The Angel of Darkness - Caleb Carr [16]
“I know I’m asking, a lot,” she said, glancing around the street and speaking with rare uncertainty. “But I tell you—all of you—if you see this woman, talk to her for just a few minutes, hear her describe it—”
“It’s all right, Sara,” Mr. Moore interrupted, abandoning complaint and softening his voice to suit the scene. He turned first to me and then to Cyrus, as if to make sure that he was speaking for us all. We didn’t need to tell him he was. “It takes a moment, that’s all,” he went on, looking up at the façade of Number 808. “But we’re with you. Lead the way.”
We passed through the marble lobby and into the great cage that was the elevator, then started the slow, laborious drift up to the sixth floor. Looking at Cyrus and Mr. Moore, I could tell they knew as well as I did that, all nervousness aside, we weren’t going to come back down again without having gotten into something we might regret. Part of that was our mutual friendship for Miss Howard; part of it was, well, something that born New Yorkers just carry in their blood. A nose for the thing, call that thing whatever name you want: the story, the case, the ride—any way you cut it, we were getting on board. Oh, sure, we could pray that it wouldn’t involve the kind of devastation what the Beecham case had; but pray was all we could do, for we didn’t have the power to back out now.
The elevator came to the kind of heavy, sudden stop typical of commercial jobs, for Number 808 was a commercial building, full of furniture builders and sweatshops. That was part of the reason Dr. Kreizler had picked it in the first place: we’d been able to carry out our investigative affairs under the harmless cover of small businesses. But secrecy was no longer an issue for Miss Howard, and through the elevator grate I could see that she’d had a very tactful sign painted on the sixth-floor door:
THE HOWARD AGENCY
RESEARCH SERVICES FOR WOMEN
Drawing the elevator grate aside, she unlocked the door and then held it open as we all filed in. The big expanse of the near-floor-through room was dark, with only the light from the arc streetlamps on Broadway and McCreery’s upper windows across the street throwing any illumination inside. But that was enough to see that Miss Howard had made only a few changes in the decor of the place. The furniture what Dr. Kreizler had bought at an antique auction the previous year—and what’d once been the property of the Marchese Luigi Carcano—still filled the room. The divan, large mahogany table, and big easy chairs rested on the green oriental carpets in their usual spots, giving the place the sudden, unexpected feel of a home. The billiard table was now in the back by the kitchen, covered with planking and a silk drape. It wasn’t the kind of thing, I figured, that would have given Miss Howard’s lady clients much reassurance. But the five big office desks were still there, though Miss Howard had arranged them in a row rather than a circle, and the baby grand piano still sat in a corner by one of the Gothic windows. Seeing it, Cyrus went over and lifted its lid with a little smile, touching two keys gently and then looking to Miss Howard.
“Still in tune,” he said softly.
She nodded and smiled back. “Still in tune.”
Cyrus put his bowler on the bench, sat down, and gently started to play. At first I figured he’d go for one of the operatic tunes what the Doctor always had him give out with at our house, but I quickly realized that it was a slow, sad rendition of some folk melody what I couldn’t immediately place.
Mr. Moore, who was staring out another window at the barely visible glimmer of the Hudson River in the distance, turned to Cyrus and beamed with a little smile of his own. “‘Shenandoah,’ “he murmured quietly, as if to rightly say that Cyrus had found the perfect tune to summarize the strange and melancholy feelings what had only grown stronger in each of us at the sight of the room.
In another shadowy corner, I could see that Miss Howard had made an addition to the furnishings: an