Caleb Carr - The Angel Of Darkness

“Okay, Mike,” I whispered, “just gimme a minute.”

Glancing around I saw that Mr. Moore’s sketch of the basement had been pretty well on the money: about the only things to be seen were a furnace, which stood behind a load-bearing brick dividing wall; some cabinets containing what looked like old cans of paint; a few garden tools (rusty ones, which came as no big surprise); some chairs and a table what were in even worse shape than the ones upstairs; a small collection of picture frames, all empty; and a big wooden rack full of jars of preserves. The only thing he’d gotten wrong was the floor, and his mistake was easy to understand: though the thing was concrete, it was covered in a layer of soot and dirt so thick that it could easily have been mistaken for bare earth.

But there was no sign of any baby, and no indication that one’d ever been there.

Mike was by now pitching a positive fit in the satchel, and I looked down to see his snout pushing out from between two buckled fasteners. “Okay, Mike, okay, this is your time, son,” I said, moving to undo the buckles on the satchel. I’d only managed to get one open before he shot out of the thing and onto the floor, moving as he’d done the first time I’d seen him: like he was made out of liquid. He got down my leg and onto the floor, held his nose up above his spread-out forepaws, then raced once around the big furnace. Pausing for just a second, he got up on his hind legs, the little dark eyes taking in the whole room in just a second or two. Then he shot behind and around the pieces of furniture, through the picture frames, and up the side of one old cabinet.

I wrinkled my brow at him. “What’s going on, Mike?” I asked, but he only did another lap around the room, looking like the proverbial blind dog in a butcher shop: he could smell it, but he couldn’t find it. Then he reached the rack of preserves that stood against the brick dividing wall next to the furnace, and I thought he was going to turn apoplectic on me. He leapt up and into one of the shelves, then ducked behind a few jars, reappeared, and moved up to the next shelf in a clawing, lightning-fast streak. But just like that he was on his way back down to the floor again, and around to the side of the thing.

And all the while he was sniffing and clawing, sniffing and clawing, trying to find, it seemed, some way to move the rack.

How long it took me to understand what I was looking at I’m not sure; but however long, it was too long, because I should’ve gotten the point as soon as I saw that rack. After all, I’d had enough clues: the flower boxes on Sunday; the dismal backyard; the unhealthy kitchen; the spare front room, as hospitable as the barracks in the Boys’ House of Refuge; not to mention all the conversations about Nurse Hunter’s character what I’d been privy to. They were all part of a pattern, and so was that rack of preserves-but it took a half-crazed ferret to drive the idea home in my head:

“Wait a minute,” I mumbled, as I walked over to the rack. “ Preserves ? Who’s she trying to kid?”

I grabbed one of the jars off the rack and unscrewed the rubber-lined tin lid: looking down, I saw a thick layer of mold across the top of the contents. Making a sour face, I quickly screwed the top back on and tried another jar, only to find the same thing inside. I tried two more jars from different parts of the rack, and when I found them to be in similar shape, I just stood back for a second, pondering it. Then I looked down at Mike: he was still scratching away at the bottom of the rack, first in front, then around to one side, then to the other, never getting anywhere what with the concrete, but desperate to all the same.

“Unh- hunh ,” I noised, stepping forward again. “Well, then…” I took a deep breath, laid hold of the corner of the rack, strained to move it away from the dividing wall, and-

And nothing. I tried again, putting my full weight into the attempt but gaining no greater result. I might as well have been trying to move the house. Looking around, I caught sight of the rusty garden tools and ran over to grab an old hoe. I tried to slide the lip of its blade into a narrow crevice between the back of the rack and the bricks. It wouldn’t go. I used the heel of my hand to jam it in and finally got a small purchase; but when I laid hold of the end of the hoe’s wooden handle and pulled it so that the blade would push the rack away from the wall, the tool snapped into two pieces. And it wasn’t the wooden handle that broke: it was the metal stem of the blade, half an inch of forged steel.

“What in hell …?” I mumbled, staring at the thing.

It was odd, all right; but I’d taken part in enough robberies in my life to know that when you were faced with a safe you didn’t have the tools to crack, you didn’t stick around to wonder why. I scooped up the still clawing Mike, who seemed to sense that he hadn’t done the job he’d been hired for and fought against me as I stuffed him back into the satchel and fastened it up good and tight. Going back to the stairs, I got halfway up them when-

Gunshots. I froze, already trying to figure how I was going to explain my presence in the basement. Then I realized: they weren’t gunshots but firecrackers, out on the street. They must have been right out on the street, too, judging by their volume. Sighing with relief and able to move again, I reached over to shut off the basement light, then carefully moved on up to the door and opened it, the oiled hinges swinging silently.

Once in the front room again, I could hear the laughter of a bunch of kids out on the street. Then a few more firecrackers went off, their sound sharp and startling against the distant, dull thunder of the bigger fireworks over the river. I looked around quickly. We weren’t going to get the baby out that night, I knew that much, but I couldn’t bring myself to leave empty-handed. There had to be something …

I glanced at the secretary, and remembered what Marcus had said: if the Hunter woman had thought to cover the thing before she’d asked them in, it stood to reason that there was something that’d be of use to us in it. I grabbed my collection of picks out of my pants pocket and dashed over to it, getting the lock in the lid undone faster than even I’d thought I could’ve.

When I pulled the lid down and open, my first reaction was disappointment: there wasn’t anything but some letters in the desk’s little wooden slots, and a stack of papers on a worn-out blotter in front of them. Before locking the thing up again, though, I decided to overrule my thief’s instinct that such items were worthless, and picked some of the papers up to read-wisely, as it turned out.

At first they made no sense to me. The items on top were written on stationery from St. Luke’s Hospital: they were addressed to Elspeth Hatch, and they seemed to be a bunch of advisories concerning the condition of a child named Jonathan. Below these were a series of hospital admitting forms what seemed to pertain to the same child. And finally, there were a couple of old newspapers, all folded up and dating from two years before. I flipped back to the hospital admitting forms, not knowing what I was looking at or for, exactly: they were all too full of unreadable handwriting, all too complicated-

But then I made out a few words that stopped me cold. At the bottom of one form appeared the pretyped word DIAGNOSIS:-and next to it somebody had scrawled RESPIRATORY FAILURE, CYANOSIS.

That was enough for me. I took the whole stack of papers, stuffed them inside my shirt, and closed the secretary. I was sure that I’d found something, sure that I hadn’t wasted-

“Don’t you move, you little bastard!”