Frederick Busch - The Night Inspector

It was at this time that Chun Ho’s children, accustomed to me now, called me Gui when they thought I didn’t hear, and then, soon enough, they said it aloud before me.

“What is Gui?” I asked her.

“They say it for this.” She gently touched my painted cheek.

“They call me a name for my mask?”

She nodded. “Ghost, you say.”

“I am a ghost to them?”

She solemnly shook her head. “Look like ghost. White face of spirit. You plenty alive. They know.” She was folding laundry at most of her small table, although a few inches were reserved for Ng, who was required to practice English for school. She had made a list of words that, in the evening, she and Kwang would chant at one another. Then Chun Ho looked up. She was wearing black wide-legged silk trousers under a kind of short black silk robe. Her light tan face, broad and impassive, under hair as black and silky as her clothes, was cocked in attention. She waited for my reaction to my name.

“You know I am more than this mask,” I said.

“Sure. They young, small people.”

“May I ask you, Chun Ho, why you look at me like that?”

“Want see,” she said. “I ask: Why you come here? Sit here? Talk here? Listen here?”

“Why do you,” Ng corrected her.

I said, “I want to see you , I suppose.”

Often, she put her hand to her face and looked away if I embarrassed her with overmuch directness. This time, she stood straight and regarded me further. Then she nodded. She saw to the laundry but, I noticed, she smiled a little at the bedsheets and pillowcases and bath towels of strangers.

Kwang, too, was smiling, as if adults were amusing. Ng had her hand upon her mouth. These, I reminded myself, were the children of the dead man to whom Chun Ho was married. And, rather than watch laundry folded, I was embarked on an operation of considerable detail and difficulty. In my office, this time working with no sleep at all, I made my lists and wrote out my instructions to myself and having to do with M and Adam and Lapham Dumont and sundry carters and the acquisition, presumably well in hand, of barrels. Timing would be exquisite or ruinous. Endurance, of course, and courage, desperation, and the air supply — I noted Reeds through staves —would, obviously, prove crucial. The master of the vessel: I wrote this unknown quantity upon my list, although I could do nothing to affect it.

Sam had seen me thus, on nights before an engagement. Burton, of course, had seen me, too, but he had been curious about nothing but his horses and his meals, and, of course, his safety. But Grafton, interested enough, had left me alone; he had always been a great believer in men alone with their thoughts. Sam, on the other hand, had always intervened, just this side of rudeness, because his curiosity was so great and his taste for the lives of others a genuine appetite.

“How many times do you clean it, then?” he asked, moving away from the fire and out to where I sat with my gear.

“Are you counting, Mr. Mordecai?”

“I am, in fact, Mr. Bartholomew. Do I intrude?”

“Of course you do.”

He sat. “I don’t mean to.”

I looked at him.

“Not a great deal,” he said. “It’s just— I just this minute realized you get nervous.”

“Frightened.”

“That’s hard to believe. Normal soldiers, infantrymen, of course. You, though. You’re William Bartholomew.”

“The cold-blooded assassin.”

“No. But you always look so … certain.”

“Well, I am, Mr. Mordecai.”

“Sam.”

“But you can be certain and be scared. They shoot at me with guns , Sam. They want to kill me. And all because I shoot them down while they use the latrine or eat their grub or yawn. So I’m scared of what they’ll do to me, with a little luck. And I’m certain that, if they don’t, I can kill them.”

“So you clean your weapon.”

“So I think of where I might have to go to take them. I think of how I might approach my blind. A line of retreat when I’m finished with work.”

“Work,” he said. “It is work, isn’t it?”

“War had better be work. If it got to be play, we’d be wrapped in wet sheets and gibbering, I think.”

He nodded and sat while I replaced the cleaning rod and put the cap on the vial of oil. “War can also be righteous,” he said.

“Is this a righteous war?”

He nodded. “I’m embarrassed to use a word like that for pissing down your pant leg with fear or watching someone drown in their blood. Yes, though. My people — not just the Mordecais, but the bunch of us, the people in America, Jews from Spain or Asia or Europe who ended up here. We’re a step away from the Negroes, you know. Truly,” he said, as I began to protest. “You’ve seen the signs: ‘No Jews, Negroes, Dagos or Dogs.’ All of that. They don’t use us as slaves, but they revile us. We sell drink on Sundays. We don’t do business on Saturdays. We lend money. We are a nation among and unto ourselves.”

He stood, he walked in a series of very small circles and came back to where he had been sitting, and he sat. I was rubbing down the cartridges with a rag so that nothing might interfere with the accuracy of my shooting. Horses nickered and Sergeant Grafton spilled hot coffee on his hand and softly cursed, as amused by his own clumsiness as annoyed. Burton sat in thoughtless rest, like his horses, content to be still, uninterested in what wasn’t.

“We would be next,” Sam said. “Maybe not slaves, but only maybe. Surely reviled. Surely treated, often enough, with indecency. With insulting impatience or amusement. Revulsion. Hanged or whipped for punishment like Negroes? Who’s to know. I don’t want to know. I have the feeling that, if we win this—”

“It isn’t about slavery, Sam.” His face fell, as a child’s does, when I told him the news he did not wish to hear. “It’s about money. Economy. Agrarians need slave labor. Industrialists need cheap labor. The North will use your Jews in any way they can. If we make the slaves free of the Rebels, then the North will use your Negroes in any way they can. We’re fighting for the oppportunity for men of business, manufacturers, to get their hands on black men, Jews, and broad-shouldered girls. It’s money, Sam, they’re waging the War about. The righteousness is only yours.”

“No,” he said.

I put my rifle cartridges away and began to sort through the pistol cartridges in my little pouch. Next I would hone my knife.

“It’s a far keener cause than that.”

“Noble,” I said.

“You mock what you might die for?”

If we had sat closer, I would have reached for his shoulder and patted it or squeezed it. I looked at his thin face under its wiry hair beneath his forage cap. There was a poignance to his need. I said, “I do not mock what you might die for, and I intend to kill enough of them to prevent your dying.”

“Why, then? Why work so hard at it? The killing. If you don’t believe.”

“Oh, Sam,” I said, “I do believe.”

“In what?”

“In me,” I told him.

The next morning, as I hid behind a tree and men first on horseback and then on foot, pursuing me, went past, I heard myself pontificate again while, half a mile away, at a folding wooden writing desk, a colonel of horse cavalry lay covered in flies, unless someone had begun tending to his corpse. Flies were gathering at my face and hands, but I did not brush them away. I lay on wet moss among ferns in a forest of pines, and I blinked away the flies at my eyes, and I waited to be safe. I had taken the colonel while he wrote, and while a lieutenant in the tent behind him had — in truth — played in a minor key at a violin. The colonel was a girlish-looking young man in a creased but clean-looking uniform, and he had long, fine fingers with which he tapped on the air, as if working out the proper phrase, or, for all I knew, the rhyme scheme of a poem. I put a bullet into the side of his head, which appeared to disintegrate as he went over, hands and elbows loose in the air, a cloud of sprayed blood remaining behind an instant where he had been. The ink spilled, and the pen hung in the air although the writer was gone while the shot still echoed.