Scrote was confused. Dense. I really don’t see what—
From now on I want to be known as Dieter Terrif.
Spelling it.
Confusion in the pig eyes: This your real name? Terrif?
In a manner of speaking.
I don’t—
It’s my real name.
Then why did you enroll as—
A long story, Dean.
Charming smile: And for our purposes, irrelevant. The important thing is from now on I want to be known as Dieter Terrif. When I graduate, the diploma will say Dieter Terrif, M.D., Ph.D.
A slip. The scrote caught it, pounced on it:
We don’t grant Ph.D.’s, Mister—
I realize that. I’m planning on continuing my studies past the M.D. Surgical pathology, histological research.
Scrote was definitely confused. That was the problem with dealing with inferior types.
Really, now, this is highly irregular.
Scrote fondled the breasts of the meerschaum lady, pig eyes widening as he watched the money land on his desk.
One, two, three, four, five hundred-dollar bills, fanned out like a green poker hand.
Will this help regularize it?
A greedy hand reaching out. Then, hesitation. More greed.
Five hundred more landed on the desk.
What do you say. Dean?
Well, I suppose . . .
Little shit held a grudge against him after that, looked at him strangely every time they passed each other.
No matter. His new identity cleansed him. Six months of medical studies went by fast, despite tropical storms and heavy rains that brought more mosquitoes to the island; a plague of hairy spiders, spiny lizards, and other creepy-crawlies making their way into the dormitories, scuttling across night sheets, melding bad dreams with reality.
His fellow students woke up screaming. More morons started dropping out, talking about pharmacy school, chiropractic.
None of that second-rate bullshit for him.
He floated above it, cracking the books. Filling his head with doctor-words, taking special pleasure in Gross Lab, spending extra time there. Alone in the basement.
He had little use for food or sleep, was preparing himself for his rightful role as prizewinning pathologist on the staff of Columbia Presbyterian Hospital.
Then came the day they wheeled Gauguin Boy into the lab, brain-ravaged, but the body so beautiful.
The cadaver got assigned to another student. He bribed the moron, exchanged a disgusting, shriveled old man, plus cash, for the boy.
Came back late at night to study. And cut. Lit the lamp over his dissecting table, left the rest of the room dark. Opened the black leather case, took out a dancer and made a real science Y incision. Cracked the sternum, pinned back the skin flaps.
And saw the internal beauty.
He wanted to dive in, swim among the colors, unite with the cells, the structure, the primal soup of life.
Be as one.
And why not?
Moving automatically, without thinking, he was stripping off his clothes, his nakedness delicious and holy. The lab, hot and humid and reeking of formaldehyde and rot, crickets chirping inside and out. But he wasn’t afraid, wasn’t sweating, so cool with purpose, floating above it all.
Then descending. On top of the boy, the hole a window to beauty, welcoming him.
Merge.
Coolflesh.
A moment of indescribable ecstasy, then betrayal:
Pidgin curses. The lights sharp and blinding.
Professor Anton Bromet Van der Veering, M.D., D.Sc., standing in the doorway, pipe in hand, the naked-lady meerschaum resembling a tiny female victim struggling in his slimy yellow fingers.
Staring, the piggy-slant eyes so bugged out they’d become round.
Fucker expelled him that night, gave him three days to leave the island. Remained resolute, beyond the lure of more money.
The first time in St. Ignatius history. Hot death-shame took hold of him and made him tremble as he packed. He considered letting a dancer jitterbug along his own wrists, ending it all, then realized it was an honor to be expelled.
He was lucky: set free from a shitpile, separated from stink. Too clean and noble for this place. It was all part of a plan—of Schwann’s plan.
Dieter-Daddy had better things in mind for him. Cleaner things.
He put aside failure-thoughts and gave himself a bon voyage party. Gauguin Girl down by the river, washing clothes. Exchange of smiles. Hi, I’m Dr. Terrific. The sweet bliss of real science, in the creamy green silence of the jungle.
He used her bucket and river water to wash her. Left her lying under an enormous mango tree—more bloody fruit to match the soft, festering ones that had fallen to the ground.
Bye-bye, stinkhole.
A stopover in Amsterdam, sluts in windows—he would have loved to play real science with them, but no time.
Back home, he went to see Doctor in his office at the hospital. Kikefuck said nothing, shot him I-told-you-so taunt-beams with his silence.
You’ll find me another school. A real one.
Oh, sure, just like that.
Bet on it. Knowing he had the fucker’s balls in his pocket.
But a week later the fucker was history. Keeled over in the operating room, dropped dead right on top of a patient.
First-class joke: Famous heart surgeon dies of heart attack. Raking in big bucks bypassing other people’s arteries; meanwhile, his own were sludging up.
Funny, but not funny. In death, the fucker got in his last licks: left him out of the will. Everything signed over to Sarah.
As if she needed it, out of Harvard, Mass General, a psychiatrist with a brand-new Boston practice. And married to that fat little hook-nosed kikeshit, also a shrink; on top of everything else, his family was filthy rich. The two of them raking it in, with their Beacon Hill town house, summer home “on the Cape,” Mercedes, good clothes, theater tickets.
He and Sarah barely noticed each other at the funeral. He stared at her tits, but kept to himself, talked to no one. She interpreted it as heavy-duty grief, wrote him a letter stinking of phony sympathy, signing over the deed to the pink Haus to him.
Throw a bone to stupid little brother.
One day he’d kill her for it.
Deprived of his ball-hold on Doctor, he took time to reassess his situation: He owned his cars. The portfolio was doing nicely—couple of hundred thou. The savings account had forty-two thou—money he’d saved up over the years from his hospital job, pill profits. His clothes, his costumes. The books in the library. The big green book. The Schwann bible. The dancers in their velvet leather crib.
He sold the pink house cheap and fast, took in another four hundred thousand. After taxes and commission, two hundred thirty thou was left.
He put it all in the bank. Boxed the books, stashed them in the Plymouth, drove around looking for a place to live, and found an apartment near Nasty: two bedrooms, two baths, clean and cheap. Twenty bucks a month extra for two parking spaces.
He spent two days scrubbing the place from floorboard to ceiling, set up bedroom number two as a lab. Went back to the hospital and got his mail-delivery job back, stole more pills than ever, and sold them for higher profit margins. Added to his fortune, spent his free time in the library.
His vacation time was set aside for travel. Medical conventions, pleasure trips, using interesting identities, becoming new people.
Travel was fun. Trapping and hunting.
Now, he’d really expanded his vistas, was an international hunter.
Back in Europe: nightwork in Amsterdam. After all those years, he’d gotten back there, found a slant window-slut, took her down to the docks, and initiated her into the world of real science.
Bought H from a diamond-eared nigger on Kalverstraat near the Dam Square, packed it without worry—U.N. luggage got V.I.P. treatment. Besides, who would think of bringing the stuff into the Middle East?
Then on to Kikeland.
A German Haus in Kikeland.
So real, so right.
While drawing up his safari plan in New York, he’d known he wanted a second place, his own place, away from the others. There was an all-night newsstand on Broadway, near Times Square. He went to it one Friday night and bought The Jerusalem Post, U.S. edition. Took it home and checked the classifieds under Dwellings, Jerusalem—Rentals and read magic words:
VILLA,GERMAN COLONY, 3 RMS,AMENITIES,FURN, 1 YR. MIN.
A phone number in New York.
The German Colony. He looked it up at the main branch of the New York Public Library, in the Encyclopedia Judaica. Old southern Jerusalem neighborhood named after the German Templar sect that had lived there from the 1870’s until the Führer’s Holy War, when they were kicked out by the British for distributing Nazi literature.
Aryans in Kikeland, brothers in spirit! So real, so right!
The kikefuck who’d run the ad was a professor named Gordon, on sabbatical at City University of New York. More than happy to rent him the place, especially after he offered a year’s rent up front in cash, plus damage deposit.
Phony name, Manhattan post office box as an address.
Everything conducted over the telephone.
Cash in the mail, keys mailed to the box three days later.
A month later he was walking through the place, knowing it was rightfully his.
Old, dark, tile-roofed Haus, shadowed by big trees, hidden from the road. A main entrance in front and another through the back. A closed double garage. And a bonus he learned about months later: just south of Liberty Bell Park, hop, skip, and jump to the tower where the nigger-kike Sharavi lived.
A clear view of the tower.
Him and his dog and his nigger friends and his kikey-ikey family.
Had to be fate, everything coming together.
He’d made himself comfy in his German Haus. Would have given anything to see the look on Gordon’s hook-nosed face when he returned next year and found out what had been done to his little kikenest, the trade he’d made for the fucking damage deposit.
But Doctor Terrific would be long gone, by then. On to new adventures.
The faggot-cop on the table stirred again, pretty eyelashes fluttering, lips parting as if for a kiss.
He filled a syringe with H, then decided to hold off.
Let him wake up, see the swastikas on the walls, the heads and pelts and messages from Dieter. Then put him back under.
Faggot opened his eyes wide. Then his mouth, which was quickly filled with a wadded-up cloth.
Taking in the room, gulping and thrusting and straining against the ropes.
“Hi, I’m Dr. Terrific. What seems to be the problem?”
CHAPTER
66
Monday, two A.M. The cries and pleadings of Margaret Pauline Cassidy still filled Daniel’s ears as he left the interrogation room.
A Mossad guard man handed him the message slip: Rav Pakad Harel needed to speak to him immediately. He left the subground interrogation suite, took the stairs up to the third floor, and wondered what the Latam chief had come up with. As he climbed, his thoughts returned to Cassidy.
Pathetic young woman. She’d entered the session spitting defiance, still believing Al Biyadi intended to marry her, that their relationship had something to do with love.
Shmeltzer had torn into her, stripped away those fantasies in no time at all.
It opened her up fast. The tape recorder was gorging itself on names, dates, and numbers by the time the brass stormed in: Laufer, his boss, high-ranking tight-lipped boys from Mossad and Shin Bet. Taking over. The case was now national security, Shmeltzer and Daniel allowed to stay but relegated to observer status.
Priorities were clear, Laufer’s attitude an excellent barometer. Since the Amelia Catherine covert, the deputy commander had abandoned his hands-off stance, insisted upon receiving daily progress reports, copies of the medical charts, the Sumbok list, the logs of the surveillance from the law building. But this morning he had no time for any of it, showed not the slightest curiosity about the case.
Fine, fine, Sharavi. Rushing past Daniel in order to question the terrorists.
Daniel watched, too, sitting behind one-way glass, as a Mossad investigator walked the soil Shmeltzer had plowed.
Three interrogations proceeded simultaneously. A marathon.
Al Biyadi in one room; next door his cousin, the phony charwoman. Both of them toughing it out, silent as dust.
But Cassidy had spilled to Nahum. He’d ignored her insults, the anti-Semitic slurs, kept picking and tearing at her resistance until he made her see that she’d been used and demeaned.
When the insight hit her, she did an immediate about-face, turning her wrath upon Al Biyadi, vomiting out her shame and hurt, talking so fast they’d had to slow her down, tell her to speak so that the recorder picked up more than mush.
And talk she did: How Hassan had seduced her, strung her along with promises of matrimony, a big house back in America, back in Huntington Beach, California. Children, cars, the good life.
Just one more assignment before settling down to eternal domestic bliss. A dozen one more’s; a score.
She’d started by composing and distributing PLO literature for him in Detroit, typing and proofreading the English versions, delivering boxfuls at out-of-the-way night drops. Meeting men in cafés, smiling Arab men. In retrospect she realized they’d had no respect for her, had been mocking her. At the time she’d thought them mysterious, charming.
Running errands. Picking up parcels at Detroit Metropolitan Airport. Making coded phone calls and taking down incomprehensible messages. Side trips up to Canada, delivering packages to a row house in Montreal, returning with other packages to Michigan. Serving coffee and donuts to Hassan’s friends as they met in the basement of a Black Muslim mosque. All of it in her spare time—going off shift at Harper Hospital and heading straight for her unpaid second job. But reimbursed by love, freeing her lover to complete his medical studies. The lack of romance sometimes painful. But telling herself that he was a patriot with more important things on his mind than movies and dinner dates. A patriot in jeopardy—the Zionists were watching him; he needed to maintain an apolitical stance.
He made love to her infrequently, told her she was a warrior-heroine, the kind of woman he wanted as mother of his children.
They signed up for the U.N. job together, planned to carry their activism to Palestine. Here, too, he doctored while she did the dirty work.
She composed twenty different propaganda pamphlets, found a printer in Nablus who could make them up in English, French, and Arabic. Made contact with the PLO operatives who came to the Amelia Catherine disguised as patients, growing close to one of them—Hassan’s cousin, Samra. A pretty, dark girl, also trained as a nurse but working full-time for the liberation of Palestine. Hassan introduced them to each other in one of the examining rooms; an easy bond of friendship followed soon. The two women became confidantes, tutor and student.
Samra coached, Peggy performed well.
In February she was promoted to more important functions: serving as a conduit between Hassan and arms smugglers in Jordan, making payoffs, overseeing early morning transfers of the wooden crates to the big house on Ibn Haldoun.
Samra lived in a flat in Sheikh Jarrah, but the house was hers, deeded to her family—a rich family, like Hassan’s. Her father had been a judge in East Jerusalem before escaping to Amman in ’67.
Good friend, Cousin Samra.
In reality she was no cousin at all, but a wife. The one and only Mrs. Hassan Al Biyadi. A Jordanian marriage certificate found in her purse proved it, complete with signature by her father the judge.
Shmeltzer had waved the dogeared piece of paper in Cassidy’s face, told her she was a gullible idiot, a stupid, stupid girl who deserved to be deceived.
She screamed denial. The old detective slapped her out of her hysteri
a and continued to attack her verbally, savagely, to the point where Daniel thought of intervening. But he didn’t and finally the denial gave way to a new grasp on reality. Peggy Cassidy sat in her chair, shaking, gulping water, bubbling at the mouth, unable to spill her guts fast enough.
Yes, she’d known the first two Butcher victims were Amelia Catherine patients—Hassan’s patients. Had wanted to tell someone—Mr. Baldwin, at least. But Hassan forbade it, said their cover was more important, they couldn’t afford police probing around the hospital.
She began weeping: “Those poor women!” Hassan hadn’t cared, didn’t care about anyone! He was a pig—the Arabs were all pigs. Filthy, sexist pigs, she hoped they all rotted in hell, hoped the Jews killed every single one of them.
One extreme to the other.
An unstable girl. Daniel wondered how she’d cope with prison.
Amos Harel was waiting outside his office, pacing and smoking. Unlike him to show nervousness; something was wrong.
Gauloise butts littered the floor. The door was closed. As Daniel came closer, he saw the look on the Latam chief’s face and a flame ignited in his belly.
“One of my men is dead,” said Harel hoarsely. “Itzik Nash, strangled in the alley behind the reporter’s building. Your man, Cohen, is missing—no trace of the car we gave him. We found his radio near Itzik’s body. They were supposed to maintain regular contact—Cohen was probably checking up on Itzik when he got hit. The reporter’s also dead, bludgeoned to pulp up in his flat, swastikas painted in blood all over his bedroom walls—his own blood, according to Forensics. They’re still there swabbing and dusting. The Canadian, Carter, is the only suspect who was out last night. No one knows where the fuck he is.”
Daniel knew Itzik Nash—they’d attended Police School together. A roly-poly guy with a ready arsenal of lewd jokes. Daniel visualized him wearing the thick-tongued idiot’s yawn of the strangulation victim. Thought of Avi in the Butcher’s hands and found himself trembling.
“God. What the hell happened!”
Harel took hold of the doorknob, twisted savagely, and shoved the door open. Inside his office sat a Latamnik—the man who’d broadcast as Relic. He was staring at the floor. Harel’s throat-clearing raised his face, and Daniel saw that his eyes were lifeless, filmed over. He looked withered, a husk of himself. The code name strangely apt.
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