The Empire of Shadows

by Richard E. Crabbe

  It was a buck, about four years old judging by his antlers. He was a creamy, yellowish white, though his legs and belly were black with mud.

  “I want to pet him. Can I pet him, Mommy?”

  “I’m not sure, sweetheart,” Mary said. “Is it safe with him being so agitated?” she said, turning to Tom, who shrugged and shook his head.

  “Make him come to us, Daddy,” Rebecca pleaded, as if Tom had magical power to command white deer.

  The burden of her innocence, her trust that he or Mary could bend the world to their will was still hers to bestow. Tom looked around and saw a bucket of oats outside the pen, placed there for the tourists. It took a couple of minutes of calling and coaxing for the deer to settle down and show some interest. Rebecca cooed to the deer, which finally stood quite still, studying them with large, brown eyes and twitching ears. It drew closer, until its muzzle was inches from their outstretched hands.

  Rebecca stopped her cooing. The animal was a good foot taller than her and was intimidating despite the fence. Rebecca’s hand pulled back, spilling some feed. Mike kept his out though, and the buck nuzzled it, nibbling the offering. Mike’s success encouraged Rebecca. She pushed her hand out for the buck to feed. “His tongue is so wet,” she laughed. “I’m all slobbery.” She beamed as the white buck ate like a contented housecat.

  Mike offered up another handful as the steamer neared the Prospect House dock. Tom noticed the name Utowana on the bow and wondered if it meant anything, or was just someone’s idea of a quaint Indian name. He watched it dock. His eye was caught by the boats resting on the steamer’s low, flat roof. They were elegant little craft, high and knife-edged at bow and stern, curving out wide and low in the middle. They weren’t canoes, at least not like any he’d seen. They actually looked more like little yachts or sailing boats, though they had no sails he could see.

  The Utowana cut her engines and bumped to a halt while a deckhand jumped out and tied off to cleats at the bow and stern. The captain gave a final toot of his steam whistle.

  “Ow!” Mike yelled. “Damn, he bit me!”

  Tom looked back to see Mike holding a bloody hand. Rebecca stared at the blood, which had started dripping on the bare ground in bright little splatters. The buck was going mad again, running about the enclosure. Rebecca’s lip started to tremble as tears welled in her eyes.

  “Let me see that, Mike,” Tom said, pulling out a handkerchief. Mike held out a hand that was so bloody it was hard to tell where the wound was. Rebecca turned and clutched Mary’s waist, burying her head in her skirts. Her tears fell almost as fast as Mike’s blood, and she started to sob.

  “Here,” Mike pointed. “Got my thumb pretty good.”

  Tom took a quick look at the wound. It was deep, but Mike made no complaint. Tom watched his face from the corner of his eye.

  “He get ya?” a voice asked over Rebecca’s crying. Tom turned to see a man ambling up behind them. The ankle-length boots, woolen trousers with leather suspenders, flannel shirt, and sweat-stained green felt hat marked him as a local as much as the sound of the mountains in his voice.

  “He all right?” the man asked with a nod toward Mike’s hand.

  “I suppose,” Tom said.

  “I’ve seen worse,” Mike volunteered. “Saw a horse take two fingers off a kid on Delancey Street once. Ain’t as bad as that.” Mike held the hand with whitened fingers as the kerchief turned red.

  “Don’t know what’s got into that buck,” the local said. “Been caught since he was a fawn. Never know’d anything but this here pen or the barn.” He hooked his thumbs behind his suspenders and watched as the buck started to settle down. “Funny thing is,” he finally went on, “the longer he’s been here the ornrier he gets.”

  “You’d think he’d be tame by now,” Tom ventured. “What with all the hand-feeding and petting he probably gets.”

  “You’d think,” the man agreed. “Most times he’s gentle as a kitten, but then there’s times…” He looked out over the lake and the forested mountains beyond. “Some things just don’t tame I guess. Name’s Busher, by the way. Chauncey’s my given name. I do some guidin’ here.” He shrugged a shoulder in the direction of the hotel. Tom stuck out a bloody hand. Busher took it with no visible concern.

  “Braddock, Tom Braddock. This is my wife Mary, my boy Mike, and the little one’s Rebecca. There a doctor at the hotel, Chauncey? I think my boy should get this looked at.” Tom could see that Mike was a little pale.

  “Sure is. Go down to the pharmacy on the first floor, west end of the building,” he said, pointing back at the hotel. “Ask for Doc Whelen. He’ll fix yer boy up in two shakes.”

  “Thanks, Chauncey,” Tom said, turning toward the hotel.

  “Sure thing, Mister Braddock,” Busher replied, then doffed his hat to Mary. “Pleased to meet you, ma’am. And don’t you worry,” he patted Rebecca’s head as she went by. “Your brother’ll be all right, Missy,” he said with a warm smile. “Don’t you cry neither. This here’s your vacation.”

  It was some hours later when Tom stopped in the hotel bar. The doctor had done an efficient job with Mike’s hand, though it required a couple of stitches. Mary had taken him and ’Becca up to their rooms to rest, but Tom felt the need for a beer.

  There was a group of men leaning against the polished mahogany when Tom entered the bar, One was holding court while the others listened in rapt attention.

  “Not a sound from his paddle,” the man said, a prosperous-looking sport with an expanding middle. “Just feet away, and I couldn’t hear so much as a swish. Took us in amongst the lily pads where he said the deer come down to drink.”

  Tom ordered a stout and asked the bartender who it was doing the storytelling.

  “Chittendon’s his name. Lawyer from Vermont, I think,” the bartender said. Tom sipped his beer and listened.

  “Heard a little splash by the shore and Sabattis told me to uncover the jacklight. Sure enough, there was the most splendid buck you ever laid eyes on, caught in the light. I fired, but I regret to say I was a bit off the mark, for he bounded off. So I said to Mitchell how I was sorry to lose such a noble animal.

  “‘We can’t lose what we never had,’ says he, ‘but we’ll have him before daylight. He’s hit hard and will not run far.’ Needless to say, I was skeptical, but Mitchell said, ‘He did not snort or whistle, as unwounded deer always do when startled, and one of his forelegs appears to be crippled, by the sound of it.’”

  “He could tell that from the sound of a running deer—at night?” one of the men in his audience said with a decided note of skepticism. A couple of the others shook their heads.

  “Oh, I was as skeptical as you gentlemen, I assure you,” Chittendon said. “But Sabattis showed me the blood, though he had to practically put it under my nose for me to see. He saw it plainly though, and actually said it was as bloody as a butcher’s shop, though I swear to you that in the dark I could not make it out amongst the leaves, not even with the jacklight right on it.”

  Chittendon took a sip of his brandy. “‘I’m going for him,’ Sabattis said, ‘stay with the boat and wait for my shot. Then you fire a pistol, which will give me my bearings.’ Then, off he went into the forest, the lantern in one hand and the gun in the other.

  “I can tell you, gentlemen, it seemed like hours that I waited there by that boat, and I suppose it was hours, though I didn’t check my watch. Then, up on the mountainside, I heard a faint report. I signaled back with my revolver and waited again until I heard something thrashing down the hill.”

  “You mean to say this Sabattis fellow tracked a wounded deer through the forest at night, ran it down and killed it?” Tom said. “And then he dragged it out of the forest single-handed?”

  “Indeed, sir,” Chittendon said. “But I can assure you it was as I say. Told me he held the lamp in one hand and shot it with the rifle in the other. Tracked the animal over a mile, following the blood,” Chittendon said, shaking his head in disbelie
f. “I tell you, gentlemen, if you have an opportunity to hunt with Mitchell Sabattis, take it. The best damn guide I ever had, and a truly uncanny man in the forest. Good cook as well, I might add.”

  Tom shook hands with Chittendon and thanked him for the story before he put his empty glass on the bar. “Quite a tale,” he said as he left.

  The band was quite good. They had set up on the wide verandah of the Prospect House once dinner was finished in the main dining room. Tom and Mary could hear them from the far side of the lake. After dinner they had boarded the Utowana for a night cruise. The steamer was gaily lit, glowing in a halo of reflected light from the still water. The boat had boarded over thirty guests. Ripples of laughter mixed with the distant strains of a waltz. The Prospect House burned with electric brilliance, casting its own rippling reflection across the lake and throwing up a starlike glow against the vault of the blue-black sky.

  “I hope this was the right thing—for Mike, I mean,” Mary said as she and Tom leaned against the port rail.

  “Had my doubts,” Tom admitted. “He did seem better once we got here, at least until that damn buck bit him.”

  “I think it bothered ’Becca more than him,” Mary said.

  Tom nodded. Rebecca had always been the sensitive one. “Yeah, he took it pretty well, especially when he saw that girl in the pharmacy.”

  “Pretty little thing,” Mary ventured. “They had eyes for each other right away.” She was a maid apparently and her long blonde hair, tied back in a bun, had framed a fresh face, with startling green eyes over a pouting mouth. She had been there when they went to find the doctor. The chemistry had been instant.

  “Probably why he didn’t want to come with us tonight. I bet he’s on the prowl,” Tom said with a faint grin.

  “So long as he’s got ’Becca with him, he can prowl all he likes. But I’ll bite his whole hand off if I find out different.” Mary said this with a smile, but it didn’t conceal the hard edge to her words. Tom grunted, listening as the distant band launched into a polka.

  “Don’t trust him yet do you?” he asked, putting a hand on Mary’s as they rested on the railing. “Not that I do either, really,” he hurried on before she had a chance to answer. “Suppose we have to give him some rope though. We try to keep him on too short a lead and we’ll lose him. He’s got too much spirit to stand that for long, even if he deserves it.”

  Mike was not theirs. He was the son of Terence Bucklin, a man whose murder had started Tom on the Brooklyn Bridge conspiracy case six years before. Tom had grown close to the boy then, a wild but promising ten-year-old who ran with a pack of boys in his Lower East Side neighborhood. When his grandmother, his last living relative, came down with consumption, Tom asked if he could adopt Mike. That was before he and Mary had married. They made it official after the wedding. They had taken Mike into their lives in eighty-four and moved to Brooklyn Heights late that same year. Yet, despite the separation, Mike’s ties to his old friends remained as strong as harness leather.

  The gang became more daring as the boys got older; it got larger, too, including boys from other streets in the old neighborhood, according to reports Tom got from the local cops. With both he and Mary working the hours they did, it was close to impossible to stop Mike from running with them. The fact that Mary was a madam who ran two respectable houses in the West Twenty’s didn’t help. It was only natural for Mike to feel that the usual rules didn’t apply to him.

  Tom had hoped that so long as Mike did well in school the gap between him and the gang was bound to widen. Mike’s grades put him near the top of his class, but they didn’t do much to break his old ties. The pull of the gang and the old neighborhood around Norfolk, Suffolk, and Rivington Streets was too strong, the temptations too great.

  They’d been his family, Mouse, Smokes, and the others, and they were on to bigger things, so big that Smokes boasted that he had to start paying the great Monk Eastman a percentage of everything they got.

  Tom got the telegram early on a Sunday morning. Mike had been out all night, something he never did before. Tom had sent his own telegrams to all the station houses on the Lower East Side during the night, alerting them to keep an eye out for the boy.

  The telegram was not good news. There had been a break-in at a warehouse, a watchman was bludgeoned and a fire set to cover the crime, the building badly burned. Mike and Mouse, whose real name was Moses Schein, were caught driving a wagon loaded with the stolen goods. Tom had been boiling when he got the telegram.

  “There’s only one way I can help you, Mike,” Tom told him. “You have to give up the rest of them. Mouse isn’t talking now, but if he does and he spills it before you do—well, I can’t help you. You understand?” Tom remembered pacing Mike’s cell in the Fourth precinct; three steps, turn, three steps, turn, three steps.

  “Who hit the watchman, who set the fire, who was on watch, who was fencing the stuff—everything, and no bullshit.” Mike sat silent as a stone. “I already talked to the prosecutor,” Tom told him. He knew the system and the players well enough to know what would get Mike off. “You do this and you’re out. No record, no jail, nothing.”

  Mike had taken some convincing. Not even the threat of what might happen if the watchman died could budge him at first. It took two more days to get him to bend. They were bad days for all of them.

  Mike gave up the names at last. Tom knew it was an agony for him, a cutting away of a piece of himself. No matter what he or Mary might think of Mike’s old gang from the Suffolk Street tenements, they had been like brothers, a street family with bonds fanning out like the tendons in the back of his hand. The cutting of those tendons had been done with a dull instrument, a tool of coercion and fear. An ax cuts more than a scalpel, even in the deftest of hands. Their own bonds were left hanging by a thread.

  “He’s a good boy, Tom, a good young man I should say,” Mary said. “I don’t believe for a second he had anything to do with what happened to that night watchman.”

  “No,” Tom said. “I don’t believe that’s in him.”

  Mary watched his face from the corner of her eye. They both had their doubts.

  The trout had been superb, the venison steaks done to perfection, with just a touch of natural “gaminess” to remind the diners they weren’t at Delmonico’s William and his cousin, Frederick Durant, sat down to a late supper once the main dining hall had emptied and only a few guests still lingered over coffee and desserts.

  “You’re going to have to keep her happy somehow, Will,” Frederick said, his fork poised over a last morsel of trout. “Even if this Van Duzer fellow can’t break down the walls you say you’ve erected, he can certainly make life inconvenient, expensive, too.”

  William grunted. He had plenty of money for now, though, God knows, he was spending it fast enough between his projects up here and the new yacht. He considered for a moment what it might take to make his sister go away. He quickly concluded that either the bulk of his plans or the yacht would have to go. The truth was he wasn’t willing to give up either, not for Ella.

  “Van Duzer can end up costing you more in lawyer’s fees than it would take to pay Ella off,” Frederick went on. He looked at his cousin as he cut into a last bit of venison. He wondered if William was even listening. “It’s your money,” he finally said with a shrug. “Your sister, too.”

  William looked across the table at his cousin. Fred owned the Prospect House and everything in it. He had built the place from lumber cut and milled on the spot, carving this fabulous place from the grip of the forest. He’d built a camp for himself way over on Forked Lake that he called The Cedars, a rival of the finest camps in the Adirondacks. He was the heir to a fortune of his father’s making, a prosperous sugar business in New York, and was a wealthy man by any measure.

  Between them they could turn this part of the world into the finest resort area in the East. The Adirondacks were protected now, at least on paper. The state legislature had seen to that with the Adirondac
k Preserve act of ’85. It was the largest park in the country, bigger than Yellowstone and Yosemite combined, and far closer to the money capitals of the East. If they were smart, he and Frederick and perhaps a small circle of investors would turn these forests into a fortune the likes of which had rarely been seen. His sister’s clamoring for her “share” of the estate was a trifling matter against such plans.

  “Morgan will be up in a couple of weeks,” William said after washing his venison down with an excellent burgundy.

  “The nose himself?” Fred asked, surprise painting his usually placid features. Morgan’s outsized strawberry nose was as huge as his reputation in business, and, if rumors were true, with the women as well. William enjoyed the moment, letting his handsome cousin dangle for a few seconds.

  “In person,” William confirmed with a smug smile. “He’s coming to look at the site on Mohegan Lake. He’ll be staying at Pine Knot of course, and I’ll be showing him the hunting lodges on Sumner and Shedd, too,” Will said. “Of course, the lodges are nothing compared to Pine Knot, but mainly I wanted to show him the sites and let him envision the possibilities.”

  “Hmph!” Fred grunted. “You get Morgan for a client, it’ll open up a world of possibilities, Will. You know the kind of friends he has? Of course you do. What the hell am I saying?”

  His cousin was excited and Will was loving it. Morgan’s interest would be good for both of them. Just his presence in the Adirondacks would give the region a caché beyond anything they could have done on their own. Will took another sip of wine.

  “Collis helped,” Will said in as offhanded a manner as he could.

  “Huntington’s a good man. Your father thought very highly of him,” Fred said.

  William nodded. “He’s been a help and a fair man to deal with; loves the Adirondacks, too. He sees the future of this country. May be selling him a camp as well,” Will said, as if the deal was already done.