Driving through the notorious Eighteenth Ward, once the home of nearly fifty thousand people crammed into a thousand decrepit tenements. When most people thought of the nineteenth century they thought in sepia--because of old photographs. But this was wrong. Old Manhattan was the color of stone. With choking industrial smoke, paint prohibitively expensive and dim lighting, the city was many shades of gray and yellow.
Schneider snuck up behind the fellow and was about to strike when Fortune's conscience, at last, cried out. Two constables chanced upon the assault. They recognized Schneider and gave chase. The killer fled east, across that engineering marvel, the Manhattan Bridge, completed in 1909, two years before these events. But he stopped halfway across, seeing that three constables were approaching from Brooklyn, having
heard the alarm raised by the whistles and pistol reports of their confederates from Manhattan.
Schneider, unarmed, as chance would have it, climbed onto the railing of the bridge as he was surrounded by the law. He shouted maniacal diatribes against the constables, condemning them for having ruined his life. His words grew ever madder. As the constabulary moved closer, he leapt from the rail into the River. A week later a pilot discovered his body on the shore of Welfare Island, near Hell Gate. There was little left, for the crabs and turtles had been diligently working to reduce Schneider to the very bone which he, in his madness, cherished.
He turned the taxi onto his deserted cobblestoned street, East Van Brevoort, and paused in front of the building. He checked the two filthy strings he'd run low across the doors to make certain that no one had entered. A sudden motion startled him and he heard the guttural snarling of the dogs again, their eyes yellow, teeth brown, bodies dotted with scars and sores. His hand strayed to his pistol but they suddenly turned and, yelping, charged after a cat or rat in the alley.
He saw no one on the hot sidewalks and opened the padlock securing the carriage-house door then climbed back inside the car and drove into the garage, parked beside his Taurus.
After the villain's death his effects were secured and perused by detectives. His diary showed that he had murdered eight good citizens of the city. Nor was he above grave robbery, for it was ascertained from his pages (if his claims be true) that he had violated several holy resting places in cemeteries around the city. None of hisvictims had accorded him the least affront;--nay, most were upstanding citizens, industrious and innocent. And yet he felt not a modicum of guilt. Indeed, he seems to have labored under the mad delusion that he was doing his victims a favor.
He paused, wiped sweat from his mouth. The ski mask itched. He dragged the woman and her daughter out of the trunk and through the garage. She was strong and fought hard. At last he managed to get the cuffs on them.
"You prick!" she howled. "Don't you dare touch my daughter. You touch her and I'll kill you."
He gripped her hard around the chest and taped her mouth. Then he did the little girl's too.
"Flesh withers and can be weak,"--(the villain wrote in his ruthless yet steady hand)--"Bone is the strongest aspect of the body. As old as we may be in the flesh, we are always young in the bone. It is a noble goal I had, and it is beyond me why any-one might quarrel with it. I did a kindness to them all. They are immortal now. I freed them. I took them down to the bone."
He dragged them into the basement and pushed the woman down hard on the floor, her daughter beside her. Tied their cuffs to the wall with clothesline. Then returned upstairs.
He lifted her yellow knapsack from the back of the cab, the suitcases from the trunk, and pushed through a bolt-studded wooden door into the main room of the building. He was about to toss them into a corner but found that, for some reason, he was curious about these particular captives. He sat down in front of one of the murals--a painting of a butcher, placidly holding a knife in one hand, a slab of beef in the other.
He examined the luggage tag. Carole Ganz. Carole with an E. Why the extra letter? he wondered. The suitcase contained nothing but clothes. He started through the knapsack. He found the cash right away. There must have been four or five thousand. He put it back in the zippered compartment.
There were a dozen child's toys: a doll, a tin of water-colors, a package of modeling clay, a Mr. Potato Head kit. There were also an expensive Discman, a half-dozen CDs and a Sony travel clock radio.
He looked through some pictures. Photos of Carole and her girl. In most of the pictures the woman seemed very somber. In a few others, she seemed happier. There were no photos of Carole and her husband even though she wore a wedding ring. Many were of the mother and daughter with a couple--a heavyset woman wearing one of those old granny dresses and a bearded, balding man in a flannel shirt.
For a long time the bone collector gazed at a portrait of the little girl.
The fate of poor Maggie O'Connor, the young slip of a girl, merely eight years of age, was particularly sad. It was her misfortune, the police speculate, that she stumbled across the path of James Schneider as he was disposing of one of his victims.
The girl, a resident of the notorious "Hell's Kitchen," had gone out to pluck horsehairs from one of the many dead animals found in that impoverished part of the city. It was the custom of youngsters to wind tail-hairs into bracelets and rings--the only trinkets such urchins might have to adorn themselves with.
Skin and bone, skin and bone.
He propped the photo on the mantelpiece, beside the small pile of bones he'd been working on that morning and some that he'd stolen from the store where he'd found the snake.
It is surmised that Schneider found young Maggie near his lair, witnessing the macabre spectacle of his murdering one of his victims. Whether he dispatched her quickly or slowly we cannot guess. But unlike his other victims, whose remains were ultimately discovered,--of frail, be-curled Maggie O'Connor, nought was ever found.
The bone collector walked downstairs.
He ripped the tape off the mother's mouth and the woman gasped for air, eyed him with cold fury. "What do you want?" she rasped. "What?"
She wasn't as thin as Esther but, thank God, she was nothing at all like fat Hanna Goldschmidt. He could see so much of her soul. The narrow mandible, the clavicle. And, through the thin blue skirt, the hint of the innominate bone--a fusion of the ilium, the ischium, the pubis. Names like Roman gods'.
The little girl squirmed. He leaned forward and placed his hand on her head. Skulls don't grow from a single piece of bone but from eight separate ones, and the crown rises up like the triangular slabs of the Astrodome roof. He touched the girl's occipital bone, the parietal bones of the cap of the skull. And two of his favorites, the sensuous bones around the eye sockets--the sphenoid and the ethmoid.
"Stop it!" Carole shook her head, furious. "Keep away from her."
"Shhhh," he said, holding his gloved finger to his lips. He looked at the little girl, who cried and pressed close to her mother.
"Maggie O'Connor," he cooed, looking at the shape of the girl's face. "My little Maggie."
The woman glared at him.