“I’ll have to think,” she said.
I sat motionless for a while, holding her hand, feeling the spring of my resolve wind ever tighter. Finally I pulled away. “I’m going to the Tombs,” was all I said.
She did not utter a word or put out a hand to deter me. How do you call back your only hope, small as he might be? I raced out the lane and into the softened light of a yellowing afternoon.
34
If my thoughts when I arrived at the cottage had been clean and baptismal, they now on the egress were charnel. I understood with a sudden clarity why Poe so detested this city. It was a cursed tongue of land upon whose lower end festered all the more conspicuous boils of mankind, the thieving and drunkenness and turpitudes of the flesh, and whose rest nurtured the remaining perfidies not so obvious to the naked eye, the deceits and subterfuges and the Machiavellian disregard for people’s lives. Over the length of the island the swine ran wild, one breed distinguishable from the other only by the number of legs on which it ran, with the fattest of the boars holding sway with filigreed tusks used to pierce and push and prod the police and the newspapers and the government and the trade. It could not be long, I knew—I hoped—before the entire island sank beneath the weight of its own fetid corruption.
No wonder Poe wanted to pack up his family and move out. To Saratoga, Richmond, Baltimore—in any case to a gentler society. Where at the least a superficial civility prevailed. A milieu of serenity and balm compared to this open privy called Manhattan.
I ran most of the way back into that privy, then slowed to a walk a block from the Tombs so as to catch my breath and collect my thoughts. Poe and I had once been able to enter that granite fortress easily enough, but could I do so alone? And then what? What was I going to do inside? I had no idea. My stratagems could not progress around that corner, could not see around that turn. Find Poe: that was as detailed as my plans would grow.
For thirty minutes or more I circled the block, discarding one grandiose plan after another, always returning to gaze up at the ominous door with but one objective intact: to get inside. Once there, could I maybe affect an accent of some kind, an educated boy, claim perhaps to be a messenger from the Mirror, Neely’s emissary sent to check on the welfare of his star reporter?
My clothes were torn and, though rinsed in the river, still stained here and there with wide shadows of mud. My face and neck were marked by fresh scratches. No sober man was going to accept me for more than I was, a liar and a sneak.
So there was no way around it, no alternate course of action. If sneaking was my forte, I would sneak.
To the corner of the building then and sidelong up the wide steps. Across the front of the building to the heavy door. Ease open the door and sneak inside. Stand small and invisible against the near wall. No one paid any attention to me; I was a harmless mouse. Like a mouse then I crept along that wall, pausing beside each doorway to first cock an ear for any telling bit of conversation, then glancing quickly into the room, moving past, slinking along the wall to the next room in line.
I made it as far as the doorway to the courtyard without being accosted. I was noticed, yes; more than one pair of eyes cut a glance my way. But apparently I was too inconsequential for concern. This thought emboldened me. I now reversed my course, and, less surreptitiously than before, I checked out each of the offices and interview rooms along the opposite wall, working my way back toward the front door.
In the end I gleaned no sign of Poe. Was he in a cell already? On one hand it seemed unthinkable to me; I could not imagine my hero so demeaned. On the other hand, he had been picked up for public drunkenness a full day ago—it was only logical to assume that they had thrown him in a cell until he could be trotted out for his ten minutes in the Police Court.
So he would be in the men’s prison, beyond the courtyard. Sonsabitches, I thought, working up my anger for it, those dirty sonsabitches. When sufficiently incensed, I marched down the main hall and out into the courtyard, across the smooth bare earth trampled and baked as hard as brick. I counted three guards standing nonchalantly at their stations around the courtyard, saw them watching me and grinning, four feet of insolence tramping sharply to the right, to an arched doorway beneath the Bridge of Sighs, to a gate of iron bars and the guard seated there behind it.
“I’ve come to see a man named Poe,” I announced to the guard. He did not bother to get up off his chair, but only leaned forward a bit and peered at me through the bars.
“Who has?” he said.
“Master Dubbins.”
This brought a chuckle from him. “Not the Master Dubbins himself?”
“I’m Mister Poe’s assistant,” I said, though my bravado was rapidly dissolving. “Editor Neely sent me here to check on him.”
“He did, did he?”
“So you’d better let me do so. Else somebody’s fur is going to fly.”
He grinned at me awhile longer. Then something happened to his gaze, it moved just to my right, went over my shoulder, back across the courtyard, and toward the main building. At the time I imagined that he was thinking over my demand. His eyes narrowed into a squint, and after fifteen seconds or so, he gave a slight nod, then looked me in the eye once more.
“Lemme see your pass,” he said.
I almost started to pat my pockets, then gave it up. “Where do I get that?”
“Back where you come from. Third door on the left.”
“Be right back,” I told him.
This time my step was lighter, more optimistic as I returned to the main building. It was going to be easy after all. Nothing to it. Ask and ye shall receive.
Out of the sunshine of the courtyard and back inside the main building at a trot. One stride later and suddenly the floor fell out from under me—I was hauled up by the hair, another hand twisting my shirt at the scruff of my neck, cinching my throat. Hobbs’s constable turned me in midair and held me up eye level with him and pulled my face within three inches of his own. His breath stank of garlic and meat fat.
“And now we catch the smaller rat,” he said.
My throat felt strangled tight, yet I managed to squeak. “Where’s Poe?”
“You come to rescue him, did you?”
“You better tell me where he is.”
He laughed at that. His voice became a rancid whisper. “Oh you’ll join him soon enough. Come nightfall you can share the bottom of the river with him.”
He looked around then to see if he was being watched, and of course he was but without much interest. I was just another gutter rat being dragged in by the scruff of the neck. He grinned to himself, and holding me at arm’s length like a squirming bag of manure, he carried me halfway back toward the front door. For a moment I thought he was going to take me outside, but instead he stepped into an open room and I knew instantly that he was going to toss me into a corner and close the door and do whatever he wished to me, and I was not agreeable to that.
I could not reach his face with my hands, but my legs were slightly longer. I kicked with my right one as hard as I could. I swear I felt his balls squish against my boot top. His breath exploded in my face, a shower of stink. But all the tension went out of his hands, and I dropped to the floor and ducked and skimmed across the dark stones of the floor, more cat now than mouse, long graceful strides so that I felt I was flying, then banging hard against the heavy door and twisting out through the opening and down off the steps and away.
35
If there had been any breath in my lungs when I went racing between the Corinthian columns and into the massive Merchants’ Exchange building, it would have vanished in a gasp with my first glance at the place. The central hall was all granite and mahogany, every cavernous inch of it ablaze with gaslight, dozens upon dozens of gaslights in crystal sconces. I went inside and skidded across the granite floor and found myself suddenly reduced to a miniature size, dwarfed by t
he high-domed ceiling and flamboyant proportions that, were it not for the buzz and drone of human voices, might have silenced me with religious awe.
This lobby was a beehive of bankers, brokers, sellers, and buyers, financial opportunists of every ilk. I grabbed the sleeve of a young clerk hurrying past. “Jacob Van Rensselaer,” I said. “Where’s his office at?”
The clerk shook me off with scarcely a look.
I had no better luck with the next four queries. In fact the last gentleman offered a swift kick back to the gutter if I did not vacate the premises posthaste.
In answer I strode to the center of the rotunda and raised my eyes to the tiers of offices and meeting rooms and screamed as if to God Himself. “Jacob Van Rensselaer! I need to talk to you right now!”
All movement in the beehive stopped, all voices silent. My own shrill voice echoed off the granite. In a moment, someone would take the initiative to seize me by the scruff of the neck and send me sliding out the door, but for the next five seconds, I stood breathless, panting, eyes watering, dizzy, summoning the breath to scream again.
And then a sound from somewhere above and to my right, a finger snap. I turned my head, looked up. There on the mezzanine he stood at the rail but sideways to me, as if not acknowledging me at all, not even aware of my presence as he tugged a white glove back onto his fingers. Without a glance in my direction, he pivoted away then, his back to the lobby, and returned to his office.
I looked about for the stairwell, found it before anyone could lay a hand on me, raced to the stairwell and up the flight of steps, found the door to Van Rensselaer’s suite left open, hurried inside to the empty anteroom, counted three more doors, only one of them ajar, strode up to it and shoved it open, and there behind his desk he sat, hands clasped atop the ink blotter.
“Close the door please,” he said.
In a gush I told him everything, everything I knew or believed to know, how Poe had been tricked by Hobbs’s cadaverous servant, led away somewhere, then allegedly arrested, and how I had been threatened by the constable in the Tombs, promised a death by drowning to match the one that awaited Poe.
Van Rensselaer listened without a word, without so much as a cocked eyebrow. I challenged his statement of concern for Poe, the one he had made to me in the Newsboys’ House. I questioned his integrity. When I finally ran out of breath and words, he sat as still as a stone. He looked down at his hands. They never moved.
“Please wait in the anteroom,” he said. “Close the door behind you please.”
“So are you going to do anything or not?”
“Please wait,” he said.
I retreated to the anteroom and stood in its center for three long minutes, sat on the edge of a brocaded chair for three more. Stood again and began to pace. I was on the verge of hammering on Van Rensselaer’s door when a second door in the anteroom opened and out stepped Glendinning.
“Come with me,” he said.
I had no time to marvel at this coincidence, of Glendinning as employee of Van Rensselaer; no time to recognize it as hardly a coincidence at all. He led me down a rear stairway and out onto the street. “Hurry,” he said. “It will soon be six.”
“What happens at six?”
“It’s the end of the watchmen’s shift.”
I understood now that we were returning to the Tombs. But instead of storming inside as I hoped and pummeling the brutish constable, Glendinning had me wait around a street corner a half block from the Tombs’ front door. He waited in a doorway not far away.
At six, the day’s constables, eight or nine of them in all, emerged from the Tombs and wandered off singly or in pairs. Hobbs’s constable was the last to emerge. He stood near the door and waited until all his colleagues were well away. I signaled to Glendinning that this was our man. He nodded and held up a hand, telling me to remain in my place.
Only when Hobbs’s man came down off the steps and headed due south down Centre did Glendinning wave me forward. (I noticed with more than a little pleasure how stiffly the constable walked.) We followed him all the way to Wall Street, then east as far as Front, then south again. Now the constable looked over his shoulder more and more frequently, checked often to his left and right. Glendinning made sure to keep us in the shadows.
East to the waterfront then. The constable slowed his pace, tried for a saunter of nonchalance. He was not easy to follow through the anarchy of the waterfront, wending his way through the clog of coal carts and stone haulers, the passengers coming or going on their way to the clippers and packets waiting at the piers, the carriages and wagons, the vendors and grifters, all the usual soaplocks and butt-enders, the mudsills and banditti.
The street literally rumbled beneath our feet. The air smelled of fish and coal dust, of sewage and horseshit and oft-fingered money.
The constable slowed to a crawl in front of a row of squat warehouses. He paused before one door in particular, stood there for a moment as if thinking, then spun quickly to look back up the street. I, of course, was too low in the boodle of people to be noticed, and Glendinning had turned to stand in profile, ostensibly gazing upriver.
“He’s moving again,” I said a moment later. We moved with him. Down nearly as far as the Whitehall Slip before he made a sharp about-face and came back in our direction. Glendinning spun me around and pushed me forward.
“He’ll go back to the warehouse where he paused a few minutes ago,” Glendinning told me.
“And how do you know that?”
“He thinks he’s being clever.”
We passed the warehouse and continued on for twenty yards. There Glendinning slipped sideways into a narrow space between two ramshackle structures. He pulled me up close to his legs and admonished me to watch what I could from my low perspective.
It was like trying to see through a pair of Venetian blinds that keep opening and closing, but I managed to keep my eye on the constable. He approached the warehouse door, just as Glendinning had predicted. He put his hand on the padlock. Looked to his right, looked to his left. Lifted a key from his pocket, fitted it into the lock. Turned the key, lifted the lock off its latch. Opened the door cautiously, a few inches at first. Peered inside. Then he leaned away from the door and glanced up the street and down one last time. Then he yanked open the door, slipped inside, and yanked the door shut.
“You think he’s got Poe in there?” I whispered.
“He’s got something in there.”
“The bastard.”
And Glendinning said, “Quickly now.”
36
How to get inside, that was the problem. The entrance door was locked on the interior, as was a larger double door that could be swung open to load and unload merchandise from the pier. There were no windows out front. The building butted up against other warehouses on both sides.
“Perhaps the solution is to have the constable come out,” Glendinning mused.
“He said that by nightfall Poe would be at the bottom of the river.”
“Then we must not wait until nightfall.”
“What if he’s done something to Poe already?”
“I know the man,” Glendinning said. “He would take more pleasure in sending Poe alive to the bottom than already dead.”
“So what are we going to do?”
We went halfway around the block and sneaked down a dirt alleyway crammed with carts and empty crates. In the warehouse’s rear wall, six feet off the ground, was a pair of small windows, shuttered. Glendinning went to one of the windows and stood there looking at its wooden face. Then he looked down at me, then back at the window.
“What are you thinking?” I asked.
“If I were to pry this shutter open, could you fit through it?”
“Maybe so. But then what?”
“You make your way to the front door and unlatch it.”
“And wha
t if I don’t make it that far?”
He looked down over his nose at me. “And what if you don’t even try?”
I could not tell him then that my legs had suddenly gone numb, that my spine felt as brittle as ice. I could still smell the constable’s breath in my face, and that alone was enough to paralyze me. It was all I could do to give Glendinning the slightest of nods.
He stepped close to the shutter and slipped eight fingers under the bottom edge. He pulled the shutter toward him, gingerly at first. The bottom binge began to creak. He stuck his right foot against the wall and leaned backward and used his weight for leverage. Just when I thought the effort futile, I saw the wood around the hinge begin to split, a nail head protruding.
“It’s coming!” I whispered.
He paused for a moment, sucked in a breath, and then finished it off with a mighty heave. The hinge popped free of the wood and Glendinning let go of the shutter. He put a finger to his lips and stood very still. We listened for movement within. Nothing.
Satisfied that his actions had gone undetected, Glendinning proceeded to pry the hinge out of the wood. He laid the hinge on the ground. By lifting up on the bottom of the shutter, he was able then to loosen and finally remove the top hinge as well. The shutter fell free into his hands. We now had our entrance, a rectangular hole perhaps sixteen inches wide and twenty-four high.
Glendinning peered inside. Half a minute later, he ducked down below the window and whispered to me. “There’s a light on the left side near the front. You’ll need to stay away from it.”
“What’s between here and there?” I asked.
“Boxes of some sort, crates; it’s hard to tell. You’ll have to find your own way, I’m afraid. Are you up to it?”
“There ain’t no way you could fit through that window, is there?”
His smile was sardonic, his answer clear.
I said, “What about a knife or some sort of weapon? You got anything on you?”
“Knives are for cowards,” he said. “Are you a coward?”
On Night's Shore Page 25