The Angel of Darkness - Caleb Carr [15]
As if to punctuate Miss Howard’s point, a sudden roar of laughter cut through the night as we waded through the rain-thinned horse manure and urine that coated Fourteenth Street. Once across, we all turned around to see a small crowd of well-dressed, drunk, and very happy men emerging from Tammany Hall, a fat cigar sucking out of each of their mouths.
“Hmm,” Mr. Moore noised in some discouragement, watching the men as he followed the rest of us west. “I’m not sure it’s quite that simple, Sara. And even if it is, that doesn’t clear up the larger issue of the Cuban crisis. We’re at a critical point in our dealings with Madrid.”
“Hogwash.” Miss Howard paused just long enough to grab Mr. Moore’s sleeve and pull him along faster. “Even if your area were foreign rather than metropolitan affairs, you’d be stymied for the moment. General Woodford”—referring to the new American minister to Spain—“hasn’t even left for Madrid yet, and McKinley doesn’t intend to send him until he’s gotten a full report from the special envoy to Cuba—what’s his name, that man Calhoun.”
“How the hell,” Mr. Moore mumbled despondently, “am I supposed to argue with a girl who reads more of my damned paper than I do …?”
“All of which,” Miss Howard finished up, “means that you’ll have nothing more to occupy your attention at the office tomorrow than the usual run of summer violence—oh, and there’s Queen Victoria’s jubilee, no doubt the Times will milk that dry.”
Mr. Moore couldn’t help but laugh. “Right lead column, all the way through the festivities—there’ll be special photos on Sunday, too. My God, Sara, doesn’t it ever get boring knowing all the angles?”
“I don’t know diem on this case, John,” Miss Howard answered, as we started down Broadway. The sounds of the carriages in the street became a bit smoother as they hit the Russ pavement of the avenue, but the slight softening of the clatter didn’t ease Miss Howard’s edginess. “I don’t mind telling you, it frightens me. There’s something terrible about this business …”
A few more silent seconds of apprehensive walking, and they hove into view: first the Gothic spire of Grace Church, reaching up and above the surrounding buildings with a kind of easy majesty, then the yellow bricks and cloisterlike windows of Number 808. Our old headquarters was actually closer to us than Grace, bordering the churchyard on the uptown side as it did, but in that part of town you always saw the spire before anything else. Not even the ever-bright windows of McCreery’s department store across Broadway or the huge cast-iron monument to huckersterism that was the old Stewart store on Tenth Street could hold a wet match to the church. The only building that came close was Number 808, and that was because it had been designed by the same architect, James Renwick, who apparently had it in mind that this little crossroads of Broadway should be a memorial to our medieval ancestors instead of a pure and simple marketplace.
We approached the swirling, pretty ironwork of Number 808’s front door—art nouveau, they called it, a name what always struck me as pretty pointless, since I figured that the next artsy fellow who came along was always bound to lay claim to the nouveau part—and then Cyrus, Mr. Moore, and I all paused before entering. It wasn’t fear, so much; but you have to remember that just a year ago this place had been our second (and sometimes first) home during an investigation that’d seen unimaginable horrors brought to light and friends of ours mercilessly killed. Everything on Broadway looked pretty much the same as it had during those dark days: the department stores, the shadowy, ghostly yard and parish house of the church, the fine but not too fussy St. Denis Hotel across the street (also designed by Mr. Renwick)—all was as it had been, and that only brought the memories more vividly to life. And so we just waited a minute before we went inside.
Miss Howard seemed to sense our uncertainty