The Angel of Darkness - Caleb Carr [19]
The old man made some drunken, confused sounds as I shoved him toward the little iron step on the carriage’s left side and down to Cyrus: “What—what do you think—what’re you doing?”
“Driving,” I answered, seating myself and taking the horse’s reins.
“You can’t drive!” the man protested as Cyrus forced him into the passenger compartment and sat alongside him, closing the little doors.
“We’ll double your rate,” Cyrus answered, keeping a good grip on the man. “And don’t worry, the boy’s an excellent driver.”
“But you’ll queer me with the cops!” the old tool bellowed on, removing his top hat and showing us the license what was fastened to it. “I can’t have any trouble with the law—I’m a licensed hack, see?”
“Yeah?” I looked back at him, grabbed the hat, and shoved it onto my own head. “Well, now I am—so sit back and pipe down!”
He did the one but not the other, and was still wailing like a stuck pig as I cracked the reins against the mare’s backside and we bolted out onto the pavement of Broadway at a speed that more than justified the quick measure I’d taken of the animal.
CHAPTER 4
By the time we rounded the corner of Ninth Street, we were moving at such a crazy pace—even, I’ll confess, for me—that the cab near went up on two wheels. The Cunard Line pier, in those days before the launch of the company’s really big liners (the Mauretania and the sad old Lusitania), was still located down at the foot of Clarkson Street, a short block above West Houston; but I was going to avoid that latter thoroughfare for as long as I could. Even late on a Sunday night it’d be a thick mass of whores, cons, and their drunken marks, one what had only gotten thicker in the months since Commissioner Roosevelt had left for Washington. The volume of their business would slow our movement badly. As it was, after we raced through the quiet residential blocks of Ninth Street, passed over Sixth Avenue, and headed west on Christopher, we began to see noticeable signs of what Miss Howard had mentioned earlier on our walk to Number 808: the criminal elements were conducting their affairs outside their dives, dens, and brothels in considerable numbers and with a total lack of the concern what Mr. Roosevelt had, if only briefly, drummed into them. Completing all this activity was the occasional sight of cops doing all those things that the commissioner had, by himself roving the streets at night on inspection tours, worked so hard to prevent: collecting graft payments, drinking outside dance halls and saloons, cavorting with whores, and sleeping anywhere they could. Yes, the old town was truly waking up to the fact that Roosevelt was gone and his reform-minded boss, Mayor Strong, would soon follow suit: the gloves were coming off of the underworld.
As we reached Bleecker Street, something snagged my eye (and, I’ll confess, my guts), and I reined up hard, somewhat to Cyrus’s surprise. “What’s happened, Stevie?” he called to me; but I could only stare across the street in momentary confusion at a patch of faded blue silk and an enormous head of blond hair. From Cyrus’s tone, I could tell he’d caught sight of the same thing, and I knew he was frowning: “Oh. Kat…”
I cracked the reins again and charged over to the blue silk and blond hair, both of which belonged to Kat Devlin, a—well, let’s just call her a friend of mine, for the moment, who worked at one of the kid dives and disorderly houses down on Worth Street. She was with a decked-out man who was old enough to be her grandfather, for Kat was but fourteen; and as they tried to cross Bleecker, I steered the grey mare into their path.
“We don’t have time for this, Stevie,” I heard Cyrus say, gently but with intent.
“One minute, that’s all,” I answered quickly.
Kat started at the sudden appearance of the mare and looked up, her small, pretty face and blue eyes going furious. “Hey! What the hell do you think you’re—” Then she caught sight