by Louis Bayard
“Nearly there, sir,” offered Lieutenant Meadows.
Well, this is what the Hudson does for you: it clears you. And so, by the time we had taken the last push up to the West Point bluff, by the time the Academy came peeping out of its mantle of woods—well, I felt equal again to what would come, and I was able to take in the views the way a tourist might. There! the gray-stone bulk of Mr. Cozzens’ hotel, belted by a verandah. And to the west, and rising above, the ruins of Fort Putnam. And rising still higher, the brown muscles of hill, bristled with trees, and above that, nothing but sky.
It wanted ten minutes to three when we reached the guard post.
“Halt!” came the call. “Who’s there?”
“Lieutenant Meadows,” answered the coachman, “escorting Mr. Landor.”
“Advance and be recognized.”
The sentinel came at us from the side, and when I peered out, I was startled to see a boy staring back. The boy saluted the lieutenant and then caught sight of me, and his hand itched its way to a half salute before my civilian status could make itself felt. Down it came, still trembling by his flank.
“Was that a cadet or a private, Lieutenant?”
“A private.”
“But the cadets walk guard, too, don’t they?”
“When they’re not studying, yes.”
“At night, then?”
He looked at me. For the first time since we’d left the cottage.
“At night, yes.”
We passed now into the Academy grounds. I was going to say we entered, but you don’t really enter because you don’t exactly leave anything. There are buildings, yes—wood and stone and stucco—but each one seems to rise on Nature’s sufferance and to be always on the brink of being drawn back. We came at length to a place that is not Nature’s: the parade ground. Forty acres of pitted ground and patched grass, light green and gold, punched with craters, running northward to the point where, still hidden behind trees, the Hudson makes its dart to the west.
“The Plain,” announced the good lieutenant.
But of course, I already knew its name, and being a neighbor, I knew its purpose. This was the windswept pitch where West Point cadets became soldiers.
But where were the soldiers? I couldn’t see anything but a pair of dismounted guns and a flagpole and a white obelisk and a narrow fringe of shadow that the midday sun hadn’t quite pushed away. And as the phaeton passed down the hard-packed dirt road, there was no one abroad to remark on our coming. Even the drumming had stopped. West Point was folded in on itself.
“Where are all the cadets, Lieutenant?”
“In afternoon recital, sir.”
“The officers?”
A slight pause before he informed me that many of them were instructors and were to be found in the section rooms.
“And the rest?” I asked.
“Not for me to say, Mr. Landor.”
“Oh, I was just wondering if we had ourselves an alarum going on.”
“I’m not at liberty to say. . . .”
“Then maybe you can tell me, am I to have a private audience with the superintendent?”
“I believe Captain Hitchcock will be present as well.”
“And Captain Hitchcock is . . . ?”
“The Academy commandant, sir. Second in authority to Colonel Thayer.”
And that was all he would tell me. He meant to stick to his one sure thing, and he did: delivered me straight to the superintendent’s quarters and led me into the parlor, where Thayer’s manservant was waiting for me. Name of Patrick Murphy, a soldier himself once, now (I would later discover) Thayer’s chief spy, and like most spies, the soul of good cheer.
“Mr. Landor! I trust your journey was as beautiful as the day. Please, won’t you follow me?”
He showed you all his teeth but never gave you his eyes. Guided you down the stairs and opened the door to the superintendent’s office and called out my name like a footman, and by the time you’d turned to thank him, he was gone.
It was a point of pride, I later learned, for Sylvanus Thayer to carry out his affairs in the basement—a bit of Common Man stagecraft. All I will say is the place was damnably dark. The windows were shrouded by bushes, and the candles seemed to be illuminating only themselves. And so my first official meeting with Superintendent Thayer was conducted under cover of blackness.
But I’ve leapt ahead of myself. The first man to present himself was Commandant Ethan Allen Hitchcock, Thayer’s second in command. He’s the fellow, Reader, who does the dirty work of watching over the cadet corps, day after day. Thayer proposes, it’s said, and Hitchcock disposes. And anyone who intends to truck with the Academy must first truck with Hitchcock, who stands like a dyke against the onrushing waters of humanity—leaving Thayer high and dry, pure as the sun.
Hitchcock, in short, is a man used to being in shadow. And that was how he first showed himself to me: a hand bathed in light, the rest of him conjecture. Only when he drew nearer did I see what a striking man he was (in appearance, I’m told, not unlike his famed grandfather). The sort of man who earns his uniform. Hard-middled, flat in the chest, with lips that look always to be compressing around a hard object: a pebble, a watermelon seed. Brown eyes streaked with melancholy. He gripped my hand in his and spoke in a surprisingly mild voice, his tone that of a sickbed visitor: “I trust your retirement agrees with you, Mr. Landor.”
“It agrees with my lungs, thank you.”
“May I please introduce you to the superintendent?”
A patch of suety light: a head bowed over a fruitwood desk. Chestnut-haired, round-chinned, cheekbones high and hard. Not a head or a body made for love’s uses. No, the man sitting at that desk was fashioning himself for posterity’s cold eye, and it was hard work, for look how slender he was, even in his blue coat and gold epaulets and gold trousers, even with that quillback blade resting quietly at his side.
But all this was the stuff of later impressions. In that dark room, with my chair pitched low and the desk pitched high, the only thing I saw, in truth, was this head, steady and clear, and the skin of his face just starting to pull away, like a mask about to be peeled off. This head looked down at me from its perch, and it spoke, it said:
“The pleasure is all mine, Mr. Landor.”
No, my mistake, it said, “Shall I send for coffee?” That’s right. And what I said in reply was, “Some beer would do nicely.”
There was a quiet. An umbrage, maybe. Does Colonel Thayer abstain? I wondered. But then Hitchcock called for Patrick, and Patrick fetched Molly, and Molly made straight for the cellar, and all it took was just the merest flexing of the fingers of Sylvanus Thayer’s right hand.
“I believe we have met once before,” he said.
“Yes, at Mr. Kemble’s. In Cold Spring.”
“Just so. Mr. Kemble speaks of you very highly.”
“Oh, that’s kind of him,” I said, smiling. “I was lucky enough to be of some use to his brother, that’s all. Many years ago.”
“He did mention that,” said Hitchcock. “Something to do with land speculators.”
“Yes, it beats all creation, doesn’t it? All the people in Manhattan who’ll sell you land they don’t have? I wonder if they still do that.”
Hitchcock pulled his chair a little closer, and rested his candle on Thayer’s desk, next to a red leather document box. “Mr. Kemble,” he said, “suggests you were something of a legend among New York City constables.”
“What kind of legend?”
“An honest man, to start with. That’s enough, I expect, to make anyone legendary among the New York police.”
I could see Thayer’s eyelashes lowering themselves like shades: Well done, Hitchcock.
“Oh, there’s nothing too honest about legends,” I said, very easy. “Although I guess if anyone’s famous for honesty, it would be you and Colonel Thayer.”
Hitchcock’s eyes narrowed. He was asking himself, maybe, whether this was flattery all the way
through.
“Among your other accomplishments,” Thayer went on, “you were instrumental in apprehending the leaders of the Daybreak Boys. Scourges of upstanding merchants everywhere.”
“I suppose they were.”
“You also had a hand in breaking up the Shirt Tails gang.”
“For a time. They came back.”
“And if I recall correctly,” said Thayer, “you were credited with solving a particularly grisly murder which everyone else had pretty well given up on. A young prostitute in the Elysian Fields. Not quite your jurisdiction, Mr. Landor?”
“The victim was. The killer, too, it turned out.”
“I’ve also been told you’re a minister’s son, Mr. Landor. Hailing from Pittsburgh?”
“Among other places.”
“Came to New York while still in your teens. Put in your oar with Tammany Hall, do I have that right? No stomach for faction, I gather. Not a political animal.”
To the justice of this, I bowed. In fact, I was just getting a better fix on Thayer’s eyes.
“Talents include code breaking,” he was saying. “Riot control. Fence-building with Catholic constituencies. And the—the gloveless interrogation.”
There it was: a tiny sweep of the eye. Something he no more could have felt than I could have seen, had I not been looking for just that.
“May I ask, Colonel Thayer?”
“Yes?”
“Is it a pigeonhole? Is that where you’ve got your notes hidden?”
“I don’t follow you, Mr. Landor.”
“Oh, please, no, it was me not following. Why, I was feeling like one of your cadets. They come in here—already a bit cowed, I can believe that— and you sit there and tell them their exact class ranking, I’ll bet, how many demerits they’ve got piled up, and oh, with just a bit more concentrating, you can even tell them just how far in debt they are. Why, they must leave here thinking you’re next to God.”
I leaned forward and pressed my hands into the mahogany plane of his desk. “Please,” I said. “What else does your little pigeonhole say, Colonel? About me, I mean. It probably says I’m a widower. Well, that should be obvious enough, I don’t have a particle of clothing that’s less than five years old. And I haven’t darkened the door of church in a long time. And oh, does it mention I had a daughter? Ran off a while back? Lonely evenings, but I do have a very nice cow—does it know about the cow, Colonel?”
Just then the door opened, revealing the manservant, bearing a tray with my beer. Good fizzy near-black. Stored deep in the cellar, I guessed, for the first sip sent a thrill of cold through me.
Over me spilled the soothing voices of Thayer and Hitchcock.
“Very sorry, Mr. Landor. . . .”
“Got off on the wrong foot. . . .”
“No desire to offend. . . .”
“All due respect. . . . ”
I held up my hand. “No, gentlemen,” I said. “I’m the one ought to apologize.” I pressed the cold glass to my temple. “Which I do. Please carry on.”
“You’re quite sure, Mr. Landor?”
“I’m afraid you’ve found me a bit done in today, but I’m happy . . . I mean, please state your business, and I’ll do my best to—”
“You wouldn’t prefer a . . .”
“No, thank you.”
Hitchcock stood now. It was his meeting once again.
“From here on we must tread very carefully, Mr. Landor. I hope we may count on your discretion.”
“Of course.”
“Let me first explain that our sole purpose in reviewing your career was to ascertain whether you were the right man for our purposes.”
“Then maybe I should ask what your purposes are.”
“We are looking for someone—a private citizen of well-documented industry and tact—who might carry out certain inquiries of a sensitive nature. In the Academy’s behalf.”
Nothing in his manner had changed, but something was different. Maybe it was just the realization, coming on as sudden as that first blast of beer, that they were seeking help from a civilian—from me.
“Well,” I said, inching my way along, “it would depend, wouldn’t it? On the nature of those inquiries. On my—my capacity to . . .”
“We have no concern about your capacities,” said Hitchcock. “The inquiries are what concern us. They are of a highly complex, I should add, a highly delicate nature. And so before we go a step further, I must once again be assured that nothing said here will be breathed anywhere outside the Point.”
“Captain,” I said, “you know the life I lead. There is no one for me to tell but Horse, and he’s the soul of discretion, I promise you.”
He seemed to take this as a solemn assurance, for he resumed his seat and, after a conference with his knees, raised his face toward mine and said:
“It concerns one of our cadets.”
“So I figured.”
“A second-year man from Kentucky, by the name of Fry.”
“Leroy Fry,” added Thayer. That level gaze again. As though he had three pigeonholes full of notes on Fry.
Hitchcock wrenched himself once more from his chair and passed in and out of the light. My eyes found him at last pressed into the wall behind Thayer’s desk.
“Well,” said Hitchcock, “there’s no point in dancing around it. Leroy Fry hanged himself last night.”
I felt in that moment as though I had stepped in at the very end or the very beginning of a large joke, and the safer course would be to play it out.
“I’m very sorry to hear it,” I said. “Indeed I am.”
“Your sympathies are—”
“A dreadful business.”
“For all concerned,” Hitchcock said, advancing a step. “For the young man himself. For his family. . . .”
“I’ve had the pleasure,” said Sylvanus Thayer, “of meeting young Fry’s parents. I don’t mind telling you, Mr. Landor, sending them word of their son’s death is one of the saddest duties with which I have ever been tasked.”
“Naturally,” I said.
“We hardly need add,” Hitchcock resumed—and here I felt something rising to a head—“we hardly need add this is a dreadful business for the Academy.”
“You see, nothing of this kind has ever happened here before,” Thayer said.
“It most certainly has not,” answered Hitchcock. “Nor will it again, if we have anything to say about it.”
“Well, gentlemen,” I said. “With all due respect, it’s not for any of us to have a say in, is it? I mean, who can know what goes through a boy’s mind from day to day? Now, tomorrow . . .” I scratched my head. “Tomorrow, the poor devil might not have done it. Tomorrow he might be alive. Today, he’s . . . well, he’s dead, isn’t he?”
Hitchcock came forward now, leaned against the spindle back of his Windsor chair.
“You must understand our position, Mr. Landor. We have been specifically charged with the care of these young men. We stand in loco parentis, as it were. It is our duty to make them gentlemen and soldiers, and toward that end, we drive them. I make no apologies for that: we drive them, Mr. Landor. But we like to think we know when to stop driving.”
“We like to think,” said Sylvanus Thayer, “that any of our cadets may approach us—whether myself or Captain Hitchcock, an instructor, a cadet officer—come to us, I mean, whenever he is troubled in mind or body.”
“I take that to mean you had no warning.”
“None at all.”
“Well, never mind,” I said. (Too breezy, I could tell that.) “I’m sure you did the best you could. No one can ask anything more.”
They both brooded over this a bit.
“Gentlemen,” I said, “I’m guessing—and now I may be wrong, but I’m guessing this is the part where you tell me what I’m wanted for. Because I still can’t make sense of it. A boy hangs himself, that’s a matter for the coroner, surely? Not a retired constable with—a weak lung and poor circulation.”
I saw Hitchcock’s torso rise and fall.
“Unfortunately,” he said, “that’s not the end of it, Mr. Landor.”
And this was followed by another long silence, even warier than the last. I looked back and forth between the two men, waiting for one of them to venture further. And then Hitchcock drew another long breath and said:
