Naked, on the Edge (13 page)

Things were as they had been for a long time. Until early March, when Danielle was pretending to sip coffee at a shop soon after nightfall and she spied through the grease-iced window a fruit peddler on the street pushing his cart and wiping his brow with a large and muscular hand. The man's face was not familiar - a hollow and sunken face it was - and the body thin and unspectacular. But the hands, she knew.

The hands were Alexandre's. She gasped.

Marie and Clarice, seated at the tiny round table with their friend, reached for her. "What is it?" whispered Clarice.

"Alexandre," said Danielle.

"You're mad!" said Marie. "What blood have you drunk last, that you would think you have seen your dead lover?" "It's him."

"It's a fruit vendor," said Clarice. "Get your wits about you."

Danielle tore free and raced out to the street. The vendor was gone, and she spent the nest of the night tracing his path by his scent and the scent of his rotting pears and apples. But the smells of the Electric City were strong, mingled, woven together into a brash and stinging tapestry, and she lost track. They retired when the darkness began to dissolve into day, and for the first time since her rebirth in Paris, Danielle felt a new hope. A new reason to embrace her immortality. She would be with Alexandre again.

Each subsequent evening she placed herself in the same shop, at the same table, buying a cup of tea she never drank, and gazed out for the fruit peddler. Even when the shop closed at eight, she stood on the corner with her irritable friends, and studied each of the dirt-coated vendors and scraggly, mobile merchants.

Surely he lived in Buffalo. Fruit peddling was not a job that took one from town to town. She only stopped in her vigil to tend to her need to feed, then returned beneath the moon or the stars or the rain or the fog to catch her love and his cart.

Several weeks later, at quarter past three in the morning, while Marie and Clarice were seated on a trolley bench comparing loose stitching in their gloves, there was the shouting of drunken men and laughter from up the street, and then a small crowd stumbled past in a makeshift parade. One man was seated in a fruit cart, another pushed, while the rest danced beside them as if they were celebrating the King of Fools. The man in the cart, nearly out with drink, was Alexandre. Danielle motioned to her friends, and they followed the mob to a rickety tenement house near the railroad station. The men dumped the cart, fruit and all, and then stumbled off to the street corner and out of sight.

Danielle hurried to the drunk man's side, pushed away the squashed fruit that covered him, and took his hand in hers. "My love," she said. Her heart hammered as if it were still alive. "My love, I've found you! Alexandre, it's me, Danielle!"

Marie said sternly, "Let it be, Danielle. It is not Alexandre."

But Danielle knew they couldn't, or wouldn’t, believe. It didn't matter, though. She did. She helped the man to his feet, and touched his split lip with her cold finger.

And then a screech from a window above: "William Kemmler, is that you? Get your sorry ass up these steps before I come after you with this hatchet, and I'll do it, you know I will!"

"Fishwife!" screamed Danielle. "You do not know who you are talking to!"

A lantern came to the window, and then many lanterns at many windows, and there were faces peering out and down.

Someone shouted, "Fishwife? Tillie ain't Kemmier's wife, just pretendin' to be so they's can fuck and still go to church on occasion!"

There was a burst of raucous laughter, and then someone spat, a long, hefty hawk the colour of rust that landed with a phatt in a puddle near Danielle's shoe. An old man came out of his flat and catch Alexandre by the forearm.

“Who is you, anyway, woman?” he asked.

Danielle let go and turned away. She would let it go for now. For tonight. She would come again where there was not so much attention. For to try to reclaim him now would be careless. And carelessness could bring destruction. She had found him. She would return tomorrow, quietly, as her kind was greatly talented, and speak to him.

And bring him to his senses.

And back to her bed, back to her heart. And unlike the other misfortunates who had fallen under her bite, she would raise him from the dead for herself.

The following evening was clear and cold, with a silver moon riding above the lights of Buffalo like a jealous and forgotten toy. Marie and Clarice warned Danielle to let it go, it was insane to believe her love was reincarnated into a fruit vendor, and when she refused to hear them, they refused to go with her.

"We wash our hands of this," said Marie. "We cannot endanger ourselves for your folly, as much as we love you."

Danielle said, "Then do not."

She went to the tenement house and watched from the shadows of a dwarfed maple tree as the occupants wandered in and out. Within minutes, two ragged women came out to the stoop in hats and shawls, their teeth broken and brown, and one said, "You get me some of them cigars if you can, Tillie. If you swipe 'em, we can sell 'em and make us a bit of coin, don't you think?"

Tillie, a skinny thing who could have been twenty or forty, said, "I'll swipe 'em and you can pay like the rest of 'em."

"Bitch!"

Tillie strode from the stoop and the other woman spun angrily and went in the other direction.

Danielle counted to twenty. And then she went to the door of the tenement and waited. A man opened the front door, and flinched when he saw her standing there. She kept her lids lowered to obscure the red of her eyes. "Hey, honey," he said. "What's a fine-looking filly like you doin' standing here?"

"Waiting for you to invite me inside," said Danielle simply. The man did. She broke his neck in the hall, and stuffed him under the steps. No one was outside the flats to see, and she guessed they might not have cared much, anyway.

Tillie had shouted from a third-floor window, on the left. Danielle trod softly and quickly up the flights of stairs to the flat that surely belonged to William - to Alexandre. The door was locked, but with a simple jerk to the handle it swung open freely. She stepped inside the cluttered apartment.

There were three rooms, set like boxcars one behind the other. Danielle stood in the kitchen. A door to the left led to a parlor. A door to the right led to a bedroom. There was a pot on the cast-iron stove half filled with slop. There was a bedpan on the floor by the table, filled with urine.

"Alexandre," whispered Danielle. "What has brought you to another difficult life? You suffered in Paris, and you suffer here. What, precious love, has so cursed you?"

She moved silently into the parlor. Several framed portraits sat, covered in dust, on a tiny table. The cushion of the blue-upholstered settee had popped its seams, and down oozed from the splits. There was a small shelf on the wall behind the settee. On it was an ink well, a pen, several volumes and a black leather book bound with string.

"Yes!" hissed Danielle. "It is my love, no doubt!" She took the book from the shelf and dropped on to the lumpy settee. He had not wanted her to look in this Bible, but she could not let it be. She flipped through the thin, yellowed pages and came to a place that had been thumbed to near illegibility.

It was in the Book of Trials. She read:

When Pilate saw that he could prevail nothing to save the man Jesus and that Jesus was indeed to die to please the crowd, he offered the execution of noble captives, to have the man's wrists slashed with sword and thus causing him to bleed quickly unto death. But from the crowd called up the man Andrew, son of Phinneas the shepherd, who said, Jesus must suffer for his words! Crucify Him! The crowd joined in the mocking call, He must suffer for his words!

"What has this to do with you, Alexandre?" Danielle wondered aloud. "I don't understand. But I must, to help my dearest lover!"

There was thumping at the door, and a woman came into the kitchen. It was Tillie. She saw Danielle through the doorway, and her lips drew back in a snarl. "Bitch!" she shrieked. "Come back to fix my shoe and what do I find here? One of William's whores, brazen and bold as a sow, sitting on my very own sofa, she is! Waiting for him to come home, eh? Waiting and thinking I wouldn’t be back soon?"

Danielle stood slowly. There would be no contest with this woman, but she didn't care to kill her if she didn't have to.

"I'm sorry," she said. "I've made a mistake. I thought this was the home of my cousin Randolph Sykes. I beg your pardon, miss."

But the woman was not to be appeased, and she reached for a hatchet that was leaning against the stove.

Danielle held out her hand. "Miss, just let me go without a fuss. It would be for the best."

"What's the best is that William quit his whorin'. What's best is you die quickly and keep your trap shut about it." Tillie ran her wrist across her nose, sniffed, and stepped into the parlour, hatchet raised.

Calmly: "Put it down."

Tillie's mouth opened wide; she growled and stepped closer. "Down middle o' your head, that'd look good! Part your hair right down the middle!"

The hatchet swung out in an arc, and down towards Danielle's forehead. Danielle stepped deftly to the side and the settee received the full force of the blow. Feathers flew.

"Damn it!" screamed the woman. She tugged the hatchet free and spun on Danielle again. Danielle retreated into the kitchen. She would wait on the street, in the shadows, and come back when Alexandre did. She'd been invited into the building so entering would be no trouble. She felt a strange sympathy for this woman, who, she supposed, cared for Alexandre in her own ignorant way.

Suddenly there was panting on the steps, in the hall, outside the door, and she whipped about to see Alexandre standing there, clutching the doorframe and panting. He looked past Danielle to the woman with the hatchet.

"What’s happening here?" he cried. "I could hear you wailin' from the street below! What you doing now, going to kill some woman who looks like she just got lost?"

"Alexandre," whispered Danielle in amazement.

But the man brushed past her and flew at Tillie, snatching for the hatchet as he clutched her hair with his other hand. "You can't be trusted with nothin' or nobody! Oughta stick you in the asylum, I oughta! Give me the damned hatchet or you'll find yourself up for murder!"

Tillie jumped away, stumbled against a straight-backed chair and fell to the floor. Alexandre - William - leaped again and grabbed for the weapon. She swung it at him and missed his face by a hair's-breadth.

Danielle stepped into the parlor. She could be cut, it wouldn't matter. But she would not let Alexandre be killed. Not again. Even in this incarnation, even as this crude, enraged fruit peddler, she would save him at last. She reached for the wavering hatchet just as the man snatched it from the woman on the floor.

"Get back!" he cried to Danielle.

Tillie was up on her feet in a second and latched on to Alexandre's arm with her teeth. He screamed, and jerked away from her, leaving a chunk of flesh dangling from her lips. She dove at him again, snapping, snarling. He dropped the hatchet and kicked at the woman, shoving her back and away. But still, she came for him.

"I'm sick of you!"' he wailed. “Why can’t you trust me?”

Danielle watched in horror as the couple stumbled past her into the kitchen. Tillie grappled the pot from the stove, lifted it to slam it into Alexandre’s head.

“Here’s to you, William !” she screamed.

And Danielle snatched up the hatchet in a flash, and buried the blade deep into Tillie’s face. The woman fell through the door and down the stairs to the landing, fully dead. Alexandre followed, his face twisted with both horror and victory. He pulled the hatchet from her and stared at the carnage.

Every flat door seemed to open at the same moment. Screams and curses followed, with fingers pointing at Alexandre and Danielle. "Murderer!" a man cried. "Killer!" screamed a child. Men flooded from their flats and took hold of Alexandre.

Danielle, dumbfounded, retreated to the apartment and escaped through the window into the mist of the night.

William Kemmler, after intense interrogation by the authorities, confessed to the murder of his common-law wife, Matilda Ziegler, and was sentenced to death by the state of New York. He was transferred to the prison in Auburn, where in August of 1890 he awaited his execution.

But the execution was to be a civil and humane one, the first one in which electricity would be used to snuff out the life of the convicted. A chair had been built of oak and electrical circuits, and tested on animals to make sure the death would be humane.

Though there had been arguments between the two leading moguls of electric power, Thomas Edison and George Westinghouse, as to which of the currents - Edison's "Direct Current" and Westinghouse's "Alternating Current" - it came to be through some underhanded manipulation that Edison assured that AC current would be used for the electric chair. Although Westinghouse refused to sell his equipment to the prison for the death machine, Edison arranged for some used equipment to be purchased without his competitor's knowledge and made into the chair. This, Edison knew, would seal in the minds of Americans that AC was deadly, and so DC should be used in homes. Men at Auburn prison as well as reporters in their daily and weekly newspapers began joking that a man put to death in the electric chair would be said to have been "Westinghoused", a term that horrified the developer of the alternating current.