In each case, and to each hanging, Carty brought a certain indefinable gentleness and savoir-faire that were identifiable to the perceptive as an unflagging pride in his profession.
He was the best, and there was no getting around it.
Then, when he had begun soaking his plates in warm salt water, when he had acquired a sturdy set of grouse-tracks around his eyes and nose, when he had been warned by his doctor to move slowly in protection of an aging heart, when he was, in short, in the thickening of his lifetime, he was called upon to create history.
It was several months after he had completed the execution of a certain gun-runner named Moxlossis, who had butchered his partner with an icepick over a center cut of filet mignon on the cruise hack from Cuba, when the governor of the state of Delaware contacted him.
By official conveyance, Matthew Carty was brought to the State House, and in secret session with the Governor — that year a rather paunchy man with a predilection for cigarillos and fetid breath — he was informed he was to preside at the hanging of Dr. Bruno Kolles.
Matthew Carry’s aging heart leaped into his wrinkled throat. The culmination of a glorious career! The piece de resistance!
Matthew swallowed heavily, and swung his short legs in the air with unrestrained emotion. It was a high-legged chair, and though he felt awkward, this was news enough to sublimate his feelings of awkwardness.
The Kolles case was a cause célèbre . The tabloids had been publishing steadily on the matter, publicizing his arrest and conviction for over seven months:
Anna Pasteur had been a cancer victim. Her days had been numbered, and her body wasting away. It had been a body loved with singular ardor by Dr. Kolles, and as a result of the strain and horror visited upon the good Doctor at sight of his paramour wasting away, a mercy killing had been performed, her hand locked in his throughout the activity with hypodermic and sleep-inducing drug.
It had been quick and with sweet terror. But he had been discovered in the act by a jealous nurse, a remarkably horsey woman he had several times rebuffed, and she had turned him in. The case had been followed with much accompanying conjecture and opinion from all sides.
It was, in fact, that the country was divided in its feelings. Half the people believed he should be turned loose — for his had been an act of compassion, easily understood and condoned — and half believed he should be hanged with brutal speed.
Thus it was that the Governor of the state of Delaware (chewing on a fetid cigarillo) told Matthew Carty, “We cannot chance a slip-up in this matter. Public sentiment is too strong.” There was a detectable note in the Governor’s voice, vaguely reminiscent of subdued hysteria. “You can do a speedy job, without trouble, can’t you?”
Matthew assured him he could. He was most convincing. The tariff on this execution was slightly higher than usual, for the prestige was greater.
Prestige, yes, but more! This was the high point of a career marked by high points.
On the morning of the execution, Matthew felt strange quivers in his stomach. He told himself it was the nervousness of his greatest job, his most exacting bit of artistry. It was da Vinci completing La Gioconda; it was Wilbur and Orville on that chilly morning near Kitty Hawk; it was Melville, cribbing out painfully the last magnificent lines of “Moby Dick.”
He felt like Icarus soaring toward the sun.
The public notice — which would not be removed until after the inquest — had been posted some twenty hours before. The demonstrators had been staunchly turned back from the prison walls. The sheriff, jailer, chaplain and surgeon of the prison all were present, as well as several dry-faced relatives, resigned to the fate of Dr. Kolles.
Matthew Carty made a point of never meeting the man (or woman) he was to execute, but today was something special, something remarkable, so he went to the cell in the late afternoon, rubbing his chin warily.
He wanted to meet the man who was soon to be the most intimately involved with his art. It seemed fitting, though oddly disquieting, somehow.
Kolles was a short, fat man. Not quite as short as Matthew, but still under five-and-a-half feet. He had a fine hairline mustache that seemed almost hesitant about its own existence, and he took the impending stretching of his neck with restrained impotence.
“Are you the man who is going to do this thing?”
Matthew nodded. “I thought I’d come in and say I’ll make it as quick as I can.”
Kolles bowed his head. A red flush came up from inside his shirt and clouded his face. “What kind of a man are you?” he asked with a quiet fury. It was the first sign of emotional strain he had evinced since the beginning of his trial. “I’m a man who tried to save lives … but … you! You take them, without apparent compunction.”
Carty stared at him silently for a moment. Then he leaned down and stuck his uncomplicated face into the Doctor’s. “I’m a craftsman,” he explained. “My idol has always been Henry I of England. Do you know why? Because he furthered the cause of hanging. He was a great man, and his life has given me inspiration. I’m an artist, Doctor. My work is important. I take a great deal of pride in it, because I’m the best in my field.
“Can you understand that?”
None of it made much sense, and of course the good doctor did not understand.
Dr. Kolles turned his face to the wall.
Matthew Carty left the cell, and went out to the courtyard where the white pine scaffold rose in cleanlimbed serenity. This was the first time he had been talked to like that since the days of his rude beginnings, when the girls had slapped him and turned gray at mention of his beloved trade. The days before fame had made him tolerable, if not socially acceptable. He had encysted himself, and this stripping-off of his shell left him raw and unprotected. He shuddered to himself.
The fools, he thought, they could never understand me.
He checked the sash weights and the oiled trap. He checked the arm and the lever and the floorboards for squeaks — which made an unpleasant effect of jollity when he was struggling so earnestly for somberness and seriousness. Yes, everything was in readiness.
Kolles would drop eight feet before the breaking strain. And served him right
Yet that nervousness, compounded with the annoyance generated by the Doctor, and the pressure of the event itself, further unsettled Matthew Carty. He began to perspire on the job for the first time in his life.
He found himself biting his perfect little nails.
How glorious today would be — his ultimate triumph!
When they brought Kolles out, with the newsmen trailing along behind (and that hideous sob-sister from the New York paper, with her frock much too gay for this occasion) something seemed to frazzle inside Matthew. For as Kolles emerged out of shadow, he stuck his tongue out at Matthew Carty.
Carty was too surprised to be flabbergasted.
It was very much like that time in Alaska, up past White Horse, when he had had to thaw out the hemp in a bucket of boiling water before he could do the job. Or the time in Kansas when the fall had been too great and had pulled the prisoner’s head off. He had been unnerved then, too, but he had been much younger and his confidence had returned, buoyed up.
But now …
Was he getting old, unsure of himself? Had he lost his confidence in his talent?
He swallowed heavily, and strung Kolles up.
Kolles stuck his tongue out once more.
“ Stop that! ” Matthew hissed under his breath, but Kolles just smiled cherubically.