Colours

Peter flees to New York to confront the long dead Radek.

Chapter Two

         Colours

 

In his forty-fifth year, sitting on his dock on Lake Lomond, Jessup pondered the uncertainties of the colour green. When he had been young, green had been the green of young leaves and of new grass emerging from the bitter New England winter.  Green had been as fixed as had the rest of his life. Yet, every time he seemed to grasp at it in his paintings, it slipped away from him. Trying to capture the colour of the trees bordering the lake was proving as difficult as trying to capture the colour of the water. It changed with every passing cloud, and with every rising or declining of the sun. As the seasons passed, he found a different shade of green with every change in the weather.  Painting, he had found as uncertain as every other aspect of his life had become.

In childhood the certainties of his life had been bound up with his father’s farm in the Berkshire Hills.  Three times since his marriage he had written to his father, to tell him of his wedding, and then of the birth of each of his sons. They had returned the first letter unopened. The second and third had received no response. Having made his point Jessup knew that his father was not one to waste money. Some certainties from his childhood had survived. 

In marriage and in fatherhood, Jessup thought that he could build a new life beside the lake, as so many others had.  As he lay with his wife and watched his sons being born, Jessup plotted the pattern of his life. He would age beside the lake, watching his boys grow.  Then, that past June, Patricia decided to take his sons to visit her sister in Buffalo. A speeding engine, a washed out bridge, a failed brake, a telegram, and the centre of his life tumbled away from him. Now he had nothing left to do except to sit alone on a dock, painting pictures that no one wanted.

Over the past winter another certainty had crumbled.  He had grown up seeing his nation as the strongest and finest in the world. No man he had believed could be truly free unless he was an American.  Canada modified that view. A person, he conceded was free because of himself, not because of his country. All the liberty in the world might not be enough to keep a man from becoming a slave. Even so another certainty had remained. Until the fall of 1860, he still held that the American Union was unbreakable.  Now his country was disintegrating.

He followed its break up in the papers, the spreading turmoil and the threats of secession from the Southern states. Jessup assumed that it would all end, as it had ended before, with another compromise patching things over. With the firing on Fort Sumter, he accepted that civil war had come, but it could not last. He had been in the south. It was no match for the north. One summer’s campaign and then the southerners would see reason.  The country would survive, but it would not be the county that he had known. Steam power and factories would be the America of the future. It pained him, but it was all so far away.  His thoughts remained beside the lake, trying to understand the nature of colours.

The trick was to catch the impermanence of light, as transient as the nature of life itself. During that past winter as he had worked in his small studio in the rear room of Still Waters, Jessup had realized the mistake that he had been making. He had looked upon colour as something precise, frozen, and unchanging. It was not that way at all.  The secret of colour lay like light itself, in tiny dots of matter. He began to experiment, using smaller brushes, dabbing at the canvas, blurring outlines, concentrating upon intermixing colours as nature did.  Jessup had been painting for almost nine years. In all that time he had not succeeded in selling one painting. He had come close once.  Maureen McKay had wanted a portrait of her father. She requested him to paint one. Never having met the man, Jessup had made detailed notes of Alex MacTavish’s description. For weeks he had worked away until he presented it to her.

The painting had been a failure. He knew that and so had Maureen. It had not been a portrait at all.  Alex’s face remained unseen. Trees took up most of the picture, great dark trees rearing up towards the winter sky. Below, on a trail leading through the trees, a rider on a horse bent his back forward as if fighting against the wind. The painting confirmed what Maureen and everyone else in the town knew.  If Jessup had any true talent, he would not be wasting it here in Kilmarnock.

She would have rejected it except that Jessup, understanding her disappointment, offered it free. He had, he told her, tried to capture the true nature of the man. Out of politeness, she placed it in the drawing room beside the portrait of her mother. As visitors came they had looked at it, murmured that it was interesting and had changed the subject. Jean had called it scary. Little Alex and Judy had admired the horse. This Maureen saw as confirming that the painting was a childish work lacking in true maturity. Only one person had liked it as a painting. Peter. Maureen had replied by giving it to him. She had then requested George to contact a painter in Kingston or Montreal to do another portrait more to her liking.

Over the past years Jessup painted away, storing most of his works in the rear studio of Still Waters, giving some to friends. Never had he thought of asking for money. Father Byrne did approach him once about doing a painting for the church. Jessup’s reputation as a freethinker led to such opposition from the parishioners that the priest was forced to change his mind. They gave the commission to a good Catholic. When told the news, Jessup nodded, said that he understood and returned to his easel.

As Maureen hurried down the path towards Jessup’s house, she could see him dressed in his grey smock and wide straw hat, sitting on his old folding stool, working at his easel. It was all such a waste, thought Maureen. She was not one to tell anyone how to conduct his or her business, but the man could have tried to understand what art was about.  Art should elevate, and bring out what was true and noble.  When she looked at the blobs and points of colour that marked Jessup’s work she could not recognize anything true or noble. Yes, if one focused at a certain distance, one could see a tree and buildings, but it seemed so unclear. Why should someone have to guess at what a painting meant? If the man had proper academic training, he might have learned how to make a proper picture. Instead, Jessup had wasted his time doing something for which he had neither the proper training nor the talent. Well, now she had something to which he could put his proper talents.

Jessup looked up from his painting at Maureen hurrying towards him.  He did not mind too much the fact that no one wanted to buy his paintings. He hated parting with them anyway.  Jessup did resent the fact that people regarded the painting as being on the level as whittling, an amusing activity that they could interrupt for something more important, such as discussion of the weather.  “Afternoon, Mrs. McKay. Warm enough for you?”

“Peter is gone,” she said.  Maureen waved a paper at him.

Jessup grunted, and resumed dabbing at the canvas.  Maureen ran up to him, the perspiration glistening on her forehead.

“He wrote the Judge and told him that he would not be coming back to Kilmarnock.”

Jessup looked up.  He wiped the brush and placed it in the water glass that squatted on the small table beside him.  “Let me see.”

She handed him the paper. Jessup studied at the message.

6 June

Mr. and Mrs. McKay

I had a letter today from young MacTavish.  Not meant for your eyes. He deeds all of his property to Doctor McKay. He says that he is going away and has no plans to return. You had better come and see me tomorrow if possible. Bring Mister Jessup and Mister Campbell.

Respectfully

Alistair

“So?” Jessup asked handing her back the note.

“So? He’s missing.”

“He is a grown man,” Jessup shrugged.  “He can go where he chooses.” Picking up his brush Jessup tapped some more brown onto a house roof.

“Not this way. You don’t believe that something is wrong, do you?” Maureen asked.

Jessup looked at her pondering whether or not he should reassure her.  “No.  No, I don’t” Jessup murmured. “But then, that’s what I’m supposed to say, isn’t it.”

Jessup looked at her, holding the paper in her hand, her other hand upon her left hip.  Sometimes he regretted not having met her when he had been younger.  This was not one of those times. “Perhaps you should wonder why he would want to come back here at all.”

“I don’t know what you mean. You’re his friend.”

“Only because he thinks that I’ve never lied to him, only because he thinks that I don’t know the truth about his past. That’s not a great basis for a friendship.”

“He’s my brother.  He knows that.”

“He knows that you believe it, yes, but he doesn’t.  Do you know those letters that he’s been sending me from Montreal?  For two years I’ve been waiting for him to refer, just once, to a friend that he might have met there, even just to a conversation that he might have had with someone.  He never has. ”

“Would you have him waste his time in foolishness?”

“I would have him stop looking at everyone as potential enemies. George doesn’t think that he should be a doctor, do you know that?”

“We have discussed the matter. Peter has done well in his studies, better then George ever did.  George admits that.”

“It’s not a question of intelligence, or of ability. Why people revere your uncle is because he cared about his patients.   Can you imagine Peter as a gentle, loving physician?”

“Given time . . .”

“He’s twenty-three, Maureen, your husband’s age when he came here. How much time can we give him? The thought of opening himself to anyone still terrifies him.  What kind of doctor sees his patients as a threat?”

“If he does, is that my fault?”

“No.”

It was not, entirely.  Jessup knew that he himself had added to the lies surrounding Peter.  He had never told the McKays about Janet Ryan.  To do so might have destroyed the boy’s trust in him, but that lie had helped thicken the crust of falsehoods covering his life.

“Don’t you think that I know what those lies have done to him,” Maureen told him, “but I had to protect him.”

“I know. He knows that too, and he hates it, Maureen. Those lies are choking him.”

Maureen shook her head.  “The point is,” she reminded him, her voice clipped and stern. “Peter is gone. We need to know where he is, and if he is safe” Touching the man’s arm, she softened her voice.  “Please, Paul. I want you to come with George, Ian and me tomorrow to see Judge Strachan.”

“I have nothing else to do but sit here making silly pictures.”  Jessup wiped his hands on an old piece of towelling that dangled from the coat of his smock.

“I didn’t mean it like that,” Maureen told him.

“Yes, I know.   Of course, I’ll come.”

Maureen smiled with relief. 

Jessup looked back at the unfinished landscape.  “Wasn’t any damn good anyway.”

***

Alistair was now seventy-two. Not old he would tell Mary, just advanced.   Three days before he had celebrated his birthday with his wife, children and grandchildren.  The glow of that happy time lingered on into the following day until the letter from Peter arrived.   He had not seen young MacTavish for over a year.  Since his going to Kingston and then to Montreal, Peter had receded from his life. Alistair admitted that he did not regret that.  He had never felt comfortable around the boy.  As the boy had grown older, the discomfort had increased.  In the days after returning from New York Alistair had hoped that the boy would adapt himself to his new life as Alex’s son.  A forlorn hope, Alistair now admitted.  He remembered the boy crouched in a corner, too afraid to look at him as if Alistair had come to preside over his execution.  He thought of the child sitting at the end of the table, willing to abandon his one hope for a life for the sake of a promise. Alistair had hoped that the child at the table would win out.  In the last few years that hope had faded. Now he saw a young man with eyes that never quite met his.  Peter MacTavish was a man who never laughed and never trusted.  Perhaps he had sensed that the people he owed his life to paid for that life with lies to which they could never admit. Had Alex found him too late?  Had their lies just worsened everything?  “We should have told him,” he said thinking of Radek.  “Someone should have.”

On the table in front of him lay two objects.  One was a deed transferring all properties held in the name of Peter MacTavish to George McKay.  The other was Alex’s old watch.   To Peter, more than the land, more than the house, the watch had symbolized his claim to be Alex’s son.   The five people in the room knew what his giving it up meant.

“I thought everything was going so well for him,” said Maureen.” He’s going to graduate. Alex would have been so . . . proud.”

Her voice died away. George, Campbell and Jessup did not reply.

“The deed was drawn up in Montreal.  He may still be there,” said Alistair.  “He may not. Someone will have to find him.”

Jessup knew who the someone would be.  He thought of the last time that he had returned the watch to Peter.  He had tracked Lewis and Janet Ryan across the lake to Oswego and then south to Syracuse.  Along the lakefront, in a small tavern he found Janet.  She had awakened there to find Lewis gone with what they had stolen. Lewis had also taken her money. To pay off the bill she worked cleaning pots and emptying slops.  The old watch was the only thing Lewis left behind when he abandoned Janet. He had not thought it worth enough to bother with.  Janet begged Jessup to take her back, to give her another chance.  As Jessup turned to go, she caught him by his arm.  “I didn’t mean to hurt him,” she said.

Jessup pocketed the watch.  He nodded and left her there.  Before leaving the tavern he paid Janet’s bill. When he returned to Kingston Peter asked him why had he not had the woman arrested?  Jessup had asked him if that was what he wanted.  Peter had looked down and refused to answer.

Jessup returned to the present.  “A long time ago,” he said, looking at Maureen, “someone told me that I if I were to drag him back to a life that he did not want, I would have to clap him in irons.  I didn’t do it then.  I won’t do it now.”

Strachan nodded. “None of us wish that.”

“All we want,” said Maureen “is to know that he is well and . . . to let him know that he has a home here . . . if he wants it?”

“I’ll tell him that,” said Jessup, “but the rest will have to be his decision.”

Jessup spent his last evening in Kilmarnock sitting on the dock, smoking his pipe and watching the stars.  Tomorrow he would leave on the afternoon steamer south to Kingston.  He would take the train to Montreal.  The McKays would look after his house and possessions.  His paintings and sketches, he  had wrapped in canvas and placed in his bedroom.  He would take his clothes, his daguerreotype of himself, Patricia and their two boys, and nothing else.  He always preferred travelling light.  Now he had nothing left to do but to listen to the water lapping against the dock and remember.

“Paul?”

Jessup turned his head to see Maureen standing at the foot of the dock. She carried a basket.  The first time had she called him Paul had been after she had heard about the accident that had killed his family.

“I brought a few things,” said Maureen.  “I thought that you might like them.  Some bread, biscuits, coffee. Some preserves.”

“Thank you.  That’s very kind.  Would you like to sit?”

“Please I . . . I really have to . . .” The thought of a married woman and mother spending time with an unmarried man at night would give the gossips of Kilmarnock fuel for months. 

“I understand,” said Jessup.

“Where do you think Peter might have gone,” she asked.

“Not Peter. Where would Josef go?  That is what I have to know.”

“Where will you go?”

“Montreal.  See what I can find there.  Check with the rail and steamship lines.” He would also check with the hospitals, morgue and asylum, but those he did not mention.  “You knew Josef better than I. Where do you think he would go?”

Maureen thought of the child that she had once known. “He came here running from what those men had done to him.  I suppose that he’s still running from it.”

Jessup nodded. Where would Josef run?

***

As he leaned back against the cool stone wall of his cell, Josef listened to his brother telling him that Maminka was cooking chicken stew for supper. Janos and he had finished hoeing the garden. When Maminka was not looking, the boys had run off into the woods.  They knew better then to run too far, with Baba Yaga and the Divozenky waiting for them. They would go to the stream.  That was safe. Laughing and shouting, the boys ran down the trail, Janos trying to keep up with his older brother. Free of work. Free of fear. Free of hunger. That moment would remain a mark in Josef”s life against which he could measure happiness. It had been a time before the typhus, before Milos, and Radek. He had found a similar happiness with Alex but not until the police officer had placed him in this cell had he felt it again.

Josef was happy here. The lies had ended. He did not need them in the Tombs, the city prison. Everyone knew him for what he was now, the judge who had sentenced him to ninety days, the officers, the other prisoners.  No one cared that he had to be something else. This was where a monster such as he belonged, in this small barred cell. No longer did he hear the woman screaming at him. They should have sent him to the insane asylum on Blackwell’s Island.  The judge however had failed to interpret his silence during his sentencing as a mental disorder, attributing it to contempt towards the court.  His sentence was set at a mere ninety days.

For the moment though, he was content. Here he could sit, free of the staring faces of the past, of the fears and pretence, and slip back to a small hut lost in the woods of Moravia.   He spent little time thinking of the journey south, even less of Kilmarnock. The McKays, he had decided would be glad to see the end of him. They would not have to lie anymore. They would never hear of what he had done to the girl in Montreal.  He had been right to go back to New York. The centre of the lies lay here. If he were ever to be free of them, he would have to strike at the origin of them.

The money in his wallet had been enough to buy a third class ticket to Brooklyn. Josef had sat on his wooden seat, huddled next to the window seeing neither passengers nor scenery, only a girl lying on a dark street and a house in Harlem.  The McKays had told him that Radek had gone to prison. He had never quite believed that. Radek had been too powerful a force in his life for Josef to accept his being shut away forever.  He would still be there, in New York, free or in prison.  Only by ending Radek, could he end the pig. Only after he had shown everyone what Josef was would the lies stop. Then he could forget the girl that he left screaming in the street.

At the border, the customs official had asked him his name. He had mumbled his name, Josef Benes.  Josef had known too many names.  Now he only had one.  No more lies. When asked his nationality, he had mumbled Canadian, which Josef conceded was true. He was afraid that the man would ask for his papers, but the man had contented himself with asking his destination and purpose of visit, and had then moved on. That was the last person that Josef spoke to until he left the train.  For much of the trip he had kept a comfortable distance between himself and the other passengers. On one side he had the window. On his other he placed his bag and coat, keeping away until deep into the states anyone whom wished to sit there.  As they moved south, the tide of people stuffed into the car lapped against his spot. By the time that they reached southern Vermont, a husband and wife squeezed themselves into the seat.  Peter moved his bag onto the luggage rack, and draping his coat over himself pressed closer to the window and tried to sleep.

Two days later when the train stopped at Brooklyn, he rose from his seat and stumbled out onto the platform, his bag forgotten in the luggage rack.  Descending from the train, he asked a porter the way to Manhattan. Following the man’s directions he had walked to the ferry station, ignoring the people jostling him, knowing only that on the island of Manhattan he would find what he was seeking.   It was only when he was on the boat that he remembered his bag. He had shrugged off the loss as unimportant.

Slumped onto the wooden seat on the deck of the Wall Street Ferry, Peter stared across the river at Manhattan. He was trying to calculate how far a walk it would be from the battery to Harlem, conceding that he should have crossed closer to the northern end of the island, when a noisy troop of blue coated men blocked his view. Most of them were not men at all but still in their teens. They jostled good-naturedly, pushing against one another to find a place next to the railing. Josef wondered why he had seen so many men in uniform as he had drawn nearer to New York. Somewhere in his mind, he told himself that America was a country at war. Having noted the fact, he dismissed it, turning his mind back to his own war with Radek.

Why had he traveled south?  Part of his mind told him that it was a fool’s errand. He could never get away from the memory of what he had done to the girl in Montreal and to the McKays.  As for Radek, if the man were still alive, he would be in his late fifties, still sealed away somewhere in a cell.  Sing Sing was the nearest prison to New York, but was Radek in prison?  Suppose that he had been freed? Where else could he have gone?  Part of Josef’s mind told him, anywhere.   Yet Josef could see only one place that remained locked with Radek’s image.  That place at least gave him a goal to his wandering.

As he made way on foot north, he contemplated what he would say to Radek, if he should find him. The man would not want to speak to him.  Josef could understand that. He would have to think of some way of getting his attention. He thought of shooting him or stabbing him but he had neither gun nor knife. Besides that was not what he wished. He wanted to show people what Radek was like.  Just killing Radek would not accomplish that.

As he made his way north along Broadway, he had found his progress blocked by a congealed mass of humanity. Above it martial music blared.  He could hear the tramping of feet and hooves, the glimpses of columns of marching men and the fluttering of pennants. In all that great crowd one person remained oblivious to the coming of war. Josef turned away into the quiet of a side street.  At the other end of the side street the crowds were thinner. He resumed his northward journey. He had gone another mile before he realized that his billfold was missing. Josef tried to remember the people he had met.  There were too many that had jostled him for him to recall one face. Anyway, it did not matter. He had decided what he would say to Radek.

***

“You have a visitor.”

Josef frowned at the warder. He was angry not with the man who was a decent sort, but with the thought of someone disturbing his thoughts.  Josef did not want a visitor. He was content to sit in his cell, as one day passed into another, sitting alone, content to be Josef again.  He was about to tell the warder to send the visitor away but it was too late. The man had already appeared at the doorway of his cell.

The man was in his sixties, balding with large white side-whiskers. A chequered waistcoat and green coat covered his large middle and velveteen trousers. A thick gold watch chain spanned his middle.

“Do I know you?” Josef asked.

“No.”

The man’s accent reminded him of Alex.  Then he remembered.  The man had been among the sparse sprinkling of spectators looking on during his trial. 

“Go away,” he told the man knowing that the man would not.

The man turned to the warder, and speaking to him as if he knew him, asked for a chair. He said nothing more until the warder brought the chair and the warder had left. Josef turned his back on the man, turning on his cot to face the stone wall. He closed his eyes hoping that the man would leave.

“My name is Walters, Angus Walters, detective, New York City Metropolitan police. Nine days ago they brought you before a magistrate on a charge of disturbing the peace. You refused to give him your name. Is that right?”

Taking Peter’s silence as assent, Walters continued. “The night before, you were throwing rocks at the front widows of a house on Mulberry Lane, in the village of Harlem, and shouting words in an unknown language, at the house. You also urinated on the doorstep. These actions caused great distress to the occupants of the house, an Episcopalian Minister, Mister Elishah Wood, his wife and children. When asked by the patrolman to desist, you refused. They subdued you by force. You continued to shout until they took you away in the police wagon. Having been found to have no money, the magistrate charged you with committing an indecent act, public mischief, the breaking of a window, and vagrancy.  Anything you would care to add, or change?”

If this were police business, cooperating would be better. Then they would leave him alone.

“No.”

“You pleaded guilty, is that not so?”

“Yes.”

“According to the arresting officer, you showed no sign of being intoxicated. When asked to explain your actions to the magistrate, you said nothing. You have refused all legal counsel.”

“Yes.”

“Reverend Wood heard you repeat the phrase Herr Radek. Why was that?” Receiving no reply, Walters leaned forward. “Eleven years ago a man named Radek did live in that house. He was the former steward of a nobleman, a Baron Von Kraunitz who died in that house in June of 1850.  Mister Radek vanished in the following August.  He disappeared with a great deal of money. To this day no one knows where he went or what happened to his money. ”

Josef rolled over. As Walters studied the thin, unshaven face, the staring brown eyes, he could see that he managed to surprise the man. It was, he thought, a step forward.

“Several disappearances came from that household. Three people named Leuger, two brothers, Franz and Ferdinand, and a sister Katrina, vanished as well.   Before these people disappeared, someone else did, a servant boy, about twelve, named Josef Krivanek. It is thought that he died in Canada. He had a scar on his left wrist. I understand that you have one as well?”

Josef’s eyes glanced down at his left wrist. He sat up placing his hands between his knees.

“What do you want?”

“My grandson. What do you want, Josef?”

Josef leaned back against the stone wall. Folding his arms he told the policeman, “I want you to go away.”

Walters fumbled inside a coat pocket for a moment and then brought a small metal frame in which was a daguerreotype. It showed a serious young man staring out of the picture awed by the solemnity of the picture taking and proud to be wearing his new uniform. To make himself more warlike he held a pistol on his lap.  Walters, leaning forward, placed it on the cot next to Josef.

“His name is Nathaniel. He will be nineteen in September, if he lives that long.”

Josef’s eyes studied the picture for a moment and then turned back to Walters. “So?”

“What brought you back, Josef, or should I call you Peter, or Doctor MacTavish?”

“I’m not a doctor.”

“Of course you’re not. By the way, you did very well in your exams. You were third in your class.”

Josef gaped at him and then closing his mouth pulled himself away pressing his back against the stone wall. “I should have been first.  What do you want?”

“I told you what I want. My grandson.”

“I don’t know him.”

“You may, some day, soon. However, let me finish. I’ve been a policeman for thirty years, ever since I came to this country. I’ve developed a sense about what happens to people sometimes.  This Radek is dead. I know that. Let him stay dead.”

“I thought that you had imprisoned him?”

The man seemed surprised.  “Radek? No. Who told you that?”

Another lie Josef told himself.  If they had not imprisoned Radek, as the McKays had told him, what had happened to him?

His confusion gave Walters the opportunity to press forward. “Look, lad, I’m not interested in solving old cases. As for finding other missing persons, if they want to stay missing, that’s fine. Eleven years ago I saw a room in that house, a room where someone had locked away a child for months. You know that room, don’t you Josef? It’s not much bigger then this cell. Do you remember it?’

Josef closed his eyes. “Yes. I remember.”

“That room, and what they did to you in that house, that’s what brought you back, isn’t it?”

“What do you want?”

“It might interest you to know that eleven years ago I received a letter from a friend of mine, another policeman. He had received the letter from a maid employed in the baron’s household, an Eva Meyer. In broken sentences and misspelled words she told of a child that she believed was being ill-used by two men, an Austrian nobleman and his steward, the man named Radek. I took the letter to my superiors and asked them what I should do. They told me to do nothing.”

“You knew?” Josef whispered.

“We . . .  suspected.” said Walters.

“And did nothing.” said Josef. “Day after day I waited for someone to come. No one ever did.”

Walters had always known that a good part of the graft that he had received as both a young roundsman and then as a middle-aged detective came from prostitution, some of it from the prostitution of children. Even so, he had considered himself an honest policeman.  He never took a bribe from a man he found committing a crime, but what went unseen, unknown, where was the harm?  Within reasonable limits he regarded himself as a dedicated professional.

“I suspected.” he said. “I couldn’t prove it.” He read the disbelief in the young man’s eyes. “I didn’t want to prove it.  No one wanted it proven,” he admitted. “Radek had been paying certain gentlemen in Tammany Hall a great deal of money to win their affections.  The mayor’s office gave instructions to leave the Baron and his household alone.  So we did.”

Josef muttered, the bitterness filling his voice. “I wasn’t important enough.”

“Yes.”

“Now I am?”

“Yes.”

Josef turned back towards the wall. “Go away,” he whispered.

“I wish that I could,” said Walters. “I wish I could just let you walk away from here, but I can’t, not without first asking for your help.”

“You want me to help you?”

“No.  I want you to help him, Nathaniel. Back then I didn’t have the power, and maybe I didn’t have the will to do anything for you.  For that I am sorry. Now you are the one that has the power. You have the power to save him, and thousands of others like him, decent, young men who never hurt you. You will deny them life, by sitting here in this place, or by just walking away from them, as I did with you. Don’t make my mistake.  Why are you here, Josef? You’re not a criminal. You’re not a lunatic, despite what Reverend Wood might think. However, you are one thing. You are a qualified physician and surgeon.”

Josef shook his head.  He murmured “I’m a fraud.”

Walters shrugged. “Half the frauds in this country claim to be doctors. Why not have a doctor claiming to be a fraud? As for practical training you’ll have enough of that. Nathaniel and hundreds of thousands of others think that they’re entering upon a great adventure. They’ll die like flies from camp fever, dysentery or pneumonia. If they survive those camps, they’ll line up on fields to die in pain and fear, their insides ripped apart by shrapnel and minie balls.”

Josef shrugged.  “The war will be over in three months.”

“You think so? This is a civil war, lad. They’re the worst kind. No quarter. No compromise. Both sides will keep fighting until the last ration, and the last bullet is gone. North and South, they’re the same people, stubborn, with more bravery then brains, and they don’t give up easily. This war will go on for years.  It will be hard. It’ll be cruel. Every day that it lasts, Nat’s chances of coming home will shrink.”

“Maybe you don’t want your life anymore, Josef.  He does.  I’d do anything within my power to see that he gets one but where he’s going, I can’t help him. The presence of one extra qualified physician may just make the difference between his being buried somewhere and coming home again.”

“I can’t even help myself. Do you know what kind of person I am?”

“I don’t give a damn what kind of person you are, Doctor MacTavish. It’s your training and your knowledge that he needs. ”

Josef turned away from him.

Walters turned and called towards the closed door. “Sergeant!”

He then turned back to Josef.

“Reverend Wood is not such a bad fellow, you know.  All he wants is someone to pay for the repair of his windows. I’ve offered to do that. The courts are willing to overlook a first offence, especially by a young man on his way to join the army, especially an assistant-surgeon appointed at the recommendation of the mayor of New York.  I still have some influence in Tammany.  There’s something else, Josef.  My father worked in the Glasgow docks. A doctor named MacTavish nursed him through a fever, charged him tuppence.  My father always said that he was a decent man.  I thought you should know that.”

Josef was silent for a moment.  Then he asked, “Doesn’t there have to be an examination?”

Walters shrugged. “People take a flexible attitude towards such things, sometimes.”

“I’m not an American.”

“We’re not fussy, lad. If you’re not a rebel, you’ll be welcome, especially as a physician. We have soldiers aplenty. Doctors willing to work for the princely sum of one hundred dollars a month, plus room and board, are harder to come by. ”

“If I say no?”

“The judge has agreed to commute your sentence. The door is open lad. You’re a free man.  I’ll give you enough money to see your way back to the border.  I owe you that much.”

Josef shook his head. “I can’t go back.”

“Never said being free is easy. It’s your choice.”

“I don’t give a damn about your cause, or your country. All those flags and speeches, they’re just more lies.”

“Maybe so, but they’re not lies to him.”  Walters tapped the picture of Nathaniel. “They’re not to the men who will die because you prefer to sit on your arse feeling sorry for yourself.”

Josef was not interested in the picture anymore. It was the large, aging man that held his attention. “How do you know about me?”

“I do my job, doctor. Why don’t you do yours?”

“You’re offering me a commission?”

“The State of New York is, aye.”

Josef hesitated for a moment. “So what does this commission mean?”

Walters pulled out a folded sheaf of paper from an inside coat pocket and placed it on the cot beside him.

“You will be serving in the sixty-ninth New York regiment for three years as physician and surgeon. You’ll be a captain. Once you leave here, Sergeant Aherne will put you in a coach and then onto a steamer to the New Jersey shore. From there you’ll both take train to Philadelphia, then Baltimore and Washington. The regiment is encamped there.”

“I have no clothes.”

“We’ve seen to that. By the by, the government will deduct ten dollars from your salary every month until I’m paid for the forty dollars to replace Reverend Wood’s windows.  You have no objections I trust?”

Josef shook his head.

Walters turned to the sergeant. “Would you bring the doctor a razor, some soap and water, and a mirror?  I am certain that he would like to wash up before he leaves. Or perhaps . . .” he turned back to Peter. “You might want to keep the whiskers. They’ve become quite popular in the army ever since old Abe grew his.”

Peter touched the half-inch beard that had sprouted on his chin.   He remembered the soldiers on the ferry. If he was to be in the army, he should look like a soldier.  The beard would stay.  

***

“So he agreed?”

“Aye.”

Walters placed the daguerreotype on the table.  Jessup picked up the whiskey bottle and poured Walters a drink.

“You never told him about Radek, did you?” The inspector asked.

“No.”

“Maybe you should of. Someone should of. ”

The two were silent for a moment. Then Jessup looked up. “You, know, Angus, in an idiotic way, he is trying to come to terms with his past. A good sign, that.”

“Maybe. You think that he’ll do well in the army?”

                “I think so.  Probably what he needs is just a good kick in the seat, something to draw him out of himself.”

“Perhaps,” Walters shrugged. “You know him better then me. You know, if Godwin ever finds out about this, there’ll be hell to pay.”

“Washington is a long way from New York.  The congressman has other things to worry about right now.”

 “What about you? What are you going to do, Paul? Go back to Canada?”

Jessup shook his head. “I don’t think so. Nothing there for me anymore.”

“Agnes and I will be glad to put you up, if you’d like to stay on in New York for a few more days.”

“Thanks, Angus but, no.  Since I have the time, I thought I’d do some traveling.”

“Where?”

“South.”

“South?” Angus asked. “You’re not thinking of enlisting are you?”

“It does seem the popular thing to do these days.”

“That’s a young man’s game, Paul. You’re fourty-five.”

Jessup shrugged. “Maybe they’ll make me a sergeant in honour of my grey hairs.”

Walters frowned.  “What I told MacTavish about the camps, that’s all true you know.”

“I know.”

“The chances aren’t any better with a man in his fourties.”

“I’ve always been lucky, Angus.”

Walters shook his head, “you really want to do this?”

“Did you tell your grandson not to go?”

“No. ”

Jessup smiled.  “You think Peter is mad?”

`          ***

They had lied to him.  All those years ago, The McKays had told him that they had sent Radek to prison. None of it had been true. Then what had happened to the man? Had he fled New York once he became aware of the failed attempt and the loss of the Leugers? Katrina would have gone with him of course. That made sense but why could the McKays have not have told him? They had wanted him to stop being afraid of the man. They had meant well. Even so, he would have liked to hear the truth just once.

“Your bag, sir.”

Peter paused in the trimming of his beard and turned away from the small mirror. He stared at the carpetbag in the sergeant’s hand. It was identical to the one that he had left behind on the train. What he could not know was that the conductor noticing the bag left in the rack had placed it for safekeeping in the station baggage room. Jessup, following Peter’s route, had come across it and reclaimed it.

“Where did you get that from, sergeant?”

“Mister Walters gave it to me, sir.”

“Where is Mister Walters?” he asked still staring at the bag.

“Gone sir,” the sergeant replied giving the answer that they had instructed him to give.

”I’ll just leave it here, sir,” the sergeant said, placing it on the cot. “Another ten minutes sir, then we’ll have to be going. Don’t want to miss our boat.”

Peter opened the bag and looked inside. His clothes were still there. One thing was added to them, an old brass watch.  He picked it up. As he sank down onto the mattress, he looked at it, watching the minute hand creep forward, listening to the soft ticking. He wondered where it had come from. Paul, he told himself. How had the man managed to locate the bag and him? Josef had been so careful never to speak to anyone on the train, always remaining away from anyone else. How had Jessup known that he would have chosen to go to New York? So much of the man remained unknown.

He did know one thing. Having the watch was wrong. He had lost the right to have it. Josef should hurl it against the bars of the cell, smash it, and show everyone that what it represented was no longer true. Instead, he curled his fingers around it and slipped it into his coat pocket.   A watch, he told himself, was still a watch. Besides, it would remind him of what he was not. 

Peter had learned one thing from his confinement.  No refuge existed in which he could hide from himself. All those years ago he had left New York, thinking that he could find one. It had all been a delusion. This had been his last attempt and they had stripped it away from him. The American army thought that they were getting a physician. They would realize their mistake soon enough and send him on his way.  What he would do after that he neither knew nor cared. He would worry about that when the time came. As he pulled on his coat he called out. “Sergeant, I’m ready”.