by Paul Boor
“Aye, it’s Mr. Van Horne, returned to us in the middle of the night.” Keiller offered a bony hand; Nicolas held it firmly.
“I’ve a delivery for you, sir. My ship’s made fast at your dock.”
“Ah, excellent. But you’re lookin’ a mite tatty, Van Horne. Difficult voyage, was it?”
“Unfathomably so.”
“Come to the office, then, and we’ll share a wee touch of whiskey.”
With a wave of his hand, Keiller led the way back through his laboratory. Retorts were stilled, Bunsen burners extinguished. A solitary student, a slim figure against the glow of the open incinerator, was adding a powder to a cold Erlenmeyer flask that sat on the slate counter.
Keiller paused halfway across the lab and called to the student, “Patrick! I’ve an errand for you, son. Very important.”
Keiller instructed the youth to run posthaste to the homes of his two anatomy assistants and shake them out of their beds. “Tell them our supplier’s back,” he said, “and there’s work to be done tonight. Get cracking, boy.”
In his blood-warm office Keiller poured two whiskeys and lowered himself behind his desk. Nicolas sank into the other chair.
“Professor, I’m afraid I carry terrible news . . .”
Nicolas’s voice quavered as he imparted the grim tale of Adam’s murder and his own near-assassination. For a long moment, silence hung like a pall over the two men. Keiller shook his head, then gave his desktop a resounding thump with his fist.
“Damnable cur! How ghastly. But, Nicolas—why would such a man be after you? This wasn’t simply an argument over cards, you say?”
“It’s a complicated tale, Professor. Since I left you last, I uncovered something I wasn’t meant to, an enterprise run by ruthless criminals, and I’m dealing with the consequences. Earlier, your niece, Renée, helped me come to grips with the problem.”
“I’m sure she advised you well. She isn’t in any danger, is she?”
“I’ve been careful to go it alone on this.”
“You best watch your back, Nicolas. But this is a great loss to your enterprise. Adam was an able assistant, as I remember. Is there family?”
“I’m afraid his wife’s a consumptive in the advanced stages of the disease. I plan to see she gets proper treatment at Saranac.”
“A world-class facility.”
“There’s four sons. The eldest works in the woods at the lumber trade.”
“Fine boys, no doubt.”
“I’ll help however I can.”
“I’m sure.”
The two men went quiet again. Nicolas’s gaze wandered over Keiller’s office, reappraising the intricately carved wood of the walls, the books and manuscripts, the smoldering fire in the fireplace of Italian tiles he’d admired on his first visit. A faint buzz came from the carefully stacked mosquito cages of the professor’s insectary.
This time Nicolas broke the silence. “Yes, it’s been a troubling year for me, yet in many ways I count myself fortunate. Despite the loss of my wife—”
“Egad, man! You have had a rough time of it.”
“Indeed, sir, I have, but my children—and Adam—carried me through. The ice business thrives, and we’ve collected a copious shipment for you, Professor.”
Nicolas paused, having touched on the delicate subject of his visit.
“How many have ye brought me?” Keiller asked.
“A full complement. Two dozen.”
“Ahh . . . Splendid.”
“I did no business whatsoever in New Orleans, neither ice nor corpses. They’re all yours, except the few I arranged for Saint Louis.”
“Our students are greatly indebted.”
“I believe there’s a future for my business in your city. I’ve a new icehouse under construction, you know.”
“Quite impressive, I understand. Everyone’s been keenly watching your son, Nicolas. They’re saying good things about him.”
A faint smile—his first since making safe harbor—flickered across Nicolas’s lips. “Schuyler’s hit a few bumps in life,” he said, “but I’m hoping he’s turned a corner at last.”
“An asset to the island, your boy. Very well-known. And now he’s concocted this new horse-racing enterprise—”
“Horse racing?”
“A truly novel idea. A racetrack should turn a pretty profit in a busy port like this. And to locate in Sailortown in the . . . um . . . entertainment district. A brilliant move.”
Nicolas hid a smirk. “Yes, I suppose.” He hesitated before asking, “Is your niece well?”
“Yes, excellent,” Keiller replied with a perfunctory nod. “Extremely busy. I don’t suppose you know about her and Fernando?”
“Renée and Fernando?”
“Their betrothal.”
Nicolas gaped for a moment, a sickening feeling in his gut. “You mean, Fernando and—?”
“It seems a tolerable match. The man’s a good worker, steady and thoughtful, though hardly an inventive mind in the laboratory.”
Nicolas fought to maintain his composure while Keiller rambled on. So much had happened since Saratoga. His confronting Zhivakov in Buffalo, the alliances he’d formed with the authorities—at Renée’s urging—and now, Adam’s murder…
“I tell you honestly, Van Horne,” Keiller went on, “it was no surprise when I asked Pasteur about Fernando and the old boy didn’t remember the chap ever working at the Université Lille. But then, Louis has gotten too damned big for his britches, I suspect. He probably overlooked the young man, and Fernando’s the silent type—these Spaniards often are. He’s worked so closely with Renée…the attraction…it’s natural, I suppose…”
Renée. Keiller’s lovely niece…When Nicolas was in hiding at Upper Spy Lake, alone, the empty feeling left by their brief summer interlude in Saratoga would well up, and his heart would ache. But Renée was pure infatuation, an impossible dream, a love never to be. For now, he had to put her out of mind. An assassin stalked him, and a hunted man had no time for idle thoughts…Still, the thought of Renée wedded to her lab assistant left a hollowness inside him.
Shakily, he set his drink down and stood. “We’d best get to my ship and get started, eh?”
“But you’ve not touched your drink,” Keiller protested. “Ye likely need it, Nicolas. Ye look a bit woozy. Drink up, man.”
Nicolas drew a breath, then another. Galaxies of sparkling white dots—an entire Milky Way—burst before his eyes.
“No . . . thank you, though, Professor. Let’s get on with the unloading, shall we?”
71
On the Dock
Nicolas sensed from the start that it wouldn’t go well on the dock that night. The sky was clear, the moon full and high. The evening was tepid, the bay flat as an Adirondack lake. Sound would carry for miles in such stillness. And he hardly had a taste for unloading bodies after the disastrous loss of Adam.
Keiller’s grumbling assistants arrived on the dock half-asleep. Nicolas recalled the two men who acted as all-around porters and lackeys in the cadaver facility; one was the seven-foot giant covered with tattoos, the other a humpbacked Chinaman named Lee Ching. Both assistants immediately became unruly and bellicose. Keiller incessantly shushed them. But the biggest problem, Nicolas quickly realized, was that Adam Klock, his right-hand man, lay dead at the bottom of the Mississippi River instead of ably assisting in the ice.
Well before loading for the trip south, while still in the Upper Spy icehouse, Adam had devised an ingenious way to extract the bodies from the shipload of ice without first unloading the top layers. His new method, he’d rightly reasoned, would make for lightning-quick delivery in Saint Louis and Galveston. Adam had built a narrow chimney at one end of the cargo, and covered the chimney with a foot-thick trapdoor of ice. The chimney allowed Nicolas’s slightly built foreman to descend into the catacombs at the bottom of the ship’s hold and wrestle the corpses into position to be hauled up, one by one, with a rope.
The new met
hod had worked perfectly at the unloading in Saint Louis, where within an hour of making port four bodies were unloaded. But now—as Nicolas recalled with a pang of remorse—Adam Klock had taken a deadly load of lead. The skinniest man on the Jilted Lady was gone. The ice chimney was far too narrow for Keiller’s giant assistant. Likewise, Lee Ching’s hunchback jammed at its entrance. Thus it fell to Nicolas to light a lantern, descend into Adam’s chimney, crawl through the frigid catacombs, wrangle the bodies out of their resting places in the ice, and affix a rope so the strong arms topside could haul them up and out. Nicolas was rawboned from his winter of dodging slave traders and hard-muscled from the ice harvests, but he was still a much bigger man than Adam Klock had been.
The back door to the college was thrown open and the vats of formaldehyde uncovered, ready to receive the corpses. Nicolas dropped down the ice chimney and pushed the lantern down the narrow tunnels. But it went slowly, very slowly. Tons of ice seemed to press in around him. The rubbery bodies jammed. Nicolas fumbled with the icy ropes.
It took two hours before Nicolas saw the last—and the largest—of the two dozen corpses squeeze through Adam’s chimney. By then, his breath came in harsh gasps; he was running out of air.
In the failing light of the lantern, he assembled a final bundle of his gruesome cargo—an assortment of arms, legs, and dismembered hands—and hastily lashed the bundle with twine. Topside, a hubbub broke out. “Hurry, Van Horne!” Keiller shouted. “Trouble’s brewing.”
With his lungs sucking at the vanishing air, body aching and stiff from the cold, Nicolas sent the final grisly parcel topside. When he scuttled up the ice chimney and peered out, he was greeted by a grotesque spectacle. The last of the bodies, a rotund and exceptionally buxom young woman, lay half on, half off the dock. Keiller’s assistants stood over the corpse, dumbly passing a pint of whiskey between them. Nicolas remembered well the unnamed woman from a nearby town; she’d died of consumption at the County Home for Wayward Women and was destined for a pauper’s grave until intercepted by Thomas Chubb.
Professor Keiller was distraught. “We were seen,” he hissed. “When they were tugging on that last big one, I spied two young rascals in the bushes. I told ’em, ‘Git!’ but I suspect they were there all night, the damned hooligans.” Keiller turned to his assistants. “Come on, you two,” he said in a coarse whisper. “Let’s finish, and fast! They’re probably still watching.”
The tattooed giant hoisted the naked female body onto his broad back; the corpse’s pendulous breasts swung to a half-drunk rhythm as the giant made his way down the dock. Lee Ching dragged Nicolas’s makeshift bundle of body parts off; Nicolas followed with Keiller hobbling alongside.
Once inside the back entrance to the medical college, Nicolas was done in and asked to take his leave of the professor.
“Yes, yes, get some rest, my good man,” Keiller said as he prepared to swing the iron door shut behind Nicolas. “Our vats are at their capacity, thanks to you.”
Nicolas, chilled to the bone, his hands blistered and lungs heavy with soot, staggered back onboard the Jilted Lady and collapsed into his bunk. His welcome sleep was broken only once, when, in the dead of the night, he heard a soft banging, or thumping, topside. Was it merely the creak of the mast? Also, he could’ve sworn he heard a rooster crow.
At dawn, Nicolas was wakened by stomping and shouting on deck.
“Father? Are you here?” It was Schuyler’s distinctive bass voice. “Egad!” he exclaimed. “What is this mess?”
Nicolas pulled on his borrowed pants and shirt and ducked out from below. Schuyler was leaning on the ship’s rail, looking prosperous and somewhat overfed in fine tweeds and a grey chesterfield jacket with a blue velvet collar. Nicolas raced to embrace his son, but at his first step he skidded on a slippery plank, his arms windmilled, and he hit the deck hard. Looking about, he found he was sitting in a puddle of blackened, congealed blood. “What in the world? Blood?”
“You’ve a mess all right,” Schuyler said, casting an eye around the deck of the Jilted Lady. “It’s chickens, Father. Look there. Chickens.”
Schuyler pointed at the lifeless bodies of three bantam roosters lying on deck near the mast. The birds had been decapitated; their bright reddish-brown feathers fluttered in the breeze. Nicolas struggled to his feet.
Schuyler, still leaning on the rail, reached into an inner jacket pocket and extracted a cigarette. He lit it and took a long draw. “Looks like black magic to me,” he said.
“Yes, and I notice the hatches have been opened.”
“Hereabouts, this sorta thing’s the speciality of the Voodoo Doctor.”
Nicolas instantly recalled the ghastly lynching he and Adam had witnessed on their first voyage to Galveston. “You’ve heard of the Voodoo Doctor?”
“I’ve actually had dealings with the gent.” Schuyler shed his chesterfield and rolled up his sleeves, the cigarette dangling from his mouth. “Can’t feature what he’d hold against you.”
“Obviously, he’s heard of my arrival. Some town hooligans saw us unloading last night, and I guess news travels fast in this town.”
“I doubt he cares about the medical college.”
“No, Son, this fellow has it in for body snatchers. He lynches them.”
“He hardly seems like the type.”
“Believe me, Son. I’ve seen it.”
Schuyler flipped his cigarette into the bay. “Well, let’s get this mess overboard, shall we? I’m eager to show you the fruits of my labor.”
They heaved the carcasses overboard and replaced the hatch covers. Schuyler donned his chesterfield and they were about to debark when he stepped to the mast and said, “Well looky here.” The heads of the decapitated chickens were nailed on the low door that led below. The bloody heads were arranged in a triangle; in the center a small black object had been fixed with a brass tack.
“It’s a charm,” Nicolas said, recalling the bizarre trinket tied to the brick that had abruptly ruined Keiller’s Mardi Gras party. “A voodoo charm.” He pulled out the tack and turned the object in his hand.
“Cute little doodad,” Schuyler said.
“I recall now, Son—the skin of a black snake wrapped around something…like a hank of hair.” As Nicolas peered at the charm, a line of silvery droplets spilled onto the deck. He bent to examine the substance. “It’s mercury, like in my weather instruments.”
“Mercury was the Romans’ messenger god, wasn’t he?”
“Yes, but also the god of merchants.”
“A message to a merchant, then, eh? An ice merchant, to be exact,” Schuyler said with a smirk. “Come on, Father, toss that thing in the drink and don’t give it a thought. Let’s see your new icehouse. Adam, too. Is that lazy bum still sleeping below?”
Nicolas groaned. “Oh Lord, I’ve horrible news, Schuyler. I’ll tell you as we go.” He took his son’s arm and led him to the Jilted Lady’s gangplank. “It’s about poor Adam.”
As they strode down the harborside, Nicolas relayed the tale of the Russian assassin and Adam’s death. Though Nicolas had his finished letter to Abigail in hand, ready to post, Schuyler suggested his father telegraph Abby to advise her immediately of the bad news. Nicolas agreed, and they detoured to the Veracruz Cable Company office.
When Nicolas pushed his telegram under the metal bars, the harried cable officer looked up and raised his voice over the ticking of the machines. “Mr. Van Horne? Just so happens we’ve a telegram for you, sir.” The officer searched in the chaos behind him, then reappeared. “It came over the wire two days ago.”
He slid the cable across the guttered marble. Wired from the town of Forestport, it was from Abigail Van Horne:
Have news from Chicago STOP
Am learning much STOP
Slave ring bigger than thought STOP
Even in South STOP Take great care STOP
Abi
Last Nicolas knew, Abigail was in Chicago investigating a community house that sheltered
runaways and misplaced orphans. The place, called Hull House, was newly opened by a certain Miss Addams, a renowned leader in the women’s movement whom Abigail idolized. When Nicolas left with the ice, Abby was waiting for more correspondence from Addams. Bigger than thought. Even in South. A wave of shivers coursed down Nicolas’s back.
Schuyler wrapped his arm around his father’s shoulder. “Let’s not dwell on this, eh? Knowing my sis, I’m sure she’s got things under control. Come, let me show you your new icehouse.”
“I’m in need of that, Schuyler. Indeed I am.”
72
The New Van Horne Icehouse
When he stepped onto Pier 28, Nicolas’s spirits were lifted from the abyss into which they’d fallen. The newest structure on the wharfs, Schuyler’s icehouse was perfectly sited and appeared to have size and capacity far greater than Pierre Bonferri’s, where Nicolas had previously stored his ice. Meticulously constructed of the hardiest swamp cypress, this was no jerry-built warehouse. What most caused Nicolas to take heart, however, was the “VAN HORNE & SON” freshly painted in bold red letters on the icehouse’s white clapboards.
“I’ve never seen a finer structure, Schuyler.”
“I specified your double-walled construction, Father, and the ventilation system, exactly reproduced, only larger. She’ll hold over forty thousand tons, twice the Saint Louis capacity.”
“If only Adam could have seen it.”
“I might add that I accomplished it without spending the entirety of your funds. Pier 28’s the perfect location, too. It’s the busiest cotton wharf in town. You won’t believe how much cotton they jam into ships on this wharf.”
Father and son rousted the ship’s pilot from the quarters he’d taken in Sailortown at the Jolly Seaman’s Inn, a Galveston wayfarers’ accommodation advertised as “cheap, lax in rules, and nearly free of bedbugs.” Nicolas dispatched Captain Rossbacher to the medical college’s pier to bring the ship around to the wharf at Pier 28. Father and son then proceeded downtown to make the bureaucratic arrangements necessary to unload thirty thousand tons of ice from the Jilted Lady.
