Byzantium (8 page)

He knew he should wait for the captain-general’s soldiers, but he couldn’t hold himself back. What were these men up to? Might Marcita still be alive, trapped inside? He crept to one of the windows and edged open a shutter and looked. In the factory’s single hall, where women once worked rolling cigarettes, a black-skinned body hung from a hook. It was being stripped by one man while two others worked at one of the old rolling tables, turning a grinder. The grinder jammed just as Burke’s gaze fell on it, and one of the men working it kicked at the table while the other shouted. The man stripping the body, cutting meat from the legs, whistled a tune, unbothered. Burke recognized him as the corpulent, red-haired tobacconist from the Gallitos shop.

It took Burke a moment to understand, and once he did he felt his reason trickle away. He couldn’t turn—the ghastly sight held him. Instead, without noticing, he leaned forward. His hand was still on the shutter, and it creaked. At that all three men looked up from their work. Burke let go of the shutter. It creaked again, and now they had seen him.

Burke tried to move, tried to run, but a lightness washed forward from the back of his skull. The men at the grinder had snatched knives from the table, and the one stripping the body had picked up an ax. Burke watched, paralyzed. They’d gone, and he could hear the cannibals’ footsteps, out of the factory now and on the grass. At last Burke beat back the lightness, pulled his feet from the morass that had gripped them, and ran. Just as he made it to the
volanta,
he heard the trumpets of the captain-general’s troops, and two cavalrymen appeared in the street. Burke didn’t care to see any more. Bent over in the
volanta
’s seat, he heaved, shut his eyes, and ordered the driver to take him home.

“IN THE SAUSAGE!?” Don Hernán repeated, his face green. He was sitting in Burke’s bedchamber, slumped in a cane chair. “Oh, my poor cinnamon! To think I—” He stopped. It seemed for the moment he could not bring himself to mention the French sausage again.

Burke lay on his cot. When he’d returned to his rooms he’d felt the lightness return, a sickness overtaking him, and he’d not been able to stand or sit. Now, morning having come, he was explaining his findings to the don, detailing how the three men had roamed the outskirts of the city capturing slaves to butcher. Fernandita stood by the door folding and refolding a cleaned sheet as she listened.

“The shop was a ruse. That’s why the price on the cigarettes was so high, to keep people away. Marcita was unlucky. She must have wandered in, looking for new labels for her collection, and that’s when they took her.”

Outside a bell tinkled, a procession of priests bringing the viaticum to a dying man.

“All of Havana eating slave flesh,” the don said. “Horrible!” He sat up, some of the green faded from his face. “But I tell you, I can’t understand why. I’ve thought over the numbers—there couldn’t have been much money in it, not nearly as much as the slaves were worth in the field.”

The ringing had gone, the priests turned around a corner. What he’d seen through the window of the cigarette factory flashed again before Burke’s eyes.

“Don Hernán, who can know the motives of such beasts?”

ONCE THE DON HAD LEFT, Burke called to Fernandita to help him to the window. She held him by the arm, and he pushed aside the curtain and looked out. The sun shone brightly on the harbor ships, ignorant of all that had just passed.

He had been working to save slaves, not trap them, but in the light of the morning his relief had begun to crumble. He’d fashioned excuses, but he’d been willing to hunt Marcita for pay. His mind spun with the thought that he’d become the equal of the men in the factory, that he’d stepped irrevocably away from the goodness he’d once imagined his.

When he turned back from the window, he said to Fernandita, who still held his arm and was smiling uncertainly up at him, “You may tell my next caller that I am taking no more cases.”

The smile vanished. “Don’t be a fool,” Fernandita said. “Not over just the one girl.”

But Burke had learned the truth of his position now. Shaking free of Fernandita’s hand he stepped back toward his cot. “If the caller insists,” he told her, with a glance back toward the masts outside his window, “you may lie and say I am no longer in the city but a lowly crewman at sea.” His legs were still weak, and he was exhausted from his night of work, hollowed and brittled by all he’d seen. At the moment he couldn’t fathom what he was going to do when his money ran out, but he’d decided his work as a detective in Havana was finished, and in that alone he found solace.

I

Enterprise

In March, during the last weeks before the season of fever returned, all Galveston was filled with talk of conquest. A ship carrying a company of
filibusteros
from the mainland had just sailed for Haiti with plans of empire, and Colonel Timson, a forceful, charismatic fellow who wore a wide-brimmed hat like a planter and swore off all whiskey and cigars, was making the rounds putting together an expedition to topple the government of Honduras and establish a white republic. He had a sharp face reddened by daily shaving, and his tight lips and dark eyes seemed always to be hiding some secret, or perhaps some fury. The man himself was a mystery. I never learned his past, apart from one year he spent as a gin operator in Burwood, Mississippi, nor how he earned his rank, which I came to believe was self-given.

I first caught his attention while passing out handbills for my meat biscuit in the Strand. I spent most mornings in this fashion, stifling my melancholy, awaiting the steamers from Tampico and Veracruz and keeping an eye out for newcomers: I would press the bill into their hands and tell them that a free sample could be obtained at the warehouse. When I stopped Timson in the street, he was attired in a black frock coat faded to gray and worn shiny at the elbows and cuffs. He inspected the bill, then folded it, put it in his coat pocket, and asked if I had a spare hour. He was the first in months to express an interest, so I said I did. We walked about the square and down to the wharves and, without further introduction, he told me of his plans.

“Do you follow Washington?” he asked.

I told him I did not.

“Well, surely men of understanding like yourself know this nation is founded upon the divine harmonies of slave and free. The Northern abolitionists hope to destroy this harmony, and the only way we can stop them is through expanding our institutions.” He unrolled each sentence by rote—they were well worn from much use—and every few words he prodded me with his finger. “I have studied the matter closely and determined Honduras as our first acquisition. We will sow her with slaves and petition for statehood. Some may cower at the thought of such an enterprise, but I foresee little resistance to our tropic campaign.” Here he took off his hat and drew from inside it a folded sheet of paper, which he opened and showed to me: a newspaper illustration of two
campesinos
dozing next to a burro. “The enemy,” he said. He then refolded the picture, taking care to make no new crease, and stuck it again in his hat, which he returned to his head.

“Of course,” he continued as we strolled, “there will be a brief period during which I shall preside over a provisional republic, and which my backers will find quite remunerative.” Here we paused as several negroes dressed in finery paraded before us, their masters goading them, showing them off to the city’s wealthy gathered on the courthouse lawn. Timson leaned closer and whispered. “I have been in contact with agents of President Pierce. They have given me assurances.”

We parted, agreeing to meet at some later time. I confess my motives were selfish. I never became a true acolyte of Timson’s; I did not believe that the addition of Honduras to our Union, or any amount of new slave states, could head off the reckoning that yet awaits our nation, and to this day every time I hear of a negro lashed or beaten I find myself drawn one inch closer to the abolitionist camp. But Timson could prove the biscuit, I felt, and this I wanted more than anything.

Returning to the Strand, I was accosted by two ruddy-nosed drunks, their mouths curled into devilish grins as they grabbed at my handbills and bellowed, “A sample, Dr. Toad, a sample!” The nickname grew from a rumor about my ingredients, and such treatment was in the normal course of things. But it was not always so. Three years ago the biscuit was birthed into the world with great hope and fanfare. As with all my inventions, my motivation was the alleviation of suffering. To make the biscuit I boiled beef, reducing it from eleven pounds to one, and combined the resulting extract with flour, which I then baked, creating an incorruptible and easily transportable nugget of nourishment. With it, ships at sea would have no worry for starvation, and missionaries and soldiers cut off from supplies would have all the benefit of a full meal in a single bite. Dr. Asa Smith was my partner. He had lodged in my back room for two months when he first arrived in the city, and I had held him in friendship ever since, allowing him to treat cholera patients in my parlor during the occasional epidemic. Though it was his habit to oppose my contrivances, he saw the biscuit’s merit and gave over half his small fortune for its support, and together we showed the biscuit at the Great Exhibition in London and sent canisters of it to Arctic explorers and British troops in the Crimea. Everywhere it was met with enthusiastic praise, and on our return to Galveston we manufactured thousands of pounds more.

And then all orders dropped. A committee of army officers in Washington complained of the flavor. Flavor! I made no claims of flavor, only sustenance. Indeed, it is my true belief that a cabal of meat purveyors bribed the committee, for they stood to lose everything to my biscuit. Whatever the cause, it was only the last failure in a long list, ranging from the terraqueous machine to the potato pill and bone bread.

After the committee’s report, Dr. Smith and I were left with a warehouse full of meat biscuit, twenty thousand pounds packed in barrels, canisters, and bottles. Often we made our nightly meals upon it—I prepared the biscuit in diverse ways, sometimes in puddings, sometimes in broths, sometimes in pies, sometimes simply toasted. Even so, this was more than Dr. Smith and I could eat on our own were we given until Armageddon.

II

Death’s Shadow, from Which Rises the Cooling Safe

It was only in the last season that the fever took my Penelope. I shut myself in the study and turned away from all projects, including the meat biscuit. Overcome by a bleakness of the soul, I spent days tracing the grains of my desk with my fingertips, searching my mind for methods of revivification. I refused food and drink, and after the first night I abandoned hope. I was emptied. She had suffered too many days, and when they took her coffin from the house I could not bear to watch. The sight of her laid out on the bed haunted me so, as did the memory of her constant calling, first for water, then for release. Dr. Smith, who had done his best to ease her pain, managed the affairs of the burial, and I only left the study to follow the black-draped wagon down Avenue P, its horses tired from the many loads forced on them by the fever-ridden island.

Distraught, when I returned from the cemetery I went once more into isolation, plagued by visions of Penelope’s deathbed agonies. Yet turning my mind to the rescue of others soon became a salve, and thinking of the fever’s coincidence with summer’s heat—a fact well known by all but little acted upon—I drew up plans for a sealed box in which men could pass frozen through the pestilential season, untouched by infection. Driven by those deathbed visions, my labors were unceasing, and when I emerged from the study two days later I erected the box in the side yard, near the fig and the oleander we had planted on our wedding day. The box was three feet tall, ten feet long, and six feet wide, piped with ether and built of wooden double walls that I reinforced with iron and lined with a mixture of cotton and corncobs. Completed, it stood like a long dwarf house between the two twiggy nuptial scrubs. For patent purposes, I named it the Cooling Safe. It would be my monument to Penelope’s memory. If only I had built the box while she yet lived!

Pleased with the Cooling Safe’s construction, I invited Dr. Smith to come inspect it. I waited as he opened the box’s door and crawled about inside, tapping the ether pipes and checking my calculations. When he finished, he said nothing, but clasped my hand and looked hard into my eyes before riding back to his office.

The next day I went about the city soliciting volunteers to test the box. The men at the Tremont and on the wharf only shook their heads. They said I had taken “a bad turn.” They could not understand. “You shall not freeze me to death, Dr. Toad!” Captain Briggs shouted, twisting his arm from my grip in the Liberty saloon. “Not death!” I countered. “I shall freeze you to life!” But he only chuckled and took his whiskey, as the others had done. I returned home, sullen at their refusal, and as I considered the box our slave boy John tugged at my sleeve and asked about repairing the chicken coop. My mind seized on the opportunity. I gave John some ham and a blanket and put him in the box, showing him the gutta-percha breathing tube and instructing him to knock soundly on the door if he should feel any deleterious effect. At first he was not obliging, but I swore I’d cuff him (an empty threat) and he crawled inside. I shut the door behind him and waited, sitting on the steps of our porch, my chin in my palm, my other hand holding the mourning ring made of Penelope’s fine golden hair.

I watched the box for nearly an hour before John banged on the door. I opened it and found him shivering, nearly passed out.

“John, are you all right?” I asked, my arms around his torso as I pulled him free, and he said, teeth chattering, “Yes, master, just a mite cold.”

Once I had John clear of the box, I took him into the study, sat him in a chair, and administered a series of tests to his person. His skin was cold to the touch, and I draped a second blanket over his shoulders to stop him shivering.

“Did you feel any spells come upon you?”

“I don’t know. It was all dark, and too cold to tell spell from no spell.”

I felt his head, his chest, his back, his feet. He had been cooling evenly, moving steadily toward the stasis I had predicted.

“Master,” he said to me then. “Please tell me what it is I done to get punished in that shack.” He gathered the blankets closer about him and looked up to me. “I promise I won’t do it no more.”

His mouth was open in pleading, his eyes teary. I held his hand, feeling the tips of his fingers. They had warmed faster than I expected.

III

The Second Meeting with Timson

The day after I met Timson in the Strand, I found him waiting for me outside the warehouse. He was sitting at the door, his head leaned against it, his wide hat low over his eyes. His clothes were dusty and rumpled, and I believe he may have slept in the street. I nudged him awake, and he asked if he might now sample the meat biscuit. He told me he had heard intriguing stories of my career. This I ignored—I knew what others said of me. I toasted him a small portion of the biscuit, and when he bit it, he declared its taste satisfactory. “This manna will feed my army,” he said, chewing still as he straightened his coat, “and strengthen its conquering hand.” He made a fist and brought it down on an imaginary Honduran’s head.

We left the warehouse and walked to the wharves. A steamer was in from Havana, unloading tobacco and bringing news; already the longshoremen were abuzz with talk of a fire that had destroyed much of Matanzas. At the customhouse I fought through a bustling crowd of negroes come to bear away packages for their masters, finally finding the ship’s machinist, from whom I collected sheet music. He and I had a compact. In exchange for jars of potato pills (he was one of their rare admirers), he brought me the latest song sheets from a stall in the Calle Obispo. This business completed, Timson and I left the customhouse and moved down the docks until we came to a gap among the cotton bales awaiting the next brig to Liverpool. The bales were stacked into mountains, and boys climbed over them, their laughing voices mixing with the shrieking of gulls and arguing of sailors. We stood in the gap, our backs to the cotton, and watched the busy harbor glinting in the noonday sun. Water lapped against the dock posts beneath us, and Timson pronounced on the divine inspiration of his plans, of God’s pact with the white man. “He has provided the African for our labor, and in return we are to raise the African, to bring him religion and feed his body.”

“How do you—”

Staring down at me with his fiery eyes, he answered before I could finish, “I am in communication with His Presence.”

Eventually I witnessed it. When God spoke to him, Timson would raise his arms to the heavens and one eye would look this way while the other eye looked that.

We left the bales and walked as far as the old pirate camp. Timson talked of Honduras, of her principal products, and of his methods for increasing her productivity—among his favorite was the granting of confiscated haciendas to the second sons of leading Southern families, who would each be required to bring fifteen negro slaves. He asked if I had been married (it was too painful, so I shook my head) and confided in me his love for a clubfooted girl in Burwood, whom he planned to send for once peace was established in his new republic. “When I paid court, she sat on the porch, and only after I had declared myself did she stand before me.” Timson rested his foot on a pile of charred brick, the remains of the old camp, and looked out to the gulf, empty and blue, as a breeze struck our faces. “The Lord humbled me with that, but I told her I loved her all the same.”

Our conversation ended, we returned to the city, where Timson excused himself, claiming another appointment, and I retreated to the warehouse to look over the song sheets and hum their tunes. Briefly I worried over Timson’s scheme, and the general furtherance of bondage, and yet for the biscuit I saw no alternative. Its failure plagued me, and success was worth any price, for men of all color would enjoy the biscuit’s benefit. I would back Timson without compunction.

That evening I opened a new canister and made a gravy for Dr. Smith, pouring it over his meat biscuit hash. For myself I fried some biscuit. I like it often this way, simple.

IV

The Cooling Safe Unveiled

I presented the now-tested box to the men of the city. The fever was still ravaging the island. Twenty more had passed away since I had buried Penelope, almost all work had stopped, and the remaining healthy spent their days drifting between street and saloon. They came now, curious, and gathered in the yard. I had John with me to demonstrate, and showed how I had placed him in the box and piped in the ether. Our bodies would be held in stasis, I explained, telling them of John’s short experience and ensuing good health. “He spent above an hour in the Cooling Safe,” I said, “and returned from it in as fine a fettle as one could hope.” Then I proposed the building of a much larger box, big enough to contain the city’s entire populace. There, together, we would reside frozen from May until October, waking after the first frost to conduct our commerce in the safe, wintry months. Never again would we suffer from the fever that took my Penelope. The men mocked me, jeered, and threw bottles at the Cooling Safe, and when I asked one, Ashby Hays, a cotton factor, to test the model for himself, he laughed in horror. “You’d ask me, a white man, to step in that nigger box?”