The execution would be accomplished by the fracturing or dislocating of the first three cervical vertebrae, hence crushing the vital centers in the spinal cord.
Matthew heard the music of lyre, sackbut and dulcimer.
He placed the knot behind the ear for the most symmetrical garrote. It was more artistic than the method favored by lesser talents — under the neck.
(In point of fact, Matthew favored the thuggee three-knot method as used in India. He had made an extensive study of choke methods in his exuberant youth, but had, in later life, realized the truth of tried and true old-fashioned approaches.)
His joy was constrained, but enormous. His fingers sang at their work.
He did not notice the knot slip around, as he moved away.
Perhaps it was unsteadiness of hand.
Perhaps the glory of this event in his career had discautioned him.
Perhaps he was not aware of the stress on the rope.
Perhaps Kolles jiggled a bit, out of spite.
Any of these are possibilities.
In any case, when the lever was thrust home, and the trap sprang open beneath Kolles, and he plummeted the eight feet to twaaaang at the end of the line, he did not break his neck. He did not die. Obstinately!
The sob-sister screamed and messed her gay frock.
The newsmen’s faces screwed up hideously in expressions of compounded horror, as their eyes moved click and click, back and forth, as though they were watching a tennis match in slow motion.
The jailer turned puce, then gray, and fled.
The chaplain began praying.
And Dr. Kolles twisted and writhed and bounced and danced and flopped and tumbled about at the end of the hemp. The hanging was a ghastly fiasco … obstinately endless … it went on for a lifetime and a half, in Matthew Carty’s mind. The condemned man seemed determined to kill himself slowly. The corpse was not a corpse for a very long time.
Everyone stood transfixed, not moving, almost blind with the ghastliness of it all. Except the jailer, who continued running till he spanged against a barred door some distance down the hall and was knocked totally unconscious.
After a while, someone croaked, “Get a kn-knife … cut him d-d-down …”
But no one did. They just stood and watched the airborne gavotte.
In actuality, it was a mere three minutes, but it was a week to each of the horrified observers.
The newspapers called him an “incompetent.”
Eric Sevareid referred to him as a “butcher.”
One Sunday morning egghead commentator labeled him a “male Ilse Koch!”
The women’s leagues impeached him as a “paid murderer.”
In all, it was a serious blow, a killing blow to Matthew Carty’s career. For Matthew Carty knew the truth; the truth that lived inside simple appearances. He was not inept. Till Dr. Kolles, he had never felt one way or the other about his “participants” in the act. They had merely been utensils, specified by the authorities as the correct instrument for the assignment. Till Dr. Kolles. He had made the mistake of meeting the man, and from Kolles’ loathing of what Matthew Carty did for a living, had been born the first stench-weed of hate in the little man.
Matthew Carty had allowed himself to become personally involved with Kolles. He had hated, and that had thrown him off his stride. He knew he was washed up. Hung up, really. He knew he had lost his touch. His time had come and gone. He had met each challenge with skill, with pride in his profession, but all that was dust now.
He was a has-been.
Because it was a rather small room, and because he had closed and locked all the windows, and because it was a very hot August, and because he had done it to excess, and because the cleaning woman didn’t come for a week, putrefaction had progressed considerably and, when she came to clean Matthew Carty’s apartment, the smell was overpowering. When she called the custodian and he unlocked the door, and they entered, they began to gag and had to step back into the hall to tie handkerchiefs over their noses.
It was the cleaning woman who first entered the bedroom. When she saw him, she tried to jam her fist into her mouth to stop the screams, but the handkerchief prevented the movement and her hysterical shrieks brought the custodian.
Even the police were shocked and surprised.
He had done it to excess. The bloodstains and brownish material he had vomited were all over the bed. The mouth was corroded and scarred, as well as the throat. He had convulsed so terribly that he was arched back into a perfect bow, the entire weight of his small body resting on the heels and back of the head. His skin was very gray and in places dark blue. The final grimace was the one most commonly associated with lockjaw. The hands had ripped the bedsheets.
Everyone knew who he was, what he was famous for, and none of them could understand the kind of fierce, unrelenting pride in his profession a man could possess that would cause him — as was revealed in the autopsy — to drink a bottle of household ammonia, swallow a diluted half-box of DDT-laden plant poison, and swallow eleven grains of strychnine sulphate.
That hanging man was dead. Pride in his profession. Not even at the end had he compromised his craft; he had poisoned himself.
Nine: The Children’s Hour
Don’t say it didn’t happen. Of course, it happened! Don’t you ever learn? I was there when it happened. It was a thing of quiet terror, and in its own way, beautiful. How can you ignore the fact that it happened!
The United Nations building stands on the edge of the East River. It is an incredibly thin, wondrous structure all glass and fine stonework. Beside it is a smaller structure, the General Assembly building. If you were to look down from a window in one of the offices of a building on, say, East 45th Street, the top of the General Assembly building might look to you like a fat man with goggles in a bathtub. The dome and stacks do it very nicely.
But the Secretariat Building, that nearly unbroken face of windows that reflects back the Manhattan skyline on clear days, is nothing humorous.
In it, the work of the world is done. In it, the plans and dreams and frustrations of billions of men and women are studied and catalogued and interoffice memoed. I work in that building.
For the record — and there will be a record, I’m certain — my name is Wallace Edmondson. I am an interpreter. I speak three languages in addition to English: Italian, French and German, all three flawlessly, idiomatically. My job with the UN has been a simple one, nothing romantic, nothing full of intrigue and disaster. I have never been outside the United States, and so my curiosity about the rest of the world has gone untended, save for information culled from periodicals and the people around me.
Unfortunately, I was present at the greatest disaster that ever befell the human race. I’ll tell you about it; there is truth in what I say; and perhaps truth will help.
God knows — nothing else will now.
The General Assembly that day — it was a Tuesday, the 3rd of June, 1995 — was a madhouse. The agenda was up to its title page in trouble. We had ten different, imperative conflicts on our hands, and any one of them could have been the one to start the big war. The big war that would make World War II seem like a street fight.
We had been drunkenly teetering on the razor-edge for years. June 25th, 1950 had been the starting date, as well as anyone could remember. That was the day the Republic of Korea was overrun by 60,000 North Korean troops spearheaded by 100 Russian-built tanks. It lasted till 1953 and no one really won. We didn’t know it till 1954, but the first hydrogen device explosion had taken place at the AEC Eniwetok proving grounds. In August of 1953 the USSR detonated theirs. Dien Bien Phu and its French garrison fell to Ho Chi Minh’s army in May of 1954. And it all began to accelerate. 1956: the Polish revolution in Poznan; Egypt seized the Suez Canal; the Hungarian uprising; Israel invaded the Sinai Peninsula. Not even the establishment of our UN international police force in November to supervise the Middle East truce could slow the rush toward war.