Such was our half day of illusion, our delirious slide before the bottom fell out.
26
We awoke still drunk with optimism. Then, after a breakfast we scarcely needed, still sated from the night before, Poe stuffed his pockets with paper and pencil and off we set to speak with the individuals whose names Mr. Hobbs had provided.
“I will listen to their words,” Poe told me as we strolled toward town, “and record them verbatim. But you, Augie, must listen to everything else and record it in your memory.”
“What everything else?” I asked.
“The look in their eyes when they are speaking. If the gaze is steady or evasive. The turn of the mouth. The hands, especially the hands. Do they tap and twist against one another? Do they wave about as if chasing away a lie? The body will either betray or confirm the words, Augie, and I am relying on you to see and hear and remember it all.”
Of the interviews that followed, two observations suffice: first, that the subjects confirmed, to a man, Johnston Hobbs’s opinion of the young lieutenant’s character, and second, that a snipe only recently salvaged from the gutter was hardly the judge to sit in appraisal of the physical chicanery of the island’s most powerful men.
All, when first informed that a man named Poe awaited an audience in the lobby or anteroom, rushed from their boardrooms and offices as if he were a long-lost brother. All appeared not only unsurprised by his visit but even impatient for it. All greeted him with a hearty handshake, asked for no references or credentials, made no inquiry as to why he had come, and began the brief conversation, one-sided as it might have been, with something like, “You wish to know my estimation of Lieutenant Andrews, am I correct? Very well, sir. This is what I can tell you.”
Then followed a litany of the lieutenant’s virtues, of which the most repeated were honesty, integrity, devotion to God, family, and country. Running a close second to these were steadfastness and reliability. They all but enshrined him as a saint. When Poe attempted to inquire of specifics, namely of the young man’s relationship with Mary Rogers, each response echoed the one previous.
“I can only say this, sir. Mr. Andrews is a born teacher and counselor. Add to this his great well of compassion for his fellow human beings and you will see quite clearly the nature of his relationship with the unfortunate young woman. They were brother and sister, nothing more. You must trust me on this, for I know whereof I speak.”
“You and the lieutenant discussed this relationship?”
“Nothing so unseemly as that, no. I inferred as much from my knowledge of his character.”
“You know him well, then. You enjoy his company regularly.”
“How many times do you need to experience rain to know that it is wet? Virtue is pellucid, Mr. Poe, and therefore easy to identify. Only evil is complex. And there is nothing complex about Lieutenant Andrews, I assure you.”
“So you have met him only once.”
“Once or twice, perhaps as many as three times. Always at the home of Johnston Hobbs, which alone tells you all you need to know about the man. Hobbs has been introducing him around, bringing him into the circle, so to speak. Hobbs has great plans for the boy. He will sire strong and handsome children. And now, sir, I apologize for having to return to my labors…”
“One final question, if I might. And this concerns the lieutenant’s whereabouts on that unfortunate Sunday morning when—”
“Whatever Hobbs told you, you can take it as gospel. I hardly remember where I was yesterday; how could I remember another man’s whereabouts two weeks past?”
Afterward, when Poe had scribbled his notes and we were ambling in the direction of the next individual on the list, Poe would ask me, “And how did you find him?”
My usual response was, “He seemed all right to me.”
“Nothing anomalous jumped out at you?”
In truth I stood in each of those rooms blinded by the authority and confidence of the men who strode forward to grasp Poe’s hand. Each and every one of them was a captain of commerce, a paladin who commanded the flow of money in and out of banks and across nations’ borders; men who plotted the shipping lines and steered the exchange of goods and who in so doing determined the balance of the world’s economy; men who whispered in the ear of the governor and the president; men who over a cigar or glass of brandy were molding the world between their very hands. And here they stood before me (ignoring me, it’s true, but before me all the same), men whose brushed and tailored suits made Poe look downright shabby and whose presence in turn reduced me again to an alley mongrel.
I was cowed by them, made blind and deaf. I observed only what they wanted me to observe.
After the final of the six interviews, Poe finally put the question to me.
“Throughout the entire morning,” he asked, “you detected no falsities? The men did not fidget or cast about for convincing words? No, of course they did not. Considering who those men are, it is no doubt an unsound assumption on my part that they might have behaved in such a manner. Let us then study the situation from another angle. Did they not strike you as a bit too confident in their responses?”
“How so?” I asked.
“A bit too ready with praise for a man they each admitted to knowing hardly at all? A bit too, shall we say, redundant in the effusion they bestowed on him?”
I cocked an eyebrow.
“What information have we been given?” he asked. “Opinion, nothing more. An opinion of Lieutenant Andrews that has been fed through a conduit emanating direct from Johnston Hobbs.”
“You lost me.”
“One more name on the list,” he said. “And not, I am relieved to say, a character reference for our fine young lieutenant. The waterman across the Hudson.”
He folded his notes and shoved them into his coat pocket. He pushed a strand of lank hair off his forehead and turned northwest and sent a long, squinting gaze up the river and across to New Jersey. Then, with what struck me as an angry stride, he flung himself forward and set a brisk pace along Wall Street toward Broadway.
Thinking to save himself the fare and the probable soaking of a river crossing, Poe led us north to Forty-Second Street, thence to the waterfront directly opposite the shoreline of Weehawken. Here he hoped that the waterman Josiah Tarr would sooner or later appear to discharge or pick up passengers. The problem with this was that watermen in their small boats did not keep to regular schedules or routes, but rowed whenever and wherever the fare dictated.
We passed a full two hours waiting for Josiah Tarr to manifest himself. In that time, four oarsmen and their eight passengers, in other words two of the long, low-bulwarked rowboats, ground ashore onto Manhattan gravel, but none of the people questioned by Poe recognized the name of the man he had been assigned by Hobbs to interview.
In the end, Poe’s mounting curiosity bested his thrift. We climbed aboard a low craft recently emptied and thusly engaged the pair of burly watermen to convey us to New Jersey. The river was not rough that day, but the Hudson is seldom a mirror, and so we backed and lurched and were doused with splash and spray.
In the interim, Poe ascertained that these two watermen—by name the Burach brothers, men whose only dissimilarity, as far as I could discern, was in their volubility—had been crossing the Hudson five or six times a day for more than three years, and neither had ever heard the name Josiah Tarr.
The man in the stern rowed facing New Jersey, correcting with a turn or twist of his oar when the bow veered off its straight line. The man forward rowed with his back to New Jersey and, facing Poe, acted as our tour guide and information officer.
“There’s a Josiah Lehnort you can find at the roadhouse there off the highway,” he said and jerked his head toward an opening in the trees some twenty yards back from the shore. Through the trees I could see a glimmer of dull white clapboard with a slate roof painted red.
“It’s his mother runs the place,” the oarsman said. “Then there’s two more Josiahs I know of back into the town there. Josiah Schiffhauer, he’s eighty if he’s a day, couldn’t row you across a washtub so I doubt as he’s your man. The other’s a schoolteacher, spindly and cross-eyed. I can’t recall his Christian name except to know it ain’t Tarr. Them’s the only Josiahs you’re going to find ’round here, mister.”
I swear I could see the hackles rising on Poe’s neck. He turned to look at the rear oarsman for confirmation, and the man nodded grimly.
If it can be said that darkness shines, Poe’s eyes became luminous with an ebony glow, a luster I recognized by then as comprised of equal parts anger and the intractable resolve to undo whatever rogue had angered him.
“Right up there in them woods is where Burr shot Hamilton,” the forward oarsman said. “Died from it, Hamilton did, as of course you know. A duel was the only thing could put an end to twenty years of squabbling between them two. Burr was the better lawyer, Hamilton the better politician. All of which had them at each other’s throats time and time again. Till the general fixed it so’s Burr couldn’t be governor, and that was the last straw. Hamilton’s boy died the same way—did you know that? Now what was that boy’s name? Philip, that’s what it was. The general’s eldest. Him that got himself shot dead the very same way just three years earlier. Both father and son, now ain’t that peculiar.”
Poe was less thrilled by this recapitulation of violence than was I. He sat seething, hands clenched atop his lap, shoulders hunched forward. When we finally ground ashore, he thanked our ferrymen and, without a word to me, hopped out and strode up the footpath. He did not wait for me to catch up until he stood atop the low bank. There he surveyed the shoreline from north to south, slowly turning until he once again faced Manhattan.
“Someone is attempting to mislead us,” he said.
“Which someone would that be?”
“Which someone,” he said, “is precisely what I mean to soon discover.”
27
We followed the carriage path south along the New Jersey shore for a quarter mile or so, and there, some thirty yards in front of the clapboard roadhouse set back in the trees, we came upon, dragged to the edge of the grassy riverbank, an overturned skiff much like the one in which we had recently crossed but smaller and noticeably less seaworthy, its hull stained here and there with rot and, upon closer inspection, over the rot a fine gray fungus.
Beside the skiff was an empty chair, a scarred straight-back of sturdy if indelicate construction. At the foot of the chair, a small area of trampled ground.
“Could this be the station of our Mr. Tarr?” Poe wondered.
“If it is, he ain’t been doing much rowing. Not in that tub anyway.”
“Have a look underneath for the oars.”
There was nothing beneath the skiff but for shaded ground and a cricket.
Poe turned toward the roadhouse. Above its front door, a shingle hung bearing the establishment’s name: the Red Onion. “If we are to find the owner of this skiff,” Poe said, “we will likely find him there.”
Unlike the saloons and doggeries I had had occasion to enter on the island, where usually a pianist or harpist plinked background music to the rumble of gambling and thieving and general skulduggery, this one bore a quiet and even respectable air.
At a table near the fieldstone hearth sat a family of six enjoying a midday repast of lamb and potatoes. At two other tables sat men alone, peaceably nursing their grog. At the final occupied table, the one nearest the back wall, were a well-dressed burgher with a girl who might or might not have been his daughter. (Considering the proximity at which they sat to one another, and the way he averted his face from view upon our entrance, and the place on his person where she tended to rest at least one hand at most times, I would hazard a speculation that they bore no blood relation to one another.)
Behind the counter stood a large man of middle age, a sallow round-faced man who looked us over as we entered but did not welcome us with a smile. Poe greeted this man with a nod but did not yet approach him. Instead he went straight to the lunching family and, after apologizing for the intrusion, asked, in a voice low enough not to be overheard, if the gentleman was acquainted with a local waterman by the name of Josiah Tarr.
Not only was the gentleman unfamiliar with the name but he directed Poe, if he wished to engage the services of a waterman, to the Burach brothers a quarter mile up the carriage path.
Poe thanked this gentleman and moved to the next table, where he conducted the same inquiry. At each of the four tables, the answer was the same.
Finally he advanced on the counterman, who all this time had stood with both hands braced on the counter’s rounded edge. Poe’s mouth by now held a firm line that could only be called a sneer.
“I am endeavoring to locate the waterman Mr. Josiah Tarr,” Poe said. “I was told he might be found in this locale.”
“Told by who?” the counterman asked.
“By a gentleman in the city. One whose fine name is beyond reproach.”
He stared at Poe for a full ten seconds. Then, before he spoke, he looked away. “That’s his boat out front there on the bank.”
“And yet no sign of Mr. Tarr.”
The counterman shrugged. “Maybe he’s in the privy out back.”
“You would not mind were we to wait here for him, would you?”
“He don’t come in except to get his pint at the end of the day. You’d do better to wait for him down by his boat.”
“Thank you, sir,” Poe said. “We shall do just that.”
We were barely out the door before Poe whispered that I should race around back to ascertain if the privy was occupied or not. I did so, then caught up with Poe again as he was crossing the carriage path.
“Not,” I told him.
He nodded and continued toward the rotting skiff. There he turned and looked back on the Red Onion.
“Your impressions?” he asked.
This time I was ready for the tutorial. “Why is it that nobody else but the counterman ever heard of this Tarr?”
“Why indeed.”
“And like I said before, this boat ain’t seen water since at least last summer. A man sits on one of those boards, he’s like to go right through.”
“Did you notice as well that the counterman knew without benefit of a glance out the window that the boat lies here on the bank?”
“And he didn’t much want us hanging around inside there neither, did he?”
“Nor was he the least curious to pursue my deliberately elliptical reference to Mr. Hobbs. Why would that be so, Augie?”
“Because he knew already who you was referring to.”
Poe smiled. He jerked his chin toward the Red Onion. “And now approaches the elusive Mr. Tarr.”
Hurrying around the side of the roadhouse came a man stuffing his shirt into his trousers. He too was a large man but one whose physiognomy in no way resembled that of the Burach brothers, those broad-shouldered and barrel-chested men whose profession was inscribed in the musculature of their torsos. All of this man’s muscles had settled in a pouch about his middle.
“He looks like he’s been in the water about as often as his boat,” I whispered.
Poe put a hand on my shoulder to quiet me.
The man came waddling toward us, swiping a hand across his mouth. “Somebody been asking after me?” he said.
“Mr. Josiah Tarr?”
“At your service, sir. Sorry about the delay. I was answering the call of nature in the Lehnorts’ privy back there.”
“We apologize for the interruption.”
“No interruption, none whatever. No, sirs—now what can I do for the two of you?”
“We would like to engage your services to return us to the island,” Poe said.<
br />
Both the waterman and I turned wide eyes on Poe. I, for one, had no intention of climbing into Tarr’s skiff. Nor, it appeared, did Tarr.
“You mean…”
“I am needed in Manhattan and would like to return there at once. You are a waterman, are you not?”
“Well I am, yes, to be sure; it’s my job as you can see for yourself. And in the normal course of things, I would be right happy to oblige…”
“Things are not now normal?” Poe asked.
“Well, they ain’t. That’s my point exactly.” He laid a hand over his kidney and screwed up his face. “I’ve had this terrible pain here for going on a week now. Don’t even want to think about putting my hands to an oar.”
“Were there any, in fact, to lay hands to.”
“Sir?”
It was all I could do to keep from giggling out loud.
“Besides,” the waterman went on, “it was the Burach boys brought you over, wasn’t it? I mean, they’re the ones working this stretch now that I’m laid up for a while.”
“Ah,” Poe said. “Well then. Back to the Burach boys we go, Augie. And to you, good sir, my apologies. We should not have disturbed your convalescence.” Poe gave the man a nod and turned away and started for the road.
“Surely, surely,” Tarr said. He followed Poe for a step or two. “Excepting which…”
Poe turned. “Sir?”
“It was my understanding,” Tarr said.
“Yes?”
“My understanding was that you was come for some information.”
“How, sir, was that understanding reached?”
“What’s that?”
“Did you, Augie, express a desire for information?”
“Wasn’t me,” I said.
“Nor I,” said Poe.
The waterman scrubbed the palm of a hand back and forth across his cheek. “Well they told me you was asking, you know. Back there at the Onion.”
“Were you not in the privy outside the Red Onion?”
“Well yes, surely, excepting that Merlin in there, he come out and let me know.”
On Night's Shore Page 21
