Beyond Rue Morgue Anthology (10 page)

“The marks on the pump,” I said. “That outlet valve did look all beaten up. As though...”

“As though someone had levered it off, with a wrench or a crowbar,” Dupin finished. “And then replaced it again, after it had served its purpose. Yes, I believe that to be the case.”

“But whatever you believe,” Boss Tweed said with the calm of complete indifference, “you can’t prove who did it.”

“Ah, but I think that I can,” said Dupin, sealing our fate. “The runner, who came from City Hall to announce that the workings were unsafe and had to close, arrived at thirty-three minutes past the hour. Let us assume that a message was sent from the worksite as soon as the deaths were discovered, and that the mayor—” He gave Oakey Hall a perfunctory bow. “— delivered his decision immediately. The two journeys, cross-town and then north to Mrs. Roebling’s house, require a minimum of fifty minutes to complete. It can therefore be established by a very simple calculation that the messenger sent from City Hall must have been dispatched before any notification could have arrived from the site.”

Hall blanched as Boss Tweed shot him a cold, disapproving glance. “That true?” he demanded.

“I thought we wanted to shut them down fast,” the mayor protested, with something of a whine in his voice. “I didn’t think anyone was going to be standing on the street with a damn stopwatch.”

“No,” Tweed agreed, “you didn’t think. You never do, Oakey. Maybe it’s time I replaced you with someone who does.” He gave a hitch of his shoulders, which was evidently a sign to Driscoll and Flood. Driscoll put his gun in my back, and Flood grabbed a hold of Dupin.

“But... but why?” I demanded. Given the extremity of the situation, talking back to the Boss didn’t feel like quite as fearful a prospect as it would normally have been. “Why would you do something like this?”

Tweed seemed surprised to be asked. He shrugged his massive shoulders. “The usual reason,” he said. “Come on, Nast. You’re a newsman, not a babe in arms. The New York to Brooklyn Bridge is the biggest building project this city has ever seen. All we wanted was a decent kickback. The old man was dragging his feet, so we arranged a little accident for him. We started leaning on the son, and he was just about to roll when he got sick. That left us with the lady, who’s the toughest nut of the lot. Or maybe just the stupidest. She didn’t seem to understand that when we said we could help her with her licenses and her on-site security, we were asking for a bribe. She just said thank you and goodnight. So we thought we’d move things along a little.”

“By killing twenty men?” I asked, my throat dry.

Those tiny black eyes blinked slowly, the way a cat’s eyes do. “Well, you know what they say about omelets. If you’re serious about making them, you can’t afford to get sentimental about eggs.”

“You murdering bastard,” I said. “Some of those eggs had wives and kids.”

“They’ll break, too,” the Boss replied laconically. “Sooner or later, makes no difference. It’s not like eggs are built to last.” He gave Driscoll a meaningful look. “Get rid of them,” he said. “Somewhere real quiet. Say a few words over the bodies, then take the evening off.”

That was the end of the interview. Driscoll and Flood hauled us out of there, and took us via the back door of the building to a paddy wagon. They pushed us inside and locked the door. We could hear Flood hitching up the horses, with a lot of cursing, while Driscoll berated him for his clumsiness.

It was a long, uncomfortable ride, all the way uptown to the northern tip of Manhattan Island. The swampy ground around the Palisades was slowly being reclaimed, and the city was obviously going to head out that way in its own good time, but back then it was a wilderness. The few tracks there were petered out quickly, leaving you adrift in an endless expanse of couch grass and stunted trees.

“I’m real sorry, Mr. Dupin,” I muttered.

“About what?” Dupin demanded.

“All this. Dying in a ditch is a poor sort of a way for your day of sightseeing to end. And I’m the native guide here. I should have headed this off before you got too far into it. Mind you,” I added, “I didn’t know you were going to be accusing Boss Tweed himself of multiple counts of homicide.”

“Je vous en prie,”
Dupin demurred, and since I had no clue what that meant, the conversation ended there.

The paddy wagon slowed to a halt. We heard Driscoll and Flood jump down from the driver’s seat, and a second later the doors were hauled open. Driscoll had a pistol leveled at us, and Flood had some kind of a sap—shorter than his nightstick, but just as lethal-looking.

“Last stop, my buckos,” the constable said cheerfully.

We climbed down out of the wagon into a desolate landscape. We were only a few miles outside the city limits, but there wasn’t a building in sight. The sun was touching the horizon, and there was a sharp wind getting up, making the leafless trees lean over like they were hunching down against the cold.

Sergeant Driscoll chucked me on the chin with the barrel of the pistol, as though to coax a smile out of me. “Any last words, Mr. Nast?” he asked mildly. “A prayer, perhaps? Or a confession? We’re not in any hurry.”

It was a thoughtful offer in the circumstances, but I couldn’t think of anything either reverential or splenetic that was worth detaining him with. I’d sort of resigned myself to death, now, and I just wanted to get the unpleasant business over with. I shook my head.

Dupin seemed even more detached. He wandered over to a flowering bush and prodded it with his cane. Flood stood over him, sap in hand, guarding him until it was his turn to be dispatched.

“Right then,” Driscoll said. “May the good Lord have mercy. I can speak for my shooting, so your only worry’s what happens afterward.”

He took aim at my forehead, and I braced myself for the world to come.

At that point, Constable Flood gave a sudden, constricted gasp and sank to his knees. Driscoll turned, astonished.

“What’s the matter with you, you idiot?” he demanded.

Flood opened his mouth, but nothing came out of it except a thin trickle of blood. He pitched forward onto his face.

Dupin swished the sword that had appeared from nowhere in his hand. “Direct your thoughts, monsieur,” he suggested, “to what happens afterward.”

Driscoll was as fast as a snake, a trait I believe I’ve remarked on earlier in this narrative. He swung the pistol round in the blink of an eye, but Dupin’s arm dipped and rose and intersected the other man’s at some significant point in its arc. The gun went flying away through the air and Driscoll started back with a cry, nursing his hand.

The sword flashed again and the sergeant’s legs buckled under him. A spurt of crimson from his severed throat splashed my sleeve as he fell. I stared at it stupidly, only decoding its meaning when Dupin slid the slender blade back into its housing in his cane.
“Voilà,”
he said.

“Y-You had...” I stammered. “You were...”

“Armed,” Dupin agreed. “The truth is all very well, but sometimes one needs a little more. Come, Monsieur Nast. We have a carriage and horses, but not much daylight left. It would be a good idea, I think, to get back to the city before night is fully upon us.”

In fact, he left me at the edge of town. He purposed to hire a boat or a berth at the tiny harbor on Spuyten Duyvil Creek, rather than risk buying a ticket home anywhere in New York City itself. He had a shrewd suspicion that Boss Tweed might be looking for him, once he realized that his two spudpicker assassins had misfired. The haulage men at Spuyten Duyvil would take him on up the coast to Bridgeport or Westhaven, and he could continue on his travels from there.

“My survival, Monsieur Nast,” the Frenchman assured me, “will be the earnest and guarantor of yours. Tweed and his associates will want you dead, but they will not dare to move against you so long as I am free and able to speak of what I know. I cannot, of course, prove that he was involved in these murders, but I can embarrass and clog the machine of which he is a part. And I will do so, if he defies me.”

We shook hands and parted company. Dupin rode away northwards and I hiked down to Morningside. There, I was able to prevail on a fisherman to give me a lift on the back of his cart when he took his day’s catch down to Peck Slip, and I was home only an hour or so after sunset.

Dupin, I learned later, had put pen to paper before he embarked from Spuyten Duyvil. Whatever it was he wrote to Tweed, the Tammany machine rescinded its writs and remands against the Roebling family and their great construction project and withdrew any and all accusations of unsafe working practices. A warrant was issued for the arrest of the foreman, O’Reilly, on twenty counts of murder, but his room in a seedy boarding house at Red Hook was found to have been emptied of all moveable items. Verbal descriptions were issued, along with a promise of reward, but O’Reilly never turned up again, and I doubt he will now—not until the last trump brings the dead up out of their graves.

Dupin wrote to me, too, enclosing a letter for Mrs. Emily Roebling, but also a few lines for my own edification.
Your Mr. Tweed,
he wrote,
trades very strongly on the appearance of invulnerability. If you wish to harm him, you must first encourage the perception that he is susceptible to harm. I mention this, my dear friend, because your own trade of cartooning seems to me to be very admirably suited to this purpose. You asked me a question when we first met: what is your motive and your métier? What is the singular thing that you pursue? I ask you now to consider this very question yourself. I believe that your answer will be the same as mine—that you are a servant of truth. And you will know to what I am referring when I say she arms her servants well.

Well, I chewed that over a while, and I saw clear enough that he was right. So I took up my sword (it was shaped somewhat like a Woodson & Penwick number 1 black sable paintbrush) and I went to war.

* * *

ADDENDUM: From 1870 to 1873, Thomas Nast’s editorial cartoons mercilessly lampooned the corrupt activities of the Tammany Ring, and its formidable front man, William “Boss” Tweed.
Harper’s Weekly
rallied behind him, and one by one the other New York newspapers joined the crusade. In 1873, Tweed was arrested on multiple charges of fraud and racketeering. He died in prison five years later, having been convicted on all counts.

By

...
the Lucifugus demons are eminently malicious and mischievous, for these, said he, not merely impair men’s intellect, by phantasms and illusions, but destroy them with the same alacrity as we would destroy the most savage wild beast.

MICHAEL PSELLUS’S
DIALOGUE ON THE OPERATION OF DEMONS,
1050 AD

Books! Books! Books! I always considered them to be the sole reason to continue to live upon our dreary Earth. Books, however, were on this November night, very nearly the death of me, and my friend, Monsieur C. Auguste Dupin.

I am writing this account just hours after the extraordinary events that nearly led to our destruction. I confess that as well as smoking pipe after pipe of strong tobacco I have drunk several invigorating glasses of absinthe. My friend, Dupin, slumbers in his bedchamber, but I am in such a state of profound excitement that I am far from the shores of sleep— so, by the light of candles, and with the heat of that powerful spirit of wormwood putting fire in my belly, I am attempting to exorcise the ghost of what I experienced tonight by writing down all that I saw, heard, and felt.

And it all began with our addiction to books that drove us out into the snowy night, where we heard the terrible sound of a woman’s scream.

* * *

Dupin had received a letter informing him that a sailor would sell him a cache of tomes acquired on his travels of the Eastern Mediterranean. One of these is a sublime rarity, entitled
Dialogue on the Operation of Demons,
penned by that Byzantine philosopher and educator of princes, Michael Psellus. Dupin has little in the way of money, yet the purse put aside for food was hastily retrieved from beneath the boards of his study; thereafter, we lit a lantern apiece and hurried out into the Parisian night. Snow had fallen steadily all evening, veiling the ground with a pristine shroud. The footprints and cart tracks left by the sparse midnight traffic soon vanished entirely as we headed out amongst the open fields beyond Montmartre.

“Books, books, books!” panted Dupin. “The word hurtles through your head like a musket ball through its barrel.”

“I know your tricks by now,” I replied. “You saw me mouthing the word to myself.”

“No, absolutely not. You are
obsessed
with books. I hear you at night chanting the word over and over in your sleep. You covet books, you crave books, monsieur. You sit at a table and curl your arms over a book, like a hawk protecting its freshly killed prey, so no other creature can steal it.”

“Is that so? Then I am morbidly diseased by my love of the printed page. My soul must be liquefying into printer’s ink.”

“Ha!” His teeth flashed in the light of our lanterns as he smiled. “I am gripped by the same
contagion bibliotheque.
The reading germ nests snugly in both our brains.”

We continued to chatter thus as our feet crunched on freshly fallen snow. A distant church clock struck the half hour after midnight, and although the bitterly cold air wormed its way through our cloaks to shiver our skin we were so eager to hold that eight hundred-year-old book of Psellus’ in our hands that we almost ran along the deserted lane, our lamps throwing out splashes of light.

It was as the lane cut through broad, flat meadows that we heard the scream.

“A woman is being murdered!” I cried.

“Not being murdered,” Dupin corrected. “That’s the sound of grief, despair, and a heart-breaking realization of loss—the woman has found the lifeless body of someone she loves.” He stood absolutely still; the lamp was held high, as he carefully and precisely stored the sound away in that remarkable brain of his. Chevalier Dupin is a man who methodically preserves memories of the sights, sounds, and odors produced by the horrors of this world, as I would methodically place books on my library shelves. He is the consummate archivist of the accouterments of tragedy.