Chicago Noir

by Joe Meno

  I wanted to ask how it happened but I figured she’d tell me soon enough at the rate she was going.

  “You people are cowards! You hide behind your black masks and slaughter people like animals! You’re nothing but murderers!”

  Look who was talking. I could do the sizing procedure in the order I chose. Now I felt it was time to slow her down a bit. I’d heard all of this before.

  Judging by her size, a pint should do the trick. I started drawing blood from her jugular vein.

  “His head was . . . severed . . . from . . . his . . . body.”

  The food in this place wasn’t that bad, as prisons go, but then those on death row seldom had much of an appetite. So she was weak and the way I drew blood was just a tad slower than a speed that would induce shock. She was coming down a bit too fast, so I cut the flow slightly.

  She hit a plateau, which she managed to maintain for a time. “They said . . . that I . . . did it . . . with a . . .” She was starting to ramble.

  Butcher knife, darling! You did it with a butcher knife. Deputy Commissioner Nimrod told me.

  As a professional, educated practitioner of the fine art of Executioning, I knew such an act as severing a head cleanly to be impossible except by guillotine or at the hands of a master craftsman of the highest caliber. I studied my inmate and the stats of her sizing. If her victim were asleep . . . ?

  “One stroke . . .”

  I removed the tube from her neck and cleaned her up. I would have to leave word with the stupid guard to make sure she was given a proper supper with plenty of liquids to replace the blood. I was putting my needles away when something she just said intrigued me.

  “One stroke . . .” she repeated in a weak, dazed voice.

  One stroke? At Harvard we had studied World History of Executions I, II, III, IV, and Advanced. Crucifixion, drawing and quartering, and boiling in oil were all methods we had been forced to review and write extensive research papers about. My paper had been on beheadings, and during the first year after Tri-X passed this method was quite popular.

  There had been few skilled practitioners of the art of severing a head cleanly from the body. When accidents started occurring with some frequency there was a public outcry and the method was outlawed in the States, although France kept it for historical reasons.

  “One stroke,” she mumbled again.

  As I recalled from the research I had done for my paper, to do the job cleanly, it took several things to carry one off with precision: either a guillotine or a sharp, heavy blade; a strong steady hand; and the eye of a sharpshooter. Outside of the lucky amateur, there was maybe one executioner who had really been good at it . . .

  “One stroke.”

  She was beginning to bore me. Enough of this nonsense! I had work to do.

  My sizing completed, I decided that this inmate would die in exactly twenty-four hours by being burned alive.

  * * *

  Back in my quarters I kept thinking about beheadings. I used my pocket 1,000 K computer to call up historical data, most of which I already knew. I’d always wanted to do a beheading myself, but by the time I completed my studies at Harvard, the law had changed. But Nimrod had said she used a butcher knife. Of course the inmate was lying, but in the Day Before Death Seminar IV it was taught that there was always motivation behind any lie. I decided to check out her story.

  * * *

  The Illinois Division of the two million–strong National Police Force had taken over the Merchandise Mart on the Chicago River. Although Illinois had a relatively small contingent compared to the New York and California divisions, they were crammed into what was once the largest office building in the world and were constantly searching for more space. It was rumored the NPF would soon be taking over the old Sears Tower, which could be confiscated from its current owners under Section V, 3, C. sub. para. f. (1), 2. of the Tri-X Law, which states: No property or possessions will be held secure from seizure by the NPF established by this Amendment, where such seizure relates to the safety, security, and peace of the United States of America.

  Under Section V, the NPF could confiscate yachts, summer homes, bank accounts, and anything else they desired in the name of law and order. This was an excellent system for the NPF to utilize as a peacekeeping tool, as it was unnecessary to make many arrests. All they had to do was confiscate everything the recalcitrant owned. The only vocal critics of this section of the Tri-X Law were currently penniless, stateless street people. This was another twenty-first-century advance of the Gingrich White House.

  The captain I was directed to see had an I’m-too-busy-for-this-shit attitude until he found out who I was. He might be able to confiscate property, but I could simultaneously confiscate his life. Isn’t this a great country?

  “This is an unusual request coming from Executions,” the captain said when the Darka Paris file was delivered to his office by a clerk.

  “Oh?” I found it best to speak in soft monosyllables when I was trying to scare the red corpuscles out of someone. Especially a pompous ass from the NPF.

  He coughed, stuttered, and handed over the file. “Take it with you. Don’t worry about getting it back to me. In fact, you can keep it.” He ushered me out the door with more than a small sigh of relief.

  * * *

  The photographs were beautiful. They revealed a work of art the likes of which I had never seen before. The head had been lopped off with a precision that would make a heart surgeon look like a beef boner. I was so excited I studied them for hours. Aside from my admiration for the work, I realized instantly that Darka Paris could not have killed this man. Not with a butcher knife, a chain saw, or a hyperbolic laser. There was no doubt in my mind that a razor-sharp blade had been used. A blade in the hands of a master executioner.

  I read the NPF report. The assigned detective had done a slipshod investigation. The evidence was sketchy, contradictory, or circumstantial. A butcher knife with the inmate’s fingerprints all over it was listed and cataloged as the murder weapon.

  Putting the file down and examining the artwork in the photos once more I made a decision. I would have to find whoever did this. Just to talk briefly with such a craftsman would be a supreme honor indeed.

  The same guard who had escorted me into the inmate’s cell at 4444 was on duty again. He was considerably more attentive than during our first meeting and I was glad he was there because I was going to need him.

  After I changed, he went into the cell to prepare the inmate. While I waited outside I thought about the girl. She was innocent but that was a secondary consideration. She would lead me to the master, then . . .

  “She’s ready,” the guard said, stepping from the cell.

  “I’ll need your assistance.”

  “Me?” He took a step backward. “I don’t know nothing about no executions.”

  “It’s a good thing to learn, friend.” I had a very difficult time talking to him like this. Especially since he wasn’t wearing an inmate’s hood. “Executions is the growth industry of the twenty-first century.”

  He seemed barely convinced, so I didn’t give him a chance to think it over. “Inside—now!”

  He jumped and followed me. He stood awkwardly in the corner of the cell not knowing what to do. The inmate was again hooded, robed, and chained in her chair. She trembled violently.

  “This is a simple procedure,” I said for the guard’s benefit. “Efficient and self-contained with very little mess to clean up later.” I pulled a pint spray bottle containing nitroholic acid from my bag.

  “It’s easy. You just spray it on . . .” I pointed the nozzle first at the inmate before turning it on the guard. He screamed and went for his electric truncheon but he was far too slow. “. . . and ignite.” I held the mini-torch in my gloved hand. The flame licked across the confined space and enveloped him. He ignited, flared, and burned away as fast as tissue paper. Only a few ashes remained, which would be enough to temporarily convince prison officials the execution had
been carried out. It had gone off quick and efficient, the way I liked it.

  “Now, my dear,” I said, undoing her chains, “you and I are going to get out of here.”

  Hooded executioners can go anywhere without question. Together we walked out of Chicago State Prison and were given a limousine ride to the jet port on the lake. It was not until we were in my private compartment aboard the Jetstar that I permitted her to remove her hood.

  “Thank you,” she said, embracing me. “I could sense when you walked in the cell that you were a decent man. I knew you’d help me.”

  She was an attractive woman, as looks go, with soft features and a petite body. Under different circumstances I might have liked to spend some of my yearly ninety-five-day vacation time with her, but I had more important things to think about now. On top of that she was a condemned prisoner whom I had already sized and I would have to terminate anyway. After all, it was still my job. I had merely postponed implementation of sentence temporarily.

  “I want you to tell me everything about Arthur’s murder that you can remember. Leave nothing out. It’s the only way I can help you.” The lie came off my lips easily, as I had been taught by the best liars in the country in Political Terminations 343. It suddenly occurred to me that all of my instructors in the course had either been politicians or bureaucrats like Nimrod.

  She was so willing to help me she made me sick. She told me everything. She and Arthur Hickey—the deceased victim—were engaged. They had taken a prenuptial vacation, as was the current custom, to Atlantis (formerly Australia). While there, Hickey began complaining that someone was following them. He became moody and withdrawn from her, constantly looking over his shoulder. He became to obsessed with the belief they were being watched, he cut short their vacation and returned to the States. A day later he was dead.

  “It happened so fast I can barely recall it now,” she said. “There was a knock at the door of our cubicle. Arthur opened it and . . .”

  I let her cry. I knew the rest anyway. The NPF detective had probably made the erroneous connection that she murdered him with the knife simply because it was in the kitchen section of the ten-foot by ten-foot cubicle they rented for $1,000 a week, and she was the only suspect because the detective didn’t look for any other.

  I went back to my computer. I concentrated on prenuptial vacations, divorce honeymoons, funeral excursions, and terminal illness jaunts. I matched all the names on these lists against anyone who had been beheaded under any circumstances in the past twenty years. I came up with 568 hits.

  Amazing! And everything pointed in one direction. I had all the answers before we set down in Miami.

  * * *

  Deputy Commissioner Nimrod looked up from his desk when we walked in. When he saw Darka he stiffened. Then his eyes flared angrily at me.

  “What are you doing, Freitag?” he said in a choked voice. “Are you insane? I sent you to do a simple execution. Why did you bring her back here?”

  I was sorry he was taking it this way. I really had hoped we could be friends now. The reason I’d brought the girl here was to give her to Nimrod so he could work his artistic execution style on her. The computer had revealed that my esteemed leader had been at or near each of the 568 locations where the bodies with severed heads had been found. That kind of coincidence was too much for even the NPF to swallow. I could only presume that he had been doing a little practice freelancing, which I could understand. After all, he was just a deskbound executioner trying to keep his hand in.

  I was starting to explain when he leaped from behind his desk swinging a very formidable-looking sixteenth-century battle ax with an edge that gleamed with terrifying sharpness. I knew that in his hands it was as lethal as a nuclear suppository.

  Darka screamed and backed away into a corner, as Nimrod advanced on me. With nothing else I could do, I fumbled in my bag and came up with the spray bottle and torch I had used in the Chicago prison. I was merely going to use them to ward Nimrod off, but he feinted toward me and then drew back to hurl the ax.

  In the instant he threw that blade, I knew I was being terminated with no chance of escape, but I admired his artistry to the last. I managed to spray a liberal amount of nitroholic acid on him before my head was sliced off my shoulders to drop to the floor.

  I was dying at light speed, but still able to see and think. It happened so fast my headless body was still standing a few feet away with the spray bottle and mini-torch in my hands. I could see Darka over in the corner cringing in fear and Nimrod looking at me with supreme triumph etched on his face.

  My last act in life was willing my hand to ignite the torch. As I blinked off into eternity I was certain I had failed because mind and body were no longer part of the same mechanism.

  But the fates were kind to me, at least as far as Nimrod went. When I arrived at the Gates of Hell, he was waiting for me. It seems his being instantly cremated succeeded in making his trip to the Netherworld faster. There we found ourselves in the company of some of history’s greatest killers. For the rest of time we sat around talking methodology, practice, and execution. It wasn’t Heaven, but what the hell.

  We Didn’t

  by STuart DYBEK

  Old Street Beach

  (Originally published in 1993)

  We did it in front of the mirror

  And in the light. We did it in darkness,

  In water, and in the high grass.

  —Yehuda Amichai, “We Did It”

  We didn’t in the light; we didn’t in darkness. We didn’t in the fresh-cut summer grass or in the mounds of autumn leaves or on the snow where moonlight threw down our shadows. We didn’t in your room on the canopy bed you slept in, the bed you’d slept in as a child, or in the backseat of my father’s rusted Rambler, which smelled of the smoked chubs and kielbasa he delivered on weekends from my uncle Vincent’s meat market. We didn’t in your mother’s Buick Eight, where a rosary twined the rearview mirror like a beaded black snake with silver cruciform fangs.

  At the dead end of our lovers’ lane—a side street of abandoned factories—where I perfected the pinch that springs open a bra; behind the lilac bushes in Marquette Park, where you first touched me through my jeans and your nipples, swollen against transparent cotton, seemed the shade of lilacs; in the balcony of the now defunct Clark Theater, where I wiped popcorn salt from my palms and slid them up your thighs and you whispered, “I feel like Doris Day is watching us,” we didn’t.

  How adept we were at fumbling, how perfectly mistimed our timing, how utterly we confused energy with ecstasy.

  Remember that night becalmed by heat, and the two of us, fused by sweat, trembling as if a wind from outer space that only we could feel was gusting across Oak Street Beach? Entwined in your faded Navajo blanket, we lay soul-kissing until you wept with wanting.

  We’d been kissing all day—all summer—kisses tasting of different shades of lip gloss and too many Cokes. The lake had turned hot pink, rose rapture, pearl amethyst with dusk, then washed in night black with a ruff of silver foam. Beyond a momentary horizon, silent bolts of heat lightning throbbed, perhaps setting barns on fire somewhere in Indiana. The beach that had been so crowded was deserted as if there was a curfew. Only the bodies of lovers remained, visible in lightning flashes, scattered like the fallen on a battlefield, a few of them moaning, waiting for the gulls to pick them clean.

  On my fingers your slick scent mixed with the coconut musk of the suntan lotion we’d repeatedly smeared over each other’s bodies. When your bikini top fell away, my hands caught your breasts, memorizing their delicate weight, my palms cupped as if bringing water to parched lips.

  Along the Gold Coast, high-rises began to glow, window added to window, against the dark. In every lighted bedroom, couples home from work were stripping off their business suits, falling to the bed, and doing it. They did it before mirrors and pressed against the glass in streaming shower stalls; they did it against walls and on the furniture in ways that requi
red previously unimagined gymnastics, which they invented on the spot. They did it in honor of man and woman, in honor of beast, in honor of God. They did it because they’d been released, because they were home free, alive, and private, because they couldn’t wait any longer, couldn’t wait for the appointed hour, for the right time or temperature, couldn’t wait for the future, for Messiahs, for peace on earth and justice for all. They did it because of the Bomb, because of pollution, because of the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, because extinction might be just a blink away. They did it because it was Friday night. It was Friday night and somewhere delirious music was playing—flutter-tongued flutes, muted trumpets meowing like cats in heat, feverish plucking and twanging, tom-toms, congas, and gongs all pounding the same pulsebeat.

  I stripped your bikini bottom down the skinny rails of your legs, and you tugged my swimsuit past my tan. Swimsuits at our ankles, we kicked like swimmers to free our legs, almost expecting a tide to wash over us the way the tide rushes in on Burt Lancaster and Deborah Kerr in From Here to Eternity—a love scene so famous that although neither of us had seen the movie, our bodies assumed the exact position of movie stars on the sand and you whispered to me softly, “I’m afraid of getting pregnant,” and I whispered back, “Don’t worry, I have protection,” then, still kissing you, felt for my discarded cutoffs and the wallet in which for the last several months I had carried a Trojan as if it was a talisman. Still kissing, I tore its flattened, dried-out wrapper, and it sprang through my fingers like a spring from a clock and dropped to the sand between our legs. My hands were shaking. In a panic, I groped for it, found it, tried to dust it off, tried as Burt Lancaster never had to, to slip it on without breaking the mood, felt the grains of sand inside it, a throb of lightning, and the Great Lake behind us became, for all practical purposes, the Pacific, and your skin tasted of salt and to the insistent question that my hips were asking your body answered yes, your thighs opened like wings from my waist as we surfaced panting from a kiss that left you pleading Oh, Christ yes, a yes gasped sharply as a cry of pain so that for a moment I thought that we were already doing it and that somehow I had missed the instant when I entered you, entered you in the bloodless way in which a young man discards his own virginity, entered you as if passing through a gateway into the rest of my life, into a life as I wanted it to be lived yes but Oh then I realized that we were still floundering unconnected in the slick between us and there was sand in the Trojan as we slammed together still feeling for that perfect fit, still in the Here groping for an Eternity that was only a fine adjustment away, just a millimeter to the left or a fraction of an inch farther south though with all the adjusting the sandy Trojan was slipping off and then it was gone but yes you kept repeating although your head was shaking no-not-quite-almost and our hearts were going like mad and you said, Yes. Yes, wait . . . Stop!