Not Quite Dead (37 page)

“And you rejected ‘The Cask of Amontillado’ because Venice has no cellars!” replied]Poe, with a certain bitterness in his tone.

CHAPTER
THIRTY-TWO

Germantown

P
utnam and I rode to Germantown on rented saddle hosses, resentfully obedient animals at best, like hired thugs. The federal agent had for once eschewed his normal flamboyant style of dress for a more appropriate set of hunting tweeds. He wore his belt and holster around his hip in the way of a penny-dreadful gunfighter, which I confess I found a bit overdone.

More irritating was his riding ability, which was well beyond my own—he had trained as a cavalryman, after all, before his present calling. My thighs cried for mercy at the speed he kept up, and I knew I would be crippled next morning. My riding ability was further impaired by the fact that I remained blind in one eye and could not perceive distances with any accuracy, so that every pothole became an unanticipated jolt that nearly knocked the molars out of my head.

We thundered past a field containing bristling stalks of Indian corn; they looked like a crop of walking sticks, all hard edges, like the bristling firs set against the sky. To a Southerner like myself, the Pennsylvania landscape seemed overrated, a two-dimensional spectacle even for a man with two eyes—suitable, perhaps, to the two-dimensional morals of its inhabitants.

In rural America, life made a person simple, in ways both good and bad. No man bred in the city can fully appreciate the isolation that attends country life, and its effects on the human soul. How each settlement becomes a small, stagnant pond, where life forms develop without interference from the “outside;” whose laws are determined by the will of a patriarch, where justice is what seems legitimate to fewer than a dozen men.

It occurred to me that this was Eddie’s America—whose inbred inhabitants became inured to the grotesques they had made of themselves.

Economy Manor was a remnant of an even older form of settlement, one that preceded the remaining farms in the area—and even more isolated as well; a remnant of the German penchant for forming cults around activities and ideas, from the hunting of boars to breast-feeding children at the age of twelve. A time when every dispute over philosophy or doctrine had the capacity to become the basis for a way of life.

Compared to the rest of Germantown, the woods surrounding Economy Manor created a small island of primordial swamp in the midst of a garden. Conifers that dated to wilderness times. Fruit trees that had gone to seed for so many generations as to resemble the limbs of giant hags, contorted this way and that by the pressure of surrounding birches and alders. The result was an impassable wall of vegetation, pierced by a narrow driveway that might have been the entrance to a medieval fort.

Above us, like a celestial scarecrow, the crumbling tower added a sinister touch to the disheveled property, as though proclaiming a purpose behind this vegetative pandemonium.

The driveway was so pitted with holes and trenches as to be scarcely a drive anymore; we dismounted and walked rather than risk splitting a hoof or breaking a leg. Eventually we reached a stone wall surrounding a clearing about the size of a football pitch, containing what seemed to have once been a tiny village. After tethering the hosses beyond sight and sound, we crouched beneath the wall, peered over, and took stock.

Had we ventured upon a field of dinosaur skeletons I should not have experienced a stronger sense of having wandered into something that belonged to another age. The wall itself was of a type of masonry that had not been practiced for at least a century. Within its boundaries, the foundations of collapsed buildings and the construction of the few remaining ones belonged to a time when men worked not for money or ambition, but as repayment to God for something done or not done by some distant relative in biblical times.

Putnam spoke in a rather officious whisper, as though we were on a training exercise. “There are three inhabited buildings, if you count the church in the middle. He must be in one of them.”

“Well and good,” I said. “However, these sects often segregate the sexes; therefore Mr. Dickens and my wife may not be in the same building.”

“I was not aware of that.”

“Try to remember, Mr. Putnam, that we are not on the same mission. I don’t give a hoot about your hostage. I am here to rescue mine.”

This was all bombast of course, and a lie besides, since my warped objective was to murder my old friend Eddie. I felt my pistol under my coat; with only one shot, and only one eye, not for the first time did I feel out of my depth. Not for the first time was I seized by the panicked impulse to simply get up and run away, flee, disappear, and do … something else.

“I plumb knackered myself bringing you along,” said Putnam. “It will be a black mark on my record for certain.”

“Nonsense, Mr. Putnam. Had you left me behind in Philadelphia, I should have gone straight to the press, thereby triggering an international incident. Precisely what your superiors engaged you to avoid.”

“Point taken,” replied Putnam, but he appeared to take no comfort in it.

“What procedure are we going to follow?” I asked. “I am only a simple doctor; you are the professional with all the expertise.”

“Dunno,” he replied, at length. “I need more information. A better vantage point.”

Suddenly, in the way that a dog moves when he sees a squirrel, my companion leaped the wall and traversed the clearing, in a crouched scurry used by infantrymen on an advance through open country, as far as the stone foundation of a ruined barn.

He disappeared inside the foundation. Seconds later his head reappeared as he waved impatiently for me to follow. I did so, but with less grace and slower speed.

Now we found ourselves behind a wall of rough stonework in what was once a shallow cellar. Before us and perhaps twenty paces away stood two plain, tall buildings shaped like oblong boxes, separated by a sort of pagoda with the absurd steeple sprouting out of its cap.

“We must wait until we know where the hostages are being kept,” said Putnam.

“How long do you suppose that will take?”

“Dunno. I am a federal agent, not a fortune-teller.” It was the first time I had seen Putnam become testy, and I began to suspect that he too was out of his depth.

We waited, crouched on our haunches against the masonry, staring at the darkening sky awaiting the moon, each utterly uninterested in what the other was thinking. Then I sensed a vague rumble, a slight earth tremor, which became a furious clatter from the direction of the front gate, and in rolled a prairie schooner, hosses in a lather as though doused with whipped cream. The driver, whom I recognized at once, hauled furiously on the reins, the wagon lurched to a halt, and out tumbled a number of shavers in duster coats, in a great hurry.

“The driver is O’Reilly,” I said. “We are in the right place.”

“You recognize him from a considerable distance,” said Putnam. You must have seen him at close quarters.”

“Close enough for him to pluck out my eye.”

CHAPTER
THIRTY-THREE

Economy Manor

A
fter several hours attempting to collaborate, having filled the room with cigarette smoke as an opaque defense against Poe’s absurd interpretations, Dickens had begun to experience a sensation of having died already, in his sleep perhaps. Now he faced eternal punishment for his sins as a writer—for what could be worse than to have one’s work perversely misinterpreted in an eternal, Satanic seminar?

As a literary interrogator Poe was relentless, being eager to have the thing over and done, and with no wish to invent a word more than absolutely necessary. At the same time, like all writers of tales, Poe had acquired firm opinions about what constituted acceptable fiction, and Dickens’s explications fell well short of the mark.

“Suh, as I see it, being a demon in human form, Uriah Heep might disappear into thin air before he can be charged with any crime, as the beast incarnate. Or better yet, at some moment during his trial, before a stunned magistrate, Heep’s flesh might fall away to the bare skeleton, which would clatter to the floor in a pile of bones.”

“Confound it, Mr. Poe, you weary me with your ghastly ideas! Where did you unearth that one? Not from anything in
Copperfield
, surely.”

“On the contrary, suh. From your text, how is any conclusion possible other than that Heep is a supernatural being? Look at your descriptions of him, suh. At every opportunity you evoke his ‘cadaverous’ appearance. In other movements he resembles a serpent. In his speech he resembles a vampire—that produces no reflection in a glass. Why plant these seeds of meaning, if not to reveal Heep as beyond human?”

“This might seem mundane to you, Mr. Poe, but I described him thus so that the reader could identify him next time he appears. Surely you don’t expect the casual reader of a serialized novel to recognize more than one primary quality per character.”

“And all you mean to point out about Mr. Heep is that he is
thin}”

“Well, it could never be, simply,
thin. Cadaverous
sticks more firmly in the mind, don’t you see. But, Mr. Poe, just because a man is thin, even cadaverous, it does not follow that he is a supernatural being.”

Then what, suh, am I to make of the following?” Poe rose to his feet, cleared his throat, and read aloud, in the resonant voice that had held audiences spellbound over “The Raven”:

… the poker got into my dozing thoughts besides, and wouldn’t come out. I thought, between sleeping and waking, that it was still red-hot, and I had snatched it out of the fire, and run him through the body. I was so haunted by this idea that I stole into the next room to look at him. There I saw him, lying on his back, with his legs extending to I don’t know where, gurglings taking place in his throat, stoppages in his nose, and his mouth open like a post office.

“I like the post office comparison,” remarked its author. “Really, I don’t think I’ve seen that before.”

“Odd that you should say that, suh, having written it yourself.”

“Perhaps, but it might just as well have been written by someone else, for I have no memory of it whatsoever.”

“With so little thought given to it, no wonder you are so prolific.”

CHAPTER
THIRTY-FOUR

Economy Manor

W
ord reached O’Reilly of the impending raid as he was conducting business in Moyamensing. Shadduck was well known in the township and his activities closely monitored. When Shadduck somehow cobbled together a
posse comitatus
out of a gang from the Fourth Ward known as the True Blue Americans, the lieutenant was informed of this within minutes. Then further word arrived that the gang was preparing to head south to Germantown, and O’Reilly concluded, correctly, that his enterprise had been blown. One of his party had peached. Economy Manor was subject to attack.

Shadduck had been a worry from the moment he first appeared. To begin, he was not confined to any particular township, and could cross boundaries at will. And his police methods, with his paid informants and hired toughs, set members of the criminal class against one another, corrupted the gangs from within.

To the Irishman such tactics seemed to belong more
to
the realm of civil war than to the activities of a constable or watchman. Seen in hindsight, it would have been better had Shadduck been put off his feet straightaway. But there was no point in crying over spilled milk …

An hour after, having snatched the
Na Coisantoiri
from their various occupations, the prairie schooner thundered out of Moyamensing to Germantown Avenue—past the orchards and the linen works, past solemn bearded gentlemen in broad-brimmed hats and enormous women in white bonnets, past the Mennonite church and the Quaker church and the Baptist church and the Pietist church, until at last the spire of Economy Manor beckoned in the distance. Whipping the horses to further exertion, in his imagination O’Reilly speculated on the snake in their bosom—for certainly there was one.

Seen in hindsight, it was inevitable that Shadduck would seek out
a member of the Irish Brotherhood. But who was the bad member? Who was the snitch?

In his mind, like the rising moon, O’Reilly saw before him the face of Finn Devlin. The partner had always been capricious, always righteous, always ready to perform some suicidal deed for a symbol. Money mattered nothing to him, nor even his life. Here was a man perfectly willing to assassinate Old Rough and Ready, the president of the United States—simply to avenge himself on an author …

Now it was clear. Devlin planned to kill Dickens, whether or not the ransom was paid. Then he would provoke a donnybrook with the police. A grand battle, an irresistible opportunity for martyrdom. The Irish Brotherhood would be consumed in a grand blaze, along with O’Reilly’s fifty thousand dollars, and he would never be mayor of Philadelphia.

P
UTNAM AND
I peered over the stone foundation while a curious scene took place before us by the light of the rising moon.

Moving at a run, O’Reilly disappeared inside the building to the right of the church, while the shavers milled about the wagon with grave expressions on their thin, pale faces. Now the sound of shouting from inside the building, while another group of young men poured out of the building to mingle with the others in a state of great agitation. Now out of the building came a good-looking young man, followed closely by the lieutenant, waving his cudgel and speaking furiously to the younger man in a foreign language. Then O’Reilly turned and struck him in the face with a sweeping gesture and the younger man went down with what appeared to be a cut above one eye. Moving quickly, O’Reilly crouched beside the man and lifted his hand, and from personal experience I knew exactly what he was about to do.