The Hellfire Club

When she carried the sheet into the bedroom, the light from the bathroom fell across the floor. 'Perfect.' Dart cut away the dead man's underpants and spread the shower curtain next to the body. A flap of underwear lay across Sheldon Dolkis's groin. 'Let's see how our boy was hung.' He ripped away the cloth. 'Had to jerk off with tweezers.'

Dart draped his suit jacket over the back of a chair. He rolled his sleeves halfway up his biceps and tucked his necktie in between the third and fourth buttons of his shirt. Kneeling beside the body, he slid his arms under the back, grunted, and rolled it onto the shower curtain. He moved up and rolled it over again, so that the body faced upward. He fussed with it, centering it on the plastic sheet. 'All righty.' He rubbed his hands together and looked fondly down at the corpse. 'Do you know what I wanted to be when I grew up?'

'A doctor,' Nora said.

'A surgeon. Loved cutting things up. Loved it. What did the great Leland Dart say? 'I'm not wasting my money on some medical school that'll flunk you out in a year.' Thanks a bunch. Dad. Lucky me, I found a way to be a surgeon despite him.'

He lowered himself to his knees and picked up the stag-handled knife. 'You've seen a million operations, right? Watch this. Tell me if I'm any good.' She watched him slide the knife beneath the breastbone and draw it down the mound of the belly, bisecting the line of hair. Yellow fat oozed from the wound. 'I don't suppose, when reminiscing about his dear old Yale days, your husband ever mentioned an organization called the Hellfire Club?'55

She gave a start of surprise and said, 'You did that very well.'

'Of course,' he said, annoyed. 'I'm a born surgeon. What's the essential quality of a born surgeon? A passion for cutting people up. Used to practice on animals when I was a kid, but I didn't want to be a vet, for God's sake.' He cut away wide semicircles of flesh on either side of the incision, then carved off soft yellow fat and dropped it onto the shower curtain. In a few seconds, he had exposed the lower part of the rib cage and the peritoneum. 'Want to take a look at Shelley's liver - a real beauty, I bet - and his pancreas, check him for gallstones and anything else that might turn up, but I have to get this huge, ugly membrane, the greater omentum, out of the way. Look at that fat. This guy could keep a soap factory running for a month.'

'You've been doing your homework.'

'Medical books are much more enjoyable than the nonsense I read for my old darlings.' He sliced through the thick, fatty membrane and peeled it back, then began probing the abdominal cavity.

'The Hellfire Club?' Nora asked.

'You know about the secret societies at Yale, don't you? The secret secret societies are a lot more interesting. The Hellfire Club is one of the oldest. Used to be you could only get in through heredity, but during the forties they started taking in outsiders. Lincoln Chancel was buddy-buddy with some old sharks who were members, and they bent the rules to get Alden in, so Davey was eligible, and he joined. I came in when I was a sophomore, so we were there together for a year. Jesus Christ, look at this.'

He sliced the peritoneal attachments and pulled the liver out of the body. 'Right lobe is about half the size it's supposed to be. See all this discoloration? A decent liver is red. Here, around the vena cava, this big vessel, it's turning black.

'The texture is all wrong. I don't know what the hell old Shelley had, but his bad habits were killing him.' Dart placed the severed liver on the plastic sheet and cut it in half. 'What a mess. Hepatic artery looks like a toothpick… I don't know why Davey stayed in the club. Probably his old man thought it would toughen him up. He was all wrong for the place. It was about cutting loose, getting down and dirty. Sex, drugs, and rock 'n' roll.'

This was interesting, even within the comforting membrane. Most of what Davey had said to her had been a lie 'Where did you meet?'

'Used to rent a couple of floors in the North End. When the neighbors got suspicious, we'd move into another building. Point was, once you got inside the club, you could do whatever you liked. Nobody was allowed to criticize anything another member chose to do. Don't question, don't hesitate, don't judge. Naturally, we had a few ODs. No problem, dump the body in a vacant lot. People in your generation think they invented drugs. Compared to us, you were pussies. Hash, LSD, angel dust, speed, heroin, bennies, lots and lots of coke. Now, that's one area where little Davey felt right at home. He'd go three and four nights without sleeping, shoving blow up his nose with both hands, babble about Hugo Driver until he finally passed out.'

Nora watched his hands working inside the gaping body.

'Hate the smell of bile. If people think shit smells bad, they ought to take a whiff of the stuff that goes through their gallbladder.' Dart brought a roll of toilet paper from the bathroom to mop up a dark brown stain spreading across the sheet. He sliced the pear-shaped sac of Dolkis's gallbladder in half and crowed. 'What did I tell you? Gallstones. At least ten of 'em. If his liver didn't kill him first, Shelley was in line for some painful surgery.' He wrapped the mutilated gallbladder in toilet paper and set it aside, but the wet, dead stench still hung in the air.

'I want to check out this guy's pancreas and look at his spleen. The spleen is a gorgeous organ.'

'Did you bring girls to the Hellfire Club?' asked Nora.

'Any woman who walked into that place was fair game. Even Davey's crazy girlfriend, Amy something or other, came there once. Made her even crazier than she was before. Then Davey started turning up with this chick. If Amy was strange, this babe was completely weird. Men's clothes, Short hair.' Dart was severing connective tissue and ducts with quick, accurate movements of his knife. 'You'd see this cute little thing sitting alongside Davey and think Yeah, I'll jump her bones, and then for some reason you realized no, no way. Also, every word she said about herself was a lie. Hello.'

Dart held up a dripping, foot-long pancreas with a gray-brown growth the size of a golf ball drooping from its; head. 'I've seen tumors before, but this baby is something special. Shelley, your body should be on display in a glass case. I can't wait to see what his heart looks like.'

'She was a liar?'

'Have you noticed your hubby has a tendency to expand upon the truth? This girl was even worse. I guess little Davey had a propensity for crazy ladies.' He put down the diseased pancreas and gave her a twist of a smile.

'What was her name?'

'Who knows? She even lied about that. As you may have noticed, I can tell when people are lying. She was about the best liar I ever met, but she was a liar, all right. According to Davey, she went to New Haven College, and came from some little town up around here, I forget which. Chester, something like that. Granville, maybe. I checked her out. She wasn't registered at New Haven College, and no family with her last name lived in that town.'

'Could it have been Amherst?'

'Amherst? No. Why?'

'Davey once told me a story about an old girlfriend of his who said she came from Amherst. I thought it might be the same girl.'

He gave her a long, straight look. 'The lad probably reeled in wacko ladies by the hundreds. He's very pretty, after all. Anyhow, he spent almost all his free time with this one. I don't suppose they spent the whole time talking about Hugo Driver, but whenever I saw them together she was, after him to get his father to do something or other with Night Journey. She was totally focused on that book. The girl was after him to let her see the manuscript - something like that. I know he tried, but it didn't work.'

Dart manipulated the knife and held up a purple, fist-shaped organ. 'Looks surprisingly okay, considering the company it kept.'

'What happened to the girl?'

He placed the spleen beside the oozing liver. 'One night I happened to walk into our favorite pizza place, and who should I see in the back of the room but Davey and his friend. Your husband-to-be was polluted. I was hardly sober myself, but I wasn't nearly as bad as Davey. He waved me over to their table, pointed at me, and said, 'There's your answer.' The girl said no. It had to be the two of them, no one else. I was the answer. No, I wasn't. The girl was stone-cold sober. Finally I figured out that until he got loaded, she'd wanted him to drive the two of them someplace, and he still wanted to do it. She kept saying they could wait until the next day. That fool you married was insisting on going that night - to Shorelands. She wanted to see the place, so tonight was the night. I