In the Shadow of Gotham (41 page)

“Biscotti and a double espresso, please.”

I placed my order with the short Italian man behind the counter who spoke no English, but appeared to make an excellent espresso—at least according to the customer in front of me. Then I settled into a small table overlooking the street and began reading my newspaper. Unable to focus, I put it aside, and turned instead to the note I had received last night.

Ziele,

Nice working with you, kid. I’ll be in touch.

—N.S.

Mulvaney had been right. “The devil always demands his due,” he had said.

In that instant, I was thrust into the underworld of illicit favors I had worked so hard to avoid. But the Lower East Side and its influences seemed to drag me back, whenever I thought I had succeeded in leaving.

Then again, what choice did I have? When she left the research center to seek out Horace, Isabella had taken with her the proof that might have led me to him. Without Nicky, I could never have identified Horace so quickly. I could never have saved Isabella. The alternative was unthinkable.

And Nicky himself was not the devil, even if he was a major player in the city’s system of money and favors—one that operated in all classes of society. Alistair traded well-placed donations for favors and bribed newspapers to sit on stories he didn’t want printed. The difference was that Alistair had a fancier name for it—
quid pro quo,
to borrow a lawyer’s turn of phrase. And he had shown me its danger: How the ease of manipulating others made it simple to go too far. Had Mamie’s admission of bribery absolved Alistair? Not necessarily. After all, a judge who took one bribe might have taken two. I didn’t know, and I decided it didn’t matter.

What mattered was that I was made of sterner stuff—at least, in that respect.

There were no simple choices. But I was resilient, if only through sheer determination and stubbornness. I would be able to handle Nicky and whatever new complications crept into our
dealings with one another. We would cross paths again only if I chose to return here.

Was Alistair right that I craved the excitement and challenges of the city in cases I’d encounter only here? Maybe. Or maybe not. There was no need to decide now.

The espresso’s warmth invigorated me as I drained my cup and ordered another. Someone put a record on the gramophone in back, and the music of a violin concerto swelled over me as I sat, enjoying the experience of being here, one of an anonymous crowd, this moment on a snowy November evening.

I waited a long time before I got up to leave.

As I shoved Nicky’s note back into my coat pocket, my fingers brushed against something else. I pulled out a scrap of paper. It was my fortune from Saturday night’s moon cake, which I had shoved into my pocket and forgotten.

I placed it in front of me and smoothed it out, visions of Isabella filling my mind—for I would forever associate memories of that night in Chinatown with her.

The first step to better times is to imagine them
.

I traced the slip of paper with my finger.

It called to mind a pleasant memory, nothing more.

I put it with the other papers I planned to toss—then reconsidered, folded it carefully, and placed it in my wallet.

And I ventured once more into the storm, where glowing billboards from nearby theaters cast half shadows of silver and blue onto the snow-covered ground, ghostly images that danced alongside me as I walked down the street and into the night.

This is a work of crime fiction grounded in a particular historical time—New York, 1905. Because it is a story first, I have taken liberties with historical fact wherever the story was improved by it, while striving to remain true to the spirit of the times. Of the many wonderful resources available, I turned most often to the holdings and helpful staff at the New-York Historical Society; the New York Public Library; the Hastings-on-Hudson Historical Society; the archives of the
New York Times
; Luc Sante’s study of the seedier side of old New York; Kenneth Jackson’s comprehensive history of New York, always an informative starting point; and Ric Burns and James Sanders’s illustrated history. I also found helpful a number of sources on criminology, including
Criminals and Their Scientists: The History
of Criminology in International Perspective
, edited by Peter Becker and Richard F. Wetzell;
Inventing the Criminal
by Richard F. Wetzell; and
Fingerprints: The Origins of Crime Detection and the Murder Case that Launched Forensic Science
by Colin Beavan. I consulted the above as well as contemporary accounts to frame the criminal himself; I am indebted to John Douglas in
Mind-hunter
for his discussion of the role fantasy can play in the criminal act.

A few historical side notes are worth mentioning. In reading both turn-of-the-century and modern accounts of killers and criminal scientists, I am struck by the fact that in both eras, scientists turned to violent criminals themselves to learn about the criminal mind. Modern criminal profiler John Douglas has detailed how interviews with notorious killers yielded the knowledge that became the foundation of the FBI Behavioral Science Unit. But a century before him, the French criminologist Alexandre Lacassagne completed a similar project, albeit on a smaller scale. My fictional Alistair Sinclair follows their example. The earliest criminal scientists were limited by people’s fear that understanding the criminal mind would lead to excusing criminal behavior. Still, by the turn of the century, ordinary police officers had begun to work with criminal experts to organize and synthesize information about criminal behavior. Their uneasy alliance presages the relationship in this novel between Simon Ziele and Alistair Sinclair.

Moreover, the mayoral election held on November 7, 1905—the day this novel begins—really happened, as did the incidents of ballot box destruction and voter intimidation alluded to in the novel. Even by the looser standards of the day, this election fraud was so egregious it led to major reforms. And finally,
Sarah’s research topic, the Riemann hypothesis, was taken from David Hilbert’s famous list of problems expected to be important in twentieth-century mathematics. Though he considered it to be one of the easier on his list, it remains unsolved as of this writing.