by Paul Boor
He saw metal flash . . . the steel bolts? No. Tinplate. A tin can. He struggled against unyielding arms. Try to shout, shout out, but no air . . . no air . . .
What is this? A wad of cotton clamped over his nose and mouth, the big man yanking his head back. He saw the tin can tipped overhead. The coolness of a volatile splashed onto his face. A familiar smell.
Ether.
He bucked against the fumes. Kicking, twisting, writhing, but weaker . . . weaker.
The next he knew he was on his side on a hardwood floor, his eyes trying to focus on . . . on his own feet, bound together so tight they ached. His wrists were bound together too, with coarse baling twine in front of him. A rag had been stuffed in his mouth. Weak light dodged around the room. Nausea rose in his craw—the familiar aftermath of ether narcosis—and he choked back vomit.
His cheek rested on a floor of polished red pine. The walls around him were carved . . . carved of fine cherry. He was in Keiller’s office lying next to the professor’s desk. A man’s broad backside—it had to be a Russian, the same overstuffed suit of fine silk—kneeled in front of Keiller’s safe. On the floor, Keiller’s desk lamp was turned low. Nicolas heard the spin of the safe’s dial, the click of its tumblers.
Behind him, through the door to the laboratory, came a harsh whisper: “All’s ready. Hurry with that, then fix him and we—”
Lying as still as he could, Nicolas worked the rag in his mouth until it loosened and dropped free. The big Russian still stooped by the safe, concentrating. Nicolas chewed at the twine around his wrists. The twine tasted of engine oil but it loosened; he slipped one hand out and shook free.
The safe door creaked open. The Russian was scooping bills, gold eagles, and silver dollars into a canvas bag. He stuffed handful after handful into the pockets of his suit jacket.
Nicolas sat up and tugged at the bond on his ankles. As tight as a steel shackle. He’d have to go it with his ankles bound, mustering all his strength to have at the big man. Nicolas shuffled closer, got his bound legs under him. Surprise was his only hope. He waited, thinking back to football days. The perfect tackle.
When the big man straightened, the safe only half emptied, Nicolas lunged at the back of the man’s knees, buckling them . . . but he didn’t go down. Nicolas threw a roundhouse deep into soft belly flesh.
The Russian grunted and the money bag fell to the floor. Nicolas, still gripping his knees, thrust again and the big man toppled onto Keiller’s insectary. Cages crashed to the floor and splintered. A buzzing cloud of mosquitoes rose toward the ceiling.
Nicolas lunged again but got nothing but air, as the Russian had gained his feet with surprising agility and sidestepped away.
Flat on the floor on his back, his legs still bound, Nicolas watched for the wire garrote from his assassin’s pocket. Instead, the Russian stood with his hands on his hips, sneering . . . as a tall silhouette entered the doorway.
“Here, use this,” the man in the shadows said, holding out a gallon jug of clear, colorless liquid. “No changing the plan. Not now.”
The Russian inched over to the door, his eyes glued on Nicolas. He took the jug and sidled back to the safe, then bent down for the bag of money and tossed it on the floor next to Nicolas. He took a step forward and delivered a wicked kick to Nicolas’s groin.
“The bag’s for you, ice man.”
A dull, crippling pain gripped Nicolas’s belly. The Russian splashed the liquid in the jar onto Nicolas’s pants and feet. A puddle formed on the floor. Nicolas recognized the fumes—alcohol, pure alcohol.
“You got lucky on boat,” the Russian snarled. “But your luck run out now.” He turned and reached for the lamp on the floor, smiling now. “See, this way we get two hares with one shot.” The assassin lifted the lamp and turned its wick high. “Rabbits, you say.”
“Get on with it,” the man standing in the doorway growled. Light fell for a second on the lean, angular face, but pain so blinded Nicolas, he couldn’t place that shadowy, twisted countenance, except that the man was ugly. Very ugly.
A flickering red-orange glow crept up the lab walls behind the tall man. “Light him,” he said. “We need to get out.” The man withdrew. The drone of the mosquitoes ratcheted to a higher pitch.
“Here you go, ice man. Try this.” The Russian dashed Keiller’s desk lamp to the floor at Nicolas’s feet.
The lamp’s kerosene flamed up with a roar, sending a dense, black cloud of smoke to the ceiling; the alcohol puddle caught with a low, blue flame. The ends of Nicolas’s pant legs flared, the baggy, oversized pants he’d borrowed from Schuyler alight in blue flames. He batted madly with bare hands, then rolled furiously to the wall.
“Now I git,” the Russian growled, running for the door straight through a cloud of enraged mosquitoes. He turned at the threshold, the tall man right behind him, both swatting at themselves. “Good-bye, ice man. Zhivakov tell me say good-bye, too.”
With a wicked grin, the Russian slammed the door shut. The key turned with a clunk in the lock.
85
Good Samaritan
Smoke slowly filled the office. He’d snuffed the still-smoldering cuff of his pants. Righting himself, he shuffled across the floor and leaned his back against the locked door. It felt warm. He tried his bonds again; they were tight. Scissors? A knife or letter opener?
Nicolas edged around the burning lamp to the desk and pulled out a drawer, scattering its contents onto the floor. Nothing sharp. He was reaching for another drawer, choking now, when the door rattled and the key again turned in the lock. They’re back? For the money bag they left behind?
The door flew open and a man ran in, a wild blur of a man with a wicked long knife drawn, a knife like Nicolas had seen used on the docks to open bales of cotton. But this man was much slighter than the killers who’d just bolted.
“You!”
With wild tresses streaming behind him, the Voodoo Doctor grasped Nicolas by the twine on his ankles and dragged him rudely out of the office and across the laboratory. Flames licked at the lab walls. The Keillers’ laboratory was filled with smoke and heat.
On the landing the Voodoo Doctor, with a single well-aimed swipe of his knife, sliced the twine that had welded itself into the flesh of Nicolas’s ankles. Nicolas wobbled onto rubbery legs. The door to the anatomy laboratory was closed, but flames flickered behind the door’s glass.
The voodoo man slung Nicolas’s arm over his shoulder and loped down the stairway at a clip with Nicolas stumbling alongside. An explosion rang out. With tendrils of smoke clinging to them, they burst out the main door of the medical college onto the portico.
Nicolas collapsed and was dragged to the sidewalk. Flames leapt from the topmost windows of the red stone building. A funnel of thick, black smoke and the reek of scorched human flesh rose from the skylights of the anatomy lab.
The Voodoo Doctor crouched beside Nicolas.
“Thank God for you,” Nicolas gasped. “You followed me here?”
“My men were always with you. I suspected a plan for tonight, so I followed myself, went in after you, slipped into a doorway, and waited. I know who’s behind this . . . well, at least I’m sure it’s not you now, Van Horne.”
“Who—”
The Voodoo Doctor glanced behind him. A fire wagon rolled to an abrupt stop, bells clanging, the team of horses wild eyed with excitement. In an instant, a hose snaked from the fire wagon around the building to the bay. Two men in shirtsleeves began working the wagon’s pump; the hose pulsed; men in black rubber slickers dashed up the stairs past Nicolas and the Voodoo Doctor.
“I’ve got to get out of here,” the Voodoo Doctor said.
“Tell me—who was the other man? The one with the Russian?”
“They’ll stick this on me . . . I must go.” He straightened and casually strode down the street.
Nicolas rubbed his bruised ankles. His hands were blistered, his trousers charred. He could hardly catch a young man like Sealy’s mulatto s
on on foot. Not in his condition.
A second fire wagon was drawn up by two horses. The street filled with hospital staff, physicians, nurses, and patients in their scant gowns with blankets wrapped around them.
Nicolas gained his feet; he still stood near the bottom step to the medical college when a large landau thundered up. Long white coats tumbled out, and Renée rushed to him, her eyes wide with terror.
“Oh, God in heaven!” she cried. “What’s happened?”
Nicolas stared blankly for a long moment. “Renée . . . it’s horrible . . .”
“Tell me, Nick!” Renée grabbed his arm, steadied herself against the stone stairway. “Where’s Uncle?”
“I—”
“Don’t you realize? Uncle Francis was teaching anatomy lab tonight. He had some sort of special specimen.”
86
Uncle
“No, you can’t go.” Nicolas took her by both arms to restrain the lady scientist. “Perhaps . . . perhaps he got out before . . . perhaps he escaped.”
Men worked the second fire wagon’s pump hard; two rubber hoses now wove their way up the central staircase. Brackish bay water tumbled down the stairs and out the front doors. Though the brave firefighters quickly staunched the flames, black puffs of smoke continued to burst sporadically from the broken windows of the top floor. Through the shattered glass Nicolas glimpsed the anatomy laboratory’s whitewashed walls, thick with char. Patches of the star-filled sky showed through gaps in the roof where the skylights had been.
Renée began to sob. Then, two firefighters burst from the entranceway pulling behind them the limp body of Francis Keiller, his head lolling from side to side, his crooked back and game legs scuttling along lifelessly on the stone of the portico. Renée and Nicolas dashed up the stairs onto the portico.
“Uncle!”
Together they cradled Keiller in their arms. A sickening gurgle escaped from the old man’s lungs; his face was coated with a thick layer of soot, his hair was singed, and his eyes were fixed in a demonic stare.
“My laboratory . . .” Keiller gasped. “I was assisting the dissection when I smelled smoke . . . the students ran but . . . but I was knocked down by a big man. Two men—one like a bear, one very tall. I . . . I . . . went into the lab, crawled into my office, the smoke, I saw . . . I saw—” Keiller sucked at another breath. “The solvents . . . alcohol, acetone . . . it all went up!”
“Oh, Francis,” Nicolas whispered into the old man’s ear, “as God is my witness, I shall get to the bottom of this.”
Orderlies rushed onto the portico. Nicolas helped lift the professor to a stretcher and the orderlies dispatched him at a jog across the street and through the front doors of the Infirmary of the Ursuline Sisters of Charity.
While nurses prepared a bed and got the old man between clean white sheets, Nicolas waited with Renée in the hall outside the large, third-floor men’s ward marked CONSUMPTIVES. But Renée was mute.
“He’s in good hands now,” Nicolas said. “They got him out in time.”
A dark shadow crossed Renée’s face. “I confess, Nick,” she said, “I was thinking of you. Our retorts, columns, everything for purification from the horse serum was in the laboratory—it’s all lost.”
“How much anti-toxoid is left?”
“I must check, but I suspect . . . hardly any.”
“Come. Let’s see to your uncle.”
The consumptives ward was long and narrow, its two rows of beds filled with patients. The bare, whitewashed walls echoed with groans and hacking coughs. Keiller, scrubbed and in a fresh hospital gown, was propped on pillows, his eyes dull, each breath a coarse whistle. Renée stood at the bedside smoothing back her uncle’s scanty white hair.
Keiller’s eyes brightened when he saw the ice merchant. “Nicolas . . . I’m sorry you’re in this,” he said, his voice a raspy whisper. “But you must find them, Nicolas. You must.” The old man, fighting for breath, closed his eyes and went quiet.
“Let’s give him a moment,” Nicolas suggested. He stepped to a window and beckoned Renée from the bedside. “He’ll recover, won’t he?”
Renée shook her head. “There’s no telling.”
“But he wasn’t badly burnt.”
“It’s his consumption, Nick. Over the years tuberculosis has taken its toll. His lungs are ravaged. His spine is full of it, and now, with the smoke . . .”
“Has he long?”
Renée turned away without answering, then whispered, “If he survives the night, it’ll be a good sign. Now hush.”
Keiller started awake. “Nicolas! You must . . . you must . . .”
Nicolas stepped to the professor’s side. “Don’t fear, Professor, I shall bring them to justice.”
“No, no, you don’t understand.” Keiller struggled to raise his head. “The culprits must be found! They must be treated.”
“Treated?” Nicolas turned to Renée. “What’s he talking about?”
“The others! Those men!” Keiller croaked. “I saw my office . . . the cages overturned . . . ransacked and . . . the mosquitoes!” He fell back onto his pillow, gasping, his eyes wild.
“Nick?” Renée asked softly. “Did they loose the mosquitoes?”
“Yes. I saw clouds of them.”
“Then the culprits were exposed, as Uncle said. A few bites, and with that potent particle from last summer, they’re bound to be infected.”
“The fools deserve worse.”
“I agree, deep down, but as physicians we’re obliged to treat them.”
Panic, raw and undiluted, gripped Nicolas. “How much anti-toxoid did you say survived?”
“Only what we already have on the ward. Very little, I’m afraid. We can bleed the horses for more serum, but as I said, from here it looks like the fire destroyed everything in the lab. I’ll need to jury-rig something.”
“My task, then, is to find the two fiends so you can save their miserable hides.” With a bewildered look, he turned to leave.
“Don’t forget!” Renée called after him. “You’re to be on the ward tomorrow for your second treatment. Best come at daybreak, without fail. I’ll see to you personally with whatever anti-toxoid I can muster.”
87
Businessmen
“Two hares with one shot.” That’s what the Russian had said—leave the ice man to roast in the fire, and close down the college with the same blow. Two birds with one stone. Damn Russians. His assassins wanted him dead, but, luckily, they’d failed. The two miserable curs succeeded in destroying the medical college, or at least they had burnt its heart out.
Who wanted the college gone?
Nicolas thought back to Keiller’s office. The safe . . . the Russian. But who was the accomplice? Nicolas had the slightest glimpse of him, a sideways view lit by the glow of the early flames, before the big blowup. A tall, ugly man. Very tall, very slim . . . and Keiller had seen him, too . . .
Trey Sealy!
Nicolas recounted to himself how Trey Sealy, the son of the financier, and another man had accosted Renée at the Cotton Exchange. Perhaps it was Trey and his businessmen allies who had been vilifying the medical college all along. But how to prove that? How to get to Trey Sealy?
Hutchinson Sealy, father of the cotton trade and father of the biggest cotton trader—Trey Sealy—would know.
And where would old man Sealy be at this late hour? At least two or three hours had passed since the attack, which took place at the start of the supper hour. Like most businessmen, Nicolas realized, the chances were that Sealy would be dining on Restaurant Row, probably nearing brandy and cigars right now.
Nicolas hopped the first trolley to downtown and marched along Restaurant Row. The street was abuzz with news of the fire. Nicolas entered the first restaurant he came to and walked briskly through its dining rooms looking for Sealy. He passed table after table. Dressed as he was in Schuyler’s oversized, disheveled, and smoky clothes, with the bottoms of his pant legs burnt and ragged, Nicol
as wasn’t surprised that eyes turned his way and diners grew unearthly quiet as he passed. Undaunted, Nicolas marched into every dining area, large and small, then moved down the street to the next restaurant.
It was in Trudeau’s that Nicolas thought to ask a familiar-looking waiter about Mr. Sealy’s dining habits. With a greenback slipped into the waiter’s white jacket, Nicolas was led upstairs to a small, private dining room where Hutch Sealy sat at the head of the table with a handful of well-dressed business types. Their plates were empty, crumbs were scattered over the tablecloth, and the men leaned back in a blue cloud of cigar smoke.
Sealy met Nicolas’s bloodshot eyes with his own for an instant, then settled his elbows heavily on the table and stared straight ahead, a half-smoked panatela motionless in his hand.
“You’ve got some nerve, Mr. Van Horne,” he said, his side-whiskers quivering. “Barging in on our dinner after your misdeeds.”
“You’ve heard what happened at the medical college, I take it,” Nicolas asked.
“News travels fast on the island, Van Horne. Of course we’ve heard of your attack.”
“My attack? Surely you joke.”
“Hardly, sir. Everyone knows the destruction you caused.”
Throats were cleared. For a long moment nothing was said, then the silence was broken by the elderly gentleman seated next to Sealy, a trim fellow with cleanly shaven cheeks, a neatly combed white goatee, and fervent blue eyes.
“I doubt any of us regrets terribly what you’ve done out there,” the elderly gent said. “We all hate their unlawful dissecting and—”
“And their unholy experiments!” added another at the table.
“Good God!” Nicolas was aghast. “It appears you’ve been lied to, gentlemen. An outrageous lie, at that.”
