The Scorpion's Tale

by Wayne Block

  James nodded his head sympathetically. “I understand your feelings but I want to show you something. I’m going to reach into my pocket, very slowly, to retrieve my wallet. I am not reaching for a weapon, I assure you. May I proceed?”

  Steven nodded, intently watching every move James made as he withdrew his wallet, opened it, and removed a photograph that he handed to Steven. Steven stared at the photograph. It was a picture of three men standing together dressed in tuxedos. The man in the middle had his arms draped around the shoulders of the other two.

  “Do you recognize anyone in this photograph?”

  Steven studied the picture. “My father.”

  “You have also met the other two men in the photograph.”

  Steven looked up at James, down at the photograph and back again at James. “I’m going to do the same thing you did, so don’t get nervous. I am retrieving my wallet,” Steven said. He opened it and pulled out a picture, which he held up next to the photo James gave him. Steven cracked a barely perceptible smile as he compared the two and pointed. “That’s you, correct?” He then handed the picture to James.

  “Yes,” James answered, as he scrutinized the photograph from Steven’s wallet. It was a black and white picture of James and Tomasso seated on a bench.

  “You’re not wearing a disguise right now, are you?”

  “No, I am not. This is what I look like. Where did you get this photo?” James asked.

  “I found it in my father’s desk after his death. Who is the other man in your photograph?”

  “A younger and handsomer version of Joaquin.”

  “When and where was this photograph taken?” Steven asked.

  “A nightclub in London. Your father and I were in our early twenties. We were both working with Joaquin, who was our mentor.”

  Steven remained quiet for a few minutes. “You’re telling me Joaquin trained you and my father to be assassins?”

  James nodded. “Your father and I learned a great deal from Joaquin.”

  Steven remained silent. James seemed to be reading his thoughts.

  “It is all beginning to make sense to you: why the police were not interested and why nobody ever had a clear and convincing version of your father’s death?”

  Steven did not reply.

  James leaned in toward Steven. “This is where your life becomes interesting and where you must accept or reject your fate. I will tell you a story and all you have to do is listen.”

  CHAPTER FORTY-ONE

  “I was created and bred to be a killer. I am the living product of a social experiment. I am such a successful killer because that was the sole purpose of my existence. My father, Klaus VonKirkheimer, was Austrian. Leading up to World War II, his family was middle class. Then his father, Karl, had the excellent fortune of finding a new source of income. Karl was in the textile business and had clients all over Europe. With the rise of the Nazis, many of his clients and other business contacts were looking for an emergency escape plan. Karl became the facilitator. In the early years, he collected a modest fee to liquidate assets and businesses. As the European Jewish community became more threatened, his services in turn were more difficult to secure. It was not because Karl did not like the Jewish people; in fact, many were his friends. It was simply a matter of supply and demand. When Jewish travel was restricted, he obtained transit documents on the black market. There were not enough buyers for the jewelry, artwork, furniture, and other valuables, so Karl kept these treasures in exchange for facilitating the escape of his desperate clients. By the time the war ended, Karl’s wealth was immeasurable.

  “Unfortunately for Klaus, the kindness and help Karl extended to strangers was never directed toward his own son. In fact, for reasons unknown, Karl despised his son. If it was not for his mother’s intervention, Klaus was certain he would have been thrown on the street like human refuse. As it was, Klaus lived at home as an only child with a loving mother and a father who ridiculed him. Klaus desperately wanted to kill his father, but he could not bring himself to do it. At the end of the war, Klaus left home and moved to South America. He studied psychology and biology at the university, in hopes of discovering why he hated so deeply yet was unable to kill the object of his hatred. Unfortunately, his studies left him unfulfilled and empty.

  “Klaus’ life was changed forever when he received a telegram that his parents had been killed in an automobile accident. While he mourned the loss of his beloved mother, he was now free of his father and fabulously rich, to boot. He decided to set up a human experiment to see if variables could be adjusted to create a man with no conscience, who could and would kill anything and anyone. Someone the real world would call a sociopath.

  “He purchased a small, uninhabited island near South America and set to work designing his experiment. He assembled a group of thirty women, mostly Europeans, who would be the mothers of his children. To keep one variable constant, he personally fathered all the subjects. Eighteen boys were born; twelve were brought to the island while the remaining six lived on the mainland to be raised by their mothers.

  “I was raised on the island. As I grew older I learned how isolated and fortified my world was, designed for this utterly bizarre and inhuman experiment. My father had made extensive arrangements that insured no trespassers could have access to our hidden world. The rare, uninvited visitor received swift and lethal elimination. I never knew my mother; actually none of us did. I did eventually learn that her last name was ‘Mateuse’, hence the name of the priest. That was one of my father’s burning questions: how far did a mother’s love go in shaping her son’s conscience. As babies and toddlers, we were raised communally, by all the men on the island. At the age of five, we were assigned to an individual instructor responsible for all facets of our lives. Destiny chose Joaquin as mine. My father played no role in my upbringing and for all intents and purposes, Joaquin was my father. I neither needed nor desired anyone else.

  “Then Joaquin lied to me about your being raised in the Amazon by Benedictine Nuns?” Steven said.

  The Scorpion smiled. “Yes, he did. That was a story I asked Joaquin to tell you.”

  Steven felt betrayed by someone he had trusted.

  “We all resided in a castle which had been restored and converted into living quarters for us, with all the amenities of modern living. My father insisted on keeping the dungeons with their inherent discomforts and cruelties intact, a lab of sorts, for his experiment. The edifice was intimidating, but also intriguing. It had four floors and endless hallways with secret passages running throughout. Many of the rooms were kept locked, which stimulated our imaginations of what lay behind the closed doors. But for all its grandeur, the castle was nothing more than a prison.

  “The back of the castle rose straight up from the cliffs overlooking a fierce ocean. We were required to rotate rooms at the whim of our father to keep us from having any feeling of security and stability. When my apartment was near the ocean, I would spend hours gazing out the window, watching the storms with their magnificent lightening displays, contemplating the waves endlessly crashing against the huge boulders. That was my ‘telly’”.

  “Telly?” Steven asked.

  “Television.” He continued with heightened animation: “When we were young, we ate our meals together, and I laughed and joked with my brothers. But as we reached adolescence, that little joy was ripped away and we were forced to dine alone in our chambers. Looking back, it is clear that the initial socialization followed by dissociation was essential to the experiment.

  “My life was reduced to a fevered pursuit of physical and mental perfection, as well as the mastery of a variety of weapons, including my body. I spent my time with Joaquin and my teachers, who were specifically brought to the island to provide training in areas where our mentors did not have the requisite expertise. We needed to apply our skills for survival and test them on each other. Ultimately, we were trained to find our place in the group, trained to fight each other until on
ly one was left standing. My favorite pastime was a morbid ‘hide-and-seek’ in which we would go on a manhunt to find each other. The game was limited to a defined portion of the island and trainers would strategically position themselves to watch the hunt develop. The hunted would get points if he could surprise a member of the predator team. I would climb trees or hide in a crevice, waiting for the perfect opportunity to capture my would-be captor. I have no memory of losing.

  “A large part of the entertainment for our mentors was wagering on our events, much like gamecock fights. A winning mentor was elated, ensuring rich rewards for his pupil. A defeated mentor was unbearable and retribution for loss was swift and severe. We were taught early to gain every possible advantage against our adversaries; there were no rules. Joaquin had instilled in me that it was critical to “kill or be killed”. Machiavellian competition was expected. We were trained to be the alpha-males of the pack, which meant we were not only the strongest and swiftest, but also the most intelligent and resourceful. There was no room for weakness, mercy, or hesitation. Fear and failure were rewarded with punishment and pain, while success, strength, and cunning were rewarded by praise, gifts, and the bitter envy of all. Competition fueled a subtle yet continual, mounting hatred and distrust amongst us, which was the major psychological strategy in our upbringing.

  “A particularly cruel mode of punishment was ‘solitary confinement’, where we would be placed in the dungeon’s dark, windowless room with cold, stone floors. Over time our father learned our deepest fears. In the dungeon, he would play upon our phobias and introduce them into the room. My first and only encounter with this torture afforded me the opportunity to share my quarters with scorpions, the only things I truly feared. As I sat naked on the floor, I felt crawling sensations on my foot, up my leg, across my stomach and chest, and ultimately onto my neck and face. All the while I was barely breathing, remaining perfectly still, unsure what was crawling on my body. I touched one and instantly realized what it was. I screamed with fear as I swatted it off my face. When I placed my hands on the floor to push myself off of the ground, I realized that my cell was teeming with scorpions. I went into a primal rage, stamping out the symbol of my fear with clenched fists, breaking them apart with my bare hands and teeth, screaming until I could no longer produce a sound. Joaquin found me the next morning, unconscious on the floor amidst the carcasses of the dead scorpions. I emerged from that hell hole, pure hate enveloping my naked, bitten body. My nom de plume was what I conquered, the Scorpion. In the dank, darkness of that tomb, my soul died with any childhood innocence I had left. I was reborn, cold and callous, a survivor who could kill anything. From that day forward, fear was my weapon, not my weakness.

  “Gradually,” he continued, “our competitive nature and jealousy made us narcissistic and unfeeling. Our life motto became triumph at any cost. We were oblivious to our final purpose; all we knew was that this was our life. With nothing to compare it to, it was normal. I was very content and comfortable in my solitude.

  “I became fluent in seven languages and had the finest tutors in the arts and sciences. Although I excelled in academics, hunting was my passion. I mastered weapons from the gun to the bow; however, the greatest weapon was my mind.

  “By my teens, the hunt became more physically stimulating and mentally challenging. When I turned fifteen, the stakes were raised and my father imported a variety of predators including wolves, tigers, and lions. We were given weapons, no provisions and sent on our way. We gathered twice to mourn the deaths of four brothers, who were ignominiously thrown into the sea for their failure. I bear the scars of every hunt both physically and mentally. It was the mental component that propelled me to the pinnacle of our slaying fraternity.

  “Our training culminated in a stimulating event. A few days before my sixteenth birthday, I was given a photograph of a man as I prepared for safari. I immediately understood. Joaquin explained my quarry was a notorious war criminal that had murdered hundreds of people and then bought his freedom. It wasn’t until years later that I learned that the men we hunted were actually poor victims, randomly rounded up. I was warned that if the man survived twelve hours, he would gain his freedom and I would be killed. Only one of us could survive.”

  “Why didn’t Joaquin tell me this story?” Steven asked. “Why did he lie to me?”

  “It wasn’t his story to tell. Nobody except Joaquin and I are still alive. He swore an oath to me in blood that he would never repeat it. My first human kill,” James continued, unfazed by the dulled expression on Steven’s face, “it was an exhilarating experience. Tracking the man was easy, but I was more cautious and meticulous than ever. I ascribed to him a superior intellect, assuming that he was older, wiser, and more experienced than I. I assumed that most human beings were as logical, calculating and analytical as I. Nothing could have been further from the truth. He was totally ordinary, predictable, and easier to track than the animals. When I found him, he had a rifle in his hand. We could see each other’s faces and he smiled when he realized I was only a teenager. He fired twice but his shots were off target and he quickly ran. I caught up with him when he emerged from the jungle and approached the edge of a cliff. He was searching for an avenue of escape, but I knew there was no safe harbor for him. I fired my rifle and watched him drop to the ground, knowing I had shot him perfectly between the eyes. The kill was intoxicating, almost sexual. I wrapped his body in a burlap sack and dragged him back to the castle where I was richly rewarded for my success. Giving chase became effortless, so I made sport out of the people by mentally torturing them. I prayed I would receive a worthy adversary, but I never encountered one. The result was always the same–a body in a burlap sack. It became a bore. That year, another brother joined the unfortunate and lost. Now, seven remained. Have you heard enough or shall I go on?”

  “Finish it,” Steven demanded, glaring back at him.

  James described the final confrontation with his five remaining brothers and how he had broken the rules and killed all of them, their mentors, and finally, their father. “After killing them, Joaquin removed keys from my dead father’s body, unlocked a door in the hallway, and walked down a secret passage leading to another locked door. Joaquin tried several keys and unlocked the door of an office, overlooking the lagoon. We located several briefcases with piles of papers, multiple passports, and stacks of cash in various currencies. Joaquin spent hours patiently reviewing the records, and eventually found what he was searching for–a small book inside a locked box in an antique armoire. We folded back heavy Persian rugs and located two floor safes. Inside was a treasure trove: diamonds, emeralds, rubies, gold bars, and lashings of currency. We transferred the contents into two travel bags. The second safe contained millions in Dollars, Pounds and Francs, which filled two more bags. Taking the untold riches, we journeyed to our new home–London.”

  James finished the rest of his coffee, folded his hands and leaned back in his chair. “Any questions?”

  “How did you become a priest?”

  The Scorpion smiled. “Joaquin took responsibility for the massacre. He was a more credible perpetrator, as nobody would believe a twenty-one year old could be so effective. Joaquin arranged a procedure for future contacts if ever they should need our services. Joaquin gave a codename to insert into classifieds in the London Gazette and the New York Times. Three weeks after the massacre, the code and a corresponding phone number were placed in both papers. Arrangements were made for delivery of photographs and instructions, with fifty percent of the $50,000 contract price. Joaquin gave me the assignment. I discovered as much as I could about my victim. He was a mid-level assassin in a rival organization, lived alone, had little family and spent most of his time at a local pub. I tracked him like those I had hunted on the island but my jungle was transformed into a cityscape. Killing him was anticlimactic and I was disappointed, as I expected more from a fellow professional. We were officially in business.

  “Joaquin perfected the means
of communicating with current and future customers and we received referrals in Brazil and Eastern Europe. From there, the Scorpion’s fame spread to Western Europe and eventually to the United States. In less than three years, I had assassinated twenty people. My standard fee had increased to $250,000. Joaquin was the only person in the world I trusted and he ran the business so I could concentrate on each assignment. I had become a master of disguise and proud that nobody knew my identity. I propagated the Scorpion’s legend, but we had to produce multiple versions of phony passports, driver’s licenses and other forms of identification to match the many personalities I was developing. It took precision planning to ensure that the documentation was accurate. A short time after my thirtieth birthday, I received an opportunity to make a final adjustment to our business plan, which would dramatically change my life once more.

  “The legend of the Scorpion had reached the ears of some of the highest echelons in the Vatican. After lengthy discussions and negotiations, we received confirmation that I would need to infiltrate the Vatican in order to identify and kill a high-ranking member of the Church. I was told that my target was suspected of engaging in business that was not in the best interests of the Vatican’s reigning power. It was a delicate matter and the Scorpion would be required to assume the identity of a priest from South America. He would have the required history and papers; thus, full credibility. One of the highest-ranking Cardinals in the Vatican was the sole person with knowledge of the Scorpion’s true identity and his ‘theological’ purpose. It was a difficult decision. The mission required that I allow another person to know my real identity, but the price was astounding: two million dollars! I was mesmerized by the complexity and intrigue of the task. I would not only be assuming the identity of a priest; I would also be trained under the tutelage of the Cardinal. Joaquin believed the assignment was much too risky, but the whole scenario appealed greatly to my conceit. I would be tracking a man throughout the Vatican, my new island. For the first time, tracking my prey would be psychological. I had to find a means to convince him to take me into his confidence while I amassed a dossier to convict him for his perceived misdeeds. Once the Cardinal was convinced, the mark would be summarily executed.