Wallflower (36 page)

"What authorization do I have to do this?"

"You're wrapping up loose ends."

"Maybe I should check out Diana, too, see if there's a connection to her."

"Sure, go ahead," Janek said casually. "But you won't find anything. Beverly's the one."

T
he next morning he drew and drew but couldn't get anywhere with trophy number five. One thing he knew: It wasn't a simple shape like a toothbrush, a hair curler, or a book. It was an elaborate object, larger than the others, something with parts that stuck out all over.

"Some of the parts are like the hair curler," he told Monika as they climbed down to the beach. "It's got wheels and a handle. It's mostly metal, but I think the handle's made of wood. I even think there're gears on it." He paused. "What the hell could it be?"

They made an encampment at the bottom of the rocks. She spread her beach towel on the sand, then lay down on her back. "If it's got moving parts, it must be some kind of machine," she said.

"Yeah. . ." He looked at her. She was wearing a brilliant white bikini that contrasted with her lightly tanned skin. "Pretend for a moment you're Diana Proctor. You've been sent up to Providence to kill a person and bring back a trophy of your kill. What kind of trophy are you going to take?"

Monika raised her head. "I won't know what I'm going to take until I see it. It'll be a spontaneous decision."

Janek lay back and stared up at the sky. "Whatever it is, you're bringing it back to Beverly to put up on the piano altar for Mama. Won't you make a point of bringing back something you know will please your shrink? It can't be valuable. It can't be something that will be missed. And it certainly can't be an object that can be traced back to the people you've just killed. It's always something humble, like a hair curler, or a couple of toothbrushes, a piece of paper, a book. Something the victims have touched. Something almost intimate, don't you think?" He turned to look at Monika. She was gazing past him. "Forgive me," he said, "I'm thinking out loud. I know it's tiresome. I'm sorry to go on and on."

She stood. "It's okay, Frank. You told me you were a worrier." She looked out at the water. "I'm going to swim. Want to come?"

He shook his head. "I'll just lie here and worry."

She smiled, then started for the water. He watched as she ran across the beach, then high-stepped into the waves. When she was out far enough, she turned, threw him a kiss, and plunged. He watched her swim for a while, then lay back, closed his eyes, and tried to free his mind of the
fifth
trophy for a while.

Think about something else,
he told himself.
Or better yet, don't think about anything at all. Just lie here and feel the sun. Breathe in the mellow aroma of the sea. Let the sweet winds of this tropical paradise caress your tough old urban hide.

He must have drifted off. The next thing he knew droplets of water were dancing on his chest. He opened his eyes. Monika was leaning over him, vigorously drying her hair.

"Good swim?"

"Terrific." She spread out her towel. "I was bobbing around out there, trying to think what's made of metal, has wheels and gears and a wooden handle, and has parts that look like hair curlers. I came up with something." She lay down. "It's what you call a real long shot."

He leaned toward her eagerly. "What've you got?"

She grinned. "How does an old-fashioned eggbeater grab you?"

A
piece of paper with printing for the homeless man. A hair curler for Bertha Parce. A small book, probably a much-read paperback for the Wexler family. An oversize book for Cynthia Morse. A pair of neatly arranged toothbrushes for the MacDonalds. An eggbeater for the Scottos. That left only position seven, the last trophy position, the Jessica Foy position, marked with an X.

He couldn't bring himself to try to draw that trophy. He couldn't even bear to think about it. Or did he resist, as Monika suggested, because to render it would make the scene in the bedroom clear and then he would no longer be haunted by his dream?

When he asked her to explain that, she said people often resist giving up a source of pain.

"Imagine how you'd feel without it, Frank? What would it be like
not
to be tormented?"

"I'd love it."

"You think so? I'm not so sure."

"Why wouldn't I love that? I don't understand."

She sat down on his chaise, placed her hand upon his knee. "
Physically you're fine. Your body's mended. But your mind is wounded still. Like anybody who's spent years living dangerously, you've become addicted to stress. If you saw the seventh trophy, the puzzle would be solved and the stress would be relieved." She spoke kindly.
"
Maybe you're not yet ready for that. I think maybe you need to suffer awhile longer. Don't you?"

He stared down at the water, then slowly turned back to her. His eyes, she saw, were filled with tears.

T
hey had leased the house for five days, intending to spend their last two on the mainland in Yucatan, where Monika wanted to visit some of the great Mayan ruins. So on the fifth day they flew from the Isla de Cozumel to Mérida, where they checked into a low all-white Moorish-style hotel set amidst a tranquil park of pools, flowering jacarandas, and palms.

The next morning they rented a car and went exploring. They had prepared for this visit by reading about the Mayans, enough so that they would know the purposes of the structures and the basic meaning of the art that they would see. But they were far less interested in archaeology than in viscerally experiencing the sites.

On the weed-choked field before the great pyramid at Chichén Itzá, Monika admitted to being deeply intrigued by the ancient Mayan cult of cruelty. Janek was attentive as she spoke. She made a stunning figure, he thought, dressed in white cotton slacks and a white polo shirt, her old Leica hanging casually from her shoulder, her face framed by the silver earrings he had bought for her in Cozumel.

"Human sacrifices," she said, "priests in bejeweled robes excising hearts from naked living persons on a high altar before multitudes of witnesses—it was an atavistic culture, Frank, obsessed by astrology, magical beasts, worship of the sun, sacrifices to gods who demanded blood." She paused. "In my profession we speak of the subconscious as if it were a kind of jungle like the one around us here. Dark, dank, overgrown, filled with snakes, reptiles, and other threatening creatures, a place where the most elemental drives, to dominate, rape, avenge, and kill, thrive without constraint. Well, here we have a place cut out of such a jungle where ancient men created a great civilization. And what did they do? They didn't suppress their animal drives. Rather, they organized them, turned them into a religion of cosmic symbols and dramatic ceremonies." She paused again. "Perhaps they were a little like the Venetians in that regard. Remember their carnival costumes and winged horses and the churches everywhere we turned?"

He loved listening to her. She was the most brilliant woman he'd ever been involved with. And the things she said found a responsive chord. He believed she was right, that there was as much cruelty in the masterpiece that was Venice as in this ancient capital of Mayan culture. A different kind of cruelty perhaps, more refined, less direct, but in the end nearly as ruthless and as bloody.

He borrowed her camera, took a picture of her. Looking through the lens, he saw a beautiful woman poised against sunstruck stone ruins with dense green jungle foliage behind. Perhaps, he kidded her, she might want to use his picture to represent herself on the back of her next book.

"You know," he said, "the gorgeous and brainy German shrink visiting the cradle of high barbarism in Central America."

Later, as they explored the site, strode along its walls, among its steles, gazing at the sculptures incised into the stones—grotesque human figures in elaborate headdresses, mouths grimacing, eyes bulging, frozen in postures that suggested the commission of violent acts—Janek asked Monika if these images were not expressions of the evil that had always fascinated him and that, he so often claimed, he struggled in his work to comprehend.

The answer she gave surprised him a little bit: "Perhaps it isn't merely the mystery of evil that intrigues you, Frank. Perhaps it's something bigger, the mystery of the human mind."

"I
think you know what the seventh trophy is," she told him that evening.

They were back in Mérida, sipping tequila by the hotel pool beside an open thatch-roofed garden bar. Janek looked around. There were two other couples and a black-haired Mexican bartender with Indian features gazing at the setting sun. On the tables were tiny hurricane lamps. The candles flickered in the dying light.

"If I know what it is, I sure can't see it now," he said. "What makes you think I know?"

"The trophy taken from Jess should be the easiest one for you to figure out."

"Because she was jogging?" Monika nodded. "She had a watch and the keys to her room on a leather thong around her neck. She was wearing a Walkman. All those things were found." He heard his voice break. It still disturbed him to talk about Jess this way, as a homicide victim instead of a person he had loved. "What else could she have been carrying?"

Monika shook her head. Her expression was compassionate. "I think you know," she said quietly.

L
ater in their room, as they lay naked together on their bed while the ceiling fan revolved slowly overhead, he broached the subject again.

"You think you know what it is, don't you?"

She looked at him. "I could venture a guess."

"But you won't tell me?" She shook her head. "Why not?"

"It's better for you to tell me, Frank," she said in a whisper.

I
n the morning he was angry. He spoke harshly while they dressed.

"I'm not in therapy. This isn't about me. It's a fucking murder case. Why won't you help?"

She turned to him. She spoke calmly. She was buckling her belt. "Why must I tell you what you already know?"

"Damn it, Monika! Don't speak to me in riddles!"

She stood still and faced him. Her eyes were sad. "Of course this is about you, Frank," she said gently. "It's your dream, your vision. Why don't you just close your eyes and look inside yourself? It's there. All you have to do is look."

A
fter breakfast they went out to the hotel pool for an early swim. He watched her as she breast-stroked back and forth.
Who am I kidding?
he asked himself.
I loved Jess. I ought to know what Diana took from her.
But what was missing? He couldn't think of anything. What would Jess carry when she went out jogging?
Maybe there was no seventh trophy,
he thought.

I
t came to him on the plane that afternoon, shortly after they had taken off for New York. They were crossing the Gulf of Mexico, still and green below. He peered out the window, and then he saw it in the pattern of the reefs.

He turned to Monika beside him. "It was a knife."

She nodded. "I think so, too."

"That switchblade she bought at the knife show, the one Fran Dunning said had an ivory handle. I'm sure that's what I saw."

She squeezed his hand. "Feel better now?"

He leaned toward her, kissed her. "Thanks. You were right, I must have known what it was. Why did I fight it?"

"I think it hurt you to see her knife sitting there. Your hurt blinded you, and then you couldn't see the other trophies either."

"But why did it hurt so much?"

"Because it was hers. And possibly because of something else. If she was carrying a knife, she could have put up a fight. But she didn't get the chance. She was attacked from behind. The thought of that still makes you furious. Your fury may have blinded you as well."

I
t was a dazzling New York that greeted them, cold but brilliant, a city of sparkling granite and shimmering glass. As they taxied into Manhattan, Janek was struck by the difference between this arrival and his arrival from Venice eight weeks before. That day he and Aaron had driven though a damp and noxious fog that matched the sorrow and confusion in his soul. Today, with Monika, the air was clear. And now, too, he knew what he was up against.

They settled into Janek's apartment, then at dusk went out to walk. Upper Broadway was filled with Christmas shoppers. On Fifth Avenue all the stores were jammed. Santas with scraggly beards stood on corners rattling pails. At Rockefeller Center skat
ers glided across the ice, while above the golden statue of Prometheus, Christmas lights blazed upon an enormous spruce.

They ate in a little Czech restaurant on West Twelfth Street. The owner, who had known Janek's father, embraced him when they walked in. After dinner they strolled through Greenwich Village. There were crowds of young people out on the streets, many walking briskly on their way to parties, while others, grasping bags choked with gifts, attempted to flag down cabs. Foursomes stood on corners making jokes, waiting for traffic lights to change. A drunken old man, in a tweed suit and bow tie, stumbled past them mouthing the lyrics to
Hark! The Herald Angels Sing
.