Beyond Rue Morgue Anthology (8 page)

The yegg tried to pass us off with some mumble about asking the shift manager, but Dupin spoke up then, and either his gimlet eyes or his weird accent took the wind out of the foreman’s sails. “What is your name?” he demanded.

“O’Reilly,” the man mumbled, truculently.

“Your given name, as well as your family name,” Dupin snapped, for all the world as though he had some kind of right to ask. “Come, come.”

“John. John O’Reilly.”

“C’est ça.
Tell us what has happened, John. Be brief and precise, if you please.”

The foreman didn’t seem to know what to make of this strange little guy in the fancy clothes. But on the principle that most people he met were going to turn out to be more important than he was, he coughed it up. “We got twenty men dead. The whole night shift. I went away to sign in the morning crew, and when I got back they was all...” He faltered into silence and pointed down into the caisson, as if the period of his sentence might be found down there.

“Twenty men?” Dupin echoed, and O’Reilly nodded. “Twenty men is a full complement, then? A full workforce?”

“It depends what’s going on,” O’Reilly said. “There’s less men on at night, on account of we just light the lanterns up in one half of the caisson. There’s a fire hazard, see?”

“No,” Dupin said forcefully.

“What?”

“No, I do not see. Show me.”

“Listen here, I got to...”

“Show me.”

If the situation hadn’t been so tragic, I might have laughed at the spectacle of this queer little foreigner taking charge so decisively. Dupin followed the foreman and I followed Dupin, my materials case clutched in my hand like a doctor’s Gladstone bag—only there wasn’t going to be any good I could do down there, I thought, as we skirted round the wheezing steam pump. Not unless you count bearing witness.

The caisson was eighty feet long, sixty wide and forty deep. The last ten feet or so were under the bedrock of the East River, so the air had a hellish dampness to it. We went down through several successive chambers, each sealed off by greased tarpaulins laid out in overlapping sheets. You had to lift a corner of the tarpaulin each time, like turning the page of a massive book, to expose the trapdoor and carry on down to the next level. Below us, candle flames flickered fitfully like someone was keeping vigil down there. The bellows of the steam pump kept up a consumptive breathing from up over our heads, and from below us that sound was compounded by the muttered conversations you mostly get around the bedsides of dying men.

The floor of the caisson was one half packed earth and one half new-laid stone. There weren’t any dying men there, only hale ones and dead ones. The dead ones were laid out in rows, like men sleeping in a dormitory. The living ones stood over them, candles in their hands, looking impotent and terrified as behooves men who are in the presence of such a disaster.

The shift manager—a clerkish-looking man of middle age, named Sittingbourne—introduced himself to us, and we returned the favor. I was vague about exactly who Dupin was, but emphasized our association with the
Harper’s Weekly.
That put a woeful look on Sittingbourne’s face, as well it might. This was the sort of thing he would probably have wanted to keep out of the papers until he’d talked to his bosses about what shape his future might likely take.

“See here,” he said, “don’t you go talking to none of my people without me being in on the conversation. Is that understood?”

“You got any people left for me to talk to?” I countered— and he deflated like a punctured soufflé.

“It was an accident,” he said. “A terrible accident. I don’t see how anyone could have foreseen this, or done anything to guard against it.”

“Perhaps not,” Dupin said acerbically. “But perhaps—yes. That is what we must ascertain. I wish to see the bodies.”

This came as a surprise to all of us, but principally to Mr. Sittingbourne, who thought he was dealing with newspapermen and now wondered if he was maybe dealing with something even scarier than that. A state commissioner, maybe.

“The... the bodies?” he temporized.

Dupin brushed past him, taking his candle out of the man’s hand in an
en passant
move that made me wonder if he’d ever done any fencing. He squatted down beside the nearest body and brought the candle up close to its face.

I winced, but I didn’t look away. I’m a sketch artist, and looking away isn’t in my religion. The dead man’s face was lividly pale, his lips blue rather than a healthy red. His face was twisted in a desperate travail, the eyes bulging half out of his head. All in all, it looked like death when it finally came for him might have been something of a relief.

“Poor bastard,” I muttered.

“Oui, le pauvre gosse,”
Dupin said. He moved the candle from face to face. “They all seem to have died in the same way. Or at least, they all display the same symptoms.”

“It’s known that working in the caissons is dangerous,” Sittingbourne said. He was hovering at my elbow, nervously wringing his hands. “There’s a condition...”

“Caisson sickness,” I said.

“Caisson sickness, to be sure. And we’ve had our fair share of it. But nothing like this. Nothing on this scale. I honestly... I don’t know what to say. I really don’t.”

He was talking to Dupin’s back. Dupin was still examining the bodies, his mouth puckered into a grimace. “The light is inadequate,” he commented.

Sittingbourne looked around, startled. “Get your candles over here!” he called out to the other men. They clustered round us looking like they were about to burst into a Christmas carol.

Dupin stood. “Who turned out the lanterns?”

“I don’t know,” Sittingbourne confessed.

“Then find out.”

The Frenchman swept past us and headed back for the ladder, but he couldn’t climb up because there was a whole posse coming down. It was hard to tell in the sepulchral light of the candles, but they looked to be in uniform. Once they touched down, I was able to identify them as New York City cops—the Eastside variety called spudpickers elsewhere in the City because they’re bog Irish and Tammany men to a fault.

The two in the vanguard were Sergeant Driscoll and his lackey, Flood. Driscoll looked as saintly as a christening cloth, and Flood looked like a nasty stain that somehow got smeared onto it, but I knew for a fact they were as bad as each other and a good deal worse than most.

“What are we having here?” Driscoll asked mildly. “Mr. Nast, is it? You must have sneaked past us all quiet like, when we were quelling the angry mob.”

“I’m sorry, sergeant,” I lied emolliently. “I didn’t realize you were restricting access. But I’m here as a representative of the press.”

“A guy who draws funny pictures!” Flood sneered.

“My associate makes a cogent argument,” Driscoll said. “You can’t be painting pictures in the dark, Mr. Nast, so I’ll thank you to bugger off out of this.” To the room at large, he added, “These workings are hazardous, and they’re not being properly maintained. I’m closing them down, herewith. You can apply at City Hall for a new license, subsequent to a complete overhaul of the safety procedures and a thorough inspection at the contractor’s expense.”

“But...” Sittingbourne protested. “Please, sergeant. If I can consult Mrs. Roebling, I’m... I’m sure we can...”

“I’m sure you can’t,” Driscoll told him, deadpan. “Not unless you want to go around Boss Tweed.”

That shut Sittingbourne up,
instanter.
You could go around William Tweed, of course. Topographically speaking, I mean. He was a mighty obstacle, but you could do it. The trouble was, you’d need to be properly provisioned for a journey like that, and your troubles would set in as soon as you were out of sight of the high road, as it were. I knew men who’d tried it. I even knew where some of them were buried.

“Might I inquire as to why this is being done?” The voice was Dupin’s, the tone was sharp, and nobody was more surprised to hear it than I was. Well, maybe I was runner-up. Driscoll’s face was a picture. He made a show of peering around on his own eye level for a little while before he looked down and found Dupin a foot or so below.

“Who the hell are you?” he demanded.

“Le Chevalier
Auguste Dupin, at your service. I repeat, why is this being done?”

Driscoll didn’t seem inclined to dignify that question with an answer, so Flood obliged us instead. “He already told you, you moron. These workings ain’t safe. Twenty men died here.”

“Twenty men died here,” Dupin agreed, “but not because of the presence or absence of adequate building standards.”

“And you’d know?”

“Yes. I would know. They were murdered.”

Flood’s face went through a series of discrete states, like a slide show. Astonishment, then a sort of ghastly dismay, then anger. “You fuck!” he spluttered. He balled his hand into a fist and drew it back.

Driscoll caught it in mid-air and held onto it. He moved as quick as a snake, and he didn’t seem to be exerting any particular effort to hold the constable immobile. “I think you should get your friend home, Mr. Nast,” he said mildly. “Otherwise, I’ll have to arrest him for breach of the peace.”

“Breach of the peace?” The Frenchman glanced at me with an interrogatory expression.

“Means you’re stirring up a riot,” I translated. “Come on, Mr. Dupin, we’re leaving.”

“Yeah, you better,” Flood spat. The sergeant gave him his hand back and he glared at us, rubbing his wrist, as I hauled Dupin over to the ladder.

“I have further questions for the gentleman in charge,” Dupin protested.

“They’ll have to keep,” I muttered. “Trust me, these two will break your head as soon as look at you.”

“They are agents and representatives of the law.”

“Nope, of the city. Not the same thing at all.”

I steered him ahead of me halfway up the ladder, but then he stopped—which meant I had to stop, too, since the only way up was through him. “Monsieur!” he called down to Sittingbourne. “Hola, monsieur! Who put out the lanterns?”

Sergeant Driscoll slipped his nightstick out of his belt and tapped it meaningfully against his palm.

Sittingbourne made a helpless gesture. Dupin tutted, and carried on up. But he’d got the bit fairly between his teeth now, and he certainly didn’t seem interested in leaving. He went over to the steam pump and started to walk around and around it, inspecting it from all angles. It looked a little beaten up here and there—especially around the protuberant valve assemblies to which the hoses were attached. A pump such as this was like a heart in a human body, working mightily without cease. It was an amazing thing in its own right, that allowed even more amazing things to be done.

“You know how a caisson works?” I asked Dupin.

“Yes,” he said. “I believe so. It is a hyperbaric environment, no?”

“It’s a what?”

“It utilizes air at higher than atmospheric pressure to create a dry working space below sea level. Or, in this case, river level. Air is pumped in by artificial means to maintain the pressure, which may be two or three times greater than that in the ambient air outside the caisson.”

“Well, yeah,” I said. “That’s more or less how it’s done.”

Actually, Dupin seemed to understand the process better than I did. He was starting to fiddle with the controls on the steam pump now, and the foreman came running over hell for leather.

“Say hey, now,” he yelped. “You don’t want to be messing with this. This is delicate equipment. And that outlet connection there is loose!”

Dupin gave him a withering glare. “Nonsense!” he snapped. “This is a Jacquard-Sevigny pump, made from a single molding. You could take a hammer to it—and indeed, it looks as though someone has—but still it would not break.”

O’Reilly faltered a little, but only for a moment. “It’s private property,” he said. “You keep your hands off it, or I’ll sic the police on you, see?”

I felt like we’d had more than enough of that already, so I took Dupin by the arm with a view to getting him moving again, but he slipped out of my grip and went after O’Reilly like a terrier after a rat. “You found the bodies?” he demanded.

O’Reilly backed away. “Yeah, I did,” he said. “So?”

“So. How did you find them? Tell me.”

“I just... well, I went away, and I come back, and they was dead. I don’t know how. I don’t know anything about it.”

“When was this?”

“It was eight o’clock. On the turn of the shift.”

“Did you disturb the bodies?” The foreman was still moving backward and Dupin was still following, almost stepping on his toes.

“No! I never touched them!”

“And yet they were arranged in rows. Was that how they died?”

“No. Yes. I moved them, obviously. But that was afterward.”

“And the lanterns?”

The foreman was looking a little bit desperate now. “The what?”

“The lanterns. Did you extinguish them?”

“No. They was already out.”

Dupin stopped dead, and turned to me.
“Bien,”
he said. “We are finished here.”

That was news to me, since I was the one who was meant to be showing him the sights. But I guess we’d gone off that agenda a while before. “Okay,” I said. “You want to go see the Equitable Life building? It’s got a hydraulic elevator, made by Elisha Otis, and you can ride all the way up to the...”

“I want to see the lady you mentioned, Monsieur Nast,” Dupin interrupted forcefully. I was a little mystified at this, and I must have looked it. “Madame Roebling, I think the name was? The lady who builds this bridge.”

I tried to explain to him that we couldn’t just walk in on the Roeblings, but Dupin wasn’t having any of that. There’s a thing called a New York minute, and inside of one of those we were pulling up at the door of the Roebling house in midtown in another cab that Curtis was going to get all sore about paying for. And Dupin was explaining to some sour old curmudgeon in a spiffy black and silver livery that he was the godson of Colonel Maximilian Roebling-Lefevre of the
Légion d’Honneur,
and on that basis would be delighted to pay his respects to the lady of the house.

The curmudgeon went away and came back with a different face on. Mrs. Roebling would be delighted to see us in the morning room.