“Things are rarely what they seem.”
“You got that right,” Pete said.
Untying the Knot
by Barry Baldwin
“Prisoner at the bar. You have been found guilty of the crime with which you are charged. Have you anything to say before sentence is passed upon you?”
“My Lord, this is one in the eye for Joe Bernstein and Harry Goldberg. I shall die. But shall I hang? Thank you.”
It was hard to tell whose voice had been the flatter, the judge’s or the defendant’s. Amid the marbles and murals of the Old Bailey, police officers and journalists and court staff winked at each other. They had heard that last kind of thing from the dock before; only its details and delivery varied. But the mention of Joe Bernstein and Harry Goldberg did produce more than a fleeting impression, not weakened by the fact that no one knew who they were. They all looked, some with less sympathy than before, others with more, at the accused with an interest they had rarely felt during his trial. Like most of his kind, he was both in demeanor and as described by others — his own voice had not been heard until now — ordinary to the point of dullness. Seasoned observers recalled those rows of nonentities with funny names at Nuremberg, whose proceedings they had helped to harden in the concrete of history a few years ago. None imagined the man in front of them would be remembered beyond the day three weeks hence when the papers would report his brief encounter with the hangman at eight o’clock in the morning in Pentonville gaol.
Some, not all, thought that if the man shared ideas for which millions had died, it was no bad thing that he should be sent to join them. The trouble was, he was not on trial for those ideas, hadn’t killed for them. To die may be accounted the best thing a man ever did. Look at what Dickens wrote about Sydney Carton. This man, though, would only be on the receiving end of death as a result of having been on the giving end of it. Yet others would have done the same, including perhaps the twelve who had just legally placed the noose around his neck, and many would agree that he did not deserve to die for this particular deed.
None of this was a concern to the judge, who was now fingering something on his desk with unfeigned concentration. He was not one of those arbiters who in certain kinds of story or propaganda enjoy passing the sentence of death, sometimes to the point of involuntary ejaculation into Saville Row — tailored dark trousers. Had there been anybody with whom to share an intimate moment, he might have mentioned that he viewed this present discharge of his duty with regret, even distaste. But only might have. He regularly defined himself in his public speeches and smoking-room conversations — between which there was not all that much difference — as an administrator of the law, an executor in two ways, if you cared for that sort of humor. His study of philosophy at Oxford had left him with a permanent distaste for Socrates and his jawing to the point where he felt a distinct sympathy for those Athenian jurymen who had dispensed the hemlock all the way back in the three hundred and ninety-ninth year before the birth of Christ.
The judge picked up the black cap, perched it upon the wig that covered his fly’s skating rink of a head, and again without inflection recited the sentence down to its hallowed conclusion: “...to be hanged by the neck until you are dead. And may God have mercy upon your soul.” After a stiff bow, stiffly acknowledged, the prisoner was stood down, taken below, and transported without fuss to the room reserved for him in Pentonville.
There, the senior of the two warders with whom he would be playing happy families until the day of the drop laid out the rules and regulations to their new guest with matter-of-fact courtesy.
“You’re more or less going to be stuck with the two of us, so we’d best get on. I daresay we shall. There’s not been any bother with our previous gentlemen. That light stays on all the time, mind, just in case. But you can have something to put over your eyes for sleeping. Otherwise, it’s all quite civilized. There are games to play. One bloke, I remember, didn’t know a king from a pawn when he arrived; he was beating us hollow by the time he had to leave. You can have a newspaper brought in, though that’s not always a good idea. The library isn’t half bad. Back in 1910, I think it was, when he was in charge of prisons, dear old Winston Churchill insisted there be some good reading. Very keen on Gibbon, he was, though he admitted that might not be ideal for short-term stays. Still, there’s lots of other stuff. You are entitled to ten cigarettes a day, or half an ounce of pipe tobacco. Also a daily pint of beer, bottle of stout if you prefer. I might suggest the stout, it keeps your strength up more. You can send and receive letters and have anyone you like to visit, within reason. Talking of visitors, the governor will pop in twice a day, and the chaplain is on call whenever you want. Any questions?”
“Do you think I stand a chance, sir?”
“You don’t have to call me that. It’s up to the home secretary. There’s always a chance. But I wouldn’t dwell on it if I were you. Not considering who was killed.”
“Years ago,” the second warder contributed, “before the war, one chap got the word in here just as they were pinioning his arms ready to haul him away. Not that it did him much good; he keeled over and died of a heart attack the very next day. Delayed reaction, the medical officer said.”
“Anything can happen. My advice is, let’s wait and see. How old are you, son?”
“Nineteen.”
The prisoner didn’t ask why this question should have been tagged on to the admonition. That was a blessing for the warder. It was one of the personal details the hangman needed to know to do his job properly. Something about the relative muscular strength between various ages. For an unexplained bureaucratic reason, he was never given this information in advance. So, when he arrived with his assistant at four in the afternoon on the day before, as per usual, he would discreetly ask questions and watch the prisoner in the exercise yard to calculate his weight. The rope would be stretched overnight by leaving a sandbag dummy on it. Hanging a man is not so easy as it looks in one of those lynching scenes in Wild West films where they just slap a noose round the victim’s neck, giddy up the horse they’ve sat him on, and that’s that. Like the judge, the hangman took no pleasure from his job but prided himself on his professionalism. There was never going to be a repetition of 1922 and Mrs. Edith Thompson: Unable to forget what had gone on, the hangman’s assistant later attempted suicide. Not to mention the way some of the Nuremberg ones had been bungled. The drop had been too short, it was more strangling than hanging; a reporter who’d been there claimed that Keitel had taken nearly half an hour to die.
The key is the C1 and C2 vertebrae, known in the trade as the Hangman’s Drops. When the spinal cord suffers a blow, these are compressed, and if proper force has been applied, fractured. The sheer force of the blow kills some nerves instantly. Then the compression causes electrical impulses traveling through nerve cells in the area to go haywire, and the overload causes many neurons to kill themselves. The dying nerve cells leak calcium, which attracts enzymes to the area that chew on the tissues. Their by-products are unstable compounds that destroy healthy cells by scavenging their oxygen. These dying cells trigger a secondary wave of destruction that sweeps from the injured area and radiates outward. Blood flow to the nervous system is slowed, immune cells flood the area and chew up damaged and healthy nerves alike. The result is gaping holes in the spinal column, and the long nerve fibers called axons that weave down the spine from the brain are stripped of their protective fatty coat of myelin, without which the nerves cannot function, and unlike the peripheral one, the central nervous system does not regenerate.