The girl knew nothing else, not a detail. But she was certain as sunrise at the end of the night that Anthony Fowler had meant to be married, and quick. Now I had not heard a word of such a thing, except in the negative, for Fowler had sworn not to marry. A public oath it had been. There was Cawber’s reference to stealing his bride from the boy, of course. But that must have been years back, for Cawber had told me he had a son and daughter.
Marriage? To whom? And why argue about it with the likes of Trenchard?
Twas dungeon dark in those Swampoodle alleys, with ugliness under the soles of my shoes. I would have watched my step, but had not light enough. It seemed a mile between gas lamps now, and the shanty stoves were burning wood and even rags by the smell of it, along with a few lumps of coal. The smoke settled in the lanes like fog in a river valley.
There is such a thing as too much thought. I had been paying too little attention to the here and now, and had lost my way. With not a living soul to lend assistance. Unless rats have souls.
I paused.
In that instant, they were on me with their clubs.
Chapter 11
There is luck. Five of them come at me, brawlers and bullies and cowards that they were. Three might have finished me quick. But five were too many, and they got in each other’s way in the tight space of the alley. They did not expect a fight, so I put one of them on the ground in a blink, though I took a few good thumps doing it.
Now one man or even two might be set to rob you. But five mean it’s killing they are out to do. I pivoted, and parried, and thrust when I could. Listening to their curses, and the crack of their bats on the bar of my cane. It is a good thing they were not Johnny Seekhs or Pushtoon men, for those boys would have had the head off my shoulders and been done with it. My attackers were big fellows, but sloven in their fighting manners.
I did wish I had my leg back sound, for the sake of the twisting and turning, but wishes are wasted things. All I could do was to keep the fight to the center of the alley and not let them back me against a wall, where I would have neither leverage nor room to maneuver. And I watched out for my hands, for the great danger when you are contesting with musket stocks or clubs is the blow that breaks your fingers and leaves you helpless to hold onto your only means of defense. I have seen too many men fall because they knew not how to place their paws in your hand-to-hand fuss, men who had not been attentive when their good sergeant lessoned them. So I fought with all the skill I had remaining, and the old reflexes were better than I deserved. When I had to take a blow, I took it on a shoulder, for I am strong in muscle, if small.
I had seen battle enough to know I could hold them for a minute, and no more. Then they would put me down, with my skull broken open.
As if four of them still standing to bother me were not enough, yet another devil come out of the darkness, screaming like Katie in the tub when the preacher walked in.
“I’ll do the lot of you,” I told them, and took a mean whack across my spine for the saying of it. One of them kept trying to get in behind me and knock out my knees.
Twas a tumult then. What your staff officer calls a “melee.” Screaming and banging and blood mixing free. And the funny thing was that it seemed as though they had begun to fight among themselves, for I saw clear as day how one of them cracked another over the head and laid him out in the slops. The fellow next to me turned, bewildered, and I gave him a proper startling with the ball of my cane.
I could not decipher it, with my enemies going after each other now as well as for me. Perhaps they were drunk in the dark, I thought, or only thoroughly Irish. Blood come wet and annoying into my eyes, and the salty taste of it lined my mouth. I only knew that I must not go down, and I concentrated my life’s effort on that.
I rammed the tip of my cane into the loins of a man who had swung too wildly and sent him to his knees. Wailing he was, and calling on all the saints. Then I gave him one over the pate and he dropped like a barley bag. One of the two apes still left on the top side of their shoes took off at a run. I lunged forward to finish the last of them.
The devil stepped aside, as neat as a veteran soldier.
“For the love o‘ the Holy Family,” he cried, “put up your shillalah, Sergeant Jones.”
That no-good Molloy it was.
“What are you doing here, man?” I said, panting. It is after the fighting that my shaking comes on.
“And is that gratitude, I ask ye? Shouldn’t the man be down to his knees, howling a hundred Hail Marys and a thousand novenas? Holy Jaysus, if ever a man wanted saving, wasn’t it this banty, cruel Welshman before me?”
All I could think was that he had drunk up my dollar with the haste of an undertaker running after a rich man’s corpse.
I am not good after a fight. It is only then that I realize how frightened I have been. The heart is like an animal, raging in its cage of ribs.
“And there I was,” Molloy went on, “dollar in me hand, and great plans for it, too. When another fellow comes by just after ye, and him looking as out o‘ place as a painted hoor in a Dublin church. And wasn’t he walking in your very footsteps, though?” Molloy was breathing hard, too, but he refused to let shortness of breath interfere with his love of the gab. A braggart he had ever been, and the worst sort of barracks barrister. “ ’Oh, and there’s trouble, sure, Jimmy Molloy,‘ I says to meself. But didn’t I follow after, just like I come to ye that blood-covered day above Attock Fort? And won’t I be having even the saying o’ thanks for me troubles?”
“Thank you, Molloy. You were ever brave and loyal, if a drunkard and a thief.”
“Now that’s better, Sergeant Jones. Like old times, it is.”
One of the men on the ground gave a groan and rose an inch, only to collapse again.
“Well, there’s a one o‘ them left alive,” Molloy said. “One o’ us must be losing his touch.”
I stepped over to the man who had moved and put the tip of my cane into his neck. Just below his Adam’s apple. And I gave him a poke.
The fellow jerked like a snake with its head cut off.
I followed his neck with my cane. Making him gasp.
“Who set you to your dirty work?” I asked him. “No mistake, now. I will kill you and find goodness in the work.”
“Don’t know,” he said, choking on his own blood and spit. He tried to rise up enough to hack the waste out of his throat, but I pinned him back down.
“Who put you after me, man?”
He gave a faint shake of the head. Twas the best he could do. “Don’t know his name,” he muttered.
“That one’s a black Donegal man,” Molloy said in disgust. “They don’t know the names o‘ their own mothers. A blight on the Irish race, they are.”
“I will give you a last chance,” I told the fallen man. “Tell me who sent you after me. Or I will put my cane through your throat and leave you to drown in your own blood.”
It is a good thing, at times, to have been a sergeant. For you know how to use your voice when another man would have to resort to a knife or a gun.
“The handsome one,” the beaten devil cried. “The handsome one wanted you dead.”
I gave Molloy another dollar, and the wanton fellow was not shy about taking it. He walked me to the edge of Swampoodle, ripe with unwelcome reminiscence, then I made my way back to Mrs. Schutzengel’s. I was not in the soundest condition.
Just as I come up the porch stairs, Herr Mager, the drummer fellow, stepped out of the front door. When he saw the wreckage of me in the hint of light, his face filled with delight and he made one of those I-knew-it-all-the-time sounds Germans make at the back of the throat.
“I have always knowed you was a stinker, Captain Jones,” he said. “Nun weiss ich es bescheid!”
There was something about the man that forever put me in mind of a chamber pot.
I had company waiting inside. Dr. Tyrone was sitting in the parlor with Mrs. Schutzengel, and thick as thieves they were.
> “Der Marx hat die Arbeiter idealisiert,” Tyrone was saying. “Doch, Fourier sagt—”
When they saw me, they both shot to their feet, which was a small miracle in Mrs. Schutzengel’s case. “For God’s sake, man. Let me look at that gash.”
“Ach, du lieber Gott,” Mrs. Schutzengel cried, “Der arme ist ermordet!”
I made the sounds of demurral a man must make, but I was beaten down in body and soul. I stood obediently under the gas jet as Tyrone felt his way along my hairline.
“Hot water, Frau Schutzengel,” he commanded. “And bring your finest needle. And thread.” His fingers made me wince. “It’s going to hurt worse than that before we’re through, laddybuck,” he told me. “Damn me, I wish I had my bag along.”
He was right. I sat there doing my best to be manly, with Mrs. Schutzengel clucking and closing her eyes each time he dug the needle back into my flesh. Tyrone had skill, though. I will say that for the man. It seemed hardly a minute, though a miserable one, before he was tying off the thread.
“You’ll do,” he said. “And how’s your stomach? Any feeling of sickness, man?”
“I would not go to a banquet this night.”
He snorted and worked his fingers over the rest of my skull.
“They make the Welsh hardheaded,” he told me. “No other damage?”
My shoulders were as stiff as a day-old corpse. But I did not want to raise any more fuss.
“Well, then,” Tyrone said, “if you haven’t had excitement enough for one night, there’s a pressing matter I’d like to bring to your attention. It involves a little stroll. But the thing will interest you no end, if Mick Tyrone’s any judge of human curiosity.”
“It won’t wait, then? I will admit to a tiredness in me.”
He nodded. He was a fine-looking man, though narrow like, with early snow on his temples and eyes full of thought. “It will wait,” he said. “Though Monday is the best night for it. No customers. We would not be interrupted. Or observed.”
My curiosity come up. As he knew it would. “And with what will it have to do?”
He glanced quickly at Mrs. Schutzengel, then whispered:
“Fowler.”
“You’ll have to change your uniform, though,” Tyrone said. “What with the blood and the damage. You look plucked halfway to the pot, man.”
I looked down at the oilcloth set over the parlor floor.
“What’s the matter, Jones?” Tyrone asked.
“Well… see… I have been busy…”
I managed to meet his baffled eyes.
“I have but the one tunic still,” I said quiet like. “Though I have a fine second set of trousers.”
Tyrone rolled his eyes. “You Welsh,” he said. “You’re tighter than absentee landlords.”
Mrs. Schutzengel had remained with us, and she made one of those little noises, hardly a whisper, that women make when they want your attention.
When we were both looking at her, she said, “I think I am helping.” Yet, there was an unusual hesitation in her voice, as though it were painful to make up her mind.
“And how might you help, gnadige Frau?” Tyrone asked.
“Frau bin ich, doch nicht so gnadige. You are… coming upstairs… with me now?”
The thought was, at least briefly, alarming.
“You wish to make justice, I think,” she said to us. “And all justice is helping the world revolution.”
Now Mrs. Schutzengel was a woman of girth. But these Germans are different from us, see. Fat she was not, if I may employ so unkindly a word even to banish it again. No, she filled the staircase with solidity, a human leviathan, with the muscles of one who worked hard and ate accordingly. Mick Tyrone was close to six feet tall, with the gait of an athlete, but the man lacked volume and Mrs. Schutzengel would have had the advantage in a fair fight.
She climbed more slowly than usual, though, puffing a bit and lingering on the landing as if she might yet turn back. But she only repeated:
“Komme doch mit. I am helping you, meine Herren.”
Now I had never even peeked into Mrs. Schutzengel’s bedroom, let alone been inside that forbidding preserve. Twas the one door in the house that remained shut to us all.
She asked us to wait while she lit the lamp, then she went into the dark room and shut the door behind her. We could hear the little lighting-up sounds, but then there come a new silence, a stillness, as if her heart remained undecided.
Tyrone gave me a look that said, What on earth is this all about?
When Mrs. Schutzengel opened the door, tears streaked her great chunk of face.
“Herein,” she said.
The room was flawless in its cleanliness and order, with dark furniture built to pass down through generations, though her plush chair looked defeated. A painted bridal chest languished in a corner and a mirror doubled the glow of the lamp, while an intense-looking young man with long hair and a student’s cravat stared down from a gilt frame. The curious thing, though, was the bed.
A man’s suit of black worsted lay flat on the cover.
“Mein Josef,” Mrs. Schutzengel said, “he is coming no more, I know. But my heart is never believing he is killed.” She looked at me. “He was a perfect man. Made small, but big in the heart. Like you, I think.”
We three stood awkwardly for a minute, not knowing what to do next or quite what to say. But Hilda Schutzengel had learned practicality from her long journey toward the world revolution, and she broke the spell she had cast.
Snatching the jacket from the bed, she fair hurled it at me. The trousers followed.
“You will go now to your Zimmer,” she said, “und wash und change your clothings. I will make your uniform good while you are going away.”
“Mrs. Schutzengel, I couldn’t possibly…”
She just gave me a no-nonsense-from-you face. “Better you are having his Anzug than the moths. Marsch, marscb!”
After Swampoodle, Murder Bay seemed an improvement. Monday late it was, and all but the most forlorn women of the night had gone in, so we were little bothered.
Tyrone led me directly to his objective, with hardly a word beyond his ritual cursing of Dr. La Bonta as we crossed Pennsylvania Avenue to enter the province of sin. He did observe, though, that Mrs. Schutzengel had a fine mind, and that she was better read than many a man he knew from Trinity. He said she was a niece of Turnvater Jahn, though the name meant nothing to me.
“A hard life, that one’s had,” he said. “But you knock a German down and damned if they don’t get back up while the next fellow’s still flat on his back seeing stars.”
He stopped us in front of a house on a lesser street. Three stories of wickedness, I made it out to be, though I did not recognize the place at first. Mind, I had been through a long day wrapped up with a bump on the head.
“You don’t remember?” Tyrone asked me.
I felt as though I should.
“It’s the house you asked me about. Where you saw those two friends of Fowler’s go in.”
Ah, yes.
“Well, forgive me, Jones, but I took it upon myself to make inquiries. I have been of service to the old girl who ranks the place. And I think we’ve come up aces. Come on, man.”
He started across the street. But my feet would not follow.
“For God’s sake, what is it now?” Tyrone asked.
“Is it going in there we’re after?”
“Well, what do you think, man? That I brought you here to admire the architecture?”
“I… have no traffic in such places.”
He came back over to me, flaming. “Do you want to solve the Fowler lad’s murder, or not? Because if you do, you’ll hitch up your trousers and follow me. And we’ll have none of your chapel righteousness inside, for they’re human beings as much as you or I. Come on, then.”
Lord forgive me—and asking my Mary Myfanwy’s pardon—I followed him.
Now life’s requirements later dragged me into a numbe
r of such establishments—for the Fowler case was but the beginning of my new career—and I have seen dens of sorrow with straw in a corner for a bed, and I have seen Mrs. Mansfield’s New York house, which catered to the princes of finance and was fit for kings. The one thing all such traps have in common is their odor. Perfume it as much as you will, and be the household staff ever so diligent, you will always have at least a hint of that cat scent to trouble your nostrils. It is a whiff that draws a man, see. If you will allow me the shameless truth. We are drawn to that danger above all others, and lose our judgement in a twinkling. What old Mick Tyrone saw as self-righteousness was but my grasp of Adam’s fall, and the ease with which it happened.
Half a dozen negresses lazed around a shabby parlor, clad in their indecencies. They hardly registered our arrival, though I heard Dr. Tyrone’s name whispered. But for the girls, the downstairs might have been the home of a grocer who had lost control of his accounts. Clean, though.
The matron of the household was a colored woman of great presence. In size she might have been the twin of Mrs. Schutzengel, though she had a polish and precision that my dear landlady lacked. Her hair was drawn back tightly and her dress matched its sober gray. She wore an ivory cameo below the folds of her neck.
“Oh, Dr. Tyrone!” she said. Then, “But I have not had the pleasure…”
“This is Captain Jones, Effie.”
“Why, another of our brave officers! And this one in disguise!”
“We’ve come to talk to Lucy.”
The practiced look fled her face. “Oh, Dr. Tyrone… there won’t be trouble with the provost marshal, will there? They’ll put City Hall on me, I know it, and those no-good Southrons cannot stand to see a free woman of color making her own way!”
“No trouble,” Tyrone said. “The girl’s had troubles enough.”
She shook her head with exaggerated drama. “I knew it was too good to be true. I said it to her, I said, Lucy, you might as well sell yourself south as believe in such fancies . .
“Trenchard or Bates in tonight?” Tyrone asked.
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