The Angel of Darkness - Caleb Carr [71]
As for me, I’d been struck, during the business with the Filipino knife, by my own ignorance of where and what those islands were and of their importance to the Spanish Empire. So I asked the Doctor for some books and monographs that might help me understand just what the situation regarding Spain and the United States was all about. Pleased by my genuine interest, the Doctor obliged, and I took the materials up to my room and sank into them.
So wrapped up did I become in these ruminations that by Saturday evening I was still going at it—two days of steady study, a longer time than I’d been able to manage in my two years of service with the Doctor. As night descended along with a late rainstorm that blew in from the northwest, I realized with a sudden start just how late in the week it was, and remembered that Kat had told me she planned to move out of Frankie’s dive and into the Dusters’ headquarters sometime during the next week. Checking to see that the Doctor was still locked up in his study, I told Cyrus that I was heading out for a while and began the long, wet walk down to my old stomping grounds near the intersection of Baxter and Worth Streets.
The dive known as Frankie’s was located at Number 55 Worth, and was as dismal a place as any kid ever passed an idle hour in. It was also the location where I’d first met Kat about six months previous. Its main attractions were bloody battles between dogs and rats in a deep pit, an even younger than usual collection of girls in the back, and a drink that was a nasty mix of buttered rum, benzene, and cocaine shavings. I’d never spent much time there during my criminal days, though I knew plenty who did; but my acquaintance with Kat had, I regret to say, caused me to journey down in recent months and pass far more hours amid the violence and squalor than I probably should’ve.
That Kat… She’d arrived in the city about a year before I’d met her in the company of her father, a smalltime con man who got too drunk one winter night and fell into the East River. After his death Kat had tried foi months to make a legitimate living vending ears of hoi roasted corn out of an old baby carriage on downtown streets, a job what wasn’t in any way as simple as it might sound. Hot corn girls in New York were something of a puzzle: most of them weren’t whores, but somehow the average person—particularly your run-of-the-mill out-of-towner—was always convinced otherwise. Nobody seems to know where the idea got started. The Doctor says it all had to do with “subconscious associations” that most people formed about young girls alone on the street selling something “hot” that had a general shape what the alienists call “phallic.” Who knows … The point is that a lot of men who bought corn off those girls figured they were actually making a bargain for sexual favors: and when Kat wised up to how much more money she could make actually selling those favors, well, she tool the chance. I didn’t judge her for it; nobody who’s ever been on the streets would’ve. You could get damned sick and real tired standing barefoot in the cold all day hawking corn, not even making enough money to buy yourself a bed in one of the worst flophouses in town.
In her early days of whoring, Kat found her trade or the streets. But eventually she ended up working out of Frankie’s, as the kid trade was steadier, safer, and, she said, a lot less painful on her insides. I met her by chance when I stopped in to Frankie’s to see an old pal. Sad and strange, what a year on the streets and working the skin trade can do to a country girl: she’d become all brass by the time we were introduced, having seen more of the way of the world in her short piece of a life than your average citizen experiences in a full one. Maybe I fell for her the minute I saw her, I’m not sure; but if it wasn’t that exact minute, it wasn’t too long after. The brass was mostly an act that covered something much more decent, I could see that even then, although she would never admit it. And I think maybe, too, that I just wanted to see one of those