Nevermore

by William Hjortsberg

  The sergeant leaned back in his chair, drifting away into memory. Switching the red, yellow, and green beacons had always made him feel important. High above the passing swarm, snug from bad weather, he pitied those poor bastards standing all over town directing traffic with white-gloved hand signals, their apple cheeks puffing, a cacophony of whistles steaming in the chill air.

  On most days, the exhaust haze had hung so thick Heegan could barely see the towers nearest him, north and south along the avenue. When he had started on the force, automobiles were an exotic rarity and high winds often whirled tons of dried horse manure, powdered by passing carriage and wagon wheels, into poisonous shit storms so dense you couldn’t see your hand in front of your face, let alone take a decent breath. Some things about the old days were not quite as grand as the desk sergeant might have wished.

  “Goddamn that dumb kike!” Heegan bellowed, his face redder than his hair.

  “Not so dumb as to be without friends in City Hall.” Captain Boyle looked more like a bishop than a policeman, his immaculate hair white as an altar cloth; the lean greyhound face shrewd and intelligent. He spoke in a whisky-mellowed whisper. “How many of your friends are pals with the mayor?”

  Subdued by the quiet, patient voice, Sergeant Heegan adopted a more conciliatory posture, like a choirboy caught throwing spitballs. “I know I was way out of line, Captain, but the sight of him there, waving that money around like he was rubbing our noses in it, well, it just got my blood up …”

  “You’ve too much heart, Jimmy, that’s your trouble.” The captain remained genuinely fond of Heegan, was in fact godfather to his oldest son. Both men knew he would never rank higher than sergeant and, although neither ever mentioned it, the bright gold badge gleaming on Francis Xavier Boyle’s breast provided a constant rebuke. “Heart’s a grand thing, but when you’re dealing with the public you’ve got to use a little more of what’s up here.” The captain tapped a manicured forefinger against his temple, chuckling inwardly at the image of the sergeant’s head thumping hollow as a melon at the same touch. “You know I’ll have to take you off the desk…?”

  “That sheeny bastard!”

  “Relax. He was after your stripes.” The captain handed Heegan an envelope. “Report down to homicide at headquarters.”

  “Headquarters? What the hell’m I gonna do down there?” “I’m sure you’ll find some way to make yourself useful.”

  Sergeant Heegan heard the captain’s words echoing in his mind all through the afternoon. Every time he refilled the detectives’ coffee mugs from the big graniteware pot kept percolating on a hot plate in the squad room lavatory, he thought about making himself useful. No one at homicide knew what to do with him. Several other uniforms served as drivers and in menial backup capacities. None ranked above corporal. So, Heegan brewed the coffee and hung around trading lies with the plainclothes dicks when they weren’t out on call or busy interrogating suspects and typing endless reports. He had no complaints. In another year, he’d have his pension.

  Just after dark, a call came in ordering every available man over to an address in Hell’s Kitchen, cutting short Heegan’s rambling blarney once again. On his way out the door, a detective caught the sergeant’s doleful glance. “You waiting for some engraved invitation?” he asked. Heegan made a pistol of his index finger and aimed it at his heart: Who, me?

  “No law says you have to sit on your ass all day long.”

  Sergeant Heegan followed the detectives down the long, narrow stairs. There was nothing for him to do, but it had to be an improvement on watching the coffee boil. He rode up front beside a uniformed driver in an open five-passenger 1918 Ford with a canvas top. They set out in a black caravan of four automobiles.

  Just for the hell of it, Heegan cranked the siren and they wove through traffic with a great wail, other vehicles pulling out of the way. An unnecessary noise, in the absence of any emergency: the dead meat didn’t care if the cops arrived on time. Technically, it was against regulations, but nobody told Heegan to knock it off. The siren’s scream made the jaded detectives feel important.

  When they pulled up at an address on Thirty-ninth Street, just east of Tenth Avenue, a small crowd had gathered on the sidewalk. Three patrolmen stood by the entrance. The detectives sauntered inside, leaving Heegan in charge of the uniforms, who now, with the addition of the drivers, numbered seven. The sergeant paced off a thirty-foot perimeter in front of the tenement, telling his men, “Don’t take no naps and keep the rubberneckers back of this here line.” Task accomplished, he made straight for the action, bustling through the building with a hefty swagger.

  The body sprawled in the courtyard out back, a dirt lot adrift in trash and almost as crowded as the street, with detectives milling everywhere. A camera on a tripod tilted down into the roped-off trapezoid enclosing the corpse. In the bright magnesium flare of flash powder, Heegan saw a gray-haired woman, shirtwaist stiff with dried blood, her splayed limbs contorted like those of a broken doll flung from some great height.

  Heegan made himself inconspicuous on the fringes of the activity, picking up what he could from overheard conversation. Two elderly tenants talked with detectives about the victim. Her name was Mrs. Esp. She was a widow; spoke with some kind of accent. Lived with her daughter on the fourth floor. Other than that, the two wheezing geezers, a man and his wife from the look of it, didn’t know beans. Widow Esp was something of a recluse. They never saw that much of her. The daughter, on the other hand, came and went every day. Had a secretarial job downtown. Lovely young thing, with long golden hair. Not bobbed the way some of them are wearing it.

  Heegan edged away from their babble, wanting a closer look at the corpse. The photographer had done with the late Mrs. Esp: having shot her from a dozen different angles, he folded his equipment into a black suitcase. Another man coiled the barrier rope. Several bored detectives leaned over the body, gazing down at her with no seeming interest.

  She was a mess. Thick clumps of hair had been yanked free by the handful, laying bare a raw, abraded scalp. Her blotched and bruised face twisted disagreeably, the backwards stare making her look all the more like a twisted doll. Heegan marveled at how deeply her throat had been slashed. The cut ran from ear to ear.

  Alone among all the others, a slim, dapper man in a battered “Open-Road” Stetson and double-breasted topcoat stared, not at the body, but straight up at a shattered fourth-floor window. “Long drop, Mr. Runyon,” quipped a detective at his side.

  Heegan took a good look at him. So, this was William Randolph Hearst’s blue-ribbon sportswriter. He knew the word along Broadway was Damon Runyon liked to hang out with shady characters. Gamblers. Torpedoes. Small-time grifters. Cops. For all of that, the sergeant had never laid eyes on him before.

  “It’s the sudden stop that kills you, Charlie,” Damon Runyon said. He was a small man, with a thin, unsmiling shark-slit mouth. His round glasses gave him an owlish look, the glint of the lenses masking the ironic twinkle in his eyes. The detective chortled appreciatively.

  “Turn her over.” Lieutenant Bremmer gave the orders. “Let’s see the rest of the damage.” Heegan glimpsed him earlier in the day, rushing in and out of his office. The lieutenant was built like an energetic fireplug, one of those small men who made up in authority what he lacked in stature. Two detectives immediately took hold of the body and everybody watched as they gently lifted it.

  Mrs. Esp’s battered head tore loose from her shoulders, falling with a soft thud into the shadows. Even the most hardened cop gasped in horror. “Eight to five she was already dead when she hit the ground,” smirked Damon Runyon.

  About this time, the wagon arrived from the morgue. Bremmer had the team bundle the stiff on a stretcher but told them not to load her until he and the boys had a look upstairs. Heegan went along with the pack, trooping up four flights. They found the door to the Esp apartment locked tight. “Give us a hand here, Sergeant,” barked “Bulldog” Bremmer. Grateful for something to do a
t last, Heegan reared back his beefy leg and splintered the door open with a single kick.

  The front room was a kitchen. An oak icebox dripped in one corner. A coal scuttle stood between the blackened range and a bathtub covered by a worktable. This was an Old Law tenement with a single toilet in the hall serving all four apartments on the floor. The men pushed inside, finding the place a shambles, broken furniture strewn like pieces of kindling. An overturned flour bin powdered most of the floor but the detectives failed to find a single white footprint.

  The back room was in even greater disorder. Twenty-dollar gold pieces lay scattered about, along with a bundle of silver spoons tied with silk ribbon and several broken bits of costume jewelry. A cotton mattress torn from the bed was bunched against the wall. Mother-of-pearl grips smeared with gore, a gleaming straight razor lay on the only unbroken chair, pointing to the blood splattering the cheap patterned wallpaper. The shattered window frame gaped with night. A gusting breeze sent several torn clumps of gray hair drifting across the bare floorboards like tiny spectral creatures.

  Lieutenant Bremmer turned the central gas jet higher. At first glance the room looked unoccupied, a fireplace on the side wall seemingly unused, as no ash collected on the grate. Oddly enough, considerable quantities of soot had fallen onto the hearth. Bremmer bent over for a look. A long strand of blond hair hung out of the flue.

  “Christ almighty,” he muttered, reaching up to tug a slender arm down from the chimney. The head and shoulders of a young woman followed, badly scratched and mauled. Discolored bruises banded her pale throat. Hanging upside down, her staring blue eyes and wide-open mouth spoke of a final uncomprehending horror.

  Damon Runyon leaned forward among the detectives. “I’ll be damned,” he said with a lopsided grin. “Rue Morgue …”

  “What’s that?” asked Heegan, standing at his elbow. He thought he’d heard him say “rumor.”

  “Just like the Poe story.”

  Sergeant Heegan didn’t know what the newspaperman was talking about. He had never heard of Edgar Allan Poe.

  3

  A VARRAY PARFIT GENTIL KNYGHT

  THE KNIGHT AND HIS lady stood arm in arm at the stern rail of the Mauretania, watching the long white line of wake describe their course across a blank and nearly motionless sea. It was very cold. Bundled in heavy overcoats, she with her ermine stole wrapped tightly around her neck, they remained the only couple on deck under a moonless, cloud-free sky. The clarity of the air magnified the myriad stars and rendered the horizon sharp and straight as a razor’s edge, the obsidian sea abruptly divided from the silver diadem of sky.

  He drew her close and whispered into the fur-muffled ear. “It was on just such a night as this that the Titanic went down. And not so very far from here, I should reckon.” His voice rumbled gently with a laconic Scots burr.

  “Is it only a decade ago?” she said. “It seems absolute centuries.”

  His heart surged with emotion, not because of what she implied: a whole world swept away; each of them losing a beloved brother to that devastating war; his son, Kingsley, gone as well. They had been through so much together, yet he felt neither sadness nor loss. He no longer believed in the finality of death. If there was such a thing as eternity, he knew in some mysterious way it was connected to the profound love he shared with this fair, stalwart woman who had remained by his side through it all.

  He was sixty-three years old, his wife fourteen years younger, although she looked to be still in her late thirties. Theirs had been a love at first sight during the Queen’s Diamond Jubilee more than a quarter century before, and the fire of it burned more fiercely now than on that first damp spring morning so long ago.

  She interrupted his musing: “Will there be any danger of ice?”

  “I should think not.” The knight wrapped a bearlike arm around his fair lady. “They steer a somewhat more southerly course these days. Still, it’s all fate, isn’t it, really?”

  “At least we should be together.” She nestled tenderly against him and he knew she was thinking of Mrs. Isidor Strauss, who had refused to enter a lifeboat, saying she had spent forty years with her husband and would not part from him.

  “I wonder how poor old Stead spent his last moments…?” He referred to W. T. Stead, once editor of the “Review of Reviews,” his Boer-sympathizing adversary back in the days of the South African War, later a friend and companion on the spiritual path, lost along with more than fifteen hundred other souls in the Titanic disaster. “Perhaps at tonight’s meeting we might make contact.”

  She smiled up at him. “I know if we don’t, it shan’t be from want of trying.”

  Never noticing their burnished reflections in the gleaming cherry-wood paneling, so intensely did they stare into each other’s eyes, the dignified couple made their way along the first-class passageway. Steam heat transformed the interior of the great ship into a balmy summer evening, and they removed their topcoats, he gallantly carrying both over his arm.

  The knight was a tall man, well over six feet, with the burly build of a heavyweight boxer. In spite of his years, he moved with an athlete’s innate grace. Carefully trimmed now, his thick, white walrus mustache had swept to dark, dashing cavalier points when first they met. She thought him then the most handsome man she had ever laid eyes upon and nothing in all the years spent together had ever altered her original opinion.

  Their stateroom was on the port side of A Deck. It was spacious, yet dainty in its “posh” appointments. Although not bound for the Indian Ocean, they had shared a quiet laugh about “port out, starboard home” upon embarking. He hung up their coats. She sat at the vanity, brushing and rearranging her dark gold hair. She caught his reflection over her shoulder and smiled.

  Her husband was one of the most famous men on the planet, his beloved books translated into dozens of languages; his plays, the toast of the West End. He received his knighthood not for these literary accomplishments but for service to Crown and country during the Boer War, something altogether more noble. Far from being a bookish chap, he was an avid sportsman, an expert amateur boxer, and a champion cricketer. She admired him enormously.

  The smiling knight rested his powerful hand on his lady’s pale shoulder. She pressed her cheek against it, kissing his fingers. Neither her pride in the man nor her admiration for his varied abilities compared to the enormity of her love. When they met she was a girl of twety-four with a passion for singing and fast horses. She still craved a spirited mount and galloped fearlessly through the woods surrounding their Sussex estate. And her fine mezzo-soprano voice, trained at Dresden and Florence, continued to give her husband great pleasure.

  She sang for him on that first rainy afternoon so long ago and she remembered the joy in his bright blue eyes. He was in his prime then, a jovial bull of a man, bursting with energy and ideas. Already celebrated, he wore his fame lightly, taking more joy in scoring a century on the cricket field than in all the kudos of the literary establishment. He was also married, “Touie,” his wife, an invalid. She loved him anyway: utterly, completely.

  If he had been a different sort of man, one to whom honor mattered little, he might have divorced his ailing wife, or baser still, taken his new love for his mistress, and she surely would have followed his lead. But, he did neither, compelled by a code he’d honored all his life. He would not abandon his wife; neither did he deny his love. Although wiser heads counseled her never to see him again, no romantic heart ever argued with her choice. For the next decade, their relationship remained platonic. They saw each other often, chastely, and with discretion. And whenever he stormed at the unfairness of it all, she smiled and said she didn’t mind as long as they were together.

  Nine years went by with dignity and decorum, and when Touie succumbed peacefully to the tuberculosis that doomed her long before, he mourned for another twelve months. He was now a knight of the realm. This meant little to him. The happiest day of his life was when at last his lady became his bride. And alth
ough the “Flaming Youth” of a more cynical postwar generation might smirk at the thought, she took pride after such a long and secret courtship in being still a virgin when she stood beside him at the altar.

  A passenger liner at sea provided a succinct microcosm of the society left behind on land. Down in the depths of the stokehole the black gang toiled in sweat and misery, shoveling coal round the clock into furnaces under the great boilers that drove the ship. Over them, the steerage passengers dwelt in dormitories little better than prisons. The spare, efficient quarters on the next level housed the crew. No frills or fancy ornament here. Servants were not expected to aspire beyond their station.

  High above the throbbing engines and catacombed human hive, the stately corridors of wealth and privilege surpassed a humble immigrant’s most extravagant dreams. The steamship companies provided fantasies as grand as any concocted in the motion picture studios of Hollywood. Shielded by riveted iron plates, surrounded by teakwood decks, magnificently arrayed beneath the four looming red stacks, the Mauretania’s hand-some public rooms included cafes modeled on the Orangery at Hampton Court, tiled Turkish baths with marble columns, a gentle-men’s smoking chamber in the manner of Renaissance Italy, grand ballrooms and dining rooms spanning every French style from François I to Louis XVI.

  Launched five years before the Titanic, sister ship to the Lusitania, the Mauretania first won the Blue Riband for speed in 1907. The prized ensign remained affixed to her foremast fifteen years later. Still the swiftest craft afloat, she was a stately survivor from a grander and less gaudy age. The same might well be said of the knight and his lady ascending the main staircase, so completely did they embody the virtues of a lost time. The year before, he had been made an Earl and Knight of the Garter. They were known, at least by sight, by all the passengers. Everyone on the stairs nodded an amicable greeting.