The Last Nightingale (8 page)

That single fact was so promising that it made Blackburn feel hopeful. Newness equals unfamiliarity and unfamiliarity could keep The Surgeon off balance just long enough for her to make a mistake.

For the past several days, the authorities had managed to keep news of that first note away from the newspapers, hoping that by retaining the detail they might gain some kind of leverage in interviewing suspects. Up to this point, secrecy hadn't been much of a challenge; the victims were all broken men, barely noticed in life and ignored in death. But on this night, with a victim who looked like a gentleman, it was plain that the official silence would never survive scrutiny by the various interested parties.

But once again, the crime had happened inside of Blackburn's beat, during his midnight shift. An involuntary shiver ran up his back when he briefly wondered if the killer was deliberately doing this to him. He decided that there was no reason to think anything like that. Yet. After all, the persistent rumor was still that the killer was one of the street hags, and long-term planning didn't exist in their world. Besides, the worst he had ever done was to arrest them and pull them in off of the streets for a night, where they could safely sleep it off and then have a hot meal the next day. For some, jail was the best accommodation they visited all week.

But who then?
The question taunted him.

The nicely dressed dead fellow at Blackburn's feet was going to be the spoiler of certain ambitions held by Mayor Schmitz and Chief Dinan, by costing them the secrecy of this new trend with notes, and the potential of using secrecy to trick a suspect into confession. That would have allowed the mayor and the chief to come off as heroes for the newspapers. There was a lot of finger-pointing going on around City Hall; a major public relations event such as the capture of a wanton killer could have served both men well.

Blackburn felt a sinking sensation as he acknowledged that another brazen murder on his watch was a guarantee of continual midnight assignments on the Barbary Coast. It tormented him to know that this time he was going to be in such a deep trench with the brass that he might go for many years and never dig his career back out. He was unaware of how hard his jaw was clenched while he stared down at the victim, until he felt the resulting pain.

He bent close enough to read the handwriting on the small paper note. This one was neatly placed in one of the body's fists. The delicate slip of paper was perfectly smooth and unwrinkled, tucked between two of the dead fist's fingers.

The world has loved me, made me welcome, everywhere I stayed But I left my wife to disgrace myself on women who are paid And nothing could have stopped me but The Blade.

"At least this one rhymes," Blackburn muttered. So The Surgeon wanted everyone to know that this victim was a man who deserved harsh justice. The body expelled gas, as if to confirm that this one wasn't going to keep itself away from the newspapers. The Surgeon's new trademark doggerel "poems" would be public knowledge before long, making the Department brass unhappy in the extreme. Although the sun wasn't going to come up for another two hours, Blackburn already sensed that the day was going nowhere but downhill.

He whistled down a mounted officer and told him to hurry back to the station house for a body recovery wagon. The officer cantered away, and then there was nothing left to do but stand guard over the scene.

Shane's new job carried a lot of free time, especially during late night hours. So within his first couple of weeks at the Mission Dolores cemetery, he began trying to undo his maddening stammer by reading out loud. He had accidentally discovered that he could still speak clearly if he was reading, while he was silently going over an announcement on the church bulletin board. He began to mumble the words under his breath. It went on for a while before he realized what he was doing—something about having the words to read and follow allowed him to bypass his stutter. Not only did he speak clearly while reading aloud, it was effortless. With that realization, he began to practice his reading in earnest. He generally did it at night, but he would take time out for it anytime that nobody was around. It soothed him to be able to hear the sound of his own voice speaking clearly once again. It gave him a form of hope.

Besides, he was seldom ready to go to sleep before sunrise, ever since the unthinkable thing. It felt safer to sleep in the daytime— harder for anybody to sneak up on him. Daylight also helped him to wake up faster whenever the familiar nightmares returned.

But at night, alone and safe in the cemetery, Shane wrapped
himself in darkness like a warm wool blanket. It never occurred to him to think of the place as frightening. Instead, he paced among worn tombstones and practiced his reading by lantern light. While the words on the pages flowed easily from his mouth, he concentrated on impressing his brain with the sensation of speaking freely, hoping that the practice would eventually keep his speech from seizing up as soon as he went off of the page and tried to talk.

Most of the time, Shane read without any real regard for the content of the article. Once in a while, though, a story captured his imagination. Especially the society pages, adorned as they were with pen-and-ink sketches, and sometimes even daguerreotype photographs of successful men and women. The shots accompanied articles about High Society's weddings, their births, their graduations, and their charity balls—all of it was news to him. The images stuck to his brain like flypaper. It wasn't the idea of money and power that was so captivating; it was the impression of contentedness. How could it be otherwise for such people, living such lives?

He tried to envision what it must be like for them to live each day, feeling assured that they were a desired presence anywhere they went, always knowing just how to behave and what to do. These people had the world's stamp of approval. Unlike Shane, their conduct brought credit to their families. No doubt, any one of them would have known what to do in the Nightingale house. They would have been able to take action where he could do nothing more than lie paralyzed.

The Nightingale family had given Shane their last name and ended his life as a foundling in order to show him a house where there was decency and discipline for everyone, even if he were little more than a glorified servant. It wasn't an unhappy household; happiness simply wasn't part of the daily roster. Mr. and Mrs. Nightingale were both vocal supporters of hot baths, cool tempers, and cold routines. It felt sterile to him, even though he couldn't imagine what he would actually do differently, given the chance.

He only knew that despite his respect and fondness for people he lived to serve, he never felt any desire to emulate their way of life once he was grown. That was even truer now, when being reminded of the Nightingale house made his mouth taste of ashes.

Shane became consumed by the urge to study the happy people of the world and discover the secret to living their lives. Most of all, he wondered what they might know that could have given him power to take action, back in the Nightingale house, if only he had known it too. Could learning it guarantee that such a thing would never happen again? That question, especially, began to haunt him.

Now while he read the society pages and practiced his speaking, he was also searching for a
particular example
—somebody who might teach him, by personal demonstration, the secret of how to live. But since Shane also knew that privileged people have authority—his experience in life so far had shown him that too much authority tends to turn nice people into mean ones and to make nasty people turn just plain evil—his plan was to select his subjects, then hang back and observe them from a distance. Let them teach him without realizing it. That seemed safer than confessing his weakness and asking for help, exposing himself to scorn. Perhaps earning himself a ticket back to St. Adrian's, where children were sometimes heard making those same yelps of surprise and fear that he now knew far too well.

Surely these society people were the antithesis of nearly everything he had absorbed with the hardscrabble survival skills learned in the orphanage, or the grim and gray discipline of the Nightingale house. He would practice. He would do more than practice; he would study them, copy them any way he could. There was no choice. Until he did, he felt certain that he was missing too many pieces inside to be able to hold his own, out there among the fast-talkers. With lives such as these society people seemed to have, surely they knew how to avoid going through their days feeling like garbage. Surely there was something he could learn from being around them.

"What a thing," Shane said under his breath, "that anyone can actually live like that." His mind sank into the fantasy images while his body exhaled so deeply that the muscles rattled in his shoulders and his legs. "What a thing," he said again, just because it seemed to need saying. He was too preoccupied to notice that he was speaking without any sort of stammer at all.

L
IEUTENANT
G
REGORY
M
OSES
WAS SERVING
as Acting Station Chief at the City Hall precinct house. It was only a temporary position, and he never let himself forget that. The job had literally fallen into his lap with the Great Earthquake, and it had somehow remained there throughout the four weeks since. Nearly everything about the job still felt new, and virtually none of it was comfortable. Moses’ decades of experience as the department's Keeper of Records never gave him any reason to expect to find himself as a station chief. And since Moses had never tasted the curse of political ambition, the personality traits necessary for leadership were baffling to him. After so many quiet years in the Record Keeping Department, padding back and forth among the stacks and files, the instant promotion and its never-ending urgencies felt about as natural as a suit of needles.

There was no avoiding it. Moses was promoted at the direct order of Police Chief Dinan on the very day of the quake, after Station Chief Winkle took a fatal brick to the skull. Somebody pulled one of the precinct's old command-succession charts from the City Hall ruins to see who was next in line for the job, but it turned out that every individual above Moses on the list was either dead or missing. Chief Dinan read all the way down to number seven in the succession line, farther down than anybody ever ex-
pected circumstances to actually go:
Head of the Record Keeping Department.

Moses’ rank of lieutenant had always been a simple perquisite grafted onto his job, a reminder that confidentiality was of the essence. For many years, the first order of secrecy down at City Hall had fallen to him. All the friends and relatives of the "Committee of Fifty," plus the city's other backroom organizations, were able to carry out their lives inside a zone of official silence. No matter how nasty certain personal events might have become, all of the appropriate sensitive events were reliably covered over and permanently forgotten. While it was true that Moses’ line of work made him the custodian of a world of secrets, rather like a father confessor, they weren't the kinds of things that were helpful in running a police station and the precinct that it serves.

Accordingly, each one of these thirty days since the Great Earthquake had felt like a long trudge through knee-deep water. Every moment was impossibly hard. Not only was Moses inexperienced with command, but while he called the morning roll and handed out the daily assignments, his brain burned with a pervasive sense that he was in
highly
dangerous territory.

Back when the news of his fateful promotion had first reached him, Moses experienced it as some sort of dark anti-miracle, something sent by demons—every pound of fat on his body quivered with the realization that this uncanny opportunity had come to him at precisely the wrong moment in his life. He was a good hundred and fifty pounds overweight, having long since passed "portly" and landed firmly in the territory of the morbidly obese. Back in the Becord Keeping Department, nobody ever called him to task about it. There was an unspoken agreement that Moses was to be tolerated, so long as he did solid and reliable work, never betrayed any secrets, and stayed out of sight among the stacks.

Until the Great Earthquake struck, he was safe in his humble ambition of efficiently running the Becord Keeping Department and knowing that he would be left in peace to slowly die inside of
his expanding carcass. And he found that the relief of giving up on life provided a strange form of comfort to his depressed condition. Moses was loath to be the center of attention anywhere, especially in a command position as he was now, responsible for dozens of officers who could see at a glance that he was unfit for the job.

Now he couldn't get the eyeballs off of him. For the last four weeks, his bizarre turn of fortune had forced him to stay on the job as much as eighteen hours a day, seven days a week. He took no time off, hoping to use his sheer level of work effort to compensate for his obvious lack of worth. And since for all that time he had been surviving on little more than soups and cigars, the weight was falling off of him. If he could keep that up, in a year or so he might look normal again. But he knew that without the nearly supernatural level of motivation he'd been experiencing, he would never be able to repress his raging appetite for that long.

For now, it was easy to endure hunger. His hunger pains helped to confirm that at least he was doing what he could about himself. He dreaded having to spend every waking hour in full view of everyone, knowing that he couldn't possibly have the respect of the other officers. It was lucky that the men listened to him at all. What would he do in the event of a general mutiny, break down in tears?

Most of the time, Moses sealed himself inside of his work routines to insulate himself from the hot sensation of people's stares and the implications in their eyes. He stayed so busy with one task after another, hour to hour, day to day, that the business rituals became unseen armor. For a while, the armor helped him to keep away certain other, more difficult aspects of his job. These job aspects were the ones that made it necessary to have an approved line of succession for Station Chief in the first place—they were the reasons that you couldn't possibly fill the position by placing an ad.