The Pale Blue Eye

by Louis Bayard

  He set down his bundle and charged, gave the door two good kicks. It shuddered but held firm. Another two kicks: the same. We were both kicking now, slamming our boots sole-first into the wood—a perfect racket of thumps and counterthumps. But even through that din, the sound on the other side of the door could still be heard.

  A sound with no equal. A queer damp sputter, like a half-extinguished candle.

  And something else now: a light, flickering through the door’s lower crevice.

  Hitchcock was the first to act. He grabbed one of the cadet trunks and hurled it at the door. The wood sagged just a little—enough to give us hope. On the next attempt, we both held the trunk, and we threw our combined weight against it, and this time the door wrenched clear of its frame, leaving a space of maybe three inches, enough to poke an arm through. One more kick from Hitchcock, and the latch on the other side at last tore off, and the door groaned away, and we were standing in the hallway, looking down on a black ball the size of a cantaloupe, with a long yarny fuse that was streaming with fire.

  Hitchcock grabbed the shell and took three long strides to the nearest window. Yanked open the casement and, after checking to see no one was there, tossed the ball with no further comment into the yard below.

  And there it lay, studded in the grass, smoking and fuming.

  “Stand back, Mr. Landor.”

  But I couldn’t, any more than he could. We watched that bristly fuse burn down and down—who would have thought it had so much distance still to travel?—and it was like trying to read a book over somebody’s shoulder, waiting for the page to turn.

  And then it turned, but there was no climax, only the slow dying of the spark, followed by . . . nothing. No explosion or cloud of sulfur, just silence. And a few hoops and vines of smoke, and the smack of my traitor heart. And a thought, real as a wound, that someone had once again danced ahead of us.

  Minutes later, when the last of the smoke had cleared and the shell still slumbered in the yard below, Captain Hitchcock went back to the wood-box, picked up the bundle he had dropped, and slowly, with the care of someone unwrapping a dead pharaoh, peeled away the brown paper.

  It was a heart. Oozing rust. As raw as life.

  Narrative of Gus Landor

  18

  November 16th

  It was good fortune, I guess, that Dr. Marquis, when we brought him a heart to identify, never thought to ask us where we’d found it. The sight was too thrilling for him: a by-God heart, still in its wrapping, lying on a blacksmith bed in Ward 3-B just as Leroy Fry had once done. It might have been a Park Avenue matron with corns, judging from the way Dr. Marquis’ fingers stole toward it. He clucked his tongue, he cleared his throat. . . .

  “Not too badly decomposed,” he offered at last. “Must have been kept in a cold place.”

  “It was cold, yes,” I said, remembering the chill of Artemus’ quarters.

  Slowly the doctor circled the bed, scratching his chin, squinting hard.

  “Mmm,” he muttered. “Yes, gentlemen. I can see why you might have thought it was a man’s heart. Nearly identical, isn’t it? The atria and ventricles, the valves and the arteries, all where they should be, yes.”

  “But?”

  His eyes were aglitter as they met ours. “The size, gentlemen. That’s what gives it away. This whippersnapper”—he worked his fingers under the bundle, gave it a speculative lift—“weighs upwards of five pounds, I’d wager. Whereas a human heart seldom gets above nine or ten ounces.”

  “No bigger than a fist,” I said, recalling our last conversation in this room.

  “Exactly,” he said, beaming.

  “Then tell us, please,” said Hitchcock. “If it’s not a human heart, what sort of creature did it come from?”

  The doctor hooked his brows over his eyes. “Hmm, yes, that’s a bit of a puzzler. Too big for a sheep. A cow, that’s my best guess. Yes, almost certainly a cow.” His face brightened in a flash. “I don’t mind telling you, gentlemen, it calls me back to my youth, seeing one of these specimens. Many was the cow heart I used to dissect in Edinburgh. Dr. Hunter used to say, ‘If you can’t find your way round a cow’s heart, you’ve got no business with a man’s.’ ”

  Captain Hitchcock’s hands were tented over his eyes. His voice was weary as suds.

  “Haverstraw,” he said dully. “The heart must have come from Haverstraw.”

  And because I didn’t respond as quickly as he wished, he pulled the tent from his eyes and glared me down.

  “Do I need to remind you?” he asked. “The two dismembered animals we read about in the paper a fortnight ago? One of them, you may recall, was a cow.”

  “I do remember,” I said. “And I consider your theory as likely an explanation as any.”

  A slow leak of breath from his clenched jaw.

  “Mr. Landor, mightn’t you just once find something definitive to say? Just once, mightn’t you come down on the positive side of an equation?”

  The thing is, I sympathized with him. Here we sat in his musty office, with drums beating in the distance. We had in our possession the most tangible sort of evidence, but we were no further along than when we started, and maybe a distance back.

  But what about the heart? you might ask. Surely that was proof enough? Well, to the best of our knowledge, nobody had seen Artemus put it in the woodbox; as Hitchcock was the first to point out, anyone could have put it there. Cadet rooms were never locked. Which also meant that anybody could have jammed that piece of stovewood into the door latch to keep me and Hitchcock from leaving.

  But what of the bomb itself ? Surely that would have been hard to procure? Well, no. The powder magazine was but lightly guarded at best, almost never at night, and the shell hadn’t been charged.

  Someone, though—someone had lit the fuse. Someone had been standing outside in the hallway while Captain Hitchcock and I were in Artemus’ barracks, between thirty and thirty-five minutes past ten.

  And here was the most damnable thing of all: Artemus Marquis had an alibi. He had been in recital from nine o’clock to noon—sitting alongside Ballinger, as it turned out, and giving every show of interest in Artillery and Infantry Tactics. Neither cadet, their professor swore, had left the section room for even half a second.

  And so we really were back to where we began—save for one thing. It was well nigh impossible that anyone outside the Academy could have made it into Artemus’ barracks in that five-minute interval. None of the sentinels had reported seeing anyone come from outside the grounds, either that morning or the previous evening. While a stranger might have slipped through the guard posts, his presence—in broad daylight, in a particularly well-trafficked area of the Academy, would almost surely have been noticed.

  So, amid all the bristling ends and dangling fringes, all the feints and taunts, the only clear inference we could draw was this: our man—our men—came from within.

  You can see now, Reader, why I was prepared to weep for Captain Hitchcock. He’d let himself hope, you see. Cadet fatalities had so far been limited to one. The local journals had contained no more accounts of savaged livestock. There was every reason to believe that the madman who’d attacked Leroy Fry had since set himself to terrorizing other communities. Who were to be pitied, of course, but who lay outside Ethan Allen Hitchcock’s sphere.

  All that had changed in the ten seconds it took him to carry that bomb from the hall to the window.

  “What I fail to understand,” he said now, “is why Artemus, if he is our man, would have been so stupid as to leave the heart in the woodbox. He knows how regularly we inspect barracks quarters. Surely he could have found a better place to secrete it.”

  “Unless . . . ,” I said.

  “Unless what?”

  “Unless someone else put it there.”

  “And toward what end?”

  “Why, to incriminate Artemus, of course.”

  Hitchcock looked at me for a long while.

  “Very well,
” he said at last. “Then why would someone plant a bomb— a bomb with no powder—outside Artemus’ door? While Artemus was in recital?”

  “Why, to give him an alibi,” I said.

  Hard deep crescents carved themselves out on either side of his mouth.

  “So you’re suggesting, Mr. Landor, that some—some fellow out there wants to clear Artemus’ name, while some other fellow wants him to hang?” He made a vise of his hands and squeezed his head through. “And where does Artemus himself fit into all this? By God, this is the most—the most infernal damned muddle I’ve ever . . .”

  Reader, I don’t want you to think that Captain Hitchcock was averse to hard thinking. He was, as anyone could have told you, a learned man. On easy terms with Kant and Bacon. A Swedenborgian, if you can believe it, and an alchemist. But I think he preferred to take his thinking on his own terms, in the quiet of his own quarters. When it came to the Academy, he wanted things to run like water through a mill: according to agreed-upon laws, with no chance of intervention, human or otherwise.

  “Very well,” he said again. “I accept that we can arrive at no positive declarations on one side or another. What do you suggest we do, then?”

  “Do? Why, nothing at all, Captain.”

  He stared at me, almost too wrought to reply.

  “Mr. Landor,” he said, in a deceptively calm voice. “A heart has been found in cadet quarters. A United States officer and a private citizen have been threatened with a bomb, and you are telling me I may do nothing?”

  “Well, we can’t place Artemus in arrest, we know that much. We can’t arrest anyone else. So I’m afraid I don’t see what we can do, other than ask the quartermaster to fix Artemus’ door.”

  Gently, he ran one of his dried quills along the edge of his desk, and I watched his eyes drift by slow degrees toward the window. In that moment, with the late-afternoon light flaring along his profile, I could almost feel the weight that was pressing on him.

  “Any day now,” he said, “we are expecting Mr. Fry’s parents. I have no illusions of being able to offer them comfort or solace. But I would like to look them both in the eye and make a solemn vow that what happened to their son will never happen to another cadet. Not while I’m commandant.” He set both hands on his desk. Stared me down. “Will I able to promise them that, Mr. Landor?”

  A rill of something—something like old tobacco juice—piled up at the corner of my mouth. I wiped it away.

  “Well, Captain,” I said. “You can certainly promise them, if you like. But just to be on the safe side, don’t look them in the eye when you do it.”

  Think of a greyhound standing on two legs, and you will have a rough idea of the height and heft of Private Horatio Cochrane. He had narrow downcast eyes and baby’s skin, and the ridge of his spine could be seen through his shirt, and he was slightly bent, like a bow that hadn’t released its arrow. I interviewed him in the shoemaker’s shop, where he had gone to get his right boot repaired for maybe the tenth time that year. There was a large gap between the boot’s toe and its sole, and this gap resembled nothing so much as a toothless mouth, which talked whenever Private Cochrane talked and went silent whenever he went silent. His boot was, in fact, the most expressive thing about him. Nothing else flickered in that planed boyish face.

  “Private,” I said. “I understand you were the one who stood watch over Leroy Fry the night he was hanged. Is that so?”

  “Yes, sir,” he said.

  “The funniest thing, Private. I’ve been going through all the—” I chuckled softly. “—all this damned paper, you know, all these statements and . . . affidavits from the night of October the twenty-fifth. And I’ve come across a bit of a problem, which I was hoping you could help me with.”

  “If I can, sir, I’ll be glad to.”

  “I’m much obliged, I’m really . . . now, if we could just start by walking through the events in question. When Mr. Fry’s body was brought back to the hospital, you were detailed to the room . . . this Ward B-3.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “And you were asked to do what, exactly?”

  “They requested me to look out for that body, sir, and make sure no harm come to it.”

  “I see. So it was just you and Mr. Fry?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “And he was covered? With a blanket, I’m thinking?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “And what time was this, Private?”

  A slight pause. “I’d say it was one o’clock when I was first detailed there.”

  “And did anything happen while you were on watch?”

  “Not till . . . not till around two-thirty, it was. That’s when I was relieved of my duty.”

  I smiled at him. I smiled at his boot, which smiled back.

  “ ‘Relieved,’ you say. Now, that’s what brings me to this—this problem I’ve been having. You see, Private, you made two statements. In the first—oh, dear, I don’t seem to have it with me, but I believe it was taken shortly after Mr. Fry’s body disappeared—you said you’d been relieved by Lieutenant Kinsley.”

  The first sign of life then: a slight flexing of the muscles round his jaw.

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Which is a very curious thing, because Lieutenant Kinsley was accompanying Captain Hitchcock all night. I have that from both of the officers in question. Now, I’m guessing you realized your mistake, Private, because in your next statement—a day later—and again, forgive me if I have it wrong, but I think you said simply ‘the lieutenant’: ‘I was relieved by the lieutenant.’ ”

  A tiny agitation in the column of his throat. “Yes, sir.”

  “So maybe now you understand my confusion. I’m just not certain who it was relieved you.” I smiled at him. “Maybe you can clear that up for me, Private.”

  A twitch of a nostril. “I’m afraid I can’t tell you, sir.”

  “Oh, now, Private. I can assure you anything you tell me will be held in private. You won’t be made to suffer any consequences for any of your actions.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “And you do understand that I have full authority from Colonel Thayer to conduct these inquiries?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Well, then, let’s try this again, shall we? Who relieved you, Private?”

  A tiny trickle of sweat along the hairline. “I can’t tell you, sir.”

  “And why not?”

  “’Cause—’cause I never got his name.”

  I eyed him for a few moments. “The name of the officer, you mean?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  His head was bowed now. The reproach he’d been awaiting so long was about to rain down.

  “Very well,” I said, as gently as I could. “Maybe you can tell me what this officer told you.”

  “He said, ‘Thank you, Private, that will be all. Please report to Lieutenant Meadows’ quarters.’”

  “Something of an odd request, wasn’t it?”

  “Yes, sir, but he was very definite on the point. ‘Off you go,’ he said.”

  “Well, that’s most interesting. Now, the funny thing about Lieutenant Meadows’ quarters is, I believe they lie directly south of the hospital.”

  “That’s correct, sir.”

  And away from the icehouse, I remembered. Hundreds of yards away.

  “What happened next, Private?”

  “Well, I lost no time in making for the lieutenant’s quarters. I was no more than five minutes in passage. Lieutenant Meadows was still asleep, so I banged on his door until he come down, and that’s when he told me I wasn’t sent for.”

  “He hadn’t sent for you?”

  “No, sir.”

  “So then you . . .”

  “I went back to the hospital, sir. To be better certain of my orders.”

  “And when you got back to Ward B-Three, you found what?”

  “Nothing, sir. I mean to say, the body was gone?”

  “And how long would you say you’d been
away from the body?”

  “Oh, no more than half an hour, sir.”

  “And once you found the body was gone, what did you do then?”

  “Well, sir, I ran straight to the guardroom in North Barracks. I told the officer on duty, and he told Captain Hitchcock.”

  The rap of the cobbler’s hammer began to sound from the next room. A slow steady pulse, like the reveille drums. Without even thinking, I was on my feet.

  “Well, Private, it’s certainly not my purpose to add to your troubles. But I’d be glad if you could tell me more about this officer who ordered you to quit your post. You didn’t recognize him?”