A Song Of Shadows Part 20

Louis sipped his wine. It was good, as was his blackened haddock. The killings, and the motivations behind them, did not trouble him on an emotional level, beyond the fact that they had put Parker back in hospital, if only for a couple of days. As a professional, though, they struck him as curious. He noticed that Walsh had gone quiet and was concentrating on his food. Perhaps it was the effort of eating all those ribs, or Walsh had decided that he had gotten all that might prove useful out of his dinner companions for now. In truth, Louis had not given him very much, yet had certainly held nothing back.

Parker should have been with them. The private detective had a way of making the kind of imaginative leaps that were beyond so many of his peers in law enforcement, and were certainly beyond Louis. He would have found the flaw in their reasoning, the diverging paths at which they had gone astray. After all, it was Parker, from his hospital bed, who had told Walsh about the mezuzah on Ruth Winter's door, and how that had initially caused him to speculate on a connection between Perlman and herself. It was also Parker who had set in motion the chain of events that led to Perlman's body being autopsied in the first place, and all of this while he was supposed to be recuperating from gunshot wounds.

Louis and Angel missed Parker's company. They had grown so used to being part of the investigator's existence, and the investigator being part of their own, that the months since his shooting seemed strangely empty, as though they were being held in stasis, waiting for Parker to return to them. All Louis could say for certain was that when he looked into Parker's eyes he saw a man in the process of reformation, and he had an image of a sword melting in a forge, there to be molded into a new instrument, although if that was to be a weapon remained to be established.

Suddenly Louis didn't want his fish, or his wine. He looked at Angel, and Angel looked back at him. His partner smiled, and had they not been in the company of Walsh, Louis might well have touched his hand.

Outside the night pressed itself enviously against the gla.s.s, seeking to break through and smother them all.

42.

At the Eastern Maine Medical Center in Bangor, Charlie Parker stared out at that same darkness and saw his reflection floating in its midst, as though he himself were lost in a void. Below him lay the city, and traffic, and people, but he took in none of it. In his mind he walked by the sh.o.r.e of a lake, a child holding his hand, his dead wife shadowing them, whispering warnings to him while she hid herself from her G.o.d.

A nurse entered his room, pulling him back to reality. He had moved from his bed and was lying semi-rec.u.mbent on an adjustable armchair, his feet outstretched. Sitting upright was uncomfortable for him, but standing or lying caused him little trouble. The nurse adjusted his cushions he hid the pain that it caused him behind a wince disguised as a smile and inquired if he needed anything. He wanted nothing but to be left alone, but thanked her and asked if she could pour him some water from the pitcher on the bedside table. He didn't want to give her any cause to be concerned about him because of silence or withdrawal. He had been told that he might be able to leave in the morning once the surgeon had given him the all clear, and he planned to let nothing get in the way of that likelihood. (The smartest move he'd ever made was not allowing his health insurance to lapse, otherwise he'd have been living out of his car. His policy had even covered his therapy at Brook House, once they'd moderated their rate. That said, he still made sure that any doctor who even looked in his direction did so as part of his coverage.) The nurse gave him the water, and he sipped it for appearance's sake before she left.

He was no longer receiving fluids intravenously, but the needle remained inserted in the back of his hand. He disliked the feel and the sight of it. He wanted it gone. It bothered him more than the st.i.tches in his side from the keyhole surgery, where they'd gone in to repair the damage caused by the blow he had received from the man who called himself Earl Steiger. He had been fortunate, the surgeon told him, once he'd come out of the anesthetic: had Steiger gone at him with a vengeance, and delivered some more punches or kicks, he might well have killed him. It hadn't seemed worth pointing out to the surgeon that Steiger had only stopped kicking him because a bullet required less effort, so the end result would have been the same. Anyway, the fact that Cory Bloom remained in the center's Intensive Care Unit following surgery to remove the bullet that had punctured one of her lungs said everything about Earl Steiger's ultimate intentions.

Parker had been thinking about Steiger a lot, but not in the way that the counseling psychologist might have wished. She had paid a brief visit earlier that day, offering her services. She was young and genuine, and so far out of her depth with him that, even had he felt the urge to open up to her, he would have stopped himself for fear of frightening her out of her chosen profession.

The fact that he had been under Steiger's gun didn't register with Parker. He had been under guns before, and learned that there were only two possible outcomes: either the gun did not fire, leaving all relatively well, or the gun fired, leading to death in which case he would know nothing more or injury. He had survived the latter, and he knew that he could take the pain. It was terrible, but it had not killed him.

No, what he kept coming back to was the look of surprise on Steiger's face as the dune collapsed beneath him: shock at the disappearance of the ground from under his feet, but also a kind of astonishment that Death could have found time in his busy schedule to come calling at last, and in such a form.

And then, beyond Steiger and his dying, there was Sam, and her demeanor as the man who had been threatening her father vanished in a flood of white sand: her implacable fury, and the depth of her concentration, evidence of the exertion of a great effort of will. In that moment she was both his daughter and something else, something beyond reckoning. He did not want to say it. He did not want to speak it aloud. But he still heard his own voice say the words as he stared into the dark, conversing with the ghost of himself that hung suspended in the blackness.

She did it. My daughter willed him dead, and he died.

My daughter. What is my daughter?

43.

They were almost done. Louis tried to ignore the fact that Angel was having coffee with his wine, although the flicker of annoyance that crossed his face every time Angel followed a sip of one with the other gave him away. Walsh, having reached his limit on beer, was sticking to water.

As the meal concluded, the conversation moved on to other subjects: Parker, briefly; Cory Bloom's condition; and, once Walsh realized that they weren't trying to score points off either him or the Maine State Police, Oran Wilde.

'So you're looking for an accomplice?' asked Angel.

'Like you said earlier, he's d.a.m.n bright for a teenager. Somebody has to be hiding him.'

'Unless he didn't do it,' said Louis, 'and someone else killed his family.'

'But then why spare Oran?'

'Maybe he didn't.'

'"He"?'

'Does it look like the work of a woman to you?'

'Gunshots? Fire? No, it doesn't. We're keeping an open mind mainly because we don't have a whole lot of choice but Oran doing the killings still looks like the most obvious solution. It's like that Occam's razor business: the simplest solution is usually the right one.'

'Except Occam never wrote that,' said Louis.

'Didn't he?' said Walsh. 'Next you'll be telling me that he didn't even own a razor.'

'He was a monk, and they had to shave their heads, so he probably did or else he borrowed one,' said Louis. 'That's not the point. The point is that Occam didn't think that the simplest solution was usually right. What he wrote was that "plurality must never be posited without necessity", and only in a limited context. He wasn't thinking of homicide investigations, or not that anyone can tell. Neither was he suggesting that the simpler a solution, the better.'

'Is he always like this?' Walsh asked Angel.

'Only with wine,' said Angel. 'Actually, strike that: yes, he is always like this. He does still surprise me with his knowledge, though, even after all these years.'

Louis let them talk. He was gifted with considerable patience. He could not have remained with Angel otherwise. When they had finished amusing themselves, he continued speaking as though they were not present, and he was working out the solution to a problem aloud, but alone.

'Oran Wilde's family dies one day after the body of Bruno Perlman washes up at Boreas,' he said. 'There is a certain type of man a certain type of criminal who might take the view that the way to distract attention from one violent crime is to commit another, especially in an area, or a state, where violent crime is untypical. It won't work in Detroit or Oakland or Memphis, not in the same way. In those cities, it would be a question of hiding one body among others. In Maine, it would be a matter of stretching resources, a sleight of hand, forcing the authorities to concentrate on one action or the other, but not both at the same time.'

'You're suggesting a connection between the Wilde family and what happened in Boreas? On what evidence?'

'None but my own impressions. If I were ruthless enough' Louis let the conditional clause hang for a moment, as much to give himself time to consider its implications as his listeners 'and the stakes were sufficiently high, then I might consider it worth my while to kill many to draw attention from one. It would be like starting a fire in one corner of a room to disguise the fact that you'd lit a match in another.'

'I don't buy it,' said Walsh.

'Of course you don't,' said Louis. 'You just misquoted William of Occam. A man clever enough to do this would know that an overworked police force, even with the help of outside agencies, would be inclined to follow the straightest path, the most obvious solution. He's adding variables in the knowledge that you'll dismiss them, or most of them. Ultimately, it's a smoke screen: the solution is simple, but not as simple as you've made it out to be. There is no connection between the Wildes and Boreas, but that's the connection.'

'You'd never make a cop,' said Walsh. 'You're too creative.'

'd.a.m.n,' said Louis. 'And I was banking on that thirty-five grand starting salary to buy my yacht.'

'What about the message that Oran Wilde left?'

'From what I read, he didn't leave a message. The message was sent later. And what did it say: "I hated my family and burned our house down, but I'm misunderstood" or some s.h.i.t like that? What the f.u.c.k kind of kid kills his family, then takes the time to sit down a day or two later and write a message to his buddy that basically says nothing at all, that doesn't even ask for help?'

'That wasn't really the first message,' said Walsh, 'but I take the point. Yeah, the texts we've picked up are odd. Again, could be the accomplice. Suppose I accept the idea of complications and variables. The messages, the dead homeless guy, they're just muddying the waters. But I have no reason to buy your central thesis about a link between Oran Wilde and Boreas.'

'True,' said Louis. 'I was just thinking aloud.'

'And Earl Steiger couldn't have killed the Wildes, the Tedescos, Perlman, and Ruth Winter. That's just not possible.'

'No, it's not. You're back to an accomplice, but maybe just not the kind you thought.'

Walsh wanted to go home, in part because his wife would be in bed by the time he got back, and he liked slipping under the sheets when she was already there, to feel her move as she woke to his presence, to return her goodnight kiss, and hear her sigh contentedly as she returned to sleep, happy that her husband had come back to her safe and sound. Such small pleasures made life worth living. But he was also looking forward to the journey, because he did a lot of his best thinking when he was driving alone, and Louis had given him much to think about.

Walsh called for the check. When it eventually arrived, it remained in the center of the table, untouched and unwanted.

'Hey, man,' Angel said to Walsh, 'why don't you pick that up and see what it is?'

Walsh reluctantly reached for his wallet.

'I figured you'd stiff me.'

'And after all we've done for you,' said Angel.

'Yeah, yeah.'

Walsh placed his credit card over the check, and the waitress whisked both away.

'One final question,' said Walsh. 'How does a man who looks like Steiger manage to stay under the radar for so long?'

'If you look strange or different, you get pretty good at hiding yourself,' said Louis. 'You could choose to remain in sight, if you're brave enough, but that wouldn't work for a killer like Steiger. He needed the shadows. And he had help.'

'This Cambion.'

'Cambion knows how to hide.'

Walsh's credit card was returned. He added a good tip. He wasn't cheap.

'Either of you ever hear of a man named Francis Galton?' he asked, as he reached for his coat.

Both Louis and Angel took their time answering. With Louis in particular, it was a matter of flicking through the Rolodex in his head just to make sure that, at some point in the past, he hadn't killed someone named Francis Galton.

'Not that I can recall,' he said at last. Angel concurred.

'He was a founder of the science of eugenics you know, improving the human race through selective reproduction, that kind of thing.'

'A n.a.z.i?' said Angel.

'No, he was pre-n.a.z.i: late nineteenth century, I think. He thought you could identify character types through their features, so he set about photographing all kinds of people, including criminals. I think he was mostly interested in murderers. He'd line up the portraits, and expose each one to a photographic plate for a fraction of the time usually required for a full exposure so that he had a kind of composite, an average, on a single frame you know, faces superimposed over one another.'

'Why?' asked Angel.

'He was trying to find a common feature in their appearance: the essence of their criminality of their evil, if you like. He wanted to believe that he could isolate it, that men who had committed terrible crimes might show some evidence of it on their faces. That way, you'd be able to tell who was a criminal just by looking at him. All he ended up with, though, was a series of distortions, and a kind of generalized degradation. But the photographs are interesting. Unsettling. I've been trying to figure out all evening why, when I looked at Steiger, there was something familiar about him. I just now remembered what it was: his face reminds me of one of Galton's composites, as if what was wrong with him inside had seeped through his pores and caused his skull to mutate.'

'Your job would be a whole lot easier if you could tell the bad folk by the way they looked,' said Angel. 'Or you could just end up putting behind bars a whole lot of ugly people who'd never done anyone any harm, and leave a bunch of beautiful people with dead souls free to walk the streets.'

They stood to leave.

'Galton had it all wrong,' said Walsh. 'The worst of them, the really foul ones, they hide their badness deep inside. They look just like average Joes and Janes, but underneath they're rotten right down to the core, and we don't find out about them until it's too late.'

They left the restaurant and walked together to their vehicles.

'You know, Walsh, you're all right,' said Angel. 'For a cop.'

'Likewise,' said Walsh. 'For whatever it is you are.'

Louis simply nodded. None of them shook hands.

'Don't forget what I said about burning down towns,' said Walsh. 'You keep that s.h.i.t for south of the Mason-Dixon.'

He watched them head back to Portland. Tomorrow, he knew, they would return to Bangor to pick up Parker. He wished them luck. He wished them all luck.

Walsh drove home, the car silent, casting the miles behind him like discarded paper, shifting pieces of information in his mind, trying to make connections. When he got back to his house he removed his shoes on the doorstep, used the downstairs bathroom, undressed in the hall, and slipped between the sheets beside his sleeping wife. He felt her stir. Half-awake, she reached for him. He accepted her kiss, and returned it. He listened for that sigh, heard it with satisfaction, and watched her curl up like a cat. He turned over, thought that he would not sleep, but when he opened his eyes his wife was gone, and he heard the sound of the radio from below, and the clattering of breakfast dishes, and the voices of his children.

Enough, he thought. This is enough, and more.

44.

Marcus Baulman attended the interrogation they called it an 'interview', but Baulman knew better at the Office of the United States Attorney, District of Maine, on Harlow Street in Bangor without a lawyer in attendance. The formal letter had arrived the day after Marie Demers's visit to his house, informing him of possible irregularities relating to his admission to the United States under the Displaced Persons Act of 1948, and the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1952. The letter noted that he could bring legal counsel with him, should he choose to do so.

Baulman had thought hard about the approach he should take, and decided that an innocent man, an old German American who had lived a blameless life, would not arrive with a lawyer in tow. He dressed in his best suit, and took his funeral shoes from their box in his closet, dusting them lightly with a cloth before putting them on. He looked at himself in the mirror and saw, beneath the wrinkles and liver spots, and the white of his spa.r.s.e beard and hair, the specter of the man he used to be.

Baulman was frightened, but no more than anyone who was forced unwillingly into contact with the inst.i.tutions of law and justice. He was not about to panic. It was not in his nature. He wished that his wife were still with him, for he had never been ashamed to rely on her for comfort and rea.s.surance. On another level, though, he was glad that she had predeceased him. Kathryn had, in her way, been a simple woman: she loved her husband, and trusted him. He looked after the bills, the bank accounts, the mortgage, the purchase of cars, the planning of vacations, and she was happy to let him do so. She, in turn, took care of him. It was an old-fashioned relationship, but what was bad about that? He had never cheated on her, and was certain that she had never cheated on him. They had enjoyed more than fifty years together before she pa.s.sed away in her sleep, and the only shadow on their marriage was the absence of children. Perhaps that, too, might now be seen as a blessing, just like Kathryn's absence from his life at this juncture. The loss of her had caused him so much pain, and he still lived with it every day, but at least it had spared her the hurt and confusion of all this. He would have denied everything, of course, and she would have believed him because she wanted to, and because her love for him was predicated on her faith in his honesty, but some doubt would surely have taken seed and prospered like a weed in a disused corner of her mind.

Marie Demers was waiting for him in the conference room with the historian, Toller, along with a third man whose purpose and affiliation they did not explain, merely referring to him as a 'colleague', an Agent Ross. Baulman took an instant dislike to Ross. He had the eyes of one who was never disappointed because his expectations of humanity were too low to allow for it. They thanked him for coming. Baulman asked if he was under arrest. They told him that he was not, that this was a civil matter. They emphasized that point. They simply wanted to talk, they said, but he knew that, just like in the movies, anything he said could be used in evidence against him. They didn't warn him of this because they didn't have to. He wondered how they could think him such an old fool. Then he remembered that what they believed they were seeing was not Marcus Baulman, a retired bus driver, but Reynard Kraus, a war criminal.

Yet he had become adept at playing Baulman, and was not about to falter now. He had been Baulman for longer than he had been Kraus. In that sense, the former was more real than the latter, and when he protested his innocence he spoke with conviction, for it was Marcus Baulman speaking.

They went over some of the same territory as before, and he gave them the same denials. Then they moved on to specific allegations, including claims that, as Reynard Kraus, he had trained at the SS-Junkerschule Bad Tolz; that he had spent time at the SS Race and Resettlement Main Office in Posen before moving to the RSHA; that he had served as a 'medical attendant' for one month at Auschwitz, following which he had been sent to Lubsko Experimentallkolonie, where he remained until the Allied advance forced the closure and liquidation of the camp. He was, they told him, not Marcus Baulman, who they now believed had been executed by the SS for desertion near the Dukla Pa.s.s on the Slovak-Polish border in September 1944, his death quietly concealed on orders from Berlin, where contingency plans were already being put in place to a.s.semble new ident.i.ties in the likely event of the collapse of the Reich.

Baulman asked, as before, where they had received such false information, and they spoke only of sources and doc.u.mentary irregularities, and as he listened he smelled smoke without the heat of fire. It could yet bloom into flame, but if they had solid evidence then surely they would have confronted him with it. This was ein Angelausflug a fishing trip. Baulman supposed that, in the past, some of their targets had confessed quickly, admitting their guilt. He was not about to join their number.

Then, just as he was allowing himself to relax a little, they sprang the next question on him.

'Have you ever heard of a man named Bruno Perlman, Mr Baulman?'

Perlman, Perlman. He thought. Should he deny it outright? No, there was another way.

'Yes,' he said, 'I think I have.'

He watched them all lean forward slightly, even the one called Ross, and he had to fight back a smile. It was as though he had caught their mouths with hooks. They were not the only anglers here.

'I read that name in the newspaper,' he said. 'He was the man who was found drowned at Boreas.'