The Cabinet of Dr. Leng Read online

  Johnny gave me cherries,

  Johnny gave me pears.

  Johnny gave me sixpence

  To kiss him on the stairs.

  And then—as the cab turned down Center toward Worth—came another change, for the worse. Constance felt as if she had just parted the forbidden veil of Isis and passed into the unnatural world beyond. The air now grew thick with greasy fumes from the illegal tanneries that infested the area. The singing of children, the cries of merchants, vanished. As a premature dusk descended from the thickening atmosphere, Constance began to make out new sounds: whimpers of despair and pain; grunts and curses; the cackling and screeching of streetwalkers; the sickening sound of brickbats hitting flesh. These, too, came back as memories, but memories she had long suppressed.

  The carriage turned a corner, then came to a lurching stop. Two raps, and the trap door opened slightly. “Let me just put the blinders on Rascal, mum,” said Murphy, his voice tight.

  Constance readied herself, sliding one hand into the pocket that contained both money and stiletto. A moment later, there was a rattling sound, then the door to the carriage opened and Murphy extended one hand to help her out. In the other hand he held a long wooden cudgel, with a spine of metal, that he had partially drawn out of one coat pocket.

  “No fears, mum,” he said. “It’s just me ugly stick.” But his attempt at a lighthearted tone failed, and his eyes were constantly in motion. Constance noted his posture was that of a man ready to repel a threat at a moment’s notice. No doubt he was wishing he’d stayed uptown. But it was just as obvious that, having escorted a lady to such a place, he would not abandon her.

  With this thought, Constance moved forward one step, another—and then, raising her eyes to look ahead, stopped with an involuntary gasp.

  3

  THEY HAD STEPPED OUT at a corner. Ahead, at the far end of the block, lay a confusing intersection of muddy streets. Four of its five approaches were dense with buildings of decaying brick, their upper stories leaning perilously over the sidewalks below. The fifth held a small square, with nothing more than a well handle for public water, surrounded by a fetid pig wallow into which all manner of garbage and filth had been tossed. A few ancient wooden structures from the previous century were visible here and there—squat and in ruinous condition. Chickens and pigs wandered unchecked, pecking and rooting. Windows everywhere were broken; some mended with waxed paper, others boarded over, still others open to the elements. No signage protruded above the blackened shopfronts: what commerce had once been eked out here had long since been given over to grogshops, tippling houses, and dens of prostitution. Men lolled in doorways, drinking, expectorating gobs of phlegm or yellow ropes of chewing tobacco; women, too, were on the street, sprawled drunken and senseless or calling out to potential customers, lifting a skirt or exposing a breast to advertise their wares. A group of young boys played in the gutter with a paper boat folded from a piece of newspaper.

  This was the Five Points—the worst crossroads in the worst slum in all of New York. To Constance the spectacle was doubly traumatizing, because she recognized it in the most personal of ways. Nearly a century and a half before, she herself had scurried along these same streets and seen these same sights as a little girl, hungry, freezing, dressed in rags.

  “Mum,” she heard the coachman say, while giving her elbow the slightest pressure. “We’d best be about it.” He turned to the boys nearby, took a silver dollar from his pocket and flipped it, then slipped it back in, leaving them staring with longing. “That’s for you if me horse and carriage are here when we get back.”

  Once again, Constance pushed down hard on the whirlwind of memories this sight stirred so violently. She had to be strong, for Mary’s sake—later, in safety, she could deal with the emotional aftermath.

  Murphy guided her forward. She went along, ignoring the muck and filth that spilled over the curbside and onto the sidewalk, eyes fixed ahead, shutting out the hoots and lecherous catcalls, along with the curses of other women who—seeing the fine cut of her clothes and the clear complexion of her skin—took her for unfair competition. She refused to glance down the dark and narrow lanes that led back from the street—crooked alleyways calf-deep in mud, sky obscured by clotheslines, lined by men in bowler hats guarding the hidden entrances to underground dens. These alleys exhaled smells of their own, much harder to shut out because of their vileness: sepsis; rotting meat; sewage.

  She stumbled on a cobble and felt the steadying hand of Murphy on her elbow. They were halfway down the block now, and the ancient structure of the House of Industry rose up on their left, its soot-streaked façade cracked, its windows barred.

  Mary was inside. Mary. Constance began to say the name over and over to herself, like a mantra.

  She glanced across the street at another large structure in better condition than its neighbors. This had once been the site of the Old Brewery, the most notorious tenement building in New York, so large and airless that most of its interior spaces had no windows. Its entrances had been given nicknames—the Den of Thieves, Murderers’ Alley, Sudden Death. But a ladies’ missionary society had it torn down and replaced it with the Five Points Mission, dedicated to helping indigent women and children. Constance knew the building well; many times, as a young orphan, she had begged bread from its kitchen entrance off Baxter Street. Mary was supposed to be quartered and fed in the Mission. But corrupt interests had transferred her and so many others across the street to the House of Industry instead, to get the benefit of cheap labor. She spent all her time locked within the House of Industry, working sixteen-hour days in crowded, lice-infested quarters.

  Steeling herself with this thought, she glanced over at Murphy, who nodded in readiness. Raising his hand to the worn brass doorknob, he turned it to no avail.

  “Oi!” he said. “Locked.” He started to knock, but Constance stayed his hand.

  She pulled a hairpin from her bonnet, bent toward the lock, and inserted it. Within a few moments, a click sounded. She stepped back again from the scuffed and dented knob.

  “Lord blind me!” the coachman said.

  “Surprise is important. Would you agree?”

  Murphy nodded.

  “In that case: after you.”

  The coachman grasped the knob again, holding his cudgel firm in the other hand. Then in one swift move he opened the door, stepped inside, and Constance followed. He closed it behind her.

  Constance glanced around quickly. The entry room was bisected by a hinged wooden counter, which could be lifted for passage through, much in the manner of a bank. Doors to the left and right led into other, larger rooms, with high ceilings of pressed tin. She could smell the tang of urine and lye in the air. Chicken feathers and oyster shells were piled in the corners.

  A man sat behind the divider, visible only from his chest up. He wore a worn coat and a white shirt with a filthy collar, unbuttoned at his neck. A pair of crepe armbands adorned his arms just above the elbows, and his fingernails were black with accumulated grime.

  He pushed an ink-stained cap back from his forehead and looked from one to the other. “What’s this? Who are you lot, then?”

  “We’re here for Mary Greene,” Constance said, stepping forward.

  “Are you now?” said the man, seemingly unfazed by her prosperous appearance and ability to bypass the lock. “And what might your business be with her?”

  “My business is no concern of yours. I wish to see her—now.”

  “Oh, indeed? You ‘wish to see her.’ What do you think this is—a zoo?”

  “It smells like one,” said Murphy.

  Quickly as possible. Quickly as possible. Constance reached into her pocket. “Let me explain. You are in a position to make yourself a good deal of money for very little work. Go find Mary Greene. Bring her here. And in return you’ll receive twenty dollars.” She showed him the money.

  The man’s eyes widened in his soot-smeared face. “Nellie Greene, is it? By God, you should have told me this involved an exchange of currency. Give me the money, and I’ll go get her.” And he reached over the desktop.

  Constance returned the money to her pocket. “It’s Mary. Not Nellie.”

  Murphy moved toward the clerk-cum-jailer. “Money later,” he said, brandishing the cudgel.

  “No, no, my friend,” said the man, holding out his hand with a coaxing motion. “Now.”

  “Give us the girl,” Murphy said in a threatening tone.

  A silence ensued. Finally, the man behind the counter replied: “I wouldn’t give you the steam off my piss.”

  “Bloody gombeen!” Murphy cried as he lunged to the counter and grabbed the man’s shirt in his fist, literally pulling him up and over. But the man, shouting at the top of his lungs, had gotten his hands on a butcher’s knife from beneath the desk and went to slash at Murphy.

  Taking advantage of the brawl, Constance ducked into the room on the left. It must have originally been a chapel, but now the windows were barred, and instead of pews there was row upon row of cots, straw scattered across the floor among them. It was brutally cold. The mattresses were so thin she could see the outline of the metal grilles beneath. Rags and bits of clothing lay beneath the beds, worn and dirty. Where plaster had fallen from the walls, the exposed laths had been patched with newsprint and oiled paper.

  Almost mad with the need to find her sister, she ran to the next room, full of dirty clothes and scullery equipment, and into the next, where a clacking, humming sound filled the air. There, in a vast, dim space, were two rows of girls and women. They sat on what looked like milking stools, and were dressed in dirty, one-piece shifts. Before each of them was a foot-pedal-operated mechanical loom.

  Slowly, the hum subsided. One after another, they stop
ped their work and looked silently in her direction.

  As Constance approached, desperately searching the faces for her sister, a uniformed man came striding over from the far end of the room, a truncheon in his belt, his hobnail boots loud on the wooden floor. “What’s this? Who are you?”

  Constance skipped back and exited, running toward the entrance, pulling out her stiletto as she ran. When she entered, she found that Murphy had the attendant in a hammerlock, the knife on the floor, the man begging and whining.

  At that moment, the door at the far end of the entryway banged open and a woman strode in.

  “Cease and desist!” she cried as she came storming over, her voice cutting the air.

  She was tall and thin, almost skeletal, and wore a long brown dress with buttons that ran from her waist to her neck. Her eyes were sharp and intelligent, and she had such an air of chill authority that the two men ceased to struggle.

  “What is the meaning of this disturbance?” she said, looking at the three occupants of the room in turn, fixing on Constance.

  Constance felt the sharp gaze freeze her blood. “We’re here for Mary Greene,” she said, still gripping the stiletto. “And we’ll be leaving with her—one way or another.”

  The woman gave a mirthless laugh. “There is no need for dramatics, young lady.” She turned back to the two men, who had released each other and were standing, disheveled and panting. “Royds,” she snapped, “get about your business.”

  As the man skulked away, giving them a final leer over his shoulder, the woman went to a nearby shelf and drew from it a large ledger book, put it on the counter, flipped the pages until she found one marked with a ribbon, then smoothed it down. “As I thought. She was taken from here yesterday.”

  “Taken?”

  “To the sanatorium. The doctor found her ill and condescended to favor her with special attention.” The woman paused. “What is your interest in the matter?”

  “She is a friend of the family,” Constance said.

  “Then you should be grateful. Very few of our residents are lucky enough to come under the care of Dr. Leng.”

  “Dr. Leng,” Constance repeated. For a moment, it felt like the floor was burning away beneath her and she was about to fall into the earth.

  “Yes. His arrival here last summer was the greatest blessing. Already, five of our young ladies have been sent to recover at his private sanatorium.”

  Constance could hardly speak. The woman continued to look at her dubiously, one eyebrow raised.

  “Where…is this sanatorium?” Constance asked.

  “It would be above my station to question the doctor. I am sure it is a fine place.” The woman spoke primly, yet with a voice of iron. “For the safety of its patients, the location is kept strictly private.”

  Moving as if in a nightmare, Constance pulled the book toward her. The page had roughly a dozen entries—several new arrivals, one released with time served, another dead from typhus and removed by hearse…and two others marked TRANSFERRED TO SANATORIUM FOR CLOSER OBSERVATION. The most recent entry was for Mary. She had been signed out on Monday, November 26. Yesterday. And beside the entry, written in ink that had not yet completely lost its gloss, was a signature: E. LENG.

  Yesterday. Constance staggered, raising the hand holding the stiletto as she did so.

  Mistaking the movement for aggression, the lady said: “Do your worst. I am ready to meet Him as made me.” And she stared at Constance with defiant scorn.

  “We’re leaving now,” said Murphy, as the clerk reached for the alarm bell. He took Constance’s arm and urged her toward the door. She went unresisting. Just before it closed, he yelled back at the man within: “Buinneach dhearg go dtigidh ort!”

  The walk back to the coach was more of a stagger, Constance oblivious to the jeers of the onlookers and the stench of the street. When she came fully back to herself, they were once again on Canal Street, heading for the hotel.

  The trap door opened slightly. “I’m very sorry, mum, that we couldn’t have done more.”

  “Thank you, Mr. Murphy,” she managed to say. “You did all you could.”

  As the cab pulled up at the hotel’s porte cochere, and the doormen rushed out to open the carriage door and assist, Constance rapped on the trap. Murphy opened it. She handed ten dollars up to him through the opening. “Mr. Murphy? I wonder if I might hire you exclusively for the next week or so.”

  “As you wish, mum—and thank you kindly.”

  “Very good. Please be here tomorrow morning at nine and wait in the cabbie queue for me.”

  “Yes, mum.”

  “And Mr. Murphy? Perhaps you might use this sunny afternoon to do me a small kindness.”

  “And what would that be, mum?”

  “Fix this lumpy seat.”

  He touched his hat with a grin. “Sure it will be done, mum.”

  As the trap door closed, she descended from the cab, walked up the marble steps through bronze doors and into the great lobby, finishing under her breath the children’s rhyme she’d heard an hour earlier, when she’d been so full of hope:

  I gave him back his cherries,

  I gave him back his pears.

  I gave him back his sixpence

  And I kicked him down the stairs.

  4

  CONSTANCE STOOD BEFORE THE bow window of her parlor, watching as lamplighters lit the gaslights, one by one, along Fifth Avenue. She remained there, motionless, for some time as night crept over the city and a winter fog rolled in from the harbor, turning the lamps on the passing coaches into fireflies and the lights of Madison Square into a constellation of soft globes.

  A blackness had settled over her and, for a while, rational thinking was extinguished. Slowly—as she looked into the dark—emotion and reason reasserted themselves. First came anger: blind, useless anger at the quirk that had brought her back one day, one day, too late to rescue her sister. Dr. Leng now had Mary in his “sanatorium”—and Constance had good reason to believe the woman at the House of Industry when she professed ignorance of its location. That was not something Leng would want known, because his sanatorium was not a place from where people emerged cured—or even emerged at all.

  Constance knew Leng had begun donating his “services” to the House of Industry that summer. Before returning here, she’d already known she might be too late. She could take some comfort—cold though it was—in knowing her sister was relatively safe for the next few weeks. Leng would put her through a period of special nourishment and observation before he performed his surgery…and made his harvest from her body.

  The more urgent problem involved her brother, Joseph, who had just turned twelve and was imprisoned on Blackwell’s Island. Constance knew he would be released on Christmas Eve. She also knew that he would be beaten to death the following day—Christmas—during a pickpocketing attempt gone bad. She knew, because she had witnessed the horrifying event herself.

  The traumatic and brutal six-month stay on Blackwell’s Island would change Joe: upon his release he would have become a different person, skilled—but not skilled enough—in the criminal arts that so quickly led to his death. Every day he was incarcerated, she knew, was damaging him further, making him less like his former innocent, trusting self.

  And then she had to consider her own doppelganger. In this parallel reality, there was another Constance Greene out there: aged nine, cold and hungry, roaming the streets of the Five Points. That was the strangest caprice of time and the multiverse: that she also had to find and save her own younger self. Now that Mary had been taken, young Constance could not even rely on the crusts of bread her older sister had been able to toss to her from the barred windows of the House of Industry. But the young Constance of this era, this parallel world, would survive. Constance knew this—because she herself had survived.