The Ductwork Snare

The mineral bathhouse smelled of wet limestone and sulfur, but beneath the mineral tang ran a thinner, sweeter thread that did not belong to the baths.

Elias van Dijk knelt by the low louver vent near Hendrik Vos's cot. The invalid slept under two heavy wool blankets, his shallow breathing whistling through a dry throat, while the zinc grate six inches from his pillow wept clear, oily condensation onto the flagstones. Elias pressed his thumb against the lip of the grate, lifted the residue to his nose, and caught the sharp bite of scorched artemisia mixed with clove oil and heavy petroleum ether.

Compound 44-B had not been brought in through the corridor. The heavy mortise lock on the oak bathhouse door remained secured from the outside, exactly as Saskia had left it earlier that morning.

Someone had tapped into the gravity intake above.

Elias stood, stepped to the small transom window overlooking the west courtyard, and pushed the latch. Cold, damp fenland air flooded his face along with the steady patter of midday drizzle against the slate eaves. High above the courtyard paving, where the Victorian copper drainage conduit met the conservatory air intake, a rectangular maintenance hatch hung open by half an inch. A faint trickle of yellow vapor drifted from the seam, swallowed almost instantly by the mist.

The clinic administration charged sixty guilders a week for the restorative peat vapors routed through that ductwork, piping fen air through zinc conduit salvaged from an Oosterhaven slaughterhouse. Now that same conduit was funneling a lethal paralytic directly down to Vos's bed.

Elias unhooked his leather orderly satchel, left it beside the door, and slipped his utility wrench into his belt. He stepped out through the transom onto the narrow limestone ledge.

The stone was slick with algae and rainwater. Just below him, the cobblestone court sat empty except for the muddy tracks of the provost horses hitched by the carriage house. Elias wedged the toe of his work boot into the rusted iron bracket securing the drainage stack, took a firm grip on the vertical copper pipe, and began to climb.

Drizzle soaked through his linen tunic within seconds. The copper was cold enough to numb his fingers, the brackets groaning under his weight where fen rot had eaten into the mortar. At the fifth bracket, thirty feet up, an iron bolt snapped with a sharp ping, pitching him outward against the gray sky. Elias threw his right arm around the main pipe, his chest slamming against the wet metal, and held until the sway dampened. He did not look down. He found another foothold in the masonry joints and pulled himself past the cornice to the recessed sub-roof gallery.

The maintenance crawlspace smelled of damp cedar, bat droppings, and the unmistakable, suffocating reek of concentrated ether.

Elias crawled forward on hands and knees across the open joists, keeping his weight balanced on the structural beams. Ten yards ahead, where the primary bathhouse flue branched off the central shaft, a kerosene storm lantern rested on a crossbeam, its wick turned down to a blue slit.

Beside the lantern knelt a man in a black wool coat, wearing a fitted brass mouth-and-nose respirator strapped behind his ears.

Rikkert Knaap worked with the practiced, meticulous grace of a compounding chemist. Clamped into the galvanized junction box was an improvised gravity dripper: a graduated glass burette filled with amber fluid, feeding drop by drop into a brass canister packed with saturated lint swabs. Every drop struck the heated copper plate over the pilot burner, vaporizing the curariform compound and sending it down the secondary flue toward Hendrik Vos.

Elias lunged across the joists.

His boots struck the cedar beam with a hollow thud. Knaap turned instantly, eyes widening behind round glass goggles. The pharmacist did not shout. With chilling efficiency, Knaap caught up a long, steel-tipped bone saw from his tool roll and swung it in a vicious horizontal arc at Elias's throat.

Elias ducked beneath the sweep, the serrated teeth clipping the collar of his tunic. He drove his shoulder straight into Knaap's midsection, slamming the smaller man back against the brick chimney stack.

The lantern tumbled sideways. Its glass chimney shattered across the joists, kerosene splashing across the damp wood without catching fire. In the dim gray light filtering through the roof slates, Knaap drove a gloved hand into Elias's face, trying to hook two fingers into his eye socket.

Elias twisted his head, caught Knaap's wrist in a two-handed lock, and slammed the pharmacist's forearm down across the iron corner of the junction box. Bone struck metal with a dull crack. Knaap made a strangled sound behind his brass mask, his grip failing as the bone saw clattered into the dark void between the ceiling laths below.

With his free hand, Knaap tore at the valve clamp of the burette, trying to smash the glass reservoir and flood the crawlway with raw, unevaporated poison.

Elias drove the butt of his heavy iron utility wrench into the chemist's shoulder. The impact broke Knaap's balance. The pharmacist slid backward over the wet roof decking, caught the edge of the copper roof valley, scrambled frantically for purchase, and dropped through the open skylight hatch into the west servants' stairwell below.

Heavy footsteps clattered away down the wooden stairs.

Elias did not pursue him down the stairwell. His lungs burned from the ambient vapor drifting from the canister. Pulling his wool kerchief over his nose and mouth, Elias reached into the open ductwork.

The brass dosing canister was scalding hot. Elias wrapped the hem of his damp tunic around his palms, twisted the bayonet mount counterclockwise, and ripped the canister free from the junction clamp. He unscrewed the threaded brass cap. Inside lay a thick cylindrical swab of absorbent surgeon's lint, dripping with heavy, viscous 44-B residue, along with Knaap's personal graduated brass injection cylinder bearing the clinic dispensary serial stamp.

Elias sealed the threaded canister shut, jammed the brass cylinder into his deep coat pocket, and blew out the pilot wick beneath the flue. The intake hissed once, then went cold. Hendrik Vos's air line was clear.

Panting, Elias dropped through the interior skylight into the third-floor servants' corridor. He checked the canister in his pocket: cold brass, heavy with physical proof that linked the poison directly to the dispensary's private tools.

He turned toward the main staircase to reach the mineral bathhouse and secure Vos before Knaap could regroup.

As he reached the central junction of the south gallery, the heavy oak double doors at the far end of the corridor crashed open against the wainscoting.

Three men in dark blue provincial wool coats stepped through the doorway, water dripping from the brims of their stiff leather shakos. In the center stood Corporal Geert Baas, his hand resting on the brass hilt of his saber. Flanking him were the two rural constables, their single-shot carbines held at the low ready across their chests.

Baas stopped twenty paces down the carpeted runner, his cold gaze locking onto Elias's soot-streaked face. Behind the soldiers, stepping out from the shadows of the dispensary vestibule, Dr. Maurits Vossebaard pointed a shaking, manicured finger straight down the hall.