by Paul Boor
“All right then, sir!” The youth’s face brightened. “I’m also to ask when you might be delivering.”
“We’re hoping for tonight. Late.”
“That’s all I needed to know. Thank you greatly, kind sir.”
As the youth turned to start down the pier, Nicolas took his arm. “Tell your professor I’ll visit him shortly to make the final arrangements.”
The student hurried off and Adam scrambled down from the steamer. “Whew.” Adam sighed. “It’s been a helluva morning. Will it be just me and you unloading that bottom layer tonight, boss?”
“I’ll see about getting some help from this new professor.”
“Good. Maybe he’ll prove more obliging than them others . . . but you’d best get a bit of sustenance in ya before venturing that trolley.” Adam pulled a warm, pungent package of butcher’s paper from his threadbare corduroy jacket. “I picked this up for us at a little dockside spot,” he said, uncovering a stack of fried oysters and glistening German sausages. From another pocket he produced two fresh-baked biscuits.
The travelers, still standing, bit at their breakfast, but while Adam commented on the fine taste of the oysters and the mild climate enjoyed by this new port city, Nicolas’s mind flew ahead to their delivery. These jitters had kept his appetite at bay since Buffalo, and he wasn’t sure why.
With a nod to his foreman, Van Horne walked off the pier and leapt onto a passing trolley car as it crackled and rattled along the waterfront. Adam, biscuit in hand, his knotty arms hanging like clubs at his sides, watched the car disappear into the frenzy of the harbor.
2
The Medical College
At the trolley’s last stop near the easternmost tip of the island, simple frame houses lined streets that appeared to be nothing more than packed oyster-shell rubble and sand. The homes were two-storied, minimally decorated, and had only small, uncovered galleries. Nicolas was surprised by their bright new paint and the many colors, nearly as gay as the larger homes he’d admired earlier.
On the south side of the street stood an imposing three-story hospital built of brick—the Infirmary of the Ursuline Sisters of Charity—which was adjoined to a convent of the same name and similar construction. The hospital and convent were surrounded by a seven-foot-high black iron fence adorned with regally wrought inserts of a religious nature and topped by tall spikes.
Nicolas stepped back to make way for a young mare drawing an ambulance to the front gate of the hospital at a brisk canter. The only other movement on the street was a hearse, its black curtains drawn, being pulled from the rear of the hospital by a tired grey mule.
Taking up the entire north side of the block and rising high above its simpler surroundings was the Medical College of Galveston, a bright, four-story mass of pink sandstone with grey granite and buff-colored terra-cotta appointments. Three domes crowned the structure. A finely sculpted six-foot-wide star of Texas graced the archway of the entrance portico, now undergoing the final touches of construction. The waters of the bay lapped at a dock only yards from the back of the reddish building, while at the college’s front, stonemasons, bricklayers, and hod carriers loitered on vine-covered piles of granite and sandstone debris.
Though it was only midmorning, Van Horne felt his shirt and hatband moisten in the glare of the tropical sun. He trotted up the dozen stone stairs to the main entrance, passed through the portico and under the five-pointed star of Texas, and pushed open the heavy cypress door. The interior was deserted and as cool as a tomb. He searched the directory in the spacious vestibule until he found the name he was after. His destination would be the uppermost floor.
A sharp, burning stench drifted down as he approached the circular stairway at the heart of the building. It was formaldehyde—an odor he’d grown all too familiar with since he’d added this twist to his livelihood. Making his way up the stairs, his nose stung. His normally sharp vision blurred. He felt his chest constrict with something like fear, but not quite fear. After all, what did he have to fear?
Nicolas Van Horne was a clear-thinking, proud man, proud of his Adirondack Mountains and the ice he harvested, as bright and pure as winter, as dense as stone. His ice brought joy to all who used it. Reputable medical men had proved it an excellent therapy for spotted fevers and the dread yellow fever. But this newer face of his enterprise had an acrid foulness to it. He’d come to dread the stink of his special cargo, and the medical men who seemed oblivious to it. And more than the stink, something about this particular cargo, details he couldn’t put his finger on, had jangled his nerves to a frazzle . . . ever since Buffalo and those boys.
On the upper landing a blessed breeze from windows open to the gulf cleared the stench. There were only two doors; the opaque glass of the one Nicolas needed was clearly marked:
LABORATORY OF ANATOMY
Francis O. Keiller, F.R.C.P., M.P.H.
Professor of Medical Therapeutics and Morbid Anatomy
Dean of the Medical College
Nicolas had just stilled the fine trembling of his hand on the topmost balustrade when the door was thrown open and out filed two scrawny, red-eyed teenage boys, as foul smelling and outlandish as the youth on the dock had been. Both wore rubber aprons and scruffy beards. The first stopped in his tracks and cast an eye at the well-dressed Van Horne. “Visitor!” he shouted, and the two edged by and rushed down the stairway.
“Visitor!”
“Someone’s here, Professor.”
Nicolas watched the youths wind their way down the stairway, their boots tapping on the stone. When he turned, a tall, ascetic-looking gentleman was clicking the door shut behind himself. The man was dressed in a dark wool suit of European style, badly worn at the elbows. Slightly stooped, he looked at least twenty years Van Horne’s senior, sixty years of age or more. The older man’s smoke-colored beard was scraggly, and the pure white, wiry tufts of hair that remained on his gleaming head stood out as if charged with electricity.
“May I be of assistance to ye?” he asked with a lilt.
“I’m looking for a certain professor, name of Keiller. My name is Van Horne.”
“Aye, yes, yes,” he said softly. “Come along, if ye would, sir.” The elder gent swiveled abruptly and motioned for Nicolas to follow. With a pronounced list to his gait, he crossed the landing to a door marked:
RESEARCH AREA
NO ADMITTANCE
“Please. We must pass through my laboratory,” he said, holding the door.
On entering, Nicolas caught the strong chemical odors of sulfur and acetone, carried by the breeze that flowed through the south-facing windows of the lab, which was well lit by overhead skylights held open for ventilation. The laboratory benches—waist-high marble counters stretching the length of the room—were covered with a variety of scientific glassware. Beakers, odd-shaped flasks, calibrated cylinders. Glass columns reached nearly to the fourteen-foot ceiling. Retorts bubbled. Squatting along the far wall, an open incinerator smoldered.
At the nearest laboratory bench stood another scruffy student like he’d seen in the hall; next to the youth was a young woman. Both wore black rubber aprons. The woman leaned over the student’s work on the lab bench, the bright windows behind her. Nicolas felt himself entranced by the striking line of the woman’s profile, her lustrous dark hair pulled into a tight coil at the back of her head, and her willowy figure, a mere few inches shorter than his own. She was deep in concentration.
“I’m sorry, son. Sorry,” she said, gently admonishing the youth with a lovely string of “s” sounds and a shake of the head. “This must be repeated. The solvent is wrong. Perhaps . . . acetone.”
Alone at the next lab bench, some distance beyond the young woman, stood a short, heavily muscled man with swarthy skin, thick mats of neatly trimmed sideburns, and a powerful, square jaw. The man had a laboratory flask at a rolling boil over a Bunsen burner. Just as he reached for the flask, he flashed Van Horne a look of authority tinged, it seemed, with arrogance. N
icolas’s initial good impression was dashed when the man knocked the bubbling flask to the floor, where it shattered. The clumsy fellow put his hands to his head and blurted a string of obscenities in squeaky, high-pitched Spanish.
At that, the young woman, who was glaring at the ham-fisted oaf, shook her head in dismay. When her gaze fell on Nicolas, however, the exasperated look on her face turned to a wry, endearing, slightly off-kilter smile, and her dark eyes flashed.
Nicolas knew this look. He’d seen it in the eyes of women as they discreetly took in the waviness of his chestnut-brown hair, or the elegant line he tried for in trimming his mustache. Perhaps it was the ruddy health of his windburnt cheeks, or the strength he believed a clean shave afforded a man’s jawline. Whatever it was, Nicolas had seen this look before in the eyes of admiring ladies, though he seldom returned it in kind.
The attractive young woman gave a slight nod, to which Nicolas nodded back.
“Come along now, come along.” Professor Keiller stood at a door labeled OFFICE at the far end of the laboratory. “This way, good sir.”
Van Horne slipped past the woman and her student. A few steps beyond, he glanced back and again caught her dark eyes and silently admired her satiny hair—near ebony in color—and her graceful silhouette against the open window.
When Nicolas stepped into Keiller’s office he was hit with a blast of heat and sultriness never before encountered by a lifelong Adirondacker such as he. The source of this discomfort was immediately evident along the north wall—an intense coal fire in a shallow fireplace lined by multicolored tiles Nicolas judged to be Italian. Steam rose from beakers of water set near the glowing heap of coal. The windows of the office were shut tight.
Nicolas took in the layout of Keiller’s overheated inner office and found it quite elegantly appointed—for a place as steamy as a Turkish bath. The walls were of a lustrous cherry wood, intricately carved into seashells, pelicans, and Texas stars. The desk, two long, heavy tables, and the surrounding cabinetry were of dark walnut.
The professor turned to Van Horne and offered his hand. “I’m Keiller, as ye probably guessed,” he said in his bouncy Scottish cadence. “Pleased to make your acquaintance, Mr. Van Horne, and I’m hopeful we may do business.”
“As am I, Professor.”
“Forgive the insufferable heat, but it’s necessary for my insectary. I’m afraid those of the class Insecta prefer it tropical.” Keiller chuckled and motioned to the further table, which was piled with oblong cages, each no bigger than a foot across, constructed of fragile slats of wood and screening. “My mosquitoes, you see. A certain temperature and humidity must be maintained. Please. Sit.”
Keiller limped to his desk. Wincing, he lowered himself into his chair. “I was excited to receive your letter of enquiry, Mr. Van Horne. How did you hear of me, may I ask?”
“From the medical people in New Orleans. Your new college is well-known, sir.”
“Aye, we’re the largest west of the Mississippi, I’m proud to say. Twenty-three men, and serious students all.”
“And such excellent new construction,” Nicolas said, gesturing at the office walls.
Keiller leaned back and smiled. “Your first time in Galveston, is it?”
“Why, yes.”
“Been trading ice long, have ye?”
“I began my enterprise shortly after college, nearly twenty years ago. In my early commercial endeavors I hauled ice to Albany and Chicago by train, but soon began shipping down the Mississippi to Saint Louis—where we now maintain our own icehouse—and then to New Orleans.”
A moment of silence followed, and the two men locked eyes.
“How many have you brought me?” Keiller asked.
“Twelve.”
“Only twelve?”
“And some parts.”
“Twelve’s a wee bit shy of our needs, but I suppose it’ll do for the semester. They’re mighty hard to come by, you know. We’ve a body-in-a-bag man, of course, but he’s a clumsy dolt and his ill-planned grave robbing has raised the hackles of Galveston’s populace, I’m afraid. The City Constable and the authorities as well. You see, I’d hoped for sixteen from you, Mr. Van Horne.”
“Yes, well . . . twenty were required in New Orleans.”
“Twenty? Damn New Orleans! We’re as large as those rascals.”
“Sorry I can’t provide more. Perhaps next year.”
“Tell me, how is their preservation? Have they decomposed badly?”
“Their condition is excellent, Professor. You may trust me on this. Remember, my business is ice—the hardest, coldest Northern ice.”
Nicolas was sweltering and could no longer take it. He stood to remove his jacket.
“Do you also employ the services of an undertaker?” Keiller asked.
“My man’s a true master of the mortician’s art,” Nicolas replied, hesitating as he envisioned Thomas Chubb, the undertaker, at his grisly work. Nicolas was reminded that it was indeed Chubb, that odd duck, that sly, secretive, but necessary accomplice in the body trade, who arranged the two dead boys in Buffalo. “This gent’s concocted an embalming solution that’s unmatched anywhere,” Nicolas continued. “He uses extracts of hemlock bark, an excellent preservative.”
“My student tells me you also have one aboard that’s not embalmed—a child.”
“That I have.”
“Are ye familiar with how the child died?”
“Why, yes, I suppose. Somewhat familiar. A boy, no more than nine or ten years old. I learned of his availability in the city of Buffalo just as we departed with the ice. I managed a brief stopover there, where the boy was found frozen to death in a snowbank. Mercifully swift, really. No one claimed the poor wretch, is what I was told.”
“Now there’s a stroke o’ good fortune.”
Nicolas grew uneasy at the mention of this boy, and at the professor’s zeal over the young body. He realized he’d grown callous toward the corpses over the years—he regretted that. Even so, a child in his hold always saddened him greatly. Indeed, this voyage had doubly saddened him since there’d been two such youngsters, two boys dead of unexplained causes loaded in Buffalo. Nicolas saw no reason to burden the new medical man with this minor detail, though, since the other boy had been unloaded in New Orleans. He needn’t rouse this Keiller fellow any further.
It was puzzling to have two unidentified youths in his ice. Abandoned corpses, without family, most likely. Ruffians and misfits. This sort of thing was all too common these days, though there was something about those two young bodies . . . the look of them, different from the others in his hold.
“Yes, yes”—Keiller was grinning gleefully—“a young male, freshly frozen. He’ll suit our purposes perfectly. We’ll take that one direct to the research laboratory. Now, as indicated by your previous correspondence, Mr. Van Horne, your price stands at twenty dollars each?”
Nicolas nodded, though for an instant he considered the possibility of charging more for the child—this professor seemed so eager to have him. But then, this was his first transaction with Keiller; he didn’t want to get off on the wrong foot with the old gent. And there was something else. In his years of travel along the Mississippi, Nicolas had met many of these medical professors, but this fellow was the first to invite him into his personal office. All the others had simply demanded delivery under cover of darkness and shoved the cash into his hand at the back door. Keiller seemed quite congenial. He was getting to like this rather odd professor.
Nicolas was about to return Keiller’s satisfied smile when there was a knock at the door, it opened a crack, and the attractive young woman who’d been instructing the student in the laboratory peered in.
“Uncle . . . forgive me for interrupting, but Fernando and I are off to the barns to see about the experiment in the horses. While I’m gone,” she chided gently, “you simply must look over my latest data. I’ll leave it in the lab for you.”
“Of course, dear, of course,” Keiller s
aid, waving her off.
The woman’s dark eyes rolled toward the intricately tooled tin ceiling, and Nicolas grinned to himself. Seeing this, she blushed, flashed Nicolas a thin, slightly lopsided smile, and gently shut the door.
“So tell me, Van Horne,” Keiller continued. “How’d you ever get yourself into this enterprise? You seem a relatively cultured chap to be supplying cadavers.”
Nicolas settled back and smoothed his mustache before he spoke. “The idea first came to me some years ago, in Saint Louis. There was an incident of grave robbing while I was unloading a ship, and . . . well, I thought, how truly wasteful to bury a dead body if some medical gent might learn something from it. Why not put ’em to good use, eh, Professor?”
“Precisely my sentiments.”
“I fostered certain connections with the medical men in Albany and supplied my first corpses . . . I suppose you’d prefer to call them ‘cadavers,’ eh?” He chuckled. “I admit I’ve turned a bit of a profit with it.”
“Ye deserve every penny, good sir. Every penny. My students benefit immeasurably from the scientific study of anatomy.”
Keiller struggled out of his chair and stood, as if lecturing at a podium. While he spoke he began waving his hands in small, questioning circles. “Anatomy and microanatomy—they’re the basis of all medicine,” he said, his voice rising. “My students study six days a week, in the evenings, as well. And morbid anatomy. Physiognomy! I ask you, Van Horne, how could one become a physician without knowing these things? Without knowing science? How? How?”
“I agree completely, Professor. Absolutely. By the way”—Nicolas cleared his throat—“is the payment available?”
“Oh, yes, of course.” Keiller took three erratic steps from his imaginary podium to the nearer of the two tables, which overflowed with books and manuscripts. A safe squatted under the table. “I had the bursar prepare enough for sixteen.”
Keiller twirled the dial and the door of the safe opened with a creak. He fumbled with an envelope thick with bills and began counting them onto his desk in front of Van Horne.
