The Angel of Darkness - Caleb Carr [128]
“Remember, don’t go upstairs, but anything you can find that looks interesting—”
“Yeah. I know.”
“Oh, and don’t forget the secretary in the front room—it was covered when we were there.”
“Detective Sergeant—we been over all this.”
Marcus drew a heavy breath, nodded, and then retreated into a shadowy corner nearby. As he did, I finished squeezing through the bars, then brought Mike along carefully behind me. Finally, I turned to find myself standing in Elspeth Hunter’s kitchen.
The first thing I noticed was the smell: a stale, slightly rotten odor, not strong enough to be sickening, but disturbing just the same. Unhealthy, you might say—a general air of uncleanliness, such as even many of the poorest immigrant mothers I’d known on the Lower East Side wouldn’t have allowed. A bucket filled with garbage, uncovered, stood in one corner, insects flying around it even in the near-darkness. Passing by the stained sink, I looked up at some pots and pans that hung over it, then reached up to touch them. Each was covered with a thin layer of grease—again, not dirty, exactly, but not clean, either. Wiping my fingers on my pants, I kept on going.
The others had told me that there was a narrow hallway between the kitchen and the front room, with a doorway cut under the front staircase: that figured to be the way down to the basement. I made my way to the front room, which was furnished with just a few old items: an easy chair, a sofa, and a rocker. A beat-up wooden mantelpiece stood over the small fireplace, and a dusty, stained rug covered the floor. Just to the left of the doorway I’d entered through was the secretary Marcus had mentioned, a cheaply veneered job scarred with chips and scratches. But it wasn’t covered up, and I could see in the half-light of the street lamps what filtered through from outside that behind the glass-paned doors of its top half were a few books, along with some old photographs: faded daguerreotype portraits of a wrinkled man and woman, along with a batch of newer, neatly framed prints of young children. Some of these last were individual pictures of infants, while one was a group portrait of three older kids.
None of them was smiling.
I pulled at the lid of the lower half of the secretary but found that it was locked. The skeleton keyhole at the top of the lid was inviting—it wouldn’t have taken but a minute to pick—but I figured I’d better get to the more serious business first. Across the room were the front stairs, and underneath them a doorway: the entrance to the basement. I stepped lightly over to the staircase, glancing up to make sure that all was quiet, and then pulled a small vial of machine oil out of my shirt pocket. Coating the basement door’s hinges, I put the vial back into my pocket, wiped my hands once again on my pants, then grabbed the doorknob, turned it, and pulled the door back without a sound.
The stairs stretched away into darkness before me. I hadn’t wanted to bring a bulky lamp along, as Mike was trouble enough, though I did have a candle and matches; but we’d noted that the light over the front doorway on the outside of the house was electrical, and figured that the whole structure, being so small, was probably wired, too. So I put one hand to the wall and slowly made my way down into the blackness, my eyes steadily adjusting and searching for any lighting fixtures. About halfway down I spotted one: right by the stairs and screwed into the basement’s ceiling, easy to reach from where I was standing. Moving back up to shut the door, I bent down and switched the light on, then kept going to the bottom of the stairs.
I’d scarcely hit the dirty floor before Mike’s movements inside the satchel became more agitated and he began to make little squeaking sounds.
“Okay, Mike,” I whispered, “just gimme a minute.”
Glancing around I saw that Mr. Moore’s sketch of the basement had been pretty well on the money: about the only things to be seen