The Alienist - Caleb Carr [72]
“Sara,” I said, as we crossed Canal Street and clattered on toward City Hall. “Have you ever been to Shang Draper’s?”
“No,” she answered quickly, her breath condensing in the frigid air. April, as always in New York, had brought precious little respite from the biting cold of March.
It wasn’t much of an opening for conversation, but I took it. “Well, it’s just that the average whore who works a disorderly house knows more ways to shake down a mark than I could probably list—and the children who work in a place like Draper’s, or Paresis Hall, for that matter, are as sharp as any adults. What if our man’s one of those marks? Suppose he was cheated one time too many and now he’s out to settle the score? It was always a theory in the Ripper killings.”
Sara shifted the heavy blanket that covered our laps, still not exactly what I’d call interested. “I suppose it might be possible, John. What makes you think of it now?”
I turned to her. “Those three years, between the Zweigs and our first murder this past January—what if our theory, that there were other bodies and that they’re well hidden, is wrong? What if he didn’t commit any other murders in New York—because he wasn’t here?”
“Wasn’t here?” Sara’s tone became more animated. “You mean, he took a trip? Left town?”
“What if he had to? A sailor, for instance. Half the marks in places like Draper’s or Ellison’s are seamen. It might make sense. If he were a regular customer, he wouldn’t have aroused any suspicion—he might even have known the boys.”
Sara thought it over, then nodded. “It’s not bad, John. It would certainly allow him to come and go without being noticed. Let’s see what the others think when we…” Her speech hitched up a bit, and then she turned back toward the street, anxious again. “When we get there.”
Things grew quiet inside the hansom once more.
Castle Garden sits in the heart of Battery Park, and to get to it we had to travel to the base of Broadway and beyond. That meant a fast trip through the pastiche of architectural styles that made up the publishing and financial districts of Manhattan in those days. On first glance, it was always a bit odd to see structures like the World Building and the dozen-storied National Shoe and Leather Bank looming (or at least, in those days before the Woolworth and Singer towers, they seemed to be looming) over such squat, ornate Victorian monuments as the Old Post Office and the headquarters of the Equitable Life Assurance Society. But the longer one was exposed to the neighborhood, the more one detected a common quality among all these buildings that overrode any stylistic variance: wealth. I had spent much of my childhood in this part of Manhattan (my father ran a moderately sized investment house) and from an early age I’d been struck by the fantastic activity that surrounded the getting and keeping of money. This activity could be alternately seductive and repellant; but by 1896 it was unarguably New York’s strongest reason for being.
I felt this undercurrent of enormous power again that night, even though the district was dark and dormant at two-thirty in the morning; and as we passed the graveyard at Trinity Church—where the father of the American economic system, Alexander Hamilton, lay buried—I found myself smiling bemusedly and thinking: He’s audacious, all right. Whoever our quarry was, and whatever the personal turmoil that was propelling him, he was no longer confining his activities to the less respectable parts of town. He had ventured into this preserve of the wealthy elite and dared to leave a body in