The Pale Blue Eye – Bayard, Louis

The Pale Blue Eye

Louis Bayard

For A. J.

The sorrow for the dead is the only sorrow from which we refuse to be divorced.

Washington Irving “Rural Funerals”

“Mid the groves of Circassian splendor, In a brook darkly dappled with sky, In a moonshattered brook raked with sky,

Athene’s lissome maidens did render Obeisances lisping and shy.

There I found Leonore, lorn and tender In the clutch of a cloud-rending cry.

Harrowed hard, I could aught but surrender To the maid with the pale blue eye To the ghoul with the pale blue eye.

Last Testament of Gus Landor

April 19th, 1831

In two or three hours… well, it’s hard to tell… in three hours, surely, or at the very outside, four hours… within four hours, let us say, I’ll be dead.

I mention it because it puts things in a certain perspective. My fingers, for instance, have become interesting to me of late. Also the lowermost slat in the Venetian blinds, a bit askew. And outside the window, a wisteria shoot, snapped off the main stem, waggling like a gallows. I never noticed that before. Something else, too: at this moment, the past comes on with all the force of the present. All the people who’ve peopled me, don’t they come thronging round? What keeps them from bumping heads, I wonder? There’s a Hudson Park alderman by the hearth; next to him, my wife, in her apron, ladling ashes into the can, and who’s watching her but my old Newfoundland retriever? Down the hall: my mother–who never set foot in this house, died before I reached the age of twelve–she’s ironing my Sunday suit.

Curious thing about my visitors: none of them says a word to the others. Very strict etiquette in place, I can’t work out the rules of it.

Not everyone, I should say, minds the rules. For the past hour, I’ve been having my ear bent–torn, nearly–by a man named Claudius Foot. I arrested him fifteen years ago for robbing the Rochester mail. A vast injustice: he had three witnesses who swore he was robbing the Baltimore mail at the time. He flew into a fine rage about it, skipped town on bail, came back six months later, crazy with cholera, and threw himself in front of a hackney cab. Talked all the way to death’s door. Still talking now.

Oh, it’s a crowd, I can tell you. Depending on my mood, depending on the angle of the sun through the parlor window, I can attend to it or not. There are times, I admit, when I wish I had more traffic with the living, but they are harder to come by these days. Patsy never stops round anymore… Professor Pawpaw is off measuring heads in Havana… and as for him, well, what is there to call him back? I can only summon him in my mind, and the moment I do, all the old talks play out again. That evening, for instance, we spent discussing the soul. I wasn’t persuaded I had one; he was. It might have been amusing to hear him go on if he hadn’t been in such terrible earnest. But then, no one had ever pressed me so strongly on this point, not even my own father (traveling Presbyterian, too busy with the souls of his flock to plant much of a boot on mine). Again and again, I said, “Well, well, you may be right.” It just made him hotter. He’d tell me I was just putting off the question, pending empirical confirmation. And I would ask, “In the absence of such confirmation, what more can I say than “You may be right’?” Round and round we went, until one day, he said, “Mr. Landor, there will come a time when your soul turns round and fronts you in the most empirical fashion possible–at the very moment it quits you. You will clutch for it, ah, in vain! See it now, sprouting eagle wings, bound for the Asiatic eyries.”

Well, he was fanciful that way. Gaudy, if you must know. Myself, I’ve always preferred facts to metaphysics. Good hard homely facts, a full day’s pottage. It is facts and inferences that will form the spine of this tale. As they’ve formed the spine of my life.

One night, a full year into my retirement, my daughter heard me talking in my sleep–came in to find me questioning a suspect twenty years dead. The corner won’t square, I kept saying. You do see that, Mr. Pierce. This particular fellow had cut up his wife’s body and fed the pieces to a pack of watchdogs at a Battery warehouse. In my dream, his eyes were pink with shame; he was very sorry for taking up my time. I remember telling him, If it hadn’t been you, it would have been someone else.

Well, it was that dream that made me see: a career won’t be left behind. You may slip away into the Hudson Highlands, you may screen yourself behind books and cyphers and walking sticks… your job will come and find you.

I might have run. A little farther into the wilderness, I might have done that. How I let myself be coaxed back I can’t honestly say, though sometimes I believe it happened–all of it–so that we should find each other, he and I.

But there’s no point in speculating. I have a story to tell, lives to account for. And since those lives were, on many sides, closed to me, I’ve made way where needed for other speakers, my young friend especially. He’s the true spirit behind this history, and whenever I try to imagine who’ll be the first to read it, he’s the one who presents himself. His fingers tracing the rows and columns, his eyes picking out my scratches.

Oh, I know: we can’t choose who will read us. Nothing left, then, but to take comfort in the thought of the stranger–still unborn, for all I know– who will find these lines. To you, my Reader, I dedicate this narrative.

And so I become my own reader. For the last time. Another log in the fire, would you please, Alderman Hunt?

And so it begins again.

Narrative of Gus Landor

1 My professional involvement in the West Point affair dates from the morning of October the twenty-sixth, 1830. On that day, I was taking my usual walk–though a little later than usual–in the hills surrounding Buttermilk Falls. I recall the weather as being Indian summer. The leaves gave off an actual heat, even the dead ones, and this heat rose through my soles and gilded the mist that banded the farmhouses. I walked alone, threading along the ribbons of hills… the only noises were the scraping of my boots and the bark of Dolph van Corlaer’s dog and, I suppose, my own breathing, for I climbed quite high that day. I was making for the granite promontory that the locals call Shadrach’s Heel, and I had just curled my arm round a poplar, preparing for the final assault, when I was met by the note of a French horn, sounding miles to the north.

A sound I’d heard before–hard to live near the Academy and not hear it–but that morning, it made a strange buzz in my ear. For the first time, I began to wonder about it. How could a French horn throw its sound so far?

This isn’t the sort of matter that occupies me, as a rule. I wouldn’t even bother you with it, but it goes some way to showing my state of mind. On a normal day, you see, I wouldn’t have been thinking about horns. I wouldn’t have turned back before reaching the summit, and I wouldn’t have been so slow to grasp the wheel traces.

Two ruts, each three inches deep, and a foot long. I saw them as I was wending home, but they were thrown in with everything else: an aster, a chevron of geese. The compartments leaked, as it were, one into the other, so that I only half regarded these wheel ruts, and I never (this is unlike me) followed the chain of causes and effects. Hence my surprise, yes, to breast the brow of the hill and find, in the piazza in front of my house, a phaeton with a black bay harnessed to it.

On top was a young artilleryman, but my eye, trained in the stations of rank, had already been drawn to the man leaning against the coach. In full uniform, he was–preening as if for a portrait. Braided from head to toe in gold: gilt buttons and a gilt cord on his shako, a gilded brass handle on his sword. Outsunning the sun, that was how he appeared to me, and such was the cast of my mind that I briefly wondered if he had been made by the French horn. There was the music, after all. There was the man. A part of me, even then–I can see this– was relaxing, in the way that a fist slackens into its parts: fingers, a palm.

I at least had this advantage: the officer had no idea I was there. Some measure of the day’s laziness had worked its way into his nerves. He leaned against the horse, he toyed with the reins, flicking them back and forth in an echo of the bay’s own switching tail. Eyes half shut, head nodding on its stem…

We might have gone on like this for some time–me watching, him being watched–had we not been interrupted by a third party. A cow. Big blowzy lashy. Coming out of a copse of sycamores, licking away a smear of clover. This cow began at once to circle the phaeton– with rare tact–she seemed to presume the young officer must have good reason for intruding. This same officer took a step backward as though to brace for a charge, and his hand, jittered, went straight to his sword handle. I suppose it was the possibility of slaughter (whose?) that finally jarred me into motion–down the hill in a long waggish stride, calling as I went.

“Her name is Hagar!”

Too well trained to whirl, this officer. He depended his head toward me in brief segments, the rest of him following in due course.
“At least, she answers to that,” I said. “She got here a few days after I did. Never told me her name, so I had to give her one.”

He managed something like a smile. He said, “She’s a fine animal, sir.”

“A republican cow. Comes as she pleases, goes the same. No obligations on either side.”

“Well. There you… it occurs to me if…”

“If only all females were that way, I know.”

This young man was not so young as I had thought. A couple of years on the good side of forty, that was my best guess: only a decade younger than me, and still running errands. But this errand was his one sure thing. It squared him from toe to shoulder.

“You are Augustus Landor, sir?” he asked.

“I am.”

“Lieutenant Meadows, at your service.”

“Pleasure.”

Cleared his throat–twice, he did that. “Sir, I am here to inform you that Superintendent Thayer requests an audience with you.”

“What would be the nature of this audience?” I asked.

“I’m not at liberty to say, sir.”

“No, of course not. Is it of a professional order?”

“I’m not at–”

“Then might I ask when this audience is to take place?”

“At once, sir. If you’re so inclined.”

I confess it. The beauty of the day was never so lucid to me as at that moment. The peculiar smokiness of the air, so rare for late October. The mist, lying in drifts across the forelands. There was a woodpecker hammering out a code on a paperbark maple. Stay.

With my walking stick, I pointed in the direction of my door. “You’re sure I can’t fix you up with some coffee, Lieutenant?”

“No thank you, sir.”

“I’ve got some ham for frying, if you–”

“No, I’ve eaten. Thank you.” I turned away. Took a step toward the house.

“I came here for my health, Lieutenant.”

“I’m sorry?”

“My physician told me it was my one chance of living to a ripe old age: I had to go up. To the Highlands. Leave the city behind, he said.”

“Mmm.”

Those flat brown eyes of his. That flat white nose.

“And here I am now,” I went on. “The picture of health.”

He nodded.

“I wonder if you agree with me, Lieutenant, that health is rated too highly?”

“I couldn’t say. You may be right, sir.”

“Are you a graduate of the Academy, Lieutenant?”

“No, sir.”

“Oh, so you came up the hard way. Through the ranks, did you?”

“Yes indeed.”

“I never went to college myself,” I said. “Seeing as how I had no particular call for the ministry, what was the point of more schooling? That’s what my father thought–that’s how fathers thought in those days.”

“I see.”

It is good to know this: the rules of interrogation don’t apply to normal conversations. In a normal conversation, the one speaking is weaker than the one who’s not. But I wasn’t strong enough just then to follow another course. So I gave the wheel of the phaeton a kick.

“Such a fancy conveyance,” I said, “for bringing back one man.”

“It was the only one available, sir. And we didn’t know if you had your own horse.”

“And what if I should decide not to come, Lieutenant?”

“Come or not, Mr. Landor, it’s your own concern. Why, you’re a private citizen, and this is a free country.”

A free country, that’s what he said.

Here was my country. Hagar, a few steps to my right. The door of my cottage, still ajar from when I’d left it. Inside: a set of cyphers, fresh from the post office, and a tin of cold coffee, and a bereaved-looking set of Venetian blinds and a string of dried peaches and, hanging in the chimney corner, an ostrich egg given me years earlier by a 4th Ward spice merchant. And in the back: my horse, an oldish roan, tied to a paling, walled round with hay. Name of Horse.

“It’s a fine day for a ride,” I said.

“Yes, sir.”

“And a man may have his fill of leisure, that’s a fact.” I looked at him. “And Colonel Thayer waits, that’s another fact. Does Colonel Thayer qualify as a fact, Lieutenant?”

“You might take your own horse,” he said, a bit desperately. “If you’d rather.”

“No.”

The word hung in the silence. We stood there, enclosing it. Hagar kept circling the phaeton.

“No,” I repeated at last. “I’d be just as glad to go with you, Lieutenant.” I looked at my feet to be sure. “Truth be told,” I said, “I’m grateful for the company.”

It was what he’d been waiting to hear. Why, didn’t he drag a little ladder from the vehicle’s interior? Didn’t he prop it against the carriage, even offer me an arm up the rungs? An arm for old Mr. Landor! I set my foot on the lowermost rung, I tried to hoist myself up, but the morning walk had wrung me hard, and my leg gave out, and I fell against the ladder, fell hard, and had to be pushed and tipped into the phaeton. I lowered myself onto the hard wooden bench, and he climbed in after me, and I said, falling back on my one sure thing, “Lieutenant, you might think of taking the post road on the way back. The lane by Farmer Hoesman’s is a bit rough on the wheels this time of year.”

It was just what I was hoping for. He stopped. Tilted his head to one side.

“I’m sorry,” I said. “I should have explained. You may have noticed there were three very large sunflower petals trapped in your horse’s harness. Of course, no one’s got bigger sunflowers than Hoesman–they practically attack you as you pass. And that slash of yellow on the side panels? The very shade of Hoesman’s Indian corn. I’m told he uses a particular type of fertilizer–chicken bones and forsythia blossoms, that’s the native gossip, but a Dutchman never tells, does he? By the way, Lieutenant, do your people still live in Wheeling?”

He never looked at me. I only knew I’d hit the mark by the slump of his shoulders and the fierce rapping he made on the roof. The horse lurched up the hill, my body tipped back, and it occurred to me then that if there were no wall behind to catch me, I could just keep tipping… back, back… I saw it all very clearly in my mind. We reached the crest of the hill, and the phaeton turned northward, and through the side window, I caught a glimpse of my piazza and the gracious figure of Hagar, no longer waiting for an explanation, already leaving. Never to return.

Narrative of Gus Landor

2

Tum. Tuh tuh tuh tum. Tum. Tuh tuh tuh tum. We’d been traveling for some ninety minutes and were about a half mile from the reservation when the drums came. Just a trouble in the air at first, and then a pulse, in every precipice. When I next looked down, there were my own feet moving to the drums’ rhythm, and not a word from me. I thought: This is how they make you obey. They get in your blood.

It had certainly turned the trick with my escort. Lieutenant Meadows kept his eyes forward, and to the few queries I put to him, he made but token replies, and he never changed his position, not even when the phaeton, riding up on a boulder, came within inches of toppling over. Through it all, he kept the bearing of an executioner, and there were times, it’s true, when that carriage became–because I was still not in my waking mind–a tumbrel, and ahead lay the mob… the guillotine…

And then we came to the end of a long ascent, and the ground to our east fell away, and there was the Hudson. Glassy, opal-gray, crumpling into a million billows. The morning vapor already a butter-haze, and the outlines of the far shore cutting straight for the sky, and every mountain melting into a blue shadow.

“Nearly there, sir,” offered Lieutenant Meadows.

Well, this is what the Hudson does for you: it clears you. And so, by the time we had taken the last push up to the West Point bluff, by the time the Academy came peeping out of its mantle of woods–well, I felt equal again to what would come, and I was able to take in the views the way a tourist might. There! the gray-stone bulk of Mr. Cozzens’ hotel, belted by a verandah. And to the west, and rising above, the ruins of Fort Putnam. And rising still higher, the brown muscles of hill, bristled with trees, and above that, nothing but sky.

It wanted ten minutes to three when we reached the guard post.

“Halt!” came the call. “Who’s there?”

“Lieutenant Meadows,” answered the coachman, “escorting Mr. Landor.”

“Advance and be recognized.”

The sentinel came at us from the side, and when I peered out, I was startled to see a boy staring back. The boy saluted the lieutenant and then caught sight of me, and his hand itched its way to a half salute before my civilian status could make itself felt. Down it came, still trembling by his flank.

“Was that a cadet or a private, Lieutenant?”

“A private.”

“But the cadets walk guard, too, don’t they?”

“When they’re not studying, yes.”

“At night, then?”

He looked at me. For the first time since we’d left the cottage. “At night, yes.”

We passed now into the Academy grounds. I was going to say we entered, but you don’t really enter because you don’t exactly leave anything. There are buildings, yes–wood and stone and stucco–but each one seems to rise on Nature’s sufferance and to be always on the brink of being drawn back. We came at length to a place that is not Nature’s: the parade ground. Forty acres of pitted ground and patched grass, light green and gold, punched with craters, running northward to the point where, still hidden behind trees, the Hudson makes its dart to the west.

“The Plain,” announced the good lieutenant.

But of course, I already knew its name, and being a neighbor, I knew its purpose. This was the windswept pitch where West Point cadets became soldiers.

But where were the soldiers? I couldn’t see anything but a pair of dismounted guns and a flagpole and a white obelisk and a narrow fringe of shadow that the midday sun hadn’t quite pushed away. And as the phaeton passed down the hard-packed dirt road, there was no one abroad to remark on our coming. Even the drumming had stopped. West Point was folded in on itself.

“Where are all the cadets, Lieutenant?”

“In afternoon recital, sir.”

“The officers?”

A slight pause before he informed me that many of them were instructors and were to be found in the section rooms.

“And the rest?” I asked.

“Not for me to say, Mr. Landor.”

“Oh, I was just wondering if we had ourselves an alarum going on.”

“I’m not at liberty to say…”

“Then maybe you can tell me, am I to have a private audience with the superintendent?”

“I believe Captain Hitchcock will be present as well.”

“And Captain Hitchcock is… ?”

“The Academy commandant, sir. Second in authority to Colonel Thayer.”

And that was all he would tell me. He meant to stick to his one sure thing, and he did: delivered me straight to the superintendent’s quarters and led me into the parlor, where Thayer’s manservant was waiting for me. Name of Patrick Murphy, a soldier himself once, now (I would later discover) Thayer’s chief spy, and like most spies, the soul of good cheer.

“Mr. Landor! I trust your journey was as beautiful as the day. Please, won’t you follow me?” He showed you all his teeth but never gave you his eyes. Guided you down the stairs and opened the door to the superintendent’s office and called out my name like a footman, and by the time you’d turned to thank him, he was gone.

It was a point of pride, I later learned, for Sylvanus Thayer to carry out his affairs in the basement–a bit of Common Man stagecraft. All I will say is the place was damnably dark. The windows were shrouded by bushes, and the candles seemed to be illuminating only themselves. And so my first official meeting with Superintendent Thayer was conducted under cover of blackness.

But I’ve leapt ahead of myself. The first man to present himself was Commandant Ethan Allen Hitchcock, Thayer’s second in command. He’s the fellow, Reader, who does the dirty work of watching over the cadet corps, day after day. Thayer proposes, it’s said, and Hitchcock disposes. And anyone who intends to truck with the Academy must first truck with Hitchcock, who stands like a dyke against the onrushing waters of humanity–leaving Thayer high and dry, pure as the sun.

Hitchcock, in short, is a man used to being in shadow. And that was how he first showed himself to me: a hand bathed in light, the rest of him conjecture. Only when he drew nearer did I see what a striking man he was (in appearance, I’m told, not unlike his famed grandfather). The sort of man who earns his uniform. Hard-middled, flat in the chest, with lips that look always to be compressing around a hard object: a pebble, a watermelon seed. Brown eyes streaked with melancholy. He gripped my hand in his and spoke in a surprisingly mild voice, his tone that of a sickbed visitor: “I trust your retirement agrees with you, Mr. Landor.”

“It agrees with my lungs, thank you.”

“May I please introduce you to the superintendent?”

A patch of suety light: a head bowed over a fruitwood desk. Chestnut-haired, round-chinned, cheekbones high and hard. Not a head or a body made for love’s uses. No, the man sitting at that desk was fashioning himself for posterity’s cold eye, and it was hard work, for look how slender he was, even in his blue coat and gold epaulets and gold trousers, even with that quillback blade resting quietly at his side.

But all this was the stuff of later impressions. In that dark room, with my chair pitched low and the desk pitched high, the only thing I saw, in truth, was this head, steady and clear, and the skin of his face just starting to pull away, like a mask about to be peeled off. This head looked down at me from its perch, and it spoke, it said:

“The pleasure is all mine, Mr. Landor.”

No, my mistake, it said, “Shall I send for coffee?” That’s right. And what I said in reply was, “Some beer would do nicely.”

There was a quiet. An umbrage, maybe. Does Colonel Thayer abstain? I wondered. But then Hitchcock called for Patrick, and Patrick fetched Molly, and Molly made straight for the cellar, and all it took was just the merest flexing of the fingers of Sylvanus Thayer’s right hand.

“I believe we have met once before,” he said. “Yes, at Mr. Kemble’s. In Cold Spring.”

“Just so. Mr. Kemble speaks of you very highly.”

“Oh, that’s kind of him,” I said, smiling. “I was lucky enough to be of some use to his brother, that’s all. Many years ago.”

“He did mention that,” said Hitchcock. “Something to do with land speculators.”

“Yes, it beats all creation, doesn’t it? All the people in Manhattan who’ll sell you land they don’t have? I wonder if they still do that.”

Hitchcock pulled his chair a little closer, and rested his candle on Thayer’s desk, next to a red leather document box. “Mr. Kemble,” he said, “suggests you were something of a legend among New York City constables.”

“What kind of legend?”

“An honest man, to start with. That’s enough, I expect, to make anyone legendary among the New York police.”

I could see Thayer’s eyelashes lowering themselves like shades: Well done, Hitchcock.

“Oh, there’s nothing too honest about legends,” I said, very easy. “Although I guess if anyone’s famous for honesty, it would be you and Colonel Thayer.”

Hitchcock’s eyes narrowed. He was asking himself, maybe, whether this was flattery all the way through.

“Among your other accomplishments,” Thayer went on, “you were instrumental in apprehending the leaders of the Daybreak Boys. Scourges of upstanding merchants everywhere.”

“I suppose they were.”

“You also had a hand in breaking up the Shirt Tails gang.”

“For a time. They came back.”

“And if I recall correctly,” said Thayer, “you were credited with solving a particularly grisly murder which everyone else had pretty well given up on. A young prostitute in the Elysian Fields. Not quite your jurisdiction, Mr. Landor?”

“The victim was. The killer, too, it turned out.”

“I’ve also been told you’re a minister’s son, Mr. Landor. Hailing from Pittsburgh?”

“Among other places.”

“Came to New York while still in your teens. Put in your oar with Tammany Hall, do I have that right? No stomach for faction, I gather. Not a political animal.”

To the justice of this, I bowed. In fact, I was just getting a better fix on Thayer’s eyes.

“Talents include code breaking,” he was saying. “Riot control. Fence-building with Catholic constituencies. And the–the gloveless interrogation.”

There it was: a tiny sweep of the eye. Something he no more could have felt than I could have seen, had I not been looking for just that.

“May I ask, Colonel Thayer?”

“Yes?”

“Is it a pigeonhole? Is that where you’ve got your notes hidden?”

“I don’t follow you, Mr. Landor.”

“Oh, please, no, it was me not following. Why, I was feeling like one of your cadets. They come in here–already a bit cowed, I can believe that– and you sit there and tell them their exact class ranking, I’ll bet, how many demerits they’ve got piled up, and oh, with just a bit more concentrating, you can even tell them just how far in debt they are. Why, they must leave here thinking you’re next to God.”

I leaned forward and pressed my hands into the mahogany plane of his desk. “Please,” I said. “What else does your little pigeonhole say, Colonel? About me, I mean. It probably says I’m a widower. Well, that should be obvious enough, I don’t have a particle of clothing that’s less than five years old. And I haven’t darkened the door of church in a long time. And oh, does it mention I had a daughter? Ran off a while back? Lonely evenings, but I do have a very nice cow–does it know about the cow, Colonel?”

Just then the door opened, revealing the manservant, bearing a tray with my beer. Good fizzy near-black. Stored deep in the cellar, I guessed, for the first sip sent a thrill of cold through me.

Over me spilled the soothing voices of Thayer and Hitchcock.

“Very sorry, Mr. Landor…”

“Got off on the wrong foot…”

“No desire to offend…”

“All due respect… ”

I held up my hand. “No, gentlemen,” I said. “I’m the one ought to apologize.” I pressed the cold glass to my temple. “Which I do. Please carry on.”

“You’re quite sure, Mr. Landor?”

“I’m afraid you’ve found me a bit done in today, but I’m happy… I mean, please state your business, and I’ll do my best to–”

“You wouldn’t prefer a…”

“No, thank you.”

Hitchcock stood now. It was his meeting once again.

“From here on we must tread very carefully, Mr. Landor. I hope we may count on your discretion.”

“Of course.”

“Let me first explain that our sole purpose in reviewing your career was to ascertain whether you were the right man for our purposes.”

“Then maybe I should ask what your purposes are.”

“We are looking for someone–a private citizen of well-documented industry and tact–who might carry out certain inquiries of a sensitive nature. In the Academy’s behalf.”

Nothing in his manner had changed, but something was different. Maybe it was just the realization, coming on as sudden as that first blast of beer, that they were seeking help from a civilian–from me.

“Well,” I said, inching my way along, “it would depend, wouldn’t it? On the nature of those inquiries. On my–my capacity to…”

“We have no concern about your capacities,” said Hitchcock. “The inquiries are what concern us. They are of a highly complex, I should add, a highly delicate nature. And so before we go a step further, I must once again be assured that nothing said here will be breathed anywhere outside the Point.”

“Captain,” I said, “you know the life I lead. There is no one for me to tell but Horse, and he’s the soul of discretion, I promise you.”

He seemed to take this as a solemn assurance, for he resumed his seat and, after a conference with his knees, raised his face toward mine and said:

“It concerns one of our cadets.”

“So I figured.”

“A second-year man from Kentucky, by the name of Fry.”

“Leroy Fry,” added Thayer. That level gaze again. As though he had three pigeonholes full of notes on Fry.

Hitchcock wrenched himself once more from his chair and passed in and out of the light. My eyes found him at last pressed into the wall behind Thayer’s desk.

“Well,” said Hitchcock, “there’s no point in dancing around it. Leroy Fry hanged himself last night.”
I felt in that moment as though I had stepped in at the very end or the very beginning of a large joke, and the safer course would be to play it out.

“I’m very sorry to hear it,” I said. “Indeed I am.”

“Your sympathies are–”

“A dreadful business.”

“For all concerned,” Hitchcock said, advancing a step. “For the young man himself. For his family…”

“I’ve had the pleasure,” said Sylvanus Thayer, “of meeting young Fry’s parents. I don’t mind telling you, Mr. Landor, sending them word of their son’s death is one of the saddest duties with which I have ever been tasked.”

“Naturally,” I said.

“We hardly need add,” Hitchcock resumed–and here I felt something rising to a head–“we hardly need add this is a dreadful business for the Academy.”

“You see, nothing of this kind has ever happened here before,” Thayer said.

“It most certainly has not,” answered Hitchcock. “Nor will it again, if we have anything to say about it.”

“Well, gentlemen,” I said. “With all due respect, it’s not for any of us to have a say in, is it? I mean, who can know what goes through a boy’s mind from day to day? Now, tomorrow …” I scratched my head. “Tomorrow, the poor devil might not have done it. Tomorrow he might be alive. Today, he’s… well, he’s dead, isn’t he?”

Hitchcock came forward now, leaned against the spindle back of his Windsor chair.

“You must understand our position, Mr. Landor. We have been specifically charged with the care of these young men. We stand in loco parentis, as it were. It is our duty to make them gentlemen and soldiers, and toward that end, we drive them. I make no apologies for that: we drive them, Mr. Landor. But we like to think we know when to stop driving.”

“We like to think,” said Sylvanus Thayer, “that any of our cadets may approach us–whether myself or Captain Hitchcock, an instructor, a cadet officer–come to us, I mean, whenever he is troubled in mind or body.”

“I take that to mean you had no warning.”

“None at all.”

“Well, never mind,” I said. (Too breezy, I could tell that.) “I’m sure you did the best you could. No one can ask anything more.”

They both brooded over this a bit. “Gentlemen,” I said, “I’m guessing–and now I may be wrong, but I’m guessing this is the part where you tell me what I’m wanted for. Because I still can’t make sense of it. A boy hangs himself, that’s a matter for the coroner, surely? Not a retired constable with–a weak lung and poor circulation.”

I saw Hitchcock’s torso rise and fall.

“Unfortunately,” he said, “that’s not the end of it, Mr. Landor.”

And this was followed by another long silence, even warier than the last. I looked back and forth between the two men, waiting for one of them to venture further. And then Hitchcock drew another long breath and said:

“During the night–between two-thirty and three o’clock a.m.–the body of Cadet Fry was removed.”

I should have recognized it then: the beat. The sound not of any drum but my own heart.

” “Removed,” you say?”

“There was–there was apparently some confusion about the protocol,” Hitchcock conceded. “The sergeant detailed to watch the body left his post, under the impression that he was needed elsewhere. By the time his mistake was discovered–that is to say, when he returned to his original post–the body had vanished.”

I set my glass down on the floor, with great care. My eyes closed of their own accord and then startled open at a peculiar noise, which, I soon found, was my hands rubbing against each other.

“Who did the removing?” I asked.

For the first time, Captain Hitchcock’s warm brown voice betrayed a note of harshness. “If we knew that,” he snapped, “we would have had no need to summon you, Mr. Landor.”

“Can you tell me, then, whether the body has been found?”

“Yes.”

Back to the wall went our Hitchcock, on a guard duty of his own making. There followed another length of silence.

“Somewhere on the reservation?” I prompted.

“By the icehouse,” Hitchcock said.

“And has it been returned?”

“Yes.”

He was going to say more but stopped himself. “Well,” I said, “the Academy has its share of pranksters, I don’t doubt. And there’s nothing so very unusual about young men playing with bodies. Count yourselves blessed they’re not digging up graves.”

“This goes far beyond a prank, Mr. Landor.”

He leaned into the lip of Thayer’s desk and then this highly seasoned officer began stammering into the air.

“Whichever person–whichever persons–removed Cadet Fry’s body, I should say they perpetrated a unique, I’ll call it a uniquely terrible desecration. Of a sort that–that one can’t…”

Poor man, he might have gone on like that forever, tiptoeing round the thing. Leave it to Sylvanus Thayer to make straight for the center. Erect in his seat, one hand resting on the document box, the other closing round a chess rook, he tilted his head and brought out the news as if he were reading the class standings. He said:

“Cadet Fry’s heart was carved from his body.”

Narrative of Gus Landor

3

When I was a boy, you never set foot in a hospital unless you were planning to die or unless you were so poor you didn’t care if you died. My father would have sooner turned himself into a Baptist, but maybe he would have changed his tune if he’d seen the West Point hospital. It was barely six months old the day I first entered it, its walls freshly whitewashed, its floors and woodwork hard-scoured, every bed and chair bathed in sulphur and oxymuriatic gas, and a current of moss-air twining through the halls.

On a normal day, there might have been a pair of scrubbed matrons ready to greet us, maybe show us the ventilation system or the operating theater. Not today. One matron had been sent home after fainting dead away, and the second matron was too harassed to say anything at all when we came. Looked through and beyond us, as though there might be a regiment trailing after, and finding none, she shook her head and led us up the stairs to Ward B-3. Walked us round an open fireplace and over to a blacksmith bed. Paused a bit. Then pulled the linen sheet off Leroy Fry’s body. “If you’ll excuse me,” she said. And closed the door behind her, like a hostess leaving the male guests to their chew.

I could live a hundred years, Reader, spend a million words, and not tell you what a sight it was.

I will come at it in small steps.

Leroy Fry, cold as a wagon tire, lay on a feather mattress girded by iron hoops.

One hand rested on his groin; the other was curled into a ball.

His eyes were half ajar, as though the drums had just beat reveille.

His mouth was twisted askew. Two yellowish front teeth protruded from his upper lip. His neck was red and purple, with black streaks.

His chest…

What remained of his chest, this was red. A number of different reds, depending on where it had been torn and where it had simply been opened. My first thought was that he had been worked on by some large concussive force. A pine tree had toppled–no, too small; a meteor had dropped from a cloud…

He hadn’t been hollowed through, though. It might have been better if he had. You wouldn’t have had to see the hairless scrolled-back flaps of his chest-skin, the shivered ends of his bones, and, deeper inside, the gummy something that lay folded and still secret. I could see the shriveled lungs, the band of his diaphragm, the rich warm brown plumpness of his liver. I could see… everything. Everything but the organ that wasn’t there, which was the thing you saw clearest of all somehow, that missing piece.

I’m embarrassed to say I was taken, in this moment, with a speculation– of the sort I wouldn’t normally trouble you with, Reader. It seemed to me that the only thing left of Leroy Fry was a question. A single question, posed by the rictus in his limbs, by the flush of green in his pale, hairless skin…

Who?

And by the throbbing inside me, I knew it was a question I had to answer. No matter the danger to me, I had to know who’d taken Leroy Fry’s heart.

And so I fronted this question the way I always do. By posing questions. Not to the air, no, but to the man who stood three feet away: Dr. Daniel Marquis, West Point surgeon. He had followed us into the room, and he was gazing at me with shy avid blood-lined eyes, eager, I think, to be consulted.

“Dr. Marquis, how does a person go about”– I pointed to the body on the bed–“doing this?”

The doctor dragged a hand down his face. I mistook it for weariness; in fact, he was hiding his excitement.

“Making the first incision,” he said, “that’s not so hard. A scalpel, any good sharp knife could do it.”

Warming to his subject now, he stood over Leroy Fry’s body, plying the air with an invisible blade.

“It’s getting to the heart, that’s the tricky part. You have to get the ribs and sternum out of your way, and those bones, well, they’re not so dense as the spine, but they’re plenty tough. You wouldn’t want to pound them,” he said, “or crack them, else you’d risk damaging the heart.” He stared into the open crater of Leroy Fry’s chest. “Now, the only remaining question is, where do you cut? Your first option is to go straight down the sternum…” Whish, went Dr. Marquis’ blade, bisecting the air. “Ah, but then you’d still have to pry away the ribs, and even with a crowbar, that’s a fair bit of labor. No, what you do–what was done–is a circular cut. Through the rib cage, and then two cuts across the sternum.” He took a step back and surveyed the results. “From the looks of things,” he said, “I’d say he went at it with a saw.” “A saw.”

“Such as a surgeon might use to amputate a limb. I’ve got one in the pharmacy. Lacking that, he might have made do with a hacksaw. Hard work, though. You’d have to keep the blade moving and keep it out of the chest cavity at the same time. Why, just have a look over here, at the lungs. See those gashes? About an inch long? More gashes in the liver. Collateral ruptures, is my guess. Comes from angling the blade outward to save the heart.”

“Oh, this is awfully helpful, Doctor,” I said. “Can you tell us what happens next? After the rib cage and the sternum are cut away?”

“Well, from there it’s a fairly simple business. You cut away the pericardium. That’s the membrane around the epicardium, helps anchor the heart.”

“Yes…”

“Then you’d sever, oh, the aorta. The pulmonary artery. You’ve got the vena cavae to get through, but that’s just a matter of minutes. Any decent knife would serve your purpose.”

“Would there be a spurting of blood, Doctor?”

“Not in somebody who’d been dead a few hours. Depending on how quickly he went, there might have been some small quantity of blood still in there. I suspect, though, that by the time he got hold of it, that heart”–he said this with a certain note of satisfaction–“that heart was played out.”

“What’s next?”

“Ooh, you’re pretty much done now,” said the surgeon. “The whole bundle comes up pretty clean, I expect. Very light, too, most people don’t know that. Just a bit larger than your fist, and no more than ten ounces. Comes from being hollow,” he said, rapping his chest for emphasis.

“So, Doctor–you don’t mind my putting all these questions to you, I hope?”

“Not at all.”

“Maybe you can tell us more about the fellow who did this. What would he require besides tools?”

A slight bafflement as his eyes drew away from the body. “Well, let me think on that. He’d– he’d have to be strong, for the reasons I mentioned.”

“Not a woman, then?”

He snorted. “No woman as I’ve ever had the pleasure of meeting, no.”

“What else would he need?”

“A goodly amount of light. Carrying out such an operation as that in pitch darkness, he’d need light. Wouldn’t surprise me if we found a deal of candle wax in the cavity.” His eyes, hungry, returned to the body on the table. It took some pressure on his sleeve to tug him away.

“What about his medical pedigree, Doctor? Would he need to be”–I smiled right into him– “as well educated and surpassingly well trained as yourself ?”

“Oh, not necessarily,” he said, newly bashful. “He’d need to know… what to look for, yes, what to expect. Where to cut. Some small knowledge of anatomy, yes, but he wouldn’t have to be a doctor. Or a surgeon.”

“A madman!”

This was Hitchcock breaking in. Startling me, I confess. I’d come to feel that Dr. Marquis (and Leroy Fry) and I were the only ones in the room.

“Who else but a madman?” Hitchcock asked. “And still out there, for all we know, ready for some new outrage. Am I… is no one else galled to think of him? Still out there?”

He was a sensitive man, our Hitchcock. For all his hardness, he could bleed. And be comforted, too. It took only the slightest pat from Colonel Thayer on the back of his shoulders, and all the tightness went out of him.

“There, Ethan,” said Thayer.

That was the first and not the last time I would think of their alliance as a sort of a marriage. I mean nothing by it except to suggest that these two bachelors had a pact of sorts, ever fluid and grounded in things unspoken. Once, and once only (I later came to learn), they had divorced: three years earlier, over the issue of whether West Point’s courts of inquiry violated the Articles of War. Never mind. A year later, Thayer was calling Hitchcock back. The rupture was healed over. And all this was conveyed in a pat. This, too: Thayer was in command. Always.

“I’m sure we all feel as Captain Hitchcock does,” he said. “Don’t we, gentlemen?”

“And it does the captain great credit for putting it in words,” I said.

“Surely the point of all this,” the superintendent added, “is to leave ourselves better positioned to find the perpetrator. Is that not so, Mr. Landor?”

“Of course, Colonel.”

Not mollified, not really, Hitchcock sat himself down on one of the spare beds, stared out through a north-facing window. We all gave him a moment. I remember tolling off the seconds. One, two …

“Doctor,” I said, smiling. “Maybe you could tell us how long it would take someone to perform this kind of operation.”

“Hard to say, Mr. Landor. It’s been years, you know, since I’ve dissected any kind of body, and never quite to this–this extent. If I had to guess, given the difficult conditions, I’d say upward of an hour. An hour and a half, maybe.”
“Most of it in the sawing.”

“Yes.”

“And what if there were two men?”

“Well, then, each man could take one side, and they’d be done in half the time. Now, three men, that’d be a crowd. A third man wouldn’t add much, unless he was carrying a lantern.”

A lantern, yes. That was the unaccountable thing about looking at Leroy Fry: I had the feeling that someone was holding a light to him. I would attribute this to the fact that his eyes were, in fact, angled toward mine, looking at me through their drooping lids, if looking you could call it. For the pupils had scrambled up like blinds, and there was only a sliver of whiteness left.

I drew closer to the bed and, with the tips of my thumbs, pulled the lids down. They paused there for the barest second before springing back up. I scarcely noticed, for now I was tracing the lacerations on Leroy Fry’s neck. They didn’t form a single band, as I had first thought, but a weave, a pattern of worry. Long before the noose had closed off this cadet’s windpipe, the rope had been gouging and chafing–a full pound of flesh by the time it was finished.

“Captain Hitchcock,” I said. “I know your men have mounted a search, but what exactly have they been looking for? A man? Or a heart?”

“All I can tell you is that we’ve canvassed the surrounding grounds and found nothing.”

“I see.”

He had strawberry-blond hair, this Leroy Fry. Long white eyelashes. Musket calluses on his right hand and bright blisters on the tips of his fingers. And a mole between two of his toes. The day before, he’d been alive.

“Would someone please remind me?” I said. “Where was the body found? After the heart was taken?”

“By the icehouse.”

“Now, Dr. Marquis, I’m afraid I must call on your expertise one more time. If you were–if you were to go about preserving a heart, how would you do it?”

“Well, I’d probably find a container of some kind. Wouldn’t need to be too big.”

“Yes?”

“Then I’d wrap the heart in something. Muslin, maybe. Newspaper, if I was hard up.”

“Go on.”

“And then I’d–I’d surround it with–” He stopped. His fingers climbed to his throat. “Ice,” he said.

Hitchcock raised himself from the bed.

“So it’s come to this,” he said. “The madman has not simply taken Leroy Fry’s heart. He is actually keeping it on ice.”

I shrugged. Showed him my palms. “It’s possible, that’s all.”

“For what ungodly purpose?”

“Oh, well, that I couldn’t tell you, Captain. I only just got here.”

By now the poor matron had come back, chaffed with duty, eager for Dr. Marquis to attend to something, I have no memory of what. I only remember the look of regret on Dr. Marquis’ face: he didn’t want to go.

So that left just me and Thayer and Hitchcock. And Leroy Fry. And then came the drum, for now the cadets were being called to evening parade.

“Well, gentlemen,” I said, “there’s no getting round it. You’ve got yourselves a poser.” My hands again, planing each other down. “I’m a bit stumped myself. One thing in particular I can’t make out. Why haven’t you called in the military authorities?”

A long silence then.

“Surely this is a matter for their attention,” I said, “not mine.”

“Mr. Landor,” said Sylvanus Thayer, “I wonder if you wouldn’t mind walking with me?”

We didn’t go far. Just down the hallway and back. Repeat. Repeat again. It had the feeling of a military maneuver. Thayer was shorter than me by four inches, but straighter, too, with more conviction in his carriage.

“You find us in a delicate position, Mr. Landor.”

“I don’t doubt it.”

“This Academy,” he began. But the key was too high; he lowered it a step or two. “This Academy, as you may know, has been in existence for less than thirty years. I have been superintendent for nearly half that time. I think it’s safe to say that neither the Academy nor I have earned the distinction of permanence.”

“Only a matter of time, I’d guess.”

“Well, like any young institution, we have acquired some estimable friends. And some formidable detractors.”

Looking at the floor, I ventured, “President Jackson falls in the second camp, does he?”

A quick sidelong glance from Thayer. “I don’t pretend to know who falls out in which camp,” he said. “I know only that we have been placed under a unique burden here. No matter how many officers we turn out, no matter how much honor we do our country, we are always, I fear, in the position of defending ourselves.”
“Against what, Colonel Thayer?”

“Oh.” He scanned the ceiling. “Elitism, that’s a common theme. Our critics say we favor the scions of rich families. If they only knew how many of our cadets came from farms, how many are the sons of mechanics, manufacturers. This is America writ small, Mr. Landor.”

It rang nicely in that hallway. America writ small.

“What else do your critics say, Colonel?”

“That we spend too much time making engineers and not enough time making soldiers. That our cadets take up the Army commissions that should go to men in the ranks.”

Lieutenant Meadows, I thought.

Thayer kept advancing, matching his step to the drumbeat outside. “And I don’t need to tell you,” he said, “about our last group of critics. The ones who want no standing army of any kind in this country.”

“What would they put in its place, I wonder?”

“The militias of old, apparently. Ragtag boys on the village common. Make-believe soldiers,” he said, with no trace of bitterness.

“It wasn’t militias won us our last war,” I said. “It was men like–General Jackson.”

“How nice to know we’re in agreement, Mr. Landor. The fact remains there are still a goodly number of Americans who recoil at the sight of a man in uniform.”

“That’s why we don’t wear any,” I said, softly.

” “We’?”

“I’m sorry, constables. Look where you like, you won’t find a constable– come to think of it, any New York City law officer–wearing something to announce himself. Uniforms do put folks off, don’t they?”

Funny, I hadn’t planned on volunteering that, but it did touch off a fraternal spark between us. Which is not to say I saw Sylvanus Thayer smile–I’ve never in my life seen him do that– but his edges could be honed down.

“I’d be remiss, Mr. Landor, if I didn’t tell you that I myself have come in for the lion’s share of attacks. I’ve been called a tyrant. A despot. Barbarian, that’s a favored term.”

With this, he stopped. Let the word settle over him.

“Well, now, it’s a bad fix, isn’t it, Colonel?” I said. “Looking at it from your side, I mean. If word got out cadets were actually breaking down under this–this brutal regime of yours, going so far as to take their own lives…”
“The word about Leroy Fry has got out,” he said, icy as a star. (Gone was the fellow feeling.) “I can’t prevent that, nor can I prevent people from construing it how they may. My only concern at present is to keep this investigation out of the hands of certain parties.”

I looked at him.

“Certain parties in Washington,” I offered.

“Just so,” he replied.

“Parties who might be hostile to the Academy’s very existence. Looking for a reason to raze it to the ground.”

“Just so.”

“But if you could show them you had things in hand–somebody on the job–then maybe you could hold off the hounds awhile longer.”

” A little while, yes,” he said.

“And what if I find nothing, Colonel?”

“Then I shall make my report to the chief of engineers, who will in turn consult with General Eaton. We shall then await their collective judgment.”

We had stopped now by the door to Ward B-3. From downstairs, we could hear the fretting sound of the matron and the slow sliding sound of the surgeon. From outside, the piercing lines of a fife. And from inside Ward B-3, nothing at all.

“Who would have guessed?” I said. “One man’s death could leave so much in the balance. Your career, even.”

“If I can persuade you of nothing else, Mr. Landor, let me persuade you of this. My career is nothing. If I could be sure the Academy would survive, I would leave here tomorrow and never look back.”

Giving me his most genial nod, he added, “You have a gift for inspiring confidences, Mr. Landor. I don’t doubt it comes in handy.”

“Well, that depends, Colonel. Tell me now. Do you honestly think I’m your man?”

” We wouldn’t be speaking if I didn’t.”

“And you’re bound to follow this out? To the very end?”

“And beyond,” said Sylvanus Thayer, “if need be.”

I smiled and looked down the hall, to the oculus window, where the light was calling up a floating chain of dust.

Thayer’s eyes narrowed. “May I interpret your silence as a yes or a no, Mr. Landor?” “Neither, Colonel.”

“If it’s a question of money…”

“I have enough money.”

“Some other concern, perhaps.”

“None you can help me with,” I said, as kindly as I could.

Thayer cleared his throat–a small rasping, was all, but I had the clear impression of something stacked in him.

“Mr. Landor, for a cadet to die so young, and by his own hand, that is a hard thing to bear. But that he should have such an offense committed against his defenseless body is beyond sufferance. It is a crime against nature, and I consider it also a strike at the heart–” He stopped himself, but the word was already out. “–at the heart of this institution. If it is the work of some passing fanatic, so be it, that is in God’s hands. If it is the work of one of our own, I will not rest until the offender has been bodily removed from the Point. In leg irons or walking free, it makes no difference, he must be sent away on the next steam packet. For the good of the Academy.”

Having rid himself of this, he exhaled softly and bowed his head.

“That is your charge, Mr. Landor, if you accept it. To discover the person who did this. And to help us ensure it never happens again.”

I watched him a good while longer. Then I drew my watch from my pocket and tapped once on its glass casing. “Ten minutes to five,” I said. “What would you say to meeting back here at six? Would that inconvenience you too much?”

“Not at all.”

“Good. I promise you’ll have my answer then.”

** *

I had some idea in mind of strolling off on my own–it was my usual way–but the Academy could not countenance such a plan. No, I would have an escort, if you please. And for this work, Lieutenant Meadows was once again detailed. If the prospect had made his face fall, someone must have rearranged it for him: he was brighter in spirits than during our last goround. I took this to mean he had not been granted a sight of Leroy Fry.

“Where do you wish to go, Mr. Landor?”

I swept my hand in the direction of the river. “East,” I said. “East would do nicely.”

To get there, of course, we had to cross round the Plain, which was no longer empty, no, not at all. The evening parade had come. The cadets of the United States Military Academy were fanned out in companies–four seething formations. The band, led by a man with a tasseled cane and a red pudding-bag hanging from his head, was playing the final strains, and the evening gun was firing, and the Stars and Stripes was fluttering to the ground like a pretty girl’s handkerchief.

“Sent harms!” cried the adjutant. At once came the clash of two hundred guns, and in less than a second, each cadet was staring into his gun barrel. The officer in charge drew his blade and slammed his heels together and cried, “Cree hump! ” Followed by (or so it sounded to me) “Charge peanuts! ” At the conclusion of which, every cadet was turned half to the right, ready to stave off the enemy.

Oh, it was quite a show: the divots kicking up from the pale green turf, the last rays of the sun snagged on the bayonets. And the young men in their tight collars and tapering uniforms, plumes sprouting mighty from their heads.

“Cree hump!… Der hump!”

The news about Leroy Fry–part fact, part rumor–had by now become common currency among these cadets. And it was a measure of Thayer’s system that it could bear such a blow with no sign of strain. The space normally occupied by Leroy Fry was now taken by another–the gap had been bridged–and anyone looking on would never have known there was one fewer in the ranks. Oh, a more trained watcher might have picked out the lost step here, the half shuffle there. A stumble, even. But that could easily be put down to the twenty or so plebes who filled each company. Boy-men only a few months free of their ploughs, still finding their rhythm… and all the same, swept up in the larger music.

“Front your section, mister!”

Yes, a fascinating sight, Reader, in the last hours of an October day, with the sun dropping, and the hills somehow twinning the blue and gray of the uniforms, and somewhere a mockingbird grouching… a fellow could do worse. There were others, too, passing time in much the same way. A raftload of tourists, down by the quartermaster’s office. Ladies in legof-mutton sleeves and men in blue frock coats and beige waistcoats… a holiday lightness about them. They’d come up that morning from Manhattan, probably, on the day boat, or maybe they were Britishers working their way through the Northern Tour. As much a part of the spectacle as anything else.

“Snied States Milita’ ‘Cademy, “S Point, “en York, “tober twe’six, “and thirty! “Shal ‘lorders ‘umber TWO!!!”

And who should be in the midst of the onlookers but Sylvanus Thayer? Not about to let a dead body keep him from his rounds. Indeed, he looked as if he’d never been anywhere but here the whole day long. Marvelous balance. He talked when he had to, stayed silent when that suited, bent an ear to any gentleman’s question, pointed out the stray detail to the ladies, never once bore down. I could almost hear him, you know:

“Mrs. Brevoort, I don’t know if you’ve noticed a certain esprit d’Europe to this particular maneuver. It was created by Frederick the Great, later elaborated upon by Napoleon during his Nile campaign… Oh, and perhaps you spotted the young man at the head of Company B? That’s Henry Clay, Junior. Yes, yes, son of the great man himself. Lost the headship of his class to a Vermont farmer’s boy. America writ small, Mrs. Brevoort…”

And now the cadet companies were being marched off in double time by the orderly sergeants, and the band was disappearing over a hill, and the spectators were falling back, and Lieutenant Meadows was asking me if I wanted to stay or keep walking, and I said walk, and so we did, all the way to Love Rock.

And there was the river, waiting a hundred feet below. Rolling with boats. Freight boats bound for the Erie Canal and packet boats bound for the great city. Skiffs and canoes and dugouts, all burning with geranium light. I could hear, not so far off, the ring of cannon on the proving grounds: a fat boom and then a trail of echoes, climbing the hillsides. To the west was river, to the east more river, and river to the south. I stood there at the crux of it, and if I’d been of a more historic cast, I might have communed with the Indians or with Benedict Arnold, who’d once stood on this very point, or with the men who dragged the great chain across the Hudson to stop the British navy from penetrating north…

Or if I’d been a deeper soul, I might have given some thought to Fate or God, for Sylvanus Thayer had just asked me to save the honor of the U.S. Military Academy by once more taking up the work I had sworn off for good, and surely there was a larger pattern at work–I won’t call it divine–but an intervention, yes.

Well, my mind doesn’t sound that deep. Here’s what I was thinking about: Hagar the cow. To be honest with you, I was wondering where she’d gone now. Toward the river? The highlands? Was there some cavern out there, back of a waterfall? Some private place only she knew about?

So yes, I thought about where she might have gone and if anything would bring her back.

At precisely ten minutes to six, I turned away from the river and found Lieutenant Meadows exactly where I had left him. Hands clasped behind his back, eyes locked, all other cares blacked away.

“I’m through, Lieutenant.”

Five minutes later, I was back in Ward B-3. Leroy Fry’s body was still there, draped in that nubby linen sheet. Thayer and Hitchcock were standing at something like parade rest, and I was just inside the door, and I was about to say, “Gentlemen, I’m your man.”

But I said something else. Before I even understood I was speaking.

“Do you want me to find who took Leroy Fry’s heart?” I asked. “Or do you want me to find who hanged him in the first place?”

Narrative of Gus Landor

4

October 27th

It was a locust tree. A hundred yards up from the South Landing. A black locust, slender and monkish-looking, with deep furrows and long mahogany pods. No different from most of the locust trees that cluster in the Highlands. No different, that is, except for the vine straggling from its bough.

Well , I thought it was a vine, more fool me. In my own defense, more than thirty-two hours had passed since the event in question, and the rope had already begun the slow work of bleeding into its surroundings. I suppose I expected someone to have taken it down by now. But they’d followed the swifter course: on finding the body, they’d severed the rope just above the dead man’s head and left the rest dangling, and there it remained, lean-muscled, morning-dappled. And there was Captain Hitchcock, wrapping his hands round it. A testing tug and then a pull, as though there were a church bell on the other end. His weight sank into it, and his knees sagged a fraction, and I realized then how very tired he was.

No wonder. Up on his feet for a night and a day and then a six-thirty breakfast summons to Sylvanus Thayer’s quarters. Me, I was just a hair fresher, having spent the evening at Mr. Cozzens’ hotel.

The hotel, like so many things at the Point, had been Thayer’s idea. If day-boat passengers were to see the Academy in all its glory, they would need somewhere to rest their heads at night. And so the United States government, in all its wisdom, decided to put up a fine hotel right on the Academy grounds. Every day in the high season, tourists from all ends of the world would lay themselves down on Mr. Cozzens’ newly plumped feather mattresses, hushed with wonder at Thayer’s mountain kingdom.

Me, I was no tourist, but my own house was too far from the Academy for easy coming and going. So, for a term indefinite, I was given a room overlooking Constitution Island. The shutters kept out nearly all the starlight and moonlight–sleeping was a dive into a pit, and the sound of reveille seemed to come from a distant star. I lay there, watching the red light steal through the bottom of the shutters. The darkness felt delicious. I wondered if maybe I’d missed my true career.

But then I did the unsoldierly thing of lying abed another ten minutes, and I dressed at my leisure, and instead of dashing out for the morning roll call, I wrapped a blanket round me and strolled down to the boat landing, and by the time I got to Thayer’s quarters, the superintendent had bathed and dressed and squeezed the tidings out of four newspapers and was poised over a plate of beefsteak, waiting for me and Hitchcock to do it the justice it demanded.

We ate in silence, the three of us, and drank Molly’s excellent coffee, and when the plates had been pushed back and we had slouched back in their chairs–well, it was then I laid out my conditions.

“First off,” I said, “if it’s all the same to you gentlemen, I’d like my own horse about me. Seeing as how I’ll be staying in your hotel for some time.”

“Not too long, we hope,” put in Hitchcock.

“No, not too long, but it’d be good to have Horse around in any event.”

They promised to fetch him and make a place for him in the stables. And when I told them I’d like leave to go back to my cottage every Sunday, they said that as a private citizen, I could leave the post whenever I wanted, so long as I told them where I was going.

“And finally this,” I said. “I’d like free rein while I’m here.”

“How are we to take that term, Mr. Landor?” “No armed guard. No Lieutenant Meadows, God bless him. No one walking me to the backhouse every three hours, no one kissing me good night. It won’t do, gentlemen. I’m a solitary sort, I get chaffed by too many elbows.”

Well, they told me this was impossible. They said that West Point, like any other military reservation, had to be closely patrolled. They had a congressionally mandated Responsibility to ensure the safety of every visitor and avoid Compromising Operations and on and on…

We found a middle path. I would be permitted to walk the outer perimeter on my own–the Hudson was all mine–and they would give me the paroles and countersigns to satisfy the sentinels who’d be stopping me at intervals. But I was not to enter the core grounds without escort, nor was I to speak to any cadet unless there was a representative of the Academy present.

All in all, I would have called it a first-rate chat… until they started sliding in conditions of their own. This I should have expected, but have I mentioned yet? That I was still a shade off my best?

Mr. Landor, you may not breathe a word of this investigation to anyone inside or outside the Academy.

So far…

Mr. Landor, you must report to Captain Hitchcock on a daily basis.

… so good…

Mr. Landor, you must prepare a detailed weekly report that outlines all your findings and conclusions, and you must be ready to recount your investigations to any Army official whenever so called upon.

Delighted, I said.

And then Ethan Allen Hitchcock gave his mouth a brutal swipe and cleared his throat and nodded sternly at the table.

“There is one final condition, Mr. Landor.”

He looked distinctly uncomfortable. I felt sorry for him until I heard what it was, and then I never felt sorry for him again.

“We’d like to ask that there be no drinking–”

“No untoward drinking,” said Thayer, working in a quieter key.

“–during the course of your investigations.”

And with that, the whole affair expanded before my eyes–it took on a dimension of time. For if they knew about that, it meant they’d been making inquiries–buttonholing neighbors and colleagues, the boys at Benny Havens’–and that was more than a morning’s work, that was days of husbanding. The only conclusion was this: Sylvanus Thayer had long ago cast his eye on me. Before he knew he had a use for me, he’d sent his scouts out to learn everything that could be learned about me. And here I sat now, eating his food, swallowing his terms. At his mercy.

If I’d been in a fighting mood, I might have denied it. I might have told them no drop of liquor had touched my lips in three days–it was the Lord’s truth–but then I remembered that was the very thing I used to hear from the micks who slept out by the Garnet Saloon. “Three days,” they always said, “three days since I touched a drop.” As fast a turnabout as dead Jesus, to hear them tell it. How I used to smile.

“Gentlemen,” I said, “you’ll find me, in all our dealings, as dry as a Methodist.”

They didn’t press the point too hard. Thinking back on it, I wonder if they weren’t more alarmed by the example I might set for the cadets, who were, of course, denied the pleasures of the bottle. The pleasures of the bed, the card table. Chess, tobacco. Music, novels. It hurt my head sometimes, thinking of all the things they couldn’t do.

“But we haven’t yet spoken of your fee,” said Captain Hitchcock.

“We needn’t.”

“Surely… some compensation…”

“Only to be expected,” said Thayer. “I’m sure in your previous capacity…”

Yes, yes, as a constable, you work on commission. Either you get paid by someone–the city, the family–or you stay out of it. But now and then you forget the rule. It’s happened to me once or twice, to my sometime regret.

“Gentlemen,” I said, drawing the napkin from my shirt, “I hope you won’t take it wrong, you seem like grand fellows, but once this business is done, I’d be most grateful if you’d leave me alone. Except for a note now and again to let me know how you are.”

I smiled to show I bore them no ill will, and they smiled, too, to show they’d saved a sum of money, and they called me a fine American and I forget what else, though I know the word principle got used. Paragon, too. And then Thayer went about his business, and Hitchcock and I went to our locust tree, and here now was the weary captain, leaning into that severed length of rope.

One of Hitchcock’s own cadets was standing not ten feet off. Epaphras Huntoon. Third-year man, a tailor’s apprentice from Georgia. Tall and ox-shouldered and still in awe of his own bulk, I thought, for he seemed all the time to be appeasing it, with a dreamy brow and a wheedling tenor. It was this cadet’s fate to have found Leroy Fry’s body.

“Mr. Huntoon,” I said, “please accept my sympathies. It must have been an awful shock.”

He jerked his head in a nettled way, as though I were calling him away from a private talk. And then he smiled and started to speak and found he couldn’t.

“Please,” I said. “If you’d take me through what happened. You were on guard duty

Wednesday night?”
That turned the trick: coming at it in pieces. “Yes, sir,” he said. “I went on post at nine-thirty. Got relieved at midnight by Mr. Ury.”

“What happened then?”

“I made my way back to the guardroom.”

“And where is that?”

“North Barracks.”

“And… where was your post?”

“Number four, sir. Over by Fort Clinton.”

“So…” I smiled, looked around. “I’ll admit I’m not very familiar with the grounds, Mr. Huntoon, but it seems to me this patch we’re standing on right now isn’t on the way from Fort Clinton to North Barracks.”

“No, sir.”

“What took you off course, then?”

He stole a look then at Captain Hitchcock, who gazed back a moment before saying, in a dull tone, “You needn’t fear, Mr. Huntoon. You won’t be reported.”

Relieved of this care, the young man gave his big shoulders a shake and looked at me with a half grin.

“Well, sir. Thing is sometimes… when I’m on guard duty… I like to get me a feel of the river.”

“A feel?”

“Put in a hand or a toe. Helps me sleep, sir, I can’t explain it.”

“No need to explain, Mr. Huntoon. Tell me, though, how you got yourself down to the river.”

“I just took the path to the South Landing, sir. Five minutes down, ten minutes up.”

“And what happened when you reached the river?”

“Oh, I didn’t get there, sir.”

“Why not?”

“I heard me something.”

Here Captain Hitchcock shook himself and, in a voice that belied his weariness, asked: “What did you hear?”
It was a sound, that was all he could say. Might have been a branch creaking or a flaw of wind; might have been nothing at all. Whenever he was moved to say what it was, it showed itself as other.

“Young sir,” I said, laying my hand on his shoulder. “I beg of you, don’t start kicking in the spurs. It’s no surprise you can’t get at it… all the excitement, all the running about, it tends to rattle a fellow’s brain. Maybe I should ask what made you follow this sound?”

That seemed to calm him. He got very still for a stretch.

“I reckoned it might be an animal, sir.”

“What sort?”

“I don’t rightly know, I… maybe it got itself caught in a trap… I’m terrible partial to animals, sir. Hounds, “specially.”

“So you did what any Christian man should do, Mr. Huntoon. You went to the aid of one of God’s creatures.”

“I reckon that’s what I done. I was just fixing to go up the hill a piece, it being pretty steep and all, and I was all ready to turn back–”

He stopped.

“But then you saw… ?”

“No, sir.” Back he came with a rush of air. “I didn’t see anything.”

“And not seeing anything, you…”

“Well, I just had me this feeling somebody was by. Something. So I said, “Who goes there?” As I’m charged to do, you see. And there weren’t any answer, so what I did, I brought my musket to “charge,” and I said, “Advance and give the countersign.””

“Still no answer.”

“That’s correct, sir.”

“And what did you do then?”

“Well, I kept going a few paces. But I never once seen him, sir.”

“Who?”

“Cadet Fry, sir.”

“Well, then, how did you find him?”

He waited a few seconds to steady his voice.

“I brushed him.” “Ah.” I cleared my throat, gently. “That must have been a surprise, Mr. Huntoon.”

“Not at first, sir, “cause I didn’t know. But once I knew, why, yes–yes, it was.”

I’ve often thought since that if Epaphras Huntoon had passed a yard to the north or a yard to the south, he might never have found Leroy Fry. For it had been almighty dark that night, cloudy with a bitty thumbnail of a moon and just the lantern in Huntoon’s hand to show the way. Yes, a yard in either direction, and he might have passed right by Leroy Fry and been none the wiser.

“What then, Mr. Huntoon?”

“Well, I jumped back, is what I did.”

“Perfectly natural.”

“And the lantern fell. Out of my hand.”

“It fell? Or maybe you dropped it?”

“Um… dropped it, that may be. Can’t say, sir.”

“And what next?”

He fell silent again. At least his voice box did. The rest of him was talking at a mad pace. Teeth dancing, toes sliding. One hand playing with his tunic, the other with the buttons that ran down the side of his trousers.

“Mr. Huntoon?”

“I didn’t rightly know what to do, sir. See, I weren’t at my post, so I weren’t sure anyone’d hear me if I called. So I run, I expect.”

His eyes were cast down now, and that was all it took to press the picture into my mind’s eye: Epaphras Huntoon dashing half blind through the forest, clawing the branches out of his face, brass and steel rattling under his cloak, cartridge boxes shivering…

“I run straight back to North Barracks,” he said, quietly.

“And who did you report this to?”

“Cadet officer of the guard, sir, and he went and got Lieutenant Kinsley, sir, who was army officer of the day. And they had me go and fetch Captain Hitchcock, and we all of us run back and…”

He looked at Hitchcock now with an unmistakable plea. Tell him, captain.

“Mr. Huntoon,” I said. “I think we might take a step back, if you don’t object. Back to when you first found the body. Do you think you could face that again?”

Fierce-browed, vise-jawed, he nodded. “Yes, sir.” “There’s a good man. Now, let me ask you, did you hear anything else at the time?”

“Nothin’ you wouldn’t hear in the normal way. An owl or two, sir. And… a bullfrog, maybe…”

“And was there anyone else about?”

“No, sir. But then I wasn’t looking for no one.”

“And I would guess–after that first contact, you didn’t touch the body again?”

He twitched his head back to the tree. “I couldn’t,” he said. “Once I seen what it was.”

“Very sensible, Mr. Huntoon. Now maybe you could tell me–” I paused to scan his face. “Maybe you could tell me just how Leroy Fry looked.”

“Not well, sir.”

And that was the first time I heard Captain Hitchcock laugh. A squoosh of merriment, gouged out of his middle. Surprised even him, I think. And it had this other virtue: it saved me from doing the same.

“I don’t doubt it,” I said, as softly as I could. “Which of us would have looked our best in such a setting? I was thinking… more the position of the body, if you recall that.”

He turned now and faced the tree head on–for the first time, maybe? Letting the memory work through him.

“His head,” he said, slowly. “The head was twisted to one side.”

“Yes?”

“And the rest of him was… he looked knocked back, sir.”

“How so?” I asked.

“Well.” He fluttered his lids, chewed his lip. “He wasn’t hanging straight.

His backside, sir, it was… like maybe he was getting ready to set. In a chair or hammock or some such.”

“Did he look that way because you’d knocked into him?”

“No, sir.” He was quite definite on that point, I remember. “No, sir, I only grazed him, word of honor. He never budged.”

“Go on, then. What else do you remember?”

“The legs.” He extended one of his own. “They were split wide, I think. And they were–they were ahead.”

“Not following you, Mr. Huntoon. You say his legs were ahead of him?”

“On account of they were on the ground, sir.”

I walked to the tree then. I stood under that dangling length of rope, feeling its tickle against my collarbone.

“Captain Hitchcock,” I said. “Do you have any notion of how tall Leroy Fry was?”

“Oh, average or above–maybe an inch or two shorter than yourself, Mr. Landor.”

Epaphras Huntoon’s eyes were still closed when I came back to him. “Well, sir,” I told him, “this is very interesting. You mean to say his feet… his heels, maybe–”

“Yes, sir.”

“–were resting on the ground, do I have that right?”

“Yes, sir.”

“I can verify that,” said Hitchcock. “He was in the same position when I saw him.”

“And how much time passed, Mr. Huntoon, between your first sighting of the body and your second?”

“No more ‘n twenty minutes, I reckon. Half an hour.”

“And did the body’s position change at all during that time?”

“No, sir. Not so’s I noticed. It was terrible dark.”

“I’ve got just one more question, Mr. Huntoon, and then I’ll trouble you no longer. Did you know it was Leroy Fry when you saw him?”

“Yes, sir.”

“How?”

A flush of red sprang to his cheeks. His mouth skewed right.

“Well, sir, when I first run into him, I swung the lantern out. Like this. And there he was.”

“And you recognized him right off ?”

“Yes, sir.” That pickled grin again. “When I was a plebe once, Cadet Fry shaved off half my scalp. Right before dinner formation. Lord, did I catch it.”

Narrative of Gus Landor

5 Lazarus began stinking after a few days–why should Leroy Fry have been any different? And as no one was planning to raise him from the dead anytime soon, and as his parents weren’t expected for another three weeks, the Academy administrators had a problem on their hands. They could bury the boy right away and brave the ire of the Fry family, or they could keep him above ground and risk the decay of his hard-used body. After some talk, they chose the latter course, but ice was still in demand, and Dr. Marquis was forced to fall back on a practice he’d witnessed many years back as a medical student at Edinburgh University. Which is to say, he submerged Leroy Fry in an alcohol bath.

And that was how we found him, Captain Hitchcock and I. Naked, in an oak box filled with ethyl alcohol. To close his mouth, a stick had been wedged between his breastbone and jaw, and to keep him from rising, a load of charcoal had been dumped inside his chest cavity, but his nose kept breaking the surface, and his eyelids still refused to close. And there he floated, looking more alive than ever, as though he were being carried back to us on the next wave.

The box had been caulked but not tightly enough, for we could hear a dripping on the trestle. All round us rose cool snarly fumes of alcohol, and I figured this was as close to drunk as I would get for some time.

“Captain,” I said. “Maybe you’ve been to the ocean?”

Hitchcock answered that he had, on several occasions.

“Me, I’ve only been once,” I said. “I remember seeing a young girl there–eight, maybe– making a cathedral in the sand. Remarkable thing, abbeys and bell towers… I couldn’t even tell you all the details she piled on. She’d planned for everything–except the tide. The faster she worked, the faster it came on. Before another hour was out, that beautiful thing of hers was just a set of humps in the sand.”

I made a leveling motion with my hand.

“Wise girl,” I said. “Never shed a tear. I think about her sometimes when I try to pile things on top of these simple facts. You can make something beautiful, and then a wave comes along, and all that’s left is the humps. Your foundations. Shame on anyone who forgets them.”

“So what are our foundations?” asked Hitchcock.

“Well,” I said, “let’s look and see. We have this idea that Leroy Fry wanted to die, which seems like a damned good foundation, Captain. Why else would a young man hang himself from a tree? He was beaten down, it’s an old story. So what would a beaten man do? Why, he’d leave a note, that’s what. Tell his friends and family why he was doing such a thing. Get the hearing he never got when he was alive. So…” I held out my palms. “Where’s his note, Captain?”

“We’ve found none.”

“Humm. Well, no matter, not every suicide leaves a note. Lord knows I’ve seen more than a few just take a leap off a bridge. Very well, Leroy Fry hies himself straight to the nearest bluff–oh, no, stop a minute, he decides to hang himself. Not–not where anyone can find him easy, but maybe he doesn’t want to be any trouble…”
I stopped, then started again.

“Very well, he finds himself a good strong tree, loops the rope around the branch… oh, but he’s too distracted to–to test the rope’s length, so…” I extended one leg, then the other. “He finds this little gallows of his won’t even lift him off the ground. All right, he ties the rope all over again… no, no, he doesn’t do that. No, Leroy Fry wants to die so badly he just… keeps kicking.”

I gave my leg a good shake.

“Till the rope finishes its work.” I frowned at the floor. “Well, yes, it’s certainly a longer business, going about it that way. And if his neck isn’t broken, it takes even longer…”

Hitchcock was rising to the challenge now. “You said yourself he wasn’t in his right mind. Why should we expect him to behave rationally?”

“Oh, well. In my experience, Captain, there’s nothing so rational as a man bent on killing himself. He knows just how he means to do it. I once–I once saw a woman take her life. She had a very fine picture of it in her head. When she finally got round to it, you’d have sworn she was recollecting the thing. Because she’d already seen it happen, over and over.”

And Captain Hitchcock said, “This woman you mention, was she… ?”

No. No, he didn’t say that. He said nothing for a short while. Just sketched a path around Leroy Fry’s coffin, scuffing up the wax with his boots.

“Perhaps,” he said, “it was a trial run of sorts that got out of hand.”

“If we’re to credit our witness, Captain, there’s no way it could have got out of hand. Feet on the ground, upper limb within reach: if Leroy Fry had wanted to call the whole thing off, he very easily might’ve.”

Still Hitchcock kept scuffing the floor. “The rope,” he said. “The rope might have given way after he hanged himself. Or perhaps Cadet Huntoon jostled him harder than he knew. There could be any number…”

He was fighting hard, it was his nature. I should have admired him for it, but he was starting to make my eyes hurt.

“Look here,” I said.

Whipping off my baize jacket, I rolled up my shirt sleeves and plunged my hand into the alcohol bath. A shock of cold, then a phantom shock of hot. And this, too: the queer feeling that my skin was melting and hardening at the same time. But my hand stayed true, hauled Leroy Fry’s head toward the surface. And with the head came the rest of the body, as hard and straight as the trestle on which it lay. I had to lace my other hand beneath him just to keep him from sinking down again.

“The neck,” I said. “That’s what first struck me. Do you see? Not a clean cinch at all. The rope grabbed at him. Ran up and down the neck, looking for a purchase.”

“As though…” “As though he was fighting. And look, if you would. The fingers.”

I gestured with my chin, and Captain Hitchcock, after a brief pause, rolled up his sleeves and bowed over the body.

“You see?” I said. “On the right hand. Very tips of the fingers.”

“Blisters.”

“Just so. Fresh blisters, by the look of them. I’m thinking he was… clutching at the rope, trying to peel the thing off him.”

We stared down at Leroy Fry’s sealed mouth, stared hard, as though by doing so we might unseal it. And by some strange accident, the room did fill with a voice–not mine, not Hitchcock’s–ringing with such force that our hands pulled away, and Leroy Fry sank back with a hiss and a gargle.

“May I ask what is going on here?”

We must have been quite a sight to Dr. Marquis. Bent over the coffin in our shirt sleeves. Daylight grave robbers, by the looks of us.

“Doctor!” I cried. “I’m delighted you could join us. We’re in dire need of a medical authority.”

“Gentlemen,” he sputtered. “This is somewhat irregular.”

“It certainly is. I was wondering if you wouldn’t mind feeling round the back of Mr. Fry’s head?”

He wrestled with the propriety of it, or at least he gave propriety a few more seconds of his time, and then he followed our lead. And by the time he had secured the back of the skull, the wince of effort on his face had been planed into something like peace. A man at home.

“Anything, Doctor?”

“Not yet, I’m… Mm. Mm, yes. A contusion of some sort.”

“A lump, you mean?”

“Yes.”

“Maybe you could describe it for us.”

“Parietal region, best I can make out… perhaps three inches in circumference.”

“How thick, roughly speaking?”

“Rising… oh, a quarter inch or so above the skull.”

“Now, what might have made such a lump as that, Doctor?” “Same thing causes any lump, I expect: something hard comes in contact with the head. Can’t tell you any more without looking at it.”

“Might the bruise have been inflicted after death?”

“Not very likely. A bruise comes from extravasated blood–blood escaping from its vessels. If there’s no blood circulating–no heart, in plain truth–” He had the good sense to stop his laugh in midcourse. “There can be no bruise.”

It was slow, almost bashful work, making ourselves civilized again– rolling our sleeves down and putting our jackets back on.

“So then, gentlemen,” I said, cracking my knuckles. “What exactly do we know?”

Getting no reply, I was forced to answer my own question.

“We have here a young fellow who tells no one he wishes to die. Leaves no note. Dies, it would seem, with his feet still on the ground. On the back of his head we find a–a contusion, as Dr. Marquis will have it. Blisters on his fingers, rope burns up and down his neck. I ask you now, does all of this suggest a man going willingly to his Maker?”

Hitchcock, I remember, was stroking the two bars on his blue coatee, as though to remind himself of his rank.

“What do you believe happened?” he asked.

“Oh, I have a theory, that’s all. Leroy Fry quits his barracks room sometime between the hours of ten o’clock and, say, eleven-thirty. He knows, of course, that in doing so, he runs a– I’m sorry, what risk is he running, Mr. Hitchcock?”

“Leaving the barracks after hours? That’s ten demerits.”

“Ten, is it? Well, then, he does run a risk, doesn’t he? Why? Is he longing to see the Hudson, like the charming Mr. Huntoon? Maybe so. Maybe your cadet corps harbors a secret squad of nature lovers. But in the case of Mr. Fry, I have to believe he has a special errand in mind. Only because someone is waiting for him.”

“And this someone… ?” said Dr. Marquis, leaving the question unsaid.

“For now, let’s assume it’s the someone who swatted him in the back of the head. Threw that noose round his neck. Drew it tight.”

I took a step away and smiled at the wall and then back at them and said, “Of course, it’s only a theory, gentlemen.”

“I think you are being a bit coy with us,” said Captain Hitchcock, the heat rising in his voice. “I can’t believe you would proffer a theory if you didn’t place some credence in it.”

“Ah yes,” I answered, “but tomorrow the ocean will sweep over it and… whoosh.” A silence then, broken only by the drip drip on the coffin trestle and the slow scuffing of Hitchcock’s boots… and at last Hitchcock’s own voice, sounding tauter with each word.

“In the meantime, Mr. Landor, you have left us with two mysteries where previously we had just one. According to you, we must find both Leroy Fry’s desecrator and Leroy Fry’s killer.”

“Unless,” said Dr. Marquis, tossing timid glances at us both, “it is the same mystery.”

Odd that he should have been the one to suggest it, but suggest it he did, and the silence that followed had a new quality. We were, all of us, I think, venturing up different roads, but feeling the same change in altitude.

“Well, Doctor,” I said, “the only fellow who can tell us is that poor boy right there.”

Leroy Fry was rocking ever so slightly in his bath–his eyes still ajar, his body still rigid. Soon, I knew, the rigor mortis would end, the joints would thaw… and maybe then, I thought, this body of his might yield up something.

That was when I noticed–noticed again, I should say–the balled-up fist of his left hand.

“Excuse me,” I said. “If you don’t mind.”

I think those were my words, but I was no more conscious of what I was saying than of what I was doing. I knew only that I had to get to Leroy Fry’s hand.

And because dragging it to the light would have meant hauling up the whole body, I contented myself with working just below the surface. The other two had no idea what I was up to until they heard the crack of Leroy Fry’s thumb being pried from his palm. Even traveling through alcohol, it was a savage sound, like a chicken getting its neck broken.

“Mr. Landor!”

“What on earth?”

The other fingers broke faster. Or maybe I just knew now how much force was needed.

Snap. Snap. Snap. Snap.

The claw lay open, and there in Leroy Fry’s hand was the tiniest of bundles, yellow and sodden and torn. A scrap of paper.

By the time I had lifted it to the light, Hitchcock and Marquis were on either side of me, and we read it together, our three sets of lips silently sounding, in the manner of students watching a line of Latin being chalked across a blackboard.

NG

HEIR A

T BE L

ME S “Well, it may be nothing,” I said, folding it back into its original shape and dropping it in my shirt pocket. I let out a long whistle and then, gazing into the faces of my companions, I said:

“Shall I put the fingers back the way I found them?”

I wasn’t a complete prisoner during my stay at the Academy. There would be times, over the span of the next several weeks, when my escort would step away for a brief while or let me veer a few yards off course. And for a minute, or two minutes, even, the tether would fall slack, and I would be standing alone in the heart of West Point, and my body would show itself to me again: the fringe of hair on my head, the rasp in my left lung, the twinge in my hip… and, coursing through it all, that beat beat beat, the cadence I’d felt in Thayer’s office. I took every symptom as a cause for rejoicing, for it meant there were parts of me that still lay apart from the Academy, and how many of the cadets, how many even of the officers, could say that?

So then let me take you back, Reader, to the moment when Captain Hitchcock and I (having left Dr. Marquis to mend the insults to Leroy Fry’s person) were stopped en route to the superintendent’s quarters by a certain Professor Church. The professor had himself a complaint, meant specially for Hitchcock’s ears. The two men drew themselves apart, and I sidled away a bit until I was standing in the superintendent’s garden. A pleasant little space: rhododendrons, asters, an oak tree spidered with rose vines. I closed my eyes and felt myself sinking into a copper beech. Alone.

Except I was not. From behind me stole a voice, speaking under great compression.

“Pardon.”

And that was when I turned and found him. Half hidden behind a Saint Michael’s pear tree. As unreal to me then as a leprechaun, for hadn’t I already watched (or heard) the cadets of the Academy being marched to breakfast, dinner, supper? Marched to class, parade, barracks? Marched to sleep, marched awake? I had come to think of these boys in the passive voice, and the idea that one of them could split from the ranks and pursue a mission of his own (more urgent than dipping a toe in the Hudson) was as likely to me as a rock sprouting feet.

“Pardon me, sir,” he said. “Are you Augustus Landor?”

“Yes.”

“Cadet Fourth Classman Poe, at your service.”

Start with this: he was too old. At least when set next to the other members of his class. Those boys still had garlands of pimple on their jaws, they had big hands and receding chests, and they startled easy, as if the schoolmaster’s switch were still singing in their ears. This plebe was different: the pimples had scarred over, and the bearing was erect, like that of an officer on convalescence.

“How do you do, Mr. Poe?”

Two strands of lank black hair hung down from the absurd leather cap, making a cameo of his eyes, which were hazel-gray and much too large for his face. His teeth, by contrast, were tiny and exquisite, the sort you might find on the necklace of a cannibal chieftain. Delicate teeth, as fitted his frame, for he was thin as straw, slight–except for that forehead, which even the hat could not contain. A pale and hulking thing, it bulged through its envelope, in the way an anaconda’s meal makes a knot of protest in its neck.

“Sir,” he said. “Unless I mistake, you have been tasked with solving the mystery surrounding Leroy Fry.”

“That’s so.”

The news had not yet been made official, but there seemed no point denying it. And in fact, the young man was under no illusion I would, though he did hesitate, long enough that I felt obliged to ask:

“What might I do for you, Mr. Poe?”

“Mr. Landor, I believe it incumbent upon me and the honor of this institution to divulge some of the conclusions which I have reached.”

“Conclusions…”

“Regarding l’affaire Fry.”

He threw back his head as he said it. I remember thinking that anyone who used a phrase like “l’affaire Fry” should probably throw back his head. Exactly like that.

“I’d be most interested to hear them, Mr. Poe.”

He made as if to speak, then stopped himself and cut his eyes both ways–assuring himself, I suppose, that no one could see–or, more likely, that I would pay him the greatest possible notice. Stepping at last from behind the tree, he stood in full view for the first time… and then leaned toward me (a hint of apology in this movement) and whispered in my ear:

“The man you’re looking for is a poet.”

And with that he touched his hat, took a deep bow, and marched away. When I next saw him, he had merged with no apparent effort into the stream of cadets proceeding to mess.

Lost in a cloud, most of our meetings. Only when someone becomes vital do we try to give that first encounter the importance it would later have… although, if we are to be honest, that man, that woman, was just a face or a circumstance. In this case, however, I have to believe my first impressions were every bit as full as the later ones. For the simple reason that nothing about him was quite right. Or would ever be.

Narrative of Gus Landor

6

October 28th

The very next day, I broke my vow of abstinence. It began, like all great falls, with the best of intentions. I was on my way home to gather some belongings when what should come my way but the steps leading to Benny Havens’ tavern? I could conclude only that Fate had brought me here. For wasn’t my mouth dry as bone? Wasn’t there a fine stack of hay in back for Horse? Weren’t there civilians inside?

And even when I passed through the doors of Benny’s Red House, I had no idea of taking a drink. One of Mrs. Havens’ buckwheat cakes, maybe. A glass of lemon juice and iced water. But Benny had made his famous flip–the hot iron had just been plunged into its eggs-and-ale bath–and the air crackled with caramel, and a fire shivered in the hearth, and before I knew it, I was sitting at the counter, and the missus was slicing up her roast turkey, and Benny was pouring the flip into a pewter flagon, and I was home again.

Here, on my right: Jasper Magoon, a former assistant editor at the New York Evening Post. Left the city (like me) for his health and was now, a scant five years later, half deaf and all blind, reduced to begging people to read the latest news into his left ear. Fair at Masonic Hall … Weekly Report of Deaths … Compound Syrup of Sarsaparilla. …

In that corner: Asher Lippard, an Episcopalian rector who nearly fell into the sea off Malta and, in a fit of reform, became one of the founders of the American Society for the Promotion of Temperance… before being taken by another fit of reform. He was now as devout a drinker as you could know. Took his drinking as seriously as a priest takes unction.

Next table over: Jack de Windt, in the midst of a lengthy lawsuit over claims he had invented the steamboat before Fulton. A local legend for two reasons: he paid for everything in Russian kopecks, and he backed only doomed candidates. Porter in ’17, Young in ’24, Rochester in ’26–if a ship was sinking somewhere, they said, de Windt would find it. But he was buoyant as a cork and would be pleased to tell you how, once the Fulton folk had given him his due, he would find the Northwest Passage–he was even now looking for dogs.

And here was Benny himself, tender of these sheared sheep. A short man, well into his thirties, with an old man’s mouth and a young man’s eyes and a thatch of black hair tousled by sweat. A prideful man: he might be serving bargemen and idlers, but you’d never find him in anything but a boiled shirt and bow tie. And though by most accounts Benny had lived his whole life in the Hudson Valley, you could often hear a brogue nagging at his vowels.

“Now did I ever tell you, Landor, about Jim Donegan’s daddy? The village sexton he was. Dressed up the corpses for funerals, put on their best clothes and such, tied their neckties for ’em. Well, whenever my pal Jim needed help getting his tie on, his daddy said, “Now, Jim, I’ll have you lie down on this here bed, there’s a boy. And close your eyes, would you? And yes, put your arms crost your chest just so.” I’m telling you, it was the only way he could dress his sons. Man had to lay down just to dress himself. And never gave a thought to how he looked from behind, for who ever sees a dead man’s ass?”

At Benny Havens’, you won’t find any of the cocktails served in Manhattan’s finer saloons. It’s raw whiskey and bourbon, thank you, it’s rum and it’s beer, and if someone is a bit out of his senses, perhaps a root beer passed off as bourbon. But do not think, Reader, our Benny is as common as his surroundings. He and his wife (as they themselves will be the first to tell you, voices tottery with pride) are the only U.S. citizens enjoined by law from setting foot on West Point. On account of their being caught a few years back running whiskey onto the reservation.

“You ask me now, the Congress should’ve given us a medal,” is what Benny Havens says. “Soldiers need drink same as they need grapeshot.”
The cadets have been inclined to see it Benny’s way, and when they are parched enough, they take their chances and run it to the Havens establishment. And if by chance they can’t, there is always Benny’s barmaid, Patsy, to ferry a load right onto the reservation under cover of darkness. This is the way preferred by many cadets, for Patsy is never too proud, they say, to add herself to the bill of sale. It’s possible (and don’t think we haven’t placed bets) that at least two dozen cadets have been led into the female mystery by our Patsy. And yet who can be sure? Patsy talks about everything but the act itself, and it may well be that she’s only squeezing herself into the idea that people have of barmaids. Playing a type, as it were, and also contemplating this type from a great remove. In truth, I can vouch for her giving herself to only one man, and he’s not likely to brag to anyone.

Here she came now: in passage from the scullery, all black eyes and batiste drawers. Bonnet too small, hips a touch wide (for some tastes). “My angel,” I cried, not insincerely.

“Gus,” she said.

Her voice was as flat as a table, but it didn’t stop Jack de Windt. “Ohh,” he moaned. “I’m a famished man, Miss Patsy.”

“Mm,” she said. “Hum.” And passed her hands across her eyes and disappeared into the kitchen.

“What’s grieving her?” I asked.

“Oh.” Blind Jasper shook his head darkly. “You’ll have to excuse her, Landor. She lost one of her boys.”

“That so?”

“You must have heard,” said Benny. “Fellow name of Fry. Once gave me a Macintosh blanket for two shots of whiskey. Not his own blanket, goes without saying. Well, the poor devil hanged himself the other night…” Casting his eyes left and right, he leaned into me and, in the loudest possible whisper, added, “What I heard? Pack of wolves tore the liver right out of his body.” He straightened again, wiped a tankard with great care. “Ah, but why’m I telling you, Landor? You’ve been up at the Point yourself.”

“Where’d you hear that, Benny?”

“The whippoorwill, I think.”

The smaller the town, the faster word gets around. And Buttermilk Falls is nothing but small. Even its citizens are a mite smaller than the mean. Except for a gigantic tinplate peddler who blows in twice a year, I may well be the tallest man about.

“Whippoorwills are chatty beasts,” said Blind Jasper, nodding sullenly.

“Listen, Benny,” I said. “You ever talk to Fry yourself ?”

“Once or twice, is all. Poor lad needed help with his conic sections.”

“Oh,” said Jack, “I don’t think it was his conic sections he wanted help with.” He might have said more in the same line, but Patsy was coming out again, with a plate of bannocks. Shamed us into silence. Only when she passed within a foot of me did I dare to touch her hem.

“I’m sorry, Patsy. I didn’t know this Fry fellow was…”

“He wasn’t,” she said. “Not in that way. But he wanted to be, and that has to count for something, don’t you think?”

“Tell us,” said Jasper, half panting. “What kept him out of your favor, Patsy?”

“Nothing he could help. But Lord, you know I like a darker coloring in a man. Red hair is all well on top, but it won’t do below. It’s one of my principles.” She set down the plate and frowned at the floor. “I can’t understand what would possess a boy to do such a thing to himself. When he’s too young even to do it proper.”

“What do you mean, “proper’?” I asked.

“Why, Gus, he couldn’t even measure the rope right. They say it took him three hours to die.”

” “They,’ Patsy? Who is this “they’?”

She thought about it for some moments before lowering her original estimate. “Him,” is what she said, nudging her head toward the far corner.

This was the corner farthest from Benny’s fire, occupied on this particular evening by a young cadet. His musket rested against the wall behind him. His leather cap lay at the very edge of the table. His black hair was smeared with sweat, and his pale swollen head bobbed in the half shadows.

Hard to say how many rules he’d broken by coming here. Leaving the West Point reservation without authorization… visiting a place where spirituous liquors were sold… visiting said place for the purpose of drinking said liquors. Many another cadet, of course, had broken these same rules, but almost always at night, when the watchdogs were abed. This was the first time I’d seen Benny’s broached in daylight.

He never saw me coming, Cadet Fourth Classman Poe. Whether it was reverie or stupor, I can’t say, but I stood there a good half minute, waiting for him to lift his head, and I had about given up on him when I heard faint sounds coming from somewhere in his neighborhood: words, maybe, or spells.

“Afternoon,” I said.

His head snapped back; his enormous gray eyes swiveled. “Oh, it’s you!” he cried.

Half tipping his chair over, he rose and seized my hand and began pumping it.

“Dear me. Sit. Yes, sit down, won’t you please? Mr. Havens! Another drink for my friend here.”

“And who would be paying?” I heard Benny mutter, but the young cadet must not have heard, for he beckoned me toward him and, under his breath, said, “Mr. Havens, there…” “What’s he saying about me, Landor?”

Laughing, Poe cupped his hands round his mouth. “Mr. Havens is the only congenial man in this whole godforsaken desert!”

“And it’s touched I am to hear it.”

There was, I should make this clear, a doubleness to everything Benny said. You had to be a long-timer to catch it: the thing said and the comment on the thing said, both happening at the same moment. Poe was not a long-timer, and so his impulse was to say his piece again– louder.

“In this whole benighted, godforsaken … den of… rapacious philistines. The only one, may God strike me down if I’m a liar!”

“You’ll make me weep, you go on, Mr. Poe.”

“And his lovely wife,” said the young man. “And Patsy. The blessed… the Hebe of the Highlands!” Pleased with this coinage, he raised his glass to the woman who had inspired it.

“How many drinks would this be?” I asked, sounding uncomfortably like Sylvanus Thayer to my own ears.

“I don’t recall,” he said.

In fact, four empty glasses lay in formation alongside his right elbow. He caught me in the act of counting them.

“Not mine, Mr. Landor, I assure you. It appears Patsy isn’t keeping the place as neat as she might. Owing to grief.”

“You do seem a bit… liquid, Mr. Poe.”

“You’re referring, probably, to my fearfully delicate constitution. It takes but one drink to rob me of my senses. Two, and I’m staggering like a pugilist. It’s a medical condition, corroborated by several eminent physicians.”

“Most unfortunate, Mr. Poe.”

With the curtest of nods, he accepted my sympathy.

“Now, maybe,” I said, “before you start staggering, you can tell me something.”

“I would be honored.”

“How did you come to learn about the position of Leroy Fry’s body?”

The question affected him as an insult. “Why, from Huntoon, of course. He’s been spouting the news like a town crier. Perhaps someone will hang him before long.”
” “Hang him,” ” I repeated. “I assume you don’t mean to imply that someone hanged Mr. Fry?”

“I don’t mean to imply anything.”

“Tell me, then. Why do you think the man who took Leroy Fry’s heart was a poet?”

This was a different sort of inquiry, for he was all business now. Pushing away his glass. Correcting the sleeves of his coatee.

“Mr. Landor,” he said, “the heart is symbol, or it is nothing. Take away the symbol, and what do you have? A fistful of muscle, of no more aesthetic interest than a bladder. To remove a man’s heart is to traffic in symbol. Who better equipped for such labor than a poet?”

“An awfully literal-minded poet, it seems to me.”

“Oh, you cannot tell me, Mr. Landor, you cannot pretend that this act of savagery did not startle literary resonances from the very crevices of your mind. Shall I delineate my own train of association? I thought in the first moment of Childe Harold: “The heart will break, yet brokenly live on.” My next thought was for Lord Suckling’s charming song: “I prithee send me back my heart / Since I cannot have thine.” The surprise, given how little use I have for religious orthodoxy, is how often I am thrown back on the Bible: “Create in me a clean heart, O God.”… “A broken and contrite heart, O God, thou wilt not despise.” ”

“Then we might just as easily be seeking a religious maniac, Mr. Poe.”

“Ah!” He brought his fist down on the table. “A statement of creed, is that what you’re saying? Go back to the original Latin, then: the verb credere is derived from the noun cardia, meaning–meaning “heart,” yes? In English, of course, heart has no predicative form. Hence we translate credo as “I believe,” when literally it means “I set my heart’ or “I place my heart.” A matter not of denying the body, in other words, nor of transcending it, but rather of expropriating it. A trajectory of secular faith.” Smiling grimly, he leaned back in his chair. “In other words, poetry.”

Maybe he saw the corners of my mouth shrink, for he seemed all at once to be questioning himself… and then just as suddenly, he laughed and rapped himself on the temple.

“I neglected to tell you, Mr. Landor! I am a poet myself. Hence inclined to think as one. I cannot help myself, you see.”

“Another medical condition, Mr. Poe?”

“Yes,” he said, unblinking. “I shall have to donate my body to science.”

It was the first time I figured him for being good at cards. For he was able to carry a bluff as far as it could go.

“I’m afraid I don’t get round to poetry much,” I said.

“Why should you?” he replied. “You’re an American.”

“And you, Mr. Poe?” “An artist. That is to say, without country.”

He liked the sound of this, too. Let it revolve in the air, like a doubloon.

“Well, now,” I said, standing to go. “I do thank you, Mr. Poe. You’ve been a great help.”

“Oh!” He grabbed my arm and drew me back down. (Great force in those slender fingers.) “You’ll want a second look at a cadet named Loughborough.”

“Why is that, Mr. Poe?”

“At evening parade last night, I happened to notice his steps were amiss.

He repeatedly confused “left face’ with “about face.” This indicated to me a mind laboring under distraction. In addition, his demeanor at mess this morning was altered.”

“And what would that tell us?”

“Well, if you were acquainted with him, you would know that he jabbers more than Cassandra, and to similar effect. No one listens, you see, not even his best friends. Today, he desired no listeners.”

As though to dramatize the scene, he draped his face with an invisible veil and sat there, as wrapped in thought as Loughborough himself. There was this difference, though: Poe brightened in a flash, as though someone had tossed a match into him.

“I don’t think I mentioned,” he said. “Loughborough was, in former days, Leroy Fry’s roommate. Until they had a falling out, the nature of which remains uncertain.”

“Strange you should know of this, Mr. Poe.”

A lazy shrug. “Someone must have told me,” he said, “for how else would I know? People do tend to confide in me, Mr. Landor. I hail from a long line of Frankish chieftains. From the dawn of civilization, great trusts have been placed in us; these trusts have never been misplaced.”

Once again, the head was thrown back in that accent of defiance–the gesture I remembered from the superintendent’s garden. He would brave any scorn.

“Mr. Poe,” I said, “you’ll pardon me. I’m still getting a fix on the Academy’s comings and goings, but it seems to me more than likely you’re expected somewhere.”

He gave me the wildest look just then, as if I’d jostled him from a fever dream. Shoved his glass away and sprang to his feet.

“What time is it?” he gasped.

“Ohhh, let’s see,” I said, drawing the watch from my pocket. “Twenty… twenty-two minutes past three.”

No reply. “p.m.,” I added.

Behind those gray eyes, something began to kindle.

“Mr. Havens,” he announced, “I shall have to make good next time.”

“Oh, there’s always next time, Mr. Poe.”

As calmly as he could, he put the leather pot back on his head, rebuck-led the yellow-brass bullet buttons, grasped his musket. Easily done: five months of cadet routine had left their stamp on him. Walking, though, this was another thing. He crossed the floor with great care, as though he were stepping over a creek bed, and upon reaching the door, he steadied himself against the lintel and, smiling, said:

“Ladies. Gentlemen. I bid you good day.”

Then he flung himself through the open door.

I don’t know what drove me after him. I would like to think I had some concern for his welfare, but more likely, he was a story that had not ended. And so I followed… hard on his heels… and as we passed up the stone steps, I heard a measured tramp of boots, echoing from the south and fast converging on us.

Poe was already running toward the sound. And when he reached the topmost step, he turned and gave me a fractured smile and put a finger to his lips before twining his head round the trunk of an elm tree to see what was coming up the butt road.

There came the familiar rattle of the drum and then, through the frames of the trees, the silhouettes of bodies. It was a double rank of cadets, mounting a long hill and already, by the looks of things, halfway through a day march. Slowly they came, bodies tipped forward, shoulders slumping beneath knapsacks. So exhausted they gave us not a sidelong glance as they passed, but simply threaded by, and only when they were nearly out of sight did Poe set off in pursuit, gradually shrinking the distance between him and them. Fifteen feet… ten… and at last he was abreast, marching into the very back of the column–tucking himself in as safely as an acorn–and then off he went, over the crest of the hill and into a shower of russet leaves, nothing to separate him from his fellows but his carriage, slightly stiffened, and this, too: a brief farewell flutter of his hand as he disappeared from view.

I watched a few moments longer, not quite willing to break the memory of him. Then I turned back to the tavern, where I arrived just in time to hear the Reverend Lippard say, “I’d have joined the Army myself if I’d known you could drink so regular.”

Narrative of Gus Landor

7

October 29th

The next order of business was to interview Leroy Fry’s intimates. Lined up, they were, outside the officers’ dining rooms–grim young men with lips greased by dinner. As they came in, Hitchcock returned their salutes and said, “Stand at ease,” and they clasped their hands behind their backs and pushed out their jaws and if that is “at ease,” Reader, you can have it. It took them a minute or two to understand that I would be the one questioning them, and still they kept their eyes fixed on the commandant, and when the interview was finished, they asked, still looking at Hitchcock, “Will that be all, sir?” Yes, the commandant said, and they saluted and stalked out, and in this way, a dozen or so cadets passed in and out of our care in under an hour. After the last of them left, Hitchcock turned to me and said, “I’m afraid we’ve wasted your time.”

“Why is that, Captain?”

“No one knows anything of Fry’s last hours. No one saw him leaving barracks. We’re right where we began.”

“Hm. Would someone mind fetching Mr. Stoddard again?”

Back came Stoddard, wriggling like an alewife. A second classman from South Carolina. Son of a sorghum planter. He had a purple-black mole on his cheek, and he had a record, poor soul: some 120 demerits to his name, and two months still left in the year. He was ripe for dismissal.

“Captain Hitchcock,” I said, “if a cadet could give us some insight into Leroy Fry’s last hours, maybe we’d consider, oh, passing over any offenses he might have committed?”

After some hesitation, it was so ordered.

“And now, Mr. Stoddard,” I said. “I’m wondering if you’ve told us quite all you can.”

No, he hadn’t. Seems on the night of October twenty-fifth, this Stoddard had been coming back late from a friend’s room. It was a good hour or so after tattoo when he crept up the stairs of North Barracks, only to hear the sound of descending feet. It was Sergeant Locke, he thought, on one of his nighttime rounds. He pressed himself as far into the wall as he could go and listened as the steps drew closer…

He needn’t have worried. It was only Leroy Fry.

“And how did you know who it was?” I asked.

Stoddard hadn’t, at first. But Fry, as he descended, grazed his elbow against Stoddard’s shoulder and then cried, in a sharp voice:

Who’s there?

It’s me, Leroy.

Julius? Any officers about?

No, all clear.

Fry continued down the steps, and Stoddard, not knowing this was the last time he would see his friend, went straight to bed and slept till reveille.
“Oh, this is most helpful, Mr. Stoddard. And now I wonder what else you might tell us. How did Mr. Fry look, for instance?”

Ah, it had been so very dark in that stairwell he couldn’t trust himself to say much on that account.

“Did you see anything else on his person, Mr. Stoddard? A length of rope, something along those lines?”

None that he could see. It’d been dark… considerable dark…

No, stop a bit, he said. There was something. As Fry was leaving, Stoddard had called after him:

Where are you off to at such an hour?

And this was what Leroy Fry had said:

Necessary business.

A bit of a joke, you see. When cadets have to relieve themselves at night–don’t care to leave it in the chamber pot–they hie themselves to the outdoor privies, and if met by an officer, they have only to say, “Necessary business, sir,” and they are suffered to pass (though expected back soon). But what stuck with Stoddard in this instance was the weight Fry had laid on the first word.

Necessary. Necessary business.

“And what did you take that to mean, Mr. Stoddard?”

He didn’t know. Fry was half whispering, so it had all come out a little gaspy.

“He sounded urgent, then?”

Maybe he was urgent. Maybe he was just having a lark.

“So he seemed cheerful to you?”

Cheerful enough, yes. Not like a man who was ready to snuff his own taper. But then you never can say, can you? Stoddard had once had an uncle who one minute was lathering up his face and whistling “Hey, Betty Martin” and next minute was drawing the razor across his throat. Never even finished shaving.

Well, that was all Cadet Julius Stoddard had to tell us. He left us that afternoon with a tinge of regret… and a bashful sort of pride, too. I had seen it in the other cadets as well. They were all glad to claim their connection with Leroy Fry. Not because he was great or good, but because he was dead.

Hitchcock watched him go and, without taking his eyes off the door, asked the question that was foremost on his mind.

“How did you know, Mr. Landor?” “About Stoddard, you mean? His shoulders, I think. I’m sure you’ve noticed, Captain, when cadets are interviewed in the presence of officers, a certain tension creeps into their bodies. Beyond the normal, I mean.”

“I know it well. We call it the examination hunch.”

“Well, of course, once the ordeal is over, the shoulders naturally go back to their starting point. Not so with Mr. Stoddard. He left the room just as he entered.”

Hitchcock’s handsome brown eyes regarded me for a short while. The possibility of a smile played along his lips. Then he said, with almost too much gravity:

“Are there any other cadets to be called back, Mr. Landor?”

“Not back, no. But I would enjoy a talk with Cadet Loughborough, if you please.”

This took a little more doing. Dinner was done, and Loughborough was in his natural and experimental philosophy section–standing before the blackboard, when the call came like a reprieve from above. It stopped being a reprieve, probably, when he came into that room and saw the commandant, arms folded on the table, and me… what did he make of me, I wonder? He was a short-limbed fellow from Delaware, with dumplings for cheeks and shiny obsidian eyes that looked in rather than out.

“Mr. Loughborough,” I said. “You were Mr. Fry’s roommate, I believe.”

“Yes, sir. When we were plebes.”

“And you later had a falling out?”

“Oh. Well, as to that, sir, I wouldn’t perhaps call it a falling out. More a matter of diverging paths, sir. I think that’s closer to the fact of it.”

“And what was it made you diverge?”

A crease formed in his brow. “Oh, nothing so… matter of course, I’d say.”

He winced as Captain Hitchcock’s voice rang out.

“Mr. Loughborough. If you know of anything pertaining to Mr. Fry, you’re bound to disclose it. At once.”

I felt for the boy, I admit. If he really was a prattler, as Poe had said, it must have pained him to be at a loss for words.

“It’s like this, sir,” he said. “Ever since I heard about Cadet Fry, I’ve been reviewing a certain incident in my mind.”

“When did this incident take place?” I asked.

“A long time ago, sir. Two years.” “Not so long. Please go on.”

And then he said: “I won’t tell, goddamn you.”

No, what he said was: “It was an evening in May.”

“May of eighteen twenty-eight?”

“Yes, sir. I remember because my sister had just written to tell me she was marrying Gabriel Guild, and the letter got here just a week before the wedding, and I had to reply in care of my uncle down in Dover, for I knew my sister would be stopping there the week after her wedding, which was the first week in June–”

“Thank you, Mr. Loughborough.” (He had found his wellspring.) “Let’s move on to the incident itself, may we? Can you tell us–in brief–what happened on that particular evening?”

He had his task now. His brows bore down on it. “Leroy ran it,” he said.

“Where did he go?”

“I don’t know, sir. He just told me to cover for him best I could.”

“And he came back the next morning?”

“Yes, sir. Though he got hived for missing the reveille roll call.”

“And he never told you where he’d gone?”

“No, sir.” He glanced briefly at Hitchcock. “But it seemed to me he was a bit on the troubled side afterward.”

“Troubled?”

“And I only say that, sir, because even though he could be shy on first meeting, it wasn’t so hard to get him talking once you got to know him, and now he didn’t wish to talk at all, which I didn’t take too hard except he had trouble even looking at me. I kept asking if I’d offended him somehow, but he said no, it wasn’t me. I asked him–seeing how we were best pals of a sort–who it was.”

“He wouldn’t tell you.”

“That’s the long and short of it, sir. But one night, this was sometime in July, he allowed as how… he said he’d fallen in with a bad bunch.”

Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Hitchcock lean forward in his seat, just the merest inch.

“Bad bunch?” I repeated. “Those were the words he used?”

“Yes, sir.”

“He didn’t tell you the–the nature of this bunch.” “No, sir. I told him, of course, if there was anything of an illegal nature going on, he was bound to report it.” The second classman smiled at Hitchcock, waiting for a sign of approval, which never came.

“By “bunch,” did he mean other cadets, Mr. Loughborough?”

“He never said. I guess I assumed it was cadets because who else does a fellow see here? Unless, of course, Leroy got mixed up with some bombardiers, sir.”

I’d been at the Point long enough to know that the “bombardiers” were members of the artillery regiment that shares space with the cadet corps. They’re regarded by the cadets the way a farmer’s pretty daughter regards an old mule: necessary but lacking in glamour. As for the bombardiers, they think the cadets as coddled as any egg.

“So, Mr. Loughborough. Despite all your best efforts, your friend would give you no more on the subject. And over time, the two of you… I think diverged was the word you used.”

“I suppose so, sir. He never wanted to loiter about the room anymore or go for a swim. Even the cadet hops, he stayed away. And then he went and joined the prayer squad for a piece.”

Hitchcock’s hands were sliding apart: farther, farther.

“Well, that’s curious,” I said. “He found religion, did he?”

“I wouldn’t… I mean, I never knew he’d lost it, sir. I don’t think he stuck with it too long, though. He was always one to complain about chapel. But by that time, he’d fallen in with a new crowd, and I suppose I was still the old crowd, and that’s–that’s how it flies, sir.”

“And this new crowd? Would you know any of their names?”

Five names, that was as many as he could conjure, and they were all in the group we had just interviewed. And still Loughborough kept throwing out the same names, over and over again, slathering them with lore… until Hitchcock raised his hand and asked:

“Why didn’t you come forward earlier?”

Caught in midphrase, the young man’s lips flapped open. “Well, there it is, sir. I wasn’t–I didn’t quite see that it had any bearing. Happening so long ago.”

“All the same,” I said, “we’re most obliged, Mr. Loughborough. And if you think of anything else that might be helpful, please don’t hesitate.”

The second classman nodded to me and saluted to Hitchcock and went to the door. There he stopped.

“Is there anything else?” Hitchcock asked.

We were back to this Loughborough, the one who’d first walked into the room. “Sir,” he said. “There’s a–there’s a particular concern, you might say, I’ve been grappling with. Pertaining to ethics.”
“Yes?”

“If a fellow knows his friend is bothered over something, and this friend goes and does something… untoward… well, then, my dilemma revolves around, should the original fellow feel accountability? Thinking maybe if he’d been a better friend, then the friend in question might still be here, and everything would be, on the whole, better?”

Hitchcock gave his ear a pinch. “I think, Mr. Loughborough, in the hypothetical case you propose, the fellow could enjoy a clear conscience. He did his very best.”

“Thank you, sir.”

“Is there anything else?”

“No, sir.”

Loughborough was almost out the door when Hitchcock’s voice went charging after him.

“The next time you present yourself before an officer, Mr. Loughborough, you will take care to button your coatee all the way down. One demerit.”

My gentleman’s contract with the Academy demanded that I have regular meetings with Hitchcock. On this occasion, Thayer asked if he could also be present.

We gathered in his parlor. Molly brought us johnny cakes and beef dodgers; Thayer poured the tea; the grandfather clock in the hallway ticked away the intervals; the burgundy curtains held the sun off. Horror, Reader.

A full twenty minutes passed before anyone dared to bring up business, and even then it was nothing more than general queries as to my progress. But at precisely thirteen minutes to five, Superintendent Thayer laid his teacup on the table, laced his fingers together in his lap.

“Mr. Landor,” he said. “Is it still your belief that Leroy Fry was murdered?”

“It is.”

“And are we any closer to knowing the murderer’s identity?”

“I’ll only know when I’m there.”

He gave this some thought. Then, after nibbling a dime-sized hole in a johnny cake, he asked:

“Is it still your belief that the two crimes are linked? The murder and the desecration?”

“Well, as to that, all I’ll say is, you can’t take out a fellow’s heart before he’s ready to give it up.”

“And that means?”

“Colonel, how likely is it that two different people, on the very same night in October, should have had evil designs on Leroy Fry?”
It was not a question, I could see, that Thayer hadn’t already asked himself. But hearing it still had its effect. The grooves round his mouth cut deeper into his skin.

“So,” he said, more quietly. “You are acting on the assumption that one man is behind both crimes.”

“One man and an accomplice, maybe. But for now, let’s just say one. That seems a good place to start.”

“And it was merely Mr. Huntoon’s intervention that kept this man from removing Leroy Fry’s heart on the spot?”

“For now, let’s suppose that.”

“Having been diverted from his task–please correct me if I go too far–the man thereupon seized his chance to abduct Mr. Fry’s body from the hospital, and then proceeded to carry out his original intention?”

“Let’s suppose that, too.”

“And the man in question. Is he one of us?”

Hitchcock stood abruptly and faced me head on, as if he were making to block my escape.

“What Colonel Thayer and I would like to know,” he said, “is whether any others of our cadets may be in danger from this madman.”

“And that’s the one thing I can’t tell you. I’m very sorry.”

They took it as well as they could. I had the feeling they almost pitied me for being so ignorant. They poured themselves more tea and busied themselves with questions of a narrower nature. Wanted to know, for instance, what I made of the scrap of paper I’d pried from Leroy Fry’s palm. (I told them I was still working it over.) Wanted to know if I’d care to interview faculty members. (Yes, I said, anyone who’d ever taught Leroy Fry.) If I’d be interviewing other cadets. (Yes, anyone who’d ever known Leroy Fry.)

It was a sedate deadly time there in Colonel Thayer’s parlor, with the clock puttering along in the background. We were all quiet before long, all except for me, for my heart had begun to shake from its very root. Thumpeta. Thumpeta.

“Are you feeling poorly, Mr. Landor?”

I brushed a ring of sweat from my temple. I said:

“Gentlemen, if it’s all right, I’d like to beg a favor from you.”

“Name it.”

They were expecting me, probably, to ask for a cool towel or a draft of air. This was what they heard instead: “I’d like to engage one of your cadets as my assistant.” I knew, as I said it, I was trespassing. Thayer and Hitchcock had been careful, from the start of our relationship, to hold the line between military and civilian. Yet here was I, ready to undo their work, and oh, it roused them. Down went the teacups, up snapped the heads, out came all their calm, good, reasoned reasons… I had to clap my hands over my ears to make them stop.

“Please! You don’t follow me, gentlemen. There’s nothing statutory about this position. I’m looking for someone to be my eyes and ears within the cadet corps. My agent, if you like. As far as I’m concerned, the fewer people know about it, the better.”

Hitchcock’s eyes flared a little as he looked at me. In that gentle voice of his, he asked:

“You’re looking for someone to spy on his fellow cadets?”

” To be our spy, yes. That won’t do too much violence to the Army’s honor, will it?”

And still they resisted. Hitchcock gave the utmost attention to his teacup. Thayer kept brushing the same speck of lint from his blue sleeve.

I got up from my seat and strode to the far side of the room.

“Gentlemen,” I said, “you’ve tied my hands. I may not go freely among your cadets, I may not speak to them without your leave, I may not do this and this. Even if I could,” I said, raising my hand to Thayer’s objection, “even if I could, where would it get me? If young men can do nothing else, they can keep secrets. With all due respect, Colonel Thayer, your system forces them to keep secrets. Which will only be revealed to one of their own.”

Did I really believe that? I don’t know. I’ve found that saying you believe something can, on occasion, pass for the real thing. At the very least, it silenced Thayer and Hitchcock.

And then–slowly–they came round. I don’t recall who budged first, but one of them did, just a fraction. I assured them their precious cadet could still go to his recitals and drills, meet all his duties, keep his class standing. I told them he would get grand experience in intelligence gathering, which in turn would bode well for his career prospects. Medals, ribbons… a whole glorious future…

Yes, they came round. Which is not to say they truly warmed to the idea, but before too long, they were bunting names at each other like croquet balls. What of Clay, Junior? What of Du Pont? Kibby was the soul of discretion, Ridgely had a quiet resourcefulness…

In my seat now, with a corncake in my palm, smiling milkily, I leaned toward them.

“And what would you say to Cadet Poe?” I asked.

Their silence I took at first to mean they did not recognize the name. I was wrong.

“Poe?”

The objections were almost too many to consider. Start with this: Poe was a fourth classman who had not yet sat for examinations. Add this: in his short time at the Academy, he had already become a disciplinary problem. (There was a shock.) He had been marked down for missing evening parade, class parade, and guard mounting. He had betrayed, in several instances, a spirit of mild insolence. Last month, his name had shown up on a list of top cadet offenders. His current ranking was…

“Seventy-first,” said Thayer, promptly. “Among eighty in his class.” That a mere plebe, checkered, untried, should be given preferment over cadets who were his superiors in class, rank, and deportment would set a terrible example… a… a precedent without precedent…

I heard them out–being military, they rather insisted on that–and then, once they were done, I said, “Gentlemen, let me remind you. This job, by its very nature, cannot go to anyone in the upper ranks. The cadet officers–well, it’s widely known they report to you, is it not? If I had something to hide, believe me, I wouldn’t take it to a cadet officer. I’d take it to a–a Poe.”

Thayer did a strange thing just then: he plied the corners of his eyes– stretched out the skin to reveal the red membrane beneath.

“Mr. Landor,” he said. “This is highly irregular.”

“This whole business is a bit irregular, isn’t it?” With a touch of roughness, I added, “It was Poe put me onto this Loughborough fellow. He has powers of observation. Which, I allow, are buried in a load of cockalorum. But I’m a good sifter, gentlemen.”

To my right, I heard Hitchcock’s voice, hushed with amazement. “Do you honestly believe Poe is suited to this?”

“Well, I don’t know. But he does show signs of it, yes.” Seeing Thayer shake his head, I said: “And if he fails to suit, then I’ll take one of your Clays or Du Ponts and call it a bargain.”

Hitchcock’s hands were tented over his mouth, so that his words, as they came forth, sounded as if they were already being taken back. “Regarded strictly on academic grounds,” he said, “Poe is rather strong. Even Berard can’t deny he has intellect.”

“Nor can Ross,” said Thayer, dismal.

“One might also argue that, relative to some of the other plebes, he’s not completely immature. His prior service, perhaps, gives him a certain poise.”

And so, for the first time that afternoon, I learned something.

“Poe’s been in the Army?” I asked.

“He was an enlisted man for three years, I believe, before coming here.”

“Well, that takes me aback, gentlemen. He told me he was a poet.”

“Oh, he is,” said Hitchcock, smiling sadly. “I am the beneficiary of two of his volumes.”

“Do they have any merit?”

“Some merit, yes. Very little sense, or at least none that my poor faculties can make out. I believe he drank too much Shelley at a young age.”

“Would that were all he drank,” murmured Thayer. You’ll excuse me, Reader, if I paled at this last remark. It was less than twenty-four hours since I’d watched Cadet Poe totter away from Benny Havens’, and it would not have shocked me to learn that Thayer had posted eyeballs on every trunk and vine.

“Well,” I said, talking faster, “I’m relieved to know the poet business pans out. He strikes me as the sort who likes making up stories. Just so he may be at the center of something.”

“Intriguing stories, too,” Hitchcock said. “He has told no fewer than three people that he is the grandson of Benedict Arnold.”

I suppose it was the madness of it that caught me in the midsection, sent a laugh spinning through that cool airless sleepy parlor. To make such a claim at West Point–the very place that General Arnold had plotted to hand over to King George–the place he would have handed over if Major Andre hadn’t gotten himself arrested–oh, that was beyond gumption.

It was certainly not a claim to endear yourself to Sylvanus Thayer. His lips, I noticed, were unusually thin, and his eyes had gone almost blue with cold as he turned to Hitchcock and said, “You’ve forgotten Poe’s most intriguing story. He claims to be a murderer.”

There was a rather long pause after that one. I could see Hitchcock shaking his head and grimacing at the floor.

“Well,” I said, “you can’t believe a tale like that. The young man I met wouldn’t–wouldn’t take a human–”

“If I believed it,” Thayer snapped, “he would no longer be a cadet at the U.S. Military Academy. Of that you may be sure.” He picked up his teacup again, drained away the last bitter remnants. “The question, Mr. Landor, is whether you believe it.” The cup wobbled on his knee and slipped, but Thayer’s hand was already sliding forward to catch it. “I suppose,” he said, half yawning, “if you’re so very keen on using this Poe fellow, you might want to ask him yourself.”

Narrative of Gus Landor

8

October 30th

Once all the dust had cleared, the only question left was how best to broach this Poe fellow. Hitchcock liked the idea of dragging him into some cockloft for a clandestine encounter. Me, I inclined toward approaching him in plain view, the better to hide what we were doing. Which was why, on Wednesday morning, Hitchcock and I went as unannounced visitors to Poe’s morning sectional, headed by one Claudius Berard.

Monsieur Berard was a native Frenchman with a history of evasion. As a young man in the days of Napoleon, he had avoided army duty by the civilized means of hiring a substitute. This had worked out very well until the substitute thoughtlessly took a cannonball in Spain, leaving M. Berard once again in line for duty. No fool, he picked up and fled overseas, where he made himself into a roving French instructor, first at Dickinson College and then, yes, the United States Military Academy. No matter how far you fly, the army will have you. And if that be the case, M. Berard must have thought, how much nicer to serve out your time in the Hudson Highlands, listening to American youths grind the French language into meal. And yet had this not proved to be a torment as deep as any he had risked back home? M. Berard had reason, in short, to question himself, and this skeptical note never left him, it formed a moving black speck in the center of his eye even as he remained utterly still.

Now, though, at the sight of his commandant, he jumped straight to his feet, and the cadets likewise rose from their backless benches. Hitchcock waved them back down and motioned me to a pair of seats just inside the door.

Sinking back into his chair, M. Berard gazed with blue-veined lids at the fourth classman who stood unguarded in the center of the room, squinting into a red-leather quarto.

“Continue, Mr. Plunkett,” said the Frenchman.

This unfortunate cadet once more clawed his way through the over-brush of prose: “He arrived to an inn and put away his horse. He then ate… a hearty dinner on bread and… poison.”

“Ah, Mr. Plunkett,” said the instructor. “That would not be a very palatable meal, even to a cadet. Poisson translates as “fish’.”

So corrected, the cadet made ready to resume until he was stopped by M. Berard’s plump white hand.

“Enough. You may be seated. The next time, I entreat you to take greater care with your prepositions. One-point-three is your grade.”

Three more cadets broke themselves on the same book, coming away with grades of 2.5, 1.9, and 2.1, respectively. Another pair labored away at the blackboard, conjugating verbs to similar effect. No one spoke a word of French. Their whole end in learning the tongue was to translate military texts, and many a lad must have asked himself why he was wasting his time with bread and poison when he might instead be taking down Jomini’s theories on terrain. It was left to M. Berard to make the case for Voltaire and Lesage, and he was too weary. Only once, ten minutes before the end of the recital, did he see fit to rouse himself. Which is to say, he pressed his hands together and inflected his voice ever so slightly upward.

“Mr. Poe, please.”

From the far side of the room, a head jerked to attention; a body sprang forth.

“Mr. Poe. Would you please translate the following passage from Chapter Two of Histoire de Gil Blas?”

Three paces brought the cadet to the center of the room. Fronted by Berard, flanked by his peers, watched by the commandant: he was on the spot, and he knew it. Opening the book, he cleared his throat–twice– and began.

“While they were preparing my eggs, I joined in conversation with the landlady, whom I had never seen before. She struck me as pretty enough. …”

Two things were clear right away. First, he knew more French than the others. And second, he wanted to make this rendition of Gil Blas linger for generations unborn. “He came up to me with a friendly air: “I have just heard that you are’ … oh, shall we say, “the eminent Gil Blas of Santillane, the ornament of Oviedo and the torch’ –sorry, “the leading light of philosophy’.”

I was so caught up in the performance–the jab of the jaw, the slicing motion of the hands– that I was slow to notice the change in Berard’s face. He was smiling, yes, but his eyes had a feline hardness that made me think a trap had been sprung. And soon I had all the confirmation I needed, as the first titters came leaking from the seated cadets.

” “Is it indeed possible that you’–by which he means the other people in the room, I expect–“that all of you behold this genius, this master wit whose reputation is so great throughout the land? Don’t you know,” he went on, addressing himself to the landlord and landlady, “don’t you know what you possess here?” ”

The titters grew in volume. The looks grew bolder.

” “Why, your house harbors a veritable treasure!’ ”

One cadet elbowed his neighbor. Another jammed his forearm into his mouth.

” ” You behold in this gentleman the eighth wonder of the world!””

Gasps and chortles, and still Poe bore on, his voice rising to match the voices around him.

“Then, turning himself toward me and throwing his arms about me: “Pardon these transports,” added he; “I can never hope to master the’–”

And at last he did pause, but only to hurl himself full bore on those final words:

“–“the absolute joy your presence causes me!””

Berard sat there softly smiling as the cadets squealed and howled. They might have torn the Academy’s roof right off had they not been stopped by the clearing of Captain Hitchcock’s throat. One unit of sound, barely loud enough to reach my ears, and the room went quiet.

“Thank you, Mr. Poe,” said Berard. “As usual, you have gone beyond the demands of literal translation. I suggest in the future you leave the embellishments to Mr. Smollett. However, you have nicely captured the sense of the passage. Two-point-seven is your grade.”

Poe said nothing. Didn’t move. Just stood there, in the center of the room, with his eyes flaming and his jaw angled out.

“You may be seated, Mr. Poe.”

Only then did he return to his seat–slowly, stiffly–without looking at another soul.

A minute later, the drums were beating assembly for dinner formation. Up stood the cadets, pushing away their slates and clapping on their shakos. Hitchcock waited until they were filing through the open doorway before calling out:

“Mr. Poe, if you would.” Poe stopped so quickly that the cadet behind him had to spin clear to avoid colliding with him.

“Sir?” He squinted us into his sights. His hands, glazed with chalk, danced across his leather visor.

“If we might speak to you, please.”

He set his mouth in a tight line and came toward us, wheeling his head just as the last of his classmates marched out.

“You may sit, Mr. Poe.”

Hitchcock’s voice, I noticed, was even softer than usual as he motioned the cadet to his bench. You can’t be too rough, I guess, on someone who’s given you two editions of his poetry.

“Mr. Landor here would like a few minutes of your time,” said the commandant. “We have already excused you from dinner formation, so you may come to mess when you’re ready. Do you require anything else, Mr. Landor?”

“No, thank you.”

“Then, gentlemen, I will bid you good day.”

This I hadn’t expected: Hitchcock taking himself out of the picture, and Berard following him, leaving just the two of us in this small, sawdusty room. Sitting on our benches and staring straight ahead, like Quakers at meeting.

“That was a brave performance,” I said at last.

“Brave?” he answered. “I was merely doing as Monsieur Berard requested.”

“I’d bet good money that you’ve read Gil Blas before.”

It was only from the corner of one eye, but I could see his mouth slowly lengthening.

“You’re amused, Mr. Poe.”

“I’m only thinking of my father.”

“The senior Poe?”

“The senior Allan,” he said. “A purely mercantile beast. He came upon me–oh, it was some years ago–reading Gil Blas in his parlor. Demanded to know why I would waste my time on such rubbish. And here we are…” He extended his arm to take in the whole room. “In the land of engineers, where Gil Blas is king.” Smiling briefly, he rattled his thin fingers. “Of course, Smollett’s translation has its charms, but he does gild the lily, doesn’t he? If I have time this winter, I shall write up my own version. The first copy will go to Mr. Allan.” I pulled out a quid of tobacco and popped it in my mouth. The sweet spicy juice burst off the lining of my cheeks, sent a tingle through my back teeth.

“If any of your classmates asks you,” I said, “you’ll kindly tell them this was a routine interview. We did nothing more than discuss your acquaintance with Leroy Fry.”

“There was no acquaintance,” he said. “I never knew him.”

“Then I was sadly misled. We had a fine laugh over it and parted on good terms.”

“If this is not an interview, what is it?”

“An offer. Of employment.”

He looked me square in the face. Said nothing.

“Before I go on,” I said, “I’m to inform you–let me see–that “this position is contingent on the satisfactory execution of your duties as a cadet.” Oh, and “should you fail or waver in these duties at any time, the position will cease to be yours.” ” I glanced over at him before adding, “That is what Colonel Thayer and Captain Hitchcock would have you know.”

The names had their intended effect. I would guess that most plebes–even this one, with his large claims on the world–think themselves beneath the notice of their superiors. The moment they learn otherwise is the moment they begin striving to be worthy of that notice.

“There’s no pay,” I went on. “You’ll need to know that. You won’t be able to boast about it. None of your classmates may ever know what you’re doing until long after you’re done with it. And if they do find out, they’re likely to curse your name.”

He gave me a lazy smile. His gray eyes glistened. “An irresistible offer, Mr. Landor. Please tell me more.”

“Mr. Poe, when I was a constable in New York City, not so long ago, I relied more than I care to say on news. Not the kind that comes from newspapers, but the kind that comes from people. Now, the people who brought this news were almost never what you’d call well bred. You wouldn’t have them over to dinner or go to concerts with them, or indeed be seen anywhere in public with them. Out-and-out criminals, mostly–thieves, fences, scratchers. For two bits, they’d auction off their children and sell their mothers–invent mothers they didn’t have. And I don’t know of a single policeman who could have done his job without them.”

Poe’s head was bowed over his hands as the import of this worked its way through. Then, sounding each syllable very slowly, as though he were waiting for its echo, he said:

“You wish me to be an informer.”

” A n observer, Mr. Poe. In other words, I wish you to be what you already are.”

“And what is it I am to observe?”

“I can’t tell you.” “Why not?”

“Because I don’t yet know myself,” I said.

I jumped up then–made straight for the blackboard.

“Would you mind, Mr. Poe, if I told you a story? When I was a boy, my father took me to a midnight camp meeting in Indiana. He was gathering some news of his own. We saw these beautiful young women sobbing and groaning, shrieking themselves blue in the face. What a noise! The preacher–fine upstanding gentleman–got them so worked up that after a while they fainted dead on their feet. One after another, like dead trees.

I remember thinking how lucky they had people ready to catch them, because they never looked to see where they were falling. All except one: she was different. Her head… turned a little just before she dropped. She wanted to be sure, you see, who would catch her. And who was the lucky fellow? Why, the preacher himself! Welcoming her into the kingdom of God.”

I passed my hand along the blackboard, felt its rasp against my palm.

“Six months later,” I said, “the preacher ran off with her. After first taking care to kill his wife. He didn’t want to be a bigamist, you see. They were caught just a few miles south of the Canadian border. No one had any inkling they were lovers. No one but me, I suppose, and even I didn’t… I didn’t know it, I only saw it. Before I knew what I was seeing.”

I turned back and found him studying me with the driest of smiles.

“And in that moment,” said Poe, “a vocation was born.”

It was a curious fact. Other cadets, when I spoke to them in private, would hold me in roughly the same awe as they did the commandant. Poe never did. There was, from the start of our relations, something… I won’t call it familiar–familial, maybe.

“Let me ask you,” I said. “When you marched back into the ranks the other day…”

“Yes?”

“That gentleman at the very end of the column, marching alone. He’s your friend–your roommate, maybe?”

A longish pause.

“He is my roommate,” said Poe, guardedly.

“I thought as much. He turned his head, you see, as you came into line. But he never flinched. I took this to mean he was expecting you. Is he a friend, Mr. Poe? Or a debtor?”

Poe tilted his head back and gazed at the ceiling.

“He is both,” he answered, sighing. “I write his letters for him.”

“His letters?” “Jared has an inamorata, back in the wastes of North Carolina. They are engaged to be married upon his graduation. Her very existence is enough to earn him dismissal.”

“Why do you write his letters, then?”

“Oh, he’s half literate at best. Wouldn’t know an indirect object if it crawled up his nose. What he does have, Mr. Landor, is a neat hand. I merely hash out some billets-doux, and he transcribes them.”

“And she thinks they’re his?”

“I’m always careful to throw in the–the awkward phrase–the rustic misspelling. I consider it an adventure in style.”

I sat myself down on the bench directly across from him.

“Well, there you are, Mr. Poe. I’ve learned something very interesting today. And all because I happened to catch a fellow turning his head. Just as you caught Cadet Loughborough missing his steps in parade.”

He snorted, stared at his boots. Said, half to himself, “Set a cadet to catch a cadet.”

“Well, now, we don’t yet know it is a cadet. But it would be a great help to have someone on the inside. And I can’t just now think of anyone better than you. Or anyone who would more enjoy the challenge of it.”

“And that would be the extent of my mission? Observing?”

“Well, as we go on, we’ll know better what we’re looking for, and you can train your eyes accordingly. In the meantime, I’ve got something for you to look at. It’s a fragment of a larger note. I’d like you to try your hand at deciphering it. Naturally,” I added, “you’ll have to work as secretly as you can. And be as precise as you can. You can never be too precise.”

“I see.”

“Precision is all.”

“I see.”

“And now, Mr. Poe. This is the part of our talk where you say yes or no.”

He rose, for the first time since our conversation began. Went to the window and stood looking out. I won’t presume to say what feelings vied inside him, but I will say this: he knew that the longer he stayed there, the more intense the effect would be.

“It will be yes,” he said finally.

There was a lopsided smile on his face when he turned back to me.

“I would be perversely honored, Mr. Landor, to be your spy.”

“And being your spymaster,” I said. “No less an honor, I’m sure.” By mutual consent, we shook hands. It was as formal as we would ever again be with each other. We jerked our hands away as though we had already breached some code.

“Well,” I said, “I suppose you’ll be off to dinner now. Why don’t we plan on meeting Sunday after chapel? Do you think you could find your way to Mr. Cozzens’ hotel without anyone seeing you?”

He nodded, twice, and then, without another word, made ready to go. Shook the starch back into his coatee. Put the leather pot on his head. Marched toward the door.

“May I ask you something, Mr. Poe?”

He took a step back. “Of course.”

“Is it true you’re a murderer?”

His face erupted then into the gaudiest smile I think I have ever seen. Imagine, Reader, a chorus line of lovely jewel-teeth, all dancing in their sockets.

“You’ll have to be much more precise than that, Mr. Landor.”

Letter from Gus Landor to Henry Kirke Reid

October 30th, 1830

c/o Reid Inquiries, Ltd. 712 Gracie Street New York, New York

Dear Henry,

It’s been forever since you’ve heard from me. I am sorry. Ever since we came to Buttermilk Falls, I’ve been meaning to get back for a visit, but days pass, boats come and go, Landor stays. Some other time, maybe.

In the meantime, I have a job for you. Don’t worry, I mean to pay you well, and as time is of the essence, I mean to pay you a little better than well.

Should you be willing, your task is to learn all you can about one Edgar A. Poe. Late of Richmond. He is at present a fourth classman at the U.S. Military Academy. Prior to that, he served in the Army. He has also published two volumes of poetry, not that anyone knew. Beyond that, I have only the sketchiest notions of him. I wish you to find out–everything– family history, upbringing, past employments, present entanglements. If he’s made a dent anywhere in the world, I’d have you find it.

I need also to know if he has ever been charged with a crime. Murder, for example.

As I said, this is pressing business. If you can forward me all your findings by the close of four weeks, I will be your eternal servant and will vouch for you at the gates of Heaven. (No use vouching for me.)

As always, bill me for any expenses. And remember me to Rachel! Also, when you write back, tell me all about this omnibus creature that is now menacing the city streets. I have heard only bits and pieces, but I understand it is the end of cabs and civilization. Please reassure me. I could do without civilization but never cabs.

Yours,

Gus Landor

Letter to Gus Landor

October 30th, 1830

Dear Mr. Landor,

I am leaving this letter for you at your hotel in advance of our next meeting.

Your insistence on precision–in all things!–has inspired me to resurrect a sonnet of mine which you may find to the point. (Never forgetting, of course, that you do not “get round” to poetry–yes, I do remember.)

Science! true daughter of Old Time thou art!

Who alterest all things with thy peering eyes. Why preyest thou thus upon the poet’s heart,

Vulture, whose wings are dull realities? How should he love thee? or how deem thee wise?

Who wouldst not leave him in his wandering To seek for treasure in the jeweled skies,

Albeit he soared with an undaunted wing? Hast thou not dragged Diana from her car?

And driven the Hamadryad from the wood To seek a shelter in some happier star?

Hast thou not torn the Naiad from her flood, The Elfin from the green grass, and from me The summer dream beneath the tamarind tree?

I often have recourse to recall these lines when I am being suffocated by spherical geometry and La Croix’ algebra. (Had I it to do over again, I might substitute a past participial adjective for the green of the penultimate line. Gor’d? Gull’d?)

A word of warning, Mr. Landor: I have a new composition to show you–as yet unfinished. I think you will “get round” it and will deem it of no small relevance to our investigations.

Your faithful servant, E.P.

Letter to Edgar A. Poe, Cadet Fourth Classman

October 31st, 1830

Mr. Poe: I read your poem with the greatest enjoyment and–I hope you’ll excuse me–bewilderment. I’m afraid all that Naiad and Hamadryad business is far beyond my ken. How I wish my daughter were here to translate for me, as she was herself a thoroughgoing Romantic and knew Milton backwards and every which way.

I hope my dimness will not discourage you from sending along more verse, whether or not it pertains to the matters at hand. I suspect I want improvement as much as the next fellow and don’t really bother about who is doing the improving.

And as for Science, I pray you won’t confuse anything I do with Science.

Yours, G.L.

p.s. A friendly reminder: we’re to meet at my hotel on Sunday afternoon, following chapel. I am in Room 12.

From the “Items” Column Poughkeepsie Journal

October 31st, 1830

School for Young Ladies.–Mrs. E. H. Putnam continues her school at 20 White Street from the 30th of August. The number of pupils in English Studies is limited to 30, who are wholly under Mrs. P.”s own instruction. Lessons in French, Music, Drawing, and Penmanship, by Teachers of first respectability.

Horrid Affair.–A cow and a sheep belonging to Mr. Elias Humphreys, of Haverstraw, were discovered Friday in a terrible condition. The animals had been dispatched by means of a slash across the throat. Mr. Humphreys also reports that the animals had been most cruelly carved open, and from each, the heart removed. No trace of those organs remained. The villain responsible for these assaults cannot be identified. Word has reached this journal of similar reports pertaining to a cow in the possession of Mr. Joseph L. Roy, a neighbor of Mr. Humphreys. These reports could not be corroborated.

Canal Tolls.–The tolls collected on the state canals up to the 1st of September amount to $514,000; being about $100,000 more than were collected…

Narrative of Gus Landor

9

October 31st

“Cattle and sheep!” cried Captain Hitchcock, brandishing the newspaper like a cutlass. “Livestock are now being sacrificed. Can we consider any of God’s creatures immune from this madman?”

“Well,” I said. “Better cows than cadets.”

I could see his nostrils flaring like a bull’s–I knew again what it was to be a cadet.

“I beg you, Captain, please don’t get yourself in a stew. We don’t yet know this is the same man.”

“It would be an extraordinary coincidence if it were not.”

“Well, then,” I said, “we can at least take comfort knowing he’s moved his attentions away from the Point.”

Frowning, Hitchcock ran his finger along the quill of his dress sword. “Haverstraw is not so very far from here,” he said. “A cadet might reach it in upwards of an hour–a good deal less, if he managed to wangle a horse.”

“You’re right,” I said. “A cadet could certainly cover the distance.” And maybe I really did mean to provoke this good soldier and fine American, for why else would I have thought to add, “Or an officer?”