The Midnight Band of Mercy

by Michael Blaine

  He acted one way at Fitzgerald and Ives, and another way at Mrs. DeVogt’s table. When he was taking a speed walk with Danny, racing from Fourteenth Street down to the harbor, their conversation reeling from women to those vampires called theater managers, to Cap Anson’s batting average, legs and words in furious motion, he became himself, but what exactly was that? They rarely talked about anything serious; and now that Danny was seeing Faye, a whole layer of his friend’s life had become off-limits.

  On their excursions, they increased the pace block by block until they were almost running through the human carnival and he forgot who he was. Then they would find themselves down at the Washington Market or the Battery, eating clams with squeezed lemon, watching paddle-wheeled towboats on the way to Sandy Hook, and chattering away about nothing at all. He wondered if he was himself only when, in sheer motion, he shed the husk of Max Greengrass and became velocity itself.

  At times, he felt less like a man than a shifting series of negotiations.

  Faye said all he cared about was chasing stories, and in a way she was right. In the hunt, he wasn’t Max Greengrass, that pigeonholed creature, he was a flow of words rushing into new, unpredictable channels.

  That night he could barely sleep, but when he finally slid under the skin of consciousness he dreamed that Mourtone Senior was slipping into the room and stealing back his thick pack of bills. Max cursed himself for not putting the money in the bank, then he concentrated hard and realized that he had, and that he was dreaming. Soon he fell deeper into the internal darkness, to that place where every nighttime phantom paralyzed him. A peevish Gretta drifted into view, tossing chamber pots at his head, accusing him of some ambiguous indiscretion. As the pots bounced off his skull, he kept apologizing for his nameless crime.

  From the Heralds office, he called the number William H. Howe had given him. Just as he’d suspected, no one answered, even after a dozen rings. From his battered desk he took surreptitious glances at Parnell, high up on his throne. Was the editor wondering why he hadn’t turned in any new copy? What was he supposed to do? The cat ladies hadn’t committed any fresh acts of mercy; none of the precincts had reported any recent carnage.

  Of course Parnell could give him a new assignment. Then the expressionless, blade-faced editor looked directly at him—and straight through him—without flicking an eyebrow. Max’s stomach clenched, but he ignored the raw taste of panic burning in his throat. Instead, he kept calling Howe’s contact every fifteen minutes, letting the phone ring twenty, then thirty times. Obviously no one was there. No one would ever be there. Mourtone had bounced him over to Howe who had bounced him into a void.

  Frustrated, he took a quick run over to Logan’s, where he downed three hard-boiled eggs with horseradish along with a couple of lagers. Rolling back to the office, he felt positively belligerent. He was prepared to keep calling the damned number all day. On the second ring, a laconic voice answered, “Yeah?”

  Howe hadn’t told him what to say. Fumbling, he muttered, “Ah … Mr. Howe said—”

  The flat voice cut him off. “Go down the oyster market on Tenth. The loading dock straight across. Brewery.”

  The line went dead. What would he do if he found Martin now? He’d convinced himself that Howe and Mourtone had been manipulating him, and that the phone number was simply part of a runaround. Now, if he found Martin’s corpse and he called the cops, he’d have what he’d needed all along, a body and a corroborating source. Why not give the cash back and write the story? Wasn’t the lion’s share of Mourtone’s money safely tucked away at the Madison Square Bank, and the rest in his billfold, less a few dollars?

  He could report the murder and its connection to the catricides, and in one fell swoop the Midnight Band would be transformed from a grotesque joke into something far more menacing. He steeled himself for the sight of Martin’s shorn-away skull, the exposed gray matter in its shell.

  To hell with Mourtone and his lawyers. He’d write what he saw, and the consequences be damned.

  Yet somehow, he didn’t think Mourtone and William H. Howe would allow him to go ahead with this plan, though he couldn’t see how they could stop him either. By the time they found out, his article would be hitting the streets. The mere thought of returning the bribe—he had to face it, a bribe is what it was—gave him mental breathing room. Thinking about renunciation didn’t amount to practicing it, but imagining a way out calmed him down. He was no prude, but taking money under the table wasn’t his style.

  Choked with wagons, painted drays, horsecars, and omnibuses, drivers on their feet shouting curses at each other, wheels clattering over uneven stones, West Street was Bedlam itself. Beer skids, barrels, and huge piles of shucked oysters littered the way. Near the shore of the Hudson, a steam tug chugged along. Several docked barks, their rigging dense webs against the sky, projected their bowsprits over the dock. Above him a pair of sailors reefed jib sails. On deck a sun-browned man sat cross-legged, sewing linen. A Royal Baking Powder wagon wobbled by. A sign on the side of a brick warehouse declared CHILDREN CRY FOR FLETCHER’S CASTORIA. A merchant in a plaid vest berated some longshoremen who were struggling to move a mountain of bales. They clawed at it with their grappling hooks.

  He took his time picking through the horses and carts. Stopping to get his thoughts together, he stood staring at the floating oyster market. Saltwater wells built into the barge’s holds kept the shellfish fresh. On deck, men wrestled with a cargo from Princess Bay, Staten Island.

  If he discovered the body, he’d have to send somebody to the precinct house. He wasn’t going to abandon Martin a second time. There were always boys around, of course, all too many. He could hire one as a messenger. Perhaps he should find a kid and send him to Mulberry Street right now. He could get a high-ranking detective on the case immediately.

  He was thinking so feverishly that he reached Tom’s Brewing Co., Malts and Ales, before he knew it. From a short distance he viewed the loading dock. A few barrels stood on its iron lip. In the building’s shadow, a drunk lay with his head twisted against a rough plank, his derby tipped off his head. Nobody else was around.

  A sick, fluttering sensation seized Max’s stomach. In the chilly air, sweat broke out on the back of his neck; but he bit his lower lip, hauled himself up onto the dock, and began walking slowly, inspecting each barrel’s contents. The first two were filled with yellow chaff, but the third, surprisingly, was stuffed to the brim with clamshells.

  Max looked around. While chaos reigned on the street, the brewery was quiet, its rear door chained shut. Maybe it was out of business. Tentatively, he scraped a few shells off the top layer. His pulse raced, and he realized he was grinding his teeth so hard his jaw ached. Stepping back, he took a deep breath. How to do it? He didn’t want to touch anything “too particular,” but he had to dig down deeper, just in case. Lightheaded, blood beating in his temples, he plunged ahead as fast as he could, rolling up his sleeve, dipping his hand in and cupping several handfuls of cold clams out of the barrel. Grease clung to his fingers and forearm, congealing into a second skin. Then he hit a layer of chipped ice.

  Now he rolled up his other sleeve and began to dig with both hands. Clawing down even farther, he touched the thing before he saw it.

  At first he thought Martin had been frozen blue, but that didn’t seem possible. The face gaping up at him, its mouth pried wide by a single shell, wasn’t blue at all. It was dark brown. Its hair was kinky, its nose broad. Encrusted with blood, its eye sockets gaped ragged and black. In a spasm, he pulled his hands out of the barrel and staggered back.

  To keep from getting sick, he took enormous draughts of salty, oily air. Then he braced himself against the wall of the brewery. Waves of nausea swept through him, but he kept breathing and breathing. For a minute or an hour, half-formed ideas swirled around in his mind, but he forced himself to think things through. There was no way of knowing, at least so far, whether the head in the barrel had once been the Negro from Stephenson�
��s.

  If the rest of the man was stuffed in the barrel, though, the parts might be clothed in some particularly ragged overalls. He might have those wormy white scars on his cheek.

  In his bones, Max knew that was who it was. Why would Howe’s contact send him here otherwise? Just to view some random slaughter? That didn’t seem likely. With the bartender tucked away in Baltimore, or in another barrel for all he knew, the witnesses to Martin’s murder had been neatly eliminated. Had Howe engineered this fresh killing? Was he threatening Max himself?

  The plaid-vested merchant seemed to be staring at him. Bobbing over their oyster well, a pair of shuckers gazed at him with keen interest. A fishmonger smeared his hands on his bloody apron and looked in Max’s direction. Was the sailor squatting and braiding a rope really Howe’s man? Were the longshoremen hauling a crate of bananas simply longshoremen? His heart tried to scuttle up his throat. He knew one thing: he didn’t want to end up in pieces too.

  He scanned West Street, searching for a likely messenger. The oyster-mongers couldn’t leave their stalls and barges. The drivers couldn’t abandon their carts and wagons. Several unsteady men were passing a bottle up and back nearby, but, strangely enough, there wasn’t a street arab or guttersnipe in sight. Usually, as he knew only too well, there were swarms of them. Stymied, he stood frozen, unable to examine the barrel again, unable to work out his next step.

  He would never abandon this body, no matter how long he had to watch over it. While a Negro in parts wouldn’t merit many column-inches, Parnell would like this one. A severed head always made good copy. When an assassin had blown himself to bits trying to slaughter Russell. Sage in 1891, Police Superintendent Byrnes had collected the man’s head from the ruins and put it on display in ajar. Hundreds of people lined up to view the bomber’s twisted features.

  Max had to think in terms of word counts and column-inches, but he felt rotten about the deaf-and-dumb Negro too. This one had wanted to live in the worst way, he thought, recalling the way the black man had torn out of Stephenson’s and disappeared into Little Africa’s alleyways. As if he were running for his life.

  Regaining his senses, Max looked around West Street, searching for a single guttersnipe to do his bidding. Then he saw a button rambling half a block away. Without hesitation, he leaped off the dock and went after the cop.

  “We could dump the pieces out,” the young policeman suggested.

  “Let’s get him to the morgue. Let the professionals take care of it, all right?” Max argued. Extracting his flask, he offered the button a snort. The cop knocked back a capful of the raw stuff. “Clears out the sinuses.”

  “You sure you don’t wanna see the rest first?” the patrolman persisted.

  “Nah. Why make a mess?” His throat was on fire from the rotgut. Across the way, the floating oyster market rose on a sickening swell. He had to turn away.

  “Suit yourself. I’ll go send for the dead wagon.”

  It took almost an hour for the varnished police vehicle, drawn by a hollow-ribbed gelding, to get to the brewery’s loading dock. Two men, whose job was to scrape corpses off the sidewalk, casually rolled the barrel inside the closed wagon. At a crawl behind the Fourteenth Street horsecar, they passed R. H. Macy’s, W. Jennings Demarest, and the old Union Square Theatre. Finally, they reached Bellevue’s gates. Caretakers in wrinkled brown cotton suits wandered in and out of the vast complex. From the dead wagon, Max could see a bald woman in gray gingham waving from a madhouse window.

  A cloud of chemical stench wafted from the examining room. Max held his breath as the attendant, a hefty man in a butcher’s apron, lifted the eyeless black man’s head and placed it at the end of the table. Water sloshed around inside the barrel. The ice had melted. Max forced himself to watch without flinching. Inside his coat pocket, his hand groped for a half-smoked cigar. He found the stub, stuck it in his mouth, and chewed, tasting the sour tobacco.

  Expressionless, the morgue attendant raised a severed arm. He held it aloft, water streaming off splayed dead fingers. Clams clattered to the stone floor. “Hand me the mop, would ya?” the bull-necked attendant asked, laying the severed limb out on his slab, whistling tunelessly through his teeth.

  Max complied. He heard the slap of the soaking swab. He lit his dead cigar. “What’s your name?”

  “Who cares?” His eyes were hidden in pouches of fat.

  “So I got something to call you.”

  “Grackle.”

  “You have a first name?”

  Fishing out another arm, Grackle shrugged. The mop. A leg. The mop. Finally, the full torso, ribs exposed under mottled skin, a hairless chest. A corona of puncture wounds wreathed the corpse’s feminine nipples. Methodically, Grackle placed each body part in its proper place, reassembling the poor man in rough order. In patches, remnants of overalls clung to the Negro’s flesh. The head, gap-toothed, smiled shyly on the slab. A chicken’s-foot of white scars marked its left cheek.

  “When do you think they did the job on him?” Max kept his eyes averted from the African’s face, its disconcerting, faintly amused expression. He would have preferred a rictus and bulging eyes.

  The attendant poked the corpse’s soft belly. “Hard to tell. They kept him fresh this way.”

  It was all too easy to picture his own blood-drained head on the table. A big piece of wax fruit. Time would dine on him soon enough, but he wasn’t ready for William H. Howe to make a meal of him.

  “Stabbed him to death?” he asked, pointing to the pattern of wounds around the corpse’s drooping nipples.

  “Maybe his pal done it after. Who knows? Sometimes they like to bite.”

  “So what came first, you think? The cuts here,” he persisted, pointing to the circle of puncture wounds, “or the rest?”

  “You mean was he axed up before or after?” Grackle patted his leather-aproned stomach and gave Max a fishy look. “After. It’s always after.”

  “Yeah, sure.” Max shrugged, doing his best to cover his gaffe.

  “It only makes sense.” Grackle spread his arms and glanced around the room, taking in his slab, his mop and pail, his chest of drawers, his entire empire. One body rolled in after another. The tide came in, the tide went out. You went through the pockets, you found six cents and an ivory comb with broken teeth, a few keys to nowhere, you looked for the usual perforations and holes, and then you filled out the form. What could be more natural?

  chapter thirteen

  Stan Parnell went for it. “It’s the barrel. If he was just another coon sliced up in Minetta Alley, I’d give it an inch, tops.”

  Padded out with non-committal remarks from Mulberry Street headquarters, Max’s treatment ran five full grafs. He’d done his best to make the victim a living, breathing person, but what did he have to work with? The body’s connection to Martin Mourtone, the remarkably prescient William H. Howe, the anonymous voice on the telephone line—in short, every compelling detail—had to be kept quiet.

  The corpse was both love note and threat. A professional had dispatched the Negro. Why not Max himself? Someone still cared for him, but the Africans body was a warning that the affection might last only so long. A spasm of fear ran through him, but he told himself that terror was a good thing. It led to sensible behavior. Yet despite the fact that he had seen danger on a slab, he didn’t quite believe it. These things happened to other men, men who weren’t careful, men who didn’t know the ropes, men tainted by lousy luck.

  He was also aware that disbelief was his greatest enemy.

  Parnell raised his rheumy eyes from Max’s copy. “Nice work, kiddo.”

  “Thanks.”

  He wasn’t imagining it. The sphinx, the man without emotions, was actually taking an interest in him. “Did Biddle set you straight on Howe?”

  “Howe and Hummel? I can’t tell whether they’re defending criminals or defending their employees.”

  Parnell made a thwarted sound that died in his throat. Parnellian laughter. “You’re mak
ing progress! Copy!” he shouted, and a boy came racing over. “Check around, see if any blackies have been reported missing,” he told Max. “Come back in a couple of hours. I’ll have something for you.”

  Not wasting any time, Max made the rounds along Thompson, Sullivan, and West Third before hitting Mulberry Street headquarters again, but he came up empty. No detective had been assigned yet, and none would be, he suspected. What was he supposed to do? Wander around the remnants of Little Africa with a lantern?

  Back at the office, Max looked around for Nicholas Biddle, who was alternately scratching some words on a pad and staring out the window. With his legs outstretched and his lanky body slid halfway down in his padded chair, Biddle appeared far too relaxed for a man at work. In between bursts of writing, he absently tapped his gold-tipped cane on the plank floor.

  Max approached the old reporter. In his hand, he held out Howe and Hummel’s opus, In Danger.

  “Thought I’d return this, Mr. Biddle.”

  Biddle’s gray-blue eyes regarded him with amusement. “Nick, call me Nick. So how did Weeping Willy go down with you?”

  “It leaves you wondering. Listen, do you have time for a spot at Logan’s? My treat.”

  “Well, if you’re treating, let’s go to Pontin’s,” Biddle replied, thereby upping the ante four-fold. “On Franklin. You know the place?”