Primal Scream (2 page)

Shrunken Head

Vancouver, British Columbia

Friday, January 5

"When the Himalayan peasant meets the he-bear in his pride,

He shouts to scare the monster, who will often turn aside.

But the she-bear thus accosted rends the peasant tooth and nail.

For the female of the species is more deadly than the male."

Katherine Spann grimaced. "I don't know whether to be impressed or think you sexist."

"You asked for something by Kipling."

"But you chose the poem."

"True," replied Zinc Chandler. "But I didn't write it. You don't kill the messenger because you don't like the message."

"Another verse?"

"When the early Jesuit fathers preached to Hurons and Choctaws,

They prayed to be delivered from the vengeance of the squaws.

‘Twas the women, not the warriors, turned those stark enthusiasts pale.

For the female of the species is more deadly than the male."

"That's going from bad to worse."

"The worst is yet to come."

Spann arched an eyebrow. "Why'd you memorize this stuff? Only guys I know who quote poems by heart are those who want to look learned or those who use them to try to coax us into bed. And that's the Romantics, not Kipling."

"I was raised on a Saskatchewan farm. My dad was a Plowman Poet, one of a group of drunks. Saturday night, they'd gather in our kitchen to swill whisky and wager who could identify the most obscure poem selected from a thick Oxford anthology. Pop refused to raise an illiterate lout, so when he was in his cups I was forced to run the gantlet of the bards. A wrong answer earned me a boxed ear, so I read and reread that anthology to ward off beating."

"I wondered why they said you're a walking volume of poetry."

"Now you know. Child abuse."

"And the worst?"

Seated behind the horseshoe desk fashioned from a trio of library tables, Inspector Zinc Chandler leaned back in Chief Superintendent DeClercq's antique office chair and regurgitated Kipling:

"Man's timid heart is bursting with the things he must not say,

For the Woman that God gave him isn't his to give away;

But when hunter meets with husbands, each confirms the other's tale—

The female of the species is more deadly than the male."

Spann chuckled. "There's a poem you couldn't write today."

"No," agreed Chandler. "Even if it's true." Her chuckle turned to laughter. "You're going from worst to worster."

"A true story," he said. "I heard it in Africa. Do you recall the legend of Androcles and the lion? He was a runaway Roman slave who hid in a cave. There he took a thorn from the paw of a suffering lion. Later when he faced the same lion in a Roman arena, Androcles survived because the beast refused to harm him.

"Hwange is the best game reserve in Zimbabwe. It's fifteen thousand square kilometers. The story concerns the warden in charge of a lion area. Months before his wedding, he befriended and mended a lioness with an injured front paw. The first night he and his new wife were in bed in camp, the lioness jumped in through a ventilation hatch in the thatch roof. The warden wrestled the cat off his wife so she could escape, and as she fled, the door shut and trapped her husband inside. When the senior ranger and his cousin responded with guns, they wrenched open the hut door to find the warden dead. The lioness leapt at the senior ranger in front, which forced the cousin behind to shoot her
through
him. The warden and the lioness died together."

"Why the attack?" asked Katherine Spann.

"The lioness was jealous," Chandler replied. "Does that back Kipling's view:
The female of the species is more deadly than the male?”

"What about humans? Do you hold that?"

"You're the female. You tell me."

"I think we're more deadly because we're naturally superior to you. The human brain evolved as a weapon of survival. No fangs, no claws, no leap, no venom, so our species outthinks predators. But as men have brutalized women since sex began, we evolved another step to match your brute strength. We're quicker to respond to stimuli, more resistant to disease, and able to tap one side of the brain while thinking with the other. You used to call that power 'female intuition.' We outthink you, so we're deadlier."

"And She knows, because She warns him, and Her instincts never fail,

That the Female of Her Species is more deadly than the Male."

"Amen," said Sergeant Spann as Corporal Craven, a parcel in hand, knocked on the door and strode into the office of Chief Superintendent DeClercq, which Inspector Chandler was manning while the chief was on vacation in France.

"Am I interrupting?"

"Join the battle, Nick. We're debating who's deadlier. Women or men?" said Spann.

"Oops. Wrong floor," said Craven, swiveling on his heels to make for the door.

"No need to flee," said Chandler. "Kipling decided the issue. Our sex is doomed to writhe
'in anguish like the Jesuit with the squaw!'"

"Thank God that's settled," Craven sighed. "I was losing sleep."

"This 'God' you mention," Spann inquired. "Is it a He or a She?"

"Would someone please read me my charter rights so I don't have to reply."

"A wimp," said Chandler.

"A wimp," Spann agreed.

The word
Amazon
was coined for Sergeant Spann. Six feet tall with a buffed full figure, she looked down on most men. Face to chest with her
Playboy
breasts was a no-win situation, for either way—linger or avert your gaze—she had your number, so she had you. With honey-blond hair, cobalt eyes, high cheekbones, and bee-stung lips, Spann reminded Craven of Ursula Andress in
Doctor No
, and watching the movie, it was hard to stare at the shell in her hand. Not only was Spann a looker, but she had pedigree, too. Kathy was the cop who had taken the Headhunter down. She had been shot and almost killed in the line of duty. Posted abroad, she had served with distinction in Thailand, India, Colombia, and Haiti. Now rumor was DeClercq was grooming her for head of Administration at Special X, a rapid climb given her age . . . but some folks had it all.

If Spann rose to inspector, Nick hoped to land her current job.

Inspector Zinc Chandler was head of Operations. He had been promoted during the Africa case, and was DeClercq's second in command. Six foot two and almost two hundred pounds, his physique was muscled from working the Saskatchewan farm. Rugged and sharp-featured, his face was hard and gaunt, years of pain subtracting from his handsome good looks. Zinc's natural steel-gray hair was the color of his eyes, its metallic tint responsible for his given name. The Special External Section of the RCMP investigated crimes with links outside Canada. Special X cases sent its Members around the world, where Zinc had taken a shot to the head in Hong Kong, a knife to the back on Deadman's Island, and barely escaped being ripped apart by Terrible Ones in Botswana. Until the chief returned from France, Chandler was commanding officer of Special X, so Craven handed him the parcel forwarded from H.Q. up the street.

With stamps but no return address, the plain brown wrapper read:

Commanding Officer

Special External Section

Royal Canadian Mounted Police

5255 Heather Street Vancouver, B.C. V5Z 1K6

"Security check it?" Chandler asked. The Force had recently endured a kamikaze bomb.

"X-ray and dog sniff," Craven replied. "Arrived in the morning mail. Nothing exposed on-screen but several small rings."

"What time's your flight?" Chandler asked Spann as he undid the wrapper, revealing the six-inch-square box within.

"Ten," she said, glowering at the downpour hammering on the windows, slanted dismal gray streaks masking Queen Elizabeth Park crowning Little Mountain. "Shitty day to travel."

"I'll drive you to the airport. What's up?" Craven asked.

"The headless body the Mad Dog found in the woods up north? It was missing a phalange from the right ring finger. Which matches an Idaho hunter who vanished near there last month."

"Maybe the animals turned the tables and bagged
his
head as a trophy."

"Christ!" cursed Chandler, dropping the box like a hot potato so what it contained tumbled out and rolled across the desk.

"Is that what I think it is?" gasped Spann.

"Those animals are smarter than I thought," Craven muttered.

Chandler recovered quickly from his reflex. "Could be we've got the jigsaw piece that completes the headless hunter."

For on the desk lay a shrunken head the size of a navel orange. The wrinkled, shriveled skin was bleached ash white. Streaming from the miniature face was silken black hair. The eyes were stitched shut, and so was the mouth. The thin lips were pierced with small gold rings laced together hoop to hoop with a zigzag black leather thong.

The Mad Charcutier

Domfront, France

For the first time in a long time DeClercq savored contentment. He stood at the north window of the piano salon on the second floor of La Maison de la Resistance and gazed up across the slope of the hill at the castle ruins on top. Domfront, a medieval town, was steeped in history, so as he watched the shadows of twilight creep around the battlements, his mind pictured incidents from the Dark Ages. Here, six hundred feet above the Varenne Valley, Duke William (not yet "the Conqueror") seized the first castle in 1049 to make this Normandy. His son, Henry I of England, raised the towering keep that stands today, once one of the ten most important fortresses in the Occident. King Henry II stayed here with his sons, King Richard the Lion-Hearted of the Third Crusade and evil King John of Magna Carta and Robin Hood fame, before he faced the pope's legates in Domfront ("Who will free me from this turbulent priest?") to seal the murder of the Archbishop of Canterbury, Thomas a Becket. Twenty times the castle was laid to siege: a tug-of-war which passed possession back and forth between England and France, Henry V, flush from victory at Agincourt, besieging the French for eight months in 1417, then followers of Joan of Arc, burned at the stake in Rouen, later driving the English out in 1430.

A published historian of the Mounted Police (
Those Who Wore the Tunic, and Bagpipes, Blood, and Glory: The Myth of Wilfred Blake
), DeClercq was drawn to Normandy by its history. Turning from the window with a glass of Calvados in hand, sipped "
Trou normand
" between courses as the locals do, he wondered if Katt was inspired to write a historical romance. The teenager sat scribbling away at a French Provincial desk pulled in front of the soaring French windows facing west, one knee tucked up almost to her chin, ash blond hair escaping like Medusa snakes from the nest pinned up under her jaunty Parisian beret. From this viewpoint halfway up the hill, she commanded the darkening vista beyond the maison garden with its apple and pear trees and solitary palm, across the quiet lane beyond the coach house and wrought iron gate to a wide panorama of rolling hills stretching for miles under a sky dragged from purple to pink to red by the setting sun. Lost in concentration, Katt nibbled at her lip. Sensing his curiosity, she glanced up to raise her glass in a toast, "To civilized drinking laws," then went back to work.

Katt was the source of his contentment.

Robert DeClercq's life was as battered as Domfront castle. His first wife, Kate, and their daughter, Jane, had been killed by terrorists in Quebec's October Crisis of 1970. A decade later his second wife, Genevieve, was shot to death in the aftermath of the Headhunter case. Since then guilt had besieged his downcast mind, for had the chief not been a cop, all three would be alive, his life a tomb as bleak and lonely as the dungeons sunk in this hill, until Katt burst from the Ripper case to free and uplift him.

Katt moving in had revolutionized his home. Raised by a practicing witch, she was an off-the-wall imp. The self-appointed poet laureate of her new realm, she penned screeds to commemorate home-front events, like "Ode to Teaboy" and "Dog Bites the Vet." Lately, her nascent ability had turned to prose instead. "The way I see it, Bob, writing's the cushy job. Home is anywhere that has a post office or modem. The world will be mine," Katt had decreed with a far-flung flourish of a gallivanting arm.

Now each day saw a new Kattechism stuck under the Happy Face magnet on the fridge door:

Katt on Zippers

Have you ever had one of those days when you're late for school, your hair dryer is on the fritz, and the cat just puked a hairball in your lap? Then, as if life isn't vexing enough, your only clean shin pops a button. Not an inconspicuous button down near the tail; no, that would make things far too easy, but the button smack-dab in the middle.

And you ask why I only wear polyester zip-up jumpsuits from Kmart?

I know you're thinking: How can she afford to take such a fashion risk?

To which I say: How can you afford not to?

The average unbuttoning time of five-button shirts is 7.8 seconds, while a zipper requires but 2.1 seconds or less to undo. The difference in time consumption may seem minor to some, but to with-it, going-places people like you and me the exponential growth of a few seconds a day is years in the long run. And when you're feeling the call of nature in a desperate way—say, you ate the special in Cairo's bazaar—would you rather be wearing Levi's 501 button-flys or my low couture with easy glide zippage . . . ?

"I've never seen you wearing a polyester jumpsuit, Katt."

"We writers call that poetic license, Bob. When I am rich and famous, no doubt I'll be hawking products I would never use myself."

An only child, DeClercq had been nine when his father died. He was killed by a drunk driver while crossing a Montreal street. Days before his tenth birthday, cancer claimed his mom. Doting on the orphan as if he were her son, a maiden aunt in Quebec became his guardian. When he was fourteen, she took him to Britain and France, at a time when his reading focused on Bradbury, Lovecraft, and Poe, so Jack the Ripper's East End, and the Bloody Tower, and Madame Tussaud's Chamber of Horrors drew him like a moth to flame. Now he was
in loco parentis
to a teen himself, and recalling how that trip had launched him on his path through life, he had decided the time was nigh for Katt to taste Europe.

Katt on Flying to Paris

Cranky and impatient, the herd of passengers files through the doorway into the plane like grunting cattle into a slaughterhouse. Let's face it, there's no fun in a ten-hour plane ride to anywhere, not when your seat's in "economy" with a shrieking baby across the aisle and a five-year-old ants-in-his-pants seat kicker behind. I find my cramped cell, aptly labeled 13A, and open the overhead bin to take a knapsack to the face. No sooner am I seated than the captain speaks in the same voice I expect he'll use to say the last remaining engine just dropped off in flight: "Sorry for the delay, folks. A small mechanical check. We'll be underway soon, so sit back and enjoy the flight."

A small mechanical check of what?

I glance out the window.

Since when did they start flying two-engine planes for ten hours over the Arctic and the Atlantic Ocean in winter. . . ?

In Paris he had asked her what she wanted to see the most. "Sewers and
Katt
acombs." He'd led her around the Louvre for a little culture. Katt on Venus de Milo: "Just think how much more she'd be worth, Bob, if only the statue had arms." Katt on the sculpture of Romulus and Remus being suckled by the shewolf: "Lucky it was Romulus, not Remus, who founded Rome. Or it'd be called Reme." Passing Flemish paintings in the Richelieu Wing, he'd told her, "DeClercq's a Belgian form of the French Leclerc. DeClercqs were noted architects in the Flemish Renaissance and no doubt built some of the buildings in these paintings." Katt: "So why can't you hammer a nail without bashing your thumb?"

An artist on the bridge crossing the Seine to the Musee d'Orsay gave her his beret when she oohed and aahed over his work. For such a smart ass, she did ooze charm. The hat would join a hundred
chapeaux
in the Mad Hatter's bedroom back home.

"Manet," announced DeClercq, as they entered Salle 31 on the Musee's upper level of Impressionists' paintings.

"Yes, of course, Monet," echoed Katt, flamboyantly sweeping an arm around the art hung on the walls. "Such distinctive style. I'd know it anywhere."

"Monet's in the next room. This is Manet, Katt."

"That's what I said. Manet. Listen up, Bob."

The best french fries in Paris are served at Brasserie Balzar. "The Existentialists Camus and Sartre had their last argument here. Both got the Nobel prize, but Sartre turned it down."

"Which do you prefer, Bob?"

"Camus," said DeClercq.

"Sartre is better."

"No, Camus."

"Sartre."

"Camus."

"Sartre."

"Camus. What gives, Katt? You've read neither."

"No, but when I'm rich and famous, this brasserie will also be known for Katt and Bob's first argument on Existentialism."

"I thought you were joining the Mounted. You won't be rich and famous."

"I'll be writing best-sellers on the side. In fact, I'm plotting one now."

He wondered if it would be a farce about an ingenue loose in the City of Lights.

A three-hour train ride westward had brought them to Domfront. La Maison de la Resistance was owned by an American diplomat in Vancouver. Bounded by steep, narrow cobblestone streets, this turn-of-the-century
maison de maitre
provided four stories of elegant motifs for them to explore. In the Puzzle Room (all names by Katt) they worked a two thousand-piece jigsaw. In Bob's News Room DeClercq savored his morning London
Times
. The Sunset Rooms were stacked one to a floor, up which they chased the bloody sun as it went down. With so many boudoirs, Katt passed each night in a different bed, and would spend tomorrow washing sheets. From here the pair had sallied forth to conquer Normandy, up to the Bayeux Tapestry, or across to Mont St. Michel, or hiking out into the countryside, a rural haven of farms, manors, towns, and tranquillity unchanged for centuries.

This
maison
took its name from the previous owner, Monsieur Andre Rougeyron, the former town mayor. During World War II he had distinguished himself as a hero of the French Resistance, hiding shot-down Allied airmen here in this house while a portion was commandeered as headquarters for the Nazis occupying Domfront. In 1944 he was arrested and sent to Buchenwald, shortly before the Allies stormed the beaches of Normandy to push back the Germans and create the "Liberty Way." Rougeyron won the Medal of Freedom from the U.S. Army and was awarded the OBE by King George VI.

With such heroics in this abode, DeClercq wondered if Katt was writing a novel of wartime suspense and adventure.

"So what's the plot?" he asked. The teenager tossed her pen in the air and caught it coming down. "Domfront's a gold mine of inspiration, Bob. Remember when I ordered
andouillette a la creme de moutarde
at Le Gourmet? The chef came out and warned me English people don't like that." She poked her belly as he had done. "It's made of guts. What's the word? Chitlins in the South?"

"Like Scots' haggis, reputation precedes it."

"That got me thinking, Bob, about the gourmet butchers scattered around town. There's a charcuterie down every medieval street. And that's how
The Mad Charcutier
came to mind."

"That's your title?"

"Catchy, eh? You got to know the market. Blood 'n' guts sells."

"I get this feeling the Tourist Office isn't going to like it."

Katt grinned. "They were the ones who gave me the next idea. You know how all their brochures contain the Legend of the Hanged Man? Jean Barbotte
? La Legende du Pendut
How's that ditty go?"

"Ah Domfront! . . . Ville de malheur!

"Arrive a midi, pendu a une heure!

"Ah Domfront! . . . Town of misfortune!

"Arrive at noon, hanged in an hour!"

"Poor Jean went to the gallows in December 1569. Now his descendant, Monsieur Lardons—"

"Mister Bacon Bits?"

"Bob, the name of a character should fit his role in the novel. He's the Mad Charcutier, who thinks he is possessed by the ghost of Jean. Each December, Monsieur Lardons stuffs special
andouilles
sausages for the town on the anniversary of Barbotte's hanging. And each year the day before, someone goes missing near the castle of Domfront."

In the gilded mirror across the room stood another DeClercq. Fifty-something, with dark, wavy hair graying at the temples, his aquiline nose suggesting arrogance he didn't have, a shadow of beard under the skin of his narrow jaw. Palms up, this twin mimicked a Gallic shrug of the shoulders that said,
Think of the money we could have saved by booking Katt on a trip through the morgue back home
. Downstairs in the Puzzle Room, the phone was ringing.

Out to the hall, and his back to the stained glass door in the foyer, Robert ran down the oak staircase to catch the seventh ring.

“Allo?”

"Chief? It's Zinc. Sorry to interrupt the close of your vacation, but I thought you should know something weird's happening here."

"Weird how?"

"You were mailed a shrunken head."