Frederick Busch - The Night Inspector

Invest or go stagnant, I maintain. And here I was, the newest, fastest friend of a man once known as literary. He helped to guard the port. He went on board the ships, he told me, in a seeming sorrow and in a kind of pride, at once; he inspected the cargoes, and when he did, he pinned, on his thick serge suit coat, a small metal badge.

“Silver?” I asked him as we ordered German sausages and ale at Delmonico’s. He set it on my palm and I said, “Tin, perhaps.”

“And locks,” he said, regarding the mask as if he were seeing me.

“And what do you lock, sir?”

“The hold. If the casks of spirit are of unlawful proof or seem of dubious quality. If we detect French letters.”

“You are a postal inspector, then, as well as an assayer of rum?”

“The letters to which I refer,” he said, “you might know as safes. American letters? Italian letters. Spanish ones, for heaven’s sake!”

“You speak of eel skins,” I ventured.

“And you, sir, tease me. Postal inspector!”

“Letters,” I said. “What mail you must see.”

“Male as in the membrum virile?”

“As in what’s sent to you in envelopes.”

He smiled gently, his small eyes not so much expressing humor as expecting it. “I believe you know an envelope’s another word for letter.”

“Of the worldly sort to which you have referred. I do. But back to business, sir. You’ve authority to lock a captain’s hold?”

“And keep him anchored in the harbor until a full-fledged inspector arrives. Why, I can investigate a premises onshore, without a sworn warrant or other affidavit, if I’ve reason to believe there’s contraband within.”

“A lock is a powerful weapon,” I said.

“A lock is everything,” he replied. He shot the frayed cuffs of his loose white shirt, and he pulled at the lapels of his coat. Then, smoothing his beard, stroking it as if it were a cat, he said, “You may lock yourself in. You may lock others out. You may capture or safeguard a person or property. Much of life is given over to the operation of locks.”

“And isn’t a French letter something of a lock?” I asked him.

“As in a dead letter.”

“Or a letter unopened, for that matter.”

He sighed. His face lost its rosiness, and his eyes their little luster. He nodded. “A good deal of life, I find, can be spoken of in terms of such mail.”

“Of the postal variety, I assume,” I said.

He said, “What you will.”

We made an arrangement for me to visit his district office — Number 4, it was called — at the foot of the Hudson, on West Street. His wife returning from Albany, he would be dining at home, he said. Unless, of course, it was his turn for night duty. Each inspector must serve, for a twelve-hour span after dark. Sometimes, as a deputy inspector, he served as substitute during a busy week.

“Do you lack for sleep? I, myself, am often up at night.”

“I have stood watches, you remember, on heaving decks and in the yards.” He took much air into his lungs and his chest swelled. I was to note his musculature, I realized, and I nodded, as if I understood what he had said. I probably had.

“I might visit you, if it is permitted by the Customs.”

“We might drink tea and a sweetener of brandy, then. Come, by all means. I might tell you — well, I might not.”

And I was to beg him for the information, I saw. “Please,” I said.

“Nothing of great magnitude to a veteran such as yourself. Did I not mention the time I went down to Washington to see the War, in April of ’64, as much as a gentleman of middle years who wore no weapon could see? And with these faltering eyes. We did ride, more than two hundred of us, in quest of Mosby and his irregulars. He stole into Washington itself, you know.”

“He has stolen into business there. He is a fine Republican gentleman these days, I am told.”

“We never found his headquarters. But it was a bold foray, and I was a boy again, riding with those boys. You’ve read my ‘Scout Toward Aldie.’ He could not read my face. He saw no face to read. I nodded, though, and he nodded in return, as though we’d told each other a truth. “Riding on the Little River,” he said, “I knew I was alive.”

“And now? Do you know it now?”

“Come visit,” he said. “I will be the night inspector on next Thursday, I believe. Come whatever time you wish after dark, and listen to the river at night among the pilings. The dead float by, every now and again. Murdered or suicide, who knows?”

“Nobody cares,” I said.

“No. And the chandlers’ lads in their long, low craft, ferrying supplies by the light of their lantern, then drifting along the shore with the lantern dim, their voices cracking under the weight of their youth and their cheap cigars apuff — you can smell them on a still night. It gives the old river a sulfurous aspect, and you might think yourself anchored off an Oriental town. And then there’s custom, and the lights flare, the gas roars in the pipeworks, and the pilot shouts from the vessel that he’s hungry and he wants a proper warm meal and will someone not row out and look out the cargo?”

“And then you row out.”

“I do, if I serve as the night inspector. It’s what I’m there for. The anchor chain rumbling is a kind of deep music, still. Like an organ in chapel, the notes singing through the floor.”

“Write us a story of the river at night,” I suggested.

“I have,” he said. “Think of Styx. I’ve written it again and again.”

“But now,” I said.

“But now I go to work there.” He looked, this time, squarely into my eyes, and I felt as naked, an instant, as if I wore no mask. It wasn’t all lies, my chattering praises, my dancing round him while throwing off respects. He was an alarming man. And he was deep. He said, as lightly as you might ask for the cellar of salt, “If I might have that little badge back, Billy.”

During the Seven Days in Virginia, as I was making the reputation that would explode in my face, I separated from Sergeant Grafton and the men, and I posted watch on a house that was occupied, according to reports, by a civilian expert in the drawing of topographical maps. Nothing, not even food at this point, was in such short supply among the Confederates; they hadn’t maps of their own Secessionist territories, and they fought, most of them, as blind as if they were in Russia. My target’s name was Washburn; I have mislaid his given name, and I came to think of him as W, for it was somehow easier to do my work. And W he remains. I heard the pattering rattle of small arms, and the thunder of artillery. It seemed to never stop, and while I chewed on hardtack and sipped at a stream a half a mile from the house, I knew that flesh, reduced to a sort of gravy, was running on the grass not eight miles hence. I crawled for several hundred yards because the trees behind the house had been harvested for stove fires and the building of redoubts. I had to lie, for a half an hour, as the setting sun illuminated the grounds; a man, moving, could throw a shadow far enough and bold enough to bring a fusillade upon himself.

They sent their large, long-legged dog, maybe a bluetick, out to patrol the grounds, and what he did was take a few dozen steps, lifting his leg several times, and then whirl slowly in the weeds of the fallow garden and, panting, drop. I could hear from his thick, fast breaths how old he was, and he was deaf and stoppered at the nose as well, for I was upon him by the time he started a low-throated growl and winced his way to his feet. I threw myself upon him to knock the wind from his lungs and arrest his warning bark. As I lay on him and slashed and stabbed, poor fellow, and murdered him, he bucked in his panic and screamed in his throat. I held his muzzle to stifle him, and I slashed for my life. His jaws, in the grip of my left hand, were under my belly, and he heaved beneath me like someone at love. Up and down we jerked and rode and sawed, I like death itself come down on him from the evening, and the tired, terrified, dying dog like any one of us.