The ascendancy of my left eye had begun.
Barker’s room proved to be a modest one, surely the least frilly in the place. Its windows faced due east, toward the plague-ridden precincts of the city. Since the hotel straddled the east — west line exactly, this meant that the room itself lay within that quarter. For some reason, however, I felt easy and secure. I went to the small bay-window while Barker made a show of fixing drinks. The view was all I expected it to be. In the alley-way below us, a man lay on top of a limp, shirtless woman, weeping and running his hands over her face and shoulders. They were perhaps ten yards below us—: I could see droplets of sweat on the man’s sun-burnt nape, yellow stains on his collar, and flakes of drying mud on the woman’s bare breasts. Her lips were slick with charcoal-colored bile.
“Remarkable, isn’t it?” Barker enthused, joining me at the window. “Close enough to spit on! Yet we feel absolutely safe.” He tapped the pane of beveled glass with his thumb. “There’s not been a single case of Yellowjack in the Pendleton, you know. The dividing line between quick and dead is straight and unswerving, from one end of Washington Street to the other—; the solitary exception is the east portion of this building.” He went back to the table, gulped down both the drinks he’d fixed, then poured out two plain snifters of whiskey. The room’s only chair had been brought to the bed-side—; Barker gestured toward it solemnly, then offered me a glass.
“Join me in a peck of nature’s restorative, Mr. Ball?”
I took the snifter from him warily. “Your good health, Mr. Barker.”
“Nothing to joke about, sirrah! Not in this sweet town.” Licking his lips, he added—: “I have my own theory about it all, of course.”
I took a sip of the whiskey and set my glass down immediately. Something had no doubt been distilled to make it—; what, however, was a mystery for the ages.
“What might your theory be?” I said once I’d recovered my voice.
Barker’s flat, pink eyes began to take on life. “Only this, Mr. Ball—: in Exodus 8, when the plague of flies is visited upon Egypt, it is mentioned — in passing — that a single land is spared the devastation. The name of that land, of course, was Goshen.” His eyes, if possible, turned pinker and flatter still. “Do you remember that much scripture?”
“My father was a minister,” I said.
This took him quite aback. “Was he, by God! What church?”
“Methodist.”
His face grew sly. “A comfortable church to serve, they tell me.”
“Not for me it wasn’t.”
“I don’t doubt that for an instant!” He fumbled a bit, unsure how to proceed. “The Methodists are, as they say in Cincinnati—”
“Exodus 8?” I said, cutting him short.
“Exactly so!” Barker cried. “You’re a listener, Mr. Ball! That’s capital.” He took a quick sip of his whiskey. “The land of Goshen, as we know, was spared because it had earned the particular favor of the Lord. But what would you say, Mr. Ball, if I told you that there was a second town, omitted mention in the Gospel, that was spared the plague as well?”
I watched him for a moment. “I’d ask you how you came to know of it.”
“Never mind that,” Barker said, affecting a merry grin. I saw, however, that his plump little hands were trembling. “Can you guess why the town in question — which, for convenience sake, we might refer to as ‘Sun-town’—was excused from duty, so to speak?”
To hide my interest — which by now, I confess, was keen — I picked up my glass and held it to the light. “I haven’t the slightest notion, Mr. Barker.”
“It was the center of a profitable trade,” Barker whispered, his breath tickling my cheek. “A very profitable one. So lucrative, in fact, that the dividends extended in all directions—; even unto the houses of greatest wealth and influence. Even, perhaps, unto those few — those elect—owed a favor from the Most High Himself.”
He took a long sip from his glass, cocked his head to one side, and spat the whiskey out onto the carpet. “A case, to put it coarsely, of Ammon collecting from his most hallowed Debtor. But I ask you this, Mr. Ball — and reflect a while before you answer — if that city existed in the current age, where, in your opinion, might it be?”
“Here, of course,” I answered blandly. But my heart beat furiously against my ribs.
Barker sat back with a gasp, as though I’d poked him in the belly with a stick. “You are a wonder, Mr. Ball! A natural wonder.”
“It is Memphis you’re dithering on about?”
“In a sense,” Barker said. “In a sense.” He held his glass to the light and peered into it intently, as if it were the oracle’s pool at Delphi. “Can you guess what I saw this morning, waiting for your steam-skiff to arrive?”
“Something portentous?”
He nodded. “A family of four, Mr. Ball, splayed out dead in the middle of the street. Rats had fed on their remains—: the softest, fattiest morsels only, leaving the rest to rot.” Here he paused a moment, pinched his features together, and sniffed at the palm of his right hand. He couldn’t have seemed more rat-like if he’d tried. “Even rats can be choosy, when Providence permits.”
“What of it?”
“Those self-same rats lay clustered in a puddle of black filth, not twenty yards away.” He tapped the side of his nose. “Dead as casket-nails themselves.”
“Must you speak in parables, Mr. Barker?” I said, making as if to rise. “I have very little patience for proselytizing—”
But Barker was already flushed with victory. “Touché, sirrah!” he squealed. “Touché!” He gave a peal of boyish laughter and brought his boots together with a bang—:
“How does the poet say—?
The flabby wine-skin of his brain
Yields to some pathologic strain,
And voids from its unstored abysm
The driblet of an aphorism.
“You’ll have no such driblets from me, Mr. Ball, I promise you! My meaning is simply this—: those who fatten themselves on the rotten, ulcerated matter of society—”
“I thought you wanted to talk about the Redeemer.”
Barker’s eyes narrowed. “That’s right, sir. I do. You appreciate straight dealing, I see.” He studied me for a time, then set his whiskey down. “I know you are disaffected with our friend Morelle. With your role in this back-water melodrama of his.”
I kept my face composed. “And how did you come by this knowledge, Mr. Barker?”
“From testimonies to that effect,” Barker said unctuously. “Acquired in the field.”
“I don’t believe you.”