“We’ve stood watch in this dreary place for four days now,” said Echo. “Maybe he’s not coming.” They were lodged in a foul-smelling room in a boardinghouse on Doyers Street opposite the headquarters of Dr. Chu Lo Sing, Ah Kung of the Low Gui Gow tong. It was late evening on Sunday and the sun was setting across the Hudson, the last pale rays of light washing over the ragged rooflines and smoking chimney pots of the city.
“He’ll come,” said Kate Warne. She was seated in a battered wooden chair and smoking a cheroot as she stared out the grimy window, barely covered by a pair of ragged curtains. Every few moments she used the stub of a pencil to jot down notes in an odd-looking deerskin-bound notebook.
“Maybe the doctor lied,” suggested Echo, who was sitting glumly on the narrow iron bed that was the only other piece of furniture in the room.
“I doubt that very much,” said Kate.
“Why?” Echo asked. “For all we know, he’s in league with this Fu Sheng.”
“Doubtful again,” said Kate.
“Why?” Echo insisted.
Kate turned away from the window briefly. “Because this is New York and our Chinee friend across the way has to live here. Lying to a Pinkerton would be more trouble to him than it’s worth. He likes to keep himself to himself. He knows I could bring the Metropolitans down on his head anytime I wanted. That’s why he’s cooperating.” She turned and glanced out the window again, then bent to jot something down in her notebook.
“What is it that you’re writing all the time?” Echo asked.
“Notes on passersby, just in case he comes in disguise. Some thinking I’ve been doing about your story; matching one fact with another to see what comes of it.”
“It’s not a story; it’s the truth,” answered the young woman vehemently. “Don’t forget, I’ve seen him, met him in the flesh. I watched him with poor Lucy, holding her with his eyes. And then—and then she was dead.”
“Of what exactly?” Kate asked.
“The doctors said anemia of some terrible foreign sort, but I know it was him!”
“How do you know?”
“The wounds in her throat when she was found in her bed. The fact that she had…” Echo fell silent.
“Had what?” Kate asked.
“Had lain with him, even though she was engaged to Arthur, Lord Godalming.”
“You know this for a fact?” Kate asked, her pencil poised.
“Yes,” said Echo, blushing furiously. “I do.”
“How do you know?”
“Because Lucy told me she had done so. And because…”
“Because?” Kate prompted.
“Because I saw them!” Echo blurted out. She squeezed her hands together, fingers intertwined, eyes shut, tears coming from beneath her closed lids and trailing down her cheeks. “They were in the conservatory on the far lawn, among the plants. He had her pushed back against a table with her skirt up around her waist and his mouth was on her neck! I saw them through the glass and then he looked up and stared at me and I swear there was blood at his mouth. Oh, God! His eyes! His eyes! He saw me watching them and he didn’t stop! He kept on and she was moaning and beating at him with her fists but he kept on and kept on watching me! Those terrible eyes!”
“Do you think perhaps that what you witnessed was nothing more than…passion?” Kate asked dryly.
Echo wiped her eyes and stared grimly across the small room. “I know what I saw, and I know what happened. A week later Lucy was dead. Three days after that my father was murdered with the same wounds on his neck as that young girl we saw in the dead house. The man we seek is an unholy demon, the Vampyr my father had been hunting for many years. He is the same, and he is here!”
Kate stared at Echo for a long moment, then slowly nodded as though coming to some decision. Outside the last light was fading. Night was coming. She turned back to the window and looked out again. Less than a minute later she straightened in her chair and leaned closer to the glass.
“The lamp!” she whispered. “It’s in the window!”
“The signal!” Echo breathed. “The Chinese has come at last.”
Echo reached the window just in time to see the door of the opium den open and a figure step out into the gathering gloom. Directly across from them the oil lamp was taken out of the window.
“Come on!” Kate said fiercely. “We’ll have to make it fast!”
They raced out of the room, tumbling down the steep, dark stairway of the filthy, foul-smelling building to the front door. They stepped out into the street just in time to see the dark figure of the Chinaman, Fu Sheng, as he turned the corner at the far end of the street and disappeared from view.
Kate and Echo raced after him. As they went around the sharp angle of the street they saw their man again, recognizable by his long pigtail. He reached the corner of Pell Street and turned again. Pell, like most streets and alleys in the district, was a tumbledown street of aging wooden tenements and sheds. Laundry drooped from clotheslines and ragged flags on long poles arched out from windows like the very ribs of death.
The cobbled street was slick with human waste, and the smells of a dozen different kinds of food spilled out of every window and doorway. A man dressed in rags, his feet bare and black, lay in a puddle by a doorway, curled up into himself, either dead or dead drunk. A huge rat appeared in the thin crack between two buildings and sniffed the air. The wet-furred creature trotted across the curled up man, then disappeared down a ragged hole in the stoop. The curled man never moved. There were no gaslights here, and the sun was fading with each passing moment. Echo felt the dry taste of fear in the back of her throat. This was no place for any man, let alone a woman, in disguise or otherwise. She looked about her; there were no cabs or carriages. She knew the great avenues lay only blocks away, but she might as well have been on the moon. This was a different world altogether.
Shouted voices could be heard, the accents mostly the round, incomprehensible drawl and drag of County Cork or the crack and trill of Mayo and Kilkenny. A barrow or two pushed by weary hawkers still rolled up the narrow street, and a few early drudges were on the stroll or standing on the corner smoking pipes and exchanging gossip.
The Chinaman’s pace quickened as he turned up Mott Street and began moving north. An omnibus, half empty, trundled past, and without a wave the Chinaman darted into the street and climbed aboard.
“Damn!” Kate hissed, but then, blessedly, a hansom stopped at the corner of Bayard Street, disgorging two young swells in checked pants and top hats, both clearly drunk and up to no good. Kate gave a shrill whistle and caught the hansom before it could move off. She flipped a coin to the driver and they climbed aboard. She pushed open the flap in the roof. “Follow the streetcar!” she instructed. The cab moved off at a trot, the twin lamps at the rear of the horse-drawn omnibus acting as their guide. Kate and Echo stared out through the glass, watching the rear doorway of the bright yellow vehicle as it trundled heavily up Mott Street, the signs on the shops and small factories between the rows of tenements now in Hebrew, German and Italian. They crossed Canal Street, passing the derelict public bathhouse and laundry on the corner of Hester Street, and still there had been no attempt by the Chinaman to leave the bright yellow tramcar.
“Where is he going?” Echo breathed, staring ahead.
They crossed Grand and Broome with their shebeens and brothels, all alight and raucous, the streets full of drunks, spivs and revelers, all looking for some satisfaction, stupor or respite. Men in working clothes, dusty from the brickworks or streaked with oil and soot from the coal gasworks and the foundries, heaved themselves through the open doorways of the saloons, while aproned wives screamed threats down at the streetwalkers trying to tempt away their husbands’ penny wages.
It was Sunday night. There’d been one day of rest and grace before the cycle repeated itself again, with less than no chance at all that the children of these men and women would ever see or know of anything either different or better. Most of the day had been spent in taverns, grumbling at Lincoln’s latest slight to the workingman. From the rooftop of one of the tenements a Confederate flag was hanging limply in the still, fetid air, and a score of shop windows were soaped with the slogan DAMN THE DRAFT. The names had been printed in the Sunday papers and in a few hours there’d be hell to pay.
The omnibus finally reached Prince Street, and at the intersection it pulled to a stop. On the left were the walls of the old Roman Catholic Orphan Asylum, long since converted to a convent and a school for girls. Directly across from it and occupying the other corner was the imposing stone structure of Saint Patrick’s Cathedral, the tall building and its accompanying cemetery occupying almost an entire block, all of which was in turn surrounded by a high brick wall.
“There!” Echo exclaimed, pointing. The Chinaman had dropped down from the rear step of the car almost before it stopped moving. He seemed to look in their direction, standing in the middle of the street for a moment, and then he ran. Kate rapped her knuckles on the roof and the driver’s hatch opened.
“This will do,” she said to the driver, and handed up another silver coin. The driver took it and tipped his battered bowler, and Kate and Echo left the cab in an instant, just in time to see the Chinaman slip through the side gate of the wall and into the churchyard.
“This isn’t right,” said Echo as they crossed to the convent on the corner, watching the Chinaman go through the gate. “Why would he come to a place like this?”
“Maybe he saw us following him,” said Kate, pulling Echo into the shadows around the convent doorway. “Now he’s trying to lead us astray.”
“In a church?” Echo said.
“Maybe there’s such a thing as a Roman Chinee.” Kate shrugged. “Because he is going into the cathedral.” They watched as the man with the long, distinctive pigtail stepped into the small, treed cemetery, then slipped into the main building through a narrow, arched doorway in the side of the building.
“Then we go in as well,” said Echo, and she struck out across the street, following in the Chinaman’s footsteps.
“Foolhardy child,” muttered Kate under her breath, but she took off after Echo even though she was beginning to get a terrible feeling of foreboding about the whole thing. She patted her pocket as she zigzagged her way across the manure-strewn street. Her friend Barnabus was going up to Elmira on the next supply train, and it occurred to her that she might have him take the journal home for safekeeping.
She went through the gate and caught up with Echo just as the young woman was about to open the small doorway. She gripped the young woman by the elbow. “Perhaps a little caution is in order,” the Pinkerton agent said quietly. “In my experience, rushing through doorways is never a good idea.”
“But he’s getting away!” Echo said, her hand on the door’s heavy latch.
“He didn’t come in here just to leave again,” said Kate. “He came for a reason.” She put a finger to her lips and gently took Echo’s hand off the latch. She leaned forward, listening. She heard nothing. She turned and scanned the gloomy environs of the cemetery. Nothing but upright marble slabs, ghostly and pale in the dusk, huddled almost invisibly under the shadows of the young, arching oaks. Everything was as it should be: silent and empty, with no one lying in wait. She put her ear to the door once again and still heard nothing except Echo’s ragged, angry breathing close beside her. Finally Kate nodded, gripped the latch and pressed down on the leaf-shaped thumb piece. She cautiously pulled the door open and they stepped inside.
Echo and Kate found themselves in a narrow stone corridor that formed an L-shaped passage. At the end they found a small room fitted with several tall, freestanding wardrobes, which proved to be empty upon examination, except for a small bouquet of flowers, abandoned and drying out on a wooden shelf below a narrow stained-glass window. Even in the fading light Echo could see the image in the colored glass: a young woman seated with a shepherd’s crook in her right hand and a Bible on her lap.
“Saint Monica,” she whispered. “We had a statue of her in our school in Amsterdam. She is the patron saint of weddings and married women. This is the bride’s room.”
“Whatever it is, it seems that our Chinee’s not here waiting for his veil and train,” said Kate. She sniffed the air. The man had left the pungent scent of the opium den on Doyers Street behind him like a trail for them to follow. “Smell that?” Kate asked. Echo nodded.
They let themselves out through an inner door and found themselves beside a row of confessionals, none occupied. Directly in front of them was the high altar, with a wonderfully carved and gold-leaf-encrusted reredos just behind, screening out the ambulatory and the lady chapel at the extreme end of the building. To their right there was the long nave of the church with its rows of wooden pews, flanked by a series of fan-vaulted columns on either side of the central aisle. The cathedral was silent and almost empty, the last mass said for the evening, the archbishop snug out of the rain in his residence at the edge of the cathedral grounds.
“Do you see him?” Echo whispered, keeping close to the rear wall of the confessionals. Kate leaned forward and looked.
“No.”
There were no more than a dozen people in the towering building, all seemingly intent on prayer and none resembling the Chinaman. Most were older women and poor, their heads covered in scraps of rag in place of scarves. Kate and Echo could hear their softly mumbled prayers from where they stood.
The two women slowly made their way past the confessionals, Kate peering through the partially opened curtains over each to convince herself that they were empty. Beyond the confessionals was the massive Henry Erben organ with its great keyboard and pipes. On one side of the raised dais of the sanctuary was the bishop’s throne and the more ornate pews for lesser clergy and the choir. They took a single step down into the nave, and against the wall Kate saw a carved stone screen, half hidden behind a bank of flickering votive candles and a tall wooden statue of the Holy Mother, gilt hands clasped in prayer, her robes a somewhat lurid and unlikely shade of blue.
Kate stepped around the slanted bank of candles and the garish statue and peered around the carved stone divider. Echo followed. In front of them, completely hidden by the narrow stone wall was a circular stone stairway that led down into the darkness. The scent of opium was here as it had been in the bride’s room, hanging like an invisible mist. Above the descending staircase, carved into the stone, was a name and a phrase in Latin: HIC TOUSSAINT REQUIESCAT.
“Here rests Toussaint,” said Echo. “Not very Irish.”
“It’s certainly odd,” said Kate, with a wry smile. “The Irish seem to hate the Negro with a passion, but it was Pierre Toussaint, a Haitian man of means, who mostly paid for this place they all hold so dear.”
“He’s buried here?” Echo asked.
“They could hardly do otherwise, given the amount of money he spent on all this stone.” Kate nodded, pointing into the forbidding darkness below the stairs. “He and his dead wife are down there in the crypt, along with our Chinee friend, I think.” She turned away, plucked one of the heavy votive candles off its spike and came back to the stairway. “Come on,” she said, and took the first step down into the hidden catacombs below.