Faded Coat of Blue

by Ralph Peters (as Owen Parry)

  I found what I was looking for. Where the thinnest sliver of light cracked out of covered windows. I saw a Chinese woman bent over a bowl, eating with her fingers.

  It took me a minute to feel my way around to the door. If door you could call that shabby gathering of boards. I put my cane to it, but not too hard.

  The world seemed quieter of a sudden. No footsteps came to answer. So I tapped again. And then again. Only when I was about to tap a fourth time did the door pull back an inch.

  I had heard no footsteps.

  There was light then, though little of it. And I saw the very face I wished to see, a bridge between two worlds.

  “You remember me,” I told Mr. Lee. “I want to talk to you.”

  “This… is irregular,” he said in that fine manner of speech that had startled me from the first.

  “That it is. But we are going to talk, see.”

  With a slowness you could barely call decision, he opened the door. Then a jolt seemed to pass through him.

  “Come inside. Quickly, please.” He slapped the boards shut behind me.

  What a stench there was. Mrs. Fowler had a grand house, with all the latest conveniences, I’m sure, but there were none such for the servants. Add on the queer smells of their cooking, and it would have gagged a Hindoo. And jabbering they were. In the room beyond the entryway. The funniest talk you ever heard, but with no mistaking the fear in it.

  Mr. Lee stood before me in the half light, a different man. He wore a stained and collarless shirt, with one sleeve garter up and one slipped down. Stepping backward to give me more space, he glanced over my shoulder. As if danger waited beyond the door. He did not have me into their room, but I could see enough of it to pity them. There was an easy dozen Chinese folk, and not got up in the splendors of the East like the Fowler mansion. No, they were dressed in cast-offs the Irish wouldn’t wear, and the furniture was broken. The only ornament I saw was a picture of Jesus on the wall, with the glass cracked over his face.

  “Why have you come here?” Mr. Lee asked me. Sweating in the cold. When last we were together, he had been the picture of composure.

  “Only to ask you a question, Mr. Lee. And one of your own making.”

  “I do not know the answer.”

  “I have not asked you yet.”

  “No questions,” he said. “Go away. Please. You are making it dangerous for us.”

  “And why would that be?”

  “No. Go away.”

  Perhaps I seemed as foul to him as that fellow with the squeezebox had seemed to me. There is no telling how another sees us.

  “I know why Mrs. Fowler keeps a carriage,” I told him. “And I know about the place in Bryn Mawr.”

  “Mrs. Fowler is a noble lady.”

  “That is not the point, Mr. Lee.”

  “Everything is fine here.”

  “Is it now? Then you shouldn’t mind a question.”

  “This is not your business.”

  I looked at that frightened man. With his American voice and the loneliness of a skin not white nor yellow. I remembered him speaking of “We Philadelphians” when first we met. Far from home he was, for such as he had none.

  “There are those who have made it my business, Mr. Lee. Now I will have one answer from you. When I asked you about Captain Fowler, you said to me, ‘He was his fathers son.’ What was your meaning there?”

  “Nothing. No meaning.”

  I shook my head. “Mr. Lee, you do not strike me as a man given to empty speech.” In the room behind him, an infant began to shriek. “I will have the meaning of it.”

  “Please,” he said. “My family is at risk. Mrs. Fowler will make us all leave. And where will we go, sir? Where will we go in America?”

  “Answer my question,” I said. “And I will bother you no more.”

  He looked down at the floor. And I realized with a shock it was earthen. Oh, Christian charity was high with Mrs. Fowler.

  I do not think I am a cruel man. I pray that I am not. But things had gone too far to fail over a nicety.

  I took him by the shoulders. The cane in my hand was as thick as his arm.

  “Talk to me, man. Or I will have a bang on Mrs. Fowler’s door that will wake the dead. And I will tell her it was you who told me about her midnight visits and her husband’s condition.”

  I must have made a commotion, for a shriveled creature peered around the corner at us. I think it was a woman. Her nose was eaten away.

  “Why was he ‘his father’s son’?” I shouted. “The weakness,” Mr. Lee said at last. “I only meant the weakness.”

  Chapter 10

  I did not reach Washington until the afternoon. My train took the direct route from Philadelphia, but it was delayed north of Baltimore. Partisans had done a mischief to the rails ahead of us and a troop train left the tracks. My fellow passengers declared Maryland a no-good Secesh state, whose citizens deserved no better than the horsewhip or the noose. And it is true that Baltimore frowned on those in Union blue. But why is it, I ask you, that those willing to do little themselves want the most done to others? For it is one thing to call for hanging Jeff Davis from a sour apple tree, though quite another to catch him and knot the rope yourself. But let that bide.

  I used my time to think and plan. Not once did I allow myself to take out the picture of my Mary Myfanwy, for I knew that would set me to moping and dreaming. And there was work to be done.

  I needed luck, see. Not a great deal of it, but just enough to open the door a crack. I saw now what a fool I had been and how much I had left undone. I had been governed by my anger over a shortage of trousers and had behaved with a shortage of sense. I had been only too ready to blame Mr. Cawber. So it was that I neglected the simple questions that needed to be asked. Now I would ask them, however late. To begin with, I needed to know why Anthony Fowler had been murdered. Twas clear enough that some men did not want the truth to come out. Yet that did not mean they knew the truth—only that they feared it.

  I needed luck, and I got it, though I did not realize it at first.

  There are days in late November when the air is made of gold dust and beauty fills the heart. On such an afternoon I got down from the train, planning to stop at Mrs. Schutzengel’s for a wash and then to take the next step in my investigation before going back to the War Department. For there was a fear in me that General McClellan would relieve me of my duties, now that the dirty work had been done to Mr. Cawber. And a Welshman is not a quitter. Now that I was in the stream and wet, I intended to get to the other side.

  An omnibus presented itself to me at the foot of Pennsylvania Avenue. My leg was queer again and I almost took a seat as far as 7th Street. But the distance was little, and it did seem a waste. I waved the driver on.

  Never was I so wise to save a few pennies.

  I marched up the sidewalk, fighting the special tiredness a man gets from travel, and paused only to look in the windows of French and Richstein, where I intended to purchase a few of my beloved’s Christmas frivolities. There was a new novel on display, Silas Marner, for seventy-five cents. Pricey that, but a pretty edition, and we must make allowances for the holidays. I knew Mr. Eliot was a favorite of my wife’s, though I never could be got to read him. There is too much puffery and pretense in a novel for me. It is very much a lady’s province, and I always suspect the men who write the things of unsound habits. Such scribblings would be better left to a feminine hand.

  There were three books by that Balzac fellow, too, in new translation. They were piled up shameless, for all the walking world to see. I will say one thing for the valleys of Wales: the chapel deacons would have made short work of any bookseller who put French matters in his windows. Only imagine what a Frenchman will put down on paper, once he learns to write. Then on I went past saloons, haberdashers, and jewelers! At the mouth of 6th Street, Brown’s Hotel faced off with the National. The same bummer as always lazed in front of the National, threadbare and natty at once, with his eye
s quick and his hand out. When I passed him by he spit tobacco juice with a great bluster and noise. In the street, a gang of Negroes worked to repair the cobbles.

  And then it happened. A train of commissary wagons clattered down 7th Street, blocking my way, and I almost turned up the near side. But something made me wait them past. As I crossed at last, my cane caught in the pavings and called my eyes down.

  When I looked up again, Lieutenant Livingston come popping out of the door on the corner. Our eyes connected.

  No man ever looked away quicker than that boy did. His mouth opened and you could feel the stammer come up in him. Then he decided to say nothing to me at all, but turned his back and took off down the avenue. As though I were a very hound of Hell.

  There is strange, I thought. But not for long. For I recognized the doorway that had poured him into the street.

  Seventh and Pennsylvania.

  The Washington Building.

  Dr. La Bonta, the quack.

  Private diseases, handled confidentially.

  I saw Livingston’s troubles clearly then. With the wedding to Miss Elizabeth Cathcart of Philadelphia coming toward him. It almost let me feel his taste for drink.

  Mrs. Schutzengel was in a state.

  “You are coming back, Captain Jones! Oooch, Gott sei dank. I think you are going because I will have the revolution, and shame on that Irish man who is making this trouble over innocent books. I think he is against the proletariat.”

  “The what?” For I thought it was another of her German words.

  She filled, the kitchen with all her yeasty dignity. “The verkers,” she said. “The verkers of the verlt.”

  “Beg pardon?”

  She said it again, and I got it.

  “There is wrong you are doing the man, Mrs. Schutzengel. Dr. Tyrone is on your side.”

  “If this man is a doctor, I am the queen of Prussia. Und die verfluchte Konigin von Preussen bin ich nicht!”

  “But he really is a doctor. He studied in Vienna. He’s a bit of a revolutionary fellow himself, see, and—”

  “Der ist doch kein Revoluzzer! Ooooch, Ich kenne diese Typen.” She was a frightening spectacle when aroused.

  “Die lesen, ja, und philosophieren, und schaffen nichts! Kampfbereit muss man sein!”

  “Please don’t upset yourself so, Mrs. Schutzengel.” I did not know whether she would shout on or break down weeping.

  Instead of doing either, she calmed and said, “You will eat now? You are hungry? How I am wishing I am cooking for the whole proletariat und for poor Mr. Marx, der arme! He is surrounded by the capitalists of London und er leidet so. Der liebe Engels hat mir alles mitgeteilt…”

  I begged off my feeding after downing a pair of biscuits and a cut of stewed beef, but my curiosity was up, of course, and I could not help asking:

  “Now… Mrs. Schutzengel… surely you are not plotting a revolution… here in America?”

  She looked at me as if I were the silliest man on earth.

  “Here? In America?” She shook her mighty chunk of head so hard a pin flipped from the strictness of her hair. “In the world, we will make the revolution. But not here, Gott erbarme, for these Irishes to break all my windows.”

  The lamplighter had gone to work by the time I left the house. I had done no more than wash and set the photograph of my beloved on my bedside table, but the November days were short. The cold followed the darkness. I made a detour to buy my newspaper from Fine Jim.

  He stood on his corner, eye swollen and coatless.

  “And how are you, lad?” I asked him. There was no more I could do, for I had shamed the boy enough. Our foolishness is boundless, though we mean it oh so well.

  “Tops, Captain Jones. I’m tops.” His smile was as thin as army coffee. I put my paper in my pocket and went on my way to G Street, where Anthony Fowler had taken his rooms in a fine town house. Twas a place I should have gone at the first opportunity, but my head had been hard and my eyes shut.

  Now that was a rooming house different from Mrs. Schutzengel’s. A Negress in a starched cap opened at my ring and the chandelier I saw behind her head would not have disgraced Mr. Cawber’s palace.

  “Yes, sir?” the girl said. Her voice was soft, with the inflection of those high-flown Southern ladies and none of your minstrel-show grossness.

  “I would like to speak to the proprietress, if you please. A Mrs. Reynolds, I believe?”

  She allowed me in, but had the art to plant me just by the door. “Excuse me, sir. I will inquire,” she said.

  No hurry to her. Nor dallying, neither. Just a stately going, as if she owned the house herself, and the city besides.

  From the next room I took the murmur of female voices. A chair creaked and shoes clacked on a parquet floor.

  A woman fine in her years approached me, all Belgian lace and silver hair.

  “May I be of assistance, sir?”

  This one did look me up and down, lady or no. She might have been buying a horse on a day no good hooves were to be had.

  “Mrs. Reynolds?”

  “Madame Reynaud, sir.”

  The maid stood quietly in the background, in case her mistress needed help in booting me out the door.

  “Yes, mum. My apologies.”

  “I have no accommodations available at present. I’m so sorry.”

  “Yes, mum. But I am not in want of such. I have come to ask you about a recent lodger, Captain Anthony Fowler.”

  Now there was play in the muscles of her face, though you needed good eyes to spot it. A slight movement at the corners of the mouth, a tightening around the eyes. There were calculations doing in that head.

  “I cannot… discuss the affairs of my guests,” she told me. “Those are private matters.”

  I had not expected much more, truth be told. “Mum… the lad was murdered. Cold and ugly. There is a difference there, see. I am not after the secrets of the living.”

  “I’m sure Captain Fowler had no secrets of any kind. He was a gentleman of flawless comportment.” She was just taller than me, but she looked down at me as if from a perch high up on the wall. “We all regret his tragic… loss. But we dare not slight decorum. Good day, sir.”

  And she turned from me just like that. There is manners and elegance for you. A wall put up to keep honesty out.

  “Decorum, mum? The boy’s dead,” I called after her. “Murdered, he was. Do you care nothing for that?”

  With her white hand on a brass nob, she turned to me again. “Good day, sir.”

  The colored girl let me out, though I had no need of help. Funny eyes she laid on me, though. As if she had a mind of her own about things.

  In the street, a lone carriage clattered by. There was little to do on a Monday evening. Any other night, with the streets fuller, I might not have noticed the gentleman following me.

  I turned down toward the Avenue, with its thousand excuses for pausing by a window and studying the reflection. And I purposely took my time going. Had the fellow been more experienced, he would have kept to his pace and passed me by without a glance. That’s how your dacoit would have done it in India. But this was a country of amateurs still, of amateur soldiers and amateur criminals.

  I was but four blocks gone when I heard a quick clapping of shoes behind me. Women’s shoes, they were, with that higher sound and a feel of hesitation even at a run. When she was almost upon me, I turned.

  Twas the Negro girl from the rooming house, with a cloak thrown about her and a hood over her fine white cap.

  “Captain… please… wait,” she called.

  I glanced back up the street and saw the man trailing me stop clumsy as a corpse on the sidewalk. It took him a long moment to think to step into a doorway.

  “Go away, girl,” I said. For I sensed the beginning of danger.

  But go she would not. “Please, sir. Please. I want to help. Captain Fowler… he was a saint, an angel. No one should die like that, no one. Especially not a man like him…”<
br />
  “What do you know?” I led her into the shadow of a flight of front steps. “Quick now. Tell me.”

  “I don’t know anything,” she said, and her brown eyes were huge and sad in the poor light. “But Annie Fitzgerald, she might know something. Annie knew everything. I declare, that girl had eyes and ears…”

  “And who would this Annie Fitzgerald be, then?”

  “His maid. Captain Fowler kept a butler and a maid, but the butler’s gone away. Nobody knows where. But Annie’s still in town, I think. Annie… she adored him. Everybody adored Captain Fowler. He was a perfect gentleman. Always. Even with me.”

  “And where would I find Miss Annie Fitzgerald?”

  “In Swampoodle. She said to leave a message at Mother Flaherty’s, if I heard of any work she might have. But it isn’t easy, sir. People in Washington… none of them want Irish help. They prefer us coloreds around the house. It’s higher class.”

  “And where is this Mother Flaherty’s? Have you an address, girl?”

  She shook her head. The hood of her cloak nearly fell back, but I caught it for her. I hoped that the man following me had not seen her face. “I don’t think there are addresses in Swampoodle,” she said. “A body just asks.” Her eyes lost what little steadiness they had. “Anyway, I’d be afraid to go there.”

  “All right,” I said. “Thank you, miss.”

  “It’s for him, sir. For Captain Anthony. Don’t let anybody ever say anything bad about that man. He was… noble, sir.” Her alarm at her own boldness mastered her. “I have to go now,” she said. “I had no leave from the house.”

  “Go, then. But don’t turn around. Go on ahead of me, and turn the corner. Then go back by another street.”

  She raised her eyes. Pretty enough, she was, and I could imagine the bother some of the gentlemen lodgers made for her. Her praise of Fowler carried a special weight.

  It was funny how the women all seemed to think Fowler a saint, while men liked him made small.

  I caught the girl just as she was walking off. My touch startled her. And offended her, I think.