Soot

by Dan Vyleta

  “I’ve been looking everywhere for you! They told me you had gone to the theatre—no address, not even the name of the troupe! I chased a taxicab all across town only to arrive at an empty tent. The boy guarding it would not talk to me and his dog almost ate me. I was reduced to asking random passers-by about your whereabouts. Not a soul had seen you. At last someone directed me to where the theatre people make their lodgings. I thought perhaps one of them had noticed you and knew where you had gone. A desperate undertaking! And then they tell me you took a room!”

  He delivers all this at an enormous pace, speaking with both mouth and hands, making an Odyssey of his chase and lanky perseverance, Smith his Ithaca to which he has been longing to return. When the latter does little to acknowledge his valour, the man steps closer yet, announcing first that “Braithwaite sent me,” his voice so loud it is as though he wishes to inform the gathered company, then bending to Smith’s ear and whispering a message betwixt his cupped and well-scrubbed hands. Even so the words are audible to all.

  “There has been a break-in. A thief! At the office!”

  Smith does not react at once, runs a finger across the hotel envelope he filled with Balthazar’s belongings, plays with its flap.

  “Yates, is it? Accounting?”

  “Yes, sir. I happened to return to the office late. When I saw what happened, I called Mr. Braithwaite at once. On the telephone.”

  “Very good, Yates. Are you armed?”

  “Armed?”

  “Do you carry a weapon? A sidearm.”

  “Good God, no, sir.” Yates looks up, prompted by a fresh idea, a bloom of pink in each cheek. “Are you being robbed?”

  [ 17 ]

  Yates’s absurd query creates a momentary lull, what theatre people like to call a “beat.” One of the players—Ada? Greta Silvana?—can be heard to giggle; another shifts their stance with an audible crack of the spine. Into this lull, this gap, Smith inserts himself, takes charge.

  “So, Yates. The offices were broken into. Why come to me?”

  Again Yates bends down, again makes a conch of his two palms. For once his voice drops, so the answer is inaudible. Smith rises with it, bends for his underpants, his shirt, his socks.

  “What did they take?”

  Once more the accountant attempts to sidle closer and win a perch at Smith’s ear. But Smith has had enough.

  “Just tell me, you fool.”

  “Well, sir, we are not sure. The desk drawer was open. Some papers are in disarray.”

  “That is all?”

  “Yes, all. Well, and the closet lock has been picked.”

  It is this last bit that rids them of Smith. Eleanor can see an urgency creep into his movements that was absent up until now. He pulls on his clothes, slips into his coat. One last time his hand hesitates over the envelope and the vial, but Geoffrey’s gun remains cocked, the stagehand’s glower unchanged. Smith shrugs and reaches for his money instead. His good-bye belongs to Balthazar.

  “Hide if you like,” he says without anger. “I can always find you.”

  On the way out, he stops near Eleanor, sniffs her like a dog. “A strange one, you are! I should have paid attention. Next time, I will make sure we are introduced.”

  And then he is gone, still buttoning his cuffs and trailing Yates who, for all his lanky height, has to match his superior’s intent stride with something closer to a run.

  He leaves behind the smell of his pomade.

  [ 18 ]

  They speak later. Balthazar needs time to recollect himself. Eleanor knows this with a certainty she would marvel at, were it not a familiar kind of knowledge. One becomes attuned to people, once one has drunk deep within their Smoke. Eleanor more so than most.

  So she watches him repack his travelling chest, then shout at Geoffrey and David for bumping it into the narrow stairwell walls when carrying it back down. The moment the chest is in his room, Balthazar turns away; offers no announcement, no speech or plan, just the slamming of his door. Eleanor returns there in the early hours of the morning and is unsurprised when her own sleeplessness is mirrored in a slip of light leaking out his room. She knocks, receives no answer, knocks again, then pushes down on the broken handle. Balthazar sits on a stool wedged between desk and bed of his tiny room. There is fresh Soot on his clothes, his face, the walls. The whites of his eyes look curdled.

  “There,” he says. “The hero of the hour. Coming to gloat.”

  She expected his sourness and is unsurprised to see him pour his relief into spite. She saw him stripped and helpless. It is a hard thing to forgive.

  “He wasn’t here for me,” she says rather carefully, sits down on the bed. “I did not expect that.”

  “You weren’t recognised after all. That mayor’s ogle in Saint John: all he saw was a girl. Smitten with your curves! Or if he did recognise you, it’s not Smith who got his letter.”

  She nods, works on the next sentence till it says what she means. “Still, you could have sold me to him. A bargain: me for the photos and the vial. I have value for one such as Smith. It might have worked.”

  Balthazar flinches, caught in a thought. “Don’t think I didn’t consider it, girl. Don’t ever think that. I only protect my own.” He blows his nose in his hand, stares at the Soot-black snot.

  “There would have been no point to it,” he continues at length. “He would have wanted everything. You and my papers. His kind always does.”

  “What next then?”

  “Next? Next we go into hiding. New York’s finished for us. Take the next ship to England. Smith won’t be welcome in the North.”

  She nods, sits there, thinks the next part, does not speak it out loud.

  Please, she thinks. Take me along.

  Why say it? Balthazar already knows.

  [ 19 ]

  They look through the photos in the pale light of dawn. The ones Smith wanted to take. Balthazar has kept them out, spread them side by side upon his desk. Four of them show the same scene from different perspectives. Panoramas of London, taken from elevated vantage points within the city. The darkness of the Thames. Struck like a heavenly spear into its flank: a column of pure black.

  “What’s that?” Eleanor asks.

  “A mystery. These were taken on the morning of the Second Smoke. They lit the fuse here”—Balthazar indicates a section of town not far from the river—“but this column rises all the way over there.”

  “It’s a Storm, isn’t it?”

  “Yes. The first Storm. Some say the only true Storm there’s ever been.”

  “And who is this?” Eleanor points to the fifth photo, which shows a boy, out of focus, glowering darkly at the lens. In black and white it is hard to gauge his skin colour. He may simply be dirty. But his face is unusual; the hair clipped as though against lice.

  “That? Someone the world has half forgotten.”

  “A beggar child?”

  “The boy from the jungle. Lady Naylor’s sacrificial lamb.”

  INTERNAL COMPANY MEMORANDUM, FILE NO. 13452/1905 SUBJECT: ORIGIN AND PROPERTIES OF SO-CALLED STORMS

  Interview with an eyewitness, SAMUEL HERBERT VAUGHAN, now a Company employee, in February 1906, in the Company concession in Maccau, where said eyewitness works as a bookkeeper and resides.

  Q: For the record, state your name and age.

  A: Samuel Herbert Vaughan, thirty-three.

  Q: You have stated in informal conversation that you were an eyewitness to a Black Storm while residing in Britain in 1899. Is this correct?

  A: Yes, it is.

  Q: Where and when did you witness the Storm?

  A: Then…when the Second Smoke was first set off. In London, in ’99.

  Q: Can you recall the precise date?

  A: The date? It was then, I
tell you—the day they set it off! When the river came alive with Smoke. When we all went a little mad.

  Q: Tell me what you saw.

  A: It’s like I said. I was in the streets that morning, part of a group of gentlemen engineers who had volunteered to improve London’s sanitary conditions. We rode in a coach, it was dawn, the streets still empty, as Smoke-free as London ever got. We crossed the bridge at Blackfriars. Then the coachman stopped. We yelled for him to continue but he wouldn’t: stood on the box, staring down into the waters. We craned our necks out the windows to see; stepped out onto the street…

  Q: And? Continue.

  A: But you know all this! The river had come alive…all the Soot trapped in the water and the river bed. We saw Smoke rising out of it, schillering. Colours we had never seen—not in the Smoke. Like an oil slick come alive. Beautiful, I suppose; moving like a living thing. Then it spread to the bridge, the streets. It quickened the muck in the alleys, the dirt in the houses. Some people ran from it, but it was faster than legs. Then we started smoking ourselves. It was like having a dozen people inside your skin. All their wants. And yours, too, mixed in with them. Anger, sure, and fear. But all these other things, too. The men I was with, my colleagues and friends—we could not bear to look one another in the eye, afterwards. But neither did we want to part. Like family—too close to be able to stand each other, too close to let each other go.

  Q: And this was the Storm?

  A: No, no. This was the Smoke, the Second Smoke.

  Q: What about the Storm then?

  A: There was a plume. A plume on the horizon, like from a fire, black as black. We saw it even before the Second Smoke had jumped up at us; while we stood there, gawping on the bridge.

  Q: A plume? Where was this, exactly?

  A: Downriver. East, I suppose. Quite a ways.

  Q: What did you do?

  A: We went to look. It wasn’t a decision any one of us made. We simply went—Smoke-tied, moving as one. Some of us were crying; others were stopping to fight, or to…You see, many were shedding their clothes, that morning, though it was cold. Lust has a strong hold on the blood. But so does curiosity; it runs deep, that, a burning need to see. It kept us moving towards the plume. We were like kittens, chasing a twitching piece of yarn.

  Q: And did you catch it?

  A: No, thank God. We were too slow. We got close enough to hear the screams, though. Close enough to see them—the dead and the dying, all knotted together. Like they had tried to eat their way into each other. Stuck together by blood and Soot.

  Q: What then?

  A: Nothing. We got scared. Best cure for curiosity there is.

  Q: And the Storm?

  A: We saw the plume racing away from us. Like a wildfire, though the wind was blowing in our faces. It leapt and pounced. We ran the other way.

  NOTE: File 13452/1905 was requested on 17 November 1908 by the Colonial Office in Bombay. Permission was granted and copy dispatched by Company courier.

   BERTH

  [ 1 ]

  He shares his room with the beetle.

  Nil had meant to move out of the room by now, had planned to leave it right after the heist, from caution as well as thrift. The beetle has kept him there. Once he had brought the tin to his room he felt compelled to open it. Ten long minutes until the thing deigned to move. He wouldn’t touch it—not yet—and was consumed by the fear that it was dead. Then a twitch of pincer, a sudden scuttle that saw it collide with the tin wall. He would leave the boardinghouse at dawn, Nil swore to himself, and spent the rest of the night stoppering up the room’s every hole and crack, using his clothes largely, undressed by his need. Then he released the beetle, tipping the tin gently on its side. What he wanted was to see it move; imagine a forest floor upon which their paths would cross. He watched it lying prone with his chest pressed into the dirty floor; stretched a hand to it only to withdraw it whenever the beetle drew near. By midafternoon they touched. By evening Nil had lifted the beetle onto his skin, felt the dance of six hooked feet needle and explore him. A slow walk across his ribcage’s undulating plain; pincers probing the soft of his throat.

  It was then that Nil wept.

  It has been two days now. Nil has not eaten, has not left the room other than to run to the dirty washroom at the end of the corridor to fetch a tumbler of fresh water. He spends his time watching the beetle, touching it; loses whole hours to some strange state of pure being that knows no thought or memory; is startled by the dark of nightfall and—moments later—by the feeble entry of the morning sun through the dust-clotted glass of the room’s little window; by the growl of his stomach and the salt of his tears flavouring his upper lip. Now and again he thinks he can smell trees, the rot of vegetation; can hear the cry of a bird that lives high within the canopy, its plumage green and gold. He takes off his trousers and lies stark naked, thinking, This is how I’m meant to live. His body, unwashed and starving, begins to take on an urgent smell. The beetle grows bolder and makes a home of his cupped hands.

  If it were human, they’d be moving towards vows.

  [ 2 ]

  Love is not without anxieties. The beetle won’t feed. At the bottom of the tin there is some remnant of vegetable matter—grass? the stalks of some flower?—too dry to easily identify and glued into a tangle by the grit of Soot. If it was put there for food, little enough is left that the beetle shows no interest in it. Nil scrambles and finds an apple core amongst his refuse and some porridge oats spilled under the bed by a previous inhabitant; finds mouse droppings and the mouldy remnant of an ancient spud. The beetle spurns all of these; squats in the dirt in its black armour; walks patterns across his skin and floor. Nil decides to run out to the grocer’s, terrified of being burgled, too scared to take along the beetle lest he lose it or be mugged. He returns with cabbage, carrots, potatoes caked in earth. The beetle ignores them. Nil hunts for spiders, woodlice, flies; offers their carcasses, then offers them legless and alive: they bend their crippled bodies like knuckles upon the concave pallor of a saucer. But the beetle is indifferent to sacrifice. By the third day of foraging for food, Nil is again in tears, of frustration this time, of raw, parental fear.

  How long does it take for a beetle to starve?

  [ 3 ]

  It is this thought that decides him into action. He must learn more about beetles, seek advice on their diet and needs. The first challenge is to find a way to carry it around with him. The tin is too conspicuous to carry, too large for his knapsack. Nil acquires a wooden box with a simple lock, drills holes in it, transfers the vegetational mess and sits the beetle in a bed of rags; then he walks slowly without moving his torso, the canvas bag strapped to his front, supporting the box with the cradle of his arms like a woman bracing her pregnancy.

  He heads to Riedl’s shop. Riedl is a scholar of sorts. His area of expertise is the materiality of life. He is a pawnbroker and fence; deals in watches, jewellery, and table silver; surgeon’s knives, captain’s sextants, brass trombones; in sweets, opium, cocaine, and hashish; sells lapdogs stolen from uptown manors; lizards, songbirds, pure-bred cats. His whole livelihood depends on knowing the value, the nature, of things. To encounter an object and not be able to name its price would be a humiliation to Riedl, a challenge to his place in life. And if Riedl knows the value of the beetle, perhaps he can also tell Nil how to keep it alive.

  Nil is spotted from afar. One of the neighbourhood urchins hails him, then takes off running to Riedl’s shop. When the same urchin darts from Riedl’s doorway even before Nil has reached it, and dashes down the side alley, something shifts in Nil and he enters Riedl’s shop on his guard.

  “The boychik!” the old Jew greets him, with evident warmth. “Coming to brag of his latest exploits. So you survived your caper, did you? But look how dirty you are. And skinny! Careful, boy, you have to eat.”

 
Nil just stands there, aware of Riedl’s eyes on his knapsack, unwilling—unable—to slip into his usual persona around the man.

  “Go on,” the pawnbroker continues. “Don’t be shy now. Show me what treasures you have brought.”

  “They didn’t tell you?”

  “Didn’t tell me? Who? You are coming to sell, no? Mind, I am low on cash right now, it won’t be very much.”

  Nil thinks about how long it will take the urchin to run from Riedl’s shop to the nearest telephone, wonders which number he has been instructed to call. There is a booth in a drugstore at the edge of the nearest scar. A minute to ask for the extension; another to explain his purpose. Then what? That man, Smith, will have a coach at his disposal, or perhaps an automobile. Five minutes to leave the summit of his Spire, more if the elevators are backed up. Ten more to race here through the crowded streets.

  It gives Nil a little bit of time.

  “Go on, sit down, boychik, you are making me jumpy. Take off a load.”

  Nil ignores the pawnbroker, makes sure there is no weapon on Riedl and none in his reach. Then he opens the knapsack and carefully pulls out the box.

  “There! He wants to sell after all. But, gevalt, what a face you are making. Sit, boy, let me make tea. Then you can show me what you have.”

  But Riedl is far too excited to go to the rear of his shop to put on the kettle and far too keen not to let Nil out of sight. Nil, for his part, keeps his eyes on Riedl’s face as he opens the wooden box. Immediately it is clear to him that the pawnbroker does not know what he is looking at. He closes the box before Riedl can come any closer, shoves it back into his bag.

  “So they didn’t tell you.”

  Riedl does not respond. He digs in a desk drawer, withdraws a bundle of money. “Here, boychik. Fifty dollars. A fortune!”