’t at all like his usual manner, “what an extraordinary face. Look at her eyes, Doctor!”

“Yes,” the Doctor said, as he jumped down from the ladder into the boat. “I’ve seen them, Roosevelt. A beautiful child.”

Letting one of his big fingers play around little Ana’s face, Mr. Roosevelt offhandedly asked, “Whose is she?”

Mr. Moore, Miss Howard, the Doctor, Cyrus, and I all froze; but fortunately Mr. Roosevelt was too preoccupied to notice.

“Whose?” the Doctor repeated smoothly, as our boat’s engines rumbled to life and our crew began to cast off. “Does it matter, Roosevelt?”

“Matter?” Mr. Roosevelt answered with a shrug. “I don’t know that it matters , but after what we’ve been through, I should like to meet the parents.” He grinned wide as Ana reached out to grasp hold of his finger. “And tell them how lucky they are to have engaged you all.”

“Her parents,” Miss Howard said, coolly and quickly, “are consular officials. French consular officials. Unfortunately, they plan to return home as soon as they’re reunited with the child. Understandably.”

“Ah. Yes.” Mr. Roosevelt nodded, looking serious for a moment. “That is understandable, I suppose-quite understandable. But I hope you’ll emphasize to them, Sara, that this sort of incident is hardly typical of our nation.”

“Of course,” Miss Howard answered.

Grinning again as he went back to studying Ana, Mr. Roosevelt said, “French, you say? What a pity they weren’t Spanish. She has something of a Spanish look about her, this little one. It might have been useful to show those blackguards how a free people handles a problem like this!”

“Mmm, yes,” Mr. Moore said casually. “It might have been.”

“Still,” Mr. Roosevelt went on, as our boat cruised out into the center of the Hudson, “as you say, Doctor, it hardly matters who her family is. She is a child, and she is safe now.” At that Ana reached out again to clutch Mr. Roosevelt’s playful finger, causing his smile to widen. “Do you know,” he said quietly, “I think a baby’s hand is the most beautiful thing in the world.”

Once we were all back at Seventeenth Street, Lucius discovered that the Doctor had a nursing bottle in his consulting room (he used it, what you might call ironically enough, to lecture women who were having trouble weaning their kids) and began to mix a concoction in it what he thought might help Ana Linares get over the touch of colic what was continuing, every few minutes, to take away her usual happy smile and playful laughter. Milk, honey, and the little paregoric what was left over from my attempts to dose Kat all went into the brew, and as the detective sergeant fed it to the baby she did seem to regain her full color and spriteliness of spirit. It was a breath of fresh air, to have a contented, even happy, symbol of new life among a group of people who’d experienced nothing but violence and killing for days and nights on end. In fact, so potent was the effect of Ana’s presence that we all took turns holding and feeding her, letting the little girl’s unspoiled joy at being alive and our knowledge that we’d rescued her from a close brush with death perform the kind of healing magic what only children can bring.

Along toward one P.M.Mr. Roosevelt and Lieutenant Kimball took their leave and headed back for Washington, to resume the business of planning the war with Spain what they believed and hoped was on its way. I don’t know to this day if anyone ever told the former police commissioner just how much our business that night might’ve been connected, if things had broken only a hair differently, to the outbreak of that war; something tells me that he and the Doctor must have had words about it before Mr. Roosevelt’s death earlier this year. But the most important fact, then as now, was that Mr. Roosevelt had come to our aid without knowing anything more than that his friends and an innocent child were in trouble. It only made me like and respect the man all the more; and as I think of him now, pulling away from the house in his landau on his way to Grand Central, flashing us that wonderful grin what would one day keep political cartoonists in such clover, I wondered why it was that so few men had his kind of strength: that particular ability to be gentle and loving with a baby on the one hand, and to crack the heads of mugs like the Hudson Dusters on the other. It’s a question what still dogs me.

At about one-thirty the detective sergeants returned from the First Precinct house down on New Street, where the body of Libby Hatch’d been taken after its arrival at the police pier. From the First the corpse would be shipped on up to the morgue, a fact what made my spirit burn: I didn’t much like the idea of the murderess being in so much as the same building as Kat, even if they were both dead. Still, there was nothing to do about it, as an autopsy had to be performed on Libby. (The conclusions of said procedure, we later found out, were “inconclusive,” just as Mr. Moore’d suspected they would be.) As for El Niño, I half expected that he might telephone the house that night, just to make sure everything’d turned out okay; but then I realized that, so far as he was concerned, everything already had. His jefe had been avenged, and baby Ana would be returned to her mother; all that was left for him in New York was trouble with the law, and when I took the time to consider it I realized that I’d much rather he move fast to get safely out of town-and maybe out of the country-than slow down to risk contact with us.

For her part, Miss Howard had, according to plan, phoned uptown to the French consulate straightway when we returned to the Doctor’s house, to inform Señora Linares that all was well and that, as soon as she had police protection, she’d bring Ana to her. We all knew that the detective sergeants were needed for this job, and that they’d best be armed when they carried it out: there was no way of saying what new servants Señor Linares had hired when El Niño’d come over to our side, or if they, like the aborigine, had been keeping watch over the Doctor’s house. But as it turned out, such caution wasn’t necessary: Miss Howard, Marcus, and Lucius got the baby back to her mother without any sign of trouble. When they returned, they told us that the señora was in the process of deciding whether to go back to her family in Spain or to head west, to those parts of the United States where new beginnings were the common coin, and where, I’d once hoped, Kat might’ve been able to get a fresh start on life. But the great and inexpressible joy the señora’d experienced when she’d been reunited with Ana, Miss Howard and the Isaacsons said, was enough to make such decisions seem of small importance for the moment, and had given our three teammates the powerful feeling that everything we’d been through had been well worth it.