The Night Inspector

by Frederick Busch

  “Bless your soul. You want to speak English.”

  She shook her head. “American.”

  “Yes. English is American. It is termed American. Chun Ho, I understand. I understand. Yes. I will teach you Eng— I will teach you American. Words for things in America, that is to say. Am I correct?”

  She said, “Cor-rect,” with great difficulty and great dignity, and then she poured us our tea. It was very smoky in odor, and its taste and effect were powerful; I felt it in the back of my head almost as if it were a brandy.

  “Green tea,” she said, pushing the r into being with her tongue and her palate and reminding me, of course, of the square-faced, angry, compassionate woman who had nursed me in Washington, contending with my anger and my sorrow and my overmuch attention to my own pain. I looked about for the mask, intending of a sudden to don it again, when Chun Ho, who had seemed to be gazing elsewhere, but of course was looking inside me, said, “You will tell me about American? Teach. In-ah-ruct. In-struct.”

  I said, “Yes.”

  “And you.”

  “Me?”

  “Tell me.”

  “I will tell you, yes. I will teach you. I promise it.”

  “No,” she said, placing the porcelain cup beside the white candle and creating new shades of white and amber with the gold of wavering candlelight, the white of the candle itself, the white of the cups, and the white and amber, combined, of her skin. She pointed, and then with her small finger, which she lay upon my paler arm, she punctuated her wish. “Tell me—teach me—you.”

  CHAPTER 7

  AND SO WE DREW TOGETHER, AT LAST, UPON THE DOCK between Hubert and Laight Streets, in the darkness of a late autumn night in New York. Lanterns at the Cunard Liverpool Steamship wharf in New Jersey ought to have been visible, but they were not. Nor were the lights of the inspector’s office, nor those, downriver, of the water police. The weather was shutting us in, and so we wished it to. The low, gray ceiling of the sky showed neither cloud nor star, only an absence of what the eye might fasten to, although I thought, as I tried to survey our preparations, that I had discerned, for only an instant, a brilliant golden light, above the darkness, that was the storm; now invisible, it seemed to construct itself by sucking upward the very air at which we gulped.

  Sam, at the cargo boom, was to supervise the unloading of the ship upon which the children had been transported in tuns, some, I had been told, the size of a large man and some about half of that. When I tried to imagine the children asleep in the barrels, like cod in salt, I could not—or, rather, did not wish to. It must be attributable to me in some wise, I thought, if the children were injured. Did I not contribute to their misery as I sought to offer—I could think of no other word for it—tribute to Jessie’s desire to free them? Yet what might freedom be worth if a less than terrible price were affixed to it? I sounded to myself like Abe in the worst of his pufferies, and I left such thoughts behind as I sought the three wagons for which I had arranged. The children would be set upon them and covered with tarpaulins before Jessie directed the drivers to the places of refuge for which she had arranged. M would offer the documents I had acquired, and Sam—whom I could not deter from accompanying me—would record for private, not journalistic purposes, the evening’s events. Although I was puzzled at how he might write with his pencil stubs upon paper certain to be soaked by the gathering moisture that, at any instant, would become a storm’s sheeting rain.

  The apprehension in the atmosphere was as powerful and prominent as the expectation we could feel, I might have said, from one another. M, despite the heat and the sweating oils that shimmered upon his face, wore his oilskins and his woolen cap. He was very pale, as if ill with a miscreant’s conscience, yet his little eyes were active, even restless, and he squinted into the dark flannel of the night, and he spoke and spoke. And Sam, to M’s apparent pleasure, seemed to note his every word.

  “It’s a sizable storm. Mark, for example, the polite nodding of the vessels at their chains. They’ll soon grow vociferous with their silent brows, and will bob like bachelors at a long night’s do.” The masts of the anchored ships did, indeed, pitch busily upon the active water. There was much foam visible, and M said, “More than harbor water will be broken tonight, I wager.” Sam smiled with pleasure as he labored in his notebook. “We might wish to encourage our brothers in this endeavor to off-load with something like alacrity, Billy. I’m pleased to see you here at last.”

  It is true that I was the final one of our group to appear. I knew that Sam had engaged to meet with M at his office on the barge, so tantalized had he become by my account of where the man sat to drink his drink and read at his philosophy, and where he paced, and how he kept his papers in their federal bins. He had brought to M a bottle of something—“grog” was what he had boyishly said to me—and I had been pleased to remain alone in my little lair in the Points. Adam, too, had wished to come by himself, and I had watched him drift toward the docks, walking as I did a mere block behind him, with what I would have called reluctance. He was going to demonstrate the last of his loyalty to me, for my friendship, or employment—what you will—had clearly demanded a difficult price; he felt, I believe, that he betrayed his own people while serving me, and in despite of his knowing, I thought, that I did labor on behalf of those very same people. Never mind my ultimate motive, my fealty to a golden woman in a Yorkville house, who had charmed, hypnotized, or otherwise compelled me to the service we were gathered to perform. It was a labor for the right, I thought, although so very much wrong was required to perform it. I thought of the tattooed signs on Jessie’s torso, and on the soft skin of the bottom halves of her breasts. I thought of her fingers moving my fingers on the intimacies of her flesh as I read her story while she recited it.

  And then Adam stood at Sam’s elbow as M described the mechanics of the gathering of a storm, and then I stood behind Adam. “I think he is right,” I said low. “I think it is going to pour upon us. Shall we secure you a coat?”

  Adam turned to me and said, “My black skin has been wet black and dry black and always in the morning it was just the same shade of black, and I don’t see any coat make some change in that, Mist Bartelmy.”

  I touched his shoulder as I had touched Sam’s or Burton’s or Sergeant Grafton’s, precedent to my crawling off or climbing off or loping off on one of my hunts in the War. Adam’s reddened eyes and strong face showed only sorrow in response. He looked at me a little longer and then he looked away. Below us, the little schooner, her sails hanging on the yards but not furled, for she was going to make her way away in despite of any weather, was snugged at the bollards of the dock, and a narrow planking ran from her rail to the wood of the wharf. Adam walked away and down the steps and soon—I watched the whiteness of his shirt as it mingled with the darker clothing of the dockhands he commanded—large men, working without benefit of brazier, torch, or lantern, were wrestling tuns in the forward hold. A mist of rain appeared but did not cool us. The air seemed to diminish further, and each movement slicked me with my own liquids underneath the airless moisture of the night.

  Sam said, “Adam is not at peace with this.”

  “He feels he owes it. He also feels that he is misused.”

  “And?”

  “I suspect that he is, and that possibly—but I am far from certain—he also does.”

  “Owe it to you?”

  I shrugged. “Perhaps to the fate that made him black, and that placed him in the United States, and that gave him a complexity of conscience.”

  “And to whom or what do you owe this venture?” Sam asked.

  I pointed to the group beside the loading boom, at the winding handles of which Adam had begun to labor. Slowly, the long boom swung over to the cargo hold of the schooner, the name of which had been obscured by canvas hung over the side. Behind Adam, and looking alternately into the ship and up at us, was Delgado, in a long coat of thick leather and wearing a cap such as a captain at sea might employ. He st
ood alongside Jessie, who was in a black cloak with a hood that protected her from the gathering rain and the eyes of strangers. Two other men were with her and Delgado; they were strangers to me, one black and one white, and each carried a broad umbrella that threatened to fly away in the rising winds. I wondered if I ought to be there among them. I knew the speculation well; it was a desire to claim her in some fashion, and I remained where I was. She would come to me, as the evening progressed, or she would not. I no longer understood the nature of her claim on me. Let the evening roll on, I thought, and we’ll know. We’ll know.

  Delgado, as if he had intercepted my thoughts, or at least felt their intensity, turned at that instant and looked up toward us—toward me, I was certain. I nodded. He nodded in turn. I waited for Jessie to turn, but she did not. To guard my mask against the effects of the increasing rain, I removed from the pocket of the black rubber coat I wore against the weather a scarf I used in winter at my neck. I tied it across the mask, over the mouth hole and my lovely painted nose, and I secured it at the back with a knot. I pressed my hat low over my head, and was as secure against damage as I could make myself. Of course, the .31 was in the right-hand pocket of the rubber coat. I wondered where Delgado’s gravity knife might be, but did not wish, really, to have to learn. Jessie pointed, and I represented to myself more than saw the tawny flesh of her arm as her hand came up.

  One of the larger tuns was in the netting of the boom, and Adam and another carter wound the heavy line back up. It went slowly, and I feared for an interruption by the river police before we had completed the task. The weather might keep them occupied, I thought, but the unloading was taking far longer than I wished. Now the tun was in the air, and now, as Adam and the other fellow labored, it had barely cleared the lip of the hold. They walked the boom around, and the great barrel, swathed in its rope netting, hovered above the dock.

  I said, to M or to Sam or to no one, “But where are the wagons?”

  The scene had nagged at me, and, of course, thinking of Jessie’s thighs and Jessie’s mouth and Jessie’s breasts, I had not considered that something aside from her tantalizing proximity and disappointing distance might be the cause. In the forests, on the hunt, I had not permitted myself to be so blind. That is what the city had done to me. And it was Jessie, of course, as well.

  Sam said, “I see none.”

  M was muttering. His hands gripped the wooden rail before us where we three were lined up, like dark herring gulls awaiting our share of the leavings. The sky pressed lower and the wind brought the rain now, and any visibility was all but closed down. M raised a hand and spoke to himself behind his beard and in his secrecies.

  “Sir!” I called to him. “What is it?”

  He pointed. Lower in the water than the schooner, and either hidden before and just hove to, or shielded from our sight because we expected nothing to present itself, was a small vessel, say the size of a brig, but with no sail mounted on the masts that were aft and forward of the thick, squat metal chimney, you might call it; the vessel was a steam-powered lighter large enough to take the cargo on and powerful enough to drive through a storm.

  I said, “No such vessel was part of the arrangement.”

  “No word of it was mentioned?”

  “None,” I said, and M shook his head.

  “That,” he said, “is the matter with plans. They are important only if lives or reputations hang upon them. And plans do so rarely eventuate as conceived. If that vessel is not of the tissue of our planning, and it isn’t, then I begin to have fears.”

  “Perhaps there’s an innocent explanation.”

  “Perhaps the only innocence within a hundred yards is that of Adam and the children laid like anchovies inside those tuns. Billy, we have broken the laws of the Port, the Surveyor, and the Customs Department. Must I bid my pension farewell?”

  “I’ll see to this,” I said. “Perhaps they decided to take them upriver, or around to Brooklyn.”

  “And did not wish to bother you with their amendments to the plan which originated with you?” I thought that he might lean his shadowy face back and laugh the silent laugh. If he did, I might have bellowed something terrible at him. But he shook his head and offered me a glance so full of disgust and disappointment that I understood, for an instant, how his son might have felt under the weight of such a dismal evaluation.

  “We’ll see,” I said.

  “He is dangerous,” Sam told M, “when he employs that tone.”

  I said, “We’ll see.” I set my hand in my right-hand pocket, and I pulled my hat down hard, then set off. By now, I could see, Delgado was behind Adam and was directing the working of the boom. Small tuns came up two at a time in the netting now, and Sam and the other fellow labored without cease in spite of the weight of the load. That, I was certain, could be laid to Delgado’s powerful persuasion.

  I went down the wooden steps, which were slick now with the hot rain, holding on to the rail for my life. Out on the river, an incoming ship had hove to and was making for the Jersey shore before the wind; with luck, she might make the Atlantic Street harbor, at the intersection of North Twelfth, a kind of jagged pocket on the coast in which vessels had, in other hard storms, found shelter. A barely discernible light at the ship’s pole, above the royal mast, dipped dangerously low and then swung laboriously to. Little else that far out was visible and, even close by, in the stairwell I descended, or upon the docks beyond the boom, I could not see much.

  Adam’s shirt had collapsed into darkness upon his dark skin. He worked, I saw, with his eyes closed. And I could not blame him, for how to understand what he saw: a majestic slender woman, even under a cloak and hood, her face animated as if she watched a sport of brave dimensions; a matched set of broad, tall men, one white, one black, whose heads and eyes in response to her commentary swiveled and roamed; a clearly dangerous man in a leather coat that glistened like a serpent’s skin who tapped Adam’s shoulder with the handle—threat enough—of his knife; the gallery, above and behind, of M and, behind him, Sam, solemn, pale-faced observers; the heavy, wet tuns that were swung and set, swung and set, from the hold of a pitching schooner to the deck of a steam-driven lighter.

  He saw me as Delgado did. I said, “Adam, I do not know of this. Why not stop your labors while I learn what I can?”

  Delgado, in his calm and uninflected voice, said, “Good evening, Mr. Bartholomew.”

  “Mist Bartelmy,” Adam said. “We did all that walking in the Loin, saw all that misery, to help somebody make up their mind to come here and get fooled? Is that what I hear in your voice?”

  “Yes. I think it is possibly so.”

  “Do you feel foolish, Mist Bartelmy?” He did not cease to work, nor did the other man, also Negro, far more slender than Adam, but apparently quite powerful. They wheeled, they swung the boom, they let their cargo down, and then, the net emptied, they swung the boom back and let down its rope for the next load.

  I said, “I may be heartily sorry to have involved you in this.”

  “What is this, Mist Bartelmy?”

  “I cannot tell you, Adam, for I do not know. I think now that I must find out. Delgado?”

  “Ask her.” He indicated Jessie.

  “Will you let these men rest while I inquire?”

  “I cannot, Mr. Bartholomew. Our schedule is a difficult one.”

  “Shall I try to force you to cease, Delgado?”

  “I fear for their safety if you do,” he said politely, tapping the handle of his knife upon Adam’s straining back. Water had gathered upon the shiny, pocked patch of skin beside Delgado’s nose, and it looked as if it were constructed of something artificial, a kind of pale gutta-percha. His eyes were unreadable, as ever, and he looked more confident than a minister taking the pulpit.

  I backed away, then walked around Delgado, and away from the boom, toward Jessie and her escort. The tuns brought the lighter lower in the water, and I found it fascinating to watch the cargo press the ship upon th
e river, and to see it drop in comparison to the level of the dock. It seemed that at any moment it might sink away from us. But, knowing Jessie as I did, I was certain that she had calculated the load.

  “Billy,” she said, smiling from within the hood with her sad eyes and with a kindness at her mouth. “Hello, Billy. We are more than halfway done.”

  “With what?”

  “Oh,” she said. Then: “Billy, these gentlemen are among the principals in this … affair. Mr. Henry Porter, who is, in a managerial capacity, a purveyor of the services of laborers.” The burly white man nodded, almost in a kind of bow, and demonstrated no surprise at the mask with which he was confronted. “Mr. Porter is well known for having sustained at Gettysburg a savage wound from which it was thought, at first, he might not recover. He wears the mangled bullet, which spun and bounced inside him, upon a chain at the throat.” I knew, of course, how Jessie knew about the chain and about the nature of his wounds, and I knew, too, how she had comforted him.

  “And this is Mr. North. He has assisted me in matters of administration and finances.”

  “I would have—”

  “I know, Billy. But you were the overall organizer. And you secured the assistance of our friend who has signed the documents. Each man has his part.”

  “Of you?”

  She said, “I must ask you to leave your emotions to the side in this, Billy. It is the children, after all, whom we serve.”

  “And you are donating to them a river voyage on a coal-fired boat as part of the service? I cannot recall our discussing this. I remember wagons. I engaged wagons, Jessie.”

  “Mr. North, at my request, informed the carters that we had reconsidered. It is always useful, I’ve been told, to have a number of plans and to see that no one knows all of them. Mr. North, for example, was unaware of the services of our … friend.”