“We know, sir.” Jasper and Allene spoke simultaneously.
“Alexander!” he barked.
Dr. Gettler rolled his eyes. “I’m right behind ya. No need to scream, Charles.”
“Oh. My apologies. Please brew us a pot of tea on the Bunsen burner.” He pulled out a chair from the nearest desk and sat down before pointing at Allene and Jasper. “You two. Sit. And tell me everything you know.”
After an hour of anxious explaining passed, with Norris and Gettler interjecting to ask thorough—and uncomfortable—questions, Jasper felt himself in an uneasy equipoise. Once the details and facts were curated by those two discerning minds, Norris ended the session by staring at Jasper. The staring continued for nearly a full two minutes.
Finally, Norris stood abruptly, as did the rest of the party. “Well. There is one piece of information missing. It’s time to get back to our trenches, so to speak.”
“Sir?” Jasper was still waiting for the verdict, and Allene glanced at him uneasily.
“You’ve both surmised that this young lady’s fiancé has been poisoned, but it’s still only a hypothesis. And our work doesn’t end with hypotheses.” He plucked a laboratory apron from a wall hook and tied it on. He turned to Allene. “Have you a strong stomach, young lady?”
“Yes.”
“Good. We’ve no alienist here to revive you with smelling salts. You, boy”—he pointed at Jasper—“what on earth are you waiting for?”
Jasper jerked out of his chair, feeling unmoored and unsure. Did this mean there was a chance he’d have his job back? It didn’t matter. And, oddly, he realized he didn’t care. He only wanted answers now. He almost laughed at how hungrily he’d wanted fame and glory, while now the simple truth would suffice to keep him satisfied. He was positively soft boiled these days.
Gettler stayed in the lab while the others followed Norris down to the autopsy room. The glittering pendulum lights cast a yellow glow on the tables. The copper basins and spigots at the end of each table had been polished cleanly. Norris wheeled over a tray of instruments—the bone saws of various sizes; the picks, scissors, and knives of different shapes and curvatures. Jasper was both impressed by and relieved at the preternatural calm that had overtaken Allene. Even in the presence of the many bodies laid out on the dissecting tables, and the stench (one of the bodies had apparently decomposed in a cellar for two weeks—slightly suspicious but more likely an influenza victim who went to fetch a bottle of medicinal whiskey and never returned), Allene remained stoic. After all, this wasn’t her first trip to the morgue, but Jasper knew she wouldn’t admit this aloud.
Well. Until they uncovered Andrew.
Jasper stared too. Andrew lay on the cold marble table, eyes closed, his body stiffened with his arms at his side. In death, the gauntness of his frame was more marked, and his skin had a papery-thin quality to it. What was more, it was a deep brown color, as if he’d been pickled in brine and set out to dry under a desert sun.
Norris picked up the tablet and began taking notes in silence. Somewhere in the room, a tap was dripping water at the rate of a slow heartbeat. Norris nodded to Jasper, who lifted a short blade with a thick handle and held it poised over Andrew’s bare chest. Then, only then, did Allene step back.
She covered her mouth with both hands before finally bursting out, “I can’t. God knows I didn’t love him but . . . still. He was my fiancé. I cannot do this.” She turned to the two of them. “Thank you, Dr. Norris. Jasper—” She couldn’t say another word but instead gave him a look that said, Oh, Jasper. How on earth did we get here? She turned on her heels and swiftly left the room.
Jasper stood at the side of the table, and Andrew waited for the truth to be diced out of him. Dr. Norris must have sensed Jasper’s discomfort and shame at feeling exactly the same way as Allene, the same horror and disgust at Andrew’s shrunken, browned body, the same avoidance of that familiar face that would grin at him no longer. Jasper put down the blade. Norris simply handed him a tablet to take the notes and made the first cut himself.
Later on, Jasper would recall the dissection only in parts, as if bits of his memory had been cut and preserved in jars for another time and place. He remembered the bloody trail of macerated stomach lining; the yellowed, fatty deposits in the liver and kidneys, which should have been a healthy burgundy color. He would remember the tap, tap, tapping sound of body liquids falling into the collection containers beneath the marble table, but not Andrew’s face during the actual autopsy. He recalled being in the laboratory afterward with Gettler, but not taking the stairs to get there. Dr. Gettler had scowled over their discourse on the matter.
“Reinsch’s test for heavy metals. We’ll start there.”
“No, Marsh’s method is better,” Jasper replied.
Gettler furrowed his eyebrows. “Are you stupid or tired, or both? Reinsch’s test is more sensitive—”
“And it’ll take all night, and I need an answer now.” Jasper didn’t balk at Gettler’s reddening face, which was gearing up for a Brooklynese tirade. “Look, I’m already fired. You can do what you want, but you’ll have to double check the results anyway, right? Marsh’s test will take less than two hours.”
“You think it’s—”
“I know it is,” Jasper finished his thought. He put on his lab coat and rolled up his sleeves. “I’ll get the hydrochloric acid.”
Jasper was right; the answer did come in less than two hours. Somewhere around three in the morning, he knew. It was one hour before the dockworkers would be heading for the piers, before the rest of New York would be waking up to the paralyzing fear that another loved one had died in the night from the Spanish grippe. More men would be drawn into the war if the armistice talks stalled. Even now, Pershing was stalwart in pledging to send 250,000 American boys a month to the front lines. On both sides of the vast, uncaring Atlantic Ocean, everyone was hoping desperately for a cease-fire.
So was Jasper, in their own little circle.
He had his answer in the form of a gleaming, shiny residue of darkness coating the inside of a test tube. He didn’t need to say what he and Norris had already guessed from the autopsy. Dr. Gettler announced the answer with that pride he always had when he’d pulled the truth, one atom at a time, from a silenced corpse.
“It makes sense. The skin color, the thickened palms.”
“You mean . . .”
“Yes. Say hello to arsenic, young man.”
CHAPTER 30