“Give me some schnapps,” the drunken pimp Sylvester commanded his drooping bartender Mortimer. His girls had given him what cash they’d made just that day, so Morty, as he was occasionally called, knew he wouldn’t duck out. Mortimer poured him a shot without a moment’s indecision. The close-to-deserted pub, basically a great wooden box, lay in the middle of a black industrial neighborhood in the East End. The thick cloud of smoke in the bar was just as regular as the building’s foundations, but there was no use retreating from it if you wanted to, since you’d find the black pall escaping from the nocturnal factories much worse.
Sylvester always looked like he’d just slouched out of the forest, his bird nose balancing on the middle of a thin, uneven mustache, his hair a forest itself of tangled vines and scuttling creatures. He squeezed the edge of the bar for purchase and hopped off of his warped wooden stool, Mortimer guessed to powder his nose.
The bartender’s sausage fingers searched behind the counter for his stiletto, and groped the haft for a moment. He remembered the time about ten years before, in that very bar, when his little knife had taken out a wretched robber’s eyeball from halfway across the room. He felt safe for the time being.
Next to the stiletto was the half-bottle of the schnapps he poured for Sylvester. He took a pull from the bottle and set it back. From the window Mortimer found that snow had begun to fall from the sky of unbounded night.
From the snow and smoke of the outdoors burst Edgar, the swarthy opium peddler. He threw his greatcoat all over the rack and plodded down at another filthy stool while Sylvester returned, nearly missing the seat in his sweaty, drunken haste. Edgar agitatedly drew his fingers through his wet hair. “You haven’t gotten the shipment of poppies yet, have you, Mortimer?” he asked the barkeep. He smiled and ruffled through a drawer, returning with a sack full of Edgar’s inquiry. Reaching into his pocket, Edgar fished out a wad of damp currency, and it adhered to the table.
“Keep your knife ready, Mortimer,” Sylvester torpidly reminded Edgar. Mortimer reached down, pulled the stiletto high above his head, and jammed it into the wooden table. It was clear that he relished that action, since the whole bar was dotted with thin little stab wounds.
Smoking a pipe, Edgar set his derringer on the table as well, indicating that he was prepared for any reprisal. “Barnabas is coming soon,” Edgar informed the two, his hand over his mouth.
“The bastard hasn’t paid me for his time with Myrtle last week,” Sylvester replied. “The penniless lecher had better have my money,” he ranted.
“Some rum, Morty,” ordered Edgar. “My customers have become more shaky recently, since the Chinamen left town. I can’t handle all of these pathetic addicts,” Edgar said, having drunk his rum and blew his pipe smoke into the gaslight. “They’re getting pushier, and I know they’ll try robbing me. That’s why I carry my pistol where I go.”
“You call that a pistol? That’s a toy,” slumping Sylvester told Edgar with conspicuous deliberation, and cackled derisively.
“I’ll show you what this toy can do,” filled with defensive anger, Edgar reached for his pistol.
“Don’t you touch it, Edgar!” Mortimer commanded. “No one else will be shot in my establishment.” Edgar withdrew suppressed his irritation by gulping the rest of his drink.
The three of them sat in complete silence as they counted each peal of the church bells. As it was midnight, the silence lasted for a little while. Just as the last peal sunk back into silence, Barnabas, cigar trapped in his jaw, prostitute on him like a Siamese twin, barged in: sweaty, laughing hysterically, hanging onto each other as though the alternative were death.
“Hello, everyone!” Barnabas yelled, leaving his top hat perched precariously on his head. Edgar hauled himself towards a cracking leather-seated booth and lay down, staring mistily at his fellow patrons. “What do you say to a little gin, Bertha?” Barnabas seemed to ask her, but made clear he was really commanding Mortimer.
“Back to your old tricks, I see.” Mortimer observed, pouring them both a little juniper juice. “Just don’t lose control of yourself again.” He warned. “I know you when you’ve had a too much to drink in your condition, and if it happens again, you’re going into the snow face-first,” he said as he wrested the stiletto from the puncture in the table. “You’re crazy!” Barnabas, the skeletal debaucher, elatedly replied.
“You never paid me for Myrtle, you clammy john,” Sylvester reminded Barnabas sternly, though with little focus. With much greater focus, Barnabas pushed the barrel of his Webley into Sylvester’s face.
“I paid you up front! What are you trying to pull over on me?” He almost shouted.
“Put that damn gun away!” Mortimer did shout. “If you two want to brawl, you’ll take it outside or I’m putting my knife in both of you.” He continued with only slightly less wrath in his voice. Barnabas angrily glared at equally angry Mortimer, and switched his pistol’s position to his bartender’s forehead. “That’s it, you damned fiend, you’re finished,” Mortimer growled. Just as he had before, he raised his stiletto, and plunged it downward, straight through Barnabas’s resting hand, pinning him to the counter. In some drugged frenzy, he suffered little, but did drop his weapon. “That was reckless, old man,” Barnabas replied to his wounding. He reached for his weapon, which had fallen at the bottom of his three-legged four-legged-stool, but, to his great displeasure, the firearm had fallen too far for his trapped body to reach.
“Barnabas, never come back to my establishment again. I’m going to take this stiletto out of your hand, and you and your whore are going to leave. If you come back, I’ll carve my initials onto your brainpan,” he twisted the knife a little.
“What did I do?” the streetwalker Bertha asked and shrugged.
“He didn’t pay me, Bertha!” Sylvester, not in a state of mind that favored attention to outside distractions, reminded his employee. “That means I won’t be able to help you out!” He continued with escalating anger.
“Sylvester, shut up!” Mortimer said, while he tore the stiletto from Barnabas’s bleeding paw. Almost immediately, he spied Edgar’s pistol, the one he had placed on the counter, and made for Mortimer. He grabbed for it, but Sylvester, acting comparatively quickly, decided that this time was the best to blow out Barnabas’s brains. The only dilemma was that the projectile didn’t stop at Barnabas, but at Sylvester’s own hire. The two of them, having been sent hurtling into oblivion, fell backwards off of their stools just about synchronically.
“Shit!” Sylvester shrieked. “I shot Bertha!”
“You’re damn right, you did, and you shot my customer,” Mortimer said in a similar frantic tone, “Now we have two cadavers to dispose of, and you’re as wet as a sponge.”
“’We’?” Sylvester, wet as a sponge at this point, replied. The word hung in the air for a little while.
“I mean, ‘if you don’t help me, I’ll murder you’” Mortimer sneered.
“Oh, Christ, don’t expend that much energy, I’ll help,” Sylvester shambled off of his stool. “But I shot them with Edgar’s weapon; kill him if he doesn’t help, too.”
“He’s in no condition!” Mortimer replied, “As much as I love blackmailing my customers, he’s probably not even conscious!”
“He’ll be fine!” Sylvester argued.
“Wake him up, then!” Mortimer commanded.
Sylvester shook Edgar. He got up groggily, “What?” He said in a dazed tone. “I just shot two people with your gun; you have to help us clean it up.” The rate at which Edgar returned to the land of the living was practically visible.
“Sylvester, you’re finished,” he replied. He stood up and brandished a penknife,
“Edgar,” said Mortimer, having a little trouble getting his attention, “No one knows except the three of us; we’re not in any trouble yet, but if you continue Sylvester’s trend by ending his life, we will be!”
“You owe me, Sylvester,” he growled.
“Quick, let’s get them to the university!” Mortimer raspily whispered.
“What the hell for?” Edgar asked, not grasping his plan.
“To the morgue! It’s only a couple blocks from here!”
“Let’s just dump them in the river! We can’t go into a building with a couple of cadavers!” Sylvester shrieked.
“No! They’ll wash up! We’ll just throw them into a few vacant drawers at the morgue!” Mortimer replied.
“Everyone will think it was just a couple flesh-traders getting it from a vigilante who threw them into the river,” Sylvester argued.
“Sure, but I hope we have fun going right by the police station on the way to the river, when the morgue is in the other direction, and closer!” Mortimer reasoned the hell out of the peculiarly reasonable Sylvester.
“We can just throw them in an alley way, you know! Maybe the one that we barely have leave the bar to get to?” Edgar interjected.
“These corpses are not staying anywhere near my bar.” Mortimer threw him aside. “We’re going to the morgue. Don’t try anything because I feed you both your poisons. When we’re done getting them there, we hurry back here and clean up the mess. Anything else?” Sylvester and Edgar glanced at each other, but kept their mouths shut.
By that time, the corpses were stiffening, perfect for transportation. “Let’s go out the back door and follow the alleys from there to the University,” Mortimer commanded, dragging bony Barnabas into the back room. Edgar and Sylvester both picked up Myrtle and followed him.
“Okay, I have a box we can put them both in,” Mortimer said as he pulled the nails out of a large wooden container that said something in Russian. “Just stuff them in and we can get out of here.” Mortimer said, sheathing his stiletto to his belt. The two of them crammed the two of them into the crate, and picked it up, and out they went through the back door.
Outside, the wind and snow were, while unfortunately a terrible inconvenience for them, fortunately a terrible inconvenience for most other people, since they were the only ones outside. Mortimer bade his clients forward, and they lugged the heavy splintering box through the merciful numbing cold.
They sewed through the labyrinthine alleyways, the cold and snow bearing down on them to an impossible degree. After fifteen minutes or so, Mortimer signaled to drop the box, which the two carriers obeyed, with relief re-coloring their faces. “I’ll check to see if there’s anyone left in there,” he said, pointing at the door which, when one squinted just right, said “University Morgue,” on it.
Cracking open the door, Mortimer peeked inside, discovering nothing. The three of them entered the abnormally but happily unlocked door, and all three carried the box. “Down here,” Mortimer bade, pointing down a flight of stairs, from where the unmistakable scent of human preservatives crept.
Finding the wall of drawers, Mortimer began checking for vacancy. “Hey, what are you doing?” A voice from behind howled. The situation was exacerbated when Edgar and Sylvester simultaneously dropped the box; a wooden cacophony resounding immediately throughout the building. “Run!” Sylvester suggested, and the three did so.
Escaping from the building the way they had entered, the night watchman pursued and fired at the three of them. Edgar stumbled and stifled a scream as they sprinted back into the maze of the inclement alleyways.
They all followed back to the bar, where Edgar yelled, “He shot me! The bastard shot me in the leg! It’s still in there!”
Sylvester attempted pacification by responding, “Edgar, I know someone who can take that out and fix you up. He doesn’t work for the hospital anymore, but he still performs surgeries.”
“Well, get him!” “Well, we can wire him, Mortimer just had a telegraph installed. He’ll come to the bar,”
“Let’s not forget the plan where we lose the evidence!” Mortimer reminded them.
“Sorry that I inconvenienced you by choosing to get shot,” irritable Edgar in the throes of pain replied.
“I’ll call him, and then we’ll clean up all the gore,” Sylvester planned. He walked into the back room, and presumably called his associate.
Mortimer fetched some filthy rainbow-stained rags and a bucket from behind the counter. Sylvester returned. “I’m going to wash the blood, you’re going to pick up the solid fragments,” Mortimer commanded. “Why can’t I wash the blood? I see pieces of brain in there!”
“Fine with me, you can do them both, after all, you’re the one who made this mess.” Mortimer said, throwing the rags to the floor.
“God, fine, we’ll just split it,” Sylvester gasped. “This is disgusting, though,”
“Try not to shoot anyone next time you get potted, maybe.” Mortimer advised, as the two squatted around the site of the gore.
Minutes later, a cloaked figure with a cane and a hood entered through the back door. “Is this your surgeon?” Edgar asked Sylvester.
“This guy got shot in the leg, you think you could help me out and fix him up?”
“Of course, Sylvester, but finances must first be discussed,” he replied.
“Sure, Ebenezer. How about I remind you of the time you got one of my whores for free? Is that acceptable to your majesty, or should I just gut you here for never paying me?”
“No more killing, Sylvester,” Mortimer reminded him, still scrubbing the human product from his warping wooden floor.
“Let’s see his wound.” Ebenezer got to business.
Looking thoughtfully at Edgar’s bullet hole, he fished out his surgeon’s kit. Out of that he pulled a mostly full bottle of unmarked dark liquor. “Drink this, and then I’ll get to work,” he said to Edgar. “What is this stuff?” “It’s just rum. Drink it or I’ll start without it, and believe me, that’s a mistake,” Ebenezer said, smirking and brandishing a not surgery-grade saw.
On its inspection, Edgar quaffed the whole bottle, coughed, and let “Rip the bastard out!” escape from his lips. Ebenezer stuffed most of his scarf into Edgar’s thunderous maw, and immediately began fishing the bullet out with his tools, dubious as they looked. A scarf-muffled scream emerged despite his obvious inebriation, and Ebenezer finally plopped the bullet out, which presently plunged onto the floor, leaving a trail of gore in its path.
“How about that?” Ebenezer asked, obviously quite satisfied with his work. He wrapped the spit-soaked scarf around Edgar’s dripping wound and stood him up.
“Excuse me,” Edgar interrupted, “but if my memory serves me correctly, we drunken fumblers left Barnabas and Myrtle at the morgue.” “Just where we wanted them,” Mortimer replied, “The night watchman couldn’t have had more than a few seconds’ look at us, and the box’s only incrimination was in Russian. What would I, a well-bred Anglo-Saxon, have anything to do with foreign contraband?” The others scoffed and made hateful looks at Mortimer
“Where’d your friend go?” Edgar addressed Sylvester.
“Ebenezer got out of here quietly and unobtrusively,” Sylvester replied with a good dose of enigmatism.
“I see,” Edgar said, and he passed out, the alcohol finally owning him.
“God damn it!” Mortimer shrieked. “Not another one!” “I gave that scoundrel all of my money!” Sylvester writhed.
“You didn’t pay for him, Sylvester” Mortimer said, approaching Edgar to feel his pulse, which was, in fact, there.
“Thank God!” he laughed.
The two of them heaved the currently traumatized Edgar into the back room, leaning his head to the side in preparation for the inevitable gastric deluge. Immediately as the reentered the main room, there waited for them a dreaded constable.
“Do you boys know why three pairs of footprints lead from this bar to the morgue, which just happens to have been recently gifted with a box containing some bodies?”
“I bet we would have gotten away with it if at least one of us were completely sober,” Sylvester incriminated. The constable rolled his eyes and sighed.
“Come with me,” he said, exasperated at his captive’s stupidity.
The three drunks woke up, their only clue as to what they had been up to the night before being the jail cell they were in.
“What are you doing here?” A pale and vomit-caked Edgar within his cell sputtered at the feet of the guard.
“Merciful God, kill me!” Sylvester groaned, fighting bravely against his hangover.
“Once again, the burden falls upon me to detail the entire night, being the only one of us who retained an unpunctured mind.” Mortimer, winner of the lucidity prize among the three of them, responded to his idiot companions.
The mutton chop wielding jailer advised the three “No more talking! They want you hanged, you know. You’ll be rewarded nicely for a double homicide.”
“A double…?” Edgar trailed off.
“Great thing is, we’re hanging you today!”
“Now I’m going to get hanged for incompetence I wasn’t responsible for,”
Mortimer angrily glowered at the two while they writhed on the floor. “Well, at least my life will end at its peak.”
“No more yapping!” The guard growled. Sylvester and Edgar had quickly re-found the bliss of hypnotic numbness. Mortimer, accepting his irritating fate as he watched helplessly but patronizingly his cellmates sleep, followed suit soon thereafter.
The three woke up later that afternoon. “Let’s go,” A jailer said while another picked up Sylvester.
“I’ll see you guys in Hell,” Sylvester, much better after a few hours of coma, smirked as he was led out of the cell.
The three men entered the courtyard and stood Sylvester beneath the noose. One guard affixed the death-rope while the other dictated a hastily-composed death warrant. Sylvester rubbed his eyes and yawned, still battling somewhat the hexes of sleep and alcohol. Midway through the yawn, the guard pulled the lever and the floor below dropped, as did Sylvester. The guards would have brightened the night sky with their blushing when the rope broke and Sylvester plummeted to the ground, annoyingly continuing in life. Mutton Chops pointed his revolver at Sylvester while he sat in the mud with the failure of a noose still festooning his neck. The first shot missed Sylvester, as did the second and third. Sylvester would have scoffed arrogantly if a guttural scratching weren’t all his voice was capable of, and the guard sighed loudly and tiredly moved closer to Sylvester, pointing the revolver directly at his temple. He pulled the trigger, and instead of a relieving display of pimp brain and pimp skull, there came from the weapon merely a disappointing ‘click.’ “He didn’t even load your revolver completely?” Sylvester thought, surprised at his odd lack of death. “Well, I’m trying again,” the guard assured him. He once again pulled the trigger, and this time, the promise of a fountain of head-contents was honored. “There!” The guard said, proud of his patience.
When they returned to gather the next victim, the cell door was hanging open and Edgar and Mortimer were gone. “Who left the door unlocked?” The enraged mutton chopped guard spat. He froze for a moment, and then glanced down at the key ring on his belt. “Forget it,” he said, sloth consuming him. He revealed a hip flask from his side pocket and took a pull.
Mortimer and Edgar had successfully walked out of the police station. “They can’t execute people there,” Edgar said confoundedly as they began the journey back to the bar on foot. “I’m pretty sure that’s extremely illegal.”
“Well, maybe they’ll get executed. Until then, though, I have to replace a lot of customers.”
They returned to the bar by nightfall, just how it was left: incriminatingly. Mortimer’s opium had been left out, and Edgar trawled for some money for a portion of its purchase. He smacked it onto the table, and Mortimer counted it out. “Want a drink, too?” Mortimer tried to coax Edgar into giving him a few more notes. “Give me a schnapps,” Edgar commanded Mortimer. They were both surprised at the luck of their exploit, but they brushed it off with a apathetic shrug and a miserable sigh.