“I don’t care what they think. I care about . . .”
He would not—or could not—finish the thought. He raised his hand as if to touch her cheek, quickly dropping it again when he saw me out of the corner of his eye.
“Will Henry,” he snapped. “Why are you constantly hovering about me like Banquo’s ghost?” He turned back to her. “Very well. Your blasted stubbornness has worn me down, madam. But surely you can’t protest to Bartholomew staying with you.”
Von Helrung thought it was a capital idea, and Muriel relented to mollify them. She seemed amused by their concern.
“And you will ring me when you’ve arrived. Don’t make me worry, liebchen!” von Helrung called to her from the doorway. He waited until the hansom had melted into the traffic, before closing the door. With a heavy sigh he ran a pudgy hand through his hair.
“My heart is troubled for her, Pellinore. Dear Muriel is in shock. The truth has not yet sunk in that John is lost to us forever.”
“I do wish you’d stop with that melodramatic drivel,” my master said. “It grates on my nerves. He may be lost, as you say, but it will be for considerably shorter than forever. I expect Inspector Byrnes will be calling within the hour to notify us of his death or capture.”
The call did not come that hour or the next or the next. Shadows crept across Fifth Avenue. Von Helrung smoked cigar after cigar, filling the room with the noxious fumes, while the doctor paced, obsessively flipping open his pocket watch. Warthrop would occasionally pause before the window to scan the street for the chief inspector’s brougham. At a quarter past four, with the sun slipping toward the Hudson, the maid poked her head into the room to inquire if the doctor and his ward would be staying for supper.
Warthrop shuddered at the question; it seemed to break inertia’s hold upon him.
“I think Will Henry and I will head over to Mulberry Street,” he said. “We can wait for word at police headquarters as well as here. Ring for us there if you hear anything, Meister Abram.”
The cigar fell from the old man’s mouth and rolled across the expensive carpet. “What?” he cried, leaping out of his chair. “Lieber Gott, what is the matter with me? How could I be so stupid?”
He rushed to the front door, calling for the maid to have Timmy—the livery boy—bring around the calash. He patted his pockets frantically, finally withdrawing from some inner recess of his jacket a pearl-handled derringer.
“What is it?” Warthrop demanded.
“It may be nothing—or it may be everything, Pellinore. In my distracted state I completely forgot, and now I pray it means nothing—I do pray so! Here.” He pulled a long-bladed knife sheathed in leather from another pocket and pressed it into the doctor’s hands. “Remember, aim for the heart! And never—never!—look into its eyes!”
He flung open the door and raced to the curb, where a boy not much older than me sat holding the reigns to a low-slung calash. We hurried after him. “Tell me what you forgot, von Helrung!” Warthrop demanded.
“Muriel, mein Freund. Muriel! She never called.”
Situated a few blocks north of the Plaza Hotel at Central Park, the Chanler residence sat squarely in the middle of Millionaires’ Row, palatial abodes lining Fifth Avenue above Fiftieth Street, mansions of such staggering size and architectural extravagance that they perfectly reflected the ethos of their owners. Here lived the titans of American capitalism and avatars of the Gilded Age—families with names such as Gould and Vanderbilt, Carnegie and Astor, to whom Muriel was now, by marriage, distantly related.
The Chanler House was not the largest of these estates by any means; still, compared to the housing in which “the other half” of the city lived—the crowded and filthy tenement buildings—it was a castle in the style of a fifteenth-century French château.
With surprising agility for a man of his years, von Helrung jumped from the calash, and he dashed through the front gates, attacking the steps two at a time.
He pounded his pudgy fist against the door for several seconds, shouting, “Muriel! Bartholomew! Open up! It is I, von Helrung!”
He turned to the doctor. “Quickly, Pellinore! We must break it down.”
The doctor responded reasonably, “Perhaps they are upstairs and simply don’t—”
“Ack!” the old monstrumologist groaned. He shoved Warthrop roughly to one side, stepped back to give himself a running start, and threw himself against the door. It bowed, but did not give way. “Dear God in heaven!” he shouted, gathering himself for the next blow. “Give.” Slam! “Me.” Slam! “Strength!”
The door gave way with a final desperate wallop of his shoulder, the splintered remains crashing into the wall inside with the force of a thunderclap. Von Helrung’s momentum carried him into the entryway, but he maintained his balance, lunging several steps into the cavernous space, where the crystal chandelier splintered the light of the setting sun into a thousand glittering pieces.
I smelled it the moment I stepped inside—the sickly sweet odor of death, the unmistakable perfume of decay. The doctor reacted to it immediately. He pushed past his winded companion and strode to the grand staircase. Von Helrung, now holding the derringer, grabbed Warthrop’s cloak with his free hand and pulled him back.
“We stay together,” he whispered harshly. “Where is the knife?”
Warthrop clucked impatiently, but took out the knife and handed it to me. “I have my revolver,” he said.
“Good, but you will need these.” Von Helrung held out several shining silver bullets. They clinked softly in the eerie silence. Warthrop pushed the offering away.
“I think my ordinary ones will do, thank you.”
We followed Warthrop up the grand staircase, past portraits of the Chanler clan’s progenitors, the occasional marble statue of a Greek god, and the bust of some anonymous personage glaring down from its perch upon the pedestal.
Upon the first turning of the stair, we found the body of a young girl in a chambermaid’s uniform, lying faceup—but she was upon her stomach. Someone had twisted her head completely around. Her eyes and face were gone. Her skirt was pushed up around her waist, exposing her na**d backside. There was nothing but a gaping wound where her bu**ocks should have been, and the air was saturated with the smell of excrement.