On Night's Shore Page 8

  I noticed that his pace had quickened again, lengthened, as if he were being drawn by some force, a compulsion I would only later come to recognize as his hunger.

  “Like you,” I answered.

  “Do I count myself among them? Is this what you ask?”

  I was about to reply that it hadn’t been a question, but he continued. “One day,” he said.

  And I, because I was just a boy, responded, “Why not now?”

  By this time our feet were striking harder ground, cobblestone. There was a bit of carriage traffic about, the growing bustle. “Were you ever alone in a large house?” he asked. “A large and unfamiliar house? The house of a stranger?”

  “Once or twice,” I answered, though in truth I had been in as many as a roving chambermaid, albeit not to tidy up the beds.

  “In such a house,” Poe said, “if you sit very quietly, if you do not stir, it is possible at times to sense a presence other than your own. You can never quite locate the room it occupies, yet you know nonetheless that the presence exists. As surely as your breath, it exists. This is the way it is with my own greatness, Augie. It sits in one of my rooms, waiting. But I have yet to find the door.”

  He seemed done in by this revelation, exhausted. He came to a halt on the corner and stood gazing blankly across the street. My own face was flushed, and my body warmed from the pace of our walk. I thought it a mistake to let either of us stand in one place too long.

  “Where to now?” I finally asked.

  He blinked twice, then turned to me.

  “We going to talk to somebody about that girl?” I asked. “That Mary Rogers?”

  “Soon,” he said, and then he was off again, striding so briskly that I had to run to keep up.

  8

  For the next two hours I followed Poe from doorway to dark doorway. Before we could take up the business of Mary Rogers, he first needed to attend to the business of making a living, and so attempted to peddle his latest composition from editor to editor. This he had in his cowhide satchel, along with several other pieces yet to see print.

  “What I most desire in life,” he had explained to me before entering the first building, “is the freedom to immerse myself in thought. A life of unfettered contemplation. Unfortunately, the stomach and the landlord demand their due.”

  He gave me license to wander off where I wished, to conduct whatever business of my own I might devise. But I found this activity of peddling words intriguing, and I was keen to see how the strange process worked.

  For Poe’s part, it worked that morning like a movable flogging. While I stationed myself outside an office building, flush in my new clothes and refurbished skin and still tasting the morning’s breakfast grease on my lips, Poe ventured inside to beg an audience. Only to emerge twenty or so minutes later looking more hangdog than when he had entered.

  “What about the Mirror?” I finally hazarded, after Poe’s seventh or eighth turndown of the morning.

  “I have been holding that card to be played last.” He peered across the street as if squinting into a fog.

  “Your ace of diamonds,” I said.

  “Five of spades, I’m afraid.”

  And to my eyes, Neely beat up on him worse than had all the others. When Poe emerged from the Mirror building, he was listing to one side, as if his satchel contained not paper but the rock of Sisyphus.

  “The bastard,” I hissed before Poe had uttered a word.

  “Oh, he will be happy to publish it,” Poe said. “He will be delighted. If only I will make a minor adjustment to the text and trim it by two-thirds.”

  “And will you?”

  In lieu of answering, he stared at the cobblestones and pinched the bridge of his nose. “A dollar for a week’s cerebration,” he muttered.

  It seemed a punishing way to make a go of things. Especially when I, in a single afternoon on the waterfront, could pocket a dollar with scarcely having to think at all.

  “If it’s so hard on you, why do you bother doing it?”

  “Why does the river seek the ocean? Why does a star send forth its feeble light?”

  I understood this to mean that he had no choice in the matter; the urge to create and to see the creation recognized was a force of nature too compelling to be resisted.

  He stood as if in trance for another twenty seconds or so. Then he shook himself out of it. “But it is another matter that puzzles me now.”

  “And what’s that?”

  “You will be pleased to know,” he said, “that your intuitions concerning Miss Rogers were on target.”

  “They was?”

  “While mine, according to the latest bit of evidence, missed the mark entirely.”

  “I wish I could say I know what you’re talking about.”

  “This morning’s paper. Shown to me—almost gleefully, I might add—by Mr. Neely. Wherein appeared a short article in refutation of my premise concerning the manner of Miss Rogers’s demise. The medical examiner now claims that prior to relinquishing the body for interment, he discerned evidence of a recent abortion. Her demise is now attributed to the failure of that procedure.”

  In answer to this, I cocked an eyebrow.

  “Are you familiar with the operation?” he asked.

  “I know it don’t leave finger marks on the neck.”

  “It is yet another abomination of this city.”

  “Better an abortion than a foundling,” I muttered.

  He gave me a long look then, at first squint-eyed, as if he were trying to peer into the wrinkles of my brain. By degrees his visage relaxed, and he warmed me with a small smile.

  “Even so,” he said, “I should very much like to speak with the official who arrived at this conclusion.”

  The prospect of a visit to the morgue set me to quivering with a strange excitement. Romantics and children—Poe and I made a full set—harbor a fascination with death, and, whether the roots of this fascination lie in fecund or sour soil, death seems to us a kind of treasure to be, pardon the pun, unearthed.

  “How much is Neely paying this time?” I asked.

  “Mr. Neely regards the story as having reached its terminus. I believe his words were ‘just another countergirl dead of a botched abortion.’”

  “And he don’t find that interesting?”

  “Not interesting nor unusual enough, no.”

  “Whether it’s the truth or not.”

  “Mr. Neely’s first job is to sell papers. The truth notwithstanding.”

  “So you’re off the story now?”

  “He offered me instead the opportunity to investigate a second mystery—the disappearance of a man named Fordyce. One whose social status renders him more deserving of the ink.”

  “He’s a muckety-muck, is he?”

  “A member of the municipal council.”

  “Probably holed up somewhere with his Quakeress.”

  Poe laughed. “Precisely. And I have no inclination to go canvasing the city’s brothels, even those better ones, for a wayward councilman.”

  “Myself, I vote for the morgue.”

  “Motion carried,” he said.

  North by northeast we went then, all the way up to the wide-open spaces around Twenty-Second Street. This area, while still smelling of orchards and pastures, was home to a few notable establishments. Most prominent in my mind was the walled enclosure of the old federal arsenal, for inside it sat the stolid building with which I had been so frequently threatened by my mother, the House of Refuge. Here criminals under the age of sixteen were sent—pickpockets, prostitutes, thieves, vandals, brawlers; in other words, my peers—sent here to be redeemed through a generous application of hard work, leg irons, brickbats, the cat-o’-nine-tails, and the rule of absolute silence enforced through long nights in a windowless cell.

  I glanced at the
place, but furtively. I did not really want to get a full look at the establishment, or allow it a look at me.

  East of the House of Refuge, on a couple dozen acres overlooking the East River, was another walled complex of buildings, our destination. This was the Bellevue Institution, comprising not only a hospital and morgue but also an icehouse, an almshouse, a greenhouse, a penitentiary, a soap factory, a bakery, a school, and a washhouse. The blue stone poorhouse, at three stories high and over three hundred feet long, was the largest building in the city. It was a small town unto itself, crammed to the gills with sixteen hundred or so wretches at a time. This was where most of the patients from the Bellevue Hospital ended up if they were unlucky enough to survive their treatment, having been earlier turned away from the hospital downtown because their diseases were too contagious or their poverty insufficiently decorous.

  But the complex was not without its entertaining side as well, for here inside its walls was the city’s main execution ground. Criminals from the various prisons were brought here to meet their Maker at the end of a rope. The audience for these spectacles was not what it had once been, however; in fact, the gallows had been moved to the Bellevue for precisely that reason, so that the long commute might deter the picnicking and generally frolicsome spirit, not to mention the inflammation of animal passions, that had accompanied the hangings downtown.

  There was little frolic to my spirit, though, or to Poe’s, as we passed solemnly through the complex’s main gate. The guard who pointed us toward the morgue was a cheerless fellow, yet sufficiently impressed by Poe’s introduction of himself, ingenuous as it was—“I am E. A. Poe, sir. On assignment for the Mirror”—to wave us through unmolested.

  The guard stationed outside the morgue, on the other hand, was downright baleful. There was more than a little of the wolverine in him, I think: squat and heavy-jawed, odoriferous, dark eyes sneaky and seething. The moment he saw us coming he leaned back in his chair propped against the fieldstone wall and threw his legs across the threshold.

  Poe introduced himself as usual, then moved to step over the outstretched legs. The guard held up a hand.

  “What’s your business here?” he said.

  “I am here to interview the medical examiner.”

  “Which one?”

  “Dr. Spirnock,” said Poe.

  The guard nodded and sat there rubbing both sets of fingers and thumbs together. His hands were stained yellow from nicotine, as were his teeth. The crease that ran from the right corner of his mouth was permanently darkened from tobacco juice.

  “About what in particular?” the guard asked.

  At this Poe’s eyes narrowed. He must have sensed, as I did, that this questioning was being conducted for its own sake, that the guard was determined in his own morbid way to wring as much interaction as possible from the only ambulatory visitors he would have all week.

  “I am here,” Poe said evenly, “on assignment for the Mirror, to complete an interview with Dr. Spirnock in regards to a matter that is not your concern. Now then. Do you intend to withdraw your feet, or shall I step over them?”

  Cowed by Poe, the guard turned his eyes on me. “That ain’t no place for a boy inside.”

  “The young man is my apprentice. He will accompany me.”

  Still the guard did not withdraw his feet.

  Poe patted his jacket pocket, as if searching for paper and pen. “What is your name, sir?”

  The guard glared at him.

  Poe glared in return.

  And finally the guard dragged his feet back to his chair. He leaned toward the door, turned the knob, and shoved the door open.

  Poe leaned forward and peered inside. Beyond the small foyer, unlighted, was a hallway leading deeper into the building. And beside the entrance to this corridor an open archway with a set of narrow steps leading downward.

  Poe cocked an eyebrow at the guard.

  “Examination rooms in the basement,” the guard mumbled.

  “As to be expected,” said Poe. “I thank you, sir.” And inside we went.

  Down the crooked steps then, Poe in the lead. Almost immediately the air grew cooler, though stuffy, dense, not clean like a forest shade but stagnant and thick. The way was lighted, though poorly, by a sputtering lamp near the top turn and another at the bottom landing, the steps narrow and uneven, tilting one way and then the other but always leading steeply down, down into that sour smell that is like no living odor, acrid and vile, so that the throat and nose and eyes want to close up against it. Even Poe flinched at the first draft of charnel air. Then he set his mouth grimly and marched on down the narrow hallway, pausing moment to moment to glance into the rooms right and left until we came to the wide dim room wherein bodies were briefly stored and examined.

  Poe opened this door and stood on the threshold looking in. By peeking around his side I could see one body lying naked and exposed on a long wooden table. It was a male, corpulent and grossly white. If taller I might have seen more of this individual than my eyes could handle, for as it was I saw more than I wished to see, that he had been sliced open down the middle and the flaps of his flesh laid over like those of an unbuttoned vest. A tub on a stand beside this table contained a pile of brown something, viscous and obscene, quivering in the lamplight. On both sides of the table, having slopped out over its gutters and onto the dirt floor, were wide dark stains old and new, some still shiny and slick, ominous shadows of life that had melted into the packed soil.

  “There,” Poe said to himself and turned to his right. Keeping near the wall, we walked six paces to the door of a smaller adjoining room, the office of the medical examiner, a Dr. Spirnock. The door was ajar and we could see him at his desk, a smallish man in a frock stained brown and yellow.

  Poe rapped his knuckles against the frame and pushed the door open. The doctor was slow to look up at him.

  “A moment of your time, sir?”

  Spirnock answered with an arch of his eyebrows. He was no doubt unused to being spoken to by the people he encountered in these rooms.

  “My name is E. A. Poe, with the Mirror, sir.”

  “And?”

  “About the girl taken from the river.”

  “Miss Rogers.”

  “The very one. A follow-up question or two, if you would be so kind.”

  Spirnock sighed and looked at the ceiling. He then waved his hand as if to motion Poe inside, but there were no chairs in the room other than the doctor’s, and we ventured no farther in.

  Poe said, “The evidence that led you to conclude the nature of Miss Rogers’s demise. Could you describe it, please?”

  “Could,” the doctor said, “but will not. We must allow the dead their dignity.”

  “To be sure, yes.” He paused. “Could you tell me, then, was she…mutilated in some way?”

  “Certainly not.”

  “Her appearance was otherwise normal, considering the circumstances.”

  “It was.”

  “The evidence, therefore, was precisely what one would expect from an unsuccessful abortion. The presence of blood and amniotic fluids.”

  “Exactly.”

  “To such degree as to render an internal examination unnecessary.”

  “Correct.”

  The doctor struck me as a very tired rodent of a man, on the very brink of exhaustion. His lips barely moved when he spoke, and he spoke as little as possible.

  “And yet…” Poe said.

  The doctor said nothing.

  “She had been in the water for quite some time.”

  Still the doctor remained silent.

  “And the current is strong; I can vouch for that myself.”

  The doctor’s gaze drifted slightly to his left, to a blankness of gray wall.

  “Would not these elements,” Poe asked, “meaning the duration of her immersi
on, coupled with the erosive force of the water, tend to wash away or otherwise obliterate all evidence of a soluble nature?”

  “Superficially,” the doctor said. “Not in the cervix.”

  “It was my understanding that you performed no internal examination.”

  The doctor did not speak for a moment, and then he smiled. It is the anomalous gesture, not the typical one, that belies the truth. “Perhaps you misunderstood,” he said.

  “Yes. Perhaps.” Now Poe smiled too, but pointedly. “As to the finger marks around the young lady’s neck, these raised no suspicions on your part?”

  “Postmortem,” he said.

  “She was strangled after she passed away?”

  The doctor closed his eyes for a few moments. He sat not quite huddled forward and brought his arms around his stomach as if to hold himself upright.

  Finally he opened his eyes and stared at the wall and spoke. “The marks had the appearance of being made by a human hand, but this appearance was illusory. In my view they were more likely the result of incidental trauma following her immersion in the river.” If he was not exhausted prior to this speech, he was wholly done in by the end of it. He appeared on the verge of slumping forward with his head on the desk. His eyes could not hold a gaze.

  “Ah, well then,” Poe said after a long and awkward pause. He nodded to himself. Finally he ended with, “I thank you, sir.”

  The doctor had no strength for reply. He lifted his hand a few inches into the air, then let it fall.

  I slid to the side so as to allow Poe’s exit from the doorway. I watched him moving out into the larger room and then into the hall. I turned to face the door into the doctor’s office once more. “What’s wrong with that fella out there on the table?” I asked.

  And Spirnock answered in a voice like night wind, “Dead.”

  “I’d sort of figured that out already. What I’m saying is, you don’t cut everybody open like that, do you?”