Dusk at the Red Sheds, and the noise of the day has died down. Among the boats delivering grain to the muddy bank, all but one have finished unloading their freight. Two dock workers, both drunk, roll a barrel ashore with difficulty. One is amusing himself and his companion by singing a vulgar ditty.
“Oh, were I in a girl’s feathers, sing fal-a-dol-fal-a-dee-oh, I would line my cunt with leather . . .”
The stream floats out on its way to the sea through the abandoned building of the great bridge. Across the water looms the imposing facade of the Hall of Nobles, with the church spire on the island just to the right. The lamps are lit on the nearby islet, in the strangely cross-hatched building with its pennant-adorned dome. The public square is empty, the laundry pier quiet. Faint voices and the clatter of wooden clogs from homebound workers can be heard in the distance from the bridge over Klara Lake. Winge stops, turns towards the City-between-the-Bridges across the water.
“It has a beauty in spite of itself.”
Cardell nods, almost against his will.
“The city? It stinks and is full of dying people who want nothing more than to shorten each other’s already cheap lives. But yes, in the sunset like this it is a pretty sight, and the prettier the more water that lies between it and the observer.”
Cardell spits tobacco into the current and turns to the right. Beside them, Keyser House stands menacingly with the long side of the building facing the square and the short side towards the lake. It is three storeys high with an arched entrance. The image of a setting sun adorns the pediment above their heads. A few lighted candles are burning on the second floor. Someone gives a shrill laugh. Cardell rubs his bare stump in the cold.
“And what now?”
“Unless you have brought a grappling hook or siege engine, there is only one thing we can do. We shall knock.”
The man who opens the door causes Cardell to take a step back in surprise. His skin is black, and in the dim light and the light-colored livery, he appears headless for a brief moment. More than once, Cardell has seen King Gustav’s black attendant, Badin, and the bastard he has fathered who runs about by the ships in the Quayside, but he has never seen one up close. Winge touches his hand to his hat in greeting.
“Good evening. I have come to meet with the lady of the house.”
The dark-skinned man gives him a wide smile in response, opens the door all the way, and welcomes them in with a sweep of his arm. He rings a small silver bell and signals for them to proceed up a staircase that spirals upwards to the right. Then he closes the oak door behind them and resumes his post on a stool under a lit sconce. On the second floor they find a door already open. A young woman is standing there, wearing a simple dress that is translucent enough to suggest her nipples. She is wearing a silk ribbon in her hair and does not seem to be wearing any makeup, with the exception of some rouge on her lips and a mouche at the corner of her mouth. Appearing well used to visitors, she curtsies and smiles at Winge.
“Please enter, sir. You must be one of the new initiates. Allow me to take your coat and with it lift the troubles of this world from off your shoulders. My name is Nana, your humble servant.”
The wallpaper in the hall is covered in purple and black flowers. Red Turkish carpets cover the floor. From the ceiling hangs a chandelier holding some dozen candles. There are candelabras on tables along the wall. Winge places a coin in her hand. Her lips make a silent o at the weight of it.
“My name is Winge. I am here to see your mistress.”
“Of course, sir! That is how we begin all of our new acquaintances. An intimate conversation as the start of a merry relationship. Madame insists upon it. In order to better satisfy your needs, she must know all about them. You should not feel bashful. We are here to serve. I ask you only to wait here for a few moments before I show you into the salon.”
Winge nods. The girl breaks the silence after a moment with a nod at Cardell, who has remained standing by the door.
“You like to discipline your servant, Monsieur Winge? Many of our guests share that inclination and that is something we can accommodate. Simply tell Madame what you wish and it will be yours!”
“One may whip your wares?”
“Your wish is our command, sir. Certainly an overabundance of enthusiasm in that regard can affect the value of our wares in the eyes of others, but as long as you are willing to compensate our loss, all is as it should be.”
“I see.”
The clear tone of a bell sounds from the apartment within.
“Now, monsieur, if you will please follow me. Would you like your servant to remain here?”
“I prefer to keep him within arm’s reach, in case my desire to whip him should overtake me.”
They follow her through the house. Outside the windows, the view of the city is magnificent. The room they are shown into is empty. A sofa is placed across from an armchair. Winge takes his place according to the girl’s instructions. She pours wine into a slender glass and hands it to him with a smile.
“Madame Sachs will soon be with you, monsieur. I hope you will not find it too forward of me if I say that I wish we will soon see you here again.”
She leaves them. Winge puts the glass down and crosses the room swiftly to an arched opening at the opposite end that is covered by a curtain. He examines a corner of the fabric, which is adorned with a pattern of copulating figures.
“Jean Michael, I think we are about to hear things that are far worse than what has already been said. It will be of utmost importance for you to remain in control of yourself, for Karl Johan’s sake. This Madame Sachs is our only opportunity to learn anything at all. Do you take my meaning?”
Cardell opens his mouth then closes it again without a word. He nods silently and takes up a position close to the wall. His healthy hand forms a fist in the pocket of his coat, the left sleeve of which is tied in a knot around his stump.
The age of the woman who shortly thereafter pulls the curtain aside is difficult to ascertain. It is not clear if she has aged prematurely or retained an illusion of youth in her old age. Her gown, adorned with gold embroidery on a field of carmine, is imposing. Her face is painted with a heavy lead-based white foundation that effectively covers any blemishes and wrinkles, but she has deep bags under her eyes. Her mouth smiles without warmth, flanked on either side by deep lines. Around her neck she has a scar, as if from a noose. Her welcoming expression soon stiffens into a grimace.
“You are not the guests I was expecting. Nana must have been drinking. I have nothing to discuss with you and nothing to offer. You would be wise to leave at once.”
Winge raises his hand in protest.
“You are mistaken, Madame. My name is Cecil Winge. I come from Indebetou House. I realize that you can run your establishment so openly thanks to a powerful protector, most likely with contacts in the police agency. However, systems that depend on some degree of secrecy have an inbuilt inertia, and there are enough who are unaware of your arrangement that they could easily decimate your business before your supporters have time to avert the catastrophe. I can have twenty men here within half an hour.”
Her face reveals nothing of her feelings but her voice has narrowed to a hiss.
“Do you know who you are dealing with?”
“I know that the Order of the Eumenides owns the house.”
“If you know that, then I know you are bluffing. Even if what you say is true, they would never let such an act go unavenged, and the price would be terrible.”
“I am dying of consumption. Our current police chief is about to lose his position. Neither of us has anything to lose. Try me.”
Madame Sachs snorts audibly.
“You are young and naive, my boy. Everyone has something to lose. But your little threat can only mean that I have something you want in exchange for your silence. Perhaps I will see the backs of you sooner if I give rather than take. So let’s have it, then. What is it you seek? A fistful each from my treasure chest? Free access to my wares to revive some memories of the extinguished glow of your marriage beds?”
“A mutilated man was taken from this house in a sedan chair and tossed into the Larder, wrapped in fabric of the same kind as that which hangs behind you. Tell me everything you know about him and his fate.”
Her eyes flit from Winge to Cardell and linger on his stump.
“Now I see. I have recently lost a chair and its carriers. The larger of the two came back the night before last, beaten and whimpering. He can’t sleep at night, plagued by terrible nightmares. He has never learned to speak, but when we gave him a piece of chalk and a slate he drew a picture of a one-armed demon. I see now that reality is far less frightening than fantasy.”
Madame Sachs turns back to Winge. Cardell has seen the same expression before in dogs provoked to fight for sport. Before they engage, they measure each other’s strength and weigh their chances. Successful gamblers learn from watching each other’s eyes which dog they should choose to bet on. Cardell himself has played and believes himself to know the game as well as anyone. He senses her spirit. A formidable opponent. And Winge? Not much to look at but with eyes that speak a different language. No terror there. Cardell knows who will win one breath before Madame Sachs does. She laughs bitterly and throws up her hands. When she smiles with an open mouth, her teeth are blackened with rot.
“Look at the two of you! A bag of bones and a cripple in rags, and you dare to look at me in that way. What can people like you know about the desires of nobler men? Men who have grown up under the yoke of generations of wealth, waiting for their inheritance of goods, property, domains, and titles. These men were raised to rule. The responsibility weighs heavily on them. They are in need of relief in a way that you cannot even imagine. They have hardly spilled their first night’s seed when they order the chambermaid to take their member in her hand, then roll it between her breasts, then close her lips about it. By twelve, they have made the rounds of the household, by eighteen they have sodomized their pages. When they have tasted all that the city has to offer, they come to me. They have pissed in open mouths for their enjoyment, hit, hurt, trampled, and destroyed. I can offer them better things. Whatever they desire, we obtain for them. At special soirées, I give them the unexpected, since many appreciate that which they could not have imagined. I keep a menagerie of unusual servants, some ugly in order to accentuate the beauty of others, some in order to increase the pleasure of my guests by their lowness, their humiliation, their pain, or their misfortune. I have hunchbacks, dwarfs, harelips, hydrocephalics, the disfigured and deformed. Those who demand payment, we pay, as we do our other employees. Others serve us without payment. The creature in the bag was one of them. For a while it was my pièce de résistance. Don’t you understand? Better than anything, it could remind one of the pleasures of life, of the fortunes that each and every one of its observers enjoyed. Some were content to have it in their presence while they pleasured themselves. Others chose to use it, enjoying what it had to offer, as defenseless as it was. It did not always serve willingly but it lacked teeth. They laughed as they pinched its nose while it chewed their stiff members and was forced to swallow what it received. My clientele are men who rule the world. What is the sacrifice of a half person as weighed against their pleasure?”
Winge can feel the storm in Cardell, like magnetism in the room. He puts his arm around his shoulders before the latter takes a step. Winge nods at Madame Sachs to continue.
“Despite its grotesqueness, it retained something of its beauty. The hair was beautiful, it was young. The contrast made it popular. It made me rich without me paying a shilling for it. Why would I not be the first to mourn its passing?”
“Am I right in inferring that the Eumenides act both as your landlord and your clientele?”
“Yes. And before you set yourself in judgment over them, know that they give of their wealth to all the most vulnerable members of our society. Who are you to condemn them for what happens behind these walls, when half of the poorhouses in Stockholm would have to shut their doors without their support?”
“How did this mutilated man come into your care?”
“One night there was a knock at my door. A man who declined to give his name offered me a present: the creature. He gave no reason. He said it was in his interests that this thing live out its remaining days in my charge. He paid me for its stay and gave instructions about its care. It did not eat of its own accord so we had to pry open its jaws and feed it once a day by pouring gruel into its mouth. When its services were not needed, we kept it in a closet.”
“He was both blind and deaf?”
“It had no eyes, nor arms, legs, tongue, or teeth. About its hearing I cannot say.”
“And his mind?”
“Who would be able to suffer such treatment and retain one’s sanity? I assumed it was an imbecile and there was one thing that convinced me of it. I mentioned that it refused to eat. This was true with one exception: it ate its own feces each time it defecated and somehow it always managed to do this when it was unsupervised. Who would do something like this other than one who had long since lost his senses?”
“And then? He died? You had him transported away.”
“Just so. Even though we fed it, it languished and wasted away with each day. One morning it had passed. We did not have it in the house more than four weeks.”
“Why the Larder? The stream runs right outside.”
“My establishment has had need to dispose of sensitive waste before, with less than desirable results that way. What is laid in the water here tends to make landfall at the wharves, and poor people who don’t care what the fish has grown fat on lay nets in the Bog, whereas only a dimwit would disturb the waters of the Larder.”
Cardell moves across the floor faster than Winge has time to react, until he stands with his healthy hand around the woman’s neck. His fingers meet behind at the nape.
“How well do you swim yourself, Madame? Maybe we should see if you hit land at the wharf or if you continue out to sea? I have seen more than my fair share of drowned men. Heard them scream their anguish before the final plunge. Many who have never before shown a bad conscience confess their sins in such a moment. I wonder what sound you would make.”
“I am not afraid of men like you. If I counted myself among the living, I would be somewhere else, happy and free, instead of collecting coins at the edge of this vile place you dare call a city.”
She spits in his face. He lets go of her out of sheer shock, and as he wipes the saliva out of his eyes, Winge moves between them. It is to him she addresses her words when she speaks again, her voice hoarse from the throttling.
“Leave now and take your one-armed beast with you. I can see that the grave awaits you with impatience. Count yourself fortunate that your dealings with the Eumenides end here, for against their might you are nothing. About the one who left me the creature in the sack, you now know as much as I do. I have never laid eyes on him before or since. I have kept my promise. Now you keep yours!”
Back outside by the Red Sheds, it is dark. No stars are to be seen. Farther down, at King’s Park, something is being celebrated with an illumination: every window in the Arsenal is lit up. It is Cardell who speaks first.
“When all of this is over, I’ll return here and kill that woman.”
Winge answers absently, as if to prevent Cardell’s voice from interrupting his train of thought.
“She saw it in your eyes just as I did, Jean Michael. If you find her here again, it will be because she has decided to welcome death. You would be doing her a favor.”
Winge wobbles as he crosses the cobblestones towards a heap of fencing material and sits on it with his face in his hands. There is a long pause before he speaks again.
“I am afraid that we have encountered a dead end. I need time to think, and of that particular resource I have very little. There is something that escapes me, something that flutters at the borders of my mind, like a moth at the windowpane. I can’t see it clearly, however hard I try.”
It is Cardell’s turn to reply. An invisible hand has squeezed his throat and prevents him from getting air. His heart leaps in his throat and he feels himself filled with a terror he can’t explain and against which he has no defense. In the darkness, the left arm materializes by his side and sends waves of throbbing pain through his shoulder. He has to muster all his strength to keep his voice level.
“Others must know more, others whose presence we don’t yet know about.”
Cardell has turned away to conceal his state. Winge’s powers of observation fail him for once as he remains deep in his own thoughts.
“Yes, without them our enterprise now seems doomed to fail.”
“Are you ready to give up? Is that what you’re saying?”
Winge lifts his pocket watch out of his waistcoat. He can hardly make out the hands on its face, but with his gaze fixed on the tiny indented circle where the seconds are counted, he places two fingers on the vein that beats under his jaw. For a minute, he counts the beats of his heart to 180 before he turns back to Cardell with the answer he owes him.
“No. But time is of the essence.”