The Last Nightingale (6 page)

The physical work was perfect for him, easing his tightened muscles and numbing his scrambled emotions. Meanwhile, the food line stayed active and a few more trips carried him through the rest of the day. By evening, the little cemetery almost looked as if nothing had happened there.

Shane's team of exhausted conscripts finished for the day just as thick rain finally began to blow in off the sea. The workers sent up a spontaneous cheer. Shane even felt the gnawing ache lift off his chest for a few seconds, borne up by the sound.

Most of the drafted workers were allowed to leave at that point, but Shane dawdled around. He hated the thought of leaving the food line before they took it down. One of the grateful Mission friars noticed that Shane was making it a point not to leave, and asked
if Shane wanted to lay down on a sleeping blanket there under the Mission's strong roof. The simple generosity of the question caught Shane so off guard that his throat seized up. He couldn't bring himself to risk an answer without breaking down, and he was grateful when the friar accepted that Shane could only nod. The man handed him a sleeping roll and pointed to an isolated corner.

Shane eagerly rolled out the mat and lay down. The padding was just thick enough to soften the floor; he could still feel the cold stone beneath. That did not matter. It was a kingly luxury to remain sheltered in that dry and quiet place, while outside the Mission a forgiving rain gradually began to quench the city's smoldering ruins.

Blackburn smelled the thick char in the air before he heard the words.

“You awake? Come on, now, Sergeant—you awake?”

He opened his eyes and looked up into the face of another young SFPD lieutenant. The lieutenant's face glowed orange and yellow in the light of his field lantern. He repeatedly jabbed Blackburn's bare foot with his boot heel.

“I'm
wp\”
Blackburn groused.

“You
sure,
now?”

“Wide awake.”

“You don't
look
wide awake, Sergeant. You know what day it is? It's Saturday evening, almost seven o'clock. You been out cold, all day long!”

“God's sake, Lieutenant! I went straight from digging graves the first day to fighting the fires when they came through here.”

“Are you being insubordinate, Sergeant?" the lieutenant asked with a sneer.

“No. Sir. I am trying to say a man has to have some rest.”

The lieutenant clucked his tongue in the way he reserved for men of lesser rank. "Now, them volunteer ladies over there got a cof-
fee wagon set up. Go get yourself some and stay awake. I'm gonna have orders for you.”

The lieutenant turned away to check a sheaf of notes in a leather-bound notebook, and walked off muttering, "And then by God, I'm gonna get some sleep myself. Somebody else can try to shovel their way through this shit pile.”

Alone now, Blackburn strained to see out into the night. Countless points of orange glow marked the horizon in all directions. There were deep fires that hadn't succumbed to the rain yet, even though the surface fires were mostly extinguished. After hours of light drizzle, thick trails of steam rose from the downed buildings all around the edge of Portsmouth Square. The stench of burning things drifted everywhere.

The scene was how his boyhood pastors had described Hell to him. He rose to his feet, painfully stiff, and headed for the coffee wagon.

Before he took three steps, the young lieutenant called out, "All right then, Sergeant! The next thing on this list is the Mission Dolores. Their messenger said it's
muy importante.
Take your coffee and hike over to Sixteenth Street. Check up on the Mission's cleanup progress. The town bigwigs want to make sure our civic heritage is protected.”

The lieutenant stepped close to Blackburn for emphasis, and went on, "Offer them police assistance to guard the place, but listen to me:
Convince them that they don't need it.
Truth is, we couldn't get around to helping them for days, and we don't need word about police weakness getting around.”

“I'll try, sir.”

“Don't
try,
Sergeant, accomplish your task. Encourage them. Flatter them if you have to. Slather them with bullshit if that works. Just convince them that they can handle it on their own. People congregate at a famous old church like that. They trade gossip, you get it? If the city realizes how badly overwhelmed we are—”

"Well God damn it, Lieutenant, is there some mysterious reason we can't draft civilians and maybe make some real progress?”

The lieutenant raised the lantern to include Blackburn in the glow. He glared at him. "Your problem is your mouth, Sergeant. Now, I know what a fine job you did here, but your mouth could be the one thing that winds up holding you back. Get your coffee and get going. When you accomplish your task at the Mission, take a few hours off. Best up. Check the ruins at your apartment, though you'll likely be wasting your time.”

“Thank you for the advice, sir!" Blackburn said with too much enthusiasm. He saluted, waited for the return, never got one. The lieutenant was gone. Blackburn lowered his arm, turned around and headed for the coffee table. That was something, anyway.

Instinct told Shane to lie still on the Mission floor and do his best to fake being sound asleep. He heard boot steps, along with the scraping of a pair of sandals. Through squinted eyes, he watched the same kindly friar who had given Shane his blanket roll. Now the priest shuffled along beside a police sergeant—the same man who had just been in Shane's dream, the one who was actually in the Nightingale house.

He was too stunned to react while the footsteps came close . . . The footsteps paused . . . Shane could hear the big man's breathing.

“So that's it, then?" the sergeant's voice boomed. He stepped into view, just a few feet away.

The Mission assistant quickly drew close to the sergeant and raised a finger to his lips, then pointed down to Shane's makeshift bed. Shane dropped his eyelids closed the rest of the way and heard the sergeant mutter "Oh," then lower his voice before continuing. "So you haven't really had any other problems here, right?”

“Sergeant Blackburn, I get the distinct impression that you don't want to hear what I've been telling you.”

"Oh, now, don't say that. You just don't realize how much good work your volunteers already accomplished here. Maybe they helped keep thieves away, just being here! Amazing teamwork! No outbreaks of trouble, no fistiights, no need for a police presence at all.”

“Sergeant, this Mission is a valuable part of the city's historical—”

“All right! All right. Listen, Padre, my head is splitting open. Tell you what; let me get a couple hours of shut-eye here, and after that we'll talk.”

“You should tell your commanders at City Hall that my position will not change. We need a sizeable labor crew here, and that will require police presence. Just because we've had no trouble yet is no reason to—”

“Some rest, Padre," Blackburn interrupted. "It's what I really need. Then we'll talk. Aren't you always more cheerful after you've had some sleep?”

There was a pause. Shane could not tell what it meant, until the padre's quiet voice replied, "I'll get you a bedroll. Take the corner opposite that young man sleeping over there.”

Shane bit his lip in frustration. The big sergeant—an unknowing witness to the Nightingale family murder scene—was going to lie down and sleep no more than ten feet from Shane's spot on the floor. The situation mocked him.

He listened to the padre's sandals scuffing out of the room, while his heartbeat hammered so that it felt like it echoed off the stone floor. What if this sergeant could simply take a good look at Shane and somehow see his whole dreadful story written on him? What if, with a single glance, the big man somehow realized that the two of them had been inches from one another, inside of a now-vanished crime scene?

Shane could hear the big man breathing, almost sighing. He sounded tired. The sergeant yawned and stretched, popping his joints, until the padre finally returned with the bedroll. The two men exchanged a few pleasantries, then the friar disappeared and
left the sergeant alone there with him. All he could do was to keep faking sleep while he listened to the sergeant spread out his roll, slip off his boots, and lie down. After a minute, the sergeant's breathing became deep and even.

It seemed safe enough to assume that the big man didn't have any sense of who Shane was. He felt better, but he still had to wonder how anyone could fail to see the guilt boiling inside of him. Strangely, nobody had so far. He wanted nothing more than to remain as a bundle of rags sleeping in the corner, lost among thousands of faceless refugees.

He gradually drifted back to sleep, resolved that if this Sergeant Blackburn of the City Hall precinct was still around when he woke up, he would immediately slip away without giving the man a chance to ask him anything.

T
OMMIE SIPPED A STEAMING MIX
of Oolong tea, honeycomb, and three teaspoons of whiskey while he stood nude but for his slippers before the large window of the top floor study. His Victorian house high atop fabulous Russian Hill stood unscathed by the earthquake and the fire. Such front and center evidence of his essential importance next to the city's ruffian public gave him a heady rush of self-affirmation, to the point that while he gazed out over the ruined city, he could not help but find the rest of its scrambling population disgusting.

The path of destruction stretched in all directions, even though the rain had finally put out the last of the big fires. The rain, it turned out, had been a true godsend. In spite of heroic efforts from the surviving firefighters and police, almost nothing that human beings did to fight the leaping firestorms had done any good.

Death was everywhere. For uncountable numbers of terrified residents who thought that the earthquake and fires signified the end of the world, it turned out to be precisely that. Rats now roamed the city with impunity. Tommie was astonished by how many found their way out of burning buildings.
Only five days,
he marveled,
and they've already learned not to fear us.

So then, how to move in harmony with this turn of events? Tommie knew that the mayor's office was doing its best to crank out in-
formation to the newspapers and wire services regarding the numbers of the injured and dead. But the simple truth was that nobody could offer anything better than a well-intended wild guess, and estimates would be held down to minimal levels. It struck Tommie that the authorities were actually trying to cover his tracks for him, in the interest of the city's reputation. Another blessing.

Tommie was aware of all these things because just the day before, he had ventured out in male clothing to catch up on general gossip. Although he kept to himself while strolling through the refugee camps, he frequently paused just long enough to eavesdrop here and there, so that by the time he got back home, he knew the state of things all around the city.

For him, those facts merely added to the self-evident truth demonstrated by the advancing wall of flames, days earlier, when the majestic conflagration split in two. The two sections each proceeded
around the sides
of Tommie's lovely hilltop neighborhood— completely sparing his house. His Victorian home came through it without so much as a singed window treatment. The only necessary recovery from the earthquake consisted of throwing out a few broken lamps and rehanging some art. Now, all it took was a simmered potpourri of cinnamon and allspice to conceal the charcoal smells from blackened ruins only a few blocks away.

He stepped out of the slippers. Now stark naked, Tommie set aside his empty glass and began to roll his new, electrically powered vacuum cleaner gracefully across the floor. The diesel generator down in the basement chugged up more than enough power while Tommie guided the machine back and forth, back and forth, using the same slow and sweeping motions that the lady in the magazine advertisement did. He carefully kept his free hand out to the side, fingertips extended, arm raised halfway between the hip and shoulder. The invention itself had only been on the market for a few years, and was priced strictly for the well-to-do. Only the best people had them. He practically danced with the machine.

The Great Earthquake had done nothing less than vault Tommie
into his dream, giving him the power of an avenging angel who rises up to mete out justice. And right from the first moment, Tommie had known where to start: that arrogant bag of skin, Mr. Nightingale, the dry goods man. For years, he allowed Tommie to pay off his tab whenever he got around to it. So what if he neglected payment for a year or so? Tommie could have written a bank check at any time and would have forgotten the whole thing by now, never feeling a hint of difference in his daily life. But it pained him to pay out money. It seriously pained him, and it made no difference that he had so much. Each time he paid a bill, it felt like swallowing a dose of poison. As far as Tommie could see it, every price tag, every line of store credit, every invoice that came in the mail, they were all nothing more than coded and toxic messages from a world that wanted to take and take and take until everything Tommie had was gone. And where would that leave a creature such as him? He had to wonder.

It was never necessary for Nightingale to take him to court and win a judgment against him. Everyone knew Tommie was good for it.
They ought to know, anyway.
All of them. They had no excuse for not knowing. Nightingale had shown no appreciation, no respect at all for Tommie's point of view. First the greedy man put a lien on Tommie's house. Then, the day before the earthquake, the fool actually showed up at Tommie's door to dun him for payment. The arrogant bastard had done all this over a few thousand dollars! The foul man had actually come to Tommie's home, unannounced and uninvited.

Nearly catching Tommie inappropriately attired.

And so it made no difference that Nightingale had been out tending to his store, right after the quakes died down. He would have accomplished nothing for the rest of the family, even if he had been at home. Tommie would have just killed him, first thing. The result for the others would have been the same.