The deformed man’s neighbor, an ectomorph with the matted beard and demented eyes of a prophet, gave a short bitter laugh. “Goddamn City Jail’s nothing but the back room of the Butterick Meat Market.”
I was fortunate enough, then, to have been arrested in my unconscious state by a city policeman and not a county peace officer, who would have removed me to the county jail, a serious place of incarceration. The city facility, on the other hand, was a makeshift pen mostly intended to hold drunks and short-term felons with little motive for evasion. My cellmates were four Chinamen, including the nephew of the magus I’d cut down from the lamppost, and five white fellows. The prophet and his scarified companion and a third man, a hog butcher by trade, had been arrested during the riot. The other two wouldn’t say what had landed them in stir, but the first was a sorrowful drunk, his bender wearing off quickly and leaving him desperate for a cupful. Though the second was seated, I would have guessed his height at six and a half feet tall at least, and he was as thick side to side as a chest of drawers.
The five white men sat on the floor on the left half of the cell, and the Chinese on the right, and there was a certain amount of grumbling from the left half when I first crossed the cell to the right to speak to the old magus’s nephew. The Chinese didn’t much like it either, and one of them rose to his feet in a threatening stance until the nephew said something to him with a gesture in my direction. His compatriot sat back down with no more friendliness showing on his face than before, but the nephew bade me sit. He introduced himself as Fong, without specifying whether that was his first or last name, and said that he believed his uncle had survived. Unsolicited, he also offered up his opinion that Mrs. Fenster had persuaded the old man to provide two advance men to distract and overpower Doctor Marcy while she murdered her brother-in-law. The two men who accompanied her (without, according to Fong, stealing the doctor’s opiates or anything else) were ignorant of her mission there, though Fong’s uncle surely knew why she needed the doctor out of her way.
I returned to the other side of the cell, where I spent the morning striking up no friendships and cultivating no allies. The three rioters, having failed to fold the remainder of the cell’s Caucasian population into their clique, spent their day talking amongst themselves and until the turnkey arrived at noon with tin cups and a bucket of corn gruel their colloquy on the various and sundry character deficits of the Irish, the Jews, the Catholics, and the Chinese were the only words spoken aloud in the cell, apart from the souse’s mostly incoherent whimpering. The gangly jailer, so bent and arthritic he walked nearly sideways like a crab, dropped the bucket on the floor and threw the cups onto the shit-stained straw without a word, then scuttled back out, ignoring my demands to know for what I was incarcerated.
“Are you deaf as well as crooked?” I shouted at the door.
The three rioters laughed. “You won’t get much out of him. He don’t care for our class of character,” the prophet said, dipping his cup into the gruel.
After they ate the foul corn—I felt too ill to partake—the door opened again and a pair of policemen entered with a defeated-looking man in civilian clothes. It took me a few moments to recognize the silhouetted figure as that of Officer Heinecker.
“This the man what took your iron off you?” the first copper asked him.
“That’s him,” Heinecker said, looking me sadly up and down.
“What’s the charge?” I asked the coppers.
“Accessory to murder, as well as unheeling a duly charged officer of the peace,” the second one said, sounding amused.
“Banbury’s dead?”
“He will be soon enough.”
“I want to see my attorney.”
“If wishes was horses, then beggars would eat.” They led Heinecker off and locked the door again.
“Say,” the prophet piped up. “You took that copper’s gun off him?”
“I needed it.”
“When’d you do that? On the street?”
“During the riot.”
“The Chinee riot? Then what the hell you so friendly with that chink for? Don’t you know they killed a poor old man in his sickbed?”
I sat down without answering, and as the others gulped their swill Fong leaned over to me and spoke very quietly.
“Five prisoners escaped this same jail six months ago. Broke bars out of the window.” He nodded at the window; the bars had been reinforced with what looked like cement.
“Might be worth a try,” I said.
The prophet dropped his empty tin cup and rose. “I want you to stop talking to that son of a bitch.”
I glanced at him without answering, and when I turned back to Fong I noted that his companions were watching the group with concern, though Fong was careful to ignore them.
“Did you hear me? Come on over to the white man’s side or I’ll crush your skull like a fuckin’ melon.”
I turned to find that the three of them had risen. The one with the ghastly scars was laughing through mostly toothless gums as though Christmas was coming. I stood and faced them, and I supposed I’d have to drop the prophet first and hope the other two would be intimidated into backing down. Lacking confidence and feeling weak as a babe from fever besides, I was trying to calculate the likelihood of Fong and his comrades coming to my aid when the gigantic, speechless man on the floor rose to his full height and width—even more massive than he’d appeared when supine—and spun the prophet around with one big paw, then cuffed him solidly across the face with the other. I thought I heard the smaller man’s nose crack, and he collapsed like an abandoned marionette onto the pissy straw.
“Gott-dam tired of listening to you,” the giant said, and then he returned to his seated position on the floor. That was the last we heard from the rioters until the evening meal, when the prophet tried to elicit assistance from the turnkey.
“That big Dutch son of a bitch knocked me down,” he said.
The turnkey shrugged painfully and spat at the ground. “Be glad he don’t fancy fucking you in the bargain.” He left another bucket of corn gruel, and after he went off for his own meal we decided to try our luck first with the bars, while the others disinterestedly concentrated on their unappetizing meal.
I rotated one clockwise, then counterclockwise, and it gave easily in the concrete the jailers had haphazardly poured after the last escape. The bar was long, however, and though we could move it vertically two or three inches it wouldn’t come out far enough to allow our egress. After watching us for a minute the giant grunted, dropped his cup, and drew up to his full height, then moved to the door and started pounding.
“Jailer! Dem crazy chinks has done and caught the straw on fire!”
I looked over at Fong, who looked puzzled for a second and then let out a scream of such convincing pain I thought he was truly injured. “I’m on fire! Help!” he shouted, and I joined my own voice to the chorus. Fong yelled something at his friends in Chinese, and they commenced screeching as well in their own tongue. Only the drunk and the three rioters kept eating, looking puzzled by the cacophony.
“Pipe down,” the prophet said. “Ain’t nothing burning.”
The giant reached down and backhanded him ever so gently across the face. “Shut it or I’ll break it.” The prophet shut it, his eyes glistening.
I heard the turnkey coming then, keys jangling, yelling for us to hold on, and when the door opened the big man gave him an uppercut that lifted him into the air before depositing his skinny, bent frame on the ground.
He looked around and then scowled. “Ain’t no goddamn fire in here.” He started to stand and then he was looking straight at a fist the size of a ham hock. “Now hold on a goddamned minute.” The rioters had stopped eating, though the drunk was taking advantage of the confusion to drink his muck straight from the bucket, and spilling the stuff down the front of his gray shirt, from which he scraped bits of wet corn with his grimy finger, which he then licked more or less clean.
Fong slipped out the door and returned with a set of wrist irons. He took the keys from the jailer, who was quietly making predictions about our speedy capture, and he chained the poor fellow to the bar we had failed to remove.
He looked sadder than he did angry. “You sons of bitches are going to get me fired,” he said as we filed out of the room calmly.
Outside on Thirteenth Street we could hear him yelling immediately. The giant wanted to go back inside, but Fong stopped him. “Always outside the jailhouse people hear yelling.”
The giant nodded. “Best ve split up now,” he said, and all concurred but the three rioters and the drunk, who were headed straight for the nearest saloon, the Rusted Nail. The last I saw of them they were whooping in harmony as they entered.
NINE
AN ANGEL’S MINISTRATIONS
By the time I had made my way through the dark streets to my studio the fever had worsened considerably. Opening the front door, which no one had seen fit to lock, I had to fight back nausea at that old familiar smell of graveyard detail and the Benders’ charnel pit, and for a moment I wondered whether I wasn’t delirious, for I could think of no rational reason for such a smell to permeate my entryway, unless Mrs. Fenster had died during my absence and gone undiscovered until now. An eerily faint orange light was barely discernible in the upstairs foyer, and I imagined I heard the muffled weeping of women.
Atop the stairs I was greeted by the macabre spectacle of a veiled quartet of ladies, dressed in mourning and quietly lamenting. Black crêpe bunting had been draped all about the walls of the foyer, and though candles were burning throughout the room no lamp was lit, and it was impossible to make out any of the faces beneath the black lace veils. At the center of the room on a makeshift catafalque lay a figure so small I took it for a child at first, until its features, distorted by two or three days’ lifelessness, resolved in my mind into those of my poor stunted assistant Lemuel. I presumed, then, that these were his aunties and his mother.
I bowed in the ladies’ general direction, as the stoutest of them rose huffing to her thick feet. “Didn’t have any way to ask for your permission,” she said.
“Mrs. Fenster?” I pointed at the still form. “What happened?”
She gave me an odd look. I attributed the pinching of her nostrils to the general stench in the room until she opened her mouth. “I shot him, as you well know, with your own gun.”
“Lemuel?” I asked, stupefied at such a claim.
“Lemuel’s over there.” She indicated a corner of the room near the gallery where the boy sat on a wicker chair with a look of bovine contentment on his imbecilic features. Looking over at the body on the slab I reconsidered its concave eyes and its lips drawn tight to reveal its uneven dentition; even in that state, these were clearly the mortal remains of a man of forty or fifty, and I understood that its slight resemblance to my own idiot assistant was a family one.
Mrs. Fenster had raised her veil, and I noted to my surprise that she herself had been weeping. “I’m surprised to see you carrying on so about Cowan,” I said.
She sniffed with some force, snorted, really. “He was my brother-in-law for an awful long time, Mr. Sadlaw, and wasn’t always mean.”
I nodded, and sniffed myself. The smell was powerful, and I wondered aloud why he hadn’t been put underground.
“What with the riots and your lady friend, plus a fire in a boardinghouse, the undertakers is all busy with the better sorts of stiffs, and Hiram’s been moved to the back of the line with the paupers.”
“I understood the Bulletin was going to pay all the funeral expenses.”
“With Mr. Banbury dead the paper ain’t paying for planting nobody but Banbury.” She studied my face and scowled. “You’re not well.”
“I’m not,” I allowed, and I sat down in a narrow armchair that sat against the wall. The pervasive tinge of corruption in the room exacerbated the effects of the fever, and a sweat had broken on my brow.
“You could do with a bite to eat, I’ll wager.”
Oddly, despite the ferocious stench in the room and my queasiness, I did feel hungry. I hadn’t eaten since the fateful hors d’oeuvre at Banbury’s reception.
“Come on into the kitchen, I’ve kept the door shut and the smell’s not bad in there.” I followed her waddling form through the door and found that the odor was, indeed, much diminished. She offered me first a biscuit from a tin. I bit into it with relish, and though it was a tasteless thing it was a pleasure to swallow. On my second bite I forgot myself and bit down with the left side of my jaw, and presently howled with such force that when I fell off my chair Mrs. Fenster’s three sisters burst into the kitchen to see what was the matter.
The pain was momentary and was replaced quickly with a foggy dreaminess as my housekeeper and her three veiled sisters clucked over my prostrate form, arguing about what was the matter with me. The fever seemed to rise back up in me with great speed, and I began wondering who was under which veil. I supposed that one sister was the pressman’s widow, that another was Mrs. Fenster’s murderous accomplice, and I wondered whether the third wasn’t the sister Mrs. Fenster had gone to visit ten years prior, from which trip she returned to kill the faithless Mr. Fenster. They seemed to be swimming above me in some sort of thick but transparent fluid, and their voices weren’t entirely clear to me either. I managed to point at my mouth.
“Tooth,” I yelled.
They picked me up and, as one, carried me through the house to the sound of rustling cotton. They babbled incoherently as they laid me out on my bed, and Mrs. Fenster lit the bedside lamp. She made some sort of pronouncement, and they all gasped at it.
Mrs. Fenster disappeared for a moment, and one of the sisters removed her veil. To my astonishment she was a lovely woman of perhaps forty years, and bore only the most tangential resemblance to my housekeeper. She mopped my brow with a handkerchief, muttering soothing words to me, and I began to feel the shameful stirrings of an erection. At that moment Mrs. Fenster returned, and at her signal the two still-veiled sisters each took hold of one of my arms. The lovely widow straddled me indecently at the waist, then grabbed my lower jaw and, simultaneously, my forehead. I was at once aroused and terrified, and as Mrs. Fenster approached me from the side I screamed, certain these were the angels of death, come to take me to hell. This arranged very well for Mrs. Fenster, who deftly inserted the pliers she had gone to fetch into my mouth and yanked powerfully once, twice, and thrice. At three I lost consciousness, aware that the fractured molar had slipped from its moorings.
I awakened on several occasions without truly regaining full consciousness; just enough to remember hearing Mrs. Fenster talking to a police officer about the reason the dead man was still in the foyer, and about her theory of where I had gone.
“He was here just long enough to pack his grip,” she said, “and then he lit back out, never to return. He said he was headed for Ohio, where he has folks.”
There was also a hubbub at one point because the idiot boy had punctured the hand of the dead man with a fork, stabbing it to the makeshift catafalque and laughing maniacally. That may have been a fever dream, however.
And then toward the end of my delirium I was brought into something akin to consciousness by the extremely pleasant sensation of some sort of warm wetness at my groin. Upon opening my eyes I found one of the sisters bobbing her head up and down at my waist. I must have let out a gasp because she looked up, disengaged her mouth from my prick and, using her right hand to keep the black veil from her face, smiled most pleasantly at me.
It was the widow Cowan herself, and the muted daylight that showed through my drawn curtain revealed her to be, if not the beauty I’d deliriously imagined the other night, a reasonably handsome woman nonetheless, despite a right eye with a tendency to wander, and a nose that had been broken and badly set. She seemed not at all embarrassed to be surprised in such an act. “This is by way of thanking you for being so kind to my boy all these months.” She slipped
her mouth back around my cock and, lowering the veil, resumed bobbing. As she did so the border of the veil rhythmically grazed the skin above my groin, and though I was somewhat bothered by the smell of her husband’s putrefaction in the other room the overall sensation was pleasurable. I drifted back into a dream-state and she became a dozen women one after another, starting chronologically with Mary Harding and proceeding forward. When a Kentucky lass whose name I couldn’t remember metamorphosed into my abandoned wife Ninna I was taken by surprise but, oddly, not displeased, and it was into Ninna’s hungry gullet that I discharged a day or two’s worth of ejaculate. I opened my eyes again to find the widow wiping her lips with a handkerchief in a demure manner.
“My name’s Henrietta, but they call me Hennie,” she said, and I slipped back into contented sleep before I found the words to reply, aware that I was recovering and anxious to be going.
A DAY LATER I sat upright as though just waking from a satisfying night’s sleep, and called for Mrs. Fenster.
“Do you want me to fetch you some soup?” she asked when she came in.
I took a whiff and nearly told her no, famished though I was. “Not to be indelicate, but when are the undertakers coming?”
“For Hiram? They came and got him yesterday. He’s planted like he belongs.” I must have looked dubious, because she added, “That’s a smell that’s going to linger for a time. You’ll have to be leaving anyhow.”
She handed me a Rocky Mountain News from a stack that had been growing at my bedside and pointed at an article on the front page:
BETRAYED BY THIRST
ANOTHER ESCAPE FROM THE CITY JAIL
The Mayor Has No Explanation.
Four of Ten Evaders Caught in a State of Inebriation, Four Chinese and Two White Inmates Still At Large. One is Accomplice of Banbury’s Murderess.
This was not the lead article, however. My old chum Banbury claimed the top of the page:
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