by Louis Bayard
A whistle sounded, and the steam blew up in a shroud as the roustabouts took their places along the gangplanks, and I could see, fluttering like an aspen leaf, a tiny skiff—weighed down by bodies and luggage—being lowered to the water. More tourists bent on swarming into Sylvanus Thayer’s kingdom. I leaned toward them, trying to fix them in my sights . . .
Only to find them peering back at me.
Their faces were tilted upward, yes, their opera glasses and binoculars were trained on my window. I rose from my chair and stepped back . . . back . . . until they had nearly dropped from view, and still I could feel them chasing me into the room, and I was all set to slam down the sash and close the shutters after it when I caught sight of a hand—a single human hand—clawing its way onto the lintel.
I didn’t cry out. It’s doubtful I even budged. The only feeling I recall is a bare curiosity, of the sort I suppose an infantryman must feel as he contemplates the cannonball that is about to meet his head. I stood there in the center of the room and watched as another hand—the twin of the first—seized the lintel. I heard a small deep molish grunt, and I waited, scarcely breathing, as an upside-down leather pot, slightly askew, pushed its way into the window frame. Followed by a damp fringe of black hair and two large gray eyes, staring and straining, and two nostrils dilated with effort. And oh, yes, two lovely rows of teeth, gritting hard.
Cadet Fourth Classman Poe, at my service.
Without a word, he hauled his torso through the open window . . . paused there a bit to catch his breath . . . and then dragged his legs after him, crawling forward on his arms until he landed in a heap on the floor. At once, he sprang to his feet, lifted his hat to give his hair a swipe, and once again proffered me that European bow.
“My apologies for being late,” he said, panting. “I hope I haven’t kept you too long.”
I stared at him.
“Our meeting,” he said. “Directly after chapel, as you suggested.”
I went to the window and looked down. It was a three-story drop— followed by a hundred-foot incline—ending in rocks and river.
“You fool,” I said. “You damned fool.”
“It was you who insisted I come in daylight hours, Mr. Landor. How else was I to escape notice?”
“Escape notice?” I slammed the sash down. “You don’t think every last soul on that steamer noticed you? Crawling up a hotel? I wouldn’t be surprised if an Army guard’s already been dispatched.”
I strode to the door and actually waited there, as though at any second the bombardiers must come storming through. And when they didn’t, I could feel (with some disappointment) my anger falling away in tatters. The best I could do was mutter:
“You might have been killed.”
“Oh, the drop’s not so bad as all that,” he said, all business now. “And at the risk of exalting myself, Mr. Landor, I must tell you that I’m an excellent swimmer. When I was fifteen, I swam seven miles and a half in the James River, under a hot June sun and against a tide of three miles per hour. Next to that, Byron’s little paddle across the Hellespont was child’s play.”
Wiping his brow, he sank into the spindle-backed rocking chair by the window and sat there yanking on his fingers, one by one, until the knuckles cracked—not unlike the sound Leroy Fry’s digits made when I broke them.
“Please tell me,” I said, lowering myself onto the end of the bed. “How did you know which room was mine?”
“I saw you from below. Needless to say, I tried to catch your eye, but you were too engrossed. At any rate, I am pleased to report that I have successfully decoded your message.”
Reaching inside his coat, he drew out the scrap of paper, still stiff from its alcohol bath. Carefully unfolding it, he spread it across the bed and, kneeling on his haunches, ran his index finger along the rows of letters.
NG
HEIR A
T BE L
ME S
“Shall I begin by limning the stages of my deductive labors for you, Mr. Landor?” He didn’t wait for a yes. “We begin with the note itself. What may we say of it? Being handwritten, it is patently of a personal nature. Leroy Fry had it with him at the time of his death; from that we may presume this note was sufficient to draw him from his barracks on the night in question. Given that the rest of the message was torn from his hand, we may presume that the note in some way identified its sender. The use of rather primitive block capitals would also indicate that the sender wished to disguise his identity. What are we to infer from these points? Might this note have been an invitation of sorts? Or might we more accurately call it a trap?”
He paused just a bit before that last word. Enough to make it obvious how much he was enjoying this.
“With that in mind,” he continued, “we concentrate our labors on the third line of our mysterious fragment. We are rewarded here with the one word that we know, for a fact, is complete: be. The English lexicography harbors few simpler or more declarative words, Mr. Landor. Be. This immediately places us, I conceive, in the terrain of imperatives. The sender would bid Leroy Fry be something. ‘Be’ what? Something that begins with an l. ‘Little?’ ‘Lucky?’ ‘Lascivious?’ None of these gibes with the nature of an invitation. ‘Be lost?’ Too ungainly a construction. Surely one gets lost, one loses one’s way. No, if in fact Leroy Fry’s attendance was desired at a particular time and place, there is but one word that can suffice: late.”
He held out his hand, as though the letters were resting in his palm.
“Two words, then, Mr. Landor: be late. A bizarre request to affix to any invitation. Late was the last thing our sender should have wished Leroy Fry to be. Ergo, as we scan this third line, we can only conclude that we are in the midst of a negative construction. And with that, the identity of that first word becomes almost insultingly simple to deduce: don’t. Don’t be late.”
He stood now and began pacing round the bed.
“Time, in short, is of the essence. And what better way to make that clear than with the fourth and, as far as we know, final line? A reinforcement of that earlier message. Begin with this enigmatic me. Is it a word unto itself, in the manner of the aforementioned be? Or is it, as I believe its position indicates, the latter portion of a larger word? Assuming the second case, we need not journey far to find a suitable candidate. Leroy Fry might be going to this predetermined location, but to the sender, Fry was—do you anticipate me, Mr. Landor?—he was coming.” He extended his hand in a beckoning motion. “Come, Mr. Fry. With that in place, it is the height of simplicity to deduce the next word. Can it be any other than soon? We insert the word, et voilà! Our little message reveals itself at last: Don’t be late, come soon. Or even, depending on the degree of urgency, come soonest.” He clapped his hands together and bowed his head. “And there you have it, Mr. Landor. The solution to our petit énigme. Respectfully submitted.”
He was expecting something—applause, maybe. A gratuity? a blast of cannon? All I did was pick up the scrap of paper and smile.
“Oh, this is first-rate work, Mr. Poe. Absolutely first-rate. I do thank you.”
“And I thank you,” he said, “for offering me such a pleasing diversion.” Easing himself back into the rocker, he planted one of his boots on the windowsill. “However short-lived,” he added.
“No, it was my pleasure. Truly, it was my . . . oh, there’s just one thing, Mr. Poe.”
“Yes?”
“Did you have any luck with the first two lines?”
He gave me a wave of his hand. “No getting anywhere with those,” he said. “The first line contains but two letters. As for the second, the only possible choice is their. A word begging for an antecedent, which sadly is lost to us. I was forced to declare the first two lines a loss, Mr. Landor.”
“Hmm.” I went to the bedside table and pulled out a stack of cream-colored paper and a pen. “I wonder, Mr. Poe, are you a good speller?”
He raised himself up a little. “I was judged a flawless speller by n
o less an authority than the Reverend John Bransby of Stoke Newington.”
You see? No simple yeses or nos with him. Everything had to be freighted down with allusions, appeals to authority . . . and what authority was this? John Bransby? Stoke Newington?
“So I take it you’ve never done what so many of us do,” I said.
“And that is . . . ?”
“Confuse the spelling of similar-sounding words. By which I mean, for example, their,” I said, writing out the word so he could see it. “And they’re . . . oh, and there.”
He bent his face over the paper, then shrugged.
“An abysmally common solecism, Mr. Landor. My roommate commits it ten times a day—or would if he wrote his own letters.”
“Well, then, what if our note-writer were, say, more like your roommate and less like you? What might we have then?” I crossed out their and circled there. “An invitation indeed, eh, Mr. Poe? Meet me there. Oh, but we run up against another word, don’t we? Beginning with an a.”
Squinting down again, he ran the letter along his lips. A few more seconds before he said, in a tone of wonder:
“At.”
“At, of course! Why, I wouldn’t be surprised if there had been a time following hard on: Meet me there at eleven P.M., something of that sort, That would be direct enough, wouldn’t it? But, now if our sender did set a specific time, I’m not sure he’d be asking Fry in that fourth line to come soon. Bit of a contradiction, isn’t it? Maybe Come see me would be closer to the mark.”
Poe gazed dully at the paper. Quiet he was.
“There’s only one problem,” I said. “ We still don’t know where they were to meet, do we? And all we have to go on is those two letters, n and g. Now the curious thing about that letter combination—as I’m sure you’ve noticed, Mr. Poe—is that it turns up quite often at the ends of words. I wonder, can you think of any place on the Academy grounds that might have an ng trailing behind?”
He looked out the window, as though the answer might be framed there—and found that it was.
“The landing,” he answered.
“The landing! Now that, Mr. Poe, is an excellent choice. I’ll meet you at the landing. Oh, but there are two landings, aren’t there? Both guarded by the Second Artillery, as I understand it. Not much in the way of privacy, eh?”
He gave that some thought. Looked at me once or twice before venturing to speak again.
“There’s a cove,” he said at last. “Not too far from the North Landing. It’s where Mr. Havens brings his wares.”
“Where—where Patsy brings them, you mean. Ah, then it must be a rather secluded sort of place. Would it be known to your fellow cadets?”
He shrugged. “Anyone who’s ever smuggled in beer or whiskey knows about it.”
“Well, then, we have—for now—a solution to our little puzzle. I’ll be at the cove by the landing. Meet me there at eleven P.M. Don’t be late. Come see me. Yes, that’ll do quite nicely for the time being. Leroy Fry receives this invitation. He finds himself obliged to accept. And if we’re to believe Mr. Stoddard’s testimony, he accepts it with a light heart. We might even believe he was glad to accept this invitation. ‘Necessary business,’ he says, winking in the dark. Does that suggest anything to you, Mr. Poe?”
Something curved around his lips; one of his eyebrows went up like a kite.
“To me,” he said, “it suggests a woman.”
“Ah. A woman, yes. That’s an awfully interesting theory. And of course, with the letter being written as it was—in block capitals, as you say— there’d be no good way of knowing the sender’s sex, would there? So Leroy Fry may well have set off that evening believing that a woman was awaiting him at the cove by the landing. And for all we know, a woman was waiting.” Lowering myself onto the bed, I propped a pillow behind me and leaned back against the headboard. I stared at my scuffed boots. “Well,” I said, “that’s a problem for another day. In the meantime, Mr. Poe, I can’t . . . I mean to say, I’m so grateful for your assistance.”
If I was expecting him to accept my thanks and quietly leave . . . well, I don’t think I ever expected that.
“You knew,” he said, quietly.
“Knew what, Mr. Poe?”
“The solution to the puzzle. You knew it all along.”
“I had an idea, that’s all.”
He was silent for a long while, and I wondered then if I’d lost him for good. He might bridle at the notion of someone’s getting the better of him. He might accuse me of using him for sport (and weren’t you, Landor?). Might even sever the tie altogether.
In fact, he did none of those things. His climbing had taxed him more than he let on, and he stayed quite still in his rocker, never once even rocking—and when I sent remarks his way, he answered them simply, with no ill will or need to embroider. We passed an hour in this way, saying very little at first and then, as he got his strength back, talking more and more of Leroy Fry.
I’ve always regretted that the people most likely to tell you about a dead man are the people who knew him least—that is, the ones who knew him in the last months of his life. To unlock a man’s secrets, I’ve always thought, you must go back to that day when he was six and wet his pantaloons in front of the schoolmistress, or to the first time his hand found its way to his nether parts . . . the small shames driving us on to the big ones.
At any rate, the only thing Leroy Fry’s cadet friends could agree on was that he was quiet and had to be drawn out. I told Poe what Loughborough had said about Fry’s falling in with his “bad bunch” and then seeking the comforts of religion, and we asked ourselves what sort of comfort he might have been seeking on the night of October the twenty-fifth.
And then our talk turned to other matters . . . sundry topics . . . I couldn’t tell you what they were because at around two in the afternoon, I fell asleep. Strangest thing. One minute I was talking—a bit lazy in the head, but talking. Next minute I was sitting in a dusky room—a place I’d never been before. A bat or a bird fluttered behind the curtains; a woman’s petticoat grazed my arm. The air was frigid on my knuckles, and something was pricking my nostrils, and a vine was swinging from the ceiling, grazing the bald space on my head, and it had the feel of fingers.
I woke with a gulp of air . . . to find him still watching me. Cadet Fourth Classman Poe, at my service. A look of biding he had, as though I’d been in the middle of a joke or a story.
“Very sorry,” I mumbled.
“Not at all.”
“Don’t know what . . .”
“Never fear, Mr. Landor, I myself must be contented with no more than four hours of sleep a night. The consequences have on occasion been dire. One night, I fell dead asleep during guard duty and remained for a whole hour in a somnambulistic trance, during which I evidently came within a whisker of firing on another cadet.”
“Well,” I said, standing. “Before I start firing on cadets myself, I should be getting on. I want to get home before nightfall.”
“I’d like to see it sometime. Your home.”
He spoke lightly and never once looked at me. As though to say whether or not I honored his request was a matter of huge indifference to him.
“It would give me the greatest pleasure,” I said, watching him brighten.
“And now, Mr. Poe, if you would please leave by the door and then by the stairs, you would spare an old man a great deal of unnecessary worry.”
He rocked himself out of the chair, then drew himself up in stages. “Not so very old,” he said.
And now it was my turn to brighten: the faintest flush in my cheeks. Who could have guessed I’d be so easy to flatter?
“You’re very kind, I’m sure, Mr. Poe.”
“Not at all.”
I expected him to leave then, but he had other ideas in mind. Once more he reached into his coat. Once more he drew out a piece of paper—a more elegant specimen, folded once—which he opened to reveal a fine regular cursive. He could barely suppress t
he tremor in his voice as he said, “If it is indeed a woman we seek, Mr. Landor, I believe I may be credited with a sighting of her.”
“Is that so?”
It was, I would soon learn, one of his tics, the way his voice dropped in volume as he became more excited, lowering to a buzzing, crackling mutter, veiled and not always intelligible. On this particular occasion, though, I heard every word.
“The morning after Leroy Fry’s death,” he said, “before I knew anything of what had passed, I awoke and at once began inditing the opening lines of a poem—lines that speak of a mysterious woman and an obscure but profound distress. Here you see the result.”