Other countries, too, claimed similar silent assassinations of bigwigs, magnates, industrialists and corrupt officials. The anonymous editor in chief of www.newworldkuomintang.org wrote that between 1980 and the present, more than 330 moguls in thirty-nine countries, including Saudi Arabia (men with a combined net worth of $400 billion), had been “quietly, efficiently disposed of” thanks to The Nightwatchmen, and though it was unclear if such sudden deaths actually benefited the downtrodden and oppressed, at the very least, it sent corporations into a temporary state of upheaval, forcing them to focus immediate attentions on resolving internal leadership problems, rather than looking outward to the land and people they might sacrifice to turn a profit. Countless employees also started to complain of a steep decline in productivity in the years following the death of the CEO or various trustees — what some referred to as a “never-ending bureaucratic nightmare.” It was nearly impossible to get any work done or for anyone to make a final decision, because so many managers from different departments were required to sign off on the tiniest of ideas. Some Web sites, particularly those out of Germany, suggested members of Nächtlich were employed as supervisors at these behemoth conglomerates, their aim being to fan the flames of inertia by means of endless mandatory paperwork, circuitous checks and balances and labyrinthine red tape. Thus, the corporation, day after day, burning millions in what was becoming an endless waiting game, would “slowly eat itself from the inside out” (see www.verschworung.de/firmaalptraume).
I liked to believe Nächtlich was still active, because it meant Hannah, during her monthly trip to Cottonwood, had not been collecting men like they were tin cans she’d hoped to recycle as we’d all believed. No, she’d been engaged in prearranged encounters, “private one-on-ones” intended to appear like seedy one-night stands, while in fact, they were a platonic exchange of vital information. And perhaps it’d been Doc, sweet Doc with his reliefmap face and retractable trellis legs who’d informed Hannah about the recent movements and probing inquiries of Smoke Harvey and following that rendezvous — the first week of November — Hannah decided she had to kill him. She had no choice, if she wished to preserve her former lover’s hiding place in Paxos, his sanctum sanctorum.
But how had she done it?
It was the question that stumped Ada Harvey, but after reading about the other Nächtlich assassinations, I could now answer it with my eyes closed (also with a little help from Connault Helig’s Machinations Idyllic and Unseen).
If rumor could be believed, The Nightwatchmen, following their post — January 1974 creed of invisibility, employed correspondingly traceless murder techniques. Their repertoire had to include something akin to “The Flying Demoiselle,” described in The History of Lynching in the American South (Kittson, 1966). (In my opinion, Mark Lecinque of Baton Rouge had been killed this way, as his death was ruled a straightforward suicide.) They also must use another, more impermeable method, a procedure first documented by Connault Helig, the London surgeon summoned by a bamboozled police force to examine the body of Mary Kelly, the fifth and final victim of Leather Apron, commonly known as Jack the Ripper. A venerated if furtive man of medicine and science, in Chapter 3, Helig details at length what he considers to be “the only flawless stealthy execution that exists in all the world”(p. 18).
It was flawless because technically it wasn’t murder, but a calculated setup of fatal circumstances. The plan was executed not by one person, but by a “consortium between five and thirteen like-minded gentlemen,” who each, on the chosen day, independently committed an act assigned by the central planner, “the engineer” (p. 21). Viewed individually, these acts were lawful, even ordinary, and yet in a concentrated period of time, they combined to elicit a “perfectly lethal state of affairs, in which the intended victim has no choice but to die” (p. 22). “Each man acts alone,” he writes on p. 21. “He does not know the faces, actions or even the final aim of those with whom he operates. Such ignorance is imperative, for his lack of knowledge maintains his virtue. Only the engineer will know the design from inception to end.”
Detailed knowledge of the victim’s personal and professional life was mandatory, in order to effectively isolate the “ideal poison” to facilitate the “slaying” (pp. 23–25). It could be any possession, weakness, physical handicap or idiosyncrasy of the doomed individual — a cherished gun collection, perhaps, the steep flight of stairs outside Belgravia townhouse (which became “startlingly slippery in the wee hours of a brisk February morning”), a secret affinity for opium, foxhunting upon skittish stallions, hobnobbing under rickety bridges with disease-ridden streetwalkers or most conveniently of all, a daily dose of medication prescribed by the family physician — the concept being that all weapons utilized against the prey were his/her own, and thus the death would appear accidental to even the “craftiest and most inventive of investigators” (p. 26).
This was how Hannah had done it — rather, how they’d done it, because I doubted she’d acted alone at the costume party, but had a number of ghouls to assist her, most of them conveniently wearing masks—Elvis: Aloha from Hawaii, maybe; he’d looked squinty eyed and suspicious, or the astronaut Nigel and I had overheard speaking Greek to the Chinese woman in the gorilla suit. (“Membership expanded not only in America but internationally,” reported Jacobus on www.deechtewaarheid.nl.)
“The primary gentleman, whom we shall hereafter refer to as One, will prepare the poisons prior to the day in question,” Helig writes on p. 31.
Hannah had been One. She’d ingratiated herself with Smoke, pinpointed his poisons: his blood-pressure medication, Minipress, and his favorite booze, Jameson, Bushmills, maybe Tullamore Dew (“He liked his whiskey…I won’t lie about that,” Ada had said). According to www.drug data.com the medicine was “incompatible with alcoholic beverages,” and when combined, the individual may suffer the effects of “syncope,” dizziness, disorientation, even a loss of consciousness. Hannah herself had acquired the drug — or perhaps she’d had it already; perhaps that nineteen-bottle stash of prescription pills in her bedroom cabinet was never for herself, but for her hit jobs. She pulverized a predetermined quantity (the exact amount of the daily dosage, so the elevated levels of the drug discovered in the autopsy could be easily explained in the absence of other signs of foul play; the coroner would assume the victim accidentally took his dosage twice on the day in question). She dissolved the powdered drug into the alcohol and served it to him when he arrived at the party.
“One,” writes Helig on p. 42, “is accountable for relaxing the victim, ensuring his defenses are down. It may serve the group well if One is a person of great physical beauty and charm.”
They passed Nigel and me on the stairs, went to her bedroom, talked, and shortly thereafter, Hannah excused herself, maybe under the guise of getting them another drink, taking both glasses with her, heading downstairs to the kitchen, rinsing them out in the sink, destroying the only piece of incriminating evidence in the entire plot — and so concluding what Helig designated the initial setup, “The First Act.” She never returned to him for the rest of the night.