Byzantium (20 page)

When questioned on the subject, Burke would chuckle—a chuckle that stirred shivers in the listener, the reporters wrote—and say his greatest case was yet before him.

The Attempts on His Life

We know of three serious attempts made on Burke’s life.

The first came one evening while he was leaving a theater. A man ran up to him and stabbed at him with a dagger. The attacker missed, the blade passing through Burke’s coat, and was overpowered by a policeman. Burke identified him as Dr. Mildenberger, a government scientist who’d been ruined when the detective uncovered the Mosquito Ring’s plot to steal the war ministry’s supply of quinine.

Then the Black Lion, a band of anarchists that Burke had foiled multiple times, caught him halfway up the Siegess äule and shot at him. He escaped with only a slight wound.

In the third attempt, an assassin working for a consortium of villains—perhaps Bloch, though the connection was never firmly made—snuck into Burke’s rooms with the intention of garroting him in his sleep. The assassin got lost in the halls, and as he wandered from room to room Burke crept up behind him and stuck him with a blow dart from his collection, putting him instantly to sleep.

Doubtless there were more, but they have not been recorded. Once, when asked about the attempts, Burke said he did not mind. “Let them come. Very well. But they mustn’t touch—” At that he broke off. When pressed, he refused to say anything else, though it is generally agreed he was referring to the harrowing events of the Schott Affair, which had passed just months before.

The Schott Affair

Aside from the gossip at Wiesbaden, the only other specific mention of Olivia Ashdown in Burke’s history—and perhaps the greatest evidence of his love for her—comes in the middle of his investigation of the murder of the mirror magnate Johannes Schott. In 1893 Schott invited his family, as well as Burke and several old army friends, to his country mansion to celebrate his birthday weekend. But just before the first night’s dinner, Schott was found stilettoed in his study. At Burke’s insistence the police sealed the mansion while he examined the rooms and conducted interviews, and by the next morning he had discovered Schott’s son’s gambling debts, his valet’s true identity (he was Schott’s nephew), and a suspicious ash pile in the garden. Burke was about to question the rest of the staff when he received an unsigned telegram. To the consternation of the police and the papers, Burke fled to Bad Kreuznach.

There, the telegram had told him, Olivia—later identified by the papers as “an unknown woman”—lay dying. She had been poisoned, and as the doctors treated her, Burke contributed his knowledge of antidotes. The toxin was rare, taken from the back of a Borneo toad, and, despite the telegram’s warning, she had not been given a lethal dose. Once Olivia was beyond danger, Burke returned to the Schott mansion. Within an hour he identified the murderer as Schott’s wife, and as he questioned her she confirmed his suspicions, confessing she had arranged Olivia’s poisoning with the hope of stopping him. When Burke asked how she knew of his love, she answered, “I have a friend.” Scarcely before the last word had passed from her lips, she fell back in her chair and a bottle of prussic acid, which she must have emptied when she heard Burke’s steps outside her door, rolled from her hand.

The identity of Frau Schott’s “friend” remains unknown. Some hold that it was Bloch, that he had stepped briefly out of retirement to give Frau Schott the plan, merely to unnerve Burke. Others believe Frau Schott was a secret devotee of the Reverend Stöcker, who, along with his attacks on Jews, had begun deriding the government’s reliance on “this trained ape in man’s clothes.” At any rate, Burke’s love for Olivia had become known to the criminal world, and now he had to choose between her and his profession. He endangered her, and she made him vulnerable: any fiend who wished to thwart him need only threaten Olivia. His decision seems clear. After the Schott Affair, the record of his cases contains no more false entries of jewel thefts in spa towns.

Des Mohren Dilemma

Not long after the Schott Affair, Burke received perhaps his highest honor. In the winter of 1894, an opera inspired by his career, Otto Hussner’s
Des Mohren Dilemma,
opened in Berlin. Set in seventeenth-century Rome,
Des Mohren Dilemma
intertwines a detective, Burccino, with the fate of two unfortunate lovers, Alberto and Francesca. At first Burccino rebuffs their entreaties for help. By the opera’s end he rushes to save them, only to find he is too late.

Two anecdotes survive from the opera’s run. The first occurred during the second intermission on the opera’s opening night, after Burccino has unknowingly aided the villain in his plot to divide the lovers. Burke was smoking in the salon, chatting with Prince von Ysenburg and a stoop-shouldered general, when a drunk Junker in a lancer’s uniform accosted him. “You fool!” the Junker cried as he tottered up to him, taking hold of Burke’s sleeve and scowling. “How could you? Those poor young things. How could you? Fool!”

All in the salon turned toward them, and for a moment Burke was startled. Then, he smiled and said, “I’ve been asking the same question. I find this Burccino rather blind.” The strained moment passed—the Junker, swaying on his feet, was pulled away by his friends—and received only a slight notice in the papers. And yet is this incident not a brief foreshadowing of what was to come?

The second anecdote concerns Burke’s reaction to the opera itself, which he attended every night of its run. His constant presence became a piece of Berlin gossip; those in the audience noted that he always wept during Burccino’s first aria, after Burccino refuses the lovers and laments that he was not fashioned for love but reason alone.

The Last Months

The next year, Burke worked with a frantic brilliance, crisscrossing the Continent, completing investigations in the span of hours, sometimes minutes. Stolen pearls in Nîmes followed by poisoned bread in Königsberg, blackmail in Prague followed by a kidnapping in Utrecht, counterfeiters in Worms followed by a druidic murder at Rügen. He turned nothing down, allowed himself no rest. For the first time since the Case of the Murdered Twin, he tracked lost dogs and followed adulterers. Observers noticed a sharp change in his behavior. He didn’t smile. He was cruel to waiters, short with clients, dour with reporters. He ignored invitations to the Imperial Palace, and was cited twice for drunkenness, once for horsewhipping a prostitute. Except for the tinge of desperation that infused his labors, one might consider this period a florescence. It was as if he knew.

The Folsch Scandal

On December 5, 1895, the war minister visited Fasanenstrasse and disclosed to Burke a grave predicament. He had made a secret bargain with Russia: in exchange for three thousand Folsch rifles (whose precision was unmatched), the czar would quietly transfer a strip of land along the China Sea to German hands. But the rifles had been stolen in transit, and the czar’s minister was furious, accusing the Germans of duplicity. Were the rifles not recovered, an international crisis would be unavoidable.

That evening Burke traveled to the far edge of Silesia, the site of the theft, and once there followed a set of subtle clues (specks of foreign soil in the snow, a dropped button, a twisted leaf ) south and west across the Austrian frontier. At Pressburg he cabled the minister that he was certain the thieves were traveling by river barge. But the next day the minister received a disturbing report. He’d sent several of his own agents to aid Burke. They’d taken rooms for the night in a tavern, and when they called on Burke in the morning they found he was gone. His night candle was burned to a nub, unreadable notes and sketches lay scattered on his table, and his bed was unused, his small traveling bag still beside it, unpacked. There was no sign of a struggle, and the agents hoped Burke had simply taken a morning stroll to order his thoughts. But with each passing hour they knew: wherever he was and however he got there, he was already far away and would not be returning. The minister confined himself to his office and sent a barrage of conciliatory telegrams to the Russians while he awaited more news from his men, whom he’d ordered to search the riverbanks for Burke’s corpse.

Then, three days later, Burke turned up in Istanbul. He was found by an Armenian dockworker in the hold of a barge. His mouth was gagged, he was tied to a chair, and the rifles were stacked behind him. On his lap lay a note: “To the Ottoman Government, with my Compliments—Bloch.”

What happened next is at the same time baffling and inevitable. The papers accused Burke of treason—an accusation the minister encouraged, as it distracted from his own role in the blunder—and the people swiftly followed, hurtling rage at one who, not a week before, they had adored. Was it his color? Or that, so used to his successes, they could not understand his failure, could only interpret it as treachery? They said he had organized the theft of the rifles and planned all along to deliver them to the Turks. The
Berliner Kurier
claimed that for years Burke had been a secret agent of the Sublime Porte, that in exchange for the rifles he was promised a principality of his own and a fully stocked harem. They printed a cartoon of him dancing for the kaiser while in the background Sultan Abdul Hamid laughed. The
Münchner Telegraf
wrote that his brutish nature had finally overtaken him, that his being tied to a chair was a cheap ruse. The
Zeitung
interviewed Police Commandant Fuchs, who assured reporters there was no secret archfiend Bloch and excused Burke’s claims otherwise as the delusions of an overstrained mind, while the
Frankfurter Abendblatt
opined that it was natural that the Moor should help the Ottomans. They referred to his duskiness, and to the blood of southern climes coursing through his veins.

When Burke returned to Berlin—the Turks kept the rifles but sent him back—angry crowds gathered beneath his windows in Fasanenstrasse, calling for his expulsion. He refused to defend himself, said nothing of how he’d been caught or what had occurred during the three days of his disappearance. Within a week he was confined, for his safety, to a cell in a police station near the Ostbahnhof, where he received news of each fresh development—that a mob had rushed into his apartment, overturning the shelves of soils; that the Moor Clubs had been swiftly disbanded; that, at the Reverend Stöcker’s urging, people across the empire were building bonfires and burning the albums they’d filled with photographs and clippings of his adventures—with a stoic acceptance.

But by the time he was delivered to the French border, he was visibly broken: meek as an invalid, given to shaking. Our only record of him at this moment comes from the diary of a Sergeant Heinz. Not one of the newspapers sent a reporter, interest in the scandal having been swept aside by a suicide pact that had claimed a member of the general staff and a junior officer’s wife. When Burke’s guards let him go, he walked into the Belfort Gap and out of history. Some believe he settled in Tunis, others that he became a hotel detective in New York, but no one knows for sure.

The Final Mystery

Burke’s life and career give rise to hundreds of unanswered questions, but, so many decades after, perhaps most vexing of all is the matter of those three days on the Danube. His complete silence on the subject has divided the followers of his career into two hostile camps. The first holds that everything is as it appears. Bloch trapped him. The villain’s vanishing had been a ploy, giving him years to plot Burke’s downfall. He planned every detail, foresaw every effect—even how signing his name on the note would only stoke the people’s doubts. The proponents of this theory say it was only a matter of time, that even one of Burke’s intellect must someday stumble. To pretend he couldn’t, they claim, denies him the hallmark of humanity and puts any doubter in line with those who turned against him. He might have recovered from the scandal, they say, were he not a black man.

But others find this account laughable, call the appeal to humanity so much posturing, and counter that in ascribing such foresight to Bloch we rob Burke of any. They grant Bloch his scheme but argue that Burke would have been too clever to play into the fiend’s hands. Noting his erratic behavior in the months leading up to the scandal, they suggest Burke wanted to retire. Knowing there would be constant demands for his return, that only if he were disgraced would he be left alone, he made perhaps the cleverest move of his career: he walked willingly into Bloch’s trap, understanding all that would happen and seeing in it freedom.

There’s no way of knowing what happened during those three days, how Burke came to be tied up in the barge’s hold, and so we’re forced to choose blindly between the two theories, the choice becoming less about the truth and more about the Burke the chooser prefers. But doesn’t an opportunity lie in the absence of fact? That is why, taking elements of the second theory, we propose a third, one we’ve never shared: after Olivia’s poisoning, forced to decide between her and his career, Burke chose as he should have—he chose love. At Olivia’s bedside in Bad Kreuznach he plotted their retreat from the world, crafting the scandal—there was no Bloch on the barge, Burke arranged the theft of the rifles himself—not to aid the Turks but to ensure his fall. Only then would they be left alone to live out their years in peace and contentment, perhaps in the French countryside, perhaps on some Greek isle. There’s no evidence, of course. The decision he made after Bad Kreuznach appears plain, as do its consequences. But as long as we don’t know his end, why not grant him this last happiness? After all, where does history exist, except in our imagination? Does that make it any less true?

The stories in this collection were originally published in the following:

“Byzantium” in
Electric Literature;
“East Texas Lumber” in
Harper’s;
“The Don’s Cinnamon” in the
Antioch Review
and
Best American Mystery Stories 2013;
“Borden’s Meat Biscuit” in
Subtropics;
“The Traitor of Zion” in
Ecotone;
“Eraser” in
One Story
and
New Stories from the South 2010: The Year’s Best;
“At Boquillas” in
The American Scholar;
“Tayopa” and “The Moor” in
Boston Review;
and “Amy” in the
Literary Review.

Thanks to: The University of Michigan Hopwood Prizes, the University of Toledo’s URAF Summer Research Award, the MacDowell Colony, the Corporation of Yaddo, Helen Herzog Zell, my MFA classmates and teachers, Jin Auh, Jacqueline Ko, Steve Woodward, and the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference.