Swimsuit (21 page)

“The police got a tip,” I said. “An arms dealer by that name checked out of the Wailea Princess around the time Kim went missing.
He was never questioned.”

“I’ll tell you something, Ben,” Henri said. “I
was
Nils Bjorn, but I’ve destroyed his identity. I’ll never use it again. It’s worthless to you now.”

Henri got up from his seat abruptly. He adjusted the awning to block the lower angle of the sun’s rays. I used the time to
steady my nerves.

I was swapping out the old audiotape for a new one when Henri said, “Someone is coming.”

My heart started tap-dancing in my chest again.

I SHIELDED my eyes with my hands and looked in the direction of the trail stretching through the desert to the west, saw a
dark-colored sedan coming over a hill.

Henri said, “Right now! Take your things, your glass and your chair, and go inside.”

I did what I was told, hustled back into the trailer with Henri behind me. He unhooked the chain from the floor, put it under
the sink. He handed me my jacket and told me to go into the bathroom.

“If our visitor gets too nosy,” Henri said, hiding the wineglasses, “I may have to dispose of him. That means you’ll have
witnessed a murder, Ben. Not good for you.”

I squeezed into the tiny washroom, looked at my face in the mirror before flicking off the light. I had a three-day beard,
rumpled shirt. I looked disreputable. I looked like a bum.

The bathroom wall was thin, and I could hear everything through it. There was a knock on the trailer door, which Henri opened.
I heard heavy footsteps.

“Please come in, Officer. I’m Brother Michael,” Henri said.

A woman’s authoritative voice said, “I’m Lieutenant Brooks. Park Service. This campsite is closed, sir. Didn’t you see the
roadblock and the words ‘Do Not Enter’ in giant letters?”

“I’m sorry,” Henri said. “I wanted to pray without being disturbed. I’m with the Camaldolese monastery. In Big Sur. I’m on
retreat.”

“I don’t care if you’re an acrobat with the Cirque du Soleil. You have no business being here.”

“
God
led me here,” said Henri. “I’m on
His
business. But I didn’t mean any harm. I’m sorry.”

I could feel the tension outside the door. If the ranger used her radio to call for help, she was a dead woman. Years ago,
back in Portland, I’d backed my squad car into a wheelchair, knocked over an old man. Another time, I put a little kid in
my gun sights when he’d jumped out from between two cars, pointing a squirt gun at me.

Both times I thought my heart couldn’t beat any harder, but honest to God, this was the worst.

If my belt buckle clanked against the metal sink, the ranger would hear it. If she saw me, if she questioned me, Henri might
feel he had to kill her, and her death would be on me.

Then he’d kill me.

I prayed not to sneeze. I prayed.

THE RANGER TOLD HENRI that she understood about desert retreats, but that the campsite wasn’t safe.

“If the chopper pilot hadn’t seen your trailer, there would be no patrols out this way. What if you ran out of fuel? What
if you ran out of water? No one would find you, and you would die,” Lieutenant Brooks said. “I’ll wait while you pack up your
gear.”

A radio crackled, and I heard the ranger say, “I got him, Yusef.”

I waited for the inevitable gunshot, thought of kicking open the door, trying to knock the gun out of Henri’s hand, save the
poor woman somehow.

The lieutenant said to her partner, “He’s a monk. A hermit. Yeah. He’s by himself. No, it’s under control.”

Henri’s voice cut in, “Lieutenant, it’s getting late. I can leave in the morning without difficulty. I’d really appreciate
one more night here for my meditation.”

There was silence as the park ranger seemed to consider Henri’s request. I slowly exhaled, took in another breath.
Lady, do what he says. Get the hell out of here.

“I can’t help you,” she said.

“Sure you can. Just one night is all I ask.”

“Your gas tank is full?”

“Yes. I filled up before I drove into the park.”

“And you have enough water?”

The refrigerator door squealed open.

The ranger said, “Tomorrow morning, you’re outta here. We have a deal?”

“Yes, we do,” Henri said. “I’m sorry for the trouble.”

“Okay. Have a good night, Brother.”

“Thank you, Lieutenant. And bless you.”

I heard the ranger’s car engine start up. A minute later, Henri opened my door.

“Change of plans,” he said, as I edged out of the washroom. “I’ll cook. We’re pulling an all-nighter.”

“No problem,” I said.

I looked out the window and saw the lights of the patrol car heading back to civilization. Behind me, Henri dropped hamburger
patties into the frying pan.

“We’ve got to cover a lot of ground tonight,” he said.

I was thinking that by noon of the next day, I could be in Venice Beach watching the bodybuilders and the thong girls, the
skaters and bikers on the winding concrete paths through the beach and along the shore. I thought of the dogs with kerchiefs
and sunglasses, the toddlers on their trikes, and that I’d have huevos rancheros with extra salsa at Scotty’s with Mandy.

I’d tell her everything.

Henri put a burger and a bottle of ketchup in front of me, said, “Here ya go, Mr. Meat and Potatoes.” He started making coffee.

The little voice in my head said,
You’re not home yet.

THE KIND OF LISTENING you do when interviewing is very different from the casual kind. I had to focus on what Henri was saying,
how it fit into the story, decide if I needed elaboration on that subject or if we had to move along.

Fatigue was coming over me like fog, and I fought it off with coffee, keeping my goal in sight.
Get it down and get out of here alive.

Henri backtracked over the story of his service with the military contractor, Brewster-North. He told me how he’d brought
several languages to the table and that he’d learned several more while working for them.

He told me how he’d formed a relationship with his forger in Beirut. And then his shoulders sagged as he detailed his imprisonment,
the executions of his friends.

I asked questions, placed Gina Prazzi in the time line. I asked Henri if Gina knew his real identity, and he told me no. He’d
used the name that matched the papers his forger had given him: Henri Benoit from Montreal.

“Have you stayed in contact with Gina?”

“I haven’t seen her for years. Not since Rome,” he said. “She doesn’t fraternize with the help.”

We worked forward from his three-month-long romance with Gina to the contract killings he did for the Alliance, a string of
murders that went back over four years.

“I mostly killed young women,” Henri told me. “I moved around, changed my identity often. You remember how I do that, Ben.”

He started ticking off the bodies, the string of young girls in Jakarta, a Sabra in Tel Aviv.

“What a fighter, that Sabra. My God. She almost killed
me.
”

I felt the natural arc of the story. I felt excited as I saw how I would organize the draft, almost forgot for a while that
this wasn’t some kind of movie pitch.

The murders were real.

Henri’s gun was loaded even now.

I numbered tapes and changed them, made notes that would remind me to ask follow-up questions as Henri listed his kills; the
young prostitutes in Korea and Venezuela and Bangkok.

He explained that he’d always loved film and that making movies for the Alliance had made him an even better killer. The murders
became more complex and cinematic.

“Don’t you worry that those films are out in the world?”

“I always disguise my face,” he told me. “Either I wear a mask as I did with Kim, or I work on the video with a blur tool.
The software that I use makes editing out my face very easy.”

He told me that his years with Brewster-North had taught him to leave the weapons and the bodies on the scene (Rosa was the
one exception), and that even though there was no record of his fingerprints, he made sure never to leave anything of himself
behind. He always wore a condom, taking no chances that the police might take DNA samples from his semen and begin to link
his crimes.

Henri told me about killing Julia Winkler, how much he loved her. I stifled a smart-ass comment about what it meant to be
loved by Henri. And he told me about the McDanielses, and how he admired them as well. At that point, I wanted to jump up
and try to strangle him.

“Why, Henri, why did you have to kill them?” I finally asked.

“It was part of a film sequence I was making for the Peepers, what we called a documentary. Maui was a big payout, Ben. Just
a few days’ work for much more than you make in a year.”

“But the work itself, how did you feel about taking all of those lives? By my count, you’ve killed thirty people.”

“I may have left out a few,” Henri said.

IT WAS AFTER THREE IN THE MORNING when Henri told me what fascinated him most about his work.

“I’ve become interested in the fleeting moment
between
life and death,” he said. I thought about the headless chickens from his childhood, the asphyxiation games he played after
killing Molly.

Henri told me more, more than I wanted to know.

“There was a tribe in the Amazon,” he continued. “They would tie a noose high under the jaws of their victims, right under
their ears. The other end of the rope was secured around the tops of bent saplings.

“When they cut off a victim’s head, it was carried upward by the young tree snapping back into place. These Indians believed
this was a good death. That their victim’s last sensation would be of flying.

“Do you know about a killer who lived in Germany in the early nineteen hundreds?” Henri asked me. “Peter Kurten, the Vampire
of Düsseldorf.”

I had never heard of the man.

“He was a plain-looking guy whose first kill was a small girl he found sleeping while he robbed her parents’ house. He strangled
her, opened her throat with a knife, and got off on the blood spouting from her arteries. This was the start of a career that
makes Jack the Ripper look like an amateur.”

Henri described how Kurten killed too many people to count, both sexes, men, women, and children, used all kinds of instruments,
and at the heart of it all, he was turned on by blood.

“Before Peter Kurten was executed by guillotine,” Henri said to me, “he asked the prison psychiatrist — wait. Let me get this
right. Okay. Kurten asked if, after his head was chopped off” — Henri put up fingers as quotation marks — ‘If I could hear
the sound of my own blood gushing from the stump of my neck. That would be the pleasure to end all pleasures.’ ”

“Henri, are you saying the moment between life and death is what makes you want to kill?”

“I think so. About three years ago, I killed a couple in Big Sur. I knotted ropes high up under their jaws,” he said, demonstrating
with the V between thumb and index finger of his hand. “I tied the other end of the ropes to the blades of a ceiling fan.
I cut their heads off with a machete, and the fan spun with their heads attached.

“I think the Peepers knew that I was very special when they saw that film,” Henri said. “I raised my fee, and they paid. But
I still wonder about those two lovers. I wonder if they felt that they were flying as they died.”

EXHAUSTION DRAGGED ME down as the sun came up. We’d worked straight through the night, and although I heavily sugared my coffee
and drank it down to the dregs, my eyelids drooped and the small world of the trailer on the rumpled acres of sand blurred.

I said, “This is important, Henri.”

I completely lost what I was going to say — and Henri prompted me by shaking my shoulder. “Finish your sentence, Ben.
What
is important?”

It was the question that would be asked by the reader at the beginning of the book, and it had to be answered at the end.
I asked, “Why do you want to write this book?”

Then I put my head down on the small table, just for a minute.

I heard Henri moving around the trailer, thought I saw him wiping down surfaces. I heard him talking, but I wasn’t sure he
was talking to me.

When I woke up, the clock on the microwave read ten after eleven.

I called out to Henri, and when he didn’t answer I struggled out of my cramped spot behind the table and opened the trailer
door.

The truck was gone.

I left the trailer and looked in all directions. The sludge began to clear from the gears in my brain, and I went back inside.
My laptop and briefcase were on the kitchen counter. The piles of tapes that I’d carefully labeled in sequence were in neat
stacks. My tape recorder was plugged into the outlet — and then I saw the note next to the machine.

Ben: Play this.

I pushed the Play button and heard Henri’s voice.

“Good morning, partner. I hope you had a good rest. You needed it, and so I gave you a sedative to help you sleep. You understand.
I wanted some time alone.

“Now. You should take the trail to the west, fourteen miles to Twenty-nine Palms Highway. I’ve left plenty of water and food,
and if you wait until sundown, you will make it out of the park by morning.

“Very possibly, Lieutenant Brooks or one of her colleagues may drop by and give you a lift. Be careful what you say, Ben.
Let’s keep our secrets for now. You’re a novelist, remember. So be sure to tell a plausible lie.

“Your car is behind the Luxury Inn where you left it, and I’ve put your keys in your jacket pocket with your plane ticket.

“Oh, I almost forgot the most important thing. I called Amanda. I told her you were safe and that you’d be home soon.

“
Ciao,
Ben. Work hard. Work well. I’ll be in touch.”

And then the tape hissed and the message was over.