Frederick Busch - The Night Inspector

“You have penetrating eyes, Billy,” he had commented, looking away, at the roiled and pockmarked surface of the river. “You see things, don’t you? Short, quick probings at the axis of reality, and then back undercover, if you don’t mind my saying it. Back beneath the mask.”

“I am flattered to have been so studied, and to have been so considered.”

“It’s the mask that reinforces the study, I think. And it’s the mask that lets you say the wise, brooding words I enjoy in our exchanges. You have read Shakespeare, I know.”

“I was a boy, at Yale.”

“An oceangoing vessel underneath a cloud of canvas was my Yale. But I have read the dark characters of Hamlet, Timon, Lear, and Iago, through whose mouths he so craftily says, or sometimes insinuates the things, which we feel to be so terrifically true.” He leaned closer and, although we were of a similar height, he reached around me as if to loom at my ear from a height. He succeeded in dripping water from his sleeve down the back of my coat. I shivered with the cold of it as he said, almost into my ear, “Those things he says, shipmate. Those true, terrible things, he tells through the mouths of his characters . Do you see? For it would be all but madness for any good man — Shakespeare or Bartholomew — in his own, proper character, to utter or even hint of the truth. Remember Lear! I feel so close to him, Billy! That frantic king tears off his mask and speaks the sane madness of vital truth. But, Billy, it is Shakespeare behind him. It is Shakespeare who wears his face, his soul. Lear is, you understand me, Shakespeare’s mask! How else might we tell the world our terrible thoughts except through these masks?”

I had nothing noteworthy to reply on the subject, although it had crossed my mind that I might mention how little choice I had in the matter of my own mask. Yet, I thought, it had been my idea to commission one. I tried to ponder his words as the rain was whipped at us by rising winds.

“I came to think in this manner after encountering Nathaniel Hawthorne the man while simultaneously encountering his work. I was shocked, as if coming upon myself unawares in a mirror. He never, to my knowledge, paid the same, thrilled courtesy to my own fishy efforts. And he is dead, poor man. Too soon taken. On your guard, Billy. Take care. This business of mortality is, I think, contagious, for men are dying, willy-nilly, every day. You need only see an evening paper or two.”

“We have business,” the one in the red bandana said.

“You and I?” I asked him.

He shook his head. “Us. You don’t belong here.”

“No,” I said. “Although I am a businessman.”

“Good for you,” he said. “We moved in the other day. We don’t want to make friends with our neighbors. It’s bad enough, living down there.”

“You’re awaiting a boat,” I suggested.

“Who told you?” He put his hand into his coat, and I did the same, reaching behind me for the.31.

“I said I’m a businessman. I have access to a schooner that won’t be full as of tomorrow night. Perhaps I should name a figure.”

“Don’t name anything,” he said. “Don’t say anything. To anybody. We don’t want your boat. Go away.”

“That’s the extent of our business, then. I’ll go away.”

“I’ll watch you leave,” he said. The two others had descended again, although I could not imagine how. The smell seemed to grow worse the longer it hovered there. Drawn in by the smell and the menace, I was sent away by them, and I was happy to be leaving. When I emerged from the alley and its convention of wary men in masks, I smiled beneath my own to consider how pleased he would have been, with his Hamlet, his Timon, his Lear, to have witnessed us. M would no doubt have spotted them — he lived in a kind of crow’s nest and was always on the lookout — but I wondered, our fear and curiosity aside, what great truths we could possibly have touched upon as, covered up and armed and circling like gaunt, wild dogs, each man had addressed the other through his mask.

As we did again, in hours, I reckoned, although I hadn’t the opportunity to consult my watch. They hammered at the door, and I was up, having barely gone to bed.

“Fire,” the man seemed to say, and I ducked my head and slid, crouching, to the floor, as I expected a volley of shots. I realized soon enough, of course, that the voice was not commanding someone to shoot me, but had cried a warning.

“Fire!” the voice called once more. And then I heard the hammering of fists upon neighboring doors, and, of a sudden, the Old Brewery, huge and dark and leaning, stinking of yeast and the intimacies of too many bodies, and made of old, alcohol-soaked wood, and ready as a wick to be lit, began to shudder. “Fire!” the fellow cried louder. There was a set of stairs nearby that ran to the roof from the ground, passing my door, and I could hear the terrified inhabitants of the upper floors as they poured from their tinderbox rooms and fled downstairs. I heard people cry out as they were trampled, and of course the small children began to shriek their terror.

I did not retrieve my pistol from the heap of my clothing at the side of the cot, nor did I bother to fetch anything with me except the keys to my Broadway office.

“Fire!” the man in the hallway called again, his voice mingling with the roars of the panicking mob.

I took up my cudgel, thinking that I might be required to pry my way into those who sought escape or blocked the way.

I sniffed at the edges of the door, and surely I did smell something powerful yet familiar, and with a tinge to it of flame or hot wax. Without thinking further — and that’s always the end of your luck, isn’t it? — I undid the lock, barely stepping back in time to avoid being struck as the door swung violently in. They were, of course, the threesome from the alley, Angels, as they were called by some, devils, as they were named by the whores upstairs, but men, at any rate, who were desperate to stay out of prison, and who knew how to see to themselves. The fleeing tenants poured through them, but they held their place until the one with the red bandana pushed me backward, and I stumbled but kept to my feet, backing up as they entered, waiting as they closed my door against rescue. I hefted the persuader. He showed me his stubby-barreled pistol. The other two seemed not to be armed, although the little one-eyed fellow in the stovepipe hat kept patting his suit coat at his heart, as if to remind me that he was but an arm’s thrust away from a gun. He carried a squat miner’s candle, which was set, on his open left palm, in a pool of its own drippings. The flickering light was sufficient for us to see one another and, I suspected, for me, as was usual in such events, to see best. To them the room was a shifting of light and dark shadows, while for me it was merely a darker version of a dark or foggy day.

The dirtiest of them, whom I had encountered first, said, “What’d you do to your face?”

“He took his veil off,” the armed one said.

“No,” the first one said. “It ain’t a face. He put a mask on.”

“Why do you not take off yours?” I suggested. “We can all be naked-faced and ugly together.”

“Why do you not find us your pocketbook and your gemstones?” asked the one with the pistol.

“In this place? Gemstones? What makes you think I can procure money?”

The gunman said, “A man who has a ship has money.”

“I said I knew a ship. I do not own one.”

“In my life, mister, you’re as good as an owner. But we don’t want your ship. We have one coming in. We want for cash. We need meanwhile-money. While the boat comes up the coast. Food, weapons, clothes.”