“She sold you—and you weren’t the only one—to Delamort in exchange for jumbee powder. Powder which was supposed to go into the general booze supply at some point, I assume, when the natives got restless or just didn’t want to pay her exorbitant costs anymore. Only me, I got to be the test subject. Why do you suppose she kept your legs? To sell to Delamort later when she was cash poor? Or for plausible deniability? Or maybe to get a dick like me involved?”
“You are, if nothing else, a clever one, Jones,” Skaron said. “You’re right. About almost everything. Some of your details are a little fuzzy, but you are correct. Your direct connections to the German threatened the little criminal empire my morgue mate built. But instead of putting you down, she thought you could be useful as a mindless slave. Little did she realize.”
I should’ve asked what he meant about the German, but I was sure I had finally found my killer so I leapt on it.
“Did she kill me just for that purpose?” I asked, finally getting to the brains and gristle of it. “The living me, I mean.”
He snorted. “That’s ridiculous. You know as well as I do there’s no way to predict who will resurrect and who will not. How could she possibly have known you would come back?”
“Then she had nothing to do with killing me.” I’m sure I couldn’t keep the disappointment out of my voice.
“I suspect not,” he said.
“Who did?”
“How should I know?” he asked. “But I will tell you one thing, Jones, that I find to be an exceedingly amateur mistake. I, like you, am familiar with detective work only in the pages of Conan Doyle and his lesser imitators. But everyone, and I mean everyone, goes back to the scene of the crime at some point for clues. Have you ever done that?”
No, I hadn’t. Of course I hadn’t. What was keeping me from going back to Rothering’s mansion? Nothing, probably. That would be my next stop. Only a little unfinished business there. “So here’s the big gap in my whole story, the thing that really bugs me. It just rattles around in the back of my head.”
I waited. It was one of those delicious moments.
“Go on,” he said.
“She sold you for spare parts, like a car thief,” I said. “Why would you care enough to avenge her?”
He jumped to his feet. If he was alive, I think he would’ve been weeping. “Because I loved her! I never stopped loving her. Not from the first moment. I always tried to cloak myself in scholastic detachment. She was nothing but my morgue mate, right? No, I never stopped caring for her, even if she did just use me.”
“And that’s why you killed Alcibé? Why not kill me?”
He sneered something so awful that I saw his green teeth and blackening gums. “You should have to live with it the way I have. Losing someone you care about. It’s a lot worse than oblivion, isn’t it?”
“Well, don’t worry,” I said. “I’ll put you out of your misery, you son of a bitch.”
My boomstick had the last word.
November 29, 1934
The rain was gushing down in great sodden sheets, like Jesus was pissing in my eye. Nothing for it.
I checked my boomstick. Six shots left. Every round in a chamber. One extra in my coat pocket. I should’ve taken a box, maybe two, but I didn’t. No place to get extra rounds from anymore. And no one was selling to me.
He killed my best friend, even if he was nothing but a lousy head-in-a-box. That wouldn’t stand. There had to be rules, had to be reckonings. That was dealt with, but there was still a reckoning for my own death.
My shoes sank into the river that the road had become and came out heavy. Slop, splash, squish. All the way up the road, out of the Welcome Mat, and toward that damnable mansion.
I probably stood outside those gates for far too long, staring at the huge “ER” carved into them. I smoked two of Ivan’s Players and drank half my flask of liquid courage. What was there to do? The rain sluiced off the brim of my hat. I had my own personal waterfall in front of my face.
To start a thing is to be half-finished, they say. It took me an age to finally get my feet moving and fling myself over the fence. There was a light on. I recognized the window as Rothering’s bedroom. There was the same trellis I’d almost climbed down the first time I was there. His silhouette appeared at the window. I ducked behind one of the hedges and waited. He’d step away eventually, I figured.
No such luck. The window opened. “Who is there?” the fat man called out in precise, measured English.
I said nothing. Staying down, I made my way toward the entrance to the hedge maze. I didn’t much want to go back inside it, but it made more sense than going around where there was no cover.
He started laughing. “It doesn’t matter to me, thief! I’m warm and dry. And armed. You’re out there, and soon my dogs will be as well.”
Damn it. I hate dogs. I got down on all fours and started pounding through the mud. It was faster than duckwalking, I figured. Son of a bitch. Wasn’t he rich enough to afford goons with guns? I would’ve preferred getting perforated a million times to getting dismembered and having to crawl around picking my limbs out of the bushes.
Then the barking started. So it wasn’t an empty threat. Son of a bitch. I might’ve been able to find my way through the hedge maze, maybe even during the dark, but at night with those slavering canids chasing me? Less so.
Well, okay, I guess it was down to a question of logistics. How many dogs were there, and how many bullets did I have? After killing all of the dogs—if that was a reasonable outcome—would I have enough lead valentines left over to threaten/kill/maim Rothering if necessary? Hard to say.
I tried to make my way on my hands and knees for a minute. Too hard. Not painful, I was way past the point of feeling pain, just hard to navigate. I took a deep breath. Didn’t need it, of course.
I stood and started running. A shot rang out through the night. I looked up just long enough to see Rothering at his window with a rifle before I ducked back down. I was back to crawling or crab-walking through that muck in a labyrinth of shrubbery I’d barely made my way through in the daylight.
“Son of a bitch,” I whispered.
Probably a skosh too loudly. The growling started over my left shoulder, real low, like when a Model T is just about to need an oil change but not quite yet. Then there was a sploosh, sploosh, sploosh through the mud, and it was a little closer. I had to turn slow, real slow. Get a bead on the beasty before it pounced.
It was standing there, sure enough, and growling so hard its teeth were quivering. I felt like I was in a dream, moving through molasses, only the molasses was the air. Finally, agonizingly, I had the pistol pointed at the bastard.
Blam.
Of course, that brought all of his compatriots running.
“Shit,” I said, only with a little more emphasis than I can express with a pen and paper. I decided there was nothing for it. I jumped up. Rothering started shooting at me again, but I figured as long as he didn’t get a lucky headshot, I’d be okay. Assuming he didn’t know I was a deadhead—assuming he even knew what a deadhead was—he wouldn’t be trying to aim for my head. If he hit me in the melon by accident, well, I guess that was about the same odds as one of his slavering devil wolves catching me and ripping me to pieces.
Much as I loved Alcibé, I didn’t want to end up like him. Dead or dismembered. I went for it. I darted through that damn maze, bullets flying around my head, and the damned dogs were hot on my trail. I came around a corner, and of course, somehow, one of those Dobermans (Dobermen?) had come around the other side and gotten the drop on me.
He charged and latched onto my ankle. There was no pain, of course; thank God for that. It gave me a minute to think about my options. I swiveled my head back real quick. The other dogs were charging. There really was only one option. I decided to let him have my ankle.
I slammed the butt of my pistol down on my ankle, and for once was glad of the decrepitude of my corpse. The leg bone, star
ved of calcium from a month of bourbon in place of milk, snapped with one blow. A stomach-churning crunch filled the air, like the sound of a Sicilian grandmother breaking a great big bundle of dry spaghetti noodles in half to fit them in the pot. A seam appeared in the flesh between my heel and knee, and the two parts of my leg sloughed apart like lovers breaking a long and wet Roman kiss.
It was a little slower going without my foot, but I found I could really punch my severed femur into the mud to keep going. I think the foot even slowed the dogs down a bit. They must’ve stopped to play with it.
A bullet shattered my shoulder. Of course. Not my gun hand, thank God or whatever merciful void is out there. I looked up. I could practically see the whites of Rothering’s eyes. There was no avoiding it if he decided to put one between my eyes. It was either that or the heart, but nobody shot for the heart anymore. We weren’t in the Old West.
He stared at me hard. The recognition in his face was obvious. I stepped forward with my good leg, then made to punch down hard with the cracked bit of my other leg. Foot or no, there was nothing to catch me. I plunged, face forward, into the swimming pool.
Lying there, I guess I felt a surge of nostalgia, or maybe that’s not the right word. Dayzha voo again, maybe. I stared at the bottom of the pool again, and the rain seemed to be not even splashing at all. Wet was wet and wet became wet, and the only difference between that moment and the identical moment all but a month ago was the statue at the bottom of the pool.
The three perfect beauties were wrapped in green. Some kind of slimy residue had enveloped them. I noticed the distinct sting of chlorine was absent from the pool, too. No one had been cleaning it. The angels were monsters, drowning in algae and indifference.
With a few pulls of my arms, I dragged myself to the side and pulled my head out of the water. A living man would’ve gulped the air, desperate to breathe. It was a habit I had somehow managed to break. I inclined my head up toward the man in his window.
He put his fingers to his lips. What the hell did that mean?
Suddenly a shrill whistle pierced the whole mansion grounds. The dogs stopped barking. Must’ve been their inviolable signal. The little Pavlovian bastards came crawling out of the hedge maze, tails between their legs. The Doberman that had bit my foot off still carried it in his maw.
“I say,” Rothering called out, “is that you, William?”
I looked up at him. What else could I say? “Of course it’s me. Now could I come up?”
He was busy cleaning his rifle. “Of course. You’d better grab your foot first.”
I stared at the Doberman with no small amount of trepidation.
“Don’t worry,” Rothering said, “he shan’t bite. Again, in any case.”
I couldn’t feel the warmth, of course, but sitting by Rothering’s fireplace almost made me feel like an ordinary human being. I saw the rain-and-pool-soaked fabric slowly drying. It was like magic. A moment later, he appeared with a tray of glasses and a decanter. Fancy, crystal stuff.
“I imagine you’ll be wanting some of this,” he said.
I nodded. He poured some as I adjusted my foot. I had strapped it back on with a little twine. Intellectually, I knew we could reattach our limbs, the same as Ivan Skaron had done, but feeling it was a whole different thing. I can’t really explain our state of affairs. How do I explain what it’s like to have a severed foot, and then just not have one anymore?
“What’s it like?” he asked, nodding in the general direction of the foot. He handed me a glass. Brandy. Good stuff, too.
I had been thinking about the same question, of course, but how to describe it? “It’s like an anthill, I imagine.”
He leaned forward. I got my first real look at him in person. First since my unbirth, anyway. He was very continental and more than a little fat. He had jowls like a bulldog and a nose like a pig. But he was friendly enough and wore a pince-nez. What a weird contraption that is. I kept meaning to ask him about it but never did.
“How so?” he asked.
“Well, the ants pour out of an anthill. You put a kid’s sucker on the anthill, and they swarm around the sucker. They just incorporate their surroundings into their community. It’s like that, kind of.”
He nodded. He didn’t understand. I didn’t really, either. But it made sense in my head, even if I couldn’t express it.
“I’m sorry about shooting you,” he said. “Of course, I wouldn’t have if I had known it was you. Would you like me to take a look at it?”
I pulled my trench coat a little tighter around me. “Not my first.”
He stood and put his brandy on an end table. “No, I suppose not.” His voice was wistful.
He stared at his bookcase for a while. German books, mostly. Couldn’t make heads or tails of them, for the most part. There were a few familiar titles, though, for some reason. De Vermis Mysteriis. Naturom Demonto.
He slowly worried his bulk back into his chair. “Tell me what you remember, William.”
“Nothing,” I admitted.
“Nothing?” He leaned back. “That can’t be right. All of your kind get their memory back. If not very quickly, then at least, eventually.”
“What can I say?” I said, sloshing the brandy around a little. “I must be special. Or else a freak.”
“How did you know your name when I called out to you?” he said.
“I didn’t.”
He leaned back in his chair and laughed long and hard. I could see the rolls of fat on his neck vibrating. It was disgusting. “Oh, that is simply perfect. Well, tell me what you’ve pieced together. Maybe I can fill in some of the gaps.”
“Well, I knew Billy, though I don’t go by it. So I figured William. Last name?”
“Hinzman,” he supplied.
I nodded. Suddenly my eyes went wide as saucers. “William Hinzman. WH.”
I whipped out the billfold and threw it down. He smiled a little bit and nodded, ever so gently. Smug bastard made me want to slug him one.
“So you knew me?” I asked.
He nodded like a teacher. Pedagogically. Man, where did I get that word? “Very well.”
“What was I? Who was I? An English professor? A door-to-door Bible salesman? I get these flashes. Words I shouldn’t know. Memories. They’re slow to come back, but they’re there, occasionally.”
“Is that what you think?” he asked. “That you were an intellectual?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “You tell me.”
He nodded. “Well, I hate to disappoint you, but most of what you know, I taught you. When we met in Chicago, you were not much more than a farmboy with a German name. A street rat, and not above doing anything for a few nickels.”
“But I suppose you pulled me out of the gutter, made a gentleman out of me?”
Rothering laughed until I thought the walls would collapse. “Oh, William, the day someone makes a gentleman out of you is the day Roosevelt walks. It’s true, though, for what it’s worth, that I pulled you off the street. I never met a more eager receptacle for knowledge. I would expound upon the Führer’s philosophy to you for hours, and you would always ask for more. You lack a certain zeal and passion that I prefer in my disciples, but no one can fault you your voracious curiosity. I recall when we moved here, you spent quite a bit of time at that rundown old library, and you did so love to use what you would colloquially call ‘fifty-cent words.’ But that was kind of a show.”
“I lived in the Mat,” I said.
“You did,” he said. “Working for me. I am many things, William, but I never made much of a hustler. Nor am I an American. In most of the towns in Europe, all I have to do is put on the airs of nobility and say the word ‘Jew,’ and I have an army of townspeople at my beck and call. Here, though, all the underclasses hate one another and they hate the wealthy even more. You had a real knack for drumming up support.”
“You mean I was a Nazi stooge. A rat.”
The fat man shrugged. It w
as a big to-do, like trying to get Muhammad to the mountain. “A pragmatist. A fan of the finer things in life.”
“You mean I did it all for money.”
“And loyalty, perhaps. We became very close, you and I.”
“Yeah, I’m sure we had tons in common. Doesn’t sound like you were using me at all.”
“Oh, on the contrary, William. I always felt that I was the luckier one in our friendship. I always admired your street sense, amongst other things. You were wise enough not to approach that gang of yours on your own.”
“The Infected,” I said.
“Correct,” he said. “You called in some Italian Fascists to sway their loyalties. You really paved the way for us there in the Welcome Mat. I give you great credit for that. I gave you money, but you were the one who rented that loft in the docks out of which we have been running our operations.”
7. Who or what was I before I died? Some slimeball Nazi sympathizer. Probably better off dead.
“I woke up dead in your pool, which says to me it was some of your goons who did it. If not you personally.”
“Go on,” he said.
“So I came here to kill you, Rothering,” I said, “for what you done to me.”
He took one of those long, deep breaths like when you need a whole lot of air to start a speech. “Well, William, I can certainly understand that conclusion. Of course, I don’t think you would say it if you remembered anything of your past life.” He stood and walked over to the mantel. He picked up a picture that had been sitting there the whole time, although I hadn’t noticed it. He handed it to me.
It was him. And me. Alive me. Arm in arm. Back from a fishing trip. I had a giant bass, he had nothing, but we were both laughing.
11. Who is “WH” and why was his billfold in Rothering’s house? Me. William Hinzman. A.K.A. Billy the Kid. And apparently, me and Rothering were thick as thieves back in real life.
“Doesn’t mean anything,” I said. “People kill people they know all the time. Maybe more often than people they don’t.”
“Perhaps,” he said, settling back into his chair, “but not in this instance.”
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