Spider Dance (41 page)

That the ground was not familiar added a certain challenge in the blood.

Ah! They had vanished into a row of warehouses. The reek of salt and fish enveloped all. Lights? No electricity here near these docks.

I could sense the oily water washing against ancient rotting wood only a few hundred feet away. Miss my prey, and they could be afloat on those soiled waves, striking for some steamship or boat.

No. Their business was here. With Vanderbilt. And myself.

I began to breach each apparently abandoned building, testing doors, peering into the deeper darkness, scenting oil and tar and rotting rope.

These men knew where they went. I had to find out where that was. I feared for the muffled form in their midst. If I took too long, came too late . . . another body for the billiard table.

Of course she had been absolutely right, coming on the scene, knowing nothing about the history of it.
The
woman. As always, as Eve in Eden, deceptive but perceptive in equal measure. Immediately reacting in character, like the superb actress she was. Is. And perhaps superb in another area.
Holy Mither of God!
No cheap stage accent, but the genuine rhythm and lilt of Mother Ireland. Otherwise I would have been alerted to the impersonation. What a woman!
Crucified
. A word not bandied about at the end of the nineteenth century, by God. In an instant she had transfixed what I had not yet seen.

I . . . am an idiot Apostle, and she is the Magdalen on Resurrection Day. She saw, she was first. I know that much.

I would not be here but for her.

So where am I? Thrown off the trail, frantically hunting men who mean no good. When have men ever meant good if they were not forced to it?

Ah. This door opens on an oiled hinge.

I cling to the wall. Waiting, sensing. I do not think, I feel,
the only time I allow passion to overcome reason, and only now because it alone works.

The air is still. Yet . . . someone has passed. There is a scent of . . . sealing wax. Ink. Fear.

Here! I open another door, cross vast expanses of piled crates and machine oil.

Oil. I withdraw the small pocket lantern, cast a narrow beam on footprints through the slick surface of the floor.

We are all snails, in our way, and as simple to track.

Even now, at midnight, I hear great winches whining and creaking, lading on crates of goods bound for Singapore and Queensland and South America’s many soiled cities.

The oil tracks fade, but I have another clue to follow.

A screech, sharp as an owl’s in this vast, high warehouse where no bird has perched.

A scream, unmistakably a man’s.

No time for secrecy, I must race to the rescue before it’s too late—

I clamber up rough stairs, around a blind corner, the pistol out of my pocket . . .

Nothing stealthy about my charge . . . oh, for Watson at the rear!

I have reached a bridge of iron, high above the warehouse floor. Some overseer’s office, halfway to heaven.

Men scatter like spiders, to the side, below, down stairs, suspended from railings.

My pistol marks them and holds silent. They slither away. They are prey now. I must find their own victim.

I open a door, half frosted glass, onto some cat’s cradle of an office strung far above the warehouse floor.

Cramped, dirty, hardly more than a hole, occupied by a battered desk.

On that desk, a man.

With his hands transfixed to the old, oily wood with the sharp impaling spikes of . . . letter openers.

The man’s eyes roll in his head as he swoons with pain. He is alive and can speak, can I but . . . unpin him and take him away from this mad, mercantile torture chamber.

I do, but he swoons nonetheless.

One man I can carry.

I watch all the way for those who have done this, but they have melted away like spiderwebs in the rain. I know, can I but return to a civilized street in this city of devils, that I have captured a witness.

The [newspaper] boys called him a great fake, but they were hardly just to him in that. I should rather call him a great actor, and without being that no man can be a great detective
.
—JACOB RHS, THE RECORDER OF LATE NINETEENTH-CENTURY NEW YORK CITY POVERTY, ABOUT INSPECTOR THOMAS BYRNES, NYC CHIEF OF DETECTIVES AND INVENTOR OF THE THIRD DEGREE

F
ROM THE
C
ASE
N
OTES OF
S
HERLOCK
H
OLMES

In London I know every crevice where vice and venality might be found, where petty criminals go to ground.

Here, in New York, I am in a new world.

I stowed my rescued man in the capacious bottom of my peddler’s cart, unconscious, and set out to find my new friends, Hungry Joe and Mother Hubbard.

In the middle of night the city shivers with skittering life forms. Like cockroaches, the criminal element scuttles over the empty streets, either celebrating successful felonies or in the process of robbing, killing, devouring.

In London, I had a half dozen hidey-holes where I could don a disguise or wait like a spider until the web of my weaving trembled with the touch of my prey upon the silk.

Not in New York.

Everything was new, and forbidding. I needed allies, and quickly.

Hungry Joe I finally found in a saloon not too far from the Vanderbilt mansion on Fifth Avenue. Great wealth always sits cheek-by-jowl with great larceny.

“Oh, yeah! The peddler from Vanderbilt Row. Whatcha want, fellow? I’m off for the day, drinkin’ my profits away.”

“I need a safe place to go to ground. I’ve a near-dead man to tend.”

“Do you, now?” He whistled sharp over the foamy head of his beer. “Why should I help you?”

I showed him.

“Well, that’s damn patriotic of you! My pocket’s never offered a warm nest for a gold eagle before. We none of us have a place to call our own but the streets and the alleys. ’Cept Mother Hubbard. She’s got a crib, if’n you can pay the rent Down lower town way, where the swells don’t go ‘cept to get late-night ladies.”

I waved the ten-dollar piece in front of his nose, and soon we were lurching along the darkened streets, he pulling my cart, I pushing. The sum was princely, but Vanderbilt could afford it and the case was dire.

Watson is wrong. I have a heart. It was beating hard for the cause of the wounded man in my charge. My witness. If he lived.

The place stank of beer and urine, no worse than any Whitechapel doss house or opium den. I could have used the calming effects of my 7 percent solution, but not here, where I controlled nothing.

Mother Hubbard eyed, then acknowledged me, then demanded five dollars. I felt like a character in a Dickens novel, but I paid.

I was shown to a somewhat sheltered corner, with a blanket
in a crumpled heap. There I laid my charge, and dosed him with cheap whiskey for his wounds, and cheaper bread for his sustenance.

Not for some time had I found occasion to go to ground so far on the selvage edge of a society. I was reminded of camping out on Grimpen Mire, unsuspected. Save now I was in the middle of a great metropolis, yet in a place somehow as wild as any moor in England.

The man I tended raved in his sleep. I heard talk of giant spiders, and Ultramontanes, and the approaching hot irons. I felt transported to an earlier, viler age, to the Inquisition, when each man’s inviolable conscience was an invitation for torment and unimaginable torture.

Crucifixion.

A barbaric concept. The stuff of ancient history, and yet . . . relevant to the Vanderbilt case.

I bandaged my charge’s wounds, wishing Watson were here to explain their extent.

The poor youth caught my coat collar in his mutilated hands, and sang my praises, thanked me. In my own terms, I’ve done nothing. The overall pattern still eludes me. His suffering is a slap in the face. Yes, I’ve saved him from further torment, but until I know everything, that means nothing.

He raves. Speaks in tongues. Spanish. French, which I know. He finally mutters a word. A word I know so well my blood chills. A name. Irene.
The
woman. I’d made certain that she remained far from my Vanderbilt investigation, and now I hear her name mentioned by the second victim of this shadowy conspiracy. I can’t doubt that she has somehow become
the
target of these pitiless villains.

“Irene Norton,” he murmurs again. “
No. No. No
!” he screams.

I used to wonder what disguise you would come in,
but I never thought I would see you as Nellie Bly
.
—THE MATRON AT NEW YORK CITY POLICE HEADQUARTERS, 1889

F
ROM
N
ELLIE
B
LY’S
J
OURNAL