The Night Inspector (32 page)

She took a blanket from a hook and wore it over her shoulders as she made a pot of tea.

“You look much,” she said.

“You, too, watch more than you speak.”

“You think I a whore kind of woman?”

“Did you come to the tub as a whore?”

Her face went absolutely impassive.

“No,” I said, “let me say it this way, please. Will you hear me? I did not think you came to me that way.”

“Whore,” she said.

“I did not think it. I thought—it was a gift. I’m sorry. It was an expression—”

“Confused man.”

“Man whose words are failing him, Chun Ho. It was a beautiful bath. You were beautiful water in the bath.”

Her sudden smile was pleased, and it more than flickered in her face.

“Flower and water. I water flower.”

“Yes, you did.”

“Not whore. Never whore. Only if children die for no food.”

“Never. I will purchase them food if they are hungry.”

“Chun Ho work.”

“Yes. Good. But only at laundry.”

“Sure.” And then she said, “Tell me American?”

“Tell you— Do you mean that you would like me to
teach
you? Instruct you? Chun Ho:
Show
you something?”

“Tell me. Ah, teach me. In-ruct me. Sure. ‘This is teapot.’ You say, ‘Ah! Teapot! American say’ ”—and here she mouthed broadly, as if to mimick a teacher of elocution—“ ‘teeee-pote.’ Tell me. Teach me. In-ah-ruct me.”

“Bless your soul. You want to speak English.”

She shook her head. “American.”

“Yes. English
is
American. It is
termed
American. Chun Ho, I understand. I understand. Yes. I will teach you Eng— I will teach you American. Words for things in America, that is to say. Am I correct?”

She said, “Cor-rect,” with great difficulty and great dignity, and then she poured us our tea. It was very smoky in odor, and its taste and effect were powerful; I felt it in the back of my head almost as if it were a brandy.

“Green tea,” she said, pushing the
r
into being with her tongue and her palate and reminding me, of course, of the square-faced, angry, compassionate woman who had nursed me in Washington, contending with my anger and my sorrow and my overmuch attention to my own pain. I looked about for the mask, intending of a sudden to don it again, when Chun Ho, who had seemed to be gazing elsewhere, but of course was
looking inside me, said, “You will tell me about American? Teach. In-ah-ruct. In-struct.”

I said, “Yes.”

“And you.”

“Me?”

“Tell me.”

“I will tell you, yes. I will teach you. I promise it.”

“No,” she said, placing the porcelain cup beside the white candle and creating new shades of white and amber with the gold of wavering candlelight, the white of the candle itself, the white of the cups, and the white and amber, combined, of her skin. She pointed, and then with her small finger, which she lay upon my paler arm, she punctuated her wish. “Tell me—teach me
—you.”

CHAPTER 7

A
ND SO WE DREW TOGETHER, AT LAST, UPON THE DOCK
between Hubert and Laight Streets, in the darkness of a late autumn night in New York. Lanterns at the Cunard Liverpool Steamship wharf in New Jersey ought to have been visible, but they were not. Nor were the lights of the inspector’s office, nor those, downriver, of the water police. The weather was shutting us in, and so we wished it to. The low, gray ceiling of the sky showed neither cloud nor star, only an absence of what the eye might fasten to, although I thought, as I tried to survey our preparations, that I had discerned, for only an instant, a brilliant golden light, above the darkness, that was the storm; now invisible, it seemed to construct itself by sucking upward the very air at which we gulped.

Sam, at the cargo boom, was to supervise the unloading of the ship upon which the children had been transported in tuns, some, I had been told, the size of a large man and some about half of that. When I tried to imagine the children asleep in the barrels, like cod in salt, I could not—or, rather, did not wish to. It must be attributable to me in some wise, I thought, if the children were injured. Did I not contribute to their misery as I sought to offer—I could think of no other word for it—tribute to Jessie’s desire to free them? Yet what might freedom be worth if a less than terrible price were affixed to it? I sounded to myself like Abe in the worst of his pufferies, and I left such thoughts behind as I sought the
three wagons for which I had arranged. The children would be set upon them and covered with tarpaulins before Jessie directed the drivers to the places of refuge for which she had arranged. M would offer the documents I had acquired, and Sam—whom I could not deter from accompanying me—would record for private, not journalistic purposes, the evening’s events. Although I was puzzled at how he might write with his pencil stubs upon paper certain to be soaked by the gathering moisture that, at any instant, would become a storm’s sheeting rain.

The apprehension in the atmosphere was as powerful and prominent as the expectation we could feel, I might have said, from one another. M, despite the heat and the sweating oils that shimmered upon his face, wore his oilskins and his woolen cap. He was very pale, as if ill with a miscreant’s conscience, yet his little eyes were active, even restless, and he squinted into the dark flannel of the night, and he spoke and spoke. And Sam, to M’s apparent pleasure, seemed to note his every word.

“It’s a sizable storm. Mark, for example, the polite nodding of the vessels at their chains. They’ll soon grow vociferous with their silent brows, and will bob like bachelors at a long night’s do.” The masts of the anchored ships did, indeed, pitch busily upon the active water. There was much foam visible, and M said, “More than harbor water will be broken tonight, I wager.” Sam smiled with pleasure as he labored in his notebook. “We might wish to encourage our brothers in this endeavor to off-load with something like alacrity, Billy. I’m pleased to see you here at last.”

It is true that I was the final one of our group to appear. I knew that Sam had engaged to meet with M at his office on the barge, so tantalized had he become by my account of where the man sat to drink his drink and read at his philosophy, and where he paced, and how he kept his papers in their federal bins. He had brought to M a bottle of something—“grog” was what he had boyishly said to me—and I had been pleased to remain alone in my little lair in the Points. Adam, too, had wished to come by himself, and I had watched him drift toward the
docks, walking as I did a mere block behind him, with what I would have called reluctance. He was going to demonstrate the last of his loyalty to me, for my friendship, or employment—what you will—had clearly demanded a difficult price; he felt, I believe, that he betrayed his own people while serving me, and in despite of his knowing, I thought, that I did labor on behalf of those very same people. Never mind my ultimate motive, my fealty to a golden woman in a Yorkville house, who had charmed, hypnotized, or otherwise compelled me to the service we were gathered to perform. It was a labor for the right, I thought, although so very much wrong was required to perform it. I thought of the tattooed signs on Jessie’s torso, and on the soft skin of the bottom halves of her breasts. I thought of her fingers moving my fingers on the intimacies of her flesh as I read her story while she recited it.

And then Adam stood at Sam’s elbow as M described the mechanics of the gathering of a storm, and then I stood behind Adam. “I think he is right,” I said low. “I think it is going to pour upon us. Shall we secure you a coat?”

Adam turned to me and said, “My black skin has been wet black and dry black and always in the morning it was just the same shade of black, and I don’t see any coat make some change in that, Mist Bartelmy.”

I touched his shoulder as I had touched Sam’s or Burton’s or Sergeant Grafton’s, precedent to my crawling off or climbing off or loping off on one of my hunts in the War. Adam’s reddened eyes and strong face showed only sorrow in response. He looked at me a little longer and then he looked away. Below us, the little schooner, her sails hanging on the yards but not furled, for she was going to make her way away in despite of any weather, was snugged at the bollards of the dock, and a narrow planking ran from her rail to the wood of the wharf. Adam walked away and down the steps and soon—I watched the whiteness of his shirt as it mingled with the darker clothing of the dockhands he commanded—large men, working without benefit of brazier, torch, or lantern, were wrestling tuns in the forward hold. A mist of rain appeared
but did not cool us. The air seemed to diminish further, and each movement slicked me with my own liquids underneath the airless moisture of the night.

Sam said, “Adam is not at peace with this.”

“He feels he owes it. He also feels that he is misused.”

“And?”

“I suspect that he is, and that possibly—but I am far from certain—he also does.”

“Owe it to you?”

I shrugged. “Perhaps to the fate that made him black, and that placed him in the United States, and that gave him a complexity of conscience.”

“And to whom or what do
you
owe this venture?” Sam asked.

I pointed to the group beside the loading boom, at the winding handles of which Adam had begun to labor. Slowly, the long boom swung over to the cargo hold of the schooner, the name of which had been obscured by canvas hung over the side. Behind Adam, and looking alternately into the ship and up at us, was Delgado, in a long coat of thick leather and wearing a cap such as a captain at sea might employ. He stood alongside Jessie, who was in a black cloak with a hood that protected her from the gathering rain and the eyes of strangers. Two other men were with her and Delgado; they were strangers to me, one black and one white, and each carried a broad umbrella that threatened to fly away in the rising winds. I wondered if I ought to be there among them. I knew the speculation well; it was a desire to claim her in some fashion, and I remained where I was. She would come to me, as the evening progressed, or she would not. I no longer understood the nature of her claim on me. Let the evening roll on, I thought, and we’ll know. We’ll know.

Delgado, as if he had intercepted my thoughts, or at least felt their intensity, turned at that instant and looked up toward us—toward me, I was certain. I nodded. He nodded in turn. I waited for Jessie to turn, but she did not. To guard my mask against the effects of the increasing rain, I removed from the pocket of the black rubber coat I wore against the
weather a scarf I used in winter at my neck. I tied it across the mask, over the mouth hole and my lovely painted nose, and I secured it at the back with a knot. I pressed my hat low over my head, and was as secure against damage as I could make myself. Of course, the .31 was in the right-hand pocket of the rubber coat. I wondered where Delgado’s gravity knife might be, but did not wish, really, to have to learn. Jessie pointed, and I represented to myself more than saw the tawny flesh of her arm as her hand came up.

One of the larger tuns was in the netting of the boom, and Adam and another carter wound the heavy line back up. It went slowly, and I feared for an interruption by the river police before we had completed the task. The weather might keep them occupied, I thought, but the unloading was taking far longer than I wished. Now the tun was in the air, and now, as Adam and the other fellow labored, it had barely cleared the lip of the hold. They walked the boom around, and the great barrel, swathed in its rope netting, hovered above the dock.

I said, to M or to Sam or to no one, “But where are the wagons?”

The scene had nagged at me, and, of course, thinking of Jessie’s thighs and Jessie’s mouth and Jessie’s breasts, I had not considered that something aside from her tantalizing proximity and disappointing distance might be the cause. In the forests, on the hunt, I had not permitted myself to be so blind. That is what the city had done to me. And it was Jessie, of course, as well.

Sam said, “I see none.”

M was muttering. His hands gripped the wooden rail before us where we three were lined up, like dark herring gulls awaiting our share of the leavings. The sky pressed lower and the wind brought the rain now, and any visibility was all but closed down. M raised a hand and spoke to himself behind his beard and in his secrecies.