Magic Words

by Gerald Kolpan

  He walked inside. The head waitress, a ruddy-faced girl named Henrietta Johnson, greeted him warmly.

  “Good morning, Mr. Julius. Such a fine day.”

  “A fine day, indeed, Miss Johnson. Gives a man an appetite.”

  “Well, hearty appetite then, sir. I can of course, seat you anywhere convenient, but I’m pleased to inform you that Mr. Eli has just this moment ordered, and I expect you might enjoy joining him.”

  “By all means. Thank you, Miss Johnson.”

  The young woman led him across the tastefully appointed dining room. At the sight of his nephew, Eli Gershonson rose. Henrietta took their drink orders, placing their coffee cups in different positions, and vanished into the kitchen.

  “Such a nice girl,” Eli said. “And such a classy place. Sure beats hell out of the old Cheese. Fights, whores. The food was good, but that place was a shithouse, a surichah.”

  “Food’s good here, too, Eli.”

  “That’s because they kept Doris on. Much more decorum here, though—he hasn’t brained anyone with a skillet since they took over.”

  As if by magic, their drinks arrived: coffee for Julius, tea for Eli. The positions to which Henrietta had moved their cups had notified the “drink girl” as to their preferences.

  “So nice,” Eli said.

  “Very efficient,” said Julius.

  Henrietta came back and took their orders. Julius took a celery stalk from the plate on the table and broke it in half.

  “So, Eli, last week Max told me you’re retiring. I almost fainted.”

  “Nobody needs a peddler anymore,” Eli said. “Anything they want they can buy here in town—and if they can’t, they order it from the Roebuck. You know that place Mick Rodney is building out by Mill Road?”

  “I’ve seen it.”

  “Roebuck catalog—the whole thing. Doors, windows, floors, all sent to the railhead to be snapped together like a child’s puzzle. Sometimes I think civilization is overrated. Old McGarrigle would have just shook his head. Which reminds me …”

  Julius’s face expressed pain. “Please, Uncle Eli, not this again.”

  “I’m just looking after you, lad. Just doing what the McGarrigle asked me to. So, are you keeping watch?”

  “Eli, this is absurd. Prophet John is dead these nine years. And yet every time you see me you ask ‘are you watching yourself,’ ‘are you keeping your eyes open?”’

  “Julius, the old man had his last vision for you. Had that last big fit and died. Had it and said ‘Watch hard for the salt bear,’ and then crawled to where I stood and implored me to watch over you.”

  “Jesus Christ, Eli! It’s nine years on! Besides, you may have noticed that the white man has done a pretty good job of wiping out every bear around here, black or brown. There’s never been any grizzly and I’m pretty sure there’s never been anything called a salt, either. Anyway, he was shaking and foaming and writhing worse than I’d ever seen him. I could hardly understand a word. To this day, I still think he said sot. That would make a lot more sense in this place.”

  “All right, all right. I’m just, kana hora, trying to carry out a dying man’s last wish. So, please. Be careful.”

  Their breakfasts arrived, huge and piping hot. They ate in silence for a while, and then Eli smiled.

  “You know, Julius, this is the very same table where I used to meet Lady-Jane Little Feather—she should rest in peace—for breakfast every morning I was in town. That was before the Nickel & Dime fire—before all those girls died and Mack Swain went crazy. It feels like it was before … everything.”

  “You were lucky she liked you,” Julius said, biting into a biscuit. “I’ve seen what she could do to those she didn’t.”

  “Oh, Julius, you don’t remember. You don’t remember how she looked coming down that stairway dressed in green or gold. But what’s the use of talking? It’s forty years ago. She’s been dead a long time.”

  “Nobody’s seen her dead, Eli. Only shot. When they rooted out the last of Chased By Owls’s army she was never found. If she had been, they’d have hung her with the rest. But I guess she must have died that day at Chadron.”

  “And what makes you so sure, Julius?”

  “Because it’s eighteen years since Chadron and I’m still alive. And with Compars and Alexander both dead, no madwoman ever had better cause to kill a man than Lady-Jane did me.”

  Unlike the stone and concrete waterspouts in most public places, the fountain in Hanscom Park looked as if God had created it, not man.

  It sprang directly from the center of the park’s man-made lake; a jet of water twenty feet high formed its center, with two smaller sprays at its base. It was a popular place for citizens to meet. On Saturdays, the shore near the fountain often saw people standing two deep—and Sundays after church it was the favored assignation point for the city’s lovers.

  But this was a Monday. Few would visit the park today, at least not until after the school bells rang. Waiting for Mr. Gael, Julius saw only a single dog walker heading toward the Woolworth Avenue gate.

  Julius sat down on a bench. He looked at the fat geese that had just migrated down from Canada and watched as their ducking heads made ripples in the water. He followed the concentric rings as they widened out from the gray bodies, until they led his eyes to a tall figure emerging from behind the park’s main pavilion.

  He was thin, even gaunt, and walked slowly, dragging one leg. Beneath his black bowler, his hair was long; steel gray streaked with rust. His face was a pale, pure white, deeply lined and with a blaze of freckles across the nose and mouth. He had drinker’s eyes: the green irises turned milky and the whites shot through with veins. Beneath them, the skin was stretched and baggy, long wrinkles radiating from their corners and down each cheek. Like the eyes, the nose was swollen and veined, but the fine lines here were blue, not red, and they flowed over bumps Prophet John always called “gin blossoms.” His black suit hung on him like a funeral shroud.

  Julius stood up and approached the stranger.

  “Mr. Gael.”

  “Yes,” said the man, his voice soft and with a lilt of Erin. “I am the man what wrote ya the note.”

  “Well, I am pleased to make your acquaintance,” Julius said, “and I welcome you to Omaha.”

  Gael wheezed heavily and coughed into a handkerchief Julius could see was already stained with blood. “I am afraid, Mr. Meyer, that once ya’ve learned the nature of my business, ya may not be so willin’ to greet me as ya suppose.”

  “I hope that will not be the case,” Julius said. “If I may say so, it has always been my greatest pleasure to solve problems that seem insoluble, and I hope that I may do so for your family and your business.”

  Gael coughed once again into the handkerchief. Julius saw a blot of red explode from the thin man’s mouth and spread across the white linen. Gael wiped the blood and saliva away and pocketed the cloth in his breast pocket. When his hand emerged again, it held a pistol.

  “Thanks in great part to yerself, Julius Meyer, I have no family—no wife or children—no business or home or health. Because of ya and yer conspirators, I have had no love but a memory since the year of eighteen-eighty and three. So now, I come to collect upon the debt what you established when ya took from me my precious jewel.”

  Julius stared into the ravaged face. “I am sorry if you have found such misfortunes, Mr. Gael. But I cannot imagine how I could have any hand in them. I believe I would remember if I had seen you before. You are not the sort of figure one forgets.”

  For the first time, Gael smiled. His teeth were yellow-brown and narrowed at their tops; there were gaps and stumps across his gums.

  “Have ya not, now? Well, perhaps ya might indulge me by takin’ a closer look at the ruin what stands before ya. Imagine it without the consumption what eats away at its insides like a rat through grain—without the gray skin and diseased leg. Use yer fine imagination, Mr. Meyer! Broaden the shoulders from the hunched bumps ya see
. Whiten the teeth and straighten the carriage. Then wash the sad gray from my head and replace it with hair red and thick as a nest a’ cardinals. Do all that, Julius Meyer, and then speak the name of the wretch before yer eyes.”

  Julius’ mind raced. He was tempted to do as this sick, sad man had asked if only to perceive the reason for his threat; but he had spent too much of his life defeating death to be distracted by an enemy’s request. As he stared at the cadaverous face, he carefully calculated the distance between himself and Gael and the difference in their respective strengths. Perhaps a frontal assault might allow him to avoid a direct shot or, failing that, escape with a wound that would allow him to live. Perhaps a kick would dislodge the gun; or a handful of dust foil the accuracy of his enemy’s aim.

  Then, as if he were standing beside him, Julius could hear the warning of the dying John McGarrigle.

  Beware, young Julius. Keep your wits about you. Watch hard for the salt bear.

  “My God,” Julius said in horror. “You are Seamus Dowie.”

  “The same,” the gaunt man croaked.

  The selt bear. Now, at last, the words made sense. Seamus Dowie, the Irishman—the Celt—once big and powerful as a grizzly.

  “I see,” said Julius. “And you have come to kill me.”

  Dowie limped forward. “And who with better right? If not for ya and yer cousin, I would today be a happy man—livin’ the life what was meant for me and consort of a princess. Instead, I have wandered the world, drinkin’ and starvin’—waitin’ for whatever would take me to her in the life after. The Lord has seen fit to make that death slow and agonizin’, but no matter. When my princess next sees me, I shall be as she knew me, straight and strong—not this pitiful creature spewin’ gore.”

  “You confuse me, Seamus,” Julius said. “You speak of Princess Noor, yet you knew she was an imposter, a fake—an Indian disguised as royalty for the pleasure of a mob.”

  “It was as a princess I knew her and as a princess I loved her,” Dowie said. “And just as I’ll appear to her as the boy she knew, so she’ll be to me: an A-rab girl—flyin’ her veils and chimin’ her cymbals. If not, then, as the poet says, what’s a heaven for?”

  “My God. It was you that tied Compars Herrmann to that stake at the Egyptian—you who tried to kill him.”

  “Yes.”

  “But I don’t understand. If you knew the princess was kidnapped and who took her, then surely you must have hated Alexander even more than me. It was the two of us who carried out the plot—why didn’t you try to kill him or me for what we did? Why Compars?”

  Seamus Dowie gave a bitter, brown smile. “One had nothin’ ta do with the other. I took ol’ Carl and set him up to be shot so as to ruin Alexander. I figured nothin’ would do it like the killin’ of his brother, his rival what he hated. I even had a diary forged and ready for the police. ‘Today, I kill my brother,’ and so on, written in Alexander’s own style. Compars would be dead and unable to testify, your Alex would rot in prison for murder, and I’d be free and clear with the one I loved. Then you came along and rescued the old fool.

  “As for me knowin’ who was behind the princess’s kidnappin,’ ya overestimate my abilities. I only discovered your deception weeks later, drownin’ my troubles in a waterfront bar. A sailor, deep in his cups, told me about the bound Indian girl aboard his ship, H.M.S. Sofia—and of the curly-haired little man what brought her aboard. Even such a rude boyo as me could suss out the rest. Straightaway, I went from there and tried to shoot Alexander, but the drink made me fail. Alex’s connections at court—that whore, Lady Caroline fucking Carstairs—got the trial closed and kept it all out of the papers. Our Great Herrmann never even showed up—they trumped it up as an attempt on that wee shit, Billy Robinson—and I rotted twenty-five years in the Dartmoor where I picked up the little pixie what now devours me from the insides out.”

  “And then Alex cheated you again,” Julius said. “A heart attack at fifty-two.”

  “Aye. So with him dead, I settled on yerself, bucko. I shoveled shit and bounced drunks in Dublin. I worked the hole on a smuggler in the Caribbean, all to earn me passage here. All to bring me face to face with the little Christ-killer what done me out of life.”

  The opening Julius had been looking for was a small one: only a slight shifting of the pistol to Dowie’s right that put his body out of the line of fire. In that instant, Julius brought his boot up toward Seamus’ groin. With surprising speed, Dowie pulled back and avoided the kick. Both feet back on the ground, Julius planted himself to deliver a left to his enemy’s jaw but was stopped short by a pain above his heart. He fell to his knees, staring straight ahead. His chest was warm where the bullet had penetrated. He brought his hand before his face; his fingers were red.

  Wheezing, Dowie stepped forward and crouched down, looking into Julius’s dark eyes.

  “You’re dead, Julius Meyer, as dead as I am, though I’ll walk a few more days. I don’t know what next world awaits the Jew, but if it’s Hell, I’ll not greet ya there. What I done this day is righteous—and the righteous are permitted retribution without sin.”

  As if the gun weighed a thousand pounds, the gaunt figure raised it to the temple of Julius Meyer. In his mind, the Speaker prayed in a patchwork of Hebrew and Ponca. He asked all Israel to hear him and alerted the Wakanda of his coming.

  Seamus Dowie cocked the pistol and fired.

  43

  WITH JULIUS MEYER DEAD ON THE GROUND, RYLAND Norcross did as he was instructed. He went in search of Dr. Henry Ball, heading first to the two taverns mentioned by Constable Palmer.

  At Marty’s, a dive on eleventh, the bartender said that he hadn’t seen the physician since the previous Friday, but if Ryland should see him first, would he please tell him to come by and settle his tab. Brian O’Hair, the day manager of an only slighter nicer spot called The Smiling Irishman, said that the doc had been in around nine that morning for some hair of the dog, but that he hadn’t seen him since he walked out an hour later.

  Dr. Ball’s office was only a few minutes’ run from the Irishman, on the second floor of the drugstore building. Dashing inside and rounding the broken balustrade, Ryland took the steps two at a time and sprinted down the long hallway to the office. He knocked at the door and waited. A minute passed and he knocked again. From behind the frosted glass, he heard a single cough—not the dry, shallow bark of a cold sufferer, but a moist, reverberating hack built on the poisons of a lifetime.

  “All right, all right,” said a voice from behind the door, “I’m coming.”

  A shadow filled the glass and the door opened.

  Dr. Henry Ball stood blinking in the doorway. He was a small man, not much over five feet, and he wore the thickest spectacles Ryland had ever seen. His hair, white at its roots, had been dyed so black that the small amount of light allowed to penetrate the office brought blue highlights to its strands. His suit was brown and rumpled and his cravat stained by food and red wine. One shoe was covered by a gray spat, one not. A heavy, acrid odor accompanied him into the hallway.

  “Yes, yes. What is it you want, boy?”

  “Constable Palmer wants you to come quick, Doctor Ball,” Ryland said. “My dad, too. There’s a man dead over near the Fountain and they want you to come see to him.”

  “Dead, eh? Dead how?”

  “Well, he’s been shot. Gun’s in his hand. Constable thinks he done it to hisself.”

  “Himself,” the doctor said.

  “Beg pardon?” Ryland said.

  “Himself, young man, not hisself. Did it to himself. I understand you are excited—but a possible crime against a citizen is no excuse for a definite one against our language.”

  “Sorry, sir.”

  “All right, boy. Come in.”

  Ryland ventured into the gloom. The odor he had first detected in the hallway became strong, almost overpowering. In the near-darkness, the boy started to notice small, yellow-green lights, some still, some moving. As his eyes adju
sted he began to discern their source: cats—large and small, old and newborn, fat and thin, alive and dead.

  “I fail to understand why you have called on me. I was of the impression that the county employed the esteemed Dr. Watkins for such investigations.”

  “Constable Palmer said to get you, sir.”

  “He did, eh? All right then, young fellow—just give me a moment to find my bag and take my medicine.”

  Doctor Ball searched through one of the piles that littered the space. Some were comprised primarily of clothing, others of objects: pots, glasses, syringes, and empty bottles. There was also a mound dedicated solely to household trash and garbage: everything from discarded newspapers to denuded chicken bones. An unmade cot in the corner made it clear that at some point in his practice, the doctor had made the office his home, as well as a sanctuary for felines as lost as he was.

  “Ah, here we are! My medicine.”

  Ball reached toward a low table covered in ashtrays overflowing with the butts of cigarettes and cigars; toward its back stood a bottle of amber liquid with no label. Lemuel, Jr. immediately recognized it as firewater—the false whiskey illegally sold to the local Indians. Produced from grain alcohol and a few herbs for flavor and color, it was the harshest and cheapest beverage available on the plain, cheaper even than beer. His father had always told him that once a white man resorted to it, he had lost all self-respect and could expect a sordid death at any moment. Ball took the bottle, upended it, and took a long pull. The motion created a flurry of shorthairs in the room. Lemuel, Jr. could see them dance against the single shaft of light struggling between the windowsill and shade.

  Replacing the bottle, the doctor put on his hat and retrieved a dried-out medical bag from a chair near the door.

  “Tempis fugit, my boy,” he said. “All in Omaha know the Ball motto: quick and friendly service—e’en for the dead.”