LoveMurder

by Saul Black

  Her voice was so calm and reasonable. She might have been a patient professor coaxing a favored student to a truth. Valerie imagined Nick watching this exchange, shaking his head. Get out. Get out. She told herself she could do just that, get up and walk away whenever she chose. She kept telling herself that, kept going to it for reassurance, as if it were a talisman in her pocket. But she didn’t move.

  “Believe it or not I have thought about it,” she said. “Since you keep insisting it’s true.”

  “And still?”

  “Yes, still.”

  Katherine sat back in her chair and raised her cuffed hands to brush her bangs from her eyes. Valerie remembered that in one of the videos strands of her hair had been floaty with static. Worked up by the heat of her actions. It was details like that that confirmed what you were watching was real. A real man and a real woman, doing what they were doing. She remembered wondering if their victim—it was Leonora Ramsey—had noticed it, too, if in the gaps between the extremities of her suffering the world’s humble details still fell on her like soft sparks. The madness of all of it still there, going about its business of physics, of prosaic cause and effect, of normality.

  “We see the world in the same way,” Katherine said.

  “Do we?”

  “You’re Police. You see that there’s no natural justice in the universe. The evil do not get punished nor the virtuous rewarded. Obviously it so happens that I’m in here and you’re out there, but you know very well that’s entirely contingent. It turns out you caught me, but the world is full of those who don’t get caught, who do just the kinds of thing I’ve done and get away with it and go on to live pleasurable lives of cold beer and television and sex. How many times haven’t you looked into the eyes of those who suffer and seen it, the hunger for justice, the call for help, the desperation for redress? And how many times haven’t you understood that justice is illusory, that the help didn’t come, that nothing—absolutely nothing—can undo or balance what has been done to them? We’ve both seen it, albeit for very different reasons.”

  “So what?” Valerie said. “That doesn’t make us—”

  “I’m not saying we’re the same,” Katherine said. “I’m saying we’re close. You see the world for what it is and do everything you can to make it otherwise. I see the same world and do everything I can to make it work for me. We’re both looking at the same blank canvas. It’s just what we paint on it that’s different.”

  “Well, call me ignorant, but that’s what makes the difference.”

  “Yes,” Katherine said, with a slightly tired version of the Smile. “That’s what makes the difference. Do you still have God hanging around?”

  “I don’t need God to know the difference between us.”

  “There’s a theory that the amount of good and evil in the world is equal. So you get genocide and rape and monsters like me, but meanwhile there’s great art and giant acts of compassion and doctors saving lives. The idea is that it evens out in the end, always in secret equilibrium. God tossing the coin.”

  “You keep saying that,” Valerie said.

  “That’s the sort of God I could believe in,” Katherine replied, leaning forward again. “Listen. Have you heard of dark matter?”

  Valerie opened her mouth to say that she hadn’t—but then, courtesy of the lawlessness of consciousness, recalled that she had, in fact, heard of it. Some barely attended-to PBS science documentary. Eggheads talking, whiteboards filled with impenetrable equations like colorful barbed wire, flashy graphics of swirling nebulae. It sounded like something that ought to be science fiction.

  “I’ve heard of it,” she said. “But I don’t know what it is. Or care.”

  “Come on,” Katherine said. “Don’t posture. Don’t talk as if you’re playing a cop in a TV show. Dark matter is this stuff in the universe they can’t even detect, but they have to assume is there because they can see the gravitational effects it has on regular matter. That and the radiation. It’s purely hypothetical, but if the hypothesis is right it means that eighty percent of the universe is made up of it. Can you imagine? Eighty percent of everything is this stuff that can’t be detected.” Katherine gave a little laugh. “I love that,” she said. “Everything’s just the tip of the iceberg. When I picture God I picture him living in a nest of dark matter, tossing a coin over and over to determine the horrors and the beautiful poems. Heads a Hitler, tails a Mandela. The coin tosses would even out eventually, you see. The world is a reflection of God’s nature. It’s just that God’s nature is a pure and infinite form of schizophrenia, and his love is nothing more than the tossing of a coin. If there were a church for that sort of God, I’d probably go.”

  Involuntarily, Valerie went to switch off the recorder—then remembered there was no recorder. She hadn’t brought it. This wasn’t an interview. It should have been, if only to rationalize the time. Instead all she had was an insane social call. The time. She was—again—wasting it. A warmth of guilt went through her.

  “You said there was something else you wanted to discuss with me,” she said. “I’m assuming it’s not Philosophy 101?”

  “There’s no end to the things I want to discuss with you,” Katherine said. “But right now I’m wondering what you’ll do when the next package finds you. Is my currency still good?”

  “You don’t think he’s been burned by this?”

  “Of course, but that’s not going to make him stop. If anything, you’ve made it more interesting for him. You know that. It’s probably what he wanted. Or at least, it’s probably what a part of him wanted. He prides himself on his ability to pull your strings. All you’ve done is remind him your strings are worth pulling. Like his mythic forebear, pride is his defining characteristic.”

  Pride. Mythic forebear? Lucifer. Lucien, Lucifer.

  “Is my currency still good?” Katherine said. “You know how much I’ve come to depend on this.”

  “Presumably that’s why you’re leaving gaps for the FBI,” Valerie said.

  Katherine gave her a mock look of sheepishness. “Well, you can hardly blame me,” she said. “I’m sorry, Valerie, but I need this too much. Anyway, what do you care? All that matters to you is finding them in time. The end justifies the means. Unfortunately the favored maxim of too many Police without your integrity.”

  “If we get another package, I imagine you’ll get to take a look at it,” Valerie said.

  “But it’s not your call? I suppose Arden’s people think it’s a scam.”

  “It’s crossed their minds.”

  “And yours?”

  “Yes, of course.”

  Katherine’s shoulders dropped, as if she’d been holding tension. She looked away for a moment, at nothing. To Valerie it was another jolting glimpse of the artless version of the woman. Katherine was so wrapped up by the performance of herself, her apparent compulsion to advertise mercurial artifice, that its sudden disappearance was always a shock, as if she’d torn off a wig you’d thought was her hair. There was a brutal poignancy to it. When she looked back at Valerie the nakedness was disconcerting. Valerie wanted to look away.

  “I exhaust myself,” Katherine said. It was the other version of the voice, too, stripped of its musical play. “Look at me. It’s pathetic, and yet I can’t stop myself. I’m sorry.”

  Valerie could neither answer nor look away. Katherine’s eyes held hers. She felt exposed.

  “Do you know what the most vicious absurdity is here?” Katherine said.

  “What?”

  Katherine’s smile this time was one of resigned incredulity—at herself. “It’s that I still expect sympathy. I was going to say I still expect sympathy, even from you, but that’s not right. What I really should have said is that I still expect sympathy, especially from you.”

  Valerie was very aware of her physical self, the weight of her hands in her lap, the heat of her scalp. It was incredible to her that she could have been anywhere else in the world—at work, buying coffee f
rom the deli, down in computer forensics talking to Nick—but she was here, in the pale windowless room, with Katherine Glass.

  “I do know—of course I know—that what I’ve done ought to have burned the rest of the circuits out,” Katherine said. “Or that there oughtn’t to have been any other circuits to burn out. I understand. It’s supposed to be an either/or situation. But here I am. I still care for myself. Intellectually I know I’ve forfeited the right to expect anyone else to care for me. But the emotional…” She looked down at her hands, then back up at Valerie. “I see you and I know that you think of me as a person. And my pathetic, wretched little scrap of personhood can’t help responding. I can’t be any other way with you, any more than a person freezing can help moving toward the warmth of a fire. I know you understand me, and it makes me want things I know I have no right to want.”

  When Valerie spoke, her mouth seemed to ache. “But I don’t understand you,” she said quietly.

  “You do,” Katherine said. “You understand that all the things that are not supposed to be part of me still are. I think you understand why I’ve done the things I’ve done.”

  “How can I?” Valerie said. She hadn’t meant to say anything.

  For a moment Katherine didn’t reply. Their eyes were locked. For Valerie the silence of this pause was like Katherine’s body weight on her.

  “You understand that I couldn’t stop myself. There are things you can’t stop.”

  “You chose it. Everyone chooses.”

  “Do you choose to love Nick? Could you stop yourself from loving him, by an act of will?”

  “It’s not the same.”

  “It’s not the same superficially. But it’s the same in principle. Either you accept there are forces to which you’re compelled to submit, or you believe everything’s resistible. The moral status of the force is irrelevant. That’s why you understand me.”

  Valerie wanted to move. Get up, at least take a couple of paces. But she couldn’t. She could feel the neural signals failing in her limbs.

  “What did we look like to you in the videos?” Katherine asked.

  “What do you mean?”

  “Did we look happy?”

  “Yes.”

  “Yes. At first. But not at the end. What did we look like when they were dead?”

  Valerie couldn’t help it: she remembered her words to Gayle Werner. I felt like I was watching people with rage and despair inside them. Not even evil. Just rage and despair.

  “You looked like you knew you’d failed,” she said. It seemed she had lost the ability to speak to Katherine any way but honestly.

  Katherine smiled again. A self-recognizing sadness. “See?” she said. “You do understand me.” She leaned forward. Her cuffed hands on the table. Strange, the white skin, the fingernails, the small lines in the knuckles: a person, as she had said. Flesh and blood. Valerie smelled hand cream. Faint vanilla. She wanted it to stop. Whatever it was. But she remained silent, pinned.

  “We never got what the Devil promised,” Katherine said. “They don’t call him the Father of Lies for nothing. He promises you something extraordinary. He promises you everything, in fact. But all you get is the sordid details.”

  “You’re talking about the Devil?”

  “It’s a way of talking. You’ve got the Catholicism, so you know what I mean. I know neither of us believes in the Devil.”

  Valerie thought of her grandfather, the last member of her family for whom the Devil was a real entity. What had he said? First the Devil lets you know there are terrible things. Then he tells you which room they’re in. Then he invites you in to look. And before you know it you can’t find the door to get out. Before you know it you’re one of the terrible things.

  Katherine Glass was a terrible thing.

  “I’m made this way,” Katherine said. “When I saw the things I saw … My father … I liked it. I liked it from the first. I didn’t, as far as I know, have a say in it. It wasn’t a discovery. It was a recognition, as if it were something I remembered from a former life. Where was the choice in that? How do we choose what we recognize? You recognized Nick, didn’t you? Isn’t that what love is? This almighty, transcendent recognition?”

  Valerie looked away. Then back at Katherine. She didn’t want the intimacy, but it had an irresistible gravity.

  “But so what?” Katherine said. “It’s faulty wiring. A genetic predisposition with exactly the right conditions of experience to trigger it. That’s the thinking these days, I know. The psychopathic gene. It doesn’t make any difference to what has to be done with me. Until the neuroscientists come up with something wonderful, people like me have to be put in places like this. Given the way the world is I am exactly where I belong. Out of the equation. That’s your job: to remove people like me from the equation.”

  “Yes,” Valerie said. “That’s my job.”

  “And here I am, no argument. But all the other aspects of me come alive the minute you walk in the room. Yes, all the other aspects. There oughtn’t to be any other aspects, but there are. And you know there are, and that’s what flows between us like a perverse little electric current.”

  Yes, all the other aspects. It occurred to Valerie that Katherine was trying to seduce her. The madness of the idea went through her system like a contained explosion. It was both incredible and weirdly inevitable. In spite of herself she had an image of Katherine leaning toward her, green eyes glimmering, lips parted for the first, sacrilegious kiss. The image was so clear she found herself thinking beyond it to the simple fact that she’d never kissed a woman in her life, not sexually. She’d simply never wanted to. She didn’t want to now, either, but that didn’t stop her filling up with something like sensual panic.

  “No,” Katherine said quietly. “I’m not coming on to you.” The usual version of her would have smiled as she said this, Valerie knew. But this time she didn’t. The unsettling, calm, lucid sadness was still there. It would’ve been better if she had smiled. Valerie’s defenses against Katherine’s default mode of vicious mischief were well-fortified. It was what she brought to every one of their encounters. But the artless Katherine wrong-footed her. The artless Katherine was, in so many ways, worse.

  “I know that’s what you’re thinking,” Katherine said. “And I’d be lying if I said the thought hadn’t occurred to me. To the lesser me, I should say, the me that inclines to baroque deviousness. But even I need time off from that now and again. Besides”—and here she did smile, but simply, with apparent spontaneity—“where exactly would we go on a date? My cell?”

  Valerie imagined telling Nick about this conversation. Knew immediately that she wouldn’t.

  “I just mean you’re rain in the desert,” Katherine said. “No one wants me to be anything other than Satan’s daughter, except you. I’m not supposed to be anything other than that. But you know that I am. For me that’s like being able to breathe. Naturally it’s atrocious logic: I want him to go on with what he’s doing so I can go on with what I’m doing, namely exercising my starved brain and getting the benefit of contact with real human beings. And of course the same logic leads me into trouble, because if that’s true, then my real goal will be to string it out as long as possible.”

  “Yes,” Valerie said. “That is the logic, unfortunately. It doesn’t help you.”

  “I know,” Katherine said. “But please listen to me. I’m doing this honorably. I am working as fast as I can. Fast enough, it turned out last time.” She paused. Looked down, as if gathering herself for a risk—then her eyes flashed back up at Valerie. “I want to ask you something,” she said.

  “Is this what we’ve been waiting to discuss?”

  “Yes. One of the things.”

  “So ask me.”

  “I want you to promise me that if I help you catch him, if the work I’m doing leads to you stopping him, really stopping him, you won’t abandon me. Promise me that when it’s over you’ll still come and see me, once a month, until they kill
me.”

  Valerie’s circuits jammed. On the surface, incredulity, ridicule, annoyance, futility. But underneath there was something else. A version of déjà vu. As the words had come out of Katherine’s mouth Valerie had been overtaken by the feeling that she’d known all along that was what Katherine was going to say. It was ludicrous—and yet it eased the ground away from under her. Her regular self was already offering the obvious calculation: promise her whatever the fuck she wants. It doesn’t count. By no sane standard can it possibly count. But her other self, wherever it was located, was appalled by a dreamy feeling of inevitability.

  “Sure,” she said, looking away.

  “No,” Katherine said, very quietly. “Look at me.”

  And as if invisible hands were guiding her, Valerie turned her head and looked at Katherine. Katherine’s younger self was there in her face. It showed through despite the glamour of the peppery green eyes and the knowing mouth. Valerie had an intimate sense of the girl in the woman, a complex creature still uncertain of herself.

  “Please,” Katherine said. “I’m calm. I’m in full command of my faculties. I know exactly what I’m doing. If you look at me, and say the words ‘I promise,’ I know it’ll mean something to you. I trust you.”

  Valerie was thinking of childhood, the crossed fingers whipped out from behind the back to invalidate whatever promise had been extorted. That she was even thinking this meant something. Again, she imagined Nick watching. Don’t do it. Because either way, you won’t have peace. You not having peace is what she wants. It’s what she wants.

  Right up until the words came she was unsure of what she was going to say. Then, with the feeling of falling away from herself, she found herself speaking. “Okay,” she said. “I promise that if your information leads to his arrest, I’ll visit you once a month until they kill you.”

  Her hands were on the table, though she hadn’t been aware until now that they were only inches from Katherine’s. She wasn’t surprised when Katherine moved hers closer, so that the tips of her fingers covered hers. As far as Valerie remembered it was the first time there had been any physical contact between them.