A lieutenant colonel sighed. “If he was more of a talking fellow, we could get him a fine ward when all this fuss is over. The party needs reliable Irishmen.”
“Mick Tyrone’s the only Irishman on earth you can’t draw two words out of.”
“One word even. The man’s hopeless.”
“He’s off by himself in his butcher shop,” the colonel said, savoring his last swallow of claret. “Lieutenant Vandervelt can show you the way.”
I thanked the officers for the generosity of their table and followed the lieutenant between two rows of those wall tents the army had begun to use for headquarters business and the like.
“So,” I said to him, “your brigade’s got a quiet Irishman for its surgeon? There is strange.”
“Oh, Tyrone’s not so bad,” the lieutenant said. He was a well-spoken lad, bred a cut above the politicals. “He’ll fix a fellow up and won’t let him down. Just not the sort you’d take into your club.”
“Can you tell me anything about the man?”
The lieutenant carried fine leather gloves, but did not put them on. He slapped them into the palm of his free hand.
“Nothing to say, really. Keeps to himself. Reads a good deal. Not a drunkard. Hardly an Irishman at all, I’d say.”
“Can you tell me where he’s from? How he joined the brigade? Anything at all?”
The lieutenant pointed with his gloves. “That’s his tent. Just there. You can ask him yourself.”
The doctor was reading a book by his stove. We certainly disturbed him, but you would not have known it by the changelessness of his face. I felt that a great bloody torrent of slaughter would not have moved the man. I suppose that made him a fair cut of a surgeon. He was a hungry-looking fellow, narrow all over, though with a strength to him. He was cleanshaven like myself, but his eyebrows were thick and black, and the eyes themselves made me think of a seacoast in bad weather. All in all, he looked like he got a short ration when the Good Lord parceled out joy. He did not offer his hand but held his book in it, finger keeping his page.
The lieutenant began, “Pardon the intrusion, Major Tyrone, but may I introduce Captain…” He lost my name.
“Jones,” I said. “Your servant, Doctor.”
The surgeon made a sound at the back of his throat.
“Captain Jones… has an investigative charge,” the lieutenant said, unsettled by the nick in his social form. “He comes to us from General McClellan, and—”
“The Fowler business?” the surgeon asked.
I nodded.
“Go on with your business, Vandervelt,” Tyrone told the lieutenant. “You are superfluous, lad.” The surgeon had a way of speaking that hardly used the muscles about his mouth. His face might have been a mask. But there were gales in those eyes.
With the lieutenant dismissed, the surgeon noted his place in his book and set it on top of a folding desk. It was a French matter by a fellow named Fourier and made me suspect the Irishman of improper habits.
“Sit down,” he said. “That leg won’t need more standing.”
I sat in the single chair and he took a place on his camp bed. A chest full of books and papers lay open. There was a smell of ether I had learned to recognize in the hospital.
“Well,” Tyrone began, “are you here out of duty, Taffy? Or is it only the curiosity dripping from your mug?”
“The two, it might be.”
He made that back-of-the-throat sound again. “You’re slow, man,” he said. “This entire army has a case of the slows.”
“Will I address you as ‘Major Tyrone’? Or as ‘Dr. Tyrone’?”
“Call me Mother McGinty’s little lamb, for all that it matters. It took you three days to get here, Taffy.” He drew a watch from the pocket of his waistcoat. “Three days and eight hours since the finding of the body. And by now they’ll have him in the ground, won’t they? When’s the burying carnival?”
“Today, I believe.”
“Isn’t that grand? They won’t dig that one up again, now will they? Holy saint and martyr that he is? No, they won’t pull that one up once they’ve got him planted.”
“Why should they dig him up, Dr. Tyrone?”
His throat rumbled again. “The question, Taffy, is why were they in such a haste to put him under? When it was as pretty a murder as ever a doctor did see.”
“You believe he was murdered, then?”
He laughed. Twas a solitary crack of a syllable. “And don’t you, then? Or have you come limping all the way over to me for the love of fine society?”
“What makes you think he was murdered?”
Those fierce eyes set on me till I felt like a great hound had me caught in its jaws.
“Went by that New York regiment, did you?” he asked.
“I did.”
“Knockos who can’t tell their well from their turd pits. I’ll not settle in New York when this is done, for I never would trust the water. And what did you ask them, man? What was it you found there that brought you to me?”
I met him eyes-front. “No one heard a shot. The body was hardly a hundred feet from the camp, and no one heard a shot until the sentry boy found him and let off his rifle.”
He gave me another thunderclap laugh. “Is that all? You might as well go on with you, if that’s all you gleaned.”
“I know he was shot through the heart. That you yourself said so. And I know it’s a lucky shot by daylight that strikes a man so. A miracle by night, it would be. And the sentry boy’s nearsighted as a schoolteacher.”
“Any more, Taffy?”
I could not think of more.
He stood up and paced the little world of his tent, “And what if the man was shot with a pistol? Close enough to have powder burns over his tunic. And yet there were no powder burns on the front of his greatcoat, nor was there a bullet hole through its front or back to match the one that passed through the rest of his uniform, to say nothing of his heart. And why so little blood on that coat, then, when the rest of him was soaked with it like a butcher’s apron? And what if no blood leaked out from under him onto the ground where they found him? What would you say to that, bucko?”
I looked at him.
“There was no blood, man,” he went on. “Or not enough of it.” It was a queer thing how his face stayed empty of feeling, though his voice went thundering and his eyes clouded black as a monsoon. “Not a drop on the ground where he lay. With a great raging hole out his back. And all the sweet life drained out of him. Not a drop of blood anywhere but for the stains clotted up on his uniform. And that uniform itself more dry than not, but for the back of it where they tossed him in the mud. And all of this during a night of drowning rain. Doesn’t that set you thinking, Taffy? Doesn’t it make you wonder just a little? Or don’t such high and mighty saints as him bleed like the rest of us?”
“I am not fond, sir, of being called ‘Taffy.’ I understand you to mean the boy was killed elsewhere and not by the camp. That the body was moved from the site of his death and put out to be found with a purpose.”
He clapped his hands and looked heavenward, for the Irish are born upon a stage with the Lord as their audience. “I’m in the presence of Newton himself! Of Galileo!” He leaned down over my chair. “Could I make it plainer, man? The boy was murdered with a pistol to his chest and hours after the deed somebody put a spanking new overcoat on him and dumped him there in the mud.” His mask cracked with a look of disgust. “But none of that matters, of course, for all they want is a great shining saint.”
“Have you told this to anyone, Dr. Tyrone?”
“And who would I tell, bucko?” He pointed out through the wall of his tent. “Do you think they want to hear it? No, man. Read the newspapers. They want him crucified like Jesus. By the Romans from Richmond.” He shook his head with Fenian exaggeration. “It could send a man to the drink.”
Now there are men who are marked by their pasts. I am one. Tyrone was another. I would learn his story later. But alre
ady I saw in him a born doer of right, and an ally. I was not to be mistaken.
“The brigade officers told me, Dr. Tyrone, that you are a man of few words. It would appear they are mistaken.”
This time I got both a laugh and a grunt. “The poor, bleeding buggers,” he said. “What man with a brain in his head would waste his breath on politicians?” He sat down and braced his hands on his knees, giving me the hard look. “Now what are you going to do about our murder, Captain Jones?”
Chapter 5
Twas crowing dark when I reached the river again. From the bridge I could see the campfires on every side, far brighter to the eye than the gaslit streets ahead. The sky was contrary with rain, now it would start, but after a few drops it would stop again. The teamster who carried me was bound for the Navy Yard and set me down after we cleared the sentries at the bridgehead. I had a walk before me, and not a welcome one.
I turned toward the Mall, for there lay the shortest path to my destination. The mud was a burden to my leg, I will not lie to you, and crossing from the brick castle to the nearest canal bridge forced me through a swamp sloshed up by cavalry drill. The street was but a hint between puddles. Smoke rose from the army butchering sheds and the fresh smell of death roamed like fog. Cattle, oblivious to the massacre of their fellows, snugged down against the weather below the unfinished obelisk. I would as soon have joined them as pass through the next few blocks.
They called the quarter between the canal and Pennsylvania Avenue “Murder Bay,” and while there was no bay to be seen, there was murder enough. Not that I feared the knife, or even the temptations of the alleys, with their slower forms of killing. No, it was the discouragement of the place that scorched my heart. Each man and woman, and not a few children, strove one with the other to reach new depths of iniquity. The army had brought with it a great spread of bawdy houses and saloons throughout the city, as armies will, but the establishments of Murder Bay were worse than anything on the Island, or even, they tell me, in Swampoodle. No provost marshal’s ordinance could reach them.
Murder Bay was the resort of the penniless and hopeless, and of all those who would not be seen in honest daylight. Not that I have been pure in deed from the cradle, mind you. Twas only that the lost souls of Murder Bay took that which was ugly and made it worse. There was sickness in the place, and despair, and walking by made it harder to recognize God’s mercy than a Christian man finds comfortable.
I kept to the edge of the place, but this was a luckless day. Tuesday though it was, a trickle of soldiers had found their way to the plank bars and gambling dens in defiance of general orders. Through windows patched or half boarded, I saw boys who should have been at home entwined with women who would never have a home again. Blackbearded, black-eyed barkeeps gauged their prospects, while touts leaned in the yellow light of the doorways.
Along a stretch without gaslamps, women emerged from the darkness. A bold creature seized my arm, whispering, “Won’t you be my sweetie boy?”
I broke away from her roughly, and she laughed. I would not be a rude man, but the picking of pockets is a great trade in Washington, and pity the unsuspecting. They say even the mayor is not above it.
Not a dozen paces, and another unfortunate stepped out. “Special treats for special boys,” she told me, “Half price for soldiers.”
Life’s ravages were plain upon her and needed no more light to be recorded. Her skin hid under whitewash and her lips were slathered crimson. She put me in mind of the medical advertisements on the first page of the Star. When she touched me, I jumped like a lad on the edge of his first battle.
“Nothing you want won’t shock Red Kate,” she said. “There’s no shame in it, dearie. Could it be a bit of the other you’re after?”
I would banter with none of them, those evening phantoms, and marched through their offers of “oriental performances” and interviews with children. Before I reached the glow of an oyster house they were laughing. One sang, “Come to look and not to buy, and home alone with Willie.”
The next time, I told myself, I would give up the money for a cab.
I went straight to General McClellan’s old headquarters, for there were things he needed to know. But I could not get past the first room. None of the faces were familiar. A staff major in a fine uniform intercepted me, to the titters of one of the Frenchmen I had seen about. The major asked my business, his tone uncharitable.
“I’m here to see General McClellan,” I said. “On a confidential matter.”
The major laughed me up and down. “He’s here to see General McClellan, this one. Did you ever hear the likes? Are you drunk, little man?” He looked about for the approval of his peers. “Are we taking cripples into the army now? Or midgets? Has it gotten so desperate?”
“The general charged me to report to him, sir.”
The Frenchman laughed and prettied his goatee. They are a cruel folk.
“Another escapee from the asylum,” the major went on in a stage actor’s bellow. “Call out the guard.”
A lieutenant colonel put down his papers and stepped forward. “The general’s not here,” he said, “and he’d have no time for the likes of you, if he was. For God’s sakes man, this is army headquarters. You can’t just stroll in. Now get along.”
You can tell, I think, that I do not look a grand or polished man. Yet I am honest, and loved by an honest wife, and I wished to do my part for my new country. Such men as those officers ever struck up a fire in me. I have never understood why Americans, of all people, wish to set themselves up as aristocrats and pretend to be more than themselves.
I caned my way down the steps to the street. A blast of rain struck me as I turned toward the War Department. But there was work to be done, no matter the hour. Twas an easterly blow come up and the wet of it pinched my eyes. I might have gone back to Mrs. Schutzengel’s instead, to fetch my India rubber cape, for all the good my visit to headquarters had done.
A voice behind me called, “Captain?”
I turned about too suddenly, wrenching the leg.
Twas a different major. Out in the rain without his hat. “What’s your name, Captain?”
“Jones, sir.”
“Well, Captain Jones,” he said, levelling his hand to his brows to keep the raindrops from his eyes, “do you really have business with the general?”
“I do, sir.”
He, too, wore a splendid uniform and he was anxious to go back inside. Yet he lingered. “I’ll see that he knows you were here. And don’t mind the boys. They act that way whenever the Frenchies come around.”
“Twas nothing,” I lied. For he seemed too decent a man to bother. And he grew wetter by the instant.
“All right then, Captain Jones. I’ll tell him.”
“You’d best go in, sir.”
“Yes. Listen, Jones. That remark about your… your impairment was tasteless. Can I fetch you a cab?”
“No, thank you,” I told him. “I would rather have respect than a cab, sir, and you have given me that.”
He knew not how to answer and went in. There is decency in men, and goodness, and we must never forget that.
I no sooner sat down behind the mass of papers swelled up in my absence than Evans the Telegraph poked his shoulders through the door.
“Noswaith dda,” he said, “I saw the light.”
“Good evening, Mr. Evans,” I said.
He looked over my desk. “There’s a great business before you there, Captain Jones.” He stepped closer and pulled up his nose. “Wet sheep, is it?”
“Sheep there are none, Mr. Evans. But fools, perhaps.” I had a welter of work waiting, but the man wanted to talk, and he was my friend. Now I am a great one for duty, but the humiliation at McClellan’s headquarters was not entirely behind me. I decided that a pause in the long day was not unreasonable. And a bit of speech with a buttie is a fine, warming thing.
“Come in and sit you down, if your time belongs to you.”
He swept
a hand across his whiskers and left a smile where it passed. Dropping into his accustomed chair, he drew out his pipe.
“I have written to my Keziah’s folk,” he said. “To give them your considerations on young Dafydd.” He struck off a match on the heel of his shoe.
“And I have written to my Mary Myfanwy, who will speak to her uncle.”
“It is a curse when a boy marries badly,” Evans said through the first smoke.
“And a blessing when he marries well.” For I knew that to be true.
He smoked and sat and looked at me. There was a matter to be gotten out.
Finally, he said, “Captain Jones… do you think it ever right to break a trust?”
I thought on that. “I would say no, Mr. Evans. Except under the most exceptional conditions.”
He smoked and nodded. “But if the conditions were powerful exceptional? If they were terrible exceptional?”
“Then I should study to see where the good lay.”
“Well, I have studied it, then.” He leaned toward my desk. “Now I saw a telegraphic message sent off by the general himself some days ago. A confidential thing, it was. To be delivered by hand to a lady in Philadelphia. Your name was mentioned, Captain Jones.”
“That would be Mrs. Fowler.”
“The very same, Captain Jones. And the telegraphic said you yourself and none other were to inquire into the young man’s deceasement.”
“That is true, Mr. Evans.”
He puffed. “As you are my buttie, and a fellow Welshman from the head of the valleys, I will tell you about another message, then.”
“From the general, as well?”
He took the pipe from his mouth and looked about him. Assured we were alone, he said, “No. From Richmond.”
He had a true Welshman’s flair for the dramatic, for we understand the quietness inherent in revelation. We would make fine actors, were the profession not indecent.
Evans let his information soak well into my brain.
Faded Coat of Blue Page 8
