The Scribe (5 page)

“I cannot match Mister Grady's oratory, so I will try to stick with simple facts,” he said in an accent too clipped and swift to be local. “The exposition opens in two days. We expected crowds of thousands for our preview days; our total attendance has been just over one hundred. Our subscription of stock has been excellent, but our revenues may never earn out that money. We will need to keep the exposition open for a year at this rate if we hope to break even. We are at present nearly a quarter of a million dollars in debt.”

There were murmurs of assent mixed with a general grumbling of disagreement. Grady rolled his eyes. “A year!” someone cried. “Sit down, Greenberg.”

Greenberg nodded and looked down at his plate as it was replaced, silently, by one of the waiters.

“I will sit down. But first may I remind you of the Greek myth of Atalanta, one of our city's namesakes?”

Someone groaned, but Greenberg pressed on. “Do you remember it, gentlemen? As the Greeks tell it, she was known for her speed. But she was defeated in a race when three golden apples were thrown at her feet and she stopped to gather them up. Three golden apples—a distraction that drew her from her main purpose. Have we committed our Atlanta to a similar fate?”

Greenburg seemed shocked by the sudden silence that greeted his question. Canby knew then that the man must indeed be a late arrival to Atlanta, for since his own childhood he had been raised among a tacit but bedrock understanding that disparaging capital in Atlanta was anathema. He saw that
Vernon was looking at Greenberg almost sadly. Billingsley's expression was inscrutable.

Greenberg pushed his spectacles up on his nose. “What I mean to say, gentlemen, is that we have perhaps overreached with this project. Think of the terrible toll if our venture fails. Why must we insist on competing with older and more established cities? Do we aim to become the next Boston, the next New York?”

But Greenberg's voice was drowned out as the room burst into violent debate, with Grady trying in vain to quiet the men. The uproar continued through the main course of venison and pheasant, diminished only slightly over the cheeses and ices, and then carried on through the last of the desserts. Nothing was resolved.

“W
E SHOULD HAVE
given that Jew the bum's rush,” Senator Gordon said as he cut the end off a cigar. “Who invited him, anyway?”

“I did,” Grady said, looking for once a bit sheepish. “Greenberg opened the new pencil factory on South Forsyth Street, John. The Georgia Pencil Company. He's going to be a prominent citizen, like it or not.”

Canby studied the faces of the men seated about the small round table. In the long minutes since the parlor's paneled pocket doors had been pulled shut by the last of the waiters the room had begun to fill with clouds of cigarette and cigar smoke—and worse, with the backroom talk of men accustomed
to making decisions by secret quorums such as this one that would effect thousands. Canby decided he had sat among the members of the Ring for as long as he could without speaking.

“Where's he from?” he asked.

Grady looked at him directly for the first time. “Brooklyn, New York, originally. He spent the last few years in England learning the manufacturing trade.”

“Another fairly recent arrival, then. Like yourself.”

“I've always said that if a man has ability, Atlantans do not care if he was hatched in a stump. But no, Mister Canby, Leon Greenberg cannot claim an Atlanta raising, like you. He is, rather, someone who has come and
stayed
.”

“I would have stayed,” Canby said, hearing his voice trail off. “Perhaps you'll drive him off, too, in time.”

“Gentlemen,” Billingsley said, his voice conciliatory, “what's past is past. Our interest is in the present, and the future.” He leaned over his crossed leg to snub his cigarette out in an ashtray on the table and nodded to Hannibal Kimball.

“Mister Canby, as director general of the Cotton Exposition, I thank you for accepting this assignment,” Kimball said, “and I give you my personal assurance that the members of the Ring will compensate you generously for your time and expenses.” He slid a key across the table to Canby. “That is for your suite at the Kimball House, sir. A sixth-floor penthouse. All expenses will be handled by me personally.”

Canby looked to Vernon. “Will I not be back on the city's force?”

“None of this is on the city,” Vernon said. “You're off the books.”

“We want this handled as expeditiously as possible, Mister Canby,” Kimball said. “Chief Thompson has fashioned the title of special inspector for you. He tells me there is no precedent for such a position on the force, so you will have carte blanche as to how you proceed. But your progress must be, as I said, expeditious.

“The concerns voiced by Mister Greenberg this evening are legitimate. The exposition is in dire straits. Men stand to be ruined if attendance is not robust. I have invited the governors of every state in the Union to attend for a day in November, and as Grady said, General Sherman has indicated that he might join us as well. Those will help, but they are weeks away. And they will do precious little if word spreads that we have some kind of maniac at large in the city. Already the Negro community is in an uproar. There are intimations that they will not support the exposition so long as these crimes remain unsolved.”

“Hang the niggers,” Gordon said. “It was foolish to count on them in the first place. What Negro would pay to see a cotton exposition after he's been picking it all day?”

“Regardless,” Kimball said, “we are in a delicate situation that must be resolved.”

“Mister Grady has agreed to cooperate fully in his coverage of your investigation,” Billingsley said. “Care will be taken in how this affair reaches the public's eye.”

Canby smiled at Grady, who seemed suddenly engrossed by a pattern on the table's surface.

“I have your word on that? No meddling?”

Grady scowled. “None. But I'm on record as saying you're not the man for the job.”

“Hell, yes. I second that,” Gordon said, looking around the table. “This man served in the goddamned Union army!” Gordon turned his fierce face to Canby. “I mean no personal insult, sir.”

Vernon stood and put a hand on Canby's shoulder. “I vouch for Canby. He will see this through.”

“Damn it, Billingsley,” Gordon said, craning his neck toward the older man, “you were there with us at Gettysburg! I can handle reconciliation so far, but—”

Billingsley's eyes were clear through the smoke as he leveled them on Gordon. “I was there, and I saw blue dead on the field as well as gray. Let the dead bury their dead, I say. This matter has already been decided.”

“Indeed, it has,” Kimball said, rising wearily from his chair. “Business is business. And this is big business.” He nodded to the men around the table. “Gentlemen, good night. Mister Canby, good luck. Atlanta has placed her trust in you.”

The others stood, too, and began to file out of the paneled doors, hands on each others' shoulders, voices sliding easily back into the tone of cultivated banter common to Atlanta's men of means, as though there had been no tension in the meeting, as though the success of this and every future venture were ultimately assured.

As he followed Vernon out of the smoky room, Canby could already feel it—the sense of being carried on a tide to a destination beyond his choosing. It was, at its core, the same feeling he'd had through his time in the army: the sense of being propelled into another action by the wills of men removed from
the fray, who would never be touched by the dirty work of its execution. That these men chose to give it a name as benign as the Atlanta Spirit did not change the nature of the tide. He knew that by any name, it was power. And that its undercurrents were ruthless.

October 4

T
HE MORNING SUN SHONE INTO THE VALLEYS
between the buildings of downtown, glowing brightly on the window glass as it crept down the stories toward the street vendors setting up their wares on the board sidewalks. Canby watched the inching progress of the light from his penthouse window, trying to take in every detail of the city. From the top floor of the Kimball House he could see nearly out to Kennesaw Mountain, and from there and from every cardinal point of the compass he could see railroad tracks emerging in the distance and winding their way down through the hills toward Atlanta, light glinting off the hard-polished steel of the rails. Terminus had been the city's original name, because all the rail lines ended here. Even the streets, in their motley arrangement that defied the grid of city blocks he'd seen in other towns, followed the rail lines in a crooked, crosshatched patchwork of lines. And all the lines met in the building across Pryor Street from the hotel, in the roundhouse where they terminated in a convergence of metal that marked the city's center, its heart.

He liked Atlanta best in this light, the morning light that promised bustle and energy, hope for the day. It was the light that had greeted him and Angus each morning as they walked down Whitehall Street to open his father's little school. Angus would throw open the school doors and light the woodstove as Canby washed clean the slate board and they readied for the arrival of Angus's pupils, the day's work waiting to begin. In the early morning, in Atlanta, one felt that all things were possible.

He had not felt such promise last night, riding in from Decatur. Stone Mountain had loomed like a wall of iron off to their east, its vast face glowing dull gray in the moonlight. Canby had turned the conversation back to the new detective, the black man. Vernon's great experiment, or else gamble. A striver, Vernon called him, who scrimped his janitor's pay for tuition at Atlanta University, taking a class or two as often as he could manage. The son of slaves and born one himself, but ambitious: the type that might have a long-simmering resentment for the likes of Alonzo Lewis or L. J. Dempsey.

“You've helped him along quite a bit in that regard, haven't you?” Canby had asked. “You gave him a hell of a promotion.”

“Indeed. He is the first of his kind. We'll turn up the heat on that kettle and see if it boils.”

“
If
he's the killer.”

Vernon had lowered his hat over his face and leaned farther back in his seat. “If he's not,” Vernon said, “he'll make a hell of a decoy, won't he?”

Then Vernon had dozed, letting the champagne and the rocking of the hansom take their effect on him, leaving Canby to muse over what kind of black man might inflict such ruinous
violence on two of his own. It struck him that what Vernon took for gut instinct could well be nothing more than ingrained prejudice. In Vernon's early years in the department, the officers were paid for each arrest they made. You did not need a crystal ball to guess which section of the segregated jail stayed the fullest in those days.

Then, as they crested the last rise of the Decatur road and headed down into town, Canby had watched the lights of smokestacks coughing soot and fire into the night, seen the sign at the city limits that read
WELCOME TO ATLANTA. WE HOPE YOU
'
LL STAY AWHILE
. Vernon had stirred when the horses' hooves began to clatter once the road gave way from dirt to macadam. Gaslights began to appear, flickering atop their poles along one side of the street.

Canby turned from the window at the sound of a knock on the door. It was nearly a morning's walk from one end of the suite to another, he thought, as the knock came again. His feet seemed to sink into the thick Brussels carpet as he picked his way around one piece of walnut furniture after another toward the door. When he opened it, the heavy door swung smoothly on its brass hinges.

A black man perhaps ten years his junior stood in the doorway, dressed in a simple suit of sage linen and with a matching hat held across his chest.

“Cyrus Underwood, sir,” the man said, nodding.

Canby studied him for a moment, noted the smoothness of his cheeks, the cast of his eyes. Gauging whether they held any of what he had come to call the night sickness in them. Then he held out a hand. Underwood took it, uncomfortably.

“Come in, then.”

“Can't come in the room, sir. Rooms in Kimball House are whites-only.”

“Horseshit. Come in and wait while I get myself together.”

Underwood stepped into the room, looking it over as he shut the door behind him. His eyes lingered for a moment on the sheet draped across the sofa where Canby had slept and on the pistols laid out on the coffee table in front of it. He watched as Canby strapped the holster holding his .32 Bulldog revolver across his chest, then pulled up his left pants leg and fitted a Colt's New Line pocket revolver into his boot.

“How many do you carry?” Canby asked.

Underwood shook his head. “They haven't issued me a sidearm yet, sir.”

Canby paused in pulling his jacket over his shoulders. “You have a badge, don't you?”