Spider Dance (15 page)

Finally, she took my wrist and led me to the window overlooking Fifth Avenue. While we gazed down, we finally spied the top of Mr. Holmes’s hat turning left up the avenue.

“He’s gone,” I said.

“Oh, that could be a dupe in hat and coat, carrying his cane.”

“Would he really go so far to spy on you?”

She shrugged. “Perhaps not, but I do believe that he has a gruesome and puzzling case on his hands and will be far too busy to meddle in minor melodramas regarding the family origins of a retired opera singer.”

“Was he right? Were you following him yesterday? Did you pass yourself off as a maid at the Vanderbilt house? That huge white one next to the church? One hardly knows which spire denotes the place of worship from the place of commerce rewarded.”

“Yes,” she answered simply, to all my questions.

“I can’t believe it! You thought you might have been born a Vanderbilt? This is worse than thinking you could be the Queen of Bohemia.”

“No, it’s far more likely, Nell. At least I was born here in America. I had a mother we know of, this Eliza Gilbert buried in Green-Wood Cemetery. At least Mr. Holmes would like me to think she is my possible mother. And Green-Wood is a fashionable cemetery, Nell. Not just anyone is buried there. She must have been someone.”

“Everyone is someone.” I sounded prissy even to myself.

“Of course, but I am speaking of how the larger world regards things, and people. Poor Ann Lohman helped many women from New York’s first families when they found themselves in the family way without having first wed.”

“It troubles me that you assume you were of . . . unsanctioned birth. That headstone read ‘
Mrs
. Eliza Gilbert.’”

“Nell, children are seldom left for strangers to rear when their births are . . . regular. I’ve always assumed I was illegitimate, and I refuse to be cowed by the notion. From my views of most mothers and fathers, they are not such a lot as one would care to spend much time around them.”

“My father was—”

“He was a saint, I know. You were lucky, Nell, but you must consider that neither Godfrey nor myself have an ordinary upbringing to look back upon. Our fathers apparently had no use for us, leaving us to mothers forced to foist us off on others. We shouldn’t suffer for it now, as we had to then.”

“Oh, goodness! I didn’t mean—No, of course they don’t
mean anything. Origins, that is. Mr. Holmes may spring from a perfectly conventional family, and look how he turned out!”

“And how is that, Nell?”

“High-handed, annoying, impossibly arrogant.”

“So did half of England, then.” Irene returned to the tea table and poured what must have been an utterly cold cup. She sat and proceeded to sip at it like the veriest savage imported to Windsor Castle and knowing no better.

“Sherlock Holmes,” she said, “is typical of his gender and class. At least this humiliating interview has given me a clue to follow regarding my sole concern in New York City: finding the mother I never had, the woman who left me behind, whether she lies under a headstone in Green-Wood Cemetery or still lurks somewhere out in the streets of New York.”

“So that dead body on the billiard table doesn’t interest you?”

“Of course it interests me! No human being could see another slain in such an odious manner and not care. But we have risked life and limb in the pursuit of one such demented killer. Let Mr. Holmes have a crack at another with the benefit of all he has learned in our wake. Here and now we will pursue nothing but my dead past, and then we will go home.”

“Is that a promise?”

“It is a solemn vow.”

Irene spoke most convincingly, but then she had always mastered her lines perfectly.

It is a capital mistake to theorize before you have all the evidence
.
—SHERLOCK HOLMES, “A STUDY IN SCARLET”

F
ROM THE
C
ASE
N
OTES OF
S
HERLOCK
H
OLMES

Mr. Vanderbilt’s carriage called for me at midnight.

I was waiting outside my hotel to assist in the subterfuge.

“Mr. Holmes?” the driver inquired from his perch.

I nodded and sprang inside, noting that the side lamps were half-shuttered.

There are some kings of small countries in Europe who could not arrange such secrecy to save their thrones.

The ride was not far. As soon as I saw the distant lights tracing a cluster of buildings, I knew where we were going: Bellevue, New York’s grande dame of city hospitals, as St. Bartholomew’s is London’s.

Vanderbilt’s civic power impressed me even more. He’d had the inconvenient body removed from his house directly to the city morgue attached to Bellevue, yet expected secrecy to be maintained. That meant that officialdom in every version was at his service.

Those who were harrying him had perhaps taken on a foe who might not be made of their same violent metal, but outmatched them in sweep and power.

I had strolled by Bellevue in daylight. Walking is the only way to truly take the measure of a city, and naturally such a
large institution should catch my interest. It was at St. Bart’s where I had first heard of some affordable rooms on Baker Street and met the medical man who needed another single young fellow to share them. Alas, Watson had not remained single for long, and so I became the solitary occupant of 221 B.

Bellevue sat on several acres at Twenty-sixth and First Avenue, on the lip of the East River, as the Paris Morgue sits upon the banks of the Seine. Like many institutions, it had grown over the decades into a cluster of two- and four-story buildings, a bit haphazard as to architectural style, which only testified to its vigorous roots in the community.

In fact, I was aware of one paramount fact about Bellevue. It was the first hospital in the world to use hypodermic’ syringes. Thus a colonial outpost managed to lead a British institution to much that is useful, and, in my case, pleasurable. The business I was on would not be in the least pleasurable.

I was not sure where on the grounds the carriage stopped, but no sooner had I alighted then another man met me.

“Mr. Holmes?” he inquired.

I was beginning to feel like an oddly welcome guest at a country house party where I knew no one.

“Yes.”

“This way, sir.”

The way was lit by his lantern, though once we were inside a few electric lights stared from the wall fixtures. Those used to the flickering glamour of flame or the gas jet find electric illumination rather relentless, but I welcome these steady beams that permit no misinterpretation.

I was taken down a passage so plain it obviously led to those unable to note its austerity: the dead. Entering a room, I felt the artificially cold air of a mortuary keeping room.

My guide lifted his lantern to touch a switch. Cold electric light flooded the concrete-and-steel table before me.

There, nude, lay the old man once cushioned on green felt in a millionaire’s residence.

“We have fifteen minutes before the night watchman returns to where your carriage waits.”

“Ten will be sufficient. Hold up your lantern, please.”

“The electric lights—”

“Are splendid, but I need as much and more.”

My guide, a youngish Irishman whose wife and four children must be gnawing upon his unaccustomed absence from home this night, reluctantly stepped near the makeshift bier. He held up the lantern until I felt its slight warmth on my face.

Nothing would warm the face below me, bloodless now and gray as granite.

I had examined the mutilated hands and feet before, but now bent again to each extremity. The wounds were as sere as ancient papyrus, all blood washed away, the skin puckering along the gashes like parchment.

Now I could truly see. Now I knew what to look for.

I moved, and my able assistant moved the lantern with me.

Yes! Rope burns at the wrists and ankles. Very faint, for the man had been dying, or freshly dead when trussed up in the Vanderbilt lighting fixture.

What hath Edison wrought? Without such cold sources of light, such huge fixtures would not be possible. Without such an opportunity, this man would not have been used as a deus ex machina in some ancient play, lowered like the god in the machine to strike awe and fear into his audience. His audience of one man only: William Kissam Vanderbilt.

What could this mild-mannered millionaire have done to invoke such bloodthirsty enemies? And why?

The answer was bound to be both confounding and intriguing.

Of incalculable value to any large newspaper is its ‘morgue’
or library. Hardly an hour passes that some situation
does not arise which requires reference to previous
items . . . a treasure of necessary information
.
—
STANLEY WALKER, CITY EDITOR,
NEW YORK HERALD TRIBUNE
, 1934

Herald Square clearly took its name from the
New York Herald
office building that faced Thirty-fifth Street. This was a pleasantly low-profile two-story building faced with graceful Italianate arches. Not far away the Sixth Avenue Elevated roared past, and the area thronged with the marquees of theaters, dance halls, and even an opera house, as well as restaurants.