A Philosophical Investigation: A Novel

by Philip Kerr

  Jake recognised the voice immediately. It was Wittgenstein all right. There was no mistaking that voice. She pushed the doorman gently aside and looked into the pictophone.

  He sat with his head tilted slightly to one side. Looking like an excrescence of thought, the curly hair grew wildly towards the same side as the angle of his head. The thin face was almost completely expressionless, but as Jake studied it more closely she saw something sulky and slightly petulant about it. It was the eyes that held Jake. They stared out from the deep shadowy hollows of his face as if from behind a masque, like the eyes of some nocturnal animal. She was reminded of photographs she had seen of survivors of the Nazi concentration camps.

  ‘It’s me,’ she said. ‘Chief Inspector Jakowicz.’

  Esterhazy smiled broadly.

  ‘My dear Chief Inspector,’ he said smoothly. ‘Is this a social call or are you here on business?’

  Jake’s heart was in her mouth. She had him. There was no way he could get away from her now. In a way she was almost sorry.

  ‘I’m here to arrest you.’

  ‘Well, what a relief. I thought you were going to try and bore me into killing myself, like your Professor Lang.’ He laughed. ‘The very idea of it: ridiculous.’

  ‘No, nothing like that,’ she said.

  ‘You know, I’ve been expecting you,’ he said. ‘By which I mean I believed that you would come, though your coming did not occupy my thoughts. I don’t mean that I was eagerly awaiting you, Chief Inspector. What I mean here is that I should have been surprised if you hadn’t come at all.’

  Out of the corner of her eye Jake caught sight of Stanley, his lips pursed in a silent whistle and his forefinger revolving suggestively next to his forehead.

  ‘Well, I’m here now. Can I come up and talk to you?’

  ‘But we’re already talking, aren’t we?’

  ‘In person.’

  ‘I am, in person. If I were not I should already be dead.’

  ‘I wish to talk to you about a number of murders,’ Jake said stiffly. It was the cop coming out in her and she flinched as she heard herself. She added, more gently, ‘Don’t you think it would be better — ’ But it was too late.

  ‘This despotic demand of yours,’ he said. ‘This wish ... Curious that you should have used that word, with its expectation of non-satisfaction. I wonder, what is your prototype of non-satisfaction? Strange, isn’t it? That a wish seems already to know what would satisfy it, even when that thing is not there at all. Even when it could not possibly exist.’

  Jake tried to hang on to the conversation. ‘It seemed simple enough when I said it.’

  Esterhazy tutted fussily. ‘You of all people should know that wishes are a veil between us and the thing wished for. It’s a problem for you, I know, to speak to someone like me with something as crude as ordinary language.’

  ‘We seem to be getting into a dead-end here,’ said Jake.

  ‘Easy, isn’t it? In philosophy. In life. But you’re right, a dead-end is exactly what this is, for both of us. For your philosophical investigation and for mine.’

  He smiled, sadly it seemed to Jake.

  ‘I agree. So why don’t you stop wasting time and let me come up and we can sort it all out?’

  ‘I’m afraid I cannot permit that. You see I have no intention of being “sorted out” as you put it. That would mean spending the next thirty years of my life in a punitive coma. Now that really would be a waste of time.’

  ‘You know there’s no way out of here,’ said Jake.

  ‘Oh but there is,’ said Esterhazy. ‘By the time you manage to break in here, I shall be squaring the circle, so to speak.’

  Stanley frowned. ‘What’s he mean?’ He looked belligerently at the doorman. ‘You sure there’s no way out?’

  Jake said to Stanley, ‘He means Infinity. He’s going to kill himself after all.’

  ‘Oh not because of any argument deployed by that fool Jameson Lang,’ said Esterhazy.

  ‘So why?’

  ‘As I said, I have no intention of wasting time in a coma. As soon as you arrived here, I realised the game was over. You’re the reason I have to kill myself, Jake. You’re the reason.’

  ‘Please,’ she said, ‘don’t do it.’

  ‘You mustn’t blame yourself, Jake. It was always part of my plans.’

  Covering the microphone with her hand, Jake asked the doorman if there was a way onto the roof.

  ‘Don’t try and stop me,’ said Esterhazy.

  ‘I can’t let you go like this,’ said Jake. ‘Aren’t you afraid?’

  The doorman handed Stanley a set of keys.

  ‘I’m touched,’ said Esterhazy. ‘Really I am.’

  ‘Don’t think I’m climbing all the way up there with you,’ said the doorman.

  ‘But, Jake, you don’t understand. Feeling the world as a limited whole - now that is something to be afraid of.’

  The screen went blank. Jake turned to the doorman.

  ‘These apartment buildings usually have some kind of window cleaner’s hoist on the roof. Is there one up there?’

  ‘Sure,’ he said. ‘But it’s never been used these past twelve months. The cleaning contractor went bust at the same time as the lift company. I don’t know that I’d want to trust my life to it.’

  But Jake was already through the door to the stairs, followed closely by Stanley.

  He said nothing until they were standing on the roof, recovering their breath.

  ‘Look, ma’am,’ he wheezed. ‘Why don’t we leave it to the TFS? Let them handle it, eh?’ He helped Jake to manoeuvre the hoist out over the edge of the roof.

  ‘What? And let them shoot him dead? No, I want this collar. I want a proper trial. Besides, by the time they get here he may well have topped himself.’

  She climbed into the hoist and inspected the controls which required two operators standing at opposite ends. Stanley peered nervously over the edge.

  ‘Best for him, best for us, eh? Save us the bother.’

  ‘You sound like one of those bastards at the Home Office,’ she said. ‘Look, are you getting in or not? I can’t operate this thing by myself.’

  ‘But it’s ten storeys,’ pleaded Stanley. He shook his head grimly and climbed aboard. ‘I don’t know why I’m doing this. The bloke’s a nutter.’ He took hold of the control handle and nodded to Jake at the other end of the platform. ‘What do I care if he tops himself or not?’

  The hoist jerked and then dropped half a metre.

  ‘Slowly,’ yelled Jake.

  ‘What the fuck happens when we get to his window? Suppose he doesn’t decide to top himself? Suppose he decides to kill us first? What then?’ Stanley drew his gun as he spoke. Jake was already holding hers. The hoist was moving smoothly now.

  ‘When we get to the seventh floor, we’ll shoot the windows out,’ said Jake. ‘Then climb inside.’

  ‘Jesus,’ muttered Stanley, and trembled visibly.

  Jake looked up at the distance they had covered. The sun had lent a huge fireball to the smoked windows of the top two floors. For a moment Jake had the thought that she and Stanley were both disposal experts working to defuse some huge nuclear device which had exploded in their faces. A blast of wind cooled her face and shook the hoist under their feet. Stanley groaned. They reached the seventh floor. She blinked and tried to focus through the brightened window and when at last she saw him it was like seeing an X-ray photograph develop in front of her eyes.

  There is nothing that cannot be solved by murder, money, or suicide. I’ve killed an apostolic number. And I’ve got plenty of money. Which only leaves option three. No problem.

  If, as Malraux says, ‘death changes life into destiny’, then suicide makes destiny subject to personal choice. In life’s great bridge game it’s the last card you can play.

  Naturally enough, suicide affects the total perception of a life in a way that no other death can ever do. Fatal car accidents, air-crashes, cot-deaths,
executions, even murders are as nothing when you take a long look at the sui side of life. If eternity changes us into what we really are, then suicide is the ultimate moving force for that change.

  Take Mr and Mrs Suicide, Vincent and Sylvia: what would their reputations have been had they not killed themselves? Both were completely unknown at the time of their deaths. But after that dread act, not only does their work become famous, but also a certain poignancy attaches to it. They achieve the status of artistic martyrdom. Their works become icons.

  No such delusions on my part need detain us here. Nor is my self-slaughter referable to my recently concluded philosophical dialogue with Professor Sir Jameson Lang. His arguments, strongly reminiscent of something Kierkegaard once wrote, were already familiar to me. Indeed I hold his truths to be self-evident.

  The fact is that it was already in my mind to kill myself and it might just as well be done now as later on. Especially as my mind is clear and equal to the task of the great philosophical discourse with the terrible nameless one which will follow the big sleep.

  How then, am I to tell you of the circumstances of my death?

  Do you wish to be told plainly that I returned home and hanged myself? Even if it were true, it would not be much of an end to my life’s story. To say only what is true is as dull as it is to say nothing except what can be said, that is, something that has nothing to do with philosophy. Although this method is the only strictly correct one, I suspect it may not be satisfying to you. Naturally you require something more, something metaphysical perhaps. I am sorry to have to disappoint you. No doubt you would have preferred some story of the way I killed myself, and what happened immediately after my death. Some story which might serve as an explanation for everything that has gone before.

  But my stories only serve as explanations in the following way: anyone who understands these stories eventually recognises them as nonsensical when he has used them as steps to climb up beyond them. Just as, in a few minutes, I will use some steps to climb up and put my head in a noose. Like me, you must also, so to speak, throw away the ladder after you have climbed up it. You must transcend the story as a mere proposition, and then you will see the world aright.

  I regret that circumstances prevent me from saying any more than this, however what we cannot speak about we must pass over in silence.

  19

  THE SWITCHBLADE WAS still open in her hand, the blade a razor-sharp, silver thumbnail protruding from her clenched fist. She held it by her side, at an arm’s length, like one of the Sharks or the Jets in West Side Story, ready for the rumble. Only the rumble was over. Even now the two ambulancewomen were manoeuvring the man’s body on to the trolley. They strapped him down as if he might have preferred to get off and walk. Not much chance of that, Jake thought. Not with a crushed windpipe.

  Pleased with the way the knife had performed she lifted it up to inspect it more closely. She had bought it on an impulse, while holidaying in Italy the previous year. Just something to put in her shoulder bag and make her feel a bit safer, when she wasn’t carrying her gun. She was almost surprised that she should have used it in the particular way she had.

  The two ambulancewomen lifted the top of the trolley clear of the wheels and then steered the man by remote control, out into the corridor outside the apartment and towards the lift door, like a toy she had once had as a child. Not a toy for a girl, her father had said. Better than a toy for a girl, Jake thought.

  Downstairs, in the lobby, the doorman did what he was supposed to do and held the door open while they steered the man out into the car-park. The trolley collided with the back of the ambulance rather too vigorously, it seemed, and automatically engaged the electronic lift. This picked him off the tarmac like a binful of garbage and drew him inside the long body of a vehicle that was covered with advertisements for Lucozade and Elastoplast. At the very second the door closed beside him, the blue laser light on top of the roof started to flash in all directions like random bolts of lightning.

  The two ambulancewomen regarded Jake and, more especially, the knife that was still in her hand, with some uncertainty. One was about to say something but then her colleague caught her eye and shook her head as if to indicate that it was probably best if they didn’t ask any questions. Their job was just to collect their fare and take him to hospital. Nothing more. But the woman holding the knife spoke to them.

  ‘Where are you taking him?’ she said. ‘Which hospital?’

  One of the ambulancewomen shrugged and held up the man’s identity card.

  ‘Depends on his ID,’ she said. ‘I haven’t stuck it into the computer yet. As soon as we do, his bar-code’ll tell us where he’s registered, and that’s where we’ll take him.’ So saying, the woman holding the card climbed into the driver’s seat.

  Jake pointed out two men sitting in a nearby police car.

  ‘See those cops?’ she said to the second woman.

  ‘I see them.’

  ‘They’ll be following you. So try not to lose them.’

  ‘Sure, anything you say, lady.’

  Jake watched them drive away, Stanley following in the police car, two sirens whistling like sex-mad construction workers. When they were out of sight she went back inside the door of Winston Mansions and up to the seventh floor where a motorcycle cop, who had arrived on the scene at the same time as the ambulance, was already restraining those other residents of the building who were curious to see what had happened. The door to Esterhazy’s flat stood open. Jake walked into the apartment, picking her way carefully across the pile of shattered glass that had been one of the windows, and surveyed the scene.

  The apartment was simply, even starkly furnished, with none of the sensational features that might have delighted some tabloid newspaper intent on depicting the mind of a serial killer as an aspect of interior decoration. There were no heads parboiled in pots still hot on the cooker, no torture chamber, no paintings or photographs of dead bodies, no collections of women’s underwear, no human skin hanging on a tailor’s dummy awaiting a needle and thread, no glass case with guns and knives displayed like so many insects and spiders. There was only one picture - a portrait of Sir Winston Churchill which, matching the mural in the lobby downstairs, Jake suspected had been there since the time Winston Mansions was built. Esterhazy’s own peculiar gun was still in its shoulder-holster, which hung from the back of a chair.

  It was true that Jake found the colour scheme in Esterhazy’s apartment was not to her own taste: a royal blue carpet, black woodwork, and yellow walls. Blue and yellow were classic opponent-process colours, mutually antagonistic to each other as neural sensory experiences, but that was hardly an indication of homicidal mania. The plain fact was that Esterhazy’s apartment seemed to provide no more obvious insight as to what had turned him into a mass-murderer than might have been obtained from the leaves in his tea cup, or a selection of Tarot cards. How ordinary it all seemed, and then all the more extraordinary, because of the nature of the man who lived there.

  It was not the first time that Jake had encountered this phenomenon. She was quite used to the idea that mass-murderers could live what were outwardly quite ordinary lives. It was the thoughts in their heads that you had to worry about, not the pictures on their walls or the trophies in the display cabinets. Real evil, she knew, did not always adorn its home with black velvet curtains and human skulls for ashtrays. The most unusual thing in the whole place was the severed end of the rope tied round one of the beams, from which Esterhazy had tried to hang himself, and the fallen step-ladder he had used to climb up to the noose, and which he had then kicked away: the ladder which, no more than a minute or two afterwards, she herself had used to climb up and cut him down. It was Jake who had given Esterhazy the kiss of life. The taste of him still lingered on her lips. It was strange, perhaps because of what he was, something dangerous, something alien to her, but somehow she had almost enjoyed breathing the life back into him, as if he had been some drowned sailor, or Don J
uan washed up on her island.

  And for what had she saved him? It was as well, she reflected, that she was not a sentimental person, because she well knew what it was to which she had delivered him. Jake lit a cigarette and smoked it, irritated with herself now, for there is nothing of so infinite vexation as one’s own thoughts. She tried to tell herself that what happened to Wittgenstein, to Esterhazy, was not her affair. She had done her duty, according to the law, and in spite of the very best endeavours of nearly everyone around her.

  It would be up to others now, the lawyers, the judges, the psychotherapists, and probably the politicians, what became of him. Perhaps he would succeed in a not-guilty plea by reason of insanity. She remembered having once said something about making sure that he got medical help, so she would make sure that a forensic psychiatrist other than Professor Waring was able to examine him. Perhaps the fact that there had been several articles in the various medical and psychiatric journals to the effect that, based on his writings alone, the real Wittgenstein might have suffered from some sort of bipolar-affective disorder (what was once called manic-depressive psychosis), would count for something in helping to sustain a plea of insanity.

  The truth was that having done her duty Jake’s sincerest hope was not that she could help the Crown Prosecution Service to build a water-tight case against Esterhazy, but that he might end up with something better than an ice-cold needle in his vein. This was a strange sensation for her. Normally she didn’t much care one way or the other what happened to the men she arrested. But then Esterhazy was hardly like any other man she had ever known.

  That was what she hoped. But in Jake’s heart she knew it would be different. In her heart she had always known it would be different.

  She sat down at Esterhazy’s desk to wait for the scenes-of-crime officers. She noted all the computer equipment, and then the black-rubberised Reality Approximation Outfit which lay on a special leather recliner like a discarded shadow. If he had been into that kind of shit, she said to herself, then there was no knowing what might be in Esterhazy’s mind. There were some people who said that protracted use of RA was every bit as dangerous as LSD. Then she noticed two notebooks on the desk, one brown and one blue, and curious about what was in them she opened the brown book.