The Waterworks by E. L. Doctorow Page A

cause—zymotic, constitutional, or sudden—and recorded them in an annual table for the city atlas that nobody ever read.
    I told him of the whole Pemberton matter—everything I knew, and also what I suspected. I had his interest. He sathunched over his desk and was absolutely still. There was something else about Donne—he held the whole city in his mind as if it were a village. In a village, people don’t need a newspaper. Newspapers arise only when things begin to happen that people cannot see and hear for themselves. Newspapers are the expedient of the municipally dissociated. But Donne had the capacious mind of a villager. He knew the Pemberton name. He remembered the dismissed slave-trading charges against Augustus, and the wartime congressional inquiry into his quartermaster contracts. He knew who Eustace Simmons was—he called him ’Tace Simmons—and understood immediately why I thought it would be nice to find him.
    But finding anyone in our city, how one went about finding someone in those days, was something of an art, as all reporters knew—especially if it was someone who didn’t have a professional or commercial life. You understand—there were no phones then. No phonebooks. No street-by-street names and addresses. There were listings of city officials, listings of doctors in the medical society rosters, lawyers and engineers could be found in their firms, and socialites at their well-known residences. But if you wanted to talk to someone you had to go where he was to be found, and if you didn’t know where that was, there were no general directories to tell you.
    “’Tace Simmons once worked for the port wardens,” Donne told me. “There is a saloon on Water Street that they like. Perhaps someone will know something. Perhaps ’Tace comes around for old times’ sake.”
    He didn’t tell me what he thought, or if he believed my reasoning was well founded. He just went to work. I had to defer, of course, to his way of doing things, which was tiresomely … methodical. “First things first,” he said, and asked me to describe Martin Pemberton in all the particulars—hisage, height, eye color, and so forth. Then he turned his long back to me and began to file through the stacks of loose pages on the table behind him.
    The Mulberry Street headquarters is a raucous place. People flow in and out and speak only in raised voices, and with all the shouting and protesting and laughing and cursing drifting into Donne’s office, I was made aware of the necessarily practical view of mankind that is produced in a police building. It’s much like a newspaper office.
    But for all the distractions, Donne might have been a scholar working in the silence of a library. A gas lamp hung from the center of the ceiling. It was lit now in the midmorning because the long, narrow windows gave almost no light. The walls were a pale tan color. Against the walls, glass-covered bookcases were bowed with the weight of law books, manuals of municipal regulations, and volumes of papers in their folders. The floor was covered with a threadbare Belgian carpet. Donne’s desk was a scarred and battered walnut. Behind the wooden chair where I sat a gated balustrade cut the room in two. I could see nothing that might have given a personal character to this office.
    After a length of time he was able to tell me there was no Caucasian male body of Martin Pemberton’s description that had not been identified and claimed.
    He was a very thorough fellow, Edmund Donne. We had next to take ourselves by hackney to the Dead House on First Avenue and Twenty-sixth Street and go through the holding rooms to look at the new arrivals. I walked the rows of zinc tables, where the livid bodies lay face upward under constant showers of cold water, until I was able to assure myself that my freelance was not among them.
    “This rules out nothing,” Donne advised me, with his policeman’s logic. “But it rules out something.”
    The character