Fin nodded and Swain rose from his chair. As he did, the gaily dressed rats scampered up his suit and onto his shoulders and arms. They clung with their claws to his back and one even dangled by its teeth from his tie. Finlayson could no longer see Commodore Dutch and guessed that he had taken refuge in one of the professor’s interior pockets.
Fin could hardly see through the gloom of the theater’s wing. He could hear grit crush beneath his boots as he followed Swain through a long black corridor. When they passed through an archway the professor flipped a large switch attached to a gun-metal box. The stage illuminated.
“Electricity,” the professor said. “The greatest boon to the performer since the theatrical brothel.”
Finlayson squinted at the sudden brightness and looked out at the many rows of worn seats. He was amazed at the sheer size of the auditorium and the grandeur of its pilasters and carvings. Women’s heads, men’s heads, and the heads of various animals were sprinkled across the two long balconies, and the stained carpet was in the pattern of a fleur-de-lis. In the far corner of the orchestra section a man was snoring in his seat. Fin recognized him as Stewie Barnes, the fry cook at Bolc’s Tavern. If he knew anything about Stewie, the guy had been here all night. Fin didn’t blame him for wanting to sleep in such a magnificent place.
Swain took Finlayson by the arm and led him to the center of the stage. There, beneath a huge canvas cover, sat an enormous object, flat on the sides and top. Swain grabbed the cover and with a single yank, pulled it to the floor.
As if on cue, the rats jumped from his arms and shoulders and on to what looked for all the world like a miniature version of a racetrack. It was oval, had a flocked “lawn” at its center, and was surrounded by tiny banners representing many nations. In the middle of the greenery and largest of all was an American flag, stiffened by glue into an eternal wave.
Swain reached beneath the track and began to remove a series of small wooden cages, six in all. From each, he produced a large cat. Like the rodents, they were bedecked in silks of varying color and number. On their backs were tiny leather replicas of English saddles. At the appearance of the cats, the rats each took up positions equidistant around the ring and stood on their hind legs.
One by one, Swain placed the cats in the center of the ring; then he snapped his fingers.
At the sound, each rat ran for the cat whose colors and number matched its own and leaped into the saddle. Swain snapped again and the cats began to race around the track in single file. After a few moments the professor clapped his hands and the cats turned toward the center of the ring. They zoomed past each other at top speed and then began running around the track again, now occupying each other’s positions. Swain clapped twice and the cats reared up. As they did, each rat leaned in toward the neck of its mount like a cowboy whooping it up on a western plain.
Swain struck the side of the track with his fist and the rats dismounted, returning to their original positions. The cats turned toward the little grass “lawn,” bunched together, and lay down, stock-still. The professor turned to his guest and grinned.
“It’s better with an orchestra.”
Finlayson stood quiet and amazed.
“I see you cannot speak,” Swain said. “Your reaction is a common one and typical of those who first experience our little exhibition. It has taken me many years to produce the zoological marvel you have just witnessed. As a result, we have topped the bill across this great land and in the capitals of Europe. I daresay that nowhere in the world is there an amusement remotely similar to Swain’s Rats and Cats.”
Fin tried to speak but his mouth was dry. Swain took a pitcher of water from a nearby stand and poured it into a thumb-marked glass. The ratcatcher took a long draught and wiped his mouth on his dirty sleeve.
“What’s this got to do with me?”
Swain’s brow knitted tightly. “Way back when, I had time to haunt the wharfs and alleys, seeking out the finest specimens. I found number six there, Romulus, in an infested theater in Brooklyn when he frightened Miss Fanny Brice into leaping on to the nearest chair.”
He reached beneath the platform again. From a large paper bag, he produced several handfuls of dried corn and sprinkled it on the floor. Immediately the rats leaped from the platform and began to gorge themselves. The cats remained in place.
“As an expert, you likely know that, even with the finest of care, the lifespan of Rattus norvegicus rarely exceeds four years, and I am far too occupied with travel and performance and training to seek out new members of my cast. Like the rest of my small charges, Romulus is aging, and in a year, perhaps two, certainly by 1915, he and his colleagues will enter our Lord’s own sewers. This, sir, as they say, is where you come in.”
“You want some rats?”
“Mr. Finlayson, I am asking far more than that. I am proposing that you become the official ratcatcher for Swain’s Rats and Cats. In this capacity, you will perform the duties such as have been your living, but that living shall be far more comfortable. I will pay you the sum of thirty dollars per capture, up to forty dollars for a swollen female of fine size. Once our business is established and mutual trust confirmed, I propose to rent a facility here in which you will breed new stars for me. New Romuluses! New Dutches! New Esmeraldas and Kittys and Whiskers!”
Fin eyed the little man suspiciously. “Thirty dollars for a rat?”
“Thirty dollars for the right rat, sir. He must be young and strong and of sufficient proportion to be seen from the rear of the mezzanine. He must be hale and smart and fecund, well able to reproduce himself ad infinitum in the cause of family diversion.”
Finlayson looked pained. “Do you want me to sign a paper? I can’t read or write.”
“No, no, my boy. All I want is for you catch me big, fat, healthy rats. Rats that will honor your skill as they delight and amaze theatergoers the world over.”
Swain whistled the first six notes of “Liebestraum” and the rats immediately stopped eating and took up their positions on the track. Then he reached into his watch pocket.
“Our first performance begins in five minutes. Here’s a ducket for the show. What you have seen is only a portion of what my little friends can do. I’m sure that once you’ve absorbed the complete performance, you’ll wish to be a part of their success. Afterward, we’ll repair to Wexler’s for the poison of your choice and a toast to your fortune and mine own.”
Jimmy O’Mara jammed his cigar in his mouth, puffing on it hard. Finlayson had only just come in from his nightly rounds and Jimmy was ready to pour some arsenic in his ear. His customers had begun to complain.
Only last night, Fatso Eagan, the owner of a particularly nasty fox terrier named Billy, had bitched him out royal over the declining quality of his bouts.
“May’s well pick posies as bring Billy here,” he said. “These rats what yous’ve been getting act like ladies at a icecream social. It’s six weeks in a row Billy’s kilt ’em all in under one-thirty. Nobody’s layin’ down shit for wagers and I’m losin’ money. Now I know they didn’t close down the refinery. Where’d all them nice, big sugar rats go, Baltimore?”
“Mebbe they croaked a’ the diabetes,” Jimmy said.
Fatso’s eyes narrowed beneath his huge brows. He shifted the chew in his cheeks from left to right and hocked. The spittoon rang like a new telephone.
“G’head and laugh,” Fatso said, “but I can count. Last week they was twenty guys in here. Week before was thirty, week before that, near fifty. You’re shrinkin’ like balls in a blizzard, palsy-walsy. And until you get some rats in here wanna kill my dog, guess I’ll hie me over the Camden side. I hear they got a pit there, one dog fights the other.”
Jimmy’s hollow cheeks lengthened in disgust. “Fuckin’ barbaric.”
Now he nearly bit through the cigar as Finlayson stood before him and emptied his sack into the pit. Twenty-odd rats spilled out and ran squealing for the ring’s edges. They were small and thin, cowards each not more
than six months old. O’Mara surveyed them for a few seconds.
“Mice,” he said.
“I’m real sorry, Jimmy,” Fin said. “I don’t know if they’ve shut the sugar lockers tighter or they finally brought in their own catchers, but it’s like I’ve told ya—these past few months the pickins has been slim.”
“Mebbe,” Jimmy said, “or mebbe anymore, you’re not a proper ratcatcher.”
Finlayson’s face became a wound. “Whadaya mean, Jimmy? Ain’t I spent most my life bringin’ you the best?”
“Yesterday and a nickel rides the horse car, m’boy. Look at you. You used to be the pitcher of your occupation—dressed in rags with that stable’s manure attached. Same shirt and collar every day. Never could tell if it was gray from dye or dirt. And the stink! I could always tell you was comin’ before you ever hit the door. That popcorn smell of rats mixed with your own sweat and the blood from where you’d been bit. It did a man’s heart good to inhale that smell and know there was a true professional about the premises, a man you could trust. Now look at you.”
“What’s wrong with me?”
“I was up Big Hearted John’s on Tuesday to buy a shirt and John tells me you been in. He says you bought that new coat and tie you’re wearin’ and what a bargain it was. Then I go to pay my bill at Mitford’s and the old man tells me you lit out and were holed up at the Caledonia Hotel. Now, the Cal’s a flea circus and them clothes are just what some guinea didn’t pick up after alteration. But for a ratcatcher, it’s like rentin’ out Vair-sye and wearin’ soup and fish. You ain’t dressin’ the part no more, bucko, nor actin’ it neither.”
Jimmy took the cigar from his mouth and crushed it on the floor. Then he turned to the poor excuse for vermin Fin had spent the night collecting.
“I can’t use these,” he said. “You can either drown ’em or I’ll set Blackie on ’em just for practice. Besides, it looks like the game’s dead. I’m sure as hell outta business.”
Finlayson made to say something but the words stuck sideways like fish bones. He certainly couldn’t tell O’Mara that twenty of the refinery’s finest specimens were presently in training to replace and enlarge Swain’s current troupe, or that thirty more were at this moment rutting in a series of breeding cages in the basement of Knox’s Triangle Saloon. In the preceding six months, Swain had paid him nearly one thousand dollars for his rats: more than he usually earned in five years. As for his clothing, it reflected his new station, as would the clothes of any man who’s come up in the world. Yes, he was still a ratcatcher, filthy and despised by the decent. But now, instead of being a supplier to a dying sport, he was a man of show business, a talent scout as it were, bringing new performers to a public blessed by a six-day work week and a hunger for amusement in the leisure time between factory and church. Finlayson took the canvas bag and turned toward the door. Jimmy O’Mara had already lit another cigar and turned to his ledgers.
Outside, autumn had come. The clouds gathering all night had broken into a gentle rain. Fin turned up his collar and crossed Delaware Avenue. He made a right onto Kenilworth and found the Schooner already open.
Without a word, Henry Kulky placed two shots on the bar and then pulled the tap for Fin’s Esslinger. Except for the two men, the bar was empty. It wouldn’t begin to fill until eleven when the dockworkers came off graveyard. As Fin downed the whiskeys he measured Henry’s silence. After all these years he knew his good quiet from his bad.
“Hey, Kulk. Wanna see something new?”
“I already seen your suit,” Kulky said.
“No, this ain’t the suit. This is something so new, nobody except me’s ever seen it. So when you see it, you’ll be the second.”
“Take much time? I’m busy.”
“A minute.”
“Cost me anything?”
“No.”
“Okay.”
Finlayson reached into his inside coat pocket. From it, he pulled a good-sized rat.
“Get that fuckin’ thing outta here!” Kulky snapped. “Ya want me to lose my license?”
“Just wait a second, Henry boy, please.”
Kulky reached beneath the bar for his bat but before he could grab it, Fin placed the rat on the worn wood and clapped his hands. The rat stood at attention like a rookie cop.
“Hut!”
With a squeak, the rat ran over his right hand, up his coat sleeve, across his shoulders, and down his left arm. Finlayson again shouted, “Hut,” and the rat stopped cold.
Kulky brought the bat from beneath the bar but didn’t raise it.
“Hut, hut!”
Fin held his arms a few inches above the bar and the rat jumped over them both and then returned, jumping to and fro until he whistled for it to stop. He took an old baseball from his pocket, placed it on the bar, and clapped again. The rat leaped onto the ball, rolling it across the bar like an elephant in the circus. He double-clapped and the rat turned, rotating the ball back toward him. Finlayson opened his coat and whistled once more. With a powerful spring, the rat leaped from the bar and back into the pocket, where it disappeared.
“Hey,” Kulky said, “that’s pretty good.”
“It’ll be better,” Finlayson said, “with an orchestra.”
GHOST WALK
BY CARY HOLLADAY
Chestnut Hill
I.
September 1899
In a basement in a stone house in Chestnut Hill, Frances Watkins, aged seventeen, and her mother are treated to a tour of an unusual collection: a group of preserved bodies owned by Vaughan Beverly, who is the widowed Mrs. Watkins’s fiancé.
Vaughan gestures to a glass-topped casket and says, “This woman turned to soap.”
Frances feels sick. The dinner at the restaurant where Vaughan took them was rich and heavy, and she drank too much champagne. She wishes her mother had never met Vaughan Beverly on his mysterious trips to Baltimore, where Frances and her mother resided. Tomorrow, her mother will marry Vaughan Beverly, and this is the house where they will live together. I won’t stay here, Frances vows. Not with dead people in the basement. She and her mother have known about them: Vaughan boasted of them at the party where Frances and her mother first met him, at the home of wealthy relatives. Vaughan is a man of science, everyone says.
Her mother acts as if it’s a grand joke, these bodies. Maybe after the wedding, her mother will come to her senses and have them taken away. Surely it is wrong to have them here, as if they are of no more consequence than Vaughan’s display cases of butterflies and beetles, with their carefully printed labels. Vaughan collects many things—guns, knives, and trophies of exotic animals. Last night, Frances stayed up late in his extraordinary library, reading about birds.
The basement is furnished as beautifully as the rest of the house, with electric lights, upholstered couches, and paintings on the walls. Frances can’t help but be intrigued. “She turned to soap?” she asks, peering through the glass. The cadaver is naked except for strips of cloth over its breasts and loins, and it appears whitish-gray.
“Tell us about her, Vaughan,” says Mrs. Watkins gleefully. She sips from a glass of wine and places a hand confidingly on her fiancé’s arm.
Vaughan pats her hand and says, “She died of yellow fever, probably in the epidemic of 1792, and was buried near the river. Some of those old cemeteries filled up with water. This woman, being rather rotund, well, her fat combined with chemicals in the wet earth. The substance is called adipocere. It’s much like lye soap.”
Frances’s mother repeats, “Adipocere. What a lovely word. It sounds French. Like an exclamation, au contraire. Adipo-cere!” she says in mock dismay, waving her hand.
To look at a dead body is shocking, Frances thinks. To look at a person dead more than a hundred years is astonishing. She asks Vaughan, “How do you know she’s soap?” She imagines Vaughan in a bathtub, humming and lathering. She heard him humming last night, while she searched for towels in a cupboard in the hallway outside his lavatory.
Strange that in a house so ornate and well-appointed, there are no servants.
“I have washed with her,” says Vaughan. He laughs, and Frances’s mother joins in. Vaughan adds, “If you mix a bit of this body with some crushed lavender, it’s the finest soap you’ll ever have. I can open the case, Frances, and you can pinch off a piece.”
“Oh, no, that’s all right,” Frances says.
Frances feels light-headed, and she assumes it’s from the company of the dead. Vaughan’s collection includes a mummified woman and baby, a pickled horror of indeterminate gender floating in formaldehyde, and a remarkably fresh-looking boy about Frances’s age.
Vaughan thumps the glass cover of the casket holding the boy. “Meet the Young Master,” he says. “He was almost certainly a soldier. He turned up near the site of the Mower Hospital, a Civil War hospital in this neighborhood which was torn down after the war.”
“Turned up?” asks Frances, determined to challenge him. “Did you dig for him?”
“He was brought to me,” says Vaughan, “and I have given him a home. He was already embalmed. Someone did a first-rate job. All I had to do was clean him up and put clothes on him. He was naked. I found this uniform in the attic, and it fits as if made for him.”
Frances dares to ask, “Does the constable know these people are here?”
Frances’s mother frowns at her.
“The authorities have enjoyed this same tour,” says Vaughan. He points to a table pushed into a corner. “We’ve played poker here, with the soap lady and the Young Master looking on.”
Frances feels Vaughan’s fingers on her back, just the lightest pressure. She has felt the fingertips before, and has assumed the touch was an accident. Does her mother see? No, her mother is absorbed by the Young Master. Vaughan takes the empty wine glass from her mother’s hand and slips an arm about her shoulders.
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