The Night Inspector (31 page)

As we did again, in hours, I reckoned, although I hadn’t the opportunity to consult my watch. They hammered at the door, and I was up, having barely gone to bed.

“Fire,” the man seemed to say, and I ducked my head and slid, crouching, to the floor, as I expected a volley of shots. I realized soon enough, of course, that the voice was not commanding someone to shoot me, but had cried a warning.

“Fire!” the voice called once more. And then I heard the hammering of fists upon neighboring doors, and, of a sudden, the Old Brewery, huge and dark and leaning, stinking of yeast and the intimacies of too many bodies, and made of old, alcohol-soaked wood, and ready as a wick to be lit, began to shudder.
“Fire!”
the fellow cried louder. There was a set of stairs nearby that ran to the roof from the ground, passing my door, and I could hear the terrified inhabitants of the upper floors as they poured from their tinderbox rooms and fled downstairs. I heard people cry out as they were trampled, and of course the small children began to shriek their terror.

I did not retrieve my pistol from the heap of my clothing at the side of the cot, nor did I bother to fetch anything with me except the keys to my Broadway office.

“Fire!” the man in the hallway called again, his voice mingling with the roars of the panicking mob.

I took up my cudgel, thinking that I might be required to pry my way into those who sought escape or blocked the way.

I sniffed at the edges of the door, and surely I did smell something powerful yet familiar, and with a tinge to it of flame or hot wax. Without thinking further—and that’s always the end of your luck, isn’t it?—I undid the lock, barely stepping back in time to avoid being struck as the door swung violently in. They were, of course, the threesome from the alley, Angels, as they were called by some, devils, as they were named by the whores upstairs, but men, at any rate, who were desperate to stay out of prison, and who knew how to see to themselves. The fleeing tenants poured through them, but they held their place until the one with the red bandana pushed me backward, and I stumbled but kept to my feet, backing up as they entered, waiting as they closed my door against rescue. I hefted the persuader. He showed me his stubby-barreled pistol. The other two seemed not to be armed, although the little one-eyed fellow in the stovepipe hat kept patting his suit coat at his heart, as if to remind me that he was but an arm’s thrust away from a gun. He carried a squat miner’s candle, which was set, on his open left palm, in a pool of its own drippings. The flickering light was sufficient for us to see one another and, I suspected, for me, as was usual in such events, to see best. To them the room was a shifting of light and dark shadows, while for me it was merely a darker version of a dark or foggy day.

The dirtiest of them, whom I had encountered first, said, “What’d you do to your face?”

“He took his veil off,” the armed one said.

“No,” the first one said. “It ain’t a face. He put a mask on.”

“Why do you not take off yours?” I suggested. “We can all be naked-faced and ugly together.”

“Why do you not find us your pocketbook and your gemstones?” asked the one with the pistol.

“In this place? Gemstones? What makes you think I can procure money?”

The gunman said, “A man who has a ship has money.”

“I said I knew a ship. I do not own one.”

“In my life, mister, you’re as good as an owner. But we don’t want your ship. We have one coming in. We want for cash. We need meanwhile-money. While the boat comes up the coast. Food, weapons, clothes.”

“Your clothing smells like a house afire. That is how you duped me.”

“A fire can still be arranged,” the other tall one said.

The little one, an animated candle stand with one ear and one eye, slapped his pocket and arched his small brows at me. His face, in the light of his candle, was seamed deeply, figured in cross-hatchings that his difficult life had etched upon him.

I swung the shovel haft with all my strength at the man with the snub-nosed pistol. I had intended to hit him at the junction of the elbow and forearm, for I knew that to be struck there sharply was to go so numb as to become unable to aim or fire a gun. I missed the elbow and hit him on the upper arm, but with great force, and I could have sworn I heard the bone crack. He howled, and I struck the arm again. He dropped the pistol, and I reached for it. But the little fellow, by then, had come forward, dropping the candle, which lay guttering while he stabbed with the folding knife he had drawn, no doubt from the pocket above his heart.

Since the blade was stuck through my nightshirt and into my arm, I removed both arm and blade from the little man’s reach, and I swung the haft again, dislodging the knife and spraying my blood across the man who had dropped his pistol as well as the little man whom I struck in the side of the head and rendered unconscious. I retrieved the pistol and I stuck it into its charging owner, for I wanted, even in the heart of the Points, amid the hysterical cries and chatter of the crowd outside, to muffle the shot with his body. The flare of the discharge was obscured and he went down to his knees at once. I scrambled backward, until I
reached the edge of my cot, and aimed the pistol, with unsteady hand and arm, but with the authority of a man who had lived with firearms, at the other tall Swamp Angel, who had been stalled in his place by, I assumed, the suddenness of my violence.

“Come here,” I said to him. He walked toward me as if he were, at once, drunk. “Now halt,” I instructed. He was but a few feet from me, and I did not wish him to become sufficiently emboldened by our proximity to fall upon me. Giving no warning, I swung the shovel haft with my left hand and caught him across the bridge of the nose, which cracked, pouring blood from his nostrils and flooding the flesh around his eyes with interior blood. He, too, went to his knees, cupping his face.

“Excellent,” I said. “Now, the first man who may stand erect will not be shot. Who’s for it?” The fellow with the broken nose moved to make the attempt. So, though he was weakened by the shock of the bullet and by his pain, did the other tall one. I said to the man whose nose I had split, “Take your friends by hand or belt or hair and bring them to their feet.”

He did so, moaning the while, as did the other tall one, who helped him bring the smaller fellow erect, though hardly conscious.

“Now attend. You are businessmen, and you have plied your trade. You take money. I make it, and I keep it; that is
my
trade. So our transaction is over. I would like to hear you agree.” They made liquid, nasal sounds, which I took for assent. “I have no desire to affect your further conduct of business. Is that clear? There’s no profit for me in sending you off to the Tombs. But there’s no profit in your further association with me. Wait in hell for your boat, and then travel on it. Agreed?” They made more sounds.

I said, “Then, good night.”

But I did not lock the door behind them. I felt as though the room was violated, polluted, and that locking it at once was somehow more of a gesture than a deed. So I picked up a broken lamp globe and papers that had been scattered, and I straightened the furniture that had been
tossed about. I poured water into a basin and made an effort to wash my hands and neck and forehead. The cleft near my brow was irritated, as if it had been wounded once more, and I took care to use soap and to lave it well, then gently pat it dry. I was unused to invasion. I was dismayed by feeling vulnerable. I found myself walking in small, tight circles, and they reminded me of the stiff-legged way those men and I, in the alley, earlier, had edged about near one another. I found the mask, on the floor beneath the head of the bed, and I put it on. I sat on the edge of the bed and listened to the rasp of my breathing, the diminishing sounds of the terrified tenants as, little by little, it became a fact that our tenement was not ablaze. With a kerchief, I bound the gash on my arm, the bleeding from which had decreased. I moved then and found clean clothing and, as I stripped myself to put on fresh linen, I held a shirt to my face and breathed in its harsh odor of strong soap, a kind of rough perfume of cleanliness.

It was dawn, and her children slept. She drew aside the curtain to display them in the weak light of the candle she held, yellow-white tallow dripping—I watched it—upon her small, tea-colored hands. The heat from the stove was oppressive in the large room, but the sleeping place seemed slightly cooler, and both Kwang and Ng were under the same white comforter in the narrow bed. Ng’s eyes opened, of a sudden, and I feared for her as she observed us in our study of her.

She narrowed her eyes, and then she closed them.
“Gui,”
she said. Her brother stirred, and they both slept.

Chun Ho stepped back and so did I, and she drew the curtain to. The heat was from the stove, of course, on which she heated water.

“Have you been to sleep?” I asked her.

She shook her head. She wore light-colored trousers and a kind of shirt that clung to her and was darkened with sweat, creating such an intimate appearance that I was both embarrassed and impelled to look more closely at the outlines of her form, and its simultaneous proximity and distance. She smelled of soap and of her own perspiration.

“You must work all night?” I asked.

“Too hot for sleeping. Not sleep, then work.”

“If you didn’t keep the fire going, perhaps you could sleep.”

“But you want bath.”

“That isn’t why the stove is fired, is it?”

She covered her mouth and laughed. “Should be, perhaps. Is not. Not sleeping, so work. Want bath?”

I did not reply. I took off my boots, and then my trousers and my jacket and shirt. I lay my hat upside down on the floor beside my clothing, and in it I placed the Colt .31. She poured the water into the tub, and I took off my mask. I stood where I was, attempting to formulate adequate words for what had possessed my body.

She said, with no expression, and this time looking into my face, “Strong flower.”

I stepped into the tub. She placed the candle on a small gold-and-red lacquered dish upon her table and dipped water from the stove into a heavy, short-handled iron pot, which she carried over. The water she poured upon me was scalding hot in a humid, hot night in the close, steamy room, but it was renewing. I thought my body might glow. Without speaking, she unwrapped the handkerchief about my left forearm, and she pressed it beneath the surface of the bathwater. Then, pulling it back with both of her small, strong hands, she touched the puckered surface of the wound. I made no sound, nor did she. From a shelf near the stove, she secured a small, dark bottle.

“Hurt,” she said, as she poured the violet liquid upon me.

“Yes, it surely does! Perhaps somewhat more than the injury.”

“Help you to not be sick.”

“Infected,” I speculated.

“So many words.”

She soaped a flannel cloth and then sat upon the rim of the tub, behind me, pouring more water and scrubbing my back and my neck, as if I were her child. I closed my eyes and let my head droop toward my
chest. My breathing was deep, almost a sort of snoring, and I listened to it, and to the slight rasp of the flannel cloth upon my skin. Chun Ho reached around me to scrub at my throat and then my chest, and I felt the cloth of her shirt and then the solidity of her nipples, the muscle at the junction of her breast and her arm. I knew that when I looked at her next, I would see her clothing soaked in upon her bosom.

I let my head sag further and, from behind, I felt her own head lie upon my neck and shoulder blades as her arm, around me and pressing at my own chest, lay still. She held me thus, and thus she held herself, as we sat in the diminishing steam of the bathwater. We did not have to see each other seeing the other one and so, in a sense, we were safe from ourselves and each other, we were suspended in the restless sounds of the working stove, in the slight stirring of the bathwater, and in the breathing rhythms we slowly composed in simultaneity; were you there, unseeing but attendant to the noises in the room, you might have concluded that only one person drew breath.

Abruptly, she shifted her weight, and I felt her leave. I slumped down under the water as far as I could to lie upon my back. Perhaps she would come and pour more upon me, I thought. But, instead, she came to the tub and it was herself she poured. As I felt her enter the tub, I felt her lie against me and along me. I drew my knees up, and she lay between them, her head near my jaw. I dared to open my eyes in the flickering light of the low-burnt candle, and I saw that her own eyes in her raised head were shut. Then she opened them and looked along my wounds and up my face.

She wept, and I did not know, nor do I now, whether her sorrow was for herself or for my face. I watched lines appear on her visage that never before had appeared to me, for her face had always been a kind of mask in itself, occasionally cracked by a smile or a tender appraisal at the eyes. Now, however, her emotions played and disappeared like shadows thrown against a lantern light. She looked wicked and full of appetite, and then playful, with hungers less dark, and then she was blank and
unreadable, and then moist at the eyes with a kind of pity, and then she seemed wise, as I had seen her when one of her children had given her a humorous sort of pleasure. Her nostrils reflected her hunger again, and the weeping went away, banished by what drove her—
“Strong
flower,” she whispered—to stuff me into her as she moved up and down upon me in the soapy, warm water, and then clasped me to her with both her powerful arms around my waist as she moved us both, back and forth, up and down, water coursing over the edge of the tin tub and onto the tin plating at the floor.

I feared that we would wake her children. I feared that we would stop. We did neither. And then she permitted me to towel her delicate collarbones and sturdy, small chest and her breasts. Then I kneeled upon the slick, sudsy tin at the foot of the tub to rub her stomach and loins, to run the towel the length of her thigh and down to her ankles. She stood facing me then as I pulled her against me and dried her back and buttocks, cupping each and pulling it from her body to explore with the towel and my fingers her crack and cleft and what was cupped within. I stood and rubbed at her hair, tossing down the towel to feel her hair’s silkiness, and then I rubbed with my fingertips at her back again, and buttocks. She leaned against me, her arms at her sides, in a signal to me, I thought.