The Dead Assassin

CHAPTER 21 BEFORE RIGOR SETS IN

Once again, the story plays out in a dreamy riffle of black-and-white images: the vaporous mist tendriling up from the loch’s glassy surface. The young woman with her hair of white fire strolling toward the camera, her bare feet paddling the shallows. A lock of hair falling loose across her lovely face. Her coy smile, as if she feels the greedy eyes pressed up against the glass of the Mutoscope. She looks back at the golden child in the sailor suit. The tinplate boat with its windup propeller churns circles about the chubby legs.…

Somewhere, ten years into a future they will never know, a shop bell jangles.

The hand continues cranking. The images cascade. Then the hand slows. Stops. Turns the crank backward. Time reverses in a way that life cannot. The toy warship churns in retrograde circles about the boy’s legs and then leaps back into his arms.

Ring… ring… ring… Someone is yanking at the bellpull with such vigor the jangling bell threatens to rip loose from the wall.

Jedidiah draws his face away from the Mutoscope, glances up to notice that it is not the shop door. Someone is at the cellar door behind the premises.

The Mutoscope swallows his coin and the cyclopean eye dims into blindness. He abandons the machine, strides across the shop, and tugs at the rope dangling from the ceiling. The trapdoor in the floor flings open. Ducking his head, he tromps down the wooden steps into a workshop lit by hissing gas jets.

Maddeningly, the bell jangles and jangles.

“Yes, yes,” he shouts. “I’m coming, damn you!”

Jedidiah moves swiftly across the workshop to the far wall. He pauses at a bench strewn with half-made toys. The wall above is lined with tools hanging on hooks. One hook, however, is conspicuously empty. He reaches up and pulls on it. At his tug, the hook pivots downward. Somewhere within the wall, a hidden catch releases with a dull thunk. A section of the wall splits open and swings wide, taking half the workbench with it.

He steps through the dark opening into another space, a workshop for a decidedly darker form of work. A restraining chair dominates the central part of the space. Behind it, a smoked glass screen. Directly in front of the restraining chair a white sheet has been hung on the wall — an improvised screen to catch a magic lantern’s projected image.

The bell jangles frantically.

He steps behind the smoked glass screen and tugs at a large handle. At the far end of the room, a tall metal door springs open.

“Why make us wait?” an impatient voice calls as its owner, the handsome Dr. Lamb bustles in, Gladstone bag gripped in one hand. Four funeral attendants dressed in black crepe stagger in behind him, lugging a cheap-deal coffin.

“How long?” Jedidiah asks.

“Less than an hour has elapsed,” Lamb answers. “Still, we must hurry… before rigor sets in.”

The funeral attendants thump the coffin to the floor and hurriedly tear loose the lid, revealing the still-cooling body of the Italian valet in his burial shroud. The kinked neck bears a purpling rope burn. The engorged face is cyanose blue, the tongue hanging loose. The funeral attendants struggle to lift the limp corpse from the coffin and drape it atop a scarred wooden operating table. Dr. Lamb drops his Gladstone beside the corpse, snatches it open, and extracts a scalpel and a bone saw. He looks up at Jedidiah. “You have the heart mechanism ready?”

“Of course.” Jedidiah brings forward the slim metal box, brassy and precisely machined.

Dr. Lamb draws up liquid from a smoky brown bottle into a horse-sized hypodermic. He raises the needle and squirts a fine jet into the air.

“What is that?” Jedidiah asks.

“Adrenaline… along with a powerful coagulant of my own devising. This time, if an artery is cut with a knife or severed by a bullet, the blood will instantly coagulate upon touching the air.”

“So this one won’t bleed out? How do you know it works?”

“The prison infirmary has many inmates lingering at death’s doorway. We had an elderly prisoner afflicted with typhus. Mere days to live. I gave him an injection of the drug. Within seconds, I was able to slice through his femoral artery. It should have produced a gushing fountain but the blood coagulated instantly. I next tried the carotid artery in the throat. The same result.”

“And the prisoner still lives?”

The doctor looks at the toy maker with puzzlement. “Certainly not. He died within minutes. The coagulant is so powerful it effectively turned his blood to stone. Of course, with the blood pressure so high, we will not have the same difficulty.”

And with that, he plunges the needle of the hypodermic into the corpse’s neck and depresses the plunger all the way. That accomplished, he sets the empty syringe aside and snatches up a huge scalpel. “Make ready with the device,” he says to Jedidiah. “My technique is advancing with practice. This one should not take as long as previous.”

He drives the scalpel into the corpse’s thorax until the blade bites into the sternum below, then draws the blade down the chest with the zeal of a butcher slicing a rump roast for an impatient customer. Moments later he has the chest cavity peeled open and the small space resounds to the bone saw’s monotonous rasp.