“He’ll find you out, both of you, and what do you think will happen to you when he does? You’ve said it yourself: ‘Warthrop’s attack dog.’ You know what happened in Aden. You know about the Isle of Blood.”
“Is that a threat? Are you threatening me, Henry?” He did not seem afraid. I found his incredulous reaction curious.
“It was Hiram Walker who sent the prize to him. So he would bring it here. So Walker could steal it back again, sweetening his profit with a heaping spoonful of humiliation and revenge. Am I not correct? Tell me the truth and I’ll spare you. I make no promises regarding your master, but you have my word as a scientist and a gentleman that I won’t touch a hair on your slightly misshapen head.”
“I’m not afraid of you.”
“Then why are you shaking like that?”
“I’m n-n-not sh-shaking.”
“Well, you can’t be afraid of him. He’s dead and legless.”
I dragged a crate over and shoved the sundered body inside, placed the severed legs on top, and nailed down the lid. One down, one to go.
He drew back when I stood up, as if he were the one left to pack up.
“I am innocent,” he said. “Dr. Walker is innocent.”
I shook my head and tsk-tsked, an echo of the monstrumologist when I said something particularly moronic. “Can’t say I believe you, old chum.”
He protested his innocence no further, a mark in his favor, and I doubted Walker would have confided in him a scheme so dangerous on so many levels. Still, I couldn’t rule out the possibility. Maybe there wasn’t a tribe of Neanderthals hiding out in the Himalayas, but the unlikelihood wasn’t absolute proof.
I made short work of the eviscerated thief outside the storeroom, and after another half hour we had both crates at the side door facing Twenty-third Street. A light, cold rain was falling, the temperature hovered just above freezing, and the streetlights sizzled, shrouded in haloes of golden fire.
I stepped outside first, instructing Isaacson to wait for my signal, and crossed the street, my hands jammed deep into my pockets. A huge chestnut-colored draft horse came clopping around the corner when I reached the opposite side, pulling behind it a weathered dray wagon. The driver swung hard to the right and stopped before the side door. He did not look at me as I crossed back over. He wore a floppy hat and a black overcoat, and the hands holding the reins were very large, the knuckles swollen from more fights than anyone—including him—could remember. He was one of Warthrop’s “special men,” known for discretion, a penchant for risk, and a disdain for the law. Such unsavory characters were a necessary evil in the study of nature’s criminal side. They were Warthrop’s couriers and spies, the muscle to his mind. This one I had never met before.
“Mr. Faulk.” I greeted him cordially.
“You must be Mr. Henry, then,” he replied in a voice scraped raw by whiskey.
“There’s been a slight change in plans,” I informed him, slipping him a five-dollar note. He tucked the bill into his pocket and gave the barest of shrugs.
Five minutes later we were loaded up and making good time. I rode alongside Mr. Faulk; Isaacson sat in the back with our cargo, casting a wary eye up and down the street and clutching the side rail like a child on a Coney Island roller coaster. The temperature continued to drop, and hard pellets of ice stung our cheeks as we drew closer to the river. Ahead of us loomed the Brooklyn Bridge, its uppermost part lost in the freezing mist.
And in me the thing unwinding.
Mr. Faulk stopped at the height of the span. I stepped down carefully. Ice crunched beneath my boots. High above the river the wind screeched, and the rain drove nearly sideways and scraped the skin like icy sandpaper. Isaacson was waiting impatiently for me at the back of the dray; for him the night had been too long already. At least it will end for you, I thought bitterly. He took one end of the first crate and I the other, and we shuffled sideways to the rail. We could not see the water below, but we could hear it and smell it and sense the drop, the empty space between our feet and its blank, black surface.
“Steady now, Isaacson,” I cautioned. “Watch your footing so you don’t go in with it! On the count of three . . .”
Up and over . . . and then down, down, and the splash was very long in coming and was very faint, a plaintive whisper, and I leaned toward him and asked, “Are you a praying man, Isaacson?” I returned to the wagon without waiting for an answer.
We tarried for a moment at the railing after dropping the second crate over. Ice clung to our hair, our wool coats; we shimmered like angels. Now that the work was done, Isaacson relaxed a bit, and some of his former swagger returned.
“I say, old chum, this business might be pleasant if it weren’t so blasted unpleasant.”
“You didn’t answer my question,” I said softly.
He stiffened. He seemed oddly insulted. “Of course I pray. I won’t bother asking if you do.”
He whipped around, his good mood vanishing as quickly as it came. It took him two steps to realize Mr. Faulk was no longer hunkered in his seat.
He stopped and turned slowly around to face me.
“Where is our driver?” he demanded, his voice rising in distress.
“Behind you,” I answered.
He did not have the opportunity to turn round again. The unwinding thing sprang free, uncoiling with enough force to break the world in half. My fist drove into his solar plexus, the very spot where he had punched me earlier. His head dropped; his knees buckled. He was not a small person by any means, but Mr. Faulk was larger: He slung Isaacson over his shoulder with the ease of a coal heaver and carried him to the rail. He wrapped his huge paws around Isaacson’s ankle and lowered him over the side, where he dangled upside down, arms clawing uselessly at the empty air,
The thing in the jar, scratch, scratch.
“Isaacson!” I shouted against the wind. “Isaacson, are you a praying man?”
He yowled. I could not see his face.
“It was Dr. Walker, wasn’t it?” I shouted. “Dr. Walker who hired Maeterlinck to bring it and Dr. Walker who hired the Irishmen to steal it!”
“No!”
“The truth will set you free, Isaacson!”
“I’m telling you the truth! Please, please!” He could not go on. His sobs tore into the indifferent rain.
Mr. Faulk turned his head toward me slowly, his prominent brow wrinkled by a question: Let go? I shook my head.