It had been weeks now of grubby rooms, of hotel grime and half-cleaned sheets. Alice was getting tired. But she took Marlowe down to the crooked streets near the harbor, where the huge passenger liners docked, and there she found a shabby little rooming house, meant for sailors maybe, or maybe for passengers paying steerage. An old wooden house, three stories, with gabled windows and a shingled roof mostly in one piece. Its hall was narrow, high-ceilinged. It might have stood in that spot more than a century, was once perhaps a respectable house in the years before the Revolution, before the city grew up all around it. Alice entered the dim office, the oil lamps above the wainscotting casting everything in a weak orange glow, hearing the floor creak under her like a ship, and wondered at the thousands who had walked those very same floors.
The dread only increased when she tried to let the room. The man who ran the place was old, and hunched, and he walked with a stagger, carrying an oil lamp in his one hand, a ring of heavy keys in the other. His slimy hair overhung his collar. There were patches on his elbows.
“Where’s your husband, then?” he said to her, suspicious.
Alice met his gaze. Her boots had stepped in a stream of green muck from the chandler-works next door and, carefully, she wiped them clean on his carpet. “He’s dead,” she said.
The man just grunted, studied Marlowe. “This your boy? I run a respectable house, I do. And there won’t be no visitors, neither,” he muttered.
Alice frowned at the implication. She could break his nose in six places before he could blink, but she couldn’t do a thing to stop his foul thoughts.
“Will you take our money or not?” she said calmly. “We need three nights.”
“You pay in full, up front.” When she didn’t argue, he gestured for them to follow.
And Alice, still with a feeling of dread in her, thought: It will do.
It was a single room at the top of the house, and when the man had opened the curtains, and turned back the moth-eaten blankets, and opened the door of the wardrobe cupboard so that the long clouded mirror reflected the daylight, he left them alone. The walls and floor were so thin, she could hear him go crookedly back down the hall, descend the stairs, cross the long corridor below and go back to the first floor.
She looked at Marlowe and he looked at her. “It’d be a palace for a mouse,” she said.
He smiled.
There was much to be done. They spent the following days standing in lines at the docks, stamping their feet for the tiredness, or filling out paperwork for the customs offices, or finding a cabman to come up to the rooming house and collect their few pieces of luggage for the sailing. The docks were crowded, ropes and hoists and great flats of crates being loaded onto barges from warehouses, and police officers drifting grimly among the laborers, and families just in from Staten Island, huddled, miserable, wary. Alice led Marlowe through all of it, that bad feeling just getting stronger and stronger. It was almost like someone was following them, she thought. It was that kind of a feeling. But whenever she ducked into a doorway, or stopped at a dry-goods window to study the street reflections, there never was anyone.
On their last night in New York she didn’t sleep. She lay beside Marlowe in the bed, listening to his breathing, staring up at the ceiling in the darkness. In a few hours they’d be climbing the gangway, finding their cabin, sailing out of the harbor. Away. It was after midnight; she’d heard the tolling of the sailor’s chapel streets away, marking twelve bells. There was a water stain yellowing the plaster overhead from some leak long years before. It made her think of Mrs. Harrogate, the birthmark on her face. Soon, now.
And that was when she sensed it.
It wasn’t a sound, not exactly. It felt more like a shadow going over the sun, a sudden drop in temperature, and she frowned and turned her face on the pillow and lay very still.
And then she did hear something. A soft creaking in the corridor below, as if someone were taking pains to be silent. She got out of bed, pulled on her trousers, her shirt, her boots. Then she stood listening. The shuffling was coming, slowly, up the stairs to the third floor, their floor.
Swiftly, quietly, she started shoving their few possessions into their traveling cases, scooping up Marlowe’s clothes, the little traveling mirror she carried. She shut the lids, buckled them fast. She looked around her. She went to the window and opened it onto the cold night, feeling an anger rising in her. Last of all she took out her Colt Peacemaker and eased back the hammer and turned the oil-smooth chambers slowly and then she pocketed it.