The Night Inspector (21 page)

It is the door, I told myself.

I had wakened to the sound of my panting, to the sound of my voice going
Oh
and
Oh
. It is someone at the door, I told myself, as if to calm a child.

I kept the discarded cracked haft of a street worker’s shovel as a life preserver, which I leaned against the wall beside the door. Squinting against the day’s light that filtered into my room, I seized the oak shaft and unlocked my door.

He made an inarticulated noise, a cry of fright and pity. I felt my hand go up to cover what I could of my face, for his sake and mine. I backed away, cursing like a wrangler of horses for my having gone to the
door in such a daze of nightmare and fatigue that I forgot to don my mask. I kept the haft in my hand as I grasped for the mask.

“Wait,” I warned him. “Wait at the door.”

Then, covered, I turned to him again and found him in the doorway, his own hand at his face as if to imitate me of seconds before. “Billy,” he said in a familiar voice. “Billy, I’m so sorry.”

His hair was a wiry dark halo. I said, “Sam Mordecai. Now it’s all right. You can look now.”

He slowly dropped his arm, too long for the brown serge sleeve of his suit coat, and he slowly opened his eyes. “No,” he said, closing them again, “no, it isn’t all right.” He took a breath and opened his eyes. “How it must have hurt beneath those bandages. How terrible, Billy.”

“I dreamed about you,” I said. “And here you are. I read your coverage of the suicide. In Boston?”

He nodded.

“And your memoir of the War?”

“I’m learning patience,” he said.

I beckoned him in and pulled a chair to. He obediently sat. “You’ll pardon the nightshirt,” I said, “but I rise late and go late to my bed. You’ll wait while I dress? And tell me, as I do, how you found me.”

He had lost a good deal of weight and his face seemed longer, boyish still but also more muscled and more worked upon; as I knew, he had seen a great deal in the War. His dark, liquid eyes were not still.

“I found you by wandering about and saying your name and pointing to my face,” he said, licking his lips and crossing and recrossing his arms. His energy was aboil. I thought him too uncontemplative, too keenly physical, to be a writer, and I thought it a piece of good luck because I wished him well. “I remembered your vow to become wealthy, so I asked questions of men in banks and at the gaming rooms on Broadway and at the Exchange. At each, you were known. No one knew where you lived, however.” He took from his breast pocket a slender notebook in black leather, and he fanned through pages to find his notes. “Assuming,
then, that you wished to be lost, I thought to discern what woods you would take to, in lying low. It was always your way. You always went for the thickets, the brambles at the bottom or the topmost parts of the leafiest trees. You were always, I realized, in hiding. Never did I think of you behind a mask, but even that makes sense.”

“Sam, you needn’t trouble yourself to make sense of me. I prefer, in fact, not to be made sense of.” I was struck by a consideration: “Sam, you haven’t hunted me down to put me in your book?”

“Of course not,” he said. I thought that he lied. He was on the trail of something, and I was included in his hunt. His jaw muscles worked, and he compelled his arms to stillness, his legs to be crossed one over the other, further wrinkling his crumpled brown suit. “But I
am
composing the memoir of which I spoke to you. It has taken a different turning, although it makes use of my experience at war. I read a book of poetry, poems about the War by someone outside its immediate experience.”

“Battle-Pieces,”
I said. “He writes so many poems. I have to confess to you that I find his meter too irregular for my crude taste.”

“Yes, you with your New Haven degree.”

“I have learned that having it pays nothing.”

“What pays, then?”

“Profit.”

“This fellow reaps no profit. I know little of poetry. But, at the end of his book, he writes a commentary, I suppose you might call it. Prose, Billy. He’s a straight-talking man on the Negro question. And about not … hating.”

“The South?”

“Yes.”

“After years of laboring to kill them.”

“And them to kill us. He is a complex man.”

“Sam, he’s a Republican, and that’s their line, and that’s their Administration giving him his badge and his paycheck and his pension.” His face fell, and something about his dedication to the man I would employ
brought my anger up. “So you found a whisper about the death of his son and you wrote a column lamenting it. You even wrote about his participation in that game played with a small ball—”

“Base ball, they call it. Yes. You read my column?” His face went boyish as he smiled his pleasure. “You see?”

“What’s that, Sam?”

“How necessary it is for a writer to be read? You see how foolish and full of moonbeams I grow when you say you’ve seen my words?”

“And you’re hunting him to see about a writer no one reads. The death provoked your interest in the life, in other words. Words again.”

“All words, Billy. All of it’s words.”

“Words may convey dollars,” I said.

“Ask the man without a son,” he argued.

“He has another son left to him. Stanwix.” Sam found a pencil and wrote down notes. “As I understand it, something about his older brother’s death has made him go deaf.”

“You see? And he cannot hear
words
, this son of a writer. It is, indeed, a story. It is a large story. How the United States will silence the voice of intellect, crush philosophical speculation, and stamp out the embers of our national literature. Have you read Charles Dickens on America?”

“I confess to not having read him on wherever it is he lives—the British Isles?” I was lacing my boots, but I looked up to smile for his enthusiasm. He could not tell. He looked distraught at my having not read Mr. Dickens. I made a note to read something by him, though my reading these days consisted of the newspapers and the news, in Mr. Morse’s code, on the telegraph in the Savarin downstairs in the Equitable Building: the rise in corn, the fall in pork bellies. From under the mask, I said, “Take your ease, Sam. Take a breath. Take your time. We’ll go to a coffeehouse and eat a breakfast and you’ll tell me where you’ve been and what you’ve done. For how long will your editor permit you to remain in the city?”

“Jack Herman is a scrupulously intelligent man who knows what’s
news. He detests speculation, and he loves hard fact. He’ll give me a few days at the Astor. If need be, I’ll pay for more from my pocket. Or borrow it from you.” He grinned, and the grin grew wider. “ ‘The city,’ you said.” He was beaming now. “As if there were none other. You are a New Yorker, Billy.”

“It’s the capital of commerce, or soon will be.”

“And you’re a captain of commerce.”

“Or soon will be.”

“I love seeing you, Billy. I hate the damage done you by the Rebel marksman, but I am so pleased to be with my comrade again. You must permit me to be of service.”

We shook hands. His was atremble, and damp. I said, “And you me.”

“I fear,” he said, “that I will burst into tears or burst into song, and neither is a pretty prospect. You know the poor fellow. Tell me how you know him. Tell me stories about his state of neglect, and I’ll grow somber and professional.”

“He is a badge-wearing deputy inspector for the Revenue Service of the Port of New York. He carries government locks, and he impounds things, I gather, if he thinks it important to keep them from coming ashore. He drinks a good deal—too much, I would say. His relations with his family strike me as tense, to say the best of it. Now, of course, with his son dead, who knows? Perhaps the boy was Isaac to his Abraham.”

Sam looked up from writing his notes. “But the Lord delivered Isaac. He sent the angel to tell the father he might let the son live.”

“I do not claim the boy was sacrificed to the father’s God.”

“I believe you implied it, Billy.”

“You know, I believe that you’re right, Sam.”

He had been writing in his notebook as he stood. His face was clenched and his eyes were active, but it was not his face I was drawn to. Although his notebook was of black leather and Uncle Sidney Cowper’s brown, I was reminded of my uncle and of how I had dreamed my way to his notebook, and how I had dreamed of Sam. It is said that a successful
trader knows to predict events. He may as well dream them, I thought. But then I remembered how, in my dream, someone was cruelly hurt, over and again.

Sam said, “What, Billy? You stand so still.”

“I was thinking, for some reason, of my uncle’s sorry death.”

“A recent loss?”

“No, you would have to call it a profit,” I said.

I led him from my room, through the dark hallway, and down to the street. He stood back against the grimy brick wall of our tenement to observe: a child with a hoop; three stalking, sneering boys of nearly twelve, their teeth yellow in their gray faces; a tot of no more than three in diapers who stood as his mother, a whore from the next street over, tried to trade her favors for something from the fishmonger’s wagon at the curbing. The sky was the color of soot, and flakes of it seemed to be drifting like coal-stained snow. The air smelled of heat and of metal, of the putrefaction of flesh. Sam’s eyes were huge. Mine, perhaps from the dirty air, were smarting, and I was noticing the edges of the eyeholes in the mask, something I did only when very fatigued; I knew that I would spend the day in watching the edges of the holes as much as I would see what they were turned to.

In their dim flat on White Street, toward Broadway, I found the Pastrowycz family at their breakfast, and I asked Mrs. Pastrowycz to permit me to give her son, Benny, some money to run a note to my Negro friend, Adam. I did not know whether Adam could read, but I knew that he was intelligent and would find someone, if he could not, to read out my request. She went back to frying something fatty for their meal while the three daughters sat staring at their platters. I frightened them, but nothing frightened Benny, who knew the neighborhood and who knew how to keep himself safe. He was a sweet fellow, chubby at the cheek and sturdy of chest and shoulder, with hair the color of sand, and pale skin. He reminded me a little of Burton, the private in our detachment to whom fell the wrangling duties and who sometimes made a kind of fried
bread dipped in egg, when we could forage eggs, on which he poured a little sorghum molasses for a treat.

“See it into his hands, Benny. Go now, for you’ll have to trace him to the docks if you miss him. You’ll do that?
And
take this other one to the North River. You understand the place?”

“Easy,” Benny said.

To his mother: “May he take the message to the river?”

She looked at me and said, “No monkey fools?”

“Monkey
shines
, Ma,” Benny said.

She smiled, and her gold tooth gleamed. She sewed at home while her husband was off digging sewers for the corporation of the City of New York. She minded the children in a hard place, yet she always smiled. I made the motion of blowing her a kiss as Benny left, and she did as ever: grinned her gold tooth and waved back.

“Lovely woman,” Sam said as he stood in the street to make a note.

“Then why not omit her? Why condemn her to be captured behind your notations?”

“Billy, I propose to tell her
story
, not condemn her.”

“You can take that up with your author. He receives the second message.”

“What is it you’re arranging?”

“A courtesy to you. A business arrangement for me. An expedition for us all to the Tenderloin. How do you feel on the question of steamed potatoes quartered and then fried with onions to flavor a small steak?”

CHAPTER 5

T
HE THREE OF US DINED AT
C
HEERIE’S, AND DURING
the meal I saw Sam’s hand stray often toward the breast pocket of his mud-colored suit. That was because he wished to make a note, I knew, and I felt a cruel pleasure that civility, if only for a time, prevented him from writing down what his idol so memorably said. Clearly, I had not, at the time, understood the need to write down life or state the having witnessed it.

As the veal was brought to us, Sam said, “Will you have some of this elixir of logwood?” He held up the bottle of red wine.

M looked at the bottle and looked at Sam. “You have read it, then?”

“The masquerade of the Confidence Man? Yes, sir, I have read it.”

“A book,” its author said to me, “in which I name such an elixir.”

“Of course,” I lied.

“A great book,” Sam said. “A philosophical argumentation.”

“As usual,” its author said, “a matter of an argument between one man and nobody else. It takes two parties to argue, and whether the party of the second part—those who are
not
the author—be one or one thousand, that party must be a party to the contention. Otherwise, you have the lone author saying to the sky or the loamy earth beneath him, ‘Given: That man is magnificent.’ Or: ‘That man is a dog.’ ” He sat back and leaned back his head and laughed, his dark mouth open and not emitting
a sound. He then shook his head and leaned forward to address his viands. Sam looked at him, then reached for his notebook, then brought his hand back around to his wineglass.