Disquiet Heart

by Randall Silvis

  She rolled her eyes and patted her chest; her expression was mournful. “Six in as many weeks.”

  “Just as he said.”

  “He’s extremely troubled by it, him and all the other councilmen. They’ve been trying to organize a police force ever since this awful business began. Problem is, everybody wants protection but nobody wants to pay for it.”

  “There have been no bodies found?”

  “Not a one.”

  “No ransom demands?”

  “None that I have heard of.”

  “Is an investigation being conducted?”

  “Of a sort,” she said. “But seeing as how the watchmen in the various wards aren’t often keen on cooperating with one another, the investigation is a fairly haphazard affair. There’s been a handful of layabouts locked up over it—one fella had his head busted by the police for refusing to confess to the crimes. He died of it, God rest his soul. That was after number four, howsoever.”

  “And are the newspapers involved?”

  “Oh, they don’t shirk when it comes to calling for something to be done. Or for running stories and sketches of the poor missing girls. Mostly what they do is to keep the city in a state of fear.”

  “Are you afraid, Mrs. Dalrymple?”

  “And why wouldn’t I be? You think I’m too old to be murdered? Every woman in this city is half scared out of her wits.”

  “Has anyone suggested that perhaps these young women haven’t been kidnapped but—how can I put this—have been introduced into a certain line of employment? In which case they are likely to be found in the kind of establishment no watchman would ever admit to frequenting.”

  “And I suppose that you, on the other hand, are just the man to be investigating these places?”

  “If it will set your mind more at ease, Mrs. Dalrymple, I shall endeavor to do my utmost in that regard.”

  “Your utmost,” she repeated, and tsk-tsked me. “I’m beginning to suspect that your utmost is like that Frenchman’s balloon I read about last week. Full of hot air.”

  I clutched my heart as if fatally wounded by the remark.

  She departed with the empty dishes and a low, sustained chuckle, leaving me with a very full belly, a soft mattress, and with thoughts of wanton women overflowing in my brain.

  I DOZED for a while, though not long, and when I awoke the gloaming was at my window. It was a gunmetal twilight, not delicately lit in pastels of sunset hue but of the color and chill of dull pewter. Upon awakening I required a few moments to retrieve my bearings and recall my whereabouts, and even afterward experienced that odd sense of displacement that comes from awakening in a strange place at the end of a long journey.

  Yet enough light remained in the sky that I, now standing at the window, could see that my bedroom was located on the mansion’s second floor, and that it looked out upon a rear yard. Some hundred yards or so out in that yard stood a line of hardwood trees, all thirty to forty feet high, all still quite skeletonal despite the buds of new leaves. A wind was blowing the high branches, shuddering the thinner limbs. And in the uppermost reaches of three of the trees, three adjoining trees near the western end of the copse, a gathering of grackles huddled, as shiny black as crows but only half their size.

  The yards were spacious, with no other homes in sight. From my window I could see all or part of several outbuildings, most notably a greenhouse, a carriage house and stable, a small corral containing four sheep (these would be released daily, by Raymund, I presumed, and allowed to manicure the grounds). Also visible was a stone pad on which sat an anvil and other blacksmithing implements. Beside it, a redbrick bread oven.

  By standing with my face close to the window and peering east along the glass I could see approximately one-fourth of an intricate hedge maze. It struck me as such a civilized accoutrement for a place like Pittsburgh, an enclosed and labyrinthine path leading, I surmised, to a comfortable bench at the secluded center, a place for meditation and reflection. Later I would discover that it was not a labyrinth but a true maze after all; that is, not with a single path meant to lead the walker to a symbolic center of his soul, but a series of convoluted switchbacks and dead-ends, such as might lead not to quietude but frustration, confusion, and even panic.

  In any case, the outdoors beckoned. I had been in this room too long, despite its luxury. In fact the luxury itself made me ill at ease; I was hesitant to touch anything lest I somehow upset the elegance. Besides, my body was stiff with inactivity, stiff from four days on a boat.

  I looked about for my boots, found them under a chair, clean and brushed. Reshod, I eased open my bedroom door and stepped out into the hallway.

  I will not bore you with my egress along that corridor and down the long, curved stairway except to say that it left its mark on me, a plain boy used to plain things, suckled on lust for the indulgences of others but weaned of that particular lust on the flatlands of Ottawa County, where I’d learned to covet freedom above all else, and came to recognize the impossibility of freedom when encumbered with the ballast of too much wealth.

  In that frame of mind, and with that history etched into my psyche, how could a place like Gingko Castle not fill me with an odd mixture of emotions, of feelings that ran the gamut from envy to contempt? The high ceilings and parquet floors, the gasolier lights in their golden wall sconces, the marble statuettes placed here and there (being busts, I assumed, of Roman gods and goddesses, though for all I knew of mythology they might have been Greek instead), the elaborate oil paintings in ornate gilded frames … ?

  The stairway descended in a graceful parabolic curve to the front foyer, and here I found the summation, the encapsulation of the mansion and all it represented. Here were but three items to catch the eye. First, hanging above the very center of the foyer, suspended on a golden rod from a ceiling at least fifteen feet high, was a chandelier so huge, so overdone, of such behemoth proportions that it made me wonder how the rest of the building withstood its pull of weight. All gold and crystal, it consisted of three tiers of hand-blown bulbs, each shaped live a wavering flame ten inches high, and inside which a gasolier flame fluttered brightly. At the center of the chandelier, hanging as if suspended by invisible wires, was a huge china globe, the sun in miniature, luminescent. The entire affair was both magnificent and grotesque.

  The second item, the doorway. It was a double door, each half four feet wide by ten high, framed in red Barbadian mahogany, intricately scrolled. The door handles were solid tubes of glass four inches in diameter, curved into a loop and twisted like braided rope, and tinted the most delicate shade of rose. The door panels were of inch-thick etched glass, a fleur-de-lis pattern, exquisitely intricate but permitting no transparent view of the outside from the foyer, nor, conversely, from the outside in.

  The final item on which my eyes fell, and which held my interest longest because it was not merely grandiose, not merely magnificent on a larger-than-human scale, but to my way of thinking, all too human, was a life-sized wood carving of the Delaware Indian chief Nemacolin (who, for the time being, I knew only as a nameless Indian).

  I do not mean to imply that the sculpture was not magnificently done, that the folds of the Chief’s robe did not appear to be made more of wood-grained velvet than of obstinate black oak, or that his head feathers, complete down to the last crenellation of each individual quill, did not appear newly plucked from a wild, if wood-grained, turkey. Or that Nemacolin’s bare feet, even rooted as they were to a wooden base, did not look as if they might at any moment return to the soft matting of the forest.

  It was the Chief’s eyes that spoke to me, that looked up at me from the bottom of the stairs and drew me slowly down, that then held me there in the foyer, face-to-face with him. I know that trees have the oldest memories and the kindest hearts, but how could wood convey to me such remorse, such abject regret?

  “Chief Nemacolin,” said Dr. Brunrichter, who had walked up quietly behind me and startled me with his voice.

 
I turned. He was standing in the archway to the library, a snifter of cognac in hand. I leaned a bit to my left and now saw behind him, seated in a chair of maroon leather but leaning half out of it, his elbow resting awkwardly on the corner of a square Chickering piano, Poe. He sat there gazing sleepy-eyed, not looking in my direction but straight across the library, grinning (imbecilicly, I thought), one leg draped over the opposite knee. His face was flushed. He was wearing clothes I had never seen before, black trousers, a shirt almost too white for the room, a black silk cravat—clothes of a material far too fine for Poe’s wallet.

  “He blazed trails over the Allegheny Mountains for Christopher Gist, among others,” the doctor continued, and raised his glass as if to toast the sloe-eyed Chief. “Helped to open up the West to Americans.”

  “His own people must despise him,” I said.

  Dr. Brunrichter was taken aback by my impertinence. “Hardly,” he said.

  “Of course, a man in your position could never subscribe to such a viewpoint.”

  I must have struck him as the most callow of youths, arrogant and ungrateful to boot. There I was with my belly stuffed with Brunrichter’s food, my mind and body rested from his fine soft bed, my skull tended to and patched by his own skillful hands—yet I stood there impugning the man’s open-mindedness, insulting him.

  Even as I did so and heard my own voice, I had to wonder if perhaps one of Poe’s imps had begun to work its perversity on me.

  As for the doctor, he remained a good host, and indulged me. “Come into the library,” he said. “Join us in a snifter and a cigar. You can enlighten me.”

  He seated me to the right of Poe, in an armchair of deep brown leather that faced the fireplace. Poe had looked up at me briefly when I came in, greeted me with the sleepy smile already on his lips, then returned to gazing deep into the fire of fragrant apple wood. Brunrichter, in the meantime, went to a small trolley table placed close to a window and poured another drink, brought it and a cigar to where I sat, and even struck a lucifer to light my cigar.

  I could not help but notice that he was treating me, a yet unwashed boy, as his equal here, a gentleman, and though I scrutinized his face for some evidence that it was all a charade, I found none. I should then have been able to bask in the man’s magnanimity, but I could not. Something rankled at me. Try as I might, I could not lay a finger on it.

  I turned to Poe. “So what have you two been talking about this evening?”

  Poe lazily raised his right hand, a cold cigar stuck between finger and thumb, and made a sedated attempt at a dramatic flourish. “Many things. Many things indeed.”

  Brunrichter added another stick of apple wood to the fire. Never before had I seen a fireplace so free of ash and soot stain, from the green-and-white tiles to the dark walnut mantelpiece to the heavy, ornate andirons. And yet the man himself, the master of this fanatical cleanliness, was himself a master of informality, the epitome of a casual demeanor.

  He caught me gawking at the room and everything in it, saw how my eyes scanned one objet d’art after another to land, finally, on a collection of glass walking canes all leaning against one another in a corner like a display of wildly baroque icicles.

  “We’re very proud of our glassworks here,” he told me as he resettled in his chair. “Some of the finest craftsmen in the country work here.”

  “But canes?” I asked. “Walking canes made of glass?”

  He laughed. “Not very practical, I agree. And yet …” After a moment he stood again, went to the display and picked up one of the canes, brought it over to me and laid it across my lap. “The impractical is sometimes the most beautiful.”

  The tip of the cane was shaped as the pointed end of a serpent’s tail and protected with a silver cap. The crystal clear body of the snake was entwined around an equally flawless crystal sassafras twig. The handle was, of course, the snake’s broad head, its eyes tiny buttons of silver.

  “There’s no question that it’s lovely,” I said, and stuck the cigar in my mouth so as to have a hand free to feel the sinuations of the snakes glass skin.

  “It’s yours,” he said.

  I nearly dropped the cigar out of my mouth.

  He waved a hand, dismissing any protest I might have uttered, and returned to his chair on the other side of Poe. All this time Poe had not taken his eyes off the fire. His lips had never lost their sad and crooked smile.

  Brunrichter did not even allow me an opportunity to thank him for his gift. “Edgar and I have embarked upon a conspiracy,” he said. “Will you join us in it?”

  “A conspiracy?” I repeated. (Here you will need to picture me as I suddenly felt: an unshaven and unwashed youth, his clothes the same he had slept in for the past several days, a crystal snifter of cognac clutched in a hand whose fingernails were black with dirt, an expensive cigar in the other and similarly soiled hand, and a finely crafted and no doubt outrageously expensive glass cane balanced precariously across his lap. There I sat, unaccomplished in virtually every noble pursuit, a gutter rat with his tail still dripping from the sewer, and in the company of two distinguished and highly accomplished men, one of whom had just now invited me into a partnership. If I had felt vaguely rankled upon entering this room, I was by this time wholly disarmed of every sensation but that of awe.)

  Brunrichter nodded. “The disappearances of which I spoke earlier. The six young women. Edgar and I, he with his intuition and me with my science, have determined to act as one mind so as to put an end to this crime.”

  “And me?” I asked. “How can I assist?”

  “In any way you wish. Edgar assures me that you are a very perceptive young man.”

  “Mrs. Dalrymple tells me that the police investigation has accomplished little.”

  “And how could it do otherwise? Their lack of organization is appalling. Were it not for the constant admonishments from myself and other councilmen, nothing whatsoever would have been accomplished.”

  “And what has been accomplished so far?” I asked.

  Again he smiled at my impertinence. “You are correct, young man. Nothing has been accomplished. That is why we are all so frustrated. Six young women have disappeared as if into thin air, and in most cases not even the exact locations of the disappearances are known.

  “But you,” he said, “being of an age, more or less, of these young ladies, perhaps you can keep an ear to the ground, as it were. As you travel about the city you might hear a bit of information the police have not been made privy to.”

  “If I do, I will let you know immediately.”

  “We would all be grateful for that,” he said.

  For a minute or so we sat in silence, Brunrichter and I drawing on our cigars, letting the smoke out slowly. Then the doctor leaned forward in his chair and spoke to Poe. “What kind of man, do you think, might be responsible for these crimes?”

  A pause before Poe answered. “Brute,” he said. “A savage brute.”

  Brunrichter nodded, then looked my way. “Would you agree?”

  I was startled to be included like this, on an equal footing with these learned men. But I tried not to show my nervousness and to live up to the task. “Well, yes. An animal, to be sure. Who else could do such a thing?”

  Again the doctor nodded, then leaned back in his chair. “Conceding that,” he finally said, “by which I mean, conceding the brutish nature of the crimes, or at least the appearance of such, should we not also consider this brute a very clever fellow?”

  I glanced at Poe, expecting his protest, but he merely sat there staring at the fire as before, his brow now furrowed.

  Brunrichter continued, “To leave not a trace of evidence—I find that fact intriguing. No bodies, no buttons torn off and left behind, not so much as a single drop of blood to pinpoint exactly where one of the girls might have disappeared. The man must be a magician.”

  I could think of nothing to refute his logic.

  “This is what troubles me most,” he said. “A dumb
beast is easy to track. But one so guileful …”

  He swished the brandy in his glass, sipped from it, and then, a moment later, shook his head. “We must be even more clever than he,” he said. “Our gravest mistake would be to assume too little.”

  The silence of the room felt ponderous. It was made so not only by the subject of conversation but by Poe’s apparent mood, his lethargy. On previous occasions when I had witnessed him at his most morose or melancholy, there was, even then, an intensity to his emotion, a bright dark fire, if you will. But on this night no intensity of demeanor was visible, no flame. Only the cold, wet ashes of indifference.

  Hoping to alter the climate of the room, I directed my next statement to Poe. “And what of our other plans in the meantime? To head south, soon after your reading tomorrow night?”

  “Two readings,” Poe said. “The second … a week tomorrow?”

  “Next Saturday evening,” Brunrichter confirmed. “At the Drury Theater. To be hosted by the Pittsburgh Institute for Arts and Sciences.”

  “Arts and Sciences,” said Poe in a dreamy monotone.

  “I hadn’t planned to stay so long,” I told them both.

  Brunrichter said, “The choice is yours, of course. But you should know that you are welcome here, both you and Edgar, to remain as long as you wish.”

  Poe said nothing.

  “Thank you but I … I really don’t know what I would do with myself. I have plans to go to Mexico. To join the conflict there.”

  “If your intention is firm,” the doctor said, “I won’t attempt to dissuade you. In fact, if you wish, I might perhaps be of some assistance in that venture. There are two local militia outfits in Mexico already—the Duquesne Grays and the Pittsburgh Blues. If you will allow me to do so, I can arrange for you to be assigned to one of them. Would the rank of adjutant suit you?”

  I could only blink in reply.

  “In the meantime,” said Brunrichter, “you absolutely must remain through Sunday. In the afternoon we shall have a picnic. And on Saturday evening—”