The Pennsylvania Railroad terminal was in Jersey City, which Arthur knew was in New Jersey—although barely so. It lay across the North River from New York, and it was one of the many vexations of his tour that after rattling into Jersey City and reaching the terminal, he wasn’t yet at his destination but had to take a ferry to reach New York.
“It’s a pity there isn’t a bridge,” he had said to a man with whom he’d struck up a conversation as the outskirts of Jersey City flashed by.
“Maybe they’ll build one. Or a tunnel. They can build anything nowadays.”
That seemed to be true. Wherever he had gone in the United States, they seemed to be building something new and gigantic, and they always seemed to want to build something even bigger.
“Not the happiest scenery to introduce one to New York,” Arthur had said as the train had slowed and they had passed shacks, pigsties, enormous piles of cinders, ponds of a revolting green color and the factories that made them so. The other man had said something about Jersey City’s having its pretty side, but not along the tracks. Arthur had thought that so it always was, even in England: where the railway met the city, the effect was always sour.
He got down and walked along the platform looking for something that would direct him to the ferry. Most people, he figured, would be taking the ferry into New York, so really it was a matter of following the crowd. He looked at his watch—right on time, and in thirty minutes he should be with Louisa. The thought of her wrung his heart; he knew he had been cruel to her, stupidly cruel; he yearned for her and he knew that his own stupidity had put a barrier between them. Louisa, my little Touie… Over money—stupid, wretched money.
What had possessed him, to be so niggardly with her? They had plenty of money; why should she not spend it on female fripperies if she wanted? But he, in his arrogance and his stupidity (as he thought of it), had hardened his heart against her to teach her a lesson! But what lesson? That he was an unfeeling dunce?
He shook his head in irritation with himself. There would be a difficult scene that he hoped would be short. He would be contrite; he would crawl, if he had to. He couldn’t have her angry with him, couldn’t bear it. She was his Gentle Touie, and to have angered her meant that he had been brutal, savage, a troglodyte: she might as well have a husband who carried a club and dragged her about by the hair.
So, some painful minutes of contrition, and then the pleasure of making up. And then he would show her the tickets he’d bought for her for the rest of the tour, and in a day they would be whisking along the railways together, and everything would be well.
The truth was, he couldn’t bear the idea of her not loving him. If some of that love was the love of a child for her father, that was only as it should be.
He stopped at a stall outside the river end of the station and bought a bunch of bright yellow and blue iris. He supposed they had been raised in a “hothouse,” as they called it here. He already had in his satchel a box of something called “handmade fudge,” about which he knew nothing except that he’d sampled a piece and it was terribly sweet but delicious. He had brought only the one satchel, really an overnight bag; the rest of his luggage would be waiting for him in Philadelphia. He hoped.
He had been walking without looking for signs, actually following a party of half a dozen men who seemed to know exactly where they were going. Then he saw over their heads a sign, “To Ferry,” with an arrow, so he knew he was all right. And he was in luck: the ferry was waiting. The men got on; he got on. One of them smiled at the flowers and then at him, as if they shared some male secret about returning to the little woman.
He stood by the rail and watched Jersey City recede—perhaps the best way to see it, he thought. He walked to the side and watched New York City grow larger and then begin to slide by as they turned downstream. That didn’t seem too odd to him; he supposed the terminal was somewhere near the tip of the city. They were supposed to dock somewhere called Cortlandt Street.
More of the city went by, mostly only the tops of buildings seen over the huge sheds of the steamship docks that lined this side of the island. Arthur tapped his foot; the scene was pleasant enough, lots of bustle and vigor, that sense of adventure that water travel always brings, but he wanted to be where he could hail a cab and hurry to Louisa.
He looked at his watch. They should be there by now; if they took much longer, he’d be late.
A large park came into view. He felt the ferry turning. Now they would be heading for the shore. But they didn’t. They stayed the same distance from New York as they steamed around a green area that his guidebook told him had to be The Battery. If he had cared about history at that moment, he’d have seen it as the site of the original Dutch fortification; as it was, he was seeing it as only something that was not the terminal of the Cortlandt Street ferry. Where was Cortlandt Street?
He walked along the rail and said to another passenger, “Do you know when we reach Cortlandt Street?”
“Cortlandt! This is the Brooklyn Annex Line. We’re going to Brooklyn.”
“I don’t understand.”
“You got on the wrong ferry, my friend. Lots of people do. It’s a good way to see lower Manhattan.”
Ahead and to the left, a large bridge soared toward the sky. This, of course, would be the famous Brooklyn Bridge. The ferry began to turn away from it, heading for a shore at the bridge’s far end. Dammit to hell!
He was going to be late. Louisa would be impatient, thus even crankier than she must be already. His plan of a speedy contrition over a nice lunch was blasted.
Hell!
He paced the deck until the ferry, seemingly hours later, bumped the dock and almost threw him off his feet. He was one of the first ones off but immediately got lost in the Pennsylvania Railroad terminal. He wanted a convenience rather desperately; he had to ask twice for directions, then got lost again finding his way to the street and a sign that said, “Cabs Here.” There were no cabs there. When, after another five minutes, one pulled up, he threw his satchel and the flowers into it and yanked himself up on the step.
“New Britannic Hotel, and I’m in a hurry.”
“That’s across the river, i’n’it?”
“Close to Fifth Avenue. Twenty-Third Street.”
“In New Yawk.”
“In New York, yes. I’m in a devil of a hurry, really.”
“If I go inta New Yawk, I got a hell of a time getting a fare back to Brooklyn, y’unnerstand me? I come back to Brooklyn wit’out a fare, I’m buggered.”
“You are required to take me where I wish to go!”
“Not outside a Brooklyn. Brooklyn ain’t New Yawk. ’Course, you wanna pay me to come back, I can take you.”
“You’ll just pick up a fare and get yourself paid twice for it!”
“I should be so lucky.”
“This is robbery.” He got into the cab. He fumed about the unfairness of it all, the wasted money, the humiliation of being duped by a clown with no more education than the horse he was driving.
The driver waved his whip at something up ahead. “The famous Brooklyn Bridge. Toll is t’ree cents, which you can gimme now or add it to the bill.”
Arthur produced three pennies. They clopped through the toll gate and joined the traffic on the bridge. The driver, who clearly had done this many times before, began a spiel. “This famous bridge was de wonder of de woild when completed in 1883 at a cost of fifteen million dollars. It is five t’ousand, nine hunnert and eighty-nine feet long. Four cables dat used enough wire to go mosta da way around da woild hold up da bridge, which is a hunnert and fifty-t’ree feet above da water. Hey—last week we got a moiderer, he jumped off da bridge to excape da cops, wuddya t’inka dat? And he survived! Least they didn’t find him. The Bowery Butcher. Some jump, huh? Where was I?”
***
Louisa sat on, numb. When Marie said she had to leave for a minute to visit the convenience, Louisa begged her not to go. Marie pointed to a policeman at the bottom of the staircase, but Louisa shook her head. Finally, Marie found another woman to stay with her.
The hotel’s guests and staff had all been gathered in the lobby, although when the police—now led by a deputy chief until Roosevelt reappeared—saw how many there were, they allowed some to move into the restaurant and the bar. There was no food, however; the police had moved the entire staff out of the kitchens. Marie came back to say that there were long lines at both of the women’s rooms on the ground floor, though the men seemed to be moving through theirs fast enough. “Superior equipment,” Marie murmured. “Superior clothing, anyway.”
She had drawn up a chair next to Louisa’s. She thanked the other woman, a big, oddly timid woman in a kimono who drifted away; she had been complaining to Louisa about having been ousted from her room before she was dressed. She said she was outraged but sounded no more exercised than if she’d found a bonbon that had a cream rather than a chocolate center.
Mostly, people stayed away from Louisa. She knew that word had spread through the lobby: people stared at her from a distance, whispered to each other. She heard the word “violated” spoken by a female voice. Only Cody came to ask her if he could do anything; Marie waved him away. Irving came toward them then but veered off when Marie shook her head. Mrs. Simmons, with her little dog tucked under her arm, was allowed to come close. All the stuffing had been knocked out of her; when she got close enough to speak, she burst into tears. She couldn’t kneel, but she bent over Louisa. “I’m so sorry. So sorry. All these years I’ve been here, and all the time, he was…he was…” She patted Louisa’s shoulder. “You’re the bravest little girl I ever saw.”
When she was gone, Louisa whispered, “No, I’m not.” She squeezed Marie’s hand. “Do they know everything?”
“I think they’ve put it together, chère. Some of them heard you and Carver and then Dunne.”
At one point, there was a demonstration at Reception, where the deputy chief had set up his command. Several guests were demanding to be let out of the hotel. “You’re keeping us locked in here with a murderer!” But the police were taking statements and they wouldn’t let anybody leave.
Then the lift descended, and everybody looked toward it before it reached the floor, because it was the first one to come down since the fire alarm had been shut off. There was a collective shrinking back and a collective holding of breath, and then the doors clashed and Manion pushed out an invalid’s chair with a draped something in it. Dunne and Cassidy were close behind him. Manion and Dunne both looked at her; the same expression of bewilderment came over their faces when they saw her absolute indifference to them: Louisa was looking not at them but at the chair. She saw the shape of the old man and the shapes of the bottles and jars under the white cloth. One of the jars had spilled or broken and the cloth was wet.
“I’m going to be sick.”
***
Roosevelt was sweating heavily in his wool jacket and thick waistcoat. His revolver felt like a fifty-pound weight in his hand. He had tried shoving it into the waistband of his trousers, but it dragged them down too much and made his braces cut into his shoulders.
It was hot and airless in the tunnels, and there was a smell. Twenty years of collected foulness whose identity he could only guess. He thought he knew men from his time in the West, and he thought he knew criminals, but he didn’t know this one at all. How could a man have done such things?
He was leading half his policemen along the third floor. The other half were on the floor below, searching in the opposite direction in hopes that they would prevent the maniac from using the tunnels. Roosevelt, however, knew now how flawed his plan was: there were too many tunnels and too many ladders, and for all they knew, the murderer could be safely going up and down ladders on the other side of the hotel.
“Fire!”
“What?” His voice was hoarse, hushed. He felt exhausted.
“I smell smoke! Smell it?”
Roosevelt stopped. He sniffed. Indeed, there was a smell of heat and burning. “It’s the lanterns.”
“No, Commissioner—it’s a fire. That’s wood smoke!”
“Forward!” He pushed on. They followed him; he could hear their muffled footsteps, see the glow of their dark lanterns. Discipline held.
Until he got to the top of a ladder and could see in the tendrils of smoke curling up in the lantern light. He could smell it, too—burning wood.
“Stay calm, men! I don’t want to hear any one of you shout the word ‘fire’! Any man who does will be summarily dismissed from the force! I want the entire unit to right-about-face and proceed in the opposite direction until we find the hatch to one of the doors, and we’ll descend and leave these tunnels. Ready? Right—about face!”
A sergeant who had been right behind him and was now right in front of him turned and whispered, “What about the other boys, sir?”
“They’re on the floor below—we’ll disperse as soon as we’re out and keep opening these infernal doors until we find them!”
He didn’t question that it was his responsibility. He was picturing the tunnels as they’d been described to him and guessing where the other policemen were.
Somebody called from up ahead that they had the correct hatch and they were opening it.
“Down as fast as you can, men. Break through the door down there if you can’t open it. Down you go—down, quickly, quickly…!” He caught the sergeant’s sleeve. “Sergeant, you take charge of getting them down to the ground floor and tell the senior man down there that there’s a fire—a real fire this time.”
“You ain’t coming, sir?”
“The commander must be the last man out.”
***
Marie hurried to lead Louisa toward the staircase. Above were the ladies’ dressing and rest rooms. A glance had told Louisa that the lines to the first-floor conveniences were impossible: her stomach was heaving, her mouth salty. “Hurry!”
“Here, now, you can’t go up there!”
The cop at the stairs held out his arms to stop them. “No admission!”
Marie looked up the stairs. “Well, you let her in!”
The cop looked around. An elderly woman was coming down.
Louisa dodged around the policeman and started to climb, digging her stick into the thick carpet and pushing herself up. It was astonishing how much of her hurt, especially her abdomen and back! Below her, Marie was screaming rather operatically at the policeman, who had taken hold of her. Louisa went on without pausing, driving herself to get somewhere that she could be sick. Even after everything, she couldn’t bear the idea of being sick in front of other people. Only a few feet now—there was the door to the ladies’—another step—another…
She put her hand on the doorknob and pulled. The door swung toward her and she rushed in. Her first breath told her something was wrong—smoke—but she was focused on her nausea, reeling from it, holding her mouth closed with her left hand. She crossed the anteroom and tore open the door to the toilets.
Heat blasted out at her. She backed. The ceiling of the large inner room seemed in flames. In a far corner, the flames were hurling themselves into a square opening as big as a chair seat.
The tunnels—it opens into the tunnels…
She turned away and vomited. That was quick, over; she felt dizzy but cleansed, weak. Aloud, she said, “That old woman.”
She hobbled out, slamming the door behind her, hurrying to the top of the stairs. She looked over the crowd of heads for the dark hat the woman had worn, realized that it was Ethel’s hat.
“Stop that woman! That woman—it’s Galt…!”
A male voice in the crowd shouted, “Fire! The hotel’s on fire!”
A woman screamed.
Somebody was pointing at her. No, at something behind her. Louisa turned. The mezzanine was in flames. She tried to run, almost pitched down the stairs. A man dashed out of the crowd and up the stairs. It was nobody she knew; she tried to fight him off. He scooped her off the stair and carried her down, and she was screaming and pummeling him and it was only when a knot of women formed around them and she was put down that she stopped. He was young; he looked pained, puzzled.
“She was violated,” one of the women said. “We’ll take charge now.”
The deputy chief was shouting from Reception, but the mob in the lobby had stampeded toward the doors. A policeman there had had the wit to open both of the big bronze doors and hold them open with the help of a kitchen cook, and the mob poured out into Twenty-Third Street.
Louisa heard the bells of more fire wagons. She was being hurried along with the crowd. Marie had reappeared, but the women who had rescued her were being jostled away from her; two of them panicked and ran, as she could not. All she could think of was Galt—that he had escaped, dressed as a woman in Ethel’s clothes; that he could be any of the women around her; that she would meet him face to face, see that ferocity, the knife…
She was aware of policemen behind her, then of a knot of them with Roosevelt at the head. He was bellowing instructions about letting “civilians” go out first. “We must be the last! It’s our duty, boys!” He had soot on his face and he had lost his glasses, but Louisa had a glimpse of a face that looked transfigured with delight.
The hotel guests tried to gather in the street but the traffic had no sympathy for them. It was New York: the tramcars and the carriages and the hurrying foot traffic had to get through. Some of the mob darted across and stood on the far side of the street to watch the hotel, but then the fire wagons were there, hose companies and ladder companies, big horses, men in rubber coats and peaked hats, men with axes and brass nozzles the size of cannons.
“Outta the way! Make room—get outta my way…!”
Louisa was pulled along the pavement by somebody, then abandoned to the pressure of people behind her. She reached the corner. Barricades had been put up there, bright yellow and white with FIRE DEPARTMENT in black letters a foot high. The traffic had to stop now—two tramcars had been stalled on the other side of Fifth Avenue; carriages and wagons were being detoured into Fifth Avenue. Policemen were everywhere out here, whistles in their mouths, arms moving, human semaphores that signaled only Keep moving! Keep moving!
When it was more or less sorted out, most of the guests were in a cordoned-off part of Madison Square near Fifth and Twenty-Third. It was as if the police and firemen knew that the guests and the staff would be morbidly driven to watch their hotel burn. They were contained in a ring of uniformed policemen; the ostensible reason was that they had yet to be interrogated. But it was cold, and morbid curiosity or not, many of them shook fists at the policemen and shouted that they were being held prisoner.
***
The slowness of the ride up Fifth Avenue maddened Arthur. His flowers were wilting; his plans for luncheon were ruined. He told the driver to stop talking. He swore at the traffic. When they had to stop at Twenty-First Street and the driver told him that the police wouldn’t let them go on, he was outraged. “Why the devil can’t we?”
“Fire. One a the hotels. Not my fault, so don’t get on your high horse wit’ me. Go shout at a copper. That’ll be two dollars and forty cents.”
Arthur wanted to jump out of the carriage and tell him to go to the devil for his money, but he was a gentleman and an agreement was an agreement. He paid and got down and started trying to work his way north. The driver’s words, “fire in a hotel,” had frightened him. What if it was the New Britannic? What if Louisa was in the hotel—unable to get out—his Louisa…
An astonishingly large crowd was gathering. It was as if nobody in New York had anything to do but watch fires. His flowers were wrecked in the first hundred feet; he had trouble keeping hold of his satchel. Seeing only worse ahead, he gave it up and backtracked, hurried east on Twenty-First Street to Fourth Avenue and turned north again.
The crowd was smaller here, but everybody in it was moving north, fortunately the direction he wanted to go—all except one old man, white hair hanging down all around his head under a peculiar old hat. He was fighting the tide. When Arthur was in his way and couldn’t move fast enough, he bumped straight into Arthur, who caught himself and stepped back and said, “Do watch where you’re going!” But as he said it he saw the old man’s face, deadly white, prematurely lined—with pain, the doctor in him thought; he knew that look. The old man coughed; Arthur saw a bright crimson spray. He tried to dodge, and somebody bumped into him from behind; he let himself be carried along for several steps, trying to turn to see the man.
But the old man had lurched on. Arthur looked down and saw drops on his trousers and one shoe. He knew what it was. Blood. Arterial or lung, from the color. I should go after him—it’s my duty as a physician— But he thought of Louisa, trapped in a fire.
He looked after the old man, but the hat had disappeared behind taller bodies and better hats. My place is with my wife. But he knew he taken an oath to heal…
Arthur went on and reached Twenty-Second Street. A remarkable number of policemen seemed to be in his way now.
He was an object of immediate interest to them. Where was he going? What was the satchel for? Who was he?
He was passed to a senior roundsman, to a sergeant, to a lieutenant.
“You can’t go to the New Britannic, Mr. Doyle. It’s the one that’s on fire.”
“But my wife’s there!”
The lieutenant had read some of his stories. He was sympathetic. He apologized for the trouble and said it was because of the Butcher, which made no sense to Arthur. They were interrupted by another policeman, who said excitedly that they’d just found Foley with his throat slit and a woman’s dress and hat thrown over him, so what now?
The lieutenant swore and turned Arthur over to an ancient of days with orders to take Mr. Doyle to Madison Square to find his wife.
Arthur trudged along behind the old bull. All his plans for reconciliation with Louisa were spoiled, but that was unimportant now. Where was she? If she was still in the hotel, what would he do?
***
Louisa, perhaps because she had gained status—half heroine, half pariah?—was in the front row of the watchers. She was shivering from cold. A fireman carrying a stack of folded blankets draped one over her shoulders without a word and moved on.
Fire hoses were shooting water on both the Fifth Avenue and Twenty-Third Street sides of the New Britannic. A separate cluster of hoses was drenching the annex, which was not on fire yet. Windows on the fourth and fifth floors of the hotel had broken or were breaking, and smoke was drifting out. The fire, however, was not yet as dramatic as the ones they could have seen any night at one of the melodrama theaters.
She watched the smoke curl into the windless air. The smell was all over the square by then. A dozen ladders were up against the walls, and firemen were climbing up as others climbed down on other ladders, seemingly at random. As she looked, a flicker of flame showed, and she thought, My old rooms. But she couldn’t know that.
Roosevelt had set up what he called his “command post” outside the barriers that held the hotel people in, where he could watch the fire and catch the eye of the press. Journalists had settled on the north-east corner of Fifth and Twenty-Third; moved back by the firemen, they had shifted as if by magnetic attraction to the spot where Roosevelt waited.
She heard Roosevelt say that he had “thrown a ring of steel” around the area to prevent the escape “of a criminal guilty of monstrous crimes. He cannot escape us!”
She had told a policeman about the old woman who was not an old woman but Galt, wearing old Carver’s hair and Ethel’s clothes. He had said he would report it.
The flames showed in three windows in the third story now. Abruptly, they belched out over the street. The crowd groaned.
Then sparks were rising from the roof, and the darker smoke that was rising over the hotel became dull red on its underside. The sparks seemed to explode upward and the flames leaped to devour the penthouse and eat their way into the sky. A fireman shouted, “The roof’s going—get them out!”
“Burn,” she murmured aloud.
More sparks and fire flew into the sky. The crackle and roar were thunderous.
“She’s going!”
The roof fell in with a violence they could feel through the ground. The crowd gasped. Released, more flames exploded upward. Windows on the lower floors smashed inward as air rushed to feed the fire above. The brick walls seemed to shudder; the ground under their feet trembled; the futile streams of water turned to steam and were swept away.
Louisa watched the roof collapse. Louder now, she growled, “Burn. Burn!”
That was the way Arthur saw her when he at last fought his way through the crowd. She was standing between two policemen, staring at the remains of the hotel. She looked small to him, pitiful, bedraggled, limp. But she was alive; she hadn’t been burned to death; she was his Louisa, his wife, his Gentle Touie.
He went to her and dropped his satchel and the crushed and broken flowers and put his arms around her. “Louisa, my darling—Louisa—there, there, little woman,” he said, “Arthur is here.”
He was astonished when she started to scream and beat him with her fists.