The Scribe

by Matthew Guinn

  “Good God, Thomas!” Vernon said, stepping between the two men. “What has happened? What deputy?”

  “Anson Burke. From Ringgold. I had him come down on the train. He was tailing Underwood all day. And now he’s dead, up in the room. You made a mess of him, you bastard.”

  Vernon looked bewildered. “When?”

  “Late. An hour ago, at the most.”

  “Thomas,” Vernon said slowly, “Underwood has been with me since suppertime.”

  Canby felt a cold prickling in his spine.

  Vernon stepped closer. “We’ve had a girl go missing. A white girl.”

  “Gentlemen!” Kimball cried, sotto voce and with a placating smile toward the gawkers at the bar. “This will not do. Not here.”

  “Where can we talk quietly?” Vernon asked.

  Kimball shot a glance at Canby, at Underwood still down on the marble floor. “Perhaps the livery would be best.”

  “Fine, then. Have one of your boys bring us out a bottle.”

  Vernon gestured for Underwood to rise, then led him and Canby out through the service door at the back of the lobby. “Quietly, indeed,” he said as they emerged into the gaslit busyness of the livery stable, where horses shied in their stalls and Negro hands moved about, independently of one another, currying the animals or pitching hay into their troughs, hanging saddles and reins on wooden pegs fixed into the stanchions between the numbered stalls. In one corner a bootblack sat on his box, furiously shining a pair of riding boots with an oiled rag; in another corner the blacksmith’s anvil stood mutely, silenced for the late hour though with a half-formed horseshoe left draped on its horn, the furnace behind it still glowing dully from the embers within. Each of the Negroes glanced up through half-lidded eyes to register the newcomers’ appearance and then, a half second later, turned back to the work before him and conspicuously redoubled his efforts on it. Vernon leaned against the door of an unoccupied stall, wiped his forehead with a handkerchief, and sighed.

  “I am sorry about your deputy, Thomas,” he said.

  “He was a good man.”

  “I’ve no doubt about that. I’ll see to it that he is treated well.”

  Canby nodded.

  “You are fairly certain of the time of his demise?”

  “The water in the bathtub was still warm. It can’t have been long.”

  “Was he . . . marked, like the others?”

  “A T this time.”

  “Goddamn it,” Vernon said, wiping his face again. “Well, there’s one bit of progress, bitter as it may be. If you’re right about the hour of the murder, Underwood did not do it. I have no choice but to vouch for him in that regard.”

  Canby looked at Underwood, who seemed to have settled himself into a kind of sullen resolve. He was about to speak when one of the bartender’s boys emerged from the hotel carrying a whiskey bottle with a shot glass capped upside down atop the bottle’s neck. Vernon took it from the boy without a word, inspected it, then lifted ruefully the single glass.

  “Rye,” he said. “Cheap son of a bitch.” He poured the shot glass full and gave it to Underwood, then handed the bottle over to Canby. Pulling a flask from within his breast pocket, Vernon raised it. “To your man.”

  “Anson Burke.”

  “To Burke.”

  The three men drank in silence for a moment. Vernon took another draw from his flask, then capped it and tucked it away.

  “Underwood has a theory of his own.”

  “Does he? From the Book of Revelation? Whoremongers and the lake of fire?”

  “As a matter of fact, he has regaled me with his version of the End Times.”

  “You’re a pragmatic man, Vernon. Surely he hasn’t led you down some hoodoo path to another dead end.”

  “You were raised with religion yourself, Thomas.”

  “I was, and the war swept that all away. Do you know, Vernon, there were men in my regiment who honestly thought of us as the veritable Second Coming? The long, blue arm of God? The Negroes who followed us through South Carolina certainly believed it. They were physically starving on that belief. And where did that get them? Or us?”

  Underwood raised a hand, tilted his head deferentially. “Study on it a minute, Mister Canby. That’s all I ask. Look who this man been after. Usurers. Whores.”

  “Negroes.”

  “People who been profiting from wrong. Certain kinds of wrong.”

  “That would cast a wide net in Atlanta.”

  “Would indeed. But that Deputy Burke up in the penthouse, he wouldn’t be a Negro, would he? Not from up in the mountain country?”

  “Anse was a good man,” Canby said again, wearily.

  “And this missing girl, Thomas,” Vernon said. “White as you or me.”

  “I read all the Fitzhugh I could stand, Mister Canby. Guess you know that from the books you took from out of my place. This case was looking to shape up that way, it was. But what I saw of that girl in Mamie O’Donnell’s place has just got one name. That was evil.”

  Canby stared at Vernon, who cleared his throat before he spoke. “It’s true, Thomas, that we’ve never seen killings like this before.”

  “Vernon, if he wants to contort this thing to fit his theology, he’ll surely find a way to do it.”

  “As you said, I’m a pragmatist, Thomas. I want to follow every lead.”

  Canby took a long pull on the bottle of rye, then corked it and set it down on the dirt floor of the stable. “Underwood,” he said, “I hope your ambition and your faith don’t collide.”

  But as he was rising, he felt himself listing to his left and in a moment Vernon was at his side, an arm around him, steadying him.

  “You’ve had a rough go these last few days,” Vernon said. He pressed a key into Thomas’s palm. “You remember the house. Still on Butler Street. Still a bottle of good bonded in the cupboard. Go rest yourself. I promise your friend will be properly seen to.”

  Canby nodded and without a word to Underwood made his way out of the livery, past the outer fringes of Kimball House’s gaslight, and into the semidarkness of Decatur Street, heading south. Thinking as he did so of Anse’s body and of those of dead soldiers he’d seen, how he had seen them handled, even in the winding-down days of the war, like cordwood, stacked on wagon beds, on the flats of freight cars.

  Not a clash of good and evil, he had come to believe. He knew too many good men—on both sides, gray and blue—who had made a demarcation that clear untenable. To reduce it to so simple an equation was an insult either to their memory or to their sacrifice.

  Not simple good and evil, he had told himself. It was the only way he had been able to bear it all.

  October 10

  THEY STOOD ON THE NORTH SIDE OF FORSYTH Street looking at it, the Georgia Pencil Company, light from the rising sun gleaming on the façade of the four-story edifice, the top floors shouldering proudly above the rest of the buildings on the block. The eastern light shone brightly on its signage, and beneath that, upon an advertisement for patent medicine that spanned the top two stories, painted black into the bricks and framed in white:

  THE WORLD’S GREATEST MEDICINE

  S.S.S.

  FOR THE BLOOD.

  The whole structure a bold incarnation of the Atlanta Spirit, dedicated to the latest in manufacturing technology, industry, and commerce, and on the second floor of which awaited, if the report proved accurate, the violated body of a fourteen-year-old girl who had died within its walls two days previous.

  But for now Canby and Vernon could only wait across the street from the factory, hats pressed against their chests, halted by the procession winding its way past them down Forsyth Street. At its head had been Henry Grady and Bishop Drew, Grady solemnly bearing the state flag of Georgia on a gilt staff and the bishop trailed by an acolyte swinging a censer, from which issued dusky tendrils of incensed smoke. The bishop’s murmurings were barely audible over the tinny clanging of the links in the censer’s chains; Grady had been, f
or once, silent. And now behind them came the war widows, many of them mutely weeping and some with their children in tow, carrying miniature versions of the Georgia flag or the Confederate Stars and Bars on little sticks. All of the processional quiet enough that Canby and Vernon could hear the creaking of axles before the wagons bearing the coffins hove into view.

  The caskets—six of them, each on a wagon of its own—were draped in six Confederate battle flags, the flags’ edges tucked neatly under the corners of the new wood. The coffins newly carved, Vernon explained under his breath, though the remains inside them dated back possibly to the first of Sherman’s cannonades, the bodies presumed to be those of Confederate artillerymen fallen early in the siege and buried in haste. Such shallow and provisional graves had been unearthed in every year since the war, as Atlanta’s expansion strained far enough to reclaim the outlying network of breastworks and trenches that Joe Johnston’s Grays had thrown up to defend the city. The entrenchments ran up through Buckhead and all the way up to the base of Vinings Mountain, upon which Sherman had reconnoitered his siege. These men had been found not far from the base of the mountain, Vernon said, and were now on their way to their reinterment in Oakland Cemetery, Atlanta gathering her lost Confederate dead, one by one, back to the city’s center.

  Canby and Vernon stood by as the last of the procession passed them, veterans bringing up the column in motley gray, some limping from old war wounds and others lamed by the march of time. As the last of them filed by, Canby could scent on the air, as it settled in the wake of the wagons and the waving flags and as the last of the incense dissipated, the sepulchral odor trailing the pine boxes.

  They crossed the street to the factory’s loading dock. Vernon, with the agility Canby still found remarkable for his age, climbed up the dock first, then offered down a hand to Canby.

  “Likely you should brace yourself, from what Underwood said,” Vernon told him. “Unnatural things were done to the girl.”

  Canby nodded wearily and dusted off his pants legs and looked out over the shipping bay. Crates were stacked against the walls, their slatted sides stenciled with G.P.C. and the dates of their packing. Elsewhere on the dock stood stacks of cedar planks, bundled into eight-foot lengths. Deep in the shadows of the bay, next to the double doors that led into the factory proper, stood Leon Greenberg, his brows knitted as he worked over figures on a clipboard with a pencil tied with string to its eye. His face bore the same look of worried concern that Canby had seen when the man spoke at the Decatur Inn, only redoubled now. Vernon hailed him and he hung the clipboard on a nail driven into the doorframe, shook their hands, and beckoned them inside. The pencil swung on its string tether as they passed.

  “Awful, awful,” Greenberg was saying as they entered, though his voice was drowned out by the churning of the machinery within. Canby saw to their right a giant drum, big as a boiler, being turned by a Negro on each of its ends. They worked in a contrapuntal rhythm, one turning a crank upward while the other carried the motion through its cycle on the bottom.

  “Graphite drum,” Greenberg barked in Canby’s ear. “Mixes graphite and clay for the pencil leads.”

  “Why so much noise?”

  “River rocks inside it to help the mixing. Chattahoochee rocks and water.”

  Canby listened to the groaning of those elements mixing, falling, separating, coming together again. A slurried, stuttered chattering. Watched the men working the rolling drum to see how closely they watched him, looking for the evasive glance, for tension or guilt in the eyes. He saw none.

  They climbed an open staircase to the second floor and the noise of the drum faded below them. They entered a tall-ceilinged room where the work was quieter. Canby saw, in the morning light falling through the high windows, that the workers on this floor were all girls. Each of them busied herself at a cubicle of her own, joining erasers to the wood shafts of the pencils one at a time, then bundling the finished pencils with twine. Save for the small clatter of the pencils being handled, the girls worked in silence, though their eyes darted toward the men watching them. The tang of cedar shavings hung heavy in the air.

  “Mary Flanagan was the best stamper I had,” Greenberg said. “A bit older than the others. Very efficient.”

  “I wonder that you employ white girls in this work,” Vernon said.

  “Small hands are best suited to small work,” Greenberg replied, never taking his eyes off the girls as they worked. “See the clamp they use to attach the ferrule to the shaft? I designed it myself. A patent is pending in Washington.”

  Greenberg resumed his walk, leading them through the cubicles, and as they passed, Canby noted that their hands and the rims of their nostrils were grimed with graphite dust. On one of the smaller girls’ faces, he saw that a tear had coursed through the gray dust on her cheek.

  “Do they know?” Canby asked.

  “Mary was a kind of leader to them. She will be missed,” Greenberg said, his voice losing some of its Brooklyn edge, “by more than me alone.”

  Greenberg threw a bolt on a door sized big enough for a barn and slid it aside on runners set into the floor. He nodded for Canby and Vernon to step through, then followed them and trundled the door shut, cutting off most of the light from the stamping room. He leaned against the door for a moment before he spoke.

  “You’ll find your colored officer in the back corner by the chimney. I’ll go no farther.”

  In the dim light Canby could make out two patches of white and as they approached he saw that one of them was a handkerchief that Underwood held pressed against his mouth and nose. Underwood sat on a stool with his elbows on his knees, head down.

  The other patch of white, Canby saw as they neared it, protruded from a metal-cased opening in the chimney. And he saw, as his eyes adjusted to the dark, that it was a pair of bloomers.

  “She died like that,” Underwood said. “I pulled her partway out to be sure there weren’t no life left in her, then put her back like they found her.”

  Canby saw that the upper half of Mary Flanagan’s body had been stuffed into the chimney grate. The bloomers, he now saw, had been pulled down in the assault. What had been done to her was unspeakable, unbelievable.

  He looked away as best he could while he tugged the underwear back up to cover the damage, then gently pulled the body from the chimney. Her arms had been flung out before her, down into the dark of the chimney shaft. Around her neck, biting into the flesh, was a leather thong. Into her forehead had been carved an H, as neatly as the others. He laid her body out on the floor and Vernon closed her eyes.

  “God Almighty,” Vernon said.

  “You wonder,” Underwood said, kneading the handkerchief in his dark fist. “Did he rape her first, then strangle her? Or did he do both at once?”

  Probably, Canby thought, they were the concerted parts of a single act. He figured the H had been carved postmortem. He hoped it had not been done until the girl had passed. And that the other carving had taken place only after Mary Flanagan was long, long gone.

  “WHY IN HELL is he here, Vernon?”

  The question was out of Canby’s mouth before Henry Grady could even settle himself into his chair in a corner of the station’s interrogation room. Grady smiled. The smile seemed to Canby, in this dingy room and in the greasy light dropping from the station’s dirty windows, unseemly.

  “Grady has an interest in seeing this thing through. Better him here than one of his cub reporters. Grady will work with us. As my daddy used to say, we’d rather have him inside the tent pissing out, than outside pissing in.”

  Canby turned his back squarely to Grady’s corner, facing Greenberg again. The note Underwood had found in the factory lay on the battered table between them.

  “Mister Greenberg, we’d like to make sure we have the sequence of events correct. You came in Saturday morning at seven, your usual time?”

  “Yes.”

  “And Mary Flanagan came in when?”

  “On towards
one in the afternoon, as I recall.”

  “She was late for work?”

  “No. The metal room was shut down on Thursday for the week. Our shipment of tin was delayed so she and the other girls were laid off.”

  “Until this morning.”

  “Correct.”

  “Then why was she in on Saturday?”

  “Saturday noon is pay time. She had wages due her.”

  “Do you often work on your Sabbath?” Vernon asked.

  Greenberg shrugged. “One works when one has to.”

  “And how much was she paid?”

  “A dollar twenty. Hers was the last pay envelope I handed out Saturday.”

  “That was the last time you saw her?”

  “Yes. She left the office with her pay; I closed up a short time after.”

  “You never saw her alive again after that?”

  “I said I did not.”

  “And the factory is usually vacant from Saturday afternoon to Monday morning?”

  “Except for the janitor, yes. His work week starts Sunday morning, to get ready for the manufactures resuming Monday.”

  “So you weren’t in on Sunday?”

  “Not until I let your men in to search the place.”

  “Would it surprise you to know that we found the pay envelope in a pocket of her dress?”

  “I would have no reaction to that, Mister Canby.”

  “The full amount of her pay was still in it.”

  Greenberg only stared across the table at the men.

  “No response to that, either?” Canby took the note from the table, uncreased it, and handed to Greenberg. “Would you read this aloud for us?”

  Greenberg stared at the rough handwriting on the paper for a moment and frowned.

  “I would rather not.”

  “Read it,” Vernon said.