The Billy Club Bastard Case Files: The Case of the Electrocuted Gangsters, Part 1 of 4

Mickey Malloy has been summoned to New York to answer weird questions that he doesn’t have or particularly want the answers to. Since Key West, he’s been the go-to guy to get thrown to the wolves at the FBI and answer questions about various oddities. Times have yet to change, especially when the graves of their most-wanted killers start coming up empty.

Crazy, Crazy, Crazy, All the Time is available as a Kindle ebook, in paperback, and as a DRM-free ebook.

This is Part 1 of The Case of the Electrocuted Gangsters, the final story in Mick’s second anthology, Crazy, Crazy, Crazy, All the Time. It takes place a month-and-a-half after The Case of the Three Eye Man and revisits characters introduced in earlier cases, although those are not required reading.

Content Warnings: Mild Swearing, Violence, Gore, Death, Body Horror, Nazis

THURSDAY AFTERNOON, OCTOBER 1, 1942
POTTERS' FIELD, SING SING CORRECTIONAL FACILITY
OSSINING, NEW YORK

Only Mickey Malloy's brows peaked over the grass from where he was standing in an open coffin at the bottom of an empty grave.

“I'm telling you, this ain't whatever you think it is,” he was saying to the circled federal agents, prison officials, and police officers standing over him.

“That makes four missing killers-for-hire,” Special Agent Ray Leddy said. His arms were crossed. He looked annoyed, just like he sounded.

“Four missing corpses, Leddy, corpses,” Mick replied. “What we got is a grave robber, so I don't know what you got me down in this hole for.”

“Four missing bodies, all executed hitmen, all from Murder, Incorporated?” Leddy pointed out. “That doesn't strike you as unusual?”

“This is New York,” Mick said with a shrug. He hated it here. It was already cold, the trees were red and brown.

“Hey, what's that supposed to mean?” one of the bulldog-faced officers grunted.

“Just saying, it's odd, yeah, and it's strange, clearly, but that's, you know, about par for this place,” Mick said. That set off a cascade of grumbles from the men glowering down on him. “Hey, hey, hey, no offense but it’s a big city, that's a lot of room for weird. Didn't y'all have a cowboy stop a monkey attack the other day?”

That got some grumbles of assent.

“Leddy, you're going to have to spell it out for me, pal. What exactly are you asking me about?”

“You got any idea why there aren't any bodies in these graves?” the fed asked.

“Why would I?”

“Because I did my digging, buddy,” Leddy snapped.

Mick surveyed the pit around him.

“Very nice.”

“No, not that, you goon,” Leddy snapped. He massaged the bridge of his nose and sighed. “I followed the paper trail. You know who signed over every one of these empty coffins?”

“The undertaker?”

“The wardens,” Leddy said, like that was some grand reveal.

“Okay,” Mick said. He looked around to find every person there waiting for more. “Is that not right?”

“Warden doesn't handle corpses, Malloy,” Leddy said, exasperated. “Thing is, I asked Warden Kirby about all this. He clammed up, tight as a drum. So I go see his predecessor, because the first couple bodies got buried here before Kirby took the reins. Wouldn’t you know it, Warden Lawes, retired or not, didn’t have anything to remember, either.”

“Sounds nefarious. Like they might've signed a form or something.”

“Wardens are political appointees. They love to talk. But if they're not talking to the Federal Bureau of Investigation, that means someone even higher told them to keep quiet.”

“Religious men, are they?” Mick asked.

“I'm not playing around here, Malloy,” Leddy snapped. “Tell me I wouldn't find an F.D.R. rubber stamp in your pocket right now.”

“You think I stole four stiffs under your nose?”

“I'm saying I don't think there ever were any stiffs,” Leddy said. The police and the prison guards looked at each other in confusion.

“Buddy, you know me, there isn't anything I like seeing more than some low-life laid out. You think that if some asshole like...” Mickey vaguely gestured at the headstone at the top of the hole, “Like Dasher Abbandando, I wouldn't be first in line to see 'em on a slab?”

“We were catching killers shoulder-to-shoulder not two months ago, and now you’re jerking me around? Look where you're standing,” Leddy said. Mick looked down at the white pine boards under his feet. “That coffin is clean. You think that box has ever seen a body?”

“I mean, if Ossining, New York is known for anything, it's the professionalism of its embalmers,” Mick shrugged.

“Always with the jokes, Malloy,” Leddy grunted. “I'm sending all of this up the ladder. Next time I see you, it'll be with a warrant in hand. You and your little freak show better be ready to answer questions.”

“Sure thing.”

“Let's get out of here,” Leddy said. He and his gaggle of officers and guards started the long hike back to the prison.

“A little help?” Mick asked from the bottom of the grave.

“Why don't you stay down there and think for a while,” Leddy said over his shoulder.

“Thanks for nothin', pal,” Mickey grunted. He watched the whole crew wander away, except for one. The remaining man was nondescript in a way that was dangerous. Even if he'd been trying to find this particular character, he'd have overlooked him. The man was white, of below-average height, with thinning brown hair in an unremarkable style, with a suit one size too baggy, a bored look on his face, and a slouch that screamed 'paunchy' rather than 'coiled.' Mickey glared at him over the grass. “And you, too, thanks for the back-up.”

“Malloy, you dug this hole,” George Keaton chuckled as he ambled over.

“I'm kind of tired of that joke,” Mick grumbled.

“You're the one that gave those keg-stompers your business card,” Keaton pointed out.

“Hey, in my defense I was very drunk. You gonna help me out of here?”

Keaton squatted down and held out his hand. Mick took it. Keaton's grip was like rolled steel. With him hauling up and back and Mick digging his toes into the dirt sides of the grave, they dragged him out. Mick was wheezing, but he was free.

“So what are we doing with four members of Murder, Incorporated? Didn't those jokers kill something like five hundred people?”

“We are not doing anything with four members of Murder, Incorporated,” Keaton replied.

“Good, so what are you doing with them?”

“You believe Agent Leddy's theory that we somehow faked their executions?”

“I've seen weirder things.”

“Fair enough,” Keaton agreed. “How are you with numbers?”

Mick just grunted. He pulled his deck out of his pocket, offered Keaton a cigarette which he declined, then lit up his own.

“Between the United States and the United Kingdom alone, we are on track to drop three million tons of bombs in this war. The man-hours, the cost, the lives lost dropping them, the waste, the civilian death toll, all of these numbers are unacceptable. But bombs do have their advantages. They cause disruption, terror. You drop them and never have to consider them again.”

“'Til you trip over one,” Mick said.

“We have proposed an alternative.”

Mick shook his head. A weird idea struck him. He knew the war was bad, but some things were a little too out there, even for the Office. Might as well strap hand grenades to bats while they were at it.

“Wait, how about drop a gang of murderers onto the krauts instead?” Mick joked. He looked up from his cigarette to find Keaton staring at him. He didn't have so much as a smirk on his doughy face.

“Those men were the most efficient killers the United States has ever produced,” Keaton said. “They deserve no place in our society, but the heinous skills they'd honed could be put to work for it.”

“I was kidding, George. That would be crazy.”

“These are crazy times, Mick.”

“But you just told me that we weren't doing anything with those four.”

“We're not,” Keaton replied. He stood and nodded to his sedan, parked on the far side of the cemetery. “Because we have five of them. And you're to escort them to their ride. When's the last time you've been to Camp X?”

Mickey knew what was buried at Camp X.

“Trade one grave for another?” he mumbled.

“What's that?” Keaton asked.

“Nothing,” Mick grunted. A chill sliced into the back of his neck. His pulled his jacket tighter around him. If New York was rough, Ontario would be a nightmare. “Just admiring the weather.”

THURSDAY MORNING, AUGUST 6, 1942
VAN DEN BERGHE RESIDENCE
TWICKENHAM, LONDON, UNITED KINGDOM

Doctor Emil Fleischer slumped into the old chair. Clotting blood and more solid tissues dripped from his hands, his chest, his face. If he hadn't already known that the body spread across the room before him had been Lander van den Berghe, he never would have been able to tell. The dead man's motorized wheelchair whirred where it was stuck running against the wall, its formerly concealed gun barrels still smoking.

“The reversion process is still inexcusably draining,” he muttered, as if Merci was there to jot down his observations. She was gone. The dead man's friends had her.

Fleischer leaned back in the chair and waited. He could feel van den Berghe's emergency transponder pulsing through this small workshop. The radio signal was like a buzzing bee snuggling into his molars. It was not unpleasant, but it was impossible to ignore. The vril still inhabiting his body turned his bones into an antenna.

He held his red-covered hands up and studied the scars running down his forearms. They were fading again, disappearing into his flesh. The vril left them a curious shade of leathery black. It took a few more minutes for them to resemble skin again. By the time the officials arrived, he would be naught but a creaky old man.

“You should have taken me up on my offer,” Fleischer told the corpse. The ornery Belgian's face was in a couple places, so Fleischer did not know where to look as he addressed the body. Lander van den Berghe had been a legend for decades, but he was as dedicating to stifling progress as he was to creating the future. He had fought against his partner during the Great War, setting back automaton research by fifty years in the process. Fleischer should have known van den Berghe would deny his successes as surely as he'd had the secrets of the kriegerpuppe armies buried.

A shudder ran through Fleischer's chest. The hidden device buried under his lungs was churning down, rattling as the last of the fuel burned off. He was empty and the man he had come to see was in pieces.

Lander van den Berghe, the small-minded fool.

Fleischer's research could have restored van den Berghe's legs. They could have helped thousands of people walk and grasp and feel again. They could have tapped into the invisible rhythms of the universe. All he needed to provide was one woman and one boy, a small price for miracles.

But the Belgian had turned him down.

Fleischer had known what would happen before he inhaled the fuel. It was not logic that drove him. He wanted van den Berghe to see what he had denied. He wanted to punish the cripple for his obstinance. The thrumming vril injector in his chest had greedily devoured the acrid vapors and extracted the hidden energies from the air around them. The razor-edged electrical current burrowed through him like a termites. The sensation was divine.

Van den Berghe had cowered at the metamorphosis. It was shocking to the unfamiliar: fat steaming off the frame like lard in the pan, eyes rolling into empty whites, muscles clenching into oak-hard masses, the breath screaming from boiling lungs like steam. Despite his horror, the Belgian retained enough of his faculties to try his tricks. If Fleischer had been in control of his body, the devices van den Berghe had brought to bear would have killed him in a half-a-hundred ways. But he was no longer a man.

The vril had taken control.

Under its sway, the instructions his body acted on bypassed his feeble, carnate mind. Its actions were ordered by a deeper consciousness than the id, ancient desires older than instinct.

Fleischer theorized that the vril was the protohuman soul, the actions of a million generations past, recorded invisibly in the spaces beyond and between atoms. Hitler's Glaubensführer insisted it was the All-Highest's touch. She had said the deity of the Reich and and the First Aryans could only be heard in whispers, a barely perceptible susurrus that could boil the galactic ice and turn raw iron ingots into flesh. Fleischer's creation translated those whispers into something that could even the pierce the Belgian's sealed mind, the universal language: violence.

The assault itself was a blur. The vril intensified strength and speed. The Belgian had unleashed explosives and bullets at him, but they did little to slow him. He was possessed by the power of the divine: shrapnel and lead held no sway over him. When he reached van den Berghe's broken body, he tore it apart with his bare hands.

Fleischer slumped back and belched exhaust. His flesh sparked and crackled as it reformed in the bullet hole like rising dough. The vril injector within him was running fever hot. It had done its work, though, drawing the vril out of the universe and into him via the brutish means of internal combustion.

The Office would be here, soon. If he had not been a priority target to them before, he had just killed one of their founders. They had already risked their lives raiding his clinic in France, stealing his work. If he had been there, they would have taken him as well.

The Führer's silly little show-and-tell in Berlin had drawn him away, and the clinic was undefended. All to what, grovel? Brag? Metzger, the fool, had brought rats. Rats! As if green vermin would impress the right hand of the All-Highest. Worst of all was the glass-eyed Sparteführer of the Sixth Arm, who had brought nothing at all, simply choosing to clomp around and disdainfully whistle at the works on display. None of them understood what Fleischer had found and unleashed.

The vril was a power denied to man. He had not intended to find it. He had initially been looking for a way to help a little girl walk again. She had fallen from a horse at the age of three. Surgeons could not help her. Her brain no longer acknowledged her legs. But her muscles were still there, still pumping blood and reacting autonomously. With the application of simple electricity, they would extend and contract, just not at the command of her brain. Fleischer was not a surgeon, he was an engineer. If he wanted to help her, he would bypass her brain. It would work, and it would be his legacy.

The human body carries a barely perceptible electric current within it. Fleischer's need to amplify and harness it was what led him to the vril. The girl could not carry a battery with her, nor could she stay plugged into a socket. But there was energy all around, electromagnetic waves filling the air, waiting to be harvested. The little generator he built could draw those waves in and direct them throughout the body as electrical energy. That was when he found the vril.

Somewhere, between its wild harvest from the living universe and its conversion into the frequencies of the living body, the energy became something else. It changed whoever it touched.

Despite his years of work, he had only implemented its use successfully in three subjects. First in himself. He trusted no one with it, not even that little girl. When he was done, his flesh was intertwined with miles of copper cable, sewn straight into the deep muscle tissue. Every instant with the vril racing through his nerves was agony, but it worked. His body moved and walked and danced without any input from his conscious mind.

The second subject was Nadine, the girl, his niece. When she had been hurt, oh, how his brother had cried. She would never walk again. Rolf had never asked him to fix her, but taking things apart and making them work again was his purpose. During his time with Department Three, he had created great weapons, and improved on many more. When he told the SS he needed Nadine, they brought her to him without question. He allowed Rolf to visit between procedures.

Nadine was strong. She endured his every upgrade with little complaint. The vril worked through her, but she hadn't the mass to support it for long. It burned what it possessed. She walked on her own, and danced with her father. Nadine and Rolf alike sobbed with each step, but their tears very different. She was strong, but she was tiny and the cost was great, and in the end the vril was stronger.

Her death did not stop his research. The progress he'd made, and his promises to injured officers of the Heer, and of the SS, secured him his funding, and his clinic. His tools were his own. Every scalpel, every soldering iron and set of pliers had its own weight and balance. He trusted no one else to open men and women like pamphlets.

SS mancatchers and the commandants of overcrowded camps provided further subjects for him. These individuals were weak, the chaff and the wan. The vril burned them all into husks. They were usually scared. One had been curious.

He found Merci curious as well. She was intrigued by him, and his work. At first he put it off as a tactic, a way to lower his defenses. He sewed the vril conduits into her legs, and she still offered observations. She had been a nurse during the last war, she understood the costs of his vision. When she healed, he allowed her to share his bed. Then he let her share his tools.

When they began cutting into his third success, it had been no different than the others. A young male with a lame leg. Besides that, he was hale, and defiant. He resisted the vril at first, but when he found he could curl his toes again, he relented. Fleischer and Merci wound conduit through the subject's body like the spool was endless. Everything about that subject was different than the rest. He would survive, he would take to the vril like a fish to water. Fleischer's excitement was palpable. He would harness this primordial force in a way that had never been done before.

Before the subject was sufficiently healed for a full-body conduction test, Fleischer had been summoned to Berlin. He was to dazzle the fools that held his purse-strings. That was when the Office struck. They stole the subject, they stole his lover, and they burned his clinic.

They ruined everything.

The Abwehr refused to rescue Merci. They had no interest in a French nurse. They refused to retrieve the subject. 'Science is replicable,' the Glaubensführer hissed. Her split, flaming death's head pin matched the wild fury in her glare. 'The vril, the All-Highest's blessing, is not to be trusted to whores and untermenchen,' she'd told him. 'Let the Office kill them.'

It took Fleischer six days to smuggle himself to London. Someone would recognize the future he sought to create: a future where everyone could trust in their own body. What better man to make his appeal to than a futurist in the employ of the very kidnappers he sought, and a cripple himself?

But Lander van den Berghe could not see past flags. He read Fleischer's research, absorbed his work. He learned about the precious vril and its miracles. The he called Fleischer a 'Nazi' and a 'murderer.' He refused to offer any aid. Fleischer would never see Merci or the subject again. Then he shot Fleischer in the stomach and called for his handlers.

Perhaps, Fleischer reasoned, he would find Merci and the subject himself. The Office had taken them. They could take him, too. His countrymen would be no help. They didn't care abut a French woman, genius with a knife or not, or a semi-comatose prisoner. He would have to do this himself.

Fleischer slumped, utterly drained. He felt every one of his years and scars, deeper even than the scalpel reached. It was too late to implement any other idea. They were already on the way.

One last hack brought up diesel soot that he spit on the blood-spattered floor. The wound in his abdomen was fully healed thanks to the vril. There was bullet inside him somewhere, but he would worry about that later.

The officials burst into Lander van den Berghe's workshop five minutes later. The carnage they found stopped them in the door. Some prayed, some vomited, some cried. One tried to shoot Fleischer in the head, but her sergeant stopped her. 'We're not like him,' the sergeant had said between sobs.

Fleischer was hooded and bound in chains. He was old, and empty, and they dragged down on him like gravity had increased tenfold. The officials yelled at him and beat him. They interrogated him for days. They denied him sleep and clothes. Their doctors ran tests and their mentalists played their tricks. They cried over their dead, short-sighted cripple. If they had been offered the exchange the Belgian had denied, they would have taken it a hundred times over.

He told them stories, nonsense and foolishness. When they grew sick of him, disgusted by him, they threw him into the back of a truck, then onto a plane, then down a pit.

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Copyright © 2023 Daniel Baldwin. All rights reserved.

Written and edited by Daniel Baldwin.