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By Root 2971 0

we rolled off of Fifth Avenue and into Central Park, bearing right to head onto the Metropolitan Museum’s carriage path, I understood for the first time just how insane, daring, or desperate the woman we believed had snatched the Linares baby must’ve been. The construction site for the museum’s new Fifth Avenue wing took up the full stretch of ground between Eighty-first and Eighty-third Streets, and beyond it to the west, inside the park, the square red brick mass of the museum’s three older wings occupied another city block or so of territory. The Metropolitan was what the Doctor and his architectural friends always called “a mongrel of styles”—Gothic and Renaissance revivals in the first three wings, what they called “Beaux Arts” in the new Fifth Avenue hall—but, different as the various sections were in their color and concept, even the first was not that much older than the one currently being built. All of which, so far as we were concerned, meant that there’d been precious little time for any trees or shrubbery to grow in this part of the park, and a lot of what had been planted or had sprung up had been ripped away by the never-ending process of construction. So when the detective sergeants said the crime had been committed in broad daylight and in a very open public spot, they meant just that. The only object what rose to any great height was the Egyptian obelisk what sat beyond the front (soon to be the side) entrance of the museum, and Señora Linares had been struck just as she got there: like I say, the abduction had been either a very gutsy, despairing, or crazy act, depending on how you elected to see it.

The ride uptown had been as quick as I could make it, and on the way the Doctor tried to relate some information from the front page of the Times, telling me as I drove that the Cuban rebels had massacred a party of Havana stagecoach riders while, in a separate engagement, the Cuban government was claiming to’ve killed one of the main rebel leaders. (The first report turned out to be true, the second wishful thinking.) But it was tough for us to keep our minds on any subject other than the business at hand, and as I kept urging Frederick forward past the churches of upper Fifth Avenue, where the wealthy families of Mansion Row were just leaving early services, I threw a panic into some people who figured Sunday morning would be a safe time to stroll absent-mindedly across the boulevard. I got some angry shouts and even a few curses from those ladies and gents for splashing horse dung and piss on their Sunday best, and I threw some feisty words back; but nothing stopped our forward motion, and we pulled up to the steps of the Metropolitan at just before eleven.

Ordinarily, the Doctor would have wanted to walk over and check what progress had been made on the new wing: the original architect, Mr. Richard Morris Hunt, who’d died a couple of years earlier, had been another old friend of his, as was Mr. Hunt’s son, who’d taken over the direction of the work. But, things being what they were on this day, the Doctor just jumped out of the calash and charged up the museum’s steps, passing between a large pair of iron lamp fixtures and through the square granite doorway. Cyrus followed him, leaving me with the question of what to do with the carriage. Spotting another driver nearby, I offered him four bits to watch our rig for what I said would only be a few minutes. It was above the going price for such a service—which was one that I sometimes performed myself for other drivers—and the man was glad to get the money. Then I took to the steps, glancing up at the red brick walls, the grey granite archways, and the high, peaked roof of the building, feeling the way I always did when we came to this place: like I was entering some sort of temple, whose services and rituals had once seemed as strange to me as a towel-headed Hindoo’s, but what I was coming to understand better and better the longer I lived under the Doctor’s roof.

The galleries just inside the entrance to the museum were full of what, for me, were the