by Robert Roper
“Boy-who?”
“Boichenko. S. Boichenko. He’s Ukrainian. I rely on him deeply, but I see I’ve been doing it all wrong. Your paper showed me that. You’re channeling the greatest set theorist of the twentieth century. You’re reincarnating him, almost.”
“I have only read your papers. The three real ones you ever wrote.”
With all the strength that he could summon, Landau grabbed the killer’s legs at the knee, like a jilted lover refusing to be abandoned in a Victorian novel. He sawed frantically at the back of the right knee, and when Heitor felt the bite of the straightedge he struck downward against the top of Landau’s large head, over and over with his scalpel. A knee tendon gave way. Heitor toppled over, onto Landau, the plastic coat crunching between them. Manuscript pages slithered out as Landau, somehow getting on top, eyes now splashed with blood, brought the razor up toward Heitor’s face. He slashed this way and that, seeking the throat but unable to quite find it. His grip grew uncertain for all the blood on his hands, seeps and spurts of it, like a plumbing job gone wrong.
Blow after blow against his own head, his own neck. At last he had to push away, pumping with his legs. Heitor made an arrrwwargh sound, a sound of indignant animal fury. Landau could recognize him no longer, his face was all wounds, nothing but wounds, blood from eyes to chin.
Heitor rolled onto his knees. His right lower leg lay sideways to the floor. With powerful blind strokes he crawled forward, the blade in his fist describing energetic half circles. Landau retreated as best he could, found himself on his feet, stumbled into the torture room. A wan light revealed Graciela on her back, the nightgown hoisted above her waist, ankles tied apart, courses of moist and drying blood along the insides of her legs. He turned as Heitor on one knee shuffled unstoppably forward, and he fell upon him from above, judging the moment to catch Heitor’s arm at its weakest point, when just about to hit a backhand. Heitor arrrwwargh-ing like a demented pirate, through much blood in his mouth. Landau struggled to keep the blade-arm pinned, and their faces came together, their bleeding faces came together.
They tumbled again. Landau now roaring too, Heitor’s blade finding its way into his chest over and over. He sought the throat one last time, Heitor protecting it by a tightly tucked chin, Landau prizing with his left hand, forcing the chin up a quarter inch, a half, then there was a wholesale giving way, and with the razor in his slippery fingers Landau sliced this way and that, roaring with all the intention that remained in him, with as much of purpose and will as he had ever summoned in his life.
chapter 20
Just as dawn came Mrs. Roger Plenicott, who lived three doors down from 4257 Avigdor Avenue, Oakland, in a gray-painted stucco house with a double-slab driveway occupying most of the front yard, saw a man in a sport coat at her front gate.
He looked drunk. Too blotto to take another step, his shoulders slack, head hanging to one side. All right, move along there, mister, bye-bye, be gone. Why my house, why am I always the lucky one? she asked herself. We need a dog or a higher fence, but she had set herself up for this, by turning her lights on so early in the morning. That attracted the loonies.
Her gate came open, and the stranger staggered forward. Fell ten feet short of the front door. Rolled over onto his back, then just lay there, face to the heavens.
“Roger. Roger. Would you come down here, please?”
Her husband was not to be roused, however—he was in the bedroom upstairs, whose door she had shut when she descended, unable to sleep.
“Roger, a man is lying in our front yard. He has collapsed and is lying flat on his back, not moving.” The stranger’s lips were moving, though; then, that stopped too.
The sky lightened fractionally. He was filthy dirty, the bum, a real mess. In winter she sometimes volunteered at the shelter on East Fourteenth Street, and she was reminded of the old Mexicans she sometimes saw there, men of forty or fifty, used-up men with nowhere else to go. They worked for twenty or thirty years sending money home, then the family ties frayed, the wives found someone else or didn’t want the old vagabond back. Meanwhile Juan Valdez has developed liver disease. If they can’t work they have nothing, really nothing. She saw old woolly white bums, too, men who had known the benefits of American citizenship but had gotten nowhere, life’s casualties, authentic losers. Dressed in clothes from Napoleon’s retreat from Moscow. This one had wads of paper spilling out of his sport coat, an old hobo’s trick to keep from freezing when they slept out.
Now she saw him differently, the light changing a bit more. It wasn’t filth or oil on his face, it was dried blood. Gaping wounds on his neck and head. “Roger, we have an injured man here! He’s been in a car accident, I think!” she shouted much louder than before. “Would you come down here, please? I need you.”
She wrapped her housecoat tight around her and went cautiously outdoors.
“Hello there—can you hear me, sir? Are you still alive?”
The old man opened his eyes.
“Are you okay? Do you know what day of the week it is, by any chance?”
Landau did not move or speak. All the telegraph lines were down.
“Try to wriggle a foot for me,” Mrs. Plenicott said. “The right one, say.”
Landau wriggled a foot.
“Okay, that’s good. That’s the left one, but okay. I’m going to call the dispatcher now. We don’t bother with 911 around here, we’re too close to the hospital, no need. The hospital’s over there on thirty-first.”
Landau said nothing.
Three days later, five days before his trial was to begin, on the fourth of March, 2007, Landau underwent a procedure at Kaiser Oakland, where he had been transferred from Highland Hospital. Jad dancing attendance as a good medical-doctor son should. Jad had intervened to prevent his father from coming under the care of one Aramis Vazkanoush, an elderly former chief of surgery board-certified in abdominal and vascular but in the last year or two erratic, according to an OR tech who logged road-miles with Jad in the hills. Jad nominated for the surgery instead a young woman trained at Stanford and UCSF, a personal friend who did Pilates with Karin two days a week. The problem, as it became clear to them all, was bowel spillage not picked up on the initial peritoneal lavage, when they had been more worried about blood loss and the scary scalp and neck stabs—“Your father has an unusually robust skull,” one of the neurosurgeons had reassured him, “almost as massive as Richard Nixon’s”—thus it was not till after the neck and head men had worked him over and he had been transfused with autologous blood deposited at Kaiser four years before, upon Jad’s suggestion, that careful attention was paid to his abdomen, where numerous nasty occult wounds were found.
The neck stabs could have done him in. They had nicked the vertebral artery but missed the carotid. What a truly lucky day it had been, just immensely lucky, you know! When Jad and Dr. Toomey told him that, how lucky he had been, Landau felt the opposite, but he did not speak. Melody came to visit him the day before the surgery. He could barely hold his head up, and though he mumbled this or that to her, he wished she wasn’t there. After the surgery, which took eleven hours, with drains now coming out of him everywhere and a normal bowel movement very far in his future, he felt hardly better at all, but the sight of her affected him differently.
“Is there something I can do for you, dear? Is the pain too much?” she asked him.
“No. They. Have. Me. On. Wonderful. Drip. Pure. Heroin. I think,” he said, panting with each word.
Melody smiled. “Use it all you can. Don’t stint. We’ll get you through withdrawal later.”
“It’s just, it’s just,” he tried to say, but then was too full of feeling to go on.
“I know. It’s all right.”
He asked her to go visit Deena. Take her some new balloons. Melody said she would, and she gave him some news about Deena, too, that Deena had awakened one evening and looked ar
ound her, while several friends of hers from the Asian Languages Department were standing around the foot of her bed, patting the blankets and crying. Though she still wasn’t saying or moving much, Deena might be able to go home soon, the doctors thought.
“Oh, that’s wonderful, just bloody wonderful,” Landau said, and he began to blubber.
Melody also cried for a while. “Just rest, darling. Things are going to be okay, you’ll see.”
“No, they aren’t. Not for that girl they aren’t. I could have saved her if I’d been a little bolder. Should never have let her leave my kitchen that afternoon. When the ambulance got me, I couldn’t talk. Had lost too much blood I guess. When you lose blood you’re useless, you don’t care about anything, even living, you’re at a loss.”
“It’s all right—they found her, they got into the house.”
“No, they didn’t. She died. She died.”
“She didn’t die. Who told you that?”
Landau had heard it from several sources. A cowboy, a nurse with an evil grin, a little birdie who flew through the room. Many voices in his head.
“She’s all right, sweetheart, she really is. She’s going to be okay, she’s fine, Gabriela.”
“Not Gabriela. Graciela.”
“Graciela, sorry. The young nanny. The really pretty one.”
“Not nanny, preschool teacher. Soon to be a distinguished librarian.”
“Okay. The point is she’s okay.”
Landau had told the EMTs that morning. He had roared and raged as he was being put on a gurney, insisting that they go up the hilly street, go into that off-white house up there, save the girl who was bleeding.
“No, I didn’t roar or do anything like that,” he insisted. “I tried to but I couldn’t make words come out. I was useless.”
“That’s just how you remember it. It says different in the papers. You did speak.”
“Oh, the papers, the papers. They’ll print anything.”
Byrum came to check in on him. He had brought Landau the new biography of Glenn Seaborg, the plutonium discoverer, and Landau thanked him for it.
“Why don’t you read it first, though, Byrum? It’s more your line. He’s one of your special guys, after all.”
“Thanks, I already have my own copy. And here’s something else for you. More reading materials.”
It was a small package, tightly wrapped in anonymous brown paper. Inside were three volumes of impeccable antique pornography. Somehow they had ended up in a recycling bin at the police station on Addison Street, Berkeley, just the other day. Byrum had happened on them as he was throwing out some stuff of his own.
“My, my,” said Landau, fondling them. “Isn’t that amazing? I thought I’d never see them again.”
Masha Dimitriopoulous also came to visit. Again she warned him not to be indiscreet, not to say things to the police that he shouldn’t, for instance. He wasn’t out of the woods yet legally—he could still be charged with a capital crime.
“Please, Masha, I’m a sick man. Don’t annoy me.”
“You killed a man, Professor. You could be charged with first-degree murder.”
“I killed a mad killer. The razor-slayer of seven people. And that was just his latest score.”
Masha had her laptop with her. They Googled Heitor Burgos-Pereira for the heck of it. Landau told her to open the fourth link down, but it wasn’t the same, it wasn’t what had been there before.
“Strange!” he said. “Look around some more, will you? I want you to read it. It’s a kind of paper he wrote.”
Masha still could not find it, even after more searching.
“It was a fake scientific paper,” he explained. “The detective says that when they write accounts like that, anything looking like a summary account, the end is near for them, the orgy of evil is burning out in them. He might have faded into a sort of normalcy if allowed to, to emerge twenty years hence with new savagery, perhaps. It was mixed up with this other orgy, this mental-math orgy, and as he felt it all coming together he kind of imploded. Somehow I was the seed of that. He needed to be near me, to have reference to me, to find consummation. Well, I understand that, sort of. I need to be near significant others when I do my work, I keep totems nearby. That I touch in the dark of night.”
“You and the killer, Professor. You and the friendly detective. You’re always teaming up, aren’t you, forming little partnerships. You need to rely on us, instead, your lawyers. We’re here to help you.”
“Yes, I know. But I have always been a collaborationist, Masha. I believe in teamwork. Working alone is less fun and more lonely.”
Four weeks passed, Landau recuperating at home. He arranged for Graciela Sanchez-Murillo to be seen by a tissue-regeneration specialist at UCSF, a highly touted doc who happened to be the first American to have replaced a thumb with a big toe. The doctor examined her and declared that she had received top-notch care at Highland Hospital. A hand surgeon named Gupta was the wizard there; he had happened to be on call the day she was brought in. Hand surgeons were top of the line; anybody could fix ruined faces, but hands were really hard.
Deena, sent home six days after Landau, identified Heitor Burgos-Pereira as the person who had attacked her after first disemboweling her husband. She typed rather than spoke her statement on an augmentative communication device that made her sound like Stephen Hawking. In contravention of several rules of prosecutorial procedure, Byrum, who had taken her statement, emailed Landau her responses. Later that afternoon Deena also emailed him, mentioning the detective and saying that she was getting a load together to go to the dry cleaner’s.
There occurred an earthshaking transfer of wealth from Landau’s retirement account into the account of Raboy Steck LLC. Landau tried not to think about it.
A second New Yorker article appeared, full of math talk. Whether because of production lags at the New York-based magazine, or because of a lingering anti-California bias, the interesting parts of the story, the throat-slitting, the naked girl tied by her ankles, everything that had happened after March 2, 2007, did not see print, although anyone who was interested had been feasting on such details online for weeks. Still with more he wanted to say about the estimable Landau and Beevors, Mark Wormser again begged for an interview, and Landau said that he was too weak to see anyone right now, but that he might feel better in six months. Try him then.
He was in a time of consuming no fibrous roughage, no spicy or greasy food, of not letting the Steri-Strips over his incisions get wet. Now off the magical drip but consuming Combunox at the maximum rate, he felt supremely confident some days; one morning, he opened his computer and searched for what he had written a while ago, and when he found it he could barely understand it. The whole idea of generating research during a slasher episode, a time of dead women and men and sexual mutilations, caused his delicate stomach to turn. Am I similar to Heitor, after all? he asked himself. Am I a slavering ghoul without a soul? But no, I am not like Heitor, not in the most important way. I killed no helpless women nor am I inclined to write the epidemiology of my own crimes. I just want to do some math. This thing of limits to computer modeling, the experts say it’s trivial, but I say not so fast. I say that hasn’t been fully demonstrated. I want to have a go at it when I have the strength.
On April 15, a Sunday, he rode with Jad to Martinez. They stopped at a mailbox in front of a post office and Landau put in his tax forms—he had filled them out himself this year, he had plenty of time.
Father and son said little. Landau was still upset with his son. They had talked things through, had no secrets about Samantha anymore, and to know all is to forgive, people say—but no, not quite. Sometimes to know all is to be appalled.
“I’m thinking now it’s a mistake to bring them a bottle of brandy, Jad. What do you think?”
“Why a mistake?”
“We don
’t know them at all. The father might be a recovering alcoholic. They might dislike liquor for religious reasons. Brandy might mean froufrou Berkeley, snooty France and all that—a sixer of Bud might be better.”
“Everybody likes a bottle of good brandy. It’s okay, Dad.”
Byrum had interviewed Jad twice. He had reported the results to Landau. Jad’s presence on Keeler Avenue on the morning when Deena Marjic and her dead husband were found had been coincidental, although you had to wonder about the playfulness of fate, to have put him there right then. At a second interview, Jad told Byrum a significantly different story. Not different about why he was there that morning but different about other things.
“I started by asking him about Doctor Beevors again. He said that she was a special person, deeply intuitive, and that she’d encouraged him when he was in a dark time in his life. Told him he wasn’t stupid, which he’d always thought he was. Maybe this rings a bell with you. He’s always compared himself to you.”
“Actually, it rings no bells, Detective. I didn’t tell him he was stupid, why would I do that? He’s my son.”
“Okay. All right. He got the message from somewhere, anyhow. When he was fourteen and a half they went to bed the first time. The wild thing just happened, to the complete surprise of both of them. I like your son, Professor, he’s odd but he says what’s real. It was the most beautiful thing he ever dreamed of, he told me. Nobody will ever understand, but if you look back in history, young men used to be brought along by kindly older women, and I don’t know if that’s true, myself, but that’s what he told me. So beautiful, so personal it was. It never seemed like she was poaching or doing something wicked or perverted, the opposite of that. The opposite. It set him up for good changes in his life.”
Oh, Christ, thought Landau. I’ll set him up, the little sneak. The sly fornicator.
“And you think this really happened?”