The Night Inspector

by Frederick Busch

  “Surely not eggs,” Jessie said. Rachel giggled and Tillie affected to snore.

  “Cheese,” Delgado said. He placed it on the table and cut crescent-shaped pieces for the girls. “Sir?” he said to me, but I declined. One side of his face, near the nose, was shiny and pocked, and I would have bet that he’d been peppered with birdshot. I thought it remarkable that he’d survived. No doubt he thought me remarkable for similar reasons.

  Jessie brought the chunk of hard orange cheese to her mouth and it rested against her lips, but she could not admit it between them. She lowered the cheese to the table and softly shook her head. Delgado raised his full, black eyebrows, then let them drop. Sam Mordecai, back at the Astor asleep, if he were present would have slowly drawn his notebook and opened it and set it upon his lap; then, with a child’s self-pardoning smile, he would have set his stub of pencil scratching at the pages, setting down that silent exchange and all its implications.

  William Bartholomew, trader and assassin, settled for gently touching the back of Jessie’s golden hand and sitting within his mask while the night leaked out. William Bartholomew, stalking the streets as if he were in charge of them, peering through his eyeholes at cats leaping in a mound of very ripe garbage at the mouth of an alley at Seventy-ninth Street, made his way down to the Five Points and his bed. Whatever Delgado and Jessie had meant, I thought, by their exchange of glances, she had been through a ghastly night. I summoned grotesque pictures, and then I fought to banish them. In every one, Jessie’s powerful haunches, the secrets of her thighs, were at the service—at the command—of paunchy men of business who were lollipopped, no doubt, while they chewed at their cigars. It was Jessie kneeling before them, was it not? But so small, as it were, a matter would not have driven her into such a sickened silence. I saw them using tableware and worse upon the girls. I heard the noises that they made.

  A man with a filthy, unshaved face, half out of his clothing, obviously paralyzed by drink, lay across the street at Seventy-first. I stood above him, for I wanted to deliver a series of blows with my boot to his ribs. I did not know him, but I was atremble with the urge to wound someone.

  He opened his eyes in mid-snore, and he looked up. I could not imagine what he thought, in the green glow of the gas lamp, he saw.

  “Father Jesus!” he cried. “I’ll stop. I’ll never drink again. Don’t take me off!”

  “This is the last chance I’ll give,” I intoned.

  “Never a drop by the Mother of God!”

  “Go home,” I told him.

  He rolled onto his hands and his knees, then edged sideways to the stanchion of the lamp and pulled himself to his feet. I pointed east, and he went that way, tripping and sliding, although of course I had no idea where he might live. A fast cabriolet, its window blinds pulled down, almost struck him, and it seemed to me that two squat, bearded sailors, nearly as drunk as he, were altering their course to follow in his steps; he was hardly out of danger, I thought.

  A family from India, it seemed—the father wore a dirty turban, his wife a sari of bright, stained yellow—were moving their household at dawn, along the railroad embankment at Hamilton Square at the corner of East Sixty-fifth. She carried a sleeping infant, swathed in blue, in her slender, hairy left arm; in her right, she steadied on her shoulder a long, thick wooden rod that rested, before her, on the shoulder of her man. To it were fastened deep baskets containing clothing, perhaps foodstuffs, implements, little wooden boxes round and square, and several sets of garments, some slippers and shoes. The father carried a sleeping child of two or so upon his other shoulder. They marched a peculiar dancing march to the rhythm established by the swinging weight of their household goods. They walked, in alternating darkness and light, communicating, so it seemed, through the distribution and redistribution of their burden. He, as he passed me, smiled; she, drawn and woeful, affected not to see me, although I watched her eyes widen as her view of me improved.

  At the time of which I speak, you could enter Harry Hill’s dance hall, on Houston Street, for twenty-five cents. Men and women alike were welcomed, but they had to pay, receive a little dish of oysters, and move upstairs toward the music. The wooden floorboards cracked and groaned beneath the dancers’ weight, and everyone danced. Men in white-and-blue-striped sailor’s jerseys circulated among the guests and they quickly compelled those not dancing, for more than one song’s duration, to leave. It was all very respectable, and although I did not any longer dance, and of course I did not parade my visage in the hope of making female friends, it had never occurred to me that Hill’s was anything but respectable. On behalf of workingmen and -women, I had always been appreciative. It took Jessie, of course, with her restrained and largely uninflected voice to tell me that on the floor above the music, a partial third floor—it did not run the breadth of the building—there were clean, inelegant private rooms where dancers might, for more than twenty-five cents, lock the door and make love—make, that is, whatever they were driven to.

  “You have done this?” I remember asking her, one night in her room.

  She said, into the flesh of my unmasked face, “I have done everything, Billy.”

  So, it seemed, had Lizzie and her girls, and possibly the silent, wracked Stanwix, waiting all the day, cajoling the silent son and brother, contemplating their wakefulness while Malcolm engaged in a sleep as alien to them, perhaps, as the winking sleep of dogs, the wintry sleep of bears. So, of course, had M. For so many of his young years, he had written what he could to make his way and make his wage; then, apparently, he had manufactured what he must, and he’d made neither. That is the way of the world, the ebb and flow of dollars, but knowing this could not have been of consolation; and in the pressure in the house—an atmosphere, like storm, as the barometric pressure dropped, and the very air pressed hard, in silence, at the inner doors of the rooms, the windows looking onto East Twenty-sixth Street—he drank his drinks and then escaped to walk to work, swallowing his own saliva as it welled like poison in his throat and mouth, and heard, from this remaining friend or that, how many of the other, former, friends were certain he had died.

  So he had died. And yet he walked upon the cold or steamy streets. He smoked his pipe. Lizzie’s life went on, and the children strove to live in theirs, and he received his pay and bought his books and drank his drinks. He had imagined his way to, or had projected upon the page from within, a man so enormous in his woundedness and hate and maleficence—a man with tenderness, too, and a lover’s eye for the shape, say, of the hunted whale’s small ear—that he would risk a story about a man awaking in an inn with the leg of a stranger thrown, like a wife’s, over his own. He would confess, that is to say, the hugeness of his own appetite in the body of a storytelling sailor. He would consider it a little moment in a momentousness: the story of a man who stabbed at all of the world, as if it were a mask, to reach through to—God, I suppose. Or the Satan we see as God. Or some absolutely other and dark indifference.

  From tasking and tallying the whale, from daring the world with his story, he had gone to philosophical growls and speculations, and from there to saying less and less, and to counting the boxes and barrels on board merchant seamen lying- to in the Port of New York. From giving forth, he had declined to acting on behalf of those who received. If Lizzie had reported ball lightning on the chandeliers and banisters, a product of electric tension, I would not have been surprised. He had gone from life to a death-in-life, and was required—as husband, as father, as laborer for the Customs Collector of New York—to pretend that his failing stumble was a healthy trot. It was required that he not merely weep, or fall upon his sword, or, like his son, become his own assassin.

  It was required—by my life, by Jessie’s needs—that his unfortunate decline be as a resource to me; I must employ him, as the builder used lumber, as the chemist used salts, as the blacksmith used iron in his fire. As, it occurred to me, Sam Mordecai, his pencil in hand, his notebook open, used the sights I showed him and, it
also occurred to me, might go so far as to use the driven man in his open-mouthed mask.

  The heat in the city, and surely in the airless Points, had grown yeasty and wet. Folded papers expanded with moisture, cloth felt saturated, and the dirty walls and cobbles looked shiny, as if with the trails of slugs I used to see on the leaves of plants in my mother’s garden and along the fieldstone walls I had maintained. I carried my coat beneath my arm when I walked at night or went to the office at midday or later. Under the mask, I perspired uncomfortably, and was disgusted by what I thought was the odor of my own torn flesh. But I did go to the office, where I prepared papers to accompany those documents under preparation by Lapham Dumont and from which I issued orders to buy winter wheat upon speculation, or to invest in certain developments—railroads, absolutely, and the larger hotels in cities (now towns) destined for rail-heads—and I conducted intelligent business. I brought in crushed tomatoes in great vats for the growing appetite of the city (they were easier to ship if crushed, and in sauces and soups were not needed whole). I brought in citrus fruits from south and west (sustaining a loss in the shipment from California that came around by boat, breaking even on the southwestern shipments that were carted to the railroad at Chicago). I imported olives from Greece because the shipper sent them in stained terra-cotta amphorae, which—once the olives, transferred to barrels, were sold to wholesalers—I then sold, through professional consultants, as antiquarian relics to a surprising number of the rising upper-middle class in manufacturing and retail sales who required something noticeably new in their little palaces along Fifth Avenue.

  It was at this time that Chun Ho’s children, accustomed to me now, called me Gui when they thought I didn’t hear, and then, soon enough, they said it aloud before me.

  “What is Gui?” I asked her.

  “They say it for this.” She gently touched my painted cheek.

  “They call me a name for my mask?”

  She nodded. “Ghost, you say.”

  “I am a ghost to them?”

  She solemnly shook her head. “Look like ghost. White face of spirit. You plenty alive. They know.” She was folding laundry at most of her small table, although a few inches were reserved for Ng, who was required to practice English for school. She had made a list of words that, in the evening, she and Kwang would chant at one another. Then Chun Ho looked up. She was wearing black wide-legged silk trousers under a kind of short black silk robe. Her light tan face, broad and impassive, under hair as black and silky as her clothes, was cocked in attention. She waited for my reaction to my name.

  “You know I am more than this mask,” I said.

  “Sure. They young, small people.”

  “May I ask you, Chun Ho, why you look at me like that?”

  “Want see,” she said. “I ask: Why you come here? Sit here? Talk here? Listen here?”

  “Why do you,” Ng corrected her.

  I said, “I want to see you, I suppose.”

  Often, she put her hand to her face and looked away if I embarrassed her with overmuch directness. This time, she stood straight and regarded me further. Then she nodded. She saw to the laundry but, I noticed, she smiled a little at the bedsheets and pillowcases and bath towels of strangers.

  Kwang, too, was smiling, as if adults were amusing. Ng had her hand upon her mouth. These, I reminded myself, were the children of the dead man to whom Chun Ho was married. And, rather than watch laundry folded, I was embarked on an operation of considerable detail and difficulty. In my office, this time working with no sleep at all, I made my lists and wrote out my instructions to myself and having to do with M and Adam and Lapham Dumont and sundry carters and the acquisition, presumably well in hand, of barrels. Timing would be exquisite or ruinous. Endurance, of course, and courage, desperation, and the air supply—I noted Reeds through staves—would, obviously, prove crucial. The master of the vessel: I wrote this unknown quantity upon my list, although I could do nothing to affect it.

  Sam had seen me thus, on nights before an engagement. Burton, of course, had seen me, too, but he had been curious about nothing but his horses and his meals, and, of course, his safety. But Grafton, interested enough, had left me alone; he had always been a great believer in men alone with their thoughts. Sam, on the other hand, had always intervened, just this side of rudeness, because his curiosity was so great and his taste for the lives of others a genuine appetite.

  “How many times do you clean it, then?” he asked, moving away from the fire and out to where I sat with my gear.

  “Are you counting, Mr. Mordecai?”

  “I am, in fact, Mr. Bartholomew. Do I intrude?”

  “Of course you do.”

  He sat. “I don’t mean to.”

  I looked at him.

  “Not a great deal,” he said. “It’s just— I just this minute realized you get nervous.”

  “Frightened.”

  “That’s hard to believe. Normal soldiers, infantrymen, of course. You, though. You’re William Bartholomew.”

  “The cold-blooded assassin.”

  “No. But you always look so … certain.”

  “Well, I am, Mr. Mordecai.”

  “Sam.”

  “But you can be certain and be scared. They shoot at me with guns, Sam. They want to kill me. And all because I shoot them down while they use the latrine or eat their grub or yawn. So I’m scared of what they’ll do to me, with a little luck. And I’m certain that, if they don’t, I can kill them.”

  “So you clean your weapon.”

  “So I think of where I might have to go to take them. I think of how I might approach my blind. A line of retreat when I’m finished with work.”

  “Work,” he said. “It is work, isn’t it?”

  “War had better be work. If it got to be play, we’d be wrapped in wet sheets and gibbering, I think.”

  He nodded and sat while I replaced the cleaning rod and put the cap on the vial of oil. “War can also be righteous,” he said.

  “Is this a righteous war?”

  He nodded. “I’m embarrassed to use a word like that for pissing down your pant leg with fear or watching someone drown in their blood. Yes, though. My people—not just the Mordecais, but the bunch of us, the people in America, Jews from Spain or Asia or Europe who ended up here. We’re a step away from the Negroes, you know. Truly,” he said, as I began to protest. “You’ve seen the signs: ‘No Jews, Negroes, Dagos or Dogs.’ All of that. They don’t use us as slaves, but they revile us. We sell drink on Sundays. We don’t do business on Saturdays. We lend money. We are a nation among and unto ourselves.”

  He stood, he walked in a series of very small circles and came back to where he had been sitting, and he sat. I was rubbing down the cartridges with a rag so that nothing might interfere with the accuracy of my shooting. Horses nickered and Sergeant Grafton spilled hot coffee on his hand and softly cursed, as amused by his own clumsiness as annoyed. Burton sat in thoughtless rest, like his horses, content to be still, uninterested in what wasn’t.

  “We would be next,” Sam said. “Maybe not slaves, but only maybe. Surely reviled. Surely treated, often enough, with indecency. With insulting impatience or amusement. Revulsion. Hanged or whipped for punishment like Negroes? Who’s to know. I don’t want to know. I have the feeling that, if we win this—”

  “It isn’t about slavery, Sam.” His face fell, as a child’s does, when I told him the news he did not wish to hear. “It’s about money. Economy. Agrarians need slave labor. Industrialists need cheap labor. The North will use your Jews in any way they can. If we make the slaves free of the Rebels, then the North will use your Negroes in any way they can. We’re fighting for the oppportunity for men of business, manufacturers, to get their hands on black men, Jews, and broad-shouldered girls. It’s money, Sam, they’re waging the War about. The righteousness is only yours.”

  “No,” he said.

  I put my rifle cartridges away and began to sort through the pistol cartridges in m
y little pouch. Next I would hone my knife.

  “It’s a far keener cause than that.”

  “Noble,” I said.

  “You mock what you might die for?”

  If we had sat closer, I would have reached for his shoulder and patted it or squeezed it. I looked at his thin face under its wiry hair beneath his forage cap. There was a poignance to his need. I said, “I do not mock what you might die for, and I intend to kill enough of them to prevent your dying.”

  “Why, then? Why work so hard at it? The killing. If you don’t believe.”

  “Oh, Sam,” I said, “I do believe.”

  “In what?”

  “In me,” I told him.

  The next morning, as I hid behind a tree and men first on horseback and then on foot, pursuing me, went past, I heard myself pontificate again while, half a mile away, at a folding wooden writing desk, a colonel of horse cavalry lay covered in flies, unless someone had begun tending to his corpse. Flies were gathering at my face and hands, but I did not brush them away. I lay on wet moss among ferns in a forest of pines, and I blinked away the flies at my eyes, and I waited to be safe. I had taken the colonel while he wrote, and while a lieutenant in the tent behind him had—in truth—played in a minor key at a violin. The colonel was a girlish-looking young man in a creased but clean-looking uniform, and he had long, fine fingers with which he tapped on the air, as if working out the proper phrase, or, for all I knew, the rhyme scheme of a poem. I put a bullet into the side of his head, which appeared to disintegrate as he went over, hands and elbows loose in the air, a cloud of sprayed blood remaining behind an instant where he had been. The ink spilled, and the pen hung in the air although the writer was gone while the shot still echoed.

  Then, of course, the playing stopped, and then the lieutenant came from the tent, violin in one hand and bow in the other. I shot him as he emerged, putting the bullet into his chest, completing my murder of the finer arts and accomplished Southern manhood. These were deaths, I thought, trying to shield my eyes from the horseflies, that I would not describe to Sam Mordecai. Although he seemed, when he was with me in New York, to know more of my peculiar history than I had ever thought he might.