Winter at Death's Hotel (35 page)

“No, sir, I think, sir, he's stolen a hack.” The cop, young and still a probationer, pointed at a pile of horse dung. “It's still warm, sir. I think the corpse was the driver, sir.”

They were in front of the
World
building. One of the cops muttered that he'd been hoping it was a reporter. The officer said, “Oh, shit, reporters! Get us out of here before they see us. You—what's your name?—stay with the body. Don't answer any questions. Let's go!”

They got back into the carriage and left the very young cop to his corpse.

***

The stolen hack was on the approach road to the bridge, going at a good clip but not one that would draw attention. A clock said not quite three, although a few bells were suggesting it was. The traffic was thin. The cab was a one-horse hansom, light and maneuverable, but the horse was another spavined plug, for which the climb up to the bridge was labor. On and on it went, nonetheless; it wouldn't collapse if it could keep the pace down. Ahead, the toll gates appeared. Only one was open, this side of it a line of half a dozen carriages, as if, as the traffic declined, gates were closed to guarantee that there would always be a delay getting through.

Behind the hack by half a mile, lights, movement, confusion: three Black Marias and five mounted police.

The hack driver looked back. His white hair was wild, his crumpled hat askew. He was coming up to the end of the line for the toll gate. He glanced back again, could see that the horses back there were galloping.

He brought the hack to the end of the line and dropped the reins; in two seconds, he was on the ground. He trotted forward on the side away from the toll operator. As he ran along the line, sleepy drivers looked down at him but said nothing. He kept going, ducked under a closed gate, and stood motionless.

The active gate opened and a milk wagon went through.

The old man jumped on the running board of the milk wagon as it moved forward.

“I need a ride, darlin'.”

“Company rules.” The milkman was short and thin, wearing a white duster and a cloth cap.

“Ah, what a pity, sweetheart.” The old man drove a knife into the driver's side, took the reins and urged the horse forward.

Behind them, the police were galloping toward the closed gates.

The milk wagon had a high dash like a carriage, and a roof that came out a little forward of the driver. There was a kind of bench to lean back on, although the driver stood to drive because he was in and out of the wagon constantly, making deliveries. Now the old man leaned on the bench as the driver collapsed on the floor, gasping and bleeding.

“You just stay down there, darlin'; I'll have you to the doctor-man in a jiffy. It was unkind of me, it was, sticking you, but I meant no harm. It'll all turn out well, you'll see.”

They were on the bridge proper by then. A huge stone support was just passing underneath them; above, miles and miles of wire soared into a sky without stars or moon or first daylight. On their left was the pedestrian railway track—three cents a crossing; above and beyond it was the raised pedestrian walkway.

“The best view in New York,” the old man said. He put his head out the side of the closed wagon and looked back. There seemed to be a lot of confusion at the toll gates. He slapped the reins on the horse's back, but they had no effect on the horse. He had one gait, and this was it. The old man looked back again. He looked up at the walkway, then ahead. The bridge was almost empty.

“Time to take care of you, then,” he said. He steered the milk wagon to the side and stopped.

***

At the toll gates, they had had to move the waiting carriages out of line so the police vehicles could go through. That hadn't gone down well, and a lot of surly suggestions had been made to the police. There was a view that they could wait their turn, or they could get somebody to open another gate. A cop saw that that was probably a good idea, and the one operator on duty was made to open the gate next to his own, although he complained that he lacked the authority and it was on their heads.

When he opened the gate, the civilian carriages waiting in line tried to go through.

Everybody cursed.

Then a cop who'd been standing off to the side shouted, “He's jumped! The Butcher's jumped off the damned bridge!” He didn't say that he'd seen a hat lined with white hair sail after, because he didn't see it, nor did he see the hat float on the wind like a gull to the water, sit briefly there, and sink.

They all piled into the Black Marias and raced toward the distant milk wagon.

***

Louisa had spent a bad night, was still spending a bad night. Outside her window, it was as dark as at midnight. Light might have been showing in the sky, but she couldn't see it; down where she was near the bottom of the cleft between the hotel and its annex, it was dead dark.

She had tried to lie still in the bed but had made a tangle of the sheets. She had got up and drunk water, got up and paced. Now she sat in a hard chair by the window in the dark and waited for day to come. Below her was a kind of narrow alley on her right—the very bottom of the divide between the two buildings—that ended in a wall on her left, behind which were the corridors between the annex and the New Britannic. Opposite her window at ground level was, she knew, a door, and she knew what the door was for: it was an entrance for the kitchen workers. She thought that the first of the breakfast cooks would come in about five-thirty; now, with nothing to do, sleepless, the bird of fatigue a weight on her shoulders, she was waiting for the cooks' human presence.

She had spent the night in a tangle of thoughts as soiled and wrinkled as the sheets on her bed: now Arthur and regret for a letter she had written him the day before; now Minnie and regret for the kiss; now the annex and regret for having taken Carver's “deal.” She had got nowhere with any of them: regret is regret, unrepairable.

Money. Why didn't she have any money? Why couldn't she get any? Part of the night had been spent thinking of who would give or lend her money. She had thought of two sources, Arthur's American editor and his bank. But would they? Banks were very strict. And she didn't know Arthur's editor. But there must be money due Arthur; his American sales were excellent. Could she go begging in her husband's name?

But
why
did
she
need
to
beg?

And dreams. She had got up once because she had found herself thinking of a dream and so arousing herself. Maybe she had been dreaming of Arthur; certainly she had woken feeling that she wanted sex. That had made her get up and drink water and walk around the little room.
I
won't touch myself. I won't.
It would be too bad of her. Marriage was supposed to relieve this desire. But she hadn't desired the figure in her dream; it was simply there unbidden, like a dream shape between her legs. Not really Arthur, not recognizably Arthur. Minnie? But a Minnie with a penis? And there had been some sense of threat, of…fear? Was it Manion? What had she to fear from Manion?

She sighed. Where was the morning?

A sound came from below. Down here, the city's sounds were muffled, but the scrape of a footstep in the alley was clear. She put her forehead against the windowpane and looked down. A shape, black against black, moved up the alley. Then there was a different sound, rat-like, furtive. A bit of metal. A key in a lock?

The door opened to make a widening wedge of pale light. She drew back without thought. What would it matter if she were seen? But it did matter, and she knew why: her fears.

Below her was a foreshortened figure, really little more than the top of a head in a cloth cap and the shoulders of a dark coat. Painted on the pavement was his pale shadow: long overcoat, head cut off by her window and the wall it stood in. She supposed it was one of the breakfast cooks; good, it must be later than she thought. Day was coming.

The wedge of light started to narrow; the black figure moved into the doorway, moved inside, stopped. The top of the head was not so black in the light there, really brown, the brown of the cap. At the same time, she heard another sound from the alley—laughter. Male, slightly high pitched. And the scrape of shoes on pavement.

The door opened a crack more. He must have heard the sound, too. She could see his silhouette as he leaned out again and looked up the alley. Abruptly, he drew back and the door almost closed and she could see only a sliver of light, as if the man was still trying to see out.

Two figures moved into the near-blackness below her. One of them giggled and pointed at the door. Cooks? Something was going on; she pressed her forehead to the glass again and could just make out the two below her. Silence. Then words she couldn't make out, another giggle. Were they kissing? One must be a woman, then. Or—

Metal on metal.
Another
key.
The door opening again, the wedge of light, and she saw the two as she had seen the other one—the top of a silk hat this time, shoulders, and the top of another head, male, no hat, the forehead pale. Not female.

The one in the hat almost fell against the partly opened door. He caught himself and looked inside, then said something that sounded to her ironic, jocular—had he seen the first man, who was already inside? Greeted him, perhaps? She heard his laugh as he turned his face back and up, and she recognized both the laugh and the face. Alexander Newcome.

He pushed the door all the way open and the bare-headed man went in, then Newcome, who grabbed him and pulled him toward himself as the door swung closed.

She knew what she had seen.
Safe.
Arthur Newcome didn't look very safe to her right then. Drunk, foolish. Bringing a young man into the hotel, just like the good-looking young man who had brought the copper-haired woman, but why through this back door? She found she didn't care about Newcome's kissing and fondling another man; she supposed she had always known that; what troubled her was his using this door. What was he doing at this hour of the morning, coming in a back door for which, surely, he wasn't supposed to have a key?

Only after she had twisted and turned in that tangle for a while did she think of the first figure who had gone through the door. Who was he, then? A cook, she had thought. But nobody else had come. Was he somebody who had had to come in early? But Newcome had seemed to know him—or had he?

She sat for three-quarters of an hour. When the breakfast cooks came, they came in a silent group, five of them, and then a dribble of waiters and dishwashers and boys who did she didn't know what.

She went back to bed and slept this time and dreamed of being on a beach with somebody and looking for a place where they could be alone, where they could make love, and there was nothing, only sand and wind and rock and the smell of salt water, and she woke from it exhausted.

***

POLICE PURSUE BOWERY BUTCHER THROUGH STREETS

Another Horrendous Murder Committed
Butcher Leaps from Brooklyn Bridge
Is
he Drowned?

Louisa looked in vain for Minnie's name on the article, but it was anonymous. It seemed a bit scatty to her—there were several grammatical errors—and she supposed it had been written in the heat to get it into the breakfast edition. Minnie's second piece about the police and the murders was in the paper as promised, but relegated to an inside page, kicked there doubtless by this new excitement. How angry Minnie must be!

Louisa grieved for yet another woman murdered and mutilated and, according to the
Express
, as yet unidentified. “Rendered unidentifiable,” had been the
Express
's murky way of putting it.
Why
couldn't they say what they meant
? “Mutilated in a particularly horrific and fiendish manner.”
Oh, really! You're not writing for children, after all.

The Butcher had been interrupted at his ghastly work.
(Or is it play?)
“I heard a wagon where a wagon oughtn't to have been,” said Richard Hoffman, private guard for the West Street Association, “and I was looking for my pal, Hermie (Herman) Steinhoffer, so I turned into this kind of alley, and I saw him and his wagon just wheeling into the next street like the devil himself was behind him. Then I shined my light around and I saw what he'd been up to, and I knew it was the Butcher.”

The police had “made a valiant effort” to capture the murderer, but he had “used a vile strategem on Mulberry Street that turned the residents of that decayed quarter into his fellow-conspirators as they poured from their tenements to smash lamp globes and tear up the covers of underground holes, with the result that two officers suffered broken limbs, three horses had to be destroyed, and a carriage was overturned with resulting damages of more than a hundred dollars.” The chase had continued on to the Brooklyn Bridge after the Butcher had murdered a hack driver and stolen his hansom. “An unfortunate misunderstanding by the employees of the bridge authority held the police back at the toll gates for several valuable minutes.” The Butcher had then apparently commandeered another vehicle—the
World
made it a milk-wagon, the
Express
“a conveyor of beef carcasses to the Jewish trade”—but, whatever the means, he got partway up the bridge and disappeared. “Eyewitnesses assure us that the Butcher dove from the very middle of the bridge's mile-long span into the icy waters of the East River almost a hundred and fifty feet below. ‘No normal man could survive that fall in this season of the year,' a police spokesman was quoted as saying.

“But are we dealing with a normal man?”

Louisa was experienced enough at reading between the lines to suspect that the police had had some share in their own failure. Perhaps it was remarkable that they had been able to assemble any pursuit at all. But the effect of the articles was to give the Butcher a morbidly heroic stature, one that was only increased by suggesting that he was supernormal. And therefore superhuman?