The Waterworks by E. L. Doctorow

lightening darkness of my suspicions, was enough for me to make the inspired, though insufficiently considered, decision to deepen my involvement and put me in pursuit as well.
    As the city editor at the Telegram I was entitled each summer to a week’s leave. However, it must be not only summer but that wilting heart of it when the heat waves rise from the pavement … when the sanitation drays take the dead horses from the streets and the ambulances of Bellevue the dead folks from their tenements … and—the key thing—when anyone left alive inthe baking blanched light is too enervated to make news. All these conditions were met, and I was off.
    I decided first of all to tell what I knew to Edmund Donne, a captain with the Municipal Police. You may not appreciate how extraordinary it was that I, or anyone else in the city of New York, for that matter, would confide in a police official. The Municipals were an organization of licensed thieves. Occasionally they interrupted their graft-gathering for practice with nightsticks on the human skull. Police jobs were customarily bought. Every exalted rank, from sergeant up through lieutenant, captain, and on to the commissioner, paid the Tweed Ring for the privilege of public service. Even patrolmen paid if they wanted to be assigned to one of the more lucrative precincts. But it was a large organization of two thousand or so, and there were some exceptions to the rule, Donne being probably the highest-ranking. Among naturalists, when a bird is seen well beyond its normal range, it is called an accidental. Donne was an accidental. He was the only captain I knew who had not paid for his commission.
    He was also atypical of his trade in being neither Irish nor German nor uneducated. In fact, he was so clearly misplaced that he was a mystery to me. He lived in the tension characteristic of the submitted life … like someone who has taken holy orders or serves his government in an obscure foreign station. I could think, in his presence, that my familiar tawdry New York was the exotic outpost of his colonial service … or perhaps a leper colony to which he’d given his life as a missionary.
    Donne was exceptionally tall and thin and had, when standing, to look down at anyone he spoke with. He had a long, narrow face, gaunt cheeks, a pointed chin. And because his hairwas gray at the temples and through the mustache, and his brows had thickened and taken wing, and when he was seated at his desk his long back curved into the hunch of his shoulders so that the twin ridges of his shoulder blades indented his blue tunic, you were put in mind of a rather impressive heron settled on its perch.
    His was a lonely eminence. He was anywhere between forty and fifty. I knew nothing of his personal life. He had come up through the ranks, remaining always outside the order of connived loyalties that passes for brotherhood among policemen. This was not from any righteousness on his part … merely that he was not the sort to ask for confidences or give them. His skills, which were considerable, were not questioned, but in the perverse thinking of his fellow officers, they were part of the brief against him. He’d achieved the rank of captain slowly, through the administrations of several commissioners, who found him useful when they needed to advertise the Municipals’ worthiness of the public trust. Since that was a periodic necessity, his employment was secure, if not comfortable. It helped also that some of us in the press had written about him from time to time. He never asked for this, of course. For us, too, he simply was what he was and went his own way.
    Donne was glumly at his work when I called on him in his office on Mulberry Street. He looked almost pleased to see me.
    “Do I interrupt something?” I said.
    “Yes, and I’m sure I’m grateful.”
    His latest humiliation was to be in charge of the office that certified deaths in the city by age, sex, race, nativity, and