Later, two men walked down the street running under the bridge, heading toward a church they knew with a warm, dry and clean alcove and a soup kitchen in the morning. The street was otherwise empty. Shanks saw the revolver first.
“Huh - that’s a funny thing to leave lying around.”
He picked it up. “We could sell it – it’s pretty new.”
The Wretch was uncomfortable with the idea. “You don’t know what’s been done with that – or who will look for it.”
Shanks popped open the chamber.
“Well how about that,” he said, looking up at his best friend. “It’s empty.”
*
Four days later, in the darkest, coldest part of the morning before the early weak blue light began to seep through the city, the Blue Man and his family still celebrated in their bunker. He indulged them. The only thing that bothered him was the apparent ease of it all. Yes, he had planned it beautifully and planted his man with exquisite touch. Yes, he had found and hired the finest shot on the continent – worth every penny as the man had done the almost impossible.
But the Blue Man was, on some perverse level, sad. He remembered watching a baseball game in which his side was playing a team including a veteran in his twilight days. The old champ had once been feared and revered, but had slipped, first down into the pack with the mortals – then lower, and now just held his place in the side by nostalgia and loyalty. And while he once would have cheered him being struck out, the Blue Man – who was not, of course, the Blue Man back then – was sad to see the old champ trudge back to the dugout. He felt the same way about Comely.
“They used to say that the Devil was afraid of him.” He said to himself, quietly. “That really is quite a rap.”
He looked up.
“Hooper – I think O’Reilly’s been sentry for two hours now. Give him a cigar and a break.”
Hooper laughed and scaled a metal ladder to a trapdoor in the roof. He pushed on it, but it wouldn’t budge.
“It’s stuck.”
“Turn off the music.”
The needle scratched across the record and the bunker went quiet. Hooper pushed the trapdoor again and could hear something sliding behind it. He got the trapdoor open an inch, enough to see O’Reilly’s body lying beside the manhole – with two arrows sticking out of his chest.
“Holy Jesus!” He almost fell down the ladder. “He’s dead! Shot by fucking arrows!”
The Blue Man knew without checking that the other sentry was already gone too.
“Doors – everyone out, but go carefully.”
The men rushed to the doors. Jammed shut. Rear and front alike. The windows were small and covered in iron bars. They were trapped.
The Blue Man smiled and leaned back in his chair as his men scrambled over each other to push the doors open. He dragged on his cigar. The first shell hit just over the front doors, sending part of the roof crashing down on a dozen men in a plume of fire and black smoke. The second hit the side of the building, showering the men in shrapnel, bricks and broken glass. There was blood everywhere. The screaming made the Blue Man wish he’d left the music on.
“Arrows and artillery,” he laughed. “Not even Comely could have come up with this.”
The third shell collapsed the roof entirely, crushing the Blue Man and most of his army in rubble and burning timber.
Outside, the men on the machine guns relaxed, and took their fingers of the triggers. They turned around and looked up the embankment to an outcrop by the road above, at the man standing between two flatbed trucks, behind the two field guns that had put an end to a curious old building and the feral animals that had taken up residence within. Kristian Vandort watched, the light of the fire flickering in his eyes. A man beside him lowered his field glasses.
“I haven’t seen anyone come out.”
“Very good Mr Romero. You have done an excellent job.”
“We have done an excellent job.”
“I suppose you will be returning home now.”
“I will, Mr Vandort.”
“Please. Call me Hans.”
Romero nodded and joined the other men to winch the guns back on to the trucks.
Kristian watched the last of the building burn, the smoke curling up, taking with it his wasted years, and he spoke to the still black sky.
“What a piece of work is a man. How noble in reason, how infinite in faculty. In form and moving how express and admirable. In action how like an Angel. In apprehension how like a god. The beauty of the world. The paragon of animals. And yet to me, what is this quintessence of dust? Man delights not me; no, nor Woman neither.”
*
Arturo arrived back from the market and despite his bag being all too lightly filled he struggled up the stairs to his family’s room. As he reached to knock on the door it opened and his sister stood in the doorway holding a thick envelope in her hand. Written neatly on it was his own first name. He took it from her and flipped it over, feeling its weight.
“Who gave this to you?” he said to her slowly, clearly enunciating.
She mouthed the words ‘a man’ and motioned with her hand to indicate his height, then shrugged.
Arturo walked in and threw a worried glance around the room, motioning to his sister to lock the door while opening the envelope.
He reached in and stopped, looking up to his sister with an expression that drew out a rare spoken word.
“What is it?” She said carefully.
Arturo looked into the envelope and removed what he took to be a letter, folded over itself several times. Unfolded he saw it was a document affixed with a seal and the twice-witnessed signature of one Aldous Comely. Arturo read it with involuntarily widening eyes.
This, the last will and testament of Aldous Comely, completed signed and sealed on August 1st, 1939, does bequeath to Arturo Como, born December 25th 1927, the following properties, on-going concerns, chattels and monies.
Listed below was, in total, Comely’s “on the books” empire - about two thirds of the man’s vast fortune.
It concluded:
A duplicate of this document will be held in the office of Henry M. Heenan, Attorney at Law, executor of the estate of Mr Comely. A second duplicate has been registered at the Office of Title Deeds. A third lodged with the general manager of the Bank of Manhattan.
Alongside this impossible document were five rail tickets to Boston and a printed leaflet; which he drew out;
Martine Schenker School for The Deaf
Communication through the language of signs
Improved Lip-Reading Techniques
First ten sessions for ten dollars
Six-month;
Twelve-month;
On-going courses available
Arturo read aloud this time, slowly but meticulously and needed much concentration to keep his composure. He looked up to his sister again and spoke with the threat of tears in his eyes.
“God chooses strange vassals to work his miracles.”
* * *
The last time Aldous Comely was killed he found the experience satisfactory.
The following year, with the war devouring France, Poland, China and beyond, Walter Rubin sat in Nathra Nader’s diner in Winsted, Connecticut. Some folks wondered if he ever did anything else; but they wondered in a good-humoured way – he was already well liked and his back story covered most questions without their being asked. He was still waiting for things to quieten right down in his former city before contemplating a visit, and enjoyed the peace of Winsted so much he’d concluded he was happy to wait for a while more.
Laura had finished school for the day and flitted around him - asking questions about his work. He gave answers that would have satisfied most people but she continued to push for detail which, for the first time in the course of his natural life, the man who became Walter Rubin was both happy and able to provide.
Through a series of contortions, the late Aldous Co
mely had transferred, laundered, then transferred his ‘off the record’ fortune (which had mostly been stashed into various shell companies, funds and hiding holes) to Walter Rubin, born December 31st 1899 in the town of Paradise. Rubin had in turn invested wisely in a number of legitimate enterprises, donated generously (but not conspicuously) to the elementary school and other civic bodies, made brief appearances at the right public events and frequented his favourite eatery. He’d abandoned his less wholesome plans for Winsted, leaving the tiny underbelly of the town to the aging drunk, Kinley. Rubin was new, he was moderately successful and he was unmarried – but otherwise he was an ordinary fellow, not one to rate more than a mention now and then in the conversations of people not personally known to him.
“Have you read the paper today?” She circled.
“Just the one?”
“Have you read a paper today?”
“To be honest, I haven’t – I was very busy all morning.”
“The situation in Europe is terrible. I heard some of General DeGaulle on the radio. He spoke well, but really, Britain is fighting alone now. The British are a tough people aren’t they?”
“They certainly are. I’d forgotten that you speak French.”
“It was being translated,” she mused.
“But you listened to the French.”
“Of course. So do you think they can beat the Germans on their own?”
“You mean, the Germans and the Italians.”
“Hm.” She nodded impatiently.
“They won’t need to.” Rubin looked out the window and watched the idyllic early afternoon scene. He could scarcely believe such a place could still operate while the gates of hell were open on three continents.
Laura was hungry for more information, as always, and so he spoke to her of Hitler’s openly declared hunger for land in the east, and his insatiable appetite, and that it meant a fight with Russia was inevitable; that the vast expanses and population of Russia would swallow the German army, even if it coughed up blood while doing so.
“Just like Napoleon’s Grand Army.” She had chipped in, thoroughly pleased with herself.
Rubin told her the United States backed and would continue to back the British commercially and that this would inextricably draw them into the war in Europe (though he failed to predict that Imperial Japan would accelerate the process with a gamble of startling foolhardiness); that the Chinese, Czechs, Poles and French would continue to resist one way or another; that the Dutch and the Greeks were brave and the Italians unconvinced and uncommitted.
“It looks terrible now; I am worried about the future.”
“It’s always darkest just before dawn,” Rubin offered, but Laura, like all intelligent people, was not readily convinced by neat platitudes. She fetched the paper from the counter and folded it to present him with page three; and he had to admit it made for bleak reading. Her father called her into the kitchen and Rubin folded the paper back to read the front page.
“Christ.” He said quietly.
TROTSKY DEAD
Beneath it a photograph he found distasteful; the man bandaged in the hospital bed, white beard dyed dark with blood but strangely peaceful in his expression to belie the shocking, violent end he met. And, as he found he had to these days, he checked the date; August 7, 1940.
Revolutionary leader fought assassin…
Assailant in custody…
Ice-pick…
survived through the night…
Leaves wife, Natalya Sedova…
‘They can reach you anywhere,’ Rubin thought. He read that there had been an earlier attempt, in May; machine-gunners bursting into the man’s room but somehow missing when Trotsky threw himself on his wife and sheltered both of them behind their bed… He thought the efforts of Stalin’s GPU were a sinister compliment to the tireless propaganda work the exiled dissident had pursued against Moscow. He read on;
A 25 year-old American man working as one of Mr Trotsky’s bodyguards, Robert Sheldon Harte, was kidnapped during the first assassination attempt. Mr Harte's body was found one month later alongside the road to Desierto de los Leones…
Rubin stopped.
He set the paper down as his hands shook violently.
He stared out the window, as if searching for evidence that it was not true, then around the diner – but two other diners, both eating alone, simply looked back at him, puzzled. Through the window to the kitchen he saw Nathra cooking, and could hear Laura’s footsteps as she moved quickly, nimbly around her father. He turned again to look out the window, tightening his hands into fists and refusing to look back down at the paper before him. He tried to speak but his throat tightened and failed him. The street began to rock quietly, slowly from side to side, so he turned back to the kitchen and watched it do the same. The white and black tiles of the floor reared angrily now, swinging into full view, the clock like a hammer pounded the seconds, the other diners slowed down, slowed down and stopped, Nathra seemed to shatter and stay whole at once, the room spun one full orbit and Rubin, attempting desperately to escape, took one step from the booth before crashing down onto the floor.
He awoke on the biggest table in Nathra’s, a rolled table cloth under his head and a horrible ache in his shoulder, which he had shattered one thousand years earlier. Nathra helped him prop himself up as another guest offered him a glass of water.
Laura was watching him closely.
“I saw you fall. What was happening to you?”
“I felt very… I was dizzy.”
He saw the paper still in the booth, still on page one, Robert still dead.
Laura turned back to look at the booth and the floor around it.
“There was nothing for you to trip on. Are you working too hard?”
Rubin looked up to the ceiling, his forehead glistening. He almost whispered:
“I thought I could get straight here.”
“Here?”
“I thought I could go straight to heaven without dying.”
He looked down and spoke with clarity.
“I was very ill. But I am good now.”
He gently pushed away the glass of water, and gracefully slipped off the table and onto his feet; standing steadily.
“That was quick.” Laura observed with muted satisfaction.
The end.
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