Mr. X (90 page)

It occurred to me that my aunts may have taken the Hatch file to hold in ransom for their own, and I later discovered it concealed in my Aunt Nettie’s house. The resemblance of a young man I assumed was Cordwainer Hatch to both Howard Dunstan and myself suggested that I had learned Edward Rinehart’s true identity.

I visited Mrs. Hatch; I tangled with drunken Stewart. When I returned to the hotel, I thought about calling Earl Sawyer to ask if he would be willing to examine some old photographs. Earl might let slip some small detail that could lead me to his employer. He was not listed in the telephone directory, so I spent half an hour wandering through the lanes in search of his address, then found myself before a derelict building. I realized that I’d had nothing to drink since midafternoon and was extremely thirsty. Yet, there I was, in front of Sawyer’s residence. I knocked. Sawyer recoiled at the sight of me, but after I explained why I had come, readily let me in.

I pretended not to notice the condition of his rooms. Sawyer said he knew his place was a mess, but if he could live that way full-time, I could stand it for a couple of minutes.

“Got that?” Mullan said. “ ‘If I can live this way full-time, you can stand it for a couple of minutes.’ ”

“Why is that important?” I asked.

“Because it’s specific enough to sound real.”

I repeated the phrase, and Mullan went on with my story.

Sawyer took me into the squalor of the front room. My presence evoked an odd, amused courtliness that seemed edged with hysteria. He asked to see the photographs. I gave him the Dunstan folder, and told him to look at the image of the young Howard Dunstan. He did so without any apparent recognition.

I put the Hatch folder in his hands. Sawyer stared at certain individual photographs with unmistakable interest. He looked again at the photograph of Howard Dunstan and placed it beside
a picture of Cordwainer Hatch. He seemed a bit dazed. I asked him if he had any bottled water, and he thrust both of the folders at me and went into the kitchen. I followed, to be certain that whatever I drank came from a bottle and was poured into a clean glass.

Unaware that I had followed him, Sawyer kicked away rubble from in front of his icebox. I noticed the photograph above the table and went up for a closer look. As soon as I had seen what Earl had done to the photograph, I understood that he was Cordwainer Hatch.

He whirled around and asked what I was doing. I pointed at the boy wearing the crown and flaming heart and said,
This is you
.

What if it is?
he asked me.
I stopped being Cordwainer Hatch a long time ago
.

“Repeat that,” Mullan ordered. “

‘I stopped being Cordwainer Hatch a long time ago.’ ”

“Then you said, ‘You came back to Edgerton as Edward Rinehart, and whether you know it or not, I’m your son.’ Repeat that, too.”

Earl Sawyer had not been surprised by my announcement. He nodded, regarding me with the faintly hysterical excitement I had seen on Buxton Place. He said,
For what it’s worth, I guess you are. I never wanted any part of you
. I began to back out of the kitchen, wanting only to return to my room and drink sanitary water from a sanitary glass. Sawyer came toward me, saying,
I want to show you something
. He opened the back door.
I owe you that much
. I followed him out into a close, winding passage.

Mullan opened the back door and said, “Come along, Mr. Dunstan.”

128

He plunged up the tiny lane, swerving with its abrupt shifts of direction, charging with the ease of long familiarity across unexpected corners and through boxlike courts.

“Do you know what this thing is called?”

“Horsehair,” I said.

“Do you know why?”

“Because it’s so narrow, I suppose.”

“Good guess,” Mullan said, leaving me to wonder if it had been no more than that, and turned into a lane twice the width of Horsehair. His dim figure moved aside and waited. The wider lane extended twenty feet to the right and met a brick wall. This was where Horsehair came to an end: not, as I had thought, into one of the streets bordering Hatchtown, but at a bluntly abbreviated lane between a brick wall and the slanting facade of a long-forgotten foundry. I looked at the wall and saw the word
Knacker
.

“Do you know what knackers used to do?”

I did not.

He waved to the building I thought was a foundry. Its wide double doors were inset with windows, like the old stable doors on Buxton Place. Mullan lowered his shoulder and pushed one of them sideways, and the entire structure trembled. We went into a long, wide space where hooks glinted from listing walls. In the center of the hard-packed earthen floor was a sunken circle about six feet in diameter. A cold, biting vapor scraped into my sinuses, and I sneezed.

Mullan moved toward the pit. “A hundred years ago, they led old horses through that lane and brought them here. The double doors were supposed to remind them of their stables.”

“Tell me what knackers used to do,” I said.

“Most places, knackers slaughtered worn-out horses and rendered their hooves into glue. Some stripped the hides and shipped them to tanneries. Here in Edgerton, they sheared the
tails and manes and sold them to wig makers and mattress companies. When a horse came inside, the boomer—that’s what they called him—hit it in the forehead with a sledgehammer. The horse dropped, and the guy they called the hoist picked it up with that thing.” He pointed to a long, half-rotted sling suspended from the ceiling. “The shearers harvested the hair, and the hoist lowered the carcass onto a hook. When the time came, he raised it up again, swung it over the pit, and lowered it in. The pit … the pit disposed of the carcass.”

“How deep is it?” I looked down at the still, black pool six or eight inches below the top of the pit.

“Deep enough. On busy days, the knackers dropped ten, twelve horses down there, and none of them ever came back up. Nothing has ever come up since, either. If all the bodies supposedly dumped into the Knacker are really there, they make quite a crowd.”

“What’s in there, acid?”

Mullan walked over to the side of the long room and scuffed in the earth. He bent down and picked up what looked like a small loaf of bread. When he brought it back, he was holding a broken cobblestone. “Watch this.” Mullan gave the stone an underhanded toss toward the pit. When the cobble fell to within two or three inches of the surface, I thought I saw the liquid ripple upward to engulf it. A sizzling jet from beneath the surface twirled the stone like a cork, and a twist of smoke drifted away to cut into my nasal passages. My eyes watered. Whipping end over end, the cobble surged across the face of the pit, already half its previous size. It looked as though a tribe of piranhas kept it afloat. In seconds, the cobble had become a spinning wafer, a crust, a speck.

“That’s what acid wants to be when it grows up,” Mullan said. “For a couple of months back in the early thirties, the city had the bright idea of using it as a supplementary garbage disposal for this part of Hatchtown. When the word got out, they stopped and issued the usual official denials. Anyhow, this is where Earl Sawyer wound up. He took you here, he pushed open the door, you went in behind him, and he pulled a knife. You dropped your folders right about here.” He brushed the sole of a shoe over the earth. “You struggled. Without knowing what was going to happen, you pushed him into the Knacker. Goodbye, Earl. Without a body, that’s the best we can do. It’ll work. No one’s
going to waste any time looking for his corpse. And you’d have to be brought here by someone who knew where it was, because you’d never find it by yourself. Most people in Edgerton have never even heard of the Knacker, and three-fourths of those who have think it’s a fable. Let’s get the rest of this night over with.”