Soot

by Dan Vyleta

  “Here, see. This is your name. And this here is your food.”

  He does not know at what point during the night he had started speaking to the beetle. It never answers back; crawls over to the flower now, inspects it once more with its feet and pincers, and does not deign to eat. By three or four it has stopped moving, reacts only when Nil reaches in its box and picks it up. He quickly places it back. The beetle is starving, conserving energy by playing dead. Nil shuts the box and feels…something.

  Grief.

  For the first time in an age he thinks about his late London mother and about his foster father, too, and wonders whether he is still alive.

  [ 10 ]

  He goes looking for Smith. Of course he does. Smith is the only one who knows.

  Nil arrives at the base of the Spire just before dawn, cranes his neck, and is rewarded by the glow of a window near the top. Smith, rising early; performing his morning ablutions, no doubt, curling his whiskers before the glass. An hour later the first employees arrive, menials mostly, heading straight to the building’s back. The doorman has manned his post by now and Nil makes sure to avoid his line of sight. Two elevator boys arrive in close succession, easily recognised by the colour of their uniforms. Neither is the boy Nil spoke to. He has a brief vision of his body lying crumpled amongst the poisoned pigeons of the building’s central hollow, then dismisses it as fanciful. The elevator boy will be in some private prison somewhere, awaiting transport or a noose; or sunk in the muck of the river bed, weighted down by a stone. Nil wonders what someone like Smith might do to you to make you talk.

  It isn’t until late evening that Smith finally emerges. Nil is ravenous by now, tired out by the heat; has finished the flask of water he brought and eaten the small wedge of bread. For a moment he is alarmed that the Company man will simply hail a cab, making him hard to shadow. But it seems he likes his exercise. They walk for almost forty minutes, stopping only when Smith spots a candy store open late into the day and acquires a paper parcel of liquorice from which he snacks as he moves on. At last, he crosses the road, rings a bell in a nondescript building and is let in. The next moment he has charged through its entrance and is gone.

  Nil gives him ten minutes. He has no plan of action, only his needs: for the beetle to live; for him to know himself, to undo his christenings, un-naught his name. And at the same time the memory of the elevator boy dances before him, the face so similar to his own, picked to whispers by Nil’s fears. Ten minutes in which to speculate whether it is a mistress Smith is visiting; a tailor; an opium den. Then he steps up to the door, presses the third button from the top, and hears the answering click of the lock. The concierge is Soot-smeared and reading a magazine; one look at Nil and he points him to the backyard.

  Nil traverses the hall obediently, trying to parse the smells and decor. Sweat, he decides, burnt dust and metal; the smell of wet cloth. A brothel, a laundry? The stairwell is bare but for its metal railing, the walls flaking old paint. Above his head he can hear the shuffle of feet, the grunting of men. The courtyard is cramped, the back building residential, its windows disclosing housewives bent over dish-filled sinks and men in armchairs perusing the day’s news. In the front wing large, metal-framed windows are lit but the glass is milked with white paint. The shadows that pass behind are hard to make sense of. There is a servant’s entrance with a separate stairwell; two men are perched not far from it, dressed in white cottons like cooks. They are chatting, passing a cigarette back and forth.

  Nil ignores them and heads up the back stairwell. Two floors up he draws the momentary attention of a fat man burdened by an armload of limp towels, who stares at Nil’s shorn head and thick suit, then dismisses him from his mind. Nil squeezes past him, sees a hall open up before him, thirty feet squared under a vaulting ceiling. The smells are vivid now, layers of sweat, of leather and Smoke. And of men. Some are on mats, flat on the ground, or squatting, or tumbling across the floor. Others lift dumbbells and sand-filled leather balls, or spin their bodies in mad circles around the pivot of a metal bar. Here a leather-covered box, raised on four legs, serves as a launch pad for a queue of men who vault over it in a variety of manners, headfirst, feetfirst, split-legged and upside down. Elsewhere two men are locked in combat, one astride the other’s back like coupling toads, their bodies slick with sooty sweat.

  Then, from a doorway opposite, Smith enters the gymnasium in white knee-length shorts and a cotton singlet. His forearms are rich in golden fuzz. Smith leaps up to two rings suspended from the ceiling by leather straps; grows red and bug-eyed as he pulls himself up by the strength of his arms. Aloft, his tremour travelling up and down the straps bolted into the ceiling, he pauses, lifts his legs; he huffs and puffs, and looks like nothing so much as a shitting pug near torn asunder by the strain of his excretion. And yet Nil cannot help but be awed by the man’s raw strength that now sees him slowly spread his arms until he has pinned himself into a self-inflicted crucifixion before dropping heavily back onto the floor; the rings swinging in erratic circles high above his head.

  I must go hide, it shoots through Nil as his mark picks himself off the ground to dip his fists in a bucket of chalk. He will know me by my colour.

  But in truth the room is filled with all manner of men, not all of them white. Some are dressed in their workday clothes shorn only of their jackets and shoes. Others stand stripped to underwear so threadbare they are hardly dressed at all. There is such a hubbub here, such a chaos of activity, so viscous a stink, that his shorn little immigrant’s face peeking out of his too-big collar is but another oddity in a room bereft of order.

  Still, it will not do to be incautious. As Smith approaches a wooden rack to perform various types of callisthenics, Nil drifts out through a door on his right into a warren of hallways. There are further, smaller gyms: one a boxing ring, the windows wide open and fans running to disperse the Smoke seeping out of the two bloodied men within; another lined with heavy dumbbells and cracked mirrors, where the stink of sweat and man stands so heavy it seems fused into the very mortar of the unpainted walls.

  Nil moves on, only half conscious of what he is looking for until he finds it: a small, tiled room lined with benches and narrow wooden cupboards, each with its own lock. Smith entered the building in his linen suit, a satchel clutched under one arm; leaped onto the rings in a singlet and shorts. One of these cupboards holds his belongings. Only a handful are closed, locked; the others stand open and empty. It will be a trifle to pick these few locks; find and search Smith’s pockets and his satchel; see what he can learn. A trifle—were it not for the fact that Nil is not alone.

  The man is slight, grey-faced and bent; is dressed in a cotton shirt and flannel trousers, holds a jacket folded in his lap. Patches of sweat have collected in his armpits. Indeed, the room is hot and damp with the mist of the steam room next door; it crawls in through a vent’s iron grille, plunges the air into a haze and feeds a vivid mould that blooms like moss upon the grouting. Nil nods to the stranger, fades through the door, continues his survey of the premises. Farther down the hall he finds a second changing room, this one devoid of lockers, adjacent to a row of showers, their drains clogged with hair and lint and standing inch-deep under dirty water; finds a toilet, a cleaning cupboard, a plunge pool filled with ice-cold water; finds a front desk from behind which a corpulent woman stares at him until he produces twenty cents and drops them on her counter, whereupon she offers him a towel and a locker room key. In the gym Smith is now hanging by his bent knees from an iron bar. His singlet has ridden up and reveals on his flank and hip a tangle of lines, some dark, some fading into pallor, like a clot of veins risen to the surface of his flesh.

  On Nil’s second pass the sweaty little man still sits amongst the lockers and has been joined by a younger man who is changing back into his clothes; on the third (Nil has passed the time by watching the boxing, enjoying the cool of the fans that push
the men’s anger through the open windows out into the yard) he sees Smith waddle into the unoccupied steam room and close the door. In the locker room next door, the bent little man now sits alone. He raises his chin to Nil as he enters, offers his face up to the light.

  “Don’t be frightened,” he says with a voice and accent like he’s talking around a pebble tucked under his tongue, “all it is, I’m blind.”

  The eyes are not blanks but spheres of rot: they hold a pulpy darkness that seems to extend all the way through the eyeballs. It is as though two sponges have been dunked in muck, then encased in globes of glass.

  “Please, young man, sit. This is the third time you have come here, I recognise your stride. I suppose I put you off.”

  Nil does not answer, stands quietly, thinks of Smith next door, sitting naked in that wooden box of a room: he can hear him humming through the wall, or perhaps it is the pipes that carry it, an Irish ditty, Nil has heard it around town. He steps past the blind man, sits down in the corner, fingers the first of the locks.

  “You will ask yourself why they look like that. You see, it happened ten years ago, ten and a half. Yes, then. Somehow or other, I got Smoke in my eyes.” The man laughs quietly to himself, resumes his former position, bent forward on the bench, his jacket lying folded in his lap. His voice is soft, a gentle chewing at the words. The first locker opens under Nil’s fingers, but the clothes inside are not Smith’s.

  “And what is a blind man doing in a gymnasium, you may well ask! I often ask it myself. It’s the humidity, I think, good for my joints. And then I like the baths. I am Hungarian, you see, from Budapest. The baths are in my blood. For a nickel they let me sit here all day, next to the steam room. Out of the way. Only I mustn’t talk to the customers!” He laughs again, that same quiet, moist cackling, intimate and quite insane.

  “But it’s hard being quiet all day. You see, I have a secret, a wonderful secret, and there’s nothing like a secret for making a man want to talk. It’s this: I used to be famous. An inventor! Creating things that must not be. I was wanted by the secret police. They caught me once; asked me to work for them. An odd invitation, signed with a hammer.” Here he wiggles fingers that are grotesquely swollen at the knuckles, then slips them back onto his folded jacket. “But I will shut my mouth now, I can tell you are listening to someone else.”

  Indeed, Nil is. Sometime in between working open the second locker (no luck) and moving on to the third, he has heard a knock on the nearby door. Smith’s singing has stopped and Nil can hear the rhythm, if not the actual words, of an exchange of greetings. He rises, drawn to pipes that climb the wall here; steps up onto the bench and moves his head closer, chasing a whisper. The blind man reacts to Nil’s movement by scooting down the bench until he sits right at his feet. He reaches up with his hand, gently tapping one of the hot pipes. Nil leans forward and feels as though he is pressing an ear against the heat of an iron. There, in the pipe, he hears the rumble of Smith’s voice.

  “…feared you hadn’t received my telegram. But here you are, very punctual. Why not strip? There is a locker next door. No? Well, it’s your laundry bill. Go on, take the jacket off at least. You look like a prune.”

  Whoever has entered the steam room speaks in a voice that, although no quieter, is hard to catch. The only word Nil is sure of is “odd.” Smith responds with his everywhere English, tinny in the pipe.

  “You disapprove? What, too public? What could be more private than a building-full of random, sweaty men. Or is it too plebeian for you? We are safe here from my colleagues, at least.” Smith pauses, grows quieter, business-like. “Go on, give me the news.”

  Again Nil cannot make out the answer. The blind man at his feet can. He mouths it, has mouthed Smith’s words, too, a moist shaping of the lips. I haven’t found him, he mouths.

  The pipe responds.

  “No trace at all?”

  “Oh, I found his trace. Found where he lived, talked to four or five people who know him. But what good is that?” Somehow the blind man contrives to channel the man’s emotion, blasé and tired, unless it is his own contribution to the words. Nil has inched closer to him, stands stooped between hot duct and wet mouth.

  “Did he talk to anyone?”

  “That man Riedl. And one of the tongs. I think they tried to tail him themselves but he gave them the slip.”

  “He tried to sell to them?”

  “I don’t know. You won’t tell me what he stole, and the Chinamen don’t discourse with my kind. All I can tell you is that he made them curious.”

  Smith’s answer carries his frustration. “I wonder what he’s up to, our thief. I doubt it’s a ransom; he’d have been in touch by now.” Then he reverts to more neutral tones. “How about the players?”

  “Oh, I found them. Spread across three hotels; lying low. Here are the addresses.”

  “Leave them with my towel. Is the girl still with them?”

  “Yes.”

  “Good. And their plans?”

  “They’ve secured a berth to Liverpool. Leaving in three days. It’s all in my notes.”

  “Three days, eh? Well, if you can’t find the thief and since we don’t know what he’s planning…Better to act than to sit on my hands, you see. Time may turn out to be of the essence; and the girl is a stroke of luck…Do me a favour and let my ship know; quietly that is. The Hyperion, a Captain Pratt—tell him to get ready. But now you pull a face!”

  “I am a Pinkerton agent, not an errand boy,” whispers the blind man, his mouth sour and dank. A moment later the man next door has reconsidered. Nil wonders what happened in that moment. Did Smith make a show of displeasure, of money, of rage?

  “Very well, Mr. Smith. Pratt, the Hyperion, on the q.t. I’ll add it to the bill. Your work is done here then?”

  “Ah, now you want gossip! The agency likes to be informed, is that it? Well, why not. Yes, I’m done. There’s nothing wrong with Braithwaite’s books. He’s losing money as honestly as the next man. Ah, look at you crease your brow! You ask for gossip and now you think I’m being disloyal. What a funny parcel of values you run around with. Look here: you can hold faith with an idea. With destiny. With a wife, even. But with a company, bah! That’s feudalism, man. Next you’ll ask me to fall on my knee and kiss a ring.”

  Nil tries to picture the man thus addressed, sweating and taunted, but all he can see is the Hungarian’s mouth.

  “You’re not afraid to tell me all this?”

  “Afraid? Who are you going to tell? Braithwaite? The board of governors? Am I to be like the man who tries to hold in his fart when he’s having lunch with the poor relations? It’s his lunch, they are there for his money, and he’s to protect them from his stink? But look, now I’ve insulted you. You are a Pinkerton agent, not a poor relation. A proud man, only here you have sweated right through your clothes. You know what, you should strike out on your own. Found your own agency. Call it Pride and Principle, Private Investigators. Then you can tell people like me to go to hell.”

  [ 11 ]

  Next he knows, Nil hears the opening and closing of a door. He has but a moment to leap down from the bench and bury his face in the towel he’s been given. Nil hears footsteps racing past. Perhaps it is the man’s anger that saves him from discovery. A professional snoop, too hot, too baited by Smith, to give them any thought: a blind eccentric and a brown-skinned stranger, bent low over the bench, towelling off.

  The moment the Pinkerton man is gone, Nil drops the towel and starts picking the next lock. Who can say how much longer Smith will soak in heat, now that his business is concluded? Nil is in luck: the next cupboard holds Smith’s clothes and satchel. He moves very quickly now, reaches into his own knapsack to withdraw the perforated wooden box and places it without hesitation into the depths of Smith’s bag. He will feel its weight and notice it at once. And the b
eetle will live. Then Nil replaces the satchel in the locker, relocks the simple mechanism without trouble. Perhaps he is distracted by the sense of loss that jumps up at him the way the ground leaps at a falling man: Nil does not notice the blind man’s movement until he holds him by the wrist and hand. Those broken, arthritic fingers, strong as ropes. The voice remains quiet. His words are hard things on which he sucks, not bites, to save his teeth.

  “Are you a thief?” the man asks.

  Nil cringes, tugs at his wrist; is afraid of making a racket, of being caught by Smith. He calms himself, considers the man, identifies his need.

  “I’m like you,” Nil says, says it with a touch of Smoke that passes like currency between their palms. “All alone.”

  The blind man nods, holds on to Nil; rot in his eyes. “When it first happened, for the first month or two…I continued seeing. Things were just like they’d always seemed, vivid and real. But everything I saw was from the past.” He shudders, stands up, face-to-face with Nil. “Now I am used to the void.”

  And then the blind man kisses him, not at all lewdly, a quick, wet-lipped kiss on the ridge of his cheek. Nil runs away the moment he releases his hand.

  [ 12 ]

  The Hyperion. Captain Pratt. It takes repeat visits to convince him to hire Nil; false letters of reference; and a ship’s boy lost to the pleasures of the city thanks to a laudanum-laced drink. In the end this young lad who presents himself twice a day is simply too accommodating, too keen to see Albion, too amusing, quick-witted, good-humoured, and earnest, and too darn cheap for Pratt to hold out any longer.

  “Cabin boy,” he decides, “and general factotum. I’ll work your fingers to the bone.