“Holy God, what kind of—” The old man tore loose from Maturo’s momentarily relaxed grip and ran for the door.
“Stop him!” roared Maturo, with such urgency that Crank forgot his never interfere rule and hurled a big jar of pickled pig’s feet into the old man’s path. It burst with a loud pop and splash, and the old man lost his footing on the wet floor, fell heavily on his hip and slid rolling into a bar stool, which toppled over. Maturo was on him in an instant, and dragged the gasping old fellow to his feet. “What did he do, Doug?” asked Crank worriedly. Maturo twisted one of the old man’s arms up and forced it down on the bar. “Open your fist, you bastard,” he hissed. The fist stayed clenched for a few moments, but sprang open when Maturo began to exert pressure against the locked elbow.
“Jesus, his hand’s empty, Doug!” exclaimed Crank with some agitation. “Here we’ve roughed him up and he didn’t take noth—”
“Pull off his glove.”
“Damn it, man, we’ve done enough to—”
“Pull off his glove.”
Rolling his eyes unhappily, Crank pinched the fabric at the ends of the thumb and middle finger and jerked the glove off.
The pale, wrinkled hand was completely covered with coarse whiskers.
“It’s Dog-Face Joe,” Maturo pronounced.
“What?” wailed the flustered Crank. “The werewolf from the kid stories?”
“He’s not a werewolf. He’s the uncanniest murderer that ever walked this city’s streets. Ask Brock over in Kenyon Court what became of his boy Kenny. Or ask Mrs. Zimmerman—”
“He’s the one that did in my brother,” said a young man who quickly stood up from a corner table. “Frank was a priest, and ran off from the rectory one day, and didn’t recognize me when I found him, and laughed when I told him who I was. But I followed him to where he lived, and a week later a thing they said was an ape leaped from the roof of the place. The busted-up corpse in the street was all covered with fur, but I looked in its mouth and saw the tooth I chipped when Frankie and me was playing sword fights when we was kids.”
The captive at the bar laughed. “I remember him. I didn’t have too bad a time in his body—though I fear I made a sad shambles of his vow of celibacy.”
The young man sprang forward with an inarticulate cry and a raised fist, but Maturo shouldered him back. “What are you going to do, hit him?” Maturo asked. “Justice has got to be done.”
“Aye, fetch the police!” someone shouted.
“That’s no good either,” said Maturo. “By the time he’d even come up for trial he’d be long gone, leaving some innocent poor devil in this carcass.” He stared at the young man, then looked around at everyone else. “He’s got to be executed,” he said carefully. “Now.”
Dog-Face Joe began struggling wildly, and at the same moment a number of people leaped to their feet, loudly protesting that they wouldn’t be party to a murder. Crank grabbed Maturo’s sleeve and said, “Not in here, Doug. No way in here.”
“No,” Maturo agreed. “But who’s with me?”
“John Carroll is,” said the young man, stepping forward again.
“Me too,” spoke up a hefty, middle-aged matron. “They pulled one o’ them apes out of the river at Gravesend, and it was wearin’ my Billy’s ring on a finger so furry that it couldn’t be pulled off—and couldn’t have been pulled on, either, after the fur was growed.”
One by one three more people walked over and stood beside John Carroll and the woman.
“Good,” Maturo said. He turned toward the table he’d leaped up from. “Any of you lads?”
His suddenly sobered friends all shook their heads. “We’re none of us the sort to shrink from a scrape, Doug,” said one pleadingly, ”’but helping in a cold-blooded murder… we’ve got families … “
“Sure.” He looked away from them. “Leave, all of you that are leaving. And fetch a constable if you feel you must—but first consider what sort of thing you’d be freeing. Remember the stories this man and woman just told you, and call to mind the stories I’m sure you’ve heard already.”
Most of the people in the room scrambled for the door, though two more men hung back to join Maturo’s group. “Just realized,” said one of them, “I was going to leave clean-handed, though damn glad it was being done. That’s no way to go.”
Maturo clapped a hand over Dog-Face Joe’s mouth, then said casually to Crank, “You know, Crankie, I believe I’ve changed my mind. I’ll just take him to the police after all. You understand? The last thing you heard me say was that I was going to take him, alive, to the authorities.”
“Got it,” said the pale-faced Crank, pouring himself a liberal slug of neat brandy. “Thanks, Doug.”
Maturo, assisted by his companions, led the struggling figure toward the back door.
“Uh, Doug?” said Crank in a strained voice. “That’s the… back door you’re leaving by?”
“We’re going to go over the fence.”
The nine vigilantes half-dragged, half-marched their captive outside into the pub’s small back lot, and Maturo glanced around at the mounded snow, which in the far corner had nearly buried a derelict beer wagon. A section of the yard wall had been knocked down, doubtless due to the mishandling of some craneful of ironwork by an employee of the forge whose yard adjoined the pub lot. There was no one visible in the forge yard, and the shadow of the unattended crane fell across the pub’s back door.
“You,” said Maturo, pointing at one of the men with him, “see if there’s a length of rope anywhere about that old wagon there. And—where’s John Carroll? Ah, there you are—do you think you can climb that crane?”
“If somebody will lend me some gloves I can.”
Dog-Face Joe’s other glove was wrenched off and the pair was tossed to him, and a moment later he was scrambling over the tumbled and snow-dusted masonry of the gap in the wall.
“There’s a rope here,” called the man Maturo had sent over to the wagon, “tied around the yoke. It’s frozen on, but I think I can get it loose.”
“When you do, meet us in the forge yard,” Maturo called. To the woman he remarked, “It looks like we may be able to do this properly, and not just hold his head in a horse trough.”
In a few minutes the nine people were grouped in a half-circle around a four-foot-tall nail keg on top of which Dog-Face Joe, his head held high, stood on tiptoe, for the rope had proven to be a few inches short, and if he let his heels rest on the barrel top the slip-knot around his neck would be uncomfortably tight.
“If you let me down,” Joe said hoarsely, peering down at them over the swell of his cheekbones, “I’ll make you all rich. I’ve kept money from each of my hosts! It’s a fortune, and I’ll let you people have it all!” He twitched his scarf-bound wrists.
“You said that before,” Maturo told him. “And we said no before. Say some prayers, Joe, you’re on your way out.” Maturo was clearly uneasy about the situation, and he kept squinting up at their captive suspiciously.
“I don’t need prayers,” said Joe. “My soul’s in good hands.” His confident words must have been a bluff, though, for an instant later he gave a despairing wail and shrieked, “Wait a minute! I’m D—”
The tightening halter choked off any further speech then, for Maturo had kicked the barrel out from under him with such force that it rolled away across the snow-covered pavement as the old man rocked and swung on the end of the suddenly taut rope, his eyes staring with intense supplication out of the darkening face and his mouth forming words that he had no breath to vocalize.
Maturo, who seemed to have dismissed his misgivings now that the deed was done, waited with a faint smile until the grisly pendulum had rotated around to face away from the executioners, toward the yard and the low sun and the still-rolling barrel, and then he leaped onto the shoulders of the dangling man as though to get a piggyback ride.