Beyond Rue Morgue Anthology: Further Tales of Edgar Allan Poe's 1st Detective

THE SONS OF TAMMANY By MIKE CAREY

My name is Thomas Nast. I’m sixty-two years old, and to be honest I don’t expect to be able to hold up my hand after another year’s seasonal turnings and returnings to say I’m sixty-three. I’m dying, at long last. And death dissolves all the bonds of obligation except the ones I owe to God. That being the case, I feel like I’m free at last to talk about the events of August 1870, which formerly I had held back from doing on account of they implicate a whole lot of people in a whole lot of queasy doings, and I couldn’t really back up what I was saying with anything you might count as actual proof.

But when a man’s staring straight down the barrel of his nunc dimittis, and the writing’s not just on the wall but on the face that stares back at him out of the mirror, he stops fretting about the legal niceties and starts to think about setting the record straight. Which is what I aim to do.

In 1870, I was residing in New York City and working as an artist and cartoonist on that excellent periodical, the Harper’s Weekly, under the editorship of George Curtis. I counted Curtis as a friend as well as an employer. But when he called me into his office on the morning of August 13th of that year, he was wearing the boss hat rather than the friend one.

Curtis gave me a civil nod and gestured me into one of the two visitor chairs. Already ensconced in the other chair was a man of a somewhat striking appearance. Although, having said that, I’m going to show myself a weak sister by admitting that I can’t really say what it was about this gentleman that was so singular.

He was a good deal older than I was, and he’d seen enough summers to get a slightly weather-beaten look around his cheeks and jowls. He was kind of short and dumpy in his build, which was neither here nor there, but he had one of those half-hearted little mustaches that looks like it’s about to give up and crawl back inside, and to be honest that was sort of a point against him in my book. If a man’s going to go for a mustache, he should go all-in for one, say I, and Devil take the hairiest. He was toying with a cane that had a carved ivory handle in the shape of a lion’s head — an effete sort of a gewgaw for a man to be playing with. And he had a suit with a waistcoat, and the waistcoat had a pattern to it. In my experience, that doesn’t speak to a man’s moral seriousness.

I guess, thinking about it, it was the eyes that were the selling point. They were a dark enough brown to count for black, and they had a sort of an augur-bit quality to them. It was the most startling thing. Like when this gentleman looked at you, looking wasn’t really the half of it, and maybe you needed a whole other verb.

“Tommy, this here’s Mr. Dupin,” Curtis said. “Visiting from Paris. Not the Texas one, t’other one, over in France.”

“Well, it’s good to meet you, Mr. Dupin,” I said, taking the collateral of the eyes against the rest of the stuff that was on offer. Curtis pronounced the name “dupan,” which I estimate is French for “out of the pan,” as in the thing you bail out from before you end up in the fire. Which wasn’t a bad name at all for this particular customer, as things transpired.

“Only he ain’t a mister,” Curtis added, scrupulous as you’d expect a good editor to be. “He’s a Chevalier.”

“What does that mean?” I asked.

“Means he’s got a horse stashed somewhere, as I understand it.”

“Good job,” I said. “With that waistcoat, he may need to access it in a hurry.”

“Monsieur,” the little man said in a waspish voice, “I speak excellent English, and I thank you for the compliment. I can, if you wish, give you the address of my tailor.”

“Oh, that won’t be necessary,” I told him. “I think one of those things in the world at any one time answers the purpose pretty well.”

The Frenchman surprised me by laughing at that — and it was a big, loud horse-laugh, too, not the little snigger you’d expect would come from underneath that lamentable mustache. “Perhaps you are right,” he said. “One at a time. Yes.”

And then Curtis got to the point, which was that Mr. Du-Frying-Pan wanted to see something of New York while he was here. What’s more, he carried letters of introduction from a job lot of people who were (as you might say) the human equivalent of big guns on big limbers, and could blast Curtis and me and Mr. Harper and the subs’ desk and Uncle Tom Cobley and all into the Hudson if we didn’t show their friend Dupin a good time.

“So I thought perhaps he could come with you today when you go to sketch the bridge,” Curtis wound up.

I knew that was where he was aiming at, so I took it in my stride. “I think that’s a swell idea,” I said. “Sure. Mr. Dupin, come and see my city. She’s something to see. George, you want to come along?”

“Oh no,” Curtis said hurriedly. “I’m tied up every which way here, and I won’t see daylight this side of Tuesday. You guys go and have a good time. Lunch is on Mr. Harper, so long as you don’t get into a second bottle… And you can take a cab to get down there.” He waited a decent length of time — maybe a slow count of five — before adding, “Trolley car will bring you back.”

“And what is it you do, way over there in Paris, Mr. Dupin?” I asked, as we toiled down the stairs. The Equitable Life Building, which they’d just finished building over on Broadway, had its very own hydraulic elevator, but every time I mentioned that to Curtis he walked the other way.

“What do I do?” Dupin repeated doubtfully.

“Yeah. What’s your motive and your métier? What’s the singular thing that you pursue?”

“Ah.” The little man’s face lit up with understanding, but then it closed down again as he took that question over the threshold of his ruminations and worried it some. “The truth,” he said at last. “The truth is what I pursue.”

“Really? There any profit to be had in that?”

He gave out with that belly laugh again. “No. Not usually.”

We waited for a cab on the corner of 41st Street right next to Peason’s cigar store. Mr. Du-Griddle-Tray kept taking sideways glances at the cigar store Indian as though he might be looking to pick a fight. “That there is Tamanend, of the Lenape nation,” I told him. “He’s widely known in these parts, despite having turned up his toes back in sixteen-ought-eight.”

The Frenchman’s answer surprised me. “Yes,” he said. “Of course. Because of the Society of St. Tammany, to which many members of New York’s current civic administration belong.”

I gave him a nod, and probably my face showed him that I was impressed. “One up to you, Dupin. That’s the connection, all right. The Great Wigwam, they call it — the Tammany Hall, down on 14th Street. And it’s got its share of famous patrons, like you say. Our illustrious mayor, Oakey Hall. Judge George Barnard, who doles out wisdom to the city benches. Hank Smith, who’s the president of the Police Commission. Oh, there’s a whole ring of them.”

I didn’t mention the Grand Sachem, William “Boss” Tweed, in the same way that you don’t speak of the Devil — in case you turn around and find him breathing over your shoulder.

“Political corruption,” Dupin mused. “It is a scourge.”

And yes, it is. But this was my city we were lambasting, and I don’t care to see my city, good-time girl though she may be, roughly handled by a stranger. So I changed the subject and talked about the bridge instead. And not long after that, we managed to hail a cab.

In deference to Du-Sausage-Cutter’s hind parts I picked out a Duncan Sherman, which had a sprung undercarriage and a horse with something of an imperturbable nature. Truth to tell, we could have made better time walking — but you’ve got to push the boat out when you’ve got a guest to entertain, and besides it was setting in to rain a little. On a rainy day, Fifth Avenue is a lot more fun to ride down than to walk down.

As we rode, I carried on waxing lyrical about the bridge. “Over yonder,” I said, pointing, “to the east of us, those buildings you see are not a part of the fair city of New York. They belong to our neighbor polity, Brooklyn, which like New York is a thriving metropolis, home to close on half a million people. It’s got just as many warehouses and factories and refineries as we do, and we’d like nothing better than to increase the ties of mutual amity and profit between the two cities. Only trouble is, there’s sixteen hundred feet of water laying between them. It would need a bridge longer than any in the world to cross that gap.”

“That would seem to be an insuperable problem,” said Dupin, who knew what was required of a straight man.

“Well, sir, you’d think so. But Mr. John Augustus Roebling, of Ohio, drew up a plan for a suspension bridge whose spans would be supported by steel wires redoubled inside flexible housings. He died before he could start in to build the thing, but his son, Washington Roebling, took over. Then Washington got sick from the Caisson disease, and deputed his wife, Emily, to see the project to completion. Now the Brooklyn tower’s mostly up and they’re laying the foundations for the New York side. Hell of a thing to see, I’ll tell you. When it’s done, it will bestride the East River like a colossus.”

“Remarkable,” Dupin observed, dryly.

“Yes, sir, it is.”

“And yet, dogged by ill fortune and tragedy.”

I shrugged that off. I was a younger man, then, and more easily impressed by big dreams and big ideas. The misfortunes of the Roebling family didn’t seem like such a big almighty deal to me. “Well, the salient fact is that this will be the biggest suspension bridge in the whole damn world. Biggest one right now is in Kentucky, and Roeblings built that, too. America is a place where anything’s possible, Mr. Dupin.”

The Frenchman nodded solemnly. “Yes,” he agreed. “I believe that is so. That is one reason why I wished to see it.”

I was opening my mouth, about to parrot some more facts and figures about steel wires and three-way overlapping joists, when I realized that I’d lost my audience. Mr. Dupin was staring ahead down the street toward the Centre Street Pier, or rather just before it, which was where they’d erected the scaffolding for the tower on the New York side of the river.

“It seems,” Mr. Dupin said, “that we have chosen a busy day.”

And in truth there was a crowd milling in the street beside the pier, the like of which I hadn’t seen since the draft riots. They didn’t seem to be up to any mischief, but there was a lot of shouting and shoving of the kind that normally signals something unusual has happened, and — undeterred by that past tense — people are jostling to line up in its wake. A few city police were trying to keep some kind of order, along with a crew or two from the new paid fire service which had replaced the volunteer brigades a few years back. They were having a lively time of it.

I paid off the cab and we pushed our way through the crowd, my press badge making little difference to the citizens, but winning me a little headway with the cops and the firemen. Finally we got through the police line and into the building yard. In front of us was the massive, complicated apparatus known as a caisson—the chief aid and comfort of bridge builders everywhere, and (sadly) the scourge and terror of their workers. It only showed six or seven feet above the ground, but it extended a great long way beneath us.

Normally, this building site was such a humming pit of industry that you had to duck and weave as you walked along, leading with your elbows like a forward in the Princeton University Football game. Today, though there were a lot of workers around, nobody was actually working. Most of the men were sitting around looking unhappy or sullen. The rain was coming down steadily now, turning the earth to mud, but it seemed like nobody cared about the cold or the wet. Some had their heads in their hands. The winch that lowered food and coffee to the men down in the caisson was standing idle, and the old Italian man who ran it was slumped against the scaffolding, his arms draped over it, like a prize fighter who’s only just made it to his corner. He looked to have been crying.

I collared a foreman who was bustling past, red-faced and urgent, and compelled him to stop. “See here, brother,” I told him, “we’re from the Harper’s Weekly and we’d like to know what’s going on here.”

The yegg tried to pass us off with some mumble about asking the shift manager, but Dupin spoke up then, and either his gimlet eyes or his weird accent took the wind out of the foreman’s sails. “What is your name?” he demanded.

“O’Reilly,” the man mumbled, truculently.

“Your given name, as well as your family name,” Dupin snapped, for all the world as though he had some kind of right to ask. “Come, come.”

“John. John O’Reilly.”

“C’est ça. Tell us what has happened, John. Be brief and precise, if you please.”

The foreman didn’t seem to know what to make of this strange little guy in the fancy clothes. But on the principle that most people he met were going to turn out to be more important than he was, he coughed it up. “We got twenty men dead. The whole night shift. I went away to sign in the morning crew, and when I got back they was all…” He faltered into silence and pointed down into the caisson, as if the period of his sentence might be found down there.

“Twenty men?” Dupin echoed, and O’Reilly nodded. “Twenty men is a full complement, then? A full workforce?”

“It depends what’s going on,” O’Reilly said. “There’s less men on at night, on account of we just light the lanterns up in one half of the caisson. There’s a fire hazard, see?”

“No,” Dupin said forcefully.

“What?”

“No, I do not see. Show me.”

“Listen here, I got to…”

“Show me.”

If the situation hadn’t been so tragic, I might have laughed at the spectacle of this queer little foreigner taking charge so decisively. Dupin followed the foreman and I followed Dupin, my materials case clutched in my hand like a doctor’s Gladstone bag — only there wasn’t going to be any good I could do down there, I thought, as we skirted round the wheezing steam pump. Not unless you count bearing witness.

The caisson was eighty feet long, sixty wide and forty deep. The last ten feet or so were under the bedrock of the East River, so the air had a hellish dampness to it. We went down through several successive chambers, each sealed off by greased tarpaulins laid out in overlapping sheets. You had to lift a corner of the tarpaulin each time, like turning the page of a massive book, to expose the trapdoor and carry on down to the next level. Below us, candle flames flickered fitfully like someone was keeping vigil down there. The bellows of the steam pump kept up a consumptive breathing from up over our heads, and from below us that sound was compounded by the muttered conversations you mostly get around the bedsides of dying men.

The floor of the caisson was one half packed earth and one half new-laid stone. There weren’t any dying men there, only hale ones and dead ones. The dead ones were laid out in rows, like men sleeping in a dormitory. The living ones stood over them, candles in their hands, looking impotent and terrified as behooves men who are in the presence of such a disaster.

The shift manager — a clerkish-looking man of middle age, named Sittingbourne — introduced himself to us, and we returned the favor. I was vague about exactly who Dupin was, but emphasized our association with the Harper’s Weekly. That put a woeful look on Sittingbourne’s face, as well it might. This was the sort of thing he would probably have wanted to keep out of the papers until he’d talked to his bosses about what shape his future might likely take.

“See here,” he said, “don’t you go talking to none of my people without me being in on the conversation. Is that understood?”

“You got any people left for me to talk to?” I countered— and he deflated like a punctured soufflé.

“It was an accident,” he said. “A terrible accident. I don’t see how anyone could have foreseen this, or done anything to guard against it.”

“Perhaps not,” Dupin said acerbically. “But perhaps — yes. That is what we must ascertain. I wish to see the bodies.”

This came as a surprise to all of us, but principally to Mr. Sittingbourne, who thought he was dealing with newspapermen and now wondered if he was maybe dealing with something even scarier than that. A state commissioner, maybe.

“The… the bodies?” he temporized.

Dupin brushed past him, taking his candle out of the man’s hand in an en passant move that made me wonder if he’d ever done any fencing. He squatted down beside the nearest body and brought the candle up close to its face.

I winced, but I didn’t look away. I’m a sketch artist, and looking away isn’t in my religion. The dead man’s face was lividly pale, his lips blue rather than a healthy red. His face was twisted in a desperate travail, the eyes bulging half out of his head. All in all, it looked like death when it finally came for him might have been something of a relief.

“Poor bastard,” I muttered.

“Oui, le pauvre gosse,” Dupin said. He moved the candle from face to face. “They all seem to have died in the same way. Or at least, they all display the same symptoms.”

“It’s known that working in the caissons is dangerous,” Sittingbourne said. He was hovering at my elbow, nervously wringing his hands. “There’s a condition…”

“Caisson sickness,” I said.

“Caisson sickness, to be sure. And we’ve had our fair share of it. But nothing like this. Nothing on this scale. I honestly… I don’t know what to say. I really don’t.”

He was talking to Dupin’s back. Dupin was still examining the bodies, his mouth puckered into a grimace. “The light is inadequate,” he commented.

Sittingbourne looked around, startled. “Get your candles over here!” he called out to the other men. They clustered round us looking like they were about to burst into a Christmas carol.

Dupin stood. “Who turned out the lanterns?”

“I don’t know,” Sittingbourne confessed.

“Then find out.”

The Frenchman swept past us and headed back for the ladder, but he couldn’t climb up because there was a whole posse coming down. It was hard to tell in the sepulchral light of the candles, but they looked to be in uniform. Once they touched down, I was able to identify them as New York City cops — the Eastside variety called spudpickers elsewhere in the City because they’re bog Irish and Tammany men to a fault.

The two in the vanguard were Sergeant Driscoll and his lackey, Flood. Driscoll looked as saintly as a christening cloth, and Flood looked like a nasty stain that somehow got smeared onto it, but I knew for a fact they were as bad as each other and a good deal worse than most.

“What are we having here?” Driscoll asked mildly. “Mr. Nast, is it? You must have sneaked past us all quiet like, when we were quelling the angry mob.”

“I’m sorry, sergeant,” I lied emolliently. “I didn’t realize you were restricting access. But I’m here as a representative of the press.”

“A guy who draws funny pictures!” Flood sneered.

“My associate makes a cogent argument,” Driscoll said. “You can’t be painting pictures in the dark, Mr. Nast, so I’ll thank you to bugger off out of this.” To the room at large, he added, “These workings are hazardous, and they’re not being properly maintained. I’m closing them down, herewith. You can apply at City Hall for a new license, subsequent to a complete overhaul of the safety procedures and a thorough inspection at the contractor’s expense.”

“But…” Sittingbourne protested. “Please, sergeant. If I can consult Mrs. Roebling, I’m… I’m sure we can…”

“I’m sure you can’t,” Driscoll told him, deadpan. “Not unless you want to go around Boss Tweed.”

That shut Sittingbourne up, instanter. You could go around William Tweed, of course. Topographically speaking, I mean. He was a mighty obstacle, but you could do it. The trouble was, you’d need to be properly provisioned for a journey like that, and your troubles would set in as soon as you were out of sight of the high road, as it were. I knew men who’d tried it. I even knew where some of them were buried.

“Might I inquire as to why this is being done?” The voice was Dupin’s, the tone was sharp, and nobody was more surprised to hear it than I was. Well, maybe I was runner-up. Driscoll’s face was a picture. He made a show of peering around on his own eye level for a little while before he looked down and found Dupin a foot or so below.

“Who the hell are you?” he demanded.

“Le Chevalier Auguste Dupin, at your service. I repeat, why is this being done?”

Driscoll didn’t seem inclined to dignify that question with an answer, so Flood obliged us instead. “He already told you, you moron. These workings ain’t safe. Twenty men died here.”

“Twenty men died here,” Dupin agreed, “but not because of the presence or absence of adequate building standards.”

“And you’d know?”

“Yes. I would know. They were murdered.”

Flood’s face went through a series of discrete states, like a slide show. Astonishment, then a sort of ghastly dismay, then anger. “You fuck!” he spluttered. He balled his hand into a fist and drew it back.

Driscoll caught it in mid-air and held onto it. He moved as quick as a snake, and he didn’t seem to be exerting any particular effort to hold the constable immobile. “I think you should get your friend home, Mr. Nast,” he said mildly. “Otherwise, I’ll have to arrest him for breach of the peace.”

“Breach of the peace?” The Frenchman glanced at me with an interrogatory expression.

“Means you’re stirring up a riot,” I translated. “Come on, Mr. Dupin, we’re leaving.”

“Yeah, you better,” Flood spat. The sergeant gave him his hand back and he glared at us, rubbing his wrist, as I hauled Dupin over to the ladder.

“I have further questions for the gentleman in charge,” Dupin protested.

“They’ll have to keep,” I muttered. “Trust me, these two will break your head as soon as look at you.”

“They are agents and representatives of the law.”

“Nope, of the city. Not the same thing at all.”

I steered him ahead of me halfway up the ladder, but then he stopped — which meant I had to stop, too, since the only way up was through him. “Monsieur!” he called down to Sittingbourne. “Hola, monsieur! Who put out the lanterns?”

Sergeant Driscoll slipped his nightstick out of his belt and tapped it meaningfully against his palm.

Sittingbourne made a helpless gesture. Dupin tutted, and carried on up. But he’d got the bit fairly between his teeth now, and he certainly didn’t seem interested in leaving. He went over to the steam pump and started to walk around and around it, inspecting it from all angles. It looked a little beaten up here and there — especially around the protuberant valve assemblies to which the hoses were attached. A pump such as this was like a heart in a human body, working mightily without cease. It was an amazing thing in its own right, that allowed even more amazing things to be done.

“You know how a caisson works?” I asked Dupin.

“Yes,” he said. “I believe so. It is a hyperbaric environment, no?”

“It’s a what?”

“It utilizes air at higher than atmospheric pressure to create a dry working space below sea level. Or, in this case, river level. Air is pumped in by artificial means to maintain the pressure, which may be two or three times greater than that in the ambient air outside the caisson.”

“Well, yeah,” I said. “That’s more or less how it’s done.”

Actually, Dupin seemed to understand the process better than I did. He was starting to fiddle with the controls on the steam pump now, and the foreman came running over hell for leather.

“Say hey, now,” he yelped. “You don’t want to be messing with this. This is delicate equipment. And that outlet connection there is loose!”

Dupin gave him a withering glare. “Nonsense!” he snapped. “This is a Jacquard-Sevigny pump, made from a single molding. You could take a hammer to it — and indeed, it looks as though someone has — but still it would not break.”

O’Reilly faltered a little, but only for a moment. “It’s private property,” he said. “You keep your hands off it, or I’ll sic the police on you, see?”

I felt like we’d had more than enough of that already, so I took Dupin by the arm with a view to getting him moving again, but he slipped out of my grip and went after O’Reilly like a terrier after a rat. “You found the bodies?” he demanded.

O’Reilly backed away. “Yeah, I did,” he said. “So?”

“So. How did you find them? Tell me.”

“I just… well, I went away, and I come back, and they was dead. I don’t know how. I don’t know anything about it.”

“When was this?”

“It was eight o’clock. On the turn of the shift.”

“Did you disturb the bodies?” The foreman was still moving backward and Dupin was still following, almost stepping on his toes.

“No! I never touched them!”

“And yet they were arranged in rows. Was that how they died?”

“No. Yes. I moved them, obviously. But that was afterward.”

“And the lanterns?”

The foreman was looking a little bit desperate now. “The what?”

“The lanterns. Did you extinguish them?”

“No. They was already out.”

Dupin stopped dead, and turned to me. “Bien,” he said. “We are finished here.”

That was news to me, since I was the one who was meant to be showing him the sights. But I guess we’d gone off that agenda a while before. “Okay,” I said. “You want to go see the Equitable Life building? It’s got a hydraulic elevator, made by Elisha Otis, and you can ride all the way up to the…”

“I want to see the lady you mentioned, Monsieur Nast,” Dupin interrupted forcefully. I was a little mystified at this, and I must have looked it. “Madame Roebling, I think the name was? The lady who builds this bridge.”

I tried to explain to him that we couldn’t just walk in on the Roeblings, but Dupin wasn’t having any of that. There’s a thing called a New York minute, and inside of one of those we were pulling up at the door of the Roebling house in midtown in another cab that Curtis was going to get all sore about paying for. And Dupin was explaining to some sour old curmudgeon in a spiffy black and silver livery that he was the godson of Colonel Maximilian Roebling-Lefevre of the Légion d’Honneur, and on that basis would be delighted to pay his respects to the lady of the house.

The curmudgeon went away and came back with a different face on. Mrs. Roebling would be delighted to see us in the morning room.

She didn’t look all that delighted, though. It was like walking in on a funeral, which I guess in one sense we were. Mrs. Roebling looked as pale as death, and though she rallied enough to greet us, she couldn’t find a whole lot to say.

“You’ll have to forgive me, gentlemen,” she said. “I–I’ve just had some very bad news. Twenty workers on one of our construction projects have died in the most tragic of circumstances. It appears that our working practices may be to blame. The caisson sickness has incapacitated a number of our masons and navigators, and laid my husband low. And now— now it seems it’s taken a score of men at a single stroke!”

She started in to crying at this, which was a distressing thing to see. I made the usual there, there noises, but Dupin surprised me — surprised both of us — by laughing. Not the belly laugh, this time, but a little snort like a steam kettle saying it’s ready. Mrs. Roebling gave him a startled look.

“Pray, sir,” she said, affronted, “what can you find in these awful facts to amuse you?”

Dupin made a dismissive gesture. “The facts, Madame,” he said, “the facts are not amusing at all. What is amusing is the refusal of all parties concerned to acknowledge them. You feel responsible for the deaths of these men?”

Mrs. Roebling blanched at the blunt question. “Why yes,” she said, “to some extent, I do.”

“Then calm yourself. You are not responsible at all, and I will prove it. But tell me, how was the news brought to you?”

“By a runner,” Mrs. Roebling said. “Sent by the foreman, Mr. O’Reilly, shortly after eight o’clock.”

“And then?”

“And then, hard on his heels, an attorney came from the mayor’s office to tell me that my building permits had been revoked. We now owe the city a great deal of money. We must pay for a full inspection, which will be expensive and onerous. There will be a fine, besides, for so serious a breach of safety regulations. And of course, compensation for the families of the dead men must also be found. I fear this may sink our project completely.”

Dupin glanced at me. “The mayor’s office?” he queried. Evidently I’d been appointed his personal perambulatory encyclopedia.

“253 Broadway,” I said. “Don’t tell me you want to go see the mayor, Dupin. It’s a long haul back the way we came, and a long haul west, and I let the cab go.”

Dupin didn’t seem to be listening. He’d turned his attention back to Mrs. Roebling again. “At what time, precisely, did these runners arrive?”

Mrs. Roebling couldn’t say — not precisely — but the butler (the gent in all the black and silver) was called and he knew the times to a nicety. See, that’s what I mean about clothes and moral seriousness. The runner from the works had arrived at 8.27, and the clerk from City Hall at 8.33.

Dupin absorbed this news in solemn silence, then turned to me again. There was a kind of a gleam in his eye. “I do not, Monsieur Nast, wish to see the mayor. But I think perhaps I would like to see the commissioner of police.”

Mrs. Roebling gasped. “Do you honestly believe, sir, that a crime has been committed?” she demanded, her face clouded with bewilderment.

“I believe, in fact,” Dupin said, “that several crimes have been committed. But I will not speak of things I cannot prove. Of this morning’s events, however, I can speak with absolute certainty. Those men were murdered, and the culprit is already known to you.” He turned to the lady again. “Madame,” he said, “I request you to remain here, and to ignore for the moment any communications from the mayor’s office or from city officials of whatever provenance. I will tell what I know, and we will see what we will see. But I assure you, you will pay for no inspections nor levies. The compensation, yes, since the men are dead and you would not wish to leave their families destitute. But that will be the limit of your exposure.”

We left the lady in a pretty confused state — and to be honest, I was more than a little consternated myself. Otherwise, I think I would have put up more resistance. But Dupin had the hang of summoning cabs now, and that was a terrible power to put in a Frenchman’s hands. He waved his cane like an orchestra conductor, and a two-horse rig rolled to a halt right in front of us. He was jumping up onto the running board even while I was explaining that this was a fool’s errand. I had no choice but to jump up after him.

“You can’t just walk into the police commissioner’s office and make wild assertions, Dupin,” I told him, in something of a panic. “Especially not in this city. It just won’t wash.”

“Pourquoi ça, Monsieur Nast?” Dupin snorted. “Why will it not wash?” He wasn’t even looking at me. He’d taken out a fancy silver pocket watch and was consulting it with a look of deep deliberation.

Where to begin? “Well, for starters, you’re not even armed.”

“But yes. I am armed with the truth.”

“Oh, jumping Jehoshaphat!”

I carried on remonstrating with him, because I kind of felt like it was incumbent on me to be the voice of reason. But there wasn’t any way of shifting him. I just got sucked along in his wake, and before I knew it we were walking up the steps of the police headquarters building.

Two officers standing up on the top step, like bouncers at the door of a bar room, looked us up and down and asked our business. Dupin was looking at his watch again, so I handled the introductions myself — with something of a sinking feeling in my stomach. I said we were from the Harper’s Weekly and we’d love to talk to Commissioner Smith and maybe sketch his portrait for the papers.

One of the cops led us inside, leaving the other one to take care of the business of looking tough and surly by himself for a while. We got some curious glances from the flatfoots sitting in the bullpen, and the officers in their little working cupboards. Dupin looked neither left nor right, but when we finally approached the commissioner’s door, he put on a turn of speed and got there first.

“See here,” our tutelary spirit said, “I got to announce you, is what.”

“I am the Chevalier Auguste Dupin,” the Frenchman declaimed, with fine contempt, “and I will announce myself.”

The door was already ajar. Dupin threw it wide with a thrust of his cane and walked inside. I followed him, into a fug of smoke chopped into lines of solid white and solid black by the sunlight filtering through the window blinds. It looked like the men in that room had put the sun in jail, almost. Had thrown it behind bars. A fanciful notion, obviously, but they were the men to do it, if such a thing could be done.

There were six of them, but I only saw four out of the gate. Police Commissioner Hank Smith, whose office this was, his doughy face overshadowed by a massive brow like the ledge over a cave. James Kelso, his superintendent, who looked like a cardinal of the Church of Rome, thinning hair swept back and thin lips pursed. Mayor Oakey Hall, with his pendulous, bifurcated mustache like the mandibles of a huge spider.

They were sitting around a big table, off to one side of Smith’s desk. At the head of the table sat not Smith, but Smith’s boss and the boss of everyone else here.

William Magear Tweed rose slowly from his chair as we entered the room. He towered above us. The man was architectural in his build — well over six feet in height, three hundred pounds or more in avoirdupois. But he looked a whole lot bigger and a whole lot heavier than that. His tiny round eyes might have looked weak on another man, in his face, the eyes being the windows of the soul, they looked like pinholes pricked into a black inferno.

“Well, now,” he said. His voice was a deep basso rumble like a trolley car going by. “It’s Mr. Nast, and his friend with the dapper clothes and the funny accent. You going to introduce us?”

“Actually, Mr. Tweed,” I said, “we just come here to sketch the commissioner’s portrait. But since he’s busy, we’ll come back another time.”

“Wouldn’t hear of it,” Tweed said. “Pull up a chair for Mr. Nast, and… I don’t know, what do you say to a high stool for the little guy?”

He was talking to the two remaining men, who stepped out of the smoke and shadow then. Sergeant Driscoll closed the door. Constable Flood kicked two chairs in our general direction, his face suffused with a nasty grin as with a bruise.

That sinking feeling I was talking about sunk about another twelve storys, quicker than any hydraulic elevator yet invented.

“Sit down, you yeggs,” Flood sneered. I slumped down in one of the chairs, but Dupin didn’t even acknowledge the loaded courtesy.

“You are Boss Tweed?” he demanded. “I have heard of you.”

“Most people have,” Tweed allowed. “As a humble servant of the City of New York, I hope. So you gents came here to paint a pretty picture?”

I opened my mouth to answer, but Dupin was in there a sight too fast for me. “No.”

“No?”

“Not at all. We are here to report an act of mass murder.”

Something like a soundless shockwave went through the room. The two cops and the three seated officials braced themselves against it, and seemed to tremble slightly as it passed. Not Tweed. He just raised his eyebrows up a little and let it go by him.

“Mass murder,” he ruminated. “I thought you ran a tighter ship than that, Hank. Any mass murderers you know of that you didn’t put on payroll yet?”

The police commissioner gave a sickly grin. “Very droll, Bill,” he muttered. “Very droll. You better watch what you say, Mr. Nast. Perjury’s still a crime in this state.”

“Although it’s also somewhat of an industry,” Tweed added. Everyone except Smith laughed at that, even the two cops.

Now I hadn’t said a thing to the purpose, let alone under oath, so the perjury shot went wide. But then it wasn’t a writ I was afraid of here. I took Dupin by the shoulder, hoping we could still steer a way out of these choppy waters, but he didn’t budge an inch. And it probably wouldn’t have mattered if he had, because Driscoll and Flood had taken up station at the door. Driscoll had his hand resting on the holster at his belt and Flood had his nightstick out, casually resting it athwart his shoulder. There wasn’t any way out except forward.

“The murders I speak of,” Dupin said, “were committed at eight o’clock this morning at the site of the bridge that is being constructed close to the Centre Street Pier. The principal agent and perpetrator is most likely the foreman at that site, a gentleman named O’Reilly, but I believe he had confederates whose names he might be made to divulge under questioning.”

“Oh, you believe that?” Tweed asked politely.

“Yes.”

“Those weren’t murders,” Jimmy Kelso said, all windy self-importance. “We already looked into that. Those men was killed by the caisson disease.”

“That,” said Dupin, “is an absurd conclusion. Every single observation that can be made says otherwise.”

“And what observations are those?” Tweed asked. He was looking highly amused, which I didn’t like at all.

Dupin seemed pretty happy too, and I realized he’d been building up to this. He struck a stance. “To begin with,” he said, “caisson sickness is a malady with a slow onset and a slow progression. The idea that it might afflict a score of people all at the same time, and kill them at a stroke, is absurd.”

“Horse pucky!” Kelso said with force. “Nobody even knows how the caisson disease even works, so nobody can say what it can and can’t do.”

Dupin’s lips turned at the corner as he stared at the superintendent. “There is already a body of literature relating to hyperbaric environments,” he said.

Kelso blinked. “There’s a what?”

“There are essays, monsieur, and monographs, and longer studies, about the conditions in which these unfortunate men worked. The caisson sickness seems to be a side effect of those conditions — conditions which, though they may be imperfectly understood, are extremely well documented. I have myself visited le professeur Fontaine’s hyperbaric chamber at the Sorbonne and studied its operation. Air from the outside world is excluded by welded seals and tight-fitting doors. Breathable air, under higher than atmospheric pressure, is injected into the caisson by means of a Jacquard-Sevigny steam-driven pumping apparatus. The same machine draws away exhaled air and expels it outside the caisson, so that the level of oxygen — that indispensable gas identified by Monsieur Lavoisier, another of my countrymen — remains constant.”

“You talk beautifully,” Boss Tweed said, every bit as easy as before. “But not to the purpose. Who cares how the pump works?”

“I do, monsieur,” Dupin said. “I care very much. When I examined the bodies in the caisson, I found that they all had livid skin and blue lips.”

“So?”

“Alors. If they had died from caisson sickness, their skin would be bright red. An urticarial rash, as from the touch of nettles, would have been visible on their faces and necks. This in itself was enough to arouse my suspicions. What confirmed them was the fact that the lamps in the caisson, essential to the continuing work there, had all been extinguished.

“And that, monsieur, could mean only one thing. A wind or breeze, in that space where air was so carefully rationed, was impossible. The only thing that could have put out those flames was the absence of the oxygen on which they fed. The lights died for the same reason that the men died. They had no oxygen to consume, and without it, had not the wherewithal to continue in existence.”

Something like a frown passed across Tweed’s big, heavy-featured face, but he rallied pretty quickly and managed a pained smile. “You’re saying someone stole the air?”

“Bien sur que non. Not the air. Only the oxygen from the air.”

“And how does a man go about stealing that, exactly?”

“A man,” Dupin said with grim emphasis, “attaches the outlet hose on the steam pump back into the inlet valve, creating in effect a closed system. A boucle. A loop. The men’s exhaled air, depleted of the vital oxygen, is fed back to them, again and again, until they suffocate. Which does not take long at all.”

There was a deathly silence in the room. The men at the table looked to Tweed, as if they weren’t willing to venture an opinion on this subject until the Boss had spoken. I kept quiet too, but for a different reason. I was thinking of those men’s last moments, and my mind was reeling. I couldn’t imagine a worse way to die — and I couldn’t imagine the mind that could have cooked up something like that. At the same time, I was starting to put things together the way Dupin had, running along after his thought processes the way a dog runs after a fire tender.

“The marks on the pump,” I said. “That outlet valve did look all beaten up. As though…”

“As though someone had levered it off, with a wrench or a crowbar,” Dupin finished. “And then replaced it again, after it had served its purpose. Yes, I believe that to be the case.”

“But whatever you believe,” Boss Tweed said with the calm of complete indifference, “you can’t prove who did it.”

“Ah, but I think that I can,” said Dupin, sealing our fate. “The runner, who came from City Hall to announce that the workings were unsafe and had to close, arrived at thirty-three minutes past the hour. Let us assume that a message was sent from the worksite as soon as the deaths were discovered, and that the mayor—” He gave Oakey Hall a perfunctory bow. “— delivered his decision immediately. The two journeys, cross-town and then north to Mrs. Roebling’s house, require a minimum of fifty minutes to complete. It can therefore be established by a very simple calculation that the messenger sent from City Hall must have been dispatched before any notification could have arrived from the site.”

Hall blanched as Boss Tweed shot him a cold, disapproving glance. “That true?” he demanded.

“I thought we wanted to shut them down fast,” the mayor protested, with something of a whine in his voice. “I didn’t think anyone was going to be standing on the street with a damn stopwatch.”

“No,” Tweed agreed, “you didn’t think. You never do, Oakey. Maybe it’s time I replaced you with someone who does.” He gave a hitch of his shoulders, which was evidently a sign to Driscoll and Flood. Driscoll put his gun in my back, and Flood grabbed a hold of Dupin.

“But… but why?” I demanded. Given the extremity of the situation, talking back to the Boss didn’t feel like quite as fearful a prospect as it would normally have been. “Why would you do something like this?”

Tweed seemed surprised to be asked. He shrugged his massive shoulders. “The usual reason,” he said. “Come on, Nast. You’re a newsman, not a babe in arms. The New York to Brooklyn Bridge is the biggest building project this city has ever seen. All we wanted was a decent kickback. The old man was dragging his feet, so we arranged a little accident for him. We started leaning on the son, and he was just about to roll when he got sick. That left us with the lady, who’s the toughest nut of the lot. Or maybe just the stupidest. She didn’t seem to understand that when we said we could help her with her licenses and her on-site security, we were asking for a bribe. She just said thank you and goodnight. So we thought we’d move things along a little.”

“By killing twenty men?” I asked, my throat dry.

Those tiny black eyes blinked slowly, the way a cat’s eyes do. “Well, you know what they say about omelets. If you’re serious about making them, you can’t afford to get sentimental about eggs.”

“You murdering bastard,” I said. “Some of those eggs had wives and kids.”

“They’ll break, too,” the Boss replied laconically. “Sooner or later, makes no difference. It’s not like eggs are built to last.” He gave Driscoll a meaningful look. “Get rid of them,” he said. “Somewhere real quiet. Say a few words over the bodies, then take the evening off.”

That was the end of the interview. Driscoll and Flood hauled us out of there, and took us via the back door of the building to a paddy wagon. They pushed us inside and locked the door. We could hear Flood hitching up the horses, with a lot of cursing, while Driscoll berated him for his clumsiness.

It was a long, uncomfortable ride, all the way uptown to the northern tip of Manhattan Island. The swampy ground around the Palisades was slowly being reclaimed, and the city was obviously going to head out that way in its own good time, but back then it was a wilderness. The few tracks there were petered out quickly, leaving you adrift in an endless expanse of couch grass and stunted trees.

“I’m real sorry, Mr. Dupin,” I muttered.

“About what?” Dupin demanded.

“All this. Dying in a ditch is a poor sort of a way for your day of sightseeing to end. And I’m the native guide here. I should have headed this off before you got too far into it. Mind you,” I added, “I didn’t know you were going to be accusing Boss Tweed himself of multiple counts of homicide.”

“Je vous en prie,” Dupin demurred, and since I had no clue what that meant, the conversation ended there.

The paddy wagon slowed to a halt. We heard Driscoll and Flood jump down from the driver’s seat, and a second later the doors were hauled open. Driscoll had a pistol leveled at us, and Flood had some kind of a sap — shorter than his nightstick, but just as lethal-looking.

“Last stop, my buckos,” the constable said cheerfully.

We climbed down out of the wagon into a desolate landscape. We were only a few miles outside the city limits, but there wasn’t a building in sight. The sun was touching the horizon, and there was a sharp wind getting up, making the leafless trees lean over like they were hunching down against the cold.

Sergeant Driscoll chucked me on the chin with the barrel of the pistol, as though to coax a smile out of me. “Any last words, Mr. Nast?” he asked mildly. “A prayer, perhaps? Or a confession? We’re not in any hurry.”

It was a thoughtful offer in the circumstances, but I couldn’t think of anything either reverential or splenetic that was worth detaining him with. I’d sort of resigned myself to death, now, and I just wanted to get the unpleasant business over with. I shook my head.

Dupin seemed even more detached. He wandered over to a flowering bush and prodded it with his cane. Flood stood over him, sap in hand, guarding him until it was his turn to be dispatched.

“Right then,” Driscoll said. “May the good Lord have mercy. I can speak for my shooting, so your only worry’s what happens afterward.”

He took aim at my forehead, and I braced myself for the world to come.

At that point, Constable Flood gave a sudden, constricted gasp and sank to his knees. Driscoll turned, astonished.

“What’s the matter with you, you idiot?” he demanded.

Flood opened his mouth, but nothing came out of it except a thin trickle of blood. He pitched forward onto his face.

Dupin swished the sword that had appeared from nowhere in his hand. “Direct your thoughts, monsieur,” he suggested, “to what happens afterward.”

Driscoll was as fast as a snake, a trait I believe I’ve remarked on earlier in this narrative. He swung the pistol round in the blink of an eye, but Dupin’s arm dipped and rose and intersected the other man’s at some significant point in its arc. The gun went flying away through the air and Driscoll started back with a cry, nursing his hand.

The sword flashed again and the sergeant’s legs buckled under him. A spurt of crimson from his severed throat splashed my sleeve as he fell. I stared at it stupidly, only decoding its meaning when Dupin slid the slender blade back into its housing in his cane. “Voilà,” he said.

“Y-You had…” I stammered. “You were…”

“Armed,” Dupin agreed. “The truth is all very well, but sometimes one needs a little more. Come, Monsieur Nast. We have a carriage and horses, but not much daylight left. It would be a good idea, I think, to get back to the city before night is fully upon us.”

In fact, he left me at the edge of town. He purposed to hire a boat or a berth at the tiny harbor on Spuyten Duyvil Creek, rather than risk buying a ticket home anywhere in New York City itself. He had a shrewd suspicion that Boss Tweed might be looking for him, once he realized that his two spudpicker assassins had misfired. The haulage men at Spuyten Duyvil would take him on up the coast to Bridgeport or Westhaven, and he could continue on his travels from there.

“My survival, Monsieur Nast,” the Frenchman assured me, “will be the earnest and guarantor of yours. Tweed and his associates will want you dead, but they will not dare to move against you so long as I am free and able to speak of what I know. I cannot, of course, prove that he was involved in these murders, but I can embarrass and clog the machine of which he is a part. And I will do so, if he defies me.”

We shook hands and parted company. Dupin rode away northwards and I hiked down to Morningside. There, I was able to prevail on a fisherman to give me a lift on the back of his cart when he took his day’s catch down to Peck Slip, and I was home only an hour or so after sunset.

Dupin, I learned later, had put pen to paper before he embarked from Spuyten Duyvil. Whatever it was he wrote to Tweed, the Tammany machine rescinded its writs and remands against the Roebling family and their great construction project and withdrew any and all accusations of unsafe working practices. A warrant was issued for the arrest of the foreman, O’Reilly, on twenty counts of murder, but his room in a seedy boarding house at Red Hook was found to have been emptied of all moveable items. Verbal descriptions were issued, along with a promise of reward, but O’Reilly never turned up again, and I doubt he will now — not until the last trump brings the dead up out of their graves.

Dupin wrote to me, too, enclosing a letter for Mrs. Emily Roebling, but also a few lines for my own edification. Your Mr. Tweed, he wrote, trades very strongly on the appearance of invulnerability. If you wish to harm him, you must first encourage the perception that he is susceptible to harm. I mention this, my dear friend, because your own trade of cartooning seems to me to be very admirably suited to this purpose. You asked me a question when we first met: what is your motive and your métier? What is the singular thing that you pursue? I ask you now to consider this very question yourself. I believe that your answer will be the same as mine — that you are a servant of truth. And you will know to what I am referring when I say she arms her servants well.

Well, I chewed that over a while, and I saw clear enough that he was right. So I took up my sword (it was shaped somewhat like a Woodson & Penwick number 1 black sable paintbrush) and I went to war.

ADDENDUM: From 1870 to 1873, Thomas Nast’s editorial cartoons mercilessly lampooned the corrupt activities of the Tammany Ring, and its formidable front man, William “Boss” Tweed. Harper’s Weekly rallied behind him, and one by one the other New York newspapers joined the crusade. In 1873, Tweed was arrested on multiple charges of fraud and racketeering. He died in prison five years later, having been convicted on all counts.