Rupert Wale's Arc

Chapter 1 of 4

At three in the morning, Rupert Wale stood over a body that was already turning against him. The old man on the table had come in yesterday. The skin at his jaw was going soft. Rupert pressed a gloved finger there and felt the wrongness give. He needed weeks with this body. He had days. He wrote the temperature on the table edge in grease pencil. Fifty-eight. Too warm. The rowhouse ran cold in winter, but the top two floors ran warm from all the lights. He had never turned the lights off. He could not read the numbers in the dark, and the numbers were what the bodies were saying. The old man's right thumb had curled inward while the left lay flat. That asymmetry meant something. It would mean nothing once he rotted. Rupert needed a cold room. A sealed cold room, hidden, with a compressor and a drain and a steel table he did not have to share with the funeral parlor downstairs. He had priced it twice. Each time the number had beaten him. Tonight he opened the ledger again and made himself look. Embalming fluid he could skim. A used compressor from the meat plant on the water. Copper line he could pull from the disused third-floor bathroom himself. He wrote the totals along the wall beside the sink. The total was still short by four hundred. Someone knocked on the street door. At three in the morning. He went down. Through the glass he saw red hair and a dark dress with small gray flowers. His rival stood on the step with a ring of black flowers in her gloved hands. Petra Pale. He had watched her work the street for a year, smiling, never touching. She had not offered him one yet. He had counted the days. He opened the door six inches. "You have a freezer problem," she said. "How do you know that." "The parlor talks. I listen." She looked past him, up the stairs, at the light. "I have a buyer for the room behind your kitchen. Cash. Tonight." "That room is mine." "You use it for boxes." She held the crown at her waist, not offering. "Four hundred. He takes the room, you keep the door. He stores crates. You never see him." Rupert's hand went to the doorframe. Four hundred was the exact number on his wall. She could not know that. She knew it. "Why," he said. "I want you working," she said. "Not sleeping." He took the money at four-fifteen. By dawn he had the compressor ordered and the copper measured. By the next night the back room on the third floor held a sealed door he had built himself, and behind it a table cold enough to hold the old man still. The stranger's crates arrived a week later. Rupert did not ask what was in them. He had his cold room. He had already lost the right to ask.