Carol O’Connell - Shell Game

She tried to pull away. Her leg was rising and she needed space for the groin shot. He wrenched her wrist sharply, and she was wrapped in his arms.

„The pendulum won’t stop for you, Mallory.“ He spoke so softly, so reasonably – this from a killer. It was the voice of reason that chilled her, as if he could believe that this was a sane act.

„It’s not a device you can switch off,“ he said. „It has to play out the movements of the gears. That machine doesn’t care if you’re a cop.“

She tried to break Malakhai’s hold, writhing in his grasp until she faced the stage. He held her closer – like a lover, like a jailor, imprisoning her hands in his, arms binding her tighter than ropes.

Futura’s pain was a continuous shriek. Malakhai’s voice was at her ear. „You wanted to know what I did in the war? Then watch.“

„No! Stop it!“ She called out to the dancing boys, „Move the coffin out of the way!“ Mallory’s shouts mingled with Futura’s screams. The assistants faced the audience as they danced at the edge of the stage, ignoring cries for help, and the music played on. Her heart was banging in a sympathetic rhythm with Futura’s terror, his bleating and his bleeding.

And Malakhai was whispering, „Rare justice, Mallory. For Louisa, for Oliver.“

The pendulum was splattering the stage with blood, drops of it landing on the costumes of the dancing boys. Their backs were turned on the coffin as they kicked their feet in unison.

Malakhai tightened his embrace. „See those people at the back?“ Two shadowy forms were rising in the dim light of the audience. „Those men are coming to save Franny. They’ll be too late, of course, but they’re coming. Only two of them. Look at the rest.“

A lone woman’s scream rose above the sound of shrieking pain in the coffin.

„Mallory, think of Oliver Tree – all those arrows. He was your Oliver, too, wasn’t he? You always called him by his first name.“

Blood splattered the edge of the stage. The pendulum swung in a wider arc, and red drops hit the dresses of two women in the front row. Only one woman was screaming as loud as Franny Futura and with the same pain. The rest of the audience sat in stunned silence, except for the two men who had made their way to the center aisle. Now they raced toward the stage.

„Only two rescuers,“ said Malakhai.

There were spots of blood on a woman’s dress in the second row. The pendulum swung out again, red and wet. And now a man in the front row had a trickle of blood streaming down his face, as did the man next to him. The two rescuers were climbing onto the stage.

„Mallory, look at the people in the front rows. They know it’s gone wrong – never doubt that. They know Franny’s dying, and they can’t take their eyes away. Now this is theater – a small window on World War II, the way it really was. A leftover minute of horror.“

The two rescuers could not reach the coffin. They were surrounded by flapping red capes in a tight formation of tap-dancing chorus boys. Blood pooled beneath the table.

One desperate woman’s scream harmonized with shrieks from the glass coffin, echoes from the back room, and a shrill electronic squeal of sound equipment.

And then the screaming stopped – Mallory’s and Franny’s.

The pendulum continued to swing in silence, to cut the flesh and break the bones, not knowing or caring that the man was dead. The blood was lessening, trickling only, with no more coming to fuel the spillage.

The dead did not bleed.

Malakhai released her. „And now you’ve been to war, Mallory. Wasn’t it sublime?“

The music ended, the dancing stopped – all silent now as the caped chorus boys and the two men in suits slowly approached the coffin.

Mallory sank down to the floor. Though spent and drained, she would not let go of the rage. She beat one clenched hand on the floorboards until the pain flooded her eyes with tears.

Malakhai knelt down beside her, and Mallory turned her face away to hide it.

„You’re a fraud.“ He caressed her hair gently. „You have more compassion than those people out there with blood on their faces – the ones who only watched.“

She shot out one fist.

He was faster, catching her balled hand and engulfing it in his own. „Of course, you did try to kill me. No one can ever take that away from you. And I do think you’re ruthless – if that’s a consolation.“ He stood up slowly, releasing the uncurling fingers of her fist, which had lost its power. „But, Mallory, we can’t all be monsters. As I said – you don’t have the makings.“

Head bowed, she drew up her legs very close to her body and listened to his footsteps leaving her, then the closing of a door. Over the babble of the audience, she heard the sirens wailing on Broadway, coming closer by the second, louder now, almost there. Mallory closed her eyes and hugged her knees, rocking, rocking, shell-shocked and wounded by her minute in the war.

Even at this distance from the stage, the air was dank and clammy – all that blood. And there was a stink of defecation and the dead man’s dinner, undigested before he was cut in two.

Detective Riker had arrived to find Mallory leaning into the glass coffin. She had allowed him to wash the blood off her hands, but pushed him away when he made a mess of her cashmere blazer, smearing and spreading the red stains with wet paper towels.

Now she sat at a desk near the stage door. A lamp cast her rigid shadow on a nearby wall of message boxes. She seemed unaware of the odors and the heavy traffic of patrolmen and detectives, the medical examiner’s investigators and the district attorney’s man. Her eyes were blind to everything in the immediate world.

Riker knew she was replaying Franny Futura’s death in her mind, repeating the images over and over, hunting for the imperfections in her work.

And that must stop.

He accepted a paper cup from a stagehand and gave the man five dollars for his trouble. Mallory eyed the container with mild suspicion, and Riker took that as a sign that she was feeling more herself.

He placed the cup in her hand. „It’s water.“

She took one sip. „It’s not.“

„Oh, that’s the booze you’re tasting. But there’s water in there, too. Drink it all down, kid. You need the vitamins.“ Riker thought she might also need a blood transfusion. He glanced toward the stage where two men were lifting the body from the coffin. When he turned back to his partner, her paper cup was drained, and she was crumpling it in a tight fist. Another good sign.

„They suckered me, Riker.“

This was true, and they would probably get away with it, but he would never throw that up to her. He pulled out his notebook. „The first cop on the scene took statements from the old guy’s assistants. They all thought the voice in the coffin was a microphone.“

She nodded. „A two-way feed. The sound equipment is in the back room. It worked like an intercom with a stuck button.“

„These magicians all swear they saw Futura leave the coffin before the pendulum dropped. How could – “

„They’re not magicians,“ said Mallory. „Just a pack of chorus boys. What they saw was a man in a red cape. That was Malakhai. He ducked under the coffin drapes and came out again on cue. The boys were so busy dancing their little brains out, none of them noticed that Malakhai was taller.“ Her face lifted, and she was staring at the suspension bridge overhead. „I would’ve caught that if I hadn’t been up there on the catwalk.“

„Don’t beat yourself up.“ He held out a copy of Faustine’s rod with a single key plug screwed into the end. „Look familiar? We found this near the body. It looks like Futura dropped it before he could unlock his cuffs.“