The Angel of Darkness - Caleb Carr [36]
I nodded at the big man, who tipped his bowler and gave me a warm look in return. “So,” I said uncertainly, “am—I gonna work for you, too, is that the deal?”
“Oh, yes, you’ll work,” the Doctor answered. “But you’ll study, as well. You will read, you’ll learn mathematics, you’ll investigate history. Among many other things.”
“I will?” I said, swallowing hard; after all, I’d never spent a day in school in my life.
“You will,” the Doctor answered, taking a silver cigarette case out, removing a stick, and lighting it. He looked up to see me staring hungrily at the cigarettes. “Ah. But I’m afraid that stops. No smoking for you, young man. And this,” he went on, stepping over and examining the little pile of things I was carrying, “will no longer be necessary.” He pulled my piece of lead pipe out of some clothes and threw it away onto a patch of thin, ratty-looking grass.
It was looking like I was going to be left with nothing but studies, and that fact was not causing me to be any less edgy. “Well—what about the work?” I finally said. “What’ll I do?”
“You mentioned,” the Doctor said, climbing back into the barouche, “that when your activities with Crazy Butch involved waylaying delivery trucks, you were generally assigned to drive them. Was there any particular reason for this?”
I shrugged. “I like horses. And I took to the driving pretty good.”
“Then say hello to Frederick and Gwendolyn,” the Doctor replied, indicating with his cigarette the gelding and mare what stood in front of the barouche. “And take the reins.”
My spirits picked up considerably at that. I went over, patted the handsome black gelding’s long snout, ran a hand along the brown mare’s neck, and grinned. “Seriously?” I asked.
“You seem to find the idea of work more comforting than that of study,” the Doctor replied. “So let us see how you manage. Cyrus, you may as well come down and help me with this appointment schedule. I’m a bit lost. It seems, from my notes, that I was scheduled to be at the Essex Street court house two hours ago.” As the big black man got down from the driver’s seat, the Doctor glanced up at me once more. “Well? You have a job to do, don’t you?”
I gave him another grin and a quick nod, then jumped up into the driver’s seat and cracked the reins against the horses’ haunches.
And I never, as they say, looked back.
Yes, they were fine days, those, when we’d never heard the name John Beecham and Mary Palmer was still alive. Fine days whose return, I realized, we now had good cause to doubt. Those people what had always fought the Doctor and his theory of context (and were driven, it seemed to me, by fear of the way his investigations into violent and illegal behavior led him to poke around in the area of how Americans raised their kids) had generally countered his arguments by saying that the United States had been built on the idea that every man is free to choose—and is responsible for—his individual ideas and actions, no matter what the circumstances of his early life may’ve been. The Doctor didn’t really disagree with them on a legal level; he was just looking for deeper scientific answers. And so, for many years, there’d been a kind of stalemate in the battle between the controversial alienist and them what he unnerved so badly. When little Paulie McPherson had hung himself, though, it’d given the Doctor’s enemies a chance to break that stalemate—and they’d grabbed at it.
But the judge who’d presided over the first hearing on the matter had been a fair-minded man, and he didn’t just flat-out shut the Doctor down. Instead, he ordered the sixty-day investigation period I’ve already mentioned, making the kids at the Institute