by Steven Price
Robert scowled. It’s unhealthy, Willie.
It’s what she has left, he said.
All that week William slept little. In the mornings he ate an early breakfast of steak and eggs and left the house with his collar unironed and vest unbuttoned. In his father’s sunlit bedchamber he would go idly through the clothes with Robert, dabbing a wet cloth to his lips, the muslin curtains glowing. They had done so as boys too when their father was away on business and William thought of this with a sudden upwelling of sorrow. A Bible sat on the nightstand, a paper folded to mark its place. The paper was blank. His father and his faith. Wherever he might be now. In the mid-morning their mother would come with cups of tea and kiss them on the tops of their heads and go.
What he was thinking, sifting through his father’s suits, was the power and vitriol that flesh had once held. He could count on the fingers of a single hand the times his father had confided in him, had looked at him with pride, had sought his judgment or advice. The old man had been impossible, unpredictable. William would smooth his fingers over the fabric of a lapel, lift his father’s sleeve. The worn cloth light as a wasp’s nest, Robert coughing someplace near.
He had always been the favoured son. That from Robert, not in resentment.
His first operation without oversight, the Farrington business, had ended in brutality, a kind of failure, and he had feared his father’s wrath. He could still recall the taste of metal in his mouth, the dread as he had descended the arrivals platform in Chicago. But instead of disappointment he had met with the fierce satisfied grip of his father’s hand on his sleeve, a long shrewd grin of approval. There were newsmen crowded at the station exit calling for comment and his father had taken William’s suitcase from him, and nodded, and let him walk through first.
The Farrington brothers were sullen black-bearded behemoths with fists the size of a man’s skull. Each had stood near seven feet tall and the smaller of the two had wrists so thick William had had to rig the cuffs to fix him. That was Hillary. Levi could crack a squirrel at fifty yards if the light was right. They had worked a Southern Express Company safe out of twenty thousand dollars at Union City with three other men and holed up in a rickety general store in the swamps near Lester’s Landing, Kentucky. It had been a botched hunt from the first and when he at last stormed their hideout he took a bullet to the gut in thanks. He’d gone in at dusk through the swamps with a former Memphis policeman whose fingertips had been buffed to softness and were quick on the hammer and with two cane-fed whites who poled the skiff in a mistrustful silence. There were birds screeching in the twilight, the dirty river pushing sluggishly past the woodyard and landing.
That general store was a rough log cabin built on stilts with a door at either end and a single window covered by bearskin. Through it an eerie orange light from an oil lamp was visible. He remembered the silence of that place, how he had walked in through the front door while the ex-cop had circled around back and how he had found five men and a woman sitting in the room playing cards and how he had asked casually for directions to the Tiptonville Road. Levi had risen huge and shaggy like a cave bear and he shot first and hit William and then he turned, shot low through the closed back door, hit the ex-cop crouched there. Then he kicked through that door in a splinter of wood and nails and knocked the wounded man aside and vanished into the swamps. William had set to, swinging his fists and his revolver and lumber and furniture until no man stood against him. He had been bleeding badly but the bullet had only just taken the skin with it. The button of the ex-cop’s heavy Kentucky denim had turned aside the other shot and passed it under the skin to the man’s back. Afterwards William had forced the woman to hold the candle while he cut out the slug with a corn knife.
Then word came in that the other brother, Hillary, had been seen near Verona, Missouri. They found him holed up in a settler’s cabin on the edge of the Indian Territory. The man was in place with rifles and ammunition and was slowly picking off the posse William had gathered. He pulled his deputies back, and thought about it, and went among the posse until he found the cabin’s owner and he bought the place outright for two hundred dollars. He outfitted a waggon with hay and rolled it against the cabin wall and was prepared to set it alight when the big man came out with his hands empty.
Why hello Hillary, William had called out with a grin.
Two days later he had engaged a stateroom on the steamer Illinois bound for Columbus, Kentucky, Hillary Farrington huge and hairy and quiet where he crouched on the cot. He was too tall to lie down and so sat up into the night and after a long while William had offered him a drink in the saloon. What was it in him that pitied a man as terrible and vicious as that? What had gone wrong in him, his father used to ask. The night air had been warm. The big man had raised his cuffed hands over William’s head as they got up on deck with an easy gentleness as if to embrace him and then he crushed him against the rail and reached for the Colt at William’s hip and neither man had said a word. They had wrestled in silence. Just grunts, muffled gasping over the quiet slap of river against the hull. When the Colt went off the sound seemed desperate and sudden and real.
Something changed in their struggle then. The bullet had grazed William’s scalp and there was blood running into his eyes. Hillary had him by the throat when William twisted the man sideways and up over the rail and then Hillary was gone into the darkness of the paddlewheel.
There was the sound of it. There would always be the sound of it. The crunch and whump and weird watery slapping of a heavy body diced and shunted and sprayed outward in a dark cloud under the river. William had slid down onto the deck with his back pressed against the posts of the railing and shook and shook.
If any part of the man was ever dredged up he never heard it. Two weeks later his brother Robert beat Levi to a pulp in the main street of Farmington with the butt of a revolver and the matter was closed.
The morning of the funeral dawned grey, muggy, a weird light shining behind the clouds and casting no shadow. They had hired two long black carriages and rode to the church in a grim silence and William wondered at the nothingness he felt. The pale faces surrounding. His daughters quiet at his side. The church itself was cold and grim and the pews felt wrong to him, hard and uncomfortable, he shifted his weight but could find no trick to it. When he rose to speak his voice sounded thin to his own ears, strained, as if he had not slept and did not believe his own words. The old Chicago attorney Luther Mills declared his father a reformer, a great man fighting the evils of the modern world. He and his brother and George Bangs and three others carried the coffin out to the hearse. It was not heavy. They might have been carrying furniture. The horses stamped in harness. Low white fences, porches, oaks, then the wrought iron gates of Graceland Cemetery. The black-ribboned wreaths and heavy white flowers lining the gateposts, dragging against their own weight as in a slow current of sorrow. The small knot of newspapermen standing respectfully aside.
What did he recall of that morning? Margaret’s gloved hand on his wrist. He could hear his frail mother weeping and he peered around him but could not comprehend what he saw. Figures in black, grey faces. The pastor had fallen silent with the book closed upon one finger and he extended a sorrowful hand that all there might bow their heads all but one and that one glared about him with a hollowness where once had been some gentler thing. Somewhere across that green field of the dead a bell was tolling. There were stones and monuments gleaming whitely under the strange light, the rain-blown sky steeped in it. Nearby lay Kate Warne decomposing in her burial clothes and the remains of Ignatius Spaar attendants both and buried with their liege and William thought of this and then he tried not to. He felt light-headed, sick. He stepped forward with his brother and together they took up the shovels and turned them. A scrape of iron, a sift and slide of dry soil and small stones. Robert’s eyes were wet. He could hear Margaret crying softly near him.
He stood like that at the edge of the earth, staring down into darkness, the col
d sky whorling over his head, and he felt the worst of it enter him like a sickness and settle there in his blood.
The worst of it. Yes that.
What he felt was not grief, or not grief only. Not grief only but also the black amoral joy of a man adrift. He had nowhere he needed to be.
What he felt, staring down at his father’s rosewood coffin, was relief.
THIRTY-FIVE
When the knocking came it came urgent, maddened, and they froze each across from each in Foole’s study and locked eyes thinking the same thing. The hour had passed midnight and not stopped. Foole could feel the blood loud in his ears. He did not think the Yard could have traced them so quickly. Then he knew in a sudden swift panic who must be outside.
Pinkerton.
He had not yet told the others of his humiliation at the dinner party. Fludd withdrew from a hidden sheath behind the bookcase a long curved blade, an evil thing Foole hated the sight of. He gestured at Molly and she started to roll the painting carefully back up in its scroll.
He did not kill the lamps. In the hall where no lights burned he drew aside a corner of the curtain but he could not see the step nor the big American with his dead eyes and strangler’s hands. He thought of what Pinkerton had done to those rampsmen with their coshes in the alley behind the Lascar’s and he set his jaw and hurried. He could hear the knock sounding again and there was something else, a kind of scraping he could not identify. He wondered if the detective was picking the front lock. Fludd went to the stairs moving with a murderous silence and Foole in his study peeled off his frock coat and his shirt as Molly held out his robe wordlessly. He clawed his hands through his hair to muss it. When he descended he found Fludd already looming silent in shadow. Foole did not look at the knife in his fist. He could see through the stained glass of the door the blurred outline of an arm, a shoulder, but no distinguishing mark to them and he felt all at once the hairs on the back of his neck stand on end. The knocking sounded a third time, angry, commanding.
Yes, yes, coming, Foole called out irritatedly. He had a hand on the bolt to draw it back when he saw too late that he still wore his shoes, crusted with the filth of the streets. He knew Pinkerton would see it at once but there was nothing to be done. He opened the door.
A cold blackness. A rush of freezing air on his face.
There, on the step, with one fist upraised and darkness tangling her hair, stood Charlotte Reckitt. He stared at her in confusion.
Charlotte? he whispered.
Hello Adam, she said, and her voice was what he remembered, water in sunlight.
American Detective
*
1862
VIRGINIA
He was no one’s son.
He was small with black whiskers still coming in and burning violet eyes and a soft accent that might have been Virginian and there seemed great beauty in him, like a buried suffering. In that second week of May 1862 he was still a boy and the seething streets of Richmond still mysterious. He wore Confederate grey as if it belonged on him, a man among men, nodding his slow nod to all. His uncle had been with Jackson in the Shenandoah, he said. No they were not licked yet, he said. He was down from Baltimore the only son of a captured courier there and he had carried his father’s mails across the lines and no sir he did not think he would go north again. He could be found staring across the grey river in the morning light running his fingers over the malformed lump of his left shoulder as if to massage a limb that was no longer. There was smoke rising above the Chickahominy. He smoked and shared his tobacco with any who asked. Officers with sabres at their sides, stiff white gloves shining. Barefoot boys younger than himself running messages from the Twenty-Third Virginia at Camp Lee. In the afternoons the Capitol gleamed its marble truth over a martial city and the clatter of regimental drums could be heard from the old fairgrounds and all day the guns on their great wheels would bog down in the streets and the powerful horses would heave against their weight in the muck and old men would come out of the shopfronts wiping their hands on their aprons to watch. He walked among them, one of them, fierce.
But he was not that one. In truth he had been sent from the North to move among them like a viper through tall grass and he felt the poison of it as if he were sick with it himself. The man who had sent him was a burly Scot with hard hands and a barrel chest and caustic blue eyes and who answered to the Union rank of Major. The boy’s task was clear. Break two Union spies from prison before they perished by bullet or by rope or by plague.
He was alone in that enemy capital, without ally or recourse. And should he fail or be caught he would meet his death blindfolded and roped to a stake under a hail of executioners’ fire and be kicked into a shallow grave outside the walls of Richmond. No man would know to mourn his loss.
No man but one.
One week earlier while a dying sun reddened below the treeline Edward had stood in a clearing, south of the Union pickets, watching as the Porters finished their preparations. The journey would take most of the night. The Major stood with a hand on the boy’s shoulder as if to claim him for his own, his hat pulled low to conceal his face. Ben trudged the perimeter of the waggon and squatted to check its axles then rose and tightened the straps on the withered mule. Sally called to her husband some instruction and then gathered her skirts and clambered into the flatbed and kicked through the straw for buried supplies. When both were satisfied they straightened and regarded the boy. No one spoke. Edward held a tied bedroll under one arm and he had wrapped a small ivory-handled pistolet in an oilskin and stuffed it into the bedding and he carried nothing else. He gave the Major a look and the older man nodded and stepped back. Sally was crouched in the straw, a shawl at her shoulders. Edward and Ben climbed up onto the bench seat, crushed together. In the gathering dusk the flies were biting. Edward swiped at his throat. When he glanced back the Major was already gone.
Darkness came on. They rode east and then south and then east again in the night forest. A single lantern burned weakly on a rod over the mule’s crooked back casting all into eerie relief. Ben had removed his earrings and gold chain and without a weapon at his side he looked somehow more sinister, more dangerous. He led them down ancient grassy tracks through the forest and twice he lost his way and retraced his steps and they went on. They passed a solitary house standing dark in a clearing but no one came out to greet them and they rolled creaking past and did not stop. At the marshy shores of the James, Edward got down and took up his bedroll and his small hat and he nodded to the Porters and they nodded gravely in return.
Godspeed, Sally murmured.
Ben shifted on the bench, clicked the reins. You be safe now, he grunted.
Edward walked the remaining distance alone. The moon was out and once onto the riverbank the light was enough to go by. He was careful to wade through mud and wipe his shirt cuffs and backside with dirt and bark. He slept that night in a stone farmhouse under the baleful glower of two widowed sisters. They were gold-skinned with long Iberian faces and sad eyes and dressed alike in grey homespun dresses and might have been twins to Edward’s eye. Rebel sympathizers both and key links in a Confederate fifth column. Before dawn a boy his own age in ragged trousers stood whistling at the gate with a lobster cage slung over one shoulder and the sisters woke him and gave him a packet of cold chicken and corn cakes and led him across the yard in their nightdresses like homesteaders fleeing a fire.
Edward had felt nothing at first, neither fear nor dread nor gratitude. The boy rowed him across the smoky waters to the Confederate shore and shipped his oars at the far bank and folded his fingers to his mouth and called a bird cry into the ominous woods for the pickets to know. Edward huddled in the stern watching the water run down the oar shafts in the half-light, listening to the waves slap at the hull. When he stepped from the slow roll of the rowboat into the shallows to splash ashore a soldier materialized out of the trees with his Enfield lowered and his eyes lost in shadow. The Confederates had commandeered a thatched cottage tw
o miles away and a peat fire was burning in its hearth when they arrived and Edward held his hands to the smoulder of it, nervous. He fumbled his pass from the cuff of one soaked boot with stiff fingers. The infantry captain interviewing him sat on a three-legged stool before the fire huddled in a blanket and he seemed very tired. Edward watched the day come on through the dirty windows and when asked he unstitched the packet of letters from the lining of his coat and passed them across.
The captain told Edward passes were being revoked. Spies had been at work, he explained. There was a Union force preparing to march on Richmond.
Edward nodded, said nothing.
The captain said he had not seen his wife and daughters in over a year and he did not believe he would see them again. He said his smallest had been born blind. There were tiny etched lines at the corners of the man’s eyes and his lashes were so pale as to look dusted in the early light.
Well, son, he said. Tell Mr. Davis if you see him there are brave men here who just want to fight and be done with it.
Somewhere bacon was sizzling in a pan, a man was coughing. Somewhere a door had been left ajar.
Everything lay still before him, a lifetime yet unlived. He walked in the middle of the road and was picked up by a passing waggon carrying bolts of silk to Richmond and when he reached the city he again showed his pass and was escorted under armed guard to a nondescript stone building behind a hedge. He was instructed to report to the intelligence-gatherer Cashmeyer on the second floor. He swallowed uneasily, stared at his scuffed boots, then went up. In an airy antechamber he was told to wait and sat under a tall portrait of Jefferson Davis drumming his fingers on his knees and through the windows he could hear birds singing. The gentleness of the light, the elegance of the marble pillars beyond the doors were at odds with the cruelty of its purpose. For the Major had warned him about this place. No traveller entered Richmond without first registering with Cashmeyer’s people. He was the rebels’ Pinkerton, a captain in the Confederate secret service and an investigator out of the provost marshal’s office serving under General Winder and one of the men responsible for the arrest of Lewis and Scully and the hanging of Timothy Webster. He had fingers, Southerners said, like a spider.
