Finally, the latches came free. With a grunt, he opened the lid … and stared down at familiar, unmistakably patrician features. The famous shock of gray hair disheveled, the sharp cheekbones bruised violet, the intelligent blue eyes bulging with fear, the fine mouth, the sensual lips, obstructed by a red cloth gag that cut into the face and left a line of blood. Blood trickled from his hairline where he had banged his head against the coffin lid. Strange symbols had been carved into his arms as if he were an offering to some cruel god.
Lake staggered backward, fell against the edge of the couch, unable to face this final, dislocating revelation—unable to comprehend that indeed the Greens were right: Voss Bender was alive. What game had he entered all unwitting?
For his part, Bender tried to get up as soon as he saw Lake, even bound as he was in coils of rope that must cruelly constrict his circulation, then thrashed about again when it became clear Lake would not help him.
The Raven stuck his head into Bender’s field of vision and caw, caw, cawed like his namesake. The action sent Bender into a hysterical spasm of fear. The Raven dealt him a cracking blow across the face. Bender slumped back down into the coffin. His eyelids fluttered; the smell of urine came from the coffin. Lake couldn’t tear his gaze away. This was Voss Bender, savior and destroyer of careers, politicians, theaters. Voss Bender, who had been dead for two days.
“Why? Why have you done this to him?”
The Stork sneered, said, “He did it to himself. He brought everything on himself.”
“He’s no good,” the Raven said.
“He is,” the Owl added, “the very epitome of Evil.”
Voss Bender moved a little. The eyes under the imperious gray eyebrows opened wide. Bender wasn’t deaf or stupid—Lake had never thought him stupid—and the man followed their conversation with an intense if weary interest. Those eyes demanded that Lake save him. Lake looked away.
“The Raven here will give you his knife,” the Owl said, “but do not think that just because you have a weapon you can escape.” As if to prove this, the Owl produced a gun, one of those sleek, dangerous-looking models newly invented by the Kalif’s scientists.
The Raven held out his knife.
Lake glanced at Voss Bender, then at the knife. A thin line of light played over the metal and the grainy whorls of the hilt. He could read the words etched into the blade, the name of the knife’s maker: Hoegbotton & Sons. That the knife should have a history, a pedigree, that he should know more about the knife than about the three men struck him as absurd, as horrible. As he stared at the blade, at the words engraved there, the full, terrible weight of the deed struck him. To take a life. To snuff out a life, and with it a vast network of love and admiration. To create a hole in the world. It was no small thing to take a life, no small thing at all. He saw his father smiling at him, palms opened up to reveal the shiny, sleek bodies of dead insects.
“For God’s sake, don’t make me kill him!”
The burst of laughter from the Owl, the Raven, the Stork, surprised him so much that he laughed with them. He shook with laughter, his jaw, his shoulders, relaxed in anticipation of the revelation that it was all a joke … before he understood that their laughter was throaty, fey, cruel. Slowly, his laughter turned to sobs.
The Raven’s hilarity subsided before that of the Owl and the Stork. He said to Lake, “He is already dead. The whole city knows he’s dead. You cannot kill someone who is already dead.”
Voss Bender began to moan, and redoubled his efforts to break free of his bonds. The three men ignored him.
“I won’t do it. I won’t do it.” His words sounded weak, susceptible to influence. He knew that faced with his own extinction he would do anything to stay alive, even if it meant corrupting, perverting, destroying, everything that made him Martin Lake. And yet his father’s face still hovered in his head, and with that image everything his father had ever said about the sanctity of life.
The Owl said, with remorseless precision, “Then we will flay your face until it is only strips of flesh hanging from your head. We will lop off your fingers, your toes, as if they were carrots for the pot. You, sir, will become a bloody red riddle for some dog to solve in an alley somewhere. And Bender will still be dead.”
Lake stared at the Owl and the Owl stared back, the owl mask betraying not a hint of weakness.
The eyes were cold wrinkled stones, implacable and ancient.
When the Raven offered Lake the knife, he took it. The lacquered wooden hilt had a satisfying weight to it, a smoothness that spoke of practiced ease in the arts of killing.
“A swift stroke across the throat and it will be done,” the Raven said, while the Stork took a white length of cloth and tucked it over Bender’s body, leaving exposed only his head and neck. How many times had he drawn his brush across a painted throat, the model before him fatally disinterested? He wished he had not taken so many anatomy classes. He found himself counting and naming the muscles in Bender’s neck, cataloging arteries and veins, bones and tendons.
The Raven and the Stork withdrew to beyond the coffin. The divide between them and Lake was enormous, the knife cold and heavy in his hand. Lake could see that tiny flakes of rust had infected the center of each engraved letter of Hoegbotton & Sons.
He looked down at Voss Bender. Bender’s eyes bulged, bloodshot, watery. The man pleaded with Lake through his gag, words Lake could only half understand. “Don’t … Don’t … what have I … Help…” Lake admired Bender’s strength and yet, as he stood over his intended victim, Lake found another, more unsettling feeling rise to the surface. To have such control. This was the man he had only the other day been cursing, the man who had so changed the city that his death had polarized it, splintered it.
Voss Bender began to thrash about and, as if the movement had broken a spell, Lake’s sense of triumph turned to disgust, buttressed by nausea. He let out a broken little laugh.
“I can’t do it. I won’t do it.”
Lake tried to drop the knife, but the Raven’s hand covered his and, turning into a fist, forced his own hand into a fist that guided the knife down into the coffin, making Lake stoop as it turned toward Bender’s throat. The Stork held Bender’s head straight, caressing the doomed man’s temples with an odd gentleness. The Owl stood aloof, watching as an owl will the passion play beneath its perch. Lake grunted, struggling against the Raven’s inexorable downward pressure. Just when it seemed he must succumb, he went limp. The knife descended at a hopeless angle, aided by Bender’s mighty flinch. The blade did only half the job—laying open a flap of skin to the left of the jugular. Blood welled up truculently.
As if the stroke had been a signal, the Raven and the Stork stood back, breathing heavily. Bender made a choking gurgle; he sounded as if he might suffocate in his own blood.
Lake rocked back and forth on his knees.
The Owl said to his companions, “You lost your heads. Do you want his blood on our hands?”
Lake stared at the knife and at Voss Bender’s incompetently cut throat, and back at the knife.
Blood had obscured all but the “Hoeg” in “Hoegbotton.” Blood had speckled his left hand. It looked nothing like paint: it was too bright. It itched where it had begun to dry.