The Seventh Bullet (27 page)

The woman let her long sleeve drop, concealing jewels and precious metal. “Cap-tain Kulakov kept all well hidden.”

“No doubt. I think he meant to keep such great treasure all to himself, and maybe to some of his men who knew of it. But to cheat his English partner–”
^*
Altamont smiled and shook his head. “Well, greed, like pride, goeth before a fall. And now the Russian hath lost all; his treasure, his woman, life itself. Almost I could feel sorry for him—why are they taking so long about his stepping off?” He squinted through his glass again.

A prosperous man, Mr. Altamont, even before his recent dramatic
accession of new wealth. He felt himself capable of handling even greater prosperity without undue difficulty. At the moment his countenance was alternating between frowns at the delay and a faint expression of abstract pleasure as he shifted from wine to hot buttered rum, while watching from his comfortable chair.

The pallid woman remained patiently seated with him. Though the air on this June morning had turned quite mild, she was glad to shelter here indoors; in her case it was in fact not chill nor damp, but the mild English sun that threatened.

On shore the experienced Thomas Turlis, and his assistant who was hardly less qualified, were proceeding about their business with deliberate speed. The junior member of the official team had already climbed to straddle the crossbeam, where he sat waiting until Turlis had guided his first victim halfway up the ladder, Kulakov’s feet on the rungs awkward with the weight of chains and terror. Then, receiving from his senior’s hand the loose end of the short rope already snug around the victim’s neck, the assistant quickly and efficiently secured it tightly to the heavy crossbeam.

The red-haired man cried out, loudly and articulately, in the last moments while he waited for the noose to choke off his breath.

“Al-ta-mont!”
There followed a string of violent un-English words, sounds carrying well across the water, between the two points on the curving shore.

“I understand very little Russian, really,” the man at the table remarked comfortably. “Which no doubt is just as well.”

“I un-der-stand a little, as with Ain-glish,” the watching woman remarked abstractedly. “I spoke to him last night,” she added after a pause. “He think he have give the jewels to you only for safe
keeping, not?”

“You saw him last night?” Briefly her companion turned a puzzled but fascinated frown in her direction. “Really, I think that you did not, for you were pretty steadily with me. As I have good cause to remember, having got but little sleep.” Lecherously Altamont displayed bad teeth. “But you know, I would wager my new fortune that it would not be beyond you to gain entry to a condemned cell— not when the guards are men.”

“I spoke to him,” the woman repeated. Not with an air of insistence, but as if she had not heard her companion’s denial. “But he would not believe that I was real. I think thees Russian must be very—what is word?—su-per-sti-tious.” Pulling her dreamy gaze back from the shore, she fastened it upon the man beside her. “Will you believe me, Al-tamont, when I try to tell you
what
I am?”

He made a small noise compounded of amusement and satisfaction. “I think I understand well enough what you are. So, you visited the condemned cell, did you, and had a chat? And what do you want me to think that you told dear Alexei? That we have both betrayed him? That the jewels are all mine now, while he is come to dine today on hearty-choke and caper sauce?”

The woman very slightly shook her head. “He did not need me to tell him that you keep the jewels.” Perhaps she intended to offer some explanation about her activities last night, or drop more teasing hints; but at the moment her full attention, like that of all other watchers, had become focused on the shore.

For the space of a held breath the raucous cries of even the least reverent onlookers were silent. Turlis, the older and paunchier of the hangman pair, with his feet planted solidly in mud—the planks had been disarranged in Kulakov’s last awkward stumbling—took
hold of the ladder and, with a strong twisting wrench, deprived the bound man of all physical support. Except for that now afforded him by taut hemp, the smoothly clasping noose.

The drop was a short one, no more than three feet at the most, in this case not nearly enough to break the neck-bones, to tear and quickly crush out life and consciousness from the vulnerable soft tissue of the spine and brain stem. There was only the steady, brutal pressure of the rope to squeeze the windpipe, veins and arteries. Kulakov’s powerful frame convulsed. His bound arms strained, his legs and feet moved in a spasmodic aerial ballet.

Hearty-choke and caper sauce.

The fact that Kulakov had been first to be hanged meant that comparatively few among the audience were paying his prolonged death struggle as much attention as it must otherwise have received; rather the fascinated scrutiny of the mob now rested in turn upon each of his colleagues.

Altamont commented knowingly to his companion that the knot of the rope had very likely slipped from the favored location behind the Russian’s ear to behind his neck—but how could Altamont have known that, at the distance, unless he had made some private arrangement to have the knot deliberately adjusted in that wise? Trying to get the better of Altamont, as the man himself would have assured you, was likely to result in truly frightful punishment.

As for Kulakov, he had been denied his broken neck. So that he hung for a quarter of an hour, intermittently twitching and tensing in agony, all breathing not quite cut off.

“Are they not going to finish him?” Altamont’s comment, coming after five minutes or so, was dryly lacking in surprise. “It would seem not.”

It was common in such cases for one or both hangmen, when not entirely lacking in pity, to seize their client by the legs, and drag down with their full weight upon the poor wretch’s body to assist his soul on its way out of it. But at the moment the executioners were busy. If any friends or relatives of the condemned were in attendance, that office might fall to them. But in Kulakov’s case no one had come forward with any such merciful intention.

One after the other, the two remaining pirates followed their captain to the scaffold. The executioners gave no thought to taking down the body of the first man to be hanged, until the third was dangling, and they had paused to fortify themselves with rum. The two Englishmen went quickly, so there was no need for relatives to intervene.

When, in the chief executioner’s professional judgment, the third man had been well and truly hanged, he gave curt directions to his assistant. Between them the two men loosened the knot holding the first body to the crossbar—there would be no wasteful cutting of the rope—and lowered their grim burden to the muddy shore. Already the feet of the hangmen splashed in water; at this hour the lower Thames was entering that part of its unending tidal cycle in which the rising weight of ocean a few miles distant forced the river swiftly back toward its source, as if it would convey the brackish tide up into the middle of the great island.

Now Kulakov’s body, hands still chained behind its back, had been dragged some twenty-five or thirty yards from the gallows, to its next temporary resting place. There with some difficulty it was being chained upright, feet at ground level, to one of the three tall, empty stakes that had been driven deep into the muddy sands. By tradition, the freshly hanged at Execution Dock remained so mounted until their already lifeless lungs had been drowned thrice
by the high tides.

One after the other, the Russian’s now-unbreathing comrades joined him, were fastened to the trees which stood one on either side of his, forming a ghastly Golgotha. Surely, in some of the onlookers’ minds, the tableau evoked thoughts of a certain antique and much more famous triple execution. But no one commented aloud upon the fact.

By the time the dead body of the third pirate was thus displayed, and the day’s task of the hangmen essentially concluded, many of those watching had gone on about their business.

But perhaps they had missed something of importance. Did a murmur of morbid excitement pass through the remaining crowd when the central one of the newly chained corpses was seen to move? Could it be that the captain and ringleader of this pirate band was still not dead after having been hanged for a quarter of an hour?

Such an event would not have been without precedent.

We will assume that Altamont, in his dry way, even commented to his companion upon the most famous such case, which some of those watching Kulakov might have seen with their own eyes—that of William Duell, executed at Tyburn a quarter of a century earlier, in 1740. Duell, though only sixteen years of age when hanged, had been widely noted for his sadism. Convicted of rape as well as murder, his body was turned over to medical anatomists... but when finally placed on the dissecting table it displayed certain faint signs of life. The surgeons, ready to try a different experiment than that originally scheduled, applied their skills at healing and soon had the patient sitting up, drawing deep breaths and drinking warm wine.

Duell had cheated the hangman after all. Returned to Newgate, he was eventually ordered to be transported to America.

Hangings here at Execution Dock, with tide-drowning added as a
flourish under Admiralty auspices, were somewhat more thorough. No one put up on one of these stakes for show had ever tasted wine again. Certainly the sharp-eyed Altamont did not find the signs of life so stubbornly displayed by today’s first hanged man at all perturbing; rather amusing.

Altamont, alternately smirking and frowning over his latest glass of hot buttered rum, made a few remarks on the case of young Duell to his fair companion, who took a somewhat different view of such phenomena.

The woman said in her abstracted way: “I think we will not have to worry about Kulakov—he will die today. I spent but little time with him last night.”

“Oh, he’ll die today, and no mistake.” The man stared at her for the space of several rummy breaths before adding: “Up to your mystification, are you, Doll? I’ve noticed you have a taste for riddles. But do go on with it—I like it well.”

Altamont and the very un-English woman he called Doll—he had tried her real name once and found it unpronounceable—remained in their snug tavern window for an hour longer, until he had made sure with his own eyes that the swiftly running tide had raised the surface of the Thames well above that pale dot of a distant, red-bearded face. Then, humming a sea-song to himself, and more than content with the day’s events so far, the prosperous observer called for his waiting carriage, offered his arm to his woman, and leisurely took his way to the Angel Inn on the south bank, where snug warm rooms awaited them.

Early next morning Turlis and his helper returned to the scene to check on their most recent handiwork. June at that latitude brought
full sunlight well before many folk of any class or inclination were up and about. Both men expressed mild surprise on observing that the central stake of three was now unoccupied, the chains in which they had hanged the Russian’s body for display now lying in the mud below, still looped and locked together but quite empty. Surely mere tide and current could not have done this—yesterday these experts had secured their trophy well. But there were obvious explanations. Either relatives had shown up belatedly to spirit his corpse away—or someone, even in this enlightened seventh decade of the eighteenth century, had coveted morsels of hanged man’s flesh as an aid to practicing the black arts of magic.

The hangmen, discussing these possibilities, were momentarily distracted by the sound of shrill feminine screaming. The sound was repeated several times, carrying readily over the water, through the bright incongruous early morning sun, all the way from the south shore. Only momentarily distracted; at the river’s edge in Wapping, such racket was common enough. Actually, what Turlis and his comrade heard were the screams of horror uttered by some innocent female servant who had just opened the door of a certain room in the dockside Angel Inn.

More than a hundred years would pass before any rational investigator connected that hanged man’s disappearance during the night with the shocking sight which met the maid’s eyes a few hours later. Not that the maid was startled by the walking undead form of Alexander Ilyich Kulakov—she was perhaps an hour too late for that. No, she had unsuspectingly come upon a corpse much more severely mangled.

* * *

Shortly after the midnight immediately following the execution,
Altamont had been awakened by something in his room. It was a supreme despair, more than terror, that choked off his first scream in his throat when he beheld what had roused him and now stood beside his bed. It was the figure of Kulakov, still wearing the prison clothes in which he had been hanged. The Russian’s red beard was dripping water, his dead face a ghastly livid hue, his strangled throat, though no longer required to breathe, made croaking noises. But his limbs were free of chains, and his white hands were half-raised and twitching, groping toward the bed. The pirate’s eyes, the only feature appearing to be fully alive in that corpse-countenance, were fixed on Altamont.

Doll in turn was awakened by Altamont’s hoarse abandoned cry. on seeing Kulakov, she registered mild surprise—so, she had been wrong about Kulakov’s dying a true death yesterday! It was obvious to her that the Russian, stimulated by Doll’s repeated attentions on the voyage and in his Newgate cell, had, after all, become a vampire instead.

The woman immediately slid her compact, dark-nippled, quite un-English body naked from the bed. she smiled, and before her bedmate’s uncomprehending eyes melted into mist-form and disappeared—only pausing long enough to pick up her jeweled bracelet from the bedside table, and slip it on her wrist. The bangle went with her when she vanished—we who are wont to travel in that fashion commonly carry with us a few small items, most commonly our clothing, when we go changing forms.

Kulakov paid little attention to either the woman’s presence or her departure. The red rage filling his whole mind concentrated his attention elsewhere. In the next moment, the hands of the undead man had fastened their icy, awkward grip on Altamont. Then the vampire—new to the powers he had been given, almost as bewildered as his victim by his own seemingly miraculous
transformation, and still unsure of how to handle it—plucked the treacherous, nightshirted Englishman like a louse out of his bedclothes, and cast him aside with stunning force. In the next moment Kulakov, moving in a kind of somnambulistic fury, groaning and grunting foul Russian expletives, began ransacking the room in search of his stolen treasure. Drawers, bags, and boxes were hurled about and emptied, furniture shifted in a grip of giant’s strength. All in vain.