Frederick Busch - The Night Inspector

DID YOU KNOW THAT IN MY TIME THERE WERE miniature broughams drawn through Central Park by teams of goats? Ragged children in cobbled-together livery drew wealthy children in Eton suits and pinafores among the polished balustrades and through the arbor made of woven live branches. While rats ran under the sewers of the lower neighborhoods, such as mine, the Harlem River steamboat took the daytrippers over to Claremont, where the aqueducts from Croton rested. You could walk the promenade and see, high above Manhattan, the tall reservoir in which thousands of gallons of water were held for those in the higher reaches of the city whose delivery pressure might drop. In my district, of course, the water often ran dark. It was a broth of invisible creatures, and when a Swamp Angel, hiding from the police beneath the alleys, relieved himself, he was infecting the immigrant children who rested from their street games and drank at the pump.

But I had faith. I had fine vision, and I saw possibilities. Indeed, I earned my livelihood from them, and of course from their overthrow. I speculated — in currencies of all nations, which I willingly exchanged (drachmas for rubles for pounds in sterling for German gold), in the future demand for slaughtered hogs, for cattle on the hoof, for codfish packed in salt, for, of course, the oil of sperm whales shipped in wooden casks. I was an importer-exporter, a student of the markets, and therefore a man who was watchful of human needs. I lamented the deaths at the minehead in Wales, but I celebrated the retrieval of every lump and boulder of coal. The port at which my friend was deputy inspector was a part of the heart of the great body I attended as Scheherazade attended her Shah. She was thrilled, I have always thought, not to receive his attention but to be allowed to lavish hers; it was the danger in which she won another night that rewarded her. So with me, from out of the Five Points and onto the Manhattan streets.

Before I attended my office, one morning after I had slept for several nighttime hours, I bathed in cold water and retrieved my shirts from Chun Ho, as she was called, the widow who supported her children and herself as a laundress. She steamed my suit and pressed it flat while I stood, indecent from the waist down and unbearable from the neck up, shifting and sighing as her household regarded me in the room’s dim light. It smelled pleasantly of fish and sauces, and of harsh soap, and it was the temperature of my body; I could not feel my skin. Before I grew dizzy, the little tan woman with large, young eyes and bleached, shriveled hands held out my trousers. I leaned upon her as I stepped into them, and then she reached up to place my coat upon my back.

“We’re like an old husband and wife, Chun Ho,” I told her. Her daughter, who spoke a little English, giggled from behind a curtain that must serve them as a wall.

The woman bowed while her eyes appraised me. Her pretty mask was little different from mine, I thought. I reached a finger toward her. She stiffened, but she let me touch her cheek. The flesh was soft, and I felt a frisson , you must call it, almost as if someone stroked the bottoms of my feet. Her eyes regarded me from deep within. The sweet young face was still. I had taken liberties.

“I have taken liberties,” I said.

She waited. I gave her twenty-five cents. She bowed and so, strangely, did I.

My office was a single room in the Equitable Building at 120 Broadway, above the small coffeehouse that would become the Café Savarin and then, with all the building, in a terrible winter inferno, burn up. I was around the corner from Pine Street, not far from Trinity Church and the Custom House, the Board of Brokers and the United States Treasury. I had a wooden chair that swiveled on an iron screw. I had a plain deal desk. I had cabinets of wood and gas lamps of brass and one window that looked out over Broad and Pine Streets, and one that might have looked upon Broadway in an earlier day that had been, for reasons I never learned, bricked up. So that I might better concentrate, I kept my desk before this window, and, staring out, looked in. The room was small, and stuffy in the warmer weather, and snug in winter, and, truly, unimportant in either regard; it was where I thought about my profit and my loss, unless I foolishly lay abed in my room in the Points and permitted my mind to race like a panicked horse on cobblestones, skittering hither and thither, scrabbling for a foothold, giving off sparks of iron against paving, and making no progress. Here, in the room in the neighborhood called Wall Street, with my name upon the half-wood, half-glass door— Wlm. Bartholomew General Transactions —I planned my days and weeks; I offered, I withdrew; I bought and sold; I profited, or I had my investment for breakfast, meaning that I died overnight in some sharp fellow’s ledger book.

And, yes, there were confidence bubbles, there were, indeed, declines. These are the natural inhalations and exhalations of the national economy. Your loss is the compost for what falters, then grows, then thrives. Great creatures were said to have walked upon the earth. They were banished by history. So, too, with nations — say, Atlantis or, less picturesquely, the Romans. They were here, then not. And in their place — who is to say not nourished by the fermentations of their ashes and bones — came others. They survived. So with companies of men, so with investments by the likes of me. Bubbles expand and burst, economies grow lame, and men wander the broken metal railings of the Battery, once grand with grand homes, now a gathering place for those who stare into the water and contemplate their ruin and — not infrequently — their drowning. Then they die. Others live. And what survives is stronger.

I had traveled, that morning, by the omnibus that ran to South Ferry. I tugged on the leather strap affixed to the driver’s leg as we came to the Corn and Produce Exchange, and he sullenly slowed, but did not stop, so that I might clamber down. I did not blame the man, although he had a contract with the public; he took our money; he ought to have taken with something like grace the fact that he was tethered back to his passengers as the brace of horses that pulled us were tethered back to him. The wooden wheels creaked and clattered on, and I made my way across Whitehall Street to the Exchange, where I was owed money by Lapham Dumont, who paced the paving stones while doing business.

He watched me cross to him, and I studied him in return. He was a negligible man who was in debt to me and, because in debt, was dangerous, or anyway warranted watching. He was very tall, and he seemed to have no muscles, only bone beneath his brown wool suit. His red face, pointy and dominated by a fleshy nose, appeared to be damp. I cannot imagine — I lie: I can imagine — how my face, my mask, appeared to him. I was a living haunt. I was a fright. I was unreadable.

“William,” he said in his basso. It was a voice suggesting strangulation, deep and weak at once.

“Lapham,” I said. “In what currency shall we deal?”

“Verbal?”

“Ah. Excuses, you mean.”

“Insufficiency.”

“That isn’t a meaning. That’s a plea.”

“I must plead, William.”

“I must press you, then.”

“It is said that you cannot press a stone,” he said, wiping each hand with a sullied handkerchief.

“No, my friend. It is said that you cannot press blood from a stone . You can always press blood from a man, and likewise, I like to think, money. It was my money, pressed at your request into service, that I invested on your behalf in the bear speculation, you’ll remember.