-3-

On his way to Scapula Street, a poor Italian section, John Board watched Metacarpus pass by along either side of him, like a gray river flowing around a rock on which he stood in its very center. Seemingly unbroken trains of row houses, compressed together like frayed books in an overstuffed shelf. Flat-roofed tenements. Small brick warehouses and mills and factories. None of these buildings were more than a few stories high. Wives on the charred skeletons of fire escapes, hanging out laundry as bleached as their skin. Dirt lots walled in by high plank fences and filled with decades’ worth of debris thrown out the tenement windows and layered like geological strata. The city would suddenly open up, part like moth-eaten curtains to lay bare broad spaces where railroad tracks ran across the uniform flatness of the land in sutures (telegraph poles like rows of crucifixes from which the bodies had long rotted), before the squat buildings swallowed up these bleak voids again, to smother them. In the distance now, in the vicinity of Scapula Street as if to guide him, Board saw a looming black water tower on a tripod of scaffolding, pointing at the sky like a rocket that might have brought the Bugs here, except that the Bugs were not here, could not get themselves here; could only manage to seed their living instruments here like remote extensions of themselves. The water tower reared like a fat prison guard over the tenements that cowered around its legs, faceless but all the more stern for that.

When he parked his Dodge, Board put his hand on the camera that rested on the seat beside him. Though it did not move at this contact, he sometimes thought he felt an imperceptible vibration of life through its inscrutable chitin. He never, ever touched the single eye purposely, except to wipe it occasionally with a soft rag.

In the street, he screwed the camera’s mounting platform onto his telescoped tripod. Then, with this under his arm, he walked toward the house to which he’d been summoned by the police. It was more of a shack than a house, really. One story. Flat tar-papered roof. A scrap of dirt for a yard, and dubious looking alleys formed by the identical buildings that flanked it. A baby cried in one of those buildings, and a block or two away a dog was barking. The sky overhead was gray as ash, as if the air had long ago caught fire, and that fire had long ago burned itself cold. It was neither cool nor warm out today, but a breeze stirred the grit of the yard around Board’s legs. Board nodded at the cop who loitered outside the shanty’s crude plank door smoking a cigarette. They went in together.

“Wife killing seems to be the national pastime, Board,” said Crate, the patrolman. “Well, I guess it’s something to do. But if we got all these wife killers together and sent them overseas, we’d win this war in no time.”

Board gave an obligatory grunt meant as a chuckle.

“Hope you haven’t eaten,” said Crate, squeezing into a room where the rusty smell of blood stung the sinuses. As he stepped to one side to make way, he asked, “Doesn’t this ever bother you?”

Board said nothing as he set up his camera for the first shot. Crate’s partner, Mattock, snorted and joked, “Board loves this stuff. He’s a ghoul.”

The walls were bare wood, with no insulation, no plaster. Folded newspapers had been wedged into gaps through which the wind might gain entry. In lieu of curtains, an old baby blanket and a half of a bed sheet were nailed up over the two windows. A cast iron stove rested on tottering stacks of bricks, its pipe skewered up through the low ceiling. A few pictures from newspapers were stuck to the walls by way of decoration. Board thought that if this were only a hunting cabin, it might be cozy. Beyond the taint of blood, the room stank of a long unbathed dog that there was no sign of, of grease, of foot odor, of dust; an embarrassingly intimate combination that this woman must have been fully accustomed to, the atmosphere of her days.

“Anything in the bedroom I need to shoot?” asked Board as he made his adjustments. The cops replied in the negative.

“The husband swears he didn’t do this,” Mattock told him idly, “says he came home and found her like this, but he was drunk as a skunk and had her blood on his hands.”

“He seemed really shaken up,” Crate added, “but that’s probably just because he’s starting to realize what he did.”

The victim lay on the floor, half under a bench that was pushed up against one wall to serve as a table. She was nude except for her socks, her legs looking forced apart, one knee cocked. Her face, broad and drably pretty, with a slight frown of disapproval, was turned to one side. Her throat had been cut with apparently one smooth incision, whereas Board often saw numerous, frenzied slashes. The woundings to her body he had witnessed many times. Her nipples had been excised, and she had been opened up from the slit of her vagina to just below her sternum. A soaked dark rag of something hung out of her like a huge tongue (the wet, apparent chaos of the human interior contrasted so disturbingly with the smooth order of its exterior). The killer was definitely a man; the hatred directed at her gender, at the specific icons of her sex. The orifice spitefully and mockingly enlarged, so that it dominated her, as it no doubt dominated the killer’s view of women. Yes, Board had seen these same mutilations perpetrated by a forgotten string of husbands, boyfriends, and strangers, far too many times. And yet, as he stepped back from his camera and pushed his thumb on the cable’s plunger—the other end of which he had plugged into a hole drilled in its shell just behind the eye—the wounds that weren’t present glared just as distinctly. Usually, in his experience, there was some battering or disfiguring of the face. Blows from a fist or heavy object. There were often numerous stab wounds in addition to the slashing, these parted into ellipsoids as the tight surrounding skin drew open their lips. Often there were defensive wounds on the hands; he’d seen fingers half hanging off backwards from trying to catch hold of a blade. But this woman seemed only to have suffered these few neat, precise strokes. And this from a passionately enraged, blurrily drunken husband?

“It was an Assassin,” Board announced softly, more to himself than to the two patrolmen. He thumbed the plunger again. There was no flash, no click, no sounds from his camera but its legs were fluttering excitedly atop the platform it was bolted to.

“Say what, Board?” Mattock replied. “An Assassin? Not…not this one. It was a crime of passion.”

“It always is. But not by her husband. He’s telling the truth.”

“Just shut your pie hole and do your work,” Crate chuckled, only half joking.

“You’ll be sending the wrong man to the gallows,” Board argued quietly.

“You’re just upset ‘cause you won’t get to photograph that, too.”

“Now the ghoul’s a detective,” Mattock laughed.

Finished with the photographs taken from the side, Board now moved in closer, for a direct downward angle. He splayed the tripod’s legs around the dead woman as if his camera were the gloating murderer, gazing down at his handiwork. He extended the skeletal legs to their full length, the top of the camera nearly touching the low ceiling. Later, when these shots were developed, he would curse himself to find that one of the legs of the tripod was positioned in such a way that it obscured half of the woman’s face. It wouldn’t matter to Detective Shoe, because there were no wounds on her face to be recorded, and it didn’t obscure the throat wound, but it bothered Board. Even though his intention was not to create art, it was a bit of artlessness, a bit of unprofessionalism—a more than usual intrusion of himself into the scene.

As he finished up, shortening the length of the tripod’s legs, he muttered, “Whoever did this should be skinned alive and have his eyeballs burned with cigarettes.”

“Whoa, Board, such barbarism!” laughed Officer Mattock. “You’re starting to frighten me! Maybe you’re the one who tore her all up!”

“What do you mean, whoever did it?” Crate said. “We’ve already told you who did it. Don’t start on that again.”

Board tucked the tripod under his arm. “Sure there was nothing in here?” he asked, peeking his head into the adjoining bedroom for the first time. There were only these two rooms in the shotgun shack.

“Nothing,” Crate snapped. “Do you think we don’t know our jobs? Get your vulture ass out of here…you and your friend. Your dirty work is finished.”

“Dirty work?” Board looked at the man. “I’m just doing a job.”

“Yeah, you and the Assassins.”

“Hey, I’m not like them. My relationship with the Bugs is not like theirs.”

“No? It’s all part of the same process, though, isn’t it? The Assassins do the painting, so to speak, and you frame the picture, so to speak.”

“I help you guys catch the Assassins!” Not that they usually were caught. That was a risk the Assassins took, when they went to work for the distant Bugs. If they were caught, they had to be punished like any common enraged husband or demented fiend.

“You don’t help us catch them, Board. You keep the Bugs’ peckers hard, is all you do. Don’t make it sound like you’re one of us.” Crate was really steaming now. “You probably get as excited as they do. Fucking voyeur.”

“You know that’s not true.”

“Do I?” Crate gestured at the rough plank door. “Get out, vulture…your work is done.”

Board carried his camera outside, where scraps of curious spectators had gathered…a few dirty children, a few faces propped like jack-o’-lanterns in windows. A red-haired man with rolled up shirt sleeves leaned in the mouth of one of the alleys between the shacks, smoking a cigarette. A thin dog, maybe the one that had been barking earlier, maybe the one whose smell filled the shack, scampered past.

Peripherally, Board saw the eye of his camera swivel ever so slightly. He looked down at it and decided it was looking up at his face. That irritated him. He tossed his equipment a little too roughly into the back of his Dodge.

Something made him look up again abruptly at the man in the alley.

The man had bright red hair. But this was the Italian neighborhood of Scapula Street, on the border of the Phalanges, the Italian ghetto.

The redheaded man smiled at Board and tossed his half-smoked cigarette to the ground. He then turned and walked further into the little alley, out of Board’s angle of view.