She came to a stop on a corner, and Eddie could see her well enough to tell she was no ghost, only flesh and blood. He readied his camera. Just as he took her photograph, she lifted her eyes, and stared directly into the lens. Later he would see that her eyes were dark, ember-colored, and he would recall that the eyes of the girl in Weiss’s dime-store photograph were pale, clearly blue. But at that moment all he could focus on was that she had begun to approach him. He had no idea what to expect, certainly he never imagined she would strike him on the chest with open palms. He reeled backward, even though he was so tall, astonished by her fury.
“You think you can come here like a jackal and take photographs while we drown in our grief ?”
“You didn’t have to hit me.” He was thankful she hadn’t damaged the camera.
“We have some rights, you know,” she remarked coldly.
When she started away, Eddie took her arm. “You’re Miss Weiss?” Several young women on the corner were watching, clearly disturbed, but Eddie wasn’t concerned. It was unlikely they would signal one of the many policemen stationed nearby. None of them wanted the authorities involved in their affairs.
Eddie showed off the dime-store photograph. “Is this you?”
The young woman flushed. “What are you doing with this? Are you a thief ? Did you rob my father?”
“Your father came to me. He thought you were lost and asked for my help. But clearly you don’t want him to know where you are.”
“My father knows exactly where I am.” The girl raised her chin and nodded to the photograph. “This is my sister,” she said of the image.
They stood together as the crowds pushed past, an odd intimacy between them. “You’re twins?”
“A year apart. Not that it’s your business.”
“I just want to speak to you about her.”
“For all I know you could work for the insurance company, or for the police. If you follow me, I’ll hit you harder. And next time I’ll scream.” Hannah’s sister backed away, slipping into the crowd.
Eddie might have followed her, but he had learned early on that it wasn’t possible to force out information; evidence gathered in that manner would be unreliable at best, threaded with half truths and assumptions. The Wizard of the Lower East Side always instructed the boys he employed that, when one was searching for a person’s whereabouts, the individual’s entire history must be considered. With every case, the investigator must look backward in time. Who was the woman who had set off on March 25 wearing a blue coat, a treasured gold locket at her throat? It was the path of that soul he must set out to discover. To find someone, it was necessary to follow in the way that the angels who follow men’s lives on earth are said to do, charting each trespass without judgment, for judgment is never ours to give.
THE RAIN was a familiar, bleak curtain when Eddie decided to return to the territory of his youth. After weeks of searching, he knew little more about Hannah Weiss than he had on the night when her father had first come to his studio. She seemed to have vanished completely, as though she’d fallen through the sidewalk and continued her fiery descent into the deepest recesses of the earth. He couldn’t help but wonder if he’d lost the knack for finding people, if his talent hadn’t come so easily to him that he hadn’t appreciated his own abilities.
Eddie sought out Sheriff Street. The weather was so raw he found himself shivering, and he kept his collar up, hands in his pockets. For a while he felt disoriented when confronted by the turmoil of the crowded markets, the steamy scent of vegetables and meat from the vendors, the men in wide black hats who gazed at him with contempt. The gutters in the old neighborhood ran with filth, for many tenement buildings were still without toilets, and the outhouses in the bare dirt yards drained sewage directly into the streets. The buildings were so close any bit of light would have been hard-pressed to break through even if the day hadn’t been so dreary. After a while, the streets seemed familiar once more. When he let his instincts take over, he still knew the route by heart. The Hall of Love looked the same. The large wooden doors, the carved balustrades, the tiled mosaic floor in the entranceway. He entered, clapping the rain from his jacket. Several women were gathered in the unheated corridor, anxiously waiting, hoping to be granted a meeting with the renowned man whose reputation had only continued to grow in the past few years. In Russia they called him an angel, a messenger from God who tended to the forsaken and the betrayed. A few of the women in the hallway held handkerchiefs, on the verge of tears. One young mother tried to hush her baby with a lullaby, but the infant continued to wail sharp, mournful cries. The air was thick with the odor of wet wool and human despair.