The Scribe (11 page)

Canby looked up to see that Billingsley was regarding him with amusement. “A vast improvement on gaslight, is it not?”

“It barely flickers.”

“Indeed. Electric is the light of the future. If my engineers can complete the project in time, we will have the entire city center lit with it before the Cotton Exposition is over. Perhaps even the exposition itself.”

Billingsley nodded at the glass before Canby. Canby picked it up and took a long sip. Irish whiskey, certainly, but not Jameson. His eyes watered as its mellow warmth burned down his throat and settled in his stomach. “That is fine whiskey,” he managed.

Billingsley smiled. “Aged. I am pleased you have a taste for it.”

Canby took in the room again, bathed in the electric light. On every wall and stacked floor to ceiling were shelves of books—bindings of every description, leather to humble cloth; oversized books of maps, he supposed; folios; small bound pamphlets. He understood now why the librarian had blushed; this room alone surpassed the Y.M.L.A.'s entire collection.

“My father would have loved a room such as this, sir.”

Billingsley's eyes crinkled before he spoke. “Indeed?”

“To the bottom of his soul. He loved books. All manner of wisdom, is probably how he would have put it.”

“He was a man of the cloth, was he not?”

“Yes. And a scholar, as well. A good man.”

Billingsley nodded. “There are good friends on each of these shelves,” he said, setting his drink on the table beside his chair. “Though not all of them are. One would be a fool to embrace every idea.”

Canby found himself leaning forward in his chair. “I had not thought of it that way, but of course that's how it is. Some to keep . . .”

“And some to be cast aside.”

“I always thought it wise to consider every vantage.”

Billingsley clapped his hands together over his knees almost soundlessly. “Every vantage, of course!” he said. “But then comes selection.” The older man rubbed at his eyes under his spectacles. “I wonder what brings you here to me.”

Canby drained his whiskey, head shaking involuntarily as the flame of Irish spirits jarred his throat. He set the empty
glass on the desk. “I'm sorry to intrude business, sir, but . . .” He watched a moment as the electric lamp on Billingsley's desk burned, the arc current dancing across the filament. “You, sir, are one of the Confederates who never sought pardon after the war. If I understand rightly, you were not allowed to vote in the last national election because of it. I do not mean to offend, but do you, perhaps, have holdings in your library of some sort that might espouse a similar kind of . . . should I say, unrepentance?”

Billingsley's gaze had gone uncommonly cold. “A gentleman, sir, has no need to ask pardon if he has not given offense. Contrary to what the United States government may claim, I committed no crime. I merely defended what was mine.” But after a moment his expression softened. “I suspect you would disagree with that assessment.”

“In some particulars, sir.”

“This inquiry, does it involve the business of our recent killings?”

“It does. I apologize for having brought it here. It seems that our man might have some notion of a mission about his work. The killings, you see, seem to target Negroes in a particular way. There seems to be some race hatred involved. I suspect he has been reading some of the slavery apologists, Fitzhugh and the like. I was hasty in assuming you might have some such holdings.”

“In my measured opinion,” Billingsley said, “Fitzhugh was a buffoon.”

“My father thought so. And I share the opinion. But I believe our man is less enlightened.”

“Perhaps he is.” Billingsley waved his hand, languidly, at one of the walls of books. “Please take a look for yourself. I do not collect the likes of George Fitzhugh, but you may find something of use.”

Embarrassed, Canby stood and stepped over to the nearest bookcase. The books were arranged in some system of order he could not quite decipher, but their number and variety were staggering. “My God,” he said, “the languages!”

“I was educated in Latin and Greek, of course. The rest are just a dalliance.
Badinage avec les belles-lettres
,” the older man said.

“My father taught me a fair bit of Latin. He said I was hopeless as a scholar of Greek.” Canby glanced at titles on theology and history, quickly, then surveyed a shelf that seemed to be devoted to the sciences: Darwin's
The Origin of Species
, Jean-Baptiste Lamarck's
Philosophie Zoologique
.

“I have some lines here sent by a friend in France,” Billingsley was saying. He had moved to his desk and resumed his seat there. In his hand were several loose sheets of stationery on which measured lines had been written by what seemed, from Canby's vantage, a flamboyant hand. “I trust you know of Victor Hugo?”

Canby smiled. “Of course I read the
Hunchback
. And
Les Misérables
. I found it moving.”

“Did you read it in the French?”

Canby felt his cheeks coloring. “No, sir. In translation. You know Hugo personally?”

Billingsley nodded. “I should say, casually. Hugo's politics have long been vulgar but I have admired his poetry for many
years. His greatest work, I believe, remains unfinished. I have urged him to revisit it.” Billingsley put the spectacles back on his nose, held a sheet aloft, and read: “‘And thus the wise man dreams in the deep of the night, his face illumined by glints of the abyss.' That notion seems particularly apt for a man in your line of work, Detective.”

“It is, in fact. But one has to remember that the world is not the abyss.”

A trace of a smile played across Billingsley's face. “But the abyss is definitely a part of the world, is it not? How many have been murdered now? Four?”

“Three.”

“Three. You mentioned race hatred. Have you not considered the notion—the old notion, I should say—of simple evil in this case?”

This time, Canby smiled slightly. “
Evil
is not a word I use much, sir. It's more fit for newspapers, sensational journalism. Most crimes, in my experience, come down to your baser motivations. Greed. Anger. Envy—all the way back to Cain and Abel. But evil? More like the result of ignorance. I think what I am trying to say is that the impetus behind all the bad acts I have seen is not so much evil as it is simply human. Although hatred should not be underestimated. I see it in this case.”

Billingsley was studying him like a curio. “I wonder that the war did not temper that view.”

“It tempered it, absolutely. But as you said yourself, sir, you were fighting for what was yours. Even the poorest private thought the same. Month in and month out, I saw a conflict between two powers—over power.”

“And the circumstances under which you left the police force before: you see no evil in that nasty business?”

Canby smiled. “In Henry Grady? In the men of the old force reclaiming their status? No, sir. Again—envy, ignorance. Certainly ignorance in the case of Grady. He thinks of himself as infallible. That's why he misrepresented my connection to Mamie O'Donnell. I took a loan from her; he called it a bribe. His pride is his weakness. He misconstrued the facts of my case.”

“And cost you your job and reputation.”

“I intend to reclaim both.”

“Yet in the meantime you suffer under charges of graft and commerce with prostitutes.”

“I'll grant you, sir, that I harbor anger. But I know the truth of the matter. And my anger is not so great as to spur me to murder, or to despair of the truth coming out in time.” Canby sighed. It seemed that all the accumulated weariness of the past days settled on him at this moment. “I suppose you could say I am cautiously optimistic, Colonel. Despite it all, I hope for better days.”

“Sounds like an Emersonian notion.”

“I have read Emerson.”

“Indeed. Take a look at that high shelf there. A complete set of works, signed by the Sage of Concord himself.”

Billingsley rose and reached for a pewter bell on his desk, rang it twice. “I believe you are something new, Mister Canby. I will be interested to see how Atlanta treats you this time.”

He came from behind the desk and reached for Canby's hand as the study door swung open, the butler waiting just
beyond it in the hall. “Mister Canby,” Billingsley said, smiling again, “Godspeed with your investigation.”

The butler bowed and gestured down the long hallway. Canby was nearly to the front door when he realized he would be leaving empty-handed.

T
HE DAYS WERE
beginning to shorten as October progressed, Canby noted as he walked through town. He'd had a tolerable shepherd's pie at a pub new to him on Mitchell Street for supper, with two neat Jamesons on the side. He had thought ruefully that the Jameson paled in comparison to the whiskey Billingsley had poured for him, had given a thought to querying the older man about the brand, but dismissed it in an instant. What point? God knew from whence it came and at what expense.

He turned up Whitehall Street with a heavy feeling in his chest. A chimneyville, as they called it, it had been, after the war. This part of the city so thoroughly scorched by Sherman that only the river-rock and brick chimneys, fireproof, had survived. For a time after the siege they alone rose above the leveled ash, like the bones of the corpse that the city had become.

No longer. Whitehall had been entirely rebuilt. He stopped in front of a two-story building midway up the block, stared through its plate-glass windows at headless mannequins adorned with men's and ladies' clothing. Gas chandeliers burned inside and he saw painted on the glass above the store's
double doors, in gold letters,
M. RICH AND BROTHERS
. So this was the new Rich's store, relocated and twice the size of the last one. He watched as the clerks shuttered the windows, maneuvering around the mannequins as they closed the louvered panels. Seven p.m.

He looked again at the lettering above the door: 54–56
WHITEHALL STREET
. He'd never known the proper address for Angus's little school but as he looked up Whitehall to Alabama Street he gauged the distance to be about right. Not even a chimney left for a marker.

He stood and listened to the last of the clerks latch the front doors. The flames of the chandeliers dimmed. As he had done so many times on his night watches as a patrolman, he wondered if he was the only one to sense Atlanta's peculiar hauntedness. There was an understanding that it was not to be spoken of. The consensus seemed to be that industry and speed would replace the city's grief, if she moved fast enough. As if her bustling energy could banish the ghosts that lingered on every corner. He walked on.

T
HE LIFT SHUDDERED
to a stop on the sixth floor and Canby stepped into the hallway of penthouse suites, bidding good night to the operator as the man slid the grate shut. He was fishing the room key from his pocket when he noticed the door to his suite was slightly ajar. Anse, who seldom even latched his screen door in Ringgold, was going to have to learn Atlanta rules.

But as he stepped into the rooms he knew something was wrong. He could hear the steady drip of water and before he was halfway to the bathroom his boots began to make squelching sounds with every step, the sodden carpet beneath his feet becoming softer as he neared the bathroom door. He threw open the door and as a cloud of steam billowed and cleared he could see that the man in the claw-foot bathtub was Anse.

Anse's back was to the door but his eyes were fixed, it seemed, on the doorway and on Canby framed in its opening, his body wrought into the peculiar contortion by the cut in his neck, which ran through ligament and tendon and down to the spine. Canby saw that the trachea was severed and gaped open like a pipe. Anse's head, thus so nearly separated from his body, lolled over the lip of the tub, all but upside down, as if to survey the exit his killer had made.

And carved above the glazed eyes, neatly as a surgeon's work, was the letter
T
.

Canby crossed the distance and pressed his fingers to Anse's neck, vainly, for sign of a pulse. Then, as gently as he could, pulled the eyelids shut. He put a hand on Anse's shoulder and felt that the body was still warm. He reached for the tap and shut off the valve, then stood over the tub as the sound of water gradually subsided to a series of erratic drips. The big man's naked bulk was mostly submerged in the water with which his lifeblood had mingled and Canby felt within himself too much dread to reach into the water and pull the plug from the drain. He stared at one of Anse's arms, draped languidly over
the edge of the tub, a runner of blood still dripping slowly down the length of it to where his fingertips touched the floor. There the blood and water mingled in pinkish clouds on the white tiles.

Before this day had dawned he had talked with Underwood about faith; this afternoon he had bandied good and evil with Robert Billingsley. He knew what he had to do next, and that haste was paramount. Why, then, did he find himself first pausing to bow his head?

H
ANNIBAL
K
IMBALL
was not pleased. With his hotel locked down and his staff being rounded up for questioning, he had placated his captive customers in the hotel bar with a free round of cocktails, but the evening was wearing on and his patience wearing thin.

“This is the opposite of the kind of discretion for which you were hired,” he hissed at Canby. “Another murder, and in my own place of business!”

“That was my friend who died upstairs.”

“And two fifth-floor rooms flooded, to boot.”

Canby was considering putting his hands on the man when the lobby's front door began to rattle. He looked up to see Vernon Thompson pounding the glass door with the heel of his fist. Kimball nodded to the doorman and Vernon was soon striding across the lobby. Underwood followed him.