The Waterworks Part 2

I was still wary of seeking out Harry Wheelwright. I remembered the allusive fragment of his conversation with Martin that I' d overheard at the St. Nicholas Hotel. As a friend and confidant of Martin' s he was a putative conspirator. If he knew where Martin was he wouldn' t tell me. If he did not know he could not tell me. In either case he could mischievously dissemble knowing or not knowing. Or his predilection for irony might persuade him to confide in me only what he believed I already knew. I didn' t want to put myself at the mercy of such a fellow - he was no one to confront unarmed, as it were.

But I did find myself thinking of Sarah Pemberton, that she had never answered Dr Grimshaw' s letter. I knew nothing of her relations with her stepson, but even if they were the most indifferent or cursory, how could she completely ignore an alarmed description of his mental state? Was she made in the mold of her husband, was this an entirely and forever combative family? But then the rudeness to a concerned pastor - a proven friend of her husband' s - had to be accounted for. If Sarah Pemberton and Martin were completely severed from each other she would still respond, if only to affirm that.

The answer was provided by the Reverend himself, who informed me in a note that he now had met with Mrs Pemberton, who was staying at the home of her late husband' s sister, Mrs Thornhill, on East Thirty eighth Street. So this was the comforting humdrum answer. Sarah Pemberton and her son, Noah, were not in residence at Ravenwood, and his letter had simply been delayed in forwarding. In any event she had taken quite seriously his observations concerning Martin' s mental state and had spoken with Emily Tisdale and now hoped, in his words, "that I would call on her to discuss the matter.".

So there I was, in the midst of things, who only felt honest outside of them but flattered, to tell you the truth, by my inclusion in the private discourse of family, fiancee, and pastor. I arranged to call in the early evening, after the final edition of the Telegram was under the arms of the homeward bound.

The Thornhill home at 60 East Thirty eighth Street was a brownstone in a row of them, with trees lining the sidewalk. This was a preferred northern neighborhood of the wealthy, just a few quiet blocks from the reservoir, in fact. I don' t know what I had expected of a stepmother, but Sarah Pemberton was the loveliest, most pacific of human beings, a mature beauty m her late thirties, I would say, more womanly than the piquant and honest Miss Tisdale, with a fuller, larger frame and a paradoxically placid manner on which her trials had made no apparent inroads. She had light blue untroubled eyes. She wore her dark hair parted in the middle and tight over the temples. A wonderful curved, clear forehead, white as alabaster like the housing for a soul. She was a calm, handsome woman, one of those who with the least attention to themselves maintain their good looks with an effortless grace, everything about her harmonious, unforced, and her voice was low melodious alto - but all of this making, finally, an impression on me, given the circ.u.mstances I was about to be informed of.

"Shall I ask for coffee or tea? They grumble, but they bring it."

I a.s.sumed she meant Mrs Thornhill' s servants, whose loyalties did not, presumably, extend to her houseguests.

The atmosphere was oppressive. This was summer, you understand, not long after Independence Day - coming uptown in my hackney I' d noticed people still had the red and blue colored papers in their window panes with the candles s.h.i.+ning through. The sitting room was furnished with a plush sofa, end tables inlaid with mosaic, and needlepoint chairs that were too small to sit in comfortably, and some quite bad European landscapes. The bay window was covered with a velour drapery of the darkest red. There was no concession to summer in this room.

"Mrs Thornhill is very advanced in years," Sarah said by way of explanation. "She is sensitive to drafts and complains often of the cold." And then with a self-deprecating smile: "We old widows are like that, you know."

I asked her how long it had been since she had seen her stepson "A few weeks, perhaps a month. Pd a.s.sumed he was busy: He says he earns his pay by the word. That would keep anyone busy, wouldn' t it? I thought it was you who might be keeping him occupied Mr McIlvaine."

"Unfortunately not."

"Since speaking with Dr Grimshaw, I can only hope Martin is doing what he' s always done. He goes off by himself. He did that as a boy. He broods, he sulks. I can' t think anything would happen to him that is not under his control." "He told Grimshaw and he told me, " I hesitated, "his father was alive. I know. My poor Martin. You have to appreciate that with Augustus' s death, everything was left unresolved between them. He died without the reconciliation I that would have made his dying easier for both of them. The effect on Martin has at various times since been a peculiar kind of grief. It' s hard to explain. This family' s life has been, always, terribly intense."

She then gave me this account of the family history.

Within a year of his first wife' s death Augustus Pemberton had proposed marriage to Sarah and she had accepted. She didn' t speak, Sarah, of her own background but did give her maiden name, van Luyden. The van Luydens were one of the New Amsterdam Dutch who' d made their fortune growing tobacco when Manhattan tobacco was considered the equal of Virginia' s. Over two hundred years, however, the fortune had declined. In certain circles, Sarah' s marriage to Augustus Pemberton would have been widely noted and deplored though the union of a lovely young woman and a brash nouveau riche thirty years her senior was not without precedent in the Social Register.

For their new home, Augustus built the place in Piermont - on a promontory overlooking the Hudson some twenty miles north of Manhattan - that he had named so grandiloquently after the ravens who were common to the area. "Martin all his life had suffered from his father' s imperious nature," she said. "I came to know something of it myself over the years. His mother was his consolation. He felt our marriage, coming so soon after her death, was a betrayal of her memory. It is a vulnerable time of life to lose a mother, I hoped as time pa.s.sed to become her surrogate.

"When Ravenwood was ready, Augustus sold the house on Lafayette Place where Martin had been born and raised not thinking he would do anything but come with us. This the boy refused to do. He would lose his schoolmates and so on, . This the boy only life he' d ever known. Augustus relented, saying it suited him just as well. Martin was boarded at Latin Grammar School and from that time - he was then fourteen - they lived apart. I had to this family of males. I' m still not sue I have.

"But Martin had a quick mind and a natural boyish honour that endeared him to me. I persuaded him to come up to Ravenwood for holidays. I wrote to him regularly and plied him with clothes and books. But while all this softened his judgment of me it did nothing to improve to Improve his relations with Augustus'

Sarah Pemberton' s cheeks flushed when she told of the great and final schism. MartIn was by then an undergraduate at Columbia. In his junior year he wrote a thesis for a course in moral philosophy on the business practices of certain private suppliers to the Union during the war, showing that they engaged in profiteering, and delivered goods of substandard quality, and so on. For doc.u.mentation he used Augustus' s merchandising house as his prime example. My G.o.d, that awed me. It was so brilliantly brazen wasn' t it?. To do a reporter' s job on your own family? I tried later on to get hold of that thesis, I thought the school would have it somewhere. But they claimed not to At any rate, as Sarah Pemberton told it, Augustus was sent a fair copy and invited by the author to make defense, which, he could rest a.s.sured, would be a statement in his final text. "Of course Martin had been outrageous but I hoped he could be dealt with diplomatically. One look at my husband told me that was not to be. I had never seen Augustus so enraged. The young man was summoned to Ravenwood and no sooner was he in the door than he heard his father condemn him as a callow idiot who did not know th first of the real world about which he was so quick to make his high and mighty judgments. Augustus had indeed testified before a congressional committee in Was.h.i.+ngton, as Martin had written, not under subpoena but, as he said, on a simple invitation which as a gentleman and patriot he' d hastened to accept. A majority of the committee had decided the allegations against his firm were unfounded. Had this not been the case there would have been an indictment issued by the district attorney in New York. There was no indictment. And Martin had managed to leave out of his moral philosophy the fact that his father was among the commercial contractors given a dinner at the White House by President Lincoln in recognition of their service to the Union.

"Martin had shocking answers to these arguments. He claimed that Augustus would certainly have been indicted had he not paid out substantial sums both to members of the congressional committee and to the district attorney' s office in New York, And that the White House dinner was held long before the charges came out, and by a president who could see evil at a distance but not where it crept up behind him. At this my husband rose from his chair and approached Martin with such fury in his face-he was a stocky man, with broader shoulders than his son-that I had to step between them.

"I wish I never heard the words that flew past me, Martin shouting that trading in shoddy was the least of Augustus' s sins and that had he more time he could have doc.u.mented also a maritime business of outfitting, slave s.h.i.+ps, and Augustus a.s.suring him with a raised fist he was a miserable, treacherous, lying dog, was the least of his epithets and if Columbia College was going to endorse such libels in the name of education, it was no university to which he would contribute tuition, room, and board.

"You know, Mr McIlvaine, I came from a very quiet home. I was an only child. I never heard a voice raised all my late parents' lives together. I cannot tell you how stunned I was outright warring. I knew of Augustus' s business dealings. To this day I don' t know what was true and what was not true. But Augustus renounced and disowned him from that moment, and a.s.sured him he would never see a penny of the Iegacy he could have enjoyed. And Martin said'' Then I' m redeemed.'' And he stormed out of the house and walked all the way to the railroad station because Augustus forbade me to order the carriage for him.

"And that was the end of it"

"And that was the end of it .Except that I deceived my husband and sent sums from my own allowance so that Martin could complete his studies, and when he began to write for the papers he sent me his published pieces from time to time, also secretly. I was very proud of him, I hoped the time would come when I could show some of the writings to my husband, but Augustus fell ill, and two years ago he died, and the reconciliation never took place. It is such a sad terrible thing isn' t it? Because the consequences go on. The finality echoes.

I suppose I could have wondered at this point if what she had learned from her stepson, the shock of ti, might have caused Sarah to act, to take some action of her own - what action I don' t know. She would never have been a business confidante of her husband' s, at least in part because, it was clear, she was not the kind of person to approve of his practices. Yet Martin' s accusations notwithstanding, her life apparently had gone on as before, whatever misgivings she might have had. She had made no effort to come to a conclusive judgement, in the way women do who have no choice but to set their course for life and never veer from it. Or was this more like living in the state of irresolution most of us live in with regard to our moral challenges?

I found her gazing at me from her clear beautiful eyes, and the slightest of smiles lighting up her face and here was my answer walking into the room, a tow haired boy of eight or nine who was unmistakably her son and unmistakably a Pemberton. A comely well - formed boy - I saw a bit of Martin in him, in the solemn, hurt look of the eye, but also saw the mother' s poise. He did not acknowledge me but went right to her in that single minded way children have. He held a book in his hand. He proposed to do his reading outside, on the front stoop, while it was still light. "Noah, first, this is Mr McIlvaine," she said, tilting her head in my direction. Noah turned and said his how-do-you-do. He received my greeting, standing with his hand possessively upon her shoulder, more like a lover than a son.

She gazed up at him, her mother' s pa.s.sion a kind of all encompa.s.sing calm. "Noah is used to the broad halls and porches and wide-open s.p.a.ces at Ravenwood. He needs lots of room to move about in. He can hardly wait till we settle all this.'' And then to him: "On the front steps, but don' t wander off, please, sir." The book the boy held was a novel of Scott' s, Quintin Durward, a quite grown up book for a nine year old. When he had left, his mother went to the window and moved the curtains to see him safely settled.

"Martin said he would come and spend some time with Noah and show him around the city. Noah adores him."

She turned back to the room and sat down. Here was the flaw in the woman, that odd calmness, that steady forbearance in the face of trouble that made her deny that anything could be wrong, that convinced her there was a reasonable explanation for Martin' s absence even after she had heard from Grimshaw that his mental state might be fragile, and had to understand from this visit of an employer the concern other people had. But Sarah' s voice never faltered, nor did a tear come to her eye. What had happened -was happening - to her family couldn' t have been more distressing, and the words conveyed this, but in tones so quiet, so self possessed - and with the expression on the beautiful face never more extreme than thoughtful - that I wondered if she was emotionally sluggish which would be a failure of intelligence, finally.

But she admitted Martin had asked her an odd question when she' d seen him last. He wanted to know the cause of his father' s death. "It was a blood ailment, an anemia. Augustus had begun to have these periods of weakness when he could hardly lift himself from the bed. And one day he fainted. I thought Martin knew.

"This was -'' "This last time, a month ago. It seemed such an urgent matter in his mind."

"No - I meant when Mr Pemberton fell ill."

"That would have been three years ago last April. I sent a telegram to his doctor, who came up on the train from New York. Martin wanted to know the name of the doctor. It was Dr Mott, Thadeus Mott. He is an eminent physician of the city."

"Yes, I know Mott."

"It was Dr Mott who made the diagnosis. He wanted my husband removed to the Presbyterian Hospital. He said it was a most serious illness. Did you know my husband, Mr McIlvaine?"

"I knew of him."

She smiled. "Then you would know what his reaction would be. He wouldn' t hear of going to the hospital. He told Dr Mott to give him a tonic and that he' d be up and about in a few days.''

And so they argued until the doctor' s back was to the wall Augustus always put people up against ...So Dr Mott told him."

"Told him what?"

She lowered her voice. "I was not in the room, but in the gallery outside the door I could hear every word. He told Augustus his disease was progressive and usually fatal, that in rare cases it reversed itself but he probably had no more than six months.''

"Augustus called Dr Mott a fool and a.s.sured him he had no intention of dying at any foreseeable time in the future and then shouted for me to show him out. He was sitting there against the pillows with his arms folded and his jaw thrust out, The doctor withdrew from the case."

"So he did not see it to its end?"

"He said he wouldn' t take responsibility where he couldn' t prescribe the treatment. I wanted to bring in someone else, but Augustus told me the illness was nothing. I couldn' t admit to him I had heard what had gone on. After a few weeks had pa.s.sed and it became apparent to him that he was weakening, he decided on another consultation. He sat outside, wrapped in blankets on a chaise at the far end of the lawn near the bluff, where he could look out over the river and see the gulls flying below him''

"What doctor did you consult?"

"Not I - his secretary arranged it. Mr Simmons, Eustace Simmons, my husband' s secretary. He conferred with him every day. Augustus conducted his business out on the lawn. Simmons would sit next to him on a shooting stick with a dispatch case across his knees and receive instructions, and so forth . When Martin heard me mention the name Simmons he could not keep still. He jumped up and began to pace back and forth. He became almost happy, even giddy.

"One morning I found Augustus' s things packed. A carriage was at the front door, and I was informed by my husband that he would be taking a course of treatment at a sanitarium in Saranac Lake in the Adirondacks. Simmons was to travel with him. He would write in due course. Noah and I stood on the piazza to watch him go. His attentions to Noah were never lavish and were negligible during his illness. Noah loved his father, how .can a child not love his father? They would rather blame themselves for a parent' s conduct toward them. In any event that was the last time we ever saw him."

"You told Martin this - about Saranac?"

She nodded.

"But I' m having trouble understanding - Saranac is for tuberculars.

Did this doctor say Mr Pemberton was consumptive?" Sarah Pemberton turned her calm gaze upon me. "That is exactly what Martin asked. But I never spoke with the doctor. I was able to learn his name, Dr Sartorius, but that was all. I never spoke with him. I was never allowed to visit. I did receive his telegram, not three months had pa.s.sed, informing me of my husband' s death and expressing his condolences. The body was brought back to the city by train and Augustus was buried from St Tames. He did entrust me, my husband, in his will, with fulfilling his wishes regarding the funeral arrangements."

Sarah Pemberton lowered her eyes. But then with the slightest of smiles, as if to herself: "I' m quite aware of the impression an outsider must have from all this, Mr McIlvaine. I understand, I' m told, there are marriages between equals who live, unthinking, in simple devotion to each other."

It was quite astonis.h.i.+ng - the effect upon me of Mrs Pemberton' s soft spoken admission of the contempt in which she was held by the man she had given her life to. His universal contempt made no exception for her. What I had supposed was her recessive nature - was it not rather an aristocrat' s training? What did I know of these things, the grace that enables you to ritualize your pain, and lay it out quietly through your sentences?

But she had such patience for everything - patience for the monstrous thieving husband, patience for the absent stepson, patience for her current, enigmatic, situation, of which I was now made aware. It was so terribly oppressive in that old woman' s sitting room, you see. I did not appreciate why someone with a country estate would choose to be in Manhattan at this time of year. But Sarah Pemberton was dest.i.tute. From obligations signed by her late husband that she still did not understand, the wife and legatee to the Pemberton fortune had not only lost the family home, Ravenwood, but, with Noah, was reduced to living upon the charity of her sister-in-law. There was no end to the surprises this family had in store for me. "Are you sure you won' t have some tea, Mr McIlvaine? They grumble, but they bring it."

Eleven.

I COULD not sleep that night after my meeting with Sarah Pemberton. I confess that as I thought about it I found her endless capacity to suspend judgement very attractive. I mean, the recessiveness of spirit that made her so lovely, even gallant, would appeal to any man who wanted endless reception, endless soft reception of whatever outrage he could conceive. But then there was the boy: I hadn' t realized I was so moved by him - a st.u.r.dy solemn, forbearing boy reading his book, a reader - was that it? - does the old bachelor merely have to see a child reading a book to lose his critical faculties?

Augustus had been worth millions. How was it possible? I had asked the woman. What on earth happened?

"Every day I speak with this lawyer or that, and ask the same question. Its become my life' s work. My husband was a very secretive man. For different matters he hired different attorneys. In that way no one would know more than a part of his business. We, Noah and I, are the sole heirs according to the will. That is not in question, but exactly what happened to our legacy, where it went, is not clear. I' m sure at least some of it is recoverable. We' ll leave here as soon as I sort it out. We' re on the top floor and have to tiptoe about like mice.

She believed a mistake had been made. What else could it have been?

I would later have occasion to see Ravenwood. Rising from a bluff over the western bank of the Hudson, it was a large s.h.i.+ngled mansion with many windows and bays and a piazza running around three sides under coupled columns a sprawling house, all its important rooms facing the river or the sky over the river, the roof gabled and crowned with a belvedere. The bulk was Victorian but the spirit vaguely Italianate Queen Anne. It came with several outbuildings and a tract of a thousand acres. Its command of the river completed the effect of defiance that you get from much money when it combines with little taste. I thought at the time of the boy, Noah, growing up there. Would he have had town children to play with? The children of staff?. His compensations were the trails through the great woods behind his home or the broad halls and porches that his mother mentioned, where he could hide, or spy, or listen for his father' s footsteps. The front lawn was overgrown when I saw it. It went downward in a long gentle reach to the bluff which was more like a palisade. And then there was a great caesura of air, a gorge of sky that implied the Hudson. And then the land resumed again with the bluffs of the eastern bank.

This Ozymandias of the slave trade. He had built his Ravenwood as a monument to himself. And he had implanted his beautiful wife and son there as monuments to himself.

There was a rail line running through the village a few miles away, but also a river sloop that came right up to the landing at the foot of the bluff when the hand flag was raised at the stair head. I was sure that was the way they had left their home. I found myself imagining them opening the big oak doors with the insets of oval gla.s.s, coming down the wide porch steps, and crossing the gravel carriageway, the mother and son, their luggage preceding them down the sward to the river, steamer trunks and cedar chests strapped to the backs of the men who were tracking the thick gra.s.s of the sloping lawn like porters on safari in one of the boys adventure tales. At the land' s end, sheer, without warning or fence, I stood for a moment to experience what they would have, the illusion of Iiving in the sky. It was true, I was higher than a pair of gulls beating their way south over the river.

A slanting cut led to the stair head, and the long descent by a scaffolded stairs of wood planks. As for Sarah, she was leaving the house she had learned about love from Augustus Pemberton. As for Noah, he would of course be thrilled by the boat, not thinking he was leaving the only home he' d ever known.

The catastrophic loss of that home would finally occur as the event of a few moments' duration. I imagined them walking to the cliff' s edge, climbing down the stairs to the river pier, Noah would go aboard first and find them seats at the port rail, where the wind was keen. And while Sarah tied a kerchief over her hat and under her chin, and other pa.s.sengers stared, he would stand beside her, his hand on her shoulder.

The captain tips his hat, the lines are cast, and the sloop slowly slides midstream into the sun and points for Manhattan.

I have traveled downriver, on Day Line side - wheelers from Poughkeepsie and Bear Mountain. The wind and current together would speed them along to New York, so that it might seem to Sarah their fate was rus.h.i.+ng toward them. In an hour or so they would see the sky over the city stained black from the smoke of chimneys and stacks and steam locomotives. Southward, the masts of the sailing s.h.i.+ps in their berths on the river would look like a kind of st.i.tching of heaven to earth. Then, as the packet came to the northern reaches of the island, she would see the world glare up much larger. It is a strange feeling. Your boat is, humbled. You are all at once in a churning traffic of ferries, the very water hurries and plashes like New York, and moving past the piers of tall masts, hearing the shouts of the stevedores, you come around at the Battery with the harbor rolling with sail and funnel, proud dippers and Indiamen and coastal steamers and lighters with iron hulls, which sometimes pa.s.s so close the sky is blocked out by their black bulk and they resound with great echoing booms in the slap of the waves.

And so Mrs Pemberton and her son had sailed down into our city, and in my terrible insomniac visions I saw the boy swept into the life of nameless children here. I define modem civilization as the social failure to keep all children named. Does that shock you? In jungle tribes or among the nomad herders the children keep their names. Only in our great industrial downtown they don' t. Only where we have newspapers to tell us the news of ourselves, are children not a.s.sured of keeping their names.

On the pier Noah Pemberton would realize what he had given up for a ride. He would no longer be thrilled. Not this boy, not by my New York. Swarms of cabbies surround them, porters shoulder their trunks without being asked. And beggars with their hands out, and beggar pigeons. And he is going to live with his aunt Lavinia, an old woman whom he knows nothing about except that she has no children. And then he is in a carriage, with the harsh unceasing music in his ears of urgent city life and its rattling transport. The hackney goes up the West Side along Eleventh Avenue, and the lungs of the young country boy fill for the first time with the sickening air of the meat district, the stockyards and slaughterhouses. Perhaps he thinks he has landed not in New York but on the chest of a monstrous carca.s.s and is inhaling the odor of its huge b.l.o.o.d.y being.

Sarah Pemberton, with the great calm by which she modulated their dire circ.u.mstances, would take her son' s hand and smile, and tell him, what? That soon they would see Martin, that Martin would be part of the family now.

But I had learned something about Martin Pemberton that let me sleep, finally. He did not live only for himself. He had a mother who had seen him through college, and a young brother who adored him. We may stride about with our principles at the ready, and hammer everyone we meet with our hard, unyielding worldview. But we have our mothers and brothers, whom we exempt, for whom the unrelenting intellect relents, just as I know in my case it does for my sister, Maddie, for whose dear sake I go to Improvement Society dinners. And if I could not say where Martin Pemberton was, I knew what he was doing. I was sure of it. He was gone in pursuit. Every detail of what I had learned of these matters he already knew, though he knew far more. And what I knew, in the lightening darkness of my suspicions, was enough for me to make the inspired, though insufficiently considered, decision to deepen my involvement and put me in pursuit as well.

As the city editor at the Telegram I was ent.i.tled each summer to a week' s leave. However, it must be not only summer but that wilting heart of it when the heat waves rise from the pavement, when the sanitation drays take the dead horses from the streets and the ambulances of Bellevue the dead folks from their tenements, and-the key thing-when anyone left alive in the baking blanched light is too curved to make news, all these conditions were met, and I as off.

I decided first of all to tell what I knew to Edmund Donne, a captain with the Munic.i.p.al Police. You may not appreciate how extraordinary it was that I, or anyone else in the city of New York, for that matter, would confide in a police official. The Munic.i.p.als were an organization of licensed thieves. Occasionally they interrupted their graft - gathering for practice with nightsticks on the human skull. Police jobs were customarily bought. Every exalted rank, from sergeant up through lieutenant, captain, and on to the commissioner, paid the Tweed Ring for the privilege of public service. Even patrolmen paid if they wanted to be a.s.signed to one of the more lucrative precincts. But it was a large organization of two thousand or so, and there were some exceptions to the rule, Donne being probably the highest - ranking. Among naturalists, when a bird is seen well beyond its normal range, it is called an accidental. Donne was an accidental. He was the only captain I knew who had not paid for his commission.

He was also atypical of his trade in being neither Irish nor German nor uneducated. In fact, he was so dearly misplaced that he was a mystery to me. He lived in the tension characteristic of the submitted life, like someone who has taken holy orders or serves his government in an obscure foreign station. I could think, in his presence, that my familiar tawdry New York was the exotic outpost of his colonial service, or perhaps a leper colony to which he' d given his life as a missionary.

Donne was exceptionally tall and thin and had, when standing, to look down at anyone he spoke with. He had a long narrow face, gaunt cheeks, a pointed chin. And because his hair was gray at the temples and through the mustache, and his brows had thickened and taken wing, and when he was seated at his desk his long back curved into the hunch of his shoulders so that the twin ridges of his shoulder blades indented his blue tunic, you were put in mind of a rather impressive heron settled on its perch.

His was a lonely eminence. He was anywhere between forty and fifty. I knew nothing of his personal life. He had come up through the ranks, remaining always outside the order of connived loyalties that pa.s.ses for brotherhood among policemen. This was not from any righteousness on his part, merely that he was not the sort to ask for confidences or give them. His skills, which were considerable, were not questioned, but in the perverse thinking of his fellow officers, they were part of the brief against him. He' d achieved the rank of captain slowly, through the administrations of several commissioners, who found him useful when they needed to advertise the Munic.i.p.als' worthiness of the public trust. Since that was a periodic necessity, his employment was secure, if not comfortable. It helped also that some of us in the press had written about him from time to time. He never asked for this, of course. For us, too, he simply was what he was and went his own way.

Donne was glumly at his work when I called on him in his office on Mulberry Street. He looked almost pleased to see me.

"Do I interrupt something?" I said.

"Yes, and I' m sure I' m grateful."

His latest humiliation was to be in charge of the office that certified deaths in the city by age, s.e.x, race, nativity, and cause - zymotic, const.i.tutional, or sudden - and recorded them in an annual table for the city atlas that n.o.body ever read.

I told him of the whole Pemberton matter - everything I knew, and also what I suspected. I had his interest. He sat hunched over his desk and was absolutely still. There was something else about Donne - he held the whole city in his mind as if it were a village.

In a village, people don' t need a newspaper. Newspapers arise only when things begin to happen that people cannot see and hear for themselves. Newspapers are the expedient of the munic.i.p.ally dissociated. But Donne had the capacious mind of a villager. He knew the Pemberton name. He remembered the dismissed slave trading charges against Augustus, and the wartime congressional inquiry into his quartermaster contracts. He knew who Eustace Simmons was-he called him Tace Simmons-and understood immediately why I thought it would be nice to find him.

But finding anyone in our city, how one went about finding someone in those days, was something of an art, as all reporters knew - especially if it was someone who didn' t have a professional or commercial life. You understand - there were no phones then. No phonebooks. No street by street names and addresses. There were listings of city officials, listings of doctors in the medical society rosters, lawyers and engineers could be found in their firms and socialites at their well known residences. But if you wanted to talk to someone you had to go where he was to be found, and if you didn' t know where that was, there were no general directories to tell you.

'' Tace Simmons once worked for the port wardens," Donne told me. "There is a saloon on Water Street that they like. Perhaps someone will know something. Perhaps Tace comes around for old times' sake."

He didn' t tell me what he thought, or if he believed my reasoning was well founded. He just went to work. I had to defer, of course, to his way of doing things, which was tiresomely, methodical. "First things first," he said, and asked me to describe Martin Pemberton in all the particulars - his age, height, eye color, and so forth. Then he turned his long back to me and began to file through the stacks of loose pages on the table behind him.

The Mulberry Street headquarters is a raucous place. People flow in and out and speak only in raised voices, and with all the shouting and protesting and laughing and cursing drifting into Donne' s office, I was made aware of the necessarily practical view of mankind that is produced in a police building. It' s much like a newspaper office But for all the distractions, Donne might have been a scholar working in the silence of a library. A gas lamp hung from the center of the ceiling. It was lit now in the midmorning because the long narrow windows gave almost no light. The walls were a pale tan color. Against the walls, gla.s.s covered bookcases were bowed with the weight of law books, manuals of munic.i.p.al regulations, and volumes of papers in their folders. The floor was covered with a threadbare Belgian carpet. Donne' s desk was a scarred and battered walnut. Behind the wooden chair where I sat a gated bal.u.s.trade cut the room in two. I could see nothing that might have given a personal character to this office.

After a length of time he was able to tell me there was no Caucasian male body of Martin Pemberton' s description that had not been identified and claimed.

He was a very thorough fellow, Edmund Donne. We had next to take ourselves by hackney to the Dead House on First Avenue and Twenty-sixth Street and go through the holding rooms to look at the new arrivals. I walked the rows of zinc tables, where the livid bodies lay face upward under constant showers of cold water, until I was able to a.s.sure myself that my freelance was not among them. "This rules out nothing," Donne advised me, with his policeman' s logic. "But it rules out something."

The character of this odd, misplaced policeman, misplaced for life, is an important piece of my story. The way enlightenment comes, is in bits and pieces of humdrum reality, each adding its mosaic bit of glitter to the eventual vision. It is almost mysterious to me now that I sought him out, this carefully stepping creature bowed by his own height. I had other recourses in a city of almost a million souls, and at the beginning of our cooperative inquiry, I admit, I was prepared to go on to them, except that he was so engaged by the problem I had brought as to take possession of it. I saw immediately that his interest had nothing to do with his lack of serious duties. In fact he had all sorts of investigative pursuits of his own that he had not abandoned since leaving his previous command of the woeful, understaffed Bureau for the Recovery of Lost Persons. There was something else, something else, a look of recognition in the eye, as if he might have been waiting for this, waiting for me to arrive, with what he was expecting.

So now we are in his office, after two or three nights of a so far unproductive search for a sign of Eustace Simmons on the waterfront - walking from one tavern to another, along the East River under the looming prows of the packets and clippers that lie at berth with their bowsprits in the chalky night casting shadows, on the cobblestone, some hidden language in the sound of creaking mast and groaning hawser, the riverfront stink of fish and ordure suggesting to me a crawl through the city' s nether parts. So, as I say, we are in his office midway through my glorious summer holiday, and I have thought for the first time to tell Donne about Martin' s allusive conversation with Harry Wheelwright at the St. Nicholas Hotel.

But now a sergeant enters, pus.h.i.+ng before him through the gate another diversion - a muscular fellow in a dirty sweater and haggy trousers, white haired and with a face well pounded, the nose and cheekbones flattened, and the ears curled up on themselves like floral blossoms. He stood before the desk in his considerable redolence, twisting the cap in his hands and smiling at nothing in particular as he waited to be acknowledged.

Donne had been reading some sort of doc.u.ment - whether to do with my subject or not, I had no idea. He glanced at me, then he arranged the papers neatly on his desk, and only then did he look up at the man before him.

"Well, look at this. It' s Knucks has come calling."

"Yes, Captain," said this Knucks with a deferential nod.

"So we' re restored to the good opinion of crime," Donne said to the sergeant, who laughed in response. "And how is your health?" Donne said to the man, as if they were club members together.

"Oh, I' m doin' poorly, thanking you, Captain," said the old tough, taking the question as an invitation to seat himself on the edge of the chair next to mine. He grinned, showing his gapped and blackened teeth, and his face lit up appealingly, like a boy' s, with the perverse charm that is given sometimes to the brainlessly amoral. "This leg o' mine," he said, stretching out the offending limb, and rubbing it vigorously. "It aches terrible and sometimes won' t be trod upon. It ain' t never healed right from the war."

"And what war was that?" said Donne.

"Why, Yer Honor, the war betwix the States."

"I never heard you had gone for a soldier, Knucks. And where did you see your action?"

"It was on the Fifth Avenue - I took a ball by the steps of the n.i.g.g.e.r orphanage there."