Robert Walker - Shadows in the White City

“Wise man…and so?”

“In that regard, I’ve come a long way toward liking myself.”

“A small miracle to hear you say it.”

“Yes, something isn’t it? Small miracle. Something to thank myself for on this fine day. Nonetheless…it would seem that the ugliness of our species intends to keep me pacing if only I were employed.”

“You’ll land on your feet, somehow.”

Alastair alighted the carriage and grabbed the copy of the Herald. “No doubt I’ll be calling on your skills with that Night Hawk all too soon, heh?”

“Whatever are you saying, Rance?”

“Pinkerton Detective Agency has offered me a position as one of their operatives.”

Alastair quickly made for the station-house steps as the carriage, carrying Philo off, pulled away. Philo hung from the window of the hansom, shouting, “Great news! And you’ve gotten my Night Hawk back?”

“Unofficially confiscated.”

“Alastair, you’re a magician and a gentleman, and my knight! I crown thee Sir Alastair Ransom of the Kingdom of Chicago!”

“Do I get a brandy with that?”

From the outside, the old stone structure called the Des Plaines Police Headquarters looked as cool and peaceful as any mausoleum, bathed as it were in a blue halo of gaslight, its yellow brick exterior reflecting back like gold. Despite the horrors of untold crimes filling the files and murder books inside, the edifice could be taken for a church if only a steeple were added, Alastair thought, pushing through the door, making his way into the mayhem. Clutter and noise hit him. Two uniforms had a wild man on the floor, attempting to cuff the rowdy drunk. The desk sergeant pleaded, at wit’s end with some woman, saying “I kin do naught-a-thing to solve yer outhouse plumbing problem, my dear lady-”

“Then what bloody good’re you coppers and the taxes I pay?”

“-and had you any sense, you’d know that no one kin turn rock to running water, so without a description down to the length of his nose, or a bloody name’n’address, would you kindly be leavin’ now?” Alastair instantly realized how much he’d missed his sour, old second home. Then he realized how little thought he’d actually given it other than the unusual weightlessness over his heart, where his badge used to be.

Other cops whisked from desk to desk, but everyone froze when Jed Logan shouted Alastair’s name over the din. A sudden silence descended over the station house as word went around that Alastair had come home. Even the complaining woman at the front desk and the man in cuffs silenced.

Sergeant of the watch came down from his high seat and around his desk, braving any blow that might come his way, and as if seeing the pope, stepped up to Ransom to shake his hand.

“What’s this?” asked Ransom. “What’re ya all gone daft?”

“Hail, the conquering hero!” Ken Behan was one of two inspectors working on the rash of killings now making headlines.

“Welcome home, Rance!” Jedidiah Logan, Behan’s partner, slapped Alastair on the back.

“What’s it all for, boys?” Ransom did a clumsy pirouette, hands extended.

“You’re a hero, Alastair.”

“For what in the name of God?”

“Indeed.”

Laughter erupted. “Does everyone in the city know?” he whispered to Behan.

“Know what? I know nothing. Logan, whataya know?”

“Nothing.”

“We’re as good as the old Know-Nothing party, aren’t we boys?” shouted Behan and a roar went up, ending in laughter and a chorus of “naught nothings.”

“See?” asked Behan amid the uproar over the mention of the anti-immigrant movement and party.

Suddenly Chief Nathan Kohler, standing on the second-floor landing, shouted over all, silencing the room with, “What goes on here?”

“Knock it off, all of you!” shouted Ransom. “Some hero. I’ve lost both my badge and my partner.” He pointed to Drimmer’s empty desk facing his own and a feeling of enormous, sick emptiness filled Alastair.

“He were a good man!” declared Sergeant Dolan, shaking his head.

“We raised more’n a pint to Griff’s memory.” Ken Behan lowered his head.

“And raised three hundred dollars for his family,” added Logan.

Alastair continued cleaning out his desk. “He was a fine assistant inspector although he had some training yet, getting himself knicked like that.”

“Remember the time we set his report on fire, Behan?” asked Jedidiah Logan.

“And that day someone stole his lunch from the icebox, and he couldn’t detect who was behind it?”

They all broke out in good-natured laughter.

The laughs ended abruptly when Chief Nathan Kohler, again shouted, “Ransom! My office, now!”

“Shitty man,” complained Logan under his breath.

“Go get ’im, Alastair,” added Behan. “Now you no longer have to eat his shit.”

“And remember,” said Sergeant Dolan, a skeletal man who stood a head taller than Ransom, “we none of us know a thing, and it’s an oath we’ve taken to your health, Inspector.”

“ Ahhh …well thanks, Dolan. I didn’t know I had so many friends among ye.”

“Aye, you do now.”

Alastair imagined the story must have circulated throughout the force about his having quietly “taken out the garbage,” but he wondered with whom the leak had begun and precisely when and maybe where and perhaps who was on hand. Harry or one of his men perhaps, during a drinking bout? He pondered the notion while making the stairs taking him up to Kohler’s closed office.

He hesitated a moment at the turning of the knob, not wishing to get into turmoil with Nathan so soon back, but as he could hardly stand Kohler in the same room, he imagined there was no dodging it. He opened the door and pushed through.

Inside the semi-darkened office, he found Kohler was not alone. In one corner stood Dr. Christian Fenger, a man to whom Alastair owed deference, as Christian had saved his life now twice-once after Haymarket exploded and more recently when Gabby’s gun had exploded.

Alastair did not recognize the seated figure who appeared doubled over, so far into himself did he lean. The stranger was white haired and white bearded, a Santa Claus figure, dumpy, doughy, and looking as if he’d slept in his suit. A gold watch fob and a diamond ring marked him as a wealthy man. When he looked up to see Ransom enter, Alastair saw that it was Senator Harold J. Chapman, the grandfather of the deceased girl. Chapman looked a shadow of himself, on the verge of death’s endgame. The terrible tragedy had left him a tattered soul.

“Senator Chapman,” began Kohler, “here is our best man for such an assignment. Along with Logan and Behan-introduced to you yesterday-Inspector Ransom here will hunt down this madman who’s brought this horror on your family. I assure you that-”

“Shut up, Kohler!” ordered the old man, getting to his feet. He lifted his cane and placed it in Alastair’s face. “You find this monster, Ransom, and you turn him over to me.”

“What’s this?” Alastair asked Kohler, confused.

“Talk to me,” the senator said sternly. “Understand, this is what I want. You do this thing and the three of you, gentlemen, you will have my fortune. The paperwork is already complete at my lawyer’s, all quite in order. All you need is to bring him to me out at my farm in Evanston alive for me to flay. I’ll strip him of every inch of his bloody skin while he’s yet alive. I want to hear him beg and scream and cry the entire-”

Unfortunately and all too often, Ransom had seen this kind of unrestrained, unconditional hatred born of unmitigated hurt, pain, and a sense of entitlement to justice and order in an unjust and disordered world. For men like Chapman, it amounted to an extreme insult. A shock to the comfortable existence of an otherwise honorable soul now twisted and confused and filled with a sense of outrage that reached back to an ancestral past: the old eye-for-eye vengeance legitimized by the man’s bible. Still, Ransom felt sorry for the man’s terrifying loss; he empathized, and being in his position earlier, he, too, had resorted to the same ancient code. But something felt different here, somehow. Most men of Chapman’s stature would never know a simple truth: no execution, no amount of punishment, no amount of justice could end the pain or quail the loss of an innocent life.