The Last Nightingale (15 page)

Moses waved the eager artist off toward the morgue area, adding a look meant to remind Kimbrough not to make any mistakes. He observed with satisfaction that the little guy was so intimidated that he not only hurried to obey, but he even made a point of looking like he was glad to agree that yes, he would keep himself scarce.

Satisfied, Moses lumbered off in uniformed pants that were now several sizes too large for his shrinking portage. He went to see what else his people were stepping into around his partially reclaimed station. "Acting, hell," he dared to grumble out loud. "I
am
the Station Chief.”

* * *

The temporary morgue was less than a block from the station, in a clearing that was formed after the collapsed building was scraped away. Workers had used rubble to construct a giant single room with a low roof and walls two feet thick. Tommie stopped just outside the morgue's large doorway. It was hung with thick canvas curtains that reached all the way to the ground. Nobody seemed to be around at the moment. He looked around and noted a worn set of wagon tracks in the ground just outside the door. The morgue team was probably out fetching more guests. He clutched his sealed lunch pail, pushed the thick curtain aside, and stepped in without bothering to look around to see if anyone was observing him.

The instant that the curtain closed behind him, the great room plunged into total darkness. The sound of thousands of buzzing flies filled his hearing, and a thick stench assaulted him. Tommie stood perfectly still for a few seconds, struggling to slow his breathing and his heart. In order to steady himself, he groped for his vial of eucalyptus oil and streaked a thick smear under his nose and into his nostrils. The room's smell did not disappear, but its power was dimmed just enough to be tolerable. He pulled several loose wooden matches from his pocket and struck one with his thumbnail.

A flare of yellow and red light filled the area around him, revealing just enough to show him that this place was perfect. Everything he needed. A series of crude stone body basins were lined up along the walls, like oversized bathtubs. Each one was large enough to place a body inside and still leave room to line the body with ice. The ice water was being efficiently drained away along thin troughs made of hastily thrown mortar, which ran down both sides of the body basin into another gutter that ran under the wall. Most of the basins were filled with bodies in various states of decomposition.

He cried out without meaning to when the flame burned him.

He lit another match with throbbing fingers. Moving along the
wall, he checked each of the bodies, just in case. During his wanderings, he had heard the rumors of the plague turning up after the quake, but while most other people laughed it all off, he knew that the stories could be true. Every single day, Chinatown received crates unloaded from ships that brought their cargo
and
their stowaway rats. Sooner or later, a few of them were bound to carry plague. The city's Guiding Lights would be loath to allow it to affect business in their young port city, and unless a real contagion broke out that was too big to hide, the chaos of Chinatown could be used to conceal all sorts of bizarre death with the city's willing assistance.

If there weren't a plague victim in storage right now, Tommie was confident that there would be one very soon. He used up the rest of his wooden matches in trying to find any Chinese faces— even one—but every body was either white, black, or one of the natives. The most decomposed and truly disfigured ones didn't look much like human beings at all, and it amazed him that in the midst of this citywide crisis, people were still expending time and effort on the likes of them.
Let the flies have ‘em.
He passed by the last body just as his last match burned low. There was nothing for him here, yet. By the time the flame went out he was on his way back outside.

Wait for it,
some inner voice assured him.
It's coming. Wait for it.

In every direction, the city was an anthill of activity and reconstruction, but the pall that hung over the morgue's grim presence kept a bubble of avoidance for a good twenty yards in all directions. It suited him to stand comfortably inside that dead zone, completely unnoticed by the scurrying creatures who swarmed the broken city.

Within a few minutes, the body wagon pulled back up to the morgue with another sad stack. Tommie introduced himself and showed his letter of permission from the Committee of Fifty, at which the corporal in charge threw up his hands and told Tommie to do whatever he wanted except to get in the way. Tommie made a
show of helping them unload the bodies, enough to get a close look at each corpse. These were all white, as it turned out, probably a family. He was quickly aroused at the thought of the Nightingales, and of the time spent with them that was over all too soon.

Four more wagonloads came that morning, but with nothing more interesting than severely decayed and mostly unidentifiable remains. It was not until midafternoon when the corporal and his private drove up again, looking much different than the slumped, exhausted men they had been all morning. Tommie was passing the time by smoking a thin cigarillo and practicing his smoke rings when noises of fast thumping hooves and squeaky wagon springs caught his attention. He looked up in time to see the body wagon driving in hard and fast. The men pulled to a halt and jumped down, both looking tense. They immediately huddled in animated conversation.

Tommie felt his boredom leave him, and while the two officers debated next to the wagon, he walked around to look into the back.

There was only one body. It was adult sized, but completely covered in layers and layers of cloth wrapping. The whole bundle was so thick, it looked like the corpse was swaddled inside of a heavy winter sleeping bag, bound together by an intricately tied network of knotted ropes. Somebody had gone to a lot of effort for this. Extraordinary effort.

At that moment, the corporal hurried over. His face was coated in a light sweat and he spoke in anxious tones. "Mr. Kimbrough, I understand that you got clearance, and all. And you know we been letting you alone so far, right?”

“Oh yes, Corporal. That's quite true. Is there a problem now?”

“There is a problem for sure, sir, but it's not with you. I've got to ask you
not
to even think about opening up that body there, not to draw sketches or nothing. We're about to put it under every scrap of ice we got left. There's doctors from Sacramento coming in here to look it over. Until they get here, we got to leave it be. Can you promise me you're gonna leave this feller alone?”

“It’s a man, then?”

“Makes no difference. If you can’t agree, then we’re gonna go talk to somebody with more rank than I got.”

“Certainly, Corporal. Certainly. I completely apologize. You do such important work. Want me to help carry him in?”

The corporal shook his head. “We already had to put the thing in there. No reason for you to get any closer to it.”

The other man, Private Something Or Other, stepped up to help, and the two men lifted the body with exaggerated care, making sure not to touch it with anything other than their thick leather gloves. Tommie ducked inside ahead of them to light an extra lantern for the task, and they placed the body in the stone basin farthest from the others. They covered it with several half melted blocks of ice and pulled a thick tarpaulin over the entire mass.

He followed the men back outside and watched while they shook their leather gloves into a small fire pit. Then the corporal poured a generous helping of lamp oil onto the gloves and threw a match onto the pile. All three men stepped back while the flames leaped up amid an inky trail of smoke.

“Corporal,” Tommie asked in his best casual voice, “where did you say that body came from?”

The corporal studied him for a moment before he took a breath and shrugged. “Chinatown.”

Randall Blackburn sat at a little table in the partially restored café, across from Shane Nightingale. He had waited until they were done eating their filling lunch of heavy soup and bread before he presented Shane with the afternoon paper. Then he listened with satisfaction while the boy followed his request to read the article out loud. The story was accompanied by a generic pencil sketch of a twelve-year-old male that nobody would recognize as Shane, but his name was mentioned several times. Blackburn’s
acquaintance at the paper had pulled every heartstring that his editors would allow.

The writer repeated Blackburn’s story about a young man adopted out of a local orphanage by the Nightingale family of the well-regarded Nightingale Dry Goods Emporium, and who was now the family’s sole survivor. Instead of dwelling on how the Nightingales were killed, it celebrated the fact that even while Shane worked for his keep at a local church, he read the
California Star
with such regularity that he noticed the article about the murder of Captain Harlan Sullivan. Based upon Shane Nightingale’s astounding insight and the reporting of the
California Star,
an important clue was delivered to Sergeant Randall Blackburn of the SFPD, and a gross injustice was prevented. The true culprit was arrested and an innocent woman, wrongfully accused, set free.

“ ‘And now,’ ” Shane finished the last line in a strong voice, “ ‘the true perpetrator sits in police custody, after a full confession.’ ” He sat and stared at the page for a moment, then slowly lowered the paper to the table.

Blackburn grinned. “Now I see what you’re doing with this thing of reading newspapers out loud! It’s impressive. You never missed a beat.”

Shane nodded and looked up long enough to show a timid smile, then quickly lowered his eyes again.

“Don’t worry,” Blackburn went on. “I didn’t tell them which church you’re working at. Otherwise all the young ladies would be sneaking down here to meet up with you.”

Shane nodded a little, but this time he didn’t look up at all. The boy was so clearly lacking in self-confidence that a little celebration in the newspaper had seemed like a great way to buck up his spirits. But even though Shane was able to read every word of the article and surely understood that he was being publicly applauded, he wasn’t making any reaction at all.

Blackburn suddenly felt like a complete fool. Obviously, he had
misjudged the boy’s depth of grief over losing his new family. Had he managed to somehow make this boy feel worse?

“Well, Shane,” he went on. “It’s just a story. Tomorrow they’ll have another one. I just thought you might like for people to know how you helped me out. You deserve it. Take some pride in it.” He smiled and clapped the boy on the shoulder. “Brag on yourself a little bit. No harm in letting people know you’ve done something good for this city.”

Shane took a deep breath and finally raised his eyes to meet Blackburn’s. “Thank—thank you. I kno-kno-know you tried to he-he-he-help. But . . . I juh-juh-juh-just . . . I just . . .” He stopped and shook his head in frustration.

“That’s all right,” Blackburn hastened. “No need to go on about it. I should have talked to you first.” He grinned. “Guess I thought the surprise might lighten your day.” He handed the waiter the money for their meal and stood up. “Anyway you keep that copy. If you want to practice reading, can’t hurt you to read about yourself.” He pointed at the paper. “Save it for your kids.” Then he walked away and let Shane have some time to think of himself as a hero.

For Blackburn, it was uncomfortable enough to be alone with another male who was emotionally overwhelmed. And while it was less disturbing to be with a very young person in such a state, Shane was too old to dismiss as a child. He was close enough to manhood that his pain was awkward to witness, even though it also seemed unfair to expect him to show a man’s stoicism and to put up the strong face.

What an age to be, Blackburn mused, old enough to see things as they are and too young to do anything about it. In comparison, his own boyhood up among the California giant redwoods was fairly idyllic, all things considered.

He realized then, that he had actually thought he might fill in a well by pouring in a bucket of water. To offer Shane this little news story as some sort of reward, expecting it to help this troubled boy, was optimistic to the point of ignorance.

* * *

As soon as the big sergeant was gone, Shane had to lower himself back into his seat at the table. His wobbly knees had nearly given him away. He was so horrified by the sergeant’s news article that he had nearly blurted out his dismay, half a dozen times. It was only the blessed, goddamned stutter that saved him.

He began a slow, staggering journey back to the Mission. The cool green isolation of the Mission cemetery seemed to be the only place in the world where he could find any safety. The holy men there seldom concerned themselves with daily newspapers, and many of the city’s residents could not read at all. Once he made it back to his toolshed, he could lose himself there. It was as close as he could come to crawling into a hole.

S
HANE’S
ARTICLE CAME OUT
in the
California Star,
and a copy found its way into the makeshift morgue near the City Hall station. It was carried under the arm of the private from the day before, who finished reading it while sipping coffee poured from a pot hung over the fire pit. Instead of tossing the used newspaper into the flames, he pulled it into sections and then used them as protection from the cold for his hands while he carried the day’s delivery of ice blocks inside. He left each section of the paper with each ice block, piling the ice with the newsprint sandwiched between to help keep the blocks from freezing together.

He left the pile under layers of burlap for Tommie to distribute over the corpses as needed, since Tommie had been pleased to volunteer to work inside. The ice was never to be allowed to melt off of the mummy-wrapped body located in the back. That particular guest got fresh ice first, no matter what. Tommie worked in earnest, and the stench of decay soon infiltrated the pores of his exposed skin and every fiber of his clothing.