knee, a figure strode out of the dark stairway and into the parlor: Sara.
“Good evening, Dr. Kreizler,” she said, the folds of her emerald-green and peacock-blue evening dress making small whispering sounds as she came into the room.
Kreizler was somewhat taken aback. “Miss Howard,” he said, his eyes clearly delighted but his voice perplexed. “This is a pleasant surprise. Have you brought our liaison?” There was a long pause. Kreizler looked from Sara to me and then back at Sara. His expression did not change as he began to nod. “Ah.
For a moment Sara looked unsure of herself. “I don’t want you to think that I simply badgered the commissioner into this. We discussed it thoroughly.”
“I was there, too,” I said quickly, though a bit unsteadily. “And when you hear the story of our afternoon, Kreizler, you’ll have no doubt that Sara’s the right person for the job.”
“It does make practical sense, Doctor,” Sara added. “No one will notice my activities when I’m at Mulberry Street, and my absences will be even less of a cause for curiosity. There aren’t many other people at headquarters who could say the same. I have a decent background in criminology, and I have access to places and people you and John might not—as we saw today.”
“It seems I missed a great deal today,” Kreizler said, in an ambiguous tone.
“Finally,” Sara continued, hesitant in the face of Laszlo’s coolness, “in the event of trouble…” She quickly pulled a small Colt Number One Derringer from a large muff she wore on her left hand and pointed it at the fireplace. “You’ll find that I’m a better shot than John.”
I took a quick step away from the gun, prompting Kreizler to chuckle once abruptly; Sara apparently thought he was laughing at her, and bridled a bit.
“I assure you, I’m quite serious, Doctor. My father was an expert marksman. My mother, however, was an invalid, and I had no siblings. I therefore became my father’s hunting and trapshooting partner.” All of which was perfectly true. Stephen Hamilton Howard had lived the life of a true country squire on his estate near Rhinebeck, and had trained his only child to ride, shoot, gamble, and drink with any Hudson Valley gentleman—which meant that Sara could do all those things well, and in volume. She indicated the small, delicately engraved pistol in her hand. “Most people consider the derringer a weak weapon; but this one holds a forty-one-caliber bullet, and could knock your man at the piano through the window behind him.”
Kreizler turned toward Cyrus, as if expecting the man to register some sort of alarm—but there was no break in his gentle rendition of “Di provenza il mar.” Laszlo took note of that.
“Not that I prefer this kind of gun,” Sara finished, putting it back in the muff. “But…” She took a deep breath, swelling the pale, bare flesh above the low neckline of her dress. “We
There was another long pause, during which Kreizler’s and Sara’s eyes stayed locked. Then Laszlo looked away, becoming his usual frenetic self. “Indeed we are,” he said, picking up a bit of caviar and a glass and handing them to Sara. “And if we don’t hurry, we shall miss the ‘Questa o quella.’ Cyrus, will you see if Stevie has the barouche ready?” At that, Cyrus was up and making for the stairs, but Kreizler caught him. “And, Cyrus—this is Miss Howard.”
“Yes, sir, Doctor,” Cyrus answered. “We’ve met.”
“Ah,” Kreizler said. “Then it will come as no surprise to learn that she will be working with us?”
“No, sir.” Cyrus gave Sara a slight bow. “Miss Howard,” he said. She nodded and smiled back, and then Cyrus continued his progress to the stairs.
“So Cyrus was involved, as well,” Kreizler said, as Sara drank her vodka quickly yet gracefully. “I confess my interest is piqued. On our way uptown you two must tell me all about this mysterious expedition to—where
“The Santorellis’,” I answered, taking a last mouthful of caviar. “And we have come away loaded with useful information.”
“The Santo—” Kreizler was genuinely impressed, and suddenly much more serious. “But…where? How? You must tell me everything,
Sara and Laszlo walked in front of me down the staircase, chatting as if this development had been expected all along. I breathed deeply in relief, for I hadn’t known how Kreizler would react to Sara’s proposal, and then put another cigarette to my mouth. Before I could light it, however, I was momentarily unnerved again, this time by the unexpected sight of Mary Palmer’s face, which appeared through a crack in the dining room door as I passed. Her wide, pretty eyes were locked on Sara apprehensively, and she seemed to be trembling.
“Things,” I whispered to the girl reassuringly, “are likely to be a little unusual around here, Mary. For the foreseeable future.” She didn’t seem to hear me, but made a small sound and then ran away from the door.
Outside the snow was still falling. The larger of Kreizler’s two carriages, a burgundy barouche with black trim, was waiting. Stevie Taggert had hitched up Frederick and another, matching gelding. Sara, pulling the hood of her cowl up, moved through the front yard and accepted Cyrus’s help getting into the vehicle. Kreizler held me back at the front door.
“An extraordinary woman, Moore,” he whispered matter-of-factly.
I nodded. “Just don’t cross her,” I murmured back. “Her nerves are strung like piano wire.”
“Yes, that’s apparent,” he said. “The father she speaks of—he’s dead.”
“Hunting accident. Eight years ago. They were very close—in fact, she spent some time in a sanatorium afterwards.” I didn’t know whether I should divulge all, but given our situation it seemed advisable. “Some people said it was suicide, but she denies it. Hotly. So that’s a subject you might want to stay away from.”
Kreizler nodded and pulled on his gloves, watching Sara all the while. “Women of such temperament,” he said as we moved to the carriage, “do not seem fated for happiness in our society. But her capabilities are obvious.”
We got inside the barouche, and Sara began to eagerly relate the details of our interview with Mrs. Santorelli. As we made our way through the snow-quieted streets south of Gramercy Park toward Broadway, Kreizler listened without comment, his fidgeting hands the only evidence of his excitement; but by the time we reached Herald Square, where the sounds of human bustling became much louder around the elevated train station, he was full of detailed questions that tested our memories to the utmost. Laszlo’s curiosity was roused by the strange tale of the two ex-cops and the two priests who had accompanied Roosevelt’s detectives, but he had far more interest (as I had suspected he would) in young Giorgio’s sexual behavior and in the boy’s character more generally. “One of the first ways in which we can know our quarry is to know his victims,” Kreizler said, and as we pulled up under the large electric globes that lit the porte-cochere awning of the Metropolitan Opera House he asked Sara and me what sense of the boy we had formed. Each of us needed to think about that one for a bit, and we grew quiet and pensive as Stevie drove off with the barouche and Cyrus accompanied us through the doors of the porte-cochere entrance.
To the old guard of New York society, the Metropolitan Opera was “that yellow brewery uptown.” This terse dismissal was prompted, on the most obvious level, by the boxiness of the building’s Early Renaissance architecture and the color of the bricks used in its construction; but the attitude behind the comment was sparked by the Metropolitan’s upstart history. Occupying the block bounded by Broadway, Seventh Avenue, and Thirty-ninth and Fortieth streets, the Metropolitan, which opened in 1883, had been paid for by seventy-five of New York’s most famous (and infamous) nouveaux riches: men with names like Morgan, Gould, Whitney, and Vanderbilt, none of whom were deemed by the old Knickerbocker clans to be socially acceptable enough to warrant selling them boxes at the venerable Academy of Music on Fourteenth Street. In reply to this unstated yet very apparent assessment of their worth, the founders of the Metropolitan had ordered not one or two tiers of boxes for their new house, but three; and the social wars that were waged in them before, during, and after performances were as vicious as anything that occurred downtown. In spite of all this backbiting, however, the impresarios who managed the Metropolitan, Henry Abbey and Maurice Grau, had brought together some of the best operatic talents in the world; and an evening at the “yellow brewery” was, by 1896, fast becoming a musical experience that no other house or company in the world could surpass.
As we entered the relatively small main vestibule, which had none of the opulence of its various European counterparts, we got the usual stares from several broad-minded souls who were not happy to see Kreizler accompanied by a black man. Most, however, had seen Cyrus before and endured his presence with weary
