The Madman's Tale

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The Madman's Tale Page 44

by John Katzenbach


  Francis shook his head, as if speaking the thoughts that were echoing inside of him was painful.

  “What are you saying, C-Bird? What do you think?” Peter had lowered his voice some.

  “What I’m saying is that we went all over all those admissions forms and conducted all those interviews because we’re looking for something that connects someone in here with the outside world. You and Lucy, what were you searching for? Men with violence in their past. Psychopaths. Men with obvious anger. Police records. Maybe people hearing voices that order them to do evil things to women. You want to find someone who is both crazy and criminal, right?”

  Lucy finally spoke up. “That’s the only approach that makes sense …”

  “But in here, everyone has some crazy impulse or another. And any number of them could be killers, right? Everyone is walking some sort of thin line in here.”

  “Yes, but …” Lucy was chewing on what Francis was saying.

  Francis pivoted toward her. “But don’t you think the Angel knows that, too?”

  She didn’t reply to this.

  Francis took a deep breath. “The Angel is someone with nothing in his record that anyone could point to. On the outside, he’s one person. In here, he’s something else. Like a chameleon who changes color with his surroundings. And he’s someone we would never think of looking at. That’s how he can be safe. And that’s how he can do what he wants.”

  Peter looked skeptical and Lucy, too, wore a look that seemed to need more convincing. She spoke first, “So, Francis, you think the Angel is faking his mental illness?” She let this question drag out and linger, as if in the word faking she had already implied the impossibility of that action.

  Francis shook his head, and then nodded. Contradictions that seemed so clear to him weren’t to the other two. “He can’t fake voices. He can’t fake delusions. He couldn’t fake being …” Francis took a deep breath, before continuing, “… like me. The doctors could see through that. Even Mister Evil would recognize that before too long.”

  “So?” Peter asked.

  “Look around,” Francis answered. He pointed across the hallway to where the large, hulking retarded man who’d been transferred from Williams was leaning against the wall, clutching his Raggedy Andy doll and crooning softly to the gaily colored bits of fabric with its jaunty hat and crooked smile. Then Francis saw a Cato standing motionless in the center of the corridor, eyes raised to the ceiling, as if his vision could penetrate the soundproofing, the support beams, the flooring and furniture on the second floor, straight through, past everything, right through the roof and up into the morning blue sky above. “How hard,” Francis asked quietly, “would it be to be dumb? Or quiet? And if you were like one of them, who in here would ever pay any attention to you?”

  Howling, screeching, caterwauling noise like a hundred screaming feral cats scraped at every nerve ending in my body. Clammy, moist sweat dripped down between my eyes, blinding me, stinging. I was short of breath, wheezing like a sick man, my hands quivering. I barely trusted my voice to make any sound other than a low, helpless moan.

  The Angel hovered next to me, spitting with rage.

  He did not have to say why, for every word I’d written told him.

  I twisted on the floor, as if some electric current were charging through my body. They never gave me electric shock treatment at Western State. Probably that was the only cruelty masquerading as a cure that I haven’t had to endure. But I suspected the pain that I was in this moment was little different.

  I could see.

  That was what hurt me.

  When I turned in that corridor inside the hospital and spoke those words to Peter and Lucy, it was as if I were opening the one door within myself that I had never wanted to open. The greatest barricaded, nailed shut and sealed tight door within me. When you are mad, you’re capable of nothing. But you’re also capable of everything. To be caught between the two extremes is agony.

  All my life, all I wanted was to be normal. Even tortured, like Peter and Lucy were, but normal. Able to modestly function in the outside world, enjoy the simplest of things. A fine morning. A greeting from a friend. A tasty meal. A routine conversation. A sense of belonging. But I couldn’t, because I knew, right in that moment, that I would forever be doomed to be closer in spirit and action to the man I hated and the man that scared me. The Angel was giving in and luxuriating in all the murderous evil thoughts that lurked within me. He was a fun house mirror version of myself. I had the same rage. The same desire. The same evil. I had just concealed it, shunted it away, thrown it into the deepest hole within me that I could find and covered it up with every mad thought, like boulders and dirt, so that it was buried where I hoped it could never burst forth.

  In the hospital, the Angel truly made only one mistake.

  He should have killed me when he could.

  “So,” he whispered in my ear, “I’m here now to rectify that error in judgment.”

  “There’s no time,” Lucy said. She was staring down at the cluttered files spread across her desk in the makeshift office where her makeshift investigation was centered. Peter was pacing to the side, clearly sorting through all sorts of conflicted thoughts. When she spoke, he looked up, slightly cockeyed at her.

  “How so?”

  “I’m going to get pulled out of here. Probably within the next few days. I spoke with my boss, and he thinks that I’m just spinning my wheels here. He didn’t like the idea of me being here in the first place, but when I insisted, he gave in. That’s about to come to a sudden stop …”

  Peter nodded. “I’m not going to be here much longer, either,” he said. “At least I don’t think so.” He didn’t elaborate, but did add, “But Francis will be left behind.”

  “Not just Francis,” Lucy said.

  “That’s right. Not just Francis.” He hesitated. “Do you think he’s right? About the Angel, I mean. Being someone we wouldn’t look at …”

  Lucy took a deep breath. She was clenching her hands tightly, then releasing them, almost in rhythm with her breathing, like someone on the verge of fury, trying to control their emotions. This was an alien concept in the hospital, where so many people gave vent to so many emotions on a near constant basis. Restraint—other than that encouraged by antipsychotic medications—was pretty much impossible. But Lucy seemed to wear some sort of punishment behind her eyes, and when she looked up at Peter, he could see great waves of trouble behind her words.

  “I cannot stand it,” she said, very quietly.

  He did not respond, for he knew she would explain herself within moments.

  Lucy sat down hard on the wooden chair, and then, just as swiftly, stood back up. She leaned forward to grasp the edges of the desk, as if that would steady her from the buffeting winds of her turmoil. When she looked over at Peter, he was unsure whether it was a murderous harshness in her eyes, or something else.

  “The idea of leaving a rapist and killer behind in here is almost too much to imagine. Whether or not the Angel and the man who killed the women in my other three cases are one and the same—and I think they are—leaving him in here untouched makes my skin crawl.”

  Again, he did not say anything.

  “I won’t do it,” she said. “I can’t do it.”

  “Suppose you’re forced to walk away?” Peter asked. He might as well have been asking the same question of himself.

  She looked hard at him. “How do you do that?” she answered, a question to match a question.

  There was a momentary silence in the room, and then, suddenly, Lucy looked down at the stack of patient dossiers on the desktop. In a single, abrupt motion, she swept her arm across the desk, dashing the folders against the wall. “Goddamn it!” she said.

  The manila folders made a slapping sound, and papers fluttered to the floor.

  Peter kept quiet and Lucy stepped back, took aim with her shoe at a metal wastebasket and sent it skittering across the room with a well-placed kick.
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  She looked up at Peter. “I won’t do it,” she said. “Tell me, which is more evil? Being a killer or allowing a killer to kill again?”

  There was an answer to this question, but Peter wasn’t sure that he wanted to say it out loud.

  Lucy took a few deep breaths, before lifting her eyes to where they locked in on Peter’s.

  “Do you understand, Peter,” she whispered, “I know in my heart one thing: If I leave here without finding this man, someone else will die. I don’t know how long it will be, but sometime, a month, six months, a year from now, I will be standing over another body, staring down at a right hand that’s missing four fingers and now a thumb, as well. And all I’ll be able to see is the opportunity that I lost, right here. And even if I catch the guy, and see him sitting in a courtroom, and get to stand up and read off the list of charges to a judge and jury, I’ll still know that someone died, because I failed here, right at this moment in time.”

  Peter finally slumped down in a chair and lowered his own face into his hands, as if he was washing up, but he was not. When he looked up at Lucy, he didn’t really address what she said, but then, in his own way, he did.

  “You know, Lucy,” he said softly, as if someone might be listening, “before I became an arson investigator, I spent some time hauling hoses. I liked it, you know. Fighting a fire is just one of those things that has little ambivalence about it. You put out the fire, or else it destroys something. Simple, right? Sometimes, on a really big, bad blowup, you could feel the heat on your face and hear the sound that a fire makes when it is really out of control. It’s an awful, angry sound. Comes straight from hell. And then there’s this second when everything in your body says to you ‘Don’t go in there!’ but you do, anyway. You go ahead, because the fire is bad, and because the other members of your brigade are already inside, and you simply know that you have to. It’s the hardest easy decision you can ever make.”

  Lucy seemed to consider what Peter said, and then asked. “So what about now?”

  “I think,” he said slowly, “that we’re going to have to take some chances.”

  “Chances?”

  “Yes.”

  “What about what Francis said,” she continued. “You think in here everything is upside down? If we were on the outside, doing this investigation, and a detective came to us and said we need to look at the least likely suspect, not the most likely, I would, of course, pretty much have that guy fired from the case. It makes no sense at all, and if nothing else, investigations are supposed to make sense.”

  “Nothing in here really makes sense,” Peter said.

  “Which is why Francis is probably right. He’s been right about a bunch of things, anyway.”

  “So, what do we do? Go over every hospital file again searching for …” He paused, then asked,“… Searching for what?”

  “What else can we do?”

  Peter hesitated again, thinking hard about what had happened. After a moment, he shrugged a little and shook his head. “I don’t know,” he said slowly. “I’m reluctant …”

  “Reluctant for what?”

  “Well, when we shook up the Williams housing unit, what happened?”

  “A man got killed. Except they don’t think so …”

  “No, beyond that, what happened? The Angel emerged. He came out to kill the Dancer—maybe. We don’t know for certain. But we do know that he showed up in the dormitory room to threaten Francis with his knife.”

  Lucy took a deep breath. “I think I see what you’re driving at.”

  “We need to get him to come out. Again.”

  She nodded. “A trap.”

  Peter agreed. “A trap. But what would we use for bait?”

  Lucy smiled. But it wasn’t the sort of smile that implied something funny. It was more the devil-may-care look of someone who understands that to accomplish much, much needs to be risked.

  Early in the afternoon Big Black collected a small squad of Amherst Building residents for a sortie out to the garden area. It had been some time since Francis had seen the results of the seeds they had planted in the hospital gardening area, before Short Blond’s death and Lanky’s arrest.

  It was a fine afternoon. Warm, with shafts of light energetically bouncing off the white trim paint on the side of the hospital buildings. A light breeze that sent the occasional bulbous white cloud skidding across the expanse of blue sky. Francis lifted his face toward the sunlight, letting the heat enter him, and hearing a murmuring of satisfaction within his head that might have been his voices speaking, but just as easily could have been a small sense of hope creeping into his imagination. For a few minutes he believed he could forget everything that was taking place around him, and luxuriate in the sunshine. It was the sort of afternoon that made all the darknesses of being mad seem a little distant.

  There were ten patients on this particular outdoor trip. Cleo started out in the front of their lineup, having taken the lead as soon as they stepped out of the doors of Amherst, still muttering, but surging forward, with a purposefulness that seemed in opposition to the laziness that was part of the day. Napoleon at first tried to keep pace with her, but failed, and then complained to Big Black that Cleo was making them march too fast, which made all of them come to a stop on the pathway and created a bit of an argument.

  “I should be first!” Cleo shouted out angrily. She lifted herself up haughtily, looking down at the others with a regal attitude that stemmed from some wayward thoughts within her. “It’s my position. My right and my duty!” she added.

  “Then don’t go so fast,” Napoleon countered, wheezing slightly, his portly frame shaking.

  “We will move at my speed,” she replied.

  Big Black looked exasperated. “Cleo, please …,” he started, and she pivoted to him.

  “All applications are inappropriate,” she said.

  Big Black shrugged and turned to Francis. “You lead the way,” he said.

  For a moment, Cleo stepped into Francis’s path, but he looked at her with such a hangdog look of resignation that after a second, she snorted with imperial disdain and moved to the side. As he stepped past her, he could see that her eyes were aflame, as if her thoughts within her head were being singed by some out of control fire. He hoped that Big Black saw the same, but he wasn’t sure, as the attendant was trying to keep the group in some semblance of organization. One man was already crying, and another woman was wandering off the pathway.

  Francis stepped out and said, “Let’s go,” hoping that the others would follow. After a moment, the group seemed to accept Francis in the head position, probably because it defused a potential shouting match that no one particularly wanted. Cleo dropped into place behind him, and after urging him to speed up a few times, was distracted by catcalls and disjointed cries that echoed between the buildings.

  They stopped at the edge of the garden, and whatever tension seemed to be building in Cleo’s head, seemed to quiet for just one moment. “Flowers!” she said in astonishment. “We’ve grown flowers!”

  Tangled clumps of reds and whites, yellows, blues, and greens all twisted together haphazardly through the muddy quadrant of the hospital grounds edge. Peonies, baby’s breath, violets, and tulips had sprung from the murky soil. The garden was as chaotic as any of their minds, with sheets and slices of vibrant color heading in every direction, planted without order or organization, but flowering wildly nevertheless. Francis stared, a little astonished, reminded in that instant how drab their lives truly were. But even this depressing thought was shunted aside, in exuberant delight over the growth in front of him.

  Within a few seconds, Big Black had distributed some modest gardening tools. They were children’s implements, made out of plastic, and they didn’t do particularly well at what the task at hand was, but still, Francis thought, they were better then nothing. He plunked himself down next to Cleo, who seemed barely aware of his presence, and started working at organizing the flowers into rows, trying to brin
g some order to the explosion of color surrounding them.

  Francis was unaware how long they worked. Even Cleo, still muttering obscenities to herself, seemed to put some of her stress on hold, although she occasionally sobbed as she dug and scraped in the moist loam of the garden, and more than once Francis saw her reach out and touch the fragile blooms of one flower with tears in her eyes. Almost all the patients at one point paused and let the rich, damp dirt dribble through their fingers. There was a smell of renewal, and vitality, and Francis thought the fragrance filled him with more optimism than any of the antipsychotic drugs they were forever ingesting.

  When he rose, after Big Black finally announced that the sortie was over, he stared down at the garden, and had to admit that it looked better. Almost all the weeds that threatened the flower beds had been plucked out; some definition had been imposed upon the rows. It was, Francis thought, a little like seeing a painting that was still only half-completed. There was form and possibility.

  He tried to dust some of the dirt from his hands and clothes, but only halfheartedly. He found he didn’t mind the sensation of being filthy, at least not on that afternoon.

  Big Black arranged the group into a single line, and returned the plastic gardening tools to a green wooden box, counting them at least three times as he did so. Then, as he was about to give the signal to start back down the pathway to Amherst, he stopped, and Francis saw the huge attendant’s gaze focus on a small group that was gathering about fifty yards away, on the very edge of the hospital property, behind a wire fence.

  “That’s the cemetery,” Napoleon whispered. Then he, like all the others, quieted.

  Francis could see Doctor Gulptilil and Mister Evans and two other senior staff. There was also a priest, wearing a collar and several workmen in gray hospital maintenance uniforms gripping shovels, or leaning on the shafts, awaiting a command. As the group gathered together, Francis heard a chugging, diesel noise, and he saw a small backhoe being driven over to where the group was standing. Behind the backhoe there was a single black Cadillac station wagon, which with a shock, Francis recognized as a hearse.

 

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