The Tragedy of Z (21 page)

“Oh.” I wondered what to do. “May I come in and wait?”

“You ain't Miss Thumm, are you?”

“Yes.”

Her old face brightened. “Then come right along in, Miss Thumm; and your gentleman-friend, too. These executions,” she whispered, “they go on gen'rally at 'leven o'clock, an'—an' I sort of hate to be alone when the time comes.” She smiled feebly. “Awful strict at the prison, they are.”

I was not much in the mood for listening even to well-meaning gossip about executions, so I called Jeremy and we went into the priest's homely little sitting room. Mrs. Crossett tried to make conversation, but after three valiant attempts sighed and left us alone. Jeremy stared morbidly into a cheerful fire, and I stared morbidly at Jeremy.

We had sat that way for a half-hour when I heard the sound of the front door being banged, and a moment later Father Muir stumbled into the sitting room with Mr. Lane. The old priest's face was contorted with agony, gray, glistening with perspiration, and his pudgy little hands clutched, as usual, a shiny new breviary. Mr. Lane's eyes were glassy, and he held himself very erect, like a man who has been stunned by a glimpse into Hell.

Father Muir nodded at us dumbly and sank into an armchair without speaking. The old gentleman crossed the room and took my hands. “Good evening, Clay … Patience,” he said in a low, strained voice, “what are you doing here?”

“Oh, Mr. Lane,” I cried, “I've the most dreadful news for you!”

His lips twisted into a little gray smile. “Dreadful, my dear? It can't be worse than—I've just seen a man die. Die! It's incredible how simple it is, how simple and how brutal and how utterly devastating.” He shuddered, drew a deep breath, and sat down in an armchair by my side. “Your news, Patience. What is it?”

I grasped his hand as if it were a life-preserver. “Dr. Fawcett has received another section of the little wooden chest!”

13. DEATH OF A MAN

Many weeks later I learned how a man had died that night, a man who meant nothing to me or to anyone else in the case, a man utterly unrelated to Dow, to the Fawcetts, or to Fanny Kaiser. And yet that man, whose life had been petty and whose death was miserable, even in his dying served a purpose which was to affect not only Dow, the Fawcetts, and Fanny Kaiser, but others as well. For by his death certain issues which otherwise must have remained forever in the darkness of non-discovery were clarified.

The old gentleman told me how, sitting about Father Muir's house in a deadly waiting, he had heard of the impending execution of one Scalzi, a member of that ill-begotten tribe who live and die by violence and whose passing is a boon to the rest of mankind. Impatient of inactivity, perhaps actuated by the curiosity of gentle creatures whose own lives are serene, Drury Lane had asked Warden Magnus the week before if he might not witness the execution.

They had been talking about electrocutions in general, a subject of which the old gentleman knew little. “Discipline in prisons,” the warden had remarked, “is always rigorous—has to be. But it's absolutely tyrannous during executions. The condemned cells are isolated, of course; but there is an underground whispering system which gets news about more quickly than you would believe, and for obvious reasons inmates are fascinated by everything that goes on in the—to use the usual term—death-house. As a result we have to clamp the lid down whenever there's an electrocution scheduled. The prison goes through a short but violent period of hysteria. Anything can happen at such times. We're damn' careful, I'll tell you that.”

“I don't envy you your job.”

“You shouldn't,” sighed Magnus. “At any rate. I've made it a prison regulation that the same officers should always be on duty at executions—whenever possible, that is; sometimes, naturally, a keeper is ill or otherwise unable to be present, and then we substitute. But so far we've never had to.”

“What's the point?” asked Mr. Lane curiously.

“The point is,” replied the warden in a grim voice, “that I want execution-hardened, experienced men about me during an electrocution. You can never tell what will happen. So my seven keepers, taken from the regular night-shift, are always the same during the gory business. And the two prison doctors as well. As a matter of fact,” he said proudly, “if I do say so myself, I've worked it down to a fine science. We've never had any trouble, because my keepers are picked men; and then routine is rigid—never change keepers from the day to the night-shifts, for instance; they've all got their jobs, and in emergencies they know just what to do. Well!” He eyed Mr. Lane keenly. “So you want to witness the Scalzi mess, eh?”

The old gentleman nodded.

“You're sure? It's not pleasant, you know. And Scalzi's not the sort of man who meets death with a grin.”

“It would be an experience,” said Drury Lane.

“So it would,” replied the warden dryly. “All right, if you want to. The law provides that the warden send invitations to ‘twelve reputable citizens of full age'—naturally, civilians unattached in any way to the prison—to witness an execution. I'll include you, if you're positive you won't mind the experience. And it
is
an experience, take my word for it.”

“It's dreadful,” said Father Muir uneasily. “God knows how many I've been compelled to attend, and yet I can never accustom myself to the—to the inhumanity of the thing.”

Magnus shrugged. “Most of us get the same reaction. Sometimes I wonder if I really believe in capital punishment after all. When you get right down to it, it's hard to be responsible for the taking of even a vicious human life.”

“But you're not,” pointed out the old gentleman. “The responsibility, in the final analysis, is the state's.”

“But I have to give the signal, and the executioner has to throw the switch. It makes a lot of difference. I knew a Governor once who used to run away from the Executive Mansion on the night of an execution. Couldn't stand the gaff.… All right, Mr. Lane, I'll arrange it.”

That was how it came about that on the Wednesday evening of my exciting visit to Dr. Fawcett's, Mr. Lane and Father Muir were inside the great stone walls. Father Muir had been away all day, busy with the condemned man; and Mr. Lane was admitted, alone, to the prison yard at a few minutes before eleven and escorted at once by a keeper to the condemned cells, or death-house. It was a long low-slung structure far off in a corner of the quadrangle, almost a prison within a prison. His senses excited by the strange and morbid air of the building, the old gentleman found himself eventually in the death-chamber itself, a drab bare room furnished with two long pew-like benches and … the electric chair.

It was natural for him to rivet his attention at once on that squat, hard, angular, ugly weapon of death. To his surprise he found it rather smaller than he had anticipated, and not nearly so formidable as he had imagined. Empty leather straps hung limply from the back, arms, and legs of the Chair; a curious arrangement above the back suggested nothing so much as the headgear of a metal football player. It was all very innocent and, at the moment, too bizarre to seem real.

He looked around; he was sitting on one of the hard benches, and all of his eleven co-witnesses were already seated. They were men of maturity, all fidgety, all pale; no one spoke. To his astonishment he recognized, among those on the second bench, the rubicund figure of Rufus Cotton; the little old politician was waxy-white, staring steadily ahead at the Chair with his remarkable eyes slightly glazed. A trifle disturbed, Drury Lane sat back and looked around.

At one side of the room there was a small door; it led, as he knew, to the mortuary. The state, he reflected, took no chances on the resuscitation of its victims; immediately after the doctors pronounced the condemned man legally dead, his carcass was carted off to the next room, where an autopsy effectually destroyed whatever spark of life might miraculously have remained.

There was another door facing the benches: a small dull-green door studded with iron nails; and this, he knew, led to the corridor down which the victim tottered on his last journey on earth.

This door now opened and a group of set-faced men marched in, their feet raising echoes from impact with the hard floor. Two were carrying black bags—physicians of the prison, required by law to attend all executions and pronounce the condemned dead; three were quietly dressed individuals who Drury Lane later discovered were court officials, required to be present in order to see that sentence of death was duly executed, as prescribed by law; and three of the group were prison keepers—blue-clad, grim-faced men.… And then for the first time the old gentleman noted that there was an alcove in one corner of the room in which stood a man of burly build, past middle age. This man was tinkering with some electrical apparatus in the recess. His face was without expression: heavy, dull, almost stupid. The executioner! From this instant a shocking realization of the scene and its cruelly ultimate meaning struck home to Drury Lane, and the muscles of his throat contracted so that he could scarcely breathe. The room was no longer unreal; it took on evil, and it throbbed with sinister life.

In a little blur he consulted his watch; it was six minutes past eleven o'clock.

Almost at once everyone stiffened, and the room became deathly, ponderably still. From beyond the green door came a shuffling, a steady rapid shuffling that rasped their nerves until to a man they gripped the edge of the benches and leaned forward with the tautness of springs. And with the shuffling came spine-prickling sounds: a slow murmuring, a hoarse murmurous wailing, and above it, like the eerie howl of the banshee, the dim animal shouts of the living dead who lined that corridor of death outside; watching, watching their companion take the long last mile in shambling steps, reluctant steps, steps shrinking from the pathway to eternity.

Nearer. Then the door swung soundlessly open, and they saw.…

Warden Magnus, cold and gray of face; Father Muir, bent, shrunken, half-fainting as his lips mumbled the prayer they had heard from the corridor; and the complement of four keepers. The quota was now full; the door swung shut.… For a moment the central figure was smothered; and he stood out so nakedly that the others faded away like wraiths.

A tall bony man, emaciated, with a swarthy pock-marked and predacious face; he was bent slightly at the knees, and his armpits were supported by two of the keepers. Between his slate-gray lips dangled a smoldering cigarette. On his feet were soft slippers. His right trouser hung loose; it had been slit from cuff to knee. His hair was clipped; he had not been shaved.… He saw nothing at all; he stared through the men on the benches with crystalline eyes that were already dead. They manipulated him like a puppet: a jerk, a gentle shove, a low-voiced order.…

Incredibly, he was seated in the electric chair, head sunken on his breast, the cigarette still smoking between his lips. Four of the seven keepers jumped forward with the precision of oiled robots; there was no lost motion, no wasted time. One of them knelt before the dying man and quickly adjusted the straps to his legs. A second pinioned his arms to the arms of the chair. A third passed the heavy body-strap around the man's torso. And the fourth whipped out a dull cloth and bound it tightly around the man's eyes. Then, wooden-faced, they rose and stepped back.

The executioner glided out of his cubicle on noiseless feet. No one said a word. He knelt before the condemned man, and his long-fingered hands began to adjust something to the condemned man's right leg. When the executioner stood up, Drury Lane saw that he had clamped an electrode around the back of the chair; he adjusted the metal cap to the man's clipped head with the polished ease of long practice. He worked in silence, swiftly, and when he had finished, Scalzi sat like statuary on the brink of the Abyss, waiting, teetering.

The executioner ran back to his alcove on rubber-shod feet.

Warden Magnus stood silently by, watch in hand.

Father Muir leaned against a keeper and made the sign of the cross, his old lips barely moving.

For that instant time stood still. And in that instant, perhaps aroused by the beating of wings, Scalzi quivered, and out of his gray lips fell the smoldering cigarette as a strangled moan slithered from wall to wall of that sound-proof room and died away like the death-call of a lost soul.

The warden's right arm flashed up, and down, in a heavy arc.

And from where he sat Drury Lane, stifled by emotions he could not analyze, smothered, heart beating wildly, breath coming in hoarse gasps, saw the blue-swathed left arm of the executioner slam down a switch into its socket on the wall of the alcove.

For a moment he thought that the vibration which made his breast tingle like a message from the fourth dimension was caused by his own pounding heart; and then he knew it was not, that his prickling skin was the answer to the cries of electricity liberated from its cells and surging through full leaping wires.

The brilliant light in the death-chamber dimmed.

And the man in the chair, simultaneous with the throwing of the switch, surged upward as if he meant by sheer strength to snap the leather straps by which he was pinned down. Lazily, a grayish wisp of smoke curled out from beneath the metal helmet. The hands gripped the arms of the chair, turning red slowly, and as slowly turning white. The cords of the neck stood out like tarred ropes, livid in their naked ugliness.

Scalzi sat siffly now, like a man at attention.

The lights grew bright again.

The two physicians stepped forward and, one by one, applied their stethoscopes to the bared breast of the man in the Chair. Then they stepped back, looked at each other, and the elder—a white-haired man with expressionless eyes—silently gave a signal.

Again the left arm of the executioner fell. Again the lights dimmed.…