The Alienist - Caleb Carr [43]
In what seemed one movement I was out the door, through the Germans and the alleyway, and down the stoop to the curb. I shouted the order to Cyrus, who sped off in the calash, and as I went back through the men on the stoop one of them held a hand to my chest.
“Just a minute,” he said. “What’s all that for?”
“Mr. Santorelli,” I answered. “He’s badly hurt.”
The man spat hard at the street. “Damned cops. I hate those damned guineas, but I’ll tell you, I hate cops more!”
This recurring theme seemed once again to be the signal for me to proceed. Back upstairs, Sara had gotten hold of some hot water and was washing Santorelli’s wounds. The wife was still chattering, waving her hands and occasionally bursting into tears.
“There were six men, John,” Sara said to me, after listening for a few minutes.
“Six?” I echoed. “I thought you said two.”
Sara indicated the bed with a jerk of her head. “Come over here and help me—she’ll be suspicious, otherwise.” Sitting down, I found that it was difficult to say which smelled worse, the mattress or Santorelli. But none of it seemed to bother Sara. “Connor and Casey were definitely here,” she said. “Along with two other men and two priests.”
“Priests?” I said, taking up a hot compress. “What in hell—”
“One Catholic, apparently, and one not. She can’t be more specific about the second. The priests had the money. They told the Santorellis to use some of it to pay for a decent burial for Giorgio. The rest was a—consideration, apparently for silence. They told her not to allow anyone to exhume Giorgio’s body, even the police, and not to talk to anyone about the matter—especially any journalists.”
“Priests?” I said again, wiping at one of Santorelli’s welts with no great enthusiasm. “What did they look like?”
Sara put the question, then translated the answer. “One short, with large white sideburns—that was the Catholic—and one thin with spectacles.”
“Why in the world would two priests have any interest in this?” I wondered. “And why would they want to keep the police out of it? You say Connor and Casey were here for that conversation?”
“Apparently.”
“So whatever’s going on, they’re involved. Well, Theodore will be happy to hear that. Two more vacancies in the Division of Detectives, I’ll wager. But who were the other two men?”
Again, Sara put the question to Mrs. Santorelli, who rattled off an answer that Sara didn’t seem to comprehend. She asked again, but got the same reply.
“I may not understand this dialect as well as I thought,” Sara said. “She says the other two weren’t policemen, but then she says that they were policemen. I don’t—”
Sara stopped and we all turned when a loud knock came at the door. Mrs. Santorelli shied away from it, and I was in no hurry to thrust myself into the breach; but Sara said, “Oh, go on, John, don’t be foolish. It’s probably Cyrus.”
I stepped to the door and opened it. Outside in the hall was one of the men from the stoop. He held up a package.
“Your medicines,” he said with a grin. “We don’t allow no coons in this building.”
“Ah,” I said, accepting the package. “I see. Thank you.”
Giving the goods to Sara, I sat back down on the bed. Santorelli was by this time semiconscious and Sara administered some of the morphine: she intended to set his arm, a trick she’d learned during her days with the visiting nurses. The break was not bad, she said, but it nonetheless made a somewhat nauseating cracking sound as she got it back into place. Between his grogginess and the drug, however, Santorelli didn’t seem to feel a thing, though his wife let out a nice little howl and some kind of a prayer. I began wiping disinfectant on the other wounds while Sara continued her conversation with Mrs. Santorelli.
“It seems,” Sara said at length, “that Santorelli got very indignant. Threw the money in the priests’ faces, and said he demanded that the police find the murderer of his son. At that point the priests left, and…”
“Yes,” I said. “And.” I was well aware of how Irish cops generally dealt with a lack of cooperation from the non-English-speaking