Murder as a Fine Art

by David Morrell

  The sergeant spoke challengingly to the artist, who fought to clear the spots from in front of his eyes.

  “Sergeant, you said don’t use opium! Ever!” the artist responded.

  “You’ll go far, laddie. Not once, everybody! Oh, you’ll be tempted to learn what the talk’s all about! You’ll want to ride the clouds! Resist that temptation, because I swear, before I kill you for using it, I’ll break every bone in your body! Everybody, am I clear about that? Do not let this devil tempt you!”

  “Yes, Sergeant.”

  “Louder!”

  “Yes, Sergeant!”

  “I CAN’T HEAR YOU!”

  “YES, SERGEANT!”

  “Good. To give you an idea of the disgusting depths into which opium can lead, I want each of you to read this piece of filth that I’m holding. This foul book is called Confessions of an English Opium-Eater. Its author is a degenerate named Thomas De Quincey. Those of you who can’t read will listen to someone read it out loud. You,” the sergeant challenged the artist. “Can you read?”

  “Yes, Sergeant!”

  “Then make certain these other men know what’s in this perverted dung heap of a book!”

  “Yes, Sergeant!”

  The sergeant dropped the poppy bulb and crushed it with his boot, making a dramatic show of grinding its white fluid into the dirt.

  “Now let me tell all of you how the British East India Company works and why you’re risking your life for it. The company has plenty of opium from here in India, but it earns more profit from the tea in China. So which makes more sense? Does the company sell the lower-priced opium at home in England and then bring back the money to buy the higher-priced tea in China? Or does it save itself the trouble and keep much of the opium right here, trading it to the Chinese in exchange for tea? Tell me!” the sergeant demanded from the artist as more spots wavered in front of his eyes.

  “Trade the opium for the Chinese tea, Sergeant!” the artist of death answered.

  “You really show promise, laddie. Exactly. The British East India Company trades the opium for the Chinese tea. There’s only one small problem in this scheme. Opium happens to be illegal in China. The Chinese emperor isn’t eager for his millions of subjects to become opium degenerates. Imagine the emperor’s nerve standing up to the British East India Company and by extension the British Empire. By the way, did I explain that it’s very difficult to tell the difference between our government and the British East India Company?”

  “You didn’t, Sergeant!” the artist replied. “But we wish to know!”

  “You’ll be a corporal in a couple of weeks, laddie. Everybody, pay attention. All the empire’s wars need financing, and we have the British East India Company to thank for making them possible. It lent the British government millions of pounds to finance the Seven Years’ War alone. Generous, don’t you think? But then, in exchange, the government gave the British East India Company the exclusive right to trade with India and China. It’s no coincidence that the chairman of the company’s board of directors is the British government’s foreign secretary. The result of this cozy arrangement is that when you protect the British East India Company, you protect the British government. Keep that thought foremost in your minds and you’ll never wonder why we’re here.”

  A recruit toppled, a victim of the sun.

  Two other arrivals stooped to help him.

  “Did I say you could move?” the sergeant demanded. “Leave him alone! Both of you remain at attention for an hour after everyone else is dismissed!”

  The sergeant walked up and down the line, glaring at all of them. In the background, two elephants used their trunks to carry logs to a construction site. The artist feared that he was going insane.

  The sergeant confronted the artist.

  “If opium is illegal in China but if the British East India Company wants to trade its opium for Chinese tea, how can that transaction be managed?”

  The artist thought carefully, fighting his heat sickness. “By smuggling the opium into China, Sergeant!”

  “I hereby officially promote you to corporal. See that you punish the two men who broke ranks just now. Yes, the opium is smuggled into China. That is accomplished via ships to Hong Kong or via caravan through India’s northern mountains. When you men aren’t making sure the natives don’t rebel against us, you’ll guard the opium as it’s loaded onto ships and caravan wagons. It’s a busy life here, laddies, provided you don’t weaken the way that man did.”

  The sergeant pointed toward the man who’d collapsed.

  “Is he dead?”

  “I think so, Sergeant,” a recruit answered.

  “Well, what doesn’t kill us makes us strong.”

  COUNTLESS OPIUM BRICKS, the color of coffee, awaited shipment to China or else home to England, there to be blended with alcohol and made into laudanum. All the warehouses had a faint biting odor of the slaked lime that was part of the water solution in which the opium paste was first boiled.

  The artist became very familiar with that odor because his first assignment in India was to guard those warehouses. Each night, he and other sentries patrolled the walkways between the buildings. Ignoring the bites of insects, he focused on the shadows ahead, aware that the insects, even if they infected him, would be nothing compared to the anger of the sergeant if someone broke into the warehouses and stole any of the opium.

  A slight scraping noise made him pause.

  When a shadow scurried from a warehouse, he raised his rifle.

  “Stop!”

  The shadow ducked behind some crates.

  The artist stepped closer, aiming. “Identify yourself!”

  “I know that voice. Is it you, Corporal?” a man whispered.

  “Step out!”

  “Thank God. We thought you was the sergeant. Keep your voice down.”

  Figures emerged from behind the crates, three privates with whom the artist had sailed to India.

  “We was just grabbin’ a brick.” One of them grinned. “Figured we’d have a smoke before goin’ to sleep. This damned heat. These bloody insects. You want some?”

  “Put it back in the warehouse.”

  “You want it all to yourself, eh? Fine. Here it is. We’ll walk away. Pretend you never saw us.”

  “I said, ‘Put it back in the warehouse.’ ”

  “And then what?”

  The artist didn’t answer.

  “You’re not gonna turn us in, are you?”

  The artist kept aiming.

  “Damn it, the bastard’s gonna turn us in!”

  When they lunged, the artist shot the first man in the chest. Pivoting with the rifle, he drove his bayonet into the second man.

  The third man crashed into him, knocking him against crates. The man thrust a knife at him. Twisting to avoid it, the artist grabbed the man’s hand and bent it, forcing him to drop the knife. Ramming his elbow into the man’s throat, he heard something crack.

  The man sank, clutching his throat, gasping for air.

  Voices and footsteps raced toward the artist. Soldiers surrounded him.

  “My God,” one of them said, holding a lantern over the bodies.

  “Who fired that shot?” The sergeant pushed his way forward. “What happened?”

  “That opium brick,” the artist explained. “I caught them stealing it from the warehouse.”

  “So you killed them?” the sergeant asked in surprise.

  “Those were your orders.”

  “Yes, those were indeed my orders.”

  “Plus, they tried to kill me.”

  “Three,” a soldier said in the background. “He killed all three.”

  “Not only three, but three of your own.” The sergeant studied him. “It’s easy to kill natives. But three of your own? Did you ever kill anybody before?”

  “No,” the artist lied.

  “Someone else might have hesitated.”

  “Sergeant, I didn’t have time to think.”

&nbs
p; “Sometimes not thinking is good. There’s someone I want you to talk to.”

  IGNORE MY RANK. No need to address me as ‘sir,’ ” the major said. “Tell me about your father.”

  “Didn’t know him. My mother wasn’t married. When I was four, she met a former soldier and lived with him.”

  “Where did he serve?”

  “With Wellington at Waterloo.”

  “You lived with a man who helped make history.”

  “He never talked about it. He had a big scar on his leg, but he never talked about that, either. Nightmares sometimes woke him.”

  “My father fought at Waterloo, also,” the major confided. “Nightmares woke him. The reason I asked is, sometimes it’s inherited.”

  “Inherited?”

  “The ability to stare a threat in the face and not flinch. But since you never knew your father, we have no way of telling what you might have inherited from him. The fear of being killed or of killing can paralyze a man. Only twenty percent of our soldiers are able to overcome those fears. The rest provide cover for the actual warriors. It seems that you are one of those warriors.”

  “All I did was defend myself.”

  “Against three trained men, but you didn’t flinch.”

  Beyond the major’s tent, an instructor showed ten soldiers how to tie a knot in a rope to make an effective garrote. The instructor explained that the weapon, a favorite of the Thug cult, crushed the windpipe in addition to strangling.

  The artist listened with interest.

  “This is a special unit I’m assembling. You speak better than your fellows. Where did you learn?” the major asked.

  “Every Sunday in London, I went to a church where a teacher gave me a cookie if I learned to read Bible verses.”

  “The Bible says, ‘Thou shalt not kill.’ ”

  “There’s a lot of killing in the Old Testament.”

  The major chuckled. “Why did you become a soldier?”

  “When I was an infant, my mother carried me on her back while she gathered chunks of coal along the Thames. Until I was nine, I worked for a dustman, collecting ashes. After that, I shoveled horse droppings from the streets and put them in bins for the fertilizer makers to pick up. When I was eleven, I helped clean privies.”

  “There seems to be a common denominator.”

  “After a year of digging out privies, I decided that the army couldn’t be much worse, so when I was twelve, I claimed to be fourteen and signed up.”

  The major’s eyes crinkled with amusement. “Enterprising. Your mother and the man she lives with, did they approve?”

  “They died in a fire long before I was shoveling horseshit.”

  “I’m sorry for your difficult life. Did you ever consider that you were meant to join the army?”

  THE HARDSHIPS OF SURVIVING on London’s streets had seemed the worst that anyone could endure, but the artist’s new training took him far beyond his former ability to withstand fatigue, heat, hunger, thirst, and lack of sleep. The strange part was, he welcomed it. He proudly developed resources of strength and determination that he hadn’t imagined were possible. He learned to ignore the threat of pain and death. Fear became an unfamiliar emotion, even as he vowed to make the enemy suffer fear in the extreme.

  He was transformed into one of the warriors that the major had spoken about.

  He received better food.

  His lodgings were less cramped.

  He was given respect.

  He loved it.

  “Your mission is to guard the opium caravans,” the major told the artist’s elite unit. “The land distance from India to China is less than the sea distance. In theory, the shorter distance should be quicker, but overland has these mountains”—the major tapped a pointer against a map on a wall—“where marauders attack our caravans and steal the opium. We send heavily armed cavalry to protect the caravans. It doesn’t matter. The caravans continue to vanish. Tons of opium have been stolen.”

  The major directed his attention toward the artist. “We believe that the marauders are Thugs. Repeat what we taught you about the Thugs.”

  The artist responded without hesitation. “Major, they’re a criminal cult that worships Kali, the Hindu goddess of death. She’s sometimes called the Devourer. That’s why she has so many arms in paintings of her. The Thugs specialize in stealing from travelers, usually killing them by strangulation.”

  “Correct as always,” the major said.

  The artist kept his face impassive but felt the pleasure of receiving approval.

  “The British East India Company wants you to stop them,” the major commanded the unit. “No, not merely stop them. Make them understand the unspeakable consequences of challenging the empire.”

  FORTY NATIVES ACCOMPANIED THE CARAVAN. They managed the oxen that pulled the twenty wagons. They herded goats that were used for milk and meat. All were trusted employees of the British East India Company.

  Each day, the artist and two members of his unit walked next to the wagons and assessed the behavior of the natives. Each night, they stepped into the dark and studied the camp, looking for secret conversations.

  The cavalry escort amounted to forty, its captain sending riders ahead to look for ambushes. Villages became widely separated. As the land rose, trees gave way to grassland and boulders. The higher altitude made the animals and men breathe harder. Streams rushed from the distant mountains, their water so cold that it made the artist’s teeth ache.

  “Three days to the pass through the mountains,” the native guide said.

  “Any risk of snow?”

  “Not this time of year, but anything is possible.”

  Indeed anything was possible. Two cavalry outriders galloped back in alarm. The caravan crested a plateau. Ravens and vultures erupted into the air, revealing the remnants of a caravan that had departed two weeks earlier. That caravan had included other members of the artist’s unit.

  Bones lay everywhere, scattered by predators. The bones of humans only. All the oxen, horses, and goats were missing, as were the wagons and their contents. The bodies had been stripped, no fragments of garments on any of the skeletons.

  Portions of foul-smelling flesh remained, but not enough to indicate wounds. None of the bones showed signs of violence from firearms or blades, however. If those weapons had been used, at least some of the bones would surely have displayed damage. That forced the artist to conclude that all eighty-three people in the caravan—cavalry, natives, and three highly trained members of the artist’s unit—had been strangled.

  “I don’t see how this is possible,” he told the cavalry commander. “Granted, the natives didn’t know how to defend themselves, but our horsemen did, and they had rifles as well as swords. The members of my special unit were even more capable. Nonetheless all of them were overpowered.”

  The odor of decay was strong enough that the artist and the soldiers worked quickly, handkerchiefs tied over their faces, to collect the bones into a huge pile and cover them with rocks. Normally the races wouldn’t have been mingled, but because there wasn’t any way to distinguish the bones of natives from those of the English cavalry, it seemed better to group all of them together and be certain that the English received a Christian burial. Prayers were said. The oxen, horses, and goats kept reacting to the smell of death, so to quiet them, the caravan moved a mile ahead, formed a circle, and camped near a stream.

  The night sky was brilliant. With so much natural illumination, the wagons were already exposed, so there was no reason not to build cooking fires.

  The cavalry commander assigned sentries. As the natives and the soldiers prepared food, the artist and the two members of his unit hoped that so much activity would conceal them from anyone watching. They crawled from camp and established their own sentry posts at three equal compass points, northeast, northwest, and south. They each took a packet of biscuits and a canteen filled with stream water.

  Away from the fires, the night was bitterly cold.
The artist lay among rocks and used force of will to keep from shivering. I can withstand anything, he told himself, remembering the sergeant’s words. What doesn’t kill me makes me strong.

  The fires didn’t last long, their fuel coming from grass, animal droppings, sparse bushes, and the branches of a solitary, long-dead tree.

  The artist kept scanning his surroundings.

  A shadow moved among the wagons, perhaps a guard coming back from his watch while another man took his place. A later shadow might have been a native relieving his bladder beyond a wagon.

  The camp settled into sleep.

  Another shadow appeared, detaching itself from the circle of wagons. Close to the ground, it came in the artist’s direction.

  As the artist drew his knife, the moon cast a shadow of someone behind him.

  The artist rolled an instant before a figure leapt toward him. The moon’s illumination was enough to reveal that the figure had a rope with a knot in it and that the figure looped it over where the artist’s throat had been. The artist stabbed him, stifling his moans. He surged up to meet the second figure, surprising him, thrusting under his rib cage while pressing a hand against his mouth.

  The artist didn’t allow himself even a moment to exult in his victory. What he felt now were the tightened nerves and compacted muscles of an animal confronted by an enemy. Something terrible was happening to the camp, and he had the even more terrible sense that he might not be able to stop it.

  He crawled silently in that direction, then stopped as he realized that just as he had seen the shadow crawl toward him, so an enemy in the camp could see him approaching. That shadow had been a decoy, drawing his attention while the true assassin had come from behind him.

  Are there others behind me? he thought.