“If Cyrus’ll help me commandeer a hansom,” I answered, “half an hour. Three quarters at the outside.”
Mr. Moore turned to Cyrus. “Go.”
The pair of us sprang toward the elevator. Before re-entering it, however, I paused just long enough to turn back to Mr. Moore. “You don’t think we should-”
Mr. Moore shook his head quickly. “We don’t know what this is yet. I won’t ask him to come back to this place until we’re sure.”
Cyrus put a hand to my shoulder. “He’s right, Stevie. Let’s go.”
I stepped into the elevator, Cyrus slammed the grate, and we moved back down the shaftway.
Because the Hotel St. Denis was right across the street, Number 808 had always been an easy spot to catch a cab at almost any hour of the day or night: there were two lined up outside the hotel when Cyrus and I crossed to it. The first was a four-wheeler, captained by an ancient geezer in a faded red liveryman’s jacket and a beat-to-hell top hat. He was nodding off in his seat and stank of booze from six feet away. His horse, however, was a good-looking gray mare who seemed game.
I turned to Cyrus. “Get him in the back,” I said, jumping into the driver’s seat and starting to haul the old man out of it. “Hey-hey, pop! Up and at ’em, you’ve got a fare!”
The old man made some drunken, confused sounds as I shoved him toward the little iron step on the carriage’s left side and down to Cyrus: “What-what do you think-what’re you doing?”
“Driving,” I answered, seating myself and taking the horse’s reins.
“You can’t drive!” the man protested as Cyrus forced him into the passenger compartment and sat alongside him, closing the little doors.
“We’ll double your rate,” Cyrus answered, keeping a good grip on the man. “And don’t worry, the boy’s an excellent driver.”
“But you’ll queer me with the cops!” the old fool bellowed on, removing his top hat and showing us the license what was fastened to it. “I can’t have any trouble with the law-I’m a licensed hack, see?”
“Yeah?” I looked back at him, grabbed the hat, and shoved it onto my own head. “Well, now I am-so sit back and pipe down!”
He did the one but not the other, and was still wailing like a stuck pig as I cracked the reins against the mare’s backside and we bolted out onto the pavement of Broadway at a speed that more than justified the quick measure I’d taken of the animal.
CHAPTER 4
By the time we rounded the corner of Ninth Street, we were moving at such a crazy pace-even, I’ll confess, for me-that the cab near went up on two wheels. The Cunard Line pier, in those days before the launch of the company’s really big liners (the Mauretania and the sad old Lusitania), was still located down at the foot of Clarkson Street, a short block above West Houston; but I was going to avoid that latter thoroughfare for as long as I could. Even late on a Sunday night it’d be a thick mass of whores, cons, and their drunken marks, one what had only gotten thicker in the months since Commissioner Roosevelt had left for Washington. The volume of their business would slow our movement badly. As it was, after we raced through the quiet residential blocks of Ninth Street, passed over Sixth Avenue, and headed west on Christopher, we began to see noticeable signs of what Miss Howard had mentioned earlier on our walk to Number 808: the criminal elements were conducting their affairs outside their dives, dens, and brothels in considerable numbers and with a total lack of the concern what Mr. Roosevelt had, if only briefly, drummed into them. Completing all this activity was the occasional sight of cops doing all those things that the commissioner had, by himself roving the streets at night on inspection tours, worked so hard to prevent: collecting graft payments, drinking outside dance halls and saloons, cavorting with whores, and sleeping anywhere they could. Yes, the old town was truly waking up to the fact that Roosevelt was gone and his reform-minded boss, Mayor Strong, would soon follow suit: the gloves were coming off of the underworld.
As we reached Bleecker Street, something snagged my eye (and, I’ll confess, my guts), and I reined up hard, somewhat to Cyrus’s surprise. “What’s happened, Stevie?” he called to me; but I could only stare across the street in momentary confusion at a patch of faded blue silk and an enormous head of blond hair. From Cyrus’s tone, I could tell he’d caught sight of the same thing, and I knew he was frowning: “Oh. Kat…”
I cracked the reins again and charged over to the blue silk and blond hair, both of which belonged to Kat Devlin, a-well, let’s just call her a friend of mine, for the moment, who worked at one of the kid dives and disorderly houses down on Worth Street. She was with a decked-out man who was old enough to be her grandfather, for Kat was but fourteen; and as they tried to cross Bleecker, I steered the gray mare into their path.
“We don’t have time for this, Stevie,” I heard Cyrus say, gently but with intent.
“One minute, that’s all,” I answered quickly.
Kat started at the sudden appearance of the mare and looked up, her small, pretty face and blue eyes going furious. “Hey! What the hell do you think you’re-” Then she caught sight of me. Her look softened, but she still appeared perplexed. A smile managed to work its way into her thin lips. “Why, Stevie! What’re you doing over here? And what’re you doing with that cab, besides trying to frighten off my trade?” At that she turned the smile up to the old man she was with and locked her arm in his tighter, making my heart burn hotter. The man patted her arm with an expensively gloved hand and grinned sickeningly.
“I was gonna ask you the same thing,” I said. “Bit west for you, ain’t it, Kat?”
“Oh, I’m moving up in the world,” she answered. “Next week I move my things out of Frankie’s for good and go to work on Hudson Street. At the Dusters’ place.” At that she suddenly sniffled hard and painfully, laughed a little to cover it, and wiped her nose quick. Her moth-eaten glove came away with a trace of blood on it-and all, as they say, became clear to me.
“The Dusters,” I said, the burn in my chest turning into fear. “Kat, you can’t-”
She could see what was coming and started to move across the street again. “Just a friend of mine,” she said to the man she was with. Then she called over her shoulder to me, “Stop by Frankie’s and see me this week, Stevie!” It was as much a warning to back off as it was an invitation. “And don’t go stealing any more cabs!”
I wanted to say something, anything, to get her to leave her mark and come with us, but Cyrus reached up and gripped my shoulder hard. “It’s no good, Stevie,” he said, in the same soft but certain tone. “There’s no time.”
I knew he was right, but there was no resignation in the knowledge, and I could feel my body tighten up to the point where, for an instant, my vision went all cockeyed. Then, with a sudden, short yell, I grabbed the cabbie’s long horsewhip out of its holder, lifted it above my head, and lashed it toward the man who was crossing the street with Kat. The whip caught his high hat at the crest, cutting a nice hole in it and sending it flying six feet into a puddle of rainwater and horse piss.
Kat spun on me. “Stevie! Damn you! You can’t-”
But I wasn’t going to hear any more: I cracked the reins and sent the gray mare flying back along Christopher Street, Kat’s curses and protests loud but indistinct behind me.
I suppose you’ve figured out by now that Kat was something more than just a friend of mine. But she wasn’t my girl, by any stretch; wasn’t anybody’s girl, really. I couldn’t and can’t tell you just what place she held in my particular world. Maybe I could say that she was the first person what I ever had intimate relations with, except that such a statement might conjure up happy images of young love, which was far from the reality of it. Truth is, she was a question and a puzzle-one what would get even more perplexing in the days to come, as her life took an unexpected turn what was destined to intertwine it with the case we were only beginning to unravel.