The Waterworks (25 page)

“The next thing I knew, I was in complete darkness, my head aching, and it was a different atmosphere, close, with the
smell of burned air, of ashes and soot…. I could hear the sound of footsteps over my head. And when I stood to get my bearings I found my hands holding the bars of a cell. I thought, finally, that was just.”

He’d been brought back to the orphanage … and could not tell us how long a journey it was … or what direction he’d come from … or anything else that would give us some idea of where this place was that was the heart of the enterprise.

“Why do you suppose Simmons didn’t just … do away with you?” I asked him.

“It was probably what he would have preferred. Simmons is a kind of dark stepbrother to me, you know. Much older, just as I am much older than Noah, but spiritually … my father’s son … and right hand … as I never was. He became the doctor’s right hand. He has the utmost respect for Dr. Sartorius…. He has the soul of a factotum, Simmons, for all his cunning. He needs someone to work for. So … the doctor might conceive of another use for me. I had the time to think about this. How long was I down there before my mind began to … drift. But I heard the footsteps of those children over my head. I knew they were children—you can’t mistake the footsteps of children. I shouted and screamed to them … to get away, to run … knowing they couldn’t hear. I was one of them, you see. After all. I understood that.”

Martin was more than a few times in these recollections on the verge of tears. I think this was a moment when he couldn’t help himself. He put his hand over his eyes and he wept.

As I have said, we were well into the autumn of the year. Somewhere in the middle of October. And now several things happened, more or less simultaneously. I arrived one afternoon
for my visit with Martin and found a policeman standing guard at the Tisdales’ door. I had to identify myself in order to be allowed to ring the bell. Emily admitted me. Behind her, her white-haired father was coming down the hall. “Newspapers! Police! What next, what next! I’m an old man, don’t you people understand? I am not used to this!”

Emily saw me into the front parlor and excused them both for a moment … and I heard their voices retreat upstairs, his louder than hers, but hers prevailing apparently … because in a few minutes she was back downstairs without him.

She said: “The man who was arrested has been found dead at the Tombs. The omnibus driver? Wrangel, is that his name? He hanged himself in his cell.”

“Where is Donne?”

“He has gone to get Noah from school.”

“Where is Martin?”

“He is upstairs in his room. His mother is with him.”

My blood was racing now. One could anticipate a certain degree of desperation on everyone’s part. The previous evening there had been the citizens’ meeting I think I have mentioned … at the Cooper Union. A raucous meeting with calls for Tweed’s scalp. Instead they formed a committee of seventy … eminent men, to bring a taxpayers’ suit against the mayor and his administration. This was to enjoin the Ring from issuing bonds or paying city money to any supplier until an investigation was held. I didn’t know what judge would give them their injunction, but it was electrifying news that the attempt would even be made.

I waited anxiously for Donne. When he returned safely with Noah and had seen him upstairs, we were able to talk alone for a few minutes. Of course he had not believed Wrangel
had hanged himself. He told me there were bruises on the driver’s skull. He’d been struck unconscious before he’d been strung up.

“Who would be employed for that?”

“It’s not an unknown practice … for the Municipals to save the judiciary the bother of an actual trial.”

“Are the Pembertons in danger?”

“I don’t know. It depends on who’s attending to this. I have to assume they could have traced Martin through the hospital. They may not have. They may be thoroughly occupied with their other troubles…. Wrangel may be sufficient for them for the time being. Or he may not. Conceivably, they could be engaged in a general … extirpation of the evidence. Of course, you shouldn’t go into this with the others.”

“Of course. Though your police guard seems to have unsettled the whole household.”

“Sarah and Noah should make camp here, if Miss Tisdale will have them. But I’ll tell everyone these are simply precautions. I’m sure now ’Tace Simmons has not fled the country. That’s all to the good, if we can get our hands on him…. What is really odd is that as of midnight yesterday, I was fully reinstated in my duties.”

“What?”

“I’m as surprised as you are. Perhaps the Ring feel they want me where they can keep their eye on me. They have a lot to deal with.”

Apart from the accelerating seriousness of all this, it was clear Donne was in his element. I envied him, being out of mine. What made matters worse, I was quite aware that I could, in the interest of protecting Martin and his family … I could give this story to a working reporter … or even do it myself on a free-lance basis for one of the dailies. If the account came out
of Martin’s imprisonment in the Home for Little Wanderers … on whose board Tweed and his colleagues had served … and which happened to be where the suicide, Wrangel, was employed … who had been arrested for the killing of a street tough … why, even that broken-off part of the thing, with promises of more of the story to come, would freeze them in their tracks. Getting the news out would be no problem. I had not lost my standing, only my job. My resignation was looking better around the trade, though I had done nothing to explain it or publicize it. I had received a note from Mr. Dana, the publisher of the
Sun
, asking me to come around for a chat. And one of my friends on the
Telegram
had told me the publisher thought the paper had gone down in quality since I’d left… and why would he have bruited that about unless he wanted me to hear it?

So there was every reason to go ahead … except that—I confess it here—it was despicable, but I felt I had … time. The more of the story I could get, the more it would be mine. Exclusively. Did that mean I found myself prepared to put the interests of the story ahead of the lives of the people involved in it? I’m not sure. Possibly it can’t be rationalized … but there is some instinct that prefers … unintruded-upon meaning. That whoever tells our moral history … must run behind, not ahead of it. That if, in fact, there is meaning, it is not tolled out by church bells but suffered into luminous existence…. Maybe I felt that to print the story now, or what I knew of it, would be an intervention … a trespass of the reporter into the realm of cause and effect… that would change the outcome. Still secret, these events could unfold naturally or unnaturally. If you’re not convinced, let’s just say that I didn’t think the story was reportable, accurately, until it was all in. That there was no story … until I saw Sartorius.

In fact, even when these matters were closed, and the events concluded and the issues resolved, and I had my exclusive, I never ran it… which may suggest I had a premonition that, even completed, the story was not… reportorially possible … that there are limits to the use of words in a newspaper.

Whatever the reason, I was a selfish son of a bitch and published nothing. I was everyone’s friend on Lafayette Place … and their secret betrayer. I was in an adventurous mood and prepared to take chances with other people’s lives.

It had not escaped my competitive notice that Martin himself had, from some profound chastening of his ordeal, lost his keenness for following things any further. He asked no questions of us. He only ruminated on his own experiences. This seemed to me a kind of proof of the soundness of my position.

And now Donne, in his researches for the collected money of the millionaires, came up with something interesting. He found an entry in the accounts of the city’s Water Department for the previous year published in the
Manual of the Corporation of the City of New York
—some twelve million dollars attributed to an 1869 bond issue for the improvement of the Croton Aqueduct. Yet, as he discovered, there had been no such bond issued on behalf of the Water Department. And why would the Ring let that glaring asset sit when their method over the years was to understate their receivables and pad their disbursements? Donne thought this entry was in fact a portion of the fellowship’s investment. He thought he would look for similarly disguised entries in other city department accounts.

And then he had his brilliant and culminating insight.

We stood one morning under our umbrellas … on a gravel road, between the distributing reservoir and the waterworks of the Croton Aqueduct… on a high, flattened hill in Westchester,
twenty miles north of the city. It was a miserable raw wet morning. The massive granite waterworks, with its crenellated turrets at the corners and cathedral entrance doors of oak, was stained and streaked black by the heavy rain.

Behind us was the reservoir, its dark water stippled with white. It looked like a natural lake except for the lack of trees around its banks. I noticed at the water’s edge, not far from where we stood, the wreck of a toy wooden boat. It lay on its side and lifted and fell in the wavelets running against the embankment under the racing black clouds.

Donne had told me only to be ready to leave my house before dawn. I’d known nothing of where we were going. We had ridden by train up the Hudson to the town of Yonkers … and there a carriage met us that took us east through the country in the direction of Long Island Sound. When we’d come up the road to the waterworks, I was astonished to see a whole troop of Municipals spread out around the building.

The policemen had brought two of their Black Marias. There were several broughams besides. The vehicles were lined up in the road, the horses wretched in the rain, their feet planted foursquare, their heads hanging.

As I stood looking up at the waterworks Donne’s realization slowly duplicated itself in my mind. Except for three bull’s-eyes set high up near the roofline, the building face was uninterrupted by windows. The sky was tumultuous with billowing black clouds that took on a green cast as they sailed over the roof. It seemed to me everything was in motion except for the waterworks. Rain in striations … the clouds very low, very swift-moving. The ground under me pulsed like a heartbeat. But this was the pumping waterworks machinery. Or was it? I couldn’t quite trust my senses because I thought I heard band
music under all of this … agitated nature. Under the rainfall’s hiss, the rumbling sky … something insistent, pompous, rhythmical.

Motioning to one of the policemen, Donne approached the entrance. I followed. We waited as the policeman pounded the doors. After a minute they opened. No man from the Water Department, but a woman in a gray nurse’s uniform stood there. Her eyes went wide, not at the sight of the policeman, but in reaction, I thought, to Donne’s height, as she stared up at him, his umbrella aloft. She didn’t seem to understand him when he asked if we could come in … but she thought a moment and then she opened the door wide and we passed through.

You know, at moments when our attention is painfully acute, we notice peripheral things … as if to reaffirm to ourselves our basic irresponsibility. The moment I was inside this stone entry hall … poorly lit, like a mine, with kerosene lamps … I felt the chill of entombed air and I heard the power of ducted water hissing and roaring in its fall … and I was aware, too, of the rap of our heels on a flight of iron stairs rising circularly about a giant grease-coated gearshaft … but what I attended to most keenly as I followed her was the movement of this woman’s uncorseted buttocks under her nurse’s dress—a plain middle-aged woman of no beauty or station.

Donne and the policeman took their time coming up, as if they were memorizing every step of the way. Finally we reached the top, a narrow catwalk that passed into a cavernous chamber … at the bottom of which was a vast inner pool of roiling water … churning up a mineral mist, like a fifth element … so that I could see, growing everywhere on the blackened stone walls, patches of moss and lichen and bearded slime.

We passed through this … atrium to a corridor lit with gas
jets … and through another door, which the woman held open for us … that led to a recognizable room. But the transformation was a shock, as in a magic trick. We were in an anteroom, or foyer, like any other, with painted white walls, parqueted floors, mirror and sidetables, and a decorative urn. The woman pointed to a group of upholstered chairs, inviting us to be seated. Instead, Donne strode past her, knowing somewhere up here he should find Dr. Sartorius.

At this level—the third story? the fourth?—the band music was audible … like a parade one hears a block away. Donne’s head-bobbing long-legged glide down the corridor threatened to leave me behind. He ignored the closed doors of several rooms. One door I happened to see as I rushed by was open a crack … and I caught… a glimpse … the suggestion of a wall of books, a figured rug on the floor, a gas lamp, and a man sitting in a chair reading. I did not for some minutes register the intelligence of this … but rushed on after the policemen.

I followed them up a broad flight of polished wood stairs with a carved banister. At the top of the stairs was a small landing … and double doors of steel with a wheel lock. Donne’s man turned the wheel, pulled open the doors, and the music rushed out at us like the wind.

Shadows of the storm clouds loomed and faded like a passing armada on the translucent green roof. The steel ribs of the roof shot out like flying buttresses. The orchestrion of oak and glass, as monumental as a cathedral organ, shuddered with its own music The great golden disc revolved that beat the drum and shook the bells and plucked out the chords of a robotic waltz.

In the central terrace, women in gray nurses’ uniforms were dancing with one another.

Our presence interrupted nothing. Here and there, stretched out on a bench, or slumped across a garden table, or, in one case, lying across a gravel path under a tubbed tree, were fully dressed old men. Donne went methodically to each one and felt the pulse. They were all dead—five there were—but for one rasping out his death rattle.