by Greg Iles
“She obviously felt she could handle whatever violence was required when we arrived here. I had no idea what was happening. My plan was to spirit Erin away under the pretense that she was a donor, and then—if she proved to be the woman I hoped she was—find a way to separate her from Kali later.
“Surveillance proved to be impossible, with your house so isolated. A blitz attack was the only option. I entered alone, meaning to tranquilize Erin immediately, to eliminate any chance of problems. But when I saw how beautiful she was in the flesh—the real Erin—I had to speak. I felt that after our conversations, she would have no trouble recognizing me for what I was. Her Dark Prince. But it was Karin Wheat all over again. Erin was terrified, of course. She had no idea what I was talking about, but her terror masked that fact. I still don’t know what she was doing here. Fate sometimes takes a hand in these things. I tried to calm her, but it did no good. Then . . .”
Suddenly Berkmann began to move about the office, like a film director blocking out scenes. “Rather than wait outside as instructed, Kali had listened through the door. She burst in with her knife and began to shout at me. Didn’t I see what a fool I had been? Like that. But when she saw Erin—a real woman who matched the JPEG photograph you’d sent me—she stopped shouting. I think she was as confused as I. I placed myself between them, tried to calm Kali. I said we should take Erin with us. Kali temporized. Then she told me to shoot Erin with a dart. I pointed the gun as instructed, but for some reason I couldn’t fire. That was the end. Kali shrieked and flew at Erin. Erin lunged for the sword on the wall. I fired then, believing that if Erin went down that way I could keep Kali from killing her. But by then she was a moving target. The dart only struck her shoulder.”
Berkmann moved faster, whirling like a choreographer, feinting and lunging with natural grace. “Kali tried to go around me, but I blocked her path. She slashed me with her knife and I went down.” He rolled on the floor and came up into a half crouch. “Both women were screaming. Erin had already struck Kali twice with the sword.” Berkmann leaped to the center of the office, where the bloody circus of footprints had been the night before. “They fought here. It was magnificent! A scene worthy of Michelangelo. The Western woman untrained but genetically superior, armed with a sword. The Eastern woman a perfect killing machine, armed only with a knife. It happened in the time it took me to load a second dart from the case in my pocket. Kali struck again and again, but Erin repelled every blow, parrying like a fencer. As soon as I had a steady shot, I fired into Kali’s neck.” Berkmann made a pffft sound with his lips and teeth. “It was a mistake. The shot stunned both women. Then Kali lunged for the kill and Erin ran her through. They stood locked together like embracing lovers, and I thought the battle done. Then Kali buried her knife in Erin’s back. Erin managed to shove her away, then collapsed herself.”
Twisting to imitate the climax of the duel, Berkmann ceased motion with his knees slightly bent, like a crazed Fred Astaire looking into the camera while dipping an invisible partner. “She died in my arms, Harper. Sorrow and pity.”
As if someone had yelled “Cut!” he rose casually and stood centered in the frame again. “I tried to save her. But Kali had hit the heart. It was hopeless.”
I looked at my watch then. The tape had been running for more than three minutes. I couldn’t believe Berkmann had the nerve to stand there making this documentary of depravity, knowing that someone could walk in on him at any moment. Buckner’s men, the FBI, me, Drewe—
A wave of sweat suffused my skin as I realized just how narrowly Drewe must have missed him.
“Once I saw how things stood,” Berkmann said, “I took a little stroll round the place. I had the run of it, after all. And such an interesting time I had, going through this peculiar little house. So many mementos. This, for example.”
From his inside coat pocket, he brought out a folded eight-by-ten photograph, which he opened. Bob Anderson had shot the picture about four months ago at one of the family barbecues. In it, Drewe and I stand beside Bob’s mammoth grill, a little apart, while Patrick rests a proprietary arm on Erin’s shoulder. Erin is wearing a yellow sundress and sitting in a white lawn chair. Holly, dressed in a matching sundress, stands with Victorian gravity, resting an arm across Erin’s tanned knees.
“I feel like part of the family,” Berkmann crooned, leaving the photo suspended from one hand and walking around to study it with the physical genius of a mime. “Hmmm . . . let’s see.” His finger danced along the paper until it stopped at my face. “Here you are, yes? Handsome enough chap, I suppose, though a little doughy for my taste. Not at all like your friend Miles.”
While I squeezed my knees in fury, the finger moved again and lighted on Erin’s face. “And here we have the sublime earth goddess I so foolishly believed I was communing with via EROS. So much darker than you led me to believe. She could almost be Kali at twenty-five.
“And behind her—can it be? The cuckolded husband? How could Erin ever have convinced herself that this mooncalf would be enough for her? Of course, she might have been a perfect match for him. I’ve given a lot of thought to that these past few minutes. Was Erin the woman you played her as? Or did you inject some of yourself into her—pardon the pun—as writers are wont to do in novels? How thrilling it must have been, playing both roles as you doled out your naughty little secret. You gave Erin a voice, didn’t you? One she never had in real life, I’ll wager.”
Berkmann’s finger slid down Erin’s chest to Holly. “And here, the little love child. But a daughter, not a son. Our own little Pearl. Any fool can see you’re her father.”
As he spoke, Berkmann moved his head upon his neck with serpentine suppleness, as if to hypnotize me by motion alone. “But I’m leaving someone out, aren’t I? The alpha female of the family. As I teased at my meager facts, it came to me that there was someone else in this house far superior to both you and your earthy paramour. You painted her as the perfect sister, the ideal wife, but she’s much more than that, I think. I’m speaking of this woman, Harper. This woman here.”
The finger lighted on Drewe’s chest.
“This is beauty, my duplicitous friend. What a fortunate boy you are. What a delicious arrangement. You had the carnal Erin for sex, and this noble lady for a wife. More than any man deserves, I should think. Oh, yes.”
Berkmann refolded the photo and slipped it back into his inside pocket. “But your day is coming, Harper. Be assured of it. I’m going to disappear for a while. Not my first choice, but then I don’t have a choice, do I? Please tell Daniel Baxter not to waste any more public funds searching for me. I’ve been planning for this day a long time. Even had my work succeeded, I could not have remained in America. Appreciation of genius takes time. But . . . there’s a wide world out there, and I know it well.”
Without warning or explanation, Berkmann suddenly slipped off his jacket and began unbuttoning his shirt. “I’m a free agent now,” he said, almost to himself. “So liberating.”
Both jacket and shirt fell to the floor.
While I stared, looking for the huge scar Miles had mentioned, he raised both arms high above his head, like a gull spreading its wings. If he had risen two feet into the air, I would not have been surprised. As his right arm lifted, I saw a dark line transecting the ribs, maybe five inches long. It took a moment to realize I was looking at sutures. They were weeping blood. Kali had stabbed him. And the son of a bitch had stitched himself up.
“I appear to be leaking,” he said in an almost embarrassed voice. “Notice the Christlike position of the wound?”
He laughed, then dropped one arm and traced a line beneath his sternum and along his ribs, and I finally saw it. A massive chevron-shaped scar, probably twenty inches long, with its midpoint beneath his breastbone and extending outward in both directions. It was an old scar, faded white, with the dotted pattern of staples rather than the hash marks of sutures. It looked as though someone had opened Berkmann’s entire abdomen for some reaso
n.
“You see this one?” he asked. “This is where it all began.”
In that moment all the levity went out of him. He stared into the lens with mesmerizing power, his latissimus dorsi muscles flaring beneath his armpits like the hood of a cobra.
“There are two kinds of people in the world, Harper. The healthy and the sick. Actually, they inhabit two different worlds. The world of shadow and the world of light. The door between those worlds opens only in one direction. And I was born on the wrong side of the door.
“I did all I could to remain strong, as you know. But when AIDS entered the blood supply, my hemophilia became a potential death sentence. Then it was discovered that hemophiliacs who received liver transplants for viral hepatitis miraculously regained their clotting ability. For me it was a revelation. The door could open in the other direction. Hemophiliacs as a class weren’t given transplants, of course. Not enough livers to go around. And their symptoms could be controlled with clotting factor. But clotting factor carried AIDS, didn’t it? I wasn’t about to die for the willful ignorance of my government. I never even hesitated. Kali helped me find the surgeons I needed, she bargained with them. They could barely speak English, after all. It caused them no end of difficulty obtaining American credentials. But they had good hands, and they liked money. The only problem was convincing someone to make the required donation.” Berkmann’s lips flattened into something like a smile. “But Kali helped me there too. She was quite indispensable.”
He tapped the transplant scar lightly. “It was a traumatic experience. Suppressing my immune system to accept the organ, all the rest. But I survived. And I was cured. Once we’d accomplished the liver transplant, well . . . you can see what a natural progression it was to further research.”
He looked down at the scar again, then raised his right hand and pointed at the camera. I felt he was pointing through the lens, right at my heart. “But now Kali is dead. My best assisting surgeon is dead. Erin is dead. Yet you are alive.”
I tasted bile in my throat.
“Remember the mills of the gods, Harper. You know the reference? Of course not.”
While I stared in disbelief, Berkmann unbuckled his pants, dropped them to the floor along with his underwear, and stepped out of the disordered pile.
“The husk falls away,” he said.
Then he lifted his left arm above his head as if holding something in his clenched fist, cocked his right arm at his side, and became utterly still. Every muscle in his body defined itself in bas-relief beneath his alabaster flesh. Without ever seeing the actual statue, I knew that I was looking at Cellini’s Perseus.
I was still trying to take in the enormity of Berkmann’s madness when he burst into fluid motion, whirling from one edge of the video frame to the other. It could have been a ritual dance or the mindless flailings of a lunatic. His voice, so resonant before, became an atonal blare, howling syllables that my mind could not form into any known language. I had the sense that I’d stumbled into a hillbilly Pentecostal church where men and women rolled on the floor with poisonous snakes and gibbered in tongues. But the man on my television screen was no hillbilly.
I started in the chair when he ducked down and came up with Erin’s body in his arms. Without missing a beat, he began twirling her corpse around the room in a grotesque parody of a waltz. Erin’s head hung limp on her chest, like the head of a broken bird. Berkmann held her in perfect ballroom position as he danced, and it struck me that he must possess demonic strength to hold a dead body suspended that way. Each time he wheeled toward the camera, he made sure his eyes met the lens, boring into mine as I gaped at the knife wound in Erin’s back. Finally—as though from boredom rather than fatigue—he danced Erin’s body over to the corner and gently laid it behind my bed, where Drewe would later discover it.
I thought I might have to run to the bathroom to be sick, but Berkmann stopped me by prancing up to the camera and aiming it toward my bed. Staying within the camera’s field of view, he walked to the bed, reached up over it, and took one of my guitars down from the wall. It was a Martin, a prewar model I’d bought with one of my first big trading checks. Berkmann looked back at the camera and said, “You’re the singer, aren’t you?”
Then he pressed the instrument against his stomach as if coupling with it. It took me a second to realize what he was doing. He had slipped his uncircumcised penis to the side of the strings—into the sound hole—and begun urinating loudly, all the while watching me with rapture on his face.
“What a lovely sound,” he said. Then he cackled. When he finished, he shook himself off and hung the guitar exactly where he’d found it. I glanced away from the TV screen long enough to verify that the Martin was still there. It was.
“Oh,” he said, as though he’d forgotten to leave a tip in a restaurant. He went to his discarded clothes and took something from a pocket. It looked like a long metal film canister. He straightened up and hefted it in his hand like a man feeling the weight of a cigar. “I harvested these before I realized Erin wasn’t who I thought she was. I saw she wasn’t menstruating, and took a chance she might be ovulating. No point in keeping them now, of course.”
He walked back to the bed and opened one end of the canister. A cloud of pale vapor swirled out. Then he leaned over the bed, slid the open end of the canister into the sound hole of the guitar he had urinated into, and shook the contents into it.
As rapidly as the manic phase had come over him, it ended, leaving only the demonic intensity and the frigid blue eyes. He stepped very close to the lens, so that his blurred face filled the frame, and said, “Save this tape, Harper. We’re forever joined now, we whose lovers killed each other. You can’t show it to anyone, though, can you? Not unless you want to acknowledge Holly.” His breath fogged the lens. “Do you want to do that?”
He pulled back then, and as his cruel smile faded he said with the gravity of a prophet: “Remember, Harper. We are all broken from within.”
Then he reached up to the camera and the screen went black.
After my heartbeat steadied, I stood up and took the treasured Martin down from the wall, walked out the back door, and laid it faceup in the yard. Then I went to the utility shed, got a gasoline can, and doused the guitar from head to strap peg. With newspaper and matches from the kitchen, I began tossing flaming balls of paper at the Martin from the back door. The third one hit the seasoned wooden face, and eighteen thousand dollars’ worth of handmade guitar and part of my sister-in-law exploded into fire. The sounds the Martin made as it died were like bones breaking and tendons snapping, and in ten minutes there was nothing left but tuning pegs and charred steel strings.
Miles and Daniel Baxter were standing outside Berkmann’s Manhattan brownstone when I called Miles’s rented cellular. Baxter was about to leave for Connecticut, to oversee the search for Berkmann’s killing house, which he thought might be in the area of the Darien airstrip. Baxter thought Berkmann’s frankness about his identity on the videotape indicated that he’d left my house with the intention of fleeing the country. I didn’t explain that Berkmann thought I would never mention the tape to the FBI. Instead, I pointed out that he had been flying north, not south, when his plane went down.
Baxter asked me to overnight the original tape to him at Quantico. I agreed, though I intended to send him a VHS copy, appropriately edited. Baxter also thought Berkmann’s knife wound lend some credence to the plane crash scenario.
Miles disagreed, but I couldn’t tell whether he’d used logic to form that opinion or whether he was merely hoping Berkmann had survived the crash so that he could kill him with his own hands.
After hanging up, I shuffled through my desk drawer until I found the number I wanted, then dialed McLean, Virginia. The phone rang ten times before Arthur Lenz answered.
“I have no interest in talking to you,” he said.
“I don’t believe you, Doctor.”
“Believe it. You’re speaking to a chastened man.”
>
“So are you. Are you up to date on the EROS case?”
“Daniel has cut off my information. He says it’s for my own good.”
“So you don’t know what happened last night?”
“I still have a few loyal friends in the Unit. You’re referring to the murder of a Mrs. Graham and an unknown female of Indian descent?”
“Yes. Did you know that Mrs. Graham was my wife’s sister? The ‘Erin’ I told you about in your car?”
A brief silence. “The mother of your child?”
“Right.”
“I didn’t.”
“Then you don’t know it was me who drew the killer straight to her.”
“Drew him how?”
“By doing exactly what you did.”
“Pretending to be a female EROS client?”
“Yes. Erin Graham, to be exact. I used my own guilty secret as bait, but I told it from her point of view.”
“And you succeeded where I failed.”
“All I succeeded in doing was getting someone I cared about killed.”
“No. You fooled Strobekker, didn’t you? He believed you were actually the woman he went to kill.”
I suddenly realized Lenz had no idea that Berkmann had been identified. “Look, I’m calling because I’ve got about twenty pages of conversation between myself and the killer. I’ve also got a video of him that looks like something from a Fellini film. I’d like you to look at it.”
“Why would I want to do that?”
“Because his whole background is there. His entire family going back three generations. It’s got to be a gold mine in terms of forensic psychiatry.”
Lenz said nothing.
“He’s a third-generation physician, Doctor.”
A sharp intake of air.
“Nobody told you that? Baxter has a team of shrinks going over his house right now.”
“They know who he is?”
“Yep. No more UNSUB. His name is Edward Berkmann.”
“Edward Berkmann!”
“Know him?”