The Technologists: A Novel

by Matthew Pearl

  There soon occurs a series of watch thefts, which cannot be reported to the guards, since the watches themselves are contraband. Marcus questions several men who have been there the longest about the physical intricacies of the warehouse and follows an assortment of clues to a cache of watches hidden in broken boards of the ceiling and also to evidence that reveals the culprit.

  When the man is brought before Marcus, the others tell him that, as police chief, he must deliver a punishment. Marcus is given a razor, one of the few weapons in their dungeon. He hesitates. If he refuses to mete out punishment, another man might be made police chief and punish Marcus for his failure to act, or renew the depredations of Marcus’s predecessor.

  “Hold him down.” he says. The man struggles, spits, and curses. Marcus shaves half his head and half of his beard and mustache. “You’ll be remembered by anyone who sees you,” he tells him. “It would be unwise to steal ever again.”

  The guards seldom enter; they, too, hate it here. The first time he sees the glaring eyes and red face of the comically short, stooped Rebel officer, he thinks there is a certain generosity and sadness reflected in his face. He cannot conceive the degree of hate he will later possess for this man. He wears a thick black beard and his eyes seem always in motion, rarely stopping long enough to make contact with those of another living being. Those on whom his gaze does come to rest soon regret it. When he speaks, his gestures are abrupt, choppy. Vicious. Marcus learns this is Captain Denzler, director of the prison. He comes after roll call whenever there is a missing man and takes one or more of the boys to question them.

  “You will not be laughing soon,” Denzler always says, though nobody is ever laughing. When those taken return, if they return, they are broken and silent.

  Marcus hears from others that Denzler was an engineer in the field before suffering an injury to his leg.

  He also likes to visit them with news of the war. He brings in Richmond newspapers and reads aloud, in his peculiar accent, of Rebel triumphs in battle. He also reads the reports of planned prisoner exchanges. Each report of an exchange results in the silent erasure from the prisoners’ minds of a hundred daring plans of escape.

  “Do you hear of the latest disease on our floor?” Frank Brewer asks Marcus.

  “Smallpox again?”

  “Exchange on the brain, Marcus.”

  Those who have been there longest have learned to be skeptical of any promises of release. When the scheduled day comes, there is always an excuse or reason for postponement. When Negro soldiers begin to be captured, the Rebel government refuses to trade any of them for their own white soldiers. Soon, the prospect of exchange will vanish again and new ideas for escape will emerge, until Captain Denzler reads another new announcement—surer always than before—promising release.

  When the first prisoners from the Negro regiments are brought to Smith, Denzler directs the other prisoners, “Make the damned niggers wait upon you. If they do not, lick them, or report them, and I will lick them.”

  Marcus knows, as chief of police, that he will have to protect the newcomers even if it puts him in danger. But while there are many among the prisoners who do not think Negroes have any place in the Federal army, no one follows Denzler’s edict—out of contempt for Denzler, or maybe respect for any fellow captured in uniform, Negro or not.

  Marcus and Frank are both known as good tinkerers, having been in companies that were shown how to rebuild bridges and railroads as they marched. They use the beef bones from rations to make rough spoons, buttons, and pocket knives for the men. Using his hands in this way for the first time since he put on the uniform of a soldier brings Marcus the wonderful and elusive feeling of accomplishment. When he works, he is alive and without doubt or guilt over his circumstances. Frank, whose health has gradually improved, makes pipes for his comrades, but Marcus can’t stand the thought of anything associated with tobacco. It is not the pipes that attract attention, but the intricate carvings Frank creates on them, picturing landscapes from home, battle scenes, and various favorite dogs described by the boys. Even the guards notice these, and begin trading laurel root and extra rations for them so they can show the “Yankee fixin’s” to their families back home.

  It is Marcus’s idea to begin taking parts out of the tobacco presses. The winter is upon them, and the sick suffer in the cold. They are given no heat. Marcus feels it his responsibility to rectify this. Frank helps him use the bolts and iron plates from the presses to build a fireplace that will not burn the floor. They can dismantle the device quickly when a guard approaches. It does not occur to them that they have started a sequence of events that will bring the full wrath of Captain Denzler down upon them.

  XVI

  Girl from the Galapagos

  IT WAS LATE AT NIGHT when he climbed the rickety stairs to the second floor and parted the same Venetian screen he remembered well. For the most part that feeling of familiarity ended there. He had not been to this place for at least three years and it stood obstinately without change, including a hard-looking crowd that might have been the very same who’d gathered in 1865 to make toasts to the fallen president of the United States. There had been many nights when being in this beer hall was far preferable to struggling to sleep. Now it felt as though he stepped into another country, an unwelcome alien.

  “Anything you wish? Beer?” asked a scantily dressed girl with a pretty English accent, who carried a tray of empty beer glasses.

  “I’m waiting for someone,” he said, offering her a smile as an apology. She moved on to other customers without a second glance.

  “Not waiting for me, I suppose, laddie,” a man’s voice said at his shoulder.

  Marcus’s hand was grabbed and held tightly before he could reclaim it. The grabber smiled, showing off the gap in his front teeth.

  “I do not believe we were formally presented at that crude lighting demonstration held by your institution Thursday last.”

  “My name is Mansfield. I know who you are. Roland Rapler. I’ve seen you gather your flock here before. I have my own affairs that bring me.”

  The man, garbed in full military dress, as he had been at the demonstration, looked him over intently. “I can feel in your hands you were not born to be a college student. You worked in a mill or a machine shop, I’d wager.”

  “I’d guess you could find out if you wished,” Marcus said. “If you haven’t already.”

  Rapler’s smile was a confession. “The injury to your hand: Was it from the machines?”

  “This? It was from meeting the face of a fellow a little too hard, actually.”

  “That species of violence,” Rapler said coolly, “runs against my principles.”

  “Your principles include throwing rocks and destroying private property?”

  The man was slow to lose his composure and quick to speechify, a mixture of polished eloquence and common vulgarisms. “We command attention, at the cost of manners, sometimes, yes. But you fire into the wrong flock, laddie. Invention after invention, and do you trust every one of your peers with their knowledge? The man who invented a weaving machine was strangled and drowned three hundred years ago because it was believed his creation would turn workingmen into beggars. We do not question the need for invention or try to stifle it. But when science finally runs away with man, it will surely blow up the whole world before it’s done. Apprenticeship already has been replaced by machinery. My people want machines to aid our labor, aye, but every minute we spend around them hazards turning the balance, as we become more and more mechanical. When the machine unmans its user, science becomes suicide.”

  “When you stop the mind from inventing, you stop nature,” Marcus countered.

  Rapler delicately drew the kid-leather glove from his left hand. Underneath, where his thumb and first two fingers belonged, were stumps. He flexed the remaining two fingers and looked upon them with a mixture of longing and pride. “Who invented the shell that blew my fingers to bits, laddie?” Rapler did no
t lose his intent grin. “You see, Mr. Mansfield, I shan’t work on a shop floor. But once I did, and now I can do all in my power to see that the people who do are protected. When I was recovering from my wounds I read all about history, the stories of great men and the first leaders. I wear this uniform because I am still in battle—for the men you see in this room, and their sisters in labor, across New England. Now all of Boston sees the terrific danger of science used without constraint. Where a few months ago, I would see a dozen chums at my gatherings, after these disasters I see a hundred, two hundred new faces.”

  Marcus had seen plenty of injuries both in war and on the machine floors. But he could not resist watching the last two fingers of the hand divide, come together, bend, and straighten. In surrendering to the sight, he had also surrendered their contest of wits to Rapler.

  On the other side of the room, piano music came to a stop and was replaced by light applause.

  “Marcus!”

  Marcus turned and saw Frank Brewer coming through the screen. “Mr. Rapler, if you do not mind,” Marcus said.

  Rapler nodded farewell, replacing his glove before excusing himself. “Remember the march of improvement must somewhere come to a stop, laddie, before it tramples us. When it does, I wager you’ll be on the right side.”

  “Sorry to be out of season, Marcus,” said Frank, adjusting the bag that was slung over his shoulder.

  “I wasn’t waiting long,” Marcus assured him, then looked over at Rapler. “Nor did I grow lonely.”

  “Mr. Brewer—a loyal machine man if ever there was!” Rapler sang out as a greeting.

  “Loyal to Chauncy Hammond for employing me, not to some unionist dolt,” Frank replied, more to Marcus than to the union leader. “Come along, Marcus.”

  They sat at a table in an empty section of the beer hall. The man in front of the piano was bowing left, right, and center.

  “Were you able …” Marcus began, then changed his mind. “Frank, perhaps I shouldn’t have asked for this. I would not place your position at the machine shop at risk.”

  “Marcus, as your friend, I order you to shut up.” Under the table, he opened his bag and took out a smaller canvas bag that he pushed to Marcus’s feet. “I did it as soon as I got your dreadful serious note. What do you need this for so urgently?”

  He could remember being in the same beer hall the evening of his final day on the machine shop floor. Frank had seemed withdrawn and cool to him that night, and when he finally asked the matter, Frank pulled him into a corner. “You’ll go to that place, that college of theirs, they’ll chew on you and spit you back and it will show once and for all … well, perhaps we are meant to be machine men forever!” It was not clear which prospect troubled him most, that Marcus might be misled, or that their established standings in society would be confirmed.

  “If that is the case, I will come back to the floor wiser for it,” he had reassured Frank, though it was Marcus who needed someone to reassure him as he was about to cross the once-unimagined threshold into being a collegey.

  Back at the same ill-lit chamber, only a few feet away from the spot of that conversation, he let an exhale escape at Frank’s question about the favor his old friend had just done for him. “You probably wouldn’t believe it if I explained, Frank.”

  “I see,” Frank replied in a softer tone of voice. “I suppose I might not understand, anyway.”

  “Frank, it’s not that!”

  “No?” Frank brightened again.

  “It’s only that it’s something I have to do on my own, that I am probably mad to even try. But I cannot see my way to not trying.”

  “Ain’t it like a college student,” marveled Frank, laughing with excitement as though he were his partner in the enterprise.

  “How do you mean?”

  “Intrigue and abstraction!”

  “I suppose. For now, I can only thank you for helping, though I know that’s not enough. One day soon, I vow I’ll be able to explain it all.”

  “I’ll be all ears.” Frank smiled and changed the subject. “Can I show you something while we’re hanging ’round the lower crust? Been working on some new statues.”

  “You should start selling them. Maybe have one placed in a museum.”

  “Some chance of that!” Frank said, laughing. “Imagine me being given the chance to be a famous sculptor! No, but I have a new one I thought you’d like to see,” he said, barely suppressing a proud grin.

  He removed a bronze statuette from his bag. It was of Ichabod Crane riding a horse in full flight, representing the moment from the Irving story when the schoolteacher flees for his life from the specter of the haunted horseman.

  Marcus looked up at him in surprise.

  “For years, I have been called Ichabod for my loose limbs and long neck.” Marcus began to protest the point, but Frank spoke over him, still smiling cheerfully. “That’s not me anymore, Marcus. You see? I have a plan now to change, with your inspiration.”

  “Mine?”

  “That’s not me, being under the thumb of someone else’s judgment,” he said wistfully, nodding to the statue, “and I want you to keep it in case I ever need a reminder once I take the plunge at Tech.”

  “What’s that one?”

  There was another head sticking out from Frank’s bag. “Oh, this! I thought you might have a laugh about this one. Do you recognize him?” Frank removed the figure and held it up.

  “Why, it’s Hammie!” Marcus exclaimed after a moment of study. The miniature sculpture showed the unmistakable figure of Hammie in a soldier’s uniform with one leg thrust forward, as if taking a step into battle. “In a soldier’s dress.”

  “Imagine that. Mr. Hammond asked that I sculpt his family, and requested that I show Hammie in military garments, I suppose to placate the spoiled brat’s giant ego, though he never came close to volunteering. But when your employer asks for a sculpture …” Frank’s line of thought drifted away.

  Marcus could tell how bothered Frank was by Hammond’s directive. “Well, I thank you for the Ichabod Crane. I’ll treasure it especially.”

  “Two beers!” Frank called out loudly to the girl. “You remember this fellow at the piano? He sings quite well—about girls left behind on the Galapagos Isle, that sort of balderdash. Stay. We’ll play a game of cards, just you and me, ex parte, like during our dinners at the machine shop. Which game do you favor these days?”

  Marcus shook his head. “I shouldn’t, if I am to be prepared for class in the morning. There is one other thing, Frank. I wanted to apologize if I seemed cool toward you when I came into the machine shop.”

  His face coloring, Frank said, “No, I called attention to your bad hand in front of your friends, Marcus. I didn’t think first—as usual. I’m to blame. Did Mr. Hammond say anything to you when he spoke to you after that? You don’t think he heard me telling you I was ready for something better than working for him? After arriving late that day to the shop, I don’t look to call down more of his ire, at least not until he finds out I’m through there.”

  “No, I don’t think he heard,” Marcus said, knowing his friend must have been severely troubled by the prospect for the last week. He didn’t want to repeat Hammond’s remark about Frank being born to be in a machine shop. “He mostly spoke about Hammie, actually.”

  “Hammie!” The return to that topic creased Frank’s brow. “I think you should keep your guard around that fellow. Mr. Hammond is a strong man; he sees into the future everywhere he looks. But he sees not his own son. He is like a father to us at the shop, and we are his sons more than Hammie can ever be. That fellow … well, don’t believe the mask, Marcus.”

  “Hammond might expect Hammie to be someone that is not possible for him, Frank.”

  “I suppose that is the way with fathers sometimes. Not mine, though. Ha! He always expected me to accomplish nothing, just like him. You are lucky, in a way, my friend. You could imagine yours however you wished, rather than having to answer to a man
who could not understand you, even on the day he died.”

  “I suppose,” Marcus answered quietly.

  “I wanted to ask you about something but …” Frank waved his own comment away. “You’ll think I’m stark-raving distracted. Just me and my phantasms.”

  “Tell me.”

  “Sometimes, Marcus, in the streets and crowds around Boston I look out and see … his face, savage, watching me, warning me. I convince myself he found me.”

  “He? You mean Denzler.” Marcus said the name with a shudder. They never talked about Denzler or Smith Prison, not since the early weeks after returning, when Frank helped secure Marcus a place at the locomotive works. It was an unspoken pact to trust the future would be better than the past.

  Frank looked down at the floor, which was covered in sawdust boot-prints. “Yes, Marcus. I mean Denzler.” His voice broke on the word. “I see him at a distance, or think I do. My heart flies, I feel danger all around. I try to give chase, but he always vanishes before I reach him.”

  Denzler still occupied Marcus’s nightmares sometimes, and so did the ghosts of their fellow prisoners who did not survive, or survived as shadows of themselves. But to speak about it aloud seemed to invite its control over his nights. “I heard he fled to Germany to escape any trials,” Marcus said, as though repeating a newspaper report distant from his own life.

  “I heard that, too. But what if it is not true? It sets my teeth on edge to think of him, even the possibility that he could walk among us. It makes a man want to do something more, while there’s time enough. You know … I’m going to do it, Marcus!” he said with the excitement of a new idea.