The Night Inspector (13 page)

“I’m on my way, Leonard.”

“You’ve been carousing, I suppose.”

He never looked at me or stopped his restless searching through as foul-smelling a two-foot heap of garbage as I had ever come across. He didn’t seem to mind. He peered and stared and studied, like a myopic man reading a volume of fine print.

“Tonight, Leonard—last night by now—I took a man to his knees, made a new friend, cooperated in the slowing or stoppage of a fat man’s heart, gave charity to a whore, drank dark rum, and ate the freshest bread. Would you call that carousing?”

“I would call this … 
pewter.”
He held the handle of an ale cup in his filthy hand. “Have a look, Mr. Bartholomew.” He brought the stinking fragment toward me and, with it, the smell of his clothing and breath.

“That’s not sweet,” I said, “though no insult’s intended, Leonard.”

“None will be taken,” he said, his dirty face, unshaven and pitted, arched—the brows, the broad mouth—in generosity.

“But it is,” I said, “time to bathe your body and burn your clothes.”

“Ah,” he said, “it is the tendency of a man in my profession that he take on certain characteristics of the materials of his work.”

“You’re too wise for the work.”

“No,” he said, “I’m suited for it. I’m damnably good at it, begging your pardon.”

“I do enjoy the company of happy men,” I said, “and I thank you.” I pressed coins upon his palm, then wiped my fingers on my coat.

“What are you buying, Mr. Bartholomew? Not that I ain’t grateful.”

“Or percipient,” I said, moving on, past a band of feral boys who swaggered, at six or seven, in clothing so foul as to be collectible, by those who wore it, for a transaction at the ragmonger’s. I put my hand upon the butt of my pistol and made certain that they saw me do so. One of them smiled, but it was not much warmer than the artificial mouth on my mask. Sunlight, cool but yellow, lay on the paving stones and on the warehouse walls, and on the horses who patiently stood in their traces while their drivers drank coffee or beer.

In the smell of refuse and ordure and the combined rank exhalations of the poor in their small rooms, I made my way to the Old Brewery. The taverns in the alleys were still noisy, but the sounds were somehow subdued, as if even the air itself that carried the exclamations and music and complaints were exhausted. I passed the door of Chun Ho and could smell the harsh, clean odor of hot water and powerful soap; she would let me bathe in a tin tub for the cost of laundering two shirts, and I thought with pleasure of the steam in which, maskless, I would wallow while she stared at me with her calm, appraising eyes. There was something about her very still face that compelled my attention. On the ground floor, entering the hive, I heard the snoring of Mr. Leone and the sobbing of one of his children. But children, here, were always in tears, and dogs were always howling. It was what gave vent to the general life of the Points—a voice, if you will, for what the populace could never say.

I unlocked my room and, entering, locked the door behind me. I poured a little water into the basin and washed my hands. Removing the mask, I washed the ruins and, gingerly, for I always ached there, dried myself with a towel that smelled of Chun Ho’s brown soap. The bed was
a military cot and, removing my clothes, I rolled into it as I had so many times when they’d assembled us at a major encampment. I closed my eyes. I had made promises to Jessie and, in a sense, to Adam as well. He could not be well served by me, I feared, for I had led him across a line—a boundary. I thought of him at the edges of rivers, his red-rimmed, yellowish eyes, his broad, dark nose, his mouth pressed tight with habit over so many years of biting his lip and holding his silence. And I had preached to him of freedom, and had led him to strike a white man down! I owed him some assistance, I thought.

And I was a tradesman, so I also remembered that he felt obliged to me. If owed, I thought, remembering my hand brushing back and forth on the head of the bearskin beside Jessie’s bed, then I must collect. I spent the early morning and the forenoon in falling asleep, then waking myself with wild thoughts—drunken small girls who acted like whores dressed in rouge and furs, a boy with a pistol that he placed inside my mouth most painfully—and with memories: the faces of men I had killed at the instant of killing them. It was, you might say, the customary sleep.

I was invited, and I would go. In truth, I had seen to the invitation because I wished—I now needed—to go to East Twenty-sixth Street, off Madison Square. Business is business and so, of course, might friendship be, and I must confess that I had a bit of what the marksmen used to call buck fever. It had not been an affliction of mine in the War; I had stalked them, and had seen them square; I might have paused before firing, but not very long, and never with the shakes some of them suffered—to the point where their target fell out of their trembling sights. I did, though, sit on my cot, the mask beside my left leg, the Navy revolver beside my right, and wonder—like a raw recruit, like a city man on a bear hunt in the fastnesses of the north country—whether I was adequate to the task. I even considered the rights and the wrongs.

Finally, though, I rubbed my hands on the smoothly beautiful
wooden butt; the oil from my fingers, over years, had permeated it, and I was rubbing upon myself, a peculiar kind of friction, yet something that gave me pleasure. It was a touching upon my own history. I had touched the pistol in difficult moments—when a detachment of Rebel horse came so close to our camp, so swiftly, that I was the only one armed, sitting with my buttocks hanging off a log of downed birch, caught in mid-stooling, my pistol in my hand, the defender of us all. Even while they paused, and while I prayed that my unfelicitous scent might not betray us, and while I squeezed the darkened walnut grip, I had my left hand to my mouth that I might smother my helpless giggling. It was a work of art, that revolver, and the falling to of the mechanism that brought the next chamber up was a smooth, heavy, inevitable motion. I would sell him my past for a song, then. Four dollars was a decent amount of money for a man who was slave to his wages; it was nothing to me for the Colt. Yet it could be much, and what men such as I were expert at was knowing when to invest, and with whom. Look at the Crédit Mobilier: I had every conviction that the railroad it protected would go bust; I had every confidence that the credit corporation itself would make fortunes for its investors. Men would go to prison, I thought, and men would go to the bank; I needed no compass to tell my own direction.

I put the pistol and some old brushes and a small bottle of gun oil wrapped in cloth inside a croker sack. In honor of our night on the harbor when the shipment of brandy came through, I carried a bottle of something older than I from the Continent, for I knew he liked his tot. I put on my good coat, and then my damned mask, and left, bearing gifts.

I found a cabriolet at Canal Street and had him carry me up Broadway. Even at that hour, verging on seven-thirty, Broadway was bright with light and noisy with prostitutes cackling about like geese. You cannot imagine how, in those days of accelerating growth of the city, the whores were everywhere, and particularly on Broadway. The men in city government who had a share in their care, feeding, and occasional policing were in a business as good as any I knew. I did not venture it myself
because of Jessie; you may believe it as you will, but I had certain limits and a few proprieties, although I would not describe myself as being a man of much conscience. Thinking of my hands upon the pistol, and of my days in the War, I had thought that I survived the sniping as long as I did because of my age. I was no nimble boy when I did service. I had entered, in 1861, at twenty-six; I had been discovered as a marksman late in 1862, and I had survived into 1864. Almost thirty years old, then, when I was skipping in the tops of trees and killing men in numbers with a gun. You cannot discount experience, and the sense, which a man will have but not a boy, of what he can and cannot achieve, whether on the ground and peaceful, or in the trees and an Angel of Death. My host of the night was, I realized, nearly old enough to be my father if my father had gone a-pollinating at the age of sixteen. And here he was, with a boy of eighteen and three other children, and his various relations—according to a sodden night’s complaint—moving in and out of the house as if Elizabeth, his wife, were a professional cook.

“Lumpy,” he had confessed in a theatrical whisper, leaning across the tavern table and making a humorous face that, as usual, did not include any expression whatsoever of the eyes. He had laughed his silent, broad mouthful of shadows, and had repeated himself: “Lumpy. Lumps in the gravy, lumps hard as gristle in the very squash and beans, much less potatoes, and lumps in the rice pudding bigger than the currants themselves. She is a resolute and dangerous cook, my patient Lizzie.”

No matter his joking, I thought, this was a man as given to the miseries as I was. You could look into my dead face and find my living eyes. In his case, the life and death were reversed, and the flesh of his face was living ground, while his eyes were little monuments to lifelessness buried therein.

He greeted me himself at the doors at the top of the outside stairs. “Shipmate,” he said, holding his glass lantern aloft as if we were on a moving deck.

We shook hands, and then I presented the croker sack. “The aforementioned
weapon,” I said, “in case you did not wish it to be table talk. As for the payment: four dollars, as and when convenient.”

He nodded, more acknowledgment than thanks, I thought, and then he surprised me. In his foyer, the shadows shifting as the lantern moved in his hand, he said nothing about my courtesies or his gratitude. Instead, hefting the sack, he asked, “Are there bullets?”

“Five in the chambers.”

“It holds five?”

“Six, but I am, like many, overly careful with something so dangerous. The hammer is somehow caught, the trigger—it is delicate, you must tell your son—may be tripped, and then someone is maimed, or dead, or anyway frightened half to death. I recommend the five, though it is up to your boy.”

“Mal.”

“And this,” I said, “is something for the end of the night, not that I wish to hurry its coming.”

“Let’s attend its beginning,” he said, leading me past an interior staircase and along a narrow corridor toward what he described as the dining room. It was a very small and dark place that once might have been the bedroom of a servant, I thought. Standing at the foot of the table was Elizabeth, his wife, her face a little plain and pug, her figure stout, her hands red, her eyes as lively and expressive as his were not. She winced at the sight of my mask, and her eyes slid away; I watched her direct them back. Her dress, of dark blue, had an oval white apron atop it, and she had the appearance, thus, of a serving maid in uniform.

“Stanny has eaten,” she said of their younger son, “and the girls are with relations for the week. So it is to be the four of us. This is Malcolm, sir”—the boy I had seen at Mrs. Hess’s, broad of shoulder and spotty of skin, with angry eyes as mobile as his mother’s and with his father’s fine features—“and I understand that we are indebted to you for his equippage.”

And so we sat down to dine. I turned from them to replace the mask
with the dark silk veil, and they dealt as well with it as any. I set the mask on the broad planking of the dining room floor, at the edge of the braided rug, and when I looked down, it looked up at me. M gestured at it from his place at the head of the table, to my left, and he said, “Hawthorne wrote a tale about a skeleton and skull at the dinner table. Do you know it? It shook me, I recall.”

“Do you liken me,” I asked, “to the skeleton or skull?”

He held his spoon aloft and tilted his head to laugh the silent laugh.

“You do not hold it against your companions,” Elizabeth said, “that they speak of your … misfortune.”

“It makes the dining simpler, ma’am. Since the management of food beneath this veil, especially liquids, is no easy matter. People see what they see. They might as well say it.”

“You’re a hero,” Malcolm said.

“Oh, no, sir. I was a military man and I suffered the consequences thereof.”

“Not everyone did what you did. Father said you were a marksman!”

“Not everyone was,” I allowed.

“I’m for the cavalry,” Malcolm said. He seemed less thick and stupid than at Mrs. Hess’s. It was his eagerness that worried me: Be a soldier reluctantly, I thought, and live awhile.

M brought the croker sack up and made a great sound with it against the dining table.

“Oh, no,” Elizabeth said.

“Oh, a week’s wages,” her husband said, rather loudly.

Malcolm untied the sack and retrieved the pistol.

“It’s loaded,” I said.

He looked at me with something like fear tinged with merriment. I watched his father sip wine and I saw his wife attend the sipping.

“Perhaps,” I said, “after dinner, if your mother agrees, I will show you how to be safe with it.”

“Guns are for
not
being safe,” the boy said loudly, reminding me now
of the fellow whom he was in Mrs. Hess’s house. I wondered that he did not recall me, and then I wondered that he drank himself so drunk that he
could
not recall me, yet had not given his father a hint, so it was said, of his fondness for the stuporous state.

“Sir, guns are for making
others
unsafe; for the fighting man, they are to be feared.”

Elizabeth instructed him to place the weapon on the floor. His father nodded like a magistrate, and the young man, looking younger, removed the weapon from the table.

We discussed the muddy print on the wall behind me—a souvenir of Liverpool, I was told. We spoke of
Miss Ravenel’s Conversion
, which he had not read, but of which, as a slight and popular thing, he disapproved. Elizabeth described for me her husband’s family’s land up the Hudson, where her daughters were, and then we chatted of her native Massachusetts. I had known men from New England in the War, especially some Vermont marksmen of Berdan’s Greencoats, and a fellow from Maine whose life had been saved at Gettysburg, he claimed, by a collapsible tin cup that he kept in his breast pocket.