The Night Inspector (28 page)

Sam had a look of terrible concentration, and I wondered whether it was the smell of the horse as its rotting began, or the sad adult sense of limitations accepted which we could see in the children’s faces; and then I understood: He was thinking of Sergeant Grafton, killed by his terrified horse, and then, of course, he was thinking of the horse, which, after all, he had destroyed.

So I waited for Sam, the teller, to begin his tale. However, in the sound of the chatter of the boys, and in the general din and motion, it was M who spoke up first. He said to no one in particular, while he gazed at the boys and at the horse, “I, for myself, have made up my mind to be annihilated.” He wore his little badge, for he was on his way to his job, and he carried in his hand a book, the title of which I could not see and about which I was little concerned.

I said, because politeness required it, “Annihilated? You mean killed?”

“Something will kill me, shipmate,” he said. “But no. I mean the moments after the agent of my destruction sees to my death. I mean the afterlife we hope for and in which some believe. I mean that when I am finished, I am
finished.”

Sam looked studious. He fished in his pocket for another pencil, the one, I presume, having dulled with overmuch use. I thought M looked deranged.

One of the wagons down the block began to move toward us. The carter pulled the horse by his bridle, talking to the big, chestnut dray which did not seem to want to approach his fellow on the cobbles.

“And,” he continued, “I have come to regard this matter of fame as the most transparent of all vanities. Though, mind you, I will not diminish or disregard that most secret of all passions, ambition. I will confess to having been fertile ground for its seeds and its shoots. As potatoes turn to stone in the ground, as corn crops wither—and I have seen them dry
into husks and curl and lie so low—so do other plantings. And, often, tender ambition may wither, and may never attain to the sweet, nourishing fullness of fame. And so be it.”

Sam kept writing as M fell into silence and as the wagon was turned in a circle, and the dray forced backward with it. Then the driver looped his rope around the long, heavy-looking head of the dead horse. He mounted his wagon and called up his horse, who responded. Off they went, at a slow walk, the dead fellow slapping and flopping and, finally, giving forth a belch from the muzzle, or a passage of wind from the flanks, which buzzed along the street and sent the urchins flying in a celebration of body noises, the final manifestation of life in the great corpse.

Waiting for Sam to finish, and to at last return his notebook to his inside pocket, we began our progress down West Broadway and then to West Street. We were silent for a time, but then Sam blurted—as if the thought had been compressed inside his head, pushing at his eyeballs and his forehead—“Sir! May I— Am I correct in inferring from what you told us that the absence of fame is the
cause
of this ‘annihilation’?”

M turned to me and gripped my arm with his powerful hand. He nodded as if in agreement with something that I had not said. “He’s a wonderful one, is he not? He studies the visual, clamps on to the audial, and he jots and jots and jots. I was not unlike you, Sam Mordecai. Although I must confess that I wrote only what paid until I saw that what paid I could no longer write. It was
then
, already having strayed some—
Mardi?
Do you ken it? And of course my great fish broiled in hellfire:
There’s
a meal to test your stomach! But then, Sam, I wrote what I would, not what
they
would have me write. And I served my ambition, though I killed off my fame. I inspected the slimy floor of the sea and the serpents under the floorboards in the cellar of the citizenry. Now, for that citizenry, I inspect the vessels that wallow behind the wind at the mouth of the North River.” He mildly belched, then stopped and pointed—we must needs stop and thus regard.

“Annihilation,” he said, “commencing before the condition of the
posthumous sets in, and recompensing an old sailor at twelve hundred dollars per annum. Night duty paying no extra, for it is part of the job.” He looked at me as he said this last, and I smiled for his emphasis, which was meant, I thought, to reassure me about our arrangement. Of course, he did not see me smile in return.

We walked again, about to separate, for M must be at his job. I was prepared to leave assured, for we had talked of our schedule and of our concerns.

He combed his beard with his fingers and said, “One matter, Billy. It really is
the
matter. I will say it in the charging of this pipe.” He lifted a coarse, oily shag from a small leather pouch and, returning it to his pocket, began to tamp it by the single pinch at a time, into the charred, high bowl of his pipe, which, from the charring at its top and the oil of his fingers on the rest, was nearly black. “A man knows what is right,” he said, packing the tobacco down, “and he knows what is required. It seems to be my topmost thought, since I have spoken on it often to you, and moments ago most latterly, in fact. I must do for you what I must not do, on pain of punishment at law. I must do it for
them
, and in the name of humankind. I do believe this. You have convinced me, and I will act.” He had the pipe stuffed and tamped now, and he struck a match against the buckle of his belt and pulled it, trailing smoke and flame, up almost through his beard as he shielded the bowl from the wind with his other hand and sucked and sucked at the stem, so that the flame of the bowl dropped deep inside and then flared up past his fingers. “I must be undeceived in this. Tell me,” he said, “that I serve only the right.”

“I do believe it to be the case,” I said, “and I swear myself confounded not a little by the fact that I, too, engage in this transaction. For there’s no profit in it.”

“Except the moral,” Sam said, staring at me, perhaps remembering the woman to whom I had referred, perhaps posing me a question in his statement.

But M nodded his approval, and I did not reply to Sam.

M, around his pipe stem, said, “What do you say, Billy?”

“Why, I think I have said what I know and what I think. Does it not suffice?”

“It does,” he said, and Sam smiled tentatively. Then he looked behind us, and then looked grim.

M, walking west and away from us, paused. He asked, “What?”

Sam shook his head. “No, you must depart, sir.”

“But, Sam,
what?”
he asked.

“I was remembering a day in the hospital at Washington, when I visited Billy. He was in much discomfort. He was very brave. And I told him—I had to tell him of a horse I was forced to kill. I was not forced by any orders to do it.”

“I was hardly brave,” I said. “I killed like other men. And killed off other men. And of course you were not required by an officer to kill the horse,” I said. “You felt you had to as a kind of revenge.” To M I said, “The horse had killed a beloved sergeant of ours. Trampled him to death, in a panic induced by an artillery barrage.”

“A horse conjures forth from memory a horse,” M said. “The streets of New York bring forth the War. We live in several moments, several places, at once.”

Sam made a noise not unlike a gasp. He wrenched his notebook out.

“You have told him something crucial,” I said.

M, leaving us now, said, “Shipmates, it would be rewarding to think so.”

What I saw, as he went, was the face of the woman who had cared for me, and who, while Sam had nervously chattered like a squirrel, unwrapped and then rewrapped my face, this time with spaces for my eyes. Hers was the first face I saw. Her nose was broad and her mouth was small and tight. Her hair, curly with humidity and the color of tree bark, clung to her square head.

Her eyes had slid away from mine when she smiled an angry smile and said, “You see? I told you I was plain.”

“If you would come into this bed with me, I would worship you,” I said.

She flushed to her neck, but on her unfortunate, oily skin, it seemed a kind of rash. She said, “You’re regaining your health, I see, and growing rude as you do.”

“I would kiss every inch of your flesh with these scabrous lips,” I said.

Sam, I remembered noticing, had also flushed.

And her thick, square body had gone quite still, and then she had peered at me, her face still angry. “Liar,” she said, as if I had betrayed her.

Sam’s head had risen, and he was motionless in his concentration.

“Not so,” I said.

“No,” she mocked.

“But no,” I said.

And she had stared and stared, taking the measure of me, whose body she knew and which she had served so generously.

I looked back into her eyes.

Then she noisily took in a breath, and she turned her face from mine and carried away the soiled bandages.

And M, embarked now for the intersection of Laight and Washington Streets, and the thump of steam whistles, the clash of metal gears and the grinding of sea-soaked wood, called back as he strode his long paces away, “You ride your horse, Sam.”

While Sam visited the telegraph office to demonstrate to his editors in Boston that his story—of a great national treasure gone into neglect—would repay the cost of his sleeping and eating and drinking very well, I made for my office. I had no check from Lapham Dumont, but I did have a set of papers that would have made a national treasure, or even a journeyman, proud if his profession was the composition of fiction. For, according to these papers, a shipper in Corpus Christi had received a cargo of rum from Haiti; he had sent it from his warehouse on a
schooner bound for the Port of New York, which had paused for replacement of its gaff sail boom at Savannah. It was due in tomorrow, three dozen tun and half-tun barrels of bonded spirits. A carter, led by Adam, would receive the shipment in the high light of noon—according to the papers—although Adam knew, and M knew, and Jessie knew, and Dumont did not, I prayed, that the wagons would be loaded and would roll—up Washington or Greenwich Street, some perhaps up Broadway—ponderous and piled, and alive with small black children who had hours before been scampering on the decks of Captain Corbeil’s ship. These papers did not represent the sums forwarded, and received, for the captain’s fee, and for two adult Negro women to supervise the conduct, and see to the comfort, of the children on their voyage from slavery to freedom. The amounts expended for food and drink and bribes for the skeleton crew were not listed. Nor were there details of how they had been freed; it was a shadow freedman’s bureau, Jessie implied, not trusting even me with names or locations, for the South was still a dangerous place. There was a bill of lading and a receipt of shipment. There were carter’s fees, marked as paid in full. And there were the warehouse receipts.

Missing was the Special License required for landing goods from on board a cargo vessel, as required in the statutes governing the tax Surveyor of the Port of New York; that license had to be provided to the night inspector by the Collector’s Office. I had written one out for M, and he was going to sign it. There was also missing a certificate of duties paid, a Customs House form, and M would also sign that. He would become, instead of the teller of truths, a liar on federal forms: a felon and a forger. This, I thought, is how fiction is constructed—of felonies and forgeries, of lies about hogsheads swung ashore, against the laws, at night.

What I did not yet know was whether M would sustain his enthusiasm. For he had said to me at last, “If we can save these children, we must.” He had faltered and gone silent, and I’d looked away. I heard the
gurgle of spirits and then his voice again: “Law must be required to kneel before the right.
That
is what happened at times in the War.”

“This I do know,” I had told him.

“And it did not occur in my home.”

I knew that he was thinking of Malcolm, and that something to do with his household laws had been obliquely touched upon. I could not see it. I could feel it, though.

“We must see to what is right. There is risk—an income, a pension, the frayed remnants of a reputation.”

“Life,” I had told him, “and limb.”

His breath met the level of the liquor in his glass. I heard his breathing fill up the glass. “They are as nothing, or at any rate little. A man falls from the yardarm and crushes his skull and dies. He is sewn into a shroud of sailcloth loaded with scraps of ballast or balls of shot, and he is slid from under a flag off the deck to lie on the floor of the sea forever and ever. That he broke, and how, are of small moment. They are life and limb. But was he, at a moment of his life, in the
right?
I will sign the forms, Billy. We will off-load in darkness. The children shall be free. And
then
may heaven protect them.”

It was all too much of principle for me, and overmuch protestation. I must see him sign before I might speculate on right, wrong, sailcloth shrouds, or freedom. What I engaged in were transactions. The rest of it, I thought, were words—some of them, I had to allow, said by Jessie.

There were other documents to read and sign, and a check to write, and one to bank, and a proposal from a speculator in real estate sold or leased for theatrical purposes; he had become one of the underwriters, and he urged me to purchase a share of his share, of appearances in New York by Mr. Charles Dickens, who, in January, would give what the notice said were readings. That is to say, the English writer would appear in the Steinway Hall, which was built to hold an audience of over two thousand, and he would dramatize scenes, as I understood it, from his many popular books. Sam had spoken of Dickens, and he was the sort of fellow
who might buy several tickets. There might be many such, according to the esteem in which Dickens seemed to be held. It seemed to me an endeavor in which I might participate, and I knew that Sam would be charmed; perhaps he would return to New York for the readings, although, according to the proposal, Dickens would also appear in Boston. But it might be a jolly occasion, I heard myself saying to Sam, and it was, after all, the season that men alone, in large cities and, I speculated, on frozen prairies and ships at sea, might find most trying. Sam, I heard myself suggest, come down to New York for a holiday! I wrote a counterproposal and pinned to it a check, the transmission of which, with other innocent documents, I would see to later in the day.