Frederick Busch - The Night Inspector

“Your clothing smells like a house afire. That is how you duped me.”

“A fire can still be arranged,” the other tall one said.

The little one, an animated candle stand with one ear and one eye, slapped his pocket and arched his small brows at me. His face, in the light of his candle, was seamed deeply, figured in cross-hatchings that his difficult life had etched upon him.

I swung the shovel haft with all my strength at the man with the snub-nosed pistol. I had intended to hit him at the junction of the elbow and forearm, for I knew that to be struck there sharply was to go so numb as to become unable to aim or fire a gun. I missed the elbow and hit him on the upper arm, but with great force, and I could have sworn I heard the bone crack. He howled, and I struck the arm again. He dropped the pistol, and I reached for it. But the little fellow, by then, had come forward, dropping the candle, which lay guttering while he stabbed with the folding knife he had drawn, no doubt from the pocket above his heart.

Since the blade was stuck through my nightshirt and into my arm, I removed both arm and blade from the little man’s reach, and I swung the haft again, dislodging the knife and spraying my blood across the man who had dropped his pistol as well as the little man whom I struck in the side of the head and rendered unconscious. I retrieved the pistol and I stuck it into its charging owner, for I wanted, even in the heart of the Points, amid the hysterical cries and chatter of the crowd outside, to muffle the shot with his body. The flare of the discharge was obscured and he went down to his knees at once. I scrambled backward, until I reached the edge of my cot, and aimed the pistol, with unsteady hand and arm, but with the authority of a man who had lived with firearms, at the other tall Swamp Angel, who had been stalled in his place by, I assumed, the suddenness of my violence.

“Come here,” I said to him. He walked toward me as if he were, at once, drunk. “Now halt,” I instructed. He was but a few feet from me, and I did not wish him to become sufficiently emboldened by our proximity to fall upon me. Giving no warning, I swung the shovel haft with my left hand and caught him across the bridge of the nose, which cracked, pouring blood from his nostrils and flooding the flesh around his eyes with interior blood. He, too, went to his knees, cupping his face.

“Excellent,” I said. “Now, the first man who may stand erect will not be shot. Who’s for it?” The fellow with the broken nose moved to make the attempt. So, though he was weakened by the shock of the bullet and by his pain, did the other tall one. I said to the man whose nose I had split, “Take your friends by hand or belt or hair and bring them to their feet.”

He did so, moaning the while, as did the other tall one, who helped him bring the smaller fellow erect, though hardly conscious.

“Now attend. You are businessmen, and you have plied your trade. You take money. I make it, and I keep it; that is my trade. So our transaction is over. I would like to hear you agree.” They made liquid, nasal sounds, which I took for assent. “I have no desire to affect your further conduct of business. Is that clear? There’s no profit for me in sending you off to the Tombs. But there’s no profit in your further association with me. Wait in hell for your boat, and then travel on it. Agreed?” They made more sounds.

I said, “Then, good night.”

But I did not lock the door behind them. I felt as though the room was violated, polluted, and that locking it at once was somehow more of a gesture than a deed. So I picked up a broken lamp globe and papers that had been scattered, and I straightened the furniture that had been tossed about. I poured water into a basin and made an effort to wash my hands and neck and forehead. The cleft near my brow was irritated, as if it had been wounded once more, and I took care to use soap and to lave it well, then gently pat it dry. I was unused to invasion. I was dismayed by feeling vulnerable. I found myself walking in small, tight circles, and they reminded me of the stiff-legged way those men and I, in the alley, earlier, had edged about near one another. I found the mask, on the floor beneath the head of the bed, and I put it on. I sat on the edge of the bed and listened to the rasp of my breathing, the diminishing sounds of the terrified tenants as, little by little, it became a fact that our tenement was not ablaze. With a kerchief, I bound the gash on my arm, the bleeding from which had decreased. I moved then and found clean clothing and, as I stripped myself to put on fresh linen, I held a shirt to my face and breathed in its harsh odor of strong soap, a kind of rough perfume of cleanliness.

It was dawn, and her children slept. She drew aside the curtain to display them in the weak light of the candle she held, yellow-white tallow dripping — I watched it — upon her small, tea-colored hands. The heat from the stove was oppressive in the large room, but the sleeping place seemed slightly cooler, and both Kwang and Ng were under the same white comforter in the narrow bed. Ng’s eyes opened, of a sudden, and I feared for her as she observed us in our study of her.

She narrowed her eyes, and then she closed them. “Gui,” she said. Her brother stirred, and they both slept.

Chun Ho stepped back and so did I, and she drew the curtain to. The heat was from the stove, of course, on which she heated water.

“Have you been to sleep?” I asked her.

She shook her head. She wore light-colored trousers and a kind of shirt that clung to her and was darkened with sweat, creating such an intimate appearance that I was both embarrassed and impelled to look more closely at the outlines of her form, and its simultaneous proximity and distance. She smelled of soap and of her own perspiration.

“You must work all night?” I asked.

“Too hot for sleeping. Not sleep, then work.”

“If you didn’t keep the fire going, perhaps you could sleep.”

“But you want bath.”

“That isn’t why the stove is fired, is it?”

She covered her mouth and laughed. “Should be, perhaps. Is not. Not sleeping, so work. Want bath?”

I did not reply. I took off my boots, and then my trousers and my jacket and shirt. I lay my hat upside down on the floor beside my clothing, and in it I placed the Colt.31. She poured the water into the tub, and I took off my mask. I stood where I was, attempting to formulate adequate words for what had possessed my body.

She said, with no expression, and this time looking into my face, “Strong flower.”

I stepped into the tub. She placed the candle on a small gold-and-red lacquered dish upon her table and dipped water from the stove into a heavy, short-handled iron pot, which she carried over. The water she poured upon me was scalding hot in a humid, hot night in the close, steamy room, but it was renewing. I thought my body might glow. Without speaking, she unwrapped the handkerchief about my left forearm, and she pressed it beneath the surface of the bathwater. Then, pulling it back with both of her small, strong hands, she touched the puckered surface of the wound. I made no sound, nor did she. From a shelf near the stove, she secured a small, dark bottle.

“Hurt,” she said, as she poured the violet liquid upon me.

“Yes, it surely does! Perhaps somewhat more than the injury.”

“Help you to not be sick.”

“Infected,” I speculated.

“So many words.”

She soaped a flannel cloth and then sat upon the rim of the tub, behind me, pouring more water and scrubbing my back and my neck, as if I were her child. I closed my eyes and let my head droop toward my chest. My breathing was deep, almost a sort of snoring, and I listened to it, and to the slight rasp of the flannel cloth upon my skin. Chun Ho reached around me to scrub at my throat and then my chest, and I felt the cloth of her shirt and then the solidity of her nipples, the muscle at the junction of her breast and her arm. I knew that when I looked at her next, I would see her clothing soaked in upon her bosom.