by Jim Musgrave
“Yes, I am ready. I am retiring to California after this. I want to be alone with my troubles. Private practice will do me good.”
“Dr. Letterman, what did you see during the hours before Dr. Mergenthaler disappeared? Were there reports of any strangers on the property or inside the building? I want to know if anybody was reported, no matter how innocuous or strange,” I said, gesturing in an inclusive, circular motion with my right hand.
“I tell you there were no strangers or different people inside this hospital. I have watches set on every floor, and they can report to me from pneumatic tubes I have installed so we can communicate in an instant if somebody untoward should enter.”
“Please. Think back. Anybody at all? Any noises? Anything out of the ordinary?” I picked up my walking pace, back and forth, until his brown eyes were following me as if I were a tiger in a cage.
“No!” he shouted, and then he stopped. I saw his Adam’s apple move up and down above his starched white collar. “Wait one moment. Yes! I heard a knocking on the walls. I thought it was probably the workers doing late repairs to our building. We had not yet completed all the outside work, such as window sashes and rain gutters. I sent Nurse Levine out to see what it was. She told me there was nothing.”
“May I speak with this nurse?” I asked.
Samuel left the room to get her.
“Take me to the room where he was located. By the way, what was Dr. Mergenthaler in the hospital for?” I asked, watching Dr. Letterman rise and walk out into the white corridors. I followed him closely as we walked up the stairs to the fourth floor.
“He suffers from what we diagnosed as Ulcerative Colitis. Abrasions inside the colon led to his frequent stomach pains and diarrheal episodes. There were two members in his late family who had this disorder when all we knew was that it was caused by bacteria or infectious agents.”
We walked inside the biggest hospital room in the building and shut the door. I pointed to the bed. “Is this where he was lying?”
Nurse Levine was standing beside the bed waiting for us. She was a tall and thin young woman with dark eyes and eyebrows that met in the middle of her forehead. Her white uniform glowed in the gaslights. “Yes, I was charge nurse on duty, and Dr. Mergenthaler was in this bed,” she said.
“How soon before the disappearance did you investigate the noises?”
“About ten minutes. I looked outside the building and walked around, but I got back to his room in about ten minutes. I know because I had to give him his medicine, and I was looking at the clock on the table beside his bed before I left to investigate. When I returned, he had disappeared without a trace. No clothes were taken. He alone was gone. Only his little boy, Seth, was in the room. He told me something about being invisible.”
I looked over the room. It had one window on the 28th Street side, overlooking the street below. It was four stories up, so a cat burglar would probably never be able to abscond with the doctor. No, there must have been some other way. Perhaps Mergenthaler left alone. Perhaps one of the staff escorted him some way that did not raise suspicion. I wanted to know about the knocking.
I began on the walls of the hospital room, knocking on the boards with my fist, taking time to cover the entire surface of the four walls. I listened for a hollow sound. I thought about my beloved Edgar and his love of walls. Dead bodies were hidden inside Poe’s walls, so perhaps here as well. Was Dr. Mergenthaler’s corpse rotting inside one of the building’s carved-out partition structures? Slowly and methodically, I knocked on all the walls, all throughout the new Mt. Sinai Hospital. The entire family Mergenthaler and most of the hospital staff were following me and watching my every knock. Just when I was about to give up, I heard it. The telltale heart revealed the hollow beating of an empty partition enclosure. “Rip out this wall!” I said, and my heart began to beat faster in momentous expectation of what we might discover inside.
Chapter 2: Underground
After the workmen had torn open the wall located in the basement of the hospital, we could all peer into a great, hollowed-out cavern leading down beneath the earth. The tunnel was tall enough for a man to walk through it bending over slightly--about four feet, eight inches--and I immediately did so. I could hear the squishing sound of my steps as I strode down inside and onto the muddy floor and the odor was quite repelling. After about fifteen yards in I saw why. This oval-shaped metal passage joined to the New York City underground sewers.
“Hello! Mister O’Malley! Are you all right down there?”
I could hear the voice of Dr. Jacobi. I turned around and shouted, “Yes I am!”
Whoever kidnapped Dr. Mergenthaler must have come this way, and if they did, then they must have also planned their crime long before the hospital was completed. It was as if the passageway beneath the earth were created especially to transport one man. I pulled myself up into the sewer and looked down the long tunnel. There were gas lights every ten yards, so it resembled a brick oven, with the waste products of all the buildings and people flowing in a stream down the center.
I thought about the possible suspects. The workers at the hospital were obvious possibilities. This underground escape route must have taken months to construct, and I needed to find out who could do this kind of work among the men who were employed at the hospital site. Of course, there was a chance that the person or persons who constructed the tunnel leading to the sewers knew nothing about the kidnapping of Dr. Mergenthaler. If so, then I needed to dig deeper into the case before I could uncover the employer.
As I walked under a gas lamp, I was looking at the wall. I stopped in front of something that was scrawled all over the brick façade. It said: “Order 11 for all America! Git rid of all the jew scumm!”
I wondered what “Order 11 meant.” I made a mental note to look it up in the newspapers and in the city’s law books. There might be some recent legislation about Jews that this illiterate slur was referencing.
I decided to leave the tunnel and go back to the hospital. As I walked along the cavernous pipe, I kept remembering my days in the Army during the war. It was before Dr. Letterman instituted his ambulance corps. It was raining, and I was hiding out with some men inside a cave in the Vicksburg hills. We were being shelled by Confederate cannons, and one of my men was hit by bouncing shrapnel. I tried to stop his wound, which was a deep puncture inside his stomach. The blood flowed down his thin frame and entered the water that was collected in a big puddle at our feet, just the way the water was in this passageway beneath the city. I have never felt as helpless and as ignorant before in my life. The poor lad kept asking me if I were taking him to the regimental tent, and I could only nod at him in the affirmative. I knew it was impossible, however, as it would have been suicide to try to run across the field outside our little cavern. We were trapped inside our cave like Dr. Mergenthaler must have been feeling as he was dragged or carried along this stretch of tunnel.
I pulled myself up into the cavern inside the hospital wall, and I felt a hand. He pulled me up and over the edge, and I was once again standing in the full light of the basement. I noticed, for the first time, that we were standing inside the morgue of Mt. Sinai. All around us were the tables used for autopsies, and I could even see the pallets that held a few cadavers waiting to be transported to funeral homes around the city.
Dr. Jacobi saw me looking at the bodies. “Our religion makes it mandatory to get the dead buried in the earth no later than 24 hours following death. These bodies shall not be here much longer,” he said. “What did you find out down there, Detective?” he added.
“We Catholics go about it a bit differently,” I said. “We like to hold a wake. That’s when the living relatives try their best to become almost as unconscious as the deceased is by imbibing alcoholic spirits. What did I discover down there? This crime must have been planned for months; because that’s the least amount of time it must have taken to construct this escape route that leads to the underground sewer system.”
“That’s a ghastly thought,” said Samuel, wiping his brow with a handkerchief. “Do you suppose they want money?”
Bessie’s face became somber. “If these people expect a lot of money, then they will have quite a surprise coming to them. My husband is not a hoarder of wealth. Most of our family’s money goes to a variety of organizations around the world to help children and other causes that were dear to his heart. My husband, in many ways, is an extremely fragile and sensitive man. How could they do this to him?” She walked over to her brother Samuel, and he put his arm around her. I could tell they were a comforting family.
Dr. Letterman shuffled his feet while Bessie talked. He looked concerned about something. “Jon, do you wish to add something?” I asked.
“I think you need to know a lot more about Art Mergenthaler. I believe I know why he was kidnapped. Can we go somewhere privately?” Letterman sounded quite serious, and I noticed that the family was staring at him.
“What do you know about my brother that we don’t?” Samuel Mergenthaler spoke up.
“I’ve been privy to some business dealings Arthur was making in the South. Your brother is a genius, that’s very true, but even savants can be taken advantage of by unscrupulous entrepreneurs.” Letterman walked over to me and grasped me by my forearm. “Let’s go, O’Malley. I know a pub around the corner where we can talk.”
“Mister Mergenthaler, could you provide me with a list of the workers who were employed to construct your hospital? I need to check on these people as possible suspects.”
“Certainly, Mister O’Malley. I’ll do that today. Shall we meet somewhere?”
“Yes, I’ll come back here to see you. Let’s say in an hour?”
“I shall see you then. Good luck with your interview. If you need more information from us, you know where to get it.”
“Thank you, sir. You have been quite helpful in the midst of this calamity. I appreciate your assistance. The sooner I can get a list of possible suspects, the sooner I can pursue this case in earnest. I also believe we may be contacted by the perpetrators, so please inform me if you get any communications from them.”
“We will certainly do that!” said Bessie. “I want my husband returned safely, and we shall find a way to negotiate, if that is the only way we can do it.”
“I sincerely hope it doesn’t come to that,” I said, and I followed Letterman out the door and into the New York City streets.
* * *
My mind was already working on how to get leads in this case. I would, of course, check with my Plug Ugly gang leader, Walter McKenzie, in New Jersey. He helped me track down the killers of Edgar Allan Poe, and he knew more about the Irish gangs of New York than any man I knew.
In addition, my soul’s treasure, Madame Rebecca Charming, was always willing to allow me her intelligent counsel. She could also find out information through her network of kept “ladies of the evening” throughout the city. She had followed me to different battles during the war, and I was still quite indebted to her for teaching me how to use my intuitive powers of detection as well as, at long last, overcoming my inability to have an intimate relationship with a member of the opposite gender. I owed a lot to Becky, and I was certain she could help me whenever I needed her.
The tavern Letterman chose was called The Shroud. It was a place where workmen came to drink, and it was filled with smoke, curses and spittoons. We sat in the back, and a tall bar man came up to us wearing a soiled apron and his hair was parted in the middle and slicked down to the sides. His moustache looked like a live caterpillar on his upper lip. “What’ll it be, gents?” he asked.
“Two pints of draft, Charley,” said Letterman.
“Make mine a root beer,” I said. “I own stock in the root beer company,” I added. I made up a different excuse every time. I still felt somewhat embarrassed by my teetotaler attitude because of my brother Tim’s alcoholism and early death.
“I will have a root beer too,” said Jon Letterman. “He needs the money,” he smiled at me.
“And so, what is this big mystery you know about Mister Mergenthaler’s business ventures?” I wanted to get right into the topic of our conversation.
Letterman twirled his mustache with the fingers of his right hand. “Arthur is a kind and generous man. He is also, as his wife knows so well, an idealist. As you must know, in this world of scallywags and ne’er-do-wells, idealists are often taken advantage of.”
“Yes and the sun rises in the morning and sets in the evening. Tell me something new.”
“Arthur wanted to help the coloreds down south. He had it all planned out. If you believe I can design an effective campaign for the safe delivery of wounded soldiers, then you have not met Dr. Arthur Mergenthaler. His genius at proscribing a preventive cure for the racism and violence following the Civil War was the most ingenious system I have ever seen. In fact, that is how we met. I was inspecting a new veterans’ hospital in Fredericksburg, and Arthur was there supervising his new company.”
“Company? What was this company’s business?”
The waiter returned and I took my root beer by its mug handle and drank a long quaff from it. I wiped the foam from my upper lip and belched. “How does this all relate to the possible kidnapping?”
“Arthur’s company is called Emancipation Incorporated. There is no jest in that title. It was his goal to free all the Negroes in the South from any type of social and economic hindrances. In order to do this, as you can imagine, he needed to step on some very important toes.”
“I need not imagine. I understand such things in my own family,” I said. “My brother was one of the prime instigators of the New York Draft Riots of ’63. In a way, it led to his alcoholism and early death.”
“I read about that. Was there any good to come out of those riots?”
“No, except in late 1863, when many of the Negroes had been driven from the city, wealthy Republican businessmen formed the Union League Club. They raised enough money to enlist black men into the 20th Regiment, which, in 1864, marched down the streets to the Hudson where a ship was waiting to take them into combat in the South. There were hundreds of thousands of supporters to see them off. However, the inequality and racism among the Irish, Germans, Jews and Negroes continued. We know it was a lot worse after we took over the southern cities from the Rebels than it ever was in New York City. How was Mergenthaler’s company going to overcome the much worse racism and adverse conditions in those southern communities?”
“Many of my friends in the Army became members of the Freedman’s Bureau when they returned home. They felt guilty about all the destruction caused by their invasion, and they wanted to help make it up to the South by becoming agents for the citizens by governing in their behalf. However, these agents were hampered by bureaucratic laws, and many of them were run out of town by the people. That’s when Arthur stepped in with his private corporation. He was not tied-down by the government rules, so he was free to be more creative in his endeavors.”
“Creative? How do you mean?”
Letterman stared hard at the gas lamp on our table as he spoke. “Mergenthaler created a system whereby the blacks ran the businesses and created the profits therein. In many areas of the South, the newly freed slaves outnumbered their masters, so Arthur decided to use their voting rights in a political way. He told these men that if they voted for his candidate, then they would become the managers of their own businesses, and Emancipation Corporation would back them completely with money, with a system of business organization, and with a production and supply network that filled orders faster than any yet devised in private industry in the northern states.”
“I imagine Mergenthaler would take a slice of this for himself, correct?”
“Correct. He was able to establish over 630 such industries down south, and he gained a big share of their profits. However, in return, these areas became self-sufficient, and the newly freed Negroes built schools, modern town buildings and even concert halls
and theaters. For many months Arthur’s business thrived in the midst of the government’s more bureaucratic and controversial system that was plagued by corruption.”
“I remember. President Johnson vetoed the Civil Rights Act of 1865, which gave voting, property and other rights to freedmen. The Radical Republicans, led by Thaddeous Stevens, himself married to a colored woman, were behind the drafting and passage of the legislation, if I recall,” I said.
“Johnson’s sympathies are with the former slave owners, as he comes from the South and was a slavery sympathizer and Democrat during the war. But the real connection of pro-slavery and corruption was between two men we know quite well. One is General Ulysses S. Grant and the other is your old boss, General William T. Sherman. They are both slavery supporters and quite sympathetic to Johnson and his wishes to keep the Negroes without equal rights under the law.”
I was quite dumbfounded. I knew Sherman had mental problems, as I had observed some of his more grandiose actions first-hand as his personal orderly. But I never heard him speak of slavery or issues of Southern Reconstruction. This was all new to me. “I really was not aware of such affairs. Can you give me some evidence?”
“On December 17, 1862, General Grant issued his infamous General Order 11, expelling all Jews from his conquered territories within 24 hours. A few months earlier, on 11 August 1862, General William Tecumseh Sherman had warned in a letter to the Adjutant General of the Union Army that quote, The country will swarm with dishonest Jews, unquote, if continued trade in cotton is encouraged.”
“My God! I never knew he had such beliefs,”
“In another letter, dated 1858, Sherman also described Jews as without pity, soul, heart, or bowels of compassion.”
“I can’t believe it. He was always such a gentleman when I knew him,” I said.