Not Quite Dead (39 page)

“I do not understand what you mean,” said O’Reilly, now certain that he had been betrayed by Devlin.

“According to his wife, Mr. Dickens’s eye was hazel in color. The eye you sent the councilman was blue. Therefore, I have hope that he still has his two eyes.”

“I have never read Dickens,” replied O’Reilly.

“Yet you have him here on the property, do you not?”

“I have not kept track of the books in my library,” replied O’Reilly, baring amber teeth, the front ones missing.

“To hold a man against his will is a criminal offense, sir. As an officer of Philadelphia County I must arrest you on a charge of kidnapping.”

“Kidnapping is a hanging offense, sor.”

“That is so.”

“I am not certain of your investigation, Inspector, and I put little faith in your deputies.” O’Reilly scratched his chin delicately with the long nail of his little finger.

“Nor I yours,” replied Shadduck. “Respectable fellers do not hire children in their defense.”

“My lads are well paid and well fed and fully under my command. Can you say the same, sor?”

“I don’t have to, sir. My aim is not to capture enemy territory but to enforce the law of the land.”

“An interesting distinction.” “To be sure.

“You were a cavalry officer yourself, Inspector Shadduck. You have experience in the field. Surely you are not counting on this pack of wolves for support. As their commanding officer, do you even know their names?”

O’Reilly had pegged Shadduck on that one, for the inspector did not know a single one of their names.
An officer who doesn’t know his men
. Is that what he had become?

“We are civilians now, sir,” said the inspector. “I suspicion you have noticed there is a difference between war and peace.”

“No, sor. Or if there is a difference, it is a subtle one.”

With the grace of an athlete, O’Reilly vaulted the stone wall on the balance of one hand; in doing so his duster coat opened and Shadduck could see the markings of an infantryman.

“We are officers and gentlemen, sor,” continued O’Reilly, stepping forward. “And it will always be so. Might it be a more pleasant affair for all concerned if we were to keep it between ourselves?”

“I am not here to fight a skirmish with your men, sir. I am here to place you under arrest.”

“Surely we two have seen enough young blood for one lifetime,” said O’Reilly, then held aloft his cudgel with the notches in the stem. “Do you know what this is?” he asked.

“I do, sir. It is what you people call a
shillelagh
.”

“You pronounce it well. It is made for the Whiskey Dance. A grand thing is the Whiskey Dance.”

“What are you leading to, sir? I do not understand what you are suggesting.”

“A fight between champions, sor. It is a grand tradition among my people. And yours too, with your gunfighters in the West.”

“Only a fool takes up an unfamiliar weapon, sir. It is a poor gardener who does not know his rake.”

“Come, sor. You have taken saber training for certain.”

“I was an officer in the cavalry, it is true.”

“There we are then. For certain the two are nearly the same, if you go to that of it. Indeed, the saber-trained fighter has an advantage. Being infantry I have only bayonet and marksman training, and that will offer no help with the
bhata.”

“You are barking at the moon, Mr. O’Reilly. I will not be goaded into fighting you on your own terms.”

O’Reilly turned to the worn-looking little fellow now seated on the wall nearby. “What do you think, Ned? Do you think our man is to be
goaded?”

In place of a reply, Ned took out a pistol and aimed it directly at Shadduck’s chest. By the way he held the weapon it was clear that he was comfortable with it. At the present distance he had an excellent chance.

“This young gentleman is known as Pistol Ned,” said O’Reilly, as though he were introducing his son. “A young man of rare accomplishment. It is said that he shot a man in the throat from, oh, about your distance—at the age of six.”

Shadduck said nothing.
Let the other person talk. You never know what he might tell you
.

“Come now, Inspector Shadduck,” said O’Reilly, as though disappointed. “Your silence disappoints me. To enjoy the Whiskey Dance, you must enter fully into the form and the ritual of it. Let me begin, sor. Now is the moment when I address the cock of the tin:
Is that Captain Shadduck? Is that the cock of the tin?”

So saying, O’Reilly nodded behind him and one of the
Na Coisan-toiri
threw a cudgel over the wall that landed at Shadduck’s feet.

Shadduck quickly picked up the weapon, at which signal the
Na Coisantoiri
began to rap their cudgels rhythmically against the stone wall like savages (which they resembled with the marks on their faces), making a sound like a herd of tiny horses galloping down a cobblestone road. For his part, O’Reilly began a strange little dance, a sort of jig, while he shouted traditional insults at the inspector, to huzzas from his boys.

“May the devil cut the head off you and make a day’s work of your neck!”

Huzzah!

“May the seven terriers of hell sit on the spool of your breast, and chase you over the hills of Damnation!

Huzzah!

“And the curse of Crumble to you!”

Huzzah!

“The treatment of the boiled broken little fish to you!”

Huzzah!

O’Reilly cut the distance between them in half, while the troops
on both sides watched carefully. He cut a graceful figure, holding his
bhata
as though it were an extension of his arm and fist, feet moving rhythmically forward and back, ready for the strike.

Shadduck abruptly dropped his cudgel, pulled out the Texas Pa-terson from his trouser belt, and shot O’Reilly in the face.

O’Reilly hit the ground on his back, dead already, as though he had been struck down by the hand of God.

P
UTNAM AND
I eased our way up the narrow, ill-lit, evil-smelling stairway to a door behind which we could hear muffled shouts and the sound of feet. Already my heart was racing over the deed I was about to undertake. I thought, if there is anything more stressful than to murder, it is waiting to murder. It would be ironic at the least were I to take a fit and die over the prospect of killing Eddie.

At the top of the stairway, Putnam stopped and turned in my direction; looming over me in the darkness. For the first time he appeared not as the gauche dandy but as something quite different—thanks, probably, to the enormous weapon he carried in his fist.

“I suggest you stay behind me at all times, sir,” he said, and immediately burst through the door.

I took out my pistol and stepped into a room with many beds, like a hospital ward. Putnam stood with his back to me, seemingly frozen to the spot, watching two men fight a duel, sword against spike. I recognized Eddie’s sword as having come from the walking stick he took into the hospital, seemingly ages ago. His opponent was the young man with blue eyes, and with blood covering one side of his face.

With one foot forward and his sword at full extension, Poe was able to keep his wiry young opponent on the defensive and off-balance; evidently his saber training had held, somewhat. Meanwhile, by a table covered with writing materials stood a pale, worried-looking man in a soiled bottle-green coat and a mustard waistcoat, nervously smoking a cigarette.

“Willie!” cried Eddie when I came into view. “Dear God, what a friend you are!”

“Yes, Eddie,” I replied. “We are friends for life.” Then I lifted my pistol, aimed it at his chest, and fired—and in that moment our eyes
met, and I was certain that he knew all that he had done to me, and how much I hated him for it.

But I missed.

The bullet sailed through the air and shattered a window at the other end of the room. I did not have access to another round.

“Jesus Christ!” cried Putnam, nearly deafened by the blast, as the young man with what appeared to be a spike in his hand momentarily turned in my direction—and Eddie took advantage of the opening to execute a lunge.

With a sigh, the young man looked down at the spreading stain on his shirt beneath the rib cage, then sat on the floor, legs spread out like a toddler, while the dark-haired woman crouched in the corner let out a howl like an animal.

P
ISTOL
N
ED AIMED
his weapon straight at Shadduck’s chest. The inspector’s Paterson did likewise, but the contest was not equal, for the boy made a smaller target, just a head and shoulders behind the wall.

“Don’t do it, Ned,” he said. “If you hit the mark, you will be hanged for it. If you miss, you will be shot. These fellers need you. The lieutenant is finished. You are their leader now.” Shadduck’s voice took on an almost singsong tone, as though to appeal to whatever was left of the child in him.

Ned’s careworn expression did not change. Shadduck heard the snick of a hammer pulled back. In his peripheral vision he saw top hats appear over the wall, like young aristocrats observing a boxing match or a hanging.

“The Daybreak Boys you were once called, is it so?” continued Shadduck. “And I reckon that is what you are now. You are not an Irishman, Pistol Ned. Nor are your men. You are an American, and you are a leader of Americans, and you have no business hanging for a foreign country.”

A long, deliberate pause followed. Even the True Blue Americans behind him had fallen silent. Then Shadduck heard the snick of Ned’s hammer, and the shaver pulled back his pistol. Momentarily catching Shadduck’s eye, he nodded briskly, then disappeared behind the wall. Shadduck returned the Paterson to his belt, took a deep
breath, and lit a cheroot. He was thinking, Pistol Ned is a sharp young feller, with a future. A useful informant, as well.

Assured that any danger to himself was past, Smit appeared beside Shadduck in the clearing to offer congratulations. “Sure, and that was a very close scrape, sir.”

“Not especially,” replied Shadduck.

I
N A SITUATION
of chaos, a man reverts to habit. In this case, I attended to the wounded Irishman.

“Will he die?” asked the pale woman with the French accent as she knelt beside me.

“The puncture did not appear to have pierced an organ. With pressure maintained on the wound he will take a while to bleed to death. As for the head wound, it will not heal unless it is sewn.”

“We must take him away from here. You will help me.”

“Madam, why on earth would I do such a thing?”

“Because that is how you will ever again see your wife. You wish her alive,
n’est pas?”

In my peripheral vision the tip of Poe’s sword appeared. “You tried to shoot me, Willie,” he said, with more than a note of hurt.

“You were already dead, Eddie. I thought it best for everyone that you remain so.”

“It concerns Elmira, does it not? It has to do with our engagement. Oh, my dear fellow—”

“It could be any number of issues, Eddie. Such as the fact that they are about to dig up your grave. And we know what they will find, do we not? Remember, it is not your signature on the death certificate, Eddie, it is mine. I am the criminal, not you.”

“Oh dear. I had not thought of that.”

“My life is over, Eddie, thanks to you. All I ask is that you do not turn this into one of your little vignettes of jealousy and revenge and horror. If there is one thing I beg of you, Eddie, please do not write about me and put me in a damn magazine.”

Poe seemed momentarily at a loss for words. As far as he was concerned, I was supposedly his best friend in the world, and, therefore, the best friend of his genius. If anyone would want to save his
literary reputation, at whatever cost, surely it would be his friend Willie.

That is how self-centered a poet can become; like an open nerve when dealing in his own. sensibilities, while utterly incapable of imagining what it might be like to be somebody else.

Another pair of legs appeared beside me, in a pair of soiled green trousers. “If you will excuse me, sir, my name is Charles Dickens, and I believe Mr. Poe saved my life a moment ago. As an Englishman I will defend him to the death if need be.”

“Am I dying?” asked the young man on the floor, who was only partially awake.

“You are coming with me,” Sister Genoux hissed into my ear. “You are going to help. Or I swear to you that you will never see your wife alive.”

T
HE TWO POLICEMAN
remained standing by Lieutenant O’Reilly’s corpse while the covered wagon containing Pistol Ned and the Daybreak Boys rumbled out of the compound and down the drive on their way back to Moyamensing.

“Sure, they are bad members and will be trouble,” said Smit, pursing his lips and shaking his head in a way that reminded Shadduck of a rooster on alert.

“I reckon we’ll have some of them fellers on the force one day,” he said.

“Inspector, it is shameful the way you joke about things sometimes.”

O’Reilly’s corpse lay flat on its back, arms spread like Jesus, eyes wide open, an expression of surprise in one, and with a hole in the center of his face mouthing a silent
o
. Looking at the empty socket, in his imagination Inspector Shadduck saw a faint glow, like the last coal in the hearth to die.

Fire!

For a veteran there is no more alarming word in the language, even from a distance. Shadduck wheeled around and dropped to one knee, half-expecting a bullet in the back. Instead, he saw pot-hatted men beneath their half-dead torches, sharing bottles of whiskey and smoking.

“Who gave that order?” he shouted. “Who gave an order to fire?”

Smit took Shadduck’s arm and helped him to his feet. “Sir, it was not an order,” he said. “It is a fire.”

F
OR THE SECOND
time in our lives, Eddie and I found ourselves on either end of a stretcher containing the inert body of a stranger. Devlin was much heavier than his predecessor, being alive.

On this occasion, Eddie held the rear position, which I preferred because it spared me having to look at him. “I didn’t mean to ruin your life, Willie,” he said. “Why would I want to do such a thing?”