Byzantium

by Ben Stroud

  Burke, alarmed, straightened in his chair. “I was hoping,” he said, “you’d be able to do that for me.”

  “But I thought she’d sent you!” Enrique said, then pleaded, “why torture me with your note?”

  “I’m trying to find her,” Burke said.

  Enrique was silent a moment. Then something seemed to catch. “Why?” he asked. A nervousness entered his voice. “Who hired you? Was it Don Hernán?”

  “I’m under his employ, but he didn’t—”

  “He knows?” At that he went to the window. A gauzy sheet hung there, luffing in the wind. “Oh, no no no.”

  “I can assure you Don Hernán knows nothing,” Burke said, “and I can further assure you that he will learn nothing. You are safe. I’m charged only to find Marcita. That I will do, and nothing else.”

  Enrique pulled back the curtain and looked out. Then he stepped back toward Burke. “I love her,” he said. “When she is free, we’re going to move to Santo Domingo, away from the don, away from this island. I’ve been saving money to help her. See?” He offered Burke one of the tins in the crate. A crowned cow stared out from its label, which touted the contents as superior butter. “I sell this, for my living, for her. I was waiting for her last Tuesday. We were going to have an hour. But then she didn’t show. I worried. I thought the don had found out. Then I saw the notices the don put in the paper, and I thought maybe she had run.”

  Burke’s mind began to leap with what Enrique had told him. “You were waiting for her on Tuesday?” he asked.

  “Yes, yes,” Enrique said.

  “Where, exactly?”

  “At the corner of O’Reilly and Compostela.”

  “And you kept a hard watch for her?”

  “I always do.”

  Burke rose, relief breaking through him like morning sun. She wasn’t a runaway—she had truly disappeared. “Thank you,” he said. Then, without another word, he went to the door.

  “Is that all?” Enrique asked, still standing by the window and staring after Burke.

  “It is enough.”

  BURKE WALKED DIRECTLY to the Calle O’Reilly. There, halfway between the Habana and Compostela intersections, he planted himself in the center of the street. He looked eastward, toward the intersection where Miércoles and Domingo had waited, O’Reilly and Habana. Then he pivoted and looked westward, toward the intersection where Enrique had kept a sharp lookout, O’Reilly and Compostela. Between these two lookouts, one at either entrance to the block, Marcita had vanished.

  On the left side of the street were the oyster shop, the bookseller’s, and the tobacco shop he’d seen before, and farther on a linen shop and a silversmith’s. On the right stood a tea shop, a music shop, a large shop selling glassware, and a perfumery. There was nothing strange about the block. The shops were all elegant, glass-fronted establishments that catered to the city’s gentry. They had preposterous names like The Empress Eugénie (the perfumery) and The Bower of Arachne (the linen shop) written in gold letters above their doors. Burke walked up and down before them, observing everything around him, looking again and again into the same shopwindows and at the crowds moving past, the gentlemen, the vendors, the slaves. He even knelt and examined the street itself, paved in smoothed cobblestones. But after two hours’ investigation, Burke had found nothing. Returned to the Calle del Sol, he sat at his desk to think, and when Fernandita brought in his supper he refused the plate of French sausages and rice with a distracted wave of his hand.

  “You must ease yourself about hunting that girl,” Fernandita said. “Somebody’s going to catch her and it might as well be you. We have debts to pay.”

  “It’s not that,” Burke said, looking up at her. “I’m quite over that.”

  The usual stoniness returned to Fernandita’s face and she left the room, but in a moment she had returned. “I almost forgot,” she said. “A boy brought this.” She handed Burke a message. It was from Galván, and he’d written only three words: Body not found.

  LATER THAT NIGHT, once full darkness had fallen, Burke dressed in trousers and a shirt made of old sailcloth and left his rooms to walk through the city. It was all he could think to do. He hoped that, passing among slaves, visiting their night haunts, he might hear rumors—of Marcita, of the murdered slave, of the others the don mentioned had gone missing. He went to the abandoned lots and shadowy groves where slaves were known to gather for their dances and their guinea magic, but each one he found deserted. The only slave he saw that night he stumbled on by chance—a fresh bozal standing outside a tavern, far from any of the slaves’ usual places. He seemed agitated; he was staring in through the tavern’s window at white men eating and drinking, gnashing his lips.

  Burke approached him. “What’s the matter?” he asked.

  The slave turned to him. Tribal scars ridged his forehead and shoulders. His front teeth were filed into points, and his breath stank of aguardiente. “I lost my little Anto,” he said.

  Just then the tavern-keeper came out and waved a stained rag at the two of them. “Bah!” he said. “Go on! Get moving!” He snapped the rag at the slave and then at Burke, who, as he leapt back, bumped into a creole passing by. Without breaking stride, the man struck him with his gold-tipped cane, then continued on down the street, paying him no more attention. Burke recognized the fellow—Maroto? Sánchez?—had even shaken his hand at a salon where he’d been invited to play cards and share stories about his cases. He wanted to shout, but by the time he’d overcome his shock at being struck the creole was gone, disappeared into the night. He turned to find the slave with the pointed teeth, but he was gone, too.

  After an hour of more wandering, Burke returned to his rooms, lit a lamp, and sat at his desk. The slaves were frightened of something—he could see that in their emptied gathering places and in the eyes of the bozal. But what was the connection to Marcita’s disappearance? He thought of the head found outside the city, and of the street where Marcita disappeared. He could sense a tie between them, but his brain failed to take hold of it. Outside, the sereno called the second hour of morning. Burke took a cigarette from the canister on his desk. Fernandita had just restocked them with the don’s money. He struck a match, brought the light to the cigarette tip, then stopped. The labels in Marcita’s room—the shop in the Calle O’Reilly with the too-high prices—the cigarette factory next to the field where the slave was found. As each piece clicked into the next the match burned down and singed his fingers.

  “Fernandita!” he shouted. “Fernandita!”

  After the fourth shout she emerged from her closet, cursing and blinking.

  “Go to the captain-general’s palace. He’ll be up, playing cards. Give him this message.” As Burke spoke, he quickly scrawled a letter telling the captain-general he was acting in the affairs of Don Hernán and asking him to send troops to the Pedroso y Compañia factory without delay.

  “Why? What’s happening?” Fernandita looked about the room, as if someone else might be there.

  “I’m not sure yet,” Burke said, the unlit cigarette still in his mouth. He shoved the letter in Fernandita’s hands. “But I’m going to find out.”

  At that he left his rooms and ran through the dark streets until he found an idle volanta waiting near the cathedral. Dropping a handful of reales into the postilion’s palm, Burke yelled for him to drive to the Calle de la Soledad, outside the city. “Race the devil!” he shouted. Then he threw himself into the volanta’s seat and the man took off.

  THEY WENT PAST THE FIELD where the head had been found, then came to an empty lane just off the paseo—the Calle de la Soledad. The volanta pulled to a stop, and Burke got out, telling the driver to wait. The white macadam glowed in the light of the moon, and the air carried the scent of meat cooked over a fire. A night bird called from a far line of trees, but otherwise everything was still. Just up the lane stood the three factories Burke had seen earlier that day when
he’d come to inquire about the murder. The snuff mill lay dormant and Burke stepped quickly, carefully past its low, silent hulk. Just beyond it was the yard of the cigarette factory. He halted. The factory’s yard was untended, overgrown with weeds and littered here and there with bottles. But light shone through the cracks in its shuttered windows, and, once he stilled his own breathing, Burke could hear the murmur of men talking.

  He knew he should wait for the captain-general’s soldiers, but he couldn’t hold himself back. What were these men up to? Might Marcita still be alive, trapped inside? He crept to one of the windows and edged open a shutter and looked. In the factory’s single hall, where women once worked rolling cigarettes, a black-skinned body hung from a hook. It was being stripped by one man while two others worked at one of the old rolling tables, turning a grinder. The grinder jammed just as Burke’s gaze fell on it, and one of the men working it kicked at the table while the other shouted. The man stripping the body, cutting meat from the legs, whistled a tune, unbothered. Burke recognized him as the corpulent, red-haired tobacconist from the Gallitos shop.

  It took Burke a moment to understand, and once he did he felt his reason trickle away. He couldn’t turn—the ghastly sight held him. Instead, without noticing, he leaned forward. His hand was still on the shutter, and it creaked. At that all three men looked up from their work. Burke let go of the shutter. It creaked again, and now they had seen him.

  Burke tried to move, tried to run, but a lightness washed forward from the back of his skull. The men at the grinder had snatched knives from the table, and the one stripping the body had picked up an ax. Burke watched, paralyzed. They’d gone, and he could hear the cannibals’ footsteps, out of the factory now and on the grass. At last Burke beat back the lightness, pulled his feet from the morass that had gripped them, and ran. Just as he made it to the volanta, he heard the trumpets of the captain-general’s troops, and two cavalrymen appeared in the street. Burke didn’t care to see any more. Bent over in the volanta’s seat, he heaved, shut his eyes, and ordered the driver to take him home.

  “IN THE SAUSAGE!?” Don Hernán repeated, his face green. He was sitting in Burke’s bedchamber, slumped in a cane chair. “Oh, my poor cinnamon! To think I—” He stopped. It seemed for the moment he could not bring himself to mention the French sausage again.

  Burke lay on his cot. When he’d returned to his rooms he’d felt the lightness return, a sickness overtaking him, and he’d not been able to stand or sit. Now, morning having come, he was explaining his findings to the don, detailing how the three men had roamed the outskirts of the city capturing slaves to butcher. Fernandita stood by the door folding and refolding a cleaned sheet as she listened.

  “The shop was a ruse. That’s why the price on the cigarettes was so high, to keep people away. Marcita was unlucky. She must have wandered in, looking for new labels for her collection, and that’s when they took her.”

  Outside a bell tinkled, a procession of priests bringing the viaticum to a dying man.

  “All of Havana eating slave flesh,” the don said. “Horrible!” He sat up, some of the green faded from his face. “But I tell you, I can’t understand why. I’ve thought over the numbers—there couldn’t have been much money in it, not nearly as much as the slaves were worth in the field.”

  The ringing had gone, the priests turned around a corner. What he’d seen through the window of the cigarette factory flashed again before Burke’s eyes.

  “Don Hernán, who can know the motives of such beasts?”

  ONCE THE DON HAD LEFT, Burke called to Fernandita to help him to the window. She held him by the arm, and he pushed aside the curtain and looked out. The sun shone brightly on the harbor ships, ignorant of all that had just passed.

  He had been working to save slaves, not trap them, but in the light of the morning his relief had begun to crumble. He’d fashioned excuses, but he’d been willing to hunt Marcita for pay. His mind spun with the thought that he’d become the equal of the men in the factory, that he’d stepped irrevocably away from the goodness he’d once imagined his.

  When he turned back from the window, he said to Fernandita, who still held his arm and was smiling uncertainly up at him, “You may tell my next caller that I am taking no more cases.”

  The smile vanished. “Don’t be a fool,” Fernandita said. “Not over just the one girl.”

  But Burke had learned the truth of his position now. Shaking free of Fernandita’s hand he stepped back toward his cot. “If the caller insists,” he told her, with a glance back toward the masts outside his window, “you may lie and say I am no longer in the city but a lowly crewman at sea.” His legs were still weak, and he was exhausted from his night of work, hollowed and brittled by all he’d seen. At the moment he couldn’t fathom what he was going to do when his money ran out, but he’d decided his work as a detective in Havana was finished, and in that alone he found solace.

  BORDEN’S MEAT BISCUIT

  I

  Enterprise

  In March, during the last weeks before the season of fever returned, all Galveston was filled with talk of conquest. A ship carrying a company of filibusteros from the mainland had just sailed for Haiti with plans of empire, and Colonel Timson, a forceful, charismatic fellow who wore a wide-brimmed hat like a planter and swore off all whiskey and cigars, was making the rounds putting together an expedition to topple the government of Honduras and establish a white republic. He had a sharp face reddened by daily shaving, and his tight lips and dark eyes seemed always to be hiding some secret, or perhaps some fury. The man himself was a mystery. I never learned his past, apart from one year he spent as a gin operator in Burwood, Mississippi, nor how he earned his rank, which I came to believe was self-given.

  I first caught his attention while passing out handbills for my meat biscuit in the Strand. I spent most mornings in this fashion, stifling my melancholy, awaiting the steamers from Tampico and Veracruz and keeping an eye out for newcomers: I would press the bill into their hands and tell them that a free sample could be obtained at the warehouse. When I stopped Timson in the street, he was attired in a black frock coat faded to gray and worn shiny at the elbows and cuffs. He inspected the bill, then folded it, put it in his coat pocket, and asked if I had a spare hour. He was the first in months to express an interest, so I said I did. We walked about the square and down to the wharves and, without further introduction, he told me of his plans.

  “Do you follow Washington?” he asked.

  I told him I did not.

  “Well, surely men of understanding like yourself know this nation is founded upon the divine harmonies of slave and free. The Northern abolitionists hope to destroy this harmony, and the only way we can stop them is through expanding our institutions.” He unrolled each sentence by rote—they were well worn from much use—and every few words he prodded me with his finger. “I have studied the matter closely and determined Honduras as our first acquisition. We will sow her with slaves and petition for statehood. Some may cower at the thought of such an enterprise, but I foresee little resistance to our tropic campaign.” Here he took off his hat and drew from inside it a folded sheet of paper, which he opened and showed to me: a newspaper illustration of two campesinos dozing next to a burro. “The enemy,” he said. He then refolded the picture, taking care to make no new crease, and stuck it again in his hat, which he returned to his head.

  “Of course,” he continued as we strolled, “there will be a brief period during which I shall preside over a provisional republic, and which my backers will find quite remunerative.” Here we paused as several negroes dressed in finery paraded before us, their masters goading them, showing them off to the city’s wealthy gathered on the courthouse lawn. Timson leaned closer and whispered. “I have been in contact with agents of President Pierce. They have given me assurances.”

  We parted, agreeing to meet at some later time. I confess my motives were selfish. I n
ever became a true acolyte of Timson’s; I did not believe that the addition of Honduras to our Union, or any amount of new slave states, could head off the reckoning that yet awaits our nation, and to this day every time I hear of a negro lashed or beaten I find myself drawn one inch closer to the abolitionist camp. But Timson could prove the biscuit, I felt, and this I wanted more than anything.

  Returning to the Strand, I was accosted by two ruddy-nosed drunks, their mouths curled into devilish grins as they grabbed at my handbills and bellowed, “A sample, Dr. Toad, a sample!” The nickname grew from a rumor about my ingredients, and such treatment was in the normal course of things. But it was not always so. Three years ago the biscuit was birthed into the world with great hope and fanfare. As with all my inventions, my motivation was the alleviation of suffering. To make the biscuit I boiled beef, reducing it from eleven pounds to one, and combined the resulting extract with flour, which I then baked, creating an incorruptible and easily transportable nugget of nourishment. With it, ships at sea would have no worry for starvation, and missionaries and soldiers cut off from supplies would have all the benefit of a full meal in a single bite. Dr. Asa Smith was my partner. He had lodged in my back room for two months when he first arrived in the city, and I had held him in friendship ever since, allowing him to treat cholera patients in my parlor during the occasional epidemic. Though it was his habit to oppose my contrivances, he saw the biscuit’s merit and gave over half his small fortune for its support, and together we showed the biscuit at the Great Exhibition in London and sent canisters of it to Arctic explorers and British troops in the Crimea. Everywhere it was met with enthusiastic praise, and on our return to Galveston we manufactured thousands of pounds more.