by Paul Boor
Meanwhile, unnoticed by their half-breed chieftain, Adam had pulled his fishing knife from his belt, slipped behind the wagon, and, with a single swipe at the rope, cut the dragged man loose. For a moment, the poor soul lay flat on his back, oozing blood, then he snapped to his feet and—with the look of an animal inexplicably freed from the jaws of a trap—he took off at a clip and disappeared between two warehouses.
The perpetrators pulled away with their sole victim, his eyes bright with terror. The chieftain stood in the buckboard, his headdress swaying to and fro as the wagon lumbered down the harborside. Pointing at Nicolas, he shouted:
“The Doctor will remember you two! Yes, he will. The Doctor remembers.”
11
Gruesome Discovery
Unnerved, Nicolas and Adam hurried in silence toward the business district, shaking their heads in dismay as they mulled over their private thoughts.
Nicolas broke the silence. “What cruelty! These Southerners. I’ve heard of such things, but never—”
“What’d those men do, I wonder?” Adam asked. “Must’ve been some crime.”
Nicolas and Adam rounded a street corner and came on a Sailortown drinking establishment known as Alciatore’s Market Tavern. The sour stink of beer spilled in dark, moldy corners drifted out the swinging doors.
“I’m desperate for a drink,” Nicolas said.
They bellied up in the midst of longshoremen, draymen, and drovers who were two deep at the bar swilling a yellowish brew.
“It’s Isle Ale we serve, gents,” said the barkeep, a burly, fully mustachioed gent. At Nicolas’s nod, two murky pints of suds came sliding down the bar. “It’ll cure what ails ya,” the barman said, studying their long, grey faces. “And there’s a first-class free lunch,” he added.
Nicolas drained his glass in two quick draughts. Adam stared blankly at a platter of oysters the barman plunked down in their rough, grey shells. He reached for one but was stopped when a drunken laborer a few feet down the bar grumbled, “Dirty rotten Injun.”
Adam Klock, grandson of a Seneca Indian and a born fighter, twirled to face the offender. Nicolas, however, saw the remark wasn’t intended for Adam at all; further down the bar, a bronze-skinned galoot with long, black braids was the target.
“He didn’t mean you,” Nicolas said, grabbing Adam’s elbow.
The two lurched together, punches were landed, and blood spewed from the drunken laborer’s nose. The drunkard tottered. A bowie blade flashed. Adam broke free of Nicolas and made a move for the knife.
Nicolas knew his friend far too well. This is a mistake, he thought. “No, Adam!” he shouted, but Adam had already disarmed the drunkard; the big knife clanged against a spittoon and was lost in the sawdust that covered the floor. “Come on, man,” Nicolas said, throwing coins on the bar. “Leave it to the barkeep.”
“Gol-damn Southerners.”
Nicolas tugged Adam through the swinging doors and into the street.
“You need to bottle up that Indian in you, Adam. You’re too quick to act.”
“Hey, boss, I acted quick back at the docks. Saved a man there, didn’t I?”
“You surely did, I admit. But we’ve had too gruesome a day already.”
Barely two steps out Alciatore’s swinging doors, Nicolas saw that the most gruesome was yet to come. “Oh, no,” he whispered.
The buckboard from hell rattled out of the alley, only now the men in its bed, crude hoods still in place, sat idle, their victim no longer in tow. The African chieftain hauled the wagon to a halt in front of Nicolas and Adam, and glared. A commotion in the alley drew the Northerners’ eyes to a loose-knit crowd of citizens in suits and ties gaping at a man hung high from a telegraph pole in the shadow of a warehouse.
“Good God,” Nicolas muttered. “They lynched ’im.”
Nicolas and Adam dashed down the alley to the crowd of morbid gents.
“Leave him be, you two,” the young chieftain on the plank hollered, shaking a fist.
The man spun slowly, hanged by a thick ship’s rope. His unruly shock of reddish hair convinced Nicolas he was the man Adam failed to free at the harborside. A crudely drawn banner around the man’s neck fluttered in the wind. As the body turned, it gave a faint shudder . . . the last throes of dying? Or just the gulf breeze?
“He’s still alive,” Adam whispered. “Boost me up.”
Adam stepped into his boss’s cupped hands and lunged onto the telegraph pole. He shimmied level with the lynched man and drew his knife, but it was too late. Flies swarmed on the man’s eyes. His neck was stretched at an ugly angle.
“Let him swing,” someone in the crowd shouted.
“It’s a lesson to others like him,” another said. “Don’t matter, black or white. It’s unnatural.”
“Serves ’im right.”
With his knife ready in hand, Adam stared into the dead man’s bulging eyes, then down at his boss. “No sense in it,” he said. “The man’s a goner.”
“Jump down, then. Quick.” Two hooded men from the buckboard were approaching fast. “This way.”
Nicolas grabbed Adam’s arm and pushed through to the other side of the crowd, down the alley and away from the corpse. Glancing back, he caught a fleeting image, a still life on the back of the eye, of a redheaded man draped on his ligature, a crudely penned banner proclaiming the lynched man’s crime:
. . . ROBBER
12
Details of Business
Nicolas had heard of lynchings but never been close to one. When the Civil War had ended, he was still a brash youth foundering at his university studies in Boston. Northern cities were rocked by unrest and riots after the war’s end, when black men fled the South and Southern slaveholders came north to make trouble. Black men were ridden on rails, tarred and feathered, or whisked away in the dead of night. Marauders traveling on horseback hunted colored men like beasts and hanged them from the lampposts with no consequence for the perpetrators except a line in the next day’s newspaper—usually little more than “Darkie lynched.”
But Nicolas realized the thing they’d witnessed today was different. Very different. A lynching party of colored men? Led by a mulatto? And the dead man white and fair haired?
At Nicolas’s side, Adam said, “Musta been a helluva job that robber pulled. A bank, maybe?”
The midday sun hammered down, but neither it nor the bustle of the commercial district did much to distract Nicolas. He and Adam walked the Strand up and down, up and down, until their hearts stopped pounding and gained a quieter rhythm. After what seemed like hours, they found themselves in front of Slade’s Emporium, their original destination. Slade’s was centrally sited in the bustling downtown, with a large display window perfect for an exhibit of ice. Nearby were clothiers’ shops and an apothecary advertising itself as “Galveston’s sole depot of leeches.”
Inside the emporium, Nicolas and Adam found Mr. Slade behind the candy counter overseeing the operation of his new taffy-pulling machine.
“Ah, yes, the ice exhibit,” Mr. Slade hollered over the rattle of his chain-driven contraption. “Pierre explained it all.” He smiled broadly and stepped from behind the counter. “Such a novel idea. Bonferri’s to be commended for his cleverness.”
“We’ll have your exhibit shortly,” Nicolas said with a nod to Mr. Slade and a wink to Adam.
“Yessiree, sir,” Adam added. “I’ll get that block in here, lickety-split.”
“Mr. Slade—tell me something,” Nicolas said, lowering his voice and stepping closer. “Have you heard of the goings-on a few blocks over, near the harbor? A man’s been killed, you know.”
Slade’s smile died. He averted his eyes to the rolls of sweet-smelling dough spinning off his taffy machine. “Why yes . . . I heard,” he said, barely audible. “But here in the South, you see, when the cause is righteous, we look the other way in such matters. It would be bad for business to do otherwise.”
Once the Northerners were back on the street,
Adam asked, “When we leaving this town, boss?”
“All that’s keeping us is the final payment from Bonferri,” Nicolas replied. “He’s yet to notify me when it will be ready. Blasted Southerners,” he groaned. “They sure take their time with their commerce.”
“Quick enough to a lynching, aren’t they?”
“That they are.”
In the fading light of day, Adam and Nicolas parted ways with Adam’s promise to haul the ice exhibit to Slade’s Emporium before dark. “Don’t worry, boss,” Adam told Nicolas. “I’ll get the block set. Then I’m planning on staying safe and warm inside tonight.”
Nicolas hailed a brightly polished barouche drawn by two spirited steeds. They were fine horses, dark spotted on a pure white background, of an unusual breed Nicolas heard called Opelousas in New Orleans.
“Majestic Hotel, if you please,” he called to the driver. “But steer clear of the tavern they call Alciatore’s,” he added, shaking his head at the thought of the horrible thing drawing flies in the alley.
As the pretty horses eased the barouche smoothly in the direction of the beach, Nicolas recounted in his mind the litany of reasons to get off this island, and fast.
13
Surprise Invitation
Nicolas made a beeline for the bar to clear his mind of his and Adam’s grisly experience, but before he could hoist his foot onto the rail, a clerk behind the main desk waved him over.
“A message, Mr. Van Horne!”
“Ah, yes, at last,” he said, anticipating Bonferri’s go-ahead for payment.
Puzzled at the look of this note, Nicolas broke its seal, a replica, in bright orange, of the Texas star he’d seen over the medical college’s entrance.
Mr. Van Horne,
Forgive my oversight in not mentioning it last evening, but I would be greatly honored by your attendance at the celebration of Mardi Gras to be held tonight at my residence, 708 Ursuline. Please arrive any time after 8:00.
Although it is traditional to attend “en masque,” I shall understand fully if your recent arrival in our city should preclude this frivolity.
Looking forward to your presence, I remain
Yours truly,
Francis Keiller
Now here was a turn of events for the better. A private party. He had no taste for one right now, but he’d be off the street and far from Sailortown.
“That laundry boy! The Chinaman! Where can he be found?” Van Horne asked of the desk clerk. “I’ll need those shirts, and quick.” Assured that the laundry boy would be summoned posthaste, Nicolas requested a hot bath be drawn in his room, then he set off to the hotel’s barber.
Clean shaven and well trimmed, he returned to the room and threw open his trunk to study the neckties he’d packed for the journey.
“A mask?” he laughed to himself. “I don’t even own such a thing.” He chose the gayest of his ties, of black silk, hand painted with delicate Japanese pagodas. It always knotted perfectly and lay nicely at the neck. “Excellent for a party, I should think, but . . .” Perhaps a long tie, with a stickpin . . . no . . . not with that ghastly burnished-steel thing for traveling . . . but then, one couldn’t travel down the Mississippi with one’s most valuable diamond stickpin.
He was easing into the steamy water when a pounding erupted at the door.
“Laundy! Laundy, sir!”
Nicolas pulled on his pants, opened the door, took the paper package from the boy, and tore it open on the bed.
“Ahh . . . excellent.” He sighed, holding at arm’s length a freshly boiled shirt, starched and pressed to rigid perfection. He was counting out three-penny pieces when the boy spoke up.
“Brothels, sir? Mister need brothels tonight?”
Nicolas smiled to himself. “No, boy, that won’t be necessary.”
“Brothels in Sailortown, sir!” The boy persisted. “I take you to Post Office Street. Nice ladies, sir. Very young girl, even, very young and you buy cheap.”
“Well thank you anyway, lad,” Nicolas said, a bit unnerved at the lad’s insistence. He searched for another coin.
“And smoking, too, sir. Very good opium. Top-notch.”
“No need for that old stuff.” Nicolas chuckled, recalling his college years of opium puffing in the dens of Boston. Indeed, that was where he first met with the pleasures of poppy.
At Harvard, Nicolas was a star attacker on the football team, scoring goals whenever he got his hands on the ball. In the first half of the big Yale game his senior year, he took a hard tackle that left him an ache in his right knee that now—twenty years later—foretold the weather far better than any of the instruments he relied on during the ice harvest.
Nicolas had to be carried off the field that afternoon in Boston. His knee ballooned. An old quack near the college supplied him with a bottle of laudanum, but it was his brothers in the secret society Alpha Delta Phi who managed his “recuperation,” as they put it, in Boston’s opium parlours.
Nowadays, as Nicolas had discovered from Thomas Chubb, sweet morphia was so easily obtained from an apothecary’s supply of the purest morphine sulfate, it was hardly necessary for a gentleman to spend hours in a smoky cellar. Morphine, chloral hydrate, tincture of cannabis, cocaine hydrochloride—all plentiful and cheap, with thin, modern needles available, and the most accurate hypodermics, even some, he’d heard, fashioned of glass rather than steel.
“But, boy, one moment!” Nicolas called, stopping the laundry chap. “One more thing, son—would you run a message for me?” Van Horne uncapped the ink bottle at the corner desk and quickly scribbled a note on hotel stationery. “Take this to Molly’s place.”
“I know it. At Pier 22.”
“On the second floor, call for a man named Adam.” Nicolas pulled his watch from the vest that hung over the chair. “You must make haste.”
Adam,
Have 200 lbs delivered to 708 Ursuline Street in my name. Do this immediately.
Choose the finest, clearest blocks.
Nicolas
Nicolas sealed the note and handed it over.
“Right away, sir!” The boy beamed at the silver half eagle dropped into his hand. “Ten minutes on bicycle!”
Nicolas sank into his hot tub as the last of the day’s sunlight stretched across the beach and streamed obliquely through the hotel window.
“I wonder,” he said with a sigh, “just what is a Mardi Gras party?”
While downtown with Adam, he’d noticed banners of purple, green, and yellow hung about the commercial district that afternoon. In New Orleans, days before, raucous, raggedy bands of horns and fiddles had marched by. Hooligans wandered the streets late into the night. He’d been warned at his hotel to watch his purse.
These Catholic port towns were serious about the final days before Lent. A last chance for revelry. Rites of spring and all that. It was good for business, he supposed, as he leaned back in the hot soak and reached for the soap.
Yes. Mardi Gras. It would take his mind away from troubling occurrences. And it was good for business.
14
The Party
At nine thirty that evening Nicolas Van Horne, in stiff shirt and tie knotted to a perfect bow, felt sure his arrival would be fashionably late. His driver found Keiller’s house easily, just one block from the hospital and new medical college. This end of town seemed quiet compared to the festive neighborhoods on the way, where the houses pulsed with revelry from the parties of the rich.
Keiller’s house was a modest structure, in the French style, with intricate black ironwork on the wraparound galleries of both stories. The panel over the front door was graced by a stained glass in the image of a brown pelican. Nicolas banged the brass knocker twice and a maid appeared, a robust young woman of a milk-chocolate color, dressed in airy black cotton and wearing a dainty white mask over her eyes. She smiled and tilted her head in polite anticipation.
Nicolas nodded back. “I am Nicolas Van Horne of New York.”
“Welco
me, Mr. Van Horne. I am Sara,” the maid replied in a seductively hushed baritone.
Sara beckoned Nicolas into a central hall warmly lit by the gaslight of alabaster wall sconces. Oil paintings of bucolic rural scenes were hung along the walls. Nicolas was particularly taken by one, the largest canvas—a dark, enigmatic woman in the style Nicolas recognized as pointillism, the latest rage on the Continent. At the far end of the hall, a staircase wound to the second floor past two lower landings, both lit by the globes of gas lamps protruding from the newels.
Sara took Nicolas’s homburg and hung it on an oak hall tree finely detailed with carvings of sandpipers and soaring gulls. She motioned Nicolas through an open set of pocket doors to the dining room, where a half dozen guests, en masque, surrounded the dining-room table. The overhead gas chandelier was turned up full, illuminating a two-foot-high mound of chipped ice covered with boiled shrimp, hardly touched, in the center of the table.
“Mr. Nicolas Van Horne of New York,” Sara announced to the group, her rich voice resonant. The guests turned masked faces to Nicolas; most held a crystal goblet and a shrimp dripping with a dark, pungent sauce.
“Aye, it’s Van Horne”—Nicolas recognized Keiller’s brogue coming from the craggy rubber face of a goat—“the ice merchant, and friend.” The goat’s ears flapped with excitement. “Come join us.”
Keiller wore a faded black academic gown with a purple and yellow cape. His frizzy white hair protruded in tufts from under a top hat that had seen better days. When Keiller offered his hand, Van Horne caught a whiff of formaldehyde from the academic robes. Their handshake held firm as the professor turned and, with an elegant, sweeping motion of his free hand, declared, “Ladies and gentlemen, this is the generous fellow who sent the ice.”
