Frederick Busch - The Night Inspector

He no longer struck me as pleased. A frown had imposed itself upon his mouth, and I saw a kind of boy’s pouting in his expression, as if I had failed him, and perhaps of a purpose. He worked at a pencil’s sharp point as if to perfect it, and of course he pressed too far and was required to begin again. He scraped rather than whittled, and the sound of the pocket knife’s blade against the pencil was a nervous scratching. I thought of damp dogs working with their claws against their ears.

“I am sorry,” I said. “You know that I have only affection for you, and the best of hopes for your career. I do seek to comprehend. But, Sam, where is the truth of it, if one entry for September tenth is so different from that which follows soon after, but which is also labeled the tenth of September? Not, of course, that I know anything of authorship. Clearly, since you have thus done it, thus it is achieved. I apologize for my outburst. I am baffled and, when I am in that state, I become almost frightened — perhaps too aggressive, let us say, in my posing of questions, Sam.”

His face was crimson, and I did not know whether with disappointment in my response, or anger at my myopia, or pleasure in my being all at sea.

“And — may I ask you another question without risking our friendship?”

“Never at risk,” he said.

I turned a page and pointed, moving the notebook over to him.

He read aloud: “ ‘He is careful not to display tenderness, most especially in regard to himself. Yet I view him as the most stung, the most wounded of men, a tattered spirit in need of much repair.’ ”

I asked, “Would that be your summary of him? A tattered spirit?”

“Of someone,” he said, smiling, then restoring the notebook to its place in his coat.

“And those — forgive me — puzzling notations?”

“Entries in a log, as one might find in the belongings of a sailor.”

“A log! So he records the events of his voyage, you say.”

“On an inner ocean, Billy.”

“Just so,” I said.

He laughed a quick hiccup of an unhappy laugh, then shut himself into silence, smiling without pleasure at his port, and then drinking it off.

Yesterday morning, I dreamed them both and woke often, fearful each time that I would open my eyes to see M, face a blur behind the screening beard, and Sam, his face a banner of friendship, beside my bed, his notebook in hand, awaiting me. Each time I woke, I kept my eyes squeezed shut. Finally I slept through to the forenoon, although I was troubled with dreaming of the huge cylinder of the pistol, slowly and inevitably grinding around. The night had ended at Mrs. Hess’s near dawn, with the clientele asleep upstairs or departed for home. Delgado, in the pantry at the back, had set down Vichy water and Madeira and a small, very heavy round Dutch cheese. While two of the girls lounged and lolled — Rachel in bloomers, undervest, and bright green shoes; Tillie in her gown with the straps down along her arms — Jessie sat beside me, wrapped in her figured blue-and-white robe, with her golden fingers clasped on the table beside her drink. Delgado stood beside the long refectory table and shook his arm in its black broadcloth jacket; a gravity knife slid into his hand, and he shook it once and the sharp, stubby blade emerged. He reached for the cheese, sealed in red wax, and began to peel it like a mango the size of a cannonball. Tillie, who was Rachel’s lover, slowly ground her head with its thick, red hair up and back in the lap of Rachel, who sat, while Tillie sprawled, in a kind of deacon’s bench against the wall.

Jessie said to Delgado, “Was it a busy night, then?”

He kept the wax coming in a single strip. “A bit less than crowded. How was the great man’s dinner?”

She clasped and unclasped her hands, then she shrugged.

“Did he mind his manners?” Delgado asked.

“He never had any to mind,” she said. “His idea of elegant dining is to hire a whore to chew his beefsteak and spit it into his mouth.”

Tillie said, “Yum,” and turned her head to nibble at Rachel, who slapped her, but did not push her face away.

“You’re lucky,” Delgado said, “if that’s all he requires. So I hear.”

“So you know. And it was not all that he required. Could I have whiskey, do you think, instead of this ladies’ drink?”

“Locked it all away, Jessie. Madeira’s not bad. This is a good one.”

She nodded and drank.

The pantry grew silent. I listened to the gas hiss behind its pink, bright globe. I listened to the scrape of Delgado’s knife between the rind of the cheese and the strip of red wax; it dropped, and I heard it strike the floor, though Delgado, for all his effort, seemed not to mind. He simply started another strip, and the cheese continued to appear. Tillie yawned and moved her head in Rachel’s lap.

Jessie said, “I am not going to talk about the dinner, in case anyone is waiting.”

No one spoke.

I watched her compress her lips, cause her brow to go flat, her eyes to open wider. When her smooth, glowing features were composed, she turned to me. “I would, if you wanted me to.”

I said, “I’d just as soon not.”

She nodded. “I would have, too. Are we any further along in—”

I put my finger to my ludicrous, artificial mouth and she closed her own. Delgado looked up. Rachel asked, “What are you two hatching?”

“Surely not eggs,” Jessie said. Rachel giggled and Tillie affected to snore.

“Cheese,” Delgado said. He placed it on the table and cut crescent-shaped pieces for the girls. “Sir?” he said to me, but I declined. One side of his face, near the nose, was shiny and pocked, and I would have bet that he’d been peppered with birdshot. I thought it remarkable that he’d survived. No doubt he thought me remarkable for similar reasons.

Jessie brought the chunk of hard orange cheese to her mouth and it rested against her lips, but she could not admit it between them. She lowered the cheese to the table and softly shook her head. Delgado raised his full, black eyebrows, then let them drop. Sam Mordecai, back at the Astor asleep, if he were present would have slowly drawn his notebook and opened it and set it upon his lap; then, with a child’s self-pardoning smile, he would have set his stub of pencil scratching at the pages, setting down that silent exchange and all its implications.

William Bartholomew, trader and assassin, settled for gently touching the back of Jessie’s golden hand and sitting within his mask while the night leaked out. William Bartholomew, stalking the streets as if he were in charge of them, peering through his eyeholes at cats leaping in a mound of very ripe garbage at the mouth of an alley at Seventy-ninth Street, made his way down to the Five Points and his bed. Whatever Delgado and Jessie had meant, I thought, by their exchange of glances, she had been through a ghastly night. I summoned grotesque pictures, and then I fought to banish them. In every one, Jessie’s powerful haunches, the secrets of her thighs, were at the service — at the command — of paunchy men of business who were lollipopped, no doubt, while they chewed at their cigars. It was Jessie kneeling before them, was it not? But so small, as it were, a matter would not have driven her into such a sickened silence. I saw them using tableware and worse upon the girls. I heard the noises that they made.

A man with a filthy, unshaved face, half out of his clothing, obviously paralyzed by drink, lay across the street at Seventy-first. I stood above him, for I wanted to deliver a series of blows with my boot to his ribs. I did not know him, but I was atremble with the urge to wound someone.

He opened his eyes in mid-snore, and he looked up. I could not imagine what he thought, in the green glow of the gas lamp, he saw.