“We now have a most unusual coincidence,” he said, examining the stick. “On the night that the Philippine knife struck the doorway of Number 808 Broadway, Cyrus says that the only person he caught sight of was a young boy, dashing around a corner.”
“That’s right,” Cyrus said. “Looked to be maybe ten, eleven.”
“And Stevie, you say you saw a boy of about the same age disappearing from Bethune Street just after the Duster fell?”
“Yeah. This kid was black, though-definitely. There was enough light to tell.”
The Doctor nodded, and I grabbed another oyster before the others finished them off. “Cyrus?” Dr. Kreizler said. “Can you guess at the ethnicity of the boy you saw?”
Cyrus shook his head. “Too dark. He could have been black, though, I can’t rule it out.”
“What about his dress?”
“The usual, for a boy on the streets,” Cyrus answered with a shrug. “Baggy clothes-castoffs, looked like.”
“Or, as Stevie said, clothes that were too big for him?”
“You could say that.”
The Doctor nodded, though there was no certainty in his face; then he examined the stick again. “Either the same child, or two, then, have appeared at crucial junctures in this investigation. The first time was during a hostile, or at least a warning, event. The second, on the contrary-” The Doctor seemed to be caught by something, and his nose started to wiggle above his mustache like a rabbit’s. “What’s that?”
Mr. Moore looked up and around as a waiter came to clear away the empty oyster tray. “What’s what?”
“That-odor,”the Doctor said. He glanced around, and then his eyes returned to the stick. He held it closer to his face, waving the sharp tip of the thing under his nose. “Hmm… yes, unmistakably. Chloroform…” He smelled the thing again. “And something else…” Unable to place it, he handed the stick to Lucius as more plates of food arrived. “Detective Sergeant?” he said, almost skewering a nice piece of sautéed salmon that Lucius had ordered. “Can you identify it?”
Lucius took the stick and held it a careful distance from his fish, green beans, and potatoes. Then he moved his nose to its tip. “Yes,” he said, thinking it over, “I get the chloroform, all right. And the other…” His face suddenly brightened, then changed to a look of excited concern. “Stevie, would you say that the Duster was dead when they took him away?”
“Dead?” I answered, taking a dish of my favorite food-plain-grilled steak and salty fried potatoes-from the waiter and then making for my little green cave again. “No. Out cold, yeah, but-he was breathing, all right.”
Lucius smelled the stick once more and then handed it to his brother. “In that case-assuming he keeps breathing-whoever used this is as much of an expert as our knife man was.”
Marcus smiled a bit in recognition as he, too, sniffed the stick. “St. Ignatius bean,” he mumbled, his own face so intrigued that he ignored the broiled baby chicken in tarragon sauce that was steaming in front of him.
“What?”Miss Howard said, leaning over and looking at the stick in shock.
“Which explains the chloroform,” Lucius added, as he started to eat.
Mr. Moore, who seconds before had been looking very happy about the brook trout in almond sauce what the waiter had brought him, now dropped his fork and knife in frustration. “All right. Here I go again, the moron of the group.” He braced himself. “What are you people talking about, please?”
“St. Ignatius bean,” Miss Howard answered, as if the first mug what you might’ve buttonholed on the sidewalk outside the terrace would’ve known what she meant. “It’s one of the plants in which strychnine occurs naturally.”
“That’s it!” the Doctor said with a snap of his fingers. “Strychnine! I was certain I recognized it.”
“It’s soluble in water, sparingly soluble in alcohol, and very soluble in chloroform,” Lucius said. “Presuming the intent here was to disable and not to kill, our man knew exactly what proportions to use. And that’s no mean trick.”
“How come?” I asked, tearing into my steak and gulping down my root beer.
“Because strychnine’s more powerful than other drugs used for similar purposes,” Marcus said, handing the stick to Miss Howard and finally starting in on his chicken. “Curare, for instance, is a blend of ingredients-strychnine’s one of them-and that blending makes it easier to control. But in its pure form, strychnine is very tricky stuff. That’s why people use it when they’ve got severe vermin problems. Better than arsenic, really.”
“But can you really be so sure that it is pure strychnine?” the Doctor asked.
“The odor’s fairly distinctive,” Lucius answered. “And the presence of chloroform as a solvent would seem to confirm it. But I’ll take it home if you like, and run some tests. Fairly simple. Little sulfuric acid, some potassium dichromate-”
“Oh, sure,” Mr. Moore said, now devouring his trout. “I do it all the time…”
“Very well,” the Doctor said. “But let us, for the moment, assume you are correct, Detective Sergeant. Can you say who would possess such knowledge, offhand?”
“Well,” Lucius answered, “the stick appears to be some sort of aboriginal dart or arrow.”
“Yes,” the Doctor said. “That was my thought.”
“But as for who uses pure strychnine in hunting, or even warfare-there you’ve got me.”
“And there,” the Doctor said, setting to work on a plate of crab cakes, “I also find my own assignment for tomorrow.”
“Ah-ha!” Mr. Moore said, holding up his fork. “At last, a cryptic comment that I can decipher-you’re going to see Boas!”
“Exactly, Moore. Boas. I’m sure he’ll be delighted to render his services once again.”
Dr. Franz Boas was another of the Doctor’s close scientific friends, the head of the Department of Anthropology at the Museum of Natural History and a man who’d helped our team gain some important tips at a crucial point during the Beecham investigation the year before. Like Dr. Kreizler, Boas was a German by birth, though he’d come to this country later in life than the Doctor. He’d studied psychology before moving on to anthropology and the United States, so he and the Doctor had no trouble communicating on a whole batch of levels; and whenever he came to the house the dining room was pretty certain to be the scene of lively talks and occasional arguments, during which Dr. Boas would sometimes slip into German and Dr. Kreizler would fall right in with him, making it impossible for me to tell what in the world they were hollering about. But he was a kindly man, was Dr. Boas, and like most of your genuine geniuses he didn’t let his brains turn him into what you might call an intellectual snob.
“I shall take him both the knife and this projectile,” Dr. Kreizler said, “and tell him the story of the child or children that we have spotted on the occasions that the weapons have been used. It may be that he can supply some insight, or that someone on his staff can. I confess, the entire matter mystifies me.”
A general noise of chewing agreement came out of the rest of us, showing that we’d pretty much reached the limits of what we could make out of the morning’s activities. For a while we just ate and drank, letting our nerves and our spirits piece themselves back together. But the silence was eventually broken by Miss Howard.
“For a woman whose original action seems to have been so impulsive,” she said slowly, sipping her wine and playing with a dish of fresh strawberries and hot chocolate sauce that had arrived for dessert, “this one seems to have planned how to elude capture awfully well.” She gently bit into a dripping strawberry. “Another paradox, I suppose, Doctor?”
“Indeed, Sara,” the Doctor answered, rolling a strawberry of his own in the chocolate. “But remember-all of you, remember-these paradoxes must not be considered contradictory. They are part of a single process. As a snake propels itself forward by pushing sideways across the sand, first to the left and then to the right, so does Nurse Hunter pursue her desperate goals. She is impulsive, then calculating. Flattering and promiscuous, then suddenly and mortally threatening. An apparently respectable woman with a bedridden husband, who nonetheless seems to have some important connection to one of the most degenerate, senselessly violent gangs in the city. By comparison, more outwardly excessive criminal behavior seems quite comprehensible. Even so obsessive a murderer as John Beecham moved along a course that almost appears linear and coherent-even though it was fatal-when held up against this woman. We find ourselves, in many ways, in an even stranger land when we face Elspeth Hunter. And with fewer maps…”