I began to laugh, and Warm asked me what was funny. ‘You, and your purple legs and hands. Morris and my brother, and the men piled high in the fire. My dead horse tumbling down a hill.’
Warm appreciated the sentiment, and stood awhile to beam at me. ‘Touch of the poet in you, Eli.’ He said he would like to ask me something personal, and I granted him permission, and here is what he wished to know: ‘It is a question I put to Morris some time ago, but now I am wondering the very same thing about you, which is how you came to work for a man like the Commodore.’
I said, ‘It’s a long story. But basically, my brother knew violence from a young age, thanks to our father, who was a bad man. This brought about many problems for Charlie, one of these being that whenever he was insulted he could never engage in your average fight with fists or even knives, but had to see each episode through to death. Well, you kill a man, then his friend or brother or father comes around, and it starts all over again. So it was that Charlie sometimes found himself outnumbered, which was where I came in. I was young, but my temper was always high, and the thought of someone causing harm to my older brother—up until then he had been a very good and protective brother—was enough to make me partway insane. As his reputation grew, so did the number of his opponents, and so did his need for assistance, and in time it was understood that to come up against one of us was to do battle with both. It turns out, and I don’t know why this is, and have at times wished it were not so, but yes—we had or have an aptitude for killing. Because of this, we were approached by the Commodore, who offered us positions in his firm. At first this was more muscle work—debt collection, that type of thing—than outright murder. But as he took us further into his confidence, and as the wage increased, it soon devolved to it.’ Warm was listening intently to the story, and his face was so serious I could not help but laugh. I said, ‘Your expression tells me your opinion of my profession, Warm. I am inclined to agree with you. At any rate, and just as I was saying to Charlie, this job is my last.’
Warm ceased walking, and turned to watch me with a lost, fearful look on his face. I asked him what was the matter and he said, ‘I believe you meant to say the job before was your last. For you do not plan to see this one through, isn’t that the case?’
We had just cleared a curve in the river; looking up, I saw Charlie, naked, stalking from the water to his clothing on the shore. Morris lay floating just behind him, belly up, his body still. When Charlie turned toward us, his face broke into a smile, and he waved. Now I saw Morris was sitting up, unmolested, and he too waved and called to us. My heart was pounding hard; it felt as though the blood was draining right out of it. Returning my attentions to Warm, I answered him, ‘It was only a mix-up of words, Hermann, and we are through working for the man. I give you my word on it.’
Warm stood before me then, looking into me; his manner conveyed several things at once: Sturdiness, wariness, fatigue, but also an energy or glow—something like the center of a low flame. Is this what they call charisma? I do not know, exactly, except to say Warm was more there than the average man.
‘I believe you,’ he said.
We made our way to the others, with Morris calling from the water, ‘Hermann! You must come in! It really is a great help.’ His voice was high pitched, and he was outside of himself, removed from his personal constraint of rigidness and seriousness, and very much pleased to be. ‘The gay little baby,’ Warm commented, dropping onto his backside in the sand. Squinting in the sunlight he looked up and asked, ‘Help me with my boots, Eli, please?’
Chapter 51
In the evening I found myself resting before the fire with Warm, waiting for the sky to darken that we might use the gold-finding formula most effectively. To pass the time, he encouraged me to speak of my life, to recount for him my many dangerous adventures, only I had no wish to do this, and in fact wanted to forget about myself for a moment; I turned the questions back upon him, and he was all the more forthcoming than I. Warm enjoyed speaking of himself, though not in a proud or egotistical way. I think he merely recognized the tale as an uncommon one, and so was pleased to share it. As such, his life story was revealed to me in a single sitting.
He was born in 1815 in Westford, Massachusetts. His mother was fifteen years old and ran off after giving birth, just as soon as she was strong enough to carry herself away. She left Warm to the care of his father, Hans, a German immigrant, a watchmaker and inventor. ‘A great thinker, a tireless puzzler and problem solver. He could never crack his own private problems, however, and there was no shortage of these. He was . . . difficult to be around. Let me just say that Father had some unnatural habits.’
‘Like what?’ I asked.
‘Ugly things. A specific area of deviancy. It is too unpleasant to speak of. The visual would put you off your feed. Best to move along.’
‘I understand.’
‘No, you don’t, and be glad of that. But here was the reason he left Germany, and from what I gather he left quickly, under cover of night, taking a near-total financial loss in transit. He hated America on sight and continued to hate it with all his being until his death. I remember him looking out at that beautiful autumnal Massachusetts landscape and spitting on the ground, saying, “The sun and moon shame themselves by shining their lights upon it!” Berlin was a great metropolis and playground for him, you see. He felt relegated and undermined here, and that his new audience was not as respectful as the one he knew back home.’
‘What did he invent?’
‘He made small, practical improvements on existing inventions. A pocket watch with a compass built into its face, for example; another that he designed exclusively for ladies—a smaller model cast in a teardrop shape and painted in pastel colors. He was well paid and well liked before scandal ruined him, and he was forced to expatriate. When he arrived in America, dressed strangely and speaking almost no English, he found himself unwanted by even the lowliest watch companies, whom he believed were far beneath him; as he fell into poverty his mind grew darker, when it was already shades darker than your average man. Increasingly his inventions became diabolical, nonsensical. At last he focused his every energy on the refinement of torture and killing devices. The guillotine, he said, was the mechanical embodiment of man’s underachievement and aesthetic sloth. He updated it so that instead of simply removing a person’s head, the body would be cut into numberless tidy cubes. He named the great sheet of crisscrossing silver blades Die Beweiskraft Bettdecke—The Conclusive Blanket. He invented a gun with five barrels that fired simultaneously and covered three hundred degrees in one blast. A hail of bullets, with a slim part, or what he called Das Dreieck des Wohlstands—The Triangle of Prosperity—inside of which stood the triggerman himself.’
‘That’s not a bad idea, actually.’
‘Unless you are fighting five men at once who happen to be standing directly in front of each barrel, it is a terrible idea.’
‘It shows imagination.’
‘It shows a complete disregard for safety and practicality.’
‘Anyway, it’s interesting.’
‘That I will not deny, though at the time—I was thirteen years old—his work brought me little in the way of amusement. Actually, his inventions filled me with horror; I could not shake the notion he wanted to try them out on me, and even now I dare say this was not mere paranoia on my part. So I was not entirely unhappy when he packed a bag and left one spring morning, without any instruction or good-bye—not so much as a pat on the head from the old man. He later committed suicide, with an ax, in Boston.’