A Crime of Secrets

This book is dedicated to all who dare to love, dare to question, and dare to seek no matter the danger. w Prologue April 1899 A brilliant afternoon in New York’s Madison Square Park, a brilliant, sparkling spring afternoon. Water dances on the tiers of the fountain, droplets glitter in the sunlight. Colorful parasols gripped gracefully in the gloved hands of strolling women are suffused with sunshine, the colored light dappling the women’s cheeks. The sun catches, too, the innocent glint in young girls’ eyes, and the not-so-innocent glint in the eyes of roguish men who linger along the paths. Children’s giggles float like bubbles in the air, rising above the murmurs of promenading lovers and the hushed discussions of men of business. Baby carriages shimmering with silk ruffles and silver fancywork delicate as their sleeping babies’ dreams are tended by mothers whose flowered hats bob in rhythm with the women’s maternal cooing. The serenity of the park is but a grace note in the clang and boom of the powerful city that surrounds it, a city growing ever taller ever faster! All around, new buildings rise higher. Horse-drawn carriages are thrust aside by the latest mechanical contraption, the automobile, and by hulking cable cars, their steel wheels grinding noisily along their tracks, thrilling the cars’ passengers but terrifying the remaining equine beasts who still pull hansom cabs and tradesmen’s wagons and the broughams of the leisurely rich. The city is shaking off its old century while it makes a mad grab for the new. The populace is lured by all that’s coming and all that’s promised of new inventions and wild ideas. Indeed, what was scorned as scandal just a few years ago is enjoyed on this radiant afternoon as a blaze of artistic glory: the golden, naked Diana the Huntress perched atop the tall campanile of Mr. Stanford White’s vast Madison Square Garden entertainment emporium overlooking the northeast corner of the park. How the righteous howled when White and his sculptor, the renowned Mr. Augustus St. Gaudens, placed the voluptuous Diana atop the tower! And how now, on this bright day, the patrons of the park bask happily in the aura of Diana’s glowing body, her archer’s bow pulled taut, her arrow aimed across the restless metropolis. Oh yes, Mr. Stanford White, New York’s boldest, busiest architect, has his way with the city, muscling its towers and its dubious morality into the future. A breeze blows through Madison Square now, tossing the hems of the women’s dresses above the tops of their high-button shoes, exposing a bit of skin, provoking feigned embarrassment in the women and enthusiastic delight in the men. Ah, the allure of a woman’s leg, the hint of the pleasures of the flesh. These windblown titillations add bits of drama to an w Chapter One Later that day Fin Donner, née Finola, well-tailored androgyne of rough and iniquitous history but who now resides in contentment, was nostalgic for gaslight. True, the recently installed electric wall sconce she switched on in the parlor to counter the fading afternoon sunlight was silent and odorless, unlike gaslight which hissed and gave off an eggy aroma. Still, despite the warm tone of the amber lampshade, Fin missed the seductive flicker of the old golden light. This modern electric illumination didn’t shimmer as softly along Fin’s brocade waistcoat or the sleeves of her bright white shirt. It didn’t slide as sinuously along the room’s polished mahogany furnishings, or down the carvings on the marble fireplace, a dark red which the old flicker imbued with whimsically devilish life. It didn’t enrich the deep green moiré silk-covered walls with quite the same sinewy sheen. But the electric bulb gave a steadier light, which made reading easier on the eyes. And Fin had to admit that the amber shade with its silken fringe had its own charm, its own serene radiance, creating a light companionably falling on the sticklike contours of that other newfangled object recently installed on the little table beside one of the room’s pair of overstuffed leather armchairs: a home telephone. Next to the telephone was its companion, the printed directory. • • • She sat down again in the comfort of the armchair, where she’d been reading the latest issue of the Police Gazette while she waited for her beloved Devorah to return from her afternoon at the Astor Library. With a sigh of yearning for her lover to hurry home, Fin took up the newspaper once again and continued reading the rollicking account of a bloody brawl at the Thumb In The Eye Saloon, a head-cracking brouhaha that spilled into the streets of the dockside neighborhood of Hell’s Kitchen. Fin knew well the saloon and its neighborhood. Indeed, she was born in its crowded tenements, strutted its brutal sidewalks. Hell’s Kitchen was even now a rough and heartless part of town where human life was chopped up as savagely as the overworked dray horses who dropped dead on the cobblestones and were carted off to the neighborhood’s slaughterhouses, their body parts sold off by the piece to tanneries and glue factories. It was on Hell’s Kitchen’s streets, in its alleys, and along its docks where Fin learned to survive. As a child, she learned to be more cunning than the sneering so-called do-gooders who snatched the city’s street urchins and put them into hellish workhouses. Eventually she, too, fell prey to the child snatchers, hauled off to an institution of cruelty