City of the Absent

by Robert W. Walker

  Ransom had watched her growth, and he’d taken great pride in her, like a father, as it’d been his urging early on that resulted in Gabby’s having taken a leap into this man’s world.

  But he didn’t figure on Gabby being on hand for the bluff he was carrying out against Kohler. It was the most outrageous card that Nathan could pull from his deck—putting her on this unctuous duty.

  Four other ragged men who’d been snatched from the alleyways of the neighborhood, aged men with beards, gray and white hair, now stood beside Ransom in his Jack Ketchum disguise. With Alastair dressed in wig, mustache, beard, and rags, perched directly in the middle, the others appeared shaky, some with the DT’s, looking confusedly about the unfamiliar circumstances. Each was now told to hold up a number. This further confused one and all.

  “What?”

  “How high?”

  “I’m no number…I’m a man.”

  “Where’s me money you promised?”

  Mike and Gabby had to deal with this confusion before they might allow the so-called eyewitnesses through the door one at a time. Anyone with any experience working such a detail knew never to place eyewitnesses in a room together, as typically a disagreement or even a fight broke out over their testimony. The disagreement and level of contradiction between people who claimed to have seen a crime in progress was legend among police, and knowing this, Alastair’s bluff rode on the twin chariots of ambiguity and inconsistency.

  This truth proved at work among the sailors who’d struggled with Ransom hand-to-hand, including the injured first mate and his captain. All of whom Ransom had supposed long gone by now, as the Lucienta Maria had, after all, been preparing to depart when he had boarded. Apparently, the crusty old lake captain had delayed departing, Kohler having impounded the ship and crew in his effort to get Inspector Ransom.

  Still, none of the sailors, including Tianetto, could conclusively identify Ransom from among the five derelicts. In fact, only the first mate called out number three as the culprit, while each of the others, taken in turn, claimed it was the man on his right or left. When First Mate Tate was told by the lovely young Gabby that he’d picked out a Chicago police detective in disguise, he blushed red and quickly recanted and selected number four instead. By this time, Mr. Tate was far more interested in Gabrielle Tewes than in righting a wrong.

  Just when Ransom thought it over, O’Malley escorted in another man, a hulking hunchback who looked familiar from the moment Ransom spied him. A kind of tall Quasimodo, he was one of the pair who’d tried to mug him on the wharf the night before, but he knew that to say so now would only further incriminate him.

  For a moment Alastair thought he’d be found out and punished, ironically, for something he hadn’t done, while a nagging voice in his head, sounding strangely like Jane’s, declared it fitting justice. A fair deal for all the crimes he’d committed in the name of lawful expediency.

  The lumbering, freakish-looking man brought in to ID Ransom kept wiping away spittle that seemed uncontrollable, and his nose was runny and red with a cold or some worse malady. He coughed into a raggedy red paisley handkerchief, and his dumb stare—as vacuous as the eyes of a kewpie doll—came along with bloodshot irises. He breathed so heavily and nasally, he seemed a queer monster to be curious of and cautious of at once. At the same time, he looked the part of a giant sapped of strength, and definitely a man who belonged abed. All the same, Ransom felt a twinge of fear from this man with whom he’d locked eyes the night of the incident.

  Staring at the lineup, the man Gabby called Mr. Rolsky could not say which of the five might be the man he saw on the wharf that night, but if he must guess, it would be number one.

  “Why number one?” asked Mike.

  “’Cause number one’s staring back at me so hard.”

  “I see.”

  “He looks guilty?” asked the slow, lumbering sloth of a man.

  From his darkened corner, Nathan Kohler, standing alongside Father O’Bannion, curtly said, “Get ’im outta here, O’Malley!”

  “Thank you, Mr. Rolsky, for coming forward and doing your civic duty,” Gabby said, showing him the door.

  “Where do I get my money for coming in?” he asked.

  “Go along with the officer,” she gently informed him.

  She then said to Mike loud enough for everyone’s ears, “This is ridiculous, the whole thing a sham just to play Russian roulette with Inspector Ransom’s life. Just to implicate him any way you can.”

  “We’ve got one more witness,” said Mike, calming her. “Mr. Rolsky’s brother, so let’s just get through this, OK, Miss Tewes?”

  “Yeah…right.”

  “Bring ’im in!” shouted Kohler, ignoring Gabby’s outburst.

  Mike escorted in the man Ransom imagined most likely to finger him. This fellow was the knife-wielder of the evening before, the man who’d cost him his gun over the side of the wharf, and this sallow-eyed fellow proved an opposite of his dote of a partner, despite similarities in their appearance, masked only by the misshapen features of his brother. This one had steel for a spine—to come forward like this, straight in Ransom’s own precinct. Arrogant impunity on spindly legs, Ransom intoned in his head.

  He watched this particular Mr. Rolsky size up the room the way a cougar might, determining who was a threat and who was not, and quite likely who was the weakest animal in his sights. When finished sizing up the authorities, he sized up the motley crew forming a lineup, studying each with great care and a critical eye. A kind of clinical detachment to his manner, like a doctor puzzling over a necrotic organ. Ransom felt as if this Rolsky could see straight through him. He felt on the verge of arrest for the suffering priest.

  Ransom took the bull by the horns, stepping out of character and leaping off the lineup stage to confront this Rolsky fellow. “I’ve had enough of this nonsense! This man is a known criminal, a mugger and quite possibly a murderer for all we know!”

  “It’s him! This is the man!” declared Philander. “He even told us—my brother and me—that he was a Chicago cop! Ask Vander! Bring him back and put it to my brother.”

  “This whole matter’s botched!” cried out Alastair. “You can’t possibly take the word of a known criminal in a lineup. Paying these men is corrupting enough of the process, but hiring wharf rats like this!”

  “I’ll show you who’s a wharf rat!” Rolsky had snatched his newly acquired blade and held it out before Ransom’s eyes.

  Ransom grabbed his wrists and squeezed until the man shouted in pain and the knife dropped to the floor.

  O’Malley jumped Philander and quickly handcuffed him, leaving him lying on the floor, his hands behind him, his knife confiscated. Then Ransom put his face close to Rolsky’s and muttered, “You’re really lousy with a knife, you know that?” He then yanked him to his feet.

  Mike slapped the man on the back of the head and said, “Gabrielle, take his measurements and check’m against the Bertillon system, see what we have on this gutter scum’s measurements and characteristics, if anything.”

  Ransom added, “And for heaven’s sakes, take his prints. When the devil’s fingerprinting going to be a matter of course around here?”

  The innovation of fingerprinting criminals and fugitives for evidentiary purposes, while in vogue in England for sometime now, and used for centuries in commercial transactions in Asia and India, was still meeting resistance in American police circles. The cumbersome and questionable Bertillon file cards continued to hold sway in the minds of most police authorities.

  “Sure, we’ll take finger and hand prints,” Gabby enthusiastically replied.

  “Just get this roach out of my sight.” Ransom sighed, knowing that no one, including Kohler and the courts, understood fingerprint evidence, and that it might take another World’s Fair and another scientific awakening. It maddened him that the same scientific fact written about in Mark Twain’s Puddin’head Wilson in ’47 was still treated as fiction and fantasy.

&nb
sp; “I tell you this is your man!” shouted Rolsky, struggling against the cuffs and Mike’s grip on him, spitting and kicking.

  “How can you be sure it’s Inspector Ransom?” shouted Nathan Kohler, now in the man’s face. “How can you know?”

  “His voice…it was his voice…and—and his eyes!”

  “Now that’ll be the day you convict a man in a court of law based on his voice or his eyes!” Ransom laughed at the notion.

  Kohler considered this and had to agree. “Take him to booking, Mike, Gabrielle,” he said. Turning to Ransom, with O’Bannion grinding his old teeth, he added, “You win this one, Alastair.”

  “But what about his guilt? What about my word?” exploded O’Bannion. “I have no reason to lie.”

  “Afraid it’s not enough, Father. Your word against his, and you saw him in a rage the night before the incident. You think he may have been hiding some sort of weapon beneath his coat, but you saw nothing, and you were nowhere near the ship where Father Jurgen was attacked.”

  Ransom gave a thought to O’Bannion’s secretary, who had not been called as a witness. Another bullet dodged.

  O’Bannion’s rage showed in every feature. He looked about to spew forth a long list of profanities. Instead, he gritted his teeth. “Force the inspector here to Father Jurgen’s bedside. He will tell you it was this man who viciously attacked him.”

  Ransom imagined the younger priest might well believe it had indeed been his hand on those pinchers at the crucial moment. Or had Jurgen punished himself?

  “It’s my understanding that your junior priest is in a coma at this time,” Kohler countered. “Perhaps when he comes ’round we can indeed arrange it.” He turned to Ransom. “That suit you, Inspector?”

  “I’d like nothing better than to clear my name of this cruel allegation.”

  O’Bannion’s red face seethed with thoughts of vengeance of his own, it seemed, as he turned and pushed through the door, rushing out, calling down a strong and effective Christian curse with a Gaelic twist: “May your bones turn to ash, Alastair Ransom, and be swept into Satan’s waste bin!”

  “And a pleasant evening to you, too, Father!” Ransom shouted after the retreating O’Bannion.

  Inconclusive as the lineup was, Nathan Kohler still believed that Alastair Ransom had something to do with castrating the young priest, but he hadn’t the proof. His score of witnesses had proven useless. Ransom believed that his expensive wolf’s head cane, which he’d held throughout the lineup proceedings, had in its way marked him as not the culprit. A stroke of genius on my part, he told himself.

  Meanwhile, the man who now twice accosted him with a knife was being booked for attempted assault on an officer. The idiot had done so not only in front of witnesses and cops, but in his own house! The man would now spend time in lockup until a judge adjudicated his case. It only proved to Ransom what he’d concluded long ago about criminals—that crime made one stupid, and the criminal urge was, for so many, a natural state of being.

  Down the hall from the room used for lineups, Ransom found Gabby trying to calm the other Rolsky brother, the giant one with the pushed-in Pekinese face and the unfortunate hunchback. The big fellow was distraught on learning his brother was not leaving the jailhouse police station with him. “This ain’t right…this is wrong! What am I gonna do without Philander? He keeps me outta trouble. He tells me what to do.”

  It was painfully clear that the big man, brother to Philander Rolsky, had the intelligence of a child. He stood pacing in pure panic, fear wrapping about him with each passing thought about spending a moment—much less a day and a night—without his brother beside him.

  “You keep this up,” Mike O’Malley said to him, “and you’ll be locked up right alongside your brother.”

  “Can you do that? I wanna be with Philander.”

  Gabby pleaded, “Why don’t you just go home and wait for your brother? He’ll find you there after he’s seen the judge.”

  Her voice seemed to calm the big fellow, who was a head taller than Ransom. When he saw Ransom, he exploded toward him, his hands extended as if to choke the life from Alastair. Side-stepping, Alastair tripped Vander Rolsky with his cane, sending the huge man sprawling across the boards, his head coming to rest at the steps going down. “Go home, Mr. Rolsky!” he shouted. “Take Miss Tewes’s advice! Now!”

  The command in Ransom’s voice often proved enough to break up a riot, and the change that came over Vander on hearing the orders barked at him seemed remarkable indeed. He suddenly became a cowed creature, and he slinked down the stairwell and out into the street like a dog with its hind legs hiding its tail. Once more Ransom marked the red, bloodshot eyes, black and beady at their centers.

  “Poor brute,” said Gabby. “Reminds me of Shelley’s Frankenstein for some reason.”

  “Don’t waste your time or sympathy on ’im!” said Mike, losing points with Gabby.

  Ransom added, “So far as I can tell, he and his brother work as a team along the wharves, accosting people for money and jewelry and anything they can turn a profit on.”

  She turned on Ransom, a fire in her eyes reminiscent of Jane when riled up. “Being callous to the retarded among us does not become either of you gentlemen! It’s obvious he does whatever his brother puts him up to. And why not? He’s learned to trust no one else.”

  “Yeah…like a monkey grinder’s pet,” said Mike, a snicker escaping.

  “Or any trained animal,” added Ransom. “Recalls to mind an A. E. Poe story I caught in Harper’s about an ape trained to murder in a Paris neighborhood.”

  “The two indeed make a strange pair, but we’re speaking of a human being here, not an animal.” Gabby remained calm despite her punctuating this with a stomp.

  “All right, say his brother is the ringleader of their little street carnival,” began Ransom. “If this dote kills someone on his brother’s say-so, it doesn’t make him any less guilty of murder.”

  “Perhaps not, but then…” She hesitated. “…perhaps it should.”

  “You’d rather see him in Cook County Asylum than prison?” asked Mike.

  “He would receive more humane treatment and medical care.”

  “Have you taken the time to see that asylum?” Mike argued.

  “Trust me, Gabby,” added Ransom, “that asylum needs major reforms. The kind that not even Christian Fenger or the love of Christ has put a dent into. People still treat the mad as a leprosy they don’t want to know about, hear about, or speak about. Result—it’s no place for any man.”

  “Neither is Vander likely to last long in Joliet.” Gabby’s eyes had gone wide with her passion. “So there’s not a damn place in all the world for people like Vander.” She stalked off.

  “Fiery when she gets her hackles up, isn’t she?” asked O’Malley.

  “Yes…like someone else I know.”

  Mike asked, “How do you want us to proceed with this Rolsky fellow in lockup?”

  “Full background check, any records we might have on him, previous arrests, time spent and where, talk to his landlord, the neighbors.”

  “Will do, and Rance…”

  “Yes?”

  “Congratulations.”

  “On the lineup, you mean?”

  “On beating Chief Kohler at his own game.”

  “Wasn’t hard to do.”

  They laughed, winning the stares of others coming and going. “Imagine Kohler thinking you cut off a priest’s nuts.” Mike’s laugh filled the station house.

  “Did make an ass of himself, didn’t he?” Ransom joined in the laughter, and it felt good. After all it was justice. A rare commodity these days.

  Alastair gave a wonder to who had harmed the priest with the weapon he’d carried aboard the Lucienta that night. Was it the crewman who’d come up the ladder brandishing the horse pinchers? Was it another down below, someone who owed Father Jurgen money, or whom the priest owed a debt? A lot of gambling went on aboard a ship. They’d just reache
d the entryway to the galley where Jurgen had proposed to feed the shabby old Jack Ketchum when Alastair had made his move. The nature of the attack on the priest begged the question of who meant to wreak such vengeance on Jurgen other than himself?

  And there was the sudden disappearance of his boy snitch, Samuel. Could it be possible that the boy had followed him, shadowed him somehow?

  Or might it be another boy, a boy aboard the ship the whole time in close proximity to the pandering Jurgen? Every ship had a cabin boy and a galley boy. Child labor was alive and well in maritime circles.

  Alastair concluded it must be so. Perhaps the likely suspect was a nameless, faceless, defenseless—until he saw the pinchers—galley boy. Whoever it’d been, he’d done the deed in the presence of other sailors, mates who’d shielded him. Perhaps it would remain one of those frustrating unsolved mysteries without end. Quite fitting perhaps.

  CHAPTER 33

  “It was perfectly sad, Mother,” Gabby told Jane over breakfast the next morning. She’d gone into detail about Ransom’s trouble with having been literally accused of the awful attack on Father Franklin Jurgen, who now lay in a coma, fighting a gangrenous infection in his private parts. Jane listened intently, allowing her daughter to go on as she described how Father O’Bannion and Kohler had done all in their power to lay it at Alastair’s doorstep, this heinous crime.

  “How absolutely mad Nathan Kohler must be!” Jane said of the allegation.

  “I know!”

  “It’s just as I’ve warned Alastair time and again. Nathan’s hatred of Alastair is beyond reason.”

  “It’s clearer every day,” agreed Gabby.