by Tim Powers
The bartender, an affable balding man called Bob Crank, had poured punch for the last couple of arrivals and now leaned back against the counter and took a sip from his mug of fortified coffee as he glanced around the low-ceilinged room. The crowd seemed to be cheery—as well they ought to be on Christmas Eve—and the logs in the fireplace were set up for a good draft, and wouldn’t need attention for an hour or so. Crank knew nearly everyone in the room, and the only patron he might have felt even slightly doubtful of was the old man sitting alone at the table nearest to the fireplace—a crazy-eyed smirking old fellow who, despite the warmth of his position, had his shirt buttoned up to the neck and was holding his glass with gloved hands.
With a bang and a squeak the front door opened, letting a swirl of snow into the entry hall. Crank had poured the cup of punch before looking up, and was holding it out before he recognized the newcomer. “Doug!” he exclaimed when the burly, gray-haired man stepped up to the bar. “Cold out there, is it? Let me,” he said, lowering his voice and the cup, “put a bit of flying buttress in that, eh?” He uncorked a brandy bottle and, down behind the bar, topped up the cup. “Thankee, Crankie.”
They both laughed, and Crank stopped laughing first. “Your mates are yonder,” he said, nodding toward the fire. “Ah, so they are.” Doug Maturo drained the punch cup and clinked it down on the bar. “Send over a brandy, will you, Crank?”
“Right.”
Maturo clumped across to the indicated table and sat down, acknowledging with a grin and a wave the drunken greetings of his friends.
“You bums,” he said, helping himself to a stray mug of beer until his brandy would arrive. “Who’s minding the shop?”
“The shop can look after itself, Mr. Doug,” mumbled one of the men at the table. “Nobody gonna want hub bosses on Christmas Eve.”
“Damn right,” agreed another. “Tomorrow too, by God. Here’s to Christmas’”
They all raised their glasses, but paused when the old man at the next table said, distinctly, “Christmas is for idiots.”
Maturo turned around and stared at him, noting with one contemptuously raised eyebrow the effeminate gloves. Crank arrived just then with his brandy, though, so he shrugged and turned back to his companions. He muttered something that set them all laughing, then took a hearty swig of the brandy as the momentary tension relaxed.
“A celebration,” the old man went on loudly, “of all that’s weakest and most unrealistic in the damned western culture. Show me a man that celebrates Christmas and I’ll show you a dewy-eyed bugger that wishes he could still be tucked in every night by his mum.”
“Write it all down, sign it ‘Iconoclast’ and send it to the Times, mate,” advised Maturo over his shoulder. “And right now stop up your jabbering mouth with drink, before someone stops it less pleasantly.”
The old man made an obscene suggestion as to how Maturo would do that.
“I don’t need this today,” Maturo sighed, pushing back his chair and standing up. He walked over to the old man and seized him by the shirt-front. “Listen to me, you unpleasant old creature. There’s plenty of taverns right nearby that’ll provide you with the fight you’re looking for, so why don’t you tote your wretched old bones thither, eh?”
The old man had started to stand up, but lost his footing and fell back into his chair. His shirt tore, and a button plunked into the cup of punch in front of him.
“Now I suppose you’ll want me to pay for your shirt,” said Maturo exasperatedly. “Well you can—” Suddenly he stopped talking and peered at the old man’s exposed chest.
“Holy God, what kind of—” The old man tore loose from Maturo’s momentarily relaxed grip and ran for the door.
“Stop him!” roared Maturo, with such urgency that Crank forgot his never interfere rule and hurled a big jar of pickled pig’s feet into the old man’s path. It burst with a loud pop and splash, and the old man lost his footing on the wet floor, fell heavily on his hip and slid rolling into a bar stool, which toppled over. Maturo was on him in an instant, and dragged the gasping old fellow to his feet. “What did he do, Doug?” asked Crank worriedly. Maturo twisted one of the old man’s arms up and forced it down on the bar. “Open your fist, you bastard,” he hissed. The fist stayed clenched for a few moments, but sprang open when Maturo began to exert pressure against the locked elbow.
“Jesus, his hand’s empty, Doug!” exclaimed Crank with some agitation. “Here we’ve roughed him up and he didn’t take noth—”
“Pull off his glove.”
“Damn it, man, we’ve done enough to—”
“Pull off his glove.”
Rolling his eyes unhappily, Crank pinched the fabric at the ends of the thumb and middle finger and jerked the glove off.
The pale, wrinkled hand was completely covered with coarse whiskers.
“It’s Dog-Face Joe,” Maturo pronounced.
“What?” wailed the flustered Crank. “The werewolf from the kid stories?”
“He’s not a werewolf. He’s the uncanniest murderer that ever walked this city’s streets. Ask Brock over in Kenyon Court what became of his boy Kenny. Or ask Mrs. Zimmerman—”
“He’s the one that did in my brother,” said a young man who quickly stood up from a corner table. “Frank was a priest, and ran off from the rectory one day, and didn’t recognize me when I found him, and laughed when I told him who I was. But I followed him to where he lived, and a week later a thing they said was an ape leaped from the roof of the place. The busted-up corpse in the street was all covered with fur, but I looked in its mouth and saw the tooth I chipped when Frankie and me was playing sword fights when we was kids.”
The captive at the bar laughed. “I remember him. I didn’t have too bad a time in his body—though I fear I made a sad shambles of his vow of celibacy.”
The young man sprang forward with an inarticulate cry and a raised fist, but Maturo shouldered him back. “What are you going to do, hit him?” Maturo asked. “Justice has got to be done.”
“Aye, fetch the police!” someone shouted.
“That’s no good either,” said Maturo. “By the time he’d even come up for trial he’d be long gone, leaving some innocent poor devil in this carcass.” He stared at the young man, then looked around at everyone else. “He’s got to be executed,” he said carefully. “Now.”
Dog-Face Joe began struggling wildly, and at the same moment a number of people leaped to their feet, loudly protesting that they wouldn’t be party to a murder. Crank grabbed Maturo’s sleeve and said, “Not in here, Doug. No way in here.”
“No,” Maturo agreed. “But who’s with me?”
“John Carroll is,” said the young man, stepping forward again.
“Me too,” spoke up a hefty, middle-aged matron. “They pulled one o’ them apes out of the river at Gravesend, and it was wearin’ my Billy’s ring on a finger so furry that it couldn’t be pulled off—and couldn’t have been pulled on, either, after the fur was growed.”
One by one three more people walked over and stood beside John Carroll and the woman.
“Good,” Maturo said. He turned toward the table he’d leaped up from. “Any of you lads?”
His suddenly sobered friends all shook their heads. “We’re none of us the sort to shrink from a scrape, Doug,” said one pleadingly, ”’but helping in a cold-blooded murder… we’ve got families … “
“Sure.” He looked away from them. “Leave, all of you that are leaving. And fetch a constable if you feel you must—but first consider what sort of thing you’d be freeing. Remember the stories this man and woman just told you, and call to mind the stories I’m sure you’ve heard already.”
Most of the people in the room scrambled for the door, though two more men hung back to join Maturo’s group. “Just realized,” said one of them, “I was going to leave clean-handed, though damn glad it was being done. That’s no way to go.”
Maturo clapped a hand over Dog-Face Joe’s mouth, then said
casually to Crank, “You know, Crankie, I believe I’ve changed my mind. I’ll just take him to the police after all. You understand? The last thing you heard me say was that I was going to take him, alive, to the authorities.”
“Got it,” said the pale-faced Crank, pouring himself a liberal slug of neat brandy. “Thanks, Doug.”
Maturo, assisted by his companions, led the struggling figure toward the back door.
“Uh, Doug?” said Crank in a strained voice. “That’s the… back door you’re leaving by?”
“We’re going to go over the fence.”
The nine vigilantes half-dragged, half-marched their captive outside into the pub’s small back lot, and Maturo glanced around at the mounded snow, which in the far corner had nearly buried a derelict beer wagon. A section of the yard wall had been knocked down, doubtless due to the mishandling of some craneful of ironwork by an employee of the forge whose yard adjoined the pub lot. There was no one visible in the forge yard, and the shadow of the unattended crane fell across the pub’s back door.
“You,” said Maturo, pointing at one of the men with him, “see if there’s a length of rope anywhere about that old wagon there. And—where’s John Carroll? Ah, there you are—do you think you can climb that crane?”
“If somebody will lend me some gloves I can.”
Dog-Face Joe’s other glove was wrenched off and the pair was tossed to him, and a moment later he was scrambling over the tumbled and snow-dusted masonry of the gap in the wall.
“There’s a rope here,” called the man Maturo had sent over to the wagon, “tied around the yoke. It’s frozen on, but I think I can get it loose.”
“When you do, meet us in the forge yard,” Maturo called. To the woman he remarked, “It looks like we may be able to do this properly, and not just hold his head in a horse trough.”
In a few minutes the nine people were grouped in a half-circle around a four-foot-tall nail keg on top of which Dog-Face Joe, his head held high, stood on tiptoe, for the rope had proven to be a few inches short, and if he let his heels rest on the barrel top the slip-knot around his neck would be uncomfortably tight.
“If you let me down,” Joe said hoarsely, peering down at them over the swell of his cheekbones, “I’ll make you all rich. I’ve kept money from each of my hosts! It’s a fortune, and I’ll let you people have it all!” He twitched his scarf-bound wrists.
“You said that before,” Maturo told him. “And we said no before. Say some prayers, Joe, you’re on your way out.” Maturo was clearly uneasy about the situation, and he kept squinting up at their captive suspiciously.
“I don’t need prayers,” said Joe. “My soul’s in good hands.” His confident words must have been a bluff, though, for an instant later he gave a despairing wail and shrieked, “Wait a minute! I’m D—”
The tightening halter choked off any further speech then, for Maturo had kicked the barrel out from under him with such force that it rolled away across the snow-covered pavement as the old man rocked and swung on the end of the suddenly taut rope, his eyes staring with intense supplication out of the darkening face and his mouth forming words that he had no breath to vocalize.
Maturo, who seemed to have dismissed his misgivings now that the deed was done, waited with a faint smile until the grisly pendulum had rotated around to face away from the executioners, toward the yard and the low sun and the still-rolling barrel, and then he leaped onto the shoulders of the dangling man as though to get a piggyback ride.
The snap of the breaking neck was loud in the chilly stillness, and John Carroll turned away and vomited into the snow.
* * *
Doug Maturo entered the dingy office building over whose door could still faintly be seen painted-out letters that spelled DEPILATORY PARLOR, locked the door behind him and walked across the floor through the slanting bars of gray light that came in around the edges of the shutters, past the dusty counter to the dark hallway and the stairs. Halfway up the stairs he became aware of voices on the floor above, and he trod very softly the rest of the way up.
“… In Jermyn Street near St. James Square,” Dundee was saying. “The rent they’re asking is exorbitant, but as you remarked the other day, I do need a better address.”
“Honestly you do, Jake,” replied a young woman’s contralto voice. “And I like the notion of you worrying about rent! What did you say you make every day?”
“Right now an average of nine hundred pounds, but it’s an upward geometrical progression—the more I’ve got, the more I get. By the end of 1811 there’ll be no way to calculate it—the time it would take to do all the math would make the figures hopelessly obsolete before you got them.”
“What a wizard it is I’m marrying!” the girl exclaimed with a smile in her voice. There was some cooing and giggling, and then she added teasingly, “Not very affectionate, though.”
Dundee’s laugh sounded, to the man smirking in the dark hall at any rate, forced, and there was no conviction in his voice when he said, “There’ll be plenty of that when we’re married, Claire. We’d be—betraying the trust your father has in us if we were to … misbehave now, here.”
The man in the hall stepped quietly back to the stairs, tramped a number of times with increasing force on the top step, then clumped up to Dundee’s door and knocked on it.
“Uh… yes?” said Dundee. “Who is it?”
The man opened the door and walked in, nodded to Dundee and smiled broadly at the slim blonde girl. “It’s Sizzlin’ Stan the Immortal Man,” he said cheerfully.
Dundee stared bleakly at the tall, burly intruder. He’d never seen this ruddy face before, with its flinty eyes and wiry gray hair, but he knew who it was. “Oh—hello,” he said. “I see it all… went well.”
“Aye, no problem atall atall—matter of fact, I’ve been doing sprints and bounds on the way here, and I’ve decided this one has it points—I think I’ll stay here a while, your electro-hair-killer devices permitting. And who is this lovely creetur?”
He made a flailing, theatrical bow.
“Uh, Joe,” said Dundee, standing up from the couch, “this is Claire Peabody, my fiancée. Claire, this is… Joe, a business associate.”
Joe bared his even white teeth in a grin. “Pleased to meet you, Miss Claire.”
Claire frowned uneasily, not pleased by the undivided attention this man was giving her. “Pleased to meet you, Joe,” she said. Suddenly aware that he was staring at her bosom, she frowned more deeply and threw a pleading glance at Dundee.
“Joe,” the young man said, “perhaps you could—”
“Isn’t that nice,” Joe interrupted, smiling more broadly than ever, “we’re both… pleased.”
“Joe,” repeated Dundee, “perhaps you could wait in your room. I’ll speak with you there presently.”
“Sure, Jake,” said Joe, turning toward the door. He paused. “Merry Christmas, Miss Claire.” There was no reply, and he chuckled almost noiselessly as he closed the door.
* * *
Jacky paid her penny at the bar and joined the queue, and after a few minutes, during which she moved one step at a time closer to the back door and the man outside who was periodically shouting, “All right, you’ve seen it, give someone else a chance,” it was her turn to go through the door and join the crowd in the back lot. The snow was all trampled to slushy mud.
Jacky couldn’t see anything but the broad back of the man in front of her, but the line was moving, and before long she filed with everyone else through a ragged gap in the brick wall into a larger, paved yard. She could see the crane and the rope now. On the next street over someone was singing snatches of Christmas carols in a drunken baritone.
So what do I do now? she wondered. Go home? Back to the little house in Romford, and school, and eventually some earnest, promising young bank clerk for a husband? Yeah, I suppose so. What else? The thing you came to London to do has been done, though by someone else. Is that what’s got you feeling so… useless an
d unmoored and—yes, face it—scared? Yesterday you had a purpose, a reason for living this way, and today you don’t. You’ve got no reason to be Jacky Snapp anymore, but you’re not quite Elizabeth Jacqueline Tichy anymore, either. What’s to become of you, girl?
She rounded the last loop of the line, and got at last a clear view of the scene. A rope had been tied to the crane boom, and from the end of it swung in the chilly breeze a sack-headed dummy with patches of moth-eaten fur sewn onto the face, hands and feet.
“Yes, friends,” said the barker in a hushed voice, “this is where the dreaded man-wolf Dog-Face Joe was brought to justice at last. The effigy you see before you was carefully constructed so as to let you all see exactly the scene the police found here last night.”
“The way I heard it,” quietly commented the man in front of Jacky to his companion, “he simply had whiskers all over him, like a two-day beard.”
“Indeed, my lord?” replied the other man politely.
The line shuffled past the display, which had shifted around to face away from them, exposing a wide, straw-leaking rip in the seat of the trousers. Several people laughed, and Jacky heard one whispered speculation on the circumstances of Dog-Face Joe’s capture.
Jacky felt a hysteria kindling deep inside herself. Are you aware of this, Colin? she thought. Can you see this… country fair side-show exhibit? You’re avenged at last. Isn’t that wonderful? And isn’t it wonderful of all these people to hang this wonderful memento of the fact? How grand and noble and satisfying it all is.
She was sobbing before she knew it was coming, and the heavy-set man in front of her took her elbow and led her out of the line to the exit point, a gate leading to the lane that the Guinea and Bun fronted on.
Once they were on the pavement outside, he said, “Parker—my flask.”
“Yes, my lord,” said the man who had docilely followed them out. He produced a pewter flask from under his coat, unscrewed the top and handed it to him.