Beyond Rue Morgue Anthology (9 page)

She didn’t look all that delighted, though. It was like walking in on a funeral, which I guess in one sense we were. Mrs. Roebling looked as pale as death, and though she rallied enough to greet us, she couldn’t find a whole lot to say.

“You’ll have to forgive me, gentlemen,” she said. “I-I’ve just had some very bad news. Twenty workers on one of our construction projects have died in the most tragic of circumstances. It appears that our working practices may be to blame. The caisson sickness has incapacitated a number of our masons and navigators, and laid my husband low. And now— now it seems it’s taken a score of men at a single stroke!”

She started in to crying at this, which was a distressing thing to see. I made the usual
there, there
noises, but Dupin surprised me—surprised both of us—by laughing. Not the belly laugh, this time, but a little snort like a steam kettle saying it’s ready. Mrs. Roebling gave him a startled look.

“Pray, sir,” she said, affronted, “what can you find in these awful facts to amuse you?”

Dupin made a dismissive gesture. “The facts, Madame,” he said, “the facts are not amusing at all. What is amusing is the refusal of all parties concerned to acknowledge them. You feel responsible for the deaths of these men?”

Mrs. Roebling blanched at the blunt question. “Why yes,” she said, “to some extent, I do.”

“Then calm yourself. You are not responsible at all, and I will prove it. But tell me, how was the news brought to you?”

“By a runner,” Mrs. Roebling said. “Sent by the foreman, Mr. O’Reilly, shortly after eight o’clock.”

“And then?”

“And then, hard on his heels, an attorney came from the mayor’s office to tell me that my building permits had been revoked. We now owe the city a great deal of money. We must pay for a full inspection, which will be expensive and onerous. There will be a fine, besides, for so serious a breach of safety regulations. And of course, compensation for the families of the dead men must also be found. I fear this may sink our project completely.”

Dupin glanced at me. “The mayor’s office?” he queried. Evidently I’d been appointed his personal perambulatory encyclopedia.

“253 Broadway,” I said. “Don’t tell me you want to go see the mayor, Dupin. It’s a long haul back the way we came, and a long haul west, and I let the cab go.”

Dupin didn’t seem to be listening. He’d turned his attention back to Mrs. Roebling again. “At what time, precisely, did these runners arrive?”

Mrs. Roebling couldn’t say—not precisely—but the butler (the gent in all the black and silver) was called and he knew the times to a nicety. See, that’s what I mean about clothes and moral seriousness. The runner from the works had arrived at 8.27, and the clerk from City Hall at 8.33.

Dupin absorbed this news in solemn silence, then turned to me again. There was a kind of a gleam in his eye. “I do not, Monsieur Nast, wish to see the mayor. But I think perhaps I would like to see the commissioner of police.”

Mrs. Roebling gasped. “Do you honestly believe, sir, that a crime has been committed?” she demanded, her face clouded with bewilderment.

“I believe, in fact,” Dupin said, “that several crimes have been committed. But I will not speak of things I cannot prove. Of this morning’s events, however, I can speak with absolute certainty. Those men were murdered, and the culprit is already known to you.” He turned to the lady again. “Madame,” he said, “I request you to remain here, and to ignore for the moment any communications from the mayor’s office or from city officials of whatever provenance. I will tell what I know, and we will see what we will see. But I assure you, you will pay for no inspections nor levies. The compensation, yes, since the men are dead and you would not wish to leave their families destitute. But that will be the limit of your exposure.”

We left the lady in a pretty confused state—and to be honest, I was more than a little consternated myself. Otherwise, I think I would have put up more resistance. But Dupin had the hang of summoning cabs now, and that was a terrible power to put in a Frenchman’s hands. He waved his cane like an orchestra conductor, and a two-horse rig rolled to a halt right in front of us. He was jumping up onto the running board even while I was explaining that this was a fool’s errand. I had no choice but to jump up after him.

“You can’t just walk into the police commissioner’s office and make wild assertions, Dupin,” I told him, in something of a panic. “Especially not in this city. It just won’t wash.”

“Pourquoi ça,
Monsieur Nast?” Dupin snorted. “Why will it not wash?” He wasn’t even looking at me. He’d taken out a fancy silver pocket watch and was consulting it with a look of deep deliberation.

Where to begin? “Well, for starters, you’re not even armed.”

“But yes. I am armed with the truth.”

“Oh, jumping Jehoshaphat!”

I carried on remonstrating with him, because I kind of felt like it was incumbent on me to be the voice of reason. But there wasn’t any way of shifting him. I just got sucked along in his wake, and before I knew it we were walking up the steps of the police headquarters building.

Two officers standing up on the top step, like bouncers at the door of a bar room, looked us up and down and asked our business. Dupin was looking at his watch again, so I handled the introductions myself—with something of a sinking feeling in my stomach. I said we were from the
Harper’s Weekly
and we’d love to talk to Commissioner Smith and maybe sketch his portrait for the papers.

One of the cops led us inside, leaving the other one to take care of the business of looking tough and surly by himself for a while. We got some curious glances from the flatfoots sitting in the bullpen, and the officers in their little working cupboards. Dupin looked neither left nor right, but when we finally approached the commissioner’s door, he put on a turn of speed and got there first.

“See here,” our tutelary spirit said, “I got to announce you, is what.”

“I am the Chevalier Auguste Dupin,” the Frenchman declaimed, with fine contempt, “and I will announce myself.”

The door was already ajar. Dupin threw it wide with a thrust of his cane and walked inside. I followed him, into a fug of smoke chopped into lines of solid white and solid black by the sunlight filtering through the window blinds. It looked like the men in that room had put the sun in jail, almost. Had thrown it behind bars. A fanciful notion, obviously, but they were the men to do it, if such a thing could be done.

There were six of them, but I only saw four out of the gate. Police Commissioner Hank Smith, whose office this was, his doughy face overshadowed by a massive brow like the ledge over a cave. James Kelso, his superintendent, who looked like a cardinal of the Church of Rome, thinning hair swept back and thin lips pursed. Mayor Oakey Hall, with his pendulous, bifurcated mustache like the mandibles of a huge spider.

They were sitting around a big table, off to one side of Smith’s desk. At the head of the table sat not Smith, but Smith’s boss and the boss of everyone else here.

William Magear Tweed rose slowly from his chair as we entered the room. He towered above us. The man was architectural in his build—well over six feet in height, three hundred pounds or more in avoirdupois. But he looked a whole lot bigger and a whole lot heavier than that. His tiny round eyes might have looked weak on another man, in his face, the eyes being the windows of the soul, they looked like pinholes pricked into a black inferno.

“Well, now,” he said. His voice was a deep basso rumble like a trolley car going by. “It’s Mr. Nast, and his friend with the dapper clothes and the funny accent. You going to introduce us?”

“Actually, Mr. Tweed,” I said, “we just come here to sketch the commissioner’s portrait. But since he’s busy, we’ll come back another time.”

“Wouldn’t hear of it,” Tweed said. “Pull up a chair for Mr. Nast, and... I don’t know, what do you say to a high stool for the little guy?”

He was talking to the two remaining men, who stepped out of the smoke and shadow then. Sergeant Driscoll closed the door. Constable Flood kicked two chairs in our general direction, his face suffused with a nasty grin as with a bruise.

That sinking feeling I was talking about sunk about another twelve storys, quicker than any hydraulic elevator yet invented.

“Sit down, you yeggs,” Flood sneered. I slumped down in one of the chairs, but Dupin didn’t even acknowledge the loaded courtesy.

“You are Boss Tweed?” he demanded. “I have heard of you.”

“Most people have,” Tweed allowed. “As a humble servant of the City of New York, I hope. So you gents came here to paint a pretty picture?”

I opened my mouth to answer, but Dupin was in there a sight too fast for me. “No.”

“No?”

“Not at all. We are here to report an act of mass murder.”

Something like a soundless shockwave went through the room. The two cops and the three seated officials braced themselves against it, and seemed to tremble slightly as it passed. Not Tweed. He just raised his eyebrows up a little and let it go by him.

“Mass murder,” he ruminated. “I thought you ran a tighter ship than that, Hank. Any mass murderers you know of that you didn’t put on payroll yet?”

The police commissioner gave a sickly grin. “Very droll, Bill,” he muttered. “Very droll. You better watch what you say, Mr. Nast. Perjury’s still a crime in this state.”

“Although it’s also somewhat of an industry,” Tweed added. Everyone except Smith laughed at that, even the two cops.

Now I hadn’t said a thing to the purpose, let alone under oath, so the perjury shot went wide. But then it wasn’t a writ I was afraid of here. I took Dupin by the shoulder, hoping we could still steer a way out of these choppy waters, but he didn’t budge an inch. And it probably wouldn’t have mattered if he had, because Driscoll and Flood had taken up station at the door. Driscoll had his hand resting on the holster at his belt and Flood had his nightstick out, casually resting it athwart his shoulder. There wasn’t any way out except forward.

“The murders I speak of,” Dupin said, “were committed at eight o’clock this morning at the site of the bridge that is being constructed close to the Centre Street Pier. The principal agent and perpetrator is most likely the foreman at that site, a gentleman named O’Reilly, but I believe he had confederates whose names he might be made to divulge under questioning.”

“Oh, you believe that?” Tweed asked politely.

“Yes.”

“Those weren’t murders,” Jimmy Kelso said, all windy self-importance. “We already looked into that. Those men was killed by the caisson disease.”

“That,” said Dupin, “is an absurd conclusion. Every single observation that can be made says otherwise.”

“And what observations are those?” Tweed asked. He was looking highly amused, which I didn’t like at all.

Dupin seemed pretty happy too, and I realized he’d been building up to this. He struck a stance. “To begin with,” he said, “caisson sickness is a malady with a slow onset and a slow progression. The idea that it might afflict a score of people all at the same time, and kill them at a stroke, is absurd.”

“Horse pucky!” Kelso said with force. “Nobody even knows how the caisson disease even works, so nobody can say what it can and can’t do.”

Dupin’s lips turned at the corner as he stared at the superintendent. “There is already a body of literature relating to hyperbaric environments,” he said.

Kelso blinked. “There’s a what?”

“There are essays, monsieur, and monographs, and longer studies, about the conditions in which these unfortunate men worked. The caisson sickness seems to be a side effect of those conditions—conditions which, though they may be imperfectly understood, are extremely well documented. I have myself visited
le professeur
Fontaine’s hyperbaric chamber at the Sorbonne and studied its operation. Air from the outside world is excluded by welded seals and tight-fitting doors. Breathable air, under higher than atmospheric pressure, is injected into the caisson by means of a Jacquard-Sevigny steam-driven pumping apparatus. The same machine draws away exhaled air and expels it outside the caisson, so that the level of oxygen—that indispensable gas identified by Monsieur Lavoisier, another of my countrymen—remains constant.”

“You talk beautifully,” Boss Tweed said, every bit as easy as before. “But not to the purpose. Who cares how the pump works?”

“I do, monsieur,” Dupin said. “I care very much. When I examined the bodies in the caisson, I found that they all had livid skin and blue lips.”

“So?”

“Alors.
If they had died from caisson sickness, their skin would be bright red. An urticarial rash, as from the touch of nettles, would have been visible on their faces and necks. This in itself was enough to arouse my suspicions. What confirmed them was the fact that the lamps in the caisson, essential to the continuing work there, had all been extinguished.

“And that, monsieur, could mean only one thing. A wind or breeze, in that space where air was so carefully rationed, was impossible. The only thing that could have put out those flames was the absence of the oxygen on which they fed. The lights died for the same reason that the men died. They had no oxygen to consume, and without it, had not the wherewithal to continue in existence.”

Something like a frown passed across Tweed’s big, heavy-featured face, but he rallied pretty quickly and managed a pained smile. “You’re saying someone stole the air?”

“Bien sur que non.
Not the air. Only the oxygen from the air.”

“And how does a man go about stealing that, exactly?”

“A man,” Dupin said with grim emphasis, “attaches the outlet hose on the steam pump back into the inlet valve, creating in effect a closed system. A
boucle.
A loop. The men’s exhaled air, depleted of the vital oxygen, is fed back to them, again and again, until they suffocate. Which does not take long at all.”

There was a deathly silence in the room. The men at the table looked to Tweed, as if they weren’t willing to venture an opinion on this subject until the Boss had spoken. I kept quiet too, but for a different reason. I was thinking of those men’s last moments, and my mind was reeling. I couldn’t imagine a worse way to die—and I couldn’t imagine the mind that could have cooked up something like that. At the same time, I was starting to put things together the way Dupin had, running along after his thought processes the way a dog runs after a fire tender.