The Angel of Darkness - Caleb Carr [141]
About half a block south of Fifty-seventh Street the noise of our carriage, along with those around us, suddenly died: huge sheets of some kind of padding—it looked like tree bark—had been laid down on the blocks around One West Fifty-seventh, so that the ailing Mr. Vanderbilt wouldn’t be disturbed by the sounds of passing horses and rigs. It might seem unbelievable, nowadays, to think that whole city blocks would be repaved just to let one man rest easier; but Cornelius II was that important to the city, mostly because of his philanthropic work. Of course, it wasn’t noise that was making him sick, as the Doctor pointed out: you could’ve put the man into a room lined with concrete and lead, and, so long as he had the thought of how little control he’d been able to exercise over his son to keep him company, his body would’ve continued to deteriorate.
When we got to One West Fifty-seventh, the Doctor informed Mr. Moore that, especially as the interview had been so tough to obtain, he was not to enter it intending to tweak Mr. Vanderbilt’s nose, as he’d said he wanted to. They’d just tell the sorry old invalid that they were trying to trace Mrs. Hatch’s movements in order to contact her, being as they thought she could be of some assistance with a case the Doctor was working on; nothing else. Mr. Moore reluctantly agreed, and then they walked on up the front steps to the big, arched limestone doorway. Mr. Moore rang the doorbell and a footman answered, saying that they were expected by Mr. Vanderbilt in the “Moorish room” at the back of the house. Knowing enough to realize that he was talking about a smoking room what probably looked like a plate illustration for A Thousand and One Nights—such rooms being all the rage among rich people in those days—I got down off the calash’s driver’s seat and, when the footman returned, asked him if he wouldn’t mind keeping an eye on the carriage for a minute, as I had an errand I had to run for the Doctor a few blocks uptown. The man very decently obliged, and I tore off to and around the corner of Fifth Avenue. When I reached the back of the house, near the handsome porte cochere what Mr. Hunt had designed, I found that a fairly high cast-iron fence separated me from the backyard. I wouldn’t have any trouble getting over the thing, of course, but there were a few strollers around, even on that wet afternoon, and so a bit of caginess was called for.
I tried an old trick: looking to the high roof of the mansion across the street, which was only a bit less luxurious than Mr. Vanderbilt’s, I pointed up and screamed:
“He’s going to jump!”
This, of course, is the single statement guaranteed to get any and all New Yorkers to stop whatever they’re doing and turn to search the direction indicated. The strollers out on Fifth Avenue that afternoon were no exceptions, and in the few seconds it took them to realize that I’d been putting them on I got over the Vanderbilts’ fence and ran to hide behind one of the square columns of the porte cochere. Scanning the back of the house, I soon caught sight of an open bay window on the western end, out of which were drifting voices. I could easily hide on the far side of the bay, and did, allowing myself just one peek inside the room.
If there’s one word to describe the Vanderbilt family’s taste, I’m not in possession of it. You could, I suppose, just say that they liked “more”: more stone with their stone, more frills with their frills, more artwork with their artwork, more food with their food. The “Moorish room” that I peered into that day was a very good example of all this. It wasn’t enough that the wood of the walls—fully two stories high—was as expensive as possible or that it was carved in more complicated patterns than the Arabian models what it’d been based on; no, the walls also had to be inlaid with other precious substances, including, if you can believe it, mother-of-pearl. Mother-of-pearl in your walls … if you can order that kind of nonsensical detail—and order it from no less a designer than Mr.