Enoch Bale the Vampyr walked the nighttime streets and alleys of the Fourth Ward from the park at City Hall to the Bowery and further to the East River and South Street. He wore a plain black frock coat, a white silk shirt and boots. He wore no hat, his pitch-black hair hanging freely down to his shoulders. He carried a walking stick that could be better described as a cudgel, its handle made in the brass image of a snarling wolf, like Napoleon’s bees or the Dragon of Saint George, a favorite motif.
It was very dark, and here there were no gas lamps to light the streets, the only illumination coming from behind the shuttered windows of the tenement buildings, the grog shops and the occasional lantern at a doorway. Even so, the streets were as full of people as they were at midday. Prostitutes in all shapes, sizes, colors and states of inebriation abounded. On corners, lounging in alleys, strutting up and down displaying their wares. There were runners and ropers-in on every street corner, whispering in strangers’ ears the delights available behind this shaded doorway or that. Open coaches rattled past with their passengers, likely travelers out for what they thought would be an adventure, hooked by the commission men in fancy clothes who spent their time in hotel lobbies scouting for prospects. Dogs, rats, women or the gaming table—it didn’t matter which. The Fabulous Fourth had every diversion known and in every variety.
There were hard men about as well, with eyes like hot coals searching for likely victims, usually those who’d already been fleeced and savaged by the saloons and sporting rooms and who’d drunk far too much blindingly cheap gin or bucket grog. If they were lucky they might escape with nothing but their shoes and shirts stolen, but most would take a beating before the constables found them tossed on the rubbish tips or down a cesspit the following morning.
No one paid much attention to the tall, dark man with the unfashionably long hair. It was almost as though he were invisible, or more likely that once they’d seen him, passersby would quickly look away and pretend their eyes had never met his. As he walked, the loiterers and streetwalkers seemed to shrink back into the shadows from whence they came, and everywhere there was the faint tremor that can be felt between a predator and its prey.
The air was full of tastes and smells. Rotting vegetables and fruit from the Fulton Market less than a block away, the stink of fish rising in a pall from the fish market on the wharves just below it. The thick odor of hops was in the air from the Empire Brewery around the corner on Cherry Street, running twenty-four hours a day and only one of hundreds brewing endless barrels to slake the city’s never-ending, never-slowing thirst. There were the fetid smells of tanneries and coal tips, the waste, liquid and solid, of the slaughterhouses, the nostril-clogging too-sweet burnt caramel snout of the sugar refineries, both here and across the East River in Brooklyn. There was the hiss and faint aftersmell of the gas lamps, the wet smell of building piles as they settled into the swampy ground where the old collect pond had been. The smell of the river, the smell of fresh-laid bricks and new-cut stone, the smell of paint and turpentine, and threaded through it all like the reaching subterranean filaments of a suppurating toadstool were the smells of mankind. Man sweat, man waste, man fear, man lust, man horror and here and there, usually hidden, man blood and death, a copper taste on the tongue, the special green-guts odor of death-vented bowels and gassy decay.
To someone unused to it, the stink was suffocating, and even those who lived nearby often walked with scented rags or handkerchiefs over their noses. To Enoch Bale the Vampyr, the horrifying odors of New York were but a nosegay to some of the battlefields he’d once walked and killed on. He let the stench break over him like a wave splitting on the bow of a ship pushed on by the wind, his senses looking for something that none around him even knew existed.
A bright light caught his eye—a doorway and the fading sign it lit: 273 WATER ST. KIT BURNS’S SPORTSMAN’S HALL. The sign was in gilt and bilious green, much the worse for wear. Remarkably, the apostrophes were in their proper places. The building itself was a little out of the ordinary and at one time had obviously stood on its own, the residence of a wealthy merchant. It was good redbrick, neatly pointed, four full stories tall, the windows invisible behind heavy shutters painted a fading green. The roof was sheathed in copper. All of it was in sharp contrast to the run-down tenements and tumbledown sailors’ lodgings all around it, their ground floors or basements almost inevitably turned into rough saloons, low brothels and grog shops serving bucket liquor.
The wide doors were open, two enormous men in bowler hats and checked suits standing on either side. From the large room beyond there was the sound of laughter, male and female, voices singing and even the occasional scream. From below, Bale could hear the hollow mutterings of a crowd, groans and cheers. Rats, or dogs or both. He looked up into the night sky. The stars and any moon were lost in the smoky, greasy haze.
He went up the ramplike steps to the front door. One of the bowler-hatted men took that moment to tap out the bowl of his pipe on an upturned shoe, and the second man, after one brief look, turned away, putting his broad back to Bale, making sure that both his hands were visible, offering no excuse for anger. The Vampyr went through the open doorway without hindrance or question.
The main floor was a saloon divided into three rooms. In the first room was a solid bar with mirrors, bottles of earthenware and glass on shelves behind, taps in rows beneath the counter. It was filled to overflowing with a laughing, jostling crowd and was wreathed in the smoke from cheap cigars.
The second room had banquettes against the walls and aproned waiters bringing drinks.
A black man sat playing a piano. It was a tune the Vampyr had heard aboard the Anglo-Saxon, and obviously a favorite here. The man was singing in a clear, strong baritone that worked its way easily above the other noise. It was called, simply, “Lorena.”
The story of the past, Lorena,
Alas! I care not to repeat,
The hopes that could not last, Lorena,
They lived, but only lived to cheat.
I would not cause e’en one regret
To wrankle in your bosom now;
For “if we try, we may forget,”
Were words of thine long years ago.
For “if we try, we may forget,”
Were words of thine long years ago.
The third room was the salon, with stairs going up and stairs going down. There were half a dozen women in the room, all of them clearly sober and smiling, dressed or undressed in varying degrees. In age they ranged from perhaps twelve to twenty-five. Each one had a paper fan and on the fan a painted number.
There was one man in the room, a huge, utterly unpleasant figure with bulging eyes in a pale porcine face, fat lips sucking wetly on a corncob pipe, his hands as big as sledgehammers, the fingers like sausages. His eyes were pale blue and watery. Red veins spread across his cheeks and glistening forehead like the tracery of a bloodshot eye. His thighs bulged the houndstooth check of his trousers, and his belly flowed over his broad leather belt like lava. He wore high boots, a green shirt and suspenders. The fringe of hair around his knotted skull might once have been red, but now it was the color of tobacco. In the wide belt were two Remington Pocket Police revolvers, the cylinders and the triggers done in brass, and Enoch Bale could see the ivory handle of a knife in the man’s right boot. An iron-banded cudgel used for stunning cows in the slaughterhouse leaned against the wooden armchair he sprawled in.
“My name’s Leese,” said the man, speaking around the pipe in his mouth. Both hands flexed slightly against his thighs, tensing. “They call me Snatchem, because that’s what I do.” He peered up at the tall man with the long black hair. “You got anything for Snatchem today, sport?”
“Not today, I’m afraid, Mr. Leese.”
“You’re a foreigner.”
“You might say that.”
“Might say?! I do say!” He laughed and turned to check the girls’ expressions for approval. They were all trying not to look at the man in front of them and not succeeding. “What brings you to Kit Burns’s place?”
“Curiosity,” murmured Enoch Bale.
“Kit doesn’t abide lookers,” said Leese. “This isn’t a fancy show at Barnum’s, understand? Here you pay, one wise or the other.”
A coin appeared in the Vampyr’s hand as if by magic. He flicked his long fingers and the coin spun through the air in Snatchem Leese’s direction, the glint of gold catching the glow from the gaslights on the walls around the room.
Almost as an afterthought the big man with the bulging eyes reached up and deftly twitched the coin out of the air. He examined it, then took the corncob pipe from his mouth and tried the coin between a few dark, stained teeth. “Twenty dollars,” observed the man. “Very nice indeed.” Twenty dollars: four times the daily wages of a skilled craftsman, forty times those of a laborer digging ditches or laying pavers. Snatchem Leese slipped the coin away into the pocket of his shirt. “Women and cards upstairs; rats, dogs and prizefights in the pits under. Got it?” He waved his hand. “Girls you order by their numbers.” He slipped the corncob pipe back between his lips. “Sheehan and Maddersly in the ring tonight, if you didn’t already know.”
The Vampyr went down the heavy oak steps into the low-ceilinged basement. The long room was dirt floored, the air choked with smoke. If anything, it was more crowded than the rooms upstairs, and everyone was either drinking or placing bets with the bookies standing on their wooden crates, betting slips tucked into hatbands, fists full of dollars and pockets bulging with coin.
In the middle of the room was the rat pit. “Pit” was a misnomer because it was nothing more than a ten-foot square made with a three-foot-high fence around it, the inner side sheathed in thin metal. On two sides of the ring, rough tiers of seats had been constructed using barrels and planks. The floor of the pit was sand, blood caked from the earlier round of dog fights and rat terriers at work. The corpses of headless rats gnawed by the terriers lay around the perimeter of the fence, and in a far corner the gutted body of a bulldog lay, its white and purple entrails coiled around its savaged belly.
In the center of the pit two men were fighting bare knuckled, stripped to the waist. One was shorter than the other, black bearded, with short, dark hair. He had the hard, lean look of an Irishman from one of the lower counties, Cork or Kerry, with as much Spaniard or French in him as Celt. The other was slimmer, dressed in kid-leather riding trousers, and had the look of a gentlemen. He wore a broad leather belt fixed with a huge silver buckle. The short one had a chest like a barrel and arms like hams, but the taller, slighter man had muscle too, and speed. The short man tried to pummel his taller rival with combinations to the belly and kidneys, but the taller man chose his battles, reaching out with his longer arms to jab at his opponent’s jaw, dancing out of the way of most of the other man’s ferocious swings. The fists of both men were slick with blood, and the short one’s left eye was swollen shut and black with crusted blood.
“What round?” asked Enoch Bale to the well-dressed man beside him.
“Thirtieth.”
“Of how many?”
“Until one of them drops, boyo,” chortled the man. Bale looked beyond the far end of the ring and saw a group of very young, dashing-looking men cheering on the taller man boxing in the ring.
“They’re friends of the man in the belt?” Bale asked, raising his voice over the steady noise in the basement.
“That’s Maddersly in the ring. He belongs to Gould.”
“Gould?”
“Jay Gould,” said the man beside the Vampyr, pointing across the pit. “The one over there with the top hat and the cane. Looks like an undertaker.” Bale stared through the smoke. The man was handsome, sallow and dark-haired, wearing an expensive-looking navy blue silk jacket and striped trousers. He looked to be in his early thirties, and the men around him seemed cut from the same cloth. His companions were all laughing and cheering, but the one called Gould wore no expression at all. His face was as impassive as a bookkeeper’s.
“Who is he?” asked Enoch Bale.
“Jay Gould?” the man answered, looking surprised. “He’s just about the hardest scalper on the exchange. He bulls the market, then milks the street. He’s been accused of kiting and ballooning, but no one has ever come up with any proof. He arranges fights for Maddersly. Makes book on him for a hobby. He’s an Assassin.”
“An Assassin?”
“A member of the Assassin’s Club. Posh gentlemen traders and such. Costs a pretty penny to join them, not that they take just anyone.”
Maddersly landed a right hook that lifted his shorter opponent off his feet, then took a short step, raised his left to fend off a haymaker, then used his own left to pound Sheehan in his ruined eye. The short man let out a yelp and tried to cover that side of his face, but it was too late. The right fist lashed out again and caught Sheehan in the throat, and the left struck him hard high in the chest. He dropped like a stone into the bloody center of the pit. There was sudden silence in the room. Maddersly stood above his prostrate opponent, waiting. The other man lay motionless in the dark-stained sand. From somewhere a deep voice boomed out heartily.
“Pay up, gents!” And then the crowd began to cheer. Enoch Bale kept his eyes on Gould. Even with his champion triumphant, he showed no pleasure or any other emotion at all. Suddenly Gould looked up, and for a fraction of a second the young man’s hooded eyes locked with Bale’s, and Jay Gould smiled, almost in recognition.
As Echo Van Helsing quickly saw, Bellevue Hospital, though well away from the center of the city, had done little or nothing to deserve its name, especially in the dead of night. It was a gloomy brownstone pile in the classical tradition, and from the odors rising up around it she could tell it had been located in very close proximity to a cesspool or swamp. As the carriage pulled up at the hospital’s main gate, the only view that Echo glimpsed was the moonlit wharf where the ferry to Blackwell’s Island and the lunatic asylum stood.
After paying the driver and promising him a fare back into town if he waited, Kate Warne led her young friend across an open courtyard and around to the side of the main building. Hidden by the high walls surrounding the grounds were two low structures, shed roofed and windowless.
“The smaller one at the back is the dead house. The big one in front is the morgue.” They went to the main door of the morgue, which was lit with a single gas lamp behind a cage of blue glass. The door itself was heavy and sheathed in painted metal. The Pinkerton agent knocked loudly, then lifted the latch and went inside without waiting for an answer.
The interior of the morgue was simple and straightforward: a single chamber, low ceilinged and lit by a series of open cruciform gas jets in the ceiling every six or seven feet. The walls were cut stone with workbenches up against them, and the floor was made from heavy paving stone and set at intervals with drains. On the far wall there were a number of taps and large sinks, and running down the center of the room were eight stone pedestals, each one supporting an eight-foot-long marble-topped table, its edges raised all around. There was one cross-shaped gas lamp for every two tables.
There was only one other living person in the chamber. He was tall, fair-haired and clean shaven, wearing a stained linen apron over what appeared to be a major’s uniform. He nodded to Kate as she stepped forward, then used the long curved knife in his hand to point at the body on the marble slab beside him.
“Here’s the one you asked for,” said the major. “She’s been in the dead house, so she’s nice and chilled.” He turned to Echo and smiled. “My name is Dr. Sanger. Eugene Sanger. We keep the fresh ones in the dead house because that’s where we store the ice.”
The body on the table was that of a naked woman, barely into her teens, brown-haired, with small, immature breasts and barely curving hips. A small strip of linen had been laid modestly across her pubic area. She appeared almost asleep, her eyes closed, her mouth relaxed. If it hadn’t been for the gaping ragged wound in her throat, she would have looked quite peaceful. Her right foot was partially gone. It looked half eaten by small razor teeth. There was no blood.
“Who is she?” Kate asked.
“No idea. A prostitute certainly.” Sanger cleared his throat self-consciously. “There’s ample evidence of that.”
“Where was she found?” Kate asked.
“Coal yard at the foot of Fourth Street and Tompkins, near the river,” Sanger said. “She was buried in the cinders, but the rats had got to her.” He pointed the heavy knife down at her foot. “A worker at the yard found her, and the police brought her here.”
“How long ago?”
“Two days. She was fresh when she was brought in. Dead no more than a few hours.”
“Cause of death?”
“I would have thought that was obvious.” Sanger laughed.
“Not so obvious,” said Echo, leaning forward to examine the girl’s mouth. There was a wooden, velvet-lined case of surgeon’s tools on the edge of the table by the dead girl’s head. Echo selected a narrow pair of tongs generally used for removing bullets from wounds and pulled back the lips. They were neatly sewn together with strong gut, from the inside, like an embalmer would do.
“Good grief,” murmured Sanger, “I never even noticed that.”
Echo turned her attention to the girl’s neck, pushing back a flap of ruined flesh on the girl’s throat.
“Quite deft,” remarked Sanger, raising an eyebrow. “Who is this young, er, man, Katherine?”
“My name is Van Helsing,” Echo answered without looking up. She peeled back another scrap of pale flesh. Beneath it, almost obscured by the main tear in the flesh, were a pair of punctures about three inches apart. “Should you care to dissect the neck, I think you’d find the two punctures extend down into the main carotid artery,” Echo said, standing upright. She pointed with the tongs. Sanger bent over, inspecting the wound.
“A reptile bite,” he said.
“No,” Echo said. “A man, of sorts.”
Sanger turned to Kate, who was busy lighting another one of her cigars.
“She knows?” Sanger asked.
“I’m afraid so,” said Kate. She blew out a cloud of smoke. “She followed one of them here from England.”
“One of them?” Echo said, surprised.
“There’s been murders like this one for the past few months, since Christmas,” Kate answered. “Long before your man even arrived. This one is just the latest.”
“We’re trying to keep this quiet,” said Sanger. “With the war going the way it is and the new draft ruling, a panic in Mr. Garvey’s paper or Mr. Harper’s magazine could throw the whole city into a frenzy. A million people rioting is not a prospect I enjoy contemplating.”
“I still don’t understand,” said Echo. “The man who killed my father didn’t fly here like some giant bird. He couldn’t have been in two places at once.”
“He wasn’t,” said Kate Warne. “We think there’s more than one of them.”
Echo stared, her eyes widening as the implications of what the Pinkerton agent was telling her sank in.
“Dear God,” she whispered. “A breed apart.”
The Vampyr followed Maddersly when he finally left Kit Burns’s establishment several hours after the fight had ended. He’d watched as Gould and the pugilists’ other friends toasted him with everything from tankards of beer to earthen bottles of imported Dutch genever water. Mounds of oysters were consumed along with the liquor, and by two thirty in the morning the fighter looked in worse shape than he had in the pit. By then most of his friends had taken whores upstairs to the rooms on the upper floors or, like Gould, were playing high-stakes poker in the gaming rooms above the saloon.
The fighter turned left after leaving the Sportsman’s Hall and staggered up to Roosevelt Street, named for the prominent glass importer’s family whose business had started there. At first it appeared that the man was making for the gaslit pleasures of the Bowery a few blocks away, but he turned again on Cherry Street, then abruptly turned into a narrow alley that ran between the high brick walls of a brewery and the tall gray planks of a fence around a livery stable. Horses whinnied and stamped at the disturbance, and somewhere a dog began to howl.
Enoch Bale stepped into the alley and reversed the heavy stick in his hand, putting the brass head at the lower end. The alley was totally dark, but shadows were where he lived, and it wasn’t difficult to make out the whisper of the other man’s breathing and to take in the absence of his receding footsteps. Maddersly was lurking no more than ten feet away, hidden in a doorway leading into the brewery’s boiler room.
Without any pause the Vampyr strode ahead, seemingly oblivious, hearing the change in Maddersly’s breathing. As he reached the doorway he swung the heavy end of the walking stick in a vicious arc, the brass wolf’s head striking the tall man in the heart, doubling him over in pain. Something dropped from the man’s hand. A pistol like the one he’d seen in Snatchem Leese’s belt, except the cylinder of this one was plain steel. The Vampyr kicked it away with a booted foot and pushed Maddersly back against the brick wall. The horses in the livery yard were stamping and whinnying madly now, kicking in their stalls. The dog continued to howl.
The Vampyr dropped the walking stick and grabbed Maddersly by the throat. He leaned forward slightly and breathed in through his nostrils, taking in the scent.
“You are Damphyr,” he said, his face no more than a few inches from the other man. “I smelled it on you in the rat pit. I tasted it on the night air. The black soulless stink of your kind.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about. You were following me,” the man choked out. The Vampyr could feel the heavy muscles in the man’s shoulders tensing. He was about to try to struggle out of Enoch Bale’s grip. With his free hand the Vampyr reached down and grasped Maddersly’s wrist, the sharpened, bone-hard nail of his thumb cutting into the ulnar artery and severing both the ulnar and radial nerves. Blood gushed. Maddersly screamed and the hand went limp. The Vampyr resisted the sensuous feeling of the man’s rich warm blood flowing over his fingers and concentrated on the subject at hand.
“You are Damphyr,” he repeated. “A creature of halves, neither one thing or another. A donkey trying to imitate a horse.”
“I thought you were a thumper for sure, or a rope man after my purse.” The fighter swallowed, his eyes flickering as the blood poured out of the long, deep incision in his wrist. “Please, take it. Two hundred dollars.”
“I don’t want your money,” said the Vampyr. “I want answers to my questions.”
“I don’t know nothing about no Damphyr or whatever you call them, mister. I’m just a prizefighter. I fight for Gould and his friends, that’s all! I swear!”
“You lie,” said Enoch Bale. “But not for long.” Maddersly began to sag. The Vampyr’s jaw slid and locked. He used both hands now to keep the man standing upright, supported by the wall. He whispered against the man’s throbbing temple and into his ear, the fighter’s terror almost palpable, like a fluttering bird in the grip of a cat. “Tell me what you know,” he said, his lips sliding down the man’s cheek to the salty, sweat-stubbled throat above his collar. “Tell me what you know, and I’ll give you quick release from all your pain and fear. I’ll end it.”
“You can’t…” breathed Maddersly, sighing as the blood pooled around his feet.
“I can,” said the Vampyr, the ivory-bright needles curving down. “And I will.”