Caleb Carr - The Angel Of Darkness

Finding himself a piece of an old tarpaulin, Hickie had to battle one of his dogs, a midsized mastiff, for possession of it. “The money? Hmm… lemme think-go on, Beauregard, let go a that damned thing!” He finally pulled the tarpaulin away from the dog, and as he came back over to the cage I climbed down with Mike. “Thith ith a firtht, thith ith.” Hickie carefully took Mike out of my arms and held him up to look into his eyes. “You do a good job and keep yerthelf thafe, now, do you hear that?” He kissed the top of Mike’s head and slipped him into the cage, then covered it. “Lemme thee… he meanth an awful lot to me, doth Mike…”

It was pretty obvious Hickie was waiting for me to make him an offer, and I pulled what seemed like a big number out of the air. “How about fifty bucks? For the week?”

Hickie got that glow bargainers sometimes do, when they’ve been offered more than they expected and figure that because they have, maybe they can do even better. “Make it theventy, Thtevie-thimply to keep my thoul at retht, mind you-and I’ll know you to truly be the gentleman what I’d alwayth taken you for.”

I nodded once, and we shook on it. “You’ll have to come with me, though, to pick up the money,” I said. “I ain’t got that kind of cash on me.”

“And I wouldn’t let Mike go without theein’ where you’re takin’ him,” Hickie answered. He picked up the cage and indicated the door. “Lead the way, old thon!”

We got back outside and made our way out of the shantytown and over to Park Row, where it was an easy job to catch a hansom uptown. It was a jolly ride, with Hickie full of stories about old friends of ours, Mike the ferret going wild inside the covered cage as he smelled the horse in front of us, and the cabbie wondering what in the world two characters like ourselves could be up to-not to mention what we might be carrying in the strange crate that sat on Hickie’s lap.

When we reached the Seventeenth Street house, we found that the Doctor, Cyrus, and Miss Howard had returned-though there was still no sign of Mrs. Leshko, a fact what was beginning to make the Doctor wonder if he shouldn’t call the police. (He didn’t; and at about 5:30 the woman finally did stumble in, ranting something about Cossacks, the Russian tsar, and her husband. The Doctor just told her to go home and come back in the morning.) Hickie was more than a little impressed at where I’d ended up after all my years of thieving and conning, and I think for a few seconds the sight of the Doctor’s house made him wonder if there wasn’t some sense to the legitimate life, after all. He made quite an impression on the others, particularly the Doctor, who took an extreme interest in Hickie’s homegrown methods of animal training.

“It’s really rather remarkable,” the Doctor said, after Hickie’d made his good-byes to Mike in my room and then headed back downtown. “Do you know, Stevie, there is a brilliant Russian physiologist and psychologist-Pavlov is his name-whom I met during my trip to St. Petersburg. He is working along similar lines as this ‘Hickie’-the causes of animal behavior. I believe he would benefit greatly from a conversation with your friend.”

“Not likely,” I answered. “Hickie don’t much like leaving the old neighborhood, even on jobs-and I don’t think he can read or write.”

Chuckling a bit, the Doctor put an arm on my shoulder. “I was,” he said, “speaking rather hypothetically, Stevie…”

Mike the ferret’s taking up residence in my room presented me with a situation the likes of which I’d never before experienced. Suddenly I had a pet, a roommate, and for the next few days my own activities were pretty well dictated by the need to train and feed the animal. He was a living responsibility, an idea what had never before appealed to me; and yet I found that I didn’t half mind it, once I was actually in the situation. In fact, Mike became the center of my attention and-given his lively, affectionate manner-my joy and amusement, too. It ended up taking Miss Howard better than a day to get in touch with Señora Linares, and another day to lay hands on a piece of little Ana’s bedclothing; and I spent most of that time either romping around my room with Mike, trying to locate mice in our basement for him, or chatting away to the animal as if I expected answers. I’d seen people behave that way with pets before, but never having had one I’d never understood such conduct; suddenly the appeal was very clear, and as the time went by I found myself deliberately putting thoughts of Mike’s departure out of my head.

There were plenty of developments to take my mind off of that prospect. Detective Sergeant Marcus and Mr. Moore did eventually locate the widow of the contractor Henry Bates, and the news they brought back from Brooklyn was disturbing: Bates’s wife declared that he’d never had a sick day in his life, and that his heart had been as strong as an ox’s. On top of that, he hadn’t died a day or two after completing his job for Nurse Hunter-he’d died that very day, some six months ago, and at Number 39 Bethune Street. He’d been struck just after taking a cup of tea-fortified with some whiskey-what’d been offered by the mistress of the house. Nurse Hunter herself had apparently reported all this to the coroner, and had gone on to say that Bates’s attack had occurred as he picked up a heavy sack of tools on his way out of the house. The coroner had told Mrs. Bates that such things did happen, and that Bates could have had some hidden heart defect that didn’t make itself known until the very end. He’d asked Mrs. Bates if she wanted him to do an autopsy to confirm this; but she was a superstitious and fanatically religious woman, who had some strange notions about what would happen to her husband’s soul if his heart was removed from his dead body.

This slightly demented attitude made it tougher for Mr. Moore and Marcus to buy the next theory what Mrs. Bates shared with them-that her husband had been seduced by Nurse Hunter-even though they wanted very much to. Her statement that Mr. Bates had been directed by his boss at Number 39 Bethune Street to hire and fire construction crews on a regular basis, on the other hand, seemed to make sense: Nurse Hunter would want as few people as possible to know the complete details of what she was building. The only man who wound up with such knowledge was Mr. Bates; and it was the Doctor and Detective Sergeant Lucius’s belief that if we checked around the Hunter household carefully enough, we’d probably find some dried purple foxglove. Nurse Hunter might even have it growing in her yard; wherever she obtained it, the flower-source of the powerful drug digitalis, what could stop even the strongest man’s heart-could easily have been mixed into that last fatal cup of tea, and any unusual odor covered up by the smell of whiskey.

This might seem to’ve been so much of what the Doctor called “hypothetical” thinking-and so, in fact, it was. But nobody who’d ever seen the cold glare that could come into Elspeth Hunter’s golden eyes would’ve doubted for a second that she was capable of such an act. Still, the thought that we were up against somebody we now had good reason to believe had killed not only a whole group of infants but at least one full-grown adult male was more than a little frightening. In fact, it seemed like every day or two we were coming across some new revelation about the woman what proved her to be dangerous in a way we hadn’t anticipated. Such didn’t make preparing for our break-in to her house any easier. But other than carrying more and bigger firearms, there really wasn’t much of a way to improve on the plan itself; and when Miss Howard showed up on Thursday morning with one of Ana Linares’s little nightgowns, my part in that plan became more pressing: I now had to spend long hours making sure Mike was properly trained, being as an awful lot was riding on his nose.