Part 14 (2/2)
It might indeed. Mud, rain, cold. Why not wheel the lady off to a nice warm room, light a cosy fire, open a bottle of amontillado? Romance, alas, was dead.
”And the third possibility?” he asked. Romance was dead: Really, under the circ.u.mstances, that was quite good.
”Guilt, Mr. Wilde.”
”Guilt?”
”Yes. Perhaps at some level this being wanted to be discovered, wanted to be punished. Perhaps it knew that what it did was wrong, and it wanted to be stopped. And perhaps this is why it attacked that night.”
”Why wouldn't it simply stop, then, on its own?”
”Perhaps it could not. Perhaps, as I said before, the attacks came out of a kind of compulsion.”
”So,” Oscar said. ”On the one hand, you maintain, it wanted to commit these attacks. On the other, it wanted to stop committing them. Sounds a fairly muddled sort of being, doesn't it?”
”But Mr. Wilde, we are speaking here in metaphors. There was in actuality no creature, no being. There was finally only the mind, the soul, of the corporal. It was divided, yes? Bifurcated. Very muddled, in fact.”
Von Hesse sipped at his coffee. ”The human mind is a great mystery, yes? As mysterious finally as the universe with all its stars and its planets. Perhaps in the distant future, perhaps in a hundred years, we will better understand how it operates, its twists and its turns and its hidden secrets. But I believe this: I believe that at bottom, we are all good. We are all tiny pieces of the infinite, and so we are all connected, each of us, to all the others, and to everything in creation. I believe that deep within us, below the masks we have acquired in our individual lives, we all somehow know this. And I believe that we know that we cannot do violence to another without doing violence to ourselves. The other is ourself. And it is from this knowledge, I believe, that the corporal's guilt arose.”
”All right, look,” said Oscar, ”even supposing that you're right, you can't be suggesting we just ignore the man who's been killing the prost.i.tutes, in the hope that somehow he'll discover a sense of guilt?”
Von Hesse shook his head. ”No, no, Mr. Wilde, I suggest no such thing. I merely explain why I thought it possible that one of us could be the killer, without himself being aware of it. It was this you asked me, yes?”
”And you really believe that one of us could secretly be a madman?”
Von Hesse frowned, puzzled. ”Did I not just say so?”
Oscar dropped the cigarette to the floor, stepped on it. ”You can accept the idea that one of us, someone you thought you knew, has been killing prost.i.tutes? Without even being aware of it?”
”Accept, yes, of course. What choice have I? It seems to me at least possible.”
”It seems to me distasteful.”
”Murder is always distasteful, Mr. Wilde. Would you find it any less so, if one of us were committing the murders deliberately? Consciously? This might also be possible, of course.”
”Well, at least in that case the murderer might be prevailed upon to stop.”
”How would one do so? He has already killed four times. Do you believe that you might make him stop simply by asking him? Even if you knew whom to ask?”
”But we still can't say with any certainty that the murderer is one of us.”
”Can you produce a more persuasive explanation than Mr. Grigsby's?”
”Grigsby.” Oscar frowned, irritated. ”He's not going to give way on this. He'll be underfoot forever, interfering with the tour.” Playing Javert to Oscar's Jean Valjean. Making it impossible to arrange future trysts with Elizabeth McCourt Doe.
”But it is his job to determine guilt.”
”I suspect that he'd be happy merely to a.s.sign it. To me, for example.”
”You feel that he is biased against you?”
”I feel that we got along less than swimmingly.”
Von Hesse frowned thoughtfully. After a moment he said, ”You are familiar with Frederick the Great?”
Oscar looked at him, smiled. ”Not intimately, I confess.”
”A great tactician and strategist. Somewhere in his Military Instruction he says, 'It is an axiom of war to secure your own flanks and rear, and endeavor to turn those of the enemy.'”
”Grigsby being the enemy?”
”No, Mr. Wilde. Your enemy is this killer. It is his flanks you must endeavor to turn.”
”By which you mean ...?”
”I mean that perhaps you should attempt to discover, yourself, who he is.”
”OH YEAH?” SAID O'CONNER. ”What kind of a deal?”
”The first part,” Grigsby said, ”is you forget you're a reporter until I nab this sonovab.i.t.c.h.”
O'Conner grinned. ”I guess,” he said, ”you being stuck out here in the sticks, you don't know much about real reporters, Marshal. We've got printer's ink in our blood. Even if we wanted to, we couldn't stop doing what we do.”
Printer's ink wasn't the only thing in O'Conner's blood. During the twenty minutes that Grigsby had been in the small, spare room, the reporter had downed two or three ounces of bourbon. The sleeves of his pale yellow s.h.i.+rt folded back, his spine slumped against the headboard, he drank the liquor, straight, from the water gla.s.s he held atop his small round belly. While Grigsby sat hunched in the hard wooden chair, O'Conner lazed with his legs comfortably crossed, like a potentate's, along the bedspread. His feet were naked, bony ankles poking out below the bottoms of his brown trousers. The soles of his feet were gray.
Grigsby didn't have any reason at all to like the man-and didn't expect to find one, even if O'Conner bothered to offer Grigsby a drink. Something that, so far, he hadn't done.
”The second part,” said Grigsby, ”is that later, after I get the b.a.s.t.a.r.d, you get the story exclusive. All the facts, straight from the horse's mouth.”
O'Conner shrugged. ”That's if you get the guy.” He didn't seem too taken by the possibility. ”And meanwhile, the public's being deprived of its right to know. You haven't read the United States Const.i.tution, I guess. A free press, it says. And as long as the public's got the money to pay for it”-he grinned and took another sip of bourbon-”they get themselves a free press.”
Grigsby thought (not for the first time) that one of the good things about an a.s.shole-probably the only good thing about an a.s.shole-was that usually he identified himself as an a.s.shole pretty quick.
”You write about these killings now,” Grigsby said, ”and this tour of Wilde's is gonna get canceled. The sonovab.i.t.c.h who killed those hookers is gonna take off. And then you and the public don't get any story at all.”
O'Conner shrugged again. ”Maybe. But before that happens, I'll sell a s.h.i.+tload of newspapers. Look, Marshal, this is a h.e.l.l of a story. s.e.x, murder, mutilation-Jesus, the b.o.o.bs'll eat that up with a spoon. 'Cross-Country Trail of Carnage'...” Fingers spread wide, he moved his hand in a broad swath through the air. He grinned at Grigsby. ”How's that for a headline?”
”The third part,” said Grigsby, ”is that you get to keep lyin' around your hotel room all day, drinkin' whiskey and makin' up headlines.”
O'Conner blinked, frowned. ”Yeah? As opposed to what?”
”As opposed to lyin' in a cell at the federal lockup. We don't serve no liquor there. Just broth and hardtack. On Sundays, you get chicken stew. Some of the boys, after a while, they take a real fancy to the chicken stew.”
O'Conner laughed-a laugh that sounded to Grigsby a bit hollow. ”You're crazy, Marshal. You can't arrest me. For what?”
”Suspicion of murder.”
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