The Scribe (22 page)

“As if evil could be dismissed from the world by the likes of you! As if an order of things as old as the world could be changed by common trash with presumptions! Think on it, Canby. My work changed with that visit. You redirected its course.”

Billingsley sat back down on the bunk, a sudden calm seeming to come over him. He pulled a leather-bound ledger from under his pillow and opened it to a place marked by a pencil that Canby saw with a sinking feeling bore the stamp of the Georgia Pencil Company on its shaft.

“Mary Flanagan was never in my sights until you interfered with my work. You made her necessary, made Greenberg necessary. But I see now the way to get back on the track. I will not be delayed again.

“You would not believe the dreams I've dreamed since they brought me here. I see the shape of the rest of what's given to me to do. It will be sublime.

“You look a bit pale, Canby. Not feeling so clever now? I hid myself in plain sight, Detective. Do you know that the lift operator at Kimball House greeted me by name as he carried me up to the penthouses? Not a soul suspected. I hid from you, even—this ledger here, do you recognize it? It was on my desk when you visited my home. I was even then writing the names of the dead in it. And you, fool that you are,
stumbled
as you looked over my shelves. You stopped at Lamarck, with good Malthus scant inches away. How close you came! You could have saved poor Mary Flanagan, and your man from Ringgold.

“But their names were not yet in my book, not yet that day. As I said, you goaded me. You damned them. Their innocent blood is on your hands. Poor Mary, there was no one there for her at the end. She died screaming down into darkness. And your man the great, fat peckerwood. He died like a pig at skinning-time.”

Yellow wick-light from the gas lamp outside the cell danced on the black bricks behind Billingsley. He smiled.

“And Greenberg. You damned him worst of them all, by altering my work. Look where that led. Another Jew on a tree! Priceless! Your doing, Canby—the trial, that mob of trash! All I did was set it in motion. Like swatting a hornet's nest with a stick, it was.”

Without realizing it, Canby had risen to his feet. He held his hands, balled into fists, by his sides, felt his fingernails biting into his palms.

“Give me the book.”

Billingsley clutched it to his breast like a babe, shook his head side to side over the high collar of his starched shirt.

“Nononononono,” he said. “Not yet. You will have it before I go, I promise. But we still have my last testament to complete together.”

Canby was reaching for the ledger with one hand, his other hand going into his pocket for the Case knife, when he heard the jail's door opening. He stepped back from Billingsley and glanced over his shoulder.

“Look,” Billingsley said. “Here comes your sable amanuensis. Good morning, nigger-boy!”

Underwood came through the door, with Vernon behind him. Vernon's face was clouded with rage.

“I think I know why these men come,” Billingsley said.

Vernon drew close to the bars and motioned for Canby to lean toward him. He whispered, “Another. The bishop's son's gone missing.”

“Oh, yes,” Billingsley cried. “Johnny Drew, are you just now realizing it? He is mine now.”

“How does he know?” Vernon said. Canby only looked at him. Vernon nodded to Underwood, who started down the hall.

“Where is he off to?” Canby whispered.

“To check that Campbell's still in his cell.”

“Why wouldn't he be?”

“No reason. I just want to be certain.”

In a moment they could hear Szabó's voice, then the men's footsteps ascending the winding stairwell of the tower.

“You will get nothing out of Fortus Campbell.” Billingsley had shut his eyes and the ledger had been put back under his bedding. He was leaning against the blackened bricks.

“What's this about Campbell, Billingsley?”

“You will be convinced, in time, Canby, that you have set the mark far too low in your appraisal of me. Fortus Campbell is dead.”

“Did you kill him?”

“In a manner of speaking. He was a useful tool for a time, like his father was. Vernon, do tell Canby here how the senior Campbell came to be in my employ.”

Vernon's cheeks colored.

“You did not recognize the old nigger down at my place, Detective, because he was quite broken by his time on the chain gang. When the chief paroled him to my farm he was enormously grateful. An arrangement was struck.”

“I never should have done it,” Vernon said, fairly spitting the words.

“Nor should you have allowed him to be arrested on such scant evidence back in '76. Tunis Campbell, like you, Canby, was a low man of ambition. Though of color, he had aspirations. He had a notion that Reconstruction could help him secure an office in the legislature—as though he would move from sweeping the floors of the Capitol to occupying a desk in it. He might have, too, if the Ring hadn't stepped in. Graft, I believe the charge was. His decline was even more precipitous than yours, Canby.”

Canby looked at Vernon. Vernon hung his head.

“And look which side of the bars you are on now, Canby,” Billingsley said with a low chuckle. “Best you watch your step around the good chief.”

Vernon seemed relieved to hear the sound of steps coming down the stairs. But Underwood came up the hallway shaking his head. Szabó followed him, slowly.

“Was it the bedsheet, boy?” Billingsley asked.

Underwood stared at the prisoner with a barely concealed look of horror on his face. “It was,” he said.

“Good boy,” Billingsley said. He closed his eyes and began the slow reclining back to his bunk that Canby had seen the day before.

“Where is the bishop's son, Billingsley?”

“Billingsley!”

Billingsley's eyes remained shut and he did not move.

“Midnight, tonight, Billingsley, that rope goes around your neck,” Vernon said between clenched teeth. He motioned for Szabó to unlock the cage and let Canby out, then leaned in to the bars as if to get closer in Billingsley's hearing. “You
know, Robert, a hanging can go a couple of different ways. I've seen it.

“The humane notion of the gallows is that the drop breaks the condemned's neck. Less suffering. But if the drop's not hard enough, the man dies of strangulation. By degrees.”

But the prisoner did not acknowledge him. He appeared to be fast asleep.

“Tell us where the Drew boy is and you'll go quick. Don't, and I'll tell them to drop you easy. It'll be a slow process, with plenty of pain.”

Canby stepped out of Spot 12 and it was then, as the cell door's latch snapped shut, that Billingsley opened one of his bloodshot eyes and fixed it on Vernon.

“I know how it works, Vernon,” Billingsley said. “You can ask Mary Flanagan when you see her, by and by.”

B
ISHOP
D
REW PACED
the slate tiles of his rooms as though he meant to wear a groove in the floor of the rectory. Canby watched him, noted that the man's anxiety seemed genuine. The black fabric of his vestments hissed and whispered as he paced, left then right, right then left, in front of the bookshelves that covered one of the church office's walls.

“He has always been a willful boy,” he said, as much to himself as to Vernon and Canby. Underwood he had asked to wait in the vestibule. “Prone to truancy—‘prone to wander,' as the hymn says. He may yet be out on one of his larks.”

“Has he been out to the Cotton Exposition?”

“Doubtless. He comes and goes.”

“And the mother? Your wife?”

The bishop cut a sharp glance at Canby. “My wife had a nervous disposition. She did not survive the siege.”

“I have a man circulating John's ferrotype among the vendors,” Vernon said. “We'll find out if he's been seen there.”

Canby thought about the image of the boy that he'd burned into his mind when Vernon showed him the ferrotype. Towheaded, as they said in the country, hair pale and fine as cornsilk. Smiling. Innocent. “Did John know Robert Billingsley?”

“Socially, of course, Mister Canby.”

“There is something Billingsley said. He said—”

“Johnny may have been gone the better part of the week, Mister Canby,” the bishop said. He had stopped pacing. “To be frank, I am not certain how long. My shortcomings as a parent are coming to light.”

“But Thomas, surely Billingsley was raving,” Vernon said. “We've had him in custody longer than that.”

Canby looked out the rectory's tall windows, through the leaded glass in granite casements. In the courtyard outside, crepe myrtles nodded in a breeze. The limbs of one of them scratched against the glass from time to time. Across the courtyard the east wall of the cathedral rose like a Gothic monument of stone gables and arches.

“Perhaps if I go to him . . .” the bishop said.

“To Billingsley?” Vernon said. “To what end? To administer last rites?”

“Yes, yes, I could.”

“I was making a poor jest, sir.”

“I have been at many a dying man's bedside, Vernon. Truths come out at such times. Even a man as fallen as Robert may unburden himself.”

Vernon looked at Canby as though hoping the younger man would confirm his incredulity. Canby shrugged.

“You're certain, Bishop? It's no easy thing to witness.”

The bishop nodded quickly. Canby could see a thin film of sweat on his upper lip.

Vernon picked up his hat from his lap. “All right, then,” he said, rising. “Eleven o'clock should be in plenty of time.”

The bishop escorted them to the door and nodded again when they stepped into the vestibule. Underwood rose from his seat there and he and Canby followed Vernon down the slate steps. Canby looked back and saw that the oaken door of the rectory had closed behind them soundlessly.

Vernon stopped in the hallway. He turned to Canby and said, “Don't mention the bishop's wife again. She died in a bombproof, suffocated.”

“I did not know.”

“It was not widely circulated. The scene was ghastly.”

Underwood whispered, “You know that man's lying. Could tell that even from out in the hall.”

Canby nearly smiled. “Underwood,” he said, “there may be hope for you yet.”

“A
LL OF IT
of a piece. If one cannot turn back time, one can at least leave one's bloody mark on the present.”

Billingsley leaned against the brick wall languidly. In his
madness, Canby thought, the man grew more relaxed as the hour of his execution neared. “Where is the boy, Billingsley?”

“Malthus is my name now.”

“It is Robert Billingsley we will hang.”

“And Malthus who will return.”

“Will Malthus then tell us where to find John Drew?”

“Little Johnny is safe. Rest your mind on that count. Johnny, too, will return.”

Billingsley raised his chin as he spoke, the trace of the old aristocrat present in his bearing if not in his wrecked countenance.

“It'll be a shame to ruin that pretty collar.”

“I am glad, Canby, that I selected you as the recorder of my last testament—you and your nigger-boy. Where the two of you were before—that was where you belonged. You will see in time that the old order of things was preferable to what this new system can offer you.”

“The system is doing a good sight better for me these days,” Underwood said.

“I have fucked your system.”

Canby reached into his vest for his pocket watch. He flipped open its cover. “Not by my reckoning,” he said, snapping the cover closed. “In an hour and a half, the system is going to fuck
you
.”

“In time, everything will be made vile.”

“Hear those sounds outside? That's your gallows they're testing. Listen close and you'll hear them dropping the trapdoor. That'll be an end to you. You'll be walked down to it from this cell like all the trash that's been locked up here before you.”

“All in due time.”

“Not after midnight.”

“This business at midnight? Tonight is only a prelude to greater things.”

“The gallows will have the final word on that.”

“Nononononono,” he said in a crazed singsong. “Remember this, Canby. I was never mortal. Not for a minute. And my last victim will be you. I will do things to your corpse that even the dead can feel.”

As he spoke Billingsley's voice went deeper than Canby had ever heard it. Canby felt the hairs on his neck stiffen.

“Tell me something,” Underwood said. “The letters on the foreheads, is that from Revelations?”

Billingsley turned away.

“Because Revelations says, ‘His name will be on their foreheads.' Is that what you intended? Or is it just the mark of the Beast?”

“
Just?
Who taught you how to read?”

“Have you read Revelations?”

“It is chapter twenty-two you reference,” Billingsley said. “Also seven, nine . . .” His voice trailed off and he looked at Underwood. The trace of a grin played across his face. “I forget the verses.”

“But Revelations also says God's name will be on them. On the believers' foreheads.”

“It's not God's name now, is it? It is mine. I say again, who taught you to read? Was it a white man?”

Canby looked at the two of them, their eyes locked. Underwood holding his own. Then the silence of the moment was
broken by a knocking on the jail's door and the sound of Szabó coming, keys jangling.

“Where is it you come from?” Underwood said.

“You truly want to know, black boy?”

“Yes.”

“Then I promise you, by and by, I will take you there.”

Billingsley's eyes fixed on some point beyond Spot 12 and held there. He took another of his shuddering breaths as Szabó passed the cell, and looked at Canby with the same benign expression Canby had seen on his face in his study weeks before.