“You may,” the old woman answered, in a tone that indicated she was very familiar with being waited on hand and foot. “This wretched nurse of mine is utterly useless!”
“Oh, surely not,” I answered, eyeing the walking stick that the woman was leaning on: it had a fine head of heavy silver, which was fashioned into the likeness of a swan. I seized the woman’s arm and guided her into a seat. “But there are limits,” I said, surprised at the old woman’s weight and ungainliness, “to even the best nurse’s capabilities.” The nurse gave me a smile, at that, and I took the opportunity to lay hold of the old woman’s stick. “If you’ll allow me to hold this, madam, I think we can—there!” With a loud groan the seat received its occupant, who let out a rush of air.
“Oh!” the woman exclaimed. “Oh, yes, that’s better. Thank you, sir. You are a gentleman.”
I smiled again. “A pleasure,” I said, walking away.
As I passed Kreizler he gave me a dumbfounded look. “Moore, what the devil—”
I indicated silence to him, then approached the rear door of the car, keeping my face to one side so that I couldn’t be seen from without. The two men were still arguing with the station attendant on the platform, about what I couldn’t tell; but when I looked down I saw that one of them held a rifle case. “He’ll have to go first,” I mumbled to myself; but before making any move I waited for the train to start rolling out of the station.
When that moment finally came I heard the two men outside yell some final, and fairly raw, insults at the stationman: in seconds they would turn and be inside. I took a deep breath, then opened the door quickly and quietly.
Not for nothing had I spend many seasons following the trials and tribulations of New York’s baseball Giants. During afternoons in Central Park I’d developed a healthy batting swing of my own, which I now exercised with the old woman’s cane across the neck and skull of the thug who held the rifle case. The man cried out, but before he could even clutch at the injury I’d put a hand between his shoulder blades and shoved him over the railing of the observation deck. Although the train was still moving fairly slowly, there was no chance of the man getting back on board—but I was still faced with the second thug, who screamed “What in hell?” as he spun on me.
Suspecting that his first instinct would be to go for my throat, I crouched down low and let him have the silver swan in the groin. The man doubled over for just an instant, and when he rose again he looked more infuriated than disabled by the blow. He threw a fist that glanced off my skull as I leaned out over the railroad tracks to avoid it. The train, I divined from a brief, somewhat dizzy glance downward, was picking up speed. Clumsy even for a man his size, the thug had stumbled when his blow failed to land securely, and as he tried to regain his balance I laid the swan across his cheek, although the move was cramped and didn’t prevent him from coming for me again. I held the stick up with both hands, but my opponent, anticipating another swing, raised his beefy arms to protect either side of his head. Then he grinned maliciously and moved forward.
“Now, you shit,” he grunted, and then he suddenly lunged. I had only one avenue of attack: leveling the stick at his throat, I shot its end into his Adam’s apple sharply, producing a sudden, choked cry and momentarily paralyzing the man. I quickly dropped the stick, grabbed hold of the roof of the deck, pulled myself up, and let the thug have a full kick with both feet. The blow sent him, too, over the railing, and into an embankment by the tracks. There he rolled to a halt, still clutching his throat.
Lowering myself back down I took a few deep, gasping breaths, then looked up to see Kreizler coming through the door.
“Moore!” he said, crouching by me. “Are you all right?” I nodded, still breathing hard, as Laszlo looked into the distance behind us. “Your condition certainly seems preferable to the state
With my pulse finally beginning to calm, I straightened out my clothes, then picked up the walking stick and headed into the car. Stumbling a bit as I walked down the aisle, I approached the old woman.
“Here you are, madam,” I said, cordially if still a bit breathlessly. She drew back in fear. “I only wanted to admire it in the sunlight.”
The woman accepted the stick without saying anything; but as I walked back to my seat I heard her shriek and exclaim: “No—get it away! There’s
Collapsing with a groan, I was joined by Kreizler, who offered me his flask. “I can only suppose that those were
I shook my head and had a drink. “No,” I breathed. “Connor’s boys. More than that I can’t tell you.”
“Did they really intend to
I shrugged. “I doubt we’ll ever know. And frankly, I’d rather not talk about it just at the moment. Besides, we were in the midst of a very important discussion, before they butted in…”
The conductor soon appeared, and as we bought two tickets to New York from him, I began to cross-examine Laszlo about the whole Mary Palmer business, not because I had any trouble believing it—no one who’d ever met the girl would have had any trouble believing it—but because, on the one hand, it soothed my nerves, and, on the other, it disarmed Kreizler so thoroughly and refreshingly. All the dangers we’d faced that day, indeed all the grimness of our investigation generally, somehow shrank in significance as Laszlo very tenuously revealed his personal hopes for the future. It was an unfamiliar sort of conversation for him, and difficult in many ways; but never had I seen the man look or sound so completely human as he did on that train ride.
And never would I see him so again.
CHAPTER 36
Our train, a local to begin with, made abominably poor time, so that when we stumbled out of the Grand Central Depot the first hints of dawn were beginning to show in the eastern sky. After agreeing that the long job of interpreting the information we’d gotten from Adam Dury could wait until that afternoon, Kreizler and I got into separate cabs and headed for our respective homes to get some sleep. All seemed quiet at my grandmother’s house when I reached Washington Square, and it was my hope that I’d be able to slip into bed before the morning’s activities began. I almost made it, too; but just as I was preparing to undress, having successfully navigated the stairs without making a sound, a light knocking came at my bedroom door. Before I’d given any reply, Harriet’s head poked into the room.
“Oh, Mr. John, sir,” she said, clearly very upset. “Thank heavens.” She came fully into the room, pulling her robe tighter around herself. “It’s Miss Howard, sir—she was calling all yesterday evening, and last night, as well.”
“Sara?” I said, alarmed at the look on Harriet’s usually cheerful face. “Where is she?”
“At Dr. Kreizler’s—she said you’d find her there. There’s been some sort of—well, I don’t know, sir, she didn’t explain much of anything, but something terrible’s happened, I could tell it from her voice.”
I jammed my feet back into my shoes in a rush. “Dr. Kreizler’s?” I said, my heart beginning to race. “What in the world’s she doing there?”
Harriet wrung her hands vigorously. “Like I say, sir, she didn’t tell me—but please hurry, she’s called more than a dozen times!”
Like a shot I was back out onto the street. Knowing that I wouldn’t find a cab any closer than Sixth Avenue at that hour, I bolted west at the fastest pace I could manage and didn’t come to a halt till I’d jumped into a hansom that was parked underneath the El tracks. I gave the driver Kreizler’s address and told him the matter was urgent, at which he grabbed his whip and put it to work. As we charged uptown—myself in a kind of fearful daze, too tired and mystified to make sense out of Harriet’s statement—I began to feel an occasional splash against my face and leaned out of the cab to look at the sky: heavy clouds had rolled in over the city, staving off the light of daybreak and moistening the streets with a steady rain.
