“I’m not going a good way tonight,” he said. “I asked you to come along because I think you might prove a good companion, and those are few. And because the Fowler boy’s bloody murder will not go out of my mind.” We passed an oyster bar, well lit. Shouting pitched against the rollick of a piano. “I read the papers, Jones. And I know better. And I know that you know better. And now I want to know why we seem to be the only two buckos in the world who do.”
I began to speak, but he stopped me. “I’ll make no embarrassment,” he said. “But I want the knowledge of the thing. Who killed that boy, and why?”
“I cannot speak of it,” I said. “Not yet. But I believe there will be justice in the end.”
He shook his head. He was the sort of man who found belief difficult. Except belief in his revolutions, I suppose. Men without Faith must substitute a dream, and mad dreams there are in plenty. There was a great loneliness in Dr. Michael Tyrone, though I hardly felt the depth of it then. Few men needed God so much and failed to find Him.
“Now wouldn’t that just be a rare thing,” he said. “To see justice done. Well, come on, man. I’ll take you where there is no justice, and never will be.”
He turned down an alley. Twas a foul stretch of darkness, its shadows alive.
“Dr. Tyrone,” I said, “perhaps you have seen me wrongly… for I am not a friend to such places.”
His laugh was sweeter now, with real humor in it. “Shut your worries, bucko. I’m no whoremonger. Tis a darker business than that.”
And he explained. Twice a week he journeyed in to visit the houses of shame frequented by his soldiers. He was trying to keep down the rate of disease in his camp and the others.
“And it isn’t only the soldiers I’m after helping,” he said. “If some of the girls are as bad as any man, others have come to the business in a thousand sorrowful ways. We must not judge them as if they were children of privilege.” The darkness whispered around us. “If you half knew them, Jones, you’d understand the need for revolution. And your landlady’s fondness for Herr Marx. The miseries of the bordello can be as grim as those of the battlefield. And the girls set out on the streets have it harder still.”
“The trade in human flesh is inexcusable under any circumstances.”
We stumbled through the darkness. Amid dreadful offers. Tyrone spoke bluntly to me, the way a doctor will speak when he’s got his students on a tour of a hospital, careless of the ears of the patients. “And what if your flesh is all you have to trade? Should you starve for virtue, Jones?”
“Yes. For a woman’s virtue is her jewel.”
He gave me a snort of a laugh. “You’ve never starved, I see.”
A female form put itself across our way. “Two at half the price,” she said. “And you boys won’t have to hurry.”
Tyrone stopped. “How’s the little one, Nellie?”
Closer she come, and I got the stink of her. “Oh it’s you, doctor. I’m sorry. I didn’t see proper, didn’t—”
“And the little one?”
“Weakening.”
“You promised me,” he said, “that I would not see you here again. You are a danger to all.”
Twas a conversation between shadows, the voice rich for the lack of sight. Her voice had been fright ened from the first, and went worse now.
“Don’t put the police on me. Please don’t you do it, doctor. I have to eat. And the baby…”
Tyrone told me of the case as we walked on. The woman had another variety of sickness I will not mention, and her baby had been born blind. Every man who went to her took the sickness from her. Now I have seen enough of the world to know of such things, but I never heard them spoken of as Tyrone did, as though they barely deserved to be hidden. He would have trumpeted them in broad daylight, I think, for he had that confidence in knowledge and reason you find in many who have lost their Christian faith. But even his fine Latin phrases could not dignify the business.
“Don’t you see, Jones?” he asked. “Ignorance is the enemy. The poor things don’t understand the least of it. Much is preventable. Some is curable. And the rest is containable. But not if we shut our eyes, man.”
I often wanted to shut my eyes that night, but Mick Tyrone did not shut his. He was fearless, in his way. I refused to go into the houses with him—for a man must fear moral contamination a hundred times more than the physical—but even their streets and alleys reeked to gagging a man. Entire houses stank of humanity gone sour, of sewage and sweat and worse. Yet there was ever a great coming and going, even through the grimmest doors, and that on a weeknight.
It is a curious thing how men and women will pursue an act meant to be one of love and beauty in surroundings of hopeless squalor. It is as if they hate what God has given them.
I sought out quiet corners where I might wait for Tyrone to be done. Of course, there were many unpleasant proposals to be declined, the oddest of which come from a wretch who thought I must be a doctor, too, and who wanted me to inspect her at the back of an alley.
“I can’t stop the damned itching,” she said, and was embarrassed when I finally made her understand I was no medical man.
Tyrone stepped out of the last house. Twas a dreadful shack of a place, next to a coalyard and hard by the canal, all wrapped in the smell of human waste. His face was green in the lamplight.
He shook his head. “I can’t imagine how they stay in business,” he said. “Every one of them sick. And most of them look it. And they’ll do things at the paying that the imagination strains to touch, yet they’re shy as maids when it comes to a doctor’s examination.” He looked up into the darkness, as if cleansing his eyes with the stars. “Two young boys are in there drunk, and they’ll regret it all their lives. They wanted to fight me when I suggested they leave.”
“You are quite the good Samaritan, Dr. Tyrone.”
The thought of such a thing brought a snicker. “I’m just bribing my devils to leave me alone. Off we go, Jones.”
We turned into a better street, although better was a relative matter in Murder Bay. Immediately, I grasped Tyrone by the arm, pulling him back into the shadows. A cat shrieked and ran out between our legs.
“What—”
“Quiet you,” I said.
Toward the end of the block, Major Trenchard and Captain Bates had gone up the front steps of a house. I had a good eye and knew it was them. I watched their backs shrink through the door.
“Who were they?” Tyrone asked me.
“Fools,” I said. “Friends of Anthony Fowler. Although he was a different kind of fool entirely.”
Dr. Tyrone’s face took on the playful. “Well, that’s fitting.”
“And your meaning, Dr. Tyrone?”
We walked again. “That they should be friends of the Fowler boy. With all of his abolition talk. Tis a house where gentlemen visit Negresses.”
I made no answer and he mistook my thoughtfulness.
“You find that shocking, Jones?”
“No, Dr. Tyrone, I do not.”
We got board pavement underfoot again. My shoes would need a fine cleaning before I might step into Mrs. Schutzengel’s hallway.
“Yes,” he said. “Of course. India. And the English rose in short supply.” He smiled. “I suspect you might be a bit of an abolitionist yourself, Jones.”
I refused to be baited. “I would see no man enslaved,” I said. “But I am one for minding my own business.”
“Tis every man’s business. All men are brothers, Jones.”
The lights and life of Pennsylvania Avenue spread before us again. Provost guards rode by where they were not needed.
“You are an abolitionist, then, Dr. Tyrone? As well as a revolutionary? Might that explain your interest in the Fowler boy?”
He shook his head. “The Fowler case has to do with a murder of the body… slavery with the murder of the soul.”
“But you would fight to abolish Negro servitude? Kill one man to free another?”
He clapped me on the shoulder. “Why do you think I’m wearing this damned blue coat, bucko? This Union of ours is man’s last hope. Oh, Jones, tis a shame we are not drinking men, for we would have such talks.”
He shifted his bag from one hand to the other and grew serious again.
“I would abolish more than slavery,” he told me.
We said goodbye in front of the National Hotel, with that bummer there as always. Twas late for me, and I had not yet written to my Mary Myfanwy. Nor did I think I could craft a letter that night. It seemed wrong, and dangerous, after what I had seen. As if such matters might seep in to taint our world. I wished to talk to my beloved, to let out my heart to her, and to ask her questions I could ask no other. But the war would not have it, and the pen dared not tell it.
I was thinking about Trenchard and Bates, curious that Livingston had not accompanied them on their revels. Of course, the boy was engaged to be married and perhaps he was given to goodness, after all. Marriage, or even its prospect, can make a great reformation in a man. Yet, they were friends, those three, and thick together in their doings. Livingston’s absence gave me a matter to think on.
So far gone was I in my weariness and wonderings that I did not see the fellow on Mrs. Schutzengel’s porch until I started up the steps. My footfalls on the planking woke him, and we both jumped.
Twas that cavalryman, come to gather me up for General McClellan.
Chapter 8
The trooper had a carriage with him, although General McClellan was not in it this time. The man mounted his horse and rode ahead, with the coachman following and me trying to order my thoughts. I had a great deal to tell, and I was confident in my determinations, but a general will have things told properly and no nonsense. I worried over my words, for justice depended upon them.
We stopped beside a fine house on the corner of H Street and 15th, and the trooper led me to the tradesman’s entrance. The house appeared dark from the outside.
“You can report here now,” the cavalryman told me, “when there’s something needs telling. Just don’t never go to the front side. This is the general’s new house, and his wife and family’s coming.”
When the door opened, I saw the gas fixtures turned low ahead of me, throwing just enough light for a man to walk. The trooper led the way. The house smelled of a recent cleaning, with lye biting the nose.
“You be quiet now, Captain. General Marcy’s asleep and he’s a coot when you wake him.” He led me up the first set of stairs and pointed to a door. “Knock soft like.”
I did as I was told. General McCIellan’s confident voice bid me come in.
Twas his very bedroom. He was at work at a table furnished with a kerosene lamp to strengthen the gas glow. A young man in a captain’s uniform stood by him, bending over a document. I saw a blood resemblance.
“That’s enough for tonight, Arthur,” the general said. “Off to the sleep of the just.”
The captain went out, nodding as he passed me.
“Jones… good to see you again. Sit down, sit down.” He pointed to a chair all velvet and fringe by the stove. Then he turned over the paper on which he had been working. “I must do it all myself. I can count on no one. They do not understand war, Jones.” His eyes shone above dark crescents. “But you understand it. Don’t you? The horror and splendor of the field of battle?”
The chair was a fine one, and soft. “I have seen the horror of it, sir.”
“And here I am… the general-in-chief. Pressed to campaign before we’re ready. Why, I even had to plan the grand review myself. Though I must say it went off splendidly. Did you see our little show, Jones?”
“Work wanted doing, sir. But I hear the Army marched well.”
He sighed. “Yes. Work. The work of building an army. Would that there were more like you, Jones. I am surrounded by amateurs and incompetents.” Even in his bedroom, he wore his full uniform, a model for us all. He sat back and slipped his hand inside his tunic as he liked to do. “Who killed Anthony Fowler?”
I looked him in the eye. “Mr. Matthew Cawber. Of Philadelphia.”
His face did not answer with the shock I expected. A good general is master of his emotions.
“I do not mean, sir,” I went on, “that Mr. Cawber pulled the trigger himself. But I believe he was behind the murder.”
“And why is that, Jones? Tell me.” His mouth remained open, as if he were smoking an invisible cigar. That was the tiredness in him, I thought, and pitied him the want of good subordinates.
“Anthony Fowler was a crusader. The boy could barely help himself. He was born to it. Abolition was his first cause. This was his second, for he saw it as just. Then he discovered evidence of corruption. Of great and terrible corruption, sir, harmful to the Union. Cawber Steel and Iron has been selling the government faulty cannon, at exorbitant prices. Many a Cawber gun blows up by the third or fourth firing. A dozen men have been killed, sir, and others maimed. And I myself saw evidence of lesser corruption on the part of Mr. Cawber, of stolen uniforms and—”
“I know Cawber,” McClellan said. “And I don’t like him or his sort. Ruthless. Piratical. Parasites upon the land. He puts on a great show of contributing to the abolitionists and their printed rags, though his own workmen are little better off than slaves.” The general chewed the side of his mouth. “Cawber’s greed anld ambition are… inhuman. But murder… that’s another matter entirely.”
I leaned forward. “Sir, Captain Fowler had built up a mass of evidence. I have it locked up in the office safe. And one of his friends came right out and told me Fowler intended to send Cawber to prison. It became the boy’s third cause, all wrapped up with saving the Union and freeing the Negro, see.”
“This war is not about the abolition of slavery, Jones.”
“No, sir. As you say. But young Fowler saw it in such a light.” The room was wicked warm and I wished for a drink of water, but dared not ask for it. “Consider it, sir. Here’s Cawber, a man who’s clawed his way up from the gutter, who’s built himself a fine fortune and great mills for iron and steel and the like. And more than anything now he wants respectability and social position. Then along comes a bright, young crusader with a mind to put him in jail. And ruin his business, like as not. Men have killed for far less.”
McClellan let his tongue come out and rest between his lips. The meat of it looked fat and pink under his mustache. It was incongruous: our general in his handsome uniform, with his hair down sleek and dignity in the very air about him—and his tongue peeking out like a small boy’s over his penmanship.
“And you say you have evidence?” he said finally. “Of the corruption. Not directly of the murder. But the thing is sure. A greater investigation—”
McClellan waved me to silence. “It would rock the Union…if true. The murder of our own golden youth. Corruption in the War Department. The public riven. And our nation’s honor discredited abroad.” He shook his head slowly and his hair took the flicker of the lamp. “This nonsense with Mason and Slidell is bad enough. Seward’s not the man to handle anything more. The British could use the scandal as their excuse to come in on Richmond’s side. Oh, Palmerston wants to do it, you know. Cotton. Manchester. Bankers and worse. As if war were a matter of national economy.” His hand slipped from his tunic and fell into his lap. “Cawber, indeed. A Cameron man, of course. No telling where that might end.”
“There is shame in it, indeed, sir.”
He writhed in his chair. “My God… I never believed the Confederates did it. I did not want these hatreds stirred up. But neither did I expect…” His eyes sought mine. “Do you realize what a scandal it would be, Jones? I almost wish I could blame it on Richmond, after all.”
“Justice must take its course, sir. An expansion of the investigation—”
“Nothing of the kind. Not yet. I can’t have others brought in on this until we’re certain. There are spies everywhere, Jones. The streets of this city are full of men of questionable interes
ts. We can trust no one.” He rubbed his eyes and permitted himself a slight yawn. “The matter may call for exceptional measures. Extraordinary measures. I want you to stay with it, Jones. You’ve done magnificently. Keep up the splendid work.”
My hands were empty and my heart was emptier. “Sir… I don’t know what more to do. The matter is far bigger than me, and I’ve come to my end of it. Surely, you can see that.”
He canted his head. “Nonsense. Toujours l’audace. We must go on the attack, Jones. But we will do it skillfully. Strike the enemy where He is weak. If Baron Jomini were in my position, I’m sure he’d do exactly the same.”
“And would this baron fellow be the Frenchman you go riding with, sir?”
He laughed. “Not likely, Jones. Listen. Here’s what we’ll do. I’ll contact Cawber telegraphically. Make it clear he is to see you, and no nonsense.” He thought. “Tomorrow’s Friday. You can take the morning train. The railroaders have the Baltimore to Philadelphia line running again, though it’s slow over the bridges. You can see Cawber tomorrow evening. The Cawber works are just down the Delaware from the city. I’ll have a military conveyance put at your disposal.”
“But…”
“Confront him. Lay out the evidence. Let Cawber know that we know what happened, make him think he’s already trapped. Then we’ll see what he does.”
“But I have no direct proof, sir. I cannot—”
“That’s the point, Jones. We can’t be timid in the face of the enemy. We have to accept risk, if we want results. If there is a weakness in our position, we must go on the offensive. Why, do you imagine I would take the field and hesitate to press the foe? Outnumbered five to one, I would attack with the resolution of Ney, of Napoleon himself. We must show ourselves confident. Frighten him, Jones. Scare Cawber out of his wits. Then we’ll have him.” He smiled. “I wouldn’t be surprised if he confesses on the spot. Imagine the shock of it.”
I sat for a moment. I sensed he expected me to say something, but my thoughts were a jumble. I did not mind confronting Cawber, who had done an evil thing. But my mind had already reached beyond that part of the business.
Faded Coat of Blue Page 15
