by Dean Koontz
“Ten foreskins from grown men, not infants,” Ethan amplified.
After chewing mechanically, not with his former relish, and after swallowing with a grimace, Hazard said, “Ouch. How many grown men get themselves circumcised?”
“They’re not standing in line for it,” Ethan agreed.
CHAPTER 9
CORKY LAPUTA THRIVED IN THE RAIN.
He wore a long shiny yellow slicker and a droopy yellow rain hat. He was as bright as a dandelion.
The slicker had many inside pockets, deep and weatherproof.
In his tall black rubber boots, two layers of socks kept his feet pleasantly warm.
He yearned for thunder.
He ached for lightning.
Storms in southern California, usually lacking crash and flash, were too quiet for his taste.
He liked the wind, however. Hissing, hooting, a champion of disorder, it lent a sting to the rain and promised chaos.
Ficus and pine trees shivered, shuddered. Palm fronds clicked and clattered.
Stripped leaves whirled in ragged green conjurations, short-lived demons that blew down into gutters.
Eventually, clogging drain grills, the leaves would be the cause of flooded streets, stalled cars, delayed ambulances, and many small but welcome miseries.
Here in the blustery, dripping midday, Corky walked a charming residential neighborhood in Studio City. Sowing disorder.
He didn’t live here. He never would.
This was a working-class neighborhood, managerial-class at best. Intellectual stimulation in such a place would be hard to find.
He had driven here to take a walk.
Emergency-yellow, blazing canary, he nevertheless passed along these streets with complete anonymity, drawing as little notice as might a ghost whose substance was but a twist of ectoplasmic mist.
He had yet to encounter anyone on foot. Few cars traveled the quiet streets.
The weather kept most people snug indoors.
The glorious rotten weather was Corky’s fine conspirator.
At this hour, of course, most residents of these houses were away at work. Toiling, toiling, with stupid purpose.
Because this was a holiday week, children had not gone to school. Today: Monday. Christmas: Friday. Deck the halls.
Some children would be in the company of siblings. A lesser number would be under the protection of a nonworking mother.
Others were home alone.
In this instance, however, children were not Corky’s avenue of expression. Here, they were safe from the yellow ghost passing among them.
Anyway, Corky was forty-two. Kids these days were too savvy to open their doors to strange men.
Welcome disorder and lovely decadence had deeply infected the world in recent years. Now the lambs of all ages were growing wary.
He contented himself with lesser outrages, just happy to be out in the storm and doing a little damage.
In one of his capacious inner pockets, he carried a plastic bag of glittering blue crystals. A wickedly powerful chemical defoliant.
The Chinese military had developed it. Prior to a war, their agents would sow this stuff in their enemy’s farms.
The blue crystals withered crops through a twelvemonth growing cycle. An enemy unable to feed itself cannot fight.
One of Corky’s colleagues at the university had accepted a grant to study the crystals for the Department of Defense. They felt an urgent need to find a way to protect against the chemical in advance of its use.
In his lab, the colleague had a fifty-pound drum of the stuff. Corky had stolen one pound.
He wore thin protective latex gloves, which he could easily hide in the great winglike sleeves of his slicker.
The slicker was as much a serape as a coat. The sleeves were so voluminous that he could withdraw his arms from them, search his interior pockets, and slip into the sleeves again with fistfuls of one poison or another.
He scattered blue crystals over primrose and liriope, over star jasmine and bougainvillea. Azaleas and ferns. Carpet roses, lantana.
The rain swiftly dissolved the crystals. The chemical seeped into the roots.
In a week, the plants would yellow, drop leaves. In two weeks, they would collapse in a muck of reeking rot.
Large trees would not be affected by the quantities that Corky could scatter. Lawns, flowers, shrubs, vines, and smaller trees would succumb, however, in satisfying numbers.
He didn’t sow death in the landscaping of every house. One out of three, in no apparent pattern.
If an entire block of homes were blighted, neighbors might be drawn closer by the shared catastrophe. If some were untouched, they would become the envy of the afflicted. And might arouse suspicion.
Corky’s mission was not merely to cause destruction. Any fool could wreck things. He intended also to spread dissension, distrust, discord, and despair.
Occasionally a dog barked or growled from the shelter of a porch where it was tethered or from within a doghouse behind a board fence or a stone wall.
Corky liked dogs. They were man’s best friend, though why they would want to fill that role remained a mystery, considering the vile nature of humanity.
Now and then, when he heard a dog, he fished tasty biscuits from an inner pocket. He tossed them onto porches, over fences.
In the interest of societal deconstruction, he could put aside his love of dogs and do what must be done. Sacrifices must be made.
You can’t make an omelet without breaking eggs, and all that.
The dog biscuits were treated with cyanide. The animals would die far faster than the plants.
Few things would spread despair so effectively as the untimely death of a beloved pet.
Corky was sad. Sad for the luckless dogs.
He was happy, too. Happy that in a thousand little ways he daily contributed to the fall of a corrupt order—and therefore to the rise of a better world.
For the same reason that he didn’t damage the landscaping at every house, he didn’t kill every dog. Let neighbor suspect neighbor.
He wasn’t concerned that he would be caught in these poisonings. Entropy, the most powerful force in the universe, was his ally and his protecting god.
Besides, the at-home parents would be watching sleazy daytime talk shows on which daughters revealed to their mothers that they were whores, on which wives revealed to their husbands that they were having affairs with their brothers-in-law.
With school out, the kids would be busy learning homicidal skills from video games. Better yet, the pubescent boys would be surfing the Net for pornography, sharing it with innocent younger brothers, and scheming to rape the little girl next door.
Because he approved of those activities, Corky went about his work as discreetly as possible, so as not to distract these people from their self-destruction.
Corky Laputa was not merely a dreary poisoner. He was a man of many talents and weapons.
From time to time, as he plodded along the puddled walkways, under the drizzling trees, he indulged in melody. He sang “Singin’ in the Rain,” of course, which might be trite, but which amused him.
He did not dance.
Not that he couldn’t dance. Although not as limber and as right with rhythm as Gene Kelly, he could dazzle on any dance floor.
Capering along a street in a yellow slicker as roomy as any nun’s habit was, however, not wise behavior for an anarchist who preferred anonymity.
The streetside mailbox in front of each house always sported a number. Some boxes featured family names, as well.
Sometimes a name appeared to be Jewish. Stein. Levy. Glickman.
At each of these boxes, Corky paused briefly. He inserted one of the letter-size white envelopes that he carried by the score in another slicker pocket.
On each envelope, a black swastika. In each, two sheets of folded paper certain to instill fear and stoke anger.
On the first page, in bold block letters, were printed the
words DEATH TO ALL DIRTY JEWS.
The photo on the second page showed bodies stacked ten deep in the furnace yard of a Nazi concentration camp. Under it in red block letters blazed the message YOU’RE NEXT.
Corky had no prejudice against the Jewish people. He held all races, religions, and ethnic groups in equal contempt.
At other special venues, he had distributed DEATH TO ALL DIRTY CATHOLICS notices, DEATH TO ALL BLACKS, and IMPRISON ALL GUN OWNERS.
For decades, politicians had been controlling the people by dividing them into groups and turning them against one another. All a good anarchist could do was try to intensify the existing hatreds and pour gasoline on the fires that the politicians had built.
Currently, hatred of Israel—and, by extension, all Jews—was the fashionable intellectual position among the most glamorous of media figures, including many nonreligious Jews. Corky was simply giving the people what they wanted.
Azalea to lantana to jasmine vine, dog to dog to mailbox, he journeyed through the rain-swept day. Seeding chaos.
Determined conspirators might be able to blow up skyscrapers and cause breathtaking destruction. Their work was helpful.
Ten thousand Corky Laputas—inventive, diligent—would in their quiet persistent way do more, however, to undermine the foundations of this society than all the suicide pilots and bombers combined.
For every thousand gunmen, Corky thought, I’d rather have one hate-filled teacher subtly propagandizing in a schoolroom, one day-care worker with an unslakable thirst for cruelty, one atheist priest hiding in cassock and alb and chasuble.
By a circuitous route, he came within sight of the BMW where he had parked it an hour and a half earlier. Right on schedule.
Spending too much time in a single neighborhood could be risky. The wise anarchist keeps moving because entropy favors the rambler, and motion foils the law.
The dirty-milk clouds had churned lower during his stroll, coagulating into sooty curds. In the storm gloom, in the wet shade of the oak tree, his silver sedan waited as dark as iron.
Trailers of bougainvillea lashed the air, casting off scarlet petals, raking thorny nails against the stucco wall of a house, making sgraffito sounds: scratch-scratch, screek-screek.
Wind threw sheets, lashed whips, spun funnels of rain. Rain hissed, sizzled, chuckled, splashed.
Corky’s phone rang.
He was still half a block from his car. He would miss the call if he waited to answer it in the BMW.
He slipped his right arm out of its sleeve, under his slicker, and unclipped the phone from his belt.
Arm in sleeve again, phone to ear, toddling along as buttercup-yellow and as smile-evoking as any character in any TV program for children, Corky Laputa was in such a good mood that he answered the call by saying, “Brighten the corner where you are.”
The caller was Rolf Reynerd. As thick as Corky was yellow, Rolf thought he’d gotten a wrong number.
“It’s me,” Corky said quickly, before Reynerd could hang up.
By the time he reached the BMW, he wished he had never answered the phone. Reynerd had done something stupid.
CHAPTER 10
BEYOND THE RESTAURANT WINDOW, FALLING rain as clear as a baby’s conscience met the city pavement and flooded the gutters with filthy churning currents.
Studying the photo of the jar full of foreskins, Hazard said, “Ten little hats from ten little proud heads? You think they could be trophies?”
“From men he’s murdered? Possible but unlikely. Anybody with that many kills isn’t the kind to taunt his victims first with freaky gifts in black boxes. He just does the job.”
“And if they were trophies, he wouldn’t give them away so easy.”
“Yeah. They’d be the central theme of his home decor. What I think is he works with stiffs. Maybe in a funeral home or a morgue.”
“Postmortem circumcisions.” Hazard twisted some string cheese onto his fork as he might have spun up a bite of spaghetti. “Kinky, but it’s got to be the answer, ’cause I haven’t heard about ten unsolved homicides where it looks like the perp might be a lunatic rabbi.” He dunked the string cheese in lebne and continued with lunch.
Ethan said, “I think he harvested these from cadavers for the sole purpose of sending them to Channing Manheim.”
“To convey what—that Chan the Man is a prick?”
“I doubt the message is that simple.”
“Fame doesn’t seem so appealing anymore.”
The fourth black box had been larger than the others. Two photos were required to document the contents.
In the first picture stood a honey-colored ceramic cat. The cat stood on its hind paws and held a ceramic cookie in each forepaw. Red letters on its chest and tummy spelled COOKIE KITTEN.
“It’s a cookie jar,” Ethan said.
“I’m such a good detective, I figured that out all by myself.”
“It was filled with Scrabble tiles.”
The second photo showed a pile of tiles. In front of the pile, Ethan had used six pieces to spell OWE and WOE.
“The jar contained ninety of each letter: O, W, E. Either word could be spelled ninety times, or both words forty-five times side by side. I don’t know which he intended.”
“So the nutball is saying, ‘I owe you woe.’ He thinks somehow Manheim has done him wrong, and now it’s payback time.”
“Maybe. But why in a cookie jar?”
“You could also spell wow,” Hazard noted.
“Yeah, but then you’re left with half the Os and all the Es not used, and they don’t make anything together. Only owe or woe uses all the letters.”
“What about two-word combinations?”
“The first one is wee woo. Which could mean ‘little love,’ I guess, but I don’t get the message in that one. The second is E-W-E, and woo again.”
“Sheep love, huh?”
“Seems like a dead end to me. I think owe woe is what he intended, one or the other, or both.”
Smearing lebne on a slice of lahmajoon flatbread, Hazard said, “Maybe after this we can play Monopoly.”
The fifth black box had contained a hardcover book titled Paws for Reflection. The cover featured a photo of an adorable golden retriever puppy.
“It’s a memoir,” Ethan said. “The guy who wrote it—Donald Gainsworth—spent thirty years training guide dogs for the blind and service dogs for people confined to wheelchairs.”
“No bugs or foreskins pressed between the pages?”
“Nope. And I checked every page for underlining, but nothing was highlighted.”
“It’s out of character with the rest. An innocuous little book, even sweet.”
“Box number six was thrown over the gate a little after three-thirty this morning.”
Hazard studied the last two photos. First, the sutured apple. Then the eye inside. “Is the peeper real?”
“He pried it out of a doll.”
“Nevertheless, this one disturbs me most of all.”
“Me too. Why you?”
“The apple’s the most crafted of the six. It took a lot of care, so it’s probably the one he finds most meaningful.”
“So far it doesn’t mean much to me,” Ethan lamented.
Stapled to the last photograph was a Xerox of the typewritten message that had been folded in the seed pocket, under the eye. After reading it twice, Hazard said, “He didn’t send anything like this with the first five packages?”
“No.”
“Then this is probably the last thing he’s sending. He’s said everything he wants to say, in symbols and now in words. Now he moves from threats to action.”
“I think you’re right. But the words are as much of a riddle as the symbols, the objects.”
With silvery insistence, headlights cleaved the afternoon gloom. Radiant wings of water flew up from the puddled pavement, obscuring the tires and lending an aura of supernatural mission to the vehicles that plied the currents of Pico Boulevard.
>
After a brooding silence, Hazard said, “An apple might symbolize dangerous or forbidden knowledge. The original sin he mentions.”
Ethan tried his salmon and couscous again. He might as well have been eating paste. He put down his fork.
“The seeds of knowledge have been replaced by the eye,” Hazard said, almost more to himself than to Ethan.
A flock of pedestrians hurried past the restaurant windows, bent forward as if resisting a wind greater than the one that the December day exhaled, under the inadequate protection of black umbrellas, like mourners quickening to a grave.
“Maybe he’s saying, ‘I see your secrets, the source—the seeds—of your evil.’”
“I had a similar thought. But it doesn’t feel entirely right, and it doesn’t lead me anywhere useful.”
“Whatever he means by it,” Hazard said, “it bothers me that you have this eye in the apple come just after this book about a guy who raised guide dogs for the blind.”
“If he’s threatening to blind Manheim, that’s bad enough,” said Ethan, “but I think he intends worse.”
After shuffling through the photos once more, Hazard returned them to Ethan and again addressed the seafood tagine with gusto. “I assume you’ve got your man well covered.”
“He’s filming in Florida. Five bodyguards travel with him.”
“You don’t?”
“Not usually. I oversee all security operations from Bel Air. I talk to the head road warrior at least once a day.”
“Road warrior?”
“That’s Manheim’s little joke. It’s what he calls the bodyguards who travel with him.”
“That’s a joke? I fart funnier than he talks.”
“I never claimed he was the king of comedy.”
“When somebody tossed the sixth box over the gate last night,” Hazard asked, “who was the somebody? Any security tape?”
“Plenty. Including a clear shot of his license plate.”
Ethan told him about Rolf Reynerd—though he didn’t mention his encounters with the man, neither the one that he knew to be real nor the one that he seemed to have dreamed.
“And what do you want from me?” Hazard asked.
“Maybe you could check him out.”