The Madman's Tale

by John Katzenbach

  The hearse came to a stop, and the backhoe shuddered forward. Big Black muttered “Maybe we should leave,” but remained rooted to his spot. The other patients lined up to watch.

  It didn’t take more than a couple of minutes for the backhoe, making all the mechanical grunting noises of machinery at work, to carve out a hole in the ground and deposit a modest pile of dirt beside it. The hospital maintenance men worked at the sides with shovels, preparing the hole. Francis saw Gulp-a-pill step forward, examine the work, and signal the men to stop. Then, with a second wave, he directed the hearse to pull forward. It did, parking a few feet away. Two men in black suits stepped out and walked to the rear, opening up the back. They were joined by four of the maintenance men, and this motley group of pallbearers removed a plain metal coffin from the back. The late afternoon sun glistened dully against the coffin’s lid.

  “It’s the Dancer,” Napoleon whispered.

  “Motherfuckers,” Cleo said quietly. “Murdering, killing fascists.” Then, she added, sonorously, in theatrical tones, “Let’s bury him in the high Roman fashion.”

  The six men struggled forward with the coffin, which Francis thought was odd, because the Dancer had hardly weighed anything at all. He watched them lower it into the grave, then step aside while the priest said a few perfunctory words. He saw that none of the men had even bothered to lower their heads in mock prayer.

  The priest stepped back, the doctors turned and headed up the pathway and the funeral parlor assistants had Doctor Gulptilil sign some paper before they returned to the hearse and drove slowly off. The backhoe followed with a chugging noise. Two of the maintenance men started shoveling dirt from the pile onto the coffin. Francis could hear the thudding sound of clumps of dirt hitting the steel, but even that faded after a moment.

  “Let’s go,” Big Black said. “Francis?”

  He realized he was supposed to lead the way, which he did, slowly, although he could feel Cleo’s presence pressuring him to move quicker with every stride. Her breathing was coming in short, machine-gun-like bursts.

  Their bedraggled parade had only made it partway back to Amherst when suddenly, with a sort of mangled half curse, half gurgle, Cleo pushed right past Francis. Her bulk swayed and jiggled as she rushed forward down the path, torpedoing in the direction of the back side of the Williams housing unit. She surged to a halt on a grassy spot, where she peered up into the windows.

  The late afternoon light was dropping fast against the side of the building, so that Francis couldn’t see the faces gathered behind the glass. Instead, each window frame seemed to be like an eye staring out of a blank, opaque face. The building was like so many of the patients; it gazed out flat and unaffected, concealing all the electric turmoil within.

  Cleo gathered herself together, put her hands on her hips and shouted: “I see you!”

  This was impossible. The reflected light blinded her, as it did Francis. She continued, raising her voice further.

  “I know who you are! You killed him! I saw you and I know all about you!”

  Big Black pushed past Francis. “Cleo!” he cried out. “Hush! What’re you saying?”

  She ignored him. She lifted a single accusatory finger and pointed it up toward the second floor of the Williams Building.

  “Killers!” she shouted. “Murderers!”

  “Cleo, Goddamn it!” Big Black thrust himself to her side. “Shut the hell up!”

  “Animals! Fiends! Motherfucking, fascist murderers!”

  Big Black reached out and grasped the bulky woman by the arm, spinning her toward him. He started to open his mouth and shout into her face, but Francis saw the huge attendant stop short, regain some composure, and whisper to her, instead, “Cleo, please, what are you doing?”

  She huffed toward Big Black. “They killed him,” she said, matter-of-factly

  “Who killed who?” Big Black asked, spinning her so that her back was to Williams. “What you mean?”

  Cleo cackled a bit, grinning wildly.

  “Marc Anthony,” she said. “Act four, Scene sixteen.”

  Still laughing, she let Big Black lead her away. Francis stared up at Williams. He didn’t know who might have heard the outburst. Or what they might have interpreted it to mean.

  Francis did not see Lucy Jones, who was standing not far away, beneath a tree, on the pathway that led past the administration building to the front gate. She also had witnessed Cleo’s explosion of accusations. But she did not give them much thought, because she was far too centered on the errand that she was about to run, which would, for the first time in days, take her on a brief excursion outside the hospital gates and into the nearby town. She watched as the single file of patients made its way back into the Amherst Building, then she turned and rapidly headed out, believing it would not take her long to find the few items that she needed.

  chapter 27

  Lucy sat quietly on the edge of her bed in the nurse-trainees’ dormitory, letting the deep night creep slowly past her. She had spread out on the bedspread the items that she had purchased late that afternoon, but instead of examining them closely, she was staring off into the vacuum around her, as she had done for several hours. When she rose, she walked into the small bathroom, where she began to inspect her face carefully in the mirror above the sink.

  She lifted her hair away from her forehead with one hand, and with the other, traced the ridges of the scar, stretching from just beneath the hairline, bisecting the eyebrow, skewing sideways slightly, where the blade had just missed her eyeball, then traveling down her cheek and ending at her chin. Where the skin had knitted together, it was just slightly lighter than the rest of her complexion. In a couple of spots the slice was barely noticeable. In others, painfully obvious. She thought that she had grown oddly familiar with the scar, and accepted it for what it represented. Once, several years back, on a date that had started with promise with an overly self-assured young doctor, he had offered to put her in touch with a prominent plastic surgeon, whom, he insisted, could fix her face so that so one would ever know she’d been cut. She had neither contacted the plastic surgeon nor ever gone out on another date with that or any other doctor.

  Lucy thought of herself as the sort of person who continues to define existence every day. The man who had put the scar on her face and stolen her privacy had thought he was damaging her, she told herself, when, in reality all he had done was give her focus and purpose. There were many men behind bars because of what that one man had done to her one night during her law school days. She told herself that it would be some time before the debt—that outrage to her heart and body was owed—would be paid in full. Single immense moments, Lucy thought, steered one through life. What made her uncomfortable in the hospital was how the patients weren’t necessarily confined by a single act, but by great accumulations of infinitesimally small incidents, all of which sent them hurtling into their depressions or schizophrenia, psychosis, bipolar diseases, and obsessive-compulsive behavior. Peter, she recognized, was much closer to her in spirit and temperament. He, too, had let a single moment shape his entire life. His, of course, had been rash impulse. Even if justifiable, on one level, it was still the product of a momentary lack of control. Hers was far colder, far more calculated and, for lack of a more correct term: revenge.

  She had a sudden, harsh memory, the sort that enters unbidden into one’s imagination and nearly slices one’s breath away: In Massachusetts General hospital, where she’d been taken after she had been discovered sobbing, bleeding, stumbling about haphazardly in a quadrangle between buildings by a pair of undergraduate physics majors coming home late from a lab, the police had questioned her closely, while a nurse and a doctor had performed the rape examination. The detectives had stood up by her head, while the physician and assistant had worked in quiet in a different realm altogether, below her waist. Did you see the man? No. Not really. He wore a tight ski mask and all I could see were his eyes. Could you recognize him again? No. Why were you walk
ing alone at night across campus? I don’t know. I’d been in the library studying and it was time to go home. What can you tell us that will help us to catch him? Silence.

  Of all the terrors that had been delivered to her that night, she thought the one that had undeniably stayed with her was the scar on her face. She had been almost comatose from shock, her mind fleeing from her body, separating itself from sensation, and then he had cut her. He did not kill her—he could have easily done that. Nor was there any overt need to do anything else. She was almost unconscious and lost, and he had more than ample opportunity to flee undetected and unobserved. But instead, he’d leaned down, marked her forever, and then through the fog of pain and insult, she’d heard him whisper a single word in her ear: Remember.

  The word had hurt more than the cut across her beauty.

  So she did, but not she thought, in the way the man that assaulted her expected.

  If she could not put the man who had scarred her in prison, she could put dozens of similar men there. If she regretted anything, it was that the assault had stolen what remained of innocence and lightheartedness from her life. Laughter came much harder afterward and love seemed impossible to attain. But, she often told herself, she was likely to have lost those qualities soon enough anyway. She had become monklike in her pursuit of evils.

  She stared into the mirror and slowly put all her memories back into the compartments where she kept them filed in an orderly and acceptable fashion. What had happened once, was finished now, she told herself. She knew the man she hunted in the hospital was as close to the one man who haunted her actions as any that she’d stared down across a courtroom. Finding the Angel would do much more, she thought, than merely stop a repetitive killer from striking again.

  She felt a little like an athlete, centering herself on the single purpose of the moment.

  “A trap,” she said out loud. “A trap needs bait.”

  She moved her hand through the cascade of black hair that framed her face, letting it drip between her fingers like raindrops.

  Short hair.

  Blond hair.

  All four victims had worn hair that was styled noticeably short. They had all approximated much the same physical characteristics. They had all been killed in the same fashion, the same murder weapon used in each case and the throat slashed left to right the same way. The postmortem mutilations to the hands had been the same. Then their bodies were abandoned in similar settings. Even the last victim, there in the hospital, when she considered the storage room that had housed the nurse-trainee’s last seconds, she could see the way that the killer had replicated the rural, forest locations of the other killings. And, she remembered, he’d compromised the physical evidence with water and cleaning fluid in the same way that nature had unwittingly abetted him with the first three homicides.

  He was here, she knew this. She suspected that she’d even looked directly into his eyes, at some point during her days in the hospital, but hadn’t seen him for what he was. This thought made her shudder, but also seemed to stoke the fury that was building within her.

  She stared at the strands of black hair that she held like so many delicate spiderwebs in her fingers.

  A small price to pay, she thought.

  She turned abruptly and returned to the bed. The first thing she did was remove a small black suitcase from where she had stored it beneath the frame. The suitcase had a combination lock, which she dialed and opened up. There was a second, zippered pocket inside, and this she opened as well, drawing forth a deep brown leather holster which held a snub-nosed .38 caliber revolver. She hefted the pistol in her hand for a moment, feeling its heft and weight. She had fired this weapon less than a half-dozen times in the years that she had owned it, and it felt unfamiliar, but incisive in her hand. Then, with a single, determined motion, she scooped up the remaining items gathered on the bedspread: A hairbrush. A pair of barber’s scissors. A box of hair dye.

  Her hair would grow back in time, she told herself.

  And the great sheen of black that she’d known for the entirety of her life would return before too long.

  Telling herself that there was nothing permanent in what she was doing, but what could be permanent was not doing enough to find the Angel right then, right at that moment, she took all the items into the bathroom and arranged them all in front of her on a small shelf. Then she lifted the scissors and half expecting to see blood flowing, began to saw away at her hair.

  One of the tricks that Francis had learned, over all the years since the first day in his childhood when he’d first heard voices, was how to find the one that made the most sense in the symphony of discord within his head. He had come to know that his own madness was defined by his ability to sort through everything that came rushing at him from inside, and make his path ahead as best he could. It wasn’t exactly logical, but there was some practicality in what he had learned to do.

  He told himself that the situation in the hospital was not all that different. A detective takes many disparate clues and pieces them together into a consistent whole, he thought to himself. He was persuaded that everything that he needed to know in order to paint the portrait that would become the Angel had already taken place, but somehow, in the wildly fluctuating, erratic world of the mental hospital, the context had been hidden.

  Francis looked over at Peter, who was dashing cold water onto his face at a washbasin. He will never see what I can see Francis told himself. There was a chorus within him of agreement.

  But before he could go any further with this thinking, Francis saw Peter pull himself off the basin, look up at himself in a mirror and shake his head, as if displeased with what he saw in the reflection. At the same time, Peter saw Francis hovering behind him and smiled. “Ah, C-Bird. Top of the morning to you. We have survived another night here, which, upon reflection and on balance, is no small feat and an accomplishment that should be celebrated with a hearty, if not altogether tasty, breakfast. What do you suppose this fine day will bring?”

  Francis shook his head to indicate he was unsure.

  “Maybe some progress?”

  “Maybe.”

  “Maybe something good?”

  “Unlikely.”

  Peter laughed. “Francis, buddy, there’s no pill and certainly no shot they can give you in here to reduce or remove a sense of cynicism.”

  Francis nodded. “None that can give you optimism, either.”

  “Touché,” Peter said. He lost the grin he wore, and leaned toward Francis. “We’ll make some headway today, I promise.” Then he smiled again, and added, “Headway. That’s a little bit of a joke. You’ll get it soon enough.”

  Francis had no idea what he was talking about, but asked, “How can you promise that?”

  “Because Lucy thinks a different approach might work.”

  “A different approach?”

  Peter looked around for a moment, then whispered, “If you cannot bring yourself to the man you’re hunting, perhaps you can bring the man to you.”

  Francis recoiled slightly, as if pummeled by the noise within him of dozens of voices screaming danger. Peter did not notice the sudden shift in Francis’s appearance, like the abrupt approach of a storm cloud on a distant horizon, as the younger man chewed over what Peter had said. Instead, he clapped Francis on the back and sardonically added, “Come on. Let’s eat soggy pancakes or runny eggs and see what starts to unfold. Big day, today, I’m guessing, C-Bird. Keep your eyes and ears open.”

  The two of them stepped from the washroom, to where the men of the dormitory were starting to stumble and shuffle out of the doorway into the corridor. The start of the daily routine. Francis was more than a little unsure what it was that he was supposed to be watching out for, but any questions he might have had were instantly erased in that moment by the high-pitched, shrill and desperate scream that furiously echoed down the hallway, reverberating in the air around them with a complete helplessness that chilled everyone who heard it.

/>   It is easy to remember that scream.

  I have thought about it many times, over many years. There are screams of fear, screams of shock, screams that speak of anxiety, tension, and some even of despair. This seemed to mingle all those qualities together into something so hopeless and terrifying that it defied reason and comfort, amplified by all the terrors of the mental hospital rolled together. A mother’s scream of danger closing in on her child. A soldier’s scream of pain as he sees his wound and knows it speaks of death. Something ancient and animal that emerges only in the rarest and most fearsome of moments. It was as if something fixed firmly in the center of things was suddenly, abruptly gone, and it was too much to bear.

  I never learned who emitted that scream, but it became a part of all of us who heard it. And stayed with us, no matter how much time had passed.

  I pushed out into the corridor directly behind Peter, who was moving quickly toward the sound. I was only peripherally aware of some of the others, who were shrinking to the sides, hugging the walls. I saw Napoleon pushing himself into a corner and Newsman, suddenly not curious in the slightest, huddling down as if he could cloak himself from the vibrant noise. Peter’s footsteps resounded against the corridor floor, as he picked up his pace, and hurried down the path of the echo toward the source of the scream. I caught just the smallest look at his face, which was set with a sudden harshness and clarity that was unfamiliar in the hospital. It was as if the sound had triggered some immense worry within him, and he was trying to outdistance all the fears that accompanied it.

  The scream had come from the far end of the corridor, past the entrance to the women’s dormitory. But the memory of the scream was as real in my mind as it was that morning in the Amherst Building. It curled around me, like smoke from a fire, and I grasped my pencil and wrote furiously on the wall of my apartment, fearing every second that the Angel’s great mocking laughter would supplant it in my recollection, and I needed to get it down before that took place. In my imagination, I could see Peter, running headlong fast, as if he could outrace the echo.