Cleopatra’s Dagger, page 12
It was nearly eight by the time Elizabeth had finished dressing to leave for work. Warring emotions battled in her breast—she was concerned about Carlotta’s mother but could not deny her excitement at the prospect of seeing her article in the Herald. Gulping down the last of her beigel and coffee, now gone quite cold, she hurried from the apartment to catch the Second Avenue El.
Across the street, a lone figure in a dark overcoat stood beside a lamppost, smoking a cigarette. The smoke curled around his face, which was mostly obscured by the wide-brimmed hat he wore low over his eyes. No one took much notice of him as he ground the cigarette beneath his shoe, pulling his hat lower as he strode off in the direction of the Second Avenue train station.
CHAPTER NINETEEN
When she arrived downtown some forty minutes later, Lower Manhattan was bustling with energy. Street vendors were doing a brisk trade—Germans sold sausages on bread rolls with mustard and sauerkraut; the ubiquitous oystermen plied their trade from rickety carts filled with clams and oysters over a bed of ice. Pretzels were everywhere, stacked on wooden posts protruding from the carts of vendors also hawking fruit and nuts. She found her favorite newsboy at his spot near the train station, a stack of newspapers in his arms.
“Read all about it—Egyptian mummy found in Central Park! Git your exclusive here! Only in the Herald!”
“Hello, Billy,” she said, fishing in her purse for money.
“Paper, miss? Big story today, y’know.”
“Yes, please,” she replied, giving him a dime.
“Thank you, miss,” he said, fishing in his pocket for change.
“Keep it, Billy,” she said, tucking the paper under her arm.
“Thanks, miss!” he called after her, as she hurried away, her heart in her throat, his words ringing in her head. Egyptian mummy found in Central Park. It was the lead story! Of course the boy misrepresented the actual facts, but she had to admit it was a clever ruse. People were mad for all things Egyptian, and the idea of a real mummy might be more intriguing than a dead woman dressed as one.
She entered the five-story Herald Building, pausing momentarily to drink in the magnificence of the marble lobby with its polished, winding staircase, the sun streaming in through the tall first-floor windows. It was only once she was safely inside the building that she dared to look at the front page. She stepped behind a column, and her hands shook as she opened the paper to read the headline on the left side of the front page.
HORROR IN CENTRAL PARK
Murderous Fiend Preys on Defenseless Woman!
So they had used her headline, but underneath the main one, which, she had to admit, was eye-catching. Her eye fell on the byline: Elizabeth van den Broek and Kenneth Ferguson. She released her breath, and only then did she realize she had been holding it. With it, she let out a tirade of emotions so torrential she couldn’t separate them—fear, excitement, sadness, relief, pride.
Freddy’s picture of the dead girl stared out at her from the page. He had caught something about her in death, a serene innocence in her heart-shaped face, and a universality of humanity, as if she represented every guileless young woman who had left this earth too early. She appeared to be peacefully sleeping, her face a blank canvas; she could be anyone’s daughter. Beneath the photo was another headline: Do You Know This Woman?
This was followed by instructions urging anyone who might be able to identify her to contact the Herald. There was also mention of a reward. As Elizabeth looked at the girl’s face, her elation at seeing her writing in print was followed by another, more unsettling emotion: shame. A woman had died—had been murdered, no less—and yet Elizabeth’s first thought in seeing the headline was of her career. Heat flared on her face, as she let it sink in. Her ambition was not evil or wrong in itself, but it did not compare to the death of an innocent young woman. The morning sun ducked behind a cloud, leaving the lobby in shadow, and Elizabeth shivered. Did she want to bring a murderer to justice, or was the poor girl simply a tool to advance her career? But then, she reasoned, why must it be one or the other? Why could it not be both?
Her skin tingled with anticipation as she climbed the staircase to the second floor. She wondered what Kenneth Ferguson would have to say. As she rounded the corner to the hallway leading to the editorial offices, she was aware of footsteps behind her. Someone was approaching quickly. Before she could turn to see who it was, she felt a hand on her neck, as another grasped her upper arm.
Her assailant forced her forward, pushing her into a small supply closet with such speed and efficiency she had no time to react. She was shoved against a metal shelf containing reams of office paper, and as she opened her mouth to scream, a cloth was shoved into it. Her attacker yanked both her hands behind her back, tying them with something smooth and soft—it felt like a cravat, but she couldn’t be sure. Whatever it was, the thought occurred to her that it probably wouldn’t leave marks.
Fear surged through her body, leaving her knees weak. She struggled to free herself, but he held her with an iron grip, one hand around her neck, as the other fumbled with her clothing. Realizing what he was after, she instinctively closed her eyes tightly. Her stomach heaved, threatening to rebel, but she fought it back, afraid with the cloth in her mouth she would choke.
She felt his breath, hot and wet on the back of her neck, as he lifted her skirts. When he released the grip on her neck, she tried to twist around, to see his face, but he pressed his body hard against hers, pinning her to the spot. The metal of the shelf was cold against her cheek, and she could feel him growing hard as he panted and groaned behind her.
Though she had never told anyone, Elizabeth was not a virgin. She knew exactly what was happening. She could feel him, hard and urgent against the cloth of her undergarments, as he pleasured himself with his right hand, while holding her down with his left. She struggled and writhed, but to no avail; he only pushed her harder against the metal cabinet. His grunts became louder, his breathing coarse and uneven, as the tempo of his self-gratification increased. Finally, he climaxed in a spasm of panting and groaning.
And then the strangest thing of all: he laughed. A soft giggle, almost like a woman’s, a laugh of relief rather than mirth. His body went limp for a moment, and then he drew air into his lungs and laughed again, a more sinister sound this time, a triumphant snicker. Untying the cloth around her wrists, he yanked the gag from her mouth, opened the closet door, and slipped out, slamming the door after him, still without revealing his identity.
She twisted around and pulled at the doorknob, but it was locked from the other side. She pounded and yelled, and after a couple of minutes, the door opened to reveal a maintenance man, clad in overalls and work boots, a puzzled look on his face. In his right hand he carried a wrench; in his left was a length of rope.
“What happened to you, miss?” He was big and young and ruddy-faced, with the smooth, plump cheeks of a cherub. His hazel eyes were earnest and kind, and she nearly cried at the sight of him.
Her first instinct was to tell him everything, but another impulse triumphed. She saw clearly the outcome of such an admission, how it would affect her career, what it would look like to her colleagues, and who would be blamed. She could hear the voices of condemnation. She should not have inserted herself into a male profession. She deserved what she got. Served her right, putting herself in that position. She should have known better. When it came right down to it, really, she was little better than a common whore.
Fighting back the tears threatening to spring to her eyes, she shocked herself by doing what, just minutes ago, she would have thought impossible: she looked him in the eyes and smiled.
“It’s quite stupid of me—I managed to lock myself in,” she said, doing her best to steady her voice.
He cocked his head to one side. “How’d you manage that?”
“When I closed the door, I heard the bolt slide into place,” she said, acutely aware of how absurd it sounded. “It was silly of me,” she added with a false little laugh, chiding herself for not being a better actress.
Her pathetic lie seemed to satisfy him, though—he smiled indulgently. She thought he was about to say something about women in the workplace, but he just chuckled. “Never mind, miss—once got locked in my own basement, so I did. Had to saw my way out. Ruined a perfectly good door.”
“Thank you for rescuing me,” she said, sincerely grateful.
“Think nothin’ of it. This lock wants a bit of oil so it don’t happen again—I’ll see it gets done.”
“Thank you so much. You are very kind.”
“Jes doin’ my job, miss,” he said, tipping his cap politely before continuing down the hall.
As she watched him retreat, Elizabeth was glad she had said nothing. She would not be stigmatized as a “fallen woman.” She knew enough of how things worked to know that her word would never stand up against that of her assailant, whoever he was. She stood in the empty hallway for several moments, wanting to scream, to cry, to howl like a wounded animal. There was no way to prove who had done this to her, but she thought she had a pretty good idea.
Elizabeth possessed an unusual gift—if it could be called that—of putting difficult or inconvenient feelings aside until such time as she could address them. As she stood in the hallway of the Herald Building, she realized she needed this ability now more than ever. This was the most important day of her career—she had triumphed, with her byline on a front-page article. She needed to march up to Kenneth Ferguson’s office, claim her victory, and make it clear she intended to follow the story wherever it might lead.
Yet she felt anything but victorious. She felt small, dirty, and to her disgust, ashamed. She had been used and discarded. She knew intellectually that what had happened wasn’t her fault, but she was unable to rid herself of the feeling of utter humiliation. She felt soiled and unclean. She started down the hall, but her knees suddenly seemed to be made not of bone but of some viscous substance that would not support her weight. Grasping at the nearest doorknob to steady herself, she saw that her hands were trembling. It was not fear that gripped her, but rage and repulsion. Drawing in a deep breath, she walked unsteadily down the hall to the ladies’ lavatory. Instinct told her she needed to purge what had happened to her before she could go forward.
The lavatory was empty. Grateful for this bit of good luck, she walked through to the rear stall, aware of the echo of her hard leather heels on the porcelain tiles. Her brain felt foggy, her reasoning impaired, yet her senses were preternaturally heightened. She was mesmerized by the pale-yellow sunlight diffused through the glass bricks in the tall window. Every sound was magnified, from the creaking of the hinges on the wooden door of the stall to the click of the metal latch as she locked it. When she closed the heavy stall door, it sounded like a gunshot.
After locking herself into the stall, she vomited profusely. When she was finished, she went to the sink and washed her mouth out vigorously. If she had expected to feel better, she was disappointed. Her head was clearer, but her hands still shook. She felt hollowed out, as though someone had scraped away everything inside her, leaving only an empty shell, like the dead horseshoe crabs she and Laura used to find on the beaches on Long Island.
The face gazing back at her in the mirror was not one she recognized. It looked older, tired, and infinitely sadder than the one she had seen that morning. She wondered whether she was losing her mind. She had an image of herself as one of the tattered, addled women roaming the Bowery, talking to themselves, lugging their few belongings in a ragged sack tied up with a bit of frayed rope.
Elizabeth leaned on the sink, gripping the sides until her knuckles turned white.
“You won’t win,” she muttered through clenched teeth. “I won’t let you.”
Looking at her own reflection, she realized the parallel between her and the girl lying lifeless in the morgue at Bellevue. Now she understood, not as a reporter but as a woman, and felt the weight of their common lot. They had both been silenced—violently, viciously, and at the hands (so she assumed) of men—simply because they were women. Weaker in every respect: physically, socially, financially—in short, in every way that mattered.
The Bellevue victim had been silenced forever, but Elizabeth still possessed a voice. And if she could not use it to speak for herself, she would use it on behalf of the young woman with the white-blond hair who lay cold and still in the darkness of the city morgue.
She took a deep breath and let it out slowly, as her father had taught her to do when she was little and given to temper tantrums. Her world had changed forever, and she would never be the same. Somehow, she would find a way to turn that bleak knowledge to her advantage. Loss could cripple a person for life, but it could also be used to construct an armor of strength.
She might be privileged, affluent, and pampered, but she could not ignore the unbreakable bond between her and the girl on the metal slab. They were not reporter and subject—they were sisters. She vowed that realization would drive her forward relentlessly, no matter what lay ahead. Straightening her dress and smoothing her hair, she left the room, the door clanging shut behind her with a hollow sound.
CHAPTER TWENTY
He stood on Forsyth Street, gazing up at the squalid tenement where he had spent too many years of his childhood, its windows grimy and dusty as ever, thinking about the poor souls now living within its unwelcoming walls. Did the children huddle around the woodstove in the kitchen, the only source of heat in the winter? Did they run rampant on the streets, as he had, or slave away in a factory, slaughterhouse, or sweatshop? Were they disregarded and unloved, as he had been, with no father and a poor excuse for a mother?
He sighed and kicked at a stone, sending it scuttering into the gutter, as a tired-looking woman hung laundry from a line that stretched from a second-story window. Clad in a blue-and-white plaid pinafore over a worn cotton frock, she wiped her sleeve across her damp brow. A small boy clung to her skirts, wailing. She bent to say something to him, to comfort him perhaps, wiping the tears from his chubby cheeks. He stopped crying and, after a few hiccoughs, plunged a grubby thumb into his mouth, the other hand still clutching his mother’s skirts.
At least she comforted the child, he thought as he turned away to wander down the street, which smelled of manure, rotting vegetables, and desperation. In spite of her circumstances, she did what she could to be a decent mother. Treading the familiar route as the August sun rounded the bottom of the island on its westward journey, he let his mind wander back to a day many years ago, on such a summer afternoon as this, shortly after his thirteenth birthday. His mother was having “tea” with a couple of her girlfriends (though the liquid she served in chipped flowered teacups was cheap whiskey, bought for a few pennies a bottle at the corner grocery). He’d been seated in the corner of the room mending one of his mother’s dresses—it was a task she regularly assigned him, and by the time he was ten, he was quite adept with a needle and thread.
The three women sat at the kitchen table, eating oranges and fanning themselves as they swilled liquor, laughing and gossiping about their johns—their “tricky boys,” as they called them. They loved sharing stories about these men, depicting them in the most derogatory way. In fact, listening to them, he got the impression they hated all men.
“A judge, he was,” said Long Sadie, a lanky redhead with a horsey face and a wandering eye. None of his mother’s friends were beauties, which to him confirmed their general opinion of men as desperate dopes who would stoop to anything to “tickle their gizzard,” as Sadie called it. “And he would only do it if he was wearin’ his judge’s robe!” she went on. “Wanted t’know if that was all right, an’ I told ’im, ‘Sugar, long as you’re payin’ me, you kin bang your gavel all night far as I’m concerned!”
The other two cackled as his mother refilled their glasses. Her other friend, a plump girl nicknamed Brassy Betty, yawned and stretched. “I surely wish it would cool down a bit,” she said, adjusting her blond wig, which she wore to cover her thinning hair. “This heat makes my head spin, so it does.” She was Irish, and sometimes sang him Celtic folk songs in a sweet, warbling soprano.
As he watched her guzzle the liquid in her cup, it occurred to him that it wasn’t the heat making her dizzy. But he said nothing—he had learned that, with his mother’s friends, it was better to keep a low profile, especially after they had been drinking. He bent over his mending, biting the thread to cut it rather than get up and get scissors, which he feared would attract their attention. But it was to no avail—Long Sadie’s wandering eye swiveled in his direction, and her lips curled in a smile.
“You’ve been awfully quiet, laddie,” she said sucking on an orange slice. “How about a wee dram?” Sadie claimed to have been born in Scotland, and every once in a while, she trotted out Scottish terms such as “wee” and “laddie.”
“No, thank you,” he said, concentrating on his work.
“Aw, c’mon,” said Sadie, licking her lips. “Have you never had a drink before?”
“He has not,” said his mother.
“I’ve had beer,” he said. “Lots of times.” It was a lie. His friends all liked to boast of their drinking, exaggerating how much they’d actually did, but he did not like it and knew too well the effect it had on his mother.
“What about whiskey?” asked Sadie.
“Won’t touch the stuff,” said his mother.
“Why not, then?” asked Betty.
His mother shrugged. “Claims he don’t like the taste.”
Sadie laughed. Even her laugh sounded equine, like a horse neighing. “It’s not about the taste, luv! It’s about the effect.”
“How old is he?” Betty asked his mother.
“Just turned thirteen last week.”
“He’s practically a man!” Sadie whinnied. “It’s high time he started actin’ like one.”
Her statement was confusing. From the stories the women told, acting like a man was nothing to be proud of. Bending over his mending, he tried to quiet his spinning head. He did not like where things were heading.
