City of Darkness (City of Mystery) (30 page)

Now he grabbed the doorframe, almost
buckling from the shock of what she was saying.  She had been stealthy and
persistent, just as his father had warned him the Jews so often were.  Had put
together certain things better than he would have guessed.  If she had been
able to follow him to where he lived, would she be willing to follow him to the
university? 

He asked her what she wanted.

Marriage.

He laughed. 

He laughed, but his arrogance was
fading fast.   She held the cards, he realized, and he himself had dealt them
to her, one Wednesday afternoon at a time. 

The girl stood in his doorway,
waiting.

Of course he would not marry her. 
That was out of the question.  His future wife would play the spinet and host
soirees; she would not be a retired whore.  And no, no, don’t even bother to
ask.  He did not have enough money to support a child on the side. 

The one thing he did have to offer
her was his surgical skill. 

Had he done this particular
procedure?  Of course not.  It was scarcely on the curriculum.  But it was
simple enough in theory and there was no other way.

Naturally, this was not what the girl
had hoped to hear.  She wept.  She clung to his shoulders.  He took her hands
and led her into the room, asked her to sit on the bed.  He apologized for the
laughter and said it was just the spasmodic result of his surprise, an
explanation she seemed to accept.  He promised future visits, a marriage
someday, yes, of course, when he was out of school and could support her in the
manner she deserved.  

Did she believe him?   Did she see a
home, a family, the cozy comfort of being a doctor’s wife?  Hard to say, but
after a long conversation punctuated with kisses and tears, Collette had agreed
that this particular child should not be born.

Church bells were ringing on the
morning that he met her.  It had to be a Sunday, the only time of the week when
he could be absolutely sure no one else would be in the laboratory wing of the
university.  He had consulted the books and figured the steps he must take, the
implements he would need.  At first he had thought about trying to remove the
surgical tools from the school but they were valuable and carefully accounted for
at the end of every lab, so he ultimately decided it would be easier to get the
girl in than to get the knives out.   He was relieved to see she had celebrated
the dawn with a good bit of vodka since he had no way of predicting how painful
the procedure would be.  She followed him unsteadily but without question
through the dark halls of the university and then into the large silver
laboratory.  

“Tell me something,” he asked.  “What
is your real name?”

She didn’t answer.  The fear, the
vodka, the strangeness of the place.  They had all rendered her mute and she
did not even look at his face.  The laboratory was bright with sunlight.  She
let him help her to the table where, only two days before, he had assisted in
the dissection of a heart. 

If a man was gifted enough to
navigate the chambers of the human heart, it should be a simple enough matter
to make your way in and out of a uterus, surely the most primitive of organs. 
No more than a muscular sack, a cove with a single outlet to the sea.  He would
never understand where it went wrong, what vessel he had managed to nick or why
there was so much blood.  He didn’t panic at first.  Who could say how much
bleeding might be normal in a task such as this one?  The fetus had not been
the problem.  It had slipped out as easily as a pit is spooned from an
apricot.  He let the mass of material drop in a bucket and the girl had turned
her head with the sound.  The trouble started later, when he began to scrape
the walls of her womb. This should have been the sweeping up part of the
procedure, the simple part.  But the blood was continuing to flow and the girl
was squirming now, crying out in fear and pain.  He dropped the scalpel and
went in with his hand.  

Three walls were fine, clean, whole. 

On the fourth, his finger found the
tear.  Slipped right through the membrane, and in that moment he knew that his
whole life was turning, that everything he was and had ever hoped to be was
slipping away.  What now?  Stitches?  He couldn’t hold her open and sew at
once, not to mention the impossible mess of the bleeding, or the fact the girl
was fighting him, trying to pull her knees to her chest, trying to knock back
his hands. 

He began to have the sense that he
was leaving his own body.  That he was floating somewhere high above the room,
looking down at the figures below him, watching the blood spread like an
overturned bucket of paint, a glass of wine, watching it cover the table and
begin to drip upon the floor.  The girl screamed – loud, too loud, and although
there was likely no one else in the building on a Sunday morning, it was
impossible to be sure.  He tried to shush her, to contain her, and when this
proved impossible, he pulled his hand from her womb and punched her face with
his bloody fist until at last she felt silent.

He had asked the professor, days
before, where the school got the organs they used in dissection, where they had
obtained that particular human heart.   The class had been concluded for the
day and they’d been standing at the big silver sink, washing up.   He could
still see it, the perfect beads of water on the hairs of the professor’s arm as
he had explained that most the cadavers were indigents, whores, or criminals,
people without families to claim them. This heart had been small.  It had
probably been taken from a female.  And then the professor had suggested he
make surgery his specialty, had said that he had a gift for the knife.

But what would the professor say if
he could see this scene now, see him frantically trying to suture the hole he
had ripped in this girl’s uterus, unable to stop the flow of blood, unable to
see his way though it to the site of the damage?  There would be no degree.  No
university post, no pretty wife with her pretty voice, no money, no position,
no respect.   He would be disgraced, jailed, excommunicated, sent to the work
houses.  His father would know.  His landlady, the professor, the other students. 
Katrina.  Katrina would know it all, would see that he was just a boy from a
small town who worked in the fields, who trapped pelts in order to buy a single
good coat.   Society knows what to do with the people who have never had hope. 
They know where to house them, what to feed them, even how to make use of their
bodies when they die.  But what becomes of the people who had hope and lost
it?  The young man knew he would have to be far away before the next morning
when his classmates would return, when the professor would push open this door
and see this sight.  Would find this bounty of healthy young organs for the
edification of his future medical students. 

The girl was no longer crying.  She was
lying very still.  He stepped back from the table, unable to take his eyes off
her, fumbling with his left hand for a chair.  How much blood could one woman
hold?  It was eternal.   Blood without end, amen.  She was so quiet now.  Her
chest was still rising and falling but there was no sound with the breathing. 

He found the chair with his hand and
lowered himself into it.  He knew he should be running, running now, but he was
unable to move. 

So this is how it ends, he thought. 

She had been his first.  This was not
a strange thing. Country boys who came to the city were often virgins, but what
disturbed him most, oddly, was that he had never known her name.

He sat for a long time.  He watched
as her life flowed slowly out, taking his life along with it.   

He knew he should flee and yet he did
not.  Instead he left the girl’s body on the examination table, and went to
Katrina’s house.  What did he expect?  Was there some part of his mind that
thought she might escape with him…..but no, only a fool would have believed that,
and he had never been a fool.  Perhaps he believed that her father would help
him, that when the professor saw how much his daughter loved…..no.  Not that
either.  Perhaps he had only wanted to say goodbye, to see the grief in her
eyes when he told her some pretty lie.  Maybe that that his own father was ill
and he must travel home for a week or two. 

She would forget him in time.  He
would never forget her.

He didn’t knock on the door but
instead waited in the garden.  She had so many dogs  that he had never been
sure of the exact number, but one or another of the little fluffs was always
needing to go into the yard to lift a leg against a bush.  He stood in the edge
of the poplars for nearly an hour waiting and was at last rewarded with the
sight of her drifting like a cloud across the lawn.

She smiled, surprised.  Walked toward
him, the yapping dogs all around her, with a hand extended as if she planned to
pull him from his hiding place into the light.  He did not wish to reveal
himself totally in case someone else was with her, but he held out a hand too,
beckoning her toward the woods, and that’s when she saw the blood on the cuff
of his sleeve.

He was, after all, a medical
student.  There were dozens of plausible reasons why he might have a smear of
blood on a white cuff, but Katrina’s mind went to none of those reasons and he
was mute, incapable of directing her there.  Perhaps he emitted the stink of
shame, perhaps his face was frozen in a mask of guilt.   Something must have
given him away, because the girl stopped in her tracks and frowned. 

“What have you done?”

Her voice was stern.  Contemptuous. 
She had no way of knowing.  A girl of her class probably didn’t even know it
was possible to do the thing he had just done. But she looked in his face and
had seen somehow, in that instant, that he had fallen, that he had made some
large and ghastly mistake, the sort that would remove him from his rightful
place at her father’s dinner table.  He thrust his hand into his pocket, felt
his fingers curl around the handle of the scalpel he had hidden there.

She frowned, repeated the words. “What
have you done?”

Only then did he run.

How many days had it taken him to get
to London, or should the question be how many weeks?   His shock and confusion
were so profound he lost his senses, hopped on trains that were going the wrong
direction, spent hours unto days in deep, dreamless sleep in haystacks along
the way.  He did not know where he would go once he finally reached the city or
what he would do next. 

He only knew that two women, each in
her separate way, had ruined him.        

Now, almost three years later, there
are ways in which he remains a mystery to himself.  The monstrous injustices of
the world have always tormented him and yet he has never been able to stop
himself from admiring those who stand above him on the ladder.   He does know
that he is following this particular girl because she too somehow reminds him
of Katrina.   The same fair coloring, serene expression, the confidence with
which she moves. 

A man might prepare his whole life
for a profession.  He trains himself from boyhood into the kind of character
that will allow him to escape poverty and hopelessness.  Builds himself up
through a thousand small steps, taken year after painful year, only to see his
whole world come tumbling down on a woman’s whim.   For women know how to make
you want something you had never knew you wanted, and then, just when you dare
to hope you might gain it, they know how to take it away.  They are the
apple-eaters, the dark angels, a mere afterthought of God, and whether they lay
a gloved hand on your arm at a dinner party or spread their dirty legs for you
in an alley, he knew that it was all the same.

The woman does not notice that he is
following.  Her stride is long and her chin is high.  You can see at a glance
that she bows for no man, that she is the one who does the choosing. 

And despite it all, he has never been
able to abandon hope that his betters will someday notice him.   Will someday accept
him as one of their own. 

It is the failing of his lifetime.  

CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

November 9, 1888

5:32 AM

Trevor had taken a sleeping powder
and it took several rounds of pounding on the door of his flat before he was up
and, although a bit dream-drunk, purposefully heading toward the door.  He
noted the time on the mantle clock.  Something must be dreadfully amiss.

He did not recognize the young bobby
standing on his stoop by name but he recognized well enough the expression on
the boy’s face.  “Come, Sir,” was nearly all the lad could manage to get out. 
“A carriage, Sir.”   Dressing by the light of his single candle, Trevor
scrambled into his suit and yesterday’s shirt and emerged from his door within
five minutes, unshaven and disheveled.  As he swept past the young officer and
into the carriage, there was little need for conversation.  The driver headed
for Whitechapel.

Mercifully, due to the hour, there
was no gathering crowd in front of the small, rattletrap house where they
stopped.  Only a few officers, most in plain clothes.  Trevor spotted Davy and Abrams
and he relaxed a bit, knowing that no matter what the morning would bring,
there was at least competent help close at hand.