It was near dark, but I had no fear of these woods. I felt I had inherited them for whatever time there was left for them. It was then I saw Beck’s wolf staring at me through the smoke. If there was anyone in the world who might understand who I’d been and how I’d lived my life it was this creature. We couldn’t go back to the lives we were meant to live. Beck had wanted the wolf to be free, but there was no wild for him to return to and no man to be his master, and he stood there uneasily, between worlds. I called him to me, and he came. I had said I would care for him, and I would do so. We walked downtown together, not quite companions, wary of each other, but together all the same. When we reached the more populated avenues, I found a rope on the street and looped it around his neck so that he wouldn’t startle when he saw carts and automobiles. He was surprisingly calm. Though the horses in the stable below my studio panicked at the sight of him, the wolf ignored them, as he ignored Mitts, choosing to slink beneath the table, where he made a sort of den for himself. I do not know if he had a name, but I called him North, an appellation I think Beck would have approved of, for it was the name the Dutch called the Hudson River when they first came here, when men set to changing the world in their image, and gave all the wild things their own names.
MAY 1911
THEY WOULD come for the body in broad daylight, during the afternoon show, for they were less likely to be seen in the midst of a crowd. The Professor would be engaged at this time, his attention on the flow of customers. No one would expect thievery, if that was what it could be called, in the middle of the day.
“This is a task best done by ghouls,” the liveryman said, for even he, with his criminal history, was queasy over the work that lay ahead.
“Then that’s what we’ll be,” Eddie said grimly.
“And how will we get into the cellar, if you don’t mind me asking?” When Eddie held up the keys Coralie had given him, the liveryman grinned. “I see I should give you a bit of credit. I won’t ask where you got those, brother.”
They had made a pact to work together, for this one day alone. They would never again speak of it, or speak of each other.
“What would make a person sew the mouth shut of a person who’d been murdered?” Eddie asked the liveryman as they traveled toward their destination.
“It’s a message. Ask no questions.”
“It was done to Hannah, the drowned girl.”
“No. I saw her for myself.”
“A person with a kind heart removed the thread. It may be he was killed for doing so.”
“Perhaps he knew more than he should have. Or at least someone believed he did.”
Eddie was now struck by the story of the man who’d been stuck in the mud; how the hermit had watched him struggle to break free. Someone had deposited Hannah in the river. Could this have been the man? “If that’s true it doesn’t serve to drive me away,” Eddie told his companion.
“I wouldn’t expect so. You’re stubborn.” The liveryman grinned. “It’s part of our heritage. If our people weren’t stubborn we would have disappeared by way of our enemies’ hands long ago.”
Eddie’s obstinate nature surfaced in his refusal to accept the physician’s verdict that his right hand might be useless in the future. At present, however, his disability was irrefutable. He had therefore stowed his camera in a cupboard, and he felt the loss of it even more deeply than he did the loss of his hand.
Eddie hadn’t expected the liveryman to be so companionable, or so intelligent in his views. “You seem sure of yourself,” he said. “I think we know each other well enough that I should call you by your right name.”
“Eastman is right enough.” The liveryman gave him a sly look. “As right as Eddie is at any rate. Names don’t matter. Our God knows how to call us to him when he wants us, it’s best to remember that.”
They didn’t speak much afterward; each man was lost in his own private thoughts. Eddie had worried about leaving Mitts alone with the hermit’s wolf, so he’d locked the dog in a stall in the stable, and he couldn’t help but think of the pathetic whining he’d heard when he left for the day. Once they’d entered Brooklyn, both men’s imaginings couldn’t help but turn to the horrors of the Raymond Street Jail, a turreted Victorian building that was damp and freezing cold, said to house the worst of criminal life, along with the largest, most vicious rats in New York.
“I’ve served my last term in jail,” the liveryman mused. “I’ll do myself in before I go back. Five years of my life gone to shit, watching the river and counting out the time, knowing I could never get it back. After this business today is done, I’m considering joining the military. It’s a better life for a man such as myself.”