The heart of the Shadow Walker - Mystery Crime

The snow drifted in from the Hudson over the unfinished streets, gummed up the rails of the horsecar, and settled into the folds of coats like the cold flour bakers dust over their hands. In the gaslamp before my window the flame trembled, as if it meant to duck. The wind pressed it flat, and for an instant it looked like a tongue licking at something unspeakable.

I had spent the day turning over files—money disputes, adultery, a boy who had vanished in a slaughterhouse—until my eyes burned. When I unfastened my cuff, the paper-dust gray clung to my wrist, and I smelled of ink and old sweat. My watch ticked. Each beat was a tiny hammer against the silence.

Then there was a knock.

Not the polite knock of a neighbor, not the bewildered knock of a messenger. It was two quick raps, a short pause, then another, as if someone were knocking on the inside of a box.

I opened. On the landing stood a man with his collar turned up, cap in hand, hair wet and stuck thinly to his forehead. His breath rose in little clouds, as if he had something inside him that did not want to come out of him.

“Mr. Van Alen?”

His voice was hoarse from running, or from silence.

I nodded.

He held out a card to me. The stock was thick, the edges sharp, the lettering impressed in a fine line, as if it had not been written but pressed into the material:

ALDERMAN & SONS

Attorneys and Trustees

Broadway

Beneath the name was a seal, dark red, with a mark I did not at once understand: a circle, and within it something that looked like the silhouette of a staircase—or like a tongue.

“You’re needed,” the man said, and looked past me into my room as if to see whether anyone else was there. “At once. A… death.”

“An accident?” I asked.

His gaze twitched. It was only an instant, but I saw his eyes draw tight, as if I had struck a sore spot.

“That’s what they call it,” he said. “When they don’t want to call it something else.”

He handed me an address. It was not far from here, on the Upper West Side, where the city had only just begun to dare to grow: new facades, fresh stucco, scaffolding like ribs. And above it all—over everything—the dark block everyone had been talking about for weeks, anyone who felt important enough to talk about more than weather and bread prices.

The first skyscraper.

Depending on one’s mood, people called it a “marvel” or a “folly.” It was too tall for what we were used to, too smooth, too self-assured. Standing before it, you had the feeling the sky itself ought to give way.

And now, so they said, people were falling from up there.

I took coat and hat, slipped in the revolver I had long since stopped showing, and locked up. As I went down the stairs, I heard that knocking again behind me—only this time it wasn’t at my door.

It came from the wall.

***

The street was a filthy channel of slush and ice. Horses pulled hard, hooves slipped, drivers cursed. The smell of coal lay over everything, sweet and biting at once; it crept into the nose and stayed there, as if it had moved in. From a basement window came music—a violin trying to be cheerful, and failing.

I kept my collar up, pressed a hand to the breast pocket where the address lay, as if it might run away. The closer I got, the quieter it became. Not because there were fewer people, but because people walked differently: faster, heads lowered, and they did not look up.

The building stood like a black tooth in a row of pale, new houses. It wasn’t fully finished yet, but finished enough to boast. Dark stone, tall windows, an entrance wide as a mouth. Over the door hung a lantern whose light was not warm but sickly, yellowish, as if shining through grease.

A policeman waited by the entrance, acting as though he happened to be here. His hand rested on his baton, but he did not grip it. He looked as if he’d rather be standing somewhere else.

“Van Alen?” he asked as I came nearer.

“Yes.”

He tugged at his mustache. “The lawyers are up top. Tenth floor.”

“Tenth.” I let the word sit on my tongue. It tasted wrong, like something you shouldn’t eat.

“There’s an elevator,” the policeman said quickly, as if afraid I would turn around. “One of those with a rope. Perfectly safe.”

I went through the revolving door. Inside it was warmer, but the warmth smelled of damp wood and fresh lime. Footsteps echoed; somewhere water dripped in a steady rhythm.

The elevator shaft was an open gullet in which a cage hung. A man in a gray vest stood beside it. He nodded at me without smiling.

“Ten,” I said.

He pulled a lever. Ropes tightened. Metal creaked. The cage jerked and began to move.

As we rose, the ground floor slid past me, then the second, the third. The floors were still raw, some walls without paper, some doors without plaques. I glanced into a half-finished corridor: scaffolding, a bucket, a broken brush, as if someone in the middle of the work had suddenly decided he had to go.

The cage swayed slightly. Below us the lobby grew smaller, farther, more unreal.

“Many trips today?” I asked, more to break the silence than out of interest.

The liftboy stared straight ahead. “Too many,” he said.

At the eighth floor I felt it for the first time: the faintest vibration in the soles of my boots, as if somewhere a great motor were running—only it was 1873, and in a house like this no motor should have been humming. The vibration did not come from the ropes. It came from the building itself.

I laid a hand on the rail. The metal was cold, though we were in a warm shaft.

“Do you feel that?” I asked.

The liftboy swallowed. His Adam’s apple jumped. “You get used to it,” he said, and his voice sounded as though getting used to it was nothing good.

The cage stopped with a jolt. Doors opened.

Tenth floor.

The corridor was wide and laid with a carpet so new it still smelled of wool and dye. Gaslamps burned in wall brackets, their light running over golden patterns. Doors stood in a row, each with a brass plate.

I walked along the corridor until I heard voices—muffled, careful. A door stood ajar. Beyond it: a sitting room, large, elegant, where everything belonged in its place.

And yet something had fallen out of its place.

Two men stood by the fireplace, both in dark suits, both too elegant for this part of town. One held a handkerchief, as if he might use it to wipe the air. The other wore spectacles that kept sliding down his nose.

On the sofa sat a woman in a dress that must once have been expensive. Now it was damp at the knees, and she held her hands clasped together so tightly her knuckles were white. Beside her stood a servant, stiff as a chair.

On the floor, before the window, lay a man.

He did not lie like someone who had fallen. He lay like someone who had been laid down.

His head was turned to the side, his mouth slightly open. His eyes were half closed, as if ashamed to be dead. His hair was slicked, a little too neat. On his shirt collar a tiny point of blood gleamed, dark as lacquer.

“Mr. Van Alen,” said the lawyer with the handkerchief. He stepped toward me, and I saw his glance dart to the dead man and at once away again. “Thank you for coming so quickly.”

I pulled off my gloves, slowly, to buy time. The room was too quiet. You couldn’t hear the fire in the hearth. You could only hear that somewhere in the house something vibrated—that fine trembling that crept through wood and stone.

“Who is he?” I asked.

“Mr. Silas Vane,” said the lawyer. “Railroads. Stocks. You know the name.”

I knew it. Everyone knew it who had ever tried to lay out a line without it suddenly belonging to someone else. Vane was one of those men who could move whole neighborhoods by setting a pen to paper.

I went closer. The servant unconsciously took a step back, as if I carried a disease.

“When did they find him?” I asked, kneeling beside the corpse, and at once I smelled something beneath the room’s perfume—something metallic, something sweet.

“This morning,” said the lawyer with the spectacles. “The valet brought the tea. The door was locked. One… one had to break it down.”

I did not touch the body. I looked. I let my eyes work.

Vane’s hands were clean. The nails tended. No scratch marks. No dirt. Only on the inside of the right hand, where the life line runs, there was a dark stain—as if he had held something that had rubbed off.

“Did he…” I looked up at the woman on the sofa. “Who are you?”

She blinked as if she first had to recognize me. Then a sound came from her throat that was more a clearing than speech.

“Eleanor,” she said. “Eleanor Vane.”

She said the name like something you let fall.

“Mrs. Vane,” I said. “Did you see him last night?”

Her hands trembled. She looked to the window, not to me.

“He was upstairs,” she whispered.

“Upstairs?” I repeated.

Her gaze flickered. The servant cleared his throat, as if to warn her.

“On the upper floors,” she said. “He said it was… business.”

The lawyer with the handkerchief took a step closer. “Mrs. Vane is distraught. You should…”

“Did your husband have enemies?” I asked, and this time I looked at the servant. The man had the posture of a soldier, but the eyes of a boy who hears too many noises at night.

“Everyone has enemies,” he said, too quickly. Then he swallowed. “Sir.”

I bent again to the dead man. The tiny dot of blood on the collar was not from a wound I could see. I drew the cloth aside the slightest bit. Beneath the ear, close at the jaw, was a puncture, so fine it looked as if someone had jabbed in with a needle. Around it the skin was slightly darkened.

“Doctor?” I asked.

“Dr. Halloway was here,” said the lawyer with the spectacles. “He said it could… it could have been a stroke. Or a fall.”

“A fall leaves more than a needle,” I muttered.

The lawyer with the handkerchief pressed his lips together. “Mr. Van Alen, we want no… unnecessary agitation. Mr. Vane was…”

“Important,” I said, and straightened. My knee cracked, loud in the silence.

The gaslamp flickered. Only once. But in that one flicker it was as if the room briefly breathed—as if the light covered something that in the next moment was there again.

In the window the room was reflected. And behind my reflection—very close to my shoulder—someone else stood.

I turned so fast my hat nearly fell.

There was no one.

My heart hammered up into my throat, a dull, misplaced racket. I forced myself to breathe evenly. The lawyer regarded me as if I had just done something indecent.

“Everything all right?” he asked.

I nodded. I even smiled, but the smile felt like a wrong button on a shirt.

I went to the window. Outside the city lay like a gray sea. Roofs, chimneys, thin threads of smoke. Farther off: the Hudson, dark, heavy.

On the inside of the window frame was a small notch. Beside it something black clung—no soot, no dirt. It looked like dried ink, but it gleamed as if it were still fresh.

I touched it with my fingertip. It did not feel dry. It felt warm.

I rubbed it between thumb and forefinger. It smeared like blood, only darker.

And then—very softly—I felt a throbbing in my finger, as if I had a second pulse there.

I drew my hand back. The throbbing stayed a moment, then vanished.

“What is that?” I asked, more to myself than to the others.

The servant’s eyes were wide. He stared at my finger as if I had held it in the flame.

“He brought it with him,” Mrs. Vane whispered.

“What did he bring with him?” I asked.

She shut her eyes tight. A tear ran down her cheek, but she did not wipe it away.

“The heart,” she said.

The lawyer with the handkerchief gave a short laugh. A sound without warmth. “Mrs. Vane…”

“Don’t!” she hissed suddenly, and in her voice was something that made me shiver. She flung her eyes open and looked at me—really at me. “You listen, Mr. Van Alen. He brought it with him. And now…” She swallowed, and her gaze slipped past me toward the door, as if she expected someone to enter. “Now it is here.”

At that moment there was a knock.

Not at the door.

In the fireplace.

Three blows, dull, as if someone were rapping a knuckle against stone.

The fire kept burning as though it had heard nothing. Yet the flame tilted briefly inward, as if bending to listen.

None of the lawyers said a word. The servant held his breath. Mrs. Vane pressed her hands over her mouth.

I went to the fireplace. The knocking did not come again.

But in the bed of ash lay something that did not belong there: a small, black shard, scarcely larger than a fingernail. It gleamed as if it had been polished. And when I leaned over it, I felt that vibration again—stronger, as if the building had noticed my gaze.

I took a pair of tongs from the fireplace tools and carefully lifted the shard out. It was heavier than it had any right to be. When I held it in the tongs, it throbbed—not visibly, but unmistakably. A rhythm, slow, deliberate.

Like a heart.

The lawyer with the spectacles took a step back. “What are you doing?”

I set the shard on the marble mantel. It left no soot. Only a tiny, dark spot that spread slowly, as if the stone were drinking it.

“I’m doing my job,” I said.

The lawyer with the handkerchief pressed his handkerchief to his lips. “We retained you to be discreet. No press. No police beyond what is necessary. You understand?”

I looked at the shard. It lay there like an eye playing dead.

“Discretion,” I said. “Of course.”

And as I said it, I felt something move in my jacket pocket, though I had put nothing in there.

A very fine, impatient tapping.

As if someone were knocking from the inside.

***

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