Games of the Hangman (53 page)

Kadar placed
the last basket on the floor beside the deep freeze,
then
looked back into the unit.
 
Nothing had
changed since his last inspection, which was reassuring if scarcely
surprising.
 
He didn't really expect the
occupant to be found munching frozen peas or to have grown a mustache to while
away the time.
 
Frozen corpses tended to
be low on the activity scale.
 
Kadar
leaned on the insulated rim of the freezer and spoke encouragingly.
 
"Your time will come, have no
fear."
 
He smiled for good measure.

Inside the
deep freeze, well frosted over, Paul Straub lay unmoving.
 
The expression of horror, panic, despair, and
downright disbelief on his face, frozen into perpetuity, indicated his general
lack of enthusiasm for his fate.
 
He had
been drugged, bound into immobility, then place alive in the deep freeze.
 
His last sight before the lid and darkness
descended was of a basket of frozen chickens.
 
As a vegetarian he might have particularly objected to this.
 
He had been frozen to death, his only offense
being a certain similarity in height, weight and general physiognomy to Kadar —
and the fact that he had been a patient of Dr. Wenger's.

Kadar leaned
farther over, reached into the freezer, and tapped the corpse.
 
It felt reassuringly solid.
 
The refrigeration was working fine.
 
He had considered using supercold liquid
nitrogen, which would minimize tissue destruction — it was used for semen and
strawberries, to name but two critical applications — but when he considered
what was going to happen to the corpse, Kadar settled for a more conventional
solution.

He
straightened himself and began replacing the baskets.
 
Just before he replaced the last one, he
looked at the late Paul Straub's frozen head.
 
The eyes were frozen open but iced over.
 
"Don't blame me," said Kadar
.
"Blame
that damn pheasant."
 
He dropped the
basket into place.
 
He felt quite
satisfied as he left the room and heard the locks snap into place behind
him.
 
All in all, given the imperfections
of the material he was working with, things were going quite well.

19

As originally
conceived, Project K was to be a low-key support
operation,
close enough to the people at the sharp end to cut out bureaucratic delay but
modest in scope and scale.
 
The killings
in Lenk changed things overnight.

Convinced that
time was running out, Charlie von Beck had turned Fitzduane's apartment into an
around-the-clock command center.
 
When
Fitzduane found that a Digital Equipment Corporation multiterminal minicomputer
was being installed in his bedroom, he took the hint and moved into a spare
room in the Bear's Saali apartment.
 
It
didn't have black silk sheets and a mirror over the bed, but the Bear's cuisine
would have merited three stars from Michelin if ever its reviewer had dropped
in, and besides, the Bear had bought himself a bigger gun — which, the way
things were going, was comforting.

Von Beck had
encountered some opposition to basing Project K in ‘nonofficial premises,’ but
he had countered with the comment that if Brigadier Masson could run the Swiss
intelligence service during the Second World War from a floor in Bern's
Schweizerhof Hotel the secluded apartment off Kirchenfeldstrasse was good
enough for him.

The occupants
of the other three apartments in the small block — wholly owned by Beat von
Graffenlaub — were amicably moved out by appeals to their patriotism and their
pockets.
 
Once the last of them left, von
Beck tightened security still further.

*
         
*
         
*
         
*
         
*

As Fitzduane,
the Bear, and, from time to time, other members of the Project K team spoke,
Beat von Graffenlaub began to look increasingly disturbed.
 
As always, the lawyer was immaculately
tailored, but the elegance of his clothes no longer seemed integrated and he
had lost weight.
 
The arrogance of wealth
was no longer so apparent in his manner.

"And what
do you call this man, this corrupter of lives?" he said in a low, angry
voice.

Henssen
indicated that he would answer.
 
"When he was nothing more than a statistical anomaly, my
cynical colleagues in the BKA christened him the Abominable No-Man.
 
Now that is not so funny anymore."

"The
Hangman," said the Bear.
 
"We've given him the code name ‘the Hangman’"

Von Graffenlaub
looked at Fitzduane.

"We
believe the Hangman exists," said Kersdorf quietly, "but it would be
idle to pretend that our view is widely held.
 
Conventional investigations parallel the work we are doing.
 
Even your own Chief of Police is skeptical."

"In
strict legal terms," sand von Beck, "we have very little
proof."
 
His rather formal tone was
counterbalanced by his attire.
 
He was
wearing a pink sweatshirt labeled SKUNKWORKS.
 
The group of snoozing skunks stenciled on it all wore bow ties.

"And if
your heuristics — your intelligent guesses — are wrong," said von
Graffenlaub, "you have cumulative error in your deductions increased by
the massive power of your computing system."

"Those
are the risks," agreed Hanssen.

"The only
thing is," said Chief Inspector Kersdorf, "nobody else has come up
with any coherent explanation of what has been happening."

Von
Graffenlaub drank some Perrier.
 
His hand
was shaking slightly as he drank.
 
He put
the glass down and bowed his head in thought.
 
The group around him remained silent, and they could hear the faint hiss
of bubbles bursting.
 
He raised his head
and looked at each man in turn.
 
His gaze
stopped at Fitzduane.

"This
man, a stranger, was concerned enough to want to know why a young man should
die so horribly," he said.
 
"Rudi was my son and, with his twin sister, Vreni, my
lastborn.
 
I can assure you that I'm not
going to back out now.
 
You'd better tell
me everything — both what you know and what you suspect.
 
Don't try to spare my feelings.
 
You had better start with Rudi's involvement
with this — this Hangman."

"And your
wife's," said Fitzduane.

"Erika,"
said von Graffenlaub.
 
"Yes, yes, of
course."
 
He was whispering, and
there were tears running down his cheeks.

Fitzduane felt
terribly, terribly sad.
 
He was looking
at a man being destroyed, and there was no way anymore to stop what would
happen.
 
He put his hand on von
Graffenlaub's shoulder, but there wasn't anything he could say.

*
         
*
         
*
         
*
         
*

As if by
agreement, the others left Fitzduane alone with von Graffenlaub.
 
What had to be said was unpleasant enough
without the embarrassment of having the entire group present.

"I'll be
as brief as I can,"
said
Fitzduane, "and
I'll concentrate on conclusions rather than reasons.
 
We can go through the logic of our reasoning
afterward if you wish.
 
We've already
told you about the Hangman, and we'll come to what we know about him — and
that's quite a lot — later, but right now I want to focus on one point, the
Hangman's method of operation.
 
His
objectives seem to be financial rather than ideological — mixed, I suspect,
with a general desire to fuck the system and a macabre sense of humor.
 
His method seems to be to tap into, and
harness, the natural energies and causes that already exist.
 
He doesn't need a coherent ideology.
 
Each little group is built around its own
obsession, and the Hangman creams off the financial result.

"He likes
dealing with impressionable people.
 
Many
of his followers — and most of them wouldn’t think of themselves as
his
followers but as members of some
specific smaller group — are young and idealistic and sexually highly
active.
 
He uses what's available, and we
have reason to believe that sexuality is one such tool.
 
It has long featured in secret rites and
initiations and is a classic bonding and manipulative lever.
 
Consider, for example, sexuality in satanic
rites or pre-Christian ceremonies, or, inversely, the absence of sex in the
Catholic orders.

"In
addition to his use of sexuality as a manipulative tool, and perhaps as a
consequence of it, we believe that the Hangman has sexual problems of his
own.
 
He seems to have both heterosexual
and homosexual inclinations, and these are mixed up with pronounced
sadomachistic behavior of the most extreme sort."

"In
short, he is a maniac," said von Graffenlaub, "a monster."

"Maybe,"
said Fitzduane, "but if we are to catch him, that's not the way to think
of him.
 
He probably looks and behaves
quite normally, much like you or me."

"And who
knows what unusual behavior lurks beneath our prosaic exteriors?" said von
Graffenlaub thoughtfully.

"Just
so," said Fitzduane.

*
         
*
         
*
         
*
         
*

Frau Raemy had
finished her shopping and was indulging herself with a coffee and a very small
pastry, or two, at an outdoor café in the Bärenplatz.
 
She was pleased because she had been able to
find on sale the pear liqueur that her husband, Gerhard, so enjoyed, and three
bottles of it now reposed in the sturdy canvas shopping bag on the ground
beside her.

Gerhard, fed
enough liqueur after his evening meal, became quite tolerable, mellow even, and
later on, in bed, he tended to fall asleep immediately and what Frau Raemy
thought of as ‘that business’ could be avoided.
 
Really, with both of them in their late fifties, it was about time that
Gerhard found another activity to amuse
himself
with —
perhaps stamp collecting or carpentry.
 
On the other hand, perhaps it was not so bad after twenty-eight years of
marriage her man continued to find her desirable.

She smiled to
herself.
 
Sitting in the sun in the
Bärenplatz was most pleasant.
 
She
enjoyed the passing parade, all these colorful characters.

A figure
wearing a large cloak, face obscured by a motorcycle helmet, and with a guitar
slung from his neck, glided to a stop in front of her and glanced around.
 
Then, with an abrupt movement, he slid off
into the crowd.

Frau Raemy
didn't watch him go.
 
There was a blur, a
muffled coughing sound, and then she was staring in some confusion at her
shopping bag, which had suddenly sprouted a ragged cluster of bullet holes.
 
From the shattered bottles the aroma of pear
liqueur filled the air.

Her mind,
quite simply, could not cope with what had happened.
 
She didn't
got
to
the police.
 
She placed her shopping bag
in a litter bin, holding it at arm's length and keeping her face averted as she
did so.
 
Then she bought replacements in
Loeb's and took the tram home.

She didn't
speak for two days.

*
         
*
         
*
         
*
         
*

"Why did
you choose this place?" asked the Lebanese.
 
He glanced around Der Falken.
 
The café was two-thirds full of characters
who
might have been lifted straight from the set of a
Fellini film.
 
Most of the men seemed to
have beards and earrings and big black hats and tattered jeans.
 
You could tell the girls because most of them
didn't have beards.
 
Both sexes drank
beer and milk shakes and smoked hash.
 
There was a relentless conformity to their outrageousness.
 
Almost no one was over twenty-five, and the
sunken eyes and general skin pallor suggested that few were aspiring to
longevity.

"No
mystery," said Sylvie.
 
"I
wanted to get you off the street but fast.
 
For fuck's sake, you missed the bastard."

The Lebanese
shrugged apologetically.
 
"He moved
just as I fired.
 
It couldn't be
helped.
 
He moves so fast on those
skates.
 
At least no one seemed to notice
anything.
 
The Skorpion silencer is most
effective."