The Death and Life of Zebulon Finch, Volume 1

by Daniel Kraus

  “Dr. Cornelius Leather, at your service.”

  Two details were of note. He spoke with an English accent. He did not offer his hand.

  “Mr. Stick,” replied I.

  Irritation sundered his forehead.

  “Please. Time is short.”

  The truth was drawn straight out of me. I steadied myself.

  “Zebulon Finch. At your service.”

  Leather’s eyes flashed in the moonlight.

  “Men of uncivil disposition are threading the grounds as we speak. My guess is that these men will not look kindly upon my unannounced appointment.”

  “You guess correctly.”

  Again that smile: tight, nervous, but pleased. It was my impression that this was a rare outdoor adventure for an indoors gentleman. He vibrated with the thrill of trespass.

  “As I said, time is of the essence. Permit me to be terse. I am a surgeon. I teach anatomy at the Medical School of Harvard College. You have no doubt noticed my elocution. The British Empire lost me for the same reason it loses so many: to the pursuit of freedom, of both idea and practice, and not at the behest of a crown nor a royal society of physicians, which will hold back, indefinitely if possible, exploration into the dark matter where resides the greatest of secrets. Forgive me. I am no longer being terse. I shall only say the following. For such opportunities I gave up an enviable position in society, stockpiles of gold, and the woman of high standing I was intended to marry. All for the chance, Mr. Zebulon Finch, of conjuring miracles from science. Indicate to me that you are following along.”

  I was but barely. The man needed to be slowed.

  “Making miracles from science,” said I. “We do that here every day.”

  Leather drew a face of such repugnance that I believed he might spew vomit.

  “Games take time to play, Mr. Finch. We have not that luxury. What you do at this hell-hole is stir fevers, irritate skin, rot intestines, and, in worst cases, incite the mortal arrest of vital organs—nothing, I assure you, about which to jest. If we have to discuss this moronic point we will get nowhere. Can we move along?”

  Fascinating, no? I crossed my arms and nodded.

  “America has been good to me. My students listen, or at least stroke their chins convincingly, and when during dissection I sever something that their texts say is not to be severed, rarely do they rush for the constable. That is much appreciated, as I rather despise explaining gross anatomy to men whose greatest accomplishment is firing a nugget of metal into living tissue so that men like me are tasked with extracting that nugget and massaging that tissue back to life.

  “Again, I find I am not being terse. Let me skip ahead. I have a laboratory in Boston. It is mine alone. It is situated on the top floor of my home on Jefferson Street. Half of my time is dedicated to my experiments. Half of my time, Mr. Finch! It was the crux of the deal struck with the college. Up there I do what few men of the saw dare, which will make me the cause célèbre of the medical world if allowed to reach completion or will have me swinging from a noose should it be discovered tomorrow. Indicate that you understand.”

  “I do,” said I, a bit flustered.

  “Doctors read journals written by other doctors. I do not begrudge it. It is helpful if what you seek is a tighter suture or a smarter dose of ether. But doctors staring at doctors will result in what, Mr. Finch? Imitations. Replications. We shall see more veins, more vessels, not the hands that wove them in the first place. So I extend my reading to the shameful. Magazines filled with fantastic tales, attacks of Himalayan ape-men, clairvoyance, the dashing rescue of women from the clutches of exotic monsters. I seek out the rare diamonds of truth among the dull stones of these concocted fabrications, and then I do what men like myself ought to. I stick those diamonds in my gas flame, submerge them in liquids both corrosive and peptic. Report, Finch, report.”

  “Yes,” sputtered I. “I am listening.”

  “The article about your jailing was rubbish. But the advertisement. Now, that carried with it the breath of conviction. So I took a leave from the college to travel, tracked you down, bought my ticket, and spent the intervening hours walking the countryside, so disgusted was I by the lethal concoctions being bottled and sold by your army of crackpots. Every one of you should be behind bars. I digress. I took in your show. I sat in the front row.”

  “I am following along.”

  “Stop interrupting. I watched carefully. I know where needles can be inserted without harm. This man working on stage with you, he is no doctor. He is a butcher. You should be dead, Mr. Finch. You should be drowned in your own blood. What I saw tonight was so aberrant, so unprecedented, so bloody insane, that I found myself non compos mentis.

  “It is your insanity I have waited for. You are my lunatic. Let me be terse. Come with me. Now. Under this cloak of night. Not a mile away waits a driver, four horses, and a carriage. Come to Boston, let me study you, and let us make the world at last retch religion and superstition and embrace science as the successor to Gød. We shall save humanity. Listen to those words. Compare them to your current mission. I repeat, Mr. Finch: We shall save humanity.”

  Leather paused and raised his eyebrows.

  “Indicate that you understand.”

  “I—well, yes, but—”

  “Then there is nothing more to discuss. We move now. Are you ready? Is there anything you wish to bring?”

  He was already on his feet, situating his top hat and ducking toward the tent flap to scout for the Barker’s night soldiers. Now that his tautologous assault was finished, up swept my pride. This palaverous crank wished to remove me from my livelihood of being prodded with needles in order to—what? Prod me with other needles? The Gallery of Suffering at least offered the warm pleasure of rapt eyes, the sustaining promise of stardom.

  “I will not come,” said I.

  Dr. Leather let the flap fall. He looked surprised, even wounded. Were I one of his students I felt sure he would deliver a stinging retort. But this was not a highfaluting Harvard dissecting theater. This was the Pageant of Health in all of its gritty, grueling glory.

  “Nonsense. Up from that bed.”

  “I will not rise.”

  He chewed on his cheeks for a moment.

  “I see you use a walking stick. Do not let that be a deterrent. I will assist you.”

  “I regret you have traveled so far, Doctor.”

  “No more interruptions. I told you about the carriage. The moon is clouded. Now is the time.”

  Dr. Cornelius Leather was nothing if not perceptive. It did not take long for him to recognize his fateful disadvantage. Everything about his attitude wilted, though he kept his shoulders high in a final effort to turn the tide. His smile, though weakened, remained shrewd.

  “Too bad, Mr. Finch. I so wanted to show you my People Garden.”

  So unexpected was this phrase that it jarred me from my vow of silence.

  “People Garden?”

  It was coy how he angled his head.

  “You will have to come and see for yourself, now, won’t you?”

  Light jocularity did not suit a man of such forthright dynamism. The twist of his lips, meant to be razzing, came off as petulant. Still, I admired the effort. I reverted my expression into one of cool patience.

  Leather drew himself to full height, which was not much, and nodded, a gesture I took as a bit of self-encouragement. He slipped his manicured fingers into his coat and removed a business card of creamy ivory flecked with gold and textured with the subtle striations of maplewood. In embossed letters were printed the doctor’s name, title, and home address.

  When I tore my eyes away from it, the doctor was peeking through the tent flap.

  “My truest hope is that we meet again, Mr. Finch. Forget nothing that I have said.”

  Sensing an ebb in watchmen, Leather forwent furth
er farewells and darted away like a doe. The wall of the tent rippled for a minute as if he had instead dived into dark waters. Indeed the whole conversation with Leather had the atmosphere of a strange dream. I let the four sharp corners of the business card bite into my palm. Dr. Whistler’s did not travel to populous cities. Boston was not in my future.

  Yet I kept the card in the same pocket where resided the Excelsior and the page from the Constitution, perhaps because the card was of quality and I wished to have printed some of my own. Or perhaps as a reminder of alternate futures, and indignities, left unrealized.

  XIV.

  CHRISTMAS EVE FOUND ME IN passable yuletide spirits. I had managed to slip into one of my subaqueous night-dazes when the front wall of my tent was ripped to shreds with the charge of a dozen multilimbed monsters. They dove upon me with fangs dribbling over my face and claws ripping at my bedclothes and the most awful of grunts and cackles emitting from their bottomless throats. I rose from this half-delusion as I rose in real life—lifted into the air not by monsters but by men whose faces I recognized as Pageant employees.

  From beyond the tumult boomed directives—Take his arm, idiot; somebody do something or other with that foot—and there was no question from whom these directives came. The Barker stood at the doorway, a familiar libertine vision: fist to hip, scarf whipping like a flag, cradling his big-game gun in his elbow like a proud poppa. His eyes were ablaze with victory. The men began to transport me and I was struck by the similarity of this scene to my kidnapping by Sheriff Nelson, except in one fundamental aspect. My defenders had become my assailants.

  The cage, that ravenous mouth, awaited me with its iron teeth and straw tongue. With all the strength I could muster, I grasped for a handhold to halt my consumption, and for a glorious instant my fingers tickled the embroidered edge of my bedsheet, the very texture of civilized man. Of course there was no stopping this cruel retrogression. The cage door groaned and I was tossed in as a log to a fire.

  The Barker twirled the key ring about a finger and grinned.

  “You have a visitor, Finch.”

  Finch, he said. Omens do not come more foreboding.

  He spoke over his shoulder to the throng of winded men.

  “Everyone back to your candy canes and eggnog. Mr. Hobby, fetch our guest from my quarters, there’s a good man.”

  The Barker positioned himself before the cage as the men filed out.

  “What a wonderful feeling it shall be to be free of you at last. The money? It has been good, that I admit. But even money is not worth the rank indignity of being dependent upon one I loathe with unholy fire, year after insufferable year.”

  Rather than meet his exultant eyes, I monitored the tent flap.

  “Who has come?”

  “I renamed the show for you. I changed the show for you. How we operate, where we devote our resources. Pornographic amounts of money were spent in ways I am ashamed to recall. Well, no more, and I am glad, so very glad. Now I shall profit from the spectacle of your demise and parlay that into more profit. Propaganda: it is, after all, what I do.”

  “Who?”

  Footsteps approached the tent. The flash of a torch made bright coins of Mr. Hobby’s spectacles before he turned aside to make space for a group of others to enter.

  “Here is the gift-giver himself,” chuckled the Barker. “The most unexpected of Saint Nicks.”

  Luca Testa had changed. You could tell by looking that Chicago had at last lifted its famous fists and punched back. I took some solace from that. His forward hunch was more pronounced, as if he had grown accustomed to hiding his face. His hair, always so smartly parted down the center, now twisted in unintentional braids across a pale scalp. Most tellingly, a pink scar, no more than a year old, I’d say, ran from the corner of his left eye down to the tip of his chin, the trail of an acid tear.

  But that night he appeared exuberant. The Barker bowed and excused himself and Hobby followed. Testa, absorbed with the pleasure of seeing me alive and captured, did not appear to notice their exit. The three well-dressed men who traveled with Testa, none of whom I recognized, hovered near the tent flap, but Testa came closer. I pushed myself into the far corner of the cage and titled my chin to hide the grappling-hook wound of my neck. Here was my murderer, back to finish the job, and what I felt most was not fear but shame for what I’d become.

  “Madonna.” The accent was as slippery smooth as ever. “The kid hasn’t aged a day. Kinda pale in the face, though.”

  He wiped cobweb from the top of the cage and chuckled as he shook clean his hands.

  “You guys see what it says here?”

  One of the men read aloud in a voice just barely literate.

  “Highly. Intelligent. Monkey.”

  The other two soldiers burst forth with laughter and Testa’s shoulders shook until I could see tears of mirth sparkle at the corner of his eyes. My humiliation burned all the greater. Oh, but it was unbearable!

  “Jonesy and me used to say the same thing. ‘Our boy Finch—pretty sharp for a trained orangutan.’ Probably thought you were quite the playboy, right? So do all the young hoodlums. Make a little dough and suddenly you’re looking up sculptors to carve you in marble.”

  More titters from the peanut gallery. Bulges in the right places told me that each of them was armed, and Testa made no effort to conceal the revolver strapped inside his coat. He leaned in and wrapped his hands around the bars. It was an image familiar from the day that I, the silly monkey, had demanded Testa tell me what he’d done to Wilma Sue while he’d danced about, pretending to shoot me. Tonight there would be no pretending.

  “Seeing you again? Makes me sentimental. Those were fun days, weren’t they? We got a lot of laughs from you, me and Jonesy. Our little Billy Shakespeare. Our little Charlie Dickens. You think we didn’t know about the letters you were writing? Full of poetry tripe that confused the hell out of whoever you sent them to? Those were immigrants, Finch. Poor, uneducated. Mannaggia, it took a lot of time to fix the damage from those letters, but we couldn’t bear to let you stop, not right away. They were so damned funny! Jonesy would fall on his ass. Ah, I miss that guy. Jonesy’s not with us no longer. Came to a bad end. But that’s life. We all come to bad ends eventually, right?”

  One needed only look at the two of us to know he spoke the truth.

  He frowned; the line of his scar deepened.

  “Things back home are prickly. You do too much boom-boom and damn if the boys with badges don’t start paying attention. Raided my place—you remember my place? Hated that goddamned place but now I’m in some stronzo apartment where I can’t even—ah, what’s the use. Better than a cage full of straw, right? Point is, I needed a vacation, needed to wait out some of the heat. And it just so happened, for the first time in my life, there was someplace else I wanted to go, someone I wanted to see.”

  There had been a time when I would have traded anything for this moment. A chance at revenge! The ticket to a better life for myself and Johnny! That old rageful passion, when measured alongside the empty hunger for fame that replaced it, seemed purer than fire.

  “Me,” said I.

  “Craziest thing in the world. Year back, the postman brings a letter. Jonesy, rest in peace, was still handling deliveries and nobody had a sense of humor like Jonesy, so he showed it to me. It was—well, it was like it was written by a child. Somehow this child had gotten my address, which is a feat in itself. He’d spelled the city and street all wrong and the whole thing looked like garbage, but by Gød there was postage paid and everything. And that’s not even the strange part. There was a little scrap of paper inside, same little-kid scribble, with just three words. Confused the hell out of us. What it said was, ‘Finch is Stick.’”

  Johnny had pulled it off. The same period during which I’d turned away from him to pursue conceited fancies beneath the spotlight, the resourceful kid had
followed through on our plan. Let me assure you, Dearest Reader, that bloating at the bottom of a lake or being driven full of needles were jolly diversions next to this moment. The villain could shoot me all he wanted; any blossoms of meat that popped from my corpse would be welcome—less weight I had to carry to Hell.

  “Jonesy and I couldn’t make heads or tails. Then a couple months back, I’m reading the paper, like I do every day now since they put me in that giamoke apartment, and there’s an editorial about, what-you-call-’em, medicine shows, how they’re no good and all that. The fuck I care, right? But alongside it is a story they picked up from down South and there’s that name again: Stick. And there was a picture, too, a guy being led out of jail. It was a shit photo. Wouldn’t have given it a second look if not for that crazy note. ‘Finch is Stick.’ Holy shit, you know? I had to come see for myself. Because I was sure, mi amico, one hundred percent fucking positive, that you were dead.”

  “Should have shot me twice.”

  His lips pursed in genuine interest.

  “I always wondered. Who did it? One of them Italiani with the triangle tattoos?”

  From my gut crept an icy sensation.

  Gød, no, thought I. No, no, no.

  “Do not lie.” I fought for a steady voice. “You had me shot.”

  The scoundrel shrugged.

  “No. Mi dispiace.”

  “Through the heart. On the beach.”

  “Sorry, Finch. Wasn’t me.”

  “You lie. You lie.”

  “Hey, I don’t mean to disappoint you. But come on, you really think I’m gonna execute my smartest monkey for a few funny letters? You don’t know me better than that? I was going to have some words, sure. I was going set you straight, you bet. Shit, if I wanted to shoot you I would’ve done it that day you killed my favorite lamp.”