The Angel of Darkness - Caleb Carr [20]
“I was gonna ask you the same thing,” I said. “Bit west for you, ain’t it, Kat?”
“Oh, I’m moving up in the world,” she answered. “Next week I move my things out of Frankie’s for good and go to work on Hudson Street. At the Dusters’ place.” At that she suddenly sniffled hard and painfully, laughed a little to cover it, and wiped her nose quick. Her moth-eaten glove came away with a trace of blood on it—and all, as they say, became clear to me.
“The Dusters,” I said, the burn in my chest turning into fear. “Kat, you can’t—”
She could see what was coming and started to move across the street again. “Just a friend of mine,” she said to the man she was with. Then she called over her shoulder to me, “Stop by Frankie’s and see me this week, Stevie!” It was as much a warning to back off as it was an invitation. “And don’t go stealing any more cabs!”
I wanted to say something, anything, to get her to leave her mark and come with us, but Cyrus reached up and gripped my shoulder hard. “It’s no good, Stevie,” he said, in the same soft but certain tone. “There’s no time.”
I knew he was right, but there was no resignation in the knowledge, and I could feel my body tighten up to the point where, for an instant, my vision went all cockeyed. Then, with a sudden, short yell, I grabbed the cabbie’s long horsewhip out of its holder, lifted it above my head, and lashed it toward the man who was crossing the street with Kat. The whip caught his high hat at the crest, cutting a nice hole in it and sending it flying six feet into a puddle of rainwater and horse piss.
Kat spun on me. “Stevie! Damn you! You can’t—”
But I wasn’t going to hear any more: I cracked the reins and sent the grey mare flying back along Christopher Street, Kat’s curses and protests loud but indistinct behind me.
I suppose you’ve figured out by now that Kat was something more than just a friend of mine. But she wasn’t my girl, by any stretch; wasn’t anybody’s girl, really. I couldn’t and can’t tell you just what place she held in my particular world. Maybe I could say that she was the first person what I ever had intimate relations with, except that such a statement might conjure up happy images of young love, which was far from the reality of it. Truth is, she was a question and a puzzle—one what would get even more perplexing in the days to come, as her life took an unexpected turn what was destined to intertwine it with the case we were only beginning to unravel.
By the time we reached Hudson Street I was still in a hell of a state, and I made no effort to slow the mare as I pulled the reins hard with my left arm and gave the animal the word to turn downtown. Once again we near went up on two wheels, and though the cabbie screamed in fear I heard no sound of protest from Cyrus, who was used to my driving and knew I’d never overturned a rig yet. Passing by the faded red bricks of old St. Luke’s Chapel on our right and then the saloons and stores of lower Hudson Street, we reached Clarkson in just a few more seconds and made another wild turn, this time west. The river and the waterfront suddenly sprang into being in front of us, the water blacker than the night and the pier at the end of the street unusually busy for the hour.
As we cleared the warehouses and sailors’ boarding hovels what lined the last couple of blocks of Clarkson Street, we could begin to make out the shape of a big steamer docked at the long, deep green superstructure of the Cunard pier: she was the Campania, not yet five years old and lying at proud rest, with strings of small lights on her boat deck that illuminated her two deep red, black-crowned funnels, her