The Night Inspector Read online

  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 inde
bted 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.

  “He carried it as a talisman until the end of the War. But wars are nothing, in the end, but stories,” I said. “Who knows which of them is true? Who knows which details, likewise, of the wars themselves?”

  “There is the great historical cement that holds the stories together,” M said. “It is the mucilage of the underground dead, do you not think? So many of them, Southern and Northern. The ghastly expense of life in a waste of— I was going to say ‘shame.’ Do you think it shameful, Bill?”

  “Which ‘it’?”

  “The dying. The killing. Drummer boys and generals, President Lincoln, the bakers and the cooks and the quartermasters.”

  “I should like to hear from someone like yourself that the men still breathing, after Grant accepted the Confederate sword, were worthy of concern, much less such tears as you propose we shed.”

  “You feel ill-served by such remembrance?”

  “No. I share its emotions with you. As to how I feel, with regard to public concern, I am unaware of any to be registered. We are absorbed, as best we can be, into our populace. There are many such as I to be resented for reminding our brothers and sisters at large that such a war took place and that such men had the misfortune to survive it.”

  “You are not resented!” the boy said, slapping the table. “You are reverenced.”

  “It seems to me,” his father said, “that some of that populace has spoken.”

  “I thank you one and all.”

  “Such dry wit virtually squeaks,” Elizabeth said. “Perhaps you will allow my husband to moisten it.”

  Her grave voice and darting, dark eyes, her ready wit, had me smiling. I gave the gruff male equivalent of a titter so that she might know my appreciation.

  In fact, the fellow from Maine had been shot right through his folding tin cup, and he had died with lung blood bubbling on his lips and with the metal of the cup inside his chest.

  M, I found, had been staring at my veil, as though to better see my thoughts. His small, weak, expressionless eyes could take on the appearance of prescience I associated with the Egyptian Sphinx, and I found him unsettling. He drank a good deal more of the bitter wine he had served, and we ate mutton that was bathed in something like horseradish and accompanied by very dry, hard greens. I was inspected as I ate by the man who had fallen from close to the sun. I was the object of speculations by the man who had made a book about a whaling voyage sound like the Holy Bible itself. And here he sat, a federal employee of small matter with a son determined to be killed in the Indian wars, and a wife who badgered him first, I felt, before he might badger her.

  He nodded, as if he had been addressed, and he set down his forkful of meat with a violent gesture, as if the food offended him. Then he clapped his hands twice and smiled like a great cat at his son.

  “Oh,” his wife said, as if about to warn me.

  Her husband clapped his mysterious applause once more and said, very loudly, “I like this good man!”

  “Yes, Pa,” Malcolm said. The boy sipped, as children are required to, from a goblet of water. His father drank down wine.

  M said, “He brings into the rooms of our house, the mortgage of which is paid off, I might say, with my wife’s largesse of resource and spirit, a kind of memento mori. And even though we break bread and chew and chew and chew at mutton, we are fortunate to be reminded of what I have called the charge through the hauntedness.”

  I saw that Elizabeth had hung her head and so had Malcolm. Evidently, they were accustomed to but not reconciled with such an apparent welling of emotion as this.

  “We should be grateful,” M said, “and we should be drinking. I propose a toast.” He raised his glass, and so did they, then so did I. “To William Bartholomew, soldier, warrior, deliverer of bleak truths. To wit”—I tired of holding my glass aloft, particularly in my own name, and I brought it down; the others, in a strange obedience, held theirs in the air—“the churches are by and large occupied by scoundrels and cowards; the libraries are by and large occupied by frauds, villainies, and the language of spun sugar; the newspapers are filled, by and large, with canards, lies, and self-congratulation.

  “But, by damn, I wrong you, Bill. For, as is obvious to a man of education, I have placed in your mouth, as it were, the words I wish to speak. I have, and I pray you forgive me, written you. You’re a damned character of mine, and for that I must apologize. Though not overly. For I have given you harsh truths to convey. And truth, though with some it makes a wholesome breakfast, proves to all a supper too hearty. Hearty food, taken late, gives bad dreams. Do you say, Lizzie? Mal? Have I heaped upon this good, this finest, fellow a burden of truth too heavy to bear? Miss Ravenel’s Conversion, by the undergarments of both Saints Peter and Paul! And Hawthorne in his grave and me in mine.”

  He shook his head slowly back and forth as it drooped toward the table. Elizabeth excused herself, gestured to Malcolm, and they began to clear.


  “May I help, ma’am?” I asked her. But she affected not to have heard.

  Her husband had. He said, “But you have helped, good fellow. We have spoken together of whales and cabbages and kings. Of Dutchmen and their papers, of poor Poe buried and remembered, and other scriveners buried and forgot.” His voice had grown softer, and he spoke now as though he had a sore throat. “You know, Bill, I am not unaccustomed to the minstrations of Dr. Charles Eliot Norton himself. He has called me mad. Poor fellow! I am but weary. I might sleep.”

  Malcolm, returning to his place, said, “My father cannot always manage his wine.”

  The father’s reddened eyes grew wide. His chin came up as if the end of his beard were a gunsight. He squinted down his face at Mal. “And you, sir,” he told him, “seem to know too much about such management. Or, anyway, to profess too much acquaintance with it.”

  Mal held his stare, and I was astonished to watch his large, pale face seem to swell, as if it were a flower that opened before me. The boy’s lips, of a sudden, seemed thicker, and his nostrils more flared. Even the bones beneath his white cheeks gave the impression of broadening. Lizzie stood before her place at the table, gripping her napkin as if it were fastened to the solidity to which she needed, for safety’s sake, to hold. Her sad, sweet features seemed the face of a woman about to faint. The glow of perspiration I saw on Malcolm’s upper lip I also saw on his mother’s. His smile became a sneer, and I worried that father and son might fall upon one another.