The Waterworks (11 page)

On the pier Noah Pemberton would realize what he had given up for a ride. He would no longer be thrilled. Not this boy, not by my New York. Swarms of cabbies surround them. Porters shoulder their trunks without being asked. And beggars with their hands out … and beggar pigeons. And he is going to live with his aunt Lavinia, an old woman whom he knows nothing about except that she has no children. And then he is in a carriage, with the harsh unceasing music in his ears of urgent city life and its rattling transport. The hackney goes up the West Side along Eleventh Avenue, and the lungs of the young country boy fill for the first time with the sickening air
of the meat district … the stockyards and slaughterhouses. Perhaps he thinks he has landed not in New York but on the chest of a monstrous carcass and is inhaling the odor of its huge bloody being.

Sarah Pemberton, with the great calm by which she modulated their dire circumstances, would take her son’s hand and smile … and tell him … what? That soon they would see Martin, that Martin would be part of the family now.

But I had learned something about Martin Pemberton that let me sleep, finally. He did not live only for himself. He had a mother who had seen him through college … and a young brother who adored him. We may stride about with our principles at the ready … and hammer everyone we meet with our hard, unyielding worldview. But we have our mothers and brothers … whom we exempt … for whom the unrelenting intellect relents … just as I know in my case it does for my sister, Maddie, for whose dear sake I go to Improvement Society dinners. And if I could not say where Martin Pemberton was, I knew what he was doing. I was sure of it. He was gone in pursuit. Every detail of what I had learned of these matters he already knew … though he knew far more. And what I knew, in the lightening darkness of my suspicions, was enough for me to make the inspired, though insufficiently considered, decision to deepen my involvement and put me in pursuit as well.

As the city editor at the
Telegram
I was entitled each summer to a week’s leave. However, it must be not only summer but that wilting heart of it when the heat waves rise from the pavement … when the sanitation drays take the dead horses from the streets and the ambulances of Bellevue the dead folks from their tenements … and—the key thing—when anyone left alive in
the baking blanched light is too enervated to make news. All these conditions were met, and I was off.

I decided first of all to tell what I knew to Edmund Donne, a captain with the Municipal Police. You may not appreciate how extraordinary it was that I, or anyone else in the city of New York, for that matter, would confide in a police official. The Municipals were an organization of licensed thieves. Occasionally they interrupted their graft-gathering for practice with nightsticks on the human skull. Police jobs were customarily bought. Every exalted rank, from sergeant up through lieutenant, captain, and on to the commissioner, paid the Tweed Ring for the privilege of public service. Even patrolmen paid if they wanted to be assigned to one of the more lucrative precincts. But it was a large organization of two thousand or so, and there were some exceptions to the rule, Donne being probably the highest-ranking. Among naturalists, when a bird is seen well beyond its normal range, it is called an accidental. Donne was an accidental. He was the only captain I knew who had not paid for his commission.

He was also atypical of his trade in being neither Irish nor German nor uneducated. In fact, he was so clearly misplaced that he was a mystery to me. He lived in the tension characteristic of the submitted life … like someone who has taken holy orders or serves his government in an obscure foreign station. I could think, in his presence, that my familiar tawdry New York was the exotic outpost of his colonial service … or perhaps a leper colony to which he’d given his life as a missionary.

Donne was exceptionally tall and thin and had, when standing, to look down at anyone he spoke with. He had a long, narrow face, gaunt cheeks, a pointed chin. And because his hair
was gray at the temples and through the mustache, and his brows had thickened and taken wing, and when he was seated at his desk his long back curved into the hunch of his shoulders so that the twin ridges of his shoulder blades indented his blue tunic, you were put in mind of a rather impressive heron settled on its perch.

His was a lonely eminence. He was anywhere between forty and fifty. I knew nothing of his personal life. He had come up through the ranks, remaining always outside the order of connived loyalties that passes for brotherhood among policemen. This was not from any righteousness on his part … merely that he was not the sort to ask for confidences or give them. His skills, which were considerable, were not questioned, but in the perverse thinking of his fellow officers, they were part of the brief against him. He’d achieved the rank of captain slowly, through the administrations of several commissioners, who found him useful when they needed to advertise the Municipals’ worthiness of the public trust. Since that was a periodic necessity, his employment was secure, if not comfortable. It helped also that some of us in the press had written about him from time to time. He never asked for this, of course. For us, too, he simply was what he was and went his own way.

Donne was glumly at his work when I called on him in his office on Mulberry Street. He looked almost pleased to see me.

“Do I interrupt something?” I said.

“Yes, and I’m sure I’m grateful.”

His latest humiliation was to be in charge of the office that certified deaths in the city by age, sex, race, nativity, and cause—zymotic, constitutional, or sudden—and recorded them in an annual table for the city atlas that nobody ever read.

I told him of the whole Pemberton matter—everything I knew, and also what I suspected. I had his interest. He sat
hunched over his desk and was absolutely still. There was something else about Donne—he held the whole city in his mind as if it were a village. In a village, people don’t need a newspaper. Newspapers arise only when things begin to happen that people cannot see and hear for themselves. Newspapers are the expedient of the municipally dissociated. But Donne had the capacious mind of a villager. He knew the Pemberton name. He remembered the dismissed slave-trading charges against Augustus, and the wartime congressional inquiry into his quartermaster contracts. He knew who Eustace Simmons was—he called him ’Tace Simmons—and understood immediately why I thought it would be nice to find him.

But finding anyone in our city, how one went about finding someone in those days, was something of an art, as all reporters knew—especially if it was someone who didn’t have a professional or commercial life. You understand—there were no phones then. No phonebooks. No street-by-street names and addresses. There were listings of city officials, listings of doctors in the medical society rosters, lawyers and engineers could be found in their firms, and socialites at their well-known residences. But if you wanted to talk to someone you had to go where he was to be found, and if you didn’t know where that was, there were no general directories to tell you.

“’Tace Simmons once worked for the port wardens,” Donne told me. “There is a saloon on Water Street that they like. Perhaps someone will know something. Perhaps ’Tace comes around for old times’ sake.”

He didn’t tell me what he thought, or if he believed my reasoning was well founded. He just went to work. I had to defer, of course, to his way of doing things, which was tiresomely … methodical. “First things first,” he said, and asked me to describe Martin Pemberton in all the particulars—his
age, height, eye color, and so forth. Then he turned his long back to me and began to file through the stacks of loose pages on the table behind him.

The Mulberry Street headquarters is a raucous place. People flow in and out and speak only in raised voices, and with all the shouting and protesting and laughing and cursing drifting into Donne’s office, I was made aware of the necessarily practical view of mankind that is produced in a police building. It’s much like a newspaper office.

But for all the distractions, Donne might have been a scholar working in the silence of a library. A gas lamp hung from the center of the ceiling. It was lit now in the midmorning because the long, narrow windows gave almost no light. The walls were a pale tan color. Against the walls, glass-covered bookcases were bowed with the weight of law books, manuals of municipal regulations, and volumes of papers in their folders. The floor was covered with a threadbare Belgian carpet. Donne’s desk was a scarred and battered walnut. Behind the wooden chair where I sat a gated balustrade cut the room in two. I could see nothing that might have given a personal character to this office.

After a length of time he was able to tell me there was no Caucasian male body of Martin Pemberton’s description that had not been identified and claimed.

He was a very thorough fellow, Edmund Donne. We had next to take ourselves by hackney to the Dead House on First Avenue and Twenty-sixth Street and go through the holding rooms to look at the new arrivals. I walked the rows of zinc tables, where the livid bodies lay face upward under constant showers of cold water, until I was able to assure myself that my freelance was not among them.

“This rules out nothing,” Donne advised me, with his policeman’s logic. “But it rules out something.”

The character of this odd, misplaced policeman, misplaced for life, is an important piece of my story. The way enlightenment comes … is in bits and pieces of humdrum reality, each adding its mosaic bit of glitter to the eventual vision. It is almost mysterious to me now that I sought him out, this carefully stepping creature bowed by his own height. I had other recourses in a city of almost a million souls … and at the beginning of our cooperative inquiry, I admit, I was prepared to go on to them … except that he was so engaged by the problem I had brought as to take possession of it. I saw immediately that his interest had nothing to do with his lack of serious duties. In fact he had all sorts of investigative pursuits of his own that he had not abandoned since leaving his previous command of the woeful, understaffed Bureau for the Recovery of Lost Persons. There was something else, something else … a look of recognition in the eye, as if he might have been waiting for this … waiting for me to arrive … with what he was expecting.

So now we are in his office, after two or three nights of a so-far-unproductive search for a sign of Eustace Simmons on the waterfront—walking from one tavern to another, along the East River under the looming prows of the packets and clippers that lie at berth with their bowsprits in the chalky night casting shadows on the cobblestone … some hidden language in the sound of creaking mast and groaning hawser … the riverfront stink of fish and ordure suggesting to me a crawl through the city’s nether parts. So, as I say, we are in his office midway through my glorious summer holiday … and I have thought for the first time to tell Donne about Martin’s allusive conversation with Harry Wheelwright at the St. Nicholas Hotel.

But now a sergeant enters, pushing before him through the gate another diversion—a muscular fellow in a dirty sweater and baggy trousers, white haired and with a face well pounded, the nose and cheekbones flattened, and the ears curled up on themselves like blossoms. He stood before the desk in his considerable redolence, twisting the cap in his hands and smiling at nothing in particular as he waited to be acknowledged.

Donne had been reading some sort of document—whether to do with my subject or not, I had no idea. He glanced at me, then he arranged the papers neatly on his desk, and only then did he look up at the man before him.

“Well, look at this. It’s Knucks has come calling.”

“Yes, Captain,” said this Knucks with a deferential nod.

“So we’re restored to the good opinion of crime,” Donne said to the sergeant, who laughed in response. “And how is your health?” Donne said to the man, as if they were club members together.

“Oh, I’m doin’ poorly, thanking you, Captain,” said the old tough, taking the question as an invitation to seat himself on the edge of the chair next to mine. He grinned, showing his gapped and blackened teeth, and his face lit up appealingly, like a boy’s, with the perverse charm that is given sometimes to the brainlessly amoral. “This leg o’ mine,” he said, stretching out the offending limb, and rubbing it vigorously. “It aches terrible and sometimes won’t be trod upon. It ain’t never healed right from the war.”

“And what war was that?” said Donne.

“Why, Yer Honor, the War Betwix the States.”

“I never heard you had gone for a soldier, Knucks. And where did you see your action?”

“It was on the Fifth Avenue—I took a ball by the steps of the nigger orphanage there.”

“I see. And were you one of the gallants putting a torch to the place?”

“I was, Captain, and ’twas one of your own rifles who nicked me in that skirmish when I was fighting for my honor against the illegal cons’ription.”

“I understand now, Knucks.”

“Yessir. And withal I p’r’aps have said the wrong thing, given what I am to divulge, with your permission. But I’m an older and wiser sod now, and whilst childrens, black or white, are no affection of mine, I have more sympathy for every soul of God since”—he generously turned to include me in the conversation—“all of us is God’s dear souls, ain’t that so? And so there have come to be things I see that I cannot countenance.”

“There is hope for us all, Mr. McIlvaine,” said Donne. “In the old days Knucks here made his living by breaking bones, twisting necks, and tearing off the ears of people. Prison was a normal condition of his life.”

“True enough, Captain,” the fellow said with a grin.

“These days,” Donne said, regarding the wretch but addressing me, “he makes his living no longer with his muscles but by his faculties of observation and deceit.”

“Right as ever, Captain. Take this matter. I don’t know when I have been so alarmed to speak of something. But, sir, it is at some risk to meself that I have come here, and for all of that I am sorely in need of an oyster or two and a glass of Steinhardts German,” he said, looking at the floor. “It’s the least for putting my life in danger.”