El Niño and I jumped off the train as soon as it came within sight of the Weehawken yard, then ran full out for the ferry station, still not exchanging a word. More and more the aborigine was becoming all business: having rested his hopes for a new life on Mr. Picton, he was determined to have his revenge, an act what, it seemed, was very important in the part of the world where he came from. All the way across the Hudson on the ferry he took to sharpening his arrows and knife and readying his short bow, along with mixing ingredients from a few small pouches into a small wooden vial what held a sticky, gluelike substance. This, I figured, was the poison what he used to coat the tips of his missiles, and I could only guess that he was tampering with the mixture to make it more deadly than it’d been on any of the occasions when I’d seen him use it. So dark and determined did his face become as he went about this process that I began to feel that I needed to get a few things straight with him.
“El Niño,” I said, “nobody knows better than me how you feel. But our first worry is making sure that we get Ana and Kat out alive, right?” The aborigine just nodded slowly as he dipped the points of his arrows into the wooden vial. “And you know what the rest of them-the Doctor and Miss Howard and the others-would say about what comes after, don’t you? They’d say that if we get the chance, we should take Libby Hatch alive and hold her for trial.”
“She has had her trial,” El Niño mumbled back. “Because of the trial she almost went free. I know that the others believe this, Señorito Stevie…” Tucking his last arrow carefully inside his jacket, he looked me dead in the eye. “But do you?”
I just shook my head. “I’m telling you what they’d say. Once we’re sure Kat and the baby are okay, what you do is your business, so far as I’m concerned.”
He nodded, looking toward the Franklin Street ferry station as it began to loom up large before us. “Yes. You and I understand these things…”
There wasn’t any other way to handle it. If I’d tried to stop El Niño from doing what he believed he had to, I’d’ve only ended up at odds with him; besides, I wasn’t at all sure that his way wasn’t best. Libby Hatch was like a snake, one what seemed able to squirm or kill her way out of any predicament she found herself in; and I couldn’t imagine anybody better suited to deal with such a strange, deadly serpent than the little man from across the seas what was sitting next to me.
New York City is never uglier than at daybreak, and it never smells worse than during the month of August: both of these facts were more than demonstrated that morning as we sloshed and bumped our way into the Franklin Street ferry terminal. Sure, in the distance we could see all the sights what gave suckers from out of town such a jolt-the Western Union Building, the towers of Printing House Square, the steeple of Trinity Church-but none of it made up for the stench of rotting garbage and filthy water what infested the waterfront, or for the sight of those miserable, dirty blocks what lay beyond the ferry station. Of course, the mood what my companion and I were in when we arrived didn’t help our impression of the city any; after a night as horrifying-and sleepless-as ours’d been, there wasn’t much of a way any town could’ve looked good. The only thing I could be grateful for was that the mission we were on left little or no time for letting the miserable feeling of being back among the dirt and dangers of the metropolis get to us: as soon as we were ashore, we began to run the mile or so to our destination, never once thinking about taking a hansom.
The first order of business, pretty obviously, was to try to get some kind of an idea of what was going on inside the Dusters’ place. At that early hour of the morning the joint would likely be pretty dead (though you never could be sure, given that the Dusters were all burny fiends, and such people, when they do sleep, tend to do so at odd hours), so I thought our smartest move was to get ourselves hidden someplace where we could keep an eye on the comings and goings around the building. This would be easiest to do from a rooftop across Hudson Street: there wouldn’t be many street corners or such where we could lurk in broad daylight without getting spotted by some member of the gang. Working our way up through the warehouses, trade stores, and boarding-houses of Hudson Street, then past little St. Luke’s Chapel (the same route, I noted, what Cyrus, the detective sergeants and I’d driven the first night of the case), we eventually reached the heart of Duster country, making sure to cut over west of Hudson Street itself as we approached the gang’s headquarters. Coming back around on Horatio Street, El Niño and I picked a likely building on the west side of Hudson that would give us a good view of what was happening in and around the gang’s filthy but fashionable dive; then we got into the building’s backyard by way of an old loading alley. I picked the lock of the back door, and in a few minutes we’d made it up onto the rooftop, where we quickly moved over to crouch down behind the little wall what rose up at the front of the thing.
It wasn’t yet eight o’clock, and the only signs of life at the Dusters’ were a few slummers leaving the place. These well-dressed types were obviously wound up on burny and hadn’t yet gotten their fill of rolling around in the muck of the gang’s violent, earthy life: but the big Duster who was pushing them out made it pretty clear that the “hosts” themselves’d had enough of entertaining such people and wanted some rest. This was good news for us, as it provided some time to figure how we were going to get a message inside to Kat and find out if Libby Hatch was in fact in the place. Obviously, I couldn’t go in and start asking questions; and if El Niño tried there was always the chance that Libby would catch sight of him provided she was there. The quickest way to attend to the problem seemed to be for me to head down to Frankie’s joint and find Kat’s pal Betty: she could enter the Dusters’ without much trouble and get the lay of things. El Niño, in the meantime, would stay on the rooftop, and if Libby Hatch appeared and tried to make good her escape, he’d set himself to following, making a move against her only if he could be sure of getting Ana Linares away safely.
So it was back down onto the street for me, where I hailed the first hansom what came into sight. The driver of the rig was just starting his day after retrieving his horse from a stable a couple of blocks away, and I knew that I wouldn’t be able to get him to drive to Frankie’s place on Worth Street for any amount of money. It wasn’t a neighborhood what cabbies operated in, unless they were looking to get robbed and probably killed; so I directed the mug to the nearest destination I could think of what I figured he’d be willing to take on: old Boss Tweed’s court house just north of City Hall. The court house wasn’t but a few blocks from Frankie’s (though those few might as well have been fifty, considering the change in scenery what took over as you traveled them), but I’d managed to time my trip just so’s it collided with the morning rush: I gave the cabbie every tip I knew about taking side streets and staying off the main routes, but it still took a frustrating amount of time to get downtown.
Morning was never a happy time to find yourself entering a joint like Frankie’s, and that day was no exception. It being summer, there were kids lying “asleep”-or, to put it plain, hammered unconscious by the foul brew what Frankie served up at his bar-all over the street outside; and them what were awake were busy throwing up into the gutter and moaning like they were ready to die. Stepping over bodies and every kind of human waste as I made my way down into the dive, I was at least relieved to hear that all was quiet in the dog-and-rat pit; in fact, there wasn’t a soul awake inside the joint except the bartender, a tough-looking Italian kid of about fifteen with a very nasty scar along the side of his face, one what seemed to glow angrily even in the darkness of that black, dirty hole.