The Butcher's Theater

by Jonathan Kellerman

  If Doctor was home, he’d go outside and talk to Lillian, shake her hand, and pick up Sarah’s suitcases. They seemed to like each other, talking all friendly, as if they had lots to talk about, and he couldn’t figure out why, if they got along so good, they’d gotten divorced. He wondered if his mother and Doctor had ever been friendly like that. As long as he could remember, it had always been fighting, the night-wars.

  Twice during each visit Doctor and Sarah went out together. Once for dinner, once for ice cream. He knew about it because he heard them talking, planning what they were going to eat. Rack of lamb. Prime rib. Baked Alaska. Rice pudding. His mother heard it, too, called him in and whispered in his ear: “They’re a pair of little piggies, absolutely disgusting. They go to nice places and eat like pigs and people stare at them. I refuse to go along anymore—it’s disgusting. You should see his shirts when he’s through. She eats chocolate ice cream and gets it all over herself. Her dresses look like used toilet paper!”

  He thought of that, chocolate ice cream stains looking like shit stains, and wondered what people shit tasted like. One time he’d taken a tiny piece of the cat’s shit out of the litter box and put it on his tongue and then spit it out real fast because it was so terrible. Tasting it had made his stomach hurt and he wanted to throw up for three days. All over his mother’s bed—that would be good, big globs of barf all over the white satin. On Doctor and Sarah and the maids too. Running all over the house—no, flying! Dive bombing everyone with shit bombs and throw-up bombs. Pow!

  Power!

  One time he saw Sarah in the cabana next to the pool. There was an open window and he looked through it. She was peeling off her bathing suit and looking at herself in the mirror before putting on her clothes.

  She had small titties with chocolate centers.

  Her body was tan except for a white tit belt and a white butt belt and her puss was covered with black hair.

  She touched her puss and smiled at herself in the mirror. Then shook her head no and lifted her leg in order to put on her panties.

  He saw a pink, squiggly line peeking out from under the middle of the hair, like one of the wounds in Doctor’s books.

  Her butt was like two eggs, small, the brown kind. He thought of cracking them open, yellow stuff coming out.

  Her head hair was dark, but not as dark as her puss hair. She stood there in her panties and brushed it, making it shine. Raising her arms so that her titties went flat and disappeared and only the chocolate tips were sticking out. Humming to herself.

  He wanted to take bites out of her, wondered what she tasted like.

  Thinking about it made his pecker get all stiff and hurt so bad he was afraid it would crack and fall off and all the blood would come pouring out of the hole and he would die.

  It took a long time for the pain to go away.

  He hated Sarah a little after that, but he still thought she was okay. He wanted to sneak into her room, go through her drawers, but she always kept the door locked. After she went back home and before the maids had a chance to lock it, he went in and opened all the drawers. All that was left was a nylon stocking box and a perfumey smell.

  It made him real angry.

  He kind of missed her.

  He thought of cutting her up and eating her, imagined that she tasted like sugared fruit.

  The house was so big it always felt empty. Which was okay—the only ones around were the maids and they were stupid, talked with an accent and hummed weird songs. They hated him—he could tell from the way they looked at him and whispered to each other when he walked by. He wondered what their pusses looked like. Their titties. Thought they probably tasted sour, like vegetables. Wondering about it made him stare at them. When they noticed it they got angry, muttered under their breaths, and walked away from him, talking foreign.

  The neat thing about the library was that the double doors were always closed; once the maids were through cleaning, you could go in, turn the key in the lock, and nobody would know you were in there.

  He liked the big, soft leather chairs. And the books. Doctor’s books, full of terrific, scary pictures. He had favorites, would always turn to them first. The nigger guy with elephantiasis (a big word; it took him a long time to figure it out), his balls were big—huge!—each one as big as a water-melon. He couldn’t believe it the first time he saw it. The picture showed the guy sitting on a chair with his hands in his lap, the balls hanging down to the floor! He looked pretty worried. Why didn’t someone just come along and chop them off so he could walk again? Clean him up and stop his worries?

  Other ones he liked were the retarded people with no foreheads, and tongues as big as salamis that just hung out of their mouths. A weird-looking naked retarded lady with a real flat face standing next to a ruler; she was only thirty-seven inches tall and had no hair on her puss, even though she was old. Naked midgets and giants, also next to rulers. People missing fingers and arms and legs. One guy without arms or legs—that looked really stupid and made him laugh.

  Lots of other naked people, with sores and spots and bent bones and weird bumps. Buttholes and lips with splits down the middle. And naked fat people. Really fat people, so fat that they looked like they were wearing squishy clothes all full of wrinkles and folds. One woman had a belly that hung down past her knees, covering her whole puss. Her elbows were covered by hang-downs of fat. Someone, a surgeon like Doctor, should come along and cut off all that fat, maybe use it for candles or something or to give to skinny people to keep them warm. The fat people could be peeled and cleaned up to make them look nice. The ones in the books probably didn’t do it because it was too expensive. They’d have to walk around like that, all covered with fat-clothes, for the rest of their lives.

  One time, after looking at the fat people, he left the library, went up to his room, and made squishy, fat people out of modeling clay. Then he took a pencil and a nail file and made holes and slit-cuts all over them, chopped off their heads and arms and legs and peeled them until they were nothing more than little chunks and pieces. Then he grabbed up the chunks and squeezed real hard, let the clay squish through his fingers. Flushed them down the toilet and imagined they were drowning. Screaming: Oh, no! Oh, God! Watching them go around and around and finally disappear made him feel like the boss, made his pecker hard and sore.

  On the top shelf of the carved bookcase was this big green book, really heavy; he had to stand on a chair to get it, be really careful not to drop it on Doctor’s leather-topped desk, break the skull that Doctor used for a paperweight. A monkey skull, too small to have come from a person, but he liked to pretend it was from a person. One of the midgets in the pictures. Maybe he’d tried to attack the boy’s family and the boy had killed him and saved everyone, like a big hero, then peeled off the skin to get the skull.

  The green book was old—the date on it was 1908—and it had a long title: The Atlas of Clinical Surgery by Professor Bockenheimer or some weird name like that, from a place called Berlin; he looked it up in his junior encyclopedia and found out it was in Germany.

  Someone had written something inside the cover of the book, in this weird, thin handwriting that looked like dead bugs and spider legs, it took him a long time to figure it out.

  To Charles, my learned colleague, with deepest gratitude for your kind hospitality and stimulating conversation.

  Best wishes,

  Dieter Schwann

  What was neat about the green book was that the pictures looked really real, as if you could put your hand out and touch them, just like looking through a 3-D stereoscope. The book said they were pictures of models. Models made by some guy named F. Kalbow from the—this was a really hard one—Pathoplastic Institute of Berlin.

  One model was a guy’s face with a hole in it called a sarcoma. The hole covered the guy’s nose and mouth. All you could see was eyes and then the hole—inside it was all pink and yellow. Another one was a pecker all squashed up, with some grayish, wrinkly thing around it and a big
sore on the tip. Kind of like an earthworm with a red head. One he really liked to look at was this big picture of a butthole with pink flowerlike things all over it. A butthole flower garden.

  It was dirty stuff. He wanted to take a knife and cut it all away and peel it, make everything clean and nice.

  To be the boss, and save everyone.

  The other things he really liked were the knives and tools in the big black leather case that sat next to the monkey skull.

  The inside of the case was red velvet. Gold letters were stamped into it: Jetter und Scheerer: Tuttlingen und Berlin. There it was again, that same place, Berlin. It was a doctor city, probably. Full of doctor stuff.

  The knives and tools were held in place by leather straps. There were a lot of them; when you picked up the case it kind of clinked. The blades were silvery metal, the handles some smooth, white, shiny stuff that looked like the inside of a seashell.

  He liked to unfasten the straps and take the knives out, one by one, then arrange them like ice-cream sticks, making letters and designs with them on the desk top. His initials, in knife-letters.

  They were really sharp. He found out by accident when he touched the tip of one of them to his finger and all of a sudden his skin had opened, as if by magic. It was a deep cut and it scared him but he felt good, seeing the different layers of skin, what was inside of him. It didn’t even hurt, at first; then it started to bleed—a lot—and he felt a sharp, pumping pain. He grabbed a tissue, wrapped it around his finger, and squeezed, watching the tissue turn from white to red, sitting there a long time until the blood finally stopped coming out. He unwrapped the finger, touched the tissue to his tongue, tasted salt and paper, crumpled it, and stuffed it into his pocket.

  After that he cut himself from time to time. On purpose—he was the boss over the knives. Little tiny cuts that didn’t bleed for long, notches nicked into the tops of his fingernails. There was a squeezing tool in the case, off to one side, and he used it to squeeze his finger until it turned purple and hot and throbbing and he couldn’t stand it any longer. He used tissues to soak up the blood, collected the bloody pieces of paper, and hid them in a toy box in his closet.

  After playing with the knives, he sometimes went up to his room, locked the door, and took out nail files, scissors, safety pins, and pencils. Laying them out on his own desk, slapping together clay people and doing operations on them, using red clay for blood, making sarcoma holes and butthole flowers, cutting off their arms and legs.

  Sometimes he imagined the clay people screaming. Loud, wiggly screams of Oh, no! and Oh, my god! Chopping off their heads stopped that.

  That’ll show you to scream!

  He played with the knives for weeks before finding the knife book.

  The knife book had no people in it, just drawings of knives and tools. A catalog. He turned pages until he found drawings that matched the knives in the black leather case. Spent a long time finding matches, learning the names and memorizing them.

  The seven ones with the short blades were called scalpels.

  The folding one on top with the little pointed blade was a lancet.

  The ones with the long blades were called bistouries.

  The skinny, round things were surgical needles.

  The sharp spoon was a probe and scoop.

  The one that kind of looked like a fork with two points was a probe-detector.

  The hollow tube was a cannula; the pointy thing that fit into it was a trocar.

  The fat one with the thick, flat blade was a raspatory.

  The squeezing one off on the side, by itself, was a harelip clamp.

  At the bottom of the case was his favorite one. It really made him feel like the boss, even though he was still scared to pick it up, it was so big and felt so dangerous.

  The amputating knife. He needed two hands to hold it steady. Swing it in an arc, a soft, white neck its target.

  Cut, slice.

  Oh, god!

  That’ll show you.

  There was other neat stuff in the library too. A big brass microscope and a wooden box of prepared slides—flies’ legs that looked like hairy trees, red blood cells, flat and round like flying saucers. Human hair, bacteria. And a box of hypodermic needles in one of the desk drawers. He took one out, unwrapped it, and stuck it in the back of one of the leather chairs, on the bottom, next to the wall, where no one would notice it. Pretending the chair was an animal, he gave it shots, jabbing the needle in again and again, hearing the animal screaming until it turned into a person—a naked, ugly person, a girl—and started screaming in words.

  Oh, no! Oh, god!

  “There!” Jab. “That’ll show you!” Twist.

  He stole that needle, took it up to his room, and put it in with the bloody tissues.

  A neat room. Lots of neat stuff.

  But he liked the knives the best.

  CHAPTER

  34

  More interviews, more dead ends; five detectives working like mules.

  Lacking any new leads, Daniel decided to retrace old ones. He drove to the Russian Compound jail and interviewed Anwar Rashmawi, concentrating on the brother’s final conversation with Issa Abdelatif, trying to discern if the boyfriend had said anything about where he and Fatma had stayed between the time she’d left Saint Saviour’s and the day of her murder. If Abdelatif’s comment about Fatma’s being dead had been more specific than Anwar had let on.

  The guard brought Anwar in, wearing prison pajamas three sizes too big for him. Daniel could tell right away the brother was different, hostile, no longer the outcast. He entered the interrogation room swaggering and scowling, ignored Daniel’s greeting and the guard’s order to sit. Finally the guard pushed him down into the chair, said, “Stay there, you,” and asked Daniel if there was anything more he needed.

  “Nothing more. You may go.”

  When they were alone, Anwar crossed his legs, sat back in his chair, and stared at the ceiling, either ignoring Daniel’s questions or turning them into feeble jokes.

  Quite a change from the puff pastry who’d confessed to him two weeks ago. Bolstered, no doubt, by what he imagined to be hero status. According to the guards, his father had been visiting him regularly, the two of them playing sheshbesh, listening to music on Radio Amman, sharing cigarettes like best pals. The old man smiling with pride as he left the cell.

  Twenty fruitless minutes passed. The room was hot and humid. Daniel felt his clothes sticking to him, a tightness in his chest.

  “Let’s go over it again,” he said. “The exact words.”

  “Whose exact words?”

  “Abdelatif’s.”

  “Snakes don’t talk.”

  Like a broken record.

  Daniel opened his note pad.

  “When you confessed, you said he had plenty to say. I have it here in my notes: ‘. . . he started to walk toward me with the knife, saying I was dead, just like Fatma. That she was nothing to him, garbage to be dumped.’ You remember that, don’t you?”

  “I remember nothing.”

  “What else did he say about Fatma’s death?”

  “I want my lawyer.”

  “You don’t need one. We’re not discussing your crime, only Fatma’s murder.”

  Anwar smiled. “Tricks. Deceit.”

  Daniel got to his feet, walked over to the brother, and stared down at him.

  “You loved her. You killed for her. It would seem to me you’d want to find out who murdered her.”

  “The one who murdered her is dead.”

  Daniel bent his knees and put his face closer to Anwar’s. “Not so. The one who murdered her has murdered again—he’s still out there, laughing at all of us.”

  Anwar closed his eyes and shook his head. “Lies.”

  “It’s the truth, Anwar.” Daniel picked up the copy of Al Fajr, waved it in front of Anwar’s face until his eyes opened, and said, “Read for yourself.”

  Anwar averted his gaze.

  “Read it, An
war.”

  “Lies. Government lies.”

  “Al Fajr is a PLO mouthpiece—everyone knows that, Anwar. Why would the PLO print government lies?”

  “Government lies.”

  “Abdelatif didn’t murder her, Anwar—at least not by himself. There’s another one out there. Laughing and plotting.”

  “I know what you’re doing,” said Anwar smugly. “You’re trying to trick me.”

  “I’m trying to find out who murdered Fatma.”

  “The one who murdered her is dead.”

  Daniel straightened, took a step backward, and regarded the brother. The stubbornness, the narrowness of vision, tightened his chest further. He stared at Anwar, who spat on the floor, played with the saliva with the frayed toe of his shoe.

  Daniel waited. The tightness in Daniel’s chest turned hot, a fiery band that seemed to press against his lungs, branding them, causing real, searing pain.

  “Idiot,” he heard himself saying, words springing to his lips, tumbling out unfettered: “I’m trying to find the one who butchered her like a goat. The one who sliced her open and scooped out her insides for a trophy. Like a goat hanging in the souq, Anwar.”

  Anwar covered his ears and screamed. “Lies!”

  “He’s done it again, Anwar,” Daniel said, louder. “He’ll keep doing it. Butchering.”

  “Lies!” shouted Anwar. “Filthy deceit!”

  “Butchering, do you hear me!”

  “Jew liar!”

  “Your revenge is incomplete!” Daniel was shouting too. “A dishonor upon your family!”

  “Lies! Jew trickery!”

  “Incomplete, do you hear me, Anwar? A sham!”

  “Filthy Jew liar!” Anwar’s teeth were chattering, his hands corpse-white, clutching his ears.

  “Worthless. A dishonor. A joke for all to know.” Daniel’s mouth kept expectorating words. “Worthless,” he repeated, looking into Anwar’s eyes, making sure the brother could see him, read his lips. “Just like your manhood.”