It was storming outside, but the sound of it didn’t reach Heinrich through the hollering of the crowd in the cellar, the stomping of feet, and the whine of the violin. He had placed Vicky’s powder mirror on top of two wine barrels, and he stood there adjusting the Windsor knot at his throat, the crisp white collar of the shirt she had brought him tight around his thick throat.

He finished with the tie, pulled down his waistcoat, and took the dark gray wool suit jacket from the chair by the door and slipped it on. He turned. Vicky was watching him from the corner of the room, her arms folded. She had helped him shave off the thick beard he’d grown in the attic. He went to her and she kissed both his cheeks, as much to feel his new skin as to tell him good-bye.

“You know where you’re going?”

“Jeremy’s, room six,” Vicky said.

“Tell her Central Station, platform two. Nine. Make her write it down. She forgets things. She’s not to go out tonight. It’ll be wild out there. It won’t stay in the room for long.”

“Where will you be?”

“Nevermind.” Heinrich buttoned his coat.

“I suppose it might be dangerous to know a thing like that.”

“You’ll have money enough for your own protection. I’ve left compensation with my belongings in the attic. Joe Harper’s coming to see you on Monday.”

Vicky dropped her eyes, smoothed out her skirt.

“Why don’t you stay?” she pleaded. “This town will be yours. You’ll have everything you ever dreamed of. Everything Bear ever wanted.”

“Bear didn’t want this,” Heinrich said. He nodded toward the city through the grimy window. “No one good could want this.”

Vicky watched him go.

 

There are varying accounts of what happened in the cellar of the Royal Hotel in Darlinghurst that night. Although it had become a rare sight in a crowded place, Caesar himself was present. By the winding staircase, a slice of what had once been the upright, broad military hulk of Caesar stood shadowed by a group of equally disheveled, thin-framed men staring into the pit, storm-cloud eyes following the blood as it was pooled in the corner by the attendant’s mop. Later all would agree that Caesar looked lost, pressed by the great weight of some tremendous decision, watching all that he had built begin to lean, to slide, to falter, without accepting the inevitable crash.

Three dogs had been lowered into the pit in cages when the young man walked out of the keg room at the back of the cellar. At first, all eyes were on the beasts. Odds were even, and money changed hands furiously, shuffling from fist to white-knuckled fist. The animals were huge broad-shouldered things shaped more like bush pigs than canines, all of them riddled in their jet black fur with the pink scars of beatings, cuttings, sharpenings. For two of them, tonight would be a welcome death. They snarled and thrust themselves against the doors of their separate cages, shaking their heads and howling above the rumble of the crowd.

The young man in the dark gray suit pushed through the crowd. As their eyes fell upon him, a ripple of horror went through the bodies pressed around the pit. It wasn’t only that most knew the face. The Dogboy of Darlinghurst. A dead boy, long forgotten, now a man. It wasn’t the black pistol clutched loosely in his fingers. It was his eyes, the way they wandered across the crowd and then settled on Caesar on the opposite side of the pit. They were hard, the eyes of a reaper.

The crowd fell quiet in one swift wave, as though a curtain had opened on a stage. Caesar seemed to be the last man in the room to see the boy. When he did, he showed no recognition. There was no terror, no rage. He watched the pistol rise in Heinrich’s hand, swinging upward at the end of a fully extended, powerful arm, and when the aim was leveled no words were said. It was as though he didn’t believe it was going to happen this way. No one did. There was silence, then the blast and the flash.

Caesar fell into the pit, seemed to bounce sideways off the dog cage just below him, and crumpled in a pile of clothes and limp hands. The Dogboy stepped down onto a cage and then down onto the bare earth in his shining leather shoes. It seemed someone had given permission for the crowd to react, because everyone at once drew a breath, sucked the oxygen from the room, made it burn. Caesar’s handlers were gone, dissolved into the crowd.

The Dogboy’s bullet had hit Caesar square in the front of his throat, blowing a hole in his windpipe the size of an eye, sprayed ruby red blood up over his jaw and face, a spotted mask. Heinrich crouched over the older man, the pistol still in his hand, and gathered the wet folds of shirt at Caesar’s throat, lifted him, and set him down to wake him from the pain.

“You don’t think I was going to make it soft,” the Dogboy said when he had the old man’s attention. “It wasn’t soft for Bear.”

Everyone heard the words, strained their minds at the same time as they flew with excitement to remember what was said, exactly, so they could recall it through history. The silence in the room was church-like. Even the dogs had stopped their racket. Caesar opened his bloody mouth and began to speak.

“He . . . Ee,” the old man said. He coughed, tried to control his huge rolling eyes, to focus them on the boy. “Heh . . . Ee.”

It sounded very much like Caesar was trying to ask for help. The blood in the ancient warlord’s throat consumed it. The Dogboy stood and looked down at the fallen man at his feet as he writhed and grasped at the wound. Then he turned, just like that, and stepped back up onto the dog cage, onto the concrete ledge where he’d appeared, back from the dead. Syd Saville, the pub owner, spoke to the boy as he paused there. The man handed Heinrich a handkerchief.

“What’d he say?” Saville asked.

Heinrich wiped his hands and returned the cloth. He let his eyes wander back to the man in the pit.

“He said ‘Hades,’” the boy lied. “He thinks he’s already in hell.”

The boy disappeared into the crowd, and as he went, Syd Saville tucked the bloody handkerchief into his coat pocket. Tom Besset, one of the dog owners, yanked the chain connected to the front of his animal’s cage and released the creature on Caesar. The dog finished Caesar in seconds. No one watched

Someone shot Besset dead in the street later that night as he was trying to sell the now infamous beast. They never found out who.