The Night Inspector (33 page)

“Sir!” I called to him. “What is it?”

He pointed. Lower in the water than the schooner, and either hidden before and just hove to, or shielded from our sight because we expected
nothing to present itself, was a small vessel, say the size of a brig, but with no sail mounted on the masts that were aft and forward of the thick, squat metal chimney, you might call it; the vessel was a steam-powered lighter large enough to take the cargo on and powerful enough to drive through a storm.

I said, “No such vessel was part of the arrangement.”

“No word of it was mentioned?”

“None,” I said, and M shook his head.

“That,” he said, “is the matter with plans. They are important only if lives or reputations hang upon them. And plans do so rarely eventuate as conceived. If that vessel is not of the tissue of our planning, and it isn’t, then I begin to have fears.”

“Perhaps there’s an innocent explanation.”

“Perhaps the only innocence within a hundred yards is that of Adam and the children laid like anchovies inside those tuns. Billy, we have broken the laws of the Port, the Surveyor, and the Customs Department. Must I bid my pension farewell?”

“I’ll see to this,” I said. “Perhaps they decided to take them upriver, or around to Brooklyn.”

“And did not wish to bother you with their amendments to the plan which originated with you?” I thought that he might lean his shadowy face back and laugh the silent laugh. If he did, I might have bellowed something terrible at him. But he shook his head and offered me a glance so full of disgust and disappointment that I understood, for an instant, how his son might have felt under the weight of such a dismal evaluation.

“We’ll see,” I said.

“He is dangerous,” Sam told M, “when he employs that tone.”

I said, “We’ll see.” I set my hand in my right-hand pocket, and I pulled my hat down hard, then set off. By now, I could see, Delgado was behind Adam and was directing the working of the boom. Small tuns came up two at a time in the netting now, and Sam and the other fellow
labored without cease in spite of the weight of the load. That, I was certain, could be laid to Delgado’s powerful persuasion.

I went down the wooden steps, which were slick now with the hot rain, holding on to the rail for my life. Out on the river, an incoming ship had hove to and was making for the Jersey shore before the wind; with luck, she might make the Atlantic Street harbor, at the intersection of North Twelfth, a kind of jagged pocket on the coast in which vessels had, in other hard storms, found shelter. A barely discernible light at the ship’s pole, above the royal mast, dipped dangerously low and then swung laboriously to. Little else that far out was visible and, even close by, in the stairwell I descended, or upon the docks beyond the boom, I could not see much.

Adam’s shirt had collapsed into darkness upon his dark skin. He worked, I saw, with his eyes closed. And I could not blame him, for how to understand what he saw: a majestic slender woman, even under a cloak and hood, her face animated as if she watched a sport of brave dimensions; a matched set of broad, tall men, one white, one black, whose heads and eyes in response to her commentary swiveled and roamed; a clearly dangerous man in a leather coat that glistened like a serpent’s skin who tapped Adam’s shoulder with the handle—threat enough—of his knife; the gallery, above and behind, of M and, behind him, Sam, solemn, pale-faced observers; the heavy, wet tuns that were swung and set, swung and set, from the hold of a pitching schooner to the deck of a steam-driven lighter.

He saw me as Delgado did. I said, “Adam, I do not know of this. Why not stop your labors while I learn what I can?”

Delgado, in his calm and uninflected voice, said, “Good evening, Mr. Bartholomew.”

“Mist Bartelmy,” Adam said. “We did all that walking in the Loin, saw all that misery, to help somebody make up their mind to come here and get fooled? Is that what I hear in your voice?”

“Yes. I think it is possibly so.”

“Do you feel foolish, Mist Bartelmy?” He did not cease to work, nor did the other man, also Negro, far more slender than Adam, but apparently quite powerful. They wheeled, they swung the boom, they let their cargo down, and then, the net emptied, they swung the boom back and let down its rope for the next load.

I said, “I may be heartily sorry to have involved you in this.”

“What
is
this, Mist Bartelmy?”

“I cannot tell you, Adam, for I do not know. I think now that I must find out. Delgado?”

“Ask her.” He indicated Jessie.

“Will you let these men rest while I inquire?”

“I cannot, Mr. Bartholomew. Our schedule is a difficult one.”

“Shall I try to force you to cease, Delgado?”

“I fear for their safety if you do,” he said politely, tapping the handle of his knife upon Adam’s straining back. Water had gathered upon the shiny, pocked patch of skin beside Delgado’s nose, and it looked as if it were constructed of something artificial, a kind of pale gutta-percha. His eyes were unreadable, as ever, and he looked more confident than a minister taking the pulpit.

I backed away, then walked around Delgado, and away from the boom, toward Jessie and her escort. The tuns brought the lighter lower in the water, and I found it fascinating to watch the cargo press the ship upon the river, and to see it drop in comparison to the level of the dock. It seemed that at any moment it might sink away from us. But, knowing Jessie as I did, I was certain that she had calculated the load.

“Billy,” she said, smiling from within the hood with her sad eyes and with a kindness at her mouth. “Hello, Billy. We are more than halfway done.”

“With what?”

“Oh,” she said. Then: “Billy, these gentlemen are among the principals in this … affair. Mr. Henry Porter, who is, in a managerial capacity, a purveyor of the services of laborers.” The burly white man nodded,
almost in a kind of bow, and demonstrated no surprise at the mask with which he was confronted. “Mr. Porter is well known for having sustained at Gettysburg a savage wound from which it was thought, at first, he might not recover. He wears the mangled bullet, which spun and bounced inside him, upon a chain at the throat.” I knew, of course, how Jessie knew about the chain and about the nature of his wounds, and I knew, too, how she had comforted him.

“And this is Mr. North. He has assisted me in matters of administration and finances.”

“I would have—”

“I know, Billy. But you were the overall organizer. And you secured the assistance of our friend who has signed the documents. Each man has his part.”

“Of you?”

She said, “I must ask you to leave your emotions to the side in this, Billy. It is the children, after all, whom we serve.”

“And you are donating to them a river voyage on a coal-fired boat as part of the service? I cannot recall our discussing this. I remember wagons. I engaged wagons, Jessie.”

“Mr. North, at my request, informed the carters that we had reconsidered. It is always useful, I’ve been told, to have a number of plans and to see that no one knows all of them. Mr. North, for example, was unaware of the services of our … friend.”

“Our friend. Just so,” Mr. North said, in a handsome, well-spoken baritone.

“Just so,” I said.

“We have two-thirds, I would say, on board,” Jessie announced. The rain now was almost horizontal, and her face was running with it, although she barely blinked and she never wiped at her eyes or mouth. The wind pulled Mr. Porter’s umbrella backward over its frame and peeled it away. Mr. Porter merely held his hat brim and leaned into the wind. I looked into his eyes and then into Jessie’s. The boom swung over,
and another tun was on the deck of the brig. I might shoot them all, I thought. Kill the two men, turn and fire twice to hit Delgado, and then deal with Jessie at my leisure.

I wondered about the children, and where they must be taken, and in whose care.

Jessie said, “I am reading you, Billy.”

I saw her light, cold eyes, and I knew that I feared as much as desired her. She was of the madness I had always thought was in, or about to envelop, me. But her astonishing beauty, her willingness, and not for the money, to go anywhere in the darkness in any kind of sudden savagery and pain—and not for the money, I’d insisted, sleeping with a whore for whose company I paid by the block of hours to a laudanum addict.

She said, “I know your thoughts.”

I thought, I know what it says on your body.

She said, “I told you the stories, Billy. Stories aren’t always the truth. Not all of it.”

I had to smile. She could not see it. “No,” I said aloud. “I enjoyed them, however.”

“And I did, too, dear Billy.”

“What did you mean?”

“How much of it did I mean? Or what was my meaning?”

“Either,” I said. “Both.”

But she was looking past me, and I turned. M, carrying a small storm lantern, had walked down the dangerous steps—he had probably sprung, like a ship’s boy on his voyage out—and had walked past Delgado. I would have enjoyed watching that—and he had come now to the laden lighter, onto which he stepped. A man forward on the brig called to him, and M waved his hand but continued on his way. He stood, and he shouted into the wind, which prevented us from hearing him.

“Billy, what does he say?” Jessie asked.

M was pinning his little badge upon the cloaking flap on the front of his oilskins.

“I imagine that he says,” I replied, “ ‘I am an inspector. Thus, I inspect.’ ”

“Truly,” she said, with some wonder in her voice.

“It is what I would expect,” I said.

M produced a bone-handled folding knife, and he cut away at the net about the tun.

“The cost of the net diminishes the profits,” Mr. North said, almost singing. He had the practiced ability to make any statement into song—the less musical the statement, the more, apparently, he sang it: Life is a tale full of sound and fury, sung by an idiot. I thought of M and his Hamlet, his Iago, his Timon, his Lear.

M now labored at the tun, standing on his toes and working to gain access to what might have been two hundred gallons and more, but which in its place should have been children, born into slavery and freed by Jessie and Porter and North, by M and by me.

M beckoned, and Jessie said, “Do not go, sweet Billy.”

“Kiss me good-bye, Jessie.”

“Farewell, you mean?”

“Please.”

She stepped forward, removing her hood, inclining her wonderful sad face, and put her arms on mine. She turned her head and kissed the scarf at the mouth of the mask. Then she leaned in beneath the mask and nipped at the flesh of my neck. She sucked upon it, and she bit it hard, and then she licked it, as if she were a child. Then she looked up and into my eyes and pulled the hood back over her. She patted my arms and stepped back.

“Thank you,” I whispered.

Jessie nodded, and smiled her smile of regret. She said, “It was Lydia Pinkham’s mixed in with the juices of fruits.”

I recited those words as I turned and went along the dock of the wharf to the brig, sitting low in the water which sometimes lapped over onto her deck. I could not understand her meaning: the juices of fruits,
the Lydia Pinkham’s. I stepped on, slipping as the rhythm of the rocking of the ship betrayed me, but M was there to catch me by each shoulder with his broad hands and to steady me.

“We’re in horror, shipmate,” he said. “This is a cargo out of the imagination of someone more stirring and capable than I.” He held up the lantern and directed me to peer down and in.

I smelled the vomit first, and then the stench of the leavings of locked-in bodies. The contents were, I saw, three children, or four, heaped in upon each other. It struck me as likely that they had been in there for days; I could not imagine their surviving the entire journey in this fashion, although I had of course no assurance now that Florida had been their home port. They might have come up from Philadelphia, for all I knew, and they might have made the entire journey in the tun. What Jessie had meant about juices of fruits and Lydia Pinkham’s was now, naturally, clear. They had been offered refreshment, and it had struck them unconscious; drugged, they were packed in their barrels and carried only heaven knew how far, for how long.

What had not been clear to her, or to her operatives, was how much of the opium dissolved in alcohol could be tolerated by a child who was deprived of fresh air and exercise, perhaps on account of the cost, and perhaps because the traders did not know. Now they might know. Terrified and helpless, without adequate air to breathe, and in the absolute dark, they had been accidentally poisoned and purposely shipped. You are born, and the world bends down to feed you, and its teat is icy, its pap is poisoned, and you are dead because a child, and black.

“All dead?” I asked him. “Not a breath from them?”

“The child on top, the little portion of person, is dead, I perceive. I do not harbor hope for the others.”

“We must open the tuns and have them out,” I said.

“Get off my boat,” the fellow behind us said.

I watched M tug at his oilskins and turn. “I am a deputy inspector of Customs in the Port of New York,” he said. “I carry, with this badge, the authority of the federal government.”

“I
carry,” the other said, “with this peacekeeper, the authority of point five six calibers of half a dozen cartridges, and more where they came from. And I seen your hand in your pocket, you, and I am told you always goes armed. Hands out, nothing in ’em, all easy and slow, thank you, gentlemen. I am the captain, and my word, as you know, is law. This”—he motioned with his pistol—“is its authority, you could say.”

“Jessie spoke of us—of me—to you?”

“Don’t know no Jessie. Mr. North told me.”

“He must have sung it.”

The captain, bald, short, soaked through in his long-sleeved seaman’s shirt, smiled his dirty gray-yellow fangs. He held a cavalry pistol upon us by crossing his left hand in front of his face and, with his right, resting his weapon upon his left forearm. He knew what he was about, and I did not wish to see M wounded. So I brought my hands out, but insisted on leaving them at my sides and not up.