The Night Inspector (7 page)

“I’ll remember that,” the sergeant said, “and with gratitude for the advice. But why, pray tell, did you shoot the rimadonna’s boy?”

“Who was to say which end of the buggery our fellow was on? They directed us to his house. They told us that his wife was dead, or fled. You may guess which. They told me he had a lot of dark hair, that in the district farmers said he had more pelt than his dog. Neither man was bald. I couldn’t tell. I—”

“You appeared in the whirlwind and you took them off.”

“I did my work.”

“So it’s work, is it?”

“The production of death, Sergeant, is a type of work.”

He poured some coffee onto the ground and stood slowly as if stiff in the back or legs. I tended to avoid his eyes because they were of a very light blue, an almost eerie, icy pallor, and he seemed to be staring hard at you even if, in fact, he was only being attentive.

“You have to pardon me,” he said, “as I must pardon you. There’s an awful odor about you. I have to believe it is physical, and not a moral decay, but you might see to it, Mr. Bartholomew.”

“I’m grateful you pointed it out,” I said. “I killed a dog lest he raise the alarm. I used a knife, and I hacked my way into his bowel, I fear.”

“The place, that is, where you did your work. The bowel of a dog.”

I know I would have riposted, but I remember nothing more, and I wakened hours later. I believe that I fell asleep sitting and uncovered by any blanket but the stench and blood I had carried home from the job.

And I am trying to say that you could feel the city coiling itself. In Manhattan, you could feel the national effort begin. Early in the day, when I might have been about for hours, when the ice wagons and scissors grinders and ragmen began to drive their rounds, then the sound came up of the iron of the horses’ hooves, the thunder of the wooden and metal-rimmed wheels, the creak of springs and chime of harness bells and the cries of vendors and drovers, the sweet reek of the honey wagon rising with the industrial salts, the smoke of fires of wood and gas and coke, and the cries of children on roofs and stoops, the wails of women and small men (for it was a place in which to be strong, or championed, or fleet of foot). The din was what I daily heard over the streets and rivers
and the canals of Brooklyn, which I had walked beside—shriek of whistle, scream of wounded creature, the ponderous friction of loading pallet on dock or rail, the immense, deep roar of limestone pouring, and the clatter of the shunting in the switchyards. And, over everything, the stink turned into smoke of a hundred kinds, and, past it, like a promise, visible upon occasion in the soot-streaked sky, especially near the Hudson or the East, a blue-white pallor, and the sun. This polluted energy, this vastness on a small island, was the national beginning of a new lunge toward—what? I did not know. The resources were in place, and the drive to use them was pulsing. Just so with my new friend.

CHAPTER 2

D
ID YOU KNOW THAT IN MY TIME THERE WERE
miniature broughams drawn through Central Park by teams of goats? Ragged children in cobbled-together livery drew wealthy children in Eton suits and pinafores among the polished balustrades and through the arbor made of woven live branches. While rats ran under the sewers of the lower neighborhoods, such as mine, the Harlem River steamboat took the daytrippers over to Claremont, where the aqueducts from Croton rested. You could walk the promenade and see, high above Manhattan, the tall reservoir in which thousands of gallons of water were held for those in the higher reaches of the city whose delivery pressure might drop. In my district, of course, the water often ran dark. It was a broth of invisible creatures, and when a Swamp Angel, hiding from the police beneath the alleys, relieved himself, he was infecting the immigrant children who rested from their street games and drank at the pump.

But I had faith. I had fine vision, and I saw possibilities. Indeed, I earned my livelihood from them, and of course from their overthrow. I speculated—in currencies of all nations, which I willingly exchanged (drachmas for rubles for pounds in sterling for German gold), in the future demand for slaughtered hogs, for cattle on the hoof, for codfish packed in salt, for, of course, the oil of sperm whales shipped in wooden casks. I was an importer-exporter, a student of the markets, and therefore
a man who was watchful of human needs. I lamented the deaths at the minehead in Wales, but I celebrated the retrieval of every lump and boulder of coal. The port at which my friend was deputy inspector was a part of the heart of the great body I attended as Scheherazade attended her Shah. She was thrilled, I have always thought, not to receive his attention but to be allowed to lavish hers; it was the danger in which she won another night that rewarded her. So with me, from out of the Five Points and onto the Manhattan streets.

Before I attended my office, one morning after I had slept for several nighttime hours, I bathed in cold water and retrieved my shirts from Chun Ho, as she was called, the widow who supported her children and herself as a laundress. She steamed my suit and pressed it flat while I stood, indecent from the waist down and unbearable from the neck up, shifting and sighing as her household regarded me in the room’s dim light. It smelled pleasantly of fish and sauces, and of harsh soap, and it was the temperature of my body; I could not feel my skin. Before I grew dizzy, the little tan woman with large, young eyes and bleached, shriveled hands held out my trousers. I leaned upon her as I stepped into them, and then she reached up to place my coat upon my back.

“We’re like an old husband and wife, Chun Ho,” I told her. Her daughter, who spoke a little English, giggled from behind a curtain that must serve them as a wall.

The woman bowed while her eyes appraised me. Her pretty mask was little different from mine, I thought. I reached a finger toward her. She stiffened, but she let me touch her cheek. The flesh was soft, and I felt a
frisson
, you must call it, almost as if someone stroked the bottoms of my feet. Her eyes regarded me from deep within. The sweet young face was still. I had taken liberties.

“I have taken liberties,” I said.

She waited. I gave her twenty-five cents. She bowed and so, strangely, did I.

My office was a single room in the Equitable Building at 120 Broadway,
above the small coffeehouse that would become the Café Savarin and then, with all the building, in a terrible winter inferno, burn up. I was around the corner from Pine Street, not far from Trinity Church and the Custom House, the Board of Brokers and the United States Treasury. I had a wooden chair that swiveled on an iron screw. I had a plain deal desk. I had cabinets of wood and gas lamps of brass and one window that looked out over Broad and Pine Streets, and one that might have looked upon Broadway in an earlier day that had been, for reasons I never learned, bricked up. So that I might better concentrate, I kept my desk before this window, and, staring out, looked in. The room was small, and stuffy in the warmer weather, and snug in winter, and, truly, unimportant in either regard; it was where I thought about my profit and my loss, unless I foolishly lay abed in my room in the Points and permitted my mind to race like a panicked horse on cobblestones, skittering hither and thither, scrabbling for a foothold, giving off sparks of iron against paving, and making no progress. Here, in the room in the neighborhood called Wall Street, with my name upon the half-wood, half-glass door—
Wlm. Bartholomew
•
General Transactions
—I planned my days and weeks; I offered, I withdrew; I bought and sold; I profited, or I had my investment for breakfast, meaning that I died overnight in some sharp fellow’s ledger book.

And, yes, there were confidence bubbles, there were, indeed, declines. These are the natural inhalations and exhalations of the national economy. Your loss is the compost for what falters, then grows, then thrives. Great creatures were said to have walked upon the earth. They were banished by history. So, too, with nations—say, Atlantis or, less picturesquely, the Romans. They were here, then not. And in their place—who is to say not nourished by the fermentations of their ashes and bones—came others. They survived. So with companies of men, so with investments by the likes of me. Bubbles expand and burst, economies grow lame, and men wander the broken metal railings of the Battery, once grand with grand homes, now a gathering place for those
who stare into the water and contemplate their ruin and—not infrequently—their drowning. Then they die. Others live. And what survives is stronger.

I had traveled, that morning, by the omnibus that ran to South Ferry. I tugged on the leather strap affixed to the driver’s leg as we came to the Corn and Produce Exchange, and he sullenly slowed, but did not stop, so that I might clamber down. I did not blame the man, although he had a contract with the public; he took our money; he ought to have taken with something like grace the fact that he was tethered back to his passengers as the brace of horses that pulled us were tethered back to him. The wooden wheels creaked and clattered on, and I made my way across Whitehall Street to the Exchange, where I was owed money by Lapham Dumont, who paced the paving stones while doing business.

He watched me cross to him, and I studied him in return. He was a negligible man who was in debt to me and, because in debt, was dangerous, or anyway warranted watching. He was very tall, and he seemed to have no muscles, only bone beneath his brown wool suit. His red face, pointy and dominated by a fleshy nose, appeared to be damp. I cannot imagine—I lie: I can imagine—how my face, my mask, appeared to him. I was a living haunt. I was a fright. I was unreadable.

“William,” he said in his basso. It was a voice suggesting strangulation, deep and weak at once.

“Lapham,” I said. “In what currency shall we deal?”

“Verbal?”

“Ah. Excuses, you mean.”

“Insufficiency.”

“That isn’t a meaning. That’s a plea.”

“I must plead, William.”

“I must press you, then.”

“It is said that you cannot press a stone,” he said, wiping each hand with a sullied handkerchief.

“No, my friend. It is said that you cannot press
blood
from a
stone
.
You can always press blood from a man, and likewise, I like to think, money. It was
my
money, pressed at your request into service, that I invested on your behalf in the bear speculation, you’ll remember.

“Bearskins,” he sneered. “How could I have gone for such a dream? How could you have persuaded me? How could I have permitted you to?” He put the handkerchief into his pocket, drew it out as if he’d never seen it before, addressed it as if it were a book he would read, then blew his nose, wiped his face, dried his hands, and put it away again, looking at me all the while as if I had appeared before him that very second in a nimbus of purple flame. “It’s summer,” he said. “Why did I not, simply, tell you? It’s
summer
. Who buys bearskins when the weather is fair?”

“Boers,” I said, and “farmers in Australia and growers in New Zealand. We invest in the world, Lapham, we are not parochial. Nor are we whiners, pouters, nor gonnifs who pike out of debts. Are we?”

He shook his head.

“Are we, Lapham?”

He took out his handkerchief, which seemed to have gone grayer in the past few minutes, and stiffer with the fruits of his physiological functions. An emptying of his left nostril only, a scrub of the forehead and cheeks, then the drying of his hands and the restoration of the handkerchief to a pocket of his vest, seemed to restore him. “I am prepared to write a certificate of obligation,” he said.

I said, “And I am prepared to come up, Lapham.” I drew, with my toe, an imagined line between us. I placed my actual toe on the imaginary line. I lifted my fists, turning sideways toward him, and bounced a few times on the balls of my feet. “I am going to administer punishment. I am about to become a nation at war. My investments must be protected, and my word as unrelenting in collection must be known as sound. You will learn about international finance. For we are nations in conflict. Are you ready for me?”

He was not. He stepped back. Looking at the street—that is, looking
down, a man already beaten—he said, “And, anyway, where would I hit you? In the papier-mâché?”

I struck. I was swift and practiced, and I slapped him hard with my open left hand.

“No,” he said, stumbling. Several potbellied brokers came toward us.

I slapped him again, and he leaned against the wall of the Exchange. “Shall we meet in a week to conclude the matter, Lapham?”

He looked at the brokers who attended us. He knew them to be more concerned with debts unpaid than with the safety of a man whose face was beaten red as a sailor’s. He nodded.

“Then I declare peace,” I said, “and good day to you.”

And that is how capital works, I thought, entering 120 Broadway and climbing the iron steps. There are the weak, there are the strong, and some survive. Some, without faces, survive. Some even grow stronger. I thought of poor M, a youthful man still in his middle age, a fellow justly proud, it seemed to me, of his powerful physique. He had invested his efforts, his constructions of language, upon the national markets of England and the United States. His initial offerings were seized upon, his latter efforts were ignored. It was that simple. Surely, what had failed might be, as he had said, his best work. I knew some of the early, a little of the late, and thought him right. He had not, to me, vouchsafed an anger or resentment, even—only a quiet, beaten aspect, as of a man who knew that he was through. It wasn’t fair, perhaps, but it was true. Once famous, he was now unknown, a deputy inspector of Customs with his badge and government notebook and his locks. I wondered if he wrote his private stories in the federal book. I wondered how deep in his soul he accepted the verdict of the marketplace. The waters would roll over him, and he would be forgotten if, already, he wasn’t yet; and someone else, who wrote what the public would have—stories of investments, I thought, and who can tell?—might be remembered.