The Waterworks (15 page)

Donne and I sat just inside the door … the sergeant went to the middle of the room and spoke. The boys had fallen silent, like schoolchildren in the presence of the principal. They stopped eating as they listened to a matter whose seriousness did not have to be proven to them.

They had known Knucks Geary, just as they knew every other adult who muscled in on them. Apparently, one of Knucks’s schemes in his declining years involved working for the newspaper carriers, or jobbers. I hadn’t known this, Donne hadn’t told me … though it particularly implicated my profession. Knucks threw the baled papers off the horse cart at a boy’s corner, or stood dispensing copies at the trucking platform of the press buildings. He was the middleman’s middleman. The carriers paid a dollar seventy-five a hundred and charged the boys two dollars. Knucks added a surcharge for Knucks. So this professed moralist of the plight of street children had, during certain hours of the working day, been stealing from them.

“Rot in ’ell,” one of the boys said. “I’m glad he got hisself croaked.”

“Now, now,” the sergeant called out.

“’E beat you, Philly?”

“I’ll say … Knucks bastard.”

“Me too, Sergeant. If’n you doan pay off, ’e goes’n slams yer.”

There was a general agreement, the boys all talking at once.

The sergeant shouted for order. “Never mind that. Worse for you if the sharp who killed him takes his place. Now we’re talking about yesterday’s paper. Speak up if you saw Knucks Geary and what time that was.”

I was not comfortable here, at the most shameful point of the newspaper business. New Yorkers got rousing good fun out of their newsboys, but looking at them in this yellow light, as yellow as the butter in the scones, I saw only undersized beings on whose faces were etched the lines and shadows of serfdom. God knows where they slept nights.

Slowly, reluctantly, they began to testify. A boy would look at his mates and get some sort of confirming glance and then he would rise and speak his piece. “I got me papers four o’clock by the Stewart’s Dry Goods same as always.” Or “He dropped me mine by Broad Street at the Stock’xchange.” As more of them spoke up I was able to see in my mind a street map of Knucks’s last journey: Starting from Printing House Square, he went downtown along Broadway, over to Wall Street, and then east to the river, Fulton and South streets.

A small, weakish boy rose and said he saw Knucks hop off the rear of the carrier’s dray in front of the Black Horse Tavern. It was dark by then, the streetlamp was lit.

The boy sat. The sergeant looked around. No one else spoke. The room was silent. Though the questions had come from the sergeant, it was Donne’s intelligence behind them. Donne rose from his chair. “Thank you, lads,” he said. “You will all have another coffee and cake on the Municipals.” And he laid two dollars on the counter. Then we were off to the Black Horse.

I prided myself on my knowledge of the city’s saloons but I did not know this one. Donne led us right there. It was on Water Street. There was little about the city he didn’t know … perhaps because he was so estranged from its normal life. He’d cultivated his skills in the face of bitter lifelong employment … perhaps that accounted for it … the knowledge that comes with estrangement. God help me, I could not spend ten
minutes trekking after him without feeling myself estranged too, as if this roaring, teeming city thrumming with the steam pistons and cog wheels and rotating belts of a million industrial purposes was an exotic and totally inexplicable culture.

The Black Horse was an old clapboard house from the Dutch days, with a gable and shuttered windows. When they’d made a tavern out of it, an entrance door had been cut athwart the corner and introduced with a stone step so as to be visible from both Water and South streets. The sergeant waited outside while Donne and I went in.

It was a quiet, dark, dead place, with the harsh excoriating smell of whiskey rising like a vapor from the creaking floorboards. A few of the regulars sat drinking. We sat at a table and I took the opportunity to have a dram or two. Donne left his shot untouched in front of him. He was oblivious of the glances the barkeep and the patrons sent his way. He was lost in thought. He did not seem to be looking for anything, he made no attempt to ask any questions. I respected his silence, granting it a specific purpose which, as it turned out, he did not have. He was merely waiting, as policemen do … for what, he didn’t know, except, as he would tell me much later, he would know it when he saw it.

And then a child came in the door, a girl of six or seven, with a basket of wilted flowers … a scrawny little thing. She bowed her head in shyness or abject fear, as if she could only come toward us by pretending not to mean anything by it. Her face was smeared with dirt, she had the slack lower lip of the slow-witted, her lightish hair was lank, her smock torn, and her overlarge shoes were clearly from the trash heap. She came right up to us and in the tiniest of voices asked Donne if he would buy a flower. All at once the barkeep was shouting and coming round from the bar. “Here you, Rosie, I toldjer doan come in
here! I toldjer doan let me catch you in here. Diddin you cause enough trouble! I’ll teach you to listen—” Or words to that effect. The child made no attempt to run, but cringed, raising one shoulder and tucking her head behind it, and screwing her eyes tight in anticipation of a blow. Donne of course held up his hand to stay the man. He spoke softly to the child. He asked her to sit down and gently and with great deliberation withdrew from the basket three of the least-fresh flowers. I don’t know what they were—they were the flowers of penury, the drooping faded flowers of the land of orphans. “I would like to buy these, Rosie, if you please,” he said. He placed some coins in the small palm.

And then Donne looked up at the hapless barkeep, who was standing behind the child, red in the face, and clutching fitfully at his apron. “And what trouble did she cause, bartender? What sort of trouble can a child bring to the Black Horse?”

Donne called the sergeant in and they took the barkeep into a back room for their interrogation. A few minutes later the sergeant left the Black Horse. Donne had asked the little girl to stay with me. She was sitting across the table and keeping her eyes averted and swinging her foot. I chafed at being kept out of things. Apparently, Donne could confide in me one moment and exclude me the next. We could be associates in one enterprise, and police and press in another. I was aware at this point of no more than … shadows, my own misgivings, a certain unsettled feeling of … ominousness. But I was angry too that Donne could become so obsessive, or feel so guilty, about the death of a worthless thug. This is a shamefaced admission of sorts for the city editor of the
Telegram
. I heard a horse and carriage stop outside. I was not prepared to see the sergeant come in escorting, of all people, Harry Wheelwright. The artist
was glum, surly, barely civil. “You again, McIlvaine!” he said. “I suppose I’ve you to thank for the captain’s interest in art.” His evening clothes were askew. But as a confessed desecrator of graves he perhaps felt a certain obligation to the man he’d confessed to. Or was it that when you come clean, you’re committed, inescapably, to redemption?

Donne had had the inspired idea of having Wheelwright draw a pencil sketch, from the barkeep’s description, of the man who’d fought Knucks Geary. It was remarkable to see. Harry asking the precise questions, by way of clarification, only a trained artist would ask … and then adding more details from the little girl…. As we all stood looking over his shoulder, he drew and erased and redrew for their recognition, and composed from the combined words, what we would not know until much later was an astonishingly accurate portrait … of the driver of the white omnibus … with its complement of old men in black … that Martin Pemberton had twice seen riding through the streets of Manhattan.

So we were on my freelance’s case after all. Not, I emphasize, that we consciously knew it at the time. We did not look at the sketch and know it was Dr. Sartorius’s driver and all-around handyman, Wrangel. We were looking at a sketch of the stolid, shaven-headed killer of Knucks Geary. But I was unaccountably … elated. It had been a good night’s work. Donne was actually smiling. He bought a round of drinks, and tea for the child, and congratulated Harry, who smiled sheepishly for his earlier bad humor and bought a round in turn, and placed his top hat on the head of the little flower girl … there in the Black Horse Tavern.

Fifteen

I
’M
fairly sure … I make the claim … Donne was the inventor of description-based portraiture for police purposes. Of course the idea of publishing these so-called composite portraits in newspapers came later … and was not Donne’s. He stubbornly insisted on police work as a profession, if not a calling, and would not think of advertising for the public’s help to apprehend a criminal—in effect deputizing the population of New York. You should remember that in this time we all held constantly in our minds images of the ragged western edges of civilization. Out there, where Mr. Greeley of the
Tribune
was urging all young men to go, the law was anyone’s to devise, ad hoc, as circumstances required. In New York, by contrast, it should be demonstrated to be something like a civil religion … at least, as I interpret the priestly mind of Edmund Donne.

So the use of that sketch would be his alone, or his trusted sergeant’s, or one or another of the very few colleagues in the Municipals he could rely on, as they patiently made their way into every depraved precinct of the city’s depths to find the strongman to match it.

But I realize now I may be giving you a false idea of Dr.
Sartorius … whom you know so far only as a name. I’m concerned that you should not have your first impression of him as a tactician … who had made a mistake. Sartorius mentioned his requirements and left it up to others to fulfill them … on the model, I suppose, of God giving free will to the human race. It was a measure of the degree of loyalty this doctor inspired that everyone in his employ was free to create what was needed to serve him. The driver of the omnibus and all-around handyman of the place … or the cooks, the nurses … the members of the board … and his hospital—if you want to call it that—administrator, Eustace Simmons, formerly in the employ of Martin’s father as slave-trade expediter … all of them lived and worked with the relish of free people.

I withhold here the circumstances of our first sight of Sartorius. I want to keep to the chronology of things but at the same time to make their pattern sensible, which means disrupting the chronology. After all, there is a difference between living in some kind of day-to-day crawl through chaos, where there is no hierarchy to your thoughts, but a raucous equality of them, and knowing in advance the whole conclusive order … which makes narration … suspect. I want you roughly in the same suspension we were in, as family and friends and counselors of the family, who understood this as a Pemberton matter, when in fact it was far more than that.

The first actual details we had of this doctor, more than the sound of his name, came from the practitioner it was said he had replaced—Dr. Mott, Thadeus Mott. What happened is that Sarah Pemberton, acting upon Captain Donne’s request, wrote to Dr. Mott and asked him if he would provide her with his records of her late husband’s medical history. Another example of Donne’s love of documentation…. I don’t know how much she confided of her lamentable circumstances, but Dr.
Mott, a gentleman of the old school, replied with a fair copy by mail… and so we had a look at Augustus Pemberton’s insides.

Until the last year of life he had suffered only from the normal variety of ailments of a man his age, including a moderate hearing loss, gout, prostatitis, and occasional mild pulmonary insufficiency. Then, a few months before he took to his bed at Ravenwood, he visited Dr. Mott’s office in Manhattan with a complaint of fainting spells and loss of vigor. The preliminary diagnosis was anemia. Dr. Mott wanted to put him in the hospital for observation. Augustus refused. So this was somewhat different from what Sarah Pemberton had understood. Her husband knew he was ill prior to his collapse at Ravenwood. What was not different was the old man’s reaction, on both occasions, to Mott’s diagnosis. Mott’s final words were that on the date he visited Ravenwood, he found Pemberton in the terminal stages of a virulent anemia, for which medical practice had only palliative treatment. I use the word
virulent
, but it was a more specific term … some form of irreversible anemia that led to death, usually in under six months.

Now it turned out that the disparity between Mott’s account and Sarah Pemberton’s recollections was of no significance. The old man had simply hidden something else from his wife. But it did lead Donne to call upon the doctor for the purpose of clarification. I went along … and when Donne introduced Sartorius’s name into the conversation Dr. Mott said: “I am not surprised that he would take on a terminal case … probably with all sorts of arrogant expectations.”