The Scribe (21 page)

“If you dream tonight, Detective, ask your father about his last view of this world. Did he see blue and gold? Or only blood-red?” Billingsley sighed hoarsely. “No more tonight.”

His eyes closed and a rattling breath came from his chest. It sounded enough like a dying breath that Canby held his own until he saw the chest rise again.

“Should we wake him?” Underwood asked.

Canby was slow to answer. “No,” he said.

“I can wake him. I'd be glad to.”

“Leave him be,” Canby said, getting to his feet. “I need a drink.”

“Y
OU KNOW
I can't serve colored, Thomas,” Lee Smith said.

“It's police business,” Canby said. “Make an exception tonight. It's been a hell of a day.” He showed him Vernon's badge.

“You think you're the only gent in here with a badge?”

Canby set Anse's Colt revolver on the mahogany bar, its long barrel not quite pointed at the apron wrapped around Lee Smith's waist, and tapped the trigger guard with his finger.

And so the Jameson was on the house this evening and they found themselves at the darkest table in the quietest corner of the Big Bonanza with the bottle and two glasses and the Colt set between them, talking of Malthus the English
parson and philosopher and of magic and madness and how soon they could noose the bastard that had brought them all together in Atlanta.

“I know nothing about this voodoo business,” Canby said. “What is it, some kind of black magic?”

Underwood shook his head. “No. But it can lead to all kinds of wickedness.”

“Used the wrong way.”

“Yeah. Can open up the wrong kinds of doors. Specially if you go looking for the wrong door.”

“Spirits and such? Spells?”

“You making fun?”

“No. Just thinking about the so-called spirit world.”

“Well, that's some progress there.”

Canby sat for a while, looking at his glass set on the table, half filled with amber whiskey. The movement of the other drinkers in the bar, the tramping on the floorboards, made the whiskey move in the glass, the surface of it tilting slightly, forward and back.

“In the old country,” Canby said, “they talk about thin places. Ever heard of those?”

“No.”

“It's a natural place—maybe a rock, or a waterfall, or a very old tree, or a grove of them—where they say the boundary between the physical world and the spiritual one is stretched thin. Where you can almost cross over. From one to the other.”

“You wanting me to call that superstitious?”

Canby shrugged.

“You believe in thin places?”

“No,” Canby said. He shook his head and sat up and took the glass and drained it. “Not at all. Just old Celtic superstition.”

“Felt like some kind of thin place up in Spot Twelve to me. The wrong kind of thin place.”

“I've not seen one like Billingsley in my time, I'll grant you.”

“Pure evil.”

“More madness than evil, Underwood.”

“I'd have thought he was testing your notions.”

“He is—of madness.”

“Up till here lately he's done pretty well for a crazy man.”

“He's done well because he enjoyed the privileges of his position. The Ring and their like, they protected him without knowing it, people looking the other way in the name of discretion. Southern manners, you know. There's your old order, still with us, at least a little.”

Canby refilled his glass.

“Do you know what this man Malthus actually wrote, Underwood? There wasn't anything sinister to it, just common sense. Common sense from an Anglican parson. Maybe I should say refined common sense. He looked around in Europe in his day and saw that the people were outgrowing the food supply. He'd been moved by the Irish famine. He pointed out the need to control population.”

“That's what Billingsley was doing. One nigger at a time.”

Canby looked up. “You think I'm making light of it?”

“Only it wasn't all Negroes, was it? Wasn't Thomas Malthus he was about by the time he got to your friend. It was a new Malthus,
him
. That's the only coherence I see. Just evil.”

Canby refilled their glasses, cocking an eyebrow at Underwood.

“There you go sliding off into superstition again.” He slid the Colt across the table to Underwood. “Put your faith in this. It's the best answer for the likes of Billingsley.”

Underwood glanced around the bar before he touched the pistol. Quickly, he slipped it into his jacket. Then he looked again at Canby as though the forbidden transaction were already off his mind. “Couldn't you
feel
it up there in Spot Twelve?”

“Hocus-pocus, Underwood.”

“How do you want to explain the hold he's had over them Campbells? Fortus up there in Fulton Tower for perjury and abetting, and the old man's head blowed clean off?”

Canby thought of Tunis Campbell's last words. Dead and gone and bound to hell, had the old man said? He shook his head. “More superstition.”

“You heard him back there. Conjuring and such? I tell you, he ain't entirely of this world.”

Canby let out a long breath and leaned back in his seat. “Underwood . . .”

“Study on it, you'll see it adds up. Tell me. What was it he said to you about your father?”

But Canby was suddenly rising to go. He tossed back the last of his drink and set the glass on the table. “Good night, Underwood,” was all he said by way of an answer.

A
GAINST HIS WILL
, he dreamed that night. He was back on Whitehall Street, July '64, and the hot streets were
exploding under Sherman's cannonade. Great clouds of sulfur smoke scurried over downtown in between the belches of the big guns, and the sun's efforts to penetrate the haze did no better than to render the sky a sheet of shimmering bronze, an impenetrable hot fog. Men and women—among them a father and his daughter—had died in their beds, asleep, or at clotheslines hanging wash, at kitchen tables eating. Still the shells rained down as though Sherman would never run out of ordnance. By then the city's better-off were spending their days huddled with their servants in bombproofs dug out beneath their homes or into the hillsides. Others, like Angus, still stubbornly maintained routine as though they could not hear the shells bouncing down the alleys, careening off the buildings. Or as if resolute that their faith would preserve them.

And so Canby, dreaming, found himself back in the little schoolhouse, of a Sunday in the siege, with his father and Julia and Frances O'Donnell. His dream-memory was ruthless in its accuracy: the hymnal lay spread open before Angus, though he knew the ritual by rote; he and Julia and Frances knelt on the raw-wood floor before the table and the meager loaf, the chalice half filled with sherry. Angus spoke the familiar words, his voice cadenced and rich, and Canby listened over and behind the voice to a cannonball bounding down Mitchell Street, heard the cracking of wood as it thwacked into clapboard siding, followed by the sound of brick crumbling.

It seemed that Angus had not heard it. He blessed the loaf and the wine, his hand hovering over each in turn. Together, the four of them recited the Lord's Prayer. Outside, a block away, a man's voice called out in pain.

Angus turned with the loaf in his hands. He raised it toward the stained-glass window set high in the north wall and broke it.

He had begun to turn back to the makeshift altar and the children when the shell struck the schoolhouse. The wall came apart, in the slowed sequence of Canby's dream, in stages: the dust first issuing forth from between the clapboards as though in a sharp exhalation, the boards splintering just after, and the stained glass shattering, bursting and flying inward in a shower of blue and gold fragments.

Angus turned back to the children before he fell. His face was transfigured. Shards of the glass protruded from his cheeks and forehead and his eyes were embedded with colored slivers. Beneath the girls' screams and the falling of boards and timbers Canby heard the glass cracking underfoot as he rushed to his father. He knelt beside him and watched, helpless, as Angus's hands sought the wounds in his face, winced back from the pain when his fingers touched the glass in his eyes. Angus shook his head from side to side and his hands went out over the floor, patting at the boards, reaching for what he could not see.

“I dropped it, boy!”

“Stop talking, Father,” Canby said.

He saw blood seeping with Angus's pulse from a shard that had caught in his neck and Canby began to pull it out, carefully as he could. But the blood pumped faster. Angus was murmuring and Canby saw that his ruined eyes were leaking tears as well as blood.

At some point he was aware that Julia and Frances were
beside him and that his father had gone on. Frances reached out a hand to Canby's cheek and turned his head and gently pulled a blue fragment, a shard the size of a penknife blade, from his face. He looked at Frances and Julia, at his father's body and the halved loaf where it lay on the floor. He looked up at the ragged gash rent in the schoolhouse wall and that coppery half-light out beyond it.

That had been the end of it, in life. But in the dream, Canby walked out of the schoolhouse, down the front steps, and saw in the lone oak of the schoolhouse yard Billingsley perched on a thick limb in his suit of glistening black.

“Died blind!” Billingsley crowed. “Died blind!”

November 6

“Y
OU EARLY
,” S
ZABÓ SAID THROUGH THE WICKET
.

“I am a detective. There is no early or late for me.”

The wicket shut and Canby stood listening to the flags atop Fulton Tower snap and flutter in the dawn breeze while the jailer worked the lock. The heavy door swung inward.

“A bad night he had,” Szabó said, locking the door behind them.

“What the hell do you care?”

The jailer shrugged. “Colonel is gentleman.”

Canby leaned close to the man, studied his furtive gray-green eyes beneath the brows, the hair nearly white where it grew out of his pale flesh. “Colonel is a murderer. Of the vilest kind. Do not forget it.”

The jailer turned and walked to the cage that was Spot 12 and unlocked the door. His broad back to Canby the entire time, dumb as an ox. Once they had breached the front door, Malcolm Harrigan and his mob must have had the run of the place. Greenberg never had a chance.

This man Szabó was new since Canby's time on the force. And from what Vernon had told him, there had been plenty of grumbling not only when local men were passed over for the job, but when it went to a Hungarian immigrant, a protégé of Hannibal Kimball's. To men of a certain hardened stripe, the jailer's job was a sinecure—a sure livelihood from the county in exchange for making sure the inmates were kept fed and quiet. Any complaints could be fixed either with solitary confinement or a discreet beating. And since Reconstruction, at least, a paycheck from Fulton County never bounced. This man, though, had hardly worked his way up to it.

Szabó opened the cage door for Canby and began to shuffle his way down the hall to his living quarters. Canby pulled the door shut behind him until it latched. Billingsley sat up on his bunk and Canby saw that he was dressed in a suit and shined shoes, all of it, except for the boiled-white shirt with its high collar, entirely black.

“Where are this man's prison togs?” Canby called down the hall. But although he could hear Szabó whistling a foreign tune as he moved down the long hallway, the jailer gave no sign of having heard him.

“You and Vernon Thompson may deny me my due process, Canby, but I intend to go to the gallows as a gentleman.” Billingsley whisked dust from his black trousers leg.

“You'll die a criminal's death regardless. Suit yourself. That jailer's days are numbered here, too.”

“Szabó was raised in an old country. He has a proper respect for a man of station.”

“Servile. What have you offered him?”

“He knows his place. He will have his reward. I had hoped that you, too, would come around to a right way of seeing things.”

“But I didn't, did I?”

“That's regrettable. But in time you will. In time you will be convinced to your very marrow.”

“You are insane, Billingsley.”

“Malthus is my name now.”

“But you didn't finish scribing your name, did you?”

“I am not yet finished.”

“You know, you talk as though you actually believe this shite.”

Billingsley was on his feet in an instant, a far measure more spry than he had been the day before. “Do not mock me, boy!” he thundered. “Bog Irish nigger-lover—you are everything that is wrong with Atlanta, with the world. And your arrogance!

“I'd have thought my work would have taught you something about that. Think of it, Canby—my work changed after you visited me in my home. Your asinine talk of crime, progress. Oh, you goaded me. You'd goaded me once, altering my work. That I could abide, could bide my time to correct. But to so . . .
belittle
what I was proving out, with every dead piece of trash. My work is
not
inspired by base motivations, Canby.” He said Canby's name as though it were the pure expression of derision.