The Gilded Hour (20 page)

Again Anna tried to get his attention. “Mr. Abernathy?”

His voice came gruff and disapproving. “If you’re sure, Dr. Savard.”

“I am. Thank you.”

But Jack walked across the foyer and said something to the porter. To her surprise, the older man’s expression shifted immediately, and he accepted the hand Jack Mezzanotte offered. Anna had never seen Mr. Abernathy shake anyone’s hand.

As soon as the cab had started off she asked, “Whatever did you say to the porter?”

“He’s a retired patrol officer, so I introduced myself.”

“But how could you know that he’s a retired police officer?”

He shrugged. “That scowl of his is standard issue.”

“I still don’t understand,” Anna said. “Why would he disapprove of you?”

One eyebrow peaked. “You’ve never had a man come calling for you at the hospital, have you, Dr. Savard.”

This felt like more of a challenge than a question.

“You think he saw you as—” She stopped and fought hard to keep her expression neutral.

“As?”

“You tell me,” she said. “Why should he be suspicious of you?”

“If you had a daughter your own age and a strange man called for her, you wouldn’t wonder about his intentions? Or hers?”

Anna heard herself sputtering. “He is not my father, obviously.”

“But you are a young woman in his care. He saw me as a potential threat.”

“That’s ridiculous.”

“He can’t know that. I’m a man who is showing interest in you.”

There was a moment’s awkward silence.

“Is that what you’re doing?”

He shook his head at her, as though she had said something very silly. Then he leaned forward and lowered his voice.

“Do you really not know the answer to that question?”

“So you’re saying that you didn’t come by to talk to me about Carmine Russo.”

“I’m not saying that at all. I did need to talk to you about Carmine Russo, but this was also an opportunity to see you away from the hospital.”

“You’re embarrassing me,” Anna said. And at that very moment her stomach announced that she had not taken time for lunch.

Without hesitation he reached into the pocket of his overcoat and handed her something wrapped in brown paper, still warm. He said, “I should have thought about your dinner; I apologize. I didn’t finish mine; please go ahead.”

There were a dozen things a lady was supposed to say in a situation like this, all adding up to polite but firm refusal. It wouldn’t do to eat in public, in front of a stranger, in a cab, without the most rudimentary implements.
But Anna was hungry and he had passed her his linen handkerchief to serve as a napkin.

She unwrapped what turned out to be half of a very large sandwich. The smell was so rich that she gave up all pretense and simply bit into it, hot and salty and exploding with flavor. The meat had been marinated in some combination of oil and lemon and garlic, and all of that had soaked into the bread, grilled until it was crisp at the edges. The pork itself was thinly sliced and succulent and Anna heard herself make a capitulatory sound.

After she had swallowed and used the handkerchief to blot her mouth she said, “Detective Sergeant Mezzanotte, I have never tasted anything so delicious in my life. I hope you really did eat, because I think you’d have to arrest me to get this back.”

•   •   •

J
ACK
TRIED
TO
temper his smile, but it was hard work. Her willingness to admit both hunger and pleasure in her food was surprising and intriguing, both. The polite thing would have been to avert his gaze while she ate, but he seemed to be incapable of courtesy until she was almost finished. Then she folded the wrapping paper, blotted her mouth once more, and sighed.

“That was excellent,” she said. “But don’t tell Mrs. Lee; she thinks she’s the only real cook in the city.”

“I had that impression,” Jack said. “I imagine she likes having the little girls to feed.”

Anna thought of Mrs. Lee, who served plates piled high three times a day. “So far they’ve kept up.” She went on to tell him about the changes in the household, the way their sedentary habits had been turned upside down, and how positive that seemed to be.

“Lia is interested in everything. Rosa is interested primarily in the
Directory of Social and Health Services
. Margaret is teaching her to read from it.”

“Your cousin Margaret seems to have taken on their cause without hesitation.”

“We all have,” Anna said. “Margaret just has more time to spend with them. And since her sons went off to travel, all her maternal instincts have been frustrated. She’s delighted to have the girls to look after.”

Jack saw the corner of her mouth twitch.

“But?”

She looked at him. “Do you read minds?”

“I read faces,” he said. “Is there a problem?”

“Not with the girls,” Anna said. “Everyone in the house dotes on them. Mr. and Mrs. Lee compete for their time.”

And then she fell silent. In the evening light he saw new color in her cheeks. Something she was embarrassed or just reluctant to talk about, then.

“Is there a medical issue?”

She hesitated. “Only indirectly.”

“Now you’ll have to satisfy my curiosity.”

She looked him directly in the eye. “Not every whim has to be satisfied, Detective Sergeant. I can tell you this much. Sophie and I refer to the matter more generally as the Corset War.”

He laughed, he couldn’t help himself. “That’s enough information, you’re right. Let me ask you something else then,” he said. “Do you think you could call me by my first name?”

“You want me to call you Giancarlo?”

“I like Jack better. You object?”

She tilted her head a little, considering. “It might be seen as inappropriate, if we were to use first names.”

“According to—”

She gestured at the city around them. “Everyone. We are two professional people working together to solve a problem, a certain degree of formality is called for.”

“I call Oscar by his first name.”

“Really? I have heard you call him Oscar, but more often you seem to call him Maroney. And he calls you Mezzanotte for the most part, as I recall. I could call you Mezzanotte, I suppose, and you could call me by my last name. It’s how we were addressed in medical school until we earned our degrees.”

“That would be a step in the right direction. In the spirit of cooperation. And friendship.”

The word seemed to give her pause. “I don’t have many friends outside the women I went to medical school with and other doctors,” she said. “I scare people off, I think.”

She had said more than she meant to; he saw that in the way she averted her gaze.

“Then,” he said, “it’s high time you widened your circle of friends.”

•   •   •

T
HE
POLICE
DEPARTMENT
ferry was small and used primarily, as far as Anna could guess, for transporting convicted criminals from the Tombs to the city penitentiary on Blackwell’s Island. Jack’s prisoner was a middle-aged man wearing a good suit; he might have been a shopkeeper or a schoolteacher. He sat inside the locked cabin, his head thrown back against the wall and snoring so loudly that the glass rattled in the windowpane.

Jack went to talk to the pilot as they moved into the middle of the East River, crowded with anything and everything that could float. Another hour until the end of the workday, but it would be light for a good while yet.

She liked being on the water, the chilly air against her heated skin. Anna watched the city and the traffic, as busy now as it had been at nine in the morning. As they got closer to the island the different buildings began to distinguish themselves, all of them facing Manhattan like a pack of squat, humorless bulldogs. As a student Anna had been assigned here twice, for short periods. It was one of the few places so desperate for doctors willing to donate their time that they allowed women medical students to attend. It had been a useful experience, but she could not recall one positive memory of the place.

Today, she reminded herself, she wasn’t here to treat anyone, but to interview a man who might be Carmine Russo. She was glad to have Jack Mezzanotte with her, not just because he spoke Italian, but because without him she would have no idea where to start beyond the very obvious and blunt question
Why did you abandon your children?

Anna wondered if this sentence was on Mezzanotte’s list of things he needed to be able to say in multiple languages. In her experience police detectives did not bother with abandoned children, but Jack Mezzanotte seemed to be the exception.

He came back to stand beside her at the rail, his eyes scanning from the workhouses to the hospitals and on to the penitentiary and back again. Anna was very aware of his size, the width of his shoulders, the way he
held himself. He was far bigger than other Italians she knew, and why, she asked herself, was she comparing him to anyone at all?

And that was a truly inane question. Not an hour ago he had leaned toward her and declared his interest; he had opened a door, and she stood on the threshold, considering.

•   •   •

A
MATRON
MET
them in the waiting room of the men’s workhouse, a bony, unusually tall woman wearing a starched white apron and an old-fashioned white dimity cap over thinning gray hair. She listened to Jack’s request with eyes averted, then led them through corridors toward the back of the building.

They passed through rooms where tailors and cobblers and rope makers were bent over their work. From the windows Anna saw the larger shops for carpenters and blacksmiths and wheelwrights and tinsmiths, with fewer uniformed guards than she might have supposed. The noise that came to her was all mechanical: saws and hammers and shovels. She wondered if the workers were not allowed to speak, or if they simply had nothing to say to each other. A good many of them bore clear signs of the choices that had brought them to this place. Sunken cheeks, broken teeth, palsy, wasted muscles, missing fingers, skin mottled with bruises and the dark red flush of broken capillaries in the cheeks and nose.

The matron led them outside to a shed where older men were sorting through nests of leather goods in need of repair. Bridles and harnesses, stirrups and straps, horn bags and saddles in great piles. The air was thick with the smells of castile soap, wax, and the vinegar used to clean mold from leather. Not unpleasant, but the air in the shed was heavy and hot, even on a cool spring afternoon.

A guard came up and asked a question not of the matron, but of Jack.

The matron ignored them both and called out in a voice that carried through the shed, “Carmine Russo.”

All the men looked up, but only one got up from the stool where he had been working, surrounded by buckets. In one hand he held a large brush and in the other what looked to be a leather cartridge box. Middle-aged, his hair shorn almost to the scalp to discourage lice, pure white at the temples. His arms were ropy with muscle; his belly was rounded in a way that
spoke not of hunger or even of beer, but of ascites. Worse still, his eyes were a startling blue in whites that had taken on a yellow cast. His natural skin tone was a bronze made deeper by jaundice.

Jack touched her elbow and they walked into the shed. Russo waited for them, water and suds dripping from the brush he still held in his hand to puddle on the packed earth floor.

“Signore Russo.” Jack spoke in Italian for some time. Anna heard names: Rosa and Vittorio and Tonino and other words that she thought might mean
children
and
wife
.

Russo’s gaze flickered toward Anna and away again while he listened. When Jack had finished, he shrugged.

“Why?” Anna said. “Why did he leave them in Hoboken and come to the city?”

It took many more minutes for Jack to get a reaction from Russo that went beyond a shrug. When the man spoke his voice was strained and rough, as though his vocal cords had suffered an insult. He might have been drinking something caustic for its alcohol content. She feared that he had been looking for a relief from pain and found only more of it, because it was clear to her that he was very ill.

“He couldn’t feed them, he couldn’t look after them, he couldn’t bear to look at them,” Jack translated. “He left them to the nuns.”

“Does he want to reclaim them?”

Carmine Russo looked at her directly as if he understood her, but he said nothing.

“Please ask him to put those things down,” Anna said, making a sudden decision. “Tell him I’m a physician and I’d like to examine him, just very quickly.”

Jack’s hesitation was so brief that she might have missed it had she not been expecting exactly that reaction. But then he spoke to Russo in a firm tone, one that sounded more like an order than a request.

She would have expected a protest, but instead Russo did as he was asked and then stood, his arms at his sides while Anna approached. She took off her gloves and handed them to Jack, and then gently turned Russo’s head so that the light from the open door fell on his face. Then she ran her fingers over his jaw and neck, hesitating over swollen lymph nodes,
and finally palpating his abdomen through his overalls, very gently. Three touches that told her everything she needed to know.

To Carmine Russo she said, “Your daughters are well. Healthy and cared for. If we can find your sons, we will see to it that they have what they need to grow into good men.”

He had understood some part of that, she was sure of it, but he still looked at Jack. For the first time Russo asked a question, and Jack spoke to him for a few moments. When Carmine Russo looked at Anna directly, his eyes were damp with tears.

On the way out Anna took the matron aside to talk to, and Jack followed along.

“Mr. Russo’s liver has failed,” Anna said. “There’s one very large tumor and other smaller ones. I’m surprised he’s still on his feet, to be honest. The pain must be overwhelming. He needs to be admitted to the hospital.”

The matron said, “Is there anything they can do for him there?”

“No,” Anna said. “There’s no treatment. It will just be a matter of days.”