The Inner Circle - Brad Meltzer [241]
Near Market Slip, Pendergast stopped in front of an old tenement. It was still inhabited: a single window glowed with yellow light. A metal door was set into the first-floor facade. Beside it was a dented intercom and a series of buttons.
“Here it is,” said Pendergast. “Number sixteen.”
They stood in the gathering darkness.
Pendergast began to speak quietly in the gloom. “Mary Greene came from a working-class family. After her father’s upstate farm failed, he brought his family down here. He worked as a stevedore on the docks. But both he and Mary’s mother died in a minor cholera epidemic when the girl was fifteen. Bad water. She had a younger brother: Joseph, seven; and a younger sister: Constance, five.”
Nora said nothing.
“Mary Greene tried to take in washing and sewing, but apparently it wasn’t enough to pay the rent. There was no other work, no way to earn money. They were evicted. Mary finally did what she had to do to support her younger siblings, whom she evidently loved very much. She became a prostitute.”
“How awful,” Nora murmured.
“That’s not the worst. She was arrested when she was sixteen. It was probably at that point her two younger siblings became street children. They called them guttersnipes in those days. There’s no more record of them in any city files; they probably starved to death. In 1871 it was estimated there were twenty-eight thousand homeless children living on the streets of New York. In any case, later Mary was sent to a workhouse known as the Five Points Mission. It was basically a sweatshop. But it was better than prison. On the surface, that would have seemed to be Mary Greene’s lucky break.”
Pendergast fell silent. A barge on the river gave out a distant, mournful bellow.
“What happened to her then?”
“The paper trail ends at the lodging house door,” Pendergast replied.
He turned to her, his pale face almost luminous in the gloaming. “Enoch Leng—Doctor Enoch Leng—placed himself and his medical expertise at the service of the Five Points Mission as well as the House of Industry, an orphanage that stood near where Chatham Square is today. He offered his time pro bono. As we know, Dr. Leng kept rooms on the top floor of Shottum’s Cabinet throughout the 1870s. No doubt he had a house somewhere else in the city. He affiliated himself with the two workhouses about a year before Shottum’s Cabinet burned down.”
“We already know from Shottum’s letter that Leng committed those murders.”
“No question.”
“Then why do you need my help?”
“There’s almost nothing on record about Leng anywhere. I’ve tried the Historical Society, the New York Public Library, City Hall. It’s as if he’s been expunged from the historical record, and I have reason to think Leng himself might have eradicated his files. It seems that Leng was an early supporter of the Museum and an enthusiastic taxonomist. I believe there may be more papers in the Museum concerning Leng, at least indirectly. Their archives are so vast and disorganized that it would be virtually impossible to purge them.”
“Why me? Why doesn’t the FBI just subpoena the files or something?”
“Files have a way of disappearing as soon as they are officially requested. Even if one knew which files to request. Besides, I’ve seen how you operate. That kind of competence is rare.”
Nora merely shook her head.
“Mr. Puck has been, and no doubt will continue to be, most helpful. And there’s something else. Tinbury McFadden’s daughter is still alive. She lives in an old house in Peekskill. She’s ninety-five, but I understand very much compos mentis. She may have a lot to say about her father. She may have even known Leng. I have a sense she’d be more willing to speak to a young woman like yourself than to an agent of the Federal Bureau of Investigation.”
“You’ve still never really explained why you’ve taken such an interest in this case.”
“The reasons