Castle Garden, after the ibn-Ghazi murder. “Fine,” I said. “While you’re waiting, Marcus, see what kind of sense you can make of that map. And remember one thing—” I ran my voice down to a whisper. “No badges. Not until you’ve got some support. It wasn’t too long ago that cops wouldn’t even come into this neighborhood, their chances of getting out were so bad.”
The Isaacsons both nodded, and then Sara and I went out into the hallway, stopping when the man with the nightstick stepped in front of us. “Now suppose youse tell me what’s all dis about an investigation? Is you cops or ain’t you?”
“This is a—private matter,” I answered. “My friends are staying—to wait for the resident.” I automatically went for my billfold and produced ten dollars. “You can just act like you never saw them.”
“For ten bucks?” the man said with a nod. “For ten bucks I’d forget me own muddah’s face.” He cackled once. “Not dat I remember it, ta begin wit!”
Sara and I got outside quickly, and started to walk quietly north and then west, hoping to catch a streetcar at Broadway without any trouble. This would be the trickiest part of our journey, though I didn’t want to tell her as much: there were only two of us now, and one of those two was a woman. In the sixties or seventies any Five Points gang worth its salt would have laid me out and had their way with Sara before we’d gotten a block from Baxter Street. I was just praying that, with dissipation having replaced violence as the neighborhood’s chief pastime in recent years, we’d be able to squeak out unnoticed.
Remarkably, we did. By nine forty-five we were on our way up Broadway, and just a few minutes later our streetcar crossed Houston Street and we jumped off. Unconcerned, now, with whether or not we were spotted together at headquarters, Sara and I rushed into the building as soon as we reached it, then bulled our way up and into Theodore’s office, which was empty. A detective told us that the president had gone home for dinner but was expected back soon—the half-hour wait that followed was maddening. When Theodore did arrive he was a bit alarmed to find us present, but on hearing our news he came alive and began barking orders throughout the second-floor hallway. As he did, a thought occurred to me, and I motioned to Sara, indicating the staircase.
“The note,” I explained, as we went downstairs and toward the front door. “The letter to Mrs. Santorelli—if we can confront Beecham with that, it may help break him down.”
Sara liked the idea, and once outside on Mulberry Street we grabbed a hansom and made for Number 808 Broadway. I wouldn’t call our mood exactly ebullient as we dashed north, but we were quietly alive to the real possibilities of the moment, enough so that our cab ride seemed to take an eternity.
When we entered Number 808 I was moving so fast that I failed to notice, and nearly tripped over, a rather large gunnysack that someone had left in the vestibule. Crouching down I saw a tag attached to the closed top of the bag: NR. 808 B’WAY—6TH FLOOR. I glanced up at Sara and saw that she, too, was examining the sack and the tag.
“You haven’t been ordering produce, have you, John?” she asked, a bit wryly.
“Don’t be ridiculous,” I answered. “Must be something for Marcus and Lucius.”
I studied the sack for a few more seconds, then shrugged and reached down to undo the twine that bound its mouth. The cord was twisted into a complex knot, however, so I pulled out a penknife and slit the thick fabric of the bag from top to bottom.
Out onto the floor, like so much meat, fell Joseph. There were no obvious marks on his body, but the pallor of his skin made it instantly clear that he was dead.
CHAPTER 42
It took the coroner at the Bellevue morgue better than six hours to determine that Joseph’s life had ended when someone jammed either a thin knife, such as a stiletto, or a large needle up under the base of his skull and into his brain. A night spent smoking cigarettes and pacing the hallways of the morgue did nothing for my ability to make sense of this information, when it finally came: I thought briefly of Biff Ellison, and of the quiet, efficient way he settled scores with a similar weapon; yet even in my shocked grief I couldn’t picture Ellison being responsible. Joseph wasn’t one of his boys, and even if Biff had had some new ax to grind with our investigation, such a murderous move would almost certainly have been preceded by an emphatic warning. So unless Byrnes and Connor had coerced Ellison into helping them (a possibility so unlikely as to be impossible), I could think of no explanation and no culprit, save one: Beecham. Somehow, he’d found a way to get close to the boy, despite all my warnings.
My warnings. As Joseph’s little body was wheeled out of one of the morgue’s autopsy rooms, it occurred to me for what must have been the thousandth time that it was meeting me that had brought the boy to such an unhappy end. I had tried to prepare him for every possible danger—but how could I have foreseen that the greatest of those dangers would be to speak to me in the first place? And now here I was at the morgue, telling the coroner that I’d arranged for a funeral and that everything was to be taken care of properly, as if it mattered whether the boy’s body was buried in a nice patch of Brooklyn ground or thrown into the tidal currents of the East River and pulled out to sea. Vanity, arrogance, irresponsibility—all through the night my mind had been pulled back to what Kreizler had said after Mary Palmer’s murder: that in our dash to defeat evil, we had only given it a wider field in which to run its own wretched course.
Lost in thoughts of Kreizler as I wandered out of the morgue and into the dawn, I was perhaps less surprised than I might otherwise have been to see my old friend sitting in his uncovered calash. Cyrus Montrose was in the driver’s seat and he offered a small, sympathetic inclination of his head when he saw me. Laszlo smiled and stepped down from the rig as I stumbled over.
“Joseph…,” I said, my voice cracking from the cigarettes and brooding silence of the night.
“I know,” Laszlo said. “Sara called. I thought you might need some breakfast.”
I nodded weakly and got into the carriage with him. Cyrus urged the horse Frederick forward with a quiet click of his tongue, and soon we were heading west on Twenty-sixth Street very slowly, though the traffic at that early hour was light.
After several minutes I leaned back and rested my head on the folded cover of the calash, sighing heavily and staring at the half-lit, cloudy sky. “It had to be Beecham.” I mumbled.
“Yes,” Laszlo answered quietly.
I turned my head toward him without picking it up. “But there was no mutilation. I couldn’t even see how he’d been killed, there was so little blood. Nothing but a small hole at the base of the skull.”
Laszlo’s eyes went thin. “Quick and clean,” he said. “This wasn’t one of his rituals. This was pragmatic. He killed the boy to protect himself—and to send a message.”
“To me?” I asked.
Kreizler nodded. “Desperate as he is, he won’t go easily.”
I began to shake my head slowly. “But how—
Kreizler’s right eyebrow arched. “Really? Why?”
“I don’t know,” I said in disgust, pulling out yet another cigarette. “Some friend of his had been approached by a man who wanted to take him away. To a—castle above the city, he said. Something like that. It did sound like it might’ve been Beecham, but the man had no facial spasms.”
Laszlo turned away, and spoke carefully: “Ah. Then you didn’t remember?”
“Remember?”
“Adam Dury. He told us that when Japheth was hunting, his spasms went away. I suspect that when he stalks these boys—” Seeing the effect his words were having on me, Kreizler cut his explanation short. “I’m sorry, John.”
I threw my unlit cigarette into the street and clutched my head with both hands. Of course he was right.
