I nodded at the big man, who tipped his bowler and gave me a warm look in return. “So,” I said uncertainly, “am-I gonna work for you, too, is that the deal?”

“Oh, yes, you’ll work,” the Doctor answered. “But you’ll study, as well. You will read, you’ll learn mathematics, you’ll investigate history. Among many other things.”

“I will?” I said, swallowing hard; after all, I’d never spent a day in school in my life.

“You will,” the Doctor answered, taking a silver cigarette case out, removing a stick, and lighting it. He looked up to see me staring hungrily at the cigarettes. “Ah. But I’m afraid that stops. No smoking for you, young man. And this,” he went on, stepping over and examining the little pile of things I was carrying, “will no longer be necessary.” He pulled my piece of lead pipe out of some clothes and threw it away onto a patch of thin, ratty-looking grass.

It was looking like I was going to be left with nothing but studies, and that fact was not causing me to be any less edgy. “Well-what about the work?” I finally said. “What’ll I do?”

“You mentioned,” the Doctor said, climbing back into the barouche, “that when your activities with Crazy Butch involved waylaying delivery trucks, you were generally assigned to drive them. Was there any particular reason for this?”

I shrugged. “I like horses. And I took to the driving pretty good.”

“Then say hello to Frederick and Gwendolyn,” the Doctor replied, indicating with his cigarette the gelding and mare what stood in front of the barouche. “And take the reins.”

My spirits picked up considerably at that. I went over, patted the handsome black gelding’s long snout, ran a hand along the brown mare’s neck, and grinned. “Seriously?” I asked.

“You seem to find the idea of work more comforting than that of study,” the Doctor replied. “So let us see how you manage. Cyrus, you may as well come down and help me with this appointment schedule. I’m a bit lost. It seems, from my notes, that I was scheduled to be at the Essex Street court house two hours ago.” As the big black man got down from the driver’s seat, the Doctor glanced up at me once more. “Well? You have a job to do, don’t you?”

I gave him another grin and a quick nod, then jumped up into the driver’s seat and cracked the reins against the horses’ haunches.

And I never, as they say, looked back.

Yes, they were fine days, those, when we’d never heard the name John Beecham and Mary Palmer was still alive. Fine days whose return, I realized, we now had good cause to doubt. Those people what had always fought the Doctor and his theory of context (and were driven, it seemed to me, by fear of the way his investigations into violent and illegal behavior led him to poke around in the area of how Americans raised their kids) had generally countered his arguments by saying that the United States had been built on the idea that every man is free to choose-and is responsible for-his individual ideas and actions, no matter what the circumstances of his early life may’ve been. The Doctor didn’t really disagree with them on a legal level; he was just looking for deeper scientific answers. And so, for many years, there’d been a kind of stalemate in the battle between the controversial alienist and them what he unnerved so badly. When little Paulie McPherson had hung himself, though, it’d given the Doctor’s enemies a chance to break that stalemate-and they’d grabbed at it.

But the judge who’d presided over the first hearing on the matter had been a fair-minded man, and he didn’t just flat-out shut the Doctor down. Instead, he ordered the sixty-day investigation period I’ve already mentioned, making the kids at the Institute wards of the court for that time and putting the place in the temporary charge of one Reverend Charles Bancroft, a retired orphanage superintendent. The Doctor himself was forbidden to set foot inside the Institute during that time: for a man of his antsy temperament, sixty days-with no sure knowledge of what would come after-could be a genuine eternity. And the question of how hard he’d take leaving the Institute didn’t involve just him, either. The kids themselves would play a crucial part, for if even one of them snapped while he was gone-and some of those kids were wound pretty tight-the Doctor would, I knew, take all the blame onto himself. He’d always taught his charges to draw strength from the fact that at least one person believed in them and to be ready to use that strength in future times of trouble. But would they be able to do it when the stakes were so high and the outcome was so uncertain…?

The sudden thunder of a gunshot bellowed out of an alleyway just after I’d turned onto Forsyth Street, causing Frederick to rear in fright and me to stop daydreaming and jerk my head around to locate the source of the trouble. It’d come from back by an old rear tenement building, the closest thing to Hell that any living person ever called home. I jumped off the calash to calm Frederick down by stroking his powerful neck and feeding him a couple of cubes of sugar what I always kept in my pocket when I was driving. Keeping my eyes locked on the alleyway, I soon saw the agent of the mayhem: a crazed-looking man, small and wiry, with a big, drooping mustache and a slouch hat. He came wandering out of the alley carrying an old side-by-side shotgun, brazen as can be, with no apparent thought to who might be watching. A scream followed him out, but his only answer was to declare, without turning around, “Now I’ll take care of your fuckin’ little boyfriend!” He then disappeared at the same quick pace around the corner of Eldridge Street. There wasn’t a cop to be seen, of course; there rarely was in that part of town, and if one had been around, the sound of the gunshot would in all likelihood have sent him scurrying in the opposite direction.

I got back onto the driver’s seat of the calash and made for the Institute at a quick pace. Reaching Numbers 185-187 East Broadway-the two red brick buildings with black trim what the Doctor’d bought and converted into one space many years back-I found that there was a young patrolman stationed at the foot of the steps to the main entrance. Jumping to the ground, I gave Frederick a few more pats on the neck and another lump of sugar, then approached the cop, who was too green to know me by sight.

“I don’t suppose you’d be interested to know that there’s a mug wandering up Eldridge Street with a shotgun,” I said.

“You don’t say,” the cop answered, looking me over. “And what business might that be of yours?”

“None of mine,” I said with a shrug, “Just thought it might be some of yours.”

“My business is right here,” the cop announced, straightening his light summer cap and puffing himself up so that his blue tunic looked near to busting. “Court business.”

“Unh-hunh,” I said. “Well, maybe you could tell Dr. Kreizler that his driver’s here. Seeing as getting him off the premises seems to be the main point of the court’s business.”

The cop turned toward the steps, giving me a glare. “You know,” he said, as he went up to the door, “an attitude like that could get you in some tight spots, sonny.”

I let him get inside before shaking my head and spitting into the gutter. “Go chase yourself,” I mumbled. “Sonny.” (Maybe I ought to note here that one of the things all my years with Dr. Kreizler never did affect-besides my taste for smokes-was my attitude toward cops.)

In a few minutes the patrolman reappeared, followed by Dr. Kreizler, a small group of his students, and a pious-looking old bag of bones what I took to be the Reverend Bancroft. The kids, some of the Doctor’s younger charges, were pretty typical of the range of types he generally had at the place: one was a little girl who came from a rich family uptown and who’d refused throughout her life to speak a word to anybody but her nanny-until she met Dr. Kreizler, that is; another was a boy whose folks owned a grocery business in Greenwich Village, a kid who’d taken more than his fair share of beatings for no greater reason than that his conception’d been an accident and neither of his parents could stand having him around; then there was another girl, who’d been found by a friend of the Doctor’s working in an adult disorderly house, even though she wasn’t but ten years old (just how the man happened to find her in said disorderly house, the Doctor never inquired too closely about); another was a boy who hailed from a big manor house in Rhode Island and who’d passed most of his eight years breaking everything he could lay his hands on in a string of unending tantrums.