By the time we reached Hudson Street I was still in a hell of a state, and I made no effort to slow the mare as I pulled the reins hard with my left arm and gave the animal the word to turn downtown. Once again we near went up on two wheels, and though the cabbie screamed in fear I heard no sound of protest from Cyrus, who was used to my driving and knew I’d never overturned a rig yet. Passing by the faded red bricks of old St. Luke’s Chapel on our right and then the saloons and stores of lower Hudson Street, we reached Clarkson in just a few more seconds and made another wild turn, this time west. The river and the waterfront suddenly sprang into being in front of us, the water blacker than the night and the pier at the end of the street unusually busy for the hour.
As we cleared the warehouses and sailors’ boarding hovels what lined the last couple of blocks of Clarkson Street, we could begin to make out the shape of a big steamer docked at the long, deep green superstructure of the Cunard pier: she was the Campania, not yet five years old and lying at proud rest, with strings of small lights on her boat deck that illuminated her two deep red, black-crowned funnels, her handsome white bridge and lifeboats, and the stately line of her hull, all of which impressively hinted at what wonders the company that’d pioneered transatlantic travel was going to achieve in the none-too-distant future.
On the waterfront near the pier was a fairly large group of people, and as we got closer I could see that a lot of them were cops, some detectives and some in uniform. There were a few sailors and longshoremen, too, and, strangely, a few young boys dressed in nothing but soaking wet pants what had been cut off at the knees. They had large sheets of canvas wrapped around their shoulders and were shivering and jumping up and down, half from the chill of the river water they’d apparently been swimming in and half from excitement. A few torches and one longshoreman’s electrical lamp lit the scene, but there was no sign as yet of the Detective Sergeants Isaacson. Which meant nothing, of course-they could easily have been at the bottom of the Hudson in diving helmets, searching for clues that the average New York detective would’ve considered useless.
Once we reached the waterfront, Cyrus pulled some money out of his billfold, stuffed it into the cabbie’s shaking hand, and said only, “Stay here,” a command that the man was in no condition to disobey. Just to make sure he didn’t bolt, though, I kept his hat and license on my head as we started to make our way through the crowd.
I let Cyrus do the talking to the cops, given that whatever little respect most New York City cops had for blacks, they had even less for me. I’d already spotted one or two officers that I’d crossed paths with during the years I’d been known as “the Stevepipe” and had been, I’ll admit, justifiably infamous around Mulberry Street. When Cyrus inquired after the Isaacsons, he was what you might call reluctantly directed toward whatever business was taking place at the center of the crowd, to a cry of “Nigger to see the Jew boys!” We shoved our way forward.
I hadn’t seen the detective sergeants in a few months, but it would’ve been impossible to imagine them in a more typical setting. On the concrete embankment of the waterfront, they were hunched over a wide piece of bright red oilcloth. The tall, handsome Marcus, with his full head of curly dark hair and big, noble nose, had a tape measure and some steel gauging instruments out, and he was busily recording the dimensions of some still unrecognizable object underneath him. His younger brother Lucius, shorter and stouter, with thinning hair what in spots revealed an always-sweating scalp, was poking around with what looked like the kind of medical instruments Dr. Kreizler kept in his examination room. They were being watched over by a captain I recognized-Hogan was his name, and he was shaking his head the way all the old guard did when faced with the work of the Isaacsons.
“There ain’t enough of it to make any sense of,” Captain Hogan said with a laugh. “We’ll be better off dragging the river to see if we can’t find something that might tell us a little more-like, for instance, maybe a head.” The cops around him joined in the laughter. “That thing ought to go straight to the morgue-though I don’t know what even the morgue boys’d do with it.”
“There are a lot of important clues in what we have here,” Marcus answered without turning, his voice deep and confident. “We can at least get an idea of how it was done.”
“And transferring it from the scene will only result in the usual damage to additional evidence,” Lucius tacked on, his voice quick and agitated. “So if you’ll just be good enough to keep these people back and let us finish, Captain Hogan, there’ll be time enough for you to make your delivery to the charnel house.”
Hogan laughed again and turned away. “You Jew boys. Always thinkin’. Okay, folks, step back, now, let’s let the experts do their job.”
As Hogan glanced our way, I pulled the top hat down over my eyes in the continuing hope of not being recognized, while Cyrus approached him. “Sir,” he said, with far more respect than I knew he felt, “I have a very important personal message for the detective sergeants.”
“Do you, now?” Hogan answered. “Well, they won’t want any Zulu boy taking them away from their scientific studies-”
But the Isaacsons had already turned at the sound of Cyrus’s voice. Seeing him, they both smiled. “Cyrus!” Marcus called. “What are you doing here?” The detective sergeant glanced around, and I knew he was looking for me. I already had a finger in front of my mouth, so that when he saw me he’d know not to say anything. He got the message and nodded, still smiling, and then Lucius did the same. They both got up off their haunches, and for the first time we could see what was lying on the oilcloth.
It was the upper part of a man’s torso, which had been cut off just below the ribs. The neck had likewise been severed, in a way what even I could see was not the work of any expert. The arms had also been hacked off of the hunk of flesh, which looked fairly fresh. That and the fact that there wasn’t much of a stench seemed to indicate the thing hadn’t been in the water all that long.
At a nod from Cyrus, Lucius and Marcus drew aside with us, and friendlier greetings were exchanged in whispered voices.
“Have you changed professions, Stevie?” Lucius asked, indicating my hat as he mopped at his head with a handkerchief.
“No, sir,” I answered. “But we needed to get here in a hurry. Miss Howard-”
“Sara?” Marcus cut in. “Is she all right? Has anything happened?”
“She’s at Number 808, sir,” Cyrus answered. “With a client and Mr. Moore. It’s a case that they seem to think you may be able to help them with. It’s urgent-but it’s got to be unofficial.”
Lucius sighed. “Like anything else that might actually advance forensic science these days. It’s all we can do to keep this bunch from taking these remains and feeding them to the lions in the Central Park menagerie.”
“What happened?” I asked, again looking at the grim quarter of a corpse on the oilcloth.
“Some kids saw it floating out in the river,” Marcus answered. “Pretty crude job. Dead less than a few hours, certainly. But there’re some interesting details, and we need to record them all. Can you give us five minutes?”
Cyrus nodded, and then the detective sergeants went back to their work. I could hear Lucius as he began to list various details of the thing to the other cops, his tone showing plainly that he knew it was useless and growing maybe just a little haughty as a result: “Now, then, Captain, you will note, I’m certain, that both the flesh and the spine have been cut with some kind of crude saw. We can rule out the possibility of any medical student or anatomist stealing body parts-they wouldn’t want to damage the organs in that way. And these rectangular patches of missing skin are extremely interesting-they’ve been deliberately cut away, in all likelihood to remove some kind of identifying marks. Tattoos, maybe, since we’re on the waterfront, or perhaps simple birthmarks. So the murderer almost certainly knew his victim well…”