Frederick Busch - The Night Inspector

“I am bobbing to the surface,” I said.

She fetched me a towel, then removed herself to the small table at which she and her children ate, and on which she folded laundry.

I stood to dry myself, and Chun Ho said, “Flower.”

When Mrs. Hess had partaken of what her clients agreed was Lydia Pinkham’s in ruby port wine, her dignified carriage grew famously erect; she looked, in fact, as though she might tip over from carrying herself all but on the balls of her feet in their patent leather slippers. Her mammoth bosom rose and fell rapidly at her prow as if a powdered creature transported into the parlor for applause. She blinked her eyes a good deal and spoke quite slowly, though I could not tell whether to herself she sounded quick and nimble of tongue. Malcolm seemed as spifflicated as she, though he did seem to recognize me, and to turn his face toward the woman to his right, who, at that instant, yawned.

“You’ve an admirer there, all right,” a stocky man said as he lit his cigar. It was fairly apparent that he had set his sights on the slight, ruddy girl for whose company Malcolm had paid. I wondered what salary his insurance firm gave a boy who at best might be a clerk, that he might spend so much money on liquor and whores.

Because it was the end of the working night, Mrs. Hess’s servant, whom we knew as Delgado, made his tour of the downstairs rooms, dimming the lights. He carried a short, thick truncheon in his coat and, although he was of stringy build and quiet demeanor, I had never seen a man stand up to him. Mrs. Hess sat beside Malcolm, on the other side from her girl, and soon she was snoring demurely; that would change, I knew, and we would all be treated to great, gasping noises unless Delgado removed her to her quarters in the back of the house.

Malcolm was pinching the girl’s jaws with his hand, squeezing hard enough to bring tears to her eyes. I watched Delgado approach him from the rear of the sofa.

“If you must be a whore, you whore, then have some manners while you’re at it,” Malcolm said.

The stocky man said, “Do not address her in that wise. And drop your hand from her face.”

“By jockies!” Malcolm said, trying to stand. The girl rubbed her face, and Malcolm gave up, sitting back, his fists raised, his eyes closed, stupid with drink.

“Sir,” Delgado said.

“What is it?” the boy asked, his eyes still closed.

“It is time to retire, sir.”

Malcolm opened his eyes. Delgado’s suggestions were almost always accepted.

“A cabriolet, sir?”

Malcolm said, “Awoke.”

Delgado turned to me. I said, “He means to say he’ll walk, I think. But here.” I held up some coins, and Delgado came around to accept them for Malcolm. “Send him home. He’ll never make it on his own. He’ll be lucky, any rate, if he’s admitted at home.”

“You know the gentleman, sir?”

“His father and I are, you might say, associates in trade, Mr. Delgado.”

Delgado raised his sparse brows, took the coins, and lifted Malcolm from the divan as if he were a frail boy instead of a bulky cross between child and adult man.

“You might have a word with the father about the comportment of the son,” the stocky fellow said.

I turned to him and stared. He dropped his eyes and attended to the girl whose face Malcolm had bruised. The stocky man addressed her with exaggerated concern, and she shrugged her shoulders and made to smile; it looked more like a leer.

I walked to the foyer, where I found Delgado about to descend the steps with his charge. “Allow me, Delgado,” I said. “If you’ll help me stuff him into the carriage, I’ll escort him home. What I gave you for fare I hope you’ll use for a drink.”

“Mr. Bartholomew,” he said. He inclined his head an inch. I had heard a rumor that on a Portuguese cod fisherman, somewhere off the English coast, he had cut a man very badly with a gaff and, while the fellow bled, Delgado had used the hook to keep the crew from coming to the man’s assistance. According to the story, he had never said a word, from start of fight to death by exsanguination.

It was a mild enough night, but I took the blanket from the driver and laid it on Malcolm’s shoulders and chest, more as a stay against his soiling his clothing if he took sick than as a protection from the night. We made our way south and west through the smells of coffee and bread and, once, the sour stink of a brewery.

“Mr. Face,” Malcolm said.

“You’ll be forgiven tonight,” I said. “But Delgado will remember.”

“Ooh,” the boy said, and he affected to laugh. “Mr. Face,” he said again.

I placed the thumb and forefinger of my left hand on his nostrils and pinched; the while, I clasped his lips between the thumb and forefinger of my right. He began to struggle, so I slapped with elbow and forearm upon his chest, and he went crimson. I squeezed and then let go with both my hands. “Don’t call me that a third time,” I said.

He began to go very pale, and I knew that he was about to heave his night’s drink. “Driver!” I called. “To the curbing, if you please, at once!”

While Malcolm leaned out to the right, I climbed down from the left, gave the driver his instructions and his fare, and I made long strides to escape the sound of the boy’s blubbering and spew.

I was at Seventy-second Street, and I would have a good night’s walk in which to think. I had been fascinated by Jessie’s tranquillity — not a word about the children until I referred to them, when I said only that I had an eye on an opportunity and that I must devote time to developing it, and hearing in return only her assurance that she knew me well enough to exercise patience. Of course, there was little about Jessie that did not fascinate me: her form, her face, the delicate tattoos and their location, and her ability to work for Mrs. Hess and keep herself fresh and somehow inviolate.

I said, “Ba!” A man carrying a heavy burlap sack came abreast and went faster as I spoke. I had addressed not him but myself. I was becoming foolish — inviolate, indeed! — and it occurred to me that I must see her less, or not at all, if I was to remain strong enough to survive in this city, and in my profession, and in, as a matter of fact, my own flesh. When I realized at once that I would not forsake seeing Jessie, and that I felt as if I could not, I also realized that something like my life was now at stake. I walked faster, as if to outrun my thoughts.

That pace, and the sound of my harsh, rapid breathing against the inside of the mask, reminded me of a story M had told me. I could not remember where it was set, or what the ship was called, but it concerned a man from the Isle of Man. I did recall how, as he said it to me, I reminded myself that I was hearing a tale from the man who had written perhaps the greatest story told by an American about American industry. His Whale was a hymn to the catching of enormous creatures and using them, blubber and ambergris, for the manufacture of oily light and the perfumed scent on golden breasts and dark brown nipples I had just recently left. How the owners failed to hire a captain who would serve their will was a lesson to every man of capital, and how they lost a ship laden with oil was the story’s moral: If you have a plan, you must see it through, and if you have none, you have no business; hire slackly and lose your investment; do not risk your money with a man who covets none.

The fishing vessel had been caught by a freeze in a cove off Lyme Regis, and the crew had actually watched the salt water thicken, first on the rigging and on the nets, and then on the bowsprit, and then in the sea that slapped, more and more slowly, against the hull itself. Within hours, as M told the story, the ship was halted, ringed with ice that lay tight against her, and the masts were like the limbs of trees in winter — bone-white, glinting. “It made the Ancient Mariner seem like a passenger on a pleasure craft,” he told me, sitting forward to lean his elbows on his knees, rubbing his hands as if against the cold that came blowing into the room from out of his story.