Suspension

by Richard E. Crabbe

  Matt had to hide his smile again, and Earl kicked him under the table to get him to pay attention as the captain droned on, his back to them as he went over a diagram on the wall. Earl gave him a quizzical frown as Matt chuckled at his shitty memory.

  Maybe this was a sign, he remembered thinking. Maybe God was punishing him. The captain could talk all he wanted about God’s will, but maybe the captain didn’t know God’s will from a stump. Maybe this indignity meant that the stain on his soul could never be wiped away. Maybe he had sold his soul to the devil himself and that devil was the captain. He imagined himself in hell, and it didn’t seem much different from that pitch-black caisson, twenty-five feet below the bottom of the East River. But then a copy of Harper’s sailed out of the inky blackness, landing at his feet. His eyes couldn’t pierce the dark. He was about to call out when a voice spoke from the dark.

  “First day?” The voice startled him with its closeness. “You’ll get used to it.” The barest glimpse of a shadow flitted across the doorway to the chamber beyond. Matt couldn’t be sure he had even seen it. He called out his thanks, but there had been no answer. Matt was pretty sure that it wasn’t God that tossed him a copy of Harper’s, but he couldn’t shake the possibility.

  He and Earl had survived their first day in purgatory, and a few months later, they lit a fire that nearly brought the bridge down and came close to killing Washington Roebling in the process. McDonald was the man they framed for it. His body still lay where they’d buried him, somewhere in the lonely marshlands of Brooklyn.

  Matt was lost in his memories when he heard the captain say in a low voice, “Emmons! We’re not keeping you from anything important, are we?”

  “Duh … I mean, no, sir,” Matt stumbled.

  “Good. Now that we have everyone’s attention, I was saying that we have nearly all the information we need, thanks to Corporal Jacobs, who has been good enough to liberate plans, specifications, order forms, letterhead stationery, et cetera, et cetera.”

  Jacobs smiled thinly and gave a small nod, gazing over the tops of glasses that clung to the bridge of his nose. They seemed about to fall in his lap, but that was nothing new. They gave the little man a schoolmarmish look. Behind his glasses, his bow tie, and clerk’s demeanor was a most vicious little man. Jacob’s slight build and medium height belied his real gifts. His eyes, small, black, and unblinking, were the only window to the real man. Usually they were taken to be the eyes of a bureaucrat. In reality, they more closely resembled the eyes of the razorback pigs he hunted as a boy in east Texas.

  Throughout the war he never took a prisoner. Earl had asked him about it once, at the end of a day when he saw Jacobs run his bayonet through the throat of a wounded Union sergeant.

  “Waste of time,” Jacobs had said. “Takes men to guard ’em, wagons and trains to haul them to camps, and food to keep them alive, things the Confederacy has precious little of. It’s just economics.”

  Bart had been a bank clerk before the war. Despite that, most men he had served with knew him to be bloodthirsty beyond all logic and reason. “Cold as the grave,” someone had once said, out of Jacobs’s earshot, of course. Earl was the closest thing to him in their little group, but where Earl was callous, he wasn’t inhuman, and that was a word that fit Bart Jacobs like a coffin. The rest of the men called him Weasel, part because of his size and his pinched, tight-lipped expression, part because he had the unsettling habit of going for the throat. Of course, nobody called him Weasel to his face, leastways not if they didn’t want a second windpipe.

  Being an unremarkable little man, Weasel blended into a crowd better than anyone. He was a good clerk too and was much valued by the bosses in the bridge offices. He worked hard, stayed late, and over the years he had slowly stolen or made precise copies of most of the plans he thought they’d need and a bunch more that they’d never use. Weasel was very thorough.

  “As you know,” the captain said, looking at Weasel, “we have been ordering copies of various components from the very manufacturers that are contracted to make them for the bridge. Some steel, for example, has come from Roebling’s own mills in Trenton. I take particular satisfaction from that. The idea that Roebling’s own company would contribute to our plans is sweet irony indeed.” There were chuckles around the table.

  “Our brothers in Richmond have been very supportive over the years. They have been busy testing the components we send them.” Glances were exchanged around the table. They all knew that the captain had shadowy backers in the South, but who they were was known only to him. Most figured it was the Klan. Nathan Bedford Forrest had testified in ’71, before a congressional committee, that he had disbanded the Klan, which nobody really believed. Forrest, the original Grand Wizard, was a legend by any standards. During the war he had thirty horses shot from under him and killed thirty-one men in hand-to-hand combat. His battles were becoming required study in military colleges around the world. When he died, a few years before, 20,000 mourners attended his funeral.

  “Their backing and assistance, combined with the proceeds from my cotton business, have helped fund our operations as well. The purchase, shipment, and testing have been expensive. By Jacobs’s reckoning we have spent somewhere over $110,000 to date.” A low whistle and a few raised eyebrows marked the reaction to that number. When most of them earned no more than $14 a week, $110,000 was an astronomical figure. “Would you put a price on justice?” Thaddeus asked, outraged that any of them would balk at such an expenditure. “Speak up. Who among you would sell your brother for less? Emmons? Watkins?”

  “Just a heap o’ money, Cap’n. That’s all,” Watkins said, trying to shrug it away. He was immediately sorry he opened his mouth.

  “That’s where you’re wrong, Watkins. It’s nothing. It’s less than nothing. Measure it against a life … your life, for example. What’s your life worth? Surely for you, Watkins, it’s worth infinitely more, immeasurably more. Isn’t that so?” The captain’s eyes were hard again, and they bored in on Watkins who seemed to shrink before the heat of his gaze. The rest looked at their hands, or they looked at the grain in the oak of the tabletop, but they didn’t look at the captain’s eyes. “Isn’t that so, Watkins?” Thaddeus pressed his point. He would spend anything to accomplish his mission. Money was nothing against that.

  “A man can’t put a price on his own life,” Watkins said defensively. He almost thought the captain might shoot him right there in front of the others from the look on his face. At that thought, an idea occurred to him. Watkins started to think it through.

  “But you find it easier to put a price on others?” the captain shot back. Silence. They waited for the storm to pass.

  “We lost five hundred ninety-seven men, killed, wounded, and missing, at Gettysburg alone. They were our friends. They had families and children. Who among us doesn’t mourn them, and all the hundreds of others fallen on so many other fields? So don’t speak to me of money,” he boomed at Watkins. “It’s money and the lust for it that has infected the Yankees. Let it twist us … pervert us from our goals, and we’ll be no better than they. We have a higher calling, a noble cause. Greenbacks have no part in it.”

  The captain was no fool, though. He knew that even though his small group was as dedicated as any men could be, there was a limit to how long men would work for a cause that didn’t put any money in their pockets. They were not fighting for their homeland, after all. The war was over and they were in the North, where prosperity blossomed all around them. Commerce boomed and bustled. Great buildings and great fortunes were built up seemingly overnight. Although there was poverty to spare, there was glittering progress as well. Money coursed through the veins of the city in great pulses of green.

  “But there will be reward, make no mistake,” Thaddeus said, softening his tone. “There are those in the South who will shower us with gold when our mission is done. Rest assured, men, there will be ample reward. I personally know this to be true. We are not the only ones who wish to
see a reckoning with the North. Riches beyond imagining will flow to us when this is over. Besides that, our investment in the ferry company will, no doubt, pay handsomely too.” The captain smiled conspiratorially. Grins ringed the table as visions of riches swam through their heads. There was one smile, though, that was a grim twist of the lips. There was no light of anticipation in those eyes. Nobody seemed to notice.

  Justice K. Lincoln had known the captain for longer than anyone else at the table. He knew the captain well enough to see when he was shoveling it thick—maybe so thick he believed it himself. Hell, they’d be lucky to get out alive. He guessed his best chance would be to book a steamer to Europe. Germany seemed a likely place for a soldier of fortune. A fine military tradition, friction between the many German states and principalities, the ever-present troubles with Poland and France seemed a perfect formula for an enterprising military man. If that didn’t pan out, there were the English. They were always fighting somewhere. The one thing he wouldn’t and couldn’t do was go south. Any fool knew that.

  Lincoln; that name had been a burden to him. Family legend had it that he was even related somewhere way back to the great man himself, not that Justice considered him a great man. He had been the butt of so many jokes and so much abuse during the years in the regiment that he ended up fighting just about every man who mocked him, regardless of size, rank, or station. For a while it became a sport in the regiment. But in the end, Justice K. Lincoln had earned their respect—not for his skill as a boxer, but for his courage and determination. For the regiment, the name of Lincoln was an odd mixture of curse and praise, and for Justice, with his flattened nose and battered face, that seemed just about right.

  He had enlisted the same day as the captain and his brother. Of course, Thaddeus hadn’t been the captain then. It wasn’t till later, just before Chancellorsville, he had become the Captain of Company B of the Fifth Texas volunteers, of Robertson’s Brigade, Hood’s Division. Lincoln knew him best, of course, from their early years together, when they sat around campfires at night, drying their socks, telling yarns, or boiling coffee. That was in the days when they still had coffee. They had a lot of things then that they were to lose later.

  They spoke of a few more things that night: about the detective who’d been seen at the murder scene—what he knew, whether he should be eliminated. It was decided to wait a bit, see what he had learned, if anything. They agreed there was no need yet to kill him, not at least until they knew more. They could deal with him at any time, if need be.

  It was getting late, though, and there was work in the morning. The others had gone out the office door, when the captain had a last, whispered word with Lebeau.

  “Find the boy, Earl,” he said forcefully. “We need to know what he knows.” Earl frowned his agreement. “Scare him, cut him if you have to, but get the truth.” The captain added something else in a whisper. Earl smiled after a moment, then he simply nodded and followed the others out.

  The captain watched from his office window. He was wondering about the sergeant. Sullivan hadn’t said much that night. Probably just in a mood, he thought. Patrick could be like that sometimes. They were all tired too, as the ache behind his eyes reminded him. He watched as the six of them walked up Water Street, moving in and out of the halo of the gas lamps. Like ghost men, their footfalls echoed on the cobbles, falling dead in the heavy, March night air. There was just a bit of a mist crawling in from the river, snaking its way down alleys and side streets. They passed from the light of a streetlamp, and the mist sucked them into the darkness.

  Mike Bucklin was struggling down the blackened stairway of his building. It was real late. Even though he felt like lying down and dying, he was doing what his grandma had asked. The bucket that Gramps used was full. Gramps was far too weak to make it down to the outhouse, back of the building, so the bucket was the only choice. Mike had forgotten about it in all the commotion of hearing about his da. He had forgotten about most everything. He was numb. His family was gone … all of them. As he lugged the sloshing pail down the coal-black stairs and out through the hallway on the first floor, he wondered if things could possibly get worse. He didn’t think so.

  The moon was a yellow slash cut in the blue-black sky. It peered over the top of the building behind as he went out to the outhouses. As soon as he stepped out the door he could smell them. They’d have to emptied soon. The night-soilers would come and haul it all away. That was about the worst job in the world, Mike figured, even worse than rag-picking. It helped a little to think that someone had it worse than he. He opened one of the creaking wooden doors in the row of outhouses, holding his breath so the stink didn’t knock him over. As fast as he could, he emptied the bucket, trying not to splash too much but knowing he did. He hurried to finish before he had to take another breath and knocked the bucket against the side of the gaping black hole to get out the last of it. Then Mike turned and got out as fast as he could, slamming the door behind him. Before he’d taken another step, an arm came out of the blackness and clamped around his neck with terrifying force. Mike was pulled off balance and dragged between a gap in the outhouses. The foul air of the jakes seemed suddenly precious as he struggled to fill his lungs. Panic gripped him so hard he couldn’t think. The arm held him like a vise.

  “Quit yer strugglin’, ya little bastard,” a voice above him said. That was about the last thing Mike figured he’d do. Instead, he slammed his foot down as hard as he could, and was rewarded with a curse as he hit a big foot. The arm didn’t let go though, so he tried it again. This time he missed, but was slammed into the wall of the outhouse for his attempt.

  “One more trick out o’ you, an’ you’ll be whistling ‘Dixie’ with your daddy,” the voice said, low and menacing. The moon shone dully off a long, sharpened line of steel as it flashed before his eyes. The arm had him pinned against the wall, an immovable weight pressing against his throat. Mike stood still, frozen with fear. He almost couldn’t breathe he was so scared.

  “That’s better. Just wanted to have a little talk, is all.” The voice sounded conversational, but the pressure on his throat didn’t let up. “You know what happened to your daddy.” This was not a question. “He made a mistake, your dad. I’m here to see if he made any others we don’t know about. You get me?” The steel swayed before Mike’s eyes. He nodded. “Good. You know what mistake your dad made, Mike?” It horrified Mike to know that they knew his name. “Your dad ever say anything to you about it?”

  “No, sir.” Mike’s voice quavered, and he was ashamed for the fear in it.

  “Well, there’s a good lad. Y’all help me and this’ll be over in two shakes,” the voice said. Mike looked up into the blackened face. He couldn’t see enough to make out the features. “Don’t look at me, squirt. Y’all don’t want to be knowin’ who I am. Now, your daddy never mentioned anything about the bridge?” Mike just shook his head and kept his eyes down, and tried not to sob. His da had talked about the job a lot over the years, but that wasn’t what this man was after, he knew. This was one of the bad men his da had warned him about. Trouble was, he didn’t know why. His da hadn’t told him anything.

  “Don’t know if I can trust you, Mikey. You sure you never heard anything about funny goings-on at the bridge?” The steel was at his throat now. Mike could feel it cold and sharp against his skin. “Y’all would tell me if he did, right? Y’all might have told that cop too, the one was here today?”

  A muffled cough sounded from the hallway at the back of the building, and an instant later a form was briefly silhouetted against the building’s faint light. The arm tightened against Mike’s throat.

  “Quiet now,” the voice said in a menacing whisper. The face was so close Mike could smell each stinking breath. The steel still pressed his throat. A door slammed, and they could clearly hear the man doing his business just a few feet away. They waited silent as the grave. Mike didn’t even think about calling out or trying to run. He was too scared to think much of anyth
ing. After what seemed like an eternity, a door slammed again and the man went back inside.

  “Good. Now, I’m not so sure you’re telling me the truth, Mikey. You’re scared, ain’t you, boy? Question is, are you scared enough?”

  Mike nodded his head and said, “I’m sc-scared mister. Please don’t hurt me.”

  “Well, I believe you, Mike, but my friend here ain’t so sure.” The knife waved before him again, coming so close to his eyes that Mike had to close them.

  “Please” was all could say.

  “Open your eyes,” the voice commanded. “I’m gonna ask you once more. What d’ya know about the bridge?” Mike started to say something, when, quick as a snake, he saw the blade slice past his head. He felt the needle-sharp tip catch on the edge of his ear and hang there for an instant.

  “I—” Mike started. He felt the knife slice through his ear. He gasped but was surprised it didn’t hurt more. A warm trickle ran down his neck.

  “Now I got your attention, you’ll answer me straight, right, boy? So what you know?”

  Almost too scared to speak, Mike croaked out, “I swear, mister, my da didn’t say nothin’. I don’t know nothin’. Really, I swear!”

  The knife came up against Mike’s throat, the tip pushing up under his chin, so he had to stand on tiptoe to keep it from sticking him.

  “I’m inclined to believe you, boy,” the voice said as the knife eased off a bit. “But there’s somethin’ else I need.”

  “What? Anything,” Mike said, trying not to beg but unable to stop.

  “Y’all got to keep quiet about us. This’ll be our little secret, right?” Mike just nodded. “Say it!” The point of the knife prodded him again. “And you better be tellin’ the truth or we’ll be meetin’ again.”

  “I won’t tell nobody, mister. I promise. I ain’t seen your face. Who can I tell who’d believe me anyway?” Mike tried to reason with him.