The Pale Blue Eye: A Novel (3 page)

"We have no concern about your capacities," said Hitchcock. "The inquiries are what concern us. They are of a highly complex, I should add, a highly delicate nature. And so before we go a step further, I must once again be assured that nothing said here will be breathed anywhere outside the Point."

"Captain," I said, "you know the life I lead. There is no one for me to tell but Horse, and he's the soul of discretion, I promise you."

He seemed to take this as a solemn assurance, for he resumed his seat and, after a conference with his knees, raised his face toward mine and said:

"It concerns one of our cadets."

"So I figured."

"A second-year man from Kentucky, by the name of Fry."

"Leroy Fry," added Thayer. That level gaze again. As though he had three pigeonholes full of notes on Fry.

Hitchcock wrenched himself once more from his chair and passed in and out of the light. My eyes found him at last pressed into the wall behind Thayer's desk.

"Well," said Hitchcock, "there's no point in dancing around it. Leroy Fry hanged himself last night."
I felt in that moment as though I had stepped in at the very end or the very beginning of a large joke, and the safer course would be to play it out.

"I'm very sorry to hear it," I said. "Indeed I am."

"Your sympathies are--"

"A dreadful business."

"For all concerned," Hitchcock said, advancing a step. "For the young man himself. For his family..."

"I've had the pleasure," said Sylvanus Thayer, "of meeting young Fry's parents. I don't mind telling you, Mr. Landor, sending them word of their son's death is one of the saddest duties with which I have ever been tasked."

"Naturally," I said.

"We hardly need add," Hitchcock resumed--and here I felt something rising to a head--"we hardly need add this is a dreadful business for the Academy."

"You see, nothing of this kind has ever happened here before," Thayer said.

"It most certainly has not," answered Hitchcock. "Nor will it again, if we have anything to say about it."

"Well, gentlemen," I said. "With all due respect, it's not for any of us to have a say in, is it? I mean, who can know what goes through a boy's mind from day to day? Now, tomorrow ..." I scratched my head. "Tomorrow, the poor devil might not have done it. Tomorrow he might be alive. Today, he's... well, he's dead, isn't he?"

Hitchcock came forward now, leaned against the spindle back of his Windsor chair.

"You must understand our position, Mr. Landor. We have been specifically charged with the care of these young men. We stand in loco parentis, as it were. It is our duty to make them gentlemen and soldiers, and toward that end, we drive them. I make no apologies for that: we drive them, Mr. Landor. But we like to think we know when to stop driving."

"We like to think," said Sylvanus Thayer, "that any of our cadets may approach us--whether myself or Captain Hitchcock, an instructor, a cadet officer--come to us, I mean, whenever he is troubled in mind or body."

"I take that to mean you had no warning."

"None at all."

"Well, never mind," I said. (Too breezy, I could tell that.) "I'm sure you did the best you could. No one can ask anything more."

They both brooded over this a bit. "Gentlemen," I said, "I'm guessing--and now I may be wrong, but I'm guessing this is the part where you tell me what I'm wanted for. Because I still can't make sense of it. A boy hangs himself, that's a matter for the coroner, surely? Not a retired constable with--a weak lung and poor circulation."

I saw Hitchcock's torso rise and fall.

"Unfortunately," he said, "that's not the end of it, Mr. Landor."

And this was followed by another long silence, even warier than the last. I looked back and forth between the two men, waiting for one of them to venture further. And then Hitchcock drew another long breath and said:

"During the night--between two-thirty and three o'clock a.m.--the body of Cadet Fry was removed."

I should have recognized it then: the beat. The sound not of any drum but my own heart.

" "Removed," you say?"

"There was--there was apparently some confusion about the protocol," Hitchcock conceded. "The sergeant detailed to watch the body left his post, under the impression that he was needed elsewhere. By the time his mistake was discovered--that is to say, when he returned to his original post--the body had vanished."

I set my glass down on the floor, with great care. My eyes closed of their own accord and then startled open at a peculiar noise, which, I soon found, was my hands rubbing against each other.

"Who did the removing?" I asked.

For the first time, Captain Hitchcock's warm brown voice betrayed a note of harshness. "If we knew that," he snapped, "we would have had no need to summon you, Mr. Landor."

"Can you tell me, then, whether the body has been found?"

"Yes."

Back to the wall went our Hitchcock, on a guard duty of his own making. There followed another length of silence.

"Somewhere on the reservation?" I prompted.

"By the icehouse," Hitchcock said.

"And has it been returned?"

"Yes."

He was going to say more but stopped himself. "Well," I said, "the Academy has its share of pranksters, I don't doubt. And there's nothing so very unusual about young men playing with bodies. Count yourselves blessed they're not digging up graves."

"This goes far beyond a prank, Mr. Landor."

He leaned into the lip of Thayer's desk and then this highly seasoned officer began stammering into the air.

"Whichever person--whichever persons--removed Cadet Fry's body, I should say they perpetrated a unique, I'll call it a uniquely terrible desecration. Of a sort that--that one can't..."

Poor man, he might have gone on like that forever, tiptoeing round the thing. Leave it to Sylvanus Thayer to make straight for the center. Erect in his seat, one hand resting on the document box, the other closing round a chess rook, he tilted his head and brought out the news as if he were reading the class standings. He said:

"Cadet Fry's heart was carved from his body."

Narrative of Gus Landor

3

When I was a boy, you never set foot in a hospital unless you were planning to die or unless you were so poor you didn't care if you died. My father would have sooner turned himself into a Baptist, but maybe he would have changed his tune if he'd seen the West Point hospital. It was barely six months old the day I first entered it, its walls freshly whitewashed, its floors and woodwork hard-scoured, every bed and chair bathed in sulphur and oxymuriatic gas, and a current of moss-air twining through the halls.

On a normal day, there might have been a pair of scrubbed matrons ready to greet us, maybe show us the ventilation system or the operating theater. Not today. One matron had been sent home after fainting dead away, and the second matron was too harassed to say anything at all when we came. Looked through and beyond us, as though there might be a regiment trailing after, and finding none, she shook her head and led us up the stairs to Ward B-3. Walked us round an open fireplace and over to a blacksmith bed. Paused a bit. Then pulled the linen sheet off Leroy Fry's body. "If you'll excuse me," she said. And closed the door behind her, like a hostess leaving the male guests to their chew.

I could live a hundred years, Reader, spend a million words, and not tell you what a sight it was.

I will come at it in small steps.

Leroy Fry, cold as a wagon tire, lay on a feather mattress girded by iron hoops.

One hand rested on his groin; the other was curled into a ball.

His eyes were half ajar, as though the drums had just beat reveille.

His mouth was twisted askew. Two yellowish front teeth protruded from his upper lip. His neck was red and purple, with black streaks.

His chest...

What remained of his chest, this was red. A number of different reds, depending on where it had been torn and where it had simply been opened. My first thought was that he had been worked on by some large concussive force. A pine tree had toppled--no, too small; a meteor had dropped from a cloud...

He hadn't been hollowed through, though. It might have been better if he had. You wouldn't have had to see the hairless scrolled-back flaps of his chest-skin, the shivered ends of his bones, and, deeper inside, the gummy something that lay folded and still secret. I could see the shriveled lungs, the band of his diaphragm, the rich warm brown plumpness of his liver. I could see... everything. Everything but the organ that wasn't there, which was the thing you saw clearest of all somehow, that missing piece.

I'm embarrassed to say I was taken, in this moment, with a speculation-- of the sort I wouldn't normally trouble you with, Reader. It seemed to me that the only thing left of Leroy Fry was a question. A single question, posed by the rictus in his limbs, by the flush of green in his pale, hairless skin...

Who?

And by the throbbing inside me, I knew it was a question I had to answer. No matter the danger to me, I had to know who'd taken Leroy Fry's heart.

And so I fronted this question the way I always do. By posing questions. Not to the air, no, but to the man who stood three feet away: Dr. Daniel Marquis, West Point surgeon. He had followed us into the room, and he was gazing at me with shy avid blood-lined eyes, eager, I think, to be consulted.

"Dr. Marquis, how does a person go about"-- I pointed to the body on the bed--"doing this?"

The doctor dragged a hand down his face. I mistook it for weariness; in fact, he was hiding his excitement.

"Making the first incision," he said, "that's not so hard. A scalpel, any good sharp knife could do it."

Warming to his subject now, he stood over Leroy Fry's body, plying the air with an invisible blade.

"It's getting to the heart, that's the tricky part. You have to get the ribs and sternum out of your way, and those bones, well, they're not so dense as the spine, but they're plenty tough. You wouldn't want to pound them," he said, "or crack them, else you'd risk damaging the heart." He stared into the open crater of Leroy Fry's chest. "Now, the only remaining question is, where do you cut? Your first option is to go straight down the sternum..." Whish, went Dr. Marquis' blade, bisecting the air. "Ah, but then you'd still have to pry away the ribs, and even with a crowbar, that's a fair bit of labor. No, what you do--what was done--is a circular cut. Through the rib cage, and then two cuts across the sternum." He took a step back and surveyed the results. "From the looks of things," he said, "I'd say he went at it with a saw." "A saw."

"Such as a surgeon might use to amputate a limb. I've got one in the pharmacy. Lacking that, he might have made do with a hacksaw. Hard work, though. You'd have to keep the blade moving and keep it out of the chest cavity at the same time. Why, just have a look over here, at the lungs. See those gashes? About an inch long? More gashes in the liver. Collateral ruptures, is my guess. Comes from angling the blade outward to save the heart."

"Oh, this is awfully helpful, Doctor," I said. "Can you tell us what happens next? After the rib cage and the sternum are cut away?"

"Well, from there it's a fairly simple business. You cut away the pericardium. That's the membrane around the epicardium, helps anchor the heart."

"Yes..."

"Then you'd sever, oh, the aorta. The pulmonary artery. You've got the vena cavae to get through, but that's just a matter of minutes. Any decent knife would serve your purpose."

"Would there be a spurting of blood, Doctor?"

"Not in somebody who'd been dead a few hours. Depending on how quickly he went, there might have been some small quantity of blood still in there. I suspect, though, that by the time he got hold of it, that heart"--he said this with a certain note of satisfaction--"that heart was played out."

"What's next?"

"Ooh, you're pretty much done now," said the surgeon. "The whole bundle comes up pretty clean, I expect. Very light, too, most people don't know that. Just a bit larger than your fist, and no more than ten ounces. Comes from being hollow," he said, rapping his chest for emphasis.

"So, Doctor--you don't mind my putting all these questions to you, I hope?"

"Not at all."

"Maybe you can tell us more about the fellow who did this. What would he require besides tools?"

A slight bafflement as his eyes drew away from the body. "Well, let me think on that. He'd-- he'd have to be strong, for the reasons I mentioned."

"Not a woman, then?"

He snorted. "No woman as I've ever had the pleasure of meeting, no."

"What else would he need?"

"A goodly amount of light. Carrying out such an operation as that in pitch darkness, he'd need light. Wouldn't surprise me if we found a deal of candle wax in the cavity." His eyes, hungry, returned to the body on the table. It took some pressure on his sleeve to tug him away.

"What about his medical pedigree, Doctor? Would he need to be"--I smiled right into him-- "as well educated and surpassingly well trained as yourself ?"

"Oh, not necessarily," he said, newly bashful. "He'd need to know... what to look for, yes, what to expect. Where to cut. Some small knowledge of anatomy, yes, but he wouldn't have to be a doctor. Or a surgeon."

"A madman!"

This was Hitchcock breaking in. Startling me, I confess. I'd come to feel that Dr. Marquis (and Leroy Fry) and I were the only ones in the room.

"Who else but a madman?" Hitchcock asked. "And still out there, for all we know, ready for some new outrage. Am I... is no one else galled to think of him? Still out there?"

He was a sensitive man, our Hitchcock. For all his hardness, he could bleed. And be comforted, too. It took only the slightest pat from Colonel Thayer on the back of his shoulders, and all the tightness went out of him.

"There, Ethan," said Thayer.

That was the first and not the last time I would think of their alliance as a sort of a marriage. I mean nothing by it except to suggest that these two bachelors had a pact of sorts, ever fluid and grounded in things unspoken. Once, and once only (I later came to learn), they had divorced: three years earlier, over the issue of whether West Point's courts of inquiry violated the Articles of War. Never mind. A year later, Thayer was calling Hitchcock back. The rupture was healed over. And all this was conveyed in a pat. This, too: Thayer was in command. Always.