The Alienist - Caleb Carr [139]
The difficulty was that Kreizler couldn’t just drop everything and shoot off to the capital—none of us could, for we were just a couple of days away from Pentecost. There was nothing to do but put the trip to Washington at the top of the list of things to be attended to after our next all-night vigil, then swallow our excitement and patiently focus on the immediate job to be done. Given the poor results that had attended our Ascension Day efforts, however, I couldn’t help feeling that such focus was going to prove somewhat difficult to achieve.
Nonetheless, when Pentecost Sunday (the feast celebrating the descent of the Holy Spirit on the Apostles) arrived we all returned to our various nocturnal aeries and waited again for the appearance of our killer. I cannot say what the mood on the other three rooftops was; but for Stevie and myself, up above the Slide, boredom struck early. It being Sunday night fairly little noise echoed up from Bleecker Street, while the occasional grunt and hiss of the Sixth Avenue Elevated nearby evolved in quality from monotonous to somewhat lulling. Before long it was all I could do to stay awake.
At about twelve-thirty I glanced over to see Stevie quietly laying out a deck of cards in thirteen piles on the tar in front of him. “Solitaire?” I whispered.
“Jewish faro,” he answered, giving the criminal class’s name for the game of stuss, a particularly shady and complicated method of bilking suckers that I’d never been able to comprehend. Seeing a chance to fill this void in my gambling education, I crept over to sit by Stevie, and he quietly tried for the better part of an hour to explain the game to me. I absorbed none of it; and finally, frustrated as well as bored, I stood up and looked out at the city around us.
“This is useless,” I decided quietly. “He’s never going to show up.” I turned to look across Cornelia Street. “I wonder how the others are doing.”
The building that housed the Black and Tan—where Cyrus and Lucius had been posted—was just across the way, and looking beyond its cornice I could see the back of Lucius’s balding pate reflected in the moonlight. I laughed quietly and called it to Stevie’s attention.
“He oughta wear a hat,” Stevie laughed. “If we can see it, so can other people.”
“True,” I answered; and then, as the balding head moved to another spot on the roof and finally disappeared, my face screwed up in puzzlement. “Has Lucius grown since we started this investigation?”
“Must’ve been standing on the dividing wall,” Stevie answered, going back to his cards.
In such innocuous ways are disasters presaged. It was another fifteen minutes before a series of urgent shouts that I recognized to be Lucius’s started to blare across Cornelia Street; and when I looked over, the urgency and fear in the detective sergeant’s face were enough to make me immediately grab Stevie by the collar and head for the staircase. It was apparent even to my tired, bored brain that we’d had our first contact with the killer.
CHAPTER 26
* * *
Once on the sidewalk, Stevie and I dispatched our waiting contingent of street arabs to fetch Kreizler, Roosevelt, Sara, and Marcus, then sped across Cornelia Street to the Black and Tan. Making straight for the structure’s front door, we ran headlong into Frank Stephenson, who had been drawn out of his infamous brothel by Lucius’s shouts for assistance. Like most men of his profession, Stephenson employed plenty of muscle, and several of these thugs were standing on the stoop with him, blocking our entrance. I was in no mood, however, to go through the usual game of threat and counterthreat with them: I simply said that we were on police business, that there was a police officer on the roof, and that the president of the Board of Police Commissioners would be arriving soon. That litany was enough to get Stephenson and his boys out of the way, and in seconds Stevie