City of Darkness (City of Mystery) (46 page)

“Emma,” Leanna said, struggling to
keep her voice from cracking.  “I think we’re being followed.”

“Followed?  What?”  Emma stopped in
her tracks and turned around.  “I see no one.”

“Come,” said Leanna, yanking her
sharply   

But Emma stood stubbornly, facing
back.  She was about to tell Leanna she was the one who was mad when she saw
him.  He was nearly a full length behind them, just passing under a street lamp,
his shadow moving like a blade of darkness through the circle of the light.
There was a moment when she might have seen his face, but then he stepped out
of the bright circle, and ceased to exist. 

There was no other movement, just
darkness as smooth and vast as an ocean and Emma stared at the next streetlight,
waiting for someone to cross beneath it.  No one did.

“Is he there?” Leanna asked
desperately.

Emma shook her head. “I’m not sure.”

8:17 PM

Going down one of the main
throughfares would have assured that he passed more bobbies along the way and
perhaps even, depending upon how steadily they were moving, overtaken the
girls.  But the back streets were faster and, debating even as he ran, Trevor
decided to take the most direct route to the water.  His anxiety increased with
each doorway he passed.  How could he, not to mention half of Scotland Yard,
have missed them?    Was he utterly wrong about the reason Emma and Leanna had
been lured to Whitechapel?  Tom’s blurted confession that his sister was an
heiress had stunned Trevor, made him realize that he could have once again
misread the situation, that Leanna might indeed the intended target.

He screamed her name.  Then Emma’s. 
No answer, although there were other noises coming from the alleys.  Moans,
grunts, giggles, the raw sounds of sex and of life’s neverending needs. 

The street he’d chosen was considerate
enough to slope downhill but it lacked streetlights and Trevor stumbled over
the irregular cobblestones, his feet sliding in the ruts and muck.  The wind
roared through these narrow venues, as loud as water in a river, and once he
thought he heard a woman cry out.  A sound that could indicate pleasure or pain
and how similar the cries are, he thought, how indistinguishable in the dark.  “Are
you there?” he shouted, waving his light torch, but he saw no one.  “Leanna?”
he screamed, trying to push down fear and keep his voice low enough to carry. 
“Emma?  Can you hear me?”

The dim glow of the waterfront drew
him onward.  The downhill slope, the river, the place where all the threads
would be drawn together.  And just then he heard the last thing he expected. 
The sound of a pistol.

8:17  PM

Death by gunshot would not ordinarily
be his first choice.  It is eruptive, imprecise, and noisy but perhaps, upon reflection,
the creature before him deserves no better.  She has threatened him and tried –
what’s the English phrase?   Yes, she has tried to turn the tables, and a price
must be paid for such impunity.

He looks at the heap of clothing
before him and reflects that it hardly looks human.  No one will ever connect
this one to him.  A different sort of method, a different type of victim.  The
death of a woman no one liked.  They will all say she deserved it, and they
will give her not a moment’s thought.

Nonetheless, he uses his scarf to
wipe the gun.  He remembers what Trevor said, that the French had means of
reading the patterns that swirled about the ends of a man’s fingertips.  There
might be a chance, however slight, that someone could connect this gun to him,
so he cleans it carefully before tossing it on the body of Maud Milford.

He pulls his knife from his pocket,
almost by habit.  But he feels not the slightest urge to approach her body, no
curiosity about what lies beneath her clothes or beneath her skin.   His heart
rate is normal.  His breath is regular and there is no film of sweat upon his
brow.  His mind is already somewhere else.

On the Sunday morning he fled Warsaw
he had the clothes on his back and the knife in his pocket, the same knife he
is holding now.  It had taken him three weeks to get to London.  He had huddled
in cattle cars, earned his passage across the channel by scrubbing decks. 
Luckily, he had studied some English at the University and he worked hard to eradicate
his accent.  

His first job had been for an
undertaker, a position he accepted because it included a room in the back where
he could sleep.  He found the dead bodies to be soothing company in the
evenings after everyone else had left.  He spoke to them sometimes, first in
Polish and then in English, until he was afraid he was going mad.  In time he
found his way to the Pony Pub and it was there that he overheard a copper
saying the Yard needed coroners.  He had not recognized the word in English so
he had asked the barmaid what it means.  She’d turned to him, all giggles and
smiles, and said “But it’s a doctor for dead people, isn’t it?” 

Phillips, with his shaky hands, had
been amazed at how fast he could drain a body.  Was amazed at how neatly he
could suture a wound, how unperturbed the young man was by the endless gore of
the Scotland Yard mortuary.  And so he became a doctor of the dead.    

He hadn’t been meant to overhear that
bit about the fingerprints, but nor did they bother to keep secrets from him.  Over
the last few months, he had learned many things and filed them away in his
mind, information to be used at some future point.  They considered themselves
men of science and thus without prejudice, but the first time he’d been
introduced to Trevor Welles the man stumbled over his last name, as all the
English seemed to do.  Despite the round of hearty handshakes that followed, it
was clear he’d been discounted in their eyes.  Had been put in a certain
category, lumped with the Michas and Lucys of the world, the ones who could not
understand, who never would. 

Trevor had mispronounced his name,
had shaken his hand, and from that point on had behaved as if Severin Klosowski
were deaf.

CHAPTER FORTY-FOUR

8:17 PM

Tom had warred within himself as he
followed John into the shabby room.  He felt he should explain that Leanna and
Emma might be in danger… but then again, Trevor had undoubtedly intercepted the
girls by now and was transporting them home to Mayfair while this woman
writhing on the bed was most clearly in need of assistance.  So he had pushed
up his sleeves and worked beside John and within minutes the two of them managed
to maneuver the child feet first into the world.  They left the baby and mother
in the care of the other woman, who had turned out to be her sister, and
stepped back into the misty night.

“Come with me,” Tom said.  “We need
to walk and I’ll tell you where we’re going on the way.”

“You’re limping,” John said.  “Why?”

Tom told John an abbreviated version
of the story and when he got to the part about Leanna and Emma, John jerked to
attention.  “My God, you’re just now telling me this?”

“They’re undoubtedly home as we speak,
sleeping in their beds.  I just want to go back to the pub and see if I can
find Trevor or Mabrey, explain to them why I disappeared.”

“You shouldn’t be on that ankle.”

“It doesn’t hurt as bad as my
shoulder, to be truthful.  I think I dislocated it trying to break down the
door.”

“Do you want to ride on my back?”

Tom looked at him, surprised and
offended.  “Of course not.”

8:22 PM

“Emma,” Leanna said breathlessly
“What’s that smell?  It’s fish, is it not?  Dead and rotting fish, thank God,
and it may as well be roses.   That means we’re getting close.”

8:22 PM

It would seem impossible to lose a
man as large as Micha, but Cecil had managed to do just that.  He had followed
his lumbering shape for nearly ten minutes and then somehow lost sight of him. 
Leanna and Emma were trodding along as steadily as lambs to the slaughter, but
the man he’d paid to slaughter them seemed to have disappeared.   Cecil could
only assume he’d elected to take another street and lie in wait for them down
by the waterfront.  At least that’s what he hoped.  For all he knew the man had
taken his coins and was drinking Polish champagne in a bar somewhere.

But just as Cecil had stepped into
one of those infernal streetlights, something unexpected had happened.  The
girls stopped and the Kelly chit had turned on her heel and faced him.  The
sight of her staring up the street so directly and boldly startled Cecil and he
had stood frozen in the circular light beneath the lamppost like an actor on a
stage.   If it had been Leanna who had whirled about to look, she doubtless
would have recognized him, and then what would he have done?

He was following far too closely.   Best
to slip into an alley for a second and let them get a bit farther down the
street.    

Cecil had no sooner stepped into the
shadows before he realized he was not alone.  A man was standing there.  Ah,
the man from the bar, the one with the mustache.  The one who was dillying and
probably beating the barmaid, the one who stayed sober while everyone around
him drank, the one who had so obligingly sent Leanna to the waterfront and to
her doom. 

Now this was a strange coincidence. 
Why was this man lurking in an alleyway, and not Micha?  Was he supposed to
greet the fellow?

“Hello,” he said.  “Fancy finding you
here.  Name’s Severin, isn’t it?”

And then Cecil saw the knife.

CHAPTER FORTY-FIVE

8:23  PM

“I’m not sure where he went,” Emma
said.  “Perhaps our nerves have gone so bad we’ve imagined every man in the
street is following us.”

“I know,” Leanna says.  “And listen
to those foghorns.  We must have come full circle because we truly are near the
docks.”

“Thank God,” Emma said.  “When we
find a cab we must –“

But as they turned the final corner
they came face to face with a man.  Strange, Leanna thought, but it seems as if
he’s waiting for us.  Emma’s mind went even more into the sort of slow-motion abstraction
that often accompanies shock and makes it feel dreamlike.  Or perhaps she was
turning pages in one of her father’s old storybooks.   A bear was before them. 
He was standing with his weight equally on each foot and in a bit of a crouch,
the paunch of his belly thrust forward.  

The bear smiled. 

And then he lunged.

Leanna tried to cry out but, before
she could make a sound, the man’s arm swooped down, as swift and mechanical as
a sickle, and lifted her straight up by the base of her throat.  She gasped for
air as she felt herself being pushed skyward until, when she struggled to open
her eyes, she found herself staring down into his grinning face.  Her feet
kicked and dangled below her, as ineffectual as ship sails on a windless day.  
Emma, snapped free from her shock, let out a shrill scream and pounded at the
back of the man.  The sound echoed through the streets, and, although no one
came to help, someone must have lit a light in one of the rooms overlooking the
waterway for a pale yellow glow began to diffuse the darkness, allowing Emma to
see.  Leanna had stopped kicking and swung about like a rag doll, her feet
grazing the rough boards of the dock.

She’s dead, Emma thought.  He’s
broken her neck.  Using all her strength she leapt on the man’s back and threw both
of her arms around his face, gouging her fingers into his eyes and biting the
fleshy overhang at the base of his skull.   She was not strong enough to pull
him down, but the pain in his eyes and neck had the desired effect.  He
released Leanna to the ground and staggered blindly while Emma crossed her
hands, grabbed her own wrists, and simply dropped.  The dead weight of her body
hanging behind him made the big man sway and she kicked as hard as she could. 
She was screaming, screaming for every pain she’d ever suffered, every loss,
every fear.  Her voice echoed up and down the waterfront. 

This time Trevor heard her.  He had
been pacing the docks since he’d arrived minutes before and now he began
running toward the sound of her voice, blowing his police whistle in short hard
blasts.   Other coppers in the area picked up the signal and began to blow
their whistles too, converging on the pier.  Davy Mabrey, coming from the west,
was among them. 

Micha had regained his balance but,
since Emma was hanging down the back of his body, he was unable to reach her. 
He whirled sharply, a move that nearly sent her spinning off of him, and
finally slammed his own back, and thus hers, into a piling.  Emma’s head hit
the boards and she slid to the ground, her mouth full of blood and her vision
gone cottony.   

It was as if she was looking down at
herself, as if this was all happening to someone else, a substitute Emma, another
person.  It would be easy to give into it and just sink from this time and place. 
Easy to release her grasp on this sad life and fall into some bigger, brighter
world.  Emma let her head roll back.   She had sat at her mother’s bed at the
end, had seen the startled look that had come across the woman’s features with
her last earthly exhalation.  Emma had always wondered what this final
revelation had been, but now she knew.