by Paul Boor
“As agreed. Twelve cadavers—two hundred and forty dollars.”
“There’s also the parts, Professor. One leg and six arms, a smattering of hands. Make that an additional twenty, if you please.”
“Fair enough, good sir. And would ye be in need of assistance with the unloadin’?” Keiller asked as he dropped back into his chair and Van Horne tucked away his billfold.
“I was just about to enquire on that. Yes, I’d appreciate it greatly. I’ve only one man, though quite able. With assistance he’ll make short work of it.”
“I’ll have my two people ready. You understand, sir, this needs to be done after nightfall. The folks in this town have not taken kindly to our new college, as ye might imagine.” Keiller pressed his hands together in front of his face as if he were settling into his family pew at church. “There’s such malicious talk these days.”
“It’s the same wherever there’s a medical college, Professor.”
“No, this island is not like other places. There are elements here, powerful elements that . . . well . . .”
“Rest assured, I shall exercise discretion.”
“We’ll set it for ten o’clock, then?”
When Nicolas stood and took up his jacket to leave, Keiller raised a hand to stop him. “Would ye have any interest in seeing my research laboratory, Mr. Van Horne?”
“Certainly. Exactly what sort of facility do you have there, Professor?”
“The most modern of medical research labs.” Keiller hoisted himself out of his chair, lurched toward the fireplace, and bent over the insect cages. “You see, sir, here we’re followers of the cellular theories of Rudolf Virchow . . .”
While he spoke, Keiller took a beaker of red, viscous liquid from the hearth and, with a delicate glass eyedropper, set a line of tiny drops onto the top screen of one of the insect cages.
“What’s it you’re doing, Professor?”
“Their blood meal. They prefer the human”—there was a buzz of insect activity—“but they’ll feed on horse blood avidly enough.”
Ever the inquisitive learner, Nicolas eased out of his chair and leaned over the professor as he worked.
“Best stay back, my good man,” Keiller said. “I go to great lengths to make it hot as a Galveston summer in here—but they’re lively at this temperature. If these critters should escape . . . well, I long ago became resistant, but a Northerner like yourself would not be so lucky.”
At Keiller’s warning, Nicolas straightened and stepped back.
“Ah, yes, Rudolf Virchow . . .” The professor, recalling his train of thought, went on as he fed his insects. “The greatest of observers, Virchow. What brilliance! What insight in his ‘cellular’ theory of disease. Rudolf’s a good friend of Darwin’s. Two of the greatest minds of our century. Yes, well . . . come along, sir. To my laboratory.”
3
The Laboratory
The research laboratory was abandoned. Keiller and Nicolas strolled between the slate benches while Keiller rambled on about Rudolf Virchow and his theory of cells and their “morbid reactions.”
“Top-notch scientists come to us from around the world, you know,” Keiller said proudly.
“Like the Spanish fellow who was here earlier?” Nicolas asked.
“Well, no . . . that chap’s still wet behind the ears. Fernando arrived only last week, recommended by Pasteur himself.”
“And the young woman?”
“My dearest niece, Renée—the other Dr. Keiller in the lab. A brilliant physician and researcher in her own right.” Keiller chuckled. “She’s the real brains around here. Graduated summa cum laude. An accomplished scientist, and only five years out of doctoral training.”
Nicolas lifted a heavy, oddly shaped piece of glassware from the lab bench to examine its finer details. “Exactly what disease do you study, Professor?”
“Yellow fever.”
Nicolas’s mouth dropped open and he set the heavy glassware down with a bang. “That’s the miserable culprit that killed my mother.”
“So sorry to hear that, sir. How unusual, though . . . you being a Northerner.”
“Father had taken Mother south, to the Carolinas, while pursuing one of his financial schemes. I was but a child. It was early summer . . . an epidemic struck there. Father never forgave himself for leaving home.”
Keiller pursed his lips and nodded sympathetically. “Where would your home be, Mr. Van Horne?”
“Northern New York, in the mountainous area drained by the Black River.”
“And a right beautiful piece o’ country it must be.” Keiller took Nicolas’s arm. “Let’s get a breath of air, shall we?” He led Nicolas to the open window. “I imagine your home’s something like my own dear Scotland.”
“Yes, it is truly God’s country, Professor.”
“Ah, I’ve spent so many years in these hot zones of the world,” Keiller said with sadness. “What’s the name of your town?”
“Forestport.”
“Forestport. That’s where they’re from then, the ones ye brought me.”
Keiller, deep in thought, leaned on the windowsill and stared out. Rising on his toes, his gaze went past the convent and hospital, over the grey slate of the rooftops, to the green water of the gulf. The breeze blew the sulfuric odors behind the two men. The sun was high. Daylight streamed in.
Keiller turned and asked, “Do you know science, Mr. Van Horne?”
“Some aspects, yes, but I’m a practical sort. I enjoy tinkering. In point of fact I hold nine patents on devices I’ve invented for harvesting ice.”
“Nine patents?” Keiller arched his bushy white eyebrows. “Indeed.”
“You’ve spiked my curiosity, Professor. Tell me, exactly how do you intend to cure this horrid disease?”
“A few years back I discovered that yellow fever is caused by a living organism I’m callin’ a ‘particle.’ We’ve succeeded in inoculating the guinea pigs we house deep in the bowels of the building with this particle . . .”
Nicolas enjoyed studying this professor, the peculiar way he had of rocking forward onto his toes and waving his hands about when he became excited.
“. . . so you see, Mr. Van Horne, the key to yellow fever”—Keiller motioned toward his office door—“is the mosquito.”
“In those cages?”
“Precisely. It’s my theory that the particle of yellow fever is passed by the bite of Aedes aegypti, the common mosquito. I’ve said this since my days in Cuba, though not a soul in the scientific world believes me!” he laughed. “If Renée can only succeed in passing the particle to that boy’s cells . . .”
“I see. A living particle.”
“. . . then we’ll infect horses and they’ll make buckets of anti-toxoid.”
“The horse will make the cure?”
“Aye, the final step will be purifying the anti-toxoid from horse blood. That’ll be our cure, my good man.”
With his arms still in midair, Keiller glanced down at a leather-bound ledger lying on the bench top, open to a page freshly inked by a careful hand. “Ooh! My, my!” he cried with an old man’s glee. “Renée’s new data!”
Keiller bent over the ledger and fell silent. With a smooth, habitual movement, Nicolas slid his long-dead father’s watch from a vest pocket and clicked open its gold lid. It was barely noon, but a sudden wave of mental fatigue made him wonder why he’d ever ventured to land a cargo in this strange new port.
“Forgive me, Professor, but I have business to attend to.”
Keiller glanced up from the notebook. “Until this evening, then, Mr. Van Horne. I look forward to delivery.”
4
Secret Cargo
Like wooden spacers the dead lay between the massive blocks of Van Horne ice. In the hold of Nicolas’s ship, rich lay with poor, male with female, young with old; there was no order to their position in the ice, no preference to their loading. Potato farmers who’d tilled the weak Adirondack soil, sawyers from the m
ill at Forestport, Canadian lumberjacks killed in the woods, ironworkers from the village of Old Forge, whores from the poorest quarters . . . all lay together in the stillness of the ice.
These bodies had come to Van Horne’s ship from locales flung far across northern New York State. Those from the village of Forestport and environs came through the trickery of Thomas Chubb, the village undertaker, who, without scruple, pocketed Van Horne’s fee to bury coffins with lakeside rocks as ballast. Lumberjacks came from the camps listed as “missing in the woods.” Victims of consumption arrived from the sanitarium at Saranac, where tombstones marked empty graves. Unclaimed bodies were sent from the lunatic asylum at Ticonderoga. And wherever a sawbones plied his trade in the North Country, he understood that the remnants of men—an arm off the sawmill floor, a hand lost to the leather chopper in Gloversville, or a leg severed by a lumberjack’s false move in the great Adirondack woods—would bring a fair price at the Van Horne icehouse on the shores of Upper Spy Lake.
Just as an ice merchant must account for every cake of ice, Nicolas knew the source of each of these corpses and every odd part of man’s anatomy that might bring a profit. He was a meticulous bookkeeper of the history of the dead. He had logged and cataloged this shipment with precision, each corpse, arm, leg, and hand—every human remnant.
The only exceptions were those two boys dragged from a Buffalo snowdrift, a fact that had eaten at Nicolas these past days . . .
It had been only moments before departing with the ice that his associate Thomas Chubb, the undertaker, alerted Nicolas of these two boys’ availability. A quick and easy addition to their cargo, the two young bodies were handed over by a chap from Buffalo’s medical college, a doctor Nicolas had never met before. Little was said at the transfer. As far as Nicolas knew, the “fresh one” so highly prized by Keiller, the new professor, was without human history.
Something odd he’d noticed about the boys as Adam stowed them in the ice in Buffalo had troubled Nicolas all the way to Galveston. There’d been an unnatural angle to their necks, a freakish, defensive pose of their limbs. And these youngsters had some sort of sinister tattoo—he could swear he saw it—a mark, a darkened, angry scar of some sort. Had he seen a thing like that before?
Nicolas checked his books while on the Mississippi and found a half dozen other unidentified bodies he’d transported in the past two years. Oddly, all were youngsters. Five were boys, ten or eleven years of age, and one a young girl—all arranged by Thomas Chubb. Two of the youngsters had been fished from the rivers or lakes, drowned. Three were found frozen in the snow. The girl was discovered one summer in the woods near Buffalo. His notes mentioned nothing about a mark on them.
Such deficits gave a careful bookkeeper pause. Worse still, these children’s bodies reminded Nicolas all too vividly of his own, personal loss of a precious young son, gone now these many years, a boy of tender age and ill health, lost in the woods and never found . . . his sweet son Ethan . . .
With hoarfrost on their faces, Nicolas Van Horne’s cargo of mortal remains had crossed America. Now longshoremen labored overhead. Canvas was thrown aside, sawdust swept away, and tons of ice were on the move in the tropical daylight. Only the hiding place of the dead, the dark, icy catacombs of the lowest layer, would remain untouched.
In the quiet of night the ship would be moved and the bottom layer of ice opened. And Van Horne’s secret cargo would find its final resting place on the island of Galveston.
5
A New Business Partner
Nicolas studied the frenetic movement of the harbor out the open trolley window. He needn’t stop at his ship; Adam oversaw these harborside operations with utmost competence. Nicolas was reassured by the sight of his great blocks of ice moving efficiently down Pier 22 and into Bonferri’s Icehouse, a worn, wood-frame structure that squatted alongside the other aging warehouses on the wharf. The stevedores hired by Adam, a group of colored men, were hard at work with the hand-drawn carts they ordinarily used for bales of cotton.
Van Horne’s present destination, then, would be the downtown office of Mr. Pierre Bonferri, midlevel merchant, procurer of dry goods, and go-between in the business of ice. Nicolas had corresponded with this Frenchman at length on matters of business; important final arrangements regarding Mr. Bonferri’s icehouse and Nicolas’s advance payment were pending.
From his years in the ice enterprise, Van Horne knew precisely what it took to become a successful ice man. Despite the myriad fine details of trading in ice, a man needed to pay attention to only three main principles. First and foremost, one should offer the finest product—pure, dense, Northern blocks, and at the right price. Next, the trader must ensure proper handling of his ice. Speed and strictest hygiene were paramount. Last—and most important—once the deal was struck, one must advertise. If these details were tended to, the demand of a local populace for ice would grow ten times greater with each year’s shipment.
“Of course we’ll handle your ice correctly, mon ami,” Mr. Bonferri assured him, once Nicolas was comfortably seated in his downtown office. “I have dealt in ice for years now, as you know.” Bonferri rocked gently in his commodious desk chair while twirling the tips of his handlebar mustache into pencil-fine points.
“I’m afraid it’s an awfully small icehouse you have, Mr. Bonferri.”
“Sir!”
“And poorly insulated.”
“It is the finest on zee coast, monsieur.”
“I’m sure. Nevertheless, I must insist, Mr. Bonferri—sharing profits as we are—that we charge a bit more than for that inferior Missouri ice you’ve been trafficking in. The public will gladly pay for a superior product such as mine.”
“Yes, yes, mon ami, we’ll up the price a few pennies. The public can bear it. Ice is practically a household item nowadays.”
“And we’ll need an exhibit.”
“What on earth are you talking about, Van Horne?”
“An exhibit of my ice. I’ll choose a perfect block and have it set out for all to see. It’s the novelty of it. It’s an advertisement, you understand.”
“An advertisement. Clever, Van Horne.”
“As many citizens as possible must see this block. Tell me, Bonferri, which is your finest, your busiest emporium?”
“That would be Slade’s, a few blocks down the Strand.”
“Then that’s the place for it. My exhibit will be the talk of the town. Properly maintained, covered at night and so forth, it will last for months.”
“Whatever you find necessary.” Bonferri leaned back, gazed at the ceiling, and twirled with renewed intensity.
Nicolas continued. “At first we’ll fetch a moderate price for our product. Then, when your summer arrives, the temperature will rise—”
“And so will zee price of ice. Excellent.”
“You’ll arrange for the exhibit?”
At Bonferri’s nod, Nicolas stood and made ready to go. The Frenchman stood behind his desk, gave his mustache one last perfunctory turn, and offered a cool, greasy hand. “Of course you must collect your advance payment for my end of the bargain . . . when will you finish unloading, Van Horne?”
“The last of the shipment should be packed in your icehouse by the end of tomorrow.”
As they passed through the outer office, Nicolas was startled by the sight of a pleasing, towheaded young woman standing at the upright desk along the wall. She was bent over a ledger book, keeping the tallies—a job usually done by a gent specially trained in affairs of business.
“How forward-thinking,” Nicolas commented quietly. “I see you employ the fairer of our species, Bonferri.”
“Ah, yes. Très moderne.” Bonferri chuckled. “I grew weary of the run-of-the-mill bookkeepers in this town. I’ve even ordered her a typewriting machine. The finest Remington.”
The comely, curvaceous girl glanced up, flashed her peacock-blue eyes at the two men, and was back at her ledger.
“Tomorrow, when you’ve finished
unloading,” Bonferri said, “I’ll arrange your payment. I’ll send you a message, once my banker has it ready. I’m afraid you’ll need to go to the financial offices on the upper floor of Hutch Sealy’s Cotton Exchange Building for your funds.”
“Is this Sealy the city’s main banker?”
Bonferri took his eyes from his fair-haired bookkeeper and fixed them on Nicolas. “Sealy’s our only banker. Hutchinson Sealy & Son Finance, Trust, and Title Company. You see, Mr. Van Horne, cotton controls this town, and the Sealys control cotton. The docks. The wharves. Every blessed dollar goes through them.”
“Even for commodities such as ice?”
“Even ice. I’ll make the arrangements. Remember, my financial officer’s located on the top floor of the Cotton Exchange Building. I’ll send a message to your hotel when the payment’s available.”
6
Delivery
At Pier 22 Nicolas found his ship riding high in the water, its topside secured. Adam had tacked a note to the ship’s side explaining that he’d retired to his quarters at Molly’s Rooms, “a stone’s throw from the dock.”
Molly’s Rooms, typical of seafarer’s quarters, was a flophouse located in the nearby neighborhood known as Sailortown, a rough-and-ready district of boardinghouses, dilapidated warehouses, rowdy drinking establishments, and bordellos. Nicolas entered the front door of Molly’s and walked the musty first-floor hallway in near-darkness, calling for Adam, then he climbed a set of rickety stairs to the second floor, where the doors were left ajar onto the hall for ventilation. Seafaring men loitered in the hall, which was thick with cigar and pipe smoke. The guttural hum of foreign speech thickened the air further.
Nicolas called out again.
