“I wrote an essay on Thor Heyerdahl as an anthropological entrepreneur when I was in university.”
“How very cynical. You were ahead of your time.”
“Yeah, actually I wrote it in high school. ‘ Kon Tiki: Boys at Sea.’ ‘ Aku Aku: Boys Still at Sea.’ ‘Indiana Jones: An Autobiography.’ Whatever. Got an ‘A.’ Or should have.”
“You ever notice how people ask about your travels so they can talk about themselves?”
“Yes, I’ve noticed that.”
They sipped their coffees, each looking over the rims at the other. Miranda smiled, inhaled coffee, and, as she choked, slammed down her cup on the table. Morgan grimaced in sympathy. Her eyes watered, she tried to speak, she waved her hand to reassure witnesses that she was not about to expire. Everyone but Morgan looked away.
“Well then,” he said. “Given this opportunity to say a few words, let me fill in possible gaps in your memory of Heyerdahl. Rapa Nui is about three thousand kilometres off South America, another three thousand from Tahiti. There are almost nine hundred moai — that’s what the statues are called — and about three times that many people.
“Nine hundred,” she mouthed in astonishment.
“Yeah, from three feet to sixty feet tall, not all completed. Every one is unique, like a signature — you know, the same and yet each version is different. They were created over an eight-hundred-year period.”
“Sixty feet?”
“That one’s still in the quarry at Rano Raraku. I spent a lot of time out there.”
He talked on and on, and Miranda was spellbound. Eventually, it was Morgan who exclaimed, “It’s time we get back to work.”
“I was working while you were away, you know. The world didn’t hold its breath in your absence. Things happened.”
“What?”
“Not much. Do you want a ride home? Maybe you should run up and let the superintendent know you’re back.”
“Is he still living there?”
“Just about. I think he’s taken a room on St. George. It’s a negotiating strategy. She threw him out, you know. The rumour is he was not having an affair.”
“No!”
“Apparently she got tired of buying the toilet paper and pepper.”
“Of course.”
“That’s my theory: if you don’t keep track of the toilet paper and pepper, you’re not sharing responsibilities, you’re just helping out.”
“I manage to run out of both on a regular basis.”
“Exactly. And she was so busy being a lawyer, a wife, a housekeeper, and society matron, and a mother, neither of them noticed he was mostly just being a cop.”
“You know all this, because…?”
“A friend of a friend has an informant who works out at her gym.”
“Ah,” he said. He forgot to tell her about Rongorongo for sale in the marketplace. He would; she’d ask. A written language no one could read; she was executor of her assailant’s estate and he had owned an incised tablet the size of a paddle blade filled with indecipherable glyphs. It was worth a small fortune, certainly more than her vintage Jaguar. Maybe she wouldn’t ask; maybe she would assume Morgan would tell her anything new he might have learned, if he had learned anything new. They both knew he couldn’t resist.
Without asking, Morgan ambled over to the counter and ordered two more cappuccinos. Miranda followed him with her eyes, sure other women were doing the same. There was something about the way he moved — a shambling self-assurance — the way his clothes looked worn in and not worn out, the crooked smile, the way he combined intensity with nonchalance.
She looked around the Starbucks interior. There were five other women; several of them, oddly enough, were looking at her. She was glad he was home.
After they checked in with Alex Rufalo, she drove him home. When he emerged from the bathroom, clean-shaven, hair combed, wrapped in a towel, he appeared almost normal. By the time he descended from the loft after dressing, he already seemed slightly unkempt; his hair looked windblown, although God knows there wasn’t much air moving through his apartment, and his clothes, while clean, were already rumpled. All signs of exhaustion had left his face; he looked refreshed and relaxed. He sat on the blue sofa since she was comfortably ensconced in his favourite armchair
“I suppose you hung out with the police down there.”
“Carabineros. Isla de Pascua Carabineros. I met a guy called Te Ave Teao, trained in Chile but born and raised on the island. There’s no crime in Rapa Nui — nothing serious. Mostly, I kept to myself. What’s happening with our major case? I’m assuming it’s still our major case.”
“Can’t tie the victims to each other or connect either of them to the house. A lot of dead ends, so to speak. I think we’re dealing with murder for amusement — the arbitrary indulgence of an inspired psychopath.”
She was aware she was echoing a conversation she had had with Rachel. This made her wonder how much her intimacy with the young woman had been to compensate for Morgan’s absence. Perhaps that explains why we never became lovers, she thought.
“There’s no use looking for motive, then,” Morgan was saying. “Method we know. Opportunity was at the killer’s convenience. So we focus on what?”
“The entertainment factor. I know it’s grotesque, but maybe our only hope is to interpret the crime as a creative event. Morgan, we have to shift from motive to intent. The ring and the cross are no longer clues to what happened; the hidden crypt is no longer evidentiary; the colonial clothes, the mummification, the eternal embrace, these aren’t factors that will help us to explain the murder itself. Everything is turned around. Don’t you see?”
“Not yet, but I’m trying.”
“Clues and evidence won’t lead to the killer directly, since they were arranged with pathological intention to achieve an aesthetic effect.”
“All art is pathological.”
“Now that is profound.”
“But true. The artist plays life against death without a twinge of conscience. Suffering, brutality, sadness — they’re just the raw materials.”
“Joy, triumph, ecstasy — they’re raw materials, too. ‘Inferno’ is only one part of the Divine Comedy, Morgan. That’s why it’s divine!”
“What about Freud?”
“What about Freud?” she retorted — but she already knew where he was going. It was good to have Morgan back in the game.
“There’s a disjunct between the signifiers and the signified — ”
“You’re switching discourses, Morgan!”
“No, I’m piggybacking Freud on Saussure. We’re trying to make a story out of signs that make no sense — we should forget the story and look for the author embedded in the mystery itself.”
“Yes,” she said. Morgan’s back.
“There’s a subtle distinction, but incredibly important. We can’t explain the psychopath’s madness by interpretation, but we can find him there, hidden among symbols and artifice, expressing his madness. It could be Freud: about issues of love and sexuality. It could be Aristotle: about hubris and achieving catharsis. It could be Beckett — ”
“That’s what I said, Beckett.”
“A story about nothing but itself.”
“So we all become characters in search of an author. Holy Pirandello, Batman! It’s a challenge. When you’re inside the play, he gets to be God.”
“You said what about Beckett, to who?”
“To whom! To Rachel Naismith, my new best friend.”
“You are a fickle woman.”
Morgan got up from the sofa and moved around the room. Lack of sleep made him restless but he felt exhilarated to be working again.
“We have a cold-blooded killer with talent,” he said. “Do we have a pattern? If this is his masterwork, did he serve an apprenticeship? With whom? More to the point, on whom? If this is the first display of his deviant aptitude, I have the distinct and uneasy feeling it will not be his last.”
“That’s just what I’m afraid of, Morgan. Success spawning success. There’s no precedent — nothing like it at all in the States, or here. Nothing with comparable flair, or the same intellectual self-consciousness.”