The Pale Blue Eye: A Novel (5 page)

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--"