The Alienist - Caleb Carr [157]
Odd how fear can cure exhaustion. I was suddenly aware of a new burst of energy, all of it directed at my feet. But flight was out of the question—Connor was quite serious, I knew, about his willingness to shoot us. So I pulled Kreizler, who struggled and objected all the way, to the rear of the ambulance. As we got in I looked up just long enough to see that the driver of the vehicle was one of the men who’d tried to waylay Sara and me at the Santorellis’ flat. Loose ends were beginning to come together.
Connor locked the ambulance door from the outside, then climbed up top with the other man. We careened off at the same hell-bent speed that’d marked their arrival, although it was impossible to tell through the small caged windows in the vehicle’s rear door exactly where we were heading.
“Feels like uptown,” I said, as we were jostled around the dark compartment.
“Kidnapped?” Kreizler said, maintaining that irritatingly detached tone that he assumed at times of danger. “Is this someone’s very bizarre idea of humor?”
“It’s no joke,” I said, trying the door but finding it quite solid. “Most cops are only about three steps away from being criminals, anyway. I’d say Connor’s taken those steps.”
Laszlo was utterly astounded. “One doesn’t really know what to say in such a situation. Do you have any particularly gruesome confessions you’d like to make, Moore? I’m not a cleric, of course, but—”
“Kreizler, did you hear what I just said? This is not a joke!” Just then, we whipped around a corner and were thrown with a crash to one side of the ambulance.
“Hmmm,” Kreizler noised, pulling himself up and checking for damage. “I begin to see your point.”
In another fifteen minutes our wild ride finally came to an end. Whatever neighborhood we were in was very quiet, the stillness broken only by the grunts and curses of our drivers. Connor finally opened the door again, and we spilled out onto what I recognized to be Madison Avenue, in the Murray Hill district. A nearby lamppost bore a marker that read “36th Street,” and in front of us stood a very large but tasteful brownstone with two columns on each side of its front door and large bay windows bulging out toward the street.
Kreizler and I looked at each other, instant recognition in our faces. “Well, well,” Kreizler said, intrigued and perhaps even a little awed.
I, on the other hand, was nearly flattened. “What in hell?” I whispered. “Why would—”
“Move,” Connor said, indicating the front door but staying by the ambulance.
Kreizler glanced at me again, shrugged, and began to climb the front steps. “I suggest we enter, Moore. He’s not a man accustomed to waiting.”
A very English butler admitted us to Number 219 Madison Avenue, the interior of which reflected the same rare combination—extreme wealth and very fine taste—that marked the outside of the brownstone. Marble flooring met our feet, and a simple yet spacious white stairway wound away into the house’s upper floors. Our destination, however, lay directly ahead. We passed splendid European paintings, sculpture, and ceramics—all elegantly and simply displayed, with none of that piling-on effect that families like the Vanderbilts were so appallingly entranced by—and kept moving toward the back of the house. There the butler opened a paneled door that led into a cavernous room that was dimly lit. Laszlo and I stepped inside.
The high walls of the room were paneled with Santo Domingo mahogany that was nearly black; indeed, the room was known, to the staff of the house as well as in New York legend, as “the Black Library.” Luxurious carpets covered the floor, and a large fireplace was set into one wall. More European canvases, framed in rich, ornate gold, hung from the walls, and tall bookshelves were crammed with splendid leather-bound rarities gathered during dozens of trips across the Atlantic. Some of the most important meetings in the history of New York—indeed, of the United States—had taken place in this room; and while that fact might have caused Kreizler and me to wonder all the more what we were doing there,