She looked up at him with a confused expression.
“There’s a woman who works at headquarters on Mulberry, the matron of the foundlings. Patrol officers bring abandoned or lost infants to her first, and she makes sure they’re fed and clean. And even if she hasn’t seen either of the boys, she might have heard some gossip that will be useful.”
He saw her straighten her shoulders and draw in a deep breath. “Well, then,” she said. “I suppose we better go talk to her.”
? ? ?
ONCE HE HAD flagged down a cab Jack leaned back against the seat and closed his eyes, trying to gather his thoughts. He could almost feel her gaze on his face, but when he opened his eyes she was looking out the window to a corner where boys played stickball.
He said, “I think that was a useful interview.”
“It was,” she agreed. “Not exactly positive, but not absolutely discouraging, either. Just a great deal of work to be done.”
“You don’t have to do it alone.”
She might take it as an offer or a challenge, or she might sidestep the issue. In polite society she would thank him and insist that he had already done enough, and the conversation would circle back on itself until he gave up or she gave in. But he had the idea that Anna Savard did not put a great deal of value in such rituals, and this time he was right.
“Thank you. I would appreciate your help.”
He had accomplished the two things he set out for himself: Anna had the information she needed to proceed, and he had reason and permission to spend as much time as he could spare with her while she did it.
They set off east along Nineteenth Street. Warehouses, mills, and factories gave way to smaller and then larger businesses and shops until they turned onto Broadway. The cabby circled around Union Square and Jack turned automatically to catch a glimpse of the family shop on the corner of Thirteenth Street before he steered the cab onto the Bowery, a move that always made Jack think of crossing a border from one kind of city to another.
Then the finer shops began to give way to cobblers and hardware merchants to secondhand clothiers, restaurants to beer gardens, banks to pawnshops, theaters to saloons. Soon they were surrounded on all sides by music halls, flophouses, stale beer joints, and bordellos. The businesses were closed up tight on a Sunday, but the dives and disorderly houses never closed despite the law. None of it seemed to take Anna Savard by surprise.
? ? ?
POLICE HEADQUARTERS WAS as busy as Anna would have guessed it to be, had she ever given it any thought. As they passed through the reception area to a steep flight of stairs, she took note of an older couple leaning against each other, half-asleep; a mother with a young boy on her lap; and a group of heavily made-up women who seemed distinctly unconcerned about their fate. One of them looked at her with dull eyes empty of all emotion, then let her gaze drop.
She followed the detective sergeant down one hall and another, and finally up a short flight of stairs. He opened the door and the purpose of the room announced itself by means of a wailing infant and the ammonia smell of wet winding clothes.
It was a long, narrow room lined with cots. There was a desk at one end and a treatment table at the other where a short, sturdy woman wrapped in an apron that covered her from neck to toe was leaning over an infant. The child was flailing unhappily about being lowered into the bathwater.
“Wheest,” she murmured to the baby. “Wheest. There’s a good girl. We’ll get you cleaned up proper first, and then you can fill your belly.”
A rocking chair creaked and Anna saw that there was another woman sitting in a shadowy corner. She seemed to be sleeping while an infant fretted at her breast. So small and so ferocious in its hunger, struggling for more and more as though he knew with certainty that he would never be fed again.
The three infants in the cots were asleep, swaddled securely, eyelids as pale as moonstone etched with a tracery of blue veins. Newborns should be rounded and padded and pink, but all of these babies were angular, like bundles of sticks wrapped in paper.
“Mrs. Webb?”
The woman bathing the baby looked over her shoulder.
“Detective Sergeant Mezzanotte. Good evening. What have you brought me today?”
“No babies today,” he said, and she turned back to her work. The infant had stopped wailing and was staring up at her with utter fascination.
“You see,” she said. “Not so bad, is it? Lovely warm water.”
To Jack she said, “Then what can I do to help? Still looking for the little Italian boy?”
“I’m afraid so. Can we have a look at your register?”