Swimsuit (20 page)

“I offered to help her,” Henri told me. “Molly said, ‘No, thanks. I’ve got it,’ something like that, and tried to shove those
calves up the ramp by herself.

“I didn’t like the way she said that, Ben. I felt she had crossed a line.

“I grabbed a shovel that was leaning against the trailer, and as Molly turned her back to me, I swung the shovel against the
back of her head. There was the one loud smack, a sound that thrilled me, and she went down.”

Henri stopped speaking. A long moment dragged on, but I waited him out.

Then he said, “I dragged her into the trailer, shut the tailgate. By now she’d started to wail. I told her no one would hear
her, but she wouldn’t stop.

“My hands went around her neck, and I choked her as naturally as if I was reenacting something I’d done before. Maybe I had,
in my dreams.”

Henri twisted his watchband and looked away into the desert. When he turned back, his eyes were flat.

“As I was choking her, I heard two men walking by, talking. Laughing. I was squeezing her neck so hard that my hands hurt,
so I adjusted my grip and choked her again until Molly stopped breathing.

“I let go of her throat, and she took another breath, but she wasn’t wailing anymore. I slapped her — and I got hard. I stripped
off her clothes, turned her over, and did her, my hands around her throat the whole time, and when I was done, I strangled
her for good.”

“What went through your mind as you were doing this?”

“I just wanted it to keep going. I didn’t want the feeling to
stop.
Imagine what it was like, Ben, to climax with the power of life and death in your hands. I felt I had earned the
right
to do this. Do you want to know how I felt?
I felt like God.
”

I WAS AWOKEN the next morning when the trailer door rolled open, and light, almost white sunlight, poured in. Henri was saying,
“I’ve got coffee and rolls, for you, bud. Eggs, too. Breakfast for my partner.”

I sat up on the foldaway bed, and Henri lit the stove, beat the eggs in a bowl, made the frying pan sizzle. After I’d eaten,
we began work under the awning. I kept turning it over in my mind: Henri had confessed to a murder. Somewhere, a fourteen-year-old
girl had been strangled at a county fair. A record of her death would still exist.

Would Henri really let me live knowing about that girl?

Henri went back to the story of Molly, picked up where he’d left off the night before.

He was animated, using his hands to show me how he’d dragged Molly’s body into the woods, buried it under piles of leaves,
said that he was imagining the fear that would spread from the fairgrounds to the surrounding towns when Molly was reported
missing.

Henri said that he’d joined the search for Molly, put up posters, went to the candlelight vigil, all the while cherishing
his secret, that he’d killed Molly and had gotten away with it.

He described the girl’s funeral, the white coffin under the blanket of flowers, how he’d watched the people crying, but especially
Molly’s family, her mother and father, the siblings.

“I wondered what it must be like to have those feelings,” he told me.

“You know about the most famous of the serial killers, don’t you, Ben? Gacy, BTK, Dahmer, Bundy. They were all run by their
sexual compulsions. I was thinking last night that it’s important for the book to make a distinction between those killers
and me.”

“Wait a minute, Henri. You told me how you felt raping and killing Molly. That video of you and Kim McDaniels? Are you telling
me now you that you’re not like those other guys? How does that follow?”

“You’re missing the point. Pay attention, Ben. This is critical. I’ve killed dozens of people and had sex with most of them.
But except for Molly, when I’ve killed I’ve done it for money.”

It was good that my recorder was taking it all down because my mind was split into three parts: The writer, figuring out how
to join Henri’s anecdotes into a compelling narrative. The cop, looking for clues to Henri’s identity from what he told me,
what he left out, and from the psychological blind spots he didn’t know that he had. And the part of my brain that was working
the hardest, the survivor.

Henri said that he killed for money, but he’d killed Molly out of anger. He’d warned me that he would kill me if I didn’t
do what he said. He could break his own rules at any time.

I listened. I tried to learn Henri Benoit in all of his dimensions. But mostly, I was figuring out what I had to do to survive.

HENRI CAME BACK to the trailer with sandwiches and a bottle of wine. After he uncorked the bottle, I asked him, “How does
your arrangement with the Peepers work?”

“They call themselves the Alliance,” Henri said. He poured out two glasses, handed one to me.

“I called them ‘the Peepers’ once and was given a lesson: no work, no pay.” He put on a mock German accent. “You are a bad
boy, Henri. Don’t trifle with us.”

“So the Alliance is German.”

“One of the members is German. Horst Werner. That name is probably an alias. I never checked. Another of the Peepers, Jan
Van der Heuvel, is Dutch.

“Listen, that could be an alias, too. It goes without saying, you’ll change all the names for the book, right, Ben? But these
people are not so stupid as to leave their own breadcrumbs.”

“Of course. I understand.”

He nodded, then went on. His agitation was gone, but his voice was harder now. I couldn’t find a crack in it.

“There are several others in the Alliance. I don’t know who they are. They live in cyberspace. Well, one I know very well.
Gina Prazzi. She recruited me.”

“That sounds interesting. You were recruited? Tell me about Gina.”

Henri sipped at his wine, then began to tell me about meeting a beautiful woman after his four years in the Iraqi prison.

“I was having lunch in a sidewalk bistro in Paris when I noticed this tall, slender, extraordinary woman at a nearby table.

“She had very white skin, and her sunglasses were pushed up into her thick brown hair. She had high breasts and long legs
and three diamond watches on one wrist. She looked rich and refined and impossibly inaccessible, and I wanted her.

“She put money down for the check and stood up to leave. I wanted to talk to her, and all I could think to say was, ‘Do you
have the time?’

“She gave me a long, slow look, from my eyes down to my shoes and back up again. My clothes were cheap. I had been out of
prison for only a few weeks. The cuts and bruises had healed, but I was still gaunt. The torture, the things I’d seen, the
afterimages, were still in my eyes. But she recognized something in me.

“This woman, this angel whose name I did not yet know, said, ‘I have Paris time, New York time, Shanghai time… and I also
have time for
you.
’ ”

Henri’s voice was softened now as he talked about Gina Prazzi. It was as if he’d finally tasted fulfillment after a lifetime
of deprivation.

He said that they’d spent a week in Paris. Henri still visited every September. He described walking with her through the
Place Vendôme, shopping with her there. He said that Gina paid for everything, bought him expensive gifts and clothing.

“She came from very old money,” Henri told me. “She had connections to a world of wealth I knew nothing about.”

After their week in Paris, Henri told me, they cruised the Mediterranean on Gina’s yacht. He called up images of the Côte
d’Azur, one of the most beautiful spots in the world, he said.

He recalled the lovemaking in her cabin, the swell of the waves, the wine, the exquisite meals in restaurants with high views
of the Mediterranean.

“I had nineteen fifty-eight Glen Garioch whisky at twenty-six hundred dollars a bottle. And here’s a meal I’ll never forget:
sea urchin ravioli, followed by rabbit with fennel, mascarpone, and lemon. Nice fare for a country boy and ex–Al Qaeda POW.”

“I’m a steak and potatoes man myself.”

Henri laughed, said, “You just haven’t had a real gastronomic tour of the Med. I could teach you. I could take you to a pastry
shop in Paris, Au Chocolat. You would never be the same, Ben.

“But I was talking about Gina, a woman with refined appetites. One day a new guy appeared at our table. The Dutchman — Jan
Van der Heuvel.”

Henri’s face tightened as he talked about Van der Heuvel, how he had joined them in their hotel room, called out stage directions
from his chair in the corner as Henri made love to Gina.

“I didn’t like this guy or this routine, but a couple of months before I’d been sleeping in my own shit, eating bugs. So what
wouldn’t I do to be with Gina, Jan Van der Heuvel or not?”

Henri’s voice was drowned out by the roar of a helicopter flying over the valley. He warned me with his eyes not to move from
my chair.

Even after the silence of the desert returned, it was several moments before he continued his story about Gina.

“I DIDN’T LOVE GINA,” Henri said to me, “but I was fascinated by her, obsessed with her. Okay. Maybe I did love her in some
way,” Henri said, admitting to having a human vulnerability for the first time.

“One day in Rome, Gina picked up a young girl —”

“And the Dutchman? He was out of the picture?”

“Not entirely. He’d gone back to Amsterdam, but he and Gina had some strange connection. They were always on the phone. She’d
be whispering and laughing when she spoke with him. You can imagine, right? The guy liked to
watch.
But in the flesh, she was with
me.
”

“You were with Gina in Rome.” I prompted him to continue with the main narrative.

“Yes, of course. Gina picked up a student who was screwing her way through college, as they say. A first-semester prostitute
from Prague, at Università degli Studi di Roma. I don’t remember her name, only that she was hot and too trusting.

“We were in bed, the three of us, and Gina told me to close my hands around the girl’s neck. It’s a sex game called ‘breath
play.’ It enhances the orgasm, and yes, Ben, before you ask, it was exciting to revisit my singular experience with Molly.
This girl passed out, and I loosened my grip so that she could breathe.

“Gina reached out, took my cock in her hand, and kissed me. And then she said, ‘Finish her, Henri.’

“I started to mount the girl, but Gina said, ‘No, Henri, you don’t understand.
Finish
her.’

“She reached over to the bedside table, held up the keys to her Ferrari, swung the keys in front of my eyes. It was an offer,
the car for the girl’s life.

“I killed that girl. And I made love to Gina with the dead girl beside us. Gina was electrified and wild under my hands. When
she came, it was like a death and a rebirth as a softer, sweeter woman.”

Henri’s body language relaxed. He told me about driving the Ferrari, a leisurely three-day ride to Florence with many stops
along the way, and about a life he believed was becoming his.

“Not long after that trip to Florence, Gina told me about the Alliance, including the fact that Jan was an important member.”

The travelogue of Western Europe had ended. Henri’s posture straightened, and the tempo of his voice changed from languid
to clipped.

“Gina told me that the Alliance was a secret organization composed of the very best people, by which she meant wealthy, filthy
rich. She said that they could use me, ‘make use of my talents’ is the way she put it. And she said that I would be rewarded
handsomely.

“So Gina didn’t love me. She had a purpose for me. Of course, I was a little hurt by that. At first, I thought I might kill
her. But there was no need for that, was there, Ben? In fact it would have been stupid.”

“Because they hired you to kill for them?”

“Of course,” Henri said.

“But how would that benefit the Alliance?”

“Benjamin,” Henri said patiently. “They didn’t hire me to do
hits.
I film my work. I make the films for
them.
They pay to
watch.
”

HENRI HAD SAID he killed for money, and now his story was coming together. He had been killing and creating films of these
sexual executions for a select audience at a premium price. The stagelike setting for Kim’s death made sense now. It had been
a cinematic backdrop to his debauchery. But I didn’t understand why Henri had drowned Levon and Barbara. What could possibly
explain that?

“You were talking about the Peepers. The assignment you took in Hawaii.”

“I remember. Well, understand, the Peepers give me a great deal of creative freedom,” Henri said. “I picked Kim out from her
photos. I used a ploy to get information from her agency. I said I wanted to book her and asked when would she be returning
from — where was she shooting?

“I was told the location, and I worked out the rest: which island, her time of arrival, and the hotel. While I was waiting
for Kim to arrive, I killed little Rosa. She was a tidbit, an
amuse-bouche —”

“
Amuse
what?”

“It means an appetizer, and in her case, the Alliance hadn’t commissioned the work. I put the film up for auction. Yes, there’s
a market for such things. I made some extra money, and I made sure the film got back to the Dutchman. Jan especially likes
young girls, and I wanted the Peepers to be hungry for my work.

“When Kim arrived in Maui for the shoot, I kept watch on her.”

“Were you going under the name of Nils Bjorn?” I asked.

Henri started. Then he frowned.

“How did you know that?”

I’d made a mistake. My mental leap had connected Gina Prazzi to the woman who’d phoned me in Hawaii telling me to check out
a guest named Nils Bjorn. This connection had apparently struck home — and Henri didn’t like it.

Why would Gina betray Henri, though? What didn’t I know about the two of them?

It felt like an important hook into Henri’s story, but I gave myself a warning.
For my own safety, I had to be careful not to tick Henri off. Very careful.