“No one’s going to gaol.”
I put iron in my voice. The need for morphine made me strong and guileful. Here was a different kind of luck and my advantage must be pressed. Do what Jack would. Turn this to your advantage. Get what you want. All that was required of me was to apply correct pressure to his flaw, his cowardice. Before me he snivelled and wiped his nose.
“They came in early this morning with her,” he said.
“Her?” Fear tingled through me. “Who is she?”
“I was here to pick up some notes. I to-, I to-, I took delivery but I didn’t have time to check. I had class, biochemistry. I told Jacques about it but he couldn’t make it this afternoon so I came in to cover for him. I should’ve known, should’ve known something was wrong right away.”
Involuntarily electricity ran up my spine and I felt my
“Show me,” I commanded.
Smiler rose and moved automatically. The word that came to mind was: robot. He went around a dividing wall to the closet in the corner and touched the hidden latch. The secret door slid open to a staircase. My knowledge of where that staircase led had been the trump I’d played to the reviewing board. It was a time- honoured practice. Subjects were always needed, by hook or by crook. Every medical faculty in Christendom and beyond had a similar facility. Here the resident warden’s true role was as chamberlain to the world below. I followed Smiler underground.
Twenty-one paces down. My initiation had been with a resident named Jones. He’d played it up as an experience out of Poe and had been onto something there. At the far wall of the subterranean chamber was a heavy door bolted shut that led through to a concealed alley with space for horse and cart to turn around. There was the smell of meat and chemicals, dampness and earth, with unclean instruments on a table by the sink. The weird scene was lit by a lambent green radiance, phosphorus in the stones. Smiler spoke in the dark.
“I should’ve known something was wrong. We weren’t expecting a, a delivery, and they didn’t ask the usual amount. They wanted less.”
Smiler turned to me guiltily. I understood. He’d been planning to pocket the difference. Typical Hebrew. He’d changed his mind, however. It was becoming difficult to stand this anticipatory tension.
“I only just unwrapped it, her. Ten minutes before you arrived. I, I thought you knew somehow.”
I couldn’t take this at all.
“Who, Goddammit?”
“Mick, I, I can’t.”
“Turn on the light.”
Smiler went to the switch and flicked on the current, then shrank away. My eyes adjusted and at first I didn’t understand what I was seeing. The shape gained discernible form and I felt a terror. Every fear had been realized, here, before me now.
No.
No.
No.
Laura was on a slab in the middle of the room, her eyes closed.
“GET OUT.”
“Mick?”
“Get out!”
“What’re you going to do?”
“Go and strip a bed. Bring back sheets.”
“Sheets?”
“A shroud, man.”
Smiler stood up, his laboratory coat dirtied by the abattoir walls. My eyes had been blinded, seemingly. He came to me.
“Bring half an ounce of morphine powder from the dispensary,” I said.
“What? What for?”
I grabbed Smiler’s necktie.
“I’m going to get you out of this scrape so don’t ask stupid questions. Understand?”
“I’ll do it. I’ll do it.”
“Sheets, clean ones. Find a bag, a large one, for hockey equipment or a duffel for the laundry. Clean ones, get it? Don’t talk to anyone. And make sure they’re clean. It’ll be dark soon and we have to move. When did the body snatchers bring her in?”
“Around six this morning.”
“And she’s been here all alone since then?”
“Yes. The office’s been locked.”
“Keep it locked. Get going.”
The last order jolted Smiler to life, now Dr. Frankenstein’s assistant. I couldn’t do what the German had, the new Prometheus. I couldn’t bring her back. My sight restored with tears, hot and stinging with salt. I blinked them away and heard the door close above.
I turned to Laura. She was resting on the oilskin tarp the resurrection men had brought her in. I wondered how many bodies had been rolled up in it before today. They probably hosed it down and hung the damn thing to dry on a clothesline in a backyard. Common understanding had the profession passing down the generations of a local French-Canadian family since the Patriot rebellion of 1838. Grandfather, father, and son, a caste of untouchables. With shovels and picks they sold the fruits of their labours to the
I could see livid bruises corresponding to fingers and thumbs around her throat. Her face was very slightly blue and the smallest tip of a tongue protruded. She’d been strangled. I touched her skin. Cold. Her hyoid bone was broken. There was dirt in the folds of her clothes, in her ears, her hair. She’d been in the earth. Someone had wiped her face. She wore a dark brown velvet riding coat, silk chemise, woolen skirt, and leather boots. Nothing indicated that she’d been violated. Her hands were gloved and a strand of pearls was looped around her neck. That was incredible. The grave robbers usually stripped valuables from bodies, a privilege of the profession. I’d seen corpses with jaws that’d been broken open so teeth with gold fillings could be yanked from the bone by pliers. Fingers with rings would be snipped by strong shears. I touched the pearls and didn’t need to rub them against the enamel of my teeth to know the pale orbs were real, not paste. The only element missing was a reticule or purse.
Her auburn hair was pinned up, more or less how she wore it in life. In life. I touched my own face, and felt my mouth tighten. She was gone, forever, and yet here she was again, one last time. It was such an incredible sequence of events leading me to this infernal place at such an instant, scarcely credible, and yet here I was. The man who loved her more than anyone in all the world stood over her lifeless body. I needed a cigaret.
In the close atmosphere was a deep, evil savour I didn’t overmuch like. So many things had happened that I’d already begun to forget or couldn’t tell myself the truth about. I wanted brandy, opium, a needle to numb me. With impious hands I lit a vesta and with it a Forest and Stream. A pretty picture in the crypt. Smoke cleaned out my lungs and the fag end was on the ground by the time Smiler returned. He was quiet and ghostly. I took a large sheet from him and wrapped Laura as tenderly as I could, breathing over her and smelling the faintest hint of her toilet water and powder, of herself mingled with earth. I made her up as an Egyptian mummy, a pharaohess, Tut- Ankh-Amon’s queen. Smiler’d found a bag and helped me hoist Laura into it. Once upon a time and on the open sea she’d be sewn into her shroud but in this age it was a sack of rubber closed with lightning fasteners. Suddenly I was incredibly tired.
“Did you bring the rest?” I asked.
Smiler flinched.
“Yes, yes I did, but what do you need it for?”
“Hand it over.”
My eyes burned into his and he saw how serious I was. Smiler took two stoppered vials from his coat and
