The Last Nightingale (7 page)

A house full of females, in a time of general civic emergency, when everybody's full attention is focused on the earthquake and
fires. What a perfect place. What an ideal set of victims for Tom-mie's new beginning at the true Savoring of his work.

It was all the better, since none of the Nightingales had any idea of who he was or why he was there.

The memories swept over him again, in a small wave of ecstasy. Tommie felt good, all the way down into his bones. The thought struck him,
there's a poem in this.
A fine poem: short, romantic, musical. He picked up one of the notepads that he kept available everywhere in the house, each with its own silver writing pen, and put his calligraphy studies to use.

Those three lines were all it needed. Something about it made him crave a sexual release. Within moments, satisfaction filled him like warm and soapy bathwater. With it came an inspiration—from that moment forward, each of Tommie's deserving ones would get an original poem left behind with them, to commemorate their contribution to the Savored experience.

As soon as darkness fell, he got into full makeup and costume and headed for the Barbary Coast. A brief step backward, for old times’ sake. A quick knife kill and an easy escape. The drunks were sure to be back down there, feeding their habits again, earthquake or not. Who among them didn't deserve it?
The poem's the thing.
What Tommie needed most of all was a deserving corpse to pin one on.

S
HANE'S
DOGGED WORK HABITS
quickly endeared him to the padres. He became all the more valuable after it dawned on the holy men that neither the San Francisco Police Department nor the United States Army could supply the labor to repair and guard the Mission, despite the good intentions of the Committee of Fifty. The priests already realized that Shane was homeless, so now they asked about his family. All he was able to tell them was that they had been lost to the Great Earthquake. Beyond that, his throat locked up on him when he tried to explain.

Once they understood what he was trying say, they offered him a position there at the Mission. There was need of a grave tender and night watchman for the Mission cemetery, since some of the more desperate earthquake victims might decide to raid the city founders’ resting places for buried gold and jewelry. The pay was only a few pennies per day, but meals were included at the friars’ table, and they let him set up a permanent living space in an empty toolshed. All he had to do was hang the watch on one of the many nails protruding from the rough wooden walls and he was all moved in. It gave him a place to exist, and some sort of a reason. Work, meals, and rest formed the core of his days.

He quickly learned that the padres at the Mission were generally not like the Helpers at the orphanage at all; they left him alone
to his chores and his daily life. One or two of them came around, nearly sniffing at him, but he hit them with his practiced blank stare and refused to respond to them in any way. That gave them the opportunity to think that he was crazy and keep their dignity while they walked away.

Shane hardly felt the time slip by. On the outside, he buried himself in his new job and adjusted to life at Mission Dolores. Inside, he survived his private turmoil with a simple grim march through days that were each the same as the next. Before the quake, a demeanor such as his would have called attention to itself, perhaps gotten him in trouble. Now everybody on the streets seemed preoccupied with their own stock of primal fear, even a lingering sense of doom.

The natural rage over the betrayal of the very ground beneath their feet gave everyone plenty to wake up screaming about in the nights that followed. Even the quiet ones, those who silently swallowed their nightmares and never spoke of them, slept without resting. They clenched their jaws hard enough to crack their teeth and tried to minimize their suffering by denying it. Among people in such a state, Shane had no trouble passing unnoticed.

His state of mind was perfect for the job of tending to a graveyard. He craved the isolation. Inside of those first days and weeks, his method of disguise was to do his best to act normally, but without attempting to speak, and to avoid drawing anyone's special attention until he could get clear of them. He took examples from the non-English-speaking Chinese and Mexican laborers, after he realized that they could get through most situations with a combination of shrugs and hand gestures. His reputation as a good worker soon began to protect him. He found that he was able to do a good enough job at his assigned tasks that it made others appreciative of his presence and less inclined to get suspicious about him. By and large, people left him alone.

Once the friars demonstrated how they wanted the repair work to be done—the careful mixing of fine mortar, the precise fitting
and gluing of broken tombstones and statuary—he discovered that he could sometimes escape the grip of his despair for a good hour or two while he was absorbed in his work. There was a small sense of peace and satisfaction to be coaxed from the results, even if the relief never lasted for long. He was grateful to do the jobs right there where he was living, and to spend both the nights and the days among his newly repaired handiworks.

His first serious solo job assignment was to repair the split gravestone of one Catherine Hoban, who had died in 1854 at the age of twenty-six. Shane's mind filled with images from the woman's time, because the strict monks at St. Adrian's had made sure that he knew all about the Gold Rush era. The stone's inscription told that Catherine Hoban lived through the great gold strike of 1849, as well as the following massive surge in the city population, plus the huge influx of young Chinese men imported as labor. Catherine Hoban was alive when San Francisco exploded into an international presence as a seaport, but she died just as the city was emerging, when she and San Francisco were both still young.

Shane carefully daubed the fine mortar all along the two edges of her broken headstone, and while he worked, he tried to feel for a presence in her grave. He wondered, was there something that would indicate whether or not Catherine Hoban had died a peaceful death? Or was hers violent and terrible? The markings told him nothing.

He fit the headstone's two pieces together and made sure that there was a complete bond all the way along the break, then held them in place by hand while the mortar dried. He could have accomplished the job more easily by propping the two pieces in place, but he wanted to give the repaired stone the simple gesture of respect of being perfectly hand balanced.

Since the city was enjoying a brief break in the pounding rain that had covered it the past few days, it was comfortable enough while he held the two stone pieces together that he drifted in memories from more peaceful days at St. Adrian's. The monks there had
always told Shane that he was left at their door with a piece of paper, no note. The paper only said "Shane, 4, born January 1." No last name. No other information.

He had always found it hard to accept that he was already four years old when he arrived at St. Adrian's. If that were true, it seemed like he ought to be able to remember something of his life before the orphanage. But his memory of anything prior to being there was blank.

Inside of St. Adrian of Canterbury's Home for Delinquents and Orphans, his daily life had always reminded him of the life of an ant in a busy anthill: a relentless pace of endless chores, one after another after another. Though he was rarely able to leave the orphanage, whenever he had free time he explored the world through the books that the friars taught him to read. And although the friars and their Helpers gave plenty of reason for fear, they employed that fear against their young charges by enforcing the proposition that ignorance was deadly for their Delinquents and Orphans.

The unwavering focus came from the friars’ conviction that knowledge might actually make a difference in the lives of these children, who were otherwise guaranteed an existence as social throwaways. They could survive a childhood without ever being adopted, but the friars promised them daily that without education they could choose between growing up to be prostitutes, thieves, or thieving prostitutes. And then they could take their natural places among the other denizens of the Barbary Coast district, down by the shrouded waterfront.

So Shane made it a never-ending point to absorb all of the friars’ lessons and to score well enough on their tests so that they saved their worst torments for thicker heads. The way he looked at it, the constant access to books had saved his life in that place.

As for the more intimate arts of family existence, it was only over the past year in the Nightingale house that he ever witnessed and participated in the daily life of an actual family. The most awkward part at first, for a boy of eleven, was the unaccustomed closeness of
two "sisters" who were so highly attractive to him. He came to hate his penis for being untrustworthy, and made it a habit around the house to always carry something he could swing around in front of himself if the need arose.

Amy's sense of music filled his heart from the day he arrived. Her voice expressed a light and feminine energy that seemed to just soar up from her, free of self-consciousness. By the time he had passed his first two weeks in the Nightingale house, Shane was convinced that he was lucky to be able to live so close to her, even if that was all he could ever do. He could never forget that there was to be nothing more; life slapped him flat to the ground every day. The worst of it was the simple fact that he was still only twelve, and a sixteen-year-old girl was older by a lifetime. Even if he had come up in the proper social class, she never would have welcomed his affection.

It was Carolyn, most of all, who had always seen him as nothing more than what he was: a house servant. But sometimes she let him hold her hand to steady her while she practiced standing on the tips of her toes. She was so light and graceful, as if her bones were hollow like a bird's. Delicate and full of quiet mischief, she dreamed of being a ballerina. Carolyn ignored parental objections to her dancing and spent about half of every day flying through the air. For one crazed instant Shane wondered how the killer knew that Carolyn was the dancer in the family. For a long time, Shane could hear the madman swinging her body, dashing her against the walls.

It was during those final weeks before the earthquake that Shane felt himself sinking into the family unit and beginning to perceive them in new ways. The constant combination of civilized discourse and household intimacy forced him to learn to work within a family relationship. The little routines of it came to feel good, reassuring.

Now his torment included a palpable sense of loss over this new way of being with others—and the guilt of having done nothing but lie in his hidden pantry bed, soaking his pants, unable to move or
cry out while the family was systematically slaughtered. No matter how he reasoned his way through it, in the end, Shane knew that his present-day circumstances were the direct result of his inability to fight against the killer. What if he could have won, somehow, through sheer luck? Or what if his display of boldness and bravery could
have forced
God to grant him a miracle? It was clear that the stuttering kicked in because some part of himself wanted to stop in the middle of whatever else he might be saying, and instead scream out to anyone within earshot that he was a coward.

Shane's muscles began to ache from holding the tombstone pieces in place. He realized that a good amount of time had passed while he held the mortared stones, so he gently tested the glue and found that the bond was strong enough for him to let go. He stood up and looked at Catherine Hoban's headstone, a tall, thin flag of granite. The balance between the two rejoined sections was as perfect as he could make it.

With that, it struck him that he might never be able to find any answers to the questions about himself that tormented him. Still, when he stepped back to admire his handiwork on the gravestone, he felt the simple pleasure of taking pride in the work of his hands.

Randall Blackburn stood alone in the darkened shadows of a garbage-fouled back alley near the Barbary Coast district. He stared down at the dead man's body, which was not that of an ordinary waterfront drunk. This one was a handsome fellow in the prime of his life. He was perfectly dressed, a well-heeled gentleman in an expensive wool suit, groomed down to the details. This was a victim who was going to be missed by somebody.

There was a note on the body. Along with the telltale
modus operandi,
it assured Blackburn that for the second time in nine days, The Surgeon had struck.

The wound from the heavy-bladed throwing knife was visible at the base of the man's skull. While the wound itself didn't prove the
knife was thrown, the obvious depth and angle of entry practically guaranteed that there was no other way to cause that exact injury. No other wounds were evident. And tonight's victim was the second to have a fancy note left behind with him. That first note had looked like a crude attempt to use humor to further debase the victim. Blackburn clearly recalled its swirling, feminine hand:

Tonight, by leaving this second note, The Surgeon was using her handwriting to make it clear that each of the two notes was left by the same killer.

Although the newspapers had ruined the Department's element of surprise in their hunt, perhaps tipping valuable information about the investigation, Blackburn didn't believe that he was looking at the work of some deranged copycat. The specific method of brutality, the skill at silent killing, the lack of interest in robbery— these things were more than clues, they were trademarks. No, this Surgeon character was evolving herself a new style. Her tastes were changing.