Beyond that, though, neither the Doctor nor anyone else could do more than speculate. Had Mr. Picton’s mother, in a fit of some kind of despondency, done away with her husband, her offspring, and herself by means of gas-not an uncommon practice, according to the Doctor, among lethally melancholic women? Had Mr. Picton suspected the truth about the matter, and had that suspicion not only made him endlessly anxious for the rest of his days, but driven him for so many years to convict Libby Hatch? We would never know. But just the possibility, combined with the sad occasion of the funeral itself, was enough to keep us all very quiet during the train ride back to New York.
Things calmed down eerily around Seventeenth Street in the days what immediately followed-the case was over, but there was no possibility of returning to a normal routine, being as, even if our spirits had been strong enough to bounce back so quickly, we were still waiting to find out the results of the court investigation into affairs at the Doctor’s Institute. On Friday morning the Isaacsons-who’d put off giving their testimony ever since we’d gotten back to town-finally went before the closed court and told their tale. That same afternoon the Reverend Bancroft was called to give his opinion about how the Institute was set up, whether the staff were up to snuff, and if, in general, the place was a sound proposition. The court waited until Monday to hand down its decision, and I’m not exaggerating when I say that those two days were among the longest of my life. The weather turned foully humid, coating every person in the city in the kind of thin sheet of heavy sweat what seems impossible to get off and always sends tempers flaring. Monday was no better: the thermometer’d already climbed into the high eighties by ten, and when Cyrus, the Doctor, and I boarded the calash to head down to the Tweed court house at two I wasn’t sure that either Frederick-whose weeks of boarding had made him a touch lazy-or any of the rest of us was going to make it.
But make it we did, in every sense of the word. Not only did Judge Samuel Welles surprise us by declaring that the affairs of the Institute were in order and the case of Paulie McPherson was “an obvious aberration,” but he went on to shock the entire courtroom by giving those city fathers what had brought on the investigation a tongue-lashing. Dr. Kreizler’s methods might be unorthodox, Judge Welles said, and some people might not be comfortable with them; in fact, he wasn’t so sure that he was comfortable with all of them himself. But you couldn’t argue with results, and the plain fact was that in all his years of operation the Doctor had lost exactly one kid, one who, as the detective sergeants’ investigation had plainly revealed, had been at least thinking about suicide before coming to the Institute, and who’d brought the instrument of the “crime” with him when he was enrolled. Reminding the Doctor’s critics that New York’s courts had better things to do than pursue unwarranted investigations, Judge Welles declared the whole matter dismissed.
We’d known that Welles was an unpredictable character; but no public official had ever made that kind of statement in support of the Doctor’s work, and the event was enough to make you think that maybe there was some kind of justice in the world, after all. Mr. Moore’d taken the hopeful chance of engaging a private room at Mr. Delmonico’s restaurant for after the hearing (such rooms being the only places in the joint where Cyrus and I were allowed to eat), and during the meal that followed the adults stuffed themselves on more kinds of strangely named French food than I could possibly rattle off all these years later. As for me, I made do with a steak and fried potatoes, and Mr. Delmonico even rounded me up a bottle of root beer (though I think he had to send one of his boys out to fetch it from a local grocer). But even if I can’t remember just what it was that everybody ate, I can remember that it was an evening of a type what was rare for us: there’d been no killings or kidnappings, and no great mystery was the main topic of conversation. In fact, crime didn’t come up much at all-it was just a time to be happy in each other’s company, and remember that terrible events were not the only things that bonded us together.
Being as the rest of the day had gone so well, we probably should’ve known that some unpleasant or at least disturbing surprise would be waiting for us at its end. The Doctor invited everyone back to his house after the meal at Delmonico’s, and when we arrived we discovered a very handsome brougham sitting at the curb in front of the front yard. But the two men sitting up on the driving seat didn’t exactly match the rig: wearing rough sailor’s jackets what indicated a familiarity with the seamier parts of the waterfront, they had the kind of deep brown features, thin, drooping mustaches, and large, dark eyes what immediately suggested they were from India, or that general part of the world. I was riding in a cab with Detective Sergeant Lucius, whose face-always jolly and rosy after a big meal and lots of red wine at Mr. Delmonico’s-suddenly went straight, even a little pale, when he saw the carriage and the men.
“What the-” he whispered. “Oh, no.”
“Oh, no?” I answered, looking at the brougham and then back at the detective sergeant. “What’s ‘oh, no’ about it? Who are they?”
Taking a deep breath, Lucius said, “They look like lascars.”
“Lascars?” I repeated, now a little disturbed myself: even I knew about the tough breed of sailors and pirates whose home waters were the Indian Ocean and the South China Sea. “What the hell are they doing here?”
“Care to guess?” the detective sergeant said. “Lascars are a very common sight-on the Manila waterfront.”
“Oh,” I noised, glancing again at the two mugs on the brougham. Then I just sank down into my seat. “Aw, shit…”
By the time Lucius’s and my cab stopped, the others had already gotten out of a second hansom and the Doctor’s calash, and were gathered around the door of the brougham. There was no sign of life from inside the thing yet, and the first such that we got was a question:
“Dr. Kreizler?” said a deep voice, one what bore a strong Spanish accent.
The Doctor stepped forward. “I am Dr. Laszlo Kreizler. May I be of assistance?”
The door of the brougham finally opened, and out stepped a very dark, handsome man of medium height and build, his hair carefully fixed with pomade. His clothes looked to be about the best that money could buy, and had that formal cut what seems to always mark the diplomat. In his hand he carried a walking stick what had a heavy ball of silver for a handle.
“I am Señor Narciso Linares. I believe you know of me.”
The Doctor just nodded with a small smile, having already guessed, like the rest of us, who the caller was. “Señor.”
Señor Linares flicked his stick toward the house. “Is there a place where we may speak? The matter is most urgent.”
“Please,” the Doctor said, indicating the front door. The señor moved toward it and the Doctor followed, after which the rest of us moved to do the same: but then the two lascars jumped down off the brougham and stood in our way at the gate to the front yard, folding their arms and seeming ready for an argument.
The Doctor turned around, an expression of shock coming into his face. “Señor,” he said, very sternly. “What is the meaning of this behavior? These people are residents of and guests in this house.”
Considering the matter for a moment, the señor just nodded and said, “So.” Then he mouthed some words in Spanish to the lascars, who glumly moved back toward the carriage. After that we all went inside, Cyrus keeping a very careful eye on the two boys at the curb as we did.
The Doctor led Señor Linares up into the parlor and offered him a drink. When the visitor requested a glass of brandy, Mr. Moore fetched it, while the rest of us took seats. Cyrus stood by one window and opened it, still watching the lascars.