The Angel of Darkness - Caleb Carr [14]
“Oh, I regretted that ages ago,” Miss Howard answered with a laugh, one that Cyrus and I picked up on. “Come on, Stevie. Let’s see if we can’t get our distraught friend here cleaned up. We need to move quickly.”
CHAPTER 3
It was a walk I hadn’t made in a year, that down to Number 808 Broadway, but you wouldn’t have known it from the way my body moved along the route. I remember reading in The Principles of Psychology—that doorstop of a book what Dr. Kreizler’s old teacher at Harvard, Professor William James, had written some years back, and which I’d fought my way through along with the rest of our team during the Beecham case—that the brain isn’t the only organ that stores memories. Some of the more primitive parts of the body—muscles, for instance—have their own ways of filing away experience and recalling it at a moment’s notice. If so, my legs were proving it that night, for I could’ve made the trip even if somebody’s cut my spinal cord below the cerebral cortex and left me running on nothing but my brain stem, like one of those poor laboratory frogs what Professor James and his students seemed to be always chopping into little pieces.
As we made our way along Gramercy Park and then down Irving Place, I once again kept a sharp eye out for any Gashouse boys what might be out to pick off drunken swells who were on their way home from the gaming houses of the Tenderloin. But there wasn’t any trouble hanging in the air, just the same moist, clean scent that’d followed the day’s rain, and as we moved south I began to loosen up. Miss Howard still didn’t want to divulge any more information concerning her case until we got to Number 808 and actually met the lady in question, so our efforts were applied with singleness of purpose to getting Mr. Moore to that location. This job was a little trickier than it might sound. We’d chosen to go downtown on Irving Place because we knew that if we headed over to Fourth Avenue and then south to Union Square we’d pass by Brübacher’s Wine Garden, where many of Mr. Moore’s drinking pals would doubtless still be engaged in the customary activity of that establishment: laying bets on whether or not passing pedestrians, carriages, and carts would be able to successfully avoid grievous collisions with the streetcars what came screaming down Broadway and tearing around the square at top speed. Faced with such a temptation, Mr. Moore would likely have proved unable to resist. But Irving Place had its own distraction in the form of Pete’s Tavern at Eighteenth Street, a cozy old watering hole what had once been a favorite retreat of Boss Tweed and his Tammany boys, and where in recent days Mr. Moore could often be found passing the evening with several of his journalistic and literary friends. Once the glowing orange lights in the smoky windows of Pete’s were behind us, however, I could tell that Mr. Moore knew his last chance for salvation had also passed: his grumbling took a decided turn toward whining.
“I mean to say, tomorrow is Monday, Sara,” he protested as we reached Fourteenth Street. The deceptively chipper front of Tammany Hall rose into view on our left, looking the way it always did to me, like some crazy giant brick wardrobe. “And keeping up with what Croker and those swine are doing”—Mr. Moore pointed toward the hall—“requires constant and irritating effort. Not to mention the Spanish business.”
“Nonsense, John,” Miss Howard replied snappily. “Politics in this city are dead in the water right now, and you know it. Strong’s as lame a duck as ever sat in City Hall, and neither Croker nor Piatt”—by which she meant the Democratic and Republican bosses of New York, respectively—“is about to let another reform mayor win in