They were sitting around a big table, off to one side of Smith’s desk. At the head of the table sat not Smith, but Smith’s boss and the boss of everyone else here.
William Magear Tweed rose slowly from his chair as we entered the room. He towered above us. The man was architectural in his build — well over six feet in height, three hundred pounds or more in avoirdupois. But he looked a whole lot bigger and a whole lot heavier than that. His tiny round eyes might have looked weak on another man, in his face, the eyes being the windows of the soul, they looked like pinholes pricked into a black inferno.
“Well, now,” he said. His voice was a deep basso rumble like a trolley car going by. “It’s Mr. Nast, and his friend with the dapper clothes and the funny accent. You going to introduce us?”
“Actually, Mr. Tweed,” I said, “we just come here to sketch the commissioner’s portrait. But since he’s busy, we’ll come back another time.”
“Wouldn’t hear of it,” Tweed said. “Pull up a chair for Mr. Nast, and… I don’t know, what do you say to a high stool for the little guy?”
He was talking to the two remaining men, who stepped out of the smoke and shadow then. Sergeant Driscoll closed the door. Constable Flood kicked two chairs in our general direction, his face suffused with a nasty grin as with a bruise.
That sinking feeling I was talking about sunk about another twelve storys, quicker than any hydraulic elevator yet invented.
“Sit down, you yeggs,” Flood sneered. I slumped down in one of the chairs, but Dupin didn’t even acknowledge the loaded courtesy.
“You are Boss Tweed?” he demanded. “I have heard of you.”
“Most people have,” Tweed allowed. “As a humble servant of the City of New York, I hope. So you gents came here to paint a pretty picture?”
I opened my mouth to answer, but Dupin was in there a sight too fast for me. “No.”
“No?”
“Not at all. We are here to report an act of mass murder.”
Something like a soundless shockwave went through the room. The two cops and the three seated officials braced themselves against it, and seemed to tremble slightly as it passed. Not Tweed. He just raised his eyebrows up a little and let it go by him.
“Mass murder,” he ruminated. “I thought you ran a tighter ship than that, Hank. Any mass murderers you know of that you didn’t put on payroll yet?”
The police commissioner gave a sickly grin. “Very droll, Bill,” he muttered. “Very droll. You better watch what you say, Mr. Nast. Perjury’s still a crime in this state.”
“Although it’s also somewhat of an industry,” Tweed added. Everyone except Smith laughed at that, even the two cops.
Now I hadn’t said a thing to the purpose, let alone under oath, so the perjury shot went wide. But then it wasn’t a writ I was afraid of here. I took Dupin by the shoulder, hoping we could still steer a way out of these choppy waters, but he didn’t budge an inch. And it probably wouldn’t have mattered if he had, because Driscoll and Flood had taken up station at the door. Driscoll had his hand resting on the holster at his belt and Flood had his nightstick out, casually resting it athwart his shoulder. There wasn’t any way out except forward.
“The murders I speak of,” Dupin said, “were committed at eight o’clock this morning at the site of the bridge that is being constructed close to the Centre Street Pier. The principal agent and perpetrator is most likely the foreman at that site, a gentleman named O’Reilly, but I believe he had confederates whose names he might be made to divulge under questioning.”
“Oh, you believe that?” Tweed asked politely.
“Yes.”
“Those weren’t murders,” Jimmy Kelso said, all windy self-importance. “We already looked into that. Those men was killed by the caisson disease.”
“That,” said Dupin, “is an absurd conclusion. Every single observation that can be made says otherwise.”
“And what observations are those?” Tweed asked. He was looking highly amused, which I didn’t like at all.
Dupin seemed pretty happy too, and I realized he’d been building up to this. He struck a stance. “To begin with,” he said, “caisson sickness is a malady with a slow onset and a slow progression. The idea that it might afflict a score of people all at the same time, and kill them at a stroke, is absurd.”
“Horse pucky!” Kelso said with force. “Nobody even knows how the caisson disease even works, so nobody can say what it can and can’t do.”
Dupin’s lips turned at the corner as he stared at the superintendent. “There is already a body of literature relating to hyperbaric environments,” he said.
Kelso blinked. “There’s a what?”
“There are essays, monsieur, and monographs, and longer studies, about the conditions in which these unfortunate men worked. The caisson sickness seems to be a side effect of those conditions — conditions which, though they may be imperfectly understood, are extremely well documented. I have myself visited le professeur Fontaine’s hyperbaric chamber at the Sorbonne and studied its operation. Air from the outside world is excluded by welded seals and tight-fitting doors. Breathable air, under higher than atmospheric pressure, is injected into the caisson by means of a Jacquard-Sevigny steam-driven pumping apparatus. The same machine draws away exhaled air and expels it outside the caisson, so that the level of oxygen — that indispensable gas identified by Monsieur Lavoisier, another of my countrymen — remains constant.”
“You talk beautifully,” Boss Tweed said, every bit as easy as before. “But not to the purpose. Who cares how the pump works?”
“I do, monsieur,” Dupin said. “I care very much. When I examined the bodies in the caisson, I found that they all had livid skin and blue lips.”
“So?”
“Alors. If they had died from caisson sickness, their skin would be bright red. An urticarial rash, as from the touch of nettles, would have been visible on their faces and necks. This in itself was enough to arouse my suspicions. What confirmed them was the fact that the lamps in the caisson, essential to the continuing work there, had all been extinguished.
“And that, monsieur, could mean only one thing. A wind or breeze, in that space where air was so carefully rationed, was impossible. The only thing that could have put out those flames was the absence of the oxygen on which they fed. The lights died for the same reason that the men died. They had no oxygen to consume, and without it, had not the wherewithal to continue in existence.”
Something like a frown passed across Tweed’s big, heavy-featured face, but he rallied pretty quickly and managed a pained smile. “You’re saying someone stole the air?”
“Bien sur que non. Not the air. Only the oxygen from the air.”
“And how does a man go about stealing that, exactly?”
“A man,” Dupin said with grim emphasis, “attaches the outlet hose on the steam pump back into the inlet valve, creating in effect a closed system. A boucle. A loop. The men’s exhaled air, depleted of the vital oxygen, is fed back to them, again and again, until they suffocate. Which does not take long at all.”
There was a deathly silence in the room. The men at the table looked to Tweed, as if they weren’t willing to venture an opinion on this subject until the Boss had spoken. I kept quiet too, but for a different reason. I was thinking of those men’s last moments, and my mind was reeling. I couldn’t imagine a worse way to die — and I couldn’t imagine the mind that could have cooked up something like that. At the same time, I was starting to put things together the way Dupin had, running along after his thought processes the way a dog runs after a fire tender.