The Night Inspector Page 9

  Waited for what? was forming in my mind as I found the first one again and sighted him in. I looked down at a man in a blue shirt rimmed at the armpits by the salt of his sweat. His trousers were of buckskin, and his boots, I saw as I swept the glass down his body, were cracked and one was caked with dung. I wondered where their horses were.

  Waited for what? I swept up to his head for the placement of my shot, and I looked into his telescopic sight.

  Waited for him to take me.

  They did not know I was me. But they knew me. You’re your actions, and those they surely knew. They had been hunting me, perhaps in more than one party.

  His companions waited for him to take me. He did. We fired at once. His ball must have struck the trigger guard or the metal at the breech. The rifle, at my shoulder and just below my right eye and right temple and right cheek, exploded into my face. I might have hit him, I realized much later, for they fled rather than come after me to see if they needed to finish. I did not fall from the tree, I realized later. I hung in the crotch, screaming. I heard myself. The metal of the mechanism, the splintered wood of the stock, were driven back into my face, as was, of course, the powder of the percussion pellet set upon the nipple. My face was the site of an explosion, yet my hearing was unaffected. I heard myself as I screamed and screamed, wiping at the teeth and gums and slices of face that fell upon my tongue as I made my undignified noises.

  “Here we come,” said Grafton, soothing even from a distance. “Here we come,” he called, like a father to his frightened child. “We’re coming,” he called from the base of the tree. I went by wagon the rest of the way, rolling home inside a dream I dreamed was dreamt by someone else. After coming to consciousness, and begging for death, which I was not granted, I tried to imagine whose dream it had been.

  I was wrapped in bandages and blind, because they did not know at first if my eyes were affected; but they had left an aperture at the mouth for breathing and speech. I used it when someone came into what I thought of as the dream to press my shoulder and ask how I fared.

  “You could kill me,” I said.

  There was a pause, and then the hand was removed from my shoulder.

  I said, “You could easily—”

  “Yes,” a stranger’s voice replied.

  CHAPTER 3

  OFF ELIZABETH STREET, AT THE HARLEM RAILROAD embankment, where a kind of tunnel burrowed into a hill of earth and cobbles—the gandy dancers for the line stored sledgehammers and ties and spikes there, for use in making repairs—I was walking late, having trotted about early as well. I was tired of walking, but not, I thought, tired enough to sleep. So I had stopped at Uncle Ned’s on the Bowery, at that time a notorious gathering place for gamblers, slaggards too filthy and used to be kept in a respectable house, and, of course, members of gangs like the Rabbits and the Ikes (who called themselves the House of Isaac—as nasty a bunch of Jews as the Rabbits were cannibal Irish). In front of a disused shop once specializing in trusses and like medical devices, and across from the embankment, I came, perhaps a little dizzy from dark rum, upon two white men beating a Negro. He dodged and wheeled, so I knew that he wished to resist; and, as he was burly and fit, broad of shoulder and lean of hip, with long, thick arms, I knew that while he chose to protect his head and face by shielding himself, he had deemed it wise not to give the account of himself of which I believed him capable.

  “Hold still, Mose, and let me thrash your woolly head,” the fatter of the two whites grunted. He slapped at the Negro with a thick black cane. He panted and sweated, and his face, in the gaslight at the corner stanchion, gleamed in oily unhealth. The other fellow, sturdy but short and quite narrow, swung what seemed to be a leather sap and, from its appearance of weight in his small hand, might have been filled with shot, or rock salt.

  The fat one swung, this time with both hands, and he caught the Negro at the junction of neck and shoulder. The Negro went to his knees and seemed inclined to remain there. His breath was deep and uneven, whether from debility or fear I could not tell. I wanted to know. I wanted him to tell me.

  “Gentlemen,” I called, stopping just behind the smaller one. “Are you certain you have the numbers and the weapons you require? Or should I round up five or six armed men to pitch in and defend you from this fellow?”

  The littler man, his sap up, turned to challenge me. I assessed his waxed mustache, his silk waistcoat and bright tan shoes. He said, “God almighty, what are you?”

  “What you are not,” I said.

  “If you must involve yourself. This nigger was told to have a wagon-load of textiles here tonight, and he brings us himself but not the goods. We are out money, cloth, and reputation. A deal’s gone dead, and he’s to be punished. If, as I say, it’s your affair.”

  “As a businessman,” I said, “I hate to see a businessman lose face. But is this Negro not a businessman as well? You seem to be on the verge of robbing him, too, of a goodly portion of his face.”

  “As you seem to have lost most of yours. I wonder in what fashion,” the fat one said, puffing and perspiring.

  I smiled, but of course they could not tell.

  To the black man, I said, “You held back because you thought them police, perhaps?”

  He said, “I held back because I thought they were white men.”

  “Before the law, no whiter than you,” I said.

  “Look, why don’t you, at the law a few more times.” He searched my mask with red-rimmed eyes. “You don’t have to shave that in the morning, I reckon.”

  I smiled again. Again, they could not tell.

  “I apologize for that,” the black man said.

  “It was clever,” I said, “and levelheaded. Do you understand me about the credentials of these men?”

  “And do you understand me?”

  “They are men of business. I don’t know their commercial bona fides, but I can attest to them as men: They are, barely.”

  “Sir!” cried the fat one.

  “Do you dare?” asked the littler man.

  I seized his ear and twisted it. He whimpered, then wept. I kept hold of it with my left hand and gestured, far too dramatically, I fear, with my right. “If he raises his sap or, indeed, his body, I will have his ear for a watch fob. Would you, while we wait upon his course of action, see to—your name, sir? Hodboy? Fatcheek? Commander Bulk, perhaps? For you do throw about your weight with great panache.”

  The Negro climbed reluctantly, it seemed, to his feet, and he sidled toward the one with the cane, who leaned back from the Negro as that man shifted his balance and made a kind of crooning sound, a statement, I thought, of his reluctance to act. Then, grunting of a sudden, as if it were he, himself, who were struck, the Negro swung his punch. Because the fat man was moving, the blow missed his face and landed with a fearful, solid sound on the fat man’s chest. He made a noise like a pig’s bladder punctured, and he went a color that, in the gaslight, seemed quite green. I thought he was dead on the spot, but the assault, either to his lungs or his heart, was brief in effect—though it was a long moment in which he seemed suspended, and it must have seemed a good deal longer to the one on whose chest the blow had landed.

  The little man whose ear I held made as if to rise, and I applied my thumb more firmly to the juncture of the ear and skull. It was a place, I remembered, where I’d once put a killing shot.

  I said to the one whose ear I held, “Get him to his feet once he’s able, and lead him away. It would be best to never burden this Negro again with your business arrangements. Make new ones.”

  I took the sap from his fingers as he stood. I gestured to the Negro—his hands were at his mouth, then eyes; he trembled as he moved his hands upon his face—and I said, “Let’s walk, if you will, across the tracks. Down where the hill dips, on the other side.”

  He stayed where he was, and I saw he was weeping.

  “Are you hurt?” I asked, watching the little man try to pry the fat one from the stones of the street. “
Was it the blow to your neck?”

  He cupped his face in his hands, at last, and he bathed himself in his own tears. Finally his bulkier assailant sat, and I took the Negro’s elbow and moved him along with me.

  “I never,” he said, smearing his nose with the back of his hand.

  We crossed the tracks of the Harlem line and went down the incline toward Rivington. There were fewer lights here, and the noises of the Jews in bakery shops and their crowded small rooms came as if from a forest warren one could smell—the sourness of yeast; the sweetness of fresh bread; the rich, dark smells of simmered inner organs of sheep and cow—but one could not descry them; those people were mysterious even in the homeliest of aspects.

  Again, he said, as we drew near the coffee shop of Alsatian Jews with whom I had business dealings, “I never.”

  “What, then? You never what?”

  “You were there,” he said, though the “there” was almost—not quite—“dere.”

  “I was.”

  “You saw. How many of that have you seen?”

  “Oh,” I said. “Ah. Of course. I beg your pardon.”

  “You don’t ever have to beg me for anything,” he said. “Just ax one time.”

  “You were talking about the blow you struck.”

  “I never even did talk back to a white man. Then I up and hit one.”

  “You surely did. You squashed his breastbone and lit up his lights. You stopped his heart, I think.”

  “White man’s heart.”

  “What passes for that particular white man’s heart.”

  We stood at the shop, Alain Freres. I knew that he would not come in, so I tugged once more at the cloth of his shirt and we continued east.

  “I hit me a white man,” he said. “Do I thank you? Or do I curse you? Do I owe you, or do you owe me?”

  “Will you tell me your name?”

  “Tackabury’s Adam is what they call me on the papers I was given. I am a freed man.”

  “You are all freed.”

  “Only some can walk around in any circles they choose, and others are freed to do what some white man says.”

  “Still,” I said—as if what he told me was surprising. I did so for his dignity’s sake.

  He said, “Still, and forever and ever. Amen, if you like.”

  “Adam, then?”

  “It’s the name I use. Adam Tackabury.”

  “Adam. Where do you live?”

  “Back that way and down. Centre Street.”

  “Near the Points. As do I.”

  “A gentleman in the Points?”

  “Two of us gentlemen in the Points. I can find you by asking for Adam?”

  He said, “You ax. I’ll hear.”

  “I might, one day.” I could smell jute on his shirt, and the wax from seals on cotton. He worked at the docks. I said, “I’m a tradesman, myself.”

  He nodded, waiting.

  “You know a little, I think, about the edge of the river.”

  “It’s how niggers live. On the edge of the water. If they will get to live. Railroad to dock or wagon to dock or brigantine to dock—we are the same as cargo, and we move how cargo moves. So I do know the edge of the river. And you can call on me. Can I know your name?”

  “Bartholomew. William Bartholomew.”

  “Bartelmy.”

  “Close enough.”

  “Bartelmy. I’m in your debtedness, Mist Bartelmy.”

  “You’re free, damn it.”

  “Did you earn that face in freeing me?”

  “I do not need to shave it.”

  “Didn’t mean an insult.”

  “None taken. What is under the mask, I every now and again must shave, however. Beards, you know, grow even on the flesh of the dead. And so with me.”

  “I did wonder. I do thank you.”

  “Adam, I won my wound in the pursuit of my own ends. Though I am heartily pleased to see no man enslaved.”

  “What was the end, Mist Bartelmy?”

  “It is a question I haven’t ever answered truly, even to myself. I do not know. I cannot learn it. It’s an answer I await.”

  “Yes, sir,” he said, as if I were lying.

  “In truth,” I said.

  “Centre Street,” he said, dismissing me. “You ax.” He clasped his hands, for I think, in spite of his disappointment with me, he would have taken my arm or hand to say his thanks and his confusion. “Adam,” he told me. “Ax.”

  He was the color of the night, and he went into it, and disappeared. For my part, I wandered back in the direction, on a whim, of the embankment where I’d found them beating him. I wondered if I would find a corpulent corpse, or a detective of police. I took from my pocket the sap I’d lifted from the littler assailant, and I threw it into the street. My face, it seemed to me, still stung from the impact of his question about my motives in the War. I was blushing, and I was pleased that neither I nor anyone else could see the furrows and puckers and craters of my face go crimson with what might be shame.

  A sister of the streets, trawling in desperation before the dawn, opened her thin-lipped mouth as I stalked past. I stopped, for I wondered what she might say.

  “Poor fellow,” she whispered. She was scrawny and her naked arms were rough with exposure and not much care. I gave her twenty-five cents.

  “For doing what?”

  “For not being hungry.”

  “Do I look like a charity case?”

  “You thought that I did.”

  “Then I beg your pardon if I insulted you. You are a veteran?”

  She was already staring into the darkness down the street in hope of work. Cool air blew from the north and east, and she clasped her arms across her meager chest. She held my coin in her dark-knuckled hand; her fingernails, I had noticed, were far from clean.

  “Sir?” she said. “What is your pleasure, then?”

  “It lies, apparently, in assisting a man to give in to his blackest desire, and his greatest danger. I have probably led him to the edge of the world. And all he could think of, sad man, was the river’s edge. Never mind.”

  She had stepped backward. “No,” she said, “I never work with a male partner, though I could scare up a girl for the tribade if it suits your fancy. To tell you the truth, though, I would just as soon not, and it would cost you more than you’ve given me.”

  “Let’s both not,” I said.

  “Then good night?”

  “Then keep the two bits and good night.”

  “God bless you,” she said.

  I still doubted it. I made my way south and west, picking up Orange off Bayard. When I was that young man, in 1867, walking, despite the vapors, with some spring in my step, and with a Colt in my pocket, there were thousands, tens of thousands, of immigrant children, filthy and wild, dangerous as wolves, some of them, who came out with the sun each day in that district; they were there to collect what they could. Someone paid some money for everything. Little more than toddlers, some of them, squired by a brother not too much older, they collected coal that fell from the delivery wagon; there were rag pickers who sold to the Jews; why, there were little fellows who tore their fingers bloody while collecting bits of glass. Often, they were beaten badly by the adults in the trade with whom they competed. The hardiest and often most dangerous were the bone pickers. You found them, too, at dawn, as I found one now, carrying an oily-looking sack and armed with a stick that ended in a metal hook that he used for turning over mounds of ashes or dirt or other filth.

  “Leonard,” I said. “Up at the first hint of light, as usual.”

  “Morning, Mr. Bartholomew. Have you been to bed yet?”

  “I’m on my way, Leonard.”

  “You’ve been carousing, I suppose.”

  He never looked at me or stopped his restless searching through as foul-smelling a two-foot heap of garbage as I had ever come across. He didn’t seem to mind. He peered and stared and studied, like a myopic man reading a volume of fine print.
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  “Tonight, Leonard—last night by now—I took a man to his knees, made a new friend, cooperated in the slowing or stoppage of a fat man’s heart, gave charity to a whore, drank dark rum, and ate the freshest bread. Would you call that carousing?”

  “I would call this … pewter.” He held the handle of an ale cup in his filthy hand. “Have a look, Mr. Bartholomew.” He brought the stinking fragment toward me and, with it, the smell of his clothing and breath.

  “That’s not sweet,” I said, “though no insult’s intended, Leonard.”

  “None will be taken,” he said, his dirty face, unshaven and pitted, arched—the brows, the broad mouth—in generosity.

  “But it is,” I said, “time to bathe your body and burn your clothes.”

  “Ah,” he said, “it is the tendency of a man in my profession that he take on certain characteristics of the materials of his work.”

  “You’re too wise for the work.”

  “No,” he said, “I’m suited for it. I’m damnably good at it, begging your pardon.”

  “I do enjoy the company of happy men,” I said, “and I thank you.” I pressed coins upon his palm, then wiped my fingers on my coat.

  “What are you buying, Mr. Bartholomew? Not that I ain’t grateful.”

  “Or percipient,” I said, moving on, past a band of feral boys who swaggered, at six or seven, in clothing so foul as to be collectible, by those who wore it, for a transaction at the ragmonger’s. I put my hand upon the butt of my pistol and made certain that they saw me do so. One of them smiled, but it was not much warmer than the artificial mouth on my mask. Sunlight, cool but yellow, lay on the paving stones and on the warehouse walls, and on the horses who patiently stood in their traces while their drivers drank coffee or beer.

  In the smell of refuse and ordure and the combined rank exhalations of the poor in their small rooms, I made my way to the Old Brewery. The taverns in the alleys were still noisy, but the sounds were somehow subdued, as if even the air itself that carried the exclamations and music and complaints were exhausted. I passed the door of Chun Ho and could smell the harsh, clean odor of hot water and powerful soap; she would let me bathe in a tin tub for the cost of laundering two shirts, and I thought with pleasure of the steam in which, maskless, I would wallow while she stared at me with her calm, appraising eyes. There was something about her very still face that compelled my attention. On the ground floor, entering the hive, I heard the snoring of Mr. Leone and the sobbing of one of his children. But children, here, were always in tears, and dogs were always howling. It was what gave vent to the general life of the Points—a voice, if you will, for what the populace could never say.