“Our friend. Just so,” Mr. North said, in a handsome, well-spoken baritone.
“Just so,” I said.
“We have two-thirds, I would say, on board,” Jessie announced. The rain now was almost horizontal, and her face was running with it, although she barely blinked and she never wiped at her eyes or mouth. The wind pulled Mr. Porter’s umbrella backward over its frame and peeled it away. Mr. Porter merely held his hat brim and leaned into the wind. I looked into his eyes and then into Jessie’s. The boom swung over, and another tun was on the deck of the brig. I might shoot them all, I thought. Kill the two men, turn and fire twice to hit Delgado, and then deal with Jessie at my leisure.
I wondered about the children, and where they must be taken, and in whose care.
Jessie said, “I am reading you, Billy.”
I saw her light, cold eyes, and I knew that I feared as much as desired her. She was of the madness I had always thought was in, or about to envelop, me. But her astonishing beauty, her willingness, and not for the money, to go anywhere in the darkness in any kind of sudden savagery and pain—and not for the money, I’d insisted, sleeping with a whore for whose company I paid by the block of hours to a laudanum addict.
She said, “I know your thoughts.”
I thought, I know what it says on your body.
She said, “I told you the stories, Billy. Stories aren’t always the truth. Not all of it.”
I had to smile. She could not see it. “No,” I said aloud. “I enjoyed them, however.”
“And I did, too, dear Billy.”
“What did you mean?”
“How much of it did I mean? Or what was my meaning?”
“Either,” I said. “Both.”
But she was looking past me, and I turned. M, carrying a small storm lantern, had walked down the dangerous steps—he had probably sprung, like a ship’s boy on his voyage out—and had walked past Delgado. I would have enjoyed watching that—and he had come now to the laden lighter, onto which he stepped. A man forward on the brig called to him, and M waved his hand but continued on his way. He stood, and he shouted into the wind, which prevented us from hearing him.
“Billy, what does he say?” Jessie asked.
M was pinning his little badge upon the cloaking flap on the front of his oilskins.
“I imagine that he says,” I replied, “ ‘I am an inspector. Thus, I inspect.’ ”
“Truly,” she said, with some wonder in her voice.
“It is what I would expect,” I said.
M produced a bone-handled folding knife, and he cut away at the net about the tun.
“The cost of the net diminishes the profits,” Mr. North said, almost singing. He had the practiced ability to make any statement into song—the less musical the statement, the more, apparently, he sang it: Life is a tale full of sound and fury, sung by an idiot. I thought of M and his Hamlet, his Iago, his Timon, his Lear.
M now labored at the tun, standing on his toes and working to gain access to what might have been two hundred gallons and more, but which in its place should have been children, born into slavery and freed by Jessie and Porter and North, by M and by me.
M beckoned, and Jessie said, “Do not go, sweet Billy.”
“Kiss me good-bye, Jessie.”
“Farewell, you mean?”
“Please.”
She stepped forward, removing her hood, inclining her wonderful sad face, and put her arms on mine. She turned her head and kissed the scarf at the mouth of the mask. Then she leaned in beneath the mask and nipped at the flesh of my neck. She sucked upon it, and she bit it hard, and then she licked it, as if she were a child. Then she looked up and into my eyes and pulled the hood back over her. She patted my arms and stepped back.
“Thank you,” I whispered.
Jessie nodded, and smiled her smile of regret. She said, “It was Lydia Pinkham’s mixed in with the juices of fruits.”
I recited those words as I turned and went along the dock of the wharf to the brig, sitting low in the water which sometimes lapped over onto her deck. I could not understand her meaning: the juices of fruits, the Lydia Pinkham’s. I stepped on, slipping as the rhythm of the rocking of the ship betrayed me, but M was there to catch me by each shoulder with his broad hands and to steady me.
“We’re in horror, shipmate,” he said. “This is a cargo out of the imagination of someone more stirring and capable than I.” He held up the lantern and directed me to peer down and in.
I smelled the vomit first, and then the stench of the leavings of locked-in bodies. The contents were, I saw, three children, or four, heaped in upon each other. It struck me as likely that they had been in there for days; I could not imagine their surviving the entire journey in this fashion, although I had of course no assurance now that Florida had been their home port. They might have come up from Philadelphia, for all I knew, and they might have made the entire journey in the tun. What Jessie had meant about juices of fruits and Lydia Pinkham’s was now, naturally, clear. They had been offered refreshment, and it had struck them unconscious; drugged, they were packed in their barrels and carried only heaven knew how far, for how long.
What had not been clear to her, or to her operatives, was how much of the opium dissolved in alcohol could be tolerated by a child who was deprived of fresh air and exercise, perhaps on account of the cost, and perhaps because the traders did not know. Now they might know. Terrified and helpless, without adequate air to breathe, and in the absolute dark, they had been accidentally poisoned and purposely shipped. You are born, and the world bends down to feed you, and its teat is icy, its pap is poisoned, and you are dead because a child, and black.
“All dead?” I asked him. “Not a breath from them?”
“The child on top, the little portion of person, is dead, I perceive. I do not harbor hope for the others.”
“We must open the tuns and have them out,” I said.
“Get off my boat,” the fellow behind us said.
I watched M tug at his oilskins and turn. “I am a deputy inspector of Customs in the Port of New York,” he said. “I carry, with this badge, the authority of the federal government.”
“I carry,” the other said, “with this peacekeeper, the authority of point five six calibers of half a dozen cartridges, and more where they came from. And I seen your hand in your pocket, you, and I am told you always goes armed. Hands out, nothing in ’em, all easy and slow, thank you, gentlemen. I am the captain, and my word, as you know, is law. This”—he motioned with his pistol—“is its authority, you could say.”
“Jessie spoke of us—of me—to you?”
“Don’t know no Jessie. Mr. North told me.”
“He must have sung it.”
The captain, bald, short, soaked through in his long-sleeved seaman’s shirt, smiled his dirty gray-yellow fangs. He held a cavalry pistol upon us by crossing his left hand in front of his face and, with his right, resting his weapon upon his left forearm. He knew what he was about, and I did not wish to see M wounded. So I brought my hands out, but insisted on leaving them at my sides and not up.
“He does croon whatever in hell he says, doesn’t he, our Mr. North?”
“Jessie must have arranged this with Mr. North,” I said to M.
“I don’t work with any Jessie, I told you.”
“Neither, I think, do I,” I said.
“You are full of mystifications, ain’t you? Off the vessel, please, gents.”
We stood then on the dock as the other tuns came over.
M said to the man with the gun, “There are children in the cargo.”
“It’s a cargo of children, as I understand it. Some large ones, one or two as what you might call an adult. But it’s little slavies for the most part.”
“Slaves,” I said.
“Remember them?” the gunman said, smiling. “We recently had some disputations on the subject. Slaves? The niggers we bred?”
“Great and brave and small men
died for this,” M said. “That we might come, in so short a period, to this. And at her behest.”
“Yes.”
“A black woman and, beside her, a black man, engaged in the selling—”
“White men, too, are involved,” I said.
“Yes, shipmate. But that is not the astonishment. Is it?”
I shook my head. M saw a pale, painted mask bound up in a sodden gray cloth that moved in nervous gestures. Sam, I realized, and I turned to find his face, was seeing it all. I saw his face beneath his narrow-brimmed, round derby hat as he leaned at the rail—beyond the conspirators, above them and Adam and the schooner and the brig, and over us, of course, looking down to study us, memorize us, make of us something larger and more of some whole about which, I had no doubt, he was thinking so hard that his sad eyes bulged and his sallow cheeks were round as if with held breath.
I was going to kill the one on board the brig who held the gun. I turned to face him, and I moved away from M so that any return of fire at me might miss him. I slowly inserted my hand into my right-hand pocket, and I forced myself to breathe out and then in as I grasped the butt of the .31.
“I beg that you do not,” Mr. North sang behind me. “I beg that you consider our captain and his armament. It is about profit and loss, Mr. Bartholomew. It is not—it need not be—about a loss of actual life.”
“Unless it’s the life of a black-skinned child in a barrel on a boat,” I said.
“There are contingencies in every aspect of existence,” he crooned. “Life is fraught with peril.”
M said, “You are, sir, to a man who endeavors to do good, as a boxful of newspaper critics to a man who endeavors to write what might be thought of as poetic. You are the adder in the garden. You are the fleshy manifestation of everything wrong. Do I make myself clear?”
“Meaning no disrespect, sir, which I might not say likewise about you, you would do well to stay away from any endeavors involving the poetic. Stick to the solidity of numbers, and the logic of the profit and the loss.” This was in the form, virtually, of an aria to canniness. I looked at M, and his features seemed to virtually melt in his rage or beneath the onslaught of the rain.
If anything, the heat had mounted. The tuns were on the deck, and Jessie and Mr. Porter, followed by Delgado at his leisurely pace, were stepping on board. I moved toward the lighter, and Mr. North accompanied me.
Jessie, seeing me, came closer. “Billy,” she said.
“What will you do with them? Those who are alive?”
“Forgive me,” she said.
“The sorrowful girlhood, the depravities of the Methodists, the days and nights in sweltering Florida? All right. I understand that people lie. But lies are the least of it, I suspect.”
“The tattoos I showed to you—”
“Read to me.”
“Yes.”
“Permitted me to read.”
“Yes.”
“They, too, were a lie?”
The rain drove at us, and then merely fell, and then only dropped, pattering. She responded by opening her hood and pulling it back, permitting her head and face and hair, which she shook, to profit from the air. Her golden skin, I thought, nearly glowed in the darkness. Her eyes were enormous, as if to gather, from M’s lantern and from the glowing gold behind the mackerel pattern in the serried dark clouds, what little light was available.
M, behind me, said, “I will not remain among these people, shipmate.”
“Please,” I said.
“No. Any man—woman, madam—who wishes to do me corporeal harm is hereby warned that I will not permit myself to be further detained.”
“He’ll bring the authorities, Billy!”
“I cannot protect you, Jessie.”
“Oh,” she said, smiling in sorrow, “oh, my dear, I always thought it was me protecting you.”
Delgado, returned now from the boom, told her, “We’re leaving.” He had passed M on the greasy dock and had not bothered to capture him. We were not of use, nor were we a threat. We did not, in terms of their transactions, exist, and I knew that Jessie would agree with me.
A dreadful noise, the firing furnace in the belly of the lighter, overwhelmed her words. M, by now, was back at the boom, a hand on each of Adam’s shoulders, addressing him. I thought I saw Adam nod. I returned to watching the ship and saw sparks burst from the smokestack, and then dark clouds come up upon the darkness of the sodden night.
M called, “Billy!”
I continued, because I was a fool, to wait for Jessie to call to me again, but she was back at the cargo, holding to a tun, as Mr. Porter and Mr. North turned one of the great barrels onto its side and leaned in, presumably to begin the pulling forth of the children. Her back was to me now, and I turned mine as I started what seemed a very long, arduous walk, to M and Adam at the boom, and Sam, above us at the rail. Now that the rain had diminished, he was holding his notebook again, and setting down whatever it was that he deemed important about this little demonstration of the profit and the loss.
As I drew near him, M regarded me sternly. “Empiricism, shipmate. It may be the death of us all. Can you do it, Adam?”
Poor Adam nodded his head. A man freed from whoever Tackabury was, a freedman in the great, expanding city, and he had the dire fortune to be rescued—so it might once have been construed to seem—by the man inside of the mask who had danced, before men, gods, former slaves, former authors, Boston journalists, the chanting North and the wounded Porter, in graceless indignity. Before Jessie, and the book of her body I had thought to learn to read.
“We are on the fly, Billy. To the wharf, adjacent, whence you and I made our way to the incoming vessel. Do you recall?”
“I do recall,” I said. I did not care.
“You have your pistol?”
I nodded.
“Eh?”
I unwrapped the soaking scarf and thrust it into a pocket of the rubber coat.
“I remain armed. How little good it did us!”
From inside his oilskins, he drew a sack, heavy and familiar in appearance, and I knew it was the Navy Colt.
“From the lip of the grave,” M said, dropping it. My hand, as if possessed by his will, sought and caught it.
“I will bring them, some of them, to theirs,” I said.
“Then we pursue them,” M said.
“From your—you mean in the dinghy?”
“The little catboat against which she’s moored. It gives us a mast, a sail, ten-foot oars, and a shallow, broad cabin where some of the children might shelter.”
“A small catboat,” I speculated.
“Yes,” he said, “but adequate to our purposes and less of a load to propel.”
“In pursuit of a coal-fired ship. Against the current.”
M said, “Mark the waters, will you?” I looked at them and saw only darkness and chop. “The tide makes in,” he said. “Did you not understand the river to be tidal? We’ll labor upriver against the current but with the power of the tide behind us. We’ll raise a sail when the wind’s right. Now we’re off. You are with us, shipmate?”
Sam had made his way to us, and he looked into the face of each, the mask of one. “Who will tell me now what that was all about?”
M turned, and Adam followed him. I, in turn, set out, tugging at the sleeve of Sam’s coat. “We’ll tell you on the way.”
“Way where, Billy?”
“Upriver.”
“After that boat?”
“After that boat.”
“Who was the woman who kissed you? The way she … But—Billy!”
“Yes, Sam.”
“She was the one! The reason all this—”
“She was the one, Sam.”
“And it was a double cross?”
I hurried him along, for M was setting a terrible pace, bouncing on his toes like a boy, while Adam was close behind him. “Everything’s a double cross,” I said, sounding sulky even to myself.
The river
grows vast as you are closer to its middle, and as you go farther upsteam, especially, its marshes and the reaches at the shore through which canals are cut breed speculation upon who might live there, and how, and in what strange relationship to the river and its traffic and its distance from the City of New York. But even at some proximity to the shore, and so far downtown, passing the ships at anchor, and the pleasure craft upon which the wealthy pass their nights in pleasures to which the likes of us might not have pretended, we all, I think, experienced the power of the deep, swift river, and the fear that cannot help but reside, awaiting travelers, in that dark water.
The waxing and waning of the storm made it impossible for me to read the shoreline and know where we were. At times, gasping, I thought to guess, from the shapes of new brick buildings, or the sprawl of old ones made of wood, the street we might have passed. I ventured to note our passage of Desbrosses Street, but then I stopped, for we fought the power of the salty surge that propelled us, and were oppressed by the lightlessness of the giant river that seemed, in this storm and in the night’s emergency and—it is not too large a word for these events—despair, to be as broad and as merciless as the sea from which the tide ran up the river.
The darkness of the Hudson was the equivalent, below, of the night under which Adam and I, side by side, toiled to sweep the oars to move the boat. Spray from the current battered the craft and soaked us deeper, if that was possible. The spume poured in upon our legs and feet; soon enough, despite the heat of this night, my limbs were nearly numb, for the water of the river was cruelly cold. Sam was in the prow, behind us, holding the lantern and warning us of no specific dangers, but only that we must be careful. At one point, he went so far as to call, “Land, ho!” We took care to avoid the boom when M drew the small sail taut. And, standing before us, one foot near the gunwale, the tiller in one hand while the other seized the gaff hook on its long pole, planted, for balance, against the ribbed flooring of the boat, his oilskins open and glinting in what light we passed or was thrown by the lantern, M, in his closed and bearded face, stared forward, over us and over Sam, toward the distant, retreating chimney that spouted gouts of fire and threw up sparks and made the sound of a railroad locomotive roaring away with a considerable portion of our dignity and hope.
The Night Inspector Page 26