The Executioner's Heart

CHAPTER 19

A man once asked her why she made a point of opening up her victims’ chests and removing their hearts, and what exactly she did with the strange, misshapen organs after the event. Was there a purpose to these most personal of thefts? A significance? There was no judgement in his voice, none of the disgust she had faced during similar conversations over the years. Only interest.

This was years after she had fled Montmartre, some time in the 1850s, during her first excursion to the frigid city of St. Petersburg. She sat in the parlour of his opulent house, her hands still sticky with the blood of her latest kill. She had left the dead man lying in the snow close by, opened up to the freezing night like a silken purse, glossy and stark against the pure white snow. She had brought his heart with her in a tanned leather satchel, and it sat upon the table before her as she waited for her employer to fetch water and a towel.

He placed the steaming bowl carefully on the table beside the leather bag and took his seat opposite her, his eyes wide with fascination. He watched her intently, patiently, as she washed herself down.

He was a well-connected man with links to the Russian royal family, and he had paid well for her services. She had executed seven men on his behalf, each of them former officials of the Tsar’s Court who had known far more about his nocturnal habits-his predilection for spending his nights in the arms of other people’s wives-than he was comfortable with. He had ensured that they had all been dismissed from their posts, of course, but he nevertheless feared the hold they had over him, the constant threat of exposure, blackmail, or worse. And so he had ordered them killed, and she was only too willing to oblige.

By this time in her long, unchanging existence, her death toll measured in the thousands. She had spent years as a hired assassin, drifting from city to city, one day finding herself in the squalid slums of Berlin, another amongst the sumptuous, gleaming spires of Prague. She had seen much of the world, living hand to mouth, from moment to moment, always trapped in the perpetual twilight of her own half-life.

The man fetched her more water, and she considered her answer while she scrubbed the sticky blood from her forearms, slowly revealing the whorls and glyphs of the dark tattoos that covered her flesh.

She could not remember a time when she had made a conscious decision to begin removing the hearts of her victims. It had begun with the acrobat’s lover. On that first occasion, of course, it was symbolic, a tribute to the woman whose heart he had broken. Yet she had been fascinated by the sight of the still-beating organ when she had cracked open the man’s rib cage, the way it pulsated and throbbed, so full of life. When she’d reached in and touched it, felt it beating beneath her fingertips, she’d wanted to claim it for her own. That, of course, had been the root of the acrobat’s entire dilemma: that the man had not pledged his heart to her. And so the Executioner had done it for him.

Three days later she had killed again. This time the act had been motivated purely by the need for money; she had fled the acrobat’s caravan with nothing, and so she’d been forced to murder a lonely businessman for the contents of his wallet.

As he’d lain dying at her feet, she’d been struck once again by that interminable sense of curiosity. She’d wanted to examine his heart, to watch it beat its last, to take it for her own. It was as if, by making it hers, she could somehow-for a few moments-replace the heart she had lost.

The man had begged her to stop as she tore open his shirt. He was weak by this point and shivering with blood loss, and she’d have to work quickly if she wanted to see the heart before he died. She’d muffled his screams with a strip of ragged cloth, and hacked him open with her razor-sharp blade, revealing the glistening jewel within.

When the heart finally shuddered and ceased to beat, she had cut it out and wrapped it in the remains of his shirt like a treasure.

It was the closest she had come to feeling anything for some time.

She told her employer all of this in calm, collected tones, reciting as many details as she could remember. He listened to her intently, and if he was shocked by her curiously unemotional manner, he did not show it.

He was, however, shocked when-just as calmly-she withdrew one of her curving scimitars and thrust it through his belly, skewering him to his chair. He had shown her kindness and tolerance, fulfilled all of his obligations to her, and more. He did not understand.

But she felt no obligation to explain. She had addressed the situation in the most logical way she could. The man had fallen into the same trap he had faced at Court, with his seven untrustworthy confidants: She had revealed to him something about herself; therefore, she could not allow him to live.

When she finished, she washed her hands again using the man’s bowl and towel, and then she left, her leather bag bulging with the fruitful dividends of her evening.