Cleopatra’s Dagger, page 1
ALSO BY CAROLE LAWRENCE
Ian Hamilton Mysteries
Edinburgh Twilight
Edinburgh Dusk
Edinburgh Midnight
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, organizations, places, events, and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.
Text copyright © 2022 by Carole Bugge
All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without express written permission of the publisher.
Published by Thomas & Mercer, Seattle
www.apub.com
Amazon, the Amazon logo, and Thomas & Mercer are trademarks of Amazon.com, Inc., or its affiliates.
ISBN-13: 9781542014304
ISBN-10: 1542014301
Cover design by Micaela Alcaino
For Kylie Isaack, a most awesome niece—a witty and wondrously gifted young woman
Contents
START READING
PROLOGUE
CHAPTER ONE
CHAPTER TWO
CHAPTER THREE
CHAPTER FOUR
CHAPTER FIVE
CHAPTER SIX
CHAPTER SEVEN
CHAPTER EIGHT
CHAPTER NINE
CHAPTER TEN
CHAPTER ELEVEN
CHAPTER TWELVE
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
CHAPTER NINETEEN
CHAPTER TWENTY
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
CHAPTER THIRTY
CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE
CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO
CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE
CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR
CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE
CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX
CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN
CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT
CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE
CHAPTER FORTY
CHAPTER FORTY-ONE
CHAPTER FORTY-TWO
CHAPTER FORTY-THREE
CHAPTER FORTY-FOUR
CHAPTER FORTY-FIVE
CHAPTER FORTY-SIX
CHAPTER FORTY-SEVEN
CHAPTER FORTY-EIGHT
CHAPTER FORTY-NINE
CHAPTER FIFTY
CHAPTER FIFTY-ONE
CHAPTER FIFTY-TWO
CHAPTER FIFTY-THREE
CHAPTER FIFTY-FOUR
CHAPTER FIFTY-FIVE
CHAPTER FIFTY-SIX
CHAPTER FIFTY-SEVEN
CHAPTER FIFTY-EIGHT
CHAPTER FIFTY-NINE
CHAPTER SIXTY
CHAPTER SIXTY-ONE
CHAPTER SIXTY-TWO
CHAPTER SIXTY-THREE
CHAPTER SIXTY-FOUR
Acknowledgments
About the Author
You have waited, you always wait, you dumb, beautiful ministers
—Walt Whitman, “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry”
PROLOGUE
New York City, 1880
Oh, they were soft, so soft . . . and so beautiful—pliable as raindrops, their limbs round and white as bone china.
But he knew they were evil—Jezebels, Salomes, Delilahs, all of them. They lured men with sweet siren songs, entrapping them with their wicked ways—either by withholding their favors or by letting them taste the splendors of heaven, lulling their victims into a senseless stupor until it was too late. They were spiders, and men were but hapless insects struggling vainly to escape their sweet, sticky webs. Their beauty was the most treacherous weapon in an arsenal of snares, designed to entrap and control their all-too-willing prey.
His hand absently stroked the pure white fur of Cleo, his prized Persian, as he gazed out the window at the hazy late-summer afternoon. She purred and stretched under his touch, her supple spine shivering with pleasure.
“Ah, Cleo,” he said. “You’ll never betray me, will you?”
She gazed up at him with wide blue eyes, the tip of her tail twitching.
Outside, the sky darkened as a thick gray cloud passed over the landscape of the city. A gust of wind tickled the leaves on the tree outside his window; they fluttered and then became still. They reminded him of a fly in a web, struggling weakly before giving in to their inevitable fate. He drew a deep breath, feeling the air course into his lungs, energizing his body. He vowed to never be one of those flies—he would be neither victim nor hunted.
Instead, he would be the hunter.
CHAPTER ONE
Elizabeth van den Broek hurried from her apartment building on East Eighteenth Street, in such a rush she was halfway down the block before the heavy front door closed behind her. It was nearly eight o’clock, and she had overslept—again. It had been less than a week since she had taken up residence in the Stuyvesant, and she was up most nights unpacking and arranging her things. She felt lucky having managed to secure a suite of rooms in the building, the first of its kind in New York. Built just a decade ago, in 1870, it was the first example of “French flats” in a city that previously had consisted of only tenements and town houses. The Stuyvesant had a certain cachet, and Elizabeth’s status-conscious mother had pulled some strings to get her an apartment there.
A gust of wind caught Elizabeth’s hat and nearly swept it from her head. She clamped it back on with her free hand, the other clutching her precious briefcase. Her mother always chided her for not using enough hairpins to secure her auburn hair. Thick and coarse, with stubborn curls, it was difficult to manage at the best of times. This time, she reflected ruefully, her mother was right. Holding the hat onto her head, she scurried awkwardly down Irving Place toward the entrance to the Third Avenue “El,” the elevated train that would take her to her job at the New York Herald.
As the newspaper’s only female reporter, Elizabeth wanted desperately to make a good impression. Approaching the entrance to the El, she thought briefly about hailing a cab but reasoned that, at this hour, traffic would likely slow down even the fleetest of horses. And streetcars were notoriously prone to congestion. No, she thought, the train might be noisy and dirty and smelly, but she was better off aboveground during the city’s infamous rush hour.
Ahead of her, Fourteenth Street swarmed with activity. At this hour, the city was a symphony of movement. Pedestrians competed with cabs, carts, carriages, and horse-drawn trams running along east–west trolley lines. Small boys darted in front of oncoming vehicles with breathless daring as their mothers shouted unheeded words of caution to their reckless offspring. Dogs barked; horses trotted; parents yelled at their children; well-heeled businessmen called for cabs; cart merchants hawked their wares with a variety of colorful phrases. City officials frowned upon street vendors, due to the city’s already excessive noise level, so they tended to cluster near certain train stations and ferry ports. The Fourteenth Street El station was a vendor gold mine, with thousands of potential customers passing through during rush hour. Oyster sellers competed with ragmen, corn vendors, and other merchants for the public’s attention.
“Oyy-sters! Get cher fresh oyy-sters here!”
“Rags, rags, any old rags! Ol’ cloth! Old clo’! A-a-any old cloth!”
A thin female voice piped up over the deeper male ones: “Hot corn, hot corn, all hot! Just came out of the boiling pot!”
The smudge-faced girl selling corn was young—too young, Elizabeth reckoned. She could not have been more than ten. In spite of being late, Elizabeth pressed a nickel into the girl’s grimy hand. Brushing aside a strand of matted hair, the child stared at her, confused. “It’s two fer a penny, miss.”
“I’ll take one.”
“But, miss—”
“Keep the change.”
The girl’s eyes widened in alarm as she handed Elizabeth an ear of roasted corn in its shaggy green husk.
“Thank you,” Elizabeth said. She knew better than to give the girl more—any excess money would likely end up in the pockets of her “handler,” anyway. The hot-corn girls differed from prostitutes only in that they were usually younger and (hopefully) not sexually available. Otherwise, their lives were similar—in the thrall of a husband or pimp of some kind, too desperate and poor to hope for a better life.
Stepping carefully over a pile of horse manure, Elizabeth shouldered her way through the crowd toward the Third Avenue station. Several cabs lined up in front of the entrance, the drivers in long dark coats and top hats. Driving a hack—named after the high-stepping Hackney horse bred for such work—was hard, cold work, especially in bad weather. Hansoms, by far the most popular type of cab, required the operator to perch above the carriage, exposed to the elements, while his passengers enjoyed the comfort of the cozy—if somewhat cramped—interior. Elizabeth glanced at the sky, the sun already obscured by threatening clouds. It was a warm day, but the cabbies would soon need their long coats if the glowering thunderclouds delivered the downpour they portended.
As she passed, the hack drivers advertised their services in hoarse voices coars
One of them caught Elizabeth’s eye and tipped his hat, smiling broadly. His teeth were the color of overcooked liver, stained gray, probably from years of cheap cigarettes. He wore tattered cloth gloves with the fingers cut off, making it easier for him to produce change when his customers paid him.
“Keb, miss?” he said, bowing slightly. His pronunciation of the word left no doubt about his working-class origins. New York liked to advertise itself as the city of opportunity, but one had only to spend a day there to know that was a lie.
“Not today, thank you,” she said, looking away. Her mother was forever cautioning her to “behave like a lady,” and ladies did not return glances from strange men, even if they were trying to sell her something. She certainly did not stare at them—though Elizabeth, possessed of an insatiable curiosity, often ignored this rule, especially when her mother was not around to correct her. Now, as a journalist, Elizabeth considered it her job to follow her curiosity wherever it led her—and if that involved staring at strange men, so be it.
As she climbed the stairs to the train platform, tightly bundled among the crowd surging up the steps with her, Elizabeth smiled to think how her mother would much prefer she take a cab—another reason she enjoyed using public transportation. Stepping onto the platform amid her fellow citizens, she could hear her mother’s protests: “It’s ridiculous. Your father can afford it, you know. You’re just being stubborn.”
Stuffed into the third car of the El, sandwiched between law clerks, office boys, and retail workers, Elizabeth momentarily regretted resisting her mother’s will so doggedly. She held her breath as a whiff of garlic sausage assailed her nostrils, no doubt coming from the bulky fellow to her left. The nicks and cuts on his fingers revealed his profession of butcher as surely as the aroma of beef tallow and lamb fat emanating from his rumpled jacket. On her other side, a thin, pinch-faced woman of middle years squirmed to avoid touching the stocky, leering lad next to her. Clad in coarse wool trousers and a worn jacket, his face and hands browned by the sun, he could be a bootblack or an errand boy for one of the many shops lining Lower Broadway. He tried to catch Elizabeth’s eye, but she looked away, aware of his gaze on the back of her neck. Her mother would be horrified that she was crammed in among such unsavory types, but Elizabeth had full confidence in her ability to look after herself.
The train lurched and swayed along its narrow trestle, belching black soot and smoke into the air, a great gray beast chugging its way past tenement buildings and shops, churches and brothels. The train afforded a view into the third floor of the buildings it passed, which must have shocked the occupants when it was first opened two years earlier. Suddenly their privacy was shattered—the only way to maintain some semblance of discretion was to cover their windows, shutting out light and air, precious commodities in an overcrowded city.
Yet Elizabeth was always amazed at how many people seemed indifferent to the passengers’ curious gazes. It was as if they refused to accept the new reality of their situation, ignoring the thousands of strangers staring into their living space. Perhaps they believed the glimpse afforded by the rapidly moving train was hardly worth bothering about—and some, she was convinced, derived a thrill from being observed by strangers. Anna Brodigen, her first roommate at Vassar, was like that, flaunting her body in public, feeding on the attention of men. Elizabeth was just the opposite, modest and shy about such things, and viewed Anna’s shenanigans with a combination of aversion and fascination.
As the train passed the Cooper Union, the northernmost point of the Bowery before it split into Third and Fourth Avenues, Elizabeth spied a pair of drunks loitering outside McSorley’s Ale House. It was not an unusual sight, even at this hour, she reflected as the train continued its southern journey on the Bowery, the street most associated with all that was wicked, degraded, and vile. The avenue possessed a dizzying number of saloons, taverns (licensed and unlicensed), flophouses, brothels, and gambling establishments, and was the entertainment center for New York’s more impoverished citizens.
As they slowed to pass an oncoming northbound train near the intersection of Rivington Street, Elizabeth glanced out the window at a crumbling tenement building. On the first floor was a butcher shop. But it was the third-floor apartment that drew her eye. The sheer curtains, once white but now soiled from soot, were parted slightly, so that she could make out two figures—a man and a woman. She was young, perhaps very young, with hair so light blond it was nearly white, and he was somewhat older—tall and solid, wearing a black homburg and a maroon frock coat. In the morning light, through the gap in the curtains, Elizabeth thought for a moment they were dancing. But it immediately became clear they were engaged in a physical struggle. The woman’s body was bent backward, her fingers clutching at the man’s wrists—his hands were wrapped around her neck.
As Elizabeth watched them, her breath caught in her throat: the man was attempting to strangle the woman. She looked around the car to see whether any of her fellow passengers realized what was happening, but they were occupied eating sweets, chatting, reading the newspaper, or fanning themselves. No one but her seemed to be taking in the terrible scene going on just yards away from them. Craning her neck, she tried to keep the couple in sight as the train chugged forward, but the building was soon lost in a gray haze of billowing smoke.
CHAPTER TWO
“You already have a column,” Karl Schuster said. “And lucky to have it, I might add.”
She followed her editor into his cluttered second-floor office, closing the door behind them as he lowered himself heavily into his desk chair. He was a large, strongly built man, and the chair creaked beneath his weight.
“But I’m certain I saw—”
“We can’t afford to go chasing after every Streit between husbands and wives,” he said, shuffling through the papers on his desk. His nearly unaccented English was perfect, but he still sprinkled his sentences with German words and phrases.
“He might have been an intruder! And what decent husband attempts to strangle his wife? Are you not concerned over the fate of the poor young woman?”
“Das macht nichts,” he said, rubbing his forehead. “Our best copy editor is home looking after his pregnant wife about to give birth, two reporters are out with dysentery—”
“No doubt the effect of gobbling several dozen oysters at a dubious tavern yesterday—”
“And I am obliged to cover the local news page today while Mr. Atwood buries his mother.”
“But that is perfect!” Elizabeth cried. “This story is local news—”
“Genug! Do not press me further on this matter,” he said, bringing a fist down on the desk with a thump, his square face reddening. Tall and broad shouldered, his blond hair always in need of a comb, Karl Schuster had thick fingers and extremely pale blue eyes. He looked more like a dockworker or a farmer than a newspaper editor. He had left a position as senior editor at the New Yorker Staats-Zeitung, the venerable German-language weekly newspaper, to work at the Herald. It was rumored that he had resigned over a disagreement with the paper’s renowned editor in chief, Oswald Ottendorfer.
Elizabeth drew herself up with as much dignity as she could muster. “I see I shall have to explore the darker deeds of my fellow citizens on my own time.”
Schuster leaned forward, resting his elbows on the solid oak desk, which was remarkably messy. Elizabeth’s mother always praised Germans for being extremely orderly, but Karl Schuster seemed to have taken it upon himself to destroy that reputation. His office was a masterpiece of untidiness. Old copies of the Herald and other New York dailies sat in dusty stacks in corners. Towers of tomes teetered in precarious piles; there were more books on the floor than in the bookshelves. Mounds of paper littered his desk, protruding from drawers, stuffed into crannies, and scattered on the carpet like fallen leaves. Instead of an air of chaos, however, all the jumble created a curious aura of calm. The room was rather cozy, the excess of objects creating the feeling of being cradled in a warm cocoon.
Karl shook his shaggy blond head. He appeared almost rueful. “Miss Van den Broek, as much as I commend your single-minded determination, may I remind you that as the only female reporter at the Herald—”
“All the more reason to concern myself with the oppression of women!”
