Haftmann's Rules

by Robert White

  He was about fifty yards ahead, about to emerge into a throng of people. “Tell me!”

  “I said he was going to be killed for what he had done to Annaliese—”

  I was running now. Shit Piss Fuck.

  So much for the plan. Tailing him to a residence was unlikely, unless he hopped a bus or took the subway, but I knew that if he got into a car, I could give Cooney the license number and they could run the tag through BMV. I wanted to confront him on my own terms. Look right into his eyes, not like this, watch to see if he bolts, and shoot him from behind if he runs. I could see him ahead easily, as if he weren’t trying to escape, or worried about anything. Could I pull the trigger on this man without knowing absolutely he was the killer? I had punched and stomped a man to death in an alley twenty-four years ago. I had lived with that guilt, not well, but I endured the nightmares and seeing Max’s leering face every day since that summer I sailed aboard the Col. James Pickands and discovered there was ineradicable evil in the world: evil inside me. But I could not shoot this man in the back unless I knew for sure.

  Just then he veered toward Frog Pond and I maintained a thirty-yard distance between us. Icy sweat was pouring down my back. If he ran, I could close some of the distance, take my combat stance and shoot. He was much younger, fitter. I’d never catch him. There were too many people around. I could not send off rounds while all these people—women, kids, elderly folks—were milling around. The sky so blue and bright it hurt to look at it. Not like then. Before. When I killed a man for the first time. In a darkened alleyway. Not even a cop. Just for me. Just to play God with a human life that I declared not worth living. The memory of stalking Max seared my brain: the wet, plopping sound of my fist striking his face (I had put rings on all fingers and wrapped my fist in duct tape); the cracking sound of snapping vertebrae from my steel-toed boots . . . Oh Jesus, awful, awful.

  He took the path that turned down past the Soldiers and Sailors monument, and then—still walking leisurely, never looking back—he backtracked to retrace his steps. I had not yet made the turn onto the path that would expose me to him face-to-face, so I used the moving crowd for cover, dropped onto a park bench, and watched him retrace his steps. He did this twice, walking his isosceles triangle in what, I suspected, was the only place in the Commons that would expose a tail from any angle.

  Then, as if he sensed me looking, he looked over to the bench and began walking toward Charles Street. I stayed forty yards behind and watched him cross the street and head straight for the bridge over the Public Garden pond. I figured he was going to come out at Commonwealth Avenue. At the top of the bridge I could see his salt-andpepper hair bobbing among the heads in the crowd going south.

  At the Washington Monument, he hesitated. I kept walking. I watched him gaze at it alongside a trio of rubberneckers, Japanese businessmen, snapping photos and clucking at one another. I made it to the Arlington Street entrance before I risked a look backwards. He was still there, so I took a bench and pretended to study a piece of paper I had picked off the ground.

  For the first time since Ingrid had trashed the scheme, I felt good. I knew I had him. He had to make a choice. I tried to ease my breathing into a slow rhythm.

  Then he was past me, going left at a good clip. I followed him down Arlington but I closed the distance to twenty yards. Let him look, I thought. I’d keep coming, walk right up to him and shove the gun in his nose.

  He was about ten yards from Newberry Street when, timing his move for the traffic, he loped across and headed for the Ritz-Carlton. A tiny doorman wearing more gold braids and piping on his scarlet trousers than an organ grinder’s monkey tipped his cap to him and held open the door. If his plan was to shake me this easily, I foiled it by jumping in front of an oncoming stream of cars and trotting right up to the doorman. I was keenly aware of my sweating and less- than-crisp attire, but I used my size to create an attitude and muttered something about enquiring at the front desk for the association dinner that evening. He grinned, an ancient homunculus of a man, and opened the door for me too.

  The air conditioning was chilly the way rich, elderly people like it. My eyes boxed the room, a spacious lobby with a gold chandelier, but he was nowhere in sight. I heard the hiss of the elevator and looked over to see a woman stepping off. My insides were churning and the hand on my gun was twitching.

  There, he was just disappearing into a doorway off to the right of the front desk. One of the clerks eyefucked me as I approached, my goofy grin in place but nothing in my head to say if this weasel wanted to bumrush me out of the joint.

  I veered off to slip past the door, opened it and found myself in a narrow, dimly lit passageway that ran the length of the building. My neck hairs were standing straight up, and I could smell my own body odor in the close air. I began walking down this corridor, a claustrophobic’s nightmare, and heard humming and whirring noises from down the corridor. A lemony light was spilling out.

  I had the gun out now and made my way toward the light. My hand shook. The air was close and the humming noise grew louder. As I reached it, I threw myself against the wall behind me and risked being backlit to take a long look. The laundry room. The humming was from rows of dryers and washing machines. Huge racks of linen surrounded me. I saw a man in a white uniform wearing a paper hat and apron extending past his knees bent over one of the dryers, extracting and folding towels. I quickly slipped the gun in my pocket so I wouldn’t alarm him. I walked right up to him because of the noise and was about to tap him on the shoulder to get his attention, when I saw them because there wasn’t time enough to change or disguise them: a pair of loafers no hotel peon could afford. I drew the gun out and held it to the nape of his neck.

  “Nice shoes,” I said.

  He turned to look at me but didn’t bother to raise his hands. “Thank you, Mister Haftmann,” he said. “Guccis, by the way. I have them handmade and shipped here. I have elongated second toes, you see—”

  That’s when I pistol-whipped him across the face. Blood spurted from a gash on his cheek. “Oh-Oh-Oh! That—that was excruciatingly painful. You didn’t have to do that.”

  My second swipe with the barrel caught him above the eyebrow, and this time he went down hard to the cement floor. It didn’t open up much, though, because I had filed off the sight to prevent snagging in my clothing.

  I watched him get up. He groaned and then wobbled a bit once he was on his feet. “Aren’t you going to read me my rights? Oh, I forgot in all the excitement. My sources tell me you’re not a cop. Just a private eye.” He dabbed at his cheek with a towel and looked at the blood. This time I used the butt to smash his nose. The blood spurted in all directions. In a few seconds, he looked liked someone had taken a machete to his face.

  I waited a few moments. “Get on your feet, you fucking lowlife bag of human shit. I’m going to beat your brains right into your expensive shoes.”

  He lay there moaning and smearing the blood across his face with one hand, then the other. I pulled him up by the hair and waited for him to register. His eyes were suddenly bright, clear, and he was laughing despite the beating and the blood. “How’s the . . . how’s the mother in bed?”

  I kicked him in the ribs.

  He staggered to his feet and held onto the edge of the dryer. He spat out some blood and I heard a tooth skitter across the floor.

  He started to babble something else, but I was past listening. I threw a left hook, which slammed him backwards into the dryer. I’d never seen a human being oblivious to pain before. His eyes reached my face.

  “Reach too hard . . . and you miss . . . that toward which you strive.” His eyes were glassy and his head wobbled on his neck.

  “Why did you kill her?”

  “Make clear . . . your antecedents . . . and pronouns?”

  I looked down on him, slowly feeling my rage boil up again.

  “Motherfucker, I’ll give you a grammar lesson,” I said. I went to smash him in the ribs, regretting I didn’
t have steel-toe boots, pulverize his vertebrae—but I held myself back.

  “Annaliese O’Reilly, you fuck,” I said.

  He laughed without much glee this time. His voice—even through the pain I had just inflicted—was lulling, a fact which spooked me. It was as if we had met in the Commons and were having a quiet conversation.

  “Haftmann. German, Hautedeutsche. One Hamburg whore said of middle-aged men attending her brothel. ‘They fear the closing of the door.’ What do you fear, Herr Haftmann?”

  “Men like you,” I said. “Men who are really reptiles inside.”

  A woman walked into the room just then, saw us, and screamed. He was coherent enough to think that funny. “Doesn’t appreciate the esthetics of blood, does she? Blood is a rainbow. Like red velvet when it first flows, black in the moonlight . . .”

  A red mist came over my eyes. I hit him again in the mouth.

  He rocked back and forth on his feet like an old man, a lock of hair displaced.

  He was mumbling incoherently now. His eyes were glazed like a dead bird’s. Blood had spattered his elegant clothing.

  This time I threw my shoulder into it, the gun butt an extension of my fist. He slammed into the dryer, his legs going in a crazy jig, before he toppled over. Then he began writhing and twisting in spasms on the cement making gargling sounds before reflexively vomiting up blood and tooth fragments. His eyes were half-mast now, so I kicked his head to the other side to keep him from choking to death. His mouth opened and closed around red jagged stumps of his front teeth. I just stood there watching him breathe, his mouth opening and closing like fish in an aquarium.

  I didn’t notice the crowd of people jostling each other in the doorway, everybody trying to get a looksee until somebody suggested it might not be safe to be jammed into a corridor while a maniac stood there watching a man drown in a pool of blood.

  I suddenly felt very tired, drained of all emotion. I wanted to close my eyes. My stomach was nauseated from adrenalin. I thought of Annaliese and wondered what her last moments were like, were they bottomless moments stretched to eternity, like these? My arms were lead and the gun seemed to weigh a hundred pounds.

  Shouts behind me—the cops, finally.

  The first guys in were the SWAT team because they wore those iron hockey masks with slits like something out of those teen stabathon films. The next thing I remember was being thrown to the floor and bodies piling on top of me; somebody had a foot on my neck and my hands and feet were tied tight behind me. I was trussed up like a pig.

  I must have said something they didn’t like because one of the cops came over to me and swung the butt of his sawed-off against my jawline. Then it was a red mist followed by blackness, and I was out for the count for a very long time.

  PART 2

  Wer mit Ungeheur kampf, mag zusehn, dass er nicht dabei aum Ungeheur wird.

  (We who fight monsters must beware unless we too become monsters.)

  —Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil

  Chapter 10

  I was aware of the sound of a man alternately pissing and shitting. Then the interminable sound of metal clanking. Laughter. A guard stopped by and called to me: “Haftmann, visitor.”

  After the pass was signed and the pat-down, I walked down a lime green corridor to the visiting room. Because this was medium security, there were no glass walls and phones. You had to sit at opposite ends of tables and talk. You could not touch, nor could you accept anything from a visitor. Since this was my first visitor in the eighteen months of my incarceration, it was explained to me.

  “Hello, Haftmann.”

  “Hello, Booth.”

  The small talk was brief, vapid, pointless. I asked him what brought him this way, and he told me. “Richard Lindell. He’s getting out. His family pulled some strings and he’ll be released in six weeks.”

  One hundred fifty millions of dollars buys a lot of string, I guessed.

  “How can they do that, Booth?”

  “Don’t be naive. He was never convicted of anything. His incarceration in a mental facility was a voluntary act.”

  “What do you mean? The state isn’t going to indict—”

  “Indict how? You pistol-whipped the bastard and destroyed whatever chance we had of making a case.”

  “Why is he getting out? He’s as mentally fit as a rabid dog.”

  “Maybe they cured him. The fact is, he’s getting out soon.”

  I remembered the VICAP profile’s description of his mental make-up. He was one of that rare breed of human being who is completely without the capacity to feel emotion. No pity, no compassion, no sorrow, no laughter. His type always learned to simulate the socially correct response to every situation in life; they simply did not have the capacity to feel. You might as well explain color to a person born blind. To survive in society, this kind of sociopath had to become a great actor to avoid detection. Now and then they would make a mistake, laugh or cry at the wrong time; people would stare. You learned by doing. The psychobabble was tortuously convoluted on the next point, but I know what it boiled down to: these vicious, sadistic monsters wanted more than anything to feel. They wanted the very thing nature denied them at birth, but there is no chromosomatic cure for this.

  There is, however, the violence you can inflict on another person, and in that person’s pain and anguish, you can feel something, escape the freakish horror of being trapped in a yawning abyss of emotionless sameness. The first one is like the first shot of heroin, and like heroin, it doesn’t last, so you have to keep maiming and killing to recapture the feeling, redefining yourself by more and more vicious acts of violence against the flesh of other human beings, and only then, for a moment in time, can you escape the sterile wasteland of living. These monsters will continue to ravage as long as they live or remain healthy. Nothing will cure it, and it’ll never stop.

  “Tell me why it happened?”

  “He asked for release.”

  “You mean the fucking state’s attorney’s office set no conditions—”

  “Sure they did. His lawyer got them overturned as unconstitutional in a federal court two weeks ago.”

  “So he’s getting out?”

  “I thought having one bad eye affected depth perception instead of hearing.”

  “All right, all right.”

  Then, smoothing back silver hair that was never out of place, he asked me, “When is your parole hearing?”

  “Next month, the fifteenth.”

  “The Ides of March,” Booth said. “Fitting.”

  “I’m not the one who needs to beware, Booth.”

  “You get three to five for breaking a deputy’s arm, and he does nineteen months in a mental hospital with more accommodations than Club Med. Fourteen murders, we know of. There could be bodies dumped all over the country.”

  “I can’t believe you can’t put a case together.”

  “The evidence is all circumstantial, Thomas. No forensics, no witnesses. His only mistake was keeping that contact code too long.”

  “What about O’Reilly?”

  “We think we have a CCTV video of him from a motel off Interstate 90. But he’s wearing a hat and the clerk’s description of him is too vague.”

  “So enhance it. That’s what your famous lab does, right?”

  “We’ll only enhance the hat. We need face to go into court. His legal team comprises of Who’s Who of Harvard and Yale luminaries with family connections back to God. I don’t need to tell you what your word is worth in a court of law.”

  “What have you got prepared for the day he gets out? How many teams are you going to have on him?”

  Booth’s look was a laser beam. “None. We’re trying to stop the entire movement at its source, not one sociopath using white supremacy for murder.”

  “Don’t tell me you’re just going to leave him out there.”

  “We’ll be monitoring him.”

  “Monitoring him. That’s FBI slang for watching him eviscerate fe
males while you build your case.”

  “Listen, you, and listen good. There’s more going on than you’re aware of. You ever heard the concept of teamwork? Seems we had this identical conversation before only it was in a West Virginia pen. Stay out of it now. Forget Lindell. You’re done and that’s official.”

  “I can’t,” I said. “He laughed in my face. You think he’s done?”

  “No, I don’t think he’s done. There’s another reason I stopped by. We’ve been paying one of the orderlies to check him out from time to time. He’s an opera buff and he was out of his room for a day and a half attending a performance.”

  “Opera? You tell me this world isn’t deeply fucked up, Booth.”

  “The orderly found his journal and xeroxed some of it. It’s not good. Of course, a shrink would call it therapy, curing himself through writing—”

  “What’s he planning?”

  “He has a lot of information on Annaliese’s mother. Where she lives, what stores she shops.”

  “Christ,” I said and waited for him to quit waltzing.

  “He’s going to use drugs to keep her sensible as long as possible—”

  “I’ll fucking kill—”

  “. . . just ravings. They don’t mean he’s going to do anything.”

  “God damn it, Booth. Look where I am.”

  “Haftmann, will you stop acting like you’re responsible for the moral order of the universe. She’s safe. He can’t get to her.”

  “Fuck your casual surveillance,” I hissed at him. “Get her into witness protection.”

  “We can’t,” he said, and I knew he was lying. She was his bait. I knew the feeling.

  “What else?”

  “He wants you. He gets quite intense on the subject. Some of the description is very technical before it collapses into gibberish.”