Mr. Kindt said that although his general state of health was catastrophic and needed constant surveillance, there had been some slight holdover from his younger days.
When you were a champion swimmer.
I used to slice the water like a serrated spoon.
Is there anything else?
I’m not following you, dear boy.
I don’t know. Friends tell each other things.
Like what?
Like who they are.
But you already know.
I’d love to hear it again.
I am Aris Kindt. I am a businessman. I am Dutch though it has been many years since I have visited those flat lands. I have lived in the city almost longer than I can remember. I keep interesting company. I am old and have health issues. My passions vary. I love art. I love a good bit of fish. I am not against meat. And I am not against helping young ne’er-do-wells who have lost their way and might otherwise end up in the proverbial ditch.
He crossed his arms and leaned back in his chair.
I’m sorry for that last bit — that was unnecessary, he said.
I deserved it, I said. You’ve been very generous. I think it’s just this headache. And all this talk about murder.
Drink some more tea. I’m sure the aspirin will begin doing its job any minute. Aspirin is a wonderful drug. We tend to forget just how effective it is.
I took another drink.
Mr. Kindt apologized again for his comment. I told him again that it was all right, that the tone of my voice had risen without my being aware of it and that I had probably sounded shrill. Mr. Kindt said that I hadn’t sounded shrill, only a touch insistent, and he had always had a hard time with insistence, although he both appreciated and respected it and possessed more than a drop of it himself. It was only natural that I would have questions.
In fact, ask me another question, he said. I shouldn’t have cut you off.
You’re sure?
He nodded.
On the same subject?
Of course.
I thought for a minute.
O.K., why is Cornelius doing this?
Because there is a market for it, certainly, and because he is a businessman. One who knows an opportunity when he sees it and has learned through the rigors of experience to leap when he does.
Like you.
Oh, yes, in many ways. Except perhaps that I never had to learn that particular lesson — that one I knew from the start.
I poured myself some more tea and, while I asked him more questions and he gave me more answers, thought about that one for a while. I decided that, despite the fact that Cornelius wore a hunting cape and said mildly strange stuff and ran a mock and maybe also not-mock murder service, he probably wasn’t really all that much like Mr. Kindt. To use the knockout’s term, it was a question of degree. Mr. Kindt had his own category. I didn’t quite know what that category was, but then I didn’t really know much of anything.
Tulip around today? I asked.
She was earlier. I think she has gone out. I’m sure she’ll be along.
He was right. About five minutes later she walked through the door, went straight across the living room without saying a word to either of us, and disappeared into Mr. Kindt’s bedroom.
Nap time, I said.
Mr. Kindt smiled.
She does so love to sleep, he said.
He then leaned forward and asked me if I wouldn’t mind returning to the subject of murder, that once one was on it, and had gotten over one’s misplaced touchiness, it was hard to stop. Mock murder, he said, could be quite instructive, could help to prepare me, to lend an air of authenticity that would spill over into all aspects of my life, that authenticity even in mock matters was very important, etc.
What about mock authenticity in real matters? I asked him.
That is an interesting question, but perhaps one for another time, he said.
He then asked what the previous night’s murder weapon had been. I told him. He asked me where I had inflicted the fatal wound. I told him that the fatal wound, a poorly executed zigzag pattern, had involved the throat.
And was there any element of torture involved?
No, I said, in theory it was a clean killing.
Ah, said Mr. Kindt, his voice suddenly dreamy, as was mine.
You mean in Cooperstown? With Cornelius?
Mr. Kindt didn’t answer.
Instead he said, yes, a good clean killing involving the neck and the windpipe, hung in the morning and delivered in the afternoon, and harrowed that night.
Harrowed?
In front of an audience, a learned audience, a group of wealthy spectators, led by a most famous doctor, one who with scalpel and illustrative anatomic manual devoured me. Then it was no longer clean. Then it became, in its combination of spectacle and fervid speculation, quite blurred.
Are you talking about your namesake or the namesake of your namesake? I said.
Finish your tea, my young mock murderer, he said. I feel like talking now, not conversing, perhaps there will be some sense in what I say, please listen to me.
How do you picture death? he asked. Is it a bullet released, perhaps at random, from a mile away, or a bright missile or a balloon out of which a bomb is dropped, or a knife onto which your name has been carved, or a fuel-filled airliner, or an avalanche of lava pouring through the heart of a city, or a bear’s embrace, or a great flood, or a devastating cyclone? Is it a heart that has begun, after many years, to leak, or that has never worked properly, that has been replaced, perhaps, by a simulacrum, or arteries, those dark, sweeping corridors that have begun to clog? Is it a fall from a high and perhaps burning building or from a fence onto your neck or is it a fall within a funicular and you are surrounded by screams? Is disease present, has a virus, have beautifully breeding bacteria, has cellular decay, taken hold? Are you alone? Are you in a dark room alone? Is it late at night and have you drunk bleach and is it spilling out of your mouth, eating away at the soft tissue of your throat and lips? Did it happen today or long ago? Were you, along with what you had hoped was an appropriately padded barrel, swept over the edge of Niagara Falls, or did you, one fine morning in the Middle Ages, accidentally ride your horse into a tree? The Lady of Shalott died of despair. In fact, many, very many, have died of despair, and it is important to point out that although it is poetic to think so, it is not the heart but the brain that gives out. And what of the tiny blood vessels, the small bearers of blood? You are young, you are surrounded by your fellows, you are on your way into Nazareth for the market and some great spectacle two thousand years ago, and such a vessel explodes in your brain. And there are other ways.
One can be hung, he said, beheaded, disemboweled, racked, flogged, broken on the wheel. One could fill a tome with descriptions of all the different shapes and sharpnesses of blades that have been applied in direct or indirect anger, but also accidentally, to the flesh. One can be electrocuted, injected with chemicals, hammered to death. In Japan there was the death of a thousand cuts and in China, until quite recently, one could be killed quite slowly, in a fog of opium, by dismemberment. And then, too, it is possible to kill people while they remain alive.
I asked him what he meant by this.
He spoke then of slaves, of Samos and the tunnel of Pisistratus, of Athens and the silver mines, of Egypt and the pyramids, of the Yucatecan monuments and bone-filled cenotes, of the American South and its plantations, of Estaban Gomez, the black Portuguese pilot, who between the brief visit of Verrazano and the arrival of the Dutch took his boat many miles up what he called the Deer and would soon be called the Noort and was now called the Hudson, who brought back fifty-seven native inhabitants for the slave markets in Lisbon. He spoke to me of the Pygmy, taken from the former Belgian colony in Africa and kept for many months, at times with an orangutan that held him tenderly in its arms, in a cage at the Bronx zoo, and of the Sioux warriors, once at home on the endless plains of Nebraska, being paid a pittance to act like “Indians” on a modified dog track in Buffalo Bill’s heralded Wild West Show. I, myself, he said, have felt at times the world becoming very far away and quite reduced and very cold, and while the doctors may have a word for it, I know it is the other thing.