The Death and Life of Zebulon Finch, Volume 1

by Daniel Kraus

  Fear should have stopped me but I moved as if on rails, following the whistle to a dining room designed in African motif. The joint jumped with the ghosts of cigarette girls, baseball sluggers, gangsters, and actresses. With every squeak of floorboard, I found myself rather longing for the busted-up braggadocio of Roseborough. I’d telephoned the NYPD a message about the Cotton Club on my way there—a fail-safe, nothing more. Should the Bird Hunter manage to dispatch me, too, I wished Roseborough to have a shot at catching him. Charlotte Weidenheim, Lucille Schrubb, and Beulah Olson deserved that much.

  The Bird Hunter, when I encountered him, did not spring from the faux jungle like a panther. His was instead a sedate and natural reveal. He stood ten feet away among chairs stacked upside-down by the waitstaff, aglow inside a windowframed bud of sun, cloaked by lingering cigarette smoke, and whistling his song. Roseborough, though, had misunderstood his key witness; this was no “little ditty.” I knew this not because I understood the language in which it was sung but because of the frequency with which I’d heard it. Reader, I wager that you, too, remember it.

  Moro, losso, al mio duolo.

  It was not a Van Dyke beard that hung from the killer’s face. It was, rather, a long oxygen tube, furred with mud, filth, and cobweb. Nor were those sunglasses. They were, rather, glass lenses, tinctured brown by the elements and betraying nothing of the man inside the iron helmet. The song, muffled by metal, concluded, and gave way to the sound that had chased me halfway across the world.

  Hweeeeee . . . fweeeeee . . . hweeeeee . . . fweeeeee . . .

  Two inhales, two exhales—a butterfly breeze that brought with it the pollen barbs of pure terror. Like a dog hearing his master’s angry tone, my instinct was rudely physical. My neck shrank and shoulders scrunched, the timorous stance of a domineered son, yes, but also that of a soldier lugging too much gear across a French countryside, alone but for the unabating ridicule of his adoptive father ringing inside his bones.

  Four two-top dining tables had been brought together to form an operating platform. Rose-petal wine glasses did the job of beakers; tall beer mugs stood in for graduated cylinders; lit candles acted as Bunsen burners; and substituting for scalpels was a spread of kitchen implements upon a bar stool, arranged by size from paring knife to cleaver. Upon that same stool rested an oxygen tank.

  Hweeeeee . . . fweeeeee . . . hweeeeee . . . fweeeeee . . .

  Then there was the matter of the body laid out for dissection. It was no flapper, no female at all. It was Church. His presence was so unexpected that it took a while for me to register that he was naked and trussed, his wrists taped beneath his back so that his belly pushed into the air, begging to be carved. Despite this, he was unperturbed, clearly victim to a tranquilizing ether.

  Hwee, hwee, hwee—

  Three rapid inhales in preparation for speech, then the helmet was pushed to the crown of the man’s head. Dr. Cornelius Leather was near sixty, and the years had been cruel to his fastidious features. His eye sockets were foxholes, his cheekbones broken peaks. His nose and forehead bubbled with infection brought about by continual contact with the helmet. Most distressing of all, a transient life had made shaving impossible and thereby proved Dr. Cockshut’s accusation: Leather was inadequate at growing a beard. Each straggle was glued inside moist scabs. The humid sickhouse of the Isolator had turned his very face into an experiment.

  Church blinked swollen eyes up at me.

  “Private?” The voice was thick and slow. “Private Finch?”

  Leather petted Church’s hair to calm him. Then he took up the paring knife and tapped a wine glass.

  “Best instruments I’ve had in ages,” said he. “Clean, sterilized.”

  There was no telling how this bogeyman had kept himself stocked with tanks, but two decades of oxygen sousing had ransacked his bodily systems. Muscle seizures danced him about like a puppet; his left eye did not move, as if its stem had detached; and his lungs snapped with mucus. The gait of his speech was choppier than ever; every short sentence was stolen between gasps of air.

  “My hand upon the Hippocratic Oath. Or Ibn Sina’s Canon. Whichever trivial pamphlet you prefer. I swear that every dead girl. Has contributed to our goal. With respect to the brain’s electricity. I have applied what meat etiquette taught us. Even under the most toilsome of conditions. I have eviscerated cows. So as to warm myself in their innards. Have fed from troughs. Performed operations in sewers.”

  He grinned. What few teeth remained were black.

  “I,” proclaimed he, “am a surgeon.”

  Though I was a creature unbothered by cold, I shivered. Leather was, to a point, correct. Robbed of money, esteem, home, and license, Leather, that rhapsodic slicer of flesh, had contrived new methods of acquiring anatomical playthings. Crowded New York City sidewalks had become his People Garden, the municipal grid his Revelation Almanac. My shiver devolved into a shudder. What had become of kindhearted Mary? And blameless Gladys? Had they, too, become sacrifices to the cause?

  I’d been a myopic fool. Murders? No. They’d been vivisections.

  His chest blasted with phlegm. It was a laugh. He knew what I was thinking.

  “Surely you do not consider. My experiments to be murders. Did not you, as well, my brave soldier? Murder for a greater good? I so wished to join you in battle. The British, they were oxen. Typed their rejection onto a form. Subject: my mind. It pains me even now. All those available carcasses. All that anatomy revealed. Had I access to that slaughter? I might have saved millions.”

  My faltering frame teetered. The idea of rushing around a trench corner to find the leering Dr. Leather was too much to bear. I lurched for the stabilizing back of a chair, and from there gauged that I’d shortened the distance between us to nine feet. For Mary and Gladys I would need to tighten the threads of my loosened mind, distract the doctor with dialogue, and creep close enough to disarm him of that knife.

  “Tell me what you want.”

  My, how insignificant I sounded.

  “No less than the Fountain of Youth,” replied he. “Herodotus. Alexander the Great. Ponce de León. May our tireless forebears rest in peace. For the Fountain exists. Not upon mythical soil. But inside each brain. Tonight I feel joy. Won’t you share it with me? Through many overgrown paths I have carved our way.”

  I pushed away from the chair. Eight feet now, but I was skittish and my ankle buckled. Church, in his infant state, snorted amusement.

  “Yes, Doctor, you have carved,” said I. “But the carving has been upon innocent young women. You cannot believe that their deaths were deserved.”

  He lifted his head as if seeing these girls frolic like fairies among the hanging ferns. He massaged his exposed neck to provoke oxygen flow. One overgrown nail snagged a patch of beard and the skin tore, discharging an opaque pus.

  “Their deaths were deserved. In a most efficacious sense. For you, Mr. Finch, are the one who chose them. My job was but to dole out their rewards. The opportunity to be like you. To have a chance at eternal youth.”

  I dared take another step. Seven feet. Nearly close enough, if I were to lunge, to pull Church to the floor. I ordered myself to keep talking, though all I wanted was to run.

  “Forgive me for saying so, Doctor—but haven’t you failed?”

  He shrugged as best he could beneath the Isolator’s weight.

  “Young women. Were easier to catch. A necessary consideration. For I am not so strong these days. But in the end, it was a problem. Female brains are too small. A quarter-pound smaller than the male. Difficult to navigate. Even for proficient hands. But tonight, a larger subject. Your friend. Doesn’t he help convince you? Let us make it so that the two of you. Can be friends forever.”

  His paring knife floated across Church’s body as if blessing it.

  While he looked down, I scuffled closer. Six feet, five. I could smell the vagrant swea
t.

  “Please,” said I. “Forego the knife. Join me over here, in this booth. We can sit together in comfort, talk about the old days, for as long as you like.” I cringed. “You frighten me, Doctor.”

  “Frighten? That injures me. My intent is to comfort. The premise, to you, should be familiar. I insert copper pins. Into particular ganglia. Then power them with electrical current. Our female subjects made stunning achievements. One sat up, tried to stand. Another acknowledged pleasure and pain. The last conversed with me. For forty-eight minutes. Forty-eight minutes, Finch. Do you see? We stand at the threshold.”

  There, at springing distance, I paused. The sad misalignment of his eyes made his appeal all the more affecting. The doctor had been twisted, yes, but had it not been the rough washmaid hands of life that had done so much of the twisting? His original plan for me had been pure, and coated though he was in grime, that kind of purity could not be polluted. His was an unsurpassable brain, even drunk on oxygen; he was a hundred horrible things and a liar was not one of them.

  Success, then, was a grape at last ripe enough to pluck. Could it be that inside the flayed organs and between the isolated synapses of two dozen dead flappers, Leather had sourced the uncanny embryo of my existence, a feat no sane man could achieve? By this same power, might he reverse my sorry fate? So help me, I believed it. It had been so long since I’d believed in anything.

  The paring knife was no more than an educator’s baton; he set it down. It was the ideal moment to attack, but I did nothing but observe the doctor pick up a serrated bone saw and place it upon the patient’s sternum. Leather knew that this, too, would be a familiar sight to his dutiful son. He’d always required access to the heart when manipulating the brain.

  “S’cold,” tee-heed Church.

  I gazed down at my friend. It was curious, the extent of my numbness. Hadn’t I always held that Burt Churchwell deserved a chance at immortality? Middle age and infirmity did not suit such a warrior. If it succeeded, this procedure might return to him all he’d lost: fearlessness, heroism, valor. And so what if it failed? What mattered of Church’s life, I told myself, had been lost in the Argonne Forest, and his technical death here would be negligible, of no more consequence than that of Mary and Gladys Leather—cheap fare, on the whole, for a shortcut across what, for me, was a journey of dispiriting length.

  “Come, then,” said Leather. “Steady an old man’s hand.”

  And I did. There I was. At table’s edge. My hand atop his. The fear was gone. How had it happened? No matter. With more tenderness than I’d assisted Bartholomew Finch from the Thirtieth Precinct, I helped this alternate, but superior, father adjust his saw for a truer entry. To my great shock, Leather began to quiver. His lips trembled. His breath snagged. This man, cold as stone, was overcome by my touch. The Excelsior, my closest thing to a heart, ticked so hard I thought it might explode. Leather and I were together again. Anything was possible. Tears ran from his eyes, even the dead one, and embarrassed, he reached up and hid his crying face with the Isolator.

  Hweeeeee . . . fweeeeee . . . hweeeeee . . . fweeeeee . . .

  He lifted the saw two inches so that he might apply maximal force. Though I knew what sort of spatter to expect, I did not step back, but rather licked my lips, lusting for a tide of blood upon which I might float my hope ever higher, while at the same time stomping into the mud whatever shame still remained.

  The saw plunged.

  Hweee—

  Flesh opened in the chest, but the wrong chest. It was quite a surprise, that plosion of white skin, red meat, and greasy clothing. The cream-colored wallpaper behind Leather was atomized with a black sunflower of blood ripped straight from his waterlogged lungs. An instant later the gunshot reported in my ears and my reaction was not a self-protective dive but rather to reach for Leather and shout—

  “NO!”

  —for this was my personal Revelation, my chance to reach into Gød’s guts, squeeze the supernova of His heart, and steal the plot printed upon His pulmonary pulsars. It was not just Cornelius Leather gored, it was Zebulon Finch, and what bled from him was his last chance for peace.

  I scrambled forward, hip knocking one of the dining tables out of position. Upon the floor knives clattered and glasses shattered and something the size of a body fell, too, but I cared not. I pushed past the spoils and fell upon my fallen savior, my torturer, my pursuer, my savior again.

  “Get off him, Finch!”

  Of course Detective Roseborough had read McKenzie’s column. Of course he would have Lou and the Babe on my tail. Of course my uncredited message had reached him via NYPD mobile radio. The lone surprise among these predictabilities was that the bruiser had stealthed through the club without knocking down a single stack of breakables to warn us of his arrival.

  Roseborough’s command went ignored. I tore the Isolator from Leather’s face and pressed a hand to the gouge in his chest. Hot blood squeezed past my fingers. Were only the Cotton Club stocked with actual cotton, so that I might staunch this mortal wound! Failing that, I’d take one of Church’s fabled Great War lemon drops, which might keep Leather alive for a few more moments, enough to tell me what I needed to know.

  Leather expelled a hellacious liquid and his pale lips made fish kisses.

  “Quick!” cried I. “Tell me what you know!”

  “Step aside!” Roseborough, closer. “Step to the goddamn side!”

  Leather’s eyes showed their yellow underbellies.

  “The hypnotist,” uttered he. “Phrenologist. Priestess.”

  “Yes, yes, what of them?”

  “MOVE, FINCH! OR I WILL SHOOT YOU IN THE FUCKING HEAD!”

  “Please, doctor!” begged I. “What did they tell you?”

  But Leather had his own request.

  “I only ever wanted to know the end. Might you, dear boy, give me a taste?”

  How many of the moribund had so far received my ministrations? What did it cost me, besides psychic upset, to drip onto his penitent tongue the sacramental wine of la silenziosità? But I was selfish and in that, our final moment together, cared only about my own answers.

  Neither of us got what we wanted. A fist snatched my hair and wrenched back my head, and in this inverted world I saw Roseborough’s boulder jaw, hastily bandaged—another fight?—and his extended arm, which ended in a revolver. The gun jutted forth; the barrel grazed my nose. Without ado, it discharged at a distance of a foot, and Cornelius Leather became a string of very small, almost invisible dots upon the vast timeline of American history.

  What a mess, thought I, for the janitors to find.

  Church had ended up on the floor. The bone saw had done damage. Blood poured from a gash in his chest and globs of gore stippled his naked body, and yet he chuckled. One of Leather’s knives glinted and I snatched it, intent to finish what the doctor started. Hadn’t I learned the routine by now? I rolled atop Church and raised the weapon, ready to slit him from gullet to groin in hopes that the secrets Leather had isolated in his recent research would be waiting just under the skin, suckling for my attention.

  The giddy glaze of Church’s eyes cleared like slandered clouds from an uncivil sun. His witless grin wavered. This could not be his best friend ready to murder him, could it? A fine question! Could it, Dearest Reader? Could it?

  It was only the lack of time that stopped me from ripping him open. I dropped the knife and pushed away. The heels of my hands slid through brain matter and I collapsed next to one of Leather’s ears. Whether the ear was still attached to his head I did not care to know. Up above, a mile away, Roseborough was shouting instructions at underlings still making their way from backstage. Soon the place would be a cyclone of activity as humans once again attempted to wipe away all traces of inhumanity, never caring that inhumanity was all to which some of us had to cling.

  I put my lips to the ear. It was already cooling. I
had acted too late before—recall the fate of John Quincy and Mother Mash—and so I whispered but one quick confession. I repeat it here, for you, Reader, only you, always you. Keep it, if you dare, at your bosom, so that its arctic secret might be thawed by your beating heart.

  “I indicate,” said I, “that I understand you.”

  PART SIX

  1932–1941

  Being The Thrills, Chills, Glitz, And Gloom Experienced By Your Hero In A Beautiful

  Make-Believe World.

  I.

  MY CARCASS HAD SEEN livelier days. Pallid during the 1890s and bluish at millennium’s dawn, my flesh had, at its dawdler’s pace, followed the devolution of the typical People Garden partygoer, and by 1932 I was the shocking white of a fresh piece of paper. My feet and back had adopted a periwinkle hue, thanks to the pooling of old blood when I walked or reclined, and my muscles had begun to sag as if strapped to my bones by weakening elastic bands. My skeleton was becoming assertive; clothing could barely hide the handlebars of my clavicle, the shutter slats of my ribs, the bowl of my pelvis.

  Now add to this the mortal offenses. Fishing-hook chasms, pistol-duel holes, meat-etiquette gouges, stomach-flap stitches, a clay-and-straw-stuffed thigh. Each of these gross infractions I had ample time to fret about as the make-up girl clapped powder upon my face and the film crew scuttled about adjusting heavy lights atop telescoping stands. The motion picture camera itself was locked onto the head of a tripod and into it was slotted a mouse-eared magazine. The hooded lens fixed me with its raven stare.

  Before the film runs, let me chronicle the mise-en-scène.

  You may credit the sensational aftermath of the Bird Hunter’s death to Kip McKenzie, who parlayed his bit part in the climax into a relentlessly promoted ten-part series of articles that told the entire tale front to back with a librettist’s flair for sentiment and exaggeration. The most egregious of fabrications was McKenzie’s casting of himself as hero, piecing together clues just in time to stop the killer from striking again.