“I don’t know,” she said. “Those pictures today… you think you can prepare yourself, but you can’t. You think you’ve seen everything, but you haven’t. It’s like there were different deaths. My pastor friend was in pain, too, horrible pain, but he smiled. There were no smiles here, just the horrific faces of suffering, like a frieze of horrible medieval pictures of Christ, made to strike terror into the viewer. A warning. Like he’s trying to warn us away from life, as medieval prelates were. And he almost succeeds.”
“I don’t know,” Hjelm tried. “I don’t really see a message in what he does. I think looking at those bodies is more like being confronted with waste products, remainders, industrial waste, if you know what I mean. It feels like the mechanical, industrial deaths of Auschwitz. If anything can ever feel like that…”
Now she looked into his eyes. She had gotten what she needed. There and then, in her deep, distressed, empty eyes, he saw the spark ignite again. The fabulous inexhaustibility of her eyes.
He wondered what she saw in his face. A clown who runs around trying to hide his erection? He hoped there was a trace of something more.
“Maybe they’re not incompatible,” she said, and her newfound energy didn’t erase her thoughtful tone. “Expressing contempt for life and clinical perfection in one and the same action. It is one and the same action, after all.”
They sank into pondering. The professional and the private blended uncontrollably into each other. Nothing in this life was isolated.
He sensed that it was his turn. He took her hand again.
She didn’t resist.
“Was what we had before just sex?” he asked without quavering. “Is there such a thing as ‘just sex’?”
She smiled a bit grimly and kept hold of his hand.
“There probably isn’t,” she said. “And in any case, what we had wasn’t that. It was-confusing. Too confusing. I had just gotten out of a hellish relationship with a man who raped me without understanding that that’s what he was doing. He was a policeman, you know that much, and then I ended up with another policeman who was the complete opposite. Hard-boiled and full of bright ideas as a cop, tender and awkward privately. The pictures got all mixed up. I had to get away from it. You fled back into the bosom of your family. I didn’t have anything like that, so I fled in my own way.”
“In one way, life is easier than ever,” said Paul. “In another, it’s harder.”
She looked into his eyes. “How do you mean?”
“I don’t really know. I have this feeling that the walls are closing in around us. We’ve cracked open the door, but now it’s being closed again. And the walls are beginning to creep in.” He was searching for words, but it was going slowly. He was trying to formulate things he had never formulated before. “I don’t know if it’s comprehensible.”
“I think it is,” she said. “You actually have changed.”
“A little bit, maybe,” he said, and paused. “Just a little on the surface, but it has to start somewhere. Our inherited patterns of habit break us down before we even get a chance to start living. I haven’t gone through any revolutionary outer changes, as you have; it’s actually been a pretty uneventful year. But a few new possibilities have opened up.”
She nodded. The conversation died away but seemed to be continuing inside them. Their eyes drifted away into nothing. Finally she said, “I’m starting to understand how important it is that we catch him.”
He nodded. He knew what she meant.
They left the restaurant and walked hand in hand up the stairs. They stopped outside his room.
“What should we say?” she said. “Seven?”
He sighed and smiled. “Okay, breakfast at seven o’clock.”
“I’ll knock on your door. Try not to be in the shower.”
He chuckled. She gave him a kiss on the cheek and went to her room. He remained standing in the corridor for a few minutes.
24
They came, they saw, they conquered-their jet lag. But hardly anything else. Their focus narrowed surprisingly, cutting out all of New York, targeted at two computers on a desk.
Sure enough, there was a gigantic amount of material, thousands of pages with impressive detail that extended to ten-page interviews with truly unimportant people, like those who had found bodies and neighbors of neighbors; pedantically scientific comparisons with earlier and contemporary serial killers; immensely elaborate maps of the crime scenes, sociopolitical analyses by university professors, autopsy reports that made note of the victims’ incipient gum problems and developing kidney stones, extremely carefully executed crime-scene investigations, and Ray Larner’s laboriously compiled description of Commando Cool’s actions in the Southeast Asian jungles.
It probably wasn’t the right place to start, but Hjelm picked the last item. If Larner had gotten hold of the truth, which was in no way certain, President Nixon had created Commando Cool by direct order, after he received information about the steadfastness of the NLF soldiers who had been captured in the field; they tended to die before they had time to talk. What was needed was a small, secret, active-service, mobile group of torturers with combat experience, even if the word torturer was, of course, never mentioned. The task of creating it went to military counterintelligence-and here Larner had placed quite a few question marks-which collected eight top men, each one younger than the last, and forced the operation into existence. It was in constant use during the final stages of the war. Where the pincers came from was uncertain, and Hjelm read “CIA” between Larner’s lines.
He opened the top-secret file about the pincers. There they were, in black and white: to the left a photograph of Commando Cool’s vocal cord pincers; to the right a sketched reconstruction of K’s pincers. Their function was the same in principle, but the differences were striking. K’s pincers were of an advanced, refined design, which seemed to have undergone some sort of industrial process of improvement. Scrupulous descriptions of their function followed: how the microwires moved through the tube with the help of miniature wheels, penetrated the throat, and fastened themselves around the vocal cords with small barbs, putting the vocal cords out of commission. A slight turn of one of the two small wheels then made it possible for whispers to force their way out. When they had forced their way out, all one had to do was turn the wheel again and end the job, in complete silence. The version on the right, K’s, was designed so that it was easier to make a puncture correctly. But Commando Cool had never used it during the war; it kept using the older model to the very end. The differences between the sets of pincers meant two things: one, that it was not at all certain that K was someone from Commando Cool; and two, that the horrible invention from the Vietnam War had been further developed. Why? And by whom? There were no hypotheses in Larner’s report.
After this came the second pincers, the pincers of pure torture, the one that twisted and pried at the cluster of nerves in the neck. This one had changed, too; someone had located new points on the nerves that were capable of increasing the pain even more, thus making the pincers even more effective. Here, too, the file provided a scrupulous description of the exact progression of pain, how it shot down to the back and shoulders and then up into the brain itself, resulting in explosive attacks.
The point was that the same pincers had been used in the first and second waves; they weren’t just identical models-certain characteristics of the wound formation indicated that the exact same pincers were used, and this was invoked as justification for saying that the perpetrator was the same. K.
If the pincers were the result of an industrial improvement process, then many people must have been involved in the task of development, whether it was military counterintelligence or the CIA or something else. But at this very point, where a considerable number of further suspects could have been sifted out, Larner had hit a wall of silence. Had he and the hacker, Andrews, invented Balls because he suspected that there actually was a Balls, a secret commander who would have been promoted all the way up into the Pentagon to effectively choke off all access to information? How had Larner obtained the information about the members of Commando Cool when he hadn’t gotten anything else?