I paid off the cab and we pushed our way through the crowd, my press badge making little difference to the citizens, but winning me a little headway with the cops and the firemen. Finally we got through the police line and into the building yard. In front of us was the massive, complicated apparatus known as a caisson—the chief aid and comfort of bridge builders everywhere, and (sadly) the scourge and terror of their workers. It only showed six or seven feet above the ground, but it extended a great long way beneath us.
Normally, this building site was such a humming pit of industry that you had to duck and weave as you walked along, leading with your elbows like a forward in the Princeton University Football game. Today, though there were a lot of workers around, nobody was actually working. Most of the men were sitting around looking unhappy or sullen. The rain was coming down steadily now, turning the earth to mud, but it seemed like nobody cared about the cold or the wet. Some had their heads in their hands. The winch that lowered food and coffee to the men down in the caisson was standing idle, and the old Italian man who ran it was slumped against the scaffolding, his arms draped over it, like a prize fighter who’s only just made it to his corner. He looked to have been crying.
I collared a foreman who was bustling past, red-faced and urgent, and compelled him to stop. “See here, brother,” I told him, “we’re from the Harper’s Weekly and we’d like to know what’s going on here.”
The yegg tried to pass us off with some mumble about asking the shift manager, but Dupin spoke up then, and either his gimlet eyes or his weird accent took the wind out of the foreman’s sails. “What is your name?” he demanded.
“O’Reilly,” the man mumbled, truculently.
“Your given name, as well as your family name,” Dupin snapped, for all the world as though he had some kind of right to ask. “Come, come.”
“John. John O’Reilly.”
“C’est ça. Tell us what has happened, John. Be brief and precise, if you please.”
The foreman didn’t seem to know what to make of this strange little guy in the fancy clothes. But on the principle that most people he met were going to turn out to be more important than he was, he coughed it up. “We got twenty men dead. The whole night shift. I went away to sign in the morning crew, and when I got back they was all…” He faltered into silence and pointed down into the caisson, as if the period of his sentence might be found down there.
“Twenty men?” Dupin echoed, and O’Reilly nodded. “Twenty men is a full complement, then? A full workforce?”
“It depends what’s going on,” O’Reilly said. “There’s less men on at night, on account of we just light the lanterns up in one half of the caisson. There’s a fire hazard, see?”
“No,” Dupin said forcefully.
“What?”
“No, I do not see. Show me.”
“Listen here, I got to…”
“Show me.”
If the situation hadn’t been so tragic, I might have laughed at the spectacle of this queer little foreigner taking charge so decisively. Dupin followed the foreman and I followed Dupin, my materials case clutched in my hand like a doctor’s Gladstone bag — only there wasn’t going to be any good I could do down there, I thought, as we skirted round the wheezing steam pump. Not unless you count bearing witness.
The caisson was eighty feet long, sixty wide and forty deep. The last ten feet or so were under the bedrock of the East River, so the air had a hellish dampness to it. We went down through several successive chambers, each sealed off by greased tarpaulins laid out in overlapping sheets. You had to lift a corner of the tarpaulin each time, like turning the page of a massive book, to expose the trapdoor and carry on down to the next level. Below us, candle flames flickered fitfully like someone was keeping vigil down there. The bellows of the steam pump kept up a consumptive breathing from up over our heads, and from below us that sound was compounded by the muttered conversations you mostly get around the bedsides of dying men.
The floor of the caisson was one half packed earth and one half new-laid stone. There weren’t any dying men there, only hale ones and dead ones. The dead ones were laid out in rows, like men sleeping in a dormitory. The living ones stood over them, candles in their hands, looking impotent and terrified as behooves men who are in the presence of such a disaster.
The shift manager — a clerkish-looking man of middle age, named Sittingbourne — introduced himself to us, and we returned the favor. I was vague about exactly who Dupin was, but emphasized our association with the Harper’s Weekly. That put a woeful look on Sittingbourne’s face, as well it might. This was the sort of thing he would probably have wanted to keep out of the papers until he’d talked to his bosses about what shape his future might likely take.
“See here,” he said, “don’t you go talking to none of my people without me being in on the conversation. Is that understood?”
“You got any people left for me to talk to?” I countered— and he deflated like a punctured soufflé.
“It was an accident,” he said. “A terrible accident. I don’t see how anyone could have foreseen this, or done anything to guard against it.”
“Perhaps not,” Dupin said acerbically. “But perhaps — yes. That is what we must ascertain. I wish to see the bodies.”
This came as a surprise to all of us, but principally to Mr. Sittingbourne, who thought he was dealing with newspapermen and now wondered if he was maybe dealing with something even scarier than that. A state commissioner, maybe.
“The… the bodies?” he temporized.
Dupin brushed past him, taking his candle out of the man’s hand in an en passant move that made me wonder if he’d ever done any fencing. He squatted down beside the nearest body and brought the candle up close to its face.
I winced, but I didn’t look away. I’m a sketch artist, and looking away isn’t in my religion. The dead man’s face was lividly pale, his lips blue rather than a healthy red. His face was twisted in a desperate travail, the eyes bulging half out of his head. All in all, it looked like death when it finally came for him might have been something of a relief.
“Poor bastard,” I muttered.
“Oui, le pauvre gosse,” Dupin said. He moved the candle from face to face. “They all seem to have died in the same way. Or at least, they all display the same symptoms.”
“It’s known that working in the caissons is dangerous,” Sittingbourne said. He was hovering at my elbow, nervously wringing his hands. “There’s a condition…”
“Caisson sickness,” I said.
“Caisson sickness, to be sure. And we’ve had our fair share of it. But nothing like this. Nothing on this scale. I honestly… I don’t know what to say. I really don’t.”
He was talking to Dupin’s back. Dupin was still examining the bodies, his mouth puckered into a grimace. “The light is inadequate,” he commented.
Sittingbourne looked around, startled. “Get your candles over here!” he called out to the other men. They clustered round us looking like they were about to burst into a Christmas carol.
Dupin stood. “Who turned out the lanterns?”
“I don’t know,” Sittingbourne confessed.
“Then find out.”
The Frenchman swept past us and headed back for the ladder, but he couldn’t climb up because there was a whole posse coming down. It was hard to tell in the sepulchral light of the candles, but they looked to be in uniform. Once they touched down, I was able to identify them as New York City cops — the Eastside variety called spudpickers elsewhere in the City because they’re bog Irish and Tammany men to a fault.