The Angel of Darkness - Caleb Carr [94]
CHAPTER 18
By the time we entered the Lafayette and got to our table on the greenery-covered terrace, we’d all recovered enough to start smiling and even laughing a little at what we’d been through.
“Well!” Miss Howard said with a big, astonished sigh, as she sat and took a menu from our waiter. “I hate to be the one to start asking stupid questions, but if Ana Linares isn’t in Nurse Hunter’s house, where in the world is she?”
“I don’t know,” Marcus answered, “but between us we covered every inch of every floor of that place—”
“Including the basement,” Lucius threw in, scanning his menu.
“—and there was no sign of a baby.” Marcus let his head rest on one hand in bewildered weariness. “No sign at all.”
“The only thing I can suggest,” Mr. Moore said, grabbing at the wine list, “given what happened to the three of you on the street, is that the Dusters are in on it, and they’ve got her somewhere.”
I’d sat down on the floor and started to crawl in amongst some bushy greenery what ran along the iron rail at the edge of the terrace (the good-natured waiters generally let me do that); but Mr. Moore’s words made me pause. “The Dusters?” I said. “In on this kind of thing?”
“Why not?” Mr. Moore asked. “You think they’re above kidnapping, Stevie?”
I felt a little out of my place, saying anything more, and glanced at the Doctor for reassurance; but he was only staring hard at the surface of the table. “Well,” I answered uncertainly. “No, not above it, exactly … just—well—too stupid, really. Or too crazy.”
Lucius nodded a couple of times. “Stevie has a point. Organization and plotting aren’t the Dusters’ strong points. That’s why the other gangs leave them alone: because they don’t control any operations that conflict with anyone else’s or that another group would want to take over. They’re blowers and thugs—they don’t go planning kidnappings and blackmail.”
The Doctor spoke firmly without looking up. “The child is in that woman’s house. I would stake everything on it.”
Mr. Moore hissed. “Kreizler, you were there—she let us go through the whole damned joint.”
“And?” Miss Howard asked.
“And, the only other person who lives there is her husband. He’s got to be fifteen years older than her, and he’s a semi-invalid. Wounded in the Civil War when he was young, apparently, and never really recovered.”
“He recovered,” the Doctor said, a bit testily. “Or at least his wounds did. What the war left him with was an addiction to opiates.”
Marcus looked puzzled. “But he’s bedridden. And his wife said that he—”
“That woman couldn’t utter a true word if her life depended on it,” the Doctor shot back. “As for his being bedridden, had I been jabbed as full of morphine as he has, I should be bedridden, too. Didn’t you note the marks on his arms and the odor in the bedroom?”
“Yes,” Lucius said, getting an annoyed glance from his brother for his trouble. “Well, it was all perfectly plain, Marcus—the man’s been jabbing morphine for years.”
“With, I don’t doubt, the help of his wife,” Dr. Kreizler added. “The good Nurse Hunter.”
“What about her?” Miss Howard asked. “What was she like when you got inside? Because I have to say, she played you all like so many piano keys when you were on the steps.”
The others looked embarrassed at that, but the Doctor lost his scowl and laughed once. “True, Sara! I knew it was happening, yet even I couldn’t stop it initially.”
“So how does she manage it?” Miss Howard pressed. “What was her style, once she had you in her lair?”
“Well—I’ll just tell you this—” Mr. Moore set both the wine list and his menu aside, ready to order his food and drink but looking, despite his outwardly certain tone and manner, a trifle unsure of what he was about to say. “I know you hate it when