Unholy Fire

by Robert J. Mrazek

  The door to the hallway opened, and she was back again.

  “Here,” she said, raising my head and putting a spoon to my lips. “This will help you.”

  I didn’t need her to tell me what it was. I recognized the earthy fragrance of the opium and felt the raw authority of the alcohol as it coursed down my throat. But of what value was a spoonful, my demented brain cried out. She was holding the bottle in her other hand. I seized it from her grasp and tilted it to my mouth, gulping the mixture down as greedily as a man dying of thirst. There was less than a pint left in the bottle, and it was gone in a few seconds.

  “Oh, you poor soul, you poor soul,” she murmured, stroking my forehead.

  The shuddering finally subsided, and I was still again.

  “I must go,” she said gently.

  “You have saved me, Mrs. Massey,” I said. “I am in your debt.”

  “My name is Adele,” she said, softly closing the door behind her.

  I lay awake all that night facing the enormity of what I had become. As the gray dawn crept slowly into my room, I silently swore that I would never again be without the one thing I needed to survive, which was a steady source of laudanum.

  My first foray into the netherworld of an addict produced a satisfactory result. One didn’t have to be an investigator for the provost marshal to know that the easiest place to find laudanum would be at a hospital. There was a new one just ten minutes on foot from Mrs. Warden’s. Formerly a government office building, it took up a whole city block on Seventh Street and was already brimming with hundreds of army casualties.

  The morning after my breakdown, I found the man I was looking for in a saloon on Sixth Street that was frequented by the hospital staff. For agreeing to supply me with two quarts of laudanum, I promised to pay the young attendant ten dollars. Two hours later, I was on my way home with the hoard that he had brazenly stolen from the dispensary. I tried not to think about the men who might be suffering without it, and vowed that I would find another source as soon as possible.

  On Monday morning I started my job at the Provost Marshal General’s Department. Mrs. Warden informed me that a military van regularly traversed the route from the War Office on Seventeenth Street to the asylum. I rarely had to wait more than fifteen minutes for transportation to and from work.

  On my first morning, Val Burdette explained the procedures he wanted me to follow in reviewing court-martial cases. It was my job to confirm the factual basis for the pending charges that had been brought. The first step was to interview the accused. If the person admitted guilt, I was to try to ascertain whether or not there were extenuating circumstances in the matter. If the accused claimed innocence, I was to use my initiative in determining whether the evidence was sufficient to bring the matter forward to a military tribunal. My legal colleague in the office, Harold Tubshawe, was available for consultation.

  As it turned out, the overwhelming number of those accused were clearly guilty of the crimes they were charged with. Occasionally, I would conclude that there was an extenuating reason for what they had done. Val Burdette would take my findings and recommendations into account before deciding whether to turn the case over to the Judge Advocate General’s Office for prosecution.

  In that first month, I handled twenty-seven investigations, most of them involving the court-martials of soldiers accused of desertion, cowardice, theft, bounty jumping, embezzlement, sexual deviancy, drunkenness, and assault. I also investigated the dealings of two small contractors who were accused of selling shoddy equipment to the army and one case of bed-wetting.

  I awoke each morning to the aromatic splendor of Mrs. Warden’s freshly baked breads and pastries as the smell drifted up the back staircase and slowly filled my room. My appetite returned like a lost muse, and by August, I had gained back much of the weight I had lost in the hospital. My cheeks filled out, and my eyes emerged again from their sockets. In fact, it would have been hard for a stranger to look at me and know that I had ever been wounded. There were only two constant reminders of what had happened to me on the windswept plain above Ball’s Bluff.

  The first was revealed each time I disrobed and saw the intricate network of jagged lines that were etched in livid red across my abdomen. The second was the fact that I was consuming a steady flow of opiates laced with grain alcohol every twenty-four hours. Although I was always under the influence of opium, it did not prevent me from functioning in the job I was assigned to do.

  My routine did not vary in any material way from one day to the next. While shaving each morning in my room, I consumed the first cup of laudanum in the collapsible tin mug my mother had sent me upon my enlistment in the army. After going downstairs to breakfast, I would return to my room for a second measure. Then I would go to my office in the asylum.

  At work, I would wait until shortly before my lunch break at 11:30, and then adjourn to the washroom down the hall from my office. There I would remove the bottle labeled “disinfectant” that I regularly replenished and kept hidden in a crevice behind the corner sink, fill one of the paper cups next to the water crock, and then go to one of the thunderboxes to consume the laudanum in relative safety. At around three every afternoon, I would go back to the washroom for another cup.

  Upon returning to Mrs. Warden’s in the military van, I would avail myself of another mug in my room before going down to supper. Back upstairs, I would have a final measure at around eight o’clock. On those long, sweltering summer evenings, the sun would still be streaming in the windows when I stripped off my uniform, closed the curtains, and fell naked across the bed. On rare occasions, if the black hole of opium-induced oblivion proved elusive, I would supplement the usual ration until I finally passed out.

  During that time I never went to a play or concert, never read a book or newspaper, never attended church, and never took part in exercise or joined friends for a meal at a restaurant. I had no friends. I saw no one outside my office or the rooming house. My only knowledge of what was happening in the world came from conversations I overheard at work or around the dining room table at Mrs. Warden’s.

  I knew that General McClellan had failed in his attempt to lay siege to Richmond in June and had been replaced by Pope, who suffered another great defeat near Manassas in August. A few days later, the flood of wounded came streaming back into the hospitals around Washington like a bloody tide. The slaughter was so great that the Sanitary Commission ended up pitching a hospital tent on the grounds of the asylum. The familiar stench of physical corruption assaulted my nostrils every time I left the building for the next two weeks.

  My life was one of complete subterfuge and concealment. Every Saturday night I would leave the house by the backstairs dressed in an old slouch hat, a patched workman’s coat, and denim overalls. By then, I had made contact with an army quartermaster named Spangler, who operated his private affairs out of a row house in the notorious area known as Swampoodle. Among the range of army goods he peddled, Spangler had crate upon crate of laudanum for sale.

  I paid him four dollars a bottle, which was a small fraction of the money I had saved during all the months I had spent in the hospital. My monthly pay as a lieutenant, including the bonus I received for my wound, was just over a hundred dollars. Laudanum was my only personal indulgence.

  Spangler had no idea that I was an army officer. If I had truly cared about my responsibilities as an investigator for the provost marshal general, I could have had him put in prison for twenty years. He was a far bigger thief than anyone I had investigated up to that time. Consumed with self-loathing every time I transacted business with him, I would ride back to Mrs. Warden’s in a hansom, and carefully conceal the bottles behind the hay bales in the small livery stable that faced onto the alley behind her house.

  Of course, I wondered whether Val Burdette knew of my condition. I also wondered why he had salvaged me from all the human detritus at the field hospital. Did some fellow officer of mine bring me to his attention? Did a surgeon of h
is acquaintance hear of my case and mention it to him?

  He seemed to have the prescient ability to divine almost everything; but after getting me started in my job, I rarely saw him. He was in charge of prosecuting major fraud cases involving military procurement contracts, and the work often kept him traveling for days and even weeks at a time.

  Being emotionally cauterized, it never occurred to me that he might also be concealing mysteries of his own until I overheard Tubshawe talking with one of the lawyers in the next office about him one day. I knew it was Val they were talking about since Harold had come to refer to him as Colonel Vagrant, due to the perpetually sad state of his uniform.

  “I tell you he was absent without leave for more than a week,” said the other lawyer. “At first, General Patrick thought he might be the victim of foul play from someone he’d prosecuted. But then he just turned up again at his office. Everyone is talking about it.”

  “He should be court-martialed,” pronounced Tubshawe, his cherubic face contorted in anger. “The man is a disgrace to the legal profession.”

  “And to the army,” added the other lawyer.

  They noticed me staring at them and went back to their work.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  One stormy night in mid-September, I was having supper with the other boarders when Captain Spellman came rushing in from his staff job at the War Office, his uniform cape streaming water.

  “A great battle is taking place in Maryland,” he announced excitedly. “The armies have collided near some little village called Sharpsburg.”

  Mr. Massey was still an unrequited believer in General McClellan, and he loudly proclaimed to us that this time Little Mac would completely annihilate Lee’s invading force.

  “Isn’t it grand?” he said, with a triumphant smile. “This battle will surely end the war.”

  “In that case, Captain Spellman, your wife will certainly be glad to have you back in Boston, won’t she?” asked one of the civil servants, with a leering glance at Mrs. Massey.

  The captain’s smile disappeared as his eyes moved in her direction, too.

  “Well, I won’t be discharged right away, of course,” he said lamely.

  At the asylum the following morning, the same air of excitement and anticipation filled the corridors. Every time another military van arrived from the War Office, a new rumor would sweep through the building. It was reported at around nine that Lee had been killed and Jackson was now in command of the Rebel army. Our boys had won a crushing victory, was the next one, and General McClellan was on his way back to Washington to claim the presidency by popular acclamation.

  Considering the number of times our army had been defeated, the pendulum of emotion was capable of swinging from euphoria to panic in a heartbeat. As the day wore on, the tenor of the rumors began to change. By noon a report swept the corridors that General Hooker had been killed, and that the army was in flight toward Washington again. Tubshawe, who had never seen active service, left the asylum at around two o’clock to warn his family of the possible need to evacuate the city.

  I happened to be looking out the window of my office late that afternoon when I heard the sound of galloping horses. As I watched, a troop of cavalry came pounding up to the entrance portico of our wing. In their wake came a large black brougham drawn by four white horses.

  As if they had been waiting at the door, three white-jacketed orderlies came rushing out as the carriage pulled to a stop. The coach door opened, and two soldiers in the brougham gently lowered a sedan chair to the men waiting on the ground. Strapped to the chair was an inert form wrapped in hospital blankets. The orderlies carried the sedan chair inside. A minute or so later, I heard them coming down the hall toward the convalescent suites at the end of our corridor. Silence returned and I thought nothing further about it.

  When I arrived for work the next morning, unofficial reports from General McClellan’s headquarters near Sharpsburg, Maryland, had finally reached Washington. The general was claiming a great victory. Based on similar inflated press accounts in the past, I remained skeptical.

  “As I recall John Pope claimed victory last month,” I said to Harold Tubshawe. He had taken the precaution that day to wear a large pistol on his belt, as if the Rebels might storm the asylum at any moment.

  “There is no way those barefoot vagabonds can defeat us again,” said Tubshawe fiercely.

  That morning, General Patrick, the provost marshal general, had called an emergency meeting to address the rash of desertions that had recently beset the army. The desertion rate usually increased fivefold or more just before a major battle, particularly in the units that had a high percentage of bounty men. All of us were ordered to attend the meeting.

  Ordinarily, I would already have consumed at least two cups of laudanum by then and been ready to go for several hours without replenishment. However, while shaving that morning, I had discovered to my chagrin that the new bottle I had brought from the livery stable was mislabeled and contained only castor oil. By then it was too late to replace it with one of the others.

  Upon arriving at work, I went directly to the washroom down the hall from my office. Unfortunately, an officer was washing at the sink, and I left without gaining access to the bottle hidden there.

  General Patrick’s staff meeting dragged on all morning. At around eleven I excused myself and made another foray to the washroom. This time a cleaning attendant was mopping the floor, and I was forced to abandon that attempt as well. When the meeting finally adjourned for lunch, I rushed back to the washroom only to find a group of men attending to their ablutions. In my increasingly demented state, I was almost convinced that some maniacal force was at work.

  It was two o’clock when the staff meeting finally ended, and I had another chance to try for the laudanum. By then my uniform was soaked with sweat, and I could feel the onset of another bout of the tremors coming on. I hastened down the dark corridor to the washroom. There was no noise behind the door, and I silently prayed that the room would be empty.

  I swung open the heavy door. There was no one at the dripping sinks, and I went straight to my hiding place. Without pause, I removed the bottle from its crevice. Normally, I would have transferred it to a cup and then headed for one of the thunderboxes. In my haste I just removed the cork, tilted it to my mouth, and swallowed. When the grain alcohol began to sear my throat, I paused for a few seconds, and then tipped the bottle again.

  “Is there enough for everyone?” came a loud voice behind me. It so startled me that I almost dropped the bottle as I turned around. A tall man was standing in front of the door to one of the thunderboxes.

  He was wearing a purple silk bathrobe that had gilt dragons sewn all over it. Beneath the robe he wore white silk pajamas. His shoulders were resting on a pair of padded wooden crutches, and I could see that his right leg was wrapped in linen bandages. I immediately knew that he must have come from one of the convalescent suites farther down the hall and was therefore a senior officer.

  “What is your pleasure?” he asked pleasantly.

  Handling the crutches as if they were new to him, he came slowly forward until we were four feet apart. The man was as tall as I, but with a more strapping build. Clean shaven, he appeared to be about forty, and had thick, flaxen hair, a sharp pointed nose, and a dimpled chin.

  “I’m sorry?” I responded.

  He must have read the guilty look on my flushed and sweaty face.

  “What are you drinking, Lieutenant?” he asked, his voice taking on a harder edge.

  “Medicine,” I said.

  “Medicine,” he repeated, with a lazy-eyed grin, “from a bottle that says disinfectant?”

  “May I ask whom I am addressing?” I responded with spirit, having learned during my last months in the hospital how to avoid direct questions about my drug use.

  “You’re addressing someone who outranks you,” he said, with a sudden haughtiness. His eyes were a remarkable purplish blue, but they were anythin
g but soft.

  “You are out of uniform, sir,” I said next.

  “I am out of uniform after sustaining an honorable wound, Lieutenant. But, of course, you have probably never gotten close enough to a battlefield to see one,” he said, his voice now filled with contempt. “What are you … a clerk? No, even worse … you’re probably an army lawyer from down the hall. Am I right?”

  “I’ve seen my share of honorable wounds,” I said.

  “Really,” he came back, “and where would that have been?”

  “At Ball’s Bluff.”

  He held my eyes for a moment, as if trying to decide whether or not I was a liar.

  “What is your name, Lieutenant?”

  “John McKittredge,” I said.

  He nodded, once.

  “I am currently residing in the third suite down the hall, Lieutenant McKittredge,” he said. “Report to me there at five o’clock this evening.”

  “Yes, sir,” I said, and turned to leave.

  “Leave the bottle on the sink,” he added.

  I went back to my office, and sat down at my desk to await my fate. I had managed to finish only a few swallows of laudanum before he interrupted me, but it was enough for the temperature of my skin to cool and for the shaking in my hands to stop. I asked Tubshawe if he knew who was occupying the convalescent suites.

  “I heard General Martindale was recuperating in there last week for his piles,” he said.

  For the next hour, I tried to think through all the possibilities of what could happen to me. There was no doubt the man was a senior officer. Since he had been wounded, he was obviously in a field command. Based on my own experience with line officers, he would probably have little or no tolerance for a clerk who was addicted to opium, and it would be easy to confirm what the bottle contained. If I was also accused of stealing it from a military hospital, a long term in a military prison could be in store. At around four I felt the tremors begin again and wandered over to the hospital wing of the asylum.