The Angel of Darkness - Caleb Carr [348]
The Doctor only shrugged. “Is it? I wonder…”
“What do you mean, Laszlo?” Mr. Moore said, picking up a little stuffed dog and rubbing it against his nose. “Given who we’ve been dealing with, I would’ve expected something a lot more—austere. And that’s putting it euphemistically.”
“That was only one side of her, John,” Miss Howard said, running a finger over the grinning baby animals of the room’s wallpaper.
“Indeed, Sara,” the Doctor agreed quietly.
“Well,” I offered, finally getting over my own amazement, “one thing’s for sure, anyway.”
“Stevie?” the Doctor asked, looking my way.
I shrugged. “She finally got some privacy. Had to dig halfway to China to get it, but…”
The Doctor nodded. “True.” He glanced at Ana Linares. “And yet, even here, sealed off from the world, she could not—could not…” The Doctor’s words trailed off as he stared into the baby’s enormous round eyes, which were almost as dark as his own. “You,” he said, forgetting his last thought and putting a hand to Ana’s chin, making her smile that big, game grin what we’d come to know so well from the photograph her mother’d given us. “You have been a very difficult young lady to find, Señorita Linares. But thank God you’re safe. Thank God …”
“Well,” Mr. Moore said, “she won’t stay safe if we all don’t get out of here. So get a good last look, Kreizler—something tells me we won’t be coming back into Duster territory for quite a while.”
With that we all started back into the passageway, leaving the Doctor behind for a few seconds to give him just a little more time to mentally memorize the strange hideaway what had been Libby Hatch’s obsession, and what was now, being as she was dead, the only remaining blueprint he had to the workings of her tangled mind.
Back upstairs, we found that Mr. Roosevelt and Lieutenant Kimball had come into the house, along with Marcus. The rest of the navy boys were gathered around the steps outside, and a couple of them were carrying a folding stretcher what they must’ve fetched from one of the torpedo boats. Strapped to the stretcher was Libby Hatch’s body, draped in a bedsheet. The general mood of the bunch seemed to have changed from celebration to concern: apparently a couple of sailors had seen a few Dusters making moves what indicated that the gang was in fact preparing a new attack. So we got out onto the sidewalk quickly, the sailors forming a circle around Lucius, who still had the baby, and the men what were carrying the stretcher. Then, at double time, we began to trot back toward the river.
As we went, I fell in beside Cyrus. His clothes were a little rearranged, but otherwise he looked hale, hearty—and very satisfied. “Ain’t many people what come away from locking horns with Ding Dong looking as healthy as you do, Cyrus,” I said, smiling up to him.
He shrugged, though he couldn’t help but grin a bit, himself. “That’s because there aren’t many people who get him in a fair fight,” he answered.
“So I’m guessing you came out on top?”
Glancing up ahead to the construction site of the Bell Laboratories, what was now on our left, Cyrus answered, “I’ll let you be the judge of that.”
He nodded in the direction of a big pile of bricks: propped up against them was Ding Dong, his face a patchwork of bruises and his arms and legs sticking out at what you might call angles.
“Jesus,” I breathed, whistling low. “Is he alive?”
“Oh, he’s alive, all right,” Cyrus answered. “Though in the morning he may wish he wasn’t.” I nodded grimly at that, feeling some deep sense of justice; and as we trotted on toward the river, Cyrus looked down at me meaningfully. “You know I always thought she was trouble, Stevie,” he said. “I won’t deny that now. But she did right by you, by us, and by the baby, in the end—so I guess I was wrong.”
I gave him a look what I hoped was as full of thanks as I felt. “You weren’t wrong,” I said. “Trouble she was. But she was other things, too.”
Cyrus nodded. “That’s so …”
The general mood of our little army improved considerably once we got back across West Street and started to move, at the same double-time